Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 August 1898 — Starving Out a Debtor. [ARTICLE]

Starving Out a Debtor.

Many queer stories are told of the persistence and clever devices of the collectors of bad debts;'but even a professional humorist would find It hard to invent anything, more absurd than the method actually in use among the Mahrattaa—at least, if travelers’- tales are to he trusted. In their country—so they say—when a creditor cannot get his money and begins to regard the debt as - desperate, he proceeds to sit “dhurna” upon his debtor—that Is, he squats down at the door of his victim's tent, and thereby, in some mysterious way, becomes master of the situation. Nq one can go in or out except by his sanction. He neither himself eats nor allows his debtor to eat, and this extraordinary starvation contest Is kept up until either the debt is paid or the creditor gives up the siege, and in the latter case the debt" is held to be cancelled.

The laws by which the “dhurna” Is regulated are as well defined as those of any other custom whatever. When it Is meant to be very strict, the claimant takes with him a number of his followers, who surround the tent, and sometimes even the bed, of his adversary, to make sure that he obtains no morsel of food. The code, however, prescribes the same abstinence for tbo man who imposes the ordeal; and, of course, the stronger stomach wins the day, A similar custom was onee so prevalent in the province and city of Benares that the Brahmins were sometimes systematically put through a course of training in order to enable them to endure a long time without partaking of food.