Caste and Race in India c11.7

c11.7

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.