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INDIA

some of the most competent observers in India, and it
is difficult to comprehend the source of that strength which
gives Brahmanism its overshadowing and overwhelming
authority.
None but a people sunk to the lowest depths in a
tangle of crude and grotesque superstitions could accept
such a sacerdotal tyranny—nothing but liberal and widespread
 education can lift them out of it.
As for those sharply defined distinctions of caste
which (so we have always been taught) separate Hindus into
four distinct communities, they are unrecognisable in the
present day. Exclusive of the Brahmans and Kshatryas,
“caste means, for the most part, hereditary occupation,
but it also often signifies a common origin of tribe or
race.” ‘In the enormous majority of instances caste is
only the name for a number of practices which are followed
by each one of a multitude of groups of men, whether
such a group be ancient and natural, or modern and
artificial. As a rule every trade, every profession, every
guild, every tribe, every class, is also a caste ; and the
members of a caste not only have their special object of
worship, selected from the Hindu pantheon, or adopted
into it, but they exclusively eat together and exclusively
intermarry.”! Even Muhammadans have castes. There
are said to be 1429 different castes in India, of which
Brahmans, Kunbis (agriculturists), and Chamars (leather
workers), are the only three castes which number more
than 10,000,000. These three include nearly 15 per
cent. of the inhabitants of India.
Of those repulsive aspects of Brahmanism which find
expression in the obscene rites of Shiva worship, or in
the fantastic eccentricities of wandering fakirs, yogis, and
devotees, who consider a thin smear of ashes as a full
and sufficient substitute for civilised clothes, and who live
a life of indecency and beggary, there is no need to write.
They are only useful to point a moral. No nation or
people that can not only tolerate such nuisances, but look
to them as a high and worshipful expression of a mystic
1 Strachey’s *¢ India.”