________________
JUNE, 1912.]
THE CASTES IN INDIA
133
necessary not to forget, that we are here exposed to more than one misunderstanding. The imitation of the Brahminical rules has filtered through even into populations which have, otherwise, remained very barbarous. They show a very strong inclination towards adopting them. Whilst keeping the least orthodox customs, they endeavour to obtain a clergy of Brahmins, which is very much despised for the help it gives them, and very disdainful itself towards its sheep, but the patronage of which they hold in high esteem, in spite of all.55 The Brahminical marriage rite has been implanted even in tribes, which do not call Brahmins to their ceremonies,56 So very low a caste, as the Ramushis, in which the exogamic limit is marked by the totem, has, nevertheless, borrowed from the Brahmins not only its genealogical legend, but also the prohibition of the marriage of widows. To ascribe to the aborigines the fathership of such restrictions is to upset the terms. In the primitive stages organization and custom look ensily alike from one race to the other; the social mechanism is too rudimentary to be much diversified. We have carefully to be on our guard, lest we take late borrowings for an inherited good.
Everything, however, induces us to anticipate that the vicinity, the intermixture of the aborigines bas not been without some influence upon the establishment of the caste, an indirect inflaence it may be, but a strong one. The collision of the Aryans with populations which they despised for their colour and their barbarity, could not but enhance in them the pride of race, strengthen their innate scruples with regard to degrading contacts, double the rigour of the endogamic laws, in a word, favour all the usages and all the inclinations which led to the caste. Among these I want to inclcde that spirit of exclusiveness and hierarchy which crowns the system, and which properly transfers it from the family ground into the social and semi-political domain.
Too numerons to be entirely turned into slaves, the ancient masters of the soil had to submit to the ascendancy of the more gifted conquerors; but even there, where they completely lost their independence, they preserved, in the main, their native organization. Enveloped in a sort of transformation, rather than reduced by a centralized power, they certainly contributed to maintain, in the whole of the country, this so peculiar character of instability and fluctuation. The tribes continued jostling each other, as so many half-autonomous little nationalities. The aboriginal population, thus opposed to the formation of an organised political regime, an enormous obstacle which has never been surmounted; by its examples it served the cause of archaic institutions ; in every way it thus favoured the upkeeping of the social condition under which the conqueror had first pushed on his expansion.
Later on, the mixture of the two races could not but act in the same direction; it lent the strength of habits and of hereditary instincts to these precedents. Did not the old frame become stronger in proportion as the doors of Hinduism opened by and by to a greater number of new-comers ? Although modified into a system of castes under the impulse of special conditions, which I am endeavoaring to set forth, the tribal organism remains in their respective state of culture, a rather natural meeting point for both the conquerors and the conquered.
Nowhere in antiquity have the Aryans shown much taste for the manual professions. The Greeks and the Romans left them to the slaves, or to intermediate classes, freed men and simple domiciled, Settled in villages, that first followed entirely pastoral pursuits, the Aryans were in India still less induced, than elsewhere, to take to manual professions. These had, in general, to remain, the allotment, either of the aborigines or of populations, which their hybrid, or suspected origin, relegated to the same level.
55 Ibbotson, PP. 153-4.
# Ibbetson,
298.
Poona Gazetteer, I. PP. 410, 423.
