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Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8: Part III: Origins

Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8

Language
English

Contents

Part III: Origins

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Introductory. I. Explanatory Theories, the Traditionalists. II. Occupation as the basis of Caste : Nesfield and Ibbetson. III. Race as the basis of Caste : Risley. IV. Caste and the Aryan Constitution of the Family. V. Genesis of the Hindu Castes. VI. General Survey : the Caste System and the Hindu Mind

Introductory

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SINCE it first invited research, the problem of the origin of castes has often been re-examined, and from several angles. Many theories have been advanced, but I believe I can without scruple shorten the list.

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I am excluding from the outset explanations which, too general or too hasty, are not based on a sufficiently careful and competent study of the field in which the problem arises.

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Among attempts recent enough to be completely well informed several groups stand out prominently. It will suffice to show their tendencies by giving examples. This will not be a mere idle exercise, for such a summary view will enable us to clear the ground, and, if only by a process of elimination, to make our approach to probable solutions.

I. Explanatory Theories. The Traditionalists

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IF the Hindus have confused the two ideas and the two terms ‘ classes ’ and ‘ castes ’, there are those among us who have followed in their erring footsteps with regrettable docility. I refer especially to Indianists. Representatives of the philological school, they obey an almost irresistible preference to regard the problem from this traditional aspect. The Brahmanic theory is, as it were, their native atmosphere, and literary chronology their invariable starting-point.

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Faithful to a principle which, to all appearance, must be adopted *a priori*—the dangers and flimsiness of which, in its application to India, I have already pointed out—the majority have admitted as an obvious certainty that the sequence of literary monuments must correspond to historic evolution and faithfully reflect its phases. The Brāhmaṇas, which in order of time are most nearly connected with the hymns, could not therefore contain anything which was not the extension or the normal development of ideas embodied therein. Hence the following dilemma : either the existence of castes is attested in the Veda, or, if this is not so, castes must have been established in the period which separates the composition of the hymns, which presumably knew them not, from the composition of the Brāhmaṇas, which assume their existence; on which follows the corollary, implicit, but none the less persistent, that it is in the elements expressly furnished by the hymns that the origins of caste must find their justification.

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No one, so far as I am aware, or practically no one, has rid himself of this postulate. It has been considered a matter of obligation to regard as the indubitable starting-point the divisions which, by common consent, are revealed in the Veda, castes complete and attested according to some, social classes according to others. The first school are all the more desirous to discover castes in the hymns because they rightly feel how difficult it is to attribute to them, in accordance with the usual method, a too recent origin. The second conclude from the silence of the hymns that the epoch to which these date back knows nothing of castes, and that the movement can therefore only have taken shape later. Both agree in regarding as primitive and indissoluble the bond which connects the four varṇas of the system with the very birth of the caste-institution.

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Under this impression students are only too ready to believe that they have done all that is necessary when they have deduced a rational explanation from general considerations supported by uncertain analogies.

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Those masters of linguistic analysis who derive the Indo-European vocabulary from some few hundred roots believe that in these tongues, which retain the highest degree of etymological transparency, they have approached the first lispings of human speech; they consider that from this to the origin of language is a negligible step, or almost so. Among the explanations which the caste has evoked, some recall this facile optimism, which has worked havoc even in those minds apparently best armed to resist it.

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Sherring, for example, has devoted an immense amount of labour to the direct study of contemporary castes.¹ When he thought of co-ordinating his general views on the ‘Natural History of the Caste’,² he set out the problem in terms which fully bore out the promise of his title. It is a curious thing that a preconceived notion should have been able to sterilize so much observation and learning. Sherring has shown us nothing in caste beyond the outcome of the political cunning of ambitious priests who, building from top to bottom, fashioned to their own ends the constitution of the Hindu world.

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¹ Tribes and Castes in Benares.

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² Calcutta Review.

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A comparison with the Jesuits and their theocratic designs generally plays a quite excessive part in these statements. We meet with it even in one of the more recent representatives of the philological school. Von Schroeder ¹ does not at first seem inclined to exaggerate the authority of the Brahmanic system: he feels that the quadruple division into priests, warriors, etc., can only correspond to a distinction of classes. Nevertheless, it is from them, and above all from the constitution peculiar to the Brahmans, that he derives the castes. Were we to believe him, the system would be linked with the victorious reaction of Brahmanism against expiring Buddhism, so that its formation would be advanced to the epoch when appeared the man in whom was personified this movement—hypothetical, in any case—that is, up to Śaṅkara, the orthodox philosopher of the eighth century!

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¹ Indiens Litteratur und Cultur, pp. 152 et seq., 410 et seq.

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These are the systems that I shall call traditionalist. They are repeated and transmitted without any great striving after novelty. However ingenious they may be in certain parts, an analysis would scarcely be profitable. Roth, ² for example, has explained the early progress of the sacerdotal caste by a presumed importance gradually acquired by the purohita or family priest of the chiefs. He supposes that the Āryan peoples, when they spread over the plains of India, split up into numerous sections, minutely subdivided, that the royal families consequently lost both power and authority and descended to the rank of mere nobility; that the Kshatriyas became the small fry of the former kings; and that it was the weakness of the latter which built up the rule of the Brahmans. All the opinions of a mind so subtle and well-informed are of value, but this theory really concerns only the history of classes, not the genesis of castes.

