The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1

93. The caste panchāyat and its code of offences

The tribunal for the punishment of caste offences is known as the panchāyat, because it usually consists of five persons (pānch, five). As a rule a separate panchāyat exists for every subcaste over an area not too large for all the members of it to meet. In theory, however, the panchāyat is only the mouthpiece of the assembly, which should consist of all the members of the subcaste. Some castes fine a member who absents himself from the meeting. The panchāyat may perhaps be supposed to represent the hand acting on behalf of the subcaste, which is considered the body. The panchāyat, however, was not the original judge. It was at first the god before whom the parties pleaded their cause, and the god who gave judgment by the method of trial by ordeal. This was probably the general character of primitive justice, and in some of the lower castes the ordeal is still resorted to for decisions. The tribe or subcaste attended as jurors or assessors, and carried out the proceedings, perhaps after having united themselves to the god for the purpose by a sacrificial meal. The panchāyat, having succeeded the god as the judge, is held to give its decisions by divine inspiration, according to the sayings: ‘God is on high and the panch on earth,’ and ‘The voice of the panchāyat is the voice of God.’236 The headship of the panchāyat and the subcaste commonly descends in one family, or did so till recently, and the utmost deference is shown to the person holding it, even though he may be only a boy for the above reason. The offences involving temporary or permanent excommunication from caste are of a somewhat peculiar kind. In the case of both a man and woman, to take food from a person of a caste from whom it is forbidden to do so, and especially from one of an impure caste, is a very serious offence, as is also that of being beaten by a member of an impure caste, especially with a shoe. It is also a serious offence to be sent to jail, because a man has to eat the impure jail food. To be handcuffed is a minor offence, perhaps by analogy with the major one of being sent to jail, or else on account of the indignity involved by the touch of the police. As regards sexual offences, there is no direct punishment for a man as a rule, but if he lives with a low-caste woman he is temporarily expelled because it is assumed that he has taken food from her hands. Sometimes a man and woman of the caste committing adultery together are both punished. A married woman who commits adultery should in the higher and middle castes, in theory at least, be permanently expelled, but if her husband does not put her away she is sometimes readmitted with a severe punishment. A girl going wrong with an outsider is as a rule expelled unless the matter can be hushed up, but if she becomes pregnant by a man of the caste, she can often be readmitted with a penalty and married to him or to some other man. There are also some religious crimes, such as killing a cow or a cat or other sacred domestic animal; and in the case of a woman it is a very serious offence to get the lobe of her ear torn apart at the large perforation usually made for earrings;237 while for either a man or a woman to get vermin in a wound is an offence of the first magnitude, entailing several months’ exclusion and large expenditure on readmission. Offences against ordinary morality are scarcely found in the category of those entailing punishment. Murder must sometimes be expiated by a pilgrimage to the Ganges, but other criminal offences against the person and property are not taken cognisance of by the caste committee unless the offender is sent to jail. Both in its negative and positive aspects the category of offences affords interesting deductions on the basis of the explanation of the caste system already given. The reason why there is scarcely any punishment for offences against ordinary morality is that the caste organisation has never developed any responsibility for the maintenance of social order and the protection of life and property. It has never exercised the function of government, because in the historical Hindu period India was divided into large military states, while since then it has been subject to foreign domination. The social organisation has thus maintained its pristine form, neither influenced by the government nor affording to it any co-operation or support. And the aims of the caste tribunal have been restricted to preserving its own corporate existence free from injury or pollution, which might arise mainly from two sources. If a member’s body was rendered impure either by eating impure food or by contact with a person of impure caste it became an unfit receptacle for the sacred food eaten at the caste feast, which bound its members together in one body. This appears to be the object of the rules about food. And since the blood of the clan and of the caste is communicated by descent through the father under the patriarchal system, adultery on the part of a married woman would bring a stranger into the group and undermine its corporate existence and unity. Hence the severity of the punishment for the adultery of a married woman, which is a special feature of the patriarchal system. It has already been seen that under the rule of female descent, as shown by Mr. Hartland in Primitive Paternity, the chastity of women was as a rule scarcely regarded at all or even conceived of. After the change to the patriarchal system a similar laxity seems to have prevailed for some period, and it was thought that any child born to a man in his house or on his bed was his own, even though he might not be the father. This idea obtained among the Arabs, as pointed out by Professor Robertson Smith in Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, and is also found in the Hindu classics, and to some extent even in modern practice. It was perhaps based on the virtue assigned to concrete facts; just as the Hindus think that a girl is properly married by going through the ceremony with an arrow or a flower, and that the fact of two children being suckled by the same woman, though she is not their mother, establishes a tie akin to consanguinity between them, so they might have thought that the fact of a boy being born in a man’s house constituted him the man’s son. Subsequently, however, the view came to be held that the clan blood was communicated directly through the father, to whom the life of the child was solely assigned in the early patriarchal period. And the chastity of married women then became of vital importance to the community, because the lack of it would cause strangers to be born into the clan, which now based its tie of kinship on descent from a common male ancestor. Thus the adultery of women became a crime which would undermine the foundations of society and the state, and as such was sometimes punished with death among communities in the early patriarchal stage. It is this view, and not simply moral principle, which has led to the severe caste penalties for the offence. Some of the primitive tribes care nothing about the chastity of unmarried girls, but punish unfaithful wives rigorously. Among the Māria Gonds a man will murder his wife for infidelity, but girls are commonly unchaste. Another rule sometimes found is that an unmarried girl becoming with child by an outsider is put out of caste for the time. When her child, which does not belong to the caste, has been born, she must make it over to some outside family, and she herself can then be readmitted to the community. Out of the view of adultery as a religious and social offence, a moral regard for chastity is however developing among the Hindus as it has in other societies.

