How to use this Page

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

Glancing across a few web hits on the word pariah I see that:

• a mother who didn’t put out chocolate Easter eggs was treated as a pariah by her family
• Iceland risks being treated as a pariah among nations if it doesn’t figure out how to pay off its debts

So a pariah is someone or something we are not very happy with.

In English we have been calling such unlucky or antisocial entities pariahs for about 200 years.

But why? The word traces back to the name of a specific kind of drum used in festivals in southern India. What’s so bad about that?

The answer lies in the old Indian caste system.

The Pariahs were a specific caste whose hereditary job it was to act as the drummer in those festivals.

But that didn’t convey much honor on them.

As a travel writer of 400 years ago Samuel Purchas put it:

“The Pareas are of worse esteeme,..reputed worse than the Diuell.”

These were one the caste known as untouchables.

It was the British time spent in India that brought the word into English and then, within English the meaning was generalized from a specific clan of unfortunate Indian to any generally hated person or entity.

I suppose Iceland or that chocolateless mom could have been called something worse; for example whatever the ancient Indian words were for shoemakers or janitors.

According to Hobson-Jobson—which is a dictionary of 1886 with a focus on words that have come to English from India:

“There are several castes in the Tamil country considered to be lower than the Pariahs, e.g. the caste of shoemakers, and the lowest caste of washermen.”

And since no one likes being low man on the totem pole, again according to Hobson-Jobson:

“the Pariah deals out the same disparaging treatment to these that he himself receives from higher castes.”

Dave Zeltserman, author of the forthcoming The Caretaker of Lorne Field, is profiled in today's Boston Globe: "Robert B. Parker had been the face of Boston crime fiction for nearly four decades when he died on Jan. 18. There is no replacing a writer who built a larger-than-life persona and cut a unique swath with his best-selling Spenser novels. But who are the new faces to watch? Who stands poised to possibly follow in Parker’s footsteps and make their mark with hard-boiled protagonists and gritty stories drawn from the streets of our fair city? Here are a few likely suspects:

Dave Zeltserman worked for 25 years as a software engineer at companies like Digital and Lucent before he got his big break as a writer of crime fiction. And it happened just in the nick of time, because Zeltserman was prepared to abandon his dream of being a novelist.

So excuse him if he seems like a man in a hurry - he wrote last year’s “Pariah’’ in six weeks - rather than pausing to savor his success.

Zeltserman broke through two years ago with “Small Crimes’’ and quickly followed it up with “Pariah’’ and his new novel, “Killer,’’ out in the United States in May (Serpent’s Tail has published all three). Before that, while he managed to get a couple of books published, he had to weather constant rebuffs from publishers who told him his work was too dark. “I was about to quit writing for good, because I was frustrated as hell,’’ says Zeltserman, 50, of Needham.

Kudos are flowing his way these days. The Washington Post compared Zeltserman to pulp-master James M. Cain, author of such classics as “Double Indemnity.’’ National Public Radio chose “Small Crimes,’’ which revolves around a corrupt ex-cop in Vermont released after serving time in prison for stabbing a district attorney, as one of the top five crime and mystery novels of 2008, calling it “a thing of sordid beauty.’’ Globe reviewer Ed Siegel lauded “Pariah,’’ one of whose characters is a Whitey Bulger-like mobster, as “darkly enjoyable,’’ adding that Zeltserman’s “smooth, lively writing’’ makes him “a fine addition to the local literary scene.’’

You ain’t seen nothing yet, according to Zeltserman: “I have a bunch of books coming out that are actually better than the books that are being published.’’ Though his reputation is for writing rough stuff about tough guys, don’t assume Zeltserman is either. “I’m not a gritty type of guy,’’ he says. “Writers are not necessarily what they write.’’