Caste and Race in India c11: Chapter VII. Origins of Caste
Caste and Race in India c11
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Chapter VII. Origins of Caste
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SOCIAL differentiation with its attendant demarcation of groups and of status of individuals is a very widespread feature of human society.¹ In by far the larger number of communities this status depends on the individual's achievement in those fields of activity which are prized by those communities. They range from capacity for certain types of supernatural experience to ability to acquire wealth. The visible marks of this differentiation are, as we have seen, special rights for some groups and disabilities on others in the matter of dress, occupation, and even food. In other communities the status of an individual is determined by birth. People, speaking Indo-European tongues, carried this theory of status by birth to a farther extent than any other peoples, both in the matter of the number of differentiated groups within a society as well as in the matter of their rights and disabilities. Some of them even enjoined that members of a group shall marry in their own group. Thus it would be seen that the Hindu system is unique only in this that it alone classified some groups as untouchable and unapproachable.² In other respects it only differs in the thoroughness with which the scheme is worked out and in the number of differentiated groups.
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¹ See C. C. North, *Social Differentiation*.
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² Untouchability in Japan can hardly be regarded as quite independent of the Indian ideas on the subject.
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Of the many cultures that flourished in India the literary records of the Indo-Aryan culture are not only the earliest but contain the first mention and a continuous history of the factors that make up caste. The only other culture whose records are intelligible is the Dravidian; but when that culture put forward its documents that are extant, it had already been immensely influenced by the Indo-Aryan tradition. The brahmanic variety of this Indo-Aryan civilization—it is the most widely and deeply spread aspect—
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was developed in the Gangetic plain. We therefore conclude that some of the important aspects of caste originated in this region. The data of physical anthropology of the present day population of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, analysed in the fifth chapter, corroborate this view. Caste in India then must be regarded as a brahmanic child of the Indo-Aryan culture, cradled in the land of the Ganges and thence transferred to other parts of India by the Brahmin-prospectors. That the spread of the Indo-Aryan culture outside Hindustan must have been largely the work of individual Brahmins or of small batches of Brahmin preachers, is clear from the legends about Agastya, who is regarded amongst the Tamils as the pioneer of their culture. The picture of Brahmin sages, maintaining small colonies in the then forested parts of South India, preserved in the Rāmāyaṇa is another indication of the same fact. Memories preserved in the Pāli work, the Sutta Nipāta, in the story of the Brahmin sage Bāvari also point in the same direction. On the basis of this hypothesis the following genesis of the origins of the various factors of caste is clearly warranted by the data adduced in the preceding chapters.
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The Indo-Aryans, when they entered India, came with a certain sense of their importance and a spirit of exclusiveness born of such an attitude. They must have had among them at least three well-defined classes, intermarriage between whom must have been rather rare, though not positively forbidden. Their first regulations in this line began with the task of excluding the Śūdras, which class must have been largely formed by the aborigines, from their religious worship. We have seen that the Śūdra was represented as the lowest class in society. Very early in their Indian history the Aryans enjoined that the Śūdra shall not practise the religious worship developed by them. Nay, they even forbade his presence in the sacrificial hall. The three first castes were first enjoined not to marry a Śūdra female before any other restriction of an endogamous nature was tried to be promulgated. A Śūdra male trying to marry a Brahmin female was the greatest sacrilege that could be perpetrated against society. The various factors that characterize caste-society were the result, in the first instance, of the attempts on the part of the upholders of the brahmanic civilization to exclude the aborigines and the Śūdras from religious and social communion with themselves. That the Śūdra class was largely formed by those aborigines who had accepted the over-lordship of the Indo-Aryans and had entered into their service is more than probable. It will have been noticed that in the earliest literature only the first three classes—the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, and the Vaiśya—are postulated and that it is only in one place, which is regarded by most Vedic scholars to be chronologically one of the latest, that the Śūdra class is mentioned as one of the four. It has not been found possible yet to give a satisfactory derivation of the word Śūdra in terms of Sanskritic roots. Further, when this fourth class is definitely formulated the brahmanic literature contemplates it as in contradistinction to the other three classes. Thus the Vedic opposition between the Ārya and the Dāsa is replaced by the brahmanic classification of the "dvijāti" and the "ekajāti" (the Śūdra), suggesting the transmutation of the Dāsa into the Śūdra in the minds of the writers of the Brahmanic and later periods.
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As an important constituent of the Brahmanic culture in connection with the sacrificial ritual there arose very exaggerated notions of ceremonial purity. Not only the correct wording and pronunciation of the sacred formulæ but also the strictest adherence to the minutest details of the ritual procedure were essential for the proper performance of rites. Distinctions began to be made between things pure and things impure. Whatever was unclean was of course impure. But with the change of outlook on the animal world even some of the formerly honourable occupations came to be looked upon as degrading. How fastidious the Brahmanic ideal of ceremonial purity had come to be by the time of the Sūtras is best illustrated by the meticulous rules laid down in them for purification and for general conduct.
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The Brahmins, partly out of their honest desire to preserve the purity of Vedic ritual, partly being the victims of their own ideas of ceremonial purity, and partly also owing to their consciousness of superiority over the aborigines, first enacted rules for the guidance of their own members, and intended to prevent the possibility of the Śūdras in any way lowering their moral standard and introducing their low blood.
