AN INDIAN PAUPER 197 



pot. He has no store of grain or firewood. His 

 children pick up cow-dung* and roots of millet, for 

 cooking purposes. 



1 Food. — He considers that his full ration would be 

 2\ pucka seers of grain or about 3J Government seers. 

 Yesterday he had cooked in his house 1^ seers of 

 barley, eked out with vegetables. Some days he gets 

 only 1 seer and sometimes \\ seers. A large part of 

 his diet consists of whatever vegetables — such as 

 leaves of gram, mustard, etc. — which his wife and 

 children can pick up in the fields. His rule is to mix 

 from 2 to 4 chittacks of flour in about 2\ seers of 

 vegetables. These are all boiled down into a mess 

 and eaten hot, with the balance of the flour made into 

 bread. 



1 Debt. — He is not in debt, a fact which he explains 

 by saying that no one would be fool enough to lend 

 him grain or money. 



1 General Remarks. — This man is admittedly the 

 poorest in the village. He makes no particular com- 

 plaint except of the cold, which forces him to get up 

 in the small hours of the morning and warm himself 

 over a fire of rubbish. But he and his children look 

 fairly nourished, and present no particular physical 

 signs of destitution.'! 



It is impossible to draw a sharp line of division 

 between the field labourer, who lives on wages, and 

 whose economic position corresponds exactly with 

 that of the English agricultural labourer, and the 

 village servant, who is conceived by Hindu tradition 

 as being in the joint service of the whole village, and 

 who therefore occupies, on a lower scale, the same 

 sort of position as the village artisan. The casual 



* This must not be considered to imply exceptional poverty, as 

 dry cow-dung is the commonest fuel in this part of India. 



t ' Inquiry into the Economic Condition of the Agricultural and 

 Labouring Classes in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh/ 

 1888, p. 87. 