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² Zeitschr. der Deutschen Morgenl. Gesellsch., I, pp. 81 et seq.

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To confound the one with the other is, in my opinion, to produce general confusion. I have given several reasons for this. The class and the caste correspond neither in extent, in character, nor in natural tendencies. Each one, even among the castes which would belong to one and the same class, is plainly distinguishable from its fellows; it isolates itself from them with a rigour which is not tempered by any regard for an underlying unity. The class subserves political ambition; the caste obeys narrow scruples, traditional customs, or, at most, certain local influences which have as a rule no relation to class-interests. Above all, the caste clings to the safeguarding of an integrity which is the subject of deep concern and sensitiveness even with the humblest. It is the distant echo of the class-struggles, handed down by legend, with which tradition resounds. By the reaction of principles on facts the two institutions may have become fused together; they are none the less essentially independent.

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The hierarchic division of the population into classes is practically universal, but the caste-system is a unique phenomenon. That Brahmanic ambition has taken advantage of it in order the more firmly to establish its domination is possible but not obvious. A caste-system is not the necessary basis of a theocracy. If theory has confused the two sets of ideas, this is a fact of secondary importance, as we have actually seen when dealing with tradition. In order to understand the historic development we must distinguish carefully between the two ideas; remembering, however, to investigate how they came to be finally combined. Sacerdotal speculation has obscured the facts by means of an artificial system, and we must be careful not to mistake the curtain which hides them from our view for the facts that are hidden.

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It may appear very simple to derive, in the Brahmanic manner, an infinite number of groups from the successive breakings-up of large primitive categories. Who can fail to recognize that this subdivision is prompted by interests and a bias directly opposed to the class-spirit, which tends naturally to closer unity? Caste, subject to varying principles of unification, geographical, professional, sectarian, etc., shows itself consistently insensible to considerations of a general nature. Class-spirit takes no heed of any of the peculiarities and scruples which constitute the foundations of caste, and sets up, even between groups belonging in a general way to the same class, so many lofty barriers.

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These systems therefore state the matter badly ; they start from an arbitrary principle which they do not demonstrate, and which is obviously inadequate. This is not all. Their excessive respect for the so-called evidence of literature compels them to advance the beginnings of the system to an unduly late period, when everything indicates that the life of India was already firmly set in its final mould. Yet another improbability ! An institution so universal in Hindu society, endowed with a vitality so elastic as to appear almost indestructible, cannot fail to be attached to the very roots of national development. Were it of late growth, it would at least, if destined to attain such sovereign power, have left clearer traces of its beginnings.

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One trait is common to all the systems belonging to this category : they are too apt to lose sight of existing facts and to ignore the comparisons and ideas which are evoked by the life of those peoples imperfectly or recently assimilated to the predominant Hinduism.

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This consideration holds, on the contrary, a place of honour in works animated by leading ideas of another kind, and deriving either from sociological doctrines or from anthropology.

II. Occupation as the Basis of Caste: Nesfield and Ibbetson

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NESFIELD is obsessed by general ethnographic views; his faith in positivist classifications is uncompromising to a degree quite astonishing in an age which has largely renounced all dogmatism. He is at least perfectly clear in his conclusions; we may hesitate to follow him, but we know where he is going.

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Common occupation is, in his eyes, the foundation of the caste; it is the centre round which it has grown up. He admits no other origin; he deliberately excludes all influence of race and religion. In his eyes it is pure illusion to distinguish in India distinct currents of population, Āryan and aboriginal. The wave of invasion was early absorbed in the mass; unity was very soon established, and was already acquired more than a thousand years before the Christian era. Only the constitution of castes succeeded in introducing a disturbing factor, thanks to occupational speciality.

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The castes would otherwise have developed according to an absolute order, the order which the march of human progress follows in life, in agriculture, in the industries; the social rank assigned to each would be precisely that occupied in this sequence by the particular trade which it practises.¹

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¹ Nesfield, *Caste System*, § 9.

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Thus, among the artisan castes he perceives two great divisions: the first corresponds to the trades before metal-working—this is the lower; the second and higher one represents the metallurgical industries, or is contemporaneous with their development. He has expended remarkable ingenuity in establishing on analogous bases within the group to which it belongs the precedence of each caste, as determined in his view by Hindu usage. The groups are thus ranked according as they are more particularly concerned with hunting, fishing, pastoral pursuits, landed property, manual trades, commerce, servile occupations, or sacerdotal functions. To use his own words:²

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² Ibid., p. 88.

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‘Each caste or group of castes represents one or other of those progressive stages of culture which have marked the industrial development of mankind, not only in India, but in every other country in the world. The rank of any caste as high or low, depends upon whether the industry represented by the caste belongs to an advanced or backward stage of culture; and thus the natural history of human industries

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affords the chief clue to the gradations as well as to the formation of Indian castes.’

