The modern science of ethnology endeavours to define and classify the various physical types with reference to their distinctive characteristics, in the hope that, when sufficient data have been accumulated, it may be possible in some measure to account for the types themselves, to determine the elements of which they are composed, and thus to establish their connexion with one or other of the great families of mankind. In India, where historical evidence can hardly be said to exist, the data ordinarily available are of three kinds: physical characters, linguistic characters, and religious and social usages. Of these the first are by far the most trustworthy.
For ethnological purposes, physical characters may be said to be of two kinds: ‘indefinite,’ which can only be described in more or less appropriate language; and ‘definite,’ which admit of being measured and reduced to numerical expression. The former class, usually called descriptive or secondary characters, includes such points as the colour and texture of the skin; the colour, form, and position of the eyes; the colour and character of the hair; and the form of the face and features. Conspicuous as these traits are, the difficulty of observing, defining, and recording them is extreme. Colour, the most striking of all, is perhaps the most evasive.
The skin of the Indian peoples exhibits extreme divergences of colouring. At one end of the scale we have the dead black of the Andamanese, and the somewhat brighter black of the Dravidians of Southern India. At the other end one may place the flushed ivory of the traditional Kashmiri beauty, and the very light transparent brown—‘wheat-coloured’ is the common vernacular description—of the higher castes of Northern India, which is hardly darker than that met with in members of the swarthier races of Southern Europe. Between these extremes we find countless shades of brown, darker or lighter, transparent or opaque, frequently tending towards yellow, more rarely approaching a reddish tint, and occasionally degenerating into a sort of greyish black. It would be a hopeless task to register and classify these variations. Nor, if it were done, should we be in a position to evolve order out of the chaos of tints. For even in the individual, minute gradations of colour are comparatively unstable, and are liable to be affected not only by exposure to sun and wind, but by differences of temperature and humidity. Natives of Bengal have stated that people of their race, one of the darkest in India, become appreciably fairer when domiciled in Hindustan or the Punjab, and the converse process may be observed in natives of Northern India living in the damp heat of the Ganges delta.
Little variety is traceable in the character of the eyes and hair. From one end of India to the other the hair of the great mass of the population is black or dark brown, while among the higher castes the latter colour is occasionally shot through by something approaching a tawny shade. Straight hair seems on the whole to predominate, but the wavy or curly character appears in much the same proportion as among the races of Europe. The Andamanese have woolly or frizzly hair, oval in section and curling on itself so tightly that it seems to grow in separate spiral tufts, while in fact it is quite evenly distributed over the scalp. Although the terms woolly and frizzly have been loosely applied to the wavy hair not uncommon among the Dravidians, no good observer has as yet found among any of the Indian races a head that could be correctly described as woolly. The eyes are almost invariably dark brown. Occasional instances of grey eyes are, however, found among the Konkanasth Brāhmans of Bombay; and the combination of blue eyes, auburn hair, and reddish blonde complexion is met with on the north-western frontier. On the Malabar coast Mr. Thurston has noticed several instances of pale blue and grey eyes combined with a dark complexion.
When we turn to the definite, or anthropometric, characters, we find ourselves upon firmer ground. In the early days of anthropology, it was natural that the attention of students should have been directed mainly to the examination of skulls. Cranometry seemed to offer a solution of the problems regarding the origin and antiquity of the human race which then divided the scientific world. Its precise method promised to clear up the mystery of the prehistoric skulls discovered in the quaternary strata of Europe, and to connect them on the one side with a possible simian ancestor of mankind, and on the other with the races of the present day. This line of research led on to the measurements of living subjects, which have since been undertaken by a number of inquirers. Anthropometry, which deals with living people, while craniometry is concerned exclusively with skulls, possesses certain advantages over the elder science. For reasons too technical to enter upon here, its procedure is in some respects less precise, and its results less minute and exhaustive, than those of craniometry. These minor shortcomings are, however, amply made up for by its incomparably wider range. The number of subjects available is practically unlimited; measurements can be undertaken on a scale large enough to eliminate not merely the personal equation of the measurer, but also the occasional variations of type arising from intermixture of blood; and the investigation is not restricted to the characters of the head, but extends to the stature and the proportions of the limbs. A further advantage arises from the fact that no doubts can arise as to the identity of the individuals measured. In working with skulls this last point has to be reckoned with. The same place of sepulment may have been used in succession by two different races; and the skulls of conquering chiefs may be mixed with those of alien slaves, or of prisoners slain to escort their captors to the world of the dead. The savage practice of head-hunting may equally bring about a deplorable confusion of cranial types; skulls picked up in times of famine may belong to people who have wandered from no one knows where; and even hospital specimens may lose their identity in the process of cleaning.
Scientific anthropometry was introduced into India on a large scale in 1886, in connexion with the Ethnographic Survey of Bengal then in progress. The survey itself was a first attempt to apply to Indian ethnography the method of systematic research sanctioned by the authority of European anthropologists. Among these the measurement of physical characters occupies a prominent place; and it seemed that the restrictions on intermarriage which are peculiar to the Indian social system would favour this method of observation, and would enable it to yield peculiarly clear and instructive results. A further reason for resorting to anthropometry was the fact that the wholesale borrowing of customs and ceremonies which goes on among the various social groups in India makes it practically impossible to arrive at any certain conclusions by examining these practices. Finally, the necessity of employing more precise methods was accentuated by Mr. Nesfield’s uncompromising denial of the truth of ’the modern doctrine which divides the population of India into Aryan and aboriginal’; and his assertion of the essential unity of the Indian race, enforced as it was by the specific statements that ’the great majority of Brāhmans are not of lighter complexion, or of finer and better bred features, than any other caste,’ and that a stranger walking through the class-rooms of the Sanskrit College at Benares ‘would never dream of supposing’ that the high caste students of that exclusive institution ‘were distinct in race and blood from the scavengers who swept the roads.’ A theory which departed so widely from the current beliefs of the people, and from the opinions of most independent observers, called for the searching test which anthropometry promised to furnish, and the case was crucial enough to put the method itself on its trial. The experiment has been justified by its results.
In 1890 Mr. H. H. Risley published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute1, under the title ‘The Study of Ethnology in India,’ a summary of the measurements of eighty-nine characteristic tribes and castes of Bengal, the United Provinces, and the Punjab. These measurements were taken in accordance with a scheme approved by the late Sir William Flower of the British Museum and Professor Topinard of Paris. Topinard’s instruments were used and his instructions were closely followed throughout. Analysis of the data rendered it possible to distinguish, in the area covered by the experiment, three main types, which were named provisionally Aryan, Dravidian, and Mongoloid. The characteristics of these types will be discussed below. Here it is sufficient to remark that the classification was accepted by Flower, Beddoe, and Haddon in England; by Topinard in France; and by Virchow, Schmidt, and Kollmann in Germany. It has recently been confirmed by the high authority of Sir William Turner, who has been led by the examination of a large number of skulls to the same conclusions that were suggested to Mr. Risley by measurements taken on living subjects. Similar confirmation is furnished by the craniometric researches of Colonel Havelock Charles in the Punjab. Great additions have been made to the number of measurements on living subjects by the exertions of Mr. Edgar Thurston, Superintendent of Ethnography, Madras; by Mr. T. H. Holland, Director of the Geological Survey of India, who has contributed important data for the Coorgs and Veravas of Southern India, and the Kanets of Kulu and Lāhul; by Messrs. K. B. Samanta and B. A. Gupte, who have carried out under Mr. Risley’s instructions an extensive series of measurements in Baluchistan, Rājputana, Bombay, and Orissa; and by Colonel Waddell, of the Indian Medical Service, who has published some most valuable data for Assam and parts of Bengal in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal2. It must be added that the conclusions based on these investigations are necessarily provisional, and will be of use mainly as a guide to research and as an indication of the progress made up to date (1905) in this line of inquiry. During the next few years the data will be greatly added to by the Ethnographic Survey of India still in progress, and we may then hope to make some approach to a final classification of the people of India on the basis of their physical characters.
It is easy enough to distinguish certain well-marked physical types. Our difficulties begin when we attempt to carry the process farther, and to differentiate the minor types or sub-types which have been formed by varying degrees of intermixture. The extremes of the series are sharply defined; but the intermediate types melt into each other, and it is hard to say where the dividing line should be drawn. Here measurements are of great assistance, especially if they are arranged in a series so as to bring out the relative preponderance of certain characters in a large number of the members of particular groups. We are further assisted by the remarkable correspondence that may be observed at the present day, in all parts of India except the Punjab, between variations of physical type and differences of grouping and social position. This, of course, is due to the operation of the caste system. Nowhere else in the world do we find the population of a large sub-continent broken up into an infinite number of mutually exclusive aggregates, the members of which are forbidden by an inexorable social law to marry outside the group to which they themselves belong. Whatever may have been the origin and the earlier developments of caste, this absolute prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth now as its essential and most prominent characteristic. In a society thus organized, a society putting an extravagant value on pride of blood and the idea of ceremonial purity, differences of physical type, however produced in the first instance, may be expected to manifest a high degree of persistence, while methods which seek to trace and express such differences find a peculiarly favourable field for their operations. In this respect India presents a remarkable contrast to most other parts of the world, where anthropometry has to confess itself hindered, if not baffled, by the constant intermixture of types, obscuring and confusing the data ascertained by measurements. All the recognized nations of Europe are the result of a process of unrestricted crossing, which has fused a number of distinct tribal types into a more or less definable national type. In India the process of fusion was long ago arrested, and the degree of progress which it had made up to the point at which it ceased to operate is expressed in the physical characteristics of the groups which have been left behind. There is consequently no national type, and no nation in the ordinary sense of the word.
The measurements themselves require a few words of explanation. The form of the head is ascertained by measuring in a horizontal plane the greatest length from a definite point on the forehead (the glabella) to the back of the head, and the greatest breadth a little above the ears. The proportion of the breadth to the length is then expressed as a percentage called the cephalic index. Heads with a proportionate breadth of 80 per cent. and over are classed as broad or brachy-cephalic; those with an index under 80, but not under 75, are called medium heads (meso- or mesati-cephalic); long or dolichocephalic heads are those in which the ratio of breadth to length is below 75 per cent.
It is not contended that these groupings correspond to the primary divisions of mankind. Long, broad, and medium heads are met with in varying degrees of preponderance among the white, black, and yellow races. But within these primary divisions the proportions of the head serve to mark off important groups. Topinard shows how the form expressed by the index separates the long-headed Scandinavian people from the broad-headed Celts and Slavs, while the Esquimaux are distinguished on similar grounds from the Asiatic Mongols, and the Australians from the Negritos. All authorities agree in regarding the form of the head as an extremely constant and persistent character, which resists the influence of climate and physical surroundings, and (having nothing to do with the personal appearance of the individual) is not liable to be modified by the action of artificial selection. Men choose their wives mainly for their faces and figures, and a long-headed woman offers no greater attractions of external form and colouring than her short-headed sister. The intermixture of races with different head-forms will of course affect the index, but even here there is a tendency to revert to the original type when the influence of crossing is withdrawn. On the whole, therefore, the form of the head, especially when combined with other characters, is a good test of racial affinity. It may be added that neither the shape nor the size of the head seems to bear any direct relation to intellectual capacity.
Compared with the rest of Asia, India may be described as mainly an area of long-headed people, separated by the Himālayas and its offshoots from the Mongolian country, where the broad-headed types are more numerous and more pronounced than anywhere else in the world. At either end of the mountain barrier broad heads are strongly represented, in Assam and Burma on the east, and in Baluchistan on the west; and the same character occurs in varying degrees in the Lower Himālayas, and in a belt of country on the west of India, extending from Gujarat through the Deccan to Coorg, the precise limits of which it is not yet possible to define. In the Punjab, Rājputāna, and the United Provinces long heads predominate, but the type gradually changes as we travel eastward. In Bihar medium heads prevail on the whole, while in certain of the Bengal groups a distinct tendency towards brachy-cephaly may be observed, which shows itself in the Muhammadans and Chandals of Eastern Bengal, is more distinctly marked in the Kāyasths, and reaches its maximum development among the Bengal Brāhmans. South of the Vindhyas the prevalent type seems to be mainly long-headed or medium-headed, short heads appearing only in the western zone referred to above. The coast population has been much affected by foreign influence—Malayan or Indo-Chinese on the east; Arab, Persian, African, European, and Jewish on the west; and the mixed types thus produced cannot be brought under any general formula.
The proportions of the nose are determined on the same principle as those of the skull. The height and the breadth are measured from certain specified points, and the latter dimension is expressed as a percentage of the former. The nasal index, therefore, is simply the relation of the breadth of the nose to its height. If a man’s nose is as broad as it is high, no infrequent case among the Dravidians, his index is 100. The results thus obtained are grouped in three classes—narrow or fine noses (leptorrhine), in which the width is less than 70 per cent. of the height; medium noses (mesorrhine), with an index of from 70 to 85; and broad noses (platyrrhine), in which the proportion rises to 85 per cent. and over. Where races with different nasal proportions have intermingled, the index marks the degree of crossing that has taken place; it records a large range of variations; and it enables us to group types in a serial order corresponding to that suggested by other characters. For these reasons the nasal index is accepted by all anthropologists as one of the best tests of racial affinity.
Speaking generally, it may be said that the broad type of nose is most common in Madras, the Central Provinces, and Chotā Nāgpur; that fine noses in the strict sense of the term are confined to the Punjab and Baluchistan; and that the population of the rest of India tends to fall within the medium class. But the range of the index is very great: it varies in individual cases from 122 to 53, and the mean indices of different groups differ considerably in the same part of the country. The average nasal proportions of the Māl Pahāriā tribe of Bengal are expressed by the figure 94.5, while the pastoral Gūjars of the Punjab have an index of 66.9 and the Sikhs of 68.8. In other words, the typical Dravidian, as represented by the Māl Pahāriā, has a nose as broad in proportion to its length as the Negro, while this feature in the Indo-Aryan group can fairly bear comparison with the noses of sixty-eight Parisians, measured by Topinard, which gave an average of 69.4. Even more striking is the curiously close correspondence between the gradations of racial type indicated by the nasal index and certain of the social data ascertained by independent inquiry. If we take a series of castes in Bengal, Bihār, the United Provinces, or Madras, and arrange them in the order of the average nasal index, so that the caste with the finest nose shall be at the top and that with the coarsest nose at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social precedence. Nor is this the only point in which the two sets of observations, the social and the physical, bear out and illustrate each other. The character of the curious matrimonial groupings for which the late Mr. J. F. McLennan devised the useful term exogamous also varies in a definite relation to the gradations of physical type. Within a certain range of nasal proportions, these subdivisions are based almost exclusively on the totem. Along with a somewhat finer form of nose, groups called after villages and larger territorial areas, or bearing the name of certain tribal or communal officials, begin to appear; and above these again we reach the eponymous saints and heroes who in India, as in Greece and Rome, are associated with a certain stage of Aryan progress.
The comparative flatness of the Mongolian face is a peculiarity which cannot fail to strike the most casual observer. On closer examination this characteristic will be seen to be closely connected with the formation of the cheek-bones, the margins of the bony sockets of the eyes, and the root of the nose. No precise measurements can be made of the cheek-bones on the living subject, for it is impossible to fix any definite points from which the dimensions can be taken. Some years ago, however, Mr. Oldfield Thomas devised a method of measuring the relative projection of the root of the nose above the level of the eye-sockets, which expresses very accurately the degree of flatness of face met with in different types. It was used by him for skulls; but it has the great advantage of being equally applicable to living persons, and, at Sir William Flower’s suggestion, it has been extensively used in India, especially among hill tribes and wherever there was reason to suspect an intermixture of Mongolian blood. The procedure adopted is to mark a point on the front surface of the outer edge of each orbit, and a third point on the centre of the root of the nose where it is lowest. The distance between the two orbital dots is then measured in a direct line, and also the distance from each of these to the dot on the bridge of the nose. The former dimension represents the base of a triangle, the latter its two sides. The index is formed by calculating the percentage of the latter breadth on the former. If, as is sometimes the case, the bridge of the nose is let down so low that it does not project at all beyond the level of the orbits, the two dimensions will obviously be of equal length and the index will be 100. If, on the other hand, the elevation of the bridge of the nose is marked, the index may be as high as 127 or 130. Experience gained in India, which extends to a large number of castes and tribes in all parts of the country, has led Mr. Risley to adopt, on the indices thus obtained, the following grouping for the living subject:
Platypic . . . . . . below 110.
