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JUNE, 1912.)
THE CASTES IN INDIA
131
The population in the East has rarely that degree of fixity to which we have been accustomed by the experience of the West. In this matter the absence of a strongly established state is in succession cause and effect. India has preserved, down to our days, something of this mobility. At all times, towns have been an exception there. It is natural that we scarcely get traces of them in an ancient period. Even later the large capitals which were founded in India, had no strong roots; they have often lived an ephemeral existence.
The village, the grame, from the Vedic hymns down to this time, has been almost the only framework of Hindu life. As it appears in the hymns, it is rather pastoral, than agricultural. Synonyms, as vrijana, which cannot be separated from vraja,' pasturage,' conjure up the same images. And likewise gotra. The word is not used in the Rig Vedr, except in its etymological sense of stable'. If yet we find it afterwards regularly denoting the eponym clan, this use is, withont doubt, ancient. The Rig Veda makes no allusion to it; this simply proves once more what, perilous illusion it is to draw positive conclusions from the silence of the hymns. This application of the word, however, is only justified by an intermediate stage. Very near to rrijana by its primitive meaning, it must have passed through an analogons evolution ; it, too. must have been a synonym, at least an approximate one, of grama or village.
The Hindu village has an altogether autonomous life. In several countries, it is actually a corporation, and its territory common property : an organization which has given rise to frequent parallels with the village communities of the Slays. Some have been led to look upon the village as the equivalent of the primitive clan; under a more fixed form it would have perpetuated the community of blood, the community of goods and jurisdiction. I do not decide, whether the village communities are of ancient origin everywhere in India, whether they have not in many cases and under the sway of special conditions accidentally reconstructed a primitive social type. They, at lenst, are witness to a powerful tradition of corporative life. Similarly, there reigns over a vast region, the system of those family communities (joint family), where several generations remain gronped without division and under a patriarchal authority. The Indian mind is stubbornly conservative of old institations. This is not all. I have spoken of those Russian villages, where the community of property and the living together on the same soil have had as their result the professional community. The same fact has happened in India, too. This cannot be doubted, when we think of the numerous villages of potmakers, of leather-dressers, of smiths, to which literature, especially Buddhist literature, makes so frequent allusions. The community of profession could the better propagate in this way, if a bond of consanguinity originally united the members of the village. Now Brahmin villages are always mentioned. Parentage, thertfore, influenced the groupings, at least often; for, certainly for the Brahmins, parentage was the essential tie, not identity of profession; they lived far less on their ritual functions, than on agricultural and, especially, pastoral industry. This does not stand in the way that their example should nevertheless, through a superficial analogy, favour round them the community of profession in less noble and less respected groups.
The mass of Aryan immigrants, therefore, settled in closed villages, ruled more or less. by A notion of real or supposed parentage, in any case forming a corporation in which the clan survived in a modified frame. The more general this organization was, the more, also, was it sure to countenance an equivalent constitution for the bodies of the tradesmen themselves. Little numerous and little specialised in the pastoral life, these were called to a necessary growth by the economical development and the advance of culture. The representatives of the mechanie professions, necessarily scattered amongst the people who claimed their services, could not, in the midst of a universally corporative organization, be assured of a tolerable existence, unless adapting themselves to the common type.
