Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s4.3

c8.s4.3

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.