Plate IIKÄyasthas—the writer caste(Mirzapur district)
Plate IIKÄyasthas—the writer caste(Mirzapur district)
Plate II
KÄyasthas—the writer caste(Mirzapur district)
It must, of course, be understood, that these types and the names allotted to them merely show that in certain areas the average characteristics of the peoplesdwelling there can be sufficiently separated to be recognisable not only by eye but by the callipers of the anthropologist. The names, it will be noticed, in some cases, imply theories as to the origin of the races thus grouped together. These theories are partly based on measurements, partly on tradition, partly on linguistic considerations. It remains for me to state, very rapidly, what these theories are.
That the Dravidians are the oldest race in India is renderedprimâ facieprobable by the fact that they inhabit the southernmost part of the peninsula, between races who can with some certainty be called invaders—and the deep sea. There is a remarkable uniformity of physical characteristics among the lower specimens of this type. They have in common an animistic religion, their distinctive language, their peculiar stone monuments, and a primitive system of totemism. They do not resemble Europeans on the one hand, or the races of the Far East on the other. Until proof to the contrary is forthcoming they may well be regarded as the autochthones of India.
There is more room for difference of opinion as to the origins of the brilliant and highly civilised Indo-Aryans of the PanjÄb and RÄjputÄnÄ. As I have said before, we have here a population closely resembling that of modern Europe in many respects. I might have added that it still more closely resembles theEurope of the Roman empire. Nowhere else in Hindu India does caste sit so lightly, or approach so nearly to the social classes of Europe. Though there are rules, or rather customs, forbidding intermarriage between different castes, yet these are mitigated by the custom, not unknown to ourselves, ofhypergamy. This simply means that a man may take a wife from a lower caste, but will not give his daughters to men of that caste. The result is a uniformity of physical type found nowhere else in India. Moreover these people speak a language of the Indo-European family, and have many words and idioms in common with ourselves. The present theory of their origin is simply that they are in the bulk immigrants into India, immigrants who came into the land from the north-west with their herds and families, as the Jews entered into and possessed Palestine.
One chief objection to this theory is that the lands through which they must have passed are in no way fitted to be anofficina gentium, being now dry, barren, and all but deserted. But abundant indications remain to show that the climate of South-Eastern Persia and the tracts to the north has changed within comparatively recent times. The relics of crowded populations and ancient civilisations abound in regions now sandy desert, and there is evidence in the tales told by Greek and Chinesetravellers that the PanjÄb itself, most of it comparatively arid, was once well wooded. The theory then is that the homogeneous and handsome population of the PanjÄb and RÄjputÄnÄ represents the almost pure descendants of Aryan settlers, who carried the Indo-European languages now prevailing over Northern India, just as our own emigrants took the English language to America.
But we have also to account for the Aryo-Dravidians who inhabit the sacred "midland" country of Hinduism, and here we have Dr Hoernle's now famous theory, remarkably confirmed by the researches of Sir George Grierson'sLinguistic Survey. This theory supposes that a second swarm of Aryan-speaking people, perhaps driven forward by the change of climate in central Asia, entered India through the high and difficult passes of Gilgit and Chitral, and established themselves in the fertile plains between the Ganges and the Jumna. They followed a route which made it impossible for their women to accompany them. They took to themselves wives from the daughters of dusky Dravidian aborigines. Here, by contact with a different, and in their sentiment, inferior race, caste came into being. Here most of the Vedic hymns were composed. Here, by a blending of imported and indigenous religious ideals, the ritual and usages of Hindu religion came into being, to spread in altered forms east and westand south. The necessity for this second hypothesis is twofold. It accounts for the marked ethnical barrier which separates western from eastern Hindustan. Elsewhere the various types melt imperceptibly into one another. Here alone is a definite racial border line. Again, the theory accounts for the fact that the Vedic hymns contain no description whatever of the earlier Aryan migration, and for the fact that the inhabitants of the middle land always felt a dislike for the early immigrants as men of low culture and barbarous manners. For the present, at all events, and perhaps for all time, Dr Hoernle's ingenious theory holds the field.
No special theory is required to account for the physical and mental qualities of the Mongolo-Dravidians of Bengal. No doubt the original population was Dravidian with a strong intermixture of Tibeto-Burmese blood, especially in the east and north-east. But the Hindu religion, developed in the sacred Midlands round Benares, spread to Bengal, bringing with it the Indo-European speech which in medieval times became the copious and supple Bengali tongue. From the west too came what we in Europe would call the gentry, the priestly and professional castes. These have acquired most of the local physical characters, dusky skin, low stature, round heads. But in nearly all cases, the fineness and sharp outline of the nose shows their aristocratic origin, and insome instances a Bengali BrÄhman has all the physical distinction of a western priest or sage.
