The Story of my Experiments with Truth

Some of the classes which render us the greatest social service, but which we Hindus have chosen to regard as "untouchables," are relegated to remote quarters of a town or a village, called in Gujarati dhedvado, and the name has acquired a bad odour. Even so in Christian Europe the Jews were once "untouchables," and the quarters that were assigned to them had the offensive name of "ghettoes. " In a similar way today we have become the untouchables of South Africa. It remains to be seen how far the sacrifice of Andrews and the magic wand of Shastri succeed in rehabilitating us.

The ancient Jews regarded themselves as the chosen people of God, to the exclusion of all others, with the result that their descendants were visited with a strange and even unjust retribution. Almost in a similar way the Hindus have considered themselves Aryas or civilized, and a section of their own kith and kin as Anaryas or untouchables, with the result that a strange, if unjust, nemesis is being visited not only upon the Hindus in South Africa, but the Mussalmans and Parsis as well, inasmuch as they belong to the same country and have the same colour as their Hindu brethren.