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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
NOVEMBER, 1920
occupations which a Brøhman could follow and so forth, which show that that simplicity is only artificial, the society being in reality under the domination of a complicated tangle of many castes, as at the present day.10
We begin, on our part, with the last of the points alluded to. When the Brâhmars are asserted by Manu to be the followers of quite diverse professions some of which were hardly honourable, does it follow therefrom that--as Senart concludes (p. 139) - that one should rather have to speak of innumerable Brahmanical castes instead of one oaste of Brahmans ? Quite certainly, beside the Brahmaņas who performed sacrifices and upon whom Veda-study was incumbert, there were, in fact, also such as maintained themselves, for example, by the butcher's trade or by theft. About them Maru seys, that they are unworthy of being invited to funeral feasts. Are we to hold that the ancient texts here disclose the existence of a special caste-or rather, perhaps, local seperete castes of thief-Brahmans, butcherBrahmans, etc., who had their chiefs and councils, who married only among themselves and so forth ? It is, I suppose, clear that there are here two quite different things, the one namely, to state as a fact certain interesting, as well as intelligible devictions in actual life from the ideals of Brahmanical life-and, on the other hand, to discover out of such data the existence of those positive structures that belong peculiarly to the modern times, but which are by no means betrayed in those alleged traces as belonging to antiquity.
Further, the theory of the mixed castes. When by a particular admixture a Vaideha, a Mâgadha, and by others a Chandála or Nishada, is said to have been produced, then everyone naturally sees that here the origin within the caste-system of non-Aryan as also of remote, less important Aryan peoples or tribes depends upon purely fictitious methods. How could these tribal communities standing in different degrees of remoteness outside the fully recognised sphere of cult and culture prove anything at all-ard upon this indeed everything depends--in favour of the contention that inside the bounds of this sphere itself there predominated such an intricacy of innumerable castes as Senart has taken to be the groundwork of the modern conditions? And those few other so-called 11 mixed castes which appear in the law-books and which bear the names of their occupations, such as the Rathakara, -what do they prove? I think only this that outside the fully qualified people of the three Aryan Varaas, be it amongst the non-Aryans, or be it amongst Aryans of no unobjectionable origin, there existed individual groups amongst whom people of & particular extraction had associated themselves more or less closely with one of the distinguished professions which were more or less hereditary ;12 amongst these groups we see that that of the Rathakâras-while their pure Aryan descent was denied, yet perhaps in consequence of the respect which was enjoyed by their craft-possessed privileges of a sacred character by virtue of which they were brought nearer to the position of the fully
10 The name of these true castes in the law books, as against the four great varme, is said to have been játi (p. 155). It is true that varya is used regularly as the technical expreesion for the four great divisions, the dominating categories of the entire system, and only exceptionally for the mixed castes (Jolly, ZDMG., 50, 518). It is therefore but natural that the mixed castes that were founded upon birth and did not represent any varyas, were designated by preference as jdt. However, it does not mean that this term corresponded, as against varsa, to the "true castes such as we see living and moving," and I could not discover any trace of this. About the use of jati in the PAli texts, of. Fick, 22.
u It is liable to question whether the tracing back of these castes to certain admixtures is to be taken seriously, as in the case of the Magadbs etc.— I refer here to p. 282 below, note 4, on the caste admixtures alluded to in Buddhist literature.
11 The way it happened may have been, as surmised by Fiok (Die Sociale Gliederung etc. 800, fl.), viz., that the Indian Aryans pushed hard upon an autochthonous tribe, who pobeorsed special skill in concle building and so forth, and was consequently employed by the conquerors for this craft.