When we turn to the Scytho-Dravidian group we have again to fall back on records of ancient invasions from the north. Ancient some of them were, but far less ancient than the settlement of the Aryans in the north-west. The Sakas have provided India with one of its many chronological eras; they founded dynasties which have left coins behind them, they have left vague but widely spread traditions. They were what we Europeans call Scythians. They were known to the Persians, the Parthians, and the Chinese. Their original home seems to have been in the south of China, a land of pre-eminently round-headed races. We know that they established their dominion over portions of the PanjÄb, Sind, GujarÄt, RÄjputÄnÄ and Central India. If they have left traces of their settlement on their descendants we may reasonably expect to find round-headed races and tribes in regions mostly surrounded by long-headed peoples. Such a zone of broad-headed people does in fact extend from the western PanjÄb right through the Deccan, till it finally ends in Coorg. Sir H. H. Risley's theory is that the Scythians first occupied the great grazing country of the western PanjÄb, and finding their progress eastwards blocked by the Indo-Aryans, turned southwards, mingled with the Dravidians, and became the ancestors of the warlikeMarÄtha race. Such an origin forms a tempting explanation of the well-known predatory habits of the MarÄtha hordes, and of their frequent raids all over the peninsula under the decaying administration of the later Mogul Emperors. It is an interesting and fascinating speculation, since it accounts not only for the physical aspect of the MarÄthas but for their characteristic political genius, for their wide-ranging forays, their guerilla warfare, their unscrupulous dealings, their inveterate love of intrigue, their clannish habits.
I must here boldly borrow Sir H. H. Risley's summary of the historical record of Scythian invasions into India, since that is the main justification for his theory. "In the time of the Achaemenian kings of Persia," he says, "the Scythians, who were known to the Chinese as Sse, occupied the regions lying between the lower course of the Sillis or Jaxartes and Lake Balkash. The fragments of early Scythian history which may be collected from classical writers are supplemented by the Chinese annals, which tell us how the Sse, originally located in southern China, occupied Sogdiana and Trans-oxiana at the time of the establishment of the Graeco-Bactrian monarchy. Dislodged from these regions by the Yueh-chi, who had themselves been put to flight by the Huns, the Sse invaded Bactriana, an enterprise in which they were frequently allied withthe Parthians. To this circumstance, Ujfalvy says may be due the resemblance which exists between the Scythian coins of India and those of the Parthian kings. At a later period, the Yueh-chi made a further advance, and drove the Sse or Sakas out of Bactriana, whereupon the latter crossed the Paropamisus and took possession of the country called after them SakastÄn, comprising SegistÄn, Arachosia, and Drangiana. But they were left in possession only for a hundred years, for about 25B.C.the Yueh-chi disturbed them afresh. A body of Scythians then emigrated eastwards, and founded a kingdom in the western portion of the PanjÄb. The route they followed in their advance upon India is uncertain; but to a people of their habits it would seem that a march through Baluchistan would have presented no serious difficulties.
"The Yueh-chi, afterwards known as the Tokhari, were a power in Central Asia and the north-west of India for more than five centuries, from 130B.C.The Hindus called them Sakas and Turushkas, but their kings seem to have known no other dynastic title than that of Kushan. The Chinese annals tell us how Kitolo, chief of the Little Kushans, whose name is identified with the Kidara of the coins, giving way before the incursion of the Ephthalites, crossed the Paropamisus, and founded, in the year 425 of our era, the kingdom of GandhÄra, of which, in the timeof his son, Peshawar became the capital. About the same time, the Ephthalites or Ye-tha-i-li-to of the Chinese annals, driven out of their territory by the Yuan-yuan, started westward, and overran in succession Sogdiana, Khwarizan (Khiva), Bactriana, and finally the north-west portion of India. Their movements reached India in the reign of Skanda Gupta (452-80) and brought about the disruption of the Gupta empire. The Ephthalites were known in India as Huns. The leader of the invasion of India, who succeeded in snatching GandhÄra from the Kushans and established his capital at SÄkala, is called by the Chinese Laelih, and inscriptions enable us to identify him with the original Lakhan UdayÄditya of the coins. His son ToramÄna (490-515) took possession of GujarÄt, RÄjputÄnÄ, and part of the Ganges valley, and in this way the Huns acquired a portion of the ancient Gupta kingdom. ToramÄna's successor, Mihirakula (515-44), eventually succumbed to the combined attack of the Hindu princes of MÄlwÄ and Magadha."
