Word: hindus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sting of Untouchability has softened somewhat. No longer, for example, are any harijans expected to use earthen spittoons hung round the neck because their spitting on the ground might "pollute" barefoot Brahmans. Until the 1930s, the lowliest Untouchables were virtually "unseeable" as well in some parts of India; caste Hindus believed even an Untouchable's shadow was defiling. Though such attitudes no longer prevail, a special government inquiry commission recently concluded that despite decades of legislation, discrimination is still "virulent all over India...
Untouchables are regular victims of brutality. In remote villages, "uppity" harijan women are sometimes paraded nude through the streets and then raped. A scuffle between an Untouchable laborer and some caste Hindus in Tamil Nadu State on Christmas Day in 1968 led to an arson attack on an Untouchable ghetto: 42 men, women and children were burned alive...
Placard-carrying "militant" Untouchables have not yet appeared on the streets of Delhi, but the harijan case is being made more and more vocally by the small harijan bloc in Parliament, by a few enlightened caste Hindus-and by the Communists. As Gandhi warned, if love and legislation do not overcome Untouchability, the only alternative may be bloody revolution...
Died. Zakir Husain, 72, President of India and first member of his country's minority (10%) Moslem faith to hold such high, though largely ceremonial office; in New Delhi. Amid a tradition of bitter enmity between Hindus and Moslems, the onetime university chancellor's election in 1967 was a significant step toward fulfilling the dream of the late Jawaharlal Nehru that India would become a secular, not a Hindu, state...
White Against Black. Through the centuries, Cochin's Jews have adopted many Indian religious traditions. Mortar for the walls of their synagogue was mixed with coconut water, which Hindus use for sacred occasions. The ceremonial dress of a Cochin Jewish woman is a heavy gold brocade sarong and blouse, worn by Malabar Indian women at weddings. But the Cochin Jews have stoutly preserved their religious Orthodoxy, even though the community so far as it is known has never had a rabbi. (Many isolated Jewish colonies in India get along without rabbis...