Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s8.19

c6.s8.19

In general, these religious movements, narrowly circumscribed, merely give birth to a group of ascetics who are sworn to mortification and celibacy, and therefore exclude the first condition of the caste, heredity. They are recruited by voluntary affiliations, or add to their numbers children procured from other castes. But many of these fraternities, composed of both sexes, turn more or less into hereditary castes, sometimes very restricted, such as the Araḍis and the Bhāraḍis of Poona.¹ The Vairāgis are very much more numerous;² subdivided into several sections on the model of the true castes, they do not yet form a strictly hereditary caste. Development is more advanced among the Gosains, who, having admitted marriage, now constitute fully practising castes.³ Certain sects, like those of the Bishnoïs in the Panjab, founded in the fifteenth century by a Rajput of Bikanir, have never had either the semblance or the rule of a religious order; they furnish a perfectly clear example of people under the domination of a common heresy abandoning their primitive group to form themselves into an autonomous body.⁴