The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s4.34

c2.s4.34

Once the folk at large, the united clansmen of the Aryan people, the people-caste had thus lost its ancient universal practices and become confined to industry and trade. Gradually, from when each warrior was rich in cattle and each cattle-raiser ready to answer to a call for arms, there came a separation of interests. Some grew to depend on their bows and swords, and, finding fighting more agreeable than labor of hands, settled more and more upon the life which the king lived, and took him as their model. They became ‘king’s men,’ the older name of those forming the warrior-caste. They arose from the people and left them. Some, again, confined themselves to study and religion, and before long gained and kept the fame of being the gods’ special ministers. They also arose from the people and left them. And so the ‘clansmen’ or ‘people’ grew socially smaller and became the people-caste—in name the whole, in fact a part, and a rapidly degrading part of the population. But a shadow of their former might remained far into the Epic period. Of this, below. The three occupations, already developed in the Vedic age, now abandoned by the warriors and priests, were cherished by the people-caste. Indeed, so rapidly do we find the subdivisions appearing in the light of demarcated professions that we even notice a differentiation between the people-caste on the one hand and the traders on the other, showing that agriculture and cattle seemed still more peculiarly the people’s work.*