example, take a kitchen and cooking, and see how Caste
rules there. For cooking is not vulgar work, or _infra dig._ in any
sense, in India; all Caste women in good orthodox Hindu families
either do their own or superintend the doing of it by younger members of
the same family or servants of the same Caste. "We Europeans cannot
understand the extent to which culinary operations may be associated
with religion. The kitchen in every Indian household is a kind of
sanctuary or holy ground. . . . The mere glance of a man of inferior
Caste makes the greatest delicacies uneatable, and if such a glance
happens to fall on the family supplies during the cooking operations,
when the ceremonial purity of the water used is a matter of almost life
and death to every member of the household, the whole repast has to be
thrown away as if poisoned. The family is for that day dinnerless. Food
thus contaminated would, if eaten, communicate a taint to the souls as
well as bodies of the eaters, a taint which could only be removed by
long and painful expiation." Thus far Sir Monier Williams (quoted as a
greater authority than any mere missionary!). Think of the defilement
which would be contracted if a member of the household who had broken
Caste in baptism took any part in the cooking. It would never be
allowed. Such a woman could take no share in the family life. Her
presence, her shadow, above all her touch, would be simply pollution.
Therefore, and for many other reasons, her life at home is impossible,
and the Hindu, without arguing about it, regards it as impossible. It
does not enter into the scheme of life as laid down by the rules of his
Caste. He never, if he is orthodox, contemplates it for a moment as a
thing to be even desired.

Cooking and kitchen work may seem small (though it would not be easy for
even the greatest to live without reference to it), so let us look out
on the world of trade, and see Caste again as a Doer there. If a
merchant becomes a Christian, no one will buy his goods; if he is a
weaver, no one will buy his cloth; if he is a dyer, no one will buy his
thread; if he is a jeweller, no one will employ him. If it is remembered
that every particular occupation in life represents a particular Caste,
it will be easily understood how matters are complicated where converts
from the great Trades Unions are concerned. Hence the need of Industrial
Missions, and the fact that they exist.

A man wants to become a Christian,