Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s6.10

c8.s6.10

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.