The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.132

v1.c17.132

As was to be expected, society was far from unchanged in this period of active Āryan expansion. As we have seen, there is good reason to believe that in the period of the Rigveda the priesthood and the nobility were hereditary. This view receives support from the fact that similar class distinctions are to be found in other Indo-European communities, such as the patrician *gentes* in Rome, the Eupatridae of Athens, the nobles of early Germany, the eorls of the Anglo-Saxons, and the still closer parallel of the Irānian classes of Athravas and Rathaesthas, ‘priests’ and ‘warriors.’ It may even be that these distinctions are earlier than the severance of the Indo-Irānians, if not as old as the union of the Āryan peoples. But in this period there comes into existence a new factor, the introduction of divisions among the ordinary freemen, the Vaiçyas, and the development of a large and complicated system of caste which converts the simple distinction of Vaiçya and Çūdra into an ever-increasing number of endogamous hereditary groups practising one occupation or at least restricted to a small number of occupations. This result was certainly far from being reached in the period of the Brāhmaṇas, but the tendency of social or racial distinctions to harden into castes is already apparent. In this development there must have been two main influences: the force of occupation is later revealed clearly enough in the Pāli texts, and another interesting case is supplied by the Brāhmaṇas themselves. In the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa the Rathakāras, ‘chariot makers,’ appear as a special class along with the Vaiçyas; and in this special position we can see how the chariot makers, the type of skilled workers in the Rigveda, have, through their devotion to a mechanical art, lost status as compared with the ordinary freeman. The influence of the aborigines must also have been very strong, as intermarriage proceeded. To be born of a female Çūdrā was a disgrace with which Kavasha and Vatsa were taunted by their priestly contemporaries: contact with the aborigines seems to have raised questions of purity of blood very like those which at present agitate the Southern States of the United States or the white people in South Africa. In the Rigveda, restrictions on intermarriage seem to have been of the simplest kind, confined to rules such as those prohibiting marriage of brother and sister or father and daughter. In the Sūtras the rules are still not quite rigid;