Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s2.2

c6.s2.2

Our Western world is enclosed in a network of institutions and laws which leave the least possible margin for the unexpected and for variety and conflict of ideas. India is governed essentially by custom, an authority both tenacious and capricious, and subject to endlessly changing local influences. It is very powerful in its immediate action, and disregards completely the importance of general and dispassionate views. The rule of custom involves complex processes of an unstable and incoherent nature as opposed to those of an ordered simplicity. This springs from the fact that Hindu society, in spite of the years behind it, has down to our own times remained very primitive in type. It has given rise to no state which is comparable even with the narrow government of the cities of antiquity, still less with our modern state. In the absence of all proper political law, the influence, both religious and social, of the Brahmans has found it an easy task, by exercising incessant pressure throughout the centuries, slowly to imprint on the whole a common physiognomy and to reduce below a certain level the most blatant contradictions. It has not effected unity, still less uniformity. It has not even been able to produce national unity, the lack of which is significant and extremely important.