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NOVEMBER, 1920)
ON THE HISTORY OF THE INDIAN CASTE-SYSTEM
213
qualified Aryans 13 But what a long stride it would be from the formation, on the one hand, of groups of this kind, which to all appearance extended over the whole sphere of culture under discussion, to the breaking up, on the other hand, of the entire people, and in the third place, of the three great Aryan castes, into those multitudes of small locally circumscribed bodies? As regards the offspring of mixed marriages, it has to be taken into consideration that they, through continued marriages inside one of the varņas which lay at the foundation of the mixture, got back, after & certain number of generations, into that parna;14 certainly no intimation this that the children of such mixed marriages formed among themselves a particularly close and compact community.
And lastly the Vratyas. If the offspring of the Brahmara, the Kshatriya or the Vaišya could lose their caste through the neglect of certain sacred duties, then does the existence, I might ask, of such a detritus as may fall off from those great castes, entitie us to conceive of the main bodies of those castes in a totally different way from what the tradition indicates ? Nothing more natural, than that the actual circumstances in the course of time obliterated the old simplicity of that threefold division where, so to speak, on the border of the structure new formations were annexed to the old stock and hero, beside the actual facts, the Indian passion for theorising has also played its part without question, as Senart so strikingly delineates : however, it is one thing to set in their proper places individual supplements of the ancient structure which annex themselves naturally to it as it progresses, which even grow out of it,--and it is something different to attribute to the entire organisation a new inner structure fundamentally different from the old one.
Moreover, the direct tradition which is comparatively abundant, especially with regard to the Brahman class, has preserved concrete materials that may furnish a means of estimating the worth of the great Senartian transformation of our fundamental principle. Senart would substitute numerous Brahman castes for & single Brahman caste. Now traditions, of which the authenticity is hardly questioned, enable us to find out with tho greatest precision the sections into which the Brahman caste really broke up in ancient times. They inform us about the system of the marriage regulations depending upon these class fications, about the endogamous and exogamous circles which had to be taken into account, about the marriage of the Brâhmaņas. Where is then Senart's dismemberment of the grest classes into crowds of endogamous castes !
Any one who takes into consideration the ethnological standpoint here referred to will naturally only find that the warņas were separated from one another by barriers of the connubium, by rules about cleanness and so forth.15 No lese natural is it that the modern castes should obey a multitude of similar regulations, certainly in part as an inheritance
13 Cf. Indische Studien X, 12 fg.
u Gautama IV, 22, eto. 15 Is, however, may I ask in pussing, othnology accepted, in the opinion of Senart, as a probable explanation about the origin of these barriers and limitations 1 The endogany of the Indian caste is said to be based upon the "Aryan conception of marriage," upon the community of sacrifice of the
sacrificing couple attached to the fire-altar of the family." I believe, that he who follows up the study of the whole range of the conception of eudogamy, throughout the full course of its development, will be led by this study to much remoter origins which have to be measured with the logio of the savage and not with that of the Aryan. Similarly I differ from Senart (212) with regard to the prohibition of interdining with persous of another caste and of taking food prepared by personsul a lower caste. To Sebart this 18 "on of the bizarre usages that take us by surprise;" it is explained, he thinks, by the Aryan conception of
