Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s6: V. Genesis of the Hindu Castes
Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s6
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V. Genesis of the Hindu Castes
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WE have reached the crux of this research. The comparisons which I have just drawn have been for the most part already recognized and pointed out. They are no more than indications and examples, which it would be easy to multiply. The essential thing is to weigh their significance.
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Everything brings us back to the elements of the old family constitution ; the true name of the caste is *jāti*, which means ‘ race ’. Here again we must be precise. The family was not the only social organism at the time when the Āryans of India separated in order to follow their own destinies. It was included in larger bodies : in the clan and the tribe. Its existence is certain, although it is not easy strictly to define the facts, which are variable and doubtful.
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The reciprocal relationship of different groups and the order in which they were formed have been somewhat confusedly discussed. It is sufficient that these concentric circles, which embrace a wider and wider area, are in the Āryan world conceived upon a common type, for us to be able to consider the clan and the tribe, whatever names they may take in different countries, as no more than an expansion of the family, the organization of which they copy and extend.¹ Their genealogy is at bottom of little importance to us; the fact is that their respective constitutions are strictly analogous: in speaking of the family constitution it is, by the same token, the constitution of the tribe and of the clan which I have in mind.
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¹ Hearn, pp. 136 et seq.; Leist, *Altarisches Jus Civile*, pp. 45, 82-3.
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The terms here correspond very adequately: *gens*, *curia*, tribe in Rome; family, *phratria*, *phylē* in Greece; family, *gotra*, caste in India. The general harmony is striking and all the more instructive since in the beginning, to judge by all the analogies, the most essential difference between the clan and the tribe, as between the section and the caste, is summed up in the fact that the more restricted group is exogamous while the larger is endogamous. Even at the somewhat late epoch when the classical countries are well known to us, political organization has merely undermined or displaced certain customs; it has, for example, substituted as regards the rule of endogamy the whole city for the mere tribe. If there is anything to cause surprise, it is the fact that the guiding principles have on both sides so obviously survived the separation, which even then was already ancient, of the ethnical branches wherein we trace their destiny.
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It can be neither by chance nor by some modern revival that caste precisely covers the whole domain of the old gentile law. Still less is it by chance that its most peculiar practices are exactly related to primitive ideas, the spirit of which they keep alive. The whole is complete, perfectly consistent, and closely welded to the past, and this in a matter which exercises supreme dominion over life and its most intimate concerns. It is therefore an organic institution drawing its vitality from very deep sources.
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The guilds of the Middle Ages remind us in some of their customs of certain similar features in antique organizations. Yet who would venture to claim that the former are the direct heirs of the latter? Customs which had only survived the domination of an entirely new set of morals and ideas at the cost of losing their real identity and significance in the public mind, gradually crept back. I am willing to admit the patronage of a saint to be the reflection in the guilds of the eponymy of the ancient heroes, and the meals, which on certain solemn days brought their members together, to be a relic of the family meal. Yet there is from the one type to the other no continuity of transmission or immediate derivation. Nothing in the guilds corresponds to the solid cohesion of the family-corporation. They are not only open to all comers, provided that the requisite conditions are fulfilled, but they furthermore impose no restrictions on the civil and private life of their members. The resemblances then are to some extent accidental and fragmentary. It is possible that the repasts which in our country still gather the relations and friends of the deceased together after a burial are not unconnected with the funeral feasts of antiquity. What does it matter if in its long journey the usage has lost its original significance?
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The relationship which binds the caste to the ancient system of the family-community is of quite another order. There is between the two a genuine continuity and direct transmission of vitality.
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Does this mean that India has simply preserved a primitive type of the Āryan constitution? Such is certainly not my belief. If caste emerged in India from common Āryan premises, there resulted in the classical countries a quite different system. The caste, however, has remained thoroughly impregnated with ideas which connect it with the Āryan background. They could hardly fail to develop into an original institution, transplanted as they were to such unique conditions in India. Their aspect has been so greatly altered that at first sight the most primitive types are unrecognizable in the caste. Caste is, however, their legitimate heir. We have accomplished nothing if we have failed to grasp the mechanism of this transformation.
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The Vedic hymns are all too indefinite concerning the details of external and social life. We at least see from them that the Āryan population was divided into a number of tribes or small peoples (janas), subdivided into clans united by the ties of kinship (viśas), which in their turn were split up into families. The terminology of the Rig-Veda is in this respect somewhat indecisive, but the general fact is clear.¹ Sajāta, that is to say, ‘kinsman’ or ‘fellow in jāti’ of race seems in the Atharva-Veda to denote fellow in clan (viś). Jana, which assumes a wider significance, recalls the Avestic equivalent of the clan, the zantu, and the jāti or caste. A series of terms, vrā, vṛijana, vrāja, vrāta, appear to be synonyms or subdivisions either of the clan or of the tribe. The Āryan population then lived at the epoch to which the hymns refer under the rule of an organization dominated by the traditions of the tribe and the lower or similar groupings. The very variety of names indicates that this organization was somewhat unsettled; it was all the more easily shaped into the definite forms that circumstances were to impose on it in India.
