“Gèsu. I want you to cease this everlasting preoccupation with matters below the waist. I engaged you to be my interpreter, and I am already shuddering for fear of what words you are likely to speak, ostensibly mine. But right now, Tofaa, our rice and goat meat are getting wet with salt spray. Come and put something in your other end.”

I really believed, at that time, that in choosing a Hindu woman for my translator in India, I had unfortunately chosen a particularly unlovely and witless and pathetic specimen. How she had come to be the consort of a king was beyond my comprehension, but I sympathized more than ever with that wretched man, and thought I better understood now why he had thrown away a kingdom and his life. But I have here recounted a few of Tofaa’s charmless attributes—only a few of them—and have repeated some of her fatuous garrulity—only some of it—by way of making her both visible and audible in all her awfulness. I do that because, on arriving in India, I discovered to my horror that Tofaa was not an anomaly. She was an unexceptional and purely typical adult Hindu female. From a crowd of Hindu women, whatever the assortment of classes, or jati, I could hardly have picked out Tofaa. Worse yet, I found the women to be immeasurably superior to the Hindu men.

In my journeying I had got acquainted with numerous other races and nations before visiting those of India. I had concluded that the Mien droppings of the Bho of To-Bhot had to be the lowest breed of mankind, and I had been mistaken. If the Mien represented humanity’s ground level, then the Hindus were its worm burrows. In some of those countries I had earlier inhabited or visited, I could not help seeing that some of the people despised and detested other people—for their different language or their lesser refinement or their lower class in society or their peculiar ways of life or their choice of religion. But in India I could not help seeing that everybody despised and detested everybody else, and for all those reasons.

Let me be as fair as I can. Let me say that I was in some small error from the start, in thinking of all Indians as Hindus. Tofaa informed me that “Hindu” was only a variant of the name “Indian,” and properly referred only to those Indians who practiced the Hindu religion of Sanatana Dharma, or Eternal Duty. Those preferred to be dignified by the name of “Brahmanists,” after the chief god (Brahma the Creator) of the three chief gods (the other two being Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer) of their numberless multitude of gods. Other Hindus had picked out some lesser god from that mob—Varuna, Krishna, Hanuman, whoever—and gave more devotion to that one, and thereby rated themselves superior to the greater ruck of Hindus. Many others of the population had adopted the Muslim religion seeping in from the north and west. A very few Indians still practiced Buddhism. That religion, after originating in India and spreading afar, had almost died out in its homeland, possibly because it enjoined cleanliness. Still other Indians followed other religions or sects or cults: Jain, Sikh, Yoga, Zarduchi. In all their teeming diversity and jumble and overlap of faiths, however, the Indian people maintained one holy attribute in common: the adherents of every religion despised and detested the adherents of every other.

The Indians did not much like, either, to be lumped all together as “Indians.” They were a seething and still unmixed caldron of different races, or so they claimed. There were the Cholas, the Aryans, Sindi, Bhils, Bangali, Gonds … I do not know how many. The lighter brown Indians called themselves white, and claimed they were descended from fair-haired, pale-eyed ancestors who came from somewhere far to the north. If that was ever true, then there had since been so much intermingling that, over the centuries, the darker browns and blacks of the southern races had predominated—as mud does when poured into milk —and all the Indians were now but shades and tints of muddy brown. None was of any color worth boasting about, and the insignificant differences of hue served only as one more basis for their abhorring each other. The lighter brown ones could sneer at the darker brown, and they at the indisputably black.

Also, depending on their race, tribe, family lineage, place of original origin and place of current habitation, the Indians spoke one hundred seventy-nine different languages, hardly any two of them mutually comprehensible, and every one was deemed by its speakers the One True and Holy Tongue (though few of them ever bothered to learn to read and write it, if indeed it had a script or character or alphabet to be written in, which not many did), and the speakers of every True Tongue scorned and reviled those who spoke any False Tongue, which meant any of the one hundred and seventy-eight others.

Whatever their race, religion, tribe, or tongue, all the Indians spinelessly submitted to a social order imposed by the Brahmanists. That was the order of jati, which divided the people into four rigid classes and an overflow of discards. Jati having been first devised by some long-ago Brahman priests, their own descendants naturally constituted the highest class, called Brahman. Next were the descendants of long-ago warriors—very long ago, I surmised; I saw no man of the present day who could conceivably be imagined as a warrior—next, the descendants of long-ago merchants, and last the descendants of long-ago humble artisans. Those would have been the bottommost order, but there were also the discards, the paraiyar, or “untouchables,” who could claim no jati at all. A man or woman born into any of the jati could not associate with anyone born into a higher, and of course would not with anyone of a lower. Marriages and alliances and business transactions were done only between matching jati, so the classes were eternally perpetuated, and a person could no more ascend to a higher one than he could ascend to the clouds. Meanwhile, the paraiyar dared not even let their defiling shadow fall on anyone of jati.

No person in India—except, I suppose, a Hindu of the Brahman class—was pleased with the jati he found himself born into. Every lower-jati person I met was anxious to tell me how his forebears had, in the long-ago, occupied a much nobler class, and had been undeservedly debased through the influence or trickery or sorcery of some enemy. Nevertheless, all preened in the fact that they were of higher order than somebody else, even if only the vile paraiyar. And any of the paraiyar could always point derisively to some still more miserable paraiyar to whom he was superior. What was most contemptible about the jati order was not that it existed, and had existed for ages, but that all the people caught in its toils—not just Hindus, but every single soul in India—willingly let it go on existing. Any other people, with the least scintilla of courage and sense and self-respect would long ago have abolished it, or died trying. The Hindus never had even tried, and I saw no sign that they ever would.

It is not impossible that even a people as degenerate as the Bho and Mien may have improved in the years since I was last among them, and made something halfway decent of themselves and their country. But, from what travelers’ report I have had of India in these later years, nothing has changed there. To this day, if a Hindu ever feels bad about his being one of the dregs of humankind, he has only to look about for some other Hindu he feels better than, and he can feel good. And that satisfies him.

Since it would have been unwieldy for me to try to identify every person I met in India according to all his entitlements of race, religion, jati and language—one man might be simultaneously a Chola, a Jain, a Brahman and a Tamil-speaker—and since the whole population, in any event, was under the sway of the Hindu jati order, I continued to think indiscriminately of them all as Hindus, and to call them all Hindus, and I still do. If the fastidious Lady Tofaa considered that an improper or derogatory appellation I did not and do not care. I could think of numerous epithets more fitting and a lot worse.