The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t6.1

c7.s16.t6.1

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.”