Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s4: III. Race as the Basis of Caste. Risley
Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s4
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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.
Linked texts (1)
- Brāhmaṇa — Sanskrit