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Starting from this point, Nesfield shows us the different occupations emerging from the tribe to constitute themselves into sectional units, and these units rising in the social scale according to the trades by which they live.¹ The caste rises from the tribe, the fragments of which it recomposes according to a new principle, and it has retained persistent memories of its origins. It is from the ancient type of the tribe that it has borrowed the narrow marriage-rules and the strict prohibition of all friendly approach to similar groups.

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¹ Nesfield, *Caste System*, §§ 177-8, 180-2.

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According to this theory, the caste-system springs from the regular evolution of social life, starting at its lowest level and following in its slow progression. How he can reconcile this with the relatively late date to which, on the other hand, he refers the constitution of the castes, I do not pretend to understand. What likelihood is there that a thousand years before our era the Hindus were still barbarians, devoid of the most rudimentary elements of civilization?

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Still less can I fathom how Nesfield, holding this point of view, comes to reserve to the Brahmans so decisive a part in this genesis. Indeed, he affirms that ‘the Brahman was the first-born of castes, the model upon which all the other castes were subsequently formed, extending gradually from king or warrior to the tribes practising hunting and fishing, whose rank is no higher than that of the savage’. It is from the Brahmans, thanks to the contagion of example and the necessity for self-defence, that the exclusivism of all the castes emanated.¹ The Brahman is the founder of the system. He it is ² who has invented for his own benefit the rule which alone rendered their constitution complete, the rule prohibiting marriage with a woman of another caste; a curious contradiction of later passages where he derives the regulation of marriage from the traditional usages of the tribe.

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¹ Ibid., §§ 171-2.

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² Ibid., §§ 169, 190.

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It is not that he is duped by the dogmatism of the religious books. In his opinion ‘the old fourfold division was never actually in force in India except as a current tradition, the only reality which attaches to it to this day’. Borrowed from the Indo-Iranian past, it has hardly any other value than that of connecting the diversity of the castes with functional differences. The Vaiśyas and the Śūdras in particular have never been anything except a kind of rubric intended to embrace a multitude of heterogeneous elements.³ But, evidently without overcoming the charm exercised on his mind by positivist constructions, Nesfield has clearly felt that for want of a corrective his theory proved too much, that it ought to be applicable to all countries. In spite of his natural independence, he has also doubtless come under the influence of tradition. However that may be, the concession which he makes to it, far from being inherent in his system, disturbs its whole ordinance. The originality of his thesis is to be found elsewhere. Though others before him have assigned an active part in the genesis of the castes to professional groups, no one has so deliberately found in these their whole evolution. He has also more than any one else connected their characteristic details with tribal memories. In taking his stand on the novel ground of ethnography, he has extended the scope of the discussion and offered a wider basis for interpretation.

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³ Ibid., § 11.

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Several of the ideas which he has let fall in passing might disappear without leaving an appreciable gap. The fusion of the various elements of population was, according to him, accomplished very early, and the complete unity of the whole secured from a remote epoch. However strong it may be, this conviction would give rise to many objections and reservations, but it is not an integral part of his views on the occupational origin of the caste. The same may be said of the etymological deductions and legendary material in which he thinks he can discern from its beginning the history of many castes at the precise moment when they broke off in successive swarms from the original tribes. This part of the work is more remarkable for variety of information and brilliance of treatment than for strictness of method.

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Nesfield has perhaps studied caste too much from its external and present aspect. He has started from everyday experience, a proceeding which has its advantages, but also its dangers. His theory has taken such hold of his mind that he has naturally been led to present it to us as a deductive exposition rather than to demonstrate it step by step. Will he convert many students to a point of view in which a special historical phenomenon is held to be derived from deductions of a purely general character?

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In attributing primary importance, on the one hand, to the occupation and, on the other, to the organization of the tribe, he has at least faithfully summed up the impression we gather from the works of most observers of contemporary Indian life. All are struck by that confusion of more or less extensive ethnical groups, of which I have tried to give some idea, and whose complicated and mobile nature must not be lost to sight. All perceive them in infinite gradations approximating somewhat narrowly to the type of the caste, and to an increasing degree as common occupation was more completely substituted for the bond of origin. Naturally, these two aspects colour their theoretic conclusions.

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Ibbetson's thesis, less complete, and, if I may venture to say so, less forced than that of Nesfield, is based on the same data.¹ Endowed with a mind less systematic and more readily impressed by shades so changeable as to discourage generalizations, he is beset with reservations.

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¹ Ibbetson, op. laud., § 341, etc.

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He nevertheless summarizes in the following words the stages which he discerns in the history of the caste : (1) the organization of the tribe, common to all primitive societies ; (2) the guilds founded on heredity of occupation ; (3) the exaltation, peculiar to India, of the sacerdotal function ; (4) the exaltation of Levitical blood by the importance attributed to heredity ; (5) the consolidation of the principle by the elaboration of a series of entirely artificial laws, derived from Hindu beliefs, regulating marriage and fixing the limits within which it may be contracted, declaring certain occupations and foods to be impure, and determining the conditions and extent of the relations permitted between the castes.

