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JUNE, 1912.)
THE CASTES IN INDIA
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now its action is very strong and very steady; it paralyses the exercise of power even in the military aristocracy. The configuration of the country does not create natural nucleuses for concentration ; every boundary there is floating. Pastoral life has long maintained a spirit of severe tradition; no ardent taste for any action impairs it. The vanquished population is numerous ; more repressed, than absorbed, it is slowly invaded by the sacerdotal propaganda rather than subjected by a rude conquest. With some temperaments, it preserves much of its ancient organization, especially there, where it is confined and isolated. By the masses which it interposes, by the example of its very rudimentary institutions, even by the facility with which these institutions are melting into the still rather rudimentary organization of the immigrants, it opposes one obstacle more to the constitution of a true political power. Therefore, there is no beginning of a state.
In this confusion the sacerdotal class alone has preserved a solid esprit de corps ; it alone is in possession of an altogether moral, but very efficacious power. This power it uses to strengthen and to extend its privileges; it further makes use of it to establish some sort of order and of cohesion under its supremacy. It generalises and codifies the state of fact in an ideal system which it is endeavouring to pass as a law, the legal regime of the caste. It amalgamates in the caste the actual situation with the tenacious traditions of the past, when the hierarchy of classes laid the foundations of its power, since then so largely increased.
Sprung from a mixture of arbitrary pretensions and authentic facts, this system becomes, in its turn, a force. Not only the Brahmins carry it as a dogma into the parts of the country, the assimilation of which takes place at a later date ; it, everywhere, is reacting by the ideas upon practice, owing to the immense authority attached to its patrons. The speculative ideal tends to impose itself as the strict rule of duty. But there was too great a distance between the facts and the theory, as that they ever could be brought completely to fit together.
What interests us, is to trace the way, which the institution bas followed in its spontaneous growth. I, therefore, may stop here.
Caste, in my opinion, is the normal prolongation of the ancient Aryan institutions as remodelled by the vicissitudes into wbich they were involved by the new conditions and surroundings they met in India. It would be inexplicable without this traditional basis, as it would be unintelligible without the alloys, that have been mixed with it, without the circumstances that have kneaded it.
I should like to be understood well. I do not pretend to assert, that the regime of castes, as We observe it at present, with the endless sections, so different in nature and cohesion it includes, contains nothing but the logical, purely organical development of primitive Aryan elements only. Groups of varied origin, of variable structure, have entered the caste regime at all time, and still are multiplying in it: clans of invaders, that mark the route of successive conquests; aboriginal tribes come forth late from their wild isolation ; accidental fractionings, citber of proper castes or of similar groups. More still : such mixtures, which, complicated by multiple combinations, gire so disconcerting, so shadowy a physiognomy to the caste of our days, undoubtedly, happened, already quite early. If they have been going on asserting themselves more and more, they have begun from the period, when the regime was forming. I have already said it; I repeat it with a purpose : by condensing a general conclusion in a brief formula, you run the risk of appearing to exaggerate your principle, you run the risk of falsifying a thesis in itself. Just by stretching it to the extreme, be it by an effort to precise too categorically, or by a desire to lay more stress on views, you consider now. I should not wish to be suspected of any such enticement, being strongly op my guard against it.
What I think is this, that the Aryans of India, whatever influences they may have undergone from outside, whatever troubles the hazards of history may have brought with them, have drawn
