Mehtar: Sweepers and scavengers.

Certain occupations, those of skinning cattle and curing hides, weaving
the coarse country cloth worn by the villagers, making baskets from
the rind of the bamboo, playing on drums and tom-toms, and scavenging
generally are relegated to the lowest and impure castes. The hides of
domestic animals are exceedingly impure; a Hindu is defiled even by
touching their dead bodies and far more so by removing the skins. Drums
and tom-toms made from the hides of animals are also impure. But in
the case of weaving and basket-making the calling itself entails no
defilement, and it would appear simply that they were despised by the
cultivators, and as a considerable number of workers were required to
satisfy the demand for baskets and cloth, were adopted by the servile
and labouring castes. Basket- and mat-making are callings naturally
suited to the primitive tribes who would obtain the bamboos from the
forests, but weaving would not be associated with them unless cloth
was first woven of tree-cotton. The weavers of the finer cotton and
silk cloths, who live in towns, rank much higher than the village
weavers, as in the case of the Koshtis and Tantis, the latter of whom
made the famous fine cotton cloth, known as _abrawan_, or 'running
water,' which was supplied to the imperial Zenana at Delhi. On one
occasion a daughter of Aurangzeb was reproached on entering the room
for her immodest attire and excused herself by the plea that she had on
seven folds of cloth over her body. [80] In Bengal Brahmans will take
water from Tantis, and it seems clear that their higher status is a
consequence of the lucrative and important nature of their occupation.

The Katias are a caste of cotton-spinners, the name being derived
from _katna_, to cut or spin. But hand-spinning is now practically
an extinct industry and the Katias have taken to weaving or ordinary
manual labour for a subsistence. The Kanjars and Berias are the gipsy
castes of India. They are accustomed to wander about carrying their
grass-matting huts with them. Many of them live by petty thieving and
cheating. Their women practise palmistry and retail charms for the cure
of sickness and for exorcising evil spirits, and love-philtres. They
do cupping and tattooing and also make reed mats, cane baskets,
palm-leaf mats and fans, ropes from grass- and tree-fibre, brushes
for the cotton-loom, string-net purses and balls, and so on; and the
women commonl