Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s2.27

c6.s2.27

This being clearly understood, let us picture a corporate group, exclusive and, in theory at least, rigorously hereditary. It possesses a certain traditional and independent organization, a chief and a council, and as occasion demands it meets in assemblies endowed with more or less full authority. Often united in the celebration of certain festivals, it is further bound together by a common profession and by the practice of common customs which bear more especially upon marriage, food, and various cases of impurity. Finally, it is armed, in order to assure its authority, with a jurisdiction of fairly wide extent, capable by the infliction of certain penalties, especially of banishment, either absolute or revocable, enforcing the power of the community. Such, briefly, is the caste system as it appears to us.