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Mangla Ram got by time increasingly impopular among savarn Hindus at Chelana for his refusal to observe conventional caste rules. Sometimes he was slapped and given blows outside the Thikana gate. And he was threatened several times. At last he shifted to Jalagarh, where he worked as a tailor for many years. He died about the same time as Madanji, i.e. in the late 1970s.
Mangla Ram was a Chinpa by caste. The traditional caste profession of the Chinpas was textile printing. They coloured the cloth with wooden blocks. Hence, Mangal Ram did not belong to the tailor caste Darji, although he worked as a tailor. People of that caste used to call themselves Suiya Darji, i.e. needle tailors, to avoid getting mixed up with tailors of a lower ranked caste such as Chinpa.
In the old days Suiya Darjis mainly sew the clothes of royals and other rich people. Common people living in villages did not have much to stitch, as they mostly used square-sized cloth such as dhoti, turban and khes, Tan Dan told.
However, there are several traditional clothes of ordinary Rajasthani villagers which require the work of a tailor. Such as the female blouse used all over western Rajasthan and elsehwere. Kurta pyjama are also old traditional clothes which require stitching, although poor villagers mostly used dhoti instead of pyjamas and other kind of pants. Ang-rakhis shirts, in the 1970s still used by traditional Charan men further to the south-west, at Sanchor and in Gujarat, also required stitching by needles.
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