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¹ Cf. Zimmer, Altind. Leben, pp. 158 et seq.
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It is easy to discern many of the factors which have contributed, each in its own way, to direct its development.
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From stern necessity the life of the invaders remained during the course of their slow conquest, if not nomadic, at least far from settled. We can follow the wanderings of some tribes; this mobility was very unfavourable to the organization of a political constitution, but very favourable to the maintenance of old institutions. The hazards of local struggles, moreover, could not fail to react on the state of the tribes, which in many instances were broken up. While preserving the tradition of hereditary customs, the fragments were reconstituted under the action of necessity and new interests, topographical or otherwise. The exclusive rigour of the genealogical bond must have been somewhat impaired by this. The way was open to diversified principles of grouping.
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An Eastern people is rarely settled with the firmness which we are accustomed to see in the West, a fact for which the absence of a strongly constituted state is both cause and effect by turn. India has preserved down to our own times something of this mobility. From time immemorial there have been very few towns there; it is natural that in the early period we should discern scarcely any traces of them. Even later, the great capitals which were founded had no deep roots, and often enjoyed but an ephemeral existence.
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The village, the *grāma*, is almost the only setting of Hindu life from the Vedic hymns down to the present time. As it appears in the hymns, it is pastoral rather than agricultural. Synonyms like *vrijana*, which cannot be separated from *vraja*, ‘pasturage’, suggest the same idea. The word ‘*gotra*’ also is never employed in the Ṛig-Veda, except in the etymological sense of ‘cowshed’. If, however, we see it later regularly denoting the eponymous clan, this use is indubitably ancient. The Ṛig-Veda makes no allusion to it at all, which merely proves once more what a dangerous delusion it is to draw positive conclusions from the silence of the hymns. This application of the word is only justified, moreover, by an intermediate stage. Very closely related to *vrijana* by its original meaning, it must have passed through an analogous evolution; it too must have been a synonym at least approximate to *grāma* or village.
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The Hindu village has an autonomous life of its own. In several regions it is a real community and its territory common property, an organization which has afforded frequent parallels with the Slavonic village-communities. We have been led to consider the village as the equivalent of the primitive clan; but in the village the community of blood, of possessions, and of jurisdiction was probably established on a more definite basis. I cannot determine whether the village-communities in India are everywhere of ancient origin, or whether they have not, in a great many cases and under the influence of special conditions, accidentally reconstituted a primitive social type. They bear witness, at any rate, to a powerful tradition of corporate life. At the same time there exists over a vast area that system of family-communities (joint families) where several generations are grouped in joint possession under a patriarchal authority. This system shows a spirit of obstinate conservatism with regard to old institutions.
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There are yet other facts: I have spoken of those Russian villages where community of property and proximity on the same soil have resulted in community of profession. The same thing has occurred in India; we cannot doubt this when we remember the numerous villages of potters, curriers, blacksmiths, etc., to which literature, above all Buddhistic literature, makes such frequent allusions. Community of trade may have spread in this way all the more readily if a blood-bond originally united the inhabitants of the village. Now there are incessant references to villages of Brahmans. This must mean that the groupings are governed, often, at any rate, by relationship, for with the Brahman relationship and not identity of profession was unquestionably the essential thing. They lived infinitely less by their ritual functions than by agricultural and above all pastoral pursuits. This, however, does not exclude the possibility that by a superficial analogy their example may have encouraged community of trade in less noble and respected groups round about them.
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Thus the bulk of Āryan immigrants settled in enclosed villages, and dominated more or less by an idea of real or supposed relationship, in any event formed a corporate body in which the clan survived in a modified form. The more general this organization was, the more must it in addition have imposed a corresponding constitution on the trade-corporations themselves. Few in number and little specialized in the pastoral period, these corporations were bound to grow by reason of economic development and the progress of culture. The members of mechanical professions whose services were needed by other groups and corporations could only ensure for themselves a tolerable existence by adapting themselves to the common type.
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At this point religious considerations intervene. Scruples of purity did not permit the inhabitants of Āryan villages to follow certain professions, nor even to receive into their fellowship compatriots who followed them. Among those excluded, the same fastidiousness tended to multiply barriers by establishing a scale of impurity among various trades. Religious sentiment made these barriers the more impassable in proportion as it was more vigorously upheld, and Brahmanic supremacy worked to this end with extraordinary energy and perseverance. We may admit that the supremacy of the sacerdotal class was not established in the beginning without conflict, but its foundations were certainly laid very early. From the most remote periods of literature its claims are asserted in high-flown terms.
