Caste and Race in India c8.137

c8.137

What constitutes effective association between members of a group is important from the point of view of the development of caste. Vishnu's views on association, though they govern the outcasts and the "mlecchas", are very much like the ideas that regulated social intercourse between caste and caste or between the members of a single caste in later times. Sitting on the same bench, riding in the same carriage, lying on the same couch, or eating in the company of a person proves such close relations that if a person happens to be an outcast, the person associating with him in the ways indicated above, becomes himself an outcast after a year. One who habitually drinks water from or bathes in a pool situated in a foreign country reduces himself to the status of the inhabitant of that country.¹ We can clearly recognize in these ideas, once they were applied to social behaviour, the potency to create, in course of time, newer and newer castes.