Caste and Race in India c12.110

c12.110

One feature of Hindu society during the last thirty or forty years has been the marked tendency for every caste to form its own association comprising all members of the caste speaking the same language. In the old regime the caste-panchayat or council was usually restricted to the confines of the village or the town. Rarely, if at all, did the jurisdiction of the council, in the case of the majority of the castes, extend beyond these limits. "In the large majority of cases, the caste-consciousness is limited by the bounds of the village and its organizations do not extend beyond the village area."² The functions of these new organizations are: (1) To further the general interests of the caste and particularly to guard its social status in the hierarchy from actual or potential attacks of other castes; (2) to start funds to provide studentships for the needy and deserving students of the caste, usually at the secondary and college stage of education, and sometimes even to help them to proceed to foreign countries for higher academic qualifications; (3) to help poor people of the caste; (4) and sometimes to try to regulate certain customs of the caste by resolutions passed at the annual meeting of the members of the caste. All these objects, excepting perhaps that of providing studentships, were used to be achieved, in a great or a small measure, by an arrangement not always permanent. Sometimes an *ad hoc* committee would take up the work and carry it out. We have already referred to the stubborn opposition of the Kammalans of Madras to the supreme position of the Brahmins in the hierarchy. The Kayasth Prabhus of Poona and many other castes of the Maratha country protested from time to time to the court of the Peshwa against certain restrictions which other castes professed to enforce upon them to stamp their status as low. Surely some elderly persons of the particular caste must have volunteered to put its case before the proper tribunal. Relief of the poor was not usually a duty undertaken by a caste. When a caste decided to apply some of its funds to charitable purposes, it handed over the money to the local priest to be used by him for benevolent purposes. The ruling ideals of the time led people to distribute charity in particular channels. The ideal was rather to build temples and rest-houses, dig wells and tanks, and to endow free feeding at the temples for a certain number of Brahmins and at the public feeding houses for travellers and others in need. All this direction of charity was most often preached and accepted without reference to caste. Only the artisan castes, which had strong guild-like organizations, had some standing provision for helping the indigent among its members.¹ Occasionally a caste would relieve its own poor by feeding them through the headman. The funds for this purpose were available from the residue of the fines imposed on the defaulting members of the caste.