94. The status of impurity

It has been seen that the Sūdras as well as the plebeians were regarded as impure, and the reason was perhaps that they were considered to belong to a hostile god. By their participation in the sacrifice and partaking of the sacrificial food, the Indian Aryans and other races considered that they were not only in fellowship with, but actually a part of the god. And similarly their enemies were part of the substance of a hostile god, whose very existence and contact were abhorrent to their own. Hence their enemies should as far as possible be completely exterminated, but when this was impossible they must dwell apart and not pollute by contact of their persons, or in any other way, the sacred soil on which the gods dwelt, nor the persons of those who became part of the substance of the god by participation in the sacrificial meal. For this reason the plebeians had to live outside the Roman city, which was all sacred ground, and the Sūdras and modern impure castes have to live outside the village, which is similarly sacred as the abode of the earth-goddess in her form of the goddess of the land of that village. For the same reason their contact had to be avoided by those who belonged to the village and were united to the goddess by partaking of the crops which she brought forth on her land. As already seen, the belief existed that the life and qualities could be communicated by contact, and in this case the worshippers would assimilate by contact the life of a god hostile to their own. In the same manner, as shown by M. Salomon Reinach in Cults, Myths and Religions, all the weapons, clothes and material possessions of the enemy were considered as impure, perhaps because they also contained part of the life of a hostile god. As already seen,238 a man’s clothing and weapons were considered to contain part of his life by contact, and since the man was united to the god by partaking of the sacrificial feast, all the possessions of the enemy might be held to participate in the life of the hostile god, and hence they could not be preserved, nor taken by the victors into their own houses or dwellings. This was the offence which Achan committed when he hid in his tent part of the spoils of Jericho; and in consequence Jehovah ceased to be with the children of Israel when they went up against Ai, that is ceased to be in them, and they could not stand before the enemy. Achan and his family were stoned and his property destroyed by fire and the impurity was removed. For the same reason the ancient Gauls and Germans destroyed all the spoils of war or burned them, or buried them in lakes where they are still found. At a later stage the Romans, instead of destroying the spoils of war, dedicated them to their own gods, perhaps as a visible sign of the conquest and subjection of the enemy’s gods; and they were hung in temples or on oak-trees, where they could not be touched except in the very direst need, as when Rome was left without arms after Cannae. Subsequently the spoils were permitted to decorate the houses of the victorious generals, where they remained sacred and inviolable heirlooms.239