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We see what importance is again attributed here to occupation and the constitution of the tribe ; but this time the role of the Brahmans is reversed. Eager to consolidate a power which was at first founded on their religious learning, but for which this basis was becoming too fragile, they found, according to Ibbetson, in the division of the people into tribes, and the theory of the heredity of occupation which had arisen therefrom, an invaluable suggestion of which they took full advantage. From it they derived that network of restrictions and inhibitions which beset a high-caste Hindu from birth.¹ The Brahmans are thus represented as contributing to the spontaneous organization of the country.

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¹ Ibid., § 212.

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This system may appear more logical than that of Nesfield, but it proceeds perhaps in an even higher degree from a wholly gratuitous conjecture unsupported by a shadow of proof. And what are we to say of this conception of the most essential and characteristic rules of the caste? It regards them, with all their strictness and the absolute sway which they exercise over conscience, as nothing more than an artificial invention of late growth, calculated to further party interests!

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The real weakness of the system is shown by the inordinate importance attributed by Ibbetson—who agrees with Nesfield on this point—to community of occupation. If this really constituted the primitive bond of the caste, the latter would have shown less tendency to split up and disintegrate; the medium which originally united it would have maintained its cohesion.

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Experience shows, on the contrary, how caste-prejudices hold apart people who should be united by the same occupation carried on in the same place.¹ We have seen what a variety of occupations may separate members of the same caste, and this not only in the lower classes, but even in the highest. Nowhere is the abandonment of the dominant profession sufficient in itself to cause exclusion. Occupations are graded according to the degree of respect which they inspire, but the degrees are fixed by conceptions of religious purity. All trades not involving pollution, or at least enhancement of impurity, are open to every caste. Nesfield himself states² that Brahmans may be found carrying on all trades ‘except those which would entail ceremonial pollution and consequent loss of caste’. If the most despised castes multiply themselves into new sections who look down upon the primitive stock, it is not because these adopt a different profession, but merely because they renounce a certain detail of their hereditary occupations which, according to current prejudice, entails pollution. Certain groups of sweepers are in this position.³

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¹ Ibbetson, § 568.

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² Nesfield, 133; cf. also § 183.

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³ Ibbetson, § 154.

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It is true that many castes render a kind of worship to the implements proper to their trade.¹ The fisherman sacrifices a goat to his new boat; the shepherd smears the tail and horns of his beasts with ochre; the ploughman pours an offering of sugar mixed with melted butter and a few grains of rice over his plough at the spot where it breaks up the first sod of earth; the artisan worships his tools; the warrior worships his weapons of war; the scribe does homage to his pen and inkstand. Interesting as these customs are, they only go to prove that people of a single caste, being engaged in a variety of occupations, may render this sort of respect to symbols of the most diverse kinds.

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¹ Nesfield, § 161.

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Many castes take their name from their dominant occupation; but this only refers to a generic denomination, the application of which does not at all necessarily correspond to the limits of the caste. Baniā (merchant) is, like Brahman or Kshatriya, a designation in which it would be very incorrect to see the name of a caste; to do so would be to unite in a single province a number of groups which, having neither the right to intermarry nor to eat together, themselves form distinct castes.² Agricultural castes are numbered by dozens in a single district, and the Kāyasths, or scribes, of Bengal, in spite of a common professional name, are really divided into as many castes, distinguished by geographical or patronymic names, as there exist among them endogamous groups with particular usages and special jurisdiction. It is the same everywhere.

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² Ibbetson, §§ 532-3.

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It may be that in certain cases a local professional title embraces a group wholly united in one single caste. This will be the exception. The bond of occupation is extremely frail, and its unity is broken by the slightest accident. It certainly does not constitute the pivot of the caste.

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As the outcome of speciality of occupation, it would be no more than a guild like those of the Middle Ages or of the Roman world. Who could confuse the two institutions? The one is confined solely to artisans, enclosed within regular limits and confined in its action to the economic functions for which it was created by necessity or interest; the other permeates the whole social state, regulating the duties of all and governing private life down to its most intimate functions. There is nothing more simple and natural than that castes and guilds should meet at certain points, for both are corporations. No one denies that community of occupation has contributed to bring together or limit certain castes of workmen or artisans. We may sometimes see individuals drawn into the orbit of a new caste, and new sections evolving under the influence of occupation.¹ How many other factors have exercised a parallel and analogous influence!

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¹ Nesfield, §§ 158-9.

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In certain Slavonic countries, in Russia and elsewhere,² there exist—or at least there still existed down to a recent date—village-communities devoted exclusively to a single occupation: villages of shoemakers and of blacksmiths or curriers, communities of joiners and of potters, even of fowlers and beggars. Now these villages are not assemblies of artisans who have merged themselves into a community, but communities which pursue a single industry. It is not occupation which results in grouping, but grouping which results in community of occupation, and has suggested it. Why should it not be the same in India?

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² Hearn, *Aryan Household*, pp. 241-2.