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It is because the Brahmins put restrictions on the acceptance of food and drink from the Śūdras during the second stage of the development of their culture that we find that in Northern India generally there is some leniency shown by them towards some of the higher castes, while in Southern India such an attitude and practice is considered a great sacrilege. As the taboo was laid against the Śūdra, and as the Brahmin most probably continued to treat the other two castes as almost his own equals in this matter, even when in later times the taboo became stricter and was made widely applicable, by force of habit and tradition, he continued to take water from pure castes and specially prepared food from high castes. When the pioneers of brahmanic culture progressed into Southern India with restrictions against food and water from the Śūdra as one of the items of their tradition, as they had none of the other castes—the Kshatriya and the Vaiśya—to whom they were accustomed, to think of in their new regions, they applied their rules against the Śūdras to all the indigenous population of the Southern countries. And the seed fell on a very congenial soil. The Southern peoples before their contact with the Indo-Aryan culture most probably had beliefs about the sanctity and power of food to transmit certain qualities very much like those of primitive peoples.¹ This is why the restrictions on food and drink are so rigorous in South India, where, as we said, the Brahmin does not accept food or water at the hands of anyone but a Brahmin.
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¹ A. E. Crawley, *The Mystic Rose*, 1902, pp. 157-60. On p. 162 he thus summarizes the attitude towards food: "It is clear that men believe human properties to be transmitted not only by contact with the food of others, but by eating with them or in their presence."
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With the progressive assimilation of the Vaiśyas with the Śūdras the Brahmins enacted rules to keep their group free from admixture with them by assigning different status to the issue of the union of a Brahmin male and a Vaiśya female. And with the march of time and particularly after the overthrow of Buddhism they stopped taking food at the hands of the Vaiśyas. Owing to the peculiar position of the Kshatriyas, the king having belonged to that group, in theory at least the Brahmins did not prohibit food being taken at their hands. Yet they tried to preserve their racial purity by treating the offspring of a Brahmin male and a Kshatriya female as belonging to a separate group.
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The restrictions on intermarriage and on food were thus in their origin the outcome of the desire of the Brahmins to keep themselves pure. This desire was partly due to the exaggerated notions of purity, partly to the enormous importance that came to be attached to the perpetuation of Vedic lore without even the slightest change, and in part also to the pride of superiority, which the Brahmins had shared in common with the other Indo-Aryan classes in the beginning, and which they alone could keep unimpaired. The total discomfiture of the Kshatriyas and the complete dissociation of the language of the people from the old language of the scriptures made it easy for the Brahmins to have it all their own way.
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It must, however, be said to the credit of the Brahmins that they did not quite forget the original solidarity of the first three classes. They tried to preserve the purity, on their model of course, of both the Kshatriyas and the Vaiśyas at least in their ideal scheme, though they treated the latter for all practical purposes as equal to the Śūdras.
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This social pattern set for themselves by the most respected class in society could not fail to be imitated with fervid enthusiasm by all manner of groups that would claim respectability. Thus it must have been that the original restrictions on intermarriage and regulations about the acceptance of food, which contemplated only four classes in society, came to be the characteristics of each and every well-marked group.
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Group solidarity and group prestige would soon assert themselves against marrying on unequal terms: the lower group would refuse to marry their females to the males of the higher classes only to create a new group giving itself superior airs. It was bound to close up its ranks and be endogamous.
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With functional differentiation in society there came into being separate occupational groups with more or less distinct interests. We have noticed it as a widespread feature of ancient and medieval society that the occupation of each group tends to become customarily hereditary among its members. Only the Brahmins reserved as their monopoly the occupation of a priest. No doubt they were in the beginning inspired by the laudable motive of preserving the all-important sacred lore. But later on equally clearly they looked upon their priestcraft as their monopolistic activity and rigorously kept it up, while the traditional occupations of the other two castes were progressively encroached upon by other castes. There is also a natural inclination for each occupational group, as we have already noticed, to be habitually endogamous. Both these tendencies became rules: the former more or less nebulous, and the latter very rigid, after the pattern of the Brahmins. Occupations thus became endogamous groups.
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The attitude of respect for details, that was first fostered in connection with ritual, became the prevailing attitude in social behaviour. Adherence to details of social and customary etiquette became the distinguishing mark of membership of a group. Distinction in any detail tended to be translated into separateness of membership and hence of a group.
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The lack of rigid unitary control of the State, the unwillingness of the rulers to enforce a uniform standard of law and custom, their readiness to recognize the varying customs of different groups as valid, and their usual practice of allowing things somehow to adjust themselves,¹ helped the fissiparous tendency of groups and fostered the spirit of solidarity and community feeling in every group.
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¹ See V. A. Gadgil in the *Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society*, 1926, p. 161, for the connection of this practice with the village-organization of Northern India.
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Both these circumstances conspired to encourage the formation of small groups based on petty distinctions.
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Special rights for the higher classes and disabilities on the lower ones was almost a universal feature of class-society; and the Brahmanic theory of four castes with their rights and disabilities does not call for any special explanation. Only the practice of untouchability is peculiar to the Hindu system. It will have been clear from the history of this factor of caste, narrated in the third and fourth chapters, that the ideas of untouchability and unapproachability arose out of the ideas of ceremonial purity, first applied to the aboriginal Śūdras in connection with the sacrificial ritual and expanded and extended to other groups because of the theoretical impurity of certain occupations.
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Multiplicity of the groups and the thoroughness of the whole system are due to the habit of the Hindu mind to create categories and to carry things to their logical end which characterized their literature, philosophy, and religious creeds.¹
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¹ Professor C. G. Seligman attributes this mental trait to the Nordic race (see his presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, *JRAI*, 1924).
Linked texts (2)
- Suttanipāta — Pāli
- Ērān