Chapter 22
THE HINDU CASTE SYSTEM (_continued_)
IV
The agency through which, and the occasion upon which, caste penalizes its members are manifold.
Formerly, Hindu kings, under instruction from their pandit ministers, would enforce caste observances. But under the present non-Hindu State no such action could be expected. In many instances pandits have to be consulted both as to whether a member has really violated _shastraic_ injunctions and as to the penalty which should be inflicted in that special case. In doubtful cases, pandits of various trainings and leanings are called who present conflicting opinions which end in confusion.
In Southern India important cases of caste violation among non-Vishnuvite Hindus are under the jurisdiction of the Superiors of Sankarite monasteries. Some of these assume and exercise Papal authority in such matters among their people. Usually, however, each local caste organization deals directly with infractions of its own rules, and is competent to deal drastically, and as a court of final resort, with all cases of caste infringement within its own membership. It may be done in public assembly, when all male members are present and have a voice; or the caste _panchayat_, or council of five, may sit in judgment upon the case and have right of final action. This latter tribunal is the more common in South India, and is more in harmony with the spirit and methods of the land.
There are a number of courses of action which are adequate as causes of removal from caste.
One of these is a change of faith. The abandonment of the ancestral religion, which is the mother of caste spirit and organization, especially when the newly accepted faith repudiates openly caste and all that belongs to it, inevitably leads to expulsion from caste. In most cases this has resulted upon conversion to either Christianity or Mohammedanism. But this is not as universal as we could wish or as many suppose, as we shall see later on. It may be seen how, in a mass movement of a large body of men toward Christianity, for instance, the people may easily, and would naturally, carry with them into the new faith many of their old customs and habits, including much that pertains to, and is of the essence of, caste.
Roman Catholicism has interpreted caste chiefly from a social standpoint, and has therefore regarded it as a social institution which can be adapted to, and adopted into, the Christian religion. Protestantism, or, at least, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, has regarded caste as primarily and dominantly a religious institution, whose spirit antagonizes fundamentally our faith, and which must be opposed at all points. Hence it is a part of the pledge of every one who enters into the Protestant fellowship in India that he will eschew and oppose caste at all times. And it may be said that, though Hinduism loves dearly compromise and evasion, it has in the main held that a man who has accepted the Christian faith and has been publicly baptized into its conviction of the "fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men," has no place in its own caste system, and it consistently deals with him as with an outcast. As we have already seen, every man who has travelled abroad has lost thereby caste and has to undergo expiation before reinstatement. It matters not how thoroughly he has tried to preserve caste customs during his travels and in the foreign land, he is regarded by all as a _de facto_ outcast.
Marrying a widow is also an act which severs caste ties and places a man under the ban. Of course, this applies not to the few castes which allow widow-remarriage. But as the bulk of Hindus deny the right of a widow to remarry (though there is no caste obstacle to a widower taking unto himself a new virgin wife every year of his life), a man cannot enter into an alliance with a widow without losing caste thereby.
Beef-eating is regarded as so heinous a sin that no member of a respectable caste would expect consideration for a moment. And yet Dr. J. H. Barrows has said that the famous Swamy, Vivekanantha, when with him at Chicago, ate a whole plateful of beef in his presence and with a great deal of relish. But he, of course, had graduated out of the ordinary level of Hindu-hood into the sacred heights of Swamyhood, in which a man is exempt from the mean limitation of caste, and when the vulgar sins of common Hindu life are transmuted into the ordinary blessings and privileges of saintdom.
In like manner, vegetarian castes punish their members for the eating of any meat. The Hindu aversion to meat is very common; it is also sanitary and wholesome; for meat-eating in the tropics is neither necessary nor conducive to health. And yet the Pariah outcast has no scruples in this matter. It is indeed true that he would deem it a sin to butcher a cow or an ox; but he will not hesitate to poison his neighbour's cattle, that he may thereby have enough carrion to eat. For the carcases of the dead cattle of the village are the perquisite of the Pariah; and it is upon finding such that he enjoys his only feasts of plenty. But to the ordinary Hindu all bovine kind are divine, and the flesh of the same is strictly and vehemently tabooed.
