The Pariah Girl reveals what we have left behind the social order wherein we could not rise above petty considerations, narrow mentality and the times too were so, one of dire poverty, cruelty, superstition, backwardness, fatalism, lethargy, inaction, underdevelopment and discrimination. We regressed in darkness and dormancy. We could not learn in the school of humanism discarding our obsolete set-up.

What the others missed, Furtado said it simply, laying bare his heart and humane feelings, what we could not have, through poetic hints and suggestions put forth to bring it out the disparity, inequality and social discrimination doing the rounds, but without any complaint.

The poem is like Tennyson’s The Beggar Maid, William Blake’s London and The Little Black Boy. Had Mulk Raj Anand, the author of Coolie and Untouchable: Did he miss Furtado?

A lovely girl, how can she be called untouchable? Can one on the basis of caste? Really, the old order was very disturbing and troublesome and inhuman too. Culture, caste, class, creed, community, race and gender were the points of discrimination. There were social evils, economic disparity, backwardness, poverty and so on as hurdles in sharing between one man and another. There is nothing greater than the philosophy of humanism. The mind of man is all. But man is not man if not in service of mankind. Man cannot be man if he helps not the mankind in distress. There is no religion greater than humanity. There is nothing more important than love. Love knows no bar, no barrier.

A poor girl, a low-caste girl, how can she be called an outcast? She is after all a woman, one of flesh and blood and if the Brahmins say it, let them. He would like to see her. Who is but not a lover of the young girl? ;Apart from the taboos, the poet tries to know her whereabouts and the child she is carrying with. She says to him that it is not hers. Actually, for menial works we cannot segregate a section, as for face and color, ethnicity and race so, but there were the slavery system, the apartheid, color bar and we were hypocritical and egoistic.

I see her every day —
And ne’er without a thrill —
The sylph-like pariah girl
Returning from the mill

Oh let the Brahmin say
Her touch would taint his soul;
I’ll strike my breast and hope
The touch will make me whole

When first I spoke to her
In arms she held a child
“Is that your child?” I’d asked —  
“No,” she’d replied — and smiled

That smile hath me undone
And gives my mind no rest,
With thinking if ever I
Shall press her to my breast