Les dieux jaloux ont enfoui quelque part les témoignages de la descendance des choses.—De Guérin.
The origin of caste.
No one can have studied the literature of social origins which has been so prolific of late years without feeling the force of Sir Henry Maine’s remark that theories of primitive society are apt to land the enquirer in a region of “mud banks and fog.” More especially is this the case in India, where the palæological data available in Europe hardly exist at all, while the historical value of the literary evidence is impaired by the uncertainty of its dates, by the sacerdotal predilections of its authors, by their passion for wire-drawn distinctions and symmetrical classifications, and by their manifest inability to draw any clear line between fact and fancy, between things as they are and things as they might be, or as a Brāhman would desire them to be. All these points are obvious at a glance; they merely reflect the idiosyncrasies of the Indian intellect, its phenomenal memory, its feeble grasp of questions of fact, its subtle manipulation of impalpable theories, its scanty development of the critical faculty. Its strength lies in other lines of mental activity, in a region of transcendental speculation which does not lead to the making of history.
These general grounds, which any enquirer can verify for himself at the shortest notice, might be thought to justify us in putting aside, as an insoluble and unprofitable conundrum, the much-discussed question of the origin of caste. But the Indian tradition as to the origin of caste is so inextricably mixed up with the most modern developments of the system; its influence is so widely diffused; and it forms so large a part of the working consciousness of the Hindu population of India that it can hardly be left out of account merely because it has no foundation in fact. It is indeed a fact in itself, a belief which has played, and continues to play, a large part in the shaping of Indian society, and whose curious vitality throws an instructive light on the inner workings of the Indian mind. To endeavour to understand the people of India, to enter into their point of view, and realize how things strike them, is the first condition of successful administration. As the work of Government becomes more complex and touches the life of the people at a greater number of points, as new interests spring up and old interests assume novel forms, the stronger is the obligation to know as much as possible of the society which our rule is insensibly but steadily modifying. The study of the facts is therefore essential, and we must take the theories, whether Indian or European, along with them. The search for origins, like the quest of the Sangreal, possesses endless fascination, and if it does not yield any very tangible results, it at least has the merit of encouraging research.
The Indian theory.
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 tenth chapter of that 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 Brahman, the progenitor of the whole world.” Then “for the sake of the prosperity of the worlds, he caused the Brāhmana, the Kshatriya, 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 Brāhman was enjoined to study, teach, sacrifice, and receive alms; the Kshatriya 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 original 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 Kshatriya father and a Sūdra mother is “a being called Ugra, resembling both a Kshatriya 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 Sūdra by a Brāhman woman, 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 Kshatriya 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 Drāvida, while each of these in its turn gives rise to further mazes of hypothetical parentage.
Its historic elements.
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 without further examination as a mere figment of the systematizing intellect of the ingenious Brāhman. Yet, fantastic as it is, it opens indirectly and unconsciously an instructive glimpse of pre-historic 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 Māgadha, Vaideha, Malla, Licchivi, Khasa, Drāviḍa, Śāka, Kirāta, 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, Dāsas, 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 śrāddha† we find physicians; temple-priests; sellers of meat; shopkeepers; usurers; cowherds; actors; singers; oilmen; keepers of gambling houses; sellers of spices; makers of bows and arrows; 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 Buddha. 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 Brahmanical 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.
Its probable origin.
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 to one 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 Baudhāyana and Āpastamba, and it seems probable that for them it was not so much a generalization from observed facts as a traditional theory, derived from still older authorities, 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 Brahmanical 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 Persia.* It is true, no doubt, that the Iranian groups, with the exception of the Athravans or priests, appear not to have been endogamous, and to have observed none of the restrictions on marriage which are so prominent in the Indian system. But we know very little about them, and it is possible that their matrimonial relations may have been governed by the practice of hypergamy which is apt to arise under a regime of classes as distinguished from castes. Let me make my meaning clear. It is not suggested that the Iranian legend of four classes formed part of the stock of tradition that 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 Sūkta, 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 Iranian 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 Brahmanical literary methods, and is in itself no more absurd than the recent attempt on the part of the Arya Samāj to discover in the Rig Veda an anticipation of the discoveries of modern science, and to interpret the horse sacrifice in Sūkta 162 as an allegorical exposition of the properties of heat or electricity.*
The Indian and Iranian classes.