95. Caste and Hinduism

In The Religions of India M. Barth defined a Hindu as a man who has a caste: ‘The man who is a member of a caste is a Hindu; he who is not, is not a Hindu.’ His definition remains perhaps the best. There is practically no dogma which is essential to Hinduism, nor is the veneration of any deity or sacred object either necessary or heretical. As has often been pointed out, there is no assembly more catholic or less exclusive than the Hindu pantheon. Another writer has said that the three essentials of a Hindu are to be a member of a caste, to venerate Brāhmans, and to hold the cow sacred. Of the latter two, the veneration of Brāhmans cannot be considered indispensable; for there are several sects, as the Lingāyats, the Bishnois, the Mānbhaos, the Kabīrpanthis and others, who expressly disclaim any veneration for Brāhmans, and, in theory at least, make no use of their services; and yet the members of these sects are by common consent acknowledged as Hindus. The sanctity of the bull and cow is a more nearly universal dogma, and extends practically to all Hindus, except the impure castes. These latter should not correctly be classed as Hindus; the very origin of their status is, as has been seen, the belief that they are the worshippers of gods hostile to Hinduism. But still they must now practically be accounted as Hindus. They worship the Hindu gods, standing at a distance when they are not allowed to enter the temples, perform their ceremonies by Hindu rites, and employ Brāhmans for fixing auspicious days, writing the marriage invitation and other business, which the Brāhman is willing to do for a consideration, so long as he does not have to enter their houses. Some of the impure castes eat beef, while others have abandoned it in order to improve their social position. At the other end of the scale are many well-educated Hindu gentlemen who have no objection to eat beef and may often have done so in England, though in India they may abstain out of deference to the prejudices of their relatives, especially the women. And Hindus of all castes are beginning to sell worn-out cattle to the butchers for slaughter without scruple—an offence which fifty years ago would have entailed permanent expulsion from caste. The reverence for the cow is thus not an absolutely essential dogma of Hinduism, though it is the nearest approach to one. As a definition or test of Hinduism it is, however, obviously inadequate. Caste, on the other hand, regulates the whole of a Hindu’s life, his social position and, usually, his occupation. It is the only tribunal which punishes religious and social offences, and when a man is out of caste he has, for so long as this condition continues, no place in Hinduism. Theoretically he cannot eat with any other Hindu nor marry his child to any Hindu. If he dies out of caste the caste-men will not bury or burn his body, which is regarded as impure. The binding tie of caste is, according to the argument given above, the communal meal or feast of grain cooked with water, and this, it would therefore seem, may correctly be termed the chief religious function of Hinduism. Caste also obtains among the Jains and Sikhs, but Sikhism is really little more than a Hindu sect, while the Jains, who are nearly all Banias, scarcely differ from Vaishnava Hindu Banias, and have accepted caste, though it is not in accordance with the real tenets of their religion. The lower industrial classes of Muhammadans have also formed castes in imitation of the Hindus. Many of these are however the descendants of converted Hindus, and nearly all of them have a number of Hindu practices.