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Class-hierarchy could not create the whole caste-system, which derives from a more spontaneous partition and corresponds to a far more minute subdivision, but it played its part therein. It had set the example and custom of a subdivision, which, though more extensive, was in certain respects scarcely less rigorously maintained. Above all, it had two indirect consequences: by the domination it claimed for the Brahmans it preserved a rigidity concerning religious scruples which was reflected in the severity of the caste-rules; it served as a basis for that hierarchy which has become an integral part of the system, and facilitated its establishment by lending peculiar force to the ideas of purity which, generally speaking, determine the levels of the social scale.
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The triumphant theocracy which crystallized the rules of caste in their systematized form sprang from those very elements from which the caste directly derived its origin and the source of its being. Thus it is that the hierarchy of the castes, determined by the Brahmans, or at least inspired and maintained by them, was enabled to oust the earlier state, thus reabsorbing the looser organization of the classes.
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In classical antiquity the slow fusion of the classes is at once the stimulant and the result of civil and political ideas. In India the theocratic power blocks all evolution in this direction; and India has never attained to the idea either of the state or of the fatherland. The sphere of interest contracts rather than expands. In the republics of antiquity the class-conception tended to develop into the wider idea of the city; in India it grows more sharply defined, and inclines to confine itself within the narrow limits of the caste. We must not forget that the immigrants were scattered over an immense area; groups too vast were doomed to dispersion, and in these circumstances peculiar tendencies acquired added strength.
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I cannot persuade myself that the caste has sprung from the aboriginal tribe: the system was too whole-heartedly embraced by the Brahmans, who raised it to the dignity of a dogma. Other branches of the Indo-European family furnish striking analogies to all the constituent elements of caste. Some of these are all the more striking in that the resemblance lies not so much in external similarities as in the identity of guiding principles. The aboriginal tribes, when they enter into the Brahmanic order, in spite of the ease with which their somewhat fluid organization yields to new conditions, are forced in the process to subject their organization to many modifications. For a long time they retain the stamp of their origin, and we discern the persistent traces of a foreign importation which is somewhat out of harmony with the whole, as, for example, the totem-clans. How are we to believe that the Brahmans borrowed from the vanquished, for whom they never ceased to display a humiliating contempt, those complicated rules of purity which make them so fastidious in regard both to food and to personal relations, and that they adopted so readily a social organization which had not sprung spontaneously from their own traditions?
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It has sometimes been too lightly assumed that the natives were themselves in possession of this whole system.¹ They may from the start have had certain of its traits; it must, however, be remembered that we are here in danger of several misconceptions.
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¹ Nesfield, § 189.
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The imitation of Brahmanic rules has penetrated even to populations which, though otherwise still quite barbarous, manifest a great eagerness to adopt them. Though they retain many unorthodox customs, they insist upon a Brahmanic clergy. While the priests are despised for the services they render, they in turn are very contemptuous of their flock; but despite everything the patronage of the Brahmans is highly esteemed.¹ The Brahmanic rite of marriage has taken root even in tribes who do not summon Brahmans to their ceremonies.² An extremely low caste such as the Rāmośis,³ where the exogamous limit is marked by the totem, nevertheless owes much to the Brahmans, not merely its genealogical legend, but the prohibition of the marriage of widows. It is reversing the true order of things to attribute the authorship of such restrictions to the aborigines. In the early stages, organization and custom show obvious resemblances from race to race, the social machinery being too primitive to admit of great diversity. One must take care, however, not to confuse what is late or borrowed with what is hereditary.
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¹ Ibbetson, pp. 153-4.
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² Ibid., § 296.
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³ Poona Gazetteer, I, pp. 410, 423.
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Everything goes to show, however, that intercourse and intermarriage with the aborigines was not without influence in the establishing of the caste, an influence which, if indirect, was powerful. The clash of the Āryans with populations which were despised on account of their colour and their state of barbarity could not but exalt their pride of race, strengthening their native scruples with regard to degrading contacts, and redoubling the rigour of endogamous rules; in a word, it encouraged all the practices and prejudices which paved the way for the caste. By this I mean that hierarchical exclusivism which crowns the system, and which, properly speaking, transfers it from the domain of the family to the social and semi-political domain.
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The former masters of the soil, too numerous to be entirely subjugated, suffered the ascendancy of a more gifted conqueror; but even where they completely lost their independence, they preserved in the main their native organization. They were rather converted than subdued by a centralized force; they certainly helped to maintain throughout the country an element of instability and fluctuation. The tribes continued to jostle one another in the guise of small semi-autonomous nationalities, so that this aboriginal population raised against the development of an organized political government a formidable obstacle which has never been surmounted. Their example upheld the cause of archaic institutions, and thus in every way encouraged the survival of those conditions which prevailed when the conqueror entered the country.
