9 May 1916 Collumbia University
(Gist)
The
population of India is a mixture of Aryans, Dravidians, Mongolians and
Scythians. All these stocks of people came into India from various directions
and with various cultures, centuries ago, when they were in a tribal state.
They all in turn elbowed their entry into the country by fighting with their
predecessors, and after a stomachful of it settled down as peaceful neighbours.
Through constant contact and mutual intercourse they evolved a common culture that superseded their distinctive
cultures.
Indian society still savours of the clan
system, even though there are no clans ; and this can be easily seen from the
law of matrimony which centres round the principle of exogamy, for it is not
that Sapindas (blood-kins)
cannot marry, but a arriage even between Sagotras (of the same class) is regarded as a sacrilege.
The problem of Caste, then, ultimately
resolves itself into one of repairing the disparity between the marriageable
units of the two sexes within it.
Thus the superposition of endogamy on
exogamy means the creation of caste.
It will now be seen that the four means
by which numerical disparity between the two sexes is conveniently maintained
are : (1) burning the widow with her deceased husband ; (2) compulsory
widowhood—a milder form of burning ; (3) imposing celibacy on the widower and
(4) wedding him to a girl not yet marriageable.
Complex though it be in its general
working the Hindu Society, even to a superficial observer, presents three
singular uxorial customs, namely : (i) Sati or
the burning of the widow on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband.
(ii) Enforced
widowhood by which a widow is not allowed to remarry.
(iii) Girl
marriage
Sati, enforced widowhood and
girl marriage are customs that were primarily intended to solve the problem
of the surplus man and surplus woman in a caste and to maintain
its endogamy. Strict endogamy could not be preserved without these customs,
while caste without endogamy is a fake.
We shall be well advised to recall at
the outset that the Hindu society, in common with other societies, was composed
of classes and the earliest known are the (1) Brahmins or the priestly class ;
(2) the Kshatriya, or the military class ; (3) the Vaishya, or the merchant
class and (4) the Shudra,or the artisan and menial class. Particular attention
has to be paid to the
fact that this was essentially a class
system, in which individuals, when qualified, could change their class, and
therefore classes did change their personnel. At some time in the history of
the Hindus, the priestly class socially detached itself from the rest of the
body of people and through a closed-door policy became a caste by itself. The
other classes being
subject to the law of social division of
labour underwent differentiation, some into large, others into very minute
groups. The Vaishya and Shudra classes were the original inchoate plasm, which
formed the sources of the numerous castes of today. As the military occupation
does not very easily lend itself to very minute sub-division, the Kshatriya
class could
have differentiated into soldiers and
administrators.
My study of the Caste problem involves
four main points : (1) that in spite of the composite make-up of the Hindu
population, there is a deep cultural unity; (2) that caste is a parcelling into
bits of a larger cultural unit; (3) that there was
one caste to start with and (4) that
classes have become Castes through imitation and excommunication.
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