The Underworld of India

Abstract

SIR GEOBGE MACMUNN knows his India from end to end in an intimate work-a-day fashion that has provided material for a life-like picture of the depressed classes, and will probably give the general reader a clearer idea of the real India than would have been gathered from a more formal treatise. The ‘underworld’, of which he writes, includes all untouchables and outcastes the castes of menial occupation, the mendicants, dancing girls, temple and other courtesans, and jungle tribes, as well as the classes whose normal occupations are criminal. Apart from the interest of this description of these characteristically eastern social groups, Sir George's book has the merit of bringing out clearly the place of caste in social relations a very real foundation of opposition to the political claims of Hinduism and the place of sex in Hindu religious thought and social life a constant and deep-rooted preoccupation, which gives them an orientation fundamentally divergent from that in a European society.