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The subsequent mingling of the two races could only promote this tendency, for thereby these precedents acquired the strength of habits and hereditary instincts. Did not the old framework become consolidated as more and more laggards found their way into Hinduism? The organization of the tribe, although transformed into a system of castes under the influence of conditions which I am endeavouring to explain, was a natural enough point of contact for conquerors and conquered, given their respective states of civilization.
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Nowhere in antiquity have the Indo-Europeans shown any great taste for manual professions. The Greeks and Romans left them to slaves or intermediate classes, freedmen and members of the household. The Āryans, settled in villages and at first completely pastoral in occupation, had even less need to follow them in India than elsewhere. Manual labour was destined in general to remain the lot of either the aborigines or of the peoples whose hybrid or doubtful origin relegated them to the same level.
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Both these groups, in becoming artisans, brought with them their tradition and the desire to be assimilated to the analogous organization of the superior race. The fear of defilement closed a number of professions to the Āryans; this fear spread and became general among the inferior population owing to the religious influence of the immigrants and of their priests. It could not fail to multiply amongst them sections graded according to the degrees of impurity in their occupations, a thing which is still happening to-day under our eyes. The aborigines, too numerous to sink individually to the condition of domestic slaves, and driven by circumstances into the blind alley of manual trade, were led both by their own traditions and by the influence of the Āryans to form themselves into new groups, in which the profession seemed to be the connecting link.
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Thus was accentuated and completed the parallel movement among the Āryans themselves, which, though in different conditions, was inspired by several common ideas. In neither case was community of profession the bond of union, but we can readily understand how it might appear so, not only to us but, in the course of time, even to the Hindus. At this point and in the age of secondary formation, where evolution has obliterated old ideas and motive-forces, or dulled the consciousness of them, a deceptive analogy might easily have been drawn regarding the autonomous factor of grouping, which as a fact was only the last stage in its development, for it had proceeded from very different sources.
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In addition to the natural play of external social or historical elements, it is necessary to take into consideration moral forces, primitive inclinations, and essential beliefs. Unfortunately it is not easy to throw light on such subtle agents, the influence of which is continuous but indeterminate.
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On some of these I have touched in passing. The Hindu mind is both religious and speculative. It jealously upholds tradition and is singularly insensible to the joys of action and the call of material progress. It offered a field for a social organization composed of extremely archaic elements, and obedient to an all-potent sacerdotal authority which regarded immutability as a duty and the established hierarchy as a natural law.
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With striking aptness this system is particularly associated with the most permanent, if not the most characteristic, of the dogmas which dominate the religious life of India—namely, metempsychosis. The immobility of the limits which the caste imposes upon life is justified and explained automatically by a doctrine which founds the terrestrial condition of each individual on the balance of his previous actions, good and bad. The fate of every man is determined by the past; in the present it must be definite and immutable. The scale of social ranks corresponds faithfully to the infinite degrees of moral good and evil.
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All or nearly all the sects born of Hinduism have accepted metempsychosis as an indisputable certainty; all or nearly all have accepted the caste without protest. Buddhism, from the point of view of religious profession, makes no difference between the castes; all are admitted without difficulty and without distinction into the body of monks, and all are called to salvation. Logically these premises ought to result in the suppression of castes, but such is not the case. Direct polemics develop late, and then—for example, in a book which is completely devoted to them, the Vajrasūchī—they take the special form of an attack directed against the privileges of the Brahmanic class. It is a struggle for influence between the two clerical orders, not a formal protest against a system outside which the Buddhists themselves could conceive no social existence.
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Various ascetic sects likewise practically abolish the caste. All postulants are admitted to their religious order, where they mingle freely. With several this equality is symbolized at the time of consecration of the adepts by the solemn destruction of the sacred thread. How can the abolition of all family ties, and the renunciation of the world, be better expressed? It is the equivalent of those funeral ceremonies which, as I have said, signify exclusion from the caste. It is not a question of overthrowing a system which is the very foundation of national life, but of the creation within this immense circle of a fairly extensive group of saints who escape from the world and break all its ties. For the bulk of adherents the caste remains unquestioned, and in a number of cases the new community of faith helps to create new sections.
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We no longer live in the days when it was permissible to represent Buddhism or Jainism as attempts at social reform directed against the caste-system.¹ The illogical resignation with which they have bowed to it shows, on the contrary, how deeply rooted it was in the Hindu conscience at the time of their foundation, and how intimately wedded to those beliefs, those fundamental ideas, such as the doctrine of moral merit, of metempsychosis and of final deliverance, which they receive without protest as their inheritance.
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¹ Cf. Oldenburg, *Le Bouddha*, translated by Foucher, pp. 155 et seq.
Linked texts (3)
- Vajrasūcī — Aśvaghoṣa, Sanskrit
- Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
- Atharvavedasaṃhitā — Atharvan & Aṅgiras, Sanskrit