Caste in India: The Facts and the System c5.10

c5.10

Let us now consider what is, briefly, the prevailing theory, even among the best informed, of its origin. There is no allusion to caste in the Vedic hymns; it did not exist therefore at the period when these were composed. Its beginnings are shown in the literature of the Brāhmaṇas. Next in order, the epic legend, with its traces of a dim past, furnishes contemporary evidence of those successive modifications whereby the conditions prescribed by the law-books appear as the outgrowth of the four primitive castes. It is by subsequent transformations, by the relaxation of the ancient rules, that the gulf which yawns between the evidence of books and the present aspect of the system is explained. I, for my part, arrive at singularly different conclusions.