Revival: Caste in India (1930)

The Facts and the System

ÉMile Charles Marie Senart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351346221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The aim of this book is to discover in what light the religious and literary tradition of India appears where caste is concerned; including discussions on the present system, the past, and its origins.

PART I

THE PRESENT

Introductory. I. General Ideas. II. Marriage Laws. III. Hereditary Occupations. IV. Intercourse and Impure Contact. V. Various Rules; Religion and Caste. VI. Organization and Jurisdiction. VII. Disintegration and Multiplication of Castes

INTRODUCTORY

WE are all familiar with the word ‘caste’, and although the notion it conveys may be regarded with disfavour, the word itself has come to stay. It was borrowed from the Portuguese casta, which signifies properly ‘breed’.

When they entered into relations with the peoples of the Malabar coast the Portuguese were quick to observe that the Hindus were divided into a great number of exclusive hereditary groups distinguished by their special occupations. They were graded in a sort of hierarchy, the upper groups refraining with superstitious care from all intercourse with those considered more lowly. It was to these sections that the Portuguese gave the name of castes. Eighteen centuries earlier the first Greeks who had established anything approaching close intercourse with India were already struck by this peculiarity. Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus, informed his countrymen that the Hindus were split into ‘divisions’ (μέρη),¹ within which individuals were to some extent confined, being unable themselves to pass or to marry into any other section than that in which they were born, or to choose a profession different from that which had devolved on them by heredity.

The fact, then, is obvious enough; its details and peculiar conditions are much more obscure. To every one, and to the foreigner especially, the private life of the Hindu is veiled in a kind of dignified shyness which is not at all easy to penetrate. The social organism of India, the play of its motive-forces, is, moreover, regulated infinitely more by custom, varying according to locality and baffling in its complexity, than by legal formulae laid down in authentic and easily accessible texts. The books which we are accustomed to regard as collections of laws do not represent rules rigidly enforced in the civil sphere. They are sacerdotal works, and leave undefined a number of interesting points. In many respects they express a certain theological ideal rather than actual statements adapted to meet real conditions.

Already complicated by the conflicting nature of the various facts, the student is therefore more hindered than helped by a legal theory misleading in its precision. Its authority is placed so high that this doctrinal barrier leaves free passage for a very different practice and a great variety of unforeseen developments. Its effects have at all times appeared wavering and uncertain. It is not then to be wondered at that the public mind, misled on so delicate and unfamiliar a subject, has formed certain conclusions which are as generally accepted as they are untrue. The nature of the facts has in consequence been gravely distorted.

The Hindu castes are generally conceived as a political system of inviolable stability, confining the individual to occupations handed down immutably from father to son. However great the personal initiative, it offers no chance of rising in the social scale. One imagined Brahmans who may only consecrate themselves to the religious life and ritual, soldiers who may only be recruited from the warrior class, chiefs who may only be drawn from the royal and military caste—all so arranged that nothing has ever disturbed, or ever can disturb, an order protected from time immemorial. It is thus, I believe, that Hindu society is commonly pictured.

Since the last century there has been abundant speculation on this view of the organization, and the same fixed idea has persisted down to our own times. Men of intelligence, whose pursuits have brought them into constant touch with the facts, have recently, even since the modern progress of comparative law, regarded the caste institution in this light; they denounce in it the deliberate and treacherous scheming of an ambitious class; the origin of social institutions may be discovered in a gratuitous pact.¹ Is it to be wondered at? To do so would be to forget how strong is the power of preconceived ideas coined into current phraseology. Such errors prove at least the difficulty of the question, and it is all the more interesting since it deals with a unique phenomenon—a social order known only in India. Its solution is therefore well worth consideration.

This solution has to-day assumed more importance than ever, but has also become less difficult. The relationship established between the Indo-European languages has brought the Aryan conquerors of India very near to us and aroused our curiosity about them. The affinity which has been revealed little by little between ancient peoples, not only in religious tradition but in the elements of social organization, has strengthened those bonds which were formed at first by a similarity of idiom. From this community of language and customs has there not been a tendency sometimes to draw too sweeping conclusions as to community of race? Certainly the common origin of institutions which, having dominated the past of our remote ancestors, are still evident in our own times, endows the different stages of evolution through which they have passed with a peculiar interest for us, and, if I may venture to say so, with an unusual piquancy.

