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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[JUNE, 1912.
It is here that the religious ideas intervene.
Scruples of purity did not allow the inhabitants of the Aryar villages to parede certain professions nor even to receive, in their communion, compatriots who were pursuing them. Amongst these excluded, the same nieeties, establishing a scale of impurity between different trades, were tending to multiply the partitions. The religious sentiment made them the more insuperable, the more carefully it was fostered. The Brahminic theocracy provided this with an energy and & perseverance that are unique. In admitting that the priestly class, at first, has not established the absolute formulas of its dominion without some protest, it certainly has early laid their foundation. From the highest periods of literature its pretensions are set forth in exalted terios.
The hierarchy of the classes could not create all-anew the regime of the castes, - this is derived from a more spontaneous division and corresponds to a partition into much smaller groups-it could belp it on. It had given the example and spread the custoun of a division, which, if larger, was in certain respeets, scarcely less rigid. It had, especially, two indirect consequences : by the domination which it granted to the Brahmins, it preserved for religious scraples & rigidity which re-echoed in the severity of the caste rules; it served as a basis to that hierarchy which has become an integral part of the system and facilitated its establishment by lending singular strength to the notions of pority wbich, on the whole, state the degrees of social rank.
If the triumphant theocracy fixed the regime of the caste in its systematic form, the caste borrowed its cause of existence and the mechanism of its genesis directly from the very elements in which this theocracy itself originated. Thus the scale of eastes, determined, or at least inspired by the Brahmins and maintained by them, could take the place of the more ancient state; the less preciso organization of the classes was absorbed into the new regime.
In classical antiquity the slow fusion of the classes is, at the same time, the stimulant and the result of the civil and political idea which is springing up. In India the theocratic power puts * stop to any such evolution. India has risen neither to the idea of the state, nor to the idea of the fatherland. Instead of extending, the frame is contracting. In the republics of antiquity the notion of classes has a tendency to melt into the wider idea of the city; in India it asserts and tends to confine itself in the narrow partitions of the caste. Let us not forget that the Aryan immigrants were spreading in India over an immense area; groupings too widely scattered were doomed to crumble. From this circumstance the particularistic inclinations were drawing an increase of strength.
I cannot persuade myself that the caste has sprang from the antoohthonous tribe. Its regmes has been too keenly patronised by the Brahmins ; they raised it to the height of a dogma. To all its constituent elements the other Aryan branches offer striking analogies, some of them all the more decisive, as the similarity is not so prominent in the outward aspect as in the affinity of leading ideas. When aboriginal tribes enter the Brahminical frame, and however apt their rather unsettled organization might make them to fit new exigencies, we see how they are forced in the passage, to submit to many a touching-up. For a long time they keep their mark of origin. One may discern persevering in the more than one element of foreign origin, which is a little jurring on the whole, for instance, the clans with a totem. How can we believe that the Brahmins should have borrowed from the vanquished population for whom they never ceased to manifest the most humiliating contempt, the complicated rules of purity in the name of which they show themselves so particular both as to food and as to personal interconrse ? That they should have so willingly appropriated a social organization not spontaneously sprung from traditions of their own ?
It, sometimes, has been too easily granted that the natives were by themselves in posses sion of this whole system. They could, by origin, possess certain of its features; still it is
04 Nesfield, 41B9.
