“The people guilty of crossing the “caste line” were considered the only “impure” beings in the entire hierarchy... In India only the people “without a caste” were considered outcasts, and they were shunned even by the lowest caste, even if they had previously belonged to the highest caste; on the contrary, nobody felt humiliated by his own caste and even a sudra was as proud of and as committed to his own caste as a brahmana of the highest station was to his.”