At first comparison was made between those races whose idioms showed relationship. Curiosity quickly outgrew these bounds and embraced indiscriminately all the various kinds of primitive constitutions. I will not assert that scholarship has not sometimes lost in accuracy what it has gained in breadth. Though rash, these bold voyages of discovery into the unknown have not been altogether fruitless. They have given training in observation and critical insight, which has been of the greatest use to more timid, or, if you will, more prudent, research. During this time documents were accumulating from which we have gained a more complete and precise knowledge of the prevailing conditions in India. The official publications of the vice-regal government enjoy a well-earned reputation. A number of reports based on the last census returns add to statistical data, which are themselves very valuable, accounts and actual memoirs which are no less important. We are obtaining more information at a time when we are becoming better able to profit by it.

The able works of Nesfield and Ibbetson on the North-West Provinces and the Panjab were afterwards supplemented by the researches of Risley on the Tribes and Castes of Bengal. This work, carried out with all the elaboration peculiar to anthropology, finally resulted in a vast ethnographical glossary. In this the author has condensed his comprehensive views together with an infinite number of facts. The care and systematic labour with which he has assembled and checked his scattered information can be imagined. Inspired with a legitimate faith in his great task, he makes an urgent appeal to technical criticism. I do not flatter myself that I can answer that appeal here. I desire merely to make use of some of his ideas and indications. These are primarily concerned with actual facts, and it may perhaps be of interest to consider them from the point of view of archaeology and history, which is my own province.¹

NOTES

¹ The statement by Megasthenes that the number of μέρη was seven certainly rests on a merely superficial knowledge or interpretation of the facts. It is curious that precisely in the north-west of India we still find to-day that subdivision into seven clans is usual in many castes. Does the Greek evidence rest fundamentally on confusion with some such custom? It is curious that Herodotus (II, 164), depicting Egyptian society as divided into castes, also enumerates seven of them. This number varies, however, among more recent authors (cf. Mallet, Les Premiers Établissements des Grecs en Égypte, pp. 410–11).

¹ I could quote numerous examples, but will content myself with referring to Sherring’s article in the Calcutta Review of 1880 on the ‘Natural History of Caste’. It is striking how the pandit Jogendra Chandra Ghosh, in attempting to reply, remains influenced by analogous views, although rejecting them in some particulars.

¹ I should like to mention here the general reports of J. Baines on the census of India in 1891. This vast production, the work of a resourceful and penetrating mind, forms a worthy conclusion to the series of documents of the same order to which I have referred in this study. As it is designed in the first place to summarize and co-ordinate statistical results, it is not of a nature to furnish me with much fresh information bearing upon either the general survey or the historical views which it is my intention to present here.

I. GENERAL IDEAS

WE are inclined, when dealing with social customs foreign to our country and civilization, to judge them by our own standards of conduct; but we must drop this habit when we are discussing India.

Our Western world is enclosed in a network of institutions and laws which leave the least possible margin for the unexpected and for variety and conflict of ideas. India is governed essentially by custom, an authority both tenacious and capricious, and subject to endlessly changing local influences. It is very powerful in its immediate action, and disregards completely the importance of general and dispassionate views. The rule of custom involves complex processes of an unstable and incoherent nature as opposed to those of an ordered simplicity. This springs from the fact that Hindu society, in spite of the years behind it, has down to our own times remained very primitive in type. It has given rise to no state which is comparable even with the narrow government of the cities of antiquity, still less with our modern state. In the absence of all proper political law, the influence, both religious and social, of the Brahmans has found it an easy task, by exercising incessant pressure throughout the centuries, slowly to imprint on the whole a common physiognomy and to reduce below a certain level the most blatant contradictions. It has not effected unity, still less uniformity. It has not even been able to produce national unity, the lack of which is significant and extremely important.

The Aryan penetration has taken place gradually and unequally throughout India. It is doubtful whether, even in the north-west, the influx of the conquering race was great enough to overwhelm or completely to absorb the former populations, which were of different origin. In the south the infiltration came later and was more restricted, so that the non-Āryan races form a substantial element throughout India, even if not the major part of the population. In spite of the uniform veneer spread over the whole by the conquering civilization, certain customs, traditions, and tendencies foreign or contrary to it have therefore survived. Even to-day groups of these ancient populations are entering under our very eyes into the general structure of the vast Brahmanic community.

It will be foreseen what complications and incoherences so active and unstable a mixture is bound to cause, and how these must be taken into account by any one who wishes for a true and vivid picture of the existing conditions. Even the most general facts are subject to an infinity of exceptions. A systematic exposition would be immense, so vast is the ground to be covered, and any summary is necessarily imperfect, and in a sense fallacious, so varied are the aspects of the question. It is not my business to attempt here either one or the other; but it is necessary at least to try to present the proble...