The resemblance between the two schemes is striking enough to suggest that it can hardly be the result of a mere accidental coincidence, but that the Indian theory must have been modelled on the Iranian.† The differences in the categories are trifling, and admit of being accounted for by the fact that India has, 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 artizans 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 has 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 jus 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.
Sir Denzil Ibbetson’s theory.
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 Punjab 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. The picture is an admirable piece of open-air work; it has been drawn on the spot; it is full of local colour; and it breathes throughout the quaint humour of the peasantry of the Punjab, the manliest and most attractive of all the Indian races. 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 I have, therefore, reproduced in Appendix V the greater part of the section dealing with the evolution of caste. The report which I quote has long been out of print, and foreign ethnologists enquire for copies in vain.
“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* of this theory is directed to two points. He demurs, in the first place, to the share which he supposes it to assign to Brahmanical 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. Nesfield’s theory.
Mr. Nesfield* 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. 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 absorbed by the indigenous population as completely as the Portuguese of India have already become absorbed into Indians, so that no observer could now distinguish members of the higher castes from the scavengers who sweep the roads. 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 Mallāhs, and Dhīmars (boatmen and fishermen), the pastoral Ahīrs and Gadariyas, and the great mass of agriculturists, while above these Mr. Nesfield finds in the Chattri 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 Bhangi, the barber (Nāpit or Nāi), 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, and reminds 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 I may observe that a theory which includes in the same categories the Dom and the Teli, the Banjāra and the Khatri, the Bhangi and the Kāyasth must, in the race for acceptance, lose a good deal of ground at the start.
M. Senart’s theory.
After examining the views propounded by Sir Denzil Ibbetson and Mr. Nesfield, and by myself in The 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, φρατρία, φυλή in Greece; and family, gotra, caste in India.* Pursuing the subject into fuller detail, he seeks to show from the records of classical antiquity 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 φρατρία was confined to the offspring of the families belonging to the group. In Rome, the long struggle of the plebeians to obtain the jus 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, foreigners or liberated slaves. Their children, like those of a Sūdra in the Indian system, were condemned to a lower status by reason of the gulf of religion that separated their parents. We read in Manu how the gods disdain the oblations offered by a Sūdra : 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 kanāla 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, on 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 symbolized 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 (περίδειπνον and silicernium) correspond to the srāddha 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 to 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 pāni band karna, 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 were developed 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 to 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 a se circonscrire dans les cloisons étroites de la caste. N’oublions pas qu’ici les immigrants se répandaient sur une aire immense ; les groupements trop vastes étaient condamnés a 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 Brahmanical 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 out, 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 hardly expect to find any tangible indication of it in a literature like that of the hymns.
Caste not merely occupation. The guilds mediaeval Europe.
Before proceeding further 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 in exactly the same way the avocation that is common to them all. Several writers have laid stress on the analogy between Indian caste and the trade guilds of mediæval 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 guild. 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 Brāhūī 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, and who survives, a belated but romantic figure, even at the present day, 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. It seems, indeed, possible that the decadence and sterility of Indian art at the present day may be due in some measure to the trammels by which the caste system has checked its natural growth. A guild may expand and develop ; it gives free play to artistic inspiration ; and it was the union of the guilds that gave birth to the Free Cities of the Middle Age. 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.
Caste under the Roman Empire.
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 and the finances had become disorganized, 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 Sir S. 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.”* 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 caste 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 Sir S. 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. The man who brought the grain of Africa to the public stores at Ostia, the baker who made it into loaves for distribution, the butchers who brought pigs from Samnium, Lucania, or Bruttium, the purveyors of wine and oil, the men who fed the furnaces of the public baths, were bound to their callings from one generation to another. 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 condition.† 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 current 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 sprung 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.
Castes not merely dveloped tribes.
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; and I am informed that the family archives of the Rāja contain an account of the process by which the change was effected. The Bhūmij, 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. This practice has given rise to one of the forms of infanticide and may well have been the cause of the extinction of whole tribes in the early struggle for existence. 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.
The genesis of caste: the basis of fact.