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To grant to community of trade a place among the motive-forces active in shaping the destiny of the caste is a very different matter from claiming it to be the all-sufficient origin of the system. The first proposition is obviously as reasonable as the second is inadmissible.

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A Hindu judge, endowed with a lively sense of the situation with which he is in familiar contact (Guru Proshad Sen ³), desiring to summarize the permanent traits of the caste, has left occupation completely out of account. The essence of the caste must surely be found in those rules which, strictly observed, assure its perpetuity, and, when even slightly violated, entail degradation for the individual and dissolution for the community. Between these rules and occupations there is no connexion, or only an indirect one operating through the medium of scruples of purity. The soul of the caste is elsewhere.

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³ *Calcutta Review*, July 1890, pp. 49 et seq.

III. Race as the Basis of Caste. Risley

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IT is in race, and the enmities born of race, that Risley, here in direct contradiction to Nesfield, seeks the soul of caste. According to him the existing hierarchy is the social consecration of the ethnological ladder from the Āryans, who have retained their purity in the highest castes, down to the humblest aboriginals herded together in the lowest. Race is now substituted for profession as the generating principle. ‘ The nasal index ’ is the formula for the proportions of the nose, and is, it appears, the most unerring criterion of race. Risley ends by making the following somewhat singular assertion : ‘ It is scarcely a paradox to lay down as a law of the caste-organization in Eastern India that a man’s social status varies in inverse ratio to the width of his nose.’ ¹ Who among his readers would not be a little sceptical ?

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¹ Risley, *Ethnogr. Gloss.*, p. xxxiv.

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I do not pretend to discuss Risley’s measurements and classifications. It must at any rate be admitted that up to the present the theories claiming to sum up the ethnographical position in India have become inextricably entangled in contradictions and difficulties. There is plenty to inspire mistrust on the part of the ignorant; so perfect an agreement, given the profound and quite accidental interminglings of so many elements—and Risley recognizes them himself—would certainly seem miraculous. Nesfield is no less decisive concerning the strict agreement which he discovers between social status and the supposed sequence of industrial evolution. By what miracle could the two principles, sprung from two absolutely different sources, be so perfectly adjusted? I leave them at grips, and can the better do so since neither the one nor the other of these principles as expounded by their able advocates really involves the fundamental problem; they affect not so much the origin of castes as the discipline of their hierarchy.

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Risley, basing his argument upon the early use of the word *varṇa* and the meaning generally attributed to it in the more modern classical language, sees in the natural enmity between the conquering and conquered races, the white and the black, the germ of a distinction. The endogamous laws are the foundation of the system. He supposes that the Āryans, in face of a despised population, raised this rampart to protect the purity of blood on which they prided themselves. The caste is, for Nesfield, a matter of profession;

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for Risley, a matter of marriage. He believes that it is the analogy and imitation of this primitive grouping which, spreading step by step with the authority lent by the sanction of the governing classes, multiplied *ad infinitum* the ramifications which were derived according to circumstances from various causes or occasions, such as community of language, proximity or identity of occupation, beliefs or social conventions.

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He arrives indirectly at a fairly general acceptance of the orthodox Brahmanic system : ¹ he supposes that the predominance gradually acquired by the priesthood was the principal source of the whole evolution.² Despite its exaggerated simplification, the theory of mixed castes remains for him ³ an invaluable proof of incessant cross-breeding ; he regards the fluctuating intermixture of the populations as the main cause of the multiplication of groups.

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¹ Risley, pp. xxxiv et seq.

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² Art. *Brāhman*, at the beginning.

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³ Risley, pp. xviii, xxxvi–xxxvii.

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If in its strictness the endogamous rule of the caste belongs properly to India, the exogamous rules, which work on parallel lines, are much more general. In unequal degrees and varying forms exogamy is a universal law. Exogamous groups are met with under different names at the top and at the bottom of Hindu society : eponymous *gotras* among the Brahmans, clans united by the totem among the aboriginal peoples meet, strengthen one another, and sometimes merge together. The lower classes are always jealous to assimilate their old organization to that Brahmanic legislation, the adoption of which confers on them a title of nobility.

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On this point we recognize in Risley, as in Nesfield, a lively sense of the influence which the traditions and customs of the aboriginal tribes have exerted on the final condition of the castes. While, however, they agree to derive a number of castes from the successive dismemberment of small autonomous peoples, the part which each of them assigns to the institutions of the tribe, and more specifically of the aboriginal tribe, is singularly unequal: Nesfield sees in them the original source of several of the laws which govern caste—for example, the endogamous rule; Risley sees in them nothing more than curious analogies to the customs which the Āryan element has furnished, such as exogamous restrictions; but such universal facts cease to have any significance.

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Over-timid theories which dare not emancipate themselves from Hindu tradition are ineffectual, and we must distrust no less those which are too vague and comprehensive. If community of occupation sufficed to found the caste-system, it should prevail in many other countries besides India. This objection stares us in the face. It condemns no less obviously the system which is content, without historical sequence or absolute certainty, to point to caste-laws as a survival of the ancient organization of the tribe or of the clan.

