“Rangiar Naidu accompanied us to the railway station in the evening, and gave me letters to friends farther on. He is a highly educated man, was at school with Ragunath Rao, and maintains close friendship with him. He is of the Khastriah or military caste, which is not common in the Madras Presidency. His type of face is distinctly Egyptian, and he might well be a village sheykh of the Delta. He is a rich man and member of the Municipal Council of Madras, an elective post which leaves him independent.
“_25th Nov._--By night train to Bellari, the head-quarters of the famine district, and so of great interest. There were five hours of daylight before arriving, and we found the country much changed from yesterday. This part of India is a high plateau, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the sea, with occasional hills of gneiss or granite, five or six hundred feet higher. The soil is light, and there is no irrigation, and, in spite of a rather unusually wet season, the crops looked scanty and poor. No rice is grown, only _raghi_ and millet, but in some parts cotton makes a fair crop. Architecturally, there is nothing worth seeing at Bellari, but we had letters to the leading Hindus and a rich Eurasian, and have found our visit so profitable that we have decided to stay on another day. First, however, we were hospitably entertained at luncheon by the English railway superintendent, Mr. Hanna, an intelligent man who has been twelve years in the country and likes it. But of course we learnt nothing much from him, as the English live in a world of their own.
“In the afternoon, however, eight or nine Hindu gentlemen came to see us, as highly educated as those at Madras, and even more free spoken. Among them was a Brahmin of high caste, who had broken his rule by visiting England, and had even become a Christian there, losing thereby his caste but not altogether his social position at Bellari. He spoke about the absurdity of the reason commonly given by English officials for having no social intercourse with the natives, namely, that the laws of caste prevent it. ‘Here you see me,’ he said. ‘A few years ago my caste laws were so strict that I could not eat with any of these gentlemen’--turning to the rest who sat round--‘I was obliged to throw away my meals if one of them happened to look at me while I was eating. Yet it did not prevent us being the best of friends. Neither, now that my caste is gone, am I less intimate with them, although they in their turn cannot now eat with me. Is it then necessary that men should eat together to be friends? The Europeans receive me no better to-day, though I could eat and drink with them all day long. The difficulty is entirely of their making.’ He said this with as little embarrassment as there might be in England between one who on religious grounds only eats fish on a Friday, and others who eat meat. The manner of the speaker, too, was so good, and with so much conversational charm, that the refusal of the English officials to associate with him sounded to us particularly ludicrous. These Hindus are no wit inferior to Italians or Spaniards in their address, and are very little darker of skin.