Punishment is also dealt out, as we have seen, to those who eat any food cooked by an outcast, whether he be Christian, Mohammedan, or Pariah. And the same is true of eating with an outcast, or with one who is of a lower caste than himself. Indeed, so far is this spirit carried by certain high castes that to be seen eating by a member of a lower caste, or to allow the shadow of a stranger to fall upon one's prepared food, is pollution. Hence the care with which all Hindus seek privacy and avoid the gaze of men during mealtime.
Officiating as a priest in the house of a low-class Sudra is strictly prohibited to a Brahman, and he loses caste thereby. He and other "twice born" are also driven out of caste if they throw away the sacred thread which is the outer badge of their second birth and dignity.
A woman, when found in open sin with a man of another caste, and a widow, when she can no longer hide the consequence of her immorality, are no longer in caste.
It is hardly necessary to mention that marrying outside of one's own caste is a sin which finds no countenance, but severest punishment, in nearly all castes.
Generally speaking, we may say that caste authority is exercised only in cases where ceremonial observance and social usages are violated. In matters that are purely ethical, and which bear upon the character and moral elevation of the individual and the clan, caste rarely acts; for it does not consider that its honour is compromised or its organic life impaired by such conduct.
It should also be mentioned that caste is not even in the distribution of its dispensations and punishments. A man of wealth and social influence succeeds in staving off many acts of caste displeasure which would fall heavily upon the poor and friendless man. Such a man may, and often does, trample under foot every command of the decalogue, and at the same time defy and violate a good moiety of the injunctions of his caste. And yet, because of his wealth and general importance in caste councils, he stands unimpeached and unrebuked.
In matters of caste observance and discipline, villages are much more conservative and strict than cities. In the latter, as we shall see, caste observance is much relaxed, and life is more on modern lines.
V
The results of the caste system in India are many and manifest. It has sown its seed for many centuries and to-day reaps a rich harvest in life and conduct. It should not be assumed, and it cannot be asserted, that this great system has always been an unmixed evil to the people of this land.
No organization which has bound by its fetters for eighty generations nearly a sixth of the population of the globe, and which continues to grip them to-day with tyrannical power, can be devoid of any redeeming feature. The very perpetuity and prosperity of the scheme argues for its possession of some rational features, originally connected with it, which gave it sanction to the myriads who have submitted to its reign over them. But it is exceedingly difficult to discover that excellence which originally commended it to the people of this land. Nor do the writings of those who have striven to defend the system assist us in making this discovery. A modern Brahman defence by Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya (see "Hindu Castes and Sects," pp. 1-10) gives only one ray of light upon the subject when he observes that "the legislation of the Rishis was calculated not only to bring about union between the isolated clans that lived in primitive India, but to render it possible to assimilate within each group the foreign hordes that were expected to pour into the country from time to time." In those remote days when weakness through isolation threatened their very existence, and when there was no possibility of a general union of all the people for defence, thorough organization of clans into castes brought strength and confidence and was a conspicuous blessing. It was in those days a convenient and effective way of enforcing religious obligations upon the heterogeneous clans. It also was then probably useful in preserving purity of blood among the higher races, and in conserving the nobility of the Aryan who was destined to rule the mixed races of India for many centuries.
Nor is the system without possibilities of good in modern times, as was illustrated recently by the action of a prominent North India caste in prohibiting large expenses in marriage and in raising, by legislation, the limit of the marriageable age of its girls.
But, alas, any good that may possibly inhere in the system has largely remained _in posse_ rather than _in esse_. The history of caste has been one of evil, and it is no wonder that such a fair-minded writer as Mr. Sherring, who has probably made a more thorough study of the subject than any other man, should call the organization "a monstrous engine of pride, dissension, and shame" (see Preface to his "Hindu Tribes and Castes"). Considering the subject, therefore, in its bearing upon the life of India to-day, and studying its results as we now find them among all classes of the people and in their definite bearing upon the future of the land, we are compelled to pronounce against it at all points.
It is, in the first place, the source of interminable discord and dissension all over the land. It not only arrays caste against caste; but bitter animosity is the order of the day among the subdivisions of castes. In every one of the numberless castes in the land there are divisions and subdivisions galore. And while the Sudras acknowledge the supremacy of the "twice born," among the myriad clans of the Sudras themselves there is endless assumption and contention, every one, fomented by pride, claiming primacy and distinction above the others. Recently, in South India, this feeling led to a serious riot, in which not a few lives were lost and villages devastated.
