Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s7.18

c8.s7.18

I have been careful to remember that heterogeneous elements may have cut across it. Moreover, once complete in its essential traits, it goes without saying that it was subject, like all ageing systems in which tradition is no longer revivified by contact with a living consciousness of its origins, to the influence of analogy. The principles which observers have thought to discover in it, and conclusions based on false premises, have both played their part in it. Although accidental or secondary, these modifications have not failed to produce an apparent confusion in the facts. But I will not press the point; if needs be, the sources can be found in the details which I have had occasion to indicate in passing.