Word: hindus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...four Hindu castes.* The Gandhis belong to the Vaishya or shopkeeper caste. While many marvelled, Devadas Gandhi knelt before a roaring fire in a ceremony of purification, was married by a saffron-robed priest who mumbled that henceforth he would be entitled to worship and act as a Brahman. Hindus in the audience knew that no matter what the priest said Devadas Gandhi will always be considered a Vaishya...
Though the ceremony was hailed as "revolutionary," though Brahman sticklers feel themselves polluted should the shadow of an Untouchable fall across their food, marriages between the three upper classes are not unknown, orthodox Hindus being less scandalized when the bride is of the higher caste as was the case last week...
...Those Hindu priests said. `Will all orthodox Hindus come forward and receive the sacred food?* I had not realized that they had a ceremony so much like our own sacrament, and there was a moment of terrific suspense, and then a woman from the back of the group said. 'There are no such distinctions here. We are all one and either we all come forward or no one will come forward.' . . . And so in a few minutes, after a consultation of those Hindu priests on that altar rock, the priest came down among us and offered...
...elaborate hall of Lady Vittal das Thackersey's marble villa outside Poona squatted more than 100 persons last week-Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Christians-all gazing out on the terrace where on a cot lay what looked like a week's wash, a great bundle of white linen shrouding the living skeleton of Mahatma Gandhi. Month ago, already an owl-eyed lemur of a man. St. Gandhi began a fast in behalf of the Hindu Untouchables, without whose liberation he believes real self-government in India is impossible...
Sitting in his cell, fasting is Gandhi's only tool but it is potent. Last September a six-day fast nearly killed him but forced a settlement between the caste Hindus and the Untouchables, which was accepted in principle by the British Government (TIME, Oct. 3). In December a 36-hour fast got another prisoner, a high-caste Brahmin, the right to do Untouchables' work as penance. For his new fast, he asked for the world's prayers, commanded that he be let alone in his cell...