The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

MIXTURE OF CLASSES

Though the line between the different classes was so strongly marked, the means taken to prevent their mixture do not seem to have been nearly so much attended to as in after times. The law in this respect seems rather dictated by jealousy of the honour of the women of the higher classes than by regard for the purity of descents.

Men of the first three classes are freely indulged in the choice of women from any inferior caste, provided they do not give them the first place in their family. But no marriage is permitted with women of a higher class; criminal intercourse with them is checked by the severest penalties, and their offspring is degraded far below either of its parents. The son of a Brahman, by a woman of the class next below him, takes a station intermediate between his father and mother; and the daughters of such connections, if they go on marrying Brahmans for seven generations, restore their progeny to the original purity of the sacerdotal class; but the son of a Sudra by a Brahman woman is a Chandala, “the lowest of mortals,” and his intercourse with women of the higher classes produces “a race more foul than their begetter.”

The classes do not seem to have associated at their meals even in the time of Manu; and there is a striking contrast between the cordial festivity recommended to Brahmans with their own class, and the constrained hospitality with which they are directed to prepare food after the Brahmans for a military man coming as a guest.

But there is no prohibition in the code against eating with other classes, or partaking of food cooked by them (which is now the great occasion for loss of caste), except in the case of Sudras; and even then the offence is expiated by living on water gruel for seven days.

Loss of caste seems, in general, to have been incurred by crimes, or by omitting the prescribed expiations for offences.

It is remarkable that, in the four classes, no place is assigned to artisans: Sudras, indeed, are permitted to practise mechanic trades during a scarcity of other employment, but it is not said to whom the employment regularly belongs.

From some of the allotments, it would appear that the artisans were supplied, as they are now, from the mixed classes: a circumstance which affords ground for surmise that the division into castes took place while arts were in too simple a state to require separate workmen for each; and also that many generations had elapsed between that division and the code, to allow so important a portion of the employments of the community to be filled by classes formed subsequently to the original distribution of the people.c

This distribution of the whole people into four classes only, and the appropriation of them to four species of employment,—an arrangement which, in the very simple state of society in which it must have been introduced, was a great step in improvement,—must have become productive of innumerable inconveniences, as the wants of society multiplied. The bare necessaries of life, with a small number of its rudest accommodations, are all it prepares to meet the desires of man. As those desires speedily extend beyond such narrow limits, a struggle must have early ensued between the first principles of human nature and those of the political establishment. The different castes were strictly commanded to marry with those only of their own class and profession; and the mixture of the classes from the union of the sexes was guarded against by the severest laws.[19] This was an occurrence, however, which laws could not prevent. Irregularities took place; children were born, who belonged to no caste, and for whom there was no occupation. No event could befall society more calamitous than this. Unholy and infamous, on account of that violation of the sacred law to which they owed their unwelcome birth, those wretched outcasts had no resource for subsistence, excepting either the bounty of the established classes, to whom they were objects of execration and abhorrence; or the plunder of those same classes, a course to which they would betake themselves with all the ingenuity of necessitous, and all the atrocity of much injured, men. When a class of this description became numerous, they must have filled society with the greatest disorders. In the preface of that compilation of the Hindu Laws, which was translated by Mr. Halhed, it is stated that, after a succession of good kings, who secured obedience to the laws, and under whom the people enjoyed felicity, came a monarch evil and corrupt, under whom the laws were violated, the mixture of the classes was perpetrated, and a new and impious race were produced. The Brahmans put this wicked king to death, and, by an effort of miraculous power, created a successor endowed with the most excellent qualities. But the kingdom did not prosper, by reason of the Burren Sunker, so were this impure brood denominated; and it required the wisdom of this virtuous king to devise a remedy. He resolved upon a classification of the mixed race, and to assign them occupations. This, accordingly, was the commencement of arts and manufactures. The Burren Sunker became all manner of artisans and handicrafts; one tribe of them weavers of cloth, another artificers in iron, and so on in other cases, till the subdivisions of the class were exhausted, or the exigencies of the community supplied.