Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s2.2

c8.s2.2

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.