Caste in India: The Facts and the System c8.s7.25

c8.s7.25

Whatever vigour it may have borrowed from external and historic circumstances, the caste is clearly the fruit of the Hindu mind. The social organization of India is to the structure of the antique cities what a Hindu poem is to a Greek tragedy. In practical life as well as in art the Hindu genius rarely shows itself capable of organization—that is to say, of measure and harmony. In the caste it has exhausted all its efforts in maintaining and strengthening a network of closed groups, without common action or mutual reaction, recognizing in the long run no other motive-power than the unchecked authority of a sacerdotal class which has constituted itself the people's sole director. Under the levelling rule of Brahmanism the castes move as the episodes jostle one another haphazard in the vague unity of an epic narrative. It is enough that an artificial system theoretically masks their incoherence.