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The organization is so natural to the archaic periods of human society that it is to be met with among most diverse races; if we turn to its general traits, therefore, we are left in complete uncertainty and can prove nothing. If we think solely or even chiefly of the organization of the aboriginal tribes of India, and if we admit that it has reacted with so decisive a force on the general constitution of the Hindu world that an ambitious class of priests have taken possession of it and made it a weapon of war, we shall reverse the probable current of history and attribute too great a power to the motive forces. Everything indicates that in the march of Indian civilization the determining influence belongs to the Āryan elements, the aboriginal elements having exerted no more than a modifying, partial, and secondary one.

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Does this mean that this comparison of the caste and the tribe is fruitless? I see in it, on the contrary, a new idea of capital importance, but only if the facts are closely examined and we are not so dazzled by convenient generalities as to lose sight of the necessary sequence of historical realities. This condition makes it unnecessary for me to enter fully into the speculations on caste which have arisen from recent researches on primitive juridical organization. Even those which have been wisely confined to the Āryan domain,¹ being too summary, have scarcely entered into the living reality of evolution. We shall occasionally profit by them, but we have had some concrete experience of the danger of over-abstract theories.

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¹ I am thinking, for example, of Hearn, *The Āryan Household*.

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Caste exists only in India. It is therefore in the situation peculiar to India that we must seek its explanation. Without shutting our eyes to other sources of information we must turn to the facts themselves and to the study of the characteristic elements of the system as they are revealed in the present and reconstructed in the past by the light of observation.

IV. Caste and the Āryan Constitution of the Family

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THE caste is the framework of the whole Brahmanic organization. In order to become Brahmans, the aboriginal peoples form themselves into castes and accept the strict caste-rules; this phenomenon goes back to very early times. Now Brahmanism may have adopted foreign elements, and it may, in the course of history, have been subject to external influences; but, generally speaking, it remains in India the representative of Āryan tradition. Without in any way excluding the possibility of subsidiary influences, we are justified in first seeking Āryan sources for an institution which appears to us so intimately bound up with Brahmanic doctrine and life.

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The history of the old Āryan societies rests on the evolution, which varies according to locality, of the ancient family-constitution, so far as we can divine its character by a comparison of the traits scattered throughout the various branches of the race.

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By the idea of relationship which permeates caste; by the jurisdiction which somewhat tyrannically regulates private life, marriage, food, ceremonial usages; by the habitual practice of certain special cults, and by its corporate organization, the caste-system does in fact recall the family-group such as we observe it in its various degrees in the family, in the *gens*, and in the tribe. Its original features are no less clearly defined. There is scarcely a single feature, however, which, if examined closely, will not reveal germs of this past, although the common elements may not elsewhere have developed either on the same lines or with the same degree of diffusion. Fundamentally it is the same phenomenon of which India gives us so many other examples. In almost all matters which provoke comparison with cognate branches of the Āryan stock, we meet with the most exact resemblances hand in hand with profound differences. The relationship penetrates even to those elements which have evidently been shaped here in a new mould.

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Amongst the rules which govern marriage in the caste, the exogamous laws which prohibit any union between people belonging to the same section, *gotras*, or clans, are remarkably strict. In all primitive societies they have exercised a wide dominion, which soon decreased wherever a more advanced political constitution flourished. In principle these rules were certainly familiar to the Āryan race as well as to others. According to Plutarch’s evidence,¹ the Romans of the early period never married women of their own blood, and indeed among the matrons known to us we do not find one bearing the same family (gentilitial) name as her husband. The *gotra* is peculiar to the Brahmans, but its role is certainly an ancient one. The exogamous rule undoubtedly goes back to the most remote past of the immigrants. It is so definitely primitive under this form of the *gotra* that it is antecedent to the caste, the limits of which it exceeds; for the same *gotras* are found in a multitude of different castes. The caste-system has therefore been superadded to it, and the two institutions, incompletely merged, are not inherently bound together. This is precisely what happened at Athens when the establishment of the ‘demes’ assigned to different districts families belonging to a single *gens* (γένος).

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¹ Cf. Kovalevsky, *Famille et Propriété primitives*, pp. 19 et seq.

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It is the endogamous law which strikes us most, the law which only authorizes marriage between betrothed of the same caste. It is scarcely less widespread than the exogamous law in the primitive phases of human societies; it has not only left very obvious traces among the Āryan peoples, but is there bound up with a whole world of fact and sentiment which bespeaks its origin. In Athens, at the time of Demosthenes, it was necessary, in order to become a member of a phratry, to be the offspring of a legitimate marriage in one of the families composing it. In Greece, Rome, and Germany the laws or customs only granted the sanction of legal marriage to a union contracted with a woman of equal rank, i.e. a free citizeness.¹

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¹ Cf. Hearn, op. laud., pp. 156-7.

