Indian Antiquary Vol 41

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

Page 139

JUNE, 1912.)
THE CASTES IN INDIA
135
suppression of every family-tie and the renunciation of the world be better expressed ? This is the equivalent of those funeral ceremonies which, as I have said, signalize the exclusion from the caste. And though, what they aim at is, not to overthrow a system which is the very foundation of the national life, but to create, in the interior of this immense circle, a more or less extended group of saints, who escape from the world and break all its ties. For the mass of the adherente, caste subsists uncontested; in a number of cases the new community of faith operates as a lever for the creation of new sections.
We are no longer in those times in which it could be allowed to represent Buddhism or Jainism as attempts of a social reform directed against the regime of the castes.58 The illogical resignation, with which they have submitted to it, shows, on the contrary, how at the period of their foundation, it was deeply rooted in the Hindu conscience, wedded to those beliefs, those elementary notions, as the doctrine of moral merit, of metempsychosis, of final liberation, the inheritance of which they received without protest.
VI.-Goneral Survey, Caste and the Indian Mind. • For a long time it has been believed, on the testimony of Plato and Herodot, that Egypt bad been ruled by the system of castes. This view has now been given up by the best authorized judges. It appears that it is decidedly contradicted by the indigenous monuments. The Greeks, little accustomed to vast hereditary organisms tied together by the privilege of rank, or the community of occapation, could easily exaggerate their importance, or their extent, where they met with their more or less strict types. Up to the present, India alone has shown a universal system of castes, in the sense in which we have stated and defined. At best, one may find elsewhere accidental traces, germs of analogous institutions; they are nowhere generalised, or arranged in a system.
Greece has known, in Lacedaemon and elsewhere, several cases of hereditary functions and trades. Notwithstanding the uncertainties which obscure their interpretation, the names borne by the four Ionian tribes (phyle) of Attica, are really professional names: soldiers, goatherds, artisans. These are assuredly no castes. The example, at least, proves that the Aryau tradition could, under the influence of a favourable situation, incline towards caste. It is good to retain this lesson. A social fact, which sways an immense country, which is wound up with its whole past, has necessarily more than one cause. If we mean to confine it in one single too precise deduction, we are sure to go astray. Currents 80 powerful are formed of numerous afluents. The true explanation, I am convinced of it, must assign its part to each one of the agents, which, one after the other, have been pushed to the front in too systematic and too exclusive a spirit. There have been many other countries in which an immigrant race has found it self in juxtaposition with occupants, whom it has vanquished and dispossessed, and this situation has not given there rise to caste. Other populations have known strong distinctions of class, and caste has remained unknown to them. Theocracy has grown in other grounds also. The regime must therefore in India result from the combined action of several factors. I hope that I have discerned the principal ones. Let us endeavour to take in, with one glance, the epitome of this history.
We take the Aryans at their entry in India. They live under the sway of old law, common to all the branches of the race. They are divided into tribes, clans and families, more or less large; the groups are equally governed by a corporative organization, the general features of which are identical with all, the bond of which is consanguinity more and more
5 Cr. Oldenberg, Le Bouddha, French transl., Ponober, p. 155. f. • Sobomann, Griech. Alterth. ed. 1861, L. p. 327 .