This certainly may be asserted, that the modern Hindus are being familiarised as never before with non-brahman leaders, religious and social. Neither of the recent Brāhma (Theistic) leaders, the late Keshub Chunder Sen and the late Protap Chunder Mozumdar, was brahman by caste. The great Bombay reformer, the Parsee, Malabari, is not even a Hindu. The founder of the Arya sect, the late Dyanand Saraswati, was out of caste altogether, being the son of a brahman father and a low-caste mother. The late Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Dutt, B.A.), who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, was not a brahman, as his real surname plainly declares. While, most wonderful of all, the accepted leaders of the pro-Hindu Theosophists, champions of Hinduism more
Hindu than the Hindus, after whom the educated Hindus flock, are not even Indians; alas, they belong, the most prominent of them, to the inferior female sex! I mean the Russian lady, the late Madame Blavatsky, the English ladies Mrs. Annie Besant and Miss Noble [Sister Nivedita], and the American, Colonel Olcott. Which side of that glaring incongruity is to give way—brahman and caste ideas, or the buttressing of caste ideas by outcastes, Feringees, like Mrs. Besant? It would be interesting to hear an orthodox brahman upon Mrs. Besant's claim to have had a previous Hindu existence as a Sanscrit pandit. What sin did the pandit commit, would be his natural reflection, that he was born again a Feringee, and a woman?
Unpardonable offences.
But the offence of the fifth sin, marrying below one's caste, or the marriage of widows, seems as rank as ever. Upon these points, rather, the force of caste seems concentrating. The marriage of widows will be considered when we come to discuss the social inferiority of woman in India. To marry within one's caste promises to be the most persistent of all the caste ideas. The official observation is that "whatever may have been the origin and the earlier developments of caste, this prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth now as
its essential and most prominent characteristic. The feeling against such unions is deeply engrained." And again, a second pronouncement on caste: "The regulations regarding food and drink are comparatively fluid and transitory, while those relating to marriage are remarkably stable and absolute."[16] The pro-Hindu lady, already referred to, also agrees. "Of hereditary caste," she says, "the essential characteristic is the refusal of intermarriage."[17] Even Indian Christians are reluctant to marry below their old caste, and value a matrimonial alliance with a higher. To that residuum of caste, when it becomes the residuum, one could not object. The Aryan purity of the stock may be a fiction, as authorities declare it to be in the great majority of castes and in by far the greater part of India; but given the belief in the purity of blood, the desire to preserve it is a natural desire. If one may prophesy, then, regarding the fate of the caste system under the prevailing modern influences, castes will survive longest simply as a number of in-marrying social groups. To that hard core the caste idea is being visibly worn down.
Support of caste by British authorities.
With strange obliviousness surely, the British officials are lending support to caste ideas in various ways, while many of the best minds in India are groaning under the tyranny. The compilers of the Report of the Census of India for 1901, gentlemen to whom every student of India is deeply indebted, in their enumeration of castes, give the imprimatur of government to such Cimmerian notions as that the touch of certain low castes is defiling to the higher. The writer and condoner of the following paragraph surely need a lengthy furlough to Britain or the States. We read that "the table of social precedence attached to the Cochin Report shows that while a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher caste only by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Palayan or Cheruman cultivators at 48 feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than 64 feet." Some consolation let us even here take from the fact that in an earlier publication the extreme range of the polluting X-rays of the pariah is stated to be 72 feet. So there has been 8 feet of
progress for the pariah. But our point is, that interesting as all that table of precedence no doubt is, it is out of place in a Government report, which may be quoted against a poor low-caste man as authoritative pronouncement regarding his social position. Justice and humanity, good grounds in the eyes of the Indian Government ere now for legislating contrary to caste ideas, ought to have enjoined the ignoring of caste ideas here. It is no mere fancy that after an accident one of these low-caste masons in South India might be brought to the door of a Government hospital and be refused admission by a native medical officer because his presence polluted at a distance of 24 feet—has not the Government Report declared it so? It is no fancy, for a year or two ago the Post Office reported that in one village the Post Office was found located where low castes were not allowed to approach. In some provinces, also, teachers will object to the admission of low-caste children in their schools; or "if they admit them make them sit outside in the verandah."[18] What now of the dignity of manual labour which many a high official has expounded to native youth? Or to take another instance of un-British countenancing of the caste
idea. The Shahas of Bengal are a humble caste, and the members of higher castes will not, as a rule, take water at their hands, so the Government Report tells us. On the other hand, the Shahas of Assam, immigrants from Bengal, have managed to raise themselves high in the social scale. Why, when an Assam Shaha takes up his residence again in his motherland, Bengal, should this Blue-book be casting up to him his humble origin? Why this un-British weighting of those who are behind in the race? Again, at the very time of the Census, the Maratha caste was in conflict with the brahman in two Native States of Western India, Kohlapur and Baroda, over a matter of religious privileges. The brahman contention is that the Mahratta pretensions to high-caste blood [kshatriya] are groundless, and now we have the very same statement in the Census Report, backing "the king of the castle" against "the dirty rascal." Not a century ago, students of kayasth [clerk] caste were excluded from the Sanscrit College in Calcutta; they are now within the privileged circle, but their claim might not yet have been made good had a Government Blue-book of these earlier days been allowed to brand them as debarred from the College by their caste. At a public meeting the writer heard one of the
most learned and respected Hindus of Calcutta respectfully protest to the Lieutenant-Governor against the public recognition in the Census Report of such irrational social grading.[19]