96. The Hindu reformers

There have not been wanting reformers in Hinduism, and the ultimate object of their preaching seems to have been the abolition of the caste system. The totem-clans, perhaps, supposed that each species of animals and plants which they distinguished had a different kind of life, the qualities of each species being considered as part of its life. This belief may have been the original basis of the idea of difference of blood arising from nobility of lineage or descent, and it may also have been that from which the theory of caste distinctions was derived. Though the sacrificial food of each caste is the same, yet its members may have held themselves to be partaking of a different sacrificial feast and absorbing a different life; just as the sacrificial feasts and the gods of the different Greek and Latin city-states were held to be distinct and hostile, and a citizen of one state could not join in the sacrificial feast of another, though the gods and sacrificial animals might be as a matter of fact the same. And the earth-goddess of each village was a separate form or part of the goddess, so that her land should only be tilled by the descendants of the cultivators who were in communion with her. The severe caste penalties attached to getting vermin in a wound, involving a long period of complete ostracism and the most elaborate ceremonies of purification, may perhaps be explained by the idea that the man so afflicted has in his body an alien and hostile life which is incompatible with his forming part of the common life of the caste or subcaste. The leading feature of the doctrines of the Hindu reformers has been that there is only one kind of life, which extends through the whole of creation and is all equally precious. Everything that lives has a spark of the divine life and hence should not be destroyed. The belief did not extend to vegetable life, perhaps because the true nature of the latter was by then partly realised, while if the consumption of vegetable life had been prohibited the sect could not have existed. The above doctrine will be recognised as a comparatively simple and natural expansion of the beliefs that animals have self-conscious volitional life and that each species of animals consists of one common life distributed through its members. If the true nature of individual animals and plants had been recognised from the beginning, it is difficult to see how the idea of one universal life running through them all could have been conceived and have obtained so large a degree of acceptance. As the effect of such a doctrine was that all men were of the same blood and life, its necessary consequence was the negation of caste distinctions. The transmigration of souls followed as a moral rule apportioning reward and punishment for the actions of men. The soul passed through a cycle of lives, and the location or body of its next life, whether an animal of varying importance or meanness, or a human being in different classes of society, was determined by its good or evil actions in previous lives. Finally, those souls which had been purified of all the gross qualities appertaining to the body were released from the cycle of existence and reabsorbed into the divine centre or focus of life. In the case of the Buddhists and Jains the divine centre of life seems to have been conceived of impersonally. The leading authorities on Buddhism state that its founder’s doctrine was pure atheism, but one may suggest that the view seems somewhat improbable in the case of a religion promulgated at so early a period. And on such a hypothesis it is difficult to understand either the stress laid on the escape from life as the highest aim or the sanctity held to attach to all kinds of animal life. But these doctrines follow naturally on the belief in a divine centre or focus of life from which all life emanates for a time, to be ultimately reabsorbed. The Vaishnava reformers, who arose subsequently, took the sun or the spirit of the sun as the divine source of all life. They also preached the sanctity of animal life, the transmigration of souls, and the final absorption of the purified soul into the divine centre of life. The abolition of caste was generally a leading feature of their doctrine and may have been its principal social aim. The survival of the individual soul was not a tenet of the earlier reformers, though the later ones adopted it, perhaps in response to the growing perception of individuality. But even now it is doubtful how far the separate existence of the individual soul after it has finally left the world is a religious dogma of the Hindus. The basis of Hindu asceticism is the necessity of completely freeing the soul or spirit from all the appetites and passions of the body before it can be reabsorbed into the god. Those who have so mortified the body that the life merely subsists in it, almost unwillingly as it were, and absolutely unaffected by human desires or affections or worldly events, have rendered their individual spark of life capable of being at once absorbed into the divine life and equal in merit to it, while still on earth. Thus Hindu ascetics in the last or perfect stage say, ‘I am God,’ or ‘I am Siva,’ and are revered by their disciples and the people as divine. Both the Buddhists and Jains lay the same stress on the value of asceticism as enabling the soul to attain perfection through complete detachment from the appetites and passions of the body and the cares of the world; and the deduction therefore seems warranted that the end of the perfect soul would be a similar reabsorption in the divine soul.

97. Decline of the caste system

The caste system has maintained its vigour unimpaired either by the political vicissitudes and foreign invasions of India or by Muhammadan persecution. Except where it has been affected by European education and inventions, Hindu society preserved until recently a remarkably close resemblance to that of ancient Greece and Rome in the classical period. But several signs point to the conclusion that the decay of caste as the governing factor of Indian society is in sight. The freedom in selection of occupation which now obtains appears to strike at the root of the caste system, because the relative social status and gradation of castes is based on their traditional occupations. When in a large number of the principal castes the majority of the members have abandoned their traditional occupation and taken freely to others, the relative status of castes becomes a fiction, which, though it has hitherto subsisted, cannot apparently be indefinitely maintained. The great extension of education undertaken by Government and warmly advocated by the best Indian opinion exercises an analogous influence. Education is free to all, and, similarly, in the careers which it opens to the most successful boys there is no account of caste. Thus members of quite low castes obtain a good social position and, as regards them personally, the prejudices and contempt for their caste necessarily fall into abeyance. The process must, probably, in time extend to general social toleration. The educated classes are also coming to regard the restrictions on food and drink, and on eating and drinking with others, as an irksome and unnecessary bar to social intercourse, and are gradually abandoning them. This tendency is greatly strengthened by the example and social contact of Europeans. Finally, the facilities for travelling and the democratic nature of modern travel have a very powerful effect. The great majority of Hindus of all castes are obliged by their comparative poverty to avail themselves of the cheap third-class fares, and have to rub shoulders together in packed railway carriages. Soon they begin to realise that this does them no harm, and get accustomed to it, with the result that the prejudices about bodily contact tend to disappear. The opinion has been given that the decline of social exclusiveness in England was largely due to the introduction of railway travelling. Taking account of all these influences, and assuming their continuance, the inference may safely be drawn that the life of the Indian caste system is limited, though no attempt can be made to estimate the degree of its vitality, nor to predict the form and constitution of the society which will arise on its decay.

Articles on Religions and Sects

Arya Samāj

[Bibliography: Sir E.D. Maclagan’s Punjab Census Report of 1891; Mr. R. Burn’s United Provinces Census Report of 1901; Professor J. C. Oman’s Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India.]

1. The founder of the sect, Dayānand Sāraswati

Arya Samāj Religion.—This important reforming sect of Hinduism numbered nearly 250,000 persons in India in 1911, as against 92,000 in 1901. Its adherents belong principally to the Punjab and the United Provinces. In the Central Provinces 974 members were returned. The sect was founded by Pandit Dayānand Sāraswati, a Gujarāti Brāhman, born in 1824. According to his own narrative he had been carefully instructed in the Vedas, which means that he had been made to commit a great portion of them to memory, and had been initiated at an early age into the Saiva sect to which his family belonged; but while still a mere boy his mind had revolted against the practices of idolatry. He could not bring himself to acknowledge that the image of Siva seated on his bull, the helpless idol, which, as he himself observed in the watches of the night, allowed the mice to run over it with impunity, ought to be worshipped as the omnipotent deity.240 He also conceived an intense aversion to marriage, and fled from home in order to avoid the match which had been arranged for him. He was attracted by the practice of Yoga, or ascetic philosophy, and studied it with great ardour, claiming to have been initiated into the highest secrets of Yoga Vidya. He tells in one of his books of his many and extensive travels, his profound researches in Sanskritic lore, his constant meditations and his ceaseless inquirings. He tells how, by dissecting in his own rough way a corpse which he found floating on a river, he finally discerned the egregious errors of the Hindu medical treatises, and, tearing up his books in disgust, flung them into the river with the mutilated corpse. By degrees he found reason to reject the authority of all the sacred books of the Hindus subsequent to the Vedas. Once convinced of this, he braced himself to a wonderful course of missionary effort, in which he formulated his new system and attacked the existing orthodox Hinduism.241 He maintained that the Vedas gave no countenance to idolatry, but inculcated monotheism, and that their contents could be reconciled with all the results of modern science, which indeed he held to be indicated in them. The Arya Samāj was founded in Lahore in 1877, and during the remainder of his life Dayānand travelled over northern India continually preaching and disputing with the advocates of other religions, and founding branches of his sect. In 1883 he died at Ajmer, according to the story of his followers, from the effects of poison administered to him at the instigation of a prostitute against whose profession he had been lecturing.242