I now come to the ethnography as distinguished from the ethnology of India. Of anthropometry and the lessons to be learnt from it, I have no personal experience, and have had to borrow my materials at second-hand. But with the great system of caste, its workings, its manifold ramifications, everyone who has lived in India has come into more or less closecontact. How important caste is in the social life of the country may be easily inferred from this little fact. I once asked the late Navin Chandra Sen, then the most popular of Bengali poets, if he would attempt a definition of what a Hindu is. After many suggestions, all of which had to be abandoned on closer examination, the poet came to the conclusion that a Hindu is (1) one who is born in India of Indian parents on both sides, and (2) accepts and obeys the rules of caste. Hinduism is, roughly speaking, the religion of the Aryo-Dravidians, the upper and fairer classes among whom regarded the aborigines, matrimonially, much as white Americans regard their negro fellow citizens. It has spread over nearly the whole of India and is still spreading, usually but not always, carrying with it one of the Indo-European languages of India. It is the religion and social system of races and classes which consider themselves intrinsically superior, and practise a traditional kind of eugenics, of race preservation. Humbler or more barbarous races are admitted on various conditions into caste, sometimes into higher, sometimes into lower positions. The process is one of that kind of "legal fiction" with which students of Roman law are familiar. It is a process of unification and, at the same time, of social segregation. I have already alluded to the suggestion that caste-divisions are horizontal, as it were, compared with the geographical divisions ofraces. But it is always dangerous to make general statements about three hundred millions of people scattered over so large an area as India. There are BrÄhmans in every part of India, and these usually trace their origin back to the sacred midland where Hinduism came into being. They may be, and probably are, the descendants of the missionaries by whom the religion of the Hindus is, imperceptibly and without open proselytism, spread abroad. Something corresponding to a warrior caste and a caste of scribes is to be found in most provinces, and many of these either claim to be migrants, or have been admitted by adoption into the privileges of warrior or writer blood.
But there are many castes which are purely local, even in name, and are not found elsewhere than in the places where they were admitted into the Hindu community. Many closely printed pages in the Census Reports of each province and state enumerate and describe the thousands of castes revealed by the numbering of the people. It is, of course, only possible to give a very vague and general idea of some of the classes into which the castes of India may conveniently be divided.
I am tempted here to borrow Sir Herbert Risley's definition of caste. But it is a highly abstract definition, and one that cannot be easily carried in the head, even by those who have a practical and familiaracquaintance with members of Indian castes. Roughly a caste is a group of human beings who may not intermarry, or (usually) eat, with members of any other caste. There are also sub-castes which are also endogamous. Very frequently, especially in the parts of India where caste is already an institution of immemorial antiquity, a caste has allotted to it a profession or occupation.
Before we discuss castes properly so called, it is convenient to speak of the tribes of India, since tribes have a tendency to become castes when they come under the pervasive influence of Hindu social ideas. In the south of India are Dravidian tribes, of which the best example are the tribes of Chota Nagpore. These are divided into a number of exogamous groups or clans, calling themselves by the name of an animal or plant, which may be regarded as their totem. The Khonds of Orissa, who once bore an evil name for their practice of human sacrifices to propitiate the earth-goddess, are divided into fiftygochisor exogamous clans, each of which bears the name of a village, and believes itself to be descended from a common ancestor. Thesegochisare the nearest known approach to the local exogamous tribe which Mr McLennan and the French sociologists believe to be the earliest form of human society.
The Mongoloid tribes of Assam are much of the same kind, but in many cases, as among thehead-hunting Nagas, live at perpetual warfare with one another. In such cases they usually capture their wives in war. It is interesting to note that when population grows too dense for the profitable pursuit of the chase, their principal means of livelihood, such a tribe breaks up into two or more "villages," which immediately begin waging war with one another, which is quite what a French sociologist would expect them to do. I can tell of a case within my own experience in which the headman of a parent village invited the chief of a colony village (his own nephew) to a feast and palaver with his young warriors. The guests were all treacherously put to the sword, as a means of acquiring heads and concubines. I could not get the headman to see that he had been guilty of an atrocious crime. For him, it was lawful strategy. And indeed Naga warfare is merely a series of artfully planned ambushes in which not a few of our own officers perished before we undertook the direct administration of the Naga Hills. Sir H. Risley remarks of this group of tribes that "no very clear traces of totemism have been discovered among them." Subsequent enquiries, however, show that totemistic clans do exist in some of the Assam tribes.