Pariah

   A Pariah for some three thousand years was a member of a lower caste in India called, in Tamil, Paraiyan, from Southern India. Pariahs were drum beaters. At certain Hindu festivals, the beating of drums plays an important part. When the British came to India, they employed these lower-caste people as domestics and as servants to whom they assigned other duties. The British corrupted their name to pariah with a lowercase p. The continental Europeans, thinking that these people were the lowest caste, or even of no caste at all, adopted their mistaken term to mean the equivalent of outcast. Their employers ranked them at the bottom of the social scale. And the sense of that word—an outcast—was imported to England and was adopted into the English language.