![From Minneapolis Picture Magazine, November 6, 1977. The Rodiya: Outcastes of Sri Lanka. Photos for the Minneapolis Tribune by Clara NiiSka. [Caption 1]. Rodiya people, the outcastes of Sri Lanka. Above, a nattukkari or Rodiya gypsy dancer. At upper right, two older Rodiya women returned from a day's begging. Near right, Bandari Vasanta, an 11-year-old Rodiya girl, who lives with her mother and five brothers and sisters in a one-room house on the outskirts of Hetipola, a village in the south-central highlands. Bandari takes care of the children while her mother begs for a living. At far right, an elderly Rodiya man. Opposite page, the landscape at Peradeniya, the location of the University of Sri Lanka. The scene is typical of highland areas not devoted to tea cultivation, areas where many Rodiya live in spread-out hamlets. [Text]: There is no literal translation of "Rodiya." But the word conveys an image of something unclean; it usually is translated as "dirt being." There are about 3,000 Rodiya among Sri Lanka's 14 million people, and they are outcastes. Clara NiiSka, a young St. Paul woman, spent two months studying the Rodiya of Sri Lanka, the teardrop-shaped island nation off the tip of India, recording their lives and their government's efforts to change them. The result of her work, sponsored by the Minnesota SPAN Association, was a 300-page photographic essay. "Take this paper," Ms. NiiSka wrote in her preface, "as a glimpse of another way of life." A few of her remarkable photographs are reproduced on these pages and on the cover. They are not intended as a portrait of Sri Lanka as a whole. The caste system in Sri Lanka, she wrote, is very different from that in India. While only a few Indians are considered high caste, about half of Sri Lanka's people have that status. Of the remaining half, the Rodiya occupy the lowest level. No one knows why, although legends blame misdeeds that brought the Rodiya this curse: "That they should beg, from Generation to Generation, from door to door, through the kingdom..." And the Rodiya have done that. Their begging has a tradition-based dignity about it and is more like "collecting what is due them" than street-corner panhandling, which they look down on. The Rodiya go from house to house, on almost inherited routes, and wait patiently at the gate for gifts. The have other skills -- hide-working, considered unclean by other Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka; basketry, to which the government is trying to add [more]](Rodiya02a.gif)
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With many thanks to the people of Sri Lanka who welcomed me as their guest,
to Picture Magazine editor Katherine Watson, and to Janis Sarles for keeping this copy of Picture magazine!
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