As I have said above, speculation concerning the origin of things is mostly vanity. Sooner or later in the course of our researches into the past we run up against the dead wall of the unknown, which is often also the unknowable. 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 is peculiar to India. Whenever in the history of the world one people has subdued another, whether by active 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 what we have called 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 Commonwealth, where negroes intermarry with negroes, and the various mixed races, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons, each have a sharply restricted jus connubii of their own and are absolutely cut off from legal unions with white races. Similar 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. In each of these cases the facts are well-known. The men of the dominant race took to themselves women of the subject race, and the offspring of these marriages intermarried for the most part only among themselves. The Eurasians of Ceylon, who are known locally as " Burghers," are a notable example of the formation of a caste in the manner here described. During the Dutch occupation of Ceylon (1656—1795) very few Dutch women settled in the island. This fact, combined with the tremendous penalties imposed by the puritanical Dutch laws on the sin of fornication, induced many of the colonists to marry Cingalese women of the higher castes. The descendants of these marriages ranked as Dutch citizens, and very soon crystallized into a caste, disdaining further alliances with the natives and marrying only among themselves. Conscious of their legitimate parentage and proud of a title which recalls their Dutch ancestry, the Burghers of Ceylon now form a distinct and independent class, standing apart from both Europeans and natives, and holding a position far superior to that of the Eurasians in India. 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 Dogras of the Kangra Hills and the Khas of Nepal are believed to be the offspring of alliances between conquering Rajputs and women of more or less Mongoloid descent. In the case of Nepal, Hodgson has described at length the conditions of these unions, which correspond in principle with those of the traditional system of Manu. 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 first made their way into India through Gilgit and Chitral. At starting 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 the distance and partly by the alliances they had con- tracted. 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 jus 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 sailed forth in the same way, and became the founders of the Rajput and pseudo-Rajput houses all over India. In each case complete amalgamation with the inferior race was averted by the fact that the invaders only took women and did not give them. They behaved, in fact, towards the Dravidians whom they conquered in exactly the same way as some planters in America behaved to the African slaves whom they imported. This is a rough statement of what may be taken 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 distinctions 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.
The genesis of caste: the influence of fiction.
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 above in the description of the various types of caste 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 sub-division, its acute sense of minute technical distinctions, its pedantic tendency to press a principle to its furthest 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 epics 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 is more natural than that he should be born into an equally immutable caste ?
Summary.
The ethnological conclusions which the foregoing chapters seek 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 49—55. (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 sub-divided into endogamous, exogamous, and hypergamous groups. (6) Of the exogamous groups a large number are totemistic.
It is suggested that both totemism and exogamy are traceable to the general law of natural selection.
(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 certain variations of physical type; secondly, on the development of mixed races from stocks of different colour; and thirdly, on the influence of fiction.
Footnotes
- De Bell. Gall., vi. 17.
- Dill, loc cit., p. 100. [^* At the Census of 1911 Hindus, including Animists, numbered 227 millions (62 per cent. of the whole population); Muhammadans 66½ millions (21.2 per cent.); Buddhists 10¾ millions (3.4 per cent.); Christians 3¾ millions (1.2 per cent.). The percentages of increase since 1901 were for Hindus 5 per cent.; Muhammadans 7 per cent.; Buddhists 13 per cent.; Christians 32 per cent. (Census of India Report, 1911, vol. i., p. 119 et seq.).]
- Report on the Census of the N.-W. P. and Oudh, 1901, by R. Burn, I.C.S., vol. i., p. 91.
- Spiegel, Eranische Alterthumskunde, III, 547—670.
- R. Burn, Census Report of the United Provinces, 1901, vol. i., p. 91. † “There is no probability in the view of Senart or Risley (Imperial Gazetteer of India, I, 336—348), that the names of the old classes were later super-imposed artificially on a system of castes that were different from them in origin. We cannot say that the castes existed before the classes, and that the classes were borrowed by India from Iran, as Risley maintains, ignoring the early Brāhmana evidence for the four Varnas, and treating the transfer as late.” A. A. Macdonald, A. B. Keith, A Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, 1912, II, 270.]
- Report on the Census of the Punjab, 1881, pp. 172—341.
- Les Castes dans l’Inde, p. 191.
- Loc. cit., p. 3.