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The Jaina Philosophy considered an honor, and yet of all outcastes the European is the worst, as he asserts his right to eat both beef and pork. Thus, professors of different castes mingle in social life without any unpleasant friction: each man respects his neighbour; he has no wish, indeed, to intermarry with the family of his neighbour, or share the cup and platter of his neighbours but he does not consider himself in the least superior or inferior.
In one sense, and in one sense only, caste may be said to be religious. All that remains to the non-Mahometan population of the religious idea and instinct, has centuries ago shrunk into the notion of caste, just as in Europe in the Middle Ages, all that to many men remained of religion, was a keen sense of personal honor. Now, both caste and honor restrain a man's actions from what is contrary to the rules of brotherhood, is dishonorable, and often from crime, in a way, in which nothing else will restrain them, and in that sense caste and honor may be said to be religious sanctions, but in no other. No wise legislator would venture to do aught to weaken such sanctions, the existence of which marks a certain progress in civilization, until other higher sanctions have been substituted.
With all my recollections of valued friends left behind me in India, whose features live in memory and whose portraits in some cases decorate my walls it is amazing to me to hear on my return to England that this good, easy going people, amiable and ignorant, tolerant and docile, accommodating and affectionate, is, in the opinion of wise and good men, "enslaved by a custom which annihilates fellow feeling and eats out human sympathy, and makes one portion of the community slaves to the other." I could multiply quotations of this kind, but it is not my object to aggravate this difficulty, but rather to compose it. I cannot see, that caste is an evil of the kind and degree, which it is imagined by many good men to be. In an exaggerated and self-asserting form it would
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