Mesopic . . . . . . 110 to 112.9.
Pro-opic . . . . . . 113 and over.
This brings the Mongoloid people of Assam and the Eastern Himālayas within the platyopic group, and effectually differentiates them from the broad-headed races of Baluchistan, Bombay, and Coorg. It also separates the Indo-Aryans from the Aryo-Dravidians.
Topinard’s classification of stature, which is generally accepted, comprises four groups whose height in feet and inches is as below:—
| Tall statures | . | . | 5′7″ and over. | | Above average | . | . | between 5′5″ and 5′7″. | | Below average | . | . | between 5′3″ and 5′5″. | | Short statures | . | . | less than 5′3″. |
Much has been written on the subject of the causes which affect the stature. The general conclusion seems to be that in Europe the influence of race is to a great extent obscured by other factors, such as climate, soil, elevation, food-supply, habits of life, occupation, and natural or artificial selection. Most of these causes also come into play in India, but not necessarily to the same extent as in Europe. The influence of city life, which in civilized countries tends to reduce the stature and to produce physical degeneracy, is relatively small in India, where the great majority of the population are engaged in agriculture. Nor are the conditions of factory industries so trying, or so likely to affect growth, as in Europe. Some of the indigenous hand-loom weavers, however, show the lowest mean stature yet recorded, a fact which is probably due to the unwholesome conditions in which they live. In India, as in Europe, dwellers in the hills are generally shorter than the people of the plains; and within the hill region it may in both countries be observed that the stature is often greater at high than at moderate altitudes, a fact which has been ascribed to the influence of rigorous climate in killing off all but vigorous individuals. In India, too, the prevalence of malaria at the lower levels would probably tend to bring about the same result. On the whole, however, the distribution of stature in India seems to suggest that race differences play a larger part here than they do in Europe. The tallest statures are found in Baluchistan, the Punjab, and Rajputana; and a progressive decline may be traced down the valley of the Ganges, until the lowest limit is reached among the Mongoloid people of the hills bordering on Assam. In the south of India the stature is generally lower than in the plains of the north. The minimum is found among the Negritos of the Andaman islands, whose mean stature is given by Deniker as 4 feet 10½ inches.
The physical data above discussed enable us to divide the people of the Indian Empire into seven main physical types. If we include the Andamanese, the number of types would be eight, but for our present purpose this tiny group of Negritos may be disregarded. Counting from the north-western frontier, the main types are as follows:—
I. The Turko-Irānian, represented by the Baloch, Brāhui, and Afghans of Baluchistan and the North-west Frontier Province. Probably formed by a fusion of Turki and Persian elements, in which the former predominate. Stature above mean; complexion fair; eyes mostly dark, but occasionally grey; hair on face plentiful; head broad; nose moderately narrow, prominent, and very long. The feature in these people that strikes one most prominently is the portentous length of their noses, and it is probably this peculiarity that has given rise to the tradition of the Jewish origin of the Afghans.
II. The Indo-Aryan, occupying the Punjab, Rājputāna, and Kashmir, and having as its characteristic members the Rājputs, Khattris, and Jāts. This type, which is readily distinguishable from the Turko-Irānian, approaches most closely to that ascribed to the traditional Aryan colonists of India. The stature is mostly tall; complexion fair; eyes dark; hair on face plentiful; head long; nose narrow and prominent, but not specially long.
The most important points to observe in the Indo-Aryan measurements are the great uniformity of type, and the very slight differences between the higher and the lower groups. Socially no gulf can be wider than that which divides the Rajput of Udaipur from the scavenging Chuhrā of the Punjab. Physically the one is cast in much the same mould as the other; and the difference in mean height which the seriations disclose is no greater than might easily be accounted for by the fact that, in respect of food, occupation, and habits of life, the Rajput has for many generations enjoyed advantages denied to the Chuhrā. Stature we know to be peculiarly sensitive to external influences of this kind. Other and more subtle influences react upon environment and tend to modify the type: thus Sikhism has transformed the despised Chuhrā into the soldierly Mazhabi.
III. The Scytho-Dravidian, comprising the Marāthā Brāhmans, the Kunbīs, and the Coorgs of Western India. Probably formed by a mixture of Scythian and Dravidian elements. This type is clearly distinguished from the Turko-Irānian by a lower stature, a greater length of head, a higher nasal index, a shorter nose, and a lower orbito-nasal index. All of these characters, except perhaps the last, may be due to a varying degree of intermixture with the Dravidians. In the higher groups the amount of crossing seems to have been slight; in the lower the Dravidian elements are more pronounced.
IV. The Aryo-Dravidian, or Hindustani, found in the United Provinces, in parts of Rajputana, and in Bihar, and represented in its upper strata by the Hindustani Brāhman and in its lower by the Chamār. Probably the result of the intermixture, in varying proportions, of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian types. The head-form is long, with a tendency to medium; the complexion varies from lightish brown to black; the nose ranges from medium to broad, being always broader than among the Indo-Aryans; the stature is lower than in the latter group, and usually below the average according to the scale given on p. 292. The higher representatives of this type approach the Indo-Aryans, while the lower members are in many respects not very far removed from the Dravidians. The type is essentially a mixed one, yet its characteristics are readily definable, and no one would take even an upper-class Hindustani for a pure Indo-Aryan, or a Chamār for a genuine Dravidian. The distinctive feature of the type, the character which gives the real clue to its origin and stamps the Aryo-Dravidian as racially different from the Indo-Aryan, is to be found in the proportions of the nose. The average index runs in an unbroken series from 73.0 in the Bhuinhār of Hindustān, and 73.2 in the Brāhman of Bihar, to 86 in the Hindustani Chamār and 88.7 in the Musahār of Bihar. The order thus established corresponds substantially with the scale of social precedence independently ascertained.
V. The Mongolo-Dravidian or Bengali type of Lower Bengal and Orissa, comprising the Bengal Brāhmans and Kāyasths, the Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal, and other groups peculiar to this part of India. Probably a blend of Dravidian and Mongoloid elements, with a strain of Indo-Aryan blood in the higher groups. The head is broad; complexion dark; hair on face usually plentiful; stature medium; nose medium, with a tendency to broad.
This is one of the most distinctive types in India, and its members may be recognized at a glance throughout the wide area where their remarkable aptitude for clerical pursuits has procured them employment. Within its own habitat the type extends to the Himālayas on the north and to Assam on the east, and probably includes the bulk of the population of Orissa; the western limit coincides approximately with the hilly country of Chotā Nāgpur and Western Bengal. The broad head of the Bengali, of which the mean index varies from 79.0 in the Brāhman to 83.0 in the Rājbansi Magh, effectively differentiates the type from the Indo-Aryan or Aryo-Dravidian. The seriation of the cephalic index for the Brāhmans of Eastern Bengal is very regular in its gradations, and it presents a striking contrast with the corresponding diagrams for the Hindustani Brāhmans and the Rājput. Here, as elsewhere, the inferences as to racial affinity suggested by the measurements are in entire accord with the evidence afforded by features and general appearance. For example, it is a matter of common knowledge that the Rājbansi Magh of Chittagong, who is in great demand as a cook in European households in India, resembles the upper-class Bengali of Eastern Bengal so closely that it takes an acute observer to tell the difference between the two. In the Brāhman seriation the finer nasal forms predominate; and it is open to any one to argue that, notwithstanding the uncompromising breadth of the head, the nose-form may in their case be due to the remote strain of Indo-Aryan ancestry to which their traditions bear witness.
VI. The Mongoloid type of the Himālayas, Nepāl, Assam, and Burma, represented by the Kanets of Lāhul and Kulū; the Lepchās of Darjeeling and Sikkim; the Limbus, Murmis, and Gurungs of Nepāl; the Bodo of Assam; and the Burmese. The head is broad; complexion dark, with a yellowish tinge; hair on face scanty; stature short or below average; nose fine to broad; face characteristically flat; eyelids often oblique.
On its northern and eastern frontier India marches with the great Mongolian region of the earth, and a glance at the ethnographic map in the Gazetteer Atlas will show how the Indian area on which this particular foreign influence has impressed itself widens gradually from west to east. The Punjab and Hindustan are left virtually untouched; the Bengalis exhibit a type sensibly modified in the direction of Mongolian characters; the Assamese are unmistakably Mongoloid; and in Burma the only non-Mongolian elements are the result of recent immigration from India. This condition of things is of course mainly due to the intervention of the great physical barrier of the Himalayas, which obstructed the southward extension of the Mongolian races. But other causes also enter in. No one who is acquainted with the population of the Lower Himālayas can have failed to observe that in the west there has been a substantial intermixture of Indo-Aryan elements, while in the east the prevailing type down to the verge of the plains is exclusively Mongoloid. The reason seems to be that the warlike races of the Punjab and Hindustan invaded the pleasant places of the hills, and conquered for themselves the little kingdoms which once extended from the Kashmir valley to the eastern border of Nepāl. The hill Rājputs of Kāngra and the Khas of Nepāl form the living records of these forgotten enterprises. Farther east the conditions were reversed. Neither Bengalis nor Assamese have any stomach for fighting; they submitted tamely to the periodical raids of the hill people; and the only check upon the incursions of the latter was their inability to stand the heat of the plains. They occupied, however, the whole of the lower ranges, and held the Duār, or gates, of Bhutān until dispossessed by us. Thus, in the Eastern Himālayas none of the plains people made good a footing within the hills, which remain to this day in the exclusive possession of races of the Mongoloid type.
VII. The Dravidian type, extending from Ceylon to the valley of the Ganges, and pervading Madras, Hyderabād, the Central Provinces, most of Central India, and Chotā Nāgpur. Its most characteristic representatives are the Paniyans of Malabar and the Santāls of Chotā Nāgpur. Probably the original type of the population of India, now modified to a varying extent by the admixture of Aryan, Scythian, and Mongoloid elements. In typical specimens the stature is short or below mean; the complexion very dark, approaching black; hair plentiful, with an occasional tendency to curl; eyes dark; head long; nose very broad, sometimes depressed at the root, but not so as to make the face appear flat. This race, the most primitive of the Indian types, occupies the oldest geological formation in India, the medley of forest-clad ranges, terraced plateaux, and undulating plains which stretches, roughly speaking, from the Vindhyas to Cape Comorin. On the east and west of the peninsular area the domain of the Dravidian is conterminous with the Ghāts, while farther north it reaches on one side to the Arāvallis, and on the other to the Rājmahāl Hills. Where the original characteristics have been unchanged by contact with Indo-Aryan or Mongoloid people, the type is remarkably uniform and distinctive. Labour is the birthright of the pure Dravidian: whether hoeing tea in Assam, the Duārs, or Ceylon, cutting rice in the swamps of Eastern Bengal, or doing scavenger’s work in the streets of Calcutta, Rangoon, and Singapore, he is recognizable at a glance by his black skin, his squat figure, and the negro-like proportions of his nose. In the upper strata of the vast social deposit which is here treated as Dravidian these typical characteristics tend to thin out and disappear, but even among them traces of the original stock survive in varying degrees.
It must, however, be clearly understood that the areas occupied by these various types do not admit of being defined as sharply as they must be shown on an ethnographic map. They melt into each other insensibly; and, although at the close of a day’s journey from one ethnic tract to another, an observer whose attention had been directed to the subject would realize clearly enough that the physical characteristics of the people had undergone an appreciable change, he would certainly be unable to say at what particular stage in his progress the transformation had taken place. Secondly, it must not be imagined that any type is alleged to be in exclusive possession of the locality to which it is assigned. When, for example, Madras is described as a Dravidian and Bengal as a Mongolo-Dravidian tract, this does not mean that all the people of Madras or Bengal must of necessity belong to the predominant type. From time immemorial in India a stream of movement has been setting from west to east and from north to south, a tendency impelling the higher types towards the territories occupied by the lower. In the course of this movement representatives of the Indo-Aryan type have spread themselves all over India, as conquerors, traders, landowners, or priests, preserving their original characteristics in varying degrees, and receiving a measure of social recognition dependent in the main on the supposed purity of their descent from the original immigrants. Family and caste traditions record countless instances of such incursions, and in many cases the tradition is confirmed by the concurrent testimony of historical documents and physical characteristics. Even in the Provinces farthest removed from the Indo-Aryan settlements in North-western India, members of the upper castes are still readily distinguishable by their features and complexion from the mass of the population, and their claims to represent a different race are thrown into relief by the definition now for the first time attempted of the predominant type of the Province. Thirdly, it may be said that the names assigned to the types beg the highly speculative question of the elements which have contributed to their formation. The criticism is unanswerable. But we must have some distinctive names for our types; names based solely on physical characters are practically mere bundles of formulae; and if hypotheses of origin are worth constructing at all, one should not shrink from expressing them in their most telling form. The origins of these types are hidden in the mist which veils the remote era of the Aryan advance into India. Our only guides are tradition and conjecture, aided by the assumption, which the history of the East warrants us in making, that in those distant ages types were formed by much the same processes as those that we find in operation to-day.
The Dravidians probably constitute the oldest of the seven types. Their low stature, black skin, long heads, broad noses, and relatively long forearm distinguish them from the rest of the population of India, and appear at first sight to confirm Huxley’s surmise that they may be related to the aborigines of Australia. Linguistic affinities, especially the resemblance between the numerals in Mundari and in certain Australian dialects, and the survival of some abortive forms of the boomerang in Southern India, have been cited in support of this view; and an appeal has also been made to Sclater’s hypothesis of a submerged continent of Lemuria, extending from Madagascar to the Malay Archipelago, and linking India with Africa on the one side and with Australia on the other. But Sir William Turner’s comparative study of the characters of Australian and Dravidian crania has not led him to the conclusion that these data can be adduced in support of the theory of the unity of the two peoples. The facts which cast doubt on the Australian affinities of the Dravidians likewise refute the hasty opinion which seeks to associate them with the tiny, broad-headed, and woolly-haired Negritos of the Andamans and the Philippines. This is the last word of scientific authority; and here we might leave the subject, were it not that another theory of the origin of the Dravidians was adopted by Sir William Hunter in the account of the non-Aryan races of India given by him in The Indian Empire. According to this view there are two branches of the Dravidians—the Kolarians, speaking dialects allied to Mundari, and the Dravidians proper, whose languages belong to the Tamil family. The former entered India from the north-east and occupied the northern portion of the Vindhya table-land. There they were conquered and split into fragments by the main body of Dravidians, who found their way into the Punjab through the north-western passes and pressed forward towards the south of India. The basis of this theory is obscure. Its account of the Dravidians proper seems to rest upon a supposed affinity between the Brāhui dialect of Baluchistan and the languages of Southern India, while the hypothesis of the north-eastern origin of the Kolarians depends on the fancied recognition of Mongolian characteristics among the people of Chotā Nāgpur. But in the first place the distinction between Kolārians and Dravidians is purely linguistic, and does not correspond to any differences of physical type. Secondly, it is extremely improbable that a large body of very black and conspicuously long-headed types should have come from the one region of the earth which is peopled exclusively by races with broad heads and yellow complexions. With this we may dismiss the theory which assigns a trans-Himalayan origin to the Dravidians. Taking them as we find them now, it may safely be said that their present geographical distribution, the marked uniformity of physical characters among the more primitive members of the group, their animistic religion, their distinctive languages, their stone monuments, and their retention of a primitive system of totemism justify us in regarding them as the earliest inhabitants of India of whom we have any knowledge.
