Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c10.137

c10.137

Āpastamba expresses the noble statement that a person should stint himself, his wife and children but neither his slave nor his hired labourer who works for him,¹ but we can hardly believe that this maxim was taken very seriously, though it shows that in the better households slaves were well fed and kindly treated. The slaves and hired labourers may have not been starved, but in general the food served to them was definitely inferior to that of their masters. Thus a brāhmaṇa monk boasts that even his slaves and servants eat rice and meat, and use clothes and ointment made in Kāsī,² which shows that ordinarily such people were given inferior food and dress. A similar claim is made by the Buddha, who says that while in the houses of others the dāsas and kammakaras are fed on rice, with sour gruel, in the house of his father they receive rice, meat and milk.³ That the slave received a fixed type of food is clear from the repeated use of the abusive phrase dāsa-paribhoga.⁴ Sour gruel was the food of a poor man working for wages.⁵ A Jātaka story refers to a potter's hireling, who after a full day's work with the clay and the wheel "sat all clay-besmeared on a bundle of straw eating balls of barley groat dipped in a little soup."⁶