inflicted upon one who is under the
ban of his caste:--

All the members of his caste are prohibited from accepting his
hospitality. Not even his own household are permitted to dine with
him. He is boycotted, absolutely, by all his best friends, associates,
and companions. Not one of them dares, under penalty of complete
ostracism, to harbour or favour him. Nor will he be invited to their
homes. They dare not receive him under the shelter of their roofs nor
offer him food. More than once the writer has seen the bitter tyranny
of caste brought to bear upon those who had abandoned caste by
becoming Christians. Here is a youth known to the writer. He is a
member of a respectable caste. He accepts the religion of Christ
publicly as his own. His parents and brothers and sister will cling to
him with the hope of bringing him back to the ancestral faith. But
caste authority steps in. It forbids the family to receive the son and
brother, or to offer him a morsel of food. In that household a sad war
of sentiment is inaugurated. Parental love and family tenderness cling
to the Christian youth; and is he not the hope of the family for the
years to come? But to harbour him means to be outcast as a family; and
how can they endure that? And are they not at heart loyal to the caste
of their fathers? So the conflict runs on for months. One night only
the tender heart of the sister compels her to defy caste to the
extent, not of eating with the dear brother and companion of her
youth, but so far as to bring him the remnant of their meal, not in
one of the home vessels from which he had eaten so often as a Hindu in
the past, but on a plantain leaf and behind the house!

Then, of course, comes the connubial ban whereby all the members of
the caste are prohibited from giving any of their children in marriage
to those of his household. To the Hindu who believes that marriage is
not only the God-given right of every human being, but who also
implicitly believes that it is a heavenly injunction whose fulfilment
rests as a duty upon every father in behalf of his children, this
interdict is the most oppressive of all. But it is enforced with
heartless severity in every case; and any family which may defy the
caste in this respect by entering into conjugal relationship with that
of the one under ban, is at once outcast.

Another mighty resource of the organization, in this connection, is to
interdict to the recreant member the use of all cast