III. THE INDO-ARYANS
The natives—The invaders—The village community—Caste—Warriors—Priests—Merchants—Workers—Outcastes
Despite the continuity of the remains in Sind and Mysore, we feel that between the heyday of Mohenjo-daro and the advent of the Aryans a great gap stands in our knowledge; or rather that our knowledge of the past is an occasional gap in our ignorance. Among the Indus relics is a peculiar seal, composed of two serpent heads, which was the characteristic symbol of the oldest historic people of India—those serpent-worshiping Nagas whom the invading Aryans found in possession of the northern provinces, and whose descendants still linger in the remoter hills.20 Farther south the land was occupied by a dark-skinned, broad-nosed people whom, without knowing the origin of the word, we call Dravidians. They were already a civilized people when the Aryans broke down upon them; their adventurous merchants sailed the sea even to Sumeria and Babylon, and their cities knew many refinements and luxuries.21 It was from them, apparently, that the Aryans took their village community and their systems of land-tenure and taxation.22 To this day the Deccan is still essentially Dravidian in stock and customs, in language, literature and arts.
The invasion and conquest of these flourishing tribes by the Aryans was part of that ancient process whereby, periodically, the north has swept down violently upon the settled and pacified south; this has been one of the main streams of history, on which civilizations have risen and fallen like epochal undulations. The Aryans poured down upon the Dravidians, the Achaeans and Dorians upon the Cretans and Ægeans, the Germans upon the Romans, the Lombards upon the Italians, the English upon the world. Forever the north produces rulers and warriors, the south produces artists and saints, and the meek inherit heaven.
Who were these marauding Aryans? They themselves used the term as meaning noblemen (Sanskrit arya, noble), but perhaps this patriotic derivation is one of those after-thoughts which cast scandalous gleams of humor into philology.* Very probably they came from that Caspian region which their Persian cousins called Airyana-vaejo—“The Aryan home.”† About the same time that the Aryan Kassites overran Babylonia, the Vedic Aryans began to enter India.
Like the Germans invading Italy, these Aryans were rather immigrants than conquerors. But they brought with them strong physiques, a hearty appetite in both solids and liquids, a ready brutality, a skill and courage in war, which soon gave them the mastery of northern India. They fought with bows and arrows, led by armored warriors in chariots, who wielded battle-axes and hurled spears. They were too primitive to be hypocrites: they subjugated India without pretending to elevate it. They wanted land, and pasture for their cattle; their word for war said nothing about national honor, but simply meant “a desire for more cows.”26 Slowly they made their way eastward along the Indus and the Ganges, until all Hindustan‡ was under their control.
As they passed from armed warfare to settled tillage their tribes gradually coalesced into petty states. Each state was ruled by a king checked by a council of warriors; each tribe was led by a raja or chieftain limited in his power by a tribal council; each tribe was composed of comparatively independent village communities governed by assemblies of family heads. “Have you heard, Ananda,” Buddha is represented as asking his St. John, “that the Vajjians foregather often, and frequent public meetings of their clans? . . . So long, Ananda, as the Vajjians foregather thus often, and frequent the public meetings of their clan, so long may they be expected not to decline, but to prosper.”27
Like all peoples, the Aryans had rules of endogamy and exogamy-forbidding marriage outside the racial group or within near degrees of kinship. From these rules came the most characteristic of Hindu institutions. Outnumbered by a subject people whom they considered inferior to themselves, the Aryans foresaw that without restrictions on intermarriage they would soon lose their racial identity; in a century or two they would be assimilated and absorbed. The first caste division, therefore, was not by status but by color;* it divided long noses from broad noses, Aryans from Nagas and Dravidians; it was merely the marriage regulation of an endogamous group.28 In its later profusion of hereditary, racial and occupational divisions the caste system hardly existed in Vedic times.29 Among the Aryans themselves marriage (except of near kin) was free, and status was not defined by birth.
As Vedic India (2000-1000 B.C.) passed into the “Heroic” age (1000-500 B.C.)—i.e., as India changed from the conditions pictured in the Vedas into those described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—occupations became more specialized and hereditary, and caste divisions were more rigidly defined. At the top were the Kshatriyas, or fighters, who held it a sin to die in bed.30 Even the religious ceremonials were in the early days performed by chieftains or kings, in the fashion of Cæsar playing Pontifex; the Brahmans or priests were then mere assistants at the sacrifice.31 In the Ramayana a Kshatriya protests passionately against mating a “proud and peerless bride” of warrior stock to “a prating priest and Brahman”;32 the Jain books take for granted the leadership of the Kshatriyas, and the Buddhist literature goes so far as to call the Brahmans “low-born.”33 Even in India? things change.
But as war gradually gave way to peace—and as religion, being then largely an aide to agriculture in the face of the incalculable elements, grew in social importance and ritual complexity, and required expert intermediaries between men and gods—the Brahmans increased in number, wealth and power. As educators of the young, and oral transmitters of the race’s history, literature and laws, they were able to recreate the past and form the future in their own image, moulding each generation into greater reverence for the priests, and building for their caste a prestige which would, in later centuries, give them the supreme place in Hindu society. Already in Buddha’s days they had begun to challenge the supremacy of the Kshatriyas; they pronounced these warriors inferior, even as the Kshatriyas pronounced the priests inferior;34 and Buddha felt that there was much to be said for both points of view. Even in Buddha’s time, however, the Kshatriyas had not conceded intellectual leadership to the Brahmans; and the Buddhist movement itself, founded by a Kshatriya noble, contested the religious hegemony of India with the Brahmans for a thousand years.
Below these ruling minorities were the Vaisyas, merchants and freemen hardly distinct as a caste before Buddha, the Shudras, or workingmen, who comprised most of the native population; and finally the Outcastes or Pariahs—unconverted native tribes like the Chandalas, war captives, and men reduced to slavery as a punishment.35 Out of this originally small group of casteless men grew the 40,000,000 “Untouchables” of India today.