Indian Antiquary Vol 41

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 112

108
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(MAY, 1917
caste, and new small divisions evolved under the influence of profession.17 But how many other factors have, in a similar way, exercised the like action ?
There exist in certain Slavonic countries, in Russia and elsewhere, 18 or at least, there were existing still at a recent date--village-communities exclusively given to a single professionvillages of shoe-makers and villages of blacksmiths, or leather-dressers, communities of joiners and potters, even of bird-catchers and beggars. Now, these villages are not assemblies of artisans wiro have melted into a community, but communities that exercise the same industry. It is not the profession which ends in a grouping, but the grouping which ends in the community of profession that has suggested it. Why should it not be the same in India P
To assign to community of profession its place among the factors that have acted on the destiny of the caste, and to make of it the unique and sufficient source of the regime, are two things. As much as the first proposition is at first probable, the second is inadmissible.
A Hindu, 19 a judge who has the living sense aud familiar practice of the situation, Guru Prashad Sen, in trying to som up the permanent features of the caste, has been able completely to neglect profession. Where shall we look for the essence of caste, unless in the rules, the absolute maintenance of which sucures its perpetuity, the infringement of which, even if it be light, entails loss of caste for the individual and dissolution for the group? These rules have no connection with the profession, or only an indirect one through the medium of scruples of purity. The soul of the caste is elsewhere.
III.-Race as the Foundation of Caste. This soul of caste, Mr. Risley is seeking in the race, in the oppositions that arise from racial diversity; he is thus in direct contradiction with Mr. Nesfield. To believe him, the actual hierarchy would be the social consecration of the ethnographical scale, from the Aryans that remained pure in their highest castes down to the hamblest aborigines that are penned up in the low castes. Tbis time race is substituted for profession as the generative principle. «The nasal index" is the formula for the proportions of the nose; this, it appears, is the most certain eriterion of the race. Mr. Risley ends with this affirmation which looks strange, apparently, at least: "It is scarcely an exaggeration to set down as a law of the organization of the castes in the East-Indies that the social rank of a man varies, in the inverze ratio of the size of his nose."20 Who would not remain a little sceptical?
I do not pride myself to discuss the measurements and classifications of Mr. Risley. At least it must be confessed that up to the present the theories wbinh have pretended to outline the ethnographical situation in India, have 3unk into the quicksands of inextricable contradictions and difficulties. This is quite enough to set the ignorant at defiance. So perfect a harmony, there being given the deep and very accidental mixtures of so many elements, and Mr. Risley admits them himself, would really be marvellous. Mr. Nesfield is no less decisive on the rigorous concordance which he discovers between the social rank and the supposed series of industrial evolution. By what miracle would the two principles, sprang from absolutely different sources, fit together so perfectly? I let them grapple with each other. I can do so the better, since neither the one nor the other, in the theory of their able advocates, really bears upon the fundamental question ; they touch less the origin of the castes than the rule of their hierarchy.
Alleging as an authority the ancient use of the word varna and the signification which is ugnally assigned to it in the more modern classical language, Mr. Risley sees in the inborn oppositio between the conquering and the conquered--the white and the black,race-the germ of a distinction » Nosfield, $ 158-9.
11 Hearn, Aryan Housshold, pp. 241-2. 11 Calcutta Revieto, Joly 1890, p. 49 n.
26 Risley, Ethnograph. Glost, P. Liv.