It also narrows the sympathies of the people in a most lamentable way. Among the common people of India it is held that a man's duties to his caste embrace his whole obligation. When a fellow-being is in difficulty and his condition strongly appeals for sympathy, the first, and often the last, question asked is, "Is he a member of my caste?" If not, like the priest and the Levite of old, his conscience allows him to "pass by on the other side." Recently a woman perished in the streets of a town near Madura. She was a resident of a village some twenty-five miles away, and was, therefore, a stranger in this town, where she sickened and was carried to a public rest-house. But when her condition became serious and no relatives or caste friends came to her support, she was put out into the street, where she lay helpless for three days in the rain and sunshine. Hundreds of people saw her dying agonies as they passed by during those days; but no heart of sympathy went out to her; for was she not a stranger? And it was left to an American, who happened to pass that way on the third day, to demand of the town officer that she be put back in the rest-house, where she shortly afterward died. Let it not be thought that this is an isolated case. He who is familiar with Indian life knows it is not, for daily he has to witness the woful limitations which caste imposes upon human sympathy.
Caste has also degraded manual labour. The loss of caste by any Brahman who follows the plough is only an application of this rule in the highest quarters. Caste has taught the people of this land that humble toil, however honest it may be, is more than mean; it is sinful. There are millions of the higher castes of India who deem it honourable to beg, and dignified to spend their years in abject laziness, but who would regard it as unspeakable degradation to take a hoe or a hammer and earn an honest living by the sweat of their brow. Nor will their caste rules permit of their undertaking such work. And this spirit has passed down the ranks until it pervades the whole of society in India, with the consequence that manual labour is universally regarded as degrading, and with the further natural result that a horde of five and a half millions of lazy, wretched, immoral, able-bodied, religious beggars are burdening this land. And thus mendicancy is made honourable at the expense of honest toil. It should be further remarked that there are a number of begging castes, in which all work is proscribed and mendicity exalted into a divinely ordained profession!
Moreover, caste makes it impossible for India to become a commercial country. So long as foreign travel is banned and contact with other lands is regarded as a sin against heaven and caste, there is little hope that the people of this land will distinguish themselves in that kind of trade and commerce which has made India's mistress, Great Britain, so illustrious in wealth and dominion.
And it is this caste spirit which so easily made the great peninsula of India a prey to the "tight little island" many thousands of miles away. For not only has caste made the Hindus an insular people, it has also so divided them that they do not realize any common sentiment, save that of opposition to the State, or seek any common good. Hence they have for many centuries been the easy prey of any adventurers who sought to overcome and despoil them. A genuine national feeling and a patriotic sentiment are all but impossible in the land. And all intelligent Hindus acknowledge this sad condition at present, and many of the best of them publicly maintain that national consciousness, self-rule, and a glowing, triumphant patriotism can be built only upon the ruins of the caste system.
And even as it is a foe to nationality, so is it the mortal enemy of individualism. The caste system is really a glorification of the multitude as against the individual. Individual initiative and assertion, liberty of conscience, the right of man to life and the pursuit of happiness,--all these are foibles of the West which it has been the chief business of caste to crush; and upon their ruin it has erected this mighty tower of Babel. In India, it has been the business of men, from time immemorial, not to do what they think to be right, nor to find out, every one for himself, what they consider to be the best and to act according to the dictates of conscience; it has rather been submission to caste dominance. And it is the unblushing teaching of the _Shastras_ that obedience to caste is the fulfilment of duty and the _summum bonum_ of life. So omnipotent and omniscient is the arm and head of caste that men dare not defy it. Hence we are compelled to look in India to-day upon the saddest spectacle of abject manhood the world has known. To those who, like the writer, have spent a lifetime in trying to raise the outcasts and the lower strata of Indian society, the most difficult and discouraging obstacle is the inertia and the abjectness of the people themselves. Through a bitter experience of many centuries they have learned that it does not pay for the individual to assert himself against the dictates of the caste, or for the lower castes to rise in rebellion against their lot. They discovered that they were merely butting their heads against an adamantine rock. So they have lost every ambition and hope; and he who would lift them up must first remove that leaden despair which rests upon them like a mighty incubus.
