Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s2.3

c8.s2.3

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.