Upon the interminable discussions known as the Aryan controversy there is no need to enter here. Whether anything that can properly be described as an Aryan race ever existed; whether the heads of its members were long, according to Penka, or short, according to Sergi; whether its original habitat was Scandinavia, the Lithuanian steppe, South-east Russia, Central Asia, or India itself, as various authorities have held; or again, whether the term Aryan is anything more than a philological expression denoting a heterogeneous group of peoples whose languages belong to the Aryan family of speech—these are questions which may for our present purpose be left unanswered. We are concerned merely with the fact that there now exists in the Punjab and Rajputana a definite physical type, represented by the Jāts and Rājputs, which is marked by a relatively long (dolicho-cephalic) head; a straight, finely cut (leptorrhine) nose; a long, symmetrically narrow face; a well-developed forehead; regular features; and a high facial angle. The stature is tall, and the general build of the figure is well proportioned, being relatively massive in the Jāts and slender in the Rājputs. Throughout the group the predominant colour of the skin is a very light transparent brown, with a tendency towards darker shades in the lower social strata. Except among the Meos and Minās of Rājputana, where a strain of Bhil blood may perhaps be discerned, the type shows no signs of having been modified by contact with the Dravidians; its physical characteristics are remarkably uniform; and the geographical conditions of its habitat tend to exclude the possibility of intermixture with the black races of the south. In respect of their social characters, the Indo-Aryans, as we have here called them, are equally distinct from the bulk of the Indian people. They have not wholly escaped the influence of caste; but its bonds are less rigid here than elsewhere, and the social system retains features which recall the more fluid organization of the tribe. Marriage in particular is not restricted by the hard-and-fast limits which caste tends to impose; but is regulated, within large groups, by the principle of hypergamy, or ‘marrying up,’ which was supposed to govern the connubial relations of the four original classes (varna) in the system described by Manu. Even now Rājputs and Jāts occasionally intermarry, the Rājputs taking wives from the Jāts, but refusing to give their own maidens in return. What is the exception to-day is said to have been the rule in earlier times. In short, both social and physical characters are those of a comparatively homogeneous community which has been but little affected by crossing with alien races.
The uniformity of the Indo-Aryan type can be accounted for only by one of two hypotheses—that its members were indigenous to the Punjab, or that they entered India in a compact body, or in a continuous stream of families, from beyond the north-west frontier. It is clear that they cannot have come by sea, and equally clear that they could not have found their way into India round the eastern end of the Himalayas. The theory that the Punjab was the cradle of the Aryan race was propounded by a writer in the Royal Asiatic Society’s Journal3 about fifty years ago, on the basis of some rather crude linguistic speculations; but it met with no acceptance, and the opinion of European scholars, from Von Schlegel down to the present time, is unanimous in favour of the foreign origin of the Indo-Aryans. The arguments appealed to are mainly philological. Vedic literature, indeed, as Zimmer4 admits, throws but scanty light upon the subject, for no great weight can be laid upon the identification of the river Basā with the Araxes, the name by which the Jaxartes was known to Herodotus. We may, however, assume for our present purpose that the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans came into India from the north-west, and that at the time of their arrival the Peninsula, as far as the valley of the Ganges and Jumna, was in the possession of the Dravidians. The only indication of the latter people having extended farther to the west is to be found in the survival of Brāhui, an island of supposed Dravidian speech, among the Irānian languages of Baluchistan. But the present speakers of Brāhui are certainly not Dravidians by race, and we find no traces of Dravidian blood among the Indo-Aryans of to-day. It seems probable, therefore, that when the Indo-Aryans entered the Punjab they brought their own women with them: on no other supposition can we explain the comparative purity of their type.
Now if the physical and social conditions of the Indian borderland had been the same in those remote ages as we find them at the present day, it is difficult to see how the slow advance of family or tribal migration could have proceeded on a scale large enough to result in an effective occupation of the Punjab. The frontier strip itself, a mere tangle of barren hills and narrow valleys, is ill adapted to serve as an officina gentium, while a pastoral people, moving by clans or families from more favoured regions farther west, would have found their way barred by obstacles which only the strongest members of the community could have surmounted. The women and children must have been left behind or they would have perished by the way. Again, given the present rainfall and climate of the countries adjacent to India, where should we find to-day, within a measurable distance of the frontier, the favoured region that would give off the swarm of emigrants required to people the Punjab? Surely not in South-eastern Persia, with its inhospitable deserts of shifting sand; nor on the dreary Central Asian steppes, where only a scanty nomadic population finds a meagre subsistence. But is it certain that, during the three or four thousand years that may have elapsed since the Aryans began to press forward into India, the climate of the countries through which they passed has not undergone a material change? There is a certain amount of evidence in favour of this supposition. Mr. W. T. Blanford, writing in 18735, thought it probable that the rainfall in both Central Asia and Persia had decreased greatly in modern times; and that, owing mainly to this cause, and in a less degree to the destruction of trees and bushes, the climate had become appreciably drier, cultivation had fallen off, and the population had greatly declined in numbers. Nearly thirty years later, we find Mr. Blanford’s views confirmed and developed by Mr. E. Vredenburg in his geological sketch of the Baluchistan desert and part of Eastern Persia6. Mr. Vredenburg applies to the problem the known
Principles of Physical Geography and the Racial Composition of India
principles of physical geography and shows how, given a dwindling rainfall in a tract situated like Eastern Persia and Baluchistan, evaporation is bound to produce the present condition of perennial drought. As the rainfall declines, fertile plains relapse into desert; lakes are transformed into salt marshes; the springs in the hills dry up; and an era of desolation sets in. In illustration of the state of things which must have existed in some former age, Mr. Vredenburg tells us how in the desolate valleys of Khârân (Kalât State) there exist hundreds of stone walls, known locally as gabrbands or ‘dams of the infidel,’ which mark the edges of ancient terraced fields and retain even now remnants of soil that once was cultivated. Arguing from what one sees in India, it seems likely that these terraced fields represent the overflow of a flourishing agricultural community, driven up into the hills by the pressure of population in the plains. Gradually, as the climate changed, the level alluvial tracts, deprived of rainfall, lapsed into desert; the bulk of the population drifted on into the Punjab; while those who remained behind eked out by pillage the meagre livelihood to be won from patches of soil in the hills. Last of all, the springs on which this scanty cultivation depended shrank and disappeared, till nothing was left but the stone walls to recall the labours of the forgotten people who built them.
The picture, which these observations enables us to construct, of a country of lakes and fertile plains extending from the centre of Persia to the western confines of India, may help to throw light upon the problem of the Indo-Aryan advance into the Punjab. The population of such a tract, as they began to press on their own means of subsistence or were pushed forward by incursions from the west, would naturally have moved on by tribes and families without any disturbance of their social order, and would have occupied the valley of the Indus. Arriving there as an organized society, like the children of Israel when they entered Palestine, they would have had no need to take to themselves any Dravidian daughters of Heth, and they would have preserved their type as distinct as we find it in the Punjab to day. The movement must of course have been gradual, and must have extended over many centuries, during which time the climate continued to dry up, and the possibilities of agriculture to decline. When the new conditions had become fully established, the north-western frontier of India was closed to the slow advance of family or tribal migration, and remained open only to bands of fighting men or adventurous nomads, who could force their way through long zones of waterless deserts ending in a maze of robber-haunted hills. Armed invasion took the place of peaceful colonization. But the invaders, however great their strength, could in any case bring few women in their train. This is the determining factor both of the ethnology and of the history of India. As each wave of conquerors—Greek, Scythian, Arab, Afghan, Mughal—that entered the country by land became more or less absorbed in the indigenous population, their physique changed, their individuality vanished, their energy was sapped, and dominion passed from their hands into those of more vigorous successors.
For the origin of the Aryo-Dravidian type, we need not travel beyond the ingenious hypothesis put forward by Dr. Hoernle twenty years ago and confirmed by the recent researches of Dr. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey. This theory supposes that after the first swarm of Indo-Aryans had occupied the Punjab, a second wave of Aryan-speaking people, the remote ancestors of the Aryo-Dravidians of to-day, impelled by some ethnic upheaval, or driven forward by the change of climate in Central Asia, made their way into India through Gilgit and Chitral and established themselves in the plains of the Ganges and Jumna, the sacred Middle-land (Madhyadeśa) of post-Vedic tradition. Here they came in contact with the Dravidians; here, by the stress of that contact, caste was evolved; here the Vedas were composed, and the whole fantastic structure of orthodox ritual and usage was built up. The linguistic evidence in favour of this view is summarized in Dr. Grierson’s chapter on Language in the Report on the Census of India, 1901. For the present purpose it is sufficient to note that the record of physical characters bears out the conclusions suggested by philology. The type of the people now dwelling in the Middle-land is precisely what might have been expected to result from the incursion of a fair long-headed race, travelling by a route which prevented women from accompanying them, into a land inhabited by dark-skinned Dravidians. The men of the stronger race took to themselves the women of the weaker, and from these unions was evolved the mixed type which we find in Hindustān and Bihār. The degree of intermixture necessarily varied: at one end of the scale the type approaches the Indo-Aryan, at the other it almost merges in the Dravidian.
It may be said that the theory of a second wave of Aryans, resting as it does on the somewhat uncertain data of philology, is not really required for the purpose of explaining the facts. Why should we not content ourselves by assuming that the original Indo-Aryans outgrew their settlements on the Indus, and threw off swarms of emigrants who passed down the Ganges valley, modifying their type as they went by alliances with the Dravidian inhabitants? But on this view of the problem it is difficult to account for the marked divergence of type that distinguishes the people of the Eastern Punjab from those of Western Hindustān. If there had been no second and distinct incursion, coming in like a wedge behind the original colonists, no such sharp contrast would now be discernible. One type would melt into the other by imperceptible gradations, and scientific observation and popular impressions would not concur, as they do, in affirming that a marked change takes place somewhere about the longitude of Sirhind. Nor is this the only point in favour of Dr. Hoernle’s hypothesis. It further explains how it is that the Vedic Hymns contain no reference to the route by which the Aryans entered India, or to their earlier settlements on the Indus; and it accounts for the antagonism between the eastern and western sections, and for the fact that the latter were regarded as comparative barbarians by the more cultured inhabitants of the Middle-land.
When we leave Bihār and pass eastward into the steamy rice-fields of Bengal, the Indo-Aryan element thins out rapidly and appears only in a sporadic form. The bulk of the population is Dravidian, modified by a strain of Mongoloid blood which is relatively strong in the east and appreciably weaker in the west. Even here, however, where the Indo-Aryan factor is so small as to be hardly traceable, certain exceptions may be noticed. The tradition, cherished by the Brāhmans and Kāyasths of Bengal, that their ancestors came from Kanauj at the invitation of King Adisura to introduce Vedic ritual into an unhallowed region, is borne out to a substantial degree by the measurements of these castes, though even among them indications are not wanting of occasional intermixture with Dravidians. If, however, the regional type is regarded as a whole, the racial features are seen to be comparatively distinct. The physical degeneration which has taken place may be due to the influence of a relaxing climate and an enfeebling diet, and still more perhaps to the practice of marrying immature children, the great blot on the social system of the upper classes of Bengal.
Of the foreign elements that have contributed to the making of the Indian peoples two have now been passed in review. We have seen the Indo-Aryan type maintaining a high degree of purity in the Punjab and Rājputānā, transformed by an increasing admixture of Dravidian blood in Hindustān and Bihar, and vanishing beyond recognition in the swamps of Lower Bengal. We have found the Mongoloid races predominant on the eastern and northern frontiers: confined to the hills where the people of the plains were strong; but farther east, where they came in contact with feebler folk, mixing with the Dravidian element to form the type characteristic of the mass of the population of Bengal and Assam. A third foreign element still remains to be accounted for. It has long been known, mainly from Chinese sources, supplemented by the evidence of coins and the uncertain testimony of Indian tradition, that, long after the settlement of the Indo-Aryans in the Punjab, successive swarms of nomadic people, vaguely designated Sakas or Scythians, forced a way into India from the west, and established their dominion over portions of the Punjab, Sind, Gujarat, Rājputānā, and Central India. The impulse which started them on their wanderings may be traced in some instances to tribal upheavals in far-distant China, while in other cases bands already on the move were pushed forward from Central Asia. All these peoples came from regions which, so far as we know, have from time immemorial been occupied by broad-headed races.
In the time of the Achaemenian kings of Persia, the Scythians, who were known to the Chinese as Sse, occupied the regions lying between the lower course of the Sillis or Jaxartes and Lake Balkash. The fragments of early Scythian history which may be collected from classical writers are supplemented by the Chinese annals, which tell us how the Sse, originally located in Southern China, occupied Sogdiana and Transoxiana at the time of the establishment of the Graeco-Bactrian monarchy. Dislodged from these regions by the Yueh-chi, who had themselves been put to flight by the Huns, the Sse invaded Bactriana, an enterprise in which they were frequently allied with the Parthians. To this circumstance, says Ujfalvy, may be due the resemblance which exists between the Scythian coins of India and those of the Parthian kings. At a later period the Yueh-chi made a further advance and drove the Sse or Sakas out of Bactriana, whereupon the latter crossed the Paropamisus and took possession of the country called after them Sakastān, comprising Segistān, Arachosia, and Drangiana. But they were left in possession only for a hundred years, for about 25 B.C. the Yueh-chi disturbed them afresh. A body of Scythians then emigrated eastward and founded a kingdom in the western portion of the Punjab. The route they followed in their advance upon India is uncertain; but to a people of their habits it would seem that the march through Baluchistan would have presented no serious difficulty.
The Yueh-chi, afterwards known as the Tokhāri, were a power in Central Asia and the north-west of India for more than five centuries, from 130 B.C. The Hindus called them Sakas and Turushkas, but their kings seem to have known no other dynastic title than that of Kushan. The Chinese annals tell us how Kitolo, chief of the Little Kushans, whose name is identified with the Kidāra of the coins, giving way before the incursions of the Ephthalites, crossed the Paropamisus and founded, in the year 425 of our era, the kingdom of Gandhāra, of which, in the time of his son, Peshāwar became the capital. About the same time, the Ephthalites or Ye-tha-i-li-to of the Chinese annals, driven out of their territory by the Yuan-Yuan, started westward and overran in succession Sogdiana, Khwārizm (Khiva), Bactriana, and finally the north-west portion of India. Their movements reached India in the reign of Skanda Gupta (452–80) and brought about the disruption of the Gupta empire. The Ephthalites were known in India as Huns. The leader of the invasion of India, who succeeded in snatching Gandhāra from the Kushans and established his capital at Sakala, is called by the Chinese Laelih, and inscriptions enable us to identify him with the original Lakhan Udayāditya of the coins. His son Toramāna (490–515) took possession of Gujarat, Rājputāna, and part of the Ganges valley, and in this way the Huns acquired a portion of the ancient Gupta kingdom. Toramāna’s successor, Mihirakula (515–44), eventually succumbed to the combined attack of the Hindu princes of Mālwā and Magadha.
These are the historical data. Scanty as they are, they serve to establish the fact that, during a long period of time, swarms of nomadic people, whose outlandish names are conveniently summed up in the generic term Scythian, poured into India, conquered, and governed. Their coins are now the sole memorial of their rule, but their inroads probably began centuries before coins were struck or annals compiled. Of the people themselves all traces seem to have vanished, and the student who inquires what has become of them finds nothing more tangible than the modern conjecture that they are represented by the Jāts and Rājputs. But the grounds for this opinion are of the flimsiest description, and consist mainly of the questionable assumption that the people who are called Jāts or Jats at the present day must have something to do with the people who were known to Herodotus as Getae. Now apart from the fact that resemblances of names are often misleading—witness the Roman identification of these very Getae with the Goths—we have good historical reasons for believing that the Scythian invaders of India came from a region occupied exclusively by broad-headed races and must themselves have belonged to that type. They were by all accounts hordes of horsemen, short and sturdy of stature, and skilled in the use of the bow. In their original homes on the Central Asian steppes their manner of life was that of pastoral nomads, and their instincts were of the predatory order. It seems, therefore, unlikely that their descendants should be found among tribes who are essentially of the long-headed type, tall heavy men without any natural aptitude for horsemanship, settled agriculturists with no traditions of a nomadic and marauding past. Still less probable is it that waves of foreign conquerors, entering India at a date when the Indo-Aryans had long been an organized community, should have been absorbed by them so completely as to take rank among their most typical representatives, while the form of their heads, the most persistent of racial distinctions, was transformed from the extreme of one type to the extreme of another without leaving any trace of transitional forms in the process. Such are the contradictions which beset the attempt to identify the Scythians with the Jāts and Rājputs. The only escape seems to lie in an alternative hypothesis which is suggested by the measurements. These data show that a zone of broad-headed people may still be traced southwards, from the region of the Western Punjab in which we lose sight of the Scythians, right through the Deccan, till it attains its farthest extension among the Coorgs. Is it not conceivable that this may mark the track of the Scythians, who first occupied the great grazing country of the Western Punjab, and then, pressed upon by later invaders and finding their progress eastwards blocked by the Indo-Aryans, turned towards the south, mingled with the Dravidian population, and became the ancestors of the Marāthāṣ? The physical type of the people of this region accords fairly well with this theory, while the arguments derived from language and religion do not seem to conflict with it. For, after entering India, the Scythians readily adopted an Aryan language, written in the Kharosthi character, and accepted Buddhism as their religion. Their Prākrit speech would have developed into Marāthī, while their Buddhist doctrines would have been absorbed in that fusion of magic and metaphysics which has resulted in popular Hinduism. On this view the wide-ranging forays of the Marāthāṣ, their guerilla methods of warfare, their unscrupulous dealings with friend and foe, their genius for intrigue and their consequent failure to build up an enduring dominion, might well be regarded as inherited from their Scythian ancestors.
