Indian Antiquary Vol 41

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

Page 134

130.
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[JUNE, 1912
feast-days, united their members, may be a remembrance of the family repast; but with all that there exists apparently no continued transmission from one type to the other, no immediate filiation. Nothing in the guilds corresponds to the solid cohesion of a family corporation. They are not only open to every new-comer, if he but falfils the requisite condition, they impose no fetter upon the civil and private life of their members. The resemblances are, in some way, accidental aud fragmentary. It is likely that the repasts at which, in our country districts, even nowadays, the relatives and friends of the departed person meet after a burial, are not without connexion with the funeral repasts of antiquity. What does it matter, if in this long way, the custom bas lost its original meaning ?
Of quite another order is the relationship wbich connects the caste with the ancient system of the family community. There is froin the one to the other a real continuity, a direct transmission of life.
Does this mean that India has simply preserved a primitive type of the Aryan constitution. Sach, assuredly, is not my thought. The premises being the game, if caste could spring from them in India, there sprang up quite a different regime in the classical countries. But caste has remained thoroughly impregnated with notions which fasten it to the Aryan background. How could they fail to expand into an original institution, under the unique conditions in which they happened to be transplanted on the soil of India ? Their physiognomy has been so much altered, as to render the more primitive types at first unrecognizable in the caste; it is, nevertheless, their legitimate heir. But we have done nothing, as long as we have not laid hold of the mechanism which brought about this transformation.
The Vedic hymns are too little explicit on the details of exterior and social life. But, at least, we notice in them, that the Argan population was divided in a number of tribes or peoples (janas), subdivided into clans united by ties of relationship (vigus), which again were broken up into families,
The terminology of the Rig Vela is, in this regard, pretty vague; the general fact is clear.55 Sajáta, i.e., relative, or companion of játi,' of race, appears in the Atharva-Veda to designate the companions of clan (vic). Jana, which assumes a wider signification, reminds us of the Avestie equivalent of clan, the Zantu and of the jati, or the caste. A series of terms, zrú, vrijana, trája, vráta, seem to be synonyins or sub-divisions, it may be, of the clan, or of the people. The Aryan po. pulation, therefore, lived at the time to which the hymns belong, under an organization which was ruled by the traditions of the tribe and of lower or siunilar groupings. Even the variety of the nanies indicates that this organization was rather floating ; hence it was the more pliable to adapt itself to the definite forms into which the circumstauces in India chanced to model then.
It is easy to discern several of the factors, which have contributed, each on its part, to push it into the road on which it has been developed.
The life of the invaders necessarily remained, in the course of their slow conquest, if not noualic, at least very unstable. There are tribes, the wanderings of which we can follow. This mobility was very unfavourable to the organization of a political rule, but very favourable for the maintenance of old institutions. The hazards of local strife, moreover, could not fail to re-act on the condition of the hordes. In many cases they were dielocated.
Whilst guarding the tradition of inherited customs, the fragments were reconstituted under the action of new necessities and of new interests, topographical, or others. The exclusive rigidity of the genealogical bond had thus to suffer some harm. The door was half opened to variable principles of grouping.
60 Cf. Zimmer, Altind, Leben, p. 158 s.