THE DEPRESSED CASTES.

The only classes in British India for whom no real representation has been devised in the enlarged Indian Councils are the millions of humble toilers who constitute what are known as the “depressed castes.”  Under present social conditions in India, this was probably inevitable.  Though, rather unreasonably, the vast majority of them go to swell the numbers of the Hindu population in the census upon which Hindu representation ought, according to Hindu politicians, to be based, those politicians have certainly not as yet shown any title to speak on their behalf.  For there is no more striking contrast to the liberal and democratic professions of a body which claims, as does the Indian National Congress, to represent an enlightened, progressive, and national Hinduism than the fact that in the course of its 25 years’ existence it has scarcely done anything to give practical effect to its theoretical repudiation of a social system that condemns some 50 millions out of the 300 millions of the Hindu population of India to a life of unspeakable degradation.  For a long time to come, the depressed castes will probably find, as in the past, their truest friends and best qualified representatives among the European members of Council, who, just because they are aliens, are free from all the influences, whether of interest or of prejudice, which tend to divide Hindu society into so many watertight compartments.  Let any one who has any doubts on this point read some of the documents published in the Blue-books on the reforms—­petitions from low-caste communities imploring Government not to commit the defence of their interests to the Hindu Brahman, but to continue to them the direct and unselfish protection which they have hitherto enjoyed at the hands of British administrators.

The “depressed classes” of whom we generally speak as Pariahs, though the name properly belongs only to one particular caste, the Pareiyas in Southern India, include all Hindus who do not belong to the four highest or “clean” castes of Hinduism, and they are therefore now officially and euphemistically designated as the Panchamas—­i.e., the fifth caste.  Many of the Panchamas, especially in Southern India, are little better than bonded serfs; others are condemned to this form of ostracism by the trades they ply.  Such are not only the scavengers and sweepers, but also the workers in leather, the Chamars and Muchis of Northern and Central India, and the Chakilians and Madigas of Southern India, who with their families number 14 or 15 million souls; the washermen, the tadi-drawers and vendors of spirituous liquors, the pressers of oil, and, in many parts of the country, the cowherd and shepherd castes, &c.  They are generally regarded as descendants of the aboriginal tribes overwhelmed centuries ago by the tide of Aryan conquest.  Some of those tribes, grouped together in the Indian Census under the denominational rubric of “Animists”