Thread by @RMBT_tweets

If #Brahmins are proud of their past, then own up to this 👉 "French anthropologist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of eastern Himalayas the low-ranking castes in a situation of permanent debt dependency....It was common practice, Galey explains, for high-caste 1/5

moneylenders to demand one of the borrower's daughters as security. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter's marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender's household after her wedding night, 2/5

spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent off to some nearby timber where she would have to spend the next year or two as camp, a prostitute working off her father's debt.
3/5 #Brahmin

Once it was paid off, she'd return to her husband and begin her married life. This seems shocking, outrageous even, but Galey does not report any widespread feeling of injustice. Everyone seemed to feel that this was just the way things worked. 4/5

Neither was there much concern voiced among the local #Brahmins, who were the ultimate arbiters in matters of morality-though this is hardly surprising, since the most prominent moneylenders were often #Brahmins themselves."

~ From David Graeber's Debt:The First 5000 Years 5/5