The Paria: A Tragedy in One Act

Michael Beer

1823

Dramatis Personae

Gadhi, A Paria

Maja, his Wife

Benassar, Indian Attendant

Scene—The Paria’s Hut

Gadhi:
[ . . . ] I have no fears for nature’s usual horrors
Impartial threatening each created being.
An exile from the reign of social life,
Cast from the world’s thronged current on the shore,
My home the forest and my friends its tenants,
Fearless for daily life’s support I tread
The tiger’s jungle and the serpent’s brake.
Yet I can tremble when the shrill Naquarrah
Proclaims the fearful neighborhood of man;
And by the track, marked with the panther’s footstep,
Turn from his human rival’s dreaded den,
The Brahmin temple. Soon some hunter’s arrow
To check my flight may reach this beating heart.
Then swells the chorus, then the shout arises;
For Bramah triumphs when a Paria falls.
Maja:
Oh! Gadhi.—Thunder not, all-powerful God!
Thy voice is fearful.
Gadhi:
Weep, my Maja, weep
Unhappy wife, and give thy thanks to Heaven
That it has left thee tears; for me, the Paria,
No memory wakes their long exhausted fountain.
But thou hast gazed on life in all its splendor,
And happier days thy earlier childhood knew.
Maja:
Not for those days, nor all their bliss, I pine;
The life ‘twas thine to save is thine for ever.
And when I see thee cheerful, canst thou deem
That such low griefs could cloud thy Maja’s brow?
What are the sensual goods of life to me?
A woman’s bosom knows one bliss on earth,
The bliss to love, and feel that love requited.
Gadhi:

An outcast’s love is but a sad requital.

Maja:

An outcast thou!

Gadhi:
And is not such thy husband?
Will not the babe which hangs upon thy bosom,
Will not his offspring, with shame-sunken head,
His blood, his race, his whole succession weep,
Weep the hot tears oppression strains from misery,
That our affection ever gave them birth?
Speak, if thy voice be thunder. If thy name
Be justice and forbearance. Mighty Bramah,
Hear and give answer. Tell me why thy hate
Pursues for aye the race from whence I spring,
Because forsooth, in ages wrapt in fable,
A Paria once withheld his worship due;
Your priests proclaim, where’er the Ganges rolls,
That still our presence spreads pollution round.
Preach that the brow, whence mercy streams for
others,
Turns in averted anger from a race
Which calls thee by the common name of father.
Maja:
Ah no! The master work of him who made us
Is such an heart as thine. The great Creator
On his best labours never stamped his curse.
Their doctrine is a lie.
Gadhi:
It is, my Maja.
Did I not deem it such, my faith would waver
In him to whom their guilty offerings rise.
Bramah is kind to all. Flows not from him
The light that vivifies a fruitful world?
Has not his hand, to shield us from his tempests,
Wreathed o’er our heads the broad banana’s vault?
Is he not sire of all embracing nature,
Who never drove the Paria from her bosom? [ . . . ]
Man only, with presumptuous hand, confounds
The general order, and repels his neighbor,
Boasts of his crimes, and calls his phrensy [frenzy] faith.

 

Translated by

Francis Egerton 
Ellesmere

.

 

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 6.

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Creator Bio

Michael Beer

1800–1833

Poet and dramatist Michael Beer was born near Berlin to a wealthy German Jewish family. From age seventeen, he traveled extensively in Italy, visiting his brother, the composer Jacob (Giacomo) Meyerbeer. Beer’s first plays were influenced by his Italian journeys, Goethe’s classicism, and a desire for Jews to be accepted into European society. At nineteen, Beer was a founding member of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, along with Heinrich Heine, Eduard Gans, and Leopold Zunz, and advocated for the recognition of both Jewish peoplehood and Jewish artistic tradition. His play The Paria may be the first to have universalized a term for an outcast class in India.

Related Guide

Theater in Jewish Culture, 1750–1880

The novelty in Jewish performing arts in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries involved the adaptation of traditional materials into new forms, as well as a turn to performing arts that were unconnected to religious life. 

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