OCR Rendition - approximate

Relations between Civilized and Savage Life. 315 village servants-hewers of wood, and drawers of water-as Helots charged to clear away refuse and dead carcasses, to skin animals, and to undertake, with all its defilements, the preparation and manufacture of leather and of leathern articles of dress or use ; and to perform other services which would defile their Aryan superiors. They are found in almost every village of the open country, as an essential part of the village organisationbut always as outcasts-living apart from the other villagers and generally outside the village area, forbidden to touch the purer races, who could not, however, live without their help, in their present condition of civilization. jThere are often clear traces of successive conquests of separate races more aboriginal than the Aryan. In large village communities in the Deccan, for instance, the outcast races are never on one uniform level of inferiority. There are grades of outcasts as well as of the " twice born," and one grade may not live, or eat with, still less intermarry with the others-the caste which removes and skins and . buries the dead ox, may not intermarry with that which twists the skin into well-ropes, or makes the skin into leather, or the leather into shoes. There is much to ustify the conjecture that each caste marks a separate conquest of some aboriginal tribe, each tribe having had its separate work assigned to it in the organisation of the village community. This description applies only to the plain and open country. In the mountain ranges and forests we still find aboriginal races in sole occupation of large tracts from which the immigrant Aryans have never been able to drive them : Gonds, Koles, and Sonthals, Warlis, Bhils, and Naikras, Katkurris, Kulis, Dublas, and Ramoosis (Baruds) are examples of tribes apparently more aboriginal than Aryans, who have succeeded in maintaining a tribal, and almost a national existence in the presence of the Hindu invaders, and who still retain in their customs, beliefs, and language, and often in their physical characteristics, unmistakeable traces of non-Aryan and probably pre-Aryan origin. How did the Aryan contact, either in the way of incorporation in a village community, or by confining these aboriginal races to mountains, forests, &c., affect the social life and physical characteristics of the aborigines ? In the village communities it imparted a certain tinge of Aryan civilization to the aboriginal Helots. They generally lost their own language and acquired that of their conquerors. They gave up their nomadic habits, and settled down to live continuously in the same locality, and to cultivate the same fields. They acquired proficiency in some distinctive industries which were necessary to the village community, e.g., as tanners, leather workers, shoemakers, &c.