Nor is it much better with the educated classes of India. There are hundreds of thousands of these men of western university training who annually assemble in Congress and in Convention, and who in spotless English of Addisonian accent and in the sonorous phraseology of a Macaulay, discourse upon human rights and who denounce the bondage of caste tyranny. And yet they submit, in their own homes, to that same accursed tyranny and are in life as abject as the meanest Pariah in the face of caste edicts which they know to be unrighteous and demeaning to the core.
It should also be remembered that caste is the foster-mother of all the manifold social evils of the land. In pre-caste days in India such evils as child marriage, prohibition of widow remarriage, temple women, excessive marriage expenses, etc., did not exist. They are a part of the caste regime supported and perpetuated by its authority. Remove this mighty compulsion, and these institutions would soon become things of the past.
Another evil of this organization is that of ignoring the ethical and spiritual standard and of measuring everything from a purely formal and ceremonial standpoint. All life is reduced into an unceasing ritual under the perpetual priestly surveillance of caste. All that it asks of man is outward conformity. He may disbelieve and hate every commandment of his faith; but if he conforms, he is a faithful son. On the other hand, he may be a man of unblemished character, and he may even intend to be obedient to caste; but if, some night, a few enemies were to thrust into his mouth and compel him to swallow a piece of beef, no power could save him from the dreadful punishment that would follow. A man may write a tract in condemnation and ridicule of all the gods of the Hindu pantheon and still remain an acceptable Hindu; but if, in the agony of a burning fever, he should drink a spoonful of water from the hands of a Christian or of a Pariah, his caste would doom him to perdition for it.
In other words, the whole system directly cultivates, in all the people, a hollowness of life which does more than anything else to rob India of her manhood and which makes nobility of character and ethical integrity most difficult things among the Hindu community. A Brahman gentleman described the whole system as a "vast hollow sham." And such it is.
VI
Paradoxical though it may seem, caste spirit is more prevalent and its influence more dominant in India at the present than in the past; yet there is more defiance and violation of caste rules and more frequent and sure evidences of the speedy termination of its reign than at any previous time.
It has ruled so long and so supremely in this country that the Hindu accepts it without questioning; and it has become more than a second nature to him, even a necessity of his being. What would be intolerably irksome to a Westerner is to the Hindu a matter of course. To the rank and file of the Hindus, caste has ceased to be a matter of question. It is the only order of life with which he is conversant; and while he may be convinced by arguments which prove its cruelty and its many evils, he still clings to it as the only system under which he knows how to live and which he cares to obey.
As we have already seen, the ramifications of caste are more numerous and its authority more general to-day than at any former time. Many Hindu reformers, especially of the Vishnu sects, have followed in the steps of the great Buddha, by denouncing caste, root and branch, and have established their own sects during the last ten centuries on a non-caste basis. But they have all succumbed to the demon which they antagonized and now generally observe caste rules with the same devotion as other Hindus.
The lower the caste spirit has descended to the "submerged tenth" of the land, the more vehemently have they become inoculated with its virus. The outcast Pariah is not to be outdone in this matter; and so we have Pariahs and Pariahs. Many divisions are found among this wretched class, and they are more exclusive in their divisions and more rigid in their narrowness than are many of the high castes.
Even those who have abandoned the Hindu faith and professed another, do not leave behind them this divisive spirit. Perhaps the converts from Mohammedanism have eschewed Hindu caste more than converts to other faiths.
Among Christian converts, though caste is professedly abandoned, it clings with vital tenacity and almost unconquerable persistence to their sense of the fitness of things. Their deepest prejudices and unconscious tendencies, even against their intellectual convictions and sincere professions, unceasingly sway the vast majority of them and lead them into affiliations and narrow sympathies which are Hindu and not Christian. It is true that the oldest Christian community in India, the Syrian Church of Malabar, has long abandoned the Hindu caste organization, with even its mean remnant of caste titles. And yet that community settled down for many centuries into the conviction that it was merely one caste among the many of that region and must keep itself aloof from and untainted by the surrounding castes. Roman Catholicism, which has still the most numerous Native Christian community in India, has largely adopted the Hindu system and tries to utilize it in the furtherance of Christianity in the land! No greater mistake was ever made than this of trying to uphold and promulgate the meekness, the humility, the love, and the fellowship of Christ by means of the haughty pride, the cruel hate, and the bitter divisiveness of caste.
