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THE CASTES IN INDIA
111
MAY, 1912]
so really primitive, under this form of gotra, that it is anterior to caste, it extends beyond the caste-frame, the same gotras go through a number of different castes. The regime of the caste, therefore, has been super-added to it. The two institutions have been melted together as well as possible; they in no way belong necessarily together. This is exactly what happened at Athens, when the establishment of demos' assigned to different districts families which belonged to one gens, to one single genos.
The endogamic law, however, strikes us most, the law which only authorizes a union between betrothed of the same caste. It is hardly. less spread than the exogamic law in the primitive phases of human societies. It has left very apparent traces far beyond the range of Aryan peoples; it is linked with a whole array of facts and sentiments that reveal its origin.
At Athens at the time of Demosthenes, it was necessary, in order to belong to a phratry (phratria), to be born of a legitimate marriage in one of the families which made it up. In Greece, at Rome, in Germany, the laws, or the customs grant the sanction of the legal marriage only to a union contracted with a woman of equal rank, who is a free citizen.26
Everybody has present in his mind the struggle which for centuries the plebeians bad to maintain at Rome in order to conquer the jus connulii, the right of marrying women of patrician rank.. It is currently taken for a political conflict between rival classes. It means quite another thing. It is not merely from pride of nobility, but in the name of a sacred right, that the patrician gentes, being of pure race and having remained faithful to the integrity of the ancient religion, rejected the alliance of impure plebeians who were of mixed origin and destitute of family rites. The patricians were guided by the same principle which, in a new frame, inspires to-day the endogamic law of caste. But in India, under the regime of caste, it is always aggravating itself and narrowing the avenues; the strife of classes at Rome, under a political regime, lowers the barriers; it soon. widens the circle to the whole category of citizens without further distinction. At this point and even in so opposed conditions, analogy continues in curious prolongations. The connubium goes beyond the city; it is granted successively to several friendly populations. Is this not, in the main, the exact counterpart of what happens in India, when sections of caste accept or refuse marriage with other sections? when this circle varies, according to localities and circumstances, with a facility which seems to ruin the rigour of the general precept? A late parallelism which, in two currents, else so divergent as the Hindu caste and the Roman city, seems to attest the kinship of the origins.
Even in theory, a man of higher caste may marry women even of the lowest caste. It was not otherwise at Rome, or at Athens. The duty or marrying a woman of equal rank, did not exclude their unions with women of an inferior stock, strangers, or freed women. Quite similar is in the Hindu family the case of a Sûdra woman. Excluded by the theory, she is not excluded in the practice, but she cannot give birth to children that are the equals of their father. We know, why. On both sides there is between husband and wife, an insuperable obstacle-the religious inequality. offering prepared by a Sûdra. In Rome the sufficient to give offence to the gods.29 The the race, which, by the investiture with the And if it is permitted to higher castes to marry
According to Manu 7 the gods do not eat the presence of a stranger at a sacrifice of the gens was Sudra woman is a stranger; she does not belong to sacred thread, is born to the fulness of religious life. a Sûdra woman at the side of the legitimate wife who possesses the full right, the union must be celebrated without the hallowed prayers, 20 In the Aryan conception of marriage, husband and wife form the sacrificing couple attached to the family altar of the hearth. Upon this common conception the endogamy of the Hindu caste rests ultimately just as the limitations imposed on the classical family.
26 Cf. Hearn, l. c., pp. 156-7.
Fustel de Coulanges, La cité Antique, p. 117.
27 III, 18. 29 Ind. Stud., X., p. 21.
