THE FORMATION OF THE CASTES IN INDIA

B.C. 1200

GUSTAVE LE BON[23] W.W.  HUNTER

The institution of caste was not peculiar to India.  In Rome there was a long struggle over the connubium.  Among the Greeks the right of commensality, or eating together, was restricted.  In fact, the phenomena of caste are world-wide in their extent.  In India the priests and nobles contended for the first place.  India had progressed along the line of ethnic evolution from a loose confederacy of tribes into several nations, ruled by kings and priests, and the iron fetters of caste were becoming more rigidly welded.  At first the father of the family was the priest.  Then the chiefs and sages took the office of spiritual guide, and conducted the sacrifices.  As writing was unknown, the liturgies were learned by heart, and handed down in families.  The exclusive knowledge of the ancient hymns became hereditary, as it were.  The ministrants increased in number, and thus sprang up the powerful priestly caste.

     [Footnote 23:  Translated from the French by Chauncey C.
     Starkweather.]

Then the warrior class arose and grew strong in numbers and power, becoming differentiated from the agriculturists, and forming the military caste.  The husbandmen drifted into another caste, and the three orders were rigidly separated by a cessation of intermarriage.

At the bottom came the Sudras, or slave bands, the servile dregs of the population.  In course of time, from various influences, the third class became almost eliminated in many provinces.  From the cradle to the grave these cruel barriers still intervene between the strata of the people, relentless as fate and insurmountable as death.

GUSTAVE LE BON

In ancient times the power of kings [in India] was only nominal.  In the Aryan village, forming a little republic, the chief, bearing the name of rajah, was secure in his fortress, exercising full sway.  Such was the political system prevailing in India through all the ages, and which has always been respected by the conquerors, whoever they might be.  So, for so many centuries back we see arise the first elements of an organization which still endures.

We find here also the beginnings of that system of castes, which, at first indistinct and floating, when the classes sought only to be distinguished from each other, was to become so rigid, when it was constituted under the influence of ethnological reasons, as to dig fathomless abysses between the races.

In the Vedas may be traced the progression of the distance between the priests and the warriors, at first slight, and then increasing more and more.  The division of functions did not stop there.  While the sacrificing priest was consecrating himself more exclusively day by day to the accomplishment of the sacred rites and to the composition of hymns; while the warrior passed his days in adventurous expeditions or daring feats, what would have become of the land and what would it have produced if others had not applied themselves without ceasing, to cultivate it?  A third class became distinct, the agriculturists.