eat, even the high caste _Nair_ cannot touch, though he
may approach, a Namburi Brahman. A member of the artisan castes will
pollute his holiness twenty-four feet off; cultivators at forty-eight
feet; the beef-eating Pariah at sixty-four feet. Like the Palestinian
leper of old, the low-caste man of that part of India was, until
recently, expected to leave the road when he saw a Brahman come, and
remove his polluting person to the required number of feet from his
sacred presence. Low-caste witnesses were not allowed to approach a
court of justice, but standing without, at the requisite distance, to
yell their testimony to the Brahman judge who sat in uncontaminated
purity within. The falling of the shadow of a low-caste person upon
any Brahman in India necessitates an ablution on the part of the
latter. It is this frequency of contaminating and polluting
contingencies in the life of the Brahman which requires of him so many
ablutions daily, and which renders him perhaps the cleanest in person
among the sons of men. So many are the dangers of contamination which
daily beset him in the ordinary pursuits of life that relief in the
form of dispensations is granted him, so as to reduce the ceremonies
and diminish the extreme burden of religious observance. This law of
contact and pollution must weigh heavily upon any genuine Hindu of
high caste. The relation of the Maharajah of Travancore to his Prime
Minister, who is a Brahman, is an interesting illustration. The Rajah
is not a born Brahman; he is by many of his people regarded as a
manufactured Brahman. But His Highness himself does not regard himself
as equal, in sacred manhood, to his Brahman Prime Minister; hence he
will never be seated in his presence. Nor will the Brahman Dewan
deign to sit in the presence of his royal master, the Maharajah. Hence
all the business of State (sometimes requiring conferences of three
hours a day) is transacted by them while standing in each other's
presence.

Occupational limitations are observed, as we have already seen, by
many modern castes. Trade castes not only prescribe the one ancestral
occupation to their members; they also, with equal distinctness and
severity, prohibit to all within their ranks any other work or trade.
So in all those legion castes not only has a man his social sphere and
status assigned to him, he is also tied to the trade of his ancestors;
yea, more, he is expected to confine himself to ancestral tools and
me