Up to this point we have been dealing with the racial divisions of the people of India, with ethnology properly so called. We now turn to their social divisions, to the ethnographic data as distinguished from the ethnological. These divisions are either tribes or castes, which in their turn are further subdivided, with reference usually to matrimonial considerations. A tribe, as we find it in India, is a collection of families, or groups of families, bearing a common name which, as a rule, does not denote any specific occupation; generally claiming common descent from a mythical or historical ancestor and occasionally from an animal, but in some parts of the country held together rather by the obligations of blood-feud than by the tradition of kinship; usually speaking the same language; and occupying, or claiming to occupy, a definite tract of country. A tribe is not necessarily endogamous, i.e. it is not an invariable rule that a man of a particular tribe must marry a woman of that tribe.
We may distinguish several kinds of tribes in various parts of India; and although it cannot be said that each of the seven racial types has its own distinctive form of tribe, the correspondence between the two sets of groupings is sufficiently close to warrant the conjecture that each type was originally organized on a characteristic tribal basis, and that where tribes have disappeared, their disappearance has been effected by caste insensibly absorbing and transforming the tribal divisions which it found in possession of particular localities. In describing the varieties of tribes we shall therefore follow the ethnic types already determined by physical characters.
The Dravidian tribe exists in its most compact and vigorous form among the people of Chotā Nāgpur. Such a tribe is usually divided into a number of exogamous groups, each of which bears the name of an animal or plant common in the locality. Usually, also, there is a distinct village organization, comprising in its most developed forms a headman with his assistant, and a priest, with various acolytes, whose business it is to propitiate the undefined powers from whom physical ills are to be apprehended. Another remarkable instance of the tribal organization of the Dravidians is to be found among the Khonds of Orissa, once infamous for the human sacrifices which they offered to propitiate the earth goddess, with the object of ensuring good crops and immunity from disease and accidents. The Khonds are divided into fifty gochis or exogamous septs, each of which bears the name of a muta or village, believes all its members to be descended from a common ancestor, and as a rule dwells in the commune or group of villages after which it is called. The Khond gochi appears, therefore, to represent the nearest approach that has yet been discovered to the local exogamous tribe, believed by Mr. McLennan to be the primitive unit of human society.
The Mongoloid type of tribe, as found in the Nāgā Hills, is divided, somewhat on the Khond pattern, into a number of khel, each of which is in theory an exogamous group of blood-relations, dwelling apart in its own territory and more or less at war with the rest of the world. Each khel fortifies the locality which it inhabits with a stockade, a deep ditch full of bamboo calthrops, and a craftily devised ladder; and raids are constantly made by one upon the other for the purpose of capturing wives. So far as our present researches have gone, no very clear traces have been found of totemism among the Mongoloid races of India; but the Mongoloid people of the Eastern Himālayas and the Chittagong Hills have a singular system of exogamous groups based upon real or mythical ancestors.
Among the Turko-Iranians there seem to be two distinct types of tribe. The first comprises tribes based upon kinship, like the Afghan group of tribes known as Pathāns, or speakers of the Pashtū language. In theory, says Mr. Hughes-Buller, ‘an Afghan tribe is constituted from a number of kindred groups of agnates. . . . Affiliated with a good many tribes, however, are to be found a certain number of alien groups.’ These are not descended from the common ancestor, and the nature of the tie that binds them to the tribe is best expressed in a picturesque phrase which describes them as ‘partners for better or worse’: in other words, active participants in any blood-feud that the tribe may have on its hands. Yet such is the influence of the idea of kinship upon which the tribe is based, that the alien origin of these groups is admitted with reluctance, and although for matrimonial purposes they are looked upon as inferior, the tendency is to merge the fact of common vendetta in the fiction of common blood.
The second type of Turko-Iranian tribe is based primarily not upon agnatic kinship, but upon common good and ill: in other words, it is cemented together only by the obligations arising from the blood-feud. There is no eponymous ancestor, and the tribe itself does not profess to be composed of homogeneous elements. In the case of the Marri tribe of Baloch, Mr. Hughes-Buller has shown that ‘Brāhuis, Baloch from the Punjab, Baloch from other parts of Afghanistan, Khetrāns, Afgāns, Jats, all gained easy admission to the tribe. . . . The process is easy to follow: admission to participation in common blood-feud; then admission to participation in the tribal land; and lastly admission to kinship with the tribe. It was not until after a man or group had been given a share of tribal land at the decennial distribution that women were given to him or them in marriage. The same principles hold good in the case of the Brāhui, who, like the Baloch, appear by their history and physique to be of Central Asian origin, and whose numbers have been recruited from among Afgāns, Kürds, Jadgāls, Baloch, and other elements, all probably belonging to the same ethnic stock. Both Baloch and Brāhui possess an elaborate organization for offensive and defensive purposes, based in each case on the principle that the clan, or section, must provide for the service of the tribe a number of armed men proportioned to the share of the tribal land which it holds.
None of the numerous tribes comprised under the names Afghan, Baloch, or Brāhui are strictly endogamous; and stalwart aliens whose services are considered worth having are admitted into the tribe by the gift of a wife, or perhaps one should rather say the loan, for, in the absence of stipulations to the contrary, a woman so given goes back to her own family on the death of her husband. Among the Baloch and Brāhui, however, a distinct tendency towards endogamy results from the practice of marrying a woman of the same group—if possible, a first cousin. This seems to be due partly to the feeling that a woman’s marriage to an outsider deprives the tribe of the accession of strength that may accrue to it from her offspring; and partly also, as Mr. Hughes-Buller observes, to the belief that ‘while among animals heredity follows the father, among human beings it follows the mother. It is argued, therefore, that there is more hope of the stock remaining pure if a man marries a woman who is nearly related to him.’ In marked contrast to the Baloch and Brāhui, the business instincts of the Afghan lead him to regard women as a marketable commodity, and under the system of walwar, or payment for wives, ‘girls are sold to the highest bidder, no matter what his social status.’
The word ‘caste,’ which has obtained such a wide currency in the literature of sociology, comes from the Portuguese adventurers who followed Vasco da Gama to the west coast of India. The word itself is derived from the Latin castus and implies purity of breed. In his article on caste in Hobson-Jobson, Sir Henry Yule quotes a decree of the sacred council of Goa, dated 1567, which recites how ’the Gentoos divide themselves into distinct races or castes (castas) of greater or less dignity, holding the Christians as of lower degree, and keep these so superstitiously that no one of a higher caste can eat or drink with those of a lower.’ It was natural enough that foreign observers should seize upon the superficial aspects of a social system which they understood but imperfectly, and should have overlooked the essential fact that the regulations affecting food and drink are comparatively fluid and transitory, while those relating to marriage are remarkably stable and absolute.
A caste may be defined as a collection of families or groups of families, bearing a common name which usually denotes or is associated with a specific occupation; claiming common descent from a mythical ancestor, human or divine; professing to follow the same calling; and regarded by those who are competent to give an opinion as forming a single homogeneous community. A caste is almost invariably endogamous in the sense that a member of the large circle denoted by the common name may not marry outside that circle; but within this circle there are usually a number of smaller circles, each of which is also endogamous. Thus, it is not enough to say that a Brāhman at the present day cannot marry any woman who is not a Brāhman: his wife must also belong to the same endogamous division of the Brāhman caste.
All over India at the present moment we can trace the gradual and almost insensible transformation of tribes into castes. The main agency at work is fiction, which, in this instance, takes the form of the pretence that whatever usage prevails to-day has been so from the beginning of time. It may be hoped that the Ethnographic Survey now in progress will throw much more light upon these singular forms of evolution, by which large masses of people surrender a condition of comparative freedom, and take in exchange a condition which becomes more burdensome in proportion as its status is higher. So far as present observation goes, several distinct processes are involved in the movement, and these proceed independently in different places and at different times:—
(1) The leading men of an aboriginal tribe, having somehow got on in the world and become independent landed proprietors, manage to enrol themselves in one of the more distinguished castes. They usually set up as Rājputs, their first step being to start a Brāhman priest who invents for them a mythical ancestor, supplies them with a family miracle connected with the locality where their tribes are settled, and discovers that they belong to some hitherto unheard-of clan of the great Rājput community. In the earlier stages of their advancement they generally find great difficulty in getting their daughters married, as they will not take husbands from their original tribe and real Rājputs will not condescend to alliances with them. But after a generation or two their persistency obtains its reward and they intermarry, if not with pure Rājputs, at least with a superior order of manufactured Rājputs whose promotion into Brāhmanical society dates far enough back for the steps by which it was gained to have been forgotten. Thus a real change of blood may take place, while in any case the tribal name is completely lost, and with it all possibility of correctly separating this class of people from the Hindus of purer blood and of tracing them to any particular Dravidian or Mongoloid tribe. They have been absorbed in the fullest sense of the word, and henceforth pass and are locally accepted as high-class Hindus. All stages of the process, family miracle and all, can be illustrated by actual instances taken from the leading families in Chotā Nāgpur.
(2) A number of aborigines, as we may conveniently call them, though the term begs an insoluble question, embrace the tenets of a Hindu religious sect, losing thereby their tribal name and becoming Vaishnavas, Lingāyats, Rāmāyats, or the like. Whether there is any mixture of blood or not will depend upon local circumstances and the rules of the sect regarding intermarriage. Anyhow, the identity of the converts as aborigines is usually, though not invariably, lost, and this also may, therefore, be regarded as a case of true absorption.
(3) A whole tribe of aborigines, or a large section of a tribe, enrol themselves in the ranks of Hinduism under the style of a new caste which, though claiming an origin of remote antiquity, is readily distinguishable by its name from any of the standard and recognized castes. Thus the great majority of the Koch inhabitants of Jalpaiguri, Rangpur, and part of Dinajpur now invariably describe themselves as Rājbansis or Bhanga Kshattriyas, a designation which enables them to represent themselves as an outlying branch of the Kshattriyas who fled to North-eastern Bengal in order to escape from the wrath of Parasu Rāma. They claim descent from Rāja Dasaratha, father of Rāma; they keep Brāhmans, imitate the Brāhmanical rituals in their marriage ceremony, and have begun to adopt the Brāhmanical system of gotras. In respect of this last point they are now in a curious state of transition, as they have all hit upon the same gotra (Kāsyapa) and thus habitually transgress the primary rule of the Brāhmanical system, which absolutely prohibits marriage within the gotra. But for this defect in their connubial arrangements—a defect which will probably be corrected in course of time as they and their priests rise in intelligence—there would be nothing in their customs to distinguish them from Indo-Aryan Hindus, although there has been no mixture of blood and they remain thoroughly Koch.
(4) A whole tribe of aborigines, or a section of a tribe, become gradually converted to Hinduism without, like the Rājbansis, abandoning their tribal designation. This is what has happened among the Bhumij of Western Bengal. Here a pure Dravidian race have lost their original language and now speak only Bengali; they worship Hindu gods in addition to their own (the tendency being to relegate the tribal gods to the women), and the more advanced among them employ Brāhmans as family priests. They still retain a set of totemistic exogamous subdivisions, closely resembling those of the Mundas and the Santals; but they are beginning to forget the totems which the names of the subdivisions denote, and the names themselves will probably soon be abandoned in favour of more aristocratic designations. The tribe will then have become a caste in the full sense of the word, and will go on stripping itself of all customs likely to betray its true descent: the physical characteristics of its members will alone survive. With their transformation into a caste, the Bhumij will be more strictly endogamous than they were as a tribe, and even less likely to modify their physical type by intermarriage with other races.
By such processes as these, and by a variety of complex social influences whose working cannot be precisely traced, a number of types or varieties of caste have been formed, which admit of being grouped as follows:—
(i) The tribal type, where a tribe like the Bhumij has insensibly been converted into a caste, preserving its original name and many of its characteristic customs, but modifying its animistic practices more and more in the direction of orthodox Hinduism, and ordering its manner of life in accordance with the same model. Numerous instances of this process are to be found all over India: it has been at work for centuries, and it has even been supposed that the Sūdras of Indo-Aryan tradition were originally a Dravidian tribe which was thus incorporated into the social system of the conquering race. We may mention as examples of such transformation the Ahir, Dom, and Dosadh of the United Provinces and Bihar; the Gujar, Jāt, Meo, and Rājput of Rājputana and the Punjab; the Kolī and Mahār of Bombay; the Bāgdi, Bauri, Chandāl (Namasudra), Kaibartta, Pod, and Rājbansi-Koch of Bengal; and, in Madras, the Mal, Nāyar, Vellāla, and Paraiyan (Pariah), of whom the last retain traditions of a time when they possessed an independent organization of their own and had not been relegated to a low place in the Hindu social system.
(ii) The functional or occupational type of caste is so numerous and so widely diffused, and its characteristics are so prominent, that community of function is ordinarily regarded as the chief factor in the evolution of caste. Almost every caste professes to have a traditional occupation, though many of its members have abandoned it, and the adoption of new occupations, or of changes in the original occupation, may give rise to subdivisions of the caste which ultimately develop into castes entirely distinct. Thus among the large castes, the Ahirs are by tradition herdsmen; the Brāhmans, priests; the Chamārs and Muchis, workers in leather; the Chuhrās, Bhangīs, and Doms, scavengers; the Dosādhs, village watchmen and messengers; the Goālās or Golās, milkmen; the Kai-barttas and Kewats, fishermen and cultivators; the Kāyasths, writers; the Koiri and Kāchhi, market gardeners; the Kumhārs, potters; the Pods, fishermen; and the Teli and Tili, oil-pressers and traders in oil. But the proportion of a caste that actually follows the traditional occupation may vary greatly. It is shown in the Bengal Census Report of 1901 that 80 per cent. of the Ahirs in Bihar are engaged in agriculture; that of the Lower Bengal Brāhmans only 17 per cent., and of the Bihar Brāhmans only 8 per cent., perform religious functions; that only 8 per cent. of the Chamārs in Bihar live by working in leather, the remainder being cultivators or general labourers; that two-thirds of the Kāyasths in Bengal are agriculturists; and that only 35 per cent. of the Telis follow their traditional profession. A remarkable instance of the formation of a caste on the basis of distinctive occupation is supplied by the Gārpagāri, or hail-averters, in the Marāthā Districts of the Central Provinces, village servants whose duty it is to control the elements and protect the crops from the destructive hail-storms which are frequent in that part of India. Changes of occupation in their turn, more especially among the lower castes, tend, as above mentioned, to bring about the formation of separate castes. The Sadgops of Bengal have, within recent times, taken to agriculture and broken away from the pastoral caste to which they originally belonged; the educated Kaibarttas and Pods are in course of separating themselves from their brethren who have not learnt English; the Madhu-nāpit are barbers who became confectioners; the Chāsā-dhobās are washermen who took to agriculture.
(iii) The sectarian type comprises a small number of castes which commenced life as religious sects founded by philanthropic enthusiasts who, having evolved some metaphysical formula offering a speedier release from the taedium vitae which oppresses the East, had further persuaded themselves that all men were equal, or at any rate that all believers in their teaching ought to be so. As time went on, the practical difficulties of realizing this ideal forced themselves upon the members of the sect; they found their company becoming unduly mixed; and they proceeded to reorganize themselves on the lines of an ordinary caste. A notable instance of this tendency to revert to the normal type of Hindu society is to be found in the present condition of the Lingāyat or Vira Saiva caste of Bombay and Southern India, which numbers 2,600,000 adherents. Founded as a sect in the twelfth century, by a reformer who proclaimed the equality of all who received the eightfold sacrament ordained by him, and wore on their persons the mystic phallus emblematic of the god Siva, the Lingāyat community had begun, by the close of the seventeenth century, to develop endogamous sub-castes based upon the social distinctions which their founder had expressly abjured. At the last Census the process of transforming the sect into a caste had advanced still farther. In a petition presented to the Government of India the members of the Lingāyat community protested against the ‘most offensive and mischievous order’ that all of them should be entered in the census papers as belonging to the same caste, and asked that they might be recorded as Vira Saiva Brāhmans, Kshattriyas, Vaisyas, or Sūdras, as the case might be. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of the essentially particularist instinct of the Indian people, of the aversion with which they regard the doctrine that all men are equal, and of the attraction exercised by the aristocratic scheme of society which their ancient traditions enshrine. The legend of the four original castes may have no historical foundation, but there can be no question as to the spread of its influence or the strength of the sentiment which it still inspires. So long, in short, as the sectarian instinct confines itself to expressing a mere predilection for one god rather than another, or simply develops a new cult, however fantastic, which permits men to indulge in the luxury of religious eccentricity without quitting the narrow circle of their social environment, its operations are undisturbed and the sects which it forms may flourish and endure. But directly it invades the social sphere and seeks to unify and amalgamate groups of theoretically different origin, it comes in contact with a force too strong for it and has to give way.