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Every one remembers the struggle that the Roman plebeians had to wage for centuries in order to win the *jus connubii*, or the right to marry patrician women. It is generally regarded as a political conflict between rival classes, but it hides something quite different. It was more in the cause of a sacred right than of any pride of nobility that the pure-bred patrician ‘gentes’, who faithfully upheld their ancient religion, rejected alliance with impure plebeians who were mixed in origin and destitute of family-rites. The patricians obeyed the same scruple which is inspired today in a new setting by the endogamous law of the caste. Under the caste-system, however, it becomes increasingly severe and restricted in India. The struggle of the classes in Rome, under a political system, lowered the barriers and soon widened the circle so as to admit indiscriminately the whole category of citizens. Up to this point, and even in such opposed conditions, the analogy may be pursued to a surprising length. The *connubium* went beyond the city; it was granted successively to several friendly peoples. Is this not, *mutatis mutandis*, the counterpart of what happens in India when caste-sections accept or refuse marriage with other sections, and when the limits vary according to place and circumstance with a facility which seems completely to break down the strictness of the general precepts? The drawing of this parallel is somewhat belated, but it seems to suggest a common source for two streams whose course is otherwise widely divergent—the Hindu caste and the Roman city.

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Even in theory a man of higher caste may marry women of lower caste. It was the same in Rome and Athens; the duty of marrying a woman of equal rank did not exclude unions with women of inferior stock—foreigners or freedwomen. The case of the Śūdra woman is precisely the same in the Hindu family. She is excluded in theory, though not in practice, but she cannot give birth to children who are the equals of their father, since there rises between husband and wife the eternal barrier of religious inequality.

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According to Manu,¹ the gods will not eat an offering prepared by a Śūdra woman. In Rome the presence of a foreigner at the sacrifice of the *gens* was sufficient to offend the gods.² The Śūdra woman is a foreigner; she does not belong to the race which by the investiture of the sacred thread is born into the fullness of the religious life. Even if it is lawful for the high castes to marry a Śūdra woman, in addition to the legitimate wife possessed of full rights, yet the union must be celebrated without the customary prayers.¹ In the Āryan conception of marriage, husband and wife form the sacrificing couple attached to the family altar of the hearth. This common conception forms the basis of the endogamy of the Hindu caste and the limitations imposed on the family in classical antiquity.

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¹ III, 18.

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² Fustel de Coulanges, *La Cité Antique*, p. 117.

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¹ *Indische Studien*, X, p. 21.

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It is forbidden to eat with people of another caste and to consume food prepared by those of a lower order. This is one of the anomalies which puzzle but do not baffle us. We must remember the religious role which from time immemorial the Āryans have assigned to the repast.² Prepared on the sacred hearth, it is the external symbol of the family-community, of its continuity in the past and in the present; and this aspect gives rise to the libations and, in India, to the daily offerings to ancestors. Even where, owing to the decay inevitable in all institutions, the primitive significance may have weakened, it remains very much alive in the funeral feast (the *perideipnon* of the Greeks, the *silicernium* of the Romans) which on the occasion of the death of relations manifests the indissoluble unity of the line.¹

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² Hearn, p. 32; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 182.

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¹ Leist, *Altarisches Jus Civile*, pp. 201 et seq.

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There are abundant proofs that the repast has kept a religious meaning for the Hindus. The Brahman avoids eating at the same time or out of the same vessel not only with a stranger or an inferior, but even with his own wife and his yet uninitiated sons.² This is so definitely a matter of religious scruple that it is forbidden to share the food even of a Brahman, if, for some cause or another, although accidental and involuntary, he is suffering from a defilement.³ Even a Śūdra cannot without contamination eat the meal of a defiled *dvija*.

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² *Mānava Dh. Ś.*, IV, 43; *Apast. Dh. S.*, II, 4, 9, 7, and the note by Bühler.

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³ *Viṣṇu Smṛiti*, XXII, 8–10.

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Impurity is contagious, and therefore excludes its victim from the religious function of the repast, and for this reason it is that by sitting down to a common banquet with his caste-companions an offender who has been temporarily excluded consecrates his rehabilitation. In virtue of the same principle, the spouses in the solemn marriage of the Romans shared a cake before the sacred fire, which was an essential ceremony marking the adoption of the wife into the family-religion of her husband. This should not be regarded as a singular or unrelated fact; it has actually been said that in the worship which united the curia or the phratry the most significant religious act was the taking of the meal.¹ The Roman feasts of the Charistia, which gathered kinsmen together, excluded not merely all strangers but any relation whose conduct appeared to render him unworthy.² The Persians had retained similar usages.³ The daily repasts of the prytanes had remained among the Greeks one of the official rites of the city religion, where, moreover, the composition of the meal was not a matter of indifference, the nature of the dishes and the kind of wine to be served being defined by rules which varied with the locality. In excluding various foods, India may have generalized the application of the principle, but she did not invent it, for this too has in the common past its analogies and its germ.

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¹ Fustel de Coulanges, p. 135.

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² Leist, *Altarisches Jus Civile*, pp. 49-50, 263-4.

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³ Ibid., pp. 49-50, 263-4.

