The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t6.4

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.