Protestant Christianity is to-day the pronounced foe of caste. It is war to the death between them, and the missionaries have not yet found a foe to their cause so subtle, deceptive, deep-rooted, persistent, and pervasive as this. It is fortified by a thousand ramparts and presents more discouragement to the Christian worker than all other obstacles combined. Even Buddhism and Jainism, the former of which was the ancient protest against Hindu caste, have fallen oft-times a prey to the subtle and damning wiles of this system. In Bengal, a number of Hindu castes are known to have been formerly members of the Jain and Buddhist communities (see Census 1901, Vol. II, p. 523).
However, notwithstanding this growing prevalence and the marvellous tenacity of caste throughout the land, there are encouraging signs of its decadence. Its grip is certainly relaxing in many ways, and its asperities are softening.
It may not untruthfully be said that the growing multiplicity of castes is one of the sure harbingers of the downfall of the system. For the divisions of caste are already beyond computation. The population is cut up into so many minute sections that the caste edifice overtowers everything else, so that it is in imminent danger of toppling over. It is claimed that war among civilized nations will soon become an impossibility because of the growing devastating power of modern weapons of warfare. In like manner, caste is speedily passing through its very excesses to a _reductio ad absurdum_; its spirit is so rampant, and its gross evils are becoming so intolerable, that even the patient inhabitants of India will soon cease to endure the ruin which this monster of their own creation carries on among them.
Educated Hindus are already denouncing it with great vehemence and with considerable unanimity. They are convinced that India can never win independence and power under the regime of caste; and they proclaim their convictions upon the house-top. It is true, as we have seen, that caste has so powerfully thrown its spell over them, its own children, that they are too abject to withstand it openly and unitedly. But I believe that they will erelong be driven to action. Further, obedience and submission will mean ruin to them, their families, and their country.
Even now, among the educated, especially in Bengal, caste restrictions upon dining are being increasingly ignored. A Bengalee gentleman enjoys ordinary hotel fare with apparently none to interfere with his liberties. In Madras, the writer has more than once rubbed shoulders with Brahman lawyers and others eating together the common fare of a well-known restaurant of the city. And he has known Brahman patients, high in society, who did not object even to buy and use nourishment in the form of "Liebig's Beef-extract," so long as they could cover its offensiveness to the women of their household by the euphemistic name "meat-extract."
And to this they are being rapidly carried by a conjunction of many forces which are increasingly dominating the land.
In the first place, they have the potent example of a host of western lives among them. This body of white people, from the far-off lands, is distributed all over India. They are the rulers of the land. A Brahman may deem their touch pollution. But that same Brahman is often glad to undergo that ceremonial taint if thereby he can only enjoy the white man's cultured society. He beholds in these people from the West a freedom from irksome caste restraints. He notices conjugal relations among them, such as furnish richest home blessings. Their social relations are untrammelled and abound in convivial privileges such as are denied to Hindu society. All this creates in him an uneasiness. If he is a man of culture and resides in some city of importance, he will wish to meet English friends upon lines of social equality; but this he will find to be impossible apart from his defiance of caste rules; for, to the man of the West, the common cup and the festal board are the essential conditions of true friendship and intimacy. Thus the life of the ruling race in India is a constant rebuke to the narrowness of caste and a source of discontent to the caste-ridden people, because it reveals to them a different and a better way of living.
Nor is it merely this new type of non-caste western life that appeals to them. The modern civilization of the West, with its humanizing laws, its exaltation of the individual, its religious freedom, its new and broadening education and culture, its equal rights to every man, its many institutions through every one of which there breathes the Anglo-Saxon's blessed love of liberty, the home with its sanctified affection and its glorified womanhood, philanthropy which carries with an even hand its sweet services to the high and the low--to Pariah as to the Brahman,--all these institutions and influences are at work like a mighty leaven in the mind and heart of India. And the people cannot be blind to this influence; and it is gradually transforming their ideals and ambition.