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It is a remarkable thing that the Hindus, who have in other respects preserved more faithfully than any one else the significance of the common meal, and have to all appearance extended it, should, more than other peoples, have departed from the primitive type in the liturgical form of the funeral feast, Śrāddha. The banquet, according to theory, instead of bringing the relations together, is offered to Brahmans. But they are regarded as representatives of the ancestors and receive food in their name. Further, the Brahman who offers the sacrifice must, symbolically at least, join in the feast with the people, as was the practice among their ancestors. In spite of new conceptions which may have been introduced into it by the more highly developed ritual, this is certainly the ideal prolongation of the family-repast.

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The invited Brahmans must be chosen with a care which recalls the law of purity imposed on primitive guests. If Brahmans are substituted for relations, the novelty is sufficiently explained by the encroachment of sacerdotal power.¹ Commentators similarly assert that even the acquittal of a murder case, shall be turned to the profit of the Brahmans.² In the Āryan past, however, it was undoubtedly paid to the family of the deceased. The insistence shown by the law-books on reserving the śrāddhas for the Brahmans³ betrays the tendency which they follow. But there is always a place reserved for the relations.⁴ What clearly emerges from these very restrictions is that in current practice the śrāddhas were the occasion of actual common meals. The Hindus hold various kinds which are in no way connected with funerals.⁵

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¹ Leist, *Altarisches Jus Gentium*, p. 205.

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² Hopkins, *Journ. Amer. Orient. Soc.*, XIII, p. 113.

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³ *Mānava Dh. Ś.*, III, 139 et seq.

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⁴ Ibid., III, 148.

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⁵ Ibid., III, 254.

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Some purificatory *śrāddhas* (*goṣṭhī-śrāddha*) seem to be the ritualistic reflection of feasts celebrating the readmission of an offending member. In incorporating them in the series it was remembered that they were intimately related by their significance to the ancient family-repast.

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Its consecration is derived from the sanctity of the domestic fire. In Roman antiquity expulsion from the religious and civil community was expressed by ‘deprivation of fire’, but also, at the same time, by ‘deprivation of water’. It seems likewise in India¹ that contact with a strange fire and polluted water renders particularly impure the food offered or prepared by an unworthy hand. I have said that some of the higher castes accept parched grain from certain lower castes, but on condition that it contains no admixture of water;² and that some Hindus, who would take pure milk from certain Muslims, would reject it with indignation if they thought that water had been added. In the rites which accompany expulsion from the caste the offender’s jar is filled with water and a slave upsets it, uttering the formula: ‘I deprive so-and-so of water.’³ We see that these ideas have remote connexions and curious analogies in Āryan life, and at the same time explain why certain texts dating back to the early period of sacerdotal literature place on an equal footing admission to community of water and to the *connubium*.¹

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¹ Nesfield, §§ 189-90.

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² Ibid., § 82.

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³ Gautama *Dh S.*, XX, 2 et seq.

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¹ *Indische Studien*, X, pp. 77-8.

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The meaning of the common meal and its correlated prohibitions is so strongly marked in the life of the people that it strikes the contemporary observer who is free from all archaeological bias. ‘Community of food,’ says Ibbetson, ‘is formally used as an outward and visible token of community of blood.’² Kinsmen gather around the same table.

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² Ibbetson, p. 185.

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It is the same principle conversely applied which forbids participation in the same meal, and in a more general way all contact between people who have no share in the same family rites. This tradition has left traces elsewhere than in India. The *jus osculi*, contact by embrace, is a sign of kinship.³ Here too, then, the germ is ancient. Even the impurity of a corpse is no doubt partly explained by the consideration that the deceased is necessarily excluded from the rites by death. It places him therefore outside the family; his contact and presence defile the relatives in the same way as would an outcast.⁴ We must not forget that exclusion from caste is by the very nature of the ceremonial likened to death; in both cases a funeral is celebrated. The impurity from which the relatives suffer during the days of mourning is a conception common to all Āryan antiquity. Impurity is transmitted by near approach; and from the man it extends to the woman and to the servant. All contact which pollutes must therefore be carefully avoided, as well as all intercourse with people who, if they do not fall under the misfortune of accidental defilement, are impure from the fact that they do not belong to the community of the same fire and water. The development of this law in the caste is perfectly logical.

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³ Cf. Leist, *Altarisches Jus Civile*, pp. 49-50, 261.

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⁴ Leist, *Græco-Ital. Rechtsgesch.*, pp. 34 et seq.

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The very tribunal of the caste, with its limited jurisdiction, does not lack in antecedents. The family of antiquity had a council, which in Rome, Greece, and Germany surrounded and assisted the father on grave occasions, notably when an offending son was to be tried.¹ Exclusion from the family is the counterpart of exclusion from the caste. In both cases it is equivalent to an excommunication, which in its most redoubtable form is expressed in Latin by the qualification *sacer*.² Among the Romans it created a religious and civil situation very much like that of the outcast, the Hindu *patita*. The Latin *gens* possessed a chief who tried litigious cases among his own people. In the same way as the caste, the *gentes* took decisions which were respected by the city,¹ and like the castes they obeyed particular usages which were incumbent on their members.²

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