Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

258. Indian Caste and Religion

Caste is peculiarly Indian. Nowhere else is it so complex, so systematically worked out and endlessly reinforced by ritual and taboo, so pervasive of conduct and thought. It has been ascribed to the conflict of races, to the drawing of a color line by conquerors in order to keep their lineage and culture pure. If so, it has failed egregiously, as the physical anthropology of modern India shows. The explanation is obviously inadequate. Castes do represent race to a certain extent, but they also represent nationalities, tribes, common residence, religious distinctness, occupations, cultural status. Whatever sets off a group in any way may be sufficient to make it a caste in India. If groups diverge within an established caste, they become recognized as sub-castes, perhaps finally to develop into wholly separate castes. Priests, nobles, clerks, fishermen, street-sweepers are castes; so are the Parsis; so are hill tribes that maintain their primitive customs—the Dravidian Todas for instance are reckoned a high caste. Clearly we have here a generic system, a pattern of organizing society, into which every sort of group as it actually forms is fitted. Caste is a way of thought which the Hindu has tried to universalize.

All Indian castes are in theory strictly endogamous: intermarriage is intolerable. All possess an intrinsic, unchangeable worth. Thus they automatically rank themselves. Each possesses an occupation, a mode of life and customs, a set of prescribed rituals, inherently peculiar to it. The greater the restrictions and prohibitions incumbent upon it, the less it relaxes to comfort and indifference, and the more spiritual it is, the higher its grade. In consequence it is also the more pollutable, and so its restrictions are drawn the closer. The wider the gap of non-intercourse, of non-contact with lower castes, the greater becomes its purity. Caste observance is thus a virtue, an aid to religion and morality; breaking caste an ultimate indecency; the offspring of inter-caste unions necessarily lower than either parent, and their descendants, unless from matings with their own miserable kind, lower still, in an infinitely descending series. There is no elevating a caste. The very attempt to rise is a vice that brings degradation as a result, since castes are eternal, founded in nature, absolute, so that alteration is of necessity a sullying.

Such is the Hindu scheme—which in actuality is lived up to in no single point. Perverse as the system seems to men reared in other cultures, it must be admitted to possess completeness, self-consistency, and the desire to preserve inward worth. It differs from the basic assumptions of our civilization in that it sees value as something already existing and therefore to be maintained, not to be created; it tries to fit life into a theoretical pattern; it is futureless. Yet all the facts show that as historical realities castes have changed enormously and are changing now. Obviously therefore each generation ignores the changes last made and repeats its insistence on caste perpetuity and unalterability. Such is the hold of patterns on men’s minds.

The theorizing which the Hindu does about caste is characteristic of him in all cultural manifestations. The relation which can be thought out between one fact or act and others, the compartment to which it can be assigned in a system, are of more interest to him, as compared with the fact itself, than to peoples of other civilizations. Hence philosophy has flourished in India, but native history has been inadequate and disorderly. Hence too the abstract sciences of logic, mathematics, grammar enjoyed an early original development, equal for a long time and in part antecedent to that which they attained in the West. On the other hand the astronomical and still more the physical and biological sciences remained backward: they were concerned with concrete objects. The Hindus seem never to have made a move of their own toward devising a system of writing; but once the Semitic alphabet had been introduced, they modified, expanded, and rearranged it into a more logical scheme, a more consistent one phonetically, than any other people has given it (§ [146]). It is probably no accident that chess and our “Arabic” position numerals with a symbol for zero (§ [109]) are Hindu inventions, and that it is only in India that priests have for age after age been ranked higher than rulers.

It is natural that a culture of such inclinations should exalt the mind and soul above the body. Hence the extraordinary development of asceticism in Indian religion; its deep pessimism as regards life on this earth; its insistence on the superior reality of soul, with which is connected the universal assumption of rebirths; the working out of a system of unescapable moral causality called karma in place of a scheme of mechanical causation; the tendencies toward pantheistic identification of soul and God, or atheistic denial of divinity as distinct from soul; and the thoroughly anti-materialistic bent of almost all Hindu philosophy. It is also intelligible that these qualities should have imparted to Indian religion a superior degree of spiritual intensity which was appreciated by the nations to the north and east when Buddhism was presented to them, and caused them to embrace it.

Like Christianity, however, Buddhism found no permanent favor among the people and in the land of its origin. It flourished in India for a time, but was rarely looked upon as more than a sect; after something over a thousand years it died out completely, except in Ceylon, at the very period that its hold on non-Indian nations to the north and east was strengthening. Its place was taken in India by the miscellaneous assemblage of cults, all theoretically recognizing Brahman ascendancy, that in the aggregate constitute what is known as Hinduism. Hinduism is not a religion in the sense that Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism are “religions.” It recognizes no personal founder, no head or establishment; it tends to exclude foreigners rather than to convert them; it is national instead of universal. It accepts and reinforces the existing institutions of its particular culture: caste, for instance, which Buddhism tried to transcend. Hinduism is therefore comparable to the ancient Greek and early west Asiatic religions in consisting of a series of locally or tribally different cults never integrated or fully harmonized, conscious and tolerant of one another, resting on common assumptions and similar in content, everywhere in accord with tradition and usage, resistive to organization into a larger whole but tied into a certain unity through reflecting a more or less common civilization.

Hinduism is also comparable to Confucianism and Shintoism with this difference. These grew up analogously, but early became associated with the central government or imperial authority, to which India never attained. They gradually became official religions, as which they survive; such religious piety as the population of China and Japan experiences finding its outlet chiefly through Buddhism. Buddhism may be said to have failed in India because it aimed at being a world religion; because it tried to be international instead of national, to overlie all cultures instead of identifying itself with one. The Hindu like the Jew preferred remaining within the limits of his nationality and particular civilization.