Storia do Mogor 281.17.2

281.17.2

Now, to lose your caste and your position among these people is something even more deadly than for a gentleman in France to be degraded and lose his nobility, he and all his [52] posterity. For there a deprived noble can still (above all, if he have any wealth) find respectable men with whom he can form an alliance, such as merchants or others. While, if deprived of his caste, the man of Malabar can no longer find a wife, nor can anyone give him his daughter without incurring the same evils and penalties. He cannot be received in anyone's house, none may eat or drink with him, cannot even serve him or help him in his necessities, even were he at the very point of death. The rule is so strict that he must either renounce marriage or take a Pariah wife. Never to marry at all is the severest punishment that can be inflicted among these people; they hold marriage to be the greatest happiness in life, and, on the contrary, never to marry the greatest of all evils. But for a man to marry a Pariah is to fall from his nobility, to lose his caste, to be rejected by his family and connections; in short, to become himself a Pariah, he and all his posterity usque in eternum. That is a most terrible thing. Still, there is a method of being rehabilitated and washing away the Pariah stain that has been contracted, and thus re-entering one's lost caste. This method is to drink for forty consecutive days a potion composed of cow's dung and urine.