Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s1.6

c6.s1.6

The Hindu castes are generally conceived as a political system of inviolable stability, confining the individual to occupations handed down immutably from father to son. However great the personal initiative, it offers no chance of rising in the social scale. One imagined Brahmans who may only consecrate themselves to the religious life and ritual, soldiers who may only be recruited from the warrior class, chiefs who may only be drawn from the royal and military caste—all so arranged that nothing has ever disturbed, or ever can disturb, an order protected from time immemorial. It is thus, I believe, that Hindu society is commonly pictured.