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BAY, 1912.)
THE CASTES IN INDIA
103
much learning sterile. Mr. Sherring has shown us in the caste only the result of the cunning policy of ambitious priests, manufacturing all suew the constitution of the Hinda world and modelling it to their own profit.
The comparison of the Jesuits and their theocratic aims plays, as a rule, a really excessive part in these explanations. We find it even with one of the latest representatives of the philological school. Mr. von Schroeder, at first, does not seem to be inclined to exaggerating the Brahminical system; he feels that the quadruple division into priests, warriors, etc., can only correspond to a distinction of classes. Nevertheless, he derives the castes from them and, above all, from the particular constitution of the Brahmins. If we were to believe him, the regime would be connected with the victorious reaction of Brahmanism against expiring Buddhism. Its formation, therefore, woull thus be bronght down to the period in which there appeared the man in whom that movement, very hypothetical as it is, personifies itself, down to Sankara, the orthodox philosopher of the eighth century.
These are the systems which I shall call traditionalistic. They repeat themselves, transform themselves without a great effort of renewal. However ingenious they may be in some of their parties, their analysis could scarcely be productive of a result. Roth, for inetance, has explained the first progress of the sacerdotal caste by the importance which the purohit, or domestic chaplain of the chieftains acquired little by little. Whilst spreading in the plains of India, the Aryan tribes would split themselves into numerous factions, they would be broken up; by this the royal families would have lost both in power and in authority; they would sink down to the rank of a simple nobility; the Kshatriyas would be the bullion of ancient kings. Their weakness would have created the ompire of the Brahmins. All the views of so excellent and well-informed #mind have their value. But this is of interest only for the history of the classes, not for the genesis of the castes.
To mix up the classes with the castes is, in my opinion, to bring confusion into the whole question, I have given several reasons for it. Class and caste correspond neither in their extent, nor in their characters, nor in their innate tendencies. Each one, even amongst the castes which would be involved in the same class, is clearly distinguished from its relatives; it isolates itself with a roughness which is not softened by the feeling of a higher union. The class serves
political ambitions; the caste obeys narrow scruples, traditional customs, at most certain local influences which have, as a rale, no connection with the interests of the class. Above all, the caste ains at safe-guarding an integrity, the preoccupation of which shows itself suspicious even with the loweet. It is the distant echo of the struggles of classes, which, transmitted by the legend, resounds in the tradition. The two institutions may have become linked together by the reaction of the systems upon the facts ; they are, done the less, essentially independent. "
The hierarchical division of the population into classes is an almost universal fact; the regime of the caste is a phenomenon, that is unique. That Brahminical ambition may have profited by it in order the better to establish its domination, is possible—it is not evident. Theocracy has not for its necessary basis the regime of castes. If theory has mixed up the two orders of ideas this is a secondary fact; we have seen it by the very criticism of the tradition. To understand the historical development, it is necessary to distinguish them carefully, regening, of course, the inquiry how the two notions could finally have been linked together. Priestly speculation bas placed an artificial system between the facts and our vision. Let us be on our guard not to take as the sight the oartain which is hiding it from us.
It may appear very simple to derivo, after the Brahminieal fashion, an infinite number of groups from & successive division of large primitive categories. How is it not seen, that this parcelling . Indimi's Litteratur and Cultur, PP. 102, p. 410.
• Zeitschrift der D. X. G. I, p. 81 Mb
