Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Ambedkar calls them, taking their name from this passage from Sir Henry Maine's account
of early Irish history:
Much of the common tribeland is not occupied at all, but constitutes, to use the
English expression, the 'waste' of the tribe. Still this waste is constantly brought un-
der tillage or permanent pasture by settlements of tribesmen, and upon it cultivators
and servile states are permitted to squat, particularly towards the border. It is part of
the territory over which the authority of the chief tends steadily to increase, and here
it is that he settles his
fuidhir
or stranger-tenants, a very important class - the outlaws
and 'broken men' from other tribes who come to him for protection, and who are only
connected with their new tribe by their dependence on its chief, and through the re-
sponsibility which he incurs for them
.
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Ambedkar suggests that in early India, the chief function of Broken Men, who were
either the remnants of defeated tribes, or outcasts from existing ones, was to live on the
edge of the settlement and 'do the work of watch and ward against the raiders belonging to
nomadic tribes.' With a shortage of land for cattle there would have been little in the way of
wastes (in the old sense of the word), as there were in Ireland, so what better than to entrust
the broken men with the wastes (in the new sense of the word) that issued from the refusal
to eat beef. The Broken Men were given the responsibility of disposing of carcases and tan-
ning the leather, and fed in part on the proceeds. It is for this reason, Ambedkar argues, that
the Broken Men, who previously had simply been outcasts, became Untouchables. Since
the cow was sacred and other meats eaten, the Brahmans fixed the notion of uncleanness
not on their pigs, but on their knackers.
So it is that, despite a slaughter ban in all states except Bengal and Kerala, some 20 milli-
on cows are butchered every year by low ranking castes, the meat gets eaten, and the hides
get tanned, providing the basis for a leather export industry worth $3.5 billion. In Gandhi's
cessing is now carried out in regulated slaughterhouses catering to middle-class non-Hin-
dus. But as an informant of Harris's remarks, it is the cow who dies of old age that the poor
get to use: 'It is good for the untouchable if a cow dies of starvation in a village, but not if
it gets sent to an urban slaughterhouse to be sold to Muslims or Christians'.
The Hindu three-diet system is an ingenious adaptation to the constraints of a default
livestock economy, which, though rooted in an oppressive caste system, has an elegant
justice about it. The Brahmans at the top are confined to an ascetic vegetarian diet, as are
members of the Vaishya mercantile class. The warrior Kshatriya caste and the Shudra la-
bourers in the middle can eat meat, but not beef; and the beef is reserved for the 60 million
poorest who might otherwise be most at risk from malnutrition. The people who do the
physical work get the bulk of the meat - in sharp contrast, say, to 19th century Britain. In-
