The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c6.11

c6.11

In olden times there were four castes: the Brahman, or priestly caste; the Kshatriya, or warrior caste; the Vaiçya, or merchant and farmer caste; and the Çūdra, or servitor caste. Then came many cross-castes, the result of intermarriages between members of the four original castes. Such marriages are now strictly taboo. Gradually, differences of occupation, trade, and profession, and, to a considerable extent also, difference of geography, established themselves as the basis of caste distinction, until the number of castes became legion. At the present time there are nearly 2000 Brahman castes alone. According to an intelligent Hindu observer of our own day¹ the Sārasvata Brahmins of the Panjab alone number 469 tribes; the Kshatriyas are split up into 590; the Vaiçyas and Çūdras into even more. There is a Hindustani proverb, "eight Brahmins, nine kitchens." In the matter of food and intermarriage all castes are now completely shut off one from the other. A tailor may not, as is the custom with all other peoples, invite his neighbor, an honest shoemaker, to share his humble fare. The son of the shoemaker may not woo and wed the blooming daughter of the barber. Even a minor deviation, some new trick of trade, will at once breed a new caste. In certain parts of India fisher-folk who knit the meshes of their nets from right to left may not intermarry with them that knit from left to right. In Cuttack, the most southerly district of Bengal, there is no intercourse between potters who turn their wheels a-sitting and make small pots, and them that stand up for the manufacture of large pots. A certain class of dairymen who make butter from unboiled milk have been excluded from the caste, and cannot marry the daughters of milkmen who churn upon more orthodox principles. Even as late a census as that of 1901 reports, and in a way gives its sanction to the Cimmerian notion that the touch of the lower caste man defiles the higher: