Caste - A Comparative Study

The physicist can measure the shift of a spectral line in micromillimetres, and no one questions the value of his work. An implicit faith is abroad that hi smallest measurements lead up to great things. Th 7 student of culture commands no such confidence. If he observes the shift of an accent, he is censured for wastin brain and time on unworthy minutiae. If he attempts something on a grand scale his theories are dismissed as flights of imagination with no firm basis. He is caught in a vicious circle and vicious circles are most difficult to escape from. Yet the physicist escaped by plodding awa in faith, patiently adding brick to brick, until at last even the blindest could see the edifice emerging. There is no reason why the study of culture should no eventually arrive at the same point, perhaps not in the student’s time, but thanks to his efforts. But he has to begin at the beginning, sorting out the excessive mass of material and reducing it to some order out of which the main lines begin to appear. Our generation is, as a matter of fact, beginning to formulate simple ideas that fit a large number of facts which formerly seemed unrelated. I shall instance more particularly the finding of recurrent structures or patterns in rituals and in myths. In my Kings and Councillors I looked for similar uniformities in social organization. Since the subject has been much neglected in favour of magic, numerous gaps were inevitable; but the aim was as much to point out the gaps to fill as those that had been filled. It was an attempt to show how small things might lead up to big things; but in order to do so the smallest had to be omitted lest they bewilder the reader. It was necessary to cut down the evidence to the bare minimum so that the general ideas might stand out. The object of the present work is to exhibit those smallest things out of which the biggest were constructed, to deal minutely with the arrangement of citizens into classes, so that the general ideas might be seen working themselves out in their minutest consequences. Depth could only be gained at the expense of breadth. What there occupied little more than a dozen pages is here expanded to a book, but the area and the scope have been reduced. There I embraced the world and society; here I have confined myself geographically to southern Asia and its extensions east and west, elementally to caste. Within these boundaries I have added a few societies which had been omitted in the sketch because they would have blurred the picture with too much detail. The reader will do well to get a bird’s-eye view from Kings and Councillors before plunging into the forest. Something will have been achieved if the reader can be persuaded that the Indian caste system is not the isolated phenomenon it is often thought to be, but a species of a very widespread genus. Not being an isolated phenomenon, it cannot be understood in isolation; it will merely be misunderstood. More than once it will be shown in these pages how localized specialism leads away from the truth and comparative study returns to it. Comparison also saves time by cutting the tangled knots which controversy ties round texts.