Theory of Government in Ancient India (Post-Vedic) c14.s5.1

c14.s5.1

The Brâhmanic Hindus left their religious life unorganised. On the social side they display some corporate activity. It was in those days physically impossible for any of the four castes, spread all over the country, to set up a central organisation. But the local sections and subsections of the sub-castes into which Hindu society had split up offered scope for organisation. In Brâhmanical theory, the state is constantly urged to keep all castes to their duties. But it is also enjoined to respect the laws and usages of families and castes, as of village communities and corporations. The province of caste usage includes marriage, commensality, rites and ceremonies and often ordinary morality. A breach of the rules may be visited by censure, imposition of penances and, lastly, excommunication. To be an outcast is a dreadful calamity which sends a shudder of horror through a whole family and the entire circle of friends. In most cases, however, provision is made for re-admission into the community. These rules of caste governance which are still in operation go back to great antiquity. Three or four hundred years before the Christian era, Gautama, the earliest of the Dharma Sûtra writers, relies partly on penances and excommunication for deadly sins as well as for what appear trivial offences or no offences at all to modern minds. He counsels a son,—apparently a Brâhmaṇa young man—to cast off a father who may have murdered a king or a Brâhmaṇa scholar, who may have sacrificed for a Śûdra from monetary motives, who may have divulged the Veda to the unauthorised, or who may have dwelt with men of the lowest castes. In another general list of offences in the following chapter, atheism is reckoned among the sins to be punished with excommunication. The excommunication should be performed to the accompaniment of certain solemn rites. Spiritual teachers and kinsmen shall assemble and perform the sinner’s funeral rites beginning with the libation of water.