Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s6.23

c8.s6.23

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?