Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s2: I. Explanatory Theories. The Traditionalists
Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s2
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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.