The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t6: (f) Contemporary Vertical Mobilities
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t6
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(f) Contemporary Vertical Mobilities
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The world-process in group “metabolism” is visible under our very eyes in Bengal.⁵⁶ In the social economy of Bengal there are some thirty tribes known as aboriginals, constituting a diversified group of a million and a quarter, and representing some 3 per cent of the total population. The big three of these primitives, namely, the Santals, the Oraons, and the Mundas, are responsible for nearly two-thirds of this number. But while the big three “higher” castes, the Kāyasthas, Brāhmaṇas and Vaidyas, numbering something over three millions, have during the last forty years grown 37 per cent the aboriginals have grown 219 per cent. The rate of growth is phenomenal, pointing, as it does, to extraordinary “differential fertility.”
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⁵⁶ *Census of India 1931*, Vol. V. *Bengal and Sikkim* Part I. (1933) pp. 441, 444, 454, 480-484, 490, 492, 497-499, 502-503.
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This numerical growth, important in itself as it is, acquires a fresh significance when one observes that the aboriginals are today more Hindu than “tribal” in religion. Nearly sixty-six per cent of the big three primitives is Hindu. As a transformation, the Hinduization of the aboriginals is further interesting in another regard. The Hinduized aboriginals form a part, nearly 12 per cent, of what are generally called the “depressed classes,”—say, the *Harijans* (God's children)—of the Hindu society. We understand, then, that the aboriginals of yesterday constitute the depressed classes of today. In other words, the societal transformation known as Hinduization hides the fact of, or prepares the way to, racial expansion, race-fusion and race-assimilation.
c7.s16.t6.4
Nor does the process stop here. Among the big three “higher” castes, the Kāyasthas were during the last four decades just below the Brāhmaṇas in number. But they were rising until today they have outnumbered the latter. In forty years while the Brāhmaṇa has grown 24 per cent, the Kāyastha has grown 58 per cent. What is this growth of Kāyasthas due to? Not all to fecundity or “natural increment”, i.e., the surplus of births over deaths. A great deal is to be accounted for by invasions from other castes whose upward trends have been manifest for some long time. The non-Kāyastha, perhaps, one of the depressed of yesterday, has grown into the Kāyastha, a higher caste of today. And in this, again, we have to register not only a social but a racial transformation as well. From the aboriginal to the high-caste Hindu the gap may be great, but the bridges are sure although slow, and quite solid. Social "stratification" is not rigid, as Ammon propagates in *Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natürliche Grundlagen* (Social Order and its Natural Foundations), 1893.
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Altogether, the Bengali people is expanding although it is undergoing a radical change in class character and racial make-up.⁵⁷ The transformations that have been going on in Eur-America today on account of the pressure of the Slavs upon the other races should appear to belong almost to the same category as those in India. As for the "quality" of hybrids or their capacity for carrying forward the torch of civilization, eugencis is still discreetly silent or indefinite in its conclusion unless the exponent happens to have a conservative reform scheme on the anvil. But positive history announces that, notwithstanding the doctrine of Lapouge in *Les Sélections Sociales*, races may come and races may go but that civilization goes on for ever.
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⁵⁷ See the discussions on the "Aboriginals of West Bengal" led by Haridas Palit at the "Āntarjātik Banga" Parishat ("International Bengal" Institute), Calcutta (*Amrita Bazar Patrika*, Calcutta, 3 May 1934). Compare in this connection the facts of miscegenation in René Martial's *La Race Françaisie et la nouvelle Conception du Mot Race*, a paper for the International Congress of Population, Berlin 1935 (see *Bevölkerungsfragen* ed. by Harmsen and Lohse, Munich 1936, pp. 486-493).