Connected with these more subtle western civilizing agencies are found the material agencies which are the dread foes of caste exclusion. The chief among these is the railroad, the thirty thousand miles of which are so many tongues to proclaim the doom of past narrowness. The Brahman, with all his mean pride, cannot forego the wonderful conveniences of the "iron road and the fire-carriage"; but in order to avail himself of them, he must sit an hour at a time cheek by jowl with a low-caste--it may be a Pariah--fellow-passenger. The railroad gnaws at the vitals of caste life and convictions.
Next to it come the schools. Millions of youth are trained in them daily to regard caste as an unworthy classification. All sections are taught in the same classes; they play in the same playground. In both places the lower often excels the higher caste boy. The seeds of equality and a common regard are thus constantly sown among the youth of all sections of the land. If it astonished the recent educational (Moseley) Commission which went from England to the United States to study the educational conditions there, when it saw the children of the President of the country studying side by side with the children of day-labourers, so must it seem wonderful, and wonderfully good, to a student of social conditions in India, to behold the child of a Pariah and that of a Brahman preparing, side by side, in the schoolroom, for the responsibilities and the blessings of life.
Many other agencies similar to the above are doing their benign levelling work.
The government, however, is the great leveller. In all its gifts of offices, in all posts of honour and influence, it distributes its blessings with strict impartiality, so far as caste is concerned. It wisely ignores all social distinctions and depends upon qualifications of culture and character when it seeks men to conduct its affairs. This is something unprecedented in the land of Manu. That the outcast should stand an equal chance with the high castes for positions of honour and emolument was unknown in this land of sharp distinctions.
And even more fundamental than this is the blessing of equal personal and political rights. In ancient India, such an idea was never entertained. Before British rule entered the land it was never dreamed that priest, prince, and beggar--and that Brahman and Pariah--had equal rights before the law. To-day they all recognize the justice of this and expect it.
Finally, the advent of Christianity, with power, into the land has brought a new death-knell to caste supremacy. We have seen that Indian Christian converts abandon all other customs and superstitions with greater facility than they do those of caste. Its roots have sunk deepest into the soil of their nature. But let it not be thought that they do not grow stronger against caste than they used to be. In the Indian Christian community there is developing a most encouraging movement toward the complete eradication of caste sentiment and observance within the Church itself. They are more sensible than ever before of the gross inconsistency of a man's taking upon himself the sacred name of Christ and at the same time submitting to the dominance of caste. Indian Christian anti-caste organizations are now at work seeking to drive out of the Church of God in India this Antichrist, and to cultivate the true spirit and amenities of Christian fellowship and fraternal communion.
The spirit of Christ is abroad in the land in regenerating and transforming power. His great message to the world was the common fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. And the Christian Church is growing increasingly true to the message of its Leader and Lord in this country. Men may not accept the Christian call to believe and to be baptized; but they cannot be blind and deaf to the work and call of the Spirit of Christ in these modern times of thrilling changes and opportunities.
It is this Christian ideal which is running athwart the most ancient and cherished institutions and customs of India, and has precipitated a conflict such as the land has never before known.
But the end is not yet, and caste will not be hurled down from its high pedestal in a day. It is a mighty institution which has its root in deepest sentiments and is sustained by cherished antiquity and by the strongest passions and prejudices. These will not succumb in a brief generation. And even when Christianity shall have triumphed and shall have driven out its rival faith from the land, as we have every reason to believe that it will, let it not be supposed that the Christianity of the East will have the social complexion of that of the West. In the earliest days of Christianity, we are told by the great Apostle to the Gentiles that there were "heresies" in the Church. These were _social_ heresies or class divisions. It was later in the West that "heresy" became an error of _belief_. The Indian Church will also have heresies of life rather than of thought. The caste spirit will not vanish entirely from India, even when it becomes Christ's land; because while India is always indulgent and tolerant concerning beliefs, she is particular about class distinctions. And this, doubtless, will be the weakness of the Indian Church of the future. But she will have her strong points, also, and in these she will glory and through them glorify her exalted Lord.