Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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and voiding; of washing, rinsing, anointing, and smearing; of clothing,
dressing and ornamenting; of sitting, rising and reclining; of moving,
visiting, and travelling; of speaking, reading listening, and reciting;
and of meditating, singing, working, playing, and fighting. It has its
laws for social and religious rights, privileges, and occupations; for
instructing, training, and educating; for obligation, duty, and practice;
for divine recognisation, duty and ceremony; for errors, sins, and
transgressions; for intercommunion, avoidance, and excommunication;
for defilement, ablution and purification; for fines, chastisements,
imprisonments, mutilations, banishments and capital executions. It
unfolds the ways of committing what it calls sin, accumulating sin,
and of putting away sin; and of acquiring merit, dispensing merit, and
losing merit. It treats of inheritance, conveyance, possession, and
dispossession; and of acquiring bargains, gain, loan, and ruin. It deals
with death, buria, and burning; and with commemoration, assistance
and injury after death. It interferes, in short, with all the relations and
events of life, and with what precedes and follows life… ’94
Adherence to these rules or usages is normally ensured through
the caste member of the locality who known each other intimately.
The members, through the caste council (Panchayat) or otherwise,
become the guardians of the caste rules. And the irony of it is that
‘the lower the caste in the social scale, the stronger its combination
and the more efficient its organization’. 95 In other words, the lower
castes are more prone to tighten their own shackles.
The infringements of caste rules carried their own censures and
penalties which were as varied as the caste rules. But, we shall take
here only a case of excommunication from the caste so as to illustrate
the inexorable working of the caste mechanism. O’Malley describes
the retched plight of some high-caste persons who had been excommunicated
in Orissa. No priest, barber or washerman would render
them any service, with the result that ‘they had long beards matted
with dirt, their hair hung in long strands and was filthy in the extreme,
and their clothes were beyond description for uncleanliness’. 96 Similarly,
Abbe Dubios draws an even more graphic picture of the fate of an
excommunicated man. ‘This expulsion from the caste, which