The early Kolarian culture seems preserved in considerable degree among the modern Kolarians, who are backward hill or forest tribes, that is, internally peripheral to the prevalent higher civilization. At any rate, their culture resembles that of many less advanced populations to the east, well out into Oceania. This presumably ancient and partly surviving “Indo-Oceanic” culture is discussed below (§ [262]). As regards its history within India, this is almost certain: the old culture is nowhere any longer pure, but has regularly absorbed elements of the advanced civilization that surrounds it; and conversely has contributed to the latter. For instance, one of the great recognized cults of India is Sivaism, which tends frequently to bloodiness and obscenity and is a strange mixture of philosophical rationalization and crass superstition. One of the most frequent attributes of Siva is a necklace of skulls; a feature that looks as if it might go back to the skull cult which is a typical ingredient of Indo-Oceanic culture.
The old Dravidian culture was probably more advanced than the Kolarian but is more difficult to reconstruct because of its extensive blending with the culture brought in or developed by Indo-Europeans. The Dravidians, perhaps because they were the more advanced and populous, were able to accept the intrusive culture and yet maintain themselves, whereas the Kolarians either preserved themselves by resisting civilization or had their speech and identity absorbed by it. When the Dravidians first begin to creep into history, shortly before the Christian era, they already possess cities, kingdoms, commerce, writing, and philosophy. They have on the whole contributed less to Indian civilization than the Indo-Europeans: its center always lay in the north; but they have long formed an integral part of it.
The Indo-Europeans are first known to us from their religious hymns, the Vedas, which have been preserved as sacrosanct by succeeding ages, and constitute the oldest continuously transmitted documents in history. They date from 2000 or 1500 to not after 1000 B.C., and are in Sanskrit, which is fairly close to Avestan or Old Persian, the two languages and their descendants constituting the Indo-Iranian or proper Aryan branch of Indo-European. When Indo-European as a whole is designated as Aryan, it is by an extension of the term. The region of India to which the Vedas almost wholly refer is the Indus drainage, that is the northwest, the parts adjoining the Iranian highland, whence the invaders came or through which they passed.
Vedic Aryan culture was of late Bronze Age type. Whether the bronze was really such, or copper, it is mentioned more frequently than iron, as in Homer and the older books of the Bible. Grains, cattle, horses, chariots and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. The temples and writing, walled towns and kingdoms, district gods and royal tombs of Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Minoan Greece are wanting. The picture is that of the first historic Indo-Europeans elsewhere, in eastern and central Europe; with whom the Aryans undoubtedly were or had been in connection through the countries north of the Black and Caspian seas.
A few centuries after the Vedas, the culture depicted by the literary remains is profoundly altered. The scene has shifted to the Ganges valley. There are cities and palaces, wealth and pomp. There are kings, priests, townsmen, peasants, hermits and ascetics. Caste is in vogue. Cotton and rice are in use. There is a deal of philosophizing; life appears complex and difficult; pessimism is abroad, soul rebirth taken for granted, spirituality emphasized. Concepts to which western science later returned, the atom and ether, are familiar. In all essentials, post-Christian Hinduism had been blocked out in this pre-Christian period. Only a few elements like money and writing are lacking.
This change from the Vedic age is not fully accounted for, and the time usually allowed for its occurrence is insufficient. Buddha was born B.C. 563 or 557. His religion assumes ideas which are part of the Sankhya philosophy—in many ways the subtlest philosophy of all India and one of the great thought systematizations of the world. Its founder Kapila is placed about 600 B.C., and must have had predecessors. Caste seems a thing of development. It is absent in the Vedas, but Buddhism is already in a measure a protest against it. It seems difficult to squeeze such growths into a few hundred years. It is true that the florescence of Greece came with a rush; but Greek civilization rose from the debris of the older Minoan one and was in contact with the cultures of Asia. In India there is no sign of an antecedent high civilization, and a greater dearth of known foreign influences between 1000 and 600 B.C. than at any other period. The transposition of the cultural center eastward must enter into the problem. Perhaps a larger and wealthier pre-Aryan population was encountered by the Aryans along the Ganges, contact and mixture with whom proved provocative of innovation. Or possibly the movement and development in the east began while the Vedas were still being composed along the Indus, and were ignored by them. Or, conceivably, the Aryans on the Ganges may have been the first comers, who quickly altered in the direction of their future civilization but remained obscure to our vision during the period in which the Vedas were being made or retained by the later comers of the Punjab, in whose memories and sub-arid environment their former steppe culture remained more unmodified. These are only speculations: they emphasize the gap in our understanding of this important chapter of world culture history.
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.