(iv) Castes formed by crossing.—Modern criticism has been especially active in its attacks on that portion of the traditional theory which derives the multitude of mixed or inferior castes from an intricate series of crosses between members of the original four. No one can examine the long lists which purport to illustrate the working of this process without being struck by much that is absurd and inconsistent. But in India it does not necessarily follow that, because the individual applications of a principle are ridiculous, the principle itself must have no foundation in fact. The last thing that would occur to the literary theorists of those times, or to their successors the pandits of to-day, would be to go back upon actual facts, and to seek by analysis and comparison to work out the true stages of evolution. They found the a priori method simpler and more congenial. Having once got hold of a formula, they insisted, like Thales and his contemporaries, on making it account for the entire order of things. Thus castes which were compact tribes, castes which had been developed out of trade corporations, and castes which expressed the distinction between fishing and hunting, agriculture and handicrafts, were all supposed to have been evolved by interbreeding. But the initial principle, though it could not be stretched to explain everything, nevertheless enshrines a grain of historical fact. It happens that we can still observe its workings among a number of Dravidian tribes which, though not yet drawn into the vortex of Brāhmanism, have been in some degree affected by the example of Hindu organization. As regards inter-tribal marriages, these seem to be in a stage of development through which the Hindus themselves have passed. A man may marry a woman of another tribe; but the offspring of such unions do not become members of either the paternal or maternal groups, but belong to a distinct endogamous aggregate, the name of which often denotes the precise cross by which it was started. Among the large tribe of Mundās we find, for instance, nine such groups, whose names denote descent from intermarriages between Mundā men and women of other tribes. Illustrations of this sort might be multiplied almost indefinitely. The point to be observed is that the sub-tribes formed by inter-tribal crossing are from an early stage complete endogamous units, and that they tend continually to sever their slender connexion with the parent group and to stand forth as independent tribes.
Within the limits of the regular caste system, Mr. Gait (Bengal Census Report, 1901) mentions the Shāgirdpeshas of Bengal as a true caste ‘which takes its origin from miscegenation, and which is still adding to its numbers in the same way. Amongst the members of the higher castes of Orissa who do not allow widow remarriage, and also amongst the Kāyasth immigrants from Bengal, it is a common practice to take as maid-servants and concubines women belonging to the lower clean castes, such as Chāsa and Bhandāri. The offspring of these maid-servants are known as Shāgirdpesha (servants). They form a regular caste of the usual type, and are divided into endogamous groups with reference to the caste of the male parent. The caste of the mother makes no difference in the rank of the children, but those who can count several generations from their original progenitor rank higher than those in whose case the stigma of illegitimacy is more recent. The relationship between the legitimate children of a man of good caste and their bastard brothers and sisters is recognized, but the latter cannot eat with the former. In spite of its number (about 47,000), this caste is said to be of quite recent origin, and it is asserted that it did not exist a century and a half ago. An older and more instructive illustration, dating possibly from long before the Christian era, of the formation of a caste by crossing, is furnished by the Khas of Nepāl, who appear to be the offspring of mixed marriages between Rājput or Brāhman immigrants and the Mongolian women of the country.
(v) Castes of the national type.—Where there is neither nation nor national sentiment, it may seem paradoxical to talk about a national type of caste. There exist, however, certain groups, usually regarded as castes at the present day, which cherish traditions of bygone sovereignty, and seem to preserve traces of an organization considerably more elaborate than that of an ordinary tribe. The Newārs, a mixed people of Mongoloid origin, who were the predominant race in Nepāl proper until the country was conquered and annexed by the Gurkha Prithwī Nārāyan in 1769, may be taken as an illustration of such a survival. The group comprises both Hindus and Buddhists. The two communities are quite distinct and each is divided into an elaborate series of castes.
If the Marāthārs can be described as a caste, their history and traditions certainly stamp them as a caste of the national type. They numbered five million at the 1901 Census: 3,650,000 in Bombay, 1,100,000 in Hyderābād, 81,000 in Madras, 53,000 in Mysore, 61,000 in the Central Provinces and Berār, and 34,000 in Central India. According to Mr. Enthoven (Bombay Census Report, 1901), the Bombay Marāthās may be classified as a tribe with two divisions, Marāthā and Marāthā Kunbī, of which the former are hypergamous to the latter, but were not originally distinct. It remains to be explained that the Kunbīs also consist of two divisions: Desh Kunbīs, numbering 1,900,000, and Konkani Kunbīs, of whom there are 350,000 recorded. Intermarriage between these divisions is not usual. The barrier, however, seems to be purely geographical. It may not withstand the altered conditions due to improvements in communications, and it is not apparently based on any religious prohibition of intermarriages. The highest class of Marāthās is supposed to consist of ninety-six families, who profess to be of Rājput descent and to represent the Kshattriyas of the traditional system. They wear the sacred thread, marry their daughters before puberty, and forbid widows to marry again. But their claim to kinship with the Rājputs is effectually refuted by the anthropometric data now published, and by the survival among them of kuldevaks or totems, such as the sunflower, the kadamba tree, the mango, the conch-shell, the peacock’s feather, and turmeric, which are worshipped at marriages and at the ceremony of dedicating a new house, while their close connexion with the Kunbīs is attested by the fact that they take Kunbīs girls as wives, though they do not give their own daughters to Kunbī men. A wealthy Kunbī, however, occasionally gains promotion to the higher grade and claims brevet rank as a Kshattriya. The fact seems to be that these superior families represent Kunbīs who came to the front under Muhammadan rule, or during the decline of the Mughal Empire won for themselves offices or estates, claimed the rank of landed gentry, and asserted their dignity by refusing their daughters to their less distinguished brethren.
(vi) Castes formed by migration.—If members of a caste leave their original habitat and settle permanently in another part of India, they tend to develop into a distinct caste. The stages of the process are readily traced. In the first instance it is assumed that people who live in foreign parts must of necessity eat forbidden food, worship alien gods, and enter into relations with strange women. Consequently when they wish to take wives from among their own people, they find that their social status has been lowered and that they must pay for the privilege of marrying within the parent group. This luxury grows more and more expensive, and in course of time the emigrants marry only among themselves and thus become a sub-caste, usually distinguished by a territorial name, such as Jaunpuriā, Tirhutiā, Bārendra, and the like.
A good illustration of the formation of a caste by migration is to be found in the traditions of the Nambūdri or Nampūtiri Brāhmans of Malabar. These Brāhmans claim to have come to the west coast from various sacred localities in Kāthiāwār and the Northern Deccan. Mr. F. Fawcett describes them as ’the truest Aryans in Southern India,’ and their complexion and features seem to lend some support to the tradition which assigns to them a foreign origin. Whatever their original stock may have been, they are now an entirely separate caste, differing from the Brāhmans of most other parts of India by their tendency to polygamy; by their rejection of infant marriage; by their restriction of marriage to the eldest son, the other brothers entering into relations with Nāyar women; and by the curious custom of ceremonial fishing which forms part of the marriage ritual with a certain division of them. Another instance of the same process is furnished by the Rārhī Brāhmans of Bengal. The current legend is that early in the eleventh century A.D., Rāja Adisura or Adisvara, finding the Brāhmans then settled in Bengal too ignorant to perform for him certain Vedic ceremonies, applied to the Rāḥā of Kanauj for priests conversant with the sacred ritual of the Aryans. In answer to his request there were sent to him five Brāhmans of Kanauj, who brought with them their wives, their sacred fire, and their sacrificial implements, and from these the Rārhī Brāhmans are descended. Adisura did what the Rāḥīs of outlying and unorthodox tracts of country (such as Bengal was in the eleventh century) have constantly done since and are doing still. A local chief, far removed from the great centres of Brāhmanical lore, somehow becomes aware of his ceremonial shortcomings. He sends for Brāhmans, gives them grants of land near his own residence, and proceeds at their dictation to reform his ways on the model of the devout kings whom Brāhmanical literature holds up as the ideal for a Rāḥā to follow. The Brāhmans find for him a pedigree of respectable antiquity and provide him with a family legend; and in course of time, by dint of money and diplomacy, he succeeds in getting himself recognized as a member of the local Rājput community. But that does not mean that the real Rājputs will acknowledge his pretensions; nor will the Brāhmans who have attached themselves to his fortunes retain their status among the community from which they have broken off. It will be said of them, as is said of the Brāhman immigrants into Bengal, that they have married local women, eaten forbidden food, adopted strange customs, and forgotten the endless details of the elaborate ritual which they set forth to teach. As priests in partibus infidelium they will be regarded with suspicion by the Brāhmans of their original stock: they will have to pay high for brides from among their own people, and eventually will be cut off altogether from the ius connubii. When that stage has been reached they will have become to all intents and purposes a separate caste, retaining the generic name of Brāhman, but forming a new species and presenting a distinctive type. And this great change will have been brought about by the simple fact of their abandoning the habitat of their original community.
Occasionally it may happen that social promotion, rather than degradation, results from a change of residence. In Chānda, a remote District of the Central Provinces, a number of persons returned themselves at the 1901 Census as Barwaiks, and it was stated that the Barwaiks were a clan of Rājputs from Orissa who had come to Nāgpur in the train of the Bhonsla Rājās and had taken military service under them. Now in Chotā Nāgpur the Baraiks or Chick-Baraiks are a sub-
caste of the Pāns, the helot weavers and basketmakers who perform a variety of service functions for the organized Dravidian tribes, and used to live in a kind of ghetto in the villages of the Khonds, for whom they purveyed children destined for human sacrifice. The Census Superintendent observes that ’though it is possible that the coincidence may be accidental, still there seems good reason to fear that it is from these humble beginnings that the Barwaik sept of Rājputs in Chānda must trace its extraction. And it is clear that, before the days of railways and the half-anna post, an imposture of this sort must have been practically impossible of detection.’
(vii) Castes formed by changes of custom.—The formation of new castes as a consequence of neglect of established usage, or the adoption of new ceremonial practices or secular occupations, has been a familiar incident of the caste system from the earliest times. We are told in Manu how men of the three twice-born castes who have not received the sacrament of initiation at the proper time, or who follow forbidden occupations, become Vrātyas or outcasts, intercourse with whom is punished with a double fine, and whose descendants are graded as distinct castes. Living as a Vrātya is a condition involving of itself exclusion from the original caste, and a Brāhman who performs sacrifices for such persons has to do penance. The idea of such changes of status is inherent in the system, and illustrations of its application are plentiful. Sometimes it figures in the traditions of a caste under the form of a claim to a more distinguished origin than is admitted by current opinion. The Skānda Purāṇa, for example, recounts an episode in Parasu Rāma’s raid upon the Kshattriyas, the object of which is to show that the Kāyasths are by birth Kshattriyas of full blood, who by reason of their observing the ceremonies of the Sūdras are called Vrātya or incomplete Kshattriyas. The Bābhans or Bhuinhārs of the United Provinces and Bihār are supposed, according to some legends, to be Brāhmans who lost status by taking to agriculture. At the present day the most potent influence in bringing about elevations or depressions of social status, which may result ultimately in the formation of new castes, is the practice of widow remarriage. With the advance of orthodox ideas that may plausibly be ascribed to the extension of railways and the diffusion of primary education, it dawns upon some members of a particular caste that the custom of marrying widows is highly reprehensible, and, with the assistance of their Brāhmans, they set to work to discourage it. The first step is to abstain from intermarriage with people who practise the forbidden thing, and thus to form a sub-caste which adopts a high-sounding name derived from some famous locality like Ajodhyā or Kanauj, or describes itself as Biyāhut or Behuta (the married ones) by way of emphasizing the orthodox character of their matrimonial arrangements. Thus the Awadhīa or Ayodhiā Kurmis of Bihār, and the Kanaujīa Kurmis of the United Provinces, pride themselves on prohibiting the remarriage of widows, and are endeavouring to establish a shadowy title to be recognized as some variety of Kshattriya, in pursuance of which, with singular ignorance of the humble origin of the great Marāthā houses, they claim kinship with Sivaji, Sindhia, and the Bhonsla family of Nāgpur. In Bihār they have succeeded in attaining a higher rank than ordinary Kurmis. But although the Awadhīa have achieved complete practical separation from the main body of Kurmis, no one accepts them as Kshattriyas or Rājputs, nor are they recognized by Hindu public opinion as forming a distinct caste. In the Punjab the distinction between the Jāts and the Rājputs, both presumably sprung from a common Indo-Aryan stock, is marked by the fact that the former practise, and the latter always abstain from, widow remarriage. The same test applies in the Kāngra Hills, the most exclusively Hindu portion of the Punjab, where Musalmān domination was never fully established. Here the line between the Thakkar and Rāthi castes, both belonging to the lower classes of hill Rājputs, is said to consist in the fact that Rāthis do, and Thakkars do not, ordinarily practise widow marriage. In Southern India movements of the same sort may be observed. Among the begging castes which form nearly 1 per cent. of the population of the Tamil country, the Pandarams rank highest, in virtue of their abstention from meat and alcohol, and more especially of their prohibition of widow marriage.
An account will be found in chapter ix of the Report on the Census of India, 1901, of what may be called the internal structure of tribes and castes in India—the various endogamous, exogamous, and hypergamous divisions which restrict and regulate matrimony, and form the minor wheels of the vast and intricate machinery by which Hindu society is controlled. It would be tedious to enter here upon a detailed description and analysis of these divisions. But from the point of view of general ethnology considerable interest attaches to one particular kind of division, to those exogamous groups which are based upon totems. The existence of totemism in India on a large scale has been brought to notice only in recent years; the inquiries instituted in connexion with the Census have added materially to our knowledge of the subject; and special attention is being given to it in the Ethnographic Survey now being conducted in all British Provinces and the more important Native States. At the bottom of the social system, as understood by the average Hindu, we find, mainly in the Dravidian regions of India, a large body of tribes and castes each of which is broken up into a number of totemistic septs. Each sept bears the name of an animal, a tree, a plant, or of some material object, natural or artificial, which the members of that sept are prohibited from tilling, eating, cutting, burning, carrying, using, &c.; and the members of such a sept may not intermarry. In short, totemistic exogamy prevails in India on a fairly large scale and is still in active operation.
In a country where the accident of birth determines irrevocably the whole course of a man’s social and domestic relations, and he must throughout life eat, drink, dress, marry, and give in marriage in accordance with the usages of the community into which he was born, one is tempted at first sight to assume that the one thing that he may be expected to know with certainty, and to disclose without much reluctance, is the name of the caste, tribe, or nationality to which he belongs. As a matter of fact, no column in the Census schedule displays a more bewildering variety of entries, or gives so much trouble to the enumerating and testing staff and to the central offices which compile the results. If the person enumerated gives the name of a well-known tribe, such as Bhil or Santal, or of a standard caste like Brāhman or Kāyasth, all is well. But he may belong to an obscure caste from the other end of India; he may give the name of a sect, of a sub-caste, of an exogamous sept or section, of a hypergamous group; he may mention some titular designation which sounds finer than the name of his caste; he may describe himself by his occupation, or by the Province or tract of country from which he comes. These various alternatives, which are far from exhausting the possibilities of the situation, undergo a series of transformations at the hands of the more or less illiterate enumerator who writes them down in his own vernacular, and the abstractor in the central office who transliterates them into English. Then begins a laborious and most difficult process of sorting, referencing, cross-referencing, and corresponding with local authorities, which ultimately results in the compilation of the Census Table XIII, showing the distribution of the inhabitants of India by caste, tribe, race, or nationality. The arrangement of this table is alphabetical, and it consists of two parts. The first is a general list of all the groups returned, with their distribution by religion, while the second shows the distribution by Provinces and States of all groups with an aggregate strength of 10,000. An analysis of the 1901 table shows that it includes 2,378 main castes and tribes, and forty-three races or nationalities. With the latter we are not concerned here; as to the former, the question at once arises—on what principle should they be arranged? An alphabetical system is useful for reference, and essential for the purely statistical purposes of a census table. But it does not help in the least towards presenting an intelligible picture of the social grouping of that large proportion of the people of India which is organized, admittedly or tacitly, on the basis of caste.
