Dom
डोम ḍomaThe community that by hereditary right tends the cremation grounds of Kashi and keeps custody of the sacred fire from which every pyre is lit; its head is called the Dom Raja.
Where this term appears
- Vijayanagara: The Empire Built to Hold the Line History
Its secular architecture borrows domes and arches from the same world it fought.
- The city in the mirror Treatise
Everything in these chapters, the trident and the taraka, the Doms and the ghats, the Aghori and the pandit, the four faiths and the burning fire, is a description of a living thing by someone standing, in the …
- The city of four faiths Treatise
…ith the caste hierarchies woven through Kashi's sacred life, from the Doms who keep the fire to the widows abandoned by the river, Ravidas is the answer the city gave to its own injustice: that from the very bo…
- The city of Rama Treatise
… counter-current, and it is a mighty one: the same city that kept the Doms outside its temples produced the poet-saints who declared that God belonged to everyone and needed no temple at all.
- The city that will not die Treatise
…astes shut out of its temples, the widows abandoned by its river, the Doms kept outside the very rites they alone can perform.
- The keepers of the fire Treatise
It is the Doms , a community that orthodox Hindu society has for centuries classed as untouchable, placed at the very bottom of its hierarchy, kept outside its temples and its wells.
- The learned city Treatise
It was a deliberate answer, in stone, to the exclusions of the old order, the same city that kept the Doms from its temples now raising a Vishwanath that turned no one away.