Caste in India: The Facts and the System c7.s2.45

c7.s2.45

First of all, the theory of mixed castes makes a troublesome breach in the system. But what is to be said of the four principal castes? We cannot doubt that the relegation of all the Śūdras to the condition of a mere mass of slaves is purely arbitrary. It is contradicted by the very status assigned to them from the civil point of view by parallel texts. Is it possible to believe that the three higher castes have ever formed those exclusive, compact, and ordered unities which one has pictured to oneself? The Brahmanic caste is working out its destiny under our eyes. But how? Not, as we have already seen, as a true caste, but as an agglomeration of innumerable castes, unequal in rights and social rank, separated in this respect by immense distances. We have only to recall the long lists of degraded and fallen Brahmans enumerated by tradition. It was not otherwise when the law-books were drawn up. As to the Kshatriyas and the Vaiśyas, the few traces which have survived even of their name are as doubtful as they are rare. Where it does appear, the name may have been taken afresh from tradition during recent times—a proceeding of which we have proved examples—in order to serve the arbitrary pretensions of a given group. They can nowhere be encountered as separate, authentic castes. Up to the present we cannot see in them more than generic names, an enormous frame destined to hold and conceal the actual existence of an infinite number of divisions.