Untouchable Friends
Chapter 16 The Chandals
At Chelana, some untouchable Shudras, such as the Bhambis and Bhangis, buried their dead in the 1970s. Most Hindus, though, burnt their dead at special cremation grounds. Since ancient times a group of people called Chandal has attended at Hindu cremation grounds, especially in the cities and other big settlements with big cremation grounds. Hence, most Chandals live in towns and kasbas rather than in villages. It is a minority caste with a small population. Still it is a well known caste, as it is at the extreme bottom of the whole caste hierarchy and its members are considered very much polluting to savarn Hindus.
It is the traditional vocation of the caste to work on cremation grounds. They call themselves Acharyas and use the name Acharya caste rather than Chandal. Acharya means religious teacher and is a title of learned Brahmins. Pandit is another Brahmin title sometimes used for the Chandals at the cremation grounds.
Several reasons have been conjectured, why the Chandals has such a low status in the Hindu society.
A reason often put forward among common people in western Rajasthan is that Chandals at cremation grounds are supposed to plunder the corpses of those who get cremated. However, it is an old custom that Chandals working at cremation grounds can take away belongings from the decorated corpses before cremation. At least nowadays it is done with the permission of the deceased person's relatives, and as a part of the death ritual.
The Chandals may search dead corpses for any belonging, especially valuables such as gold and silver rings, which happen to be left on the body. It is done in the cremation ground immediately before the cremation. According to Tan Dan, a few ornaments are sometimes left intentionally, as it is a belief among Hindus, that objects taken away by the Chandals from the dead body will be given to the dead also in his next life. It is even a custom among savarn Hindus to put a miniature golden ladder next to the corpse in such a way that the Chandal can take it away. It is done, as people think that the one who has died goes straight up to heaven, if a Chandal takes such an expensive small golden ladder from his dead body.
The custom of leaving small golden ladders in this way exists in many parts of India, Tan Dan told.
The strong ritual pollution
A shadow of a Chandal on the body of a savarn Hindu was considered polluting, that is, it gave a feeling of dirtiness, although that feeling was induced by religious thinking and not by any physical dirt.
Hearing or seeing a Chandal from a distance was not polluting. It was the touch and the shadow, which was considered polluting to most Hindus. Hearing or seeing a Chandal was rather considered ill luck and a bad omen than pollution, Tan Dan thought.
If a Chandal had to pass a road or a lane on which there were people or children, then the Chandal had to shout something like, "Here a man of the Chandal caste is coming". Very seldom grown up people got polluted by Chandals. It mostly happened to children, who did not have the sense to run away, when the Chandal passed by.
In Rajasthan, avoiding ritual pollution from Chandals in a very strict way went on among Hindus up to the 1960s, Tan Dan told. In more recent decades the concern has been less, but is still there.
The problem of sticking to untouchability rules in modern life for savarn Hindus
Generally speaking, the rule of untouchability was less rigidly carried out after the 1960s, because people did not manage to adhere to this rule in many modern situations. For example, when travelling in buses and visiting hospitals. But they tried to carry out the prescribed antipollution formalities, after coming home.
Untouchability rules have softened not so much due to increased enlightment among the common people, as to changed living conditions with many novelties, which has made strict observance of untouchability rules impossible.
Chandals as described in the literature
Learned savarn Hindus tell that Chandals are the offspring of Shudra men and Brahmin women. Already in ancient India the socio-religious law texts such as Manu Smriti proclaimed, that the offspring of those who marriage across the borders of the four varnas would get a degraded status. The most degraded of all such excluded groups was that of the Chandals. (From Shudra men and Brahmin women.) It had a lower rank than the offspring to Brahmin men and Shudra women. Offspring of the latter kind would not be downgraded to the Chandal level, the Brahmin texts prescribed, but were allowed to live as Shudras like their mothers. These rules of discrimination were probably created several centuries before the rigid caste system was created in the middle of the first century B.C. at the time of Gupta rule or the centuries that followed. The Chandal of the early Sanskrit text evidently did not refer to a special caste, but rather to a type of excluded and boycotted people. Discriminated in the same spirit as some groups later on were treated as untouchables.
Could love across the caste barriers be a reason for outcasting and the formation of untouchable castes?
Are all the Chandals of today the offspring of couples who had been excluded from their original castes because they belonged to different castes, in this case Brahmin and Shudra castes? Very unlikely, Tan Dan thought.
Chandals and intercaste marriages
The Chandals constitute a special caste and a well defined community, which is very old, but has nothing to do with intercaste marriages, according to Tan Dan.
Because that is not the way new castes are formed. Neither now nor in feudal Rajasthani history as far back as their is some solid knowledge.
Still, the old thoughts about the Chandals as a mixture of Brahmins and untouchables still lives on in the mind of people in villages such as Chelana. So children of intercaste marriages of various kinds are sometimes called Chandals, as an abuse. Also other children, who do not conform to accepted behaviour, especially when people get angry.
There were no Chandal family at Chelana.
back to top