Accordingly, the principle adopted in 1901 was that of classification by social precedence, as recognized by native public opinion at the present day, and manifesting itself in the facts that particular castes are supposed to be the modern representatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Hindu system; that Brāhmans will take water from certain castes; that Brāhmans of high standing will serve particular castes; that certain castes, though not served by the best Brāhmans, have nevertheless got Brāhmans of their own, whose rank varies according to circumstances; that certain castes are not served by Brāhmans at all, but have their own priests; that the status of certain castes has been raised by their taking to infant marriage or abandoning the remarriage of widows; that the status of some castes has been lowered by living in a particular locality; that the status of others has been modified by their pursuing some occupation in a special or peculiar way; that some can claim the services of the village barber, the village palanquin-bearer, the village midwife, &c., while others cannot; that some castes may not enter the court-yards of certain temples; that some are subject to special taboos, such as that they must not use the village well, or may draw water only with their own vessels, that they must live outside the village or in a separate quarter, that they must leave the road on the approach of a high-caste man or must call out to give warning of their approach. In the case of the Animistic tribes it was mentioned that the prevalence of totemism and the degree of adoption of Hindu usages would serve as ready tests. Most of the Provincial Census Superintendents readily grasped the main idea of the scheme, and their patient industry, supplemented by the intelligent assistance given by the highest native authorities, has added very greatly to our knowledge of an obscure and intricate subject.
As no stereotyped scheme of classification was drawn up, but every Province was left to adopt its own system in consultation with local experts and representative men, it is clearly impossible to draw up any general scheme for the whole of India. One might as well try to construct a table of social precedence for Europe which should bring together Spanish grandees, Swiss hotel-keepers, Turkish Pashas, and Stock Exchange millionaires, and should indicate the precise degree of relative distinction attaching to each. The problem in fact is essentially a local one, and India is no more one country than is Europe. The Provincial schemes of classification are summarized in the Appendix to chapter xi of the Report on the Census of India, 1901. Although they cannot be reduced to common terms, they exhibit points of resemblance and difference which deserve some further examination. The first point to observe is the predominance throughout India of the influence of the traditional system of four original castes. In every scheme of grouping the Brāhman heads the list. Then come the castes whom popular opinion accepts as the modern representatives of the Kshattriyas, and these are followed by the mercantile groups supposed to be akin to the Vaisyas. When we leave the higher circles of the twice-born, the difficulty of finding a uniform basis of classification becomes apparent. The ancient designation ‘Sūdra’ finds no great favour in modern times, and we can point to no group that is generally recognized as representing it. The term is used in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal to denote a considerable number of castes of moderate respectability, the higher of whom are considered ‘clean’ Sūdras, while the precise status of the lower is a question which lends itself to controversy. At this stage of the grouping a sharp distinction may be noticed between Northern India and Bombay and Madras. In Rajputana, the Punjab, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bengal, and Assam, the grade next below twice-born rank is occupied by a number of castes from whose hands Brāhmans and members of the higher castes will take water and certain kinds of sweetmeats. Below these again is a rather indeterminate group from whom water is taken by some of the higher castes, but not by others. Farther down, where the test of water no longer applies, the status of a caste depends on the nature of its occupation and its habits in respect of diet. There are castes whose touch defiles the twice-born, but who do not commit the crowning enormity of eating beef; while below these again in the social system of Northern India are people like Chamārs and Doms, who eat beef and various sorts of miscellaneous vermin. In Western and Southern India the idea that the social status of a caste depends on whether Brāhmans will take water and sweetmeats from its members is unknown, for the higher caste will as a rule take water only from persons of their own caste and sub-caste. In Southern India the idea of ceremonial pollution by the proximity of a member of an unclean caste has been developed with much elaboration. Thus, the table of social precedence attached to the Cochin Report shows that, while a Nāyar can pollute a man of a higher caste only by touching him, people of the Kammālan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of 24 feet, toddy-drawers (Iluvan or Tiyan) at 36 feet, Pulayan or Cheruman cultivators at 48 feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariah), who eats beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than 64 feet.
The subject is examined fully in some of the Provincial Census Reports of 1901, to which the reader is referred for further particulars. No attempt was made to grade every caste. Large classes were formed, and the various groups included in these were arranged in alphabetical order so as to escape the necessity of settling the more delicate questions of precedence. As an illustration of the method of procedure, we may refer to the table of precedence for Bengal proper, which was compiled by Mr. Risley some years ago, and was adopted by Mr. Gait (Census Superintendent, 1901) after careful examination by local committees of native gentlemen appointed for the purpose.
The entire Hindu population of this tract, numbering nineteen millions, has been divided into seven classes. The first class is reserved for the Brāhmans, of whom there are more than a million, forming 6 per cent. of the Hindus of Bengal. As every one knows, there are Brāhmans and Brāhmans, of status varying from the Rāhi, who claim to have been imported by Adisura from Kanauj, to the Barna Brāhmans who serve the lower castes, from whose hands pure Brāhmans will not take water, and to the Vyāsokta Brāhmans who serve the Chāsi Kaibartta caste, and rank so low that even their own clients will not touch food in their houses.
Next in order, at the top of the second class, come the Rājputs, basing their claims to precedence on their supposed descent from the pure Rājputs of the distant Indo-Aryan tract. Their number (113,405) must include a large proportion of families belonging to local castes who acquired land and assumed the title of Rājput on the strength of their territorial position. Then follow the Baidiyas, by tradition physicians, and the writer caste of Kāyasths. The former pose as the modern representatives of the Ambastha of Manu, and assert their superiority to the Kāyasths. The Kāyasths, on the other hand, claim to be Kshattriyas who took to clerical work; deny the identity of the Baidiyas with the Ambasthas; and describe them as a local caste, unknown in the great centres of Hinduism, who were Sūdras till about a century ago, when they took to wearing the sacred thread and bribed the Brāhmans to acquiesce in their pretensions.
The third class, numbering three millions, comprises the functional castes originally known as Navasakha (the nine ‘branches’ or ‘arrows’) and the other ‘clean’ Sūdras, from whose hands the higher castes take water, and who are served by high-class Brāhmans. Confectioners, perfume vendors, betel growers, oilmen, gardeners, potters, and barbers figure in this group, the constitution of which appears to have been largely determined by considerations of practical convenience. The preparation of a Hindu meal is a very elaborate performance, involving lengthy ablutions and a variety of ritualistic observances which cannot be performed on a journey; and it is essential to the comfort of the orthodox traveller that he should be able to procure sweetmeats of various kinds without being troubled by misgivings as to the ceremonial cleanliness of the people from whom he buys them. In matters of food and drink caste rules are wisely elastic. It has been held that neither ice nor soda-water counts as water for the purpose of conveying pollution; there are special exemptions in favour of biscuits and patent medicines, for the last of which the Bengali has an insatiable appetite; and in an outlying District where the only palanquin-bearers available were Dravidian Bhuiyāṣ, these have been promoted to the rank of a water-giving (jalācharaniya) caste in order that the twice-born traveller might be able to get a drink without quitting his palanquin.
The fourth class includes only two castes—the Chāsi Kaibartta and the Goālā—from whom water is taken by the high castes, but whose Brāhmans are held to be degraded. About the former group Mr. Risley wrote in 1891: ‘It seems likely, as time goes on, that this sub-caste will rise in social estimation, and will altogether sink the Kaibartta, so that eventually it is possible that they may succeed in securing a place with the Navasakha.’ The forecast has so far been fulfilled that, at the 1901 Census, the Chāsi Kaibartta called themselves Māhisya, the name of the offspring of a legendary cross between Kshattriyas and Vaisyas, and posed as a separate caste.
Class V contains a rather miscellaneous assortment of castes, including the Baishtam, the Sunri, and the Subarnabanik, from whom the higher castes do not usually take water. Their precedence is also defined by the fact that, although the village barber will shave them, he will not cut their toe-nails, nor will he take part in their marriage ceremonies.
The sixth class includes a long list of castes, numbering nearly eight millions, who abstain from eating beef, pork, and fowls, but from whom the higher castes will not take water. They are served by degraded Brāhmans, the regular barbers refuse to shave them, and some of them have special barbers of their own. Most of them, however, can get their clothes washed by the village washerman. The typical members of this group are the Bāgdi (1,032,004), Dravidian cultivators and labourers; the Jeliya or fishing Kaibartta (447,237); the Namasudra or Chandāl (1,860,914); the Pod (464,921), fishermen and cultivators; and the Rājbansi-Koch (2,065,982), nearly all of whom are small cultivators.
Class VII represents the lowest grade of the Bengal system, castes who eat all manner of unclean food, whose touch pollutes, whom no Brāhman, however degraded, will serve, and for whom neither barber nor washerman will work. It comprises the scavenging Doms and Haris; the leather-working Chamārs and Muchis; and the Bauris, who eat rats and revere the dog as their totem, because, as some of them told Colonel Dalton, it is the right thing to have some sacred animal, and dogs are useful while alive and not very nice to eat when dead.
Islam, whether regarded as a religious system or as a theory of things, is in every respect the antithesis of Hinduism. Its idea is strenuous action rather than hypnotic contemplation; it allots to man a single life and bids him make the best of it; its practical spirit knows nothing of a series of transmigrations, of karma, of the weariness of existence which weighs upon the Hindu mind. For the dream of absorption into an impersonal Weltgeist it substitutes a very personal Paradise, made up of joys such as all Orientals understand. On its social side the religion of Muhammad is equally opposed to the Hindu scheme of a hierarchy of castes, an elaborate stratification of society based upon subtle distinctions of food, drink, dress, marriage, and ceremonial usage. In the sight of God and of His Prophet all followers of Islam are equal. In India, however, caste is in the air; its contagion has spread even to the Muhammadans; and we find its evolution proceeding on characteristically Hindu lines. In both communities foreign descent forms the highest claim to social distinction; in both promotion cometh from the west. As the twice-born Aryan is to the mass of Hindus, so is the Muhammadan of alleged Arab, Persian, Afghan, or Mughal origin to the rank and file of his co-religionists. And just as in the traditional Hindu system men of the higher groups could marry women of the lower, while the converse process was vigorously condemned, so, within the higher ranks of the Muhammadans, a Saiyid will marry a Sheikh’s daughter but will not give his daughter in return; and intermarriage between the upper circle of soi-disant foreigners and the main body of Indian Muhammadans is generally reprobated, except in parts of the country where the aristocratic element is small and must arrange its marriages as best it can. Even there, however, it is only under the stress of great poverty that a member of the ashraf, or ’noble’ class, will give his daughter to one of the ajlaf, or ’low people,’ as converts of indigenous origin are called in Bengal. Of course, the limits of the various groups are not defined as sharply as they are with the Hindus. The well-known proverb which occurs in various forms in different parts of Northern India—‘Last year I was a Jolahā (weaver); now I am a Sheikh; next year if prices rise, I shall become a Saiyid’—marks the difference, though analogous changes of status are not unknown among Hindus and, as Mr. Gait observes, ‘promotion is not so rapid in reality as it is in the proverb.’ But speaking generally, it may be said that the social cadre of the higher ranks of Muhammadans is based on hypergamy with a tendency in the direction of endogamy, while the lower functional groups are strictly endogamous, and are organized on the model of regular castes, with councils and officers which enforce the observance of caste rules by the time-honoured sanction of boycotting.
On the outskirts of the Empire lie two regions where Hindu standards of social precedence and Hindu notions of caste are neither recognized nor known. In Baluchistan, until less than a generation ago, Hindus were tolerated only as a useful class of menials who carried on the petty trade which the fighting races deemed below their dignity. They adopted the device, not unknown in mediaeval Europe, of putting themselves under the protection of their more powerful neighbours, and Mr. Hughes-Buller (Baluchistan Census Report, 1901) tells us that even now a Hindu, when asked to what caste he belongs, ‘will often describe himself by the name of the tribal group to which he holds himself attached.’ Among the non-Hindu people of Baluchistan the question of social precedence is intricate and obscure, and its details must be studied in Mr. Hughes-Buller’s excellent Report. Of the three chief races, the Afghans rank highest, in virtue of their former sovereignty; then come the Baloch, who also once bore rule; and last the Brāhui, who were in power at the time of the British occupation. The relative position of the two latter is indicated by various proverbs, by the attempts of the Brāhui to trace their descent to the Baloch, and by the fact that ’no self-respecting Baloch will give his daughter to a Brāhui.’ Below these races come the Jats, a term which seems to be loosely used to denote all sorts of menial classes, including professional musicians (Langahs), blacksmiths (Loris), and leather-workers (Muchis). But even here there is no hard and fast prohibition of intermarriage, and both Baloch and Brāhui will take wives from among the Jats. Within the circle of each tribe a condition of theoretical equality appears to prevail, tempered by personal considerations arising from capacity to lead, religious sanctity, age, and kinship with a ruling family.
In Burma caste is so little known that the Burmese language possesses no word for it, while one of the difficulties of conducting the census of the numerous Indian immigrants was the impossibility of making the average Burman enumerator understand the meaning of the Indian term zāt or jāt. Differences of religion he can grasp in a vague sort of way; he has a notion of what is meant by race; but caste remains to him an insoluble mystery, a thing with which his democratic spirit has no sympathy whatever. Mr. Lewis (Burma Census Report, 1901) assures us that there are not and never have been any true castes in Burma, though a class of landed proprietors in Minbu, known as the Thugaangs, appear to be endogamous, and thirty-six professional groups with hereditary occupations are said to have existed among the Chins.
No attempt can be made here to analyse and explain the distribution of the nearly 2,400 castes and tribes which have been enumerated in the 1901 Census. The distribution of thirty-six of the principal tribes and castes is shown in the series of maps annexed to chapter xi of the Census Report, and a glance at these will show that some castes are diffused over the whole of India, while others are localized in particular Provinces or tracts of country1. The typical instance of a widely diffused caste is furnished by the Brāhmans, who number nearly fifteen millions, and represent a proportion of the total population ranging from ten per cent. in the United Provinces, Central India, and Rājputāna, to three per cent. in Madras, the Central Provinces, and Bengal proper, and two per cent. in Assam and Chotā Nagpur. The distribution accords fairly well with the history and traditions of the caste. They are strongest in their original centre, numbering nearly five millions in the United Provinces, and weakest in the outlying tracts, peopled mainly by non-Aryan races, whom their influence has even now only imperfectly reached. There can, moreover, be little doubt that many of the Brāhmans of the more remote tracts have been manufactured on the spot by the simple process of conferring the title of Brāhman on the tribal priests of the local deities. The so-called Barna Brāhmans, who serve the lower castes of Bengal, probably obtained sacerdotal rank in this fashion. That the priestly caste is not of altogether unmixed descent is attested by the numerous legends of Rājas who, having sworn a rash oath to feed a stated number of Brāhmans, found the supply run short and were obliged to make them up for the occasion out of any materials that were at hand. As with the Brāhmans, so in the chief functional groups the tendency is towards wide diffusion, and their racial composition probably differs materially in different Provinces. Owing to differences of language, the maps above mentioned fail to bring out the complete facts in relation to the whole of India. Thus, the leather-workers (Chamār and Muchi) of Northern India, numbering about twelve millions and forming twelve per cent. of the population of the United Provinces, correspond with the Chakkiliyan (486,884) and Mādiga (755,316) of Madras, but the maps do not include these. In each Province such groups form, of course, distinct castes which have probably been evolved independently.
Of the localized groups a large number are admittedly tribes. The Bhīl, Gond, Kolī, and Santāl come within this category, and are still outside the Hindu social system. The Doms, Dosādhṣ, Gūjars, Jāts, Kaibarttas, Namasūdras (Chandāls), Pods, Nāyars, Pallis, Paraiyans (Pariahs), and Rājbansi-Koch represent tribes which have been transformed into castes at a comparatively recent date and still retain some traces of the tribal stage of development.
