Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s6.14

c8.s6.14

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.