32 old drama of Sacontala contains a delightful picture of a monarch who "had felicity at his command," and was capable of fulfilling the desires natural to a bold and a merciful heart; but this was poetry. The reality is still to be observed in the laws of Menu, ancient, perhaps, as any other code in history, that royalty was but an office in the gift and under the dominion of the Brahmins.3 The people, properly speaking, of India were composed of the Vaisyas and the Chatriyas, as the middle and the lower classes below the superior Brahmins. The Vaisyas were the husbandmen or farmers, and the tradesmen; 34 with whom alone industry was honorable, in remembrance of the tradition which made their existence indispensable to the warriors and the priests above them. They had the privilege of offering certain sacrifices and of receiving some limited instruction in the holy writ Brahmin, had only to repeat a few of them in order to be absolved of his greatest sins. 32 See the translation in Sir William Jones's Works, Vol. IX. pp. 462, 463, 466. 33 There is a passage in the laws of Menu, in which the Brahmin's power, dependent on himself, (note 18,) is particularly described as "mightier than the royal power, which depends upon other men." Menu, XI. 32. In the charming Sacontala, the King Dushmanta makes the frank confession, that the Brahmins must be obeyed; for that "holy men are eminent for patient 4 VOL. I. virtue, yet conceal within their bo- ings; but they were not secured against exactions or injuries from stronger men than they were themselves. Their weakness as a caste, and their insecurity as individuals, were the source, undoubtedly, of many bitter evils; but in a land whose soil was so prolific, the Vaisyas must have lived without much hardship, except when their crops were carried away or their dwellings plundered by the invader or by their own marauding countrymen. 35 The Sudras were the slaves of the three other castes; and however ingeniously their condition has been represented 36 as tolerable in comparison with the slavery among other ancient nations, it must be confessed that they were most unhappy beings. Even though emancipated by his master, the Sudra could never be released from servitude." The doom pronounced upon the caste by the great god Brahma was remembered from generation to generation; and the Sudra was deprived, not only of all present comfort and independence, of the right of property, and of social happiness, but of hope itself, which seemed to be too sacred for the slave to know. He could receive no instruction in the law, no "spiritual counsel" of any kind. The mysteries of earth and heaven would have appeared polluted in his possession, and not even the "remains from a Brahmin's 35 One principal duty the supreme ruler assigned to a Sudra; namely, to serve the before-mentioned classes." Menu, I. 91. 36 As in the notes by Professor 38 Wilson to Mill's History, Vol. I. pp. 194 and 198 particularly. 37 Menu, VIII. 414. 38 Ibid., VIII. 417; X. 129. table" 40 were for the Sudra's gathering. This degra dation of the slave is clearer, perhaps, than the humiliation of the upper castes, upon whom the authority of the Brahmins was nevertheless fast bound. But, in comparing the condition of the Sudra with that of the Vaisya or the Chatriya, we can measure the change between the civilization of the priests and the system of things which went before." But beyond the laws of the priesthood it was not intended that there should be any further progress ; and the castes, as they have been defined, were declared to be fixed and immovable. There was an ideal standard, it is true, to each; 42 but the Sudra could never hope to be a Vaisya, nor was it possible for the Vaisya or the Chatriya, though neither was a slave, to reach a higher place than that in which he had been born. None would find it practicable to rise by services more eminent than his caste was expected or entitled to fulfil; for the laws denied him any other reward than what his birthright suffered him to receive. The superior regarded his inferior with contempt; the inferior looked up to his superior with despair. A great object with the Brahmins was to preserve this isolation of the castes, 40 Menu, IV. 80. 41 Perchè la legge teocratica," says the Italian historian, Micali, "è veramente la prima delle sperienze politiche messe in opra a mansuefare uomini fieri e materiali, ed a condurli quietamente a vita ordinata." Stor. Antichi Popoli Italiani, Cap. XXI. 42 "Devotion," the law declared, "is equal to the performance of all duties; it is divine knowledge in a Brahmin; it is defence of the people in a Chatriya; devotion is the business of trade and agriculture in a Vaisya; devotion is dutiful service in a Sudra." Menu, XI. 236. Cf. the Vishnu Purana, Book III. ch. 8. 43 and even of the families of their subjects. They insisted upon purity of descent, visited the offspring of a mixed marriage with the heaviest penalties, and guarded the rights of the women in each separate order with as much solemnity as if they had been on the same footing with the men. But the charms of the mother and the wife were lost in the polygamy which the laws allowed.1 44 It need not be imagined that these various divisions and institutions appeared of old so formal or so oppressive as they have been here described. In the times antecedent to the period of our inquiry, before the laws and the habits of the dwellers by the Ganges were such as we have found them, there had been a priesthood, distinguished by its energy and its violence, amongst the tribe or the tribes to which it belonged. It was undoubtedly through force as much as through wisdom, that its authority was established, and transmitted, unbroken, to its posterity. But the priests of later years were distinguished for something else than energy. They brought themselves into close intercourse with the 43 The child of a mixed marriage was always degraded to one of the mixed castes, the most inferior of all. The offspring of a Sudra and one of any other caste, for instance, was condemned to a condition still lower than that of the Sudra pure. Taking the number of the pure, the mixed, and the impure castes together, there were more than eighty in all. Each of these would be separ ated from the others either by pride or by degradation. See Heeren's Researches, etc., Asia, Part III. sect. 2. 44 See Menu, Ch. V. and IX. There is nothing more amusing in all the Hindoo writings than the injunctions of the Vishnu Purana concerning the choice of a wife, from whom it is confessed that great benefits" may be derived. 66 abundant and the glowing nature which met their eyes and provoked their wonder; they penetrated, in part, at least, within their own minds, and discovered how they might be uplifted by knowledge, of which their forefathers had never dreamed. Theirs were the powers, eminent above the inactivity and the ignorance of their people; and to them belonged, nearly as of right, the liberty in which their powers could be employed. But they or their successors appear to have speedily passed into still another phase. Uncontrolled by truth or by sympathy, to which they had scarcely aspired in all their toils, they exalted themselves, whether they knew or knew not better, at the expense of their fellowbeings. Others were content to obey them with reverence for the authority and the knowledge so far superior to their own; though the abuses in religion and in government, to which the system of the Brahmins was exposed, were seen, in time, to lead either to reform or to degradation. The reform came first in the history of the Brahmins. Earlier traditions of wars and conquests and empires had been succeeded by the castes and the laws which seemed to be established for ever. But other accounts now follow these, bearing with them a few indistinct outlines of a great history. Here it can be but briefly mentioned, that the name of Bouddha 5 belongs to a spirit of resistance against 45 45 The name in full was Bouddha Sakia Muni