Several theories of the origin of caste are to be found in the literature of the subject. The oldest and most famous is accepted as an article of faith by all orthodox Hindus, and its attraction extends, as each successive Census shows, through an ever-widening circle of aspirants to social distinction. It appears in its most elaborate form in the curious jumble of magic, religion, law, custom, ritual, and metaphysics which is commonly called the Institutes of Manu. Here we read how the Anima Mundi, the supreme soul which ‘contains all created beings and is inconceivable,’ produced by a thought a golden egg, in which ‘he himself was born as Brahma, the progenitor of the whole world.’ Then ‘for the sake of the prosperity of the worlds, he caused the Brahman, the Kshattriya, the Vaisya, and the Sūdra to proceed from his mouth, his arms, his thighs, and his feet,’ and allotted to each of these their distinctive duties. The Brahman was enjoined to study, teach, sacrifice, and receive alms; the Kshattriya to protect the people and abstain from sensual pleasures; the Vaisya to tend cattle, to trade, to lend money, and to cultivate land; while for the Sūdra was prescribed the comprehensive avocation of meekly serving the other three groups. Starting from this basis, the standard Indian tradition proceeds to trace the evolution of the caste system from a series of complicated crosses, first between members of the four groups and then between the descendants of these initial unions. The men of the three higher groups might marry women of any of the groups below them, and if the wife belonged to the group next in order of precedence the children took her rank, and no new caste was formed. If, however, the mother came from a group lower down in the scale, her children belonged neither to her group nor to their father’s, but formed a distinct caste called by a different name. Thus the son of a Brāhman by a Vaisya woman is an Ambastha, to whom belongs the art of healing; while if the mother is a Sūdra, the son is a Nishāda and must live by killing fish. The son of a Kshattriya father and a Sūdra mother is ‘a being called Ugra, resembling both a Kshattriya and a Sūdra, ferocious in his manners and delighting in cruelty.’ In all of these the father is of higher rank than the mother, and the marriages are held to have taken place in the right order (anuloma, or ‘with the hair’). Unions of the converse type, in which the woman belongs to a superior group, are condemned as pratiloma, or ‘against the hair.’ The extreme instance of the fruit of pratiloma relations is the Chandāl, the son of a Brāhman woman by a Sūdra, who is described as ’that lowest of mortals,’ and is condemned to live outside the village, to clothe himself in the garments of the dead, to eat from broken dishes, to execute criminals, and to carry out the corpses of friendless men. But the Ayogavas, with a Sūdra father and a Kshattriya mother, are not much better off, for the accident of their birth is sufficient to brand them as wicked people who eat reprehensible food. Alliances between the descendants of these first crosses produce, among others, the Sairandhra who is ‘skilled in adorning his master,’ and pursues as an alternative occupation the art of snaring animals; and ’the sweet-voiced Maitreyaka who, ringing a bell at the appearance of dawn, continually praises great men.’ Finally, a fresh series of connubial complications is introduced by the Vrātya, the twice-born men who have neglected their sacred duties and have among their direct descendants the Malla, the Licchivi, the Nata, the Karana, the Khasa, and the Dravida, while each of these in its turn gives rise to further mazes of hypothetical parentage.
It is small wonder that European critics should have been so impressed by the unreal character of this grotesque scheme of social evolution, that some of them have put it aside as a mere figment of the subjective intellect of the ingenious Brāhman. Yet, fantastic as it is, it opens indirectly and unconsciously an instructive glimpse of prehistoric society in India. It shows us that at the time when Manu’s treatise was compiled, probably about the second century A.D., there must have existed an elaborate and highly developed social system, including tribal or national groups like the Nishāda, Māgādha, Vaideha, Malla, Licchivi, Khasa, Dravida, Saka, Kīrāta, and Chandāl; and functional groups such as the Ambastha, who were physicians; the Sūta, who were concerned with horses and chariots; the Nishāda, and the Mārgavas, Dasas or Kaivartas, who were fishermen; the Ayogava, carpenters; the Kārāvara and Dhigvansa, workers in leather; and the Vena, musicians and players on the drum. It is equally clear that the occupations of Brāhmans were as diverse as they are at the present day, and that their position in this respect was just as far removed from that assigned to them by the traditional theory. In the list of Brāhmans whom a pious householder should not entertain at a srāddha1 we find physicians; sellers of meat; shopkeepers; usurers; actors; singers; oilmen; keepers of gambling houses; sellers of spices; makers of bows and arrows; cowherds, and trainers of elephants, oxen, horses or camels; astrologers; bird-fanciers; fencing-masters; architects; breeders of sporting dogs; falconers; cultivators; shepherds; and even carriers of dead bodies. The conclusions suggested by the passages cited from Manu are confirmed by Dr. Richard Fick’s instructive study of the structure of society in Bihār and the Eastern Districts of the United Provinces at the time of Buddha2. Dr. Fick’s work is based mainly upon the Jātakas or ‘birth-stories’ of the Southern Buddhists; and from these essentially popular sources, free from any suggestion of Brāhmanical influence, he succeeds in showing that, at the period depicted, the social organization in the part of India with which his authorities were familiar did not differ very materially from that which prevails at the present day. Then, as now, the traditional hierarchy of four castes had no distinct and determinate existence, still less had the so-called mixed castes supposed to be derived from them, while of the Sūdras in particular no trace at all was to be found. Then, as now, Indian society was made up of a medley of diverse and heterogeneous groups, apparently not so strictly and uniformly endogamous as the castes of to-day, but containing within themselves the germs out of which the modern system has developed by natural and insensible stages. That development has been furthered by a variety of influences which will be discussed below.
Assuming that the writers of the law books had before their eyes the same kind of social chaos that exists now, the first question that occurs is, From what source did they derive the theory of the four castes? Manu, of course, as Sir Henry Maine has pointed out, is a relatively modern work; but the traditional scheme of castes figures in earlier law books, such as the Baudhāyana and Apastamba, and it seems probable that for them it was not so much a generalization from observed facts as a traditional theory, which they attempted to stretch so as to explain the facts. The Indian pandit does not take kindly to inductive methods, nor is it easy to see how he could have arrived by this road at a hypothesis which breaks down directly it is brought into contact with the realities of life. But it is possible that the Brāhmanical theory of castes may be nothing more than a modified version of the division of society into four classes—priests, warriors, cultivators, and artisans—which appears in the sacerdotal literature of ancient Persia3. It is not suggested that the Irānian legend of four classes formed part of the stock of tradition which the Aryans brought with them into India. Had this been so, the myth relating to their origin would have figured prominently in the Vedas, and would not have appeared solely in the Purusha Sukta, which most critics agree in regarding as a modern interpolation. The conjecture is that the relatively modern compilers of the law books, having become acquainted with the Irānian legend, were fascinated by its assertion of priestly supremacy, and made use of it as the basis of the theory by which they attempted to explain the manifold complexities of the caste system. The procedure is characteristic of Brāhmanical literary methods, and is in itself no more absurd than a recent attempt on the part of the Aryā Samāj to discover in the Rig-veda an anticipation of the discoveries of modern science.
The differences in the Indian and Iranian categories are trifling, and admit of being accounted for by the fact that India had, what Persia had not, a large aboriginal population, differing from the Indo-Aryans in respect of religion, usages, and physical type, and more especially in the conspicuous attribute of colour. These people had somehow to be brought within the limits of the scheme; and this was done by the simple process of lumping them together in the servile class of Sūdras, which is sharply distinguished from the twice-born groups and has a far lower status than is assigned to the artisans in the Iranian system. Thus the four varnas, or colours, of the Indian myth seem to occupy an intermediate position between the purely occupational classes of ancient Persia and Egypt and the rigidly defined castes of modern India. In the Persian system only the highest group of Athravans or priests was endogamous, while between the other three groups, as between all the groups of the Egyptian system (excluding the swineherds if we follow Herodotus), no restrictions on intermarriage appear to have been recognized. Moreover, as is implied by the distinction between the twice-born classes and the Sūdras, and by the prominence given to the element of colour (varna), the Indian system rests upon a basis of racial antagonism of which there is no trace in Persia and Egypt. Yet in the stage of development portrayed in the law books the system had not hardened into the rigid mechanism of the present day. It is still more or less fluid; it admits of intermarriage under the limitations imposed by the rule of hypergamy; it represents caste in the making, not caste as it has since been made. This process of caste-making has indeed by no means come to an end. Fresh castes are constantly being formed, and wherever we can trace the stages of their evolution they seem to proceed on the lines followed in the traditional scheme. The first stage is for a number of families, who discover in themselves some quality of social distinction, to refuse to give their women in marriage to other members of the caste, from whom nevertheless they continue to take wives. After a time, when their numbers have increased and they have bred women enough to supply material for a ius connubii of their own, they close their ranks, marry only among themselves, and pose as a superior sub-caste of the main caste to which they belong. Last of all they break off all connexion with the parent stock, assume a new name which ignores or disguises their original affinities, and claim general recognition as a distinct caste. The educated Pods of Bengal are an illustration of the first stage; the Chāsi Kaibartta of the second; the Māhisya of the third.
We may now pass from the pious fictions of Manu and the Rāmāyana to those modern critical theories which, whether they carry conviction or not, at least start from and give full weight to the facts, and make an honest attempt to work out a scientific solution of the problem. Among these Sir Denzil Ibbetson’s description of caste in the Punjab4 contains the most vivid presentment of the system in its everyday working, of the various elements which have contributed to its making, and of the surprising diversity of the results which have been produced. From this wealth of material it is not altogether easy to disentangle the outlines of a cut-and-dried theory, and it may well have been the intention of the writer to leave the question more or less open, and to refrain from the futile endeavour to compress such infinite variety within the limits of any formula. The following passage sums up the leading features of the hypothesis; but the exposition of its working requires to be studied as a whole, and the entire section dealing with the evolution of caste will be found in the Ethnographic Appendices to the Report on the Census of India, 1901.
‘Thus, if my theory be correct, we have the following steps in the process by which caste has been evolved in the Punjab:—
(1) the tribal divisions common to all primitive societies; (2) the guilds based upon hereditary occupation common to the middle life of all communities; (3) the exaltation of the priestly office to a degree unexampled in other countries; (4) the exaltation of the Levitical blood by a special insistence upon the necessarily hereditary nature of occupation; (5) the preservation and support of this principle by the elaboration from the theories of the Hindu creed or cosmogony of a purely artificial set of rules, regulating marriage and intermarriage, declaring certain occupations and foods to be impure and polluting, and prescribing the conditions and degree of social intercourse permitted between the several castes. Add to these the pride of social rank and the pride of blood which are natural to man, and which alone could reconcile a nation to restrictions at once irksome from a domestic and burdensome from a material point of view; and it is hardly to be wondered at that caste should have assumed the rigidity which distinguishes it in India.
M. Senart’s criticism on this theory5 is directed to two points. He demurs, in the first place, to the share which he supposes it to assign to Brāhmanical influence, and challenges the supposition that a strict code of rules, exercising so absolute a dominion over the consciences of men, could be merely a modern invention, artificial in its character and self-regarding in its aims. Secondly, he takes exception to the disproportionate importance which he conceives Sir Denzil Ibbetson to attach to community of occupation, and points out that, if this were really the original binding principle of caste, the tendency towards incessant fission and dislocation would be much less marked: the force that in the beginning united the various scattered atoms would continue to hold them together to the end. Both criticisms appear to miss an essential feature in the scheme, the influence of the idea of kinship, which is certainly the oldest and probably the most enduring factor in the caste system, and which seems to have supplied the framework and the motive principle of the more modern restrictions based upon ceremonial usage and community of occupation.
Mr. Nesfield6 is a theorist of quite a different type. He feels no doubts and is troubled by no misgivings. Inspired by the systematic philosophy of Comte, he maps out the whole confused region of Indian caste into a graduated series of groups and explains exactly how each has come by the place that it occupies in the scheme. As stated on page 286, he assumes as the basis of his theory the essential unity of the Indian race, and appeals to ‘physiological resemblance’ to prove that ‘for the last three thousand years at least no real difference of blood between Aryan and aboriginal’ has existed ’except perhaps in a few isolated tracts.’ In his opinion the conquering Aryan race was completely absorbed by the indigenous population. The homogeneous people thus formed are divided by Mr. Nesfield, in the area to which his researches relate, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, into the following seven groups, among which he distributes the 121 castes enumerated in the Census of 1881:
I. Casteless tribes.
II. Castes connected with land:
A. Allied to hunting state.
B. Allied to fishing state.
C. Allied to pastoral state.
D. Agricultural.
E. Landlords and warriors.
III. Artisan castes:
A. Preceding metallurgy.
B. Coeval with metallurgy.
IV. Trading castes.
V. Serving castes.
VI. Priestly castes.
VII. Religious orders.
The classification, it will be observed, is based solely upon occupation, and it expresses Mr. Nesfield’s conviction that ‘function, and function only, as I think, was the foundation upon which the whole caste system of India was built up.’ The order of the groups is determined by the principle that ’each caste or group of castes represents one or other of those progressive stages of culture which have marked the industrial development of mankind, not only in India, but in every other country in the world wherein some advance has been made from primeval savagery to the arts and industries of civilized life. The rank of any caste as high or low depends upon whether the industry represented by the caste belongs to an advanced or backward stage of culture; and thus the natural history of human industries affords the chief clue to the gradations as well as to the formation of Indian castes.’ At the bottom of the scale are the more or less primitive tribes—Thārus, Kanjars, Doms, and Nats—’the last remains and sole surviving representatives of the aboriginal Indian savage, who was once the only inhabitant of the Indian continent, and from whose stock the entire caste system, from the sweeper to the priest, was fashioned by the slow growth of centuries.’ Then come the hunting Baheliyas, the Mallahs and Dhimars (boatmen and fishermen), the pastoral Ahirs and Gadarias, and the great mass of agriculturists, while above these he finds in the Kshattriya or Rajput the sole representative of the landlord and warrior caste. The artisan castes are subdivided with reference to the supposed priority of the evolution of their crafts. The basket-making Bānsphors, the weavers (Kori and Jolāhā), the potters (Kumhār), and the oilmen (Teli) fall within the more primitive group antecedent to metallurgy, while blacksmiths, goldsmiths, tailors, and confectioners are placed in the group coeval with the use of metals. Above them again come the trading and the serving castes, among whom we find in rather odd collocation the scavenging Bhangī, the barber (Nāpit or Nai), the bard and genealogist (Bhāt), and the Kāyasths, who are described as estate managers and writers. The Brāhmans and the religious orders complete the scheme. But the mere classification obviously offers no solution of the real problem. How did these groups, which occur in one form or another all over the world, become hardened into castes? Why is it that in India alone their members are absolutely forbidden to intermarry? Mr. Nesfield replies without hesitation that the whole series of matrimonial taboos which constitute the caste system are due to the initiative of the Brāhmans. According to him they introduced for their own purposes, and in order to secure the dignity and privileges of their own caste, the rule that a Brāhman could only marry a Brāhman, and all the other classes, who up to that time had intermarried freely, followed their example, ‘partly in imitation and partly in self-defence.’ The proposition recalls the short way that writers of the eighteenth century were apt to take with historical problems, reminding one of Bolingbroke’s easy assertion that the sacred literature of Egypt was invented by the priests. Detailed criticism would be out of place here: the main object of this chapter is to lay stress on precisely those factors of evolution which Mr. Nesfield ignores; but it may be observed that a theory which includes in the same categories the Dom and the Teli, the Banjārā and the Khattrī, the Bhangī and the Kāyasth must, in the race for acceptance, have a good deal of leeway to make up.
After examining the views propounded by Sir Denzil Ibbet-M. Senart’s son and Mr. Nesfield, and by Mr. Risley in his Tribes and Castes of Bengal, M. Senart passes on to formulate his own theory of the origin of caste. In his view caste is the normal development of ancient Aryan institutions, which assumed this form in the struggle to adapt themselves to the conditions with which they came into contact in India. In developing this proposition he relies greatly upon the general parallelism that may be traced between the social organization of the Hindus and that of the Greeks and Romans in the earlier stages of their national development. He points out the close correspondence that exists between the three series of groups—gens, curia, tribe at Rome; family, φαρία, φυνή in Greece; and family, gotra, caste in India. Pursuing the subject into fuller detail, he seeks to show that the leading principles which underlie the caste system form part of a stock of usage and tradition common to all branches of the Aryan people. In the department of marriage, for example, the Athenian γένος and the Roman gens present striking resemblances to the Indian gotra. We learn from Plutarch that the Romans never married a woman of their own kin, and among the matrons who figure in classical literature none bears the same gentile name as her husband. Nor was endogamy unknown. At Athens, in the time of Demosthenes, membership of a φαρία was confined to the offspring of the families belonging to the group. In Rome the long struggle of the plebeians to obtain the ius connubii with patrician women belongs to the same class of facts; and the patricians, according to M. Senart, were guarding the endogamous rights of their order—or should we not rather say the hypergamous rights? for in Rome, as in Athens, the primary duty of marrying a woman of equal rank did not exclude the possibility of union with women of humbler origin. We read in Manu how the gods disdain the oblations offered by a Sudra: at Rome they were equally offended by the presence of a stranger at the sacrifice of the gens. Marriage itself is a sacrifice at which husband and wife officiate as priests, and their equality of status is attested by their solemnly eating together. The Roman confarreatio has its parallel in the got kanâla or ’tribal trencher’ of the Punjab, the connubial meal by partaking of which the wife is transferred from her own exogamous group to that of her husband.
As with marriage so with food. The prohibition, which strikes us as so strange, against eating with members of another caste or partaking of food prepared by a man of lower caste recalls the religious significance which the Aryans attached to the common meal of the household. Cooked at the sacred fire, it symbolizes the unity of the family, its life in the present, its ties with the past. In Rome, as in India, daily libations were offered to ancestors; and the funeral feasts of the Greeks and Romans (περιδείπνον and silicernium) correspond to the śrāddha of Hindu usage which, in M. Senart’s view, represents “an ideal prolongation of the family meal.” He seems even to find in the communal meals of the Persians, and in the Roman charistia, from which were excluded not only strangers but any members of the family whose conduct had been unworthy, the analogue of the communal feast at which a social offender in India is received back into caste. The exclusion from religious and social intercourse symbolized by the Roman interdict aqua et igni corresponds to the ancient Indian ritual for expulsion from caste, where a slave fills the offender’s vessel with water and solemnly pours it out on the ground, and to the familiar formula hukka pâni band karma, in which the modern luxury of tobacco takes the place of the sacred fire of the Roman excommunication. Even the caste panchāyat that wields these formidable sanctions has its parallel in the family councils which in Greece, Rome, and ancient Germany assisted at the exercise of the patria potestas, and in the chief of the gens who, like the mātabar of a caste, decided disputes between its members and gave decisions which were recognized by the state.
How was it that out of this common stock of usage there arose institutions so antagonistic in their nature as the castes of India and the nations of Europe? To what causes is it due that among the Aryans of the West all the minor groups have been absorbed in the wider circle of national unity, while the Indian Aryans have nothing to show in the way of social organization but a bewildering multitude of castes and sub-castes? M. Senart suggests a cause, but makes no attempt to follow out or illustrate its workings. He says, ‘L’Inde ne s’est élevée ni à l’idée de l’État ni à l’idée de la Patrie. Au lieu de s’étendre, le cadre s’y resserre. Au sein des républiques antiques la notion des classes tend à se résoudre dans l’idée plus large de la cité ; dans l’Inde elle s’accuse, elle tend à se circonscrire dans les cloisons étroites de la caste. N’oublions pas qu’ici les immigrants se répandaient sur une aire immense ; les groupemens trop vastes étaient condamnés à se disperser. Dans cette circonstance les inclinations particularistes puisèrent un supplément de force.’
Distribution over a wide area, tending to multiply groups; contact with the aborigines, encouraging pride of blood; the idea of ceremonial purity, leading to the employment of the indigenous races in occupations involving manual labour, while the higher pursuits were reserved for the Aryans; the influence of the doctrine of metempsychosis, which assigns to every man a definite status determined by the inexorable law of karma; the absence of any political power to draw the scattered groups together; and the authority which the Brāhmanical system gradually acquired—these seem to be the main factors of M. Senart’s theory of caste. It may be urged in favour of his view of the subject that evolution, especially social evolution, is a gradual and complex process, that many causes work together to produce the final result, and that the attempt to reduce them to a single formula carries with it its own refutation. On the other hand, as Dr. Fick has pointed out1, if caste were a normal extension of the ancient Aryan family system, the absence of any traces of this tendency in the Vedas is hardly accounted for by the statement that development proceeded so slowly, and was based on such primitive and instinctive impulses, that we could scarcely expect to find any tangible indications of it in a literature like that of the Hymns.
Before proceeding farther we may dispose of the popular notion that community of occupation is the sole basis of the caste system. If this were so, as M. Senart has effectively pointed out, the institution ‘aurait montré moins de tendance à se morceler, à se disloquer; l’agent qui l’aurait unifiée d’abord en aurait maintenu la cohésion.’ To put it in another way, if the current idea were correct, all cultivators, all traders, all weavers ought to belong to the same caste, at any rate within the same area. But every one knows that this is not the case; that the same occupation embraces a whole crowd of castes each of which is a close corporation, though the members of each carry on the avocation that is common to them all. Several writers have laid stress on the analogy between Indian castes and the trade guilds of mediaeval Europe. The comparison is misleading. In the first place the guild was never endogamous in the sense that a caste is: there was nothing to prevent a man of one guild from marrying a girl of another. Secondly, there was no bar to the admission of outsiders who had learned the business: the guild recruited smart apprentices, just as the Baloch and Brāhui open their ranks to a fighting man who has proved his worth. The common occupation was a real tie, a source of strength in the long struggle against nobles and kings, not a symbol of disunion and weakness like caste in India. If the guild had been a caste, bound by rigid rules as to food, marriage, and social intercourse, and split up into a dozen divisions which could not eat together or intermarry, the wandering apprentice who was bound to travel for a year from town to town to learn the secrets of his art could hardly have managed to exist, still less could he have discharged, like Quintin Matsys and a host of less famous craftsmen, the traditional duty of marrying his master’s daughter. A guild may expand and develop; it gives free play to artistic endeavour; and it was the union of the guilds that gave birth to the Free Cities of the Middle Ages. A caste is an organism of a lower type; it grows by fission, and each step in its growth detracts from its power to advance or even to preserve the art which it professes to practise.
A curious illustration of the inadequacy of occupation alone to generate and maintain the instinct of caste as we see it at work in India is furnished by certain ordinances of the Theodosian code. In the early part of the fifth century, when the Western Roman Empire was fast falling to pieces, an attempt was made, from purely fiscal motives, to determine the status and fix the obligations of all classes of officials. In his fascinating account of the constitution of society in those days, Professor Dill tells us how ‘an almost Oriental system of caste’ had made all public functions hereditary, ‘from the senator to the waterman on the Tiber or the sentinel at a frontier post’2. The Navicularii who maintained vessels for transport by sea, the Pistores who provided bread for the people of Italy, the Pecuarii and Suarii who kept up the supply of butcher’s meat, were all organized on a system as rigid and tyrannical as that which prevails in India at the present day. Each class was bound down to its characteristic occupation, and its matrimonial arrangements were governed by the curious rule that a man must marry within the caste, while if a woman married outside of it her husband thereby acquired her status and had to take on the public duties that went with it. This surprising arrangement was not a spontaneous growth, like caste in India, but owed its existence to a law enforced by executive action. ‘One of the hardest tasks of the Government (says Mr. Dill) was to prevent the members of these guilds from deserting or evading their hereditary obligations. It is well known that the tendency of the later Empire was to stereotype society, by compelling men to follow the occupation of their fathers, and preventing a free circulation among different callings and grades of life…. It was the principle of rural serfdom applied to social functions. Every avenue of escape was closed. A man was bound to his calling not only by his father’s but by his mother’s condition3. Men were not permitted to marry out of their guild. If the daughter of one of the baker caste married a man not belonging to it, her husband was bound to her father’s calling. Not even a dispensation obtained by some means from the imperial chancery, not even the power of the Church, could avail to break the chain of servitude.’ There was even a caste of curiales or, as we should say in India, municipal commissioners, of whom we read that at a certain time all of them were ordered back to their native cities, and were forbidden to evade their hereditary obligations by entering any branch of the government service. As the Empire broke up, the caste system vanished with it. Men hastened to shake off all artificial restrictions and to choose wives and professions for themselves. But on the theory that community of function is the sole causative principle of caste, that is the last thing that they ought to have done. They should have hugged their chains and proceeded to manufacture new castes or sub-castes to fit every new occupation that sprang up. If the principle had been worth anything, it should have operated in Europe as effectually as it does in India. No one can say that the Theodosian code had not given it a good start.
But, it will be asked, if the origin of caste is not to be found in the trade guild may we not seek it in the more primitive institution of the tribe? Early society, as far back as we can trace it, is made up of a network of tribes, and in India it is easy to observe the process of the conversion of a tribe into a caste. The conjecture seems at first sight plausible; but a glance at the facts will show that the transformation in question is confined to those tribes which have been brought into contact with the regular caste system, and have adopted its characteristic usages from religious or social motives. The Manipuris, for example, were converted from Nāgas into Hindus only a century or two ago. The Bhumij, again, were a tribe at a still more recent date and retain plentiful traces of their origin. On the other hand, the races of Baluchistan, where Hindu influence is practically non-existent, show no inclination to follow the example of the Indian Muhammadans and organize themselves on the model of caste. The primitive tribe, in fact, wherever we find it, is not usually endogamous, and, so far from having any distaste for alien marriages, makes a regular business of capturing wives. In short, when tribes are left to themselves they exhibit no inborn tendency to crystallize into castes. In Europe, indeed, the movement has been all in the opposite direction: the tribes consolidated into nations; they did not sink into the political impotence of caste.
In the case of a complex phenomenon such as caste, to the formation of which a number of subtle tendencies must have contributed, all that we can hope to do is to disentangle one or two leading ideas and to show how their operation may have produced the state of things that actually exists. Following out this line of thought, it seems possible to distinguish two elements in the growth of caste sentiment: a basis of fact and a superstructure of fiction. The former is widespread if not universal; the latter peculiar to India. Whenever in the history of the world one people has subdued another, whether by sudden invasion or by gradual occupation of their territory, the conquerors have taken the women of the country as concubines or wives, but have given their own daughters in marriage only among themselves. Where the two peoples are of the same race, or at any rate of the same colour, this initial stage of hypergamy soon passes away and complete amalgamation takes place. Where, on the other hand, marked distinctions of race and colour intervene, and especially if the dominant people are continually recruited by men of their own blood, the course of evolution runs on different lines. The tendency then is towards the formation of a class of half-breeds, the result of irregular unions between men of the higher race and women of the lower, who marry only among themselves and are to all intents and purposes a caste. In this literal or physiological sense caste is not confined to India. It occurs in a pronounced form in the Southern States of the American Republic, where negroes intermarry with negroes, and the various mixed races, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons, each have a sharply restricted ius connubii of their own and are practically cut off from legal unions with the white races. The same set of phenomena may be observed among the half-breeds of Canada, Mexico, and South America, and among the Eurasians of India, who do not intermarry with natives and only occasionally with pure-bred Europeans. Illustrations of the same process may be observed in the Himalayas, where, if anywhere in India, the practices recorded with exaggerated precision in the Indian law books still survive. The Rājputs of the Kangra Hills and the Khas of Nepāl are believed to be the offspring of alliances between conquering Rājputs and women of more or less Mongoloid descent. Working from this analogy, it is not difficult to construct the rough outlines of the process which must have taken place when the second wave of Indo-Aryans made their way into India through Gilgit and Chitral. To start with, they formed a homogeneous community, scantily supplied with women, which speedily outgrew its original habitat. A company of the more adventurous spirits set out to conquer for themselves new domains among the neighbouring Dravidians. They went forth as fighting men, taking with them few women or none at all. They subdued the inferior race, established themselves as conquerors, and captured women according to their needs. Then they found themselves cut off from their original stock, partly by distance and partly by the alliances they had contracted. By marrying the captured women they had, to some extent, modified their original type; but a certain pride of blood remained to them, and when they had bred females enough to serve their purposes and to establish a distinct ius connubii, they closed their ranks to all further intermixture of blood. When they did this they became a caste like the castes of the present day. As their numbers grew, their cadets again sallied forth in the same way, and became the founders of Rājput and pseudo-Rājput houses all over India. In each case complete amalgamation with the inferior race was averted by the fact that they only took women and did not give them. They behaved in fact towards the Dravidians whom they conquered in the same way as some planters in America behaved to the African slaves whom they imported. This is a rough statement of what we may take to be the ultimate basis of caste, a basis of fact common to India and to certain stages of society all over the world. The principle upon which the system rests is the sense of distinction of race indicated by differences of colour: a sense which, while too weak to preclude the men of the dominant race from intercourse with the women whom they have captured, is still strong enough to make it out of the question that they should admit the men whom they have conquered to equal rights in the matter of marriage.
Once started in India, the principle was strengthened, perpetuated, and extended to all ranks of society by the fiction that people who speak a different language, dwell in a different district, worship different gods, eat different food, observe different social customs, follow a different profession, or practise the same profession in a slightly different way must be so unmistakably aliens by blood that intermarriage with them is a thing not to be thought of. Illustrations of the working of this fiction have been given already and might be multiplied indefinitely. Its precise origin is necessarily uncertain. All that can be said is that fictions of various kinds have contributed largely to the development of early societies in all parts of the world, and that their appearance is probably due to that tendency to vary, and to perpetuate beneficial variations, which seems to be a law of social no less than of physical development. However this may be, it is clear that the growth of the caste instinct must have been greatly promoted and stimulated by certain characteristic peculiarities of the Indian intellect—its lax hold of facts, its indifference to action, its absorption in dreams, its exaggerated reverence for tradition, its passion for endless division and subdivision, its acute sense of minute technical distinctions, its pedantic tendency to press a principle to its farthest logical conclusion, and its remarkable capacity for imitating and adapting social ideas and usages of whatever origin. It is through this imitative faculty that the myth of the four castes—evolved in the first instance by some speculative Brāhman, and reproduced in the popular versions of the Rāmāyana which the educated Hindu villager studies as diligently as the English rustic used to read his Bible—has attained its wide currency as the model to which Hindu society ought to conform. That it bears no relation to the actual facts of life is, in the view of its adherents, an irrelevant detail. It descends from remote antiquity, it has the sanction of the Brāhmans, it is an article of faith, and every one seeks to bring his own caste within one or other of the traditional classes. Finally, as M. Senart has pointed out, the whole caste system, with its scale of social merit and demerit and its endless gradations of status, is in remarkable accord with the philosophic doctrine of transmigration and karma. Every Hindu believes that his spiritual status at any given time is determined by the sum total of his past lives: he is born to an immutable karma, what more natural than that he should be born into an equally immutable caste?
Summary
The conclusions which this chapter seeks to establish may now be summed up. They are these:—
(1) There are seven main physical types in India, of which the Dravidian alone is, or may be, indigenous. The Indo-Aryan, the Mongoloid, and the Turko-Iranian types are in the main of foreign origin. The Aryo-Dravidian, the Mongolo-Dravidian, and the Scytho-Dravidian are composite types formed by crossing with the Dravidians.
(2) The dominant influence in the formation of these types was the physical seclusion of India, involving the consequence that the various invaders brought few women with them and took the women of the country to wife.
(3) To this rule the first wave of Indo-Aryans formed the sole exception, for the reasons given on pages 300–3.
(4) The social grouping of the Indian people comprises both tribes and castes. We may distinguish three types of tribe and seven types of caste.
(5) Both tribes and castes are subdivided into endogamous, exogamous, and hypergamous groups.
(6) Of the exogamous groups a large number are totemistic.
(7) Castes can be classified only on the basis of social precedence, but no scheme of classification can be framed for the whole of India.
(8) The Indian theory of caste was perhaps derived from Persia. It has no foundation in fact, but is universally accepted in India.
(9) The origin of caste is from the nature of the case an insoluble problem. We can only frame more or less plausible conjectures, derived from the analogy of observed facts. The particular conjecture now put forward is based—firstly, upon the correspondence that can be traced between certain caste gradations and the variations of physical type; secondly, on the development of mixed races from stocks of different colour; and thirdly, on the influence of fiction.