Caste and Race in India c5.106

c5.106

To regard endogamy as the chief characteristic of a caste is to treat all so-called sub-castes as the real castes. Gait¹ advances two reasons against this procedure of raising sub-castes to the position of castes, viz. it would be "contrary to the native feeling on the subject", and would be "highly inconvenient in practice, as it would create a bewildering multiplicity of castes". As for the second objection, we may safely pass it over, as it concerns only an administrative difficulty. As regards the Indian sentiment against making a sub-caste into a caste, it must be pointed out that, at best, this is the representation of only one side of the problem; for if, to confine ourselves to the Maratha country, a Saraswat Brahmin is known to the outsiders as a Saraswat, to a Saraswat he is better known either as a Shenvi or as a Sashtikar or Pednekar. Stated generally, though it is the caste that is recognized by the society at large it is the sub-caste that is regarded by the particular caste and the individual. It is mainly indifference towards others, so characteristic of the Indian system, that is responsible for this attitude. For a Brahmin most others are Sūdras, irrespective of high or low status; and for two or three higher castes that are allied to the Brahmins in culture, the rest of the population, excepting the impure castes and some other specific groups, is Kulwadi or Sūdra—a generic term for manual workers. The higher castes are grouped together as either Ashrafin in Bihar,² Bhadralok in Bengal, or Pandhar-peshe in Maharashtra. Further, if we are to take some kind of Indian sentiment as our guide in our analysis, then, as according to the orthodox theory on this matter there are only two or at the most three castes, in the present age, we shall have to divide the whole population of any major linguistic province into two castes, Brahmin and Sūdra, or at the most three, where the existence of the Kshatriya is grudgingly granted. Evidently no scientific student of caste, not even Gait himself, has proposed to follow Indian opinion on this matter. There is ample reason why, to get a sociologically correct idea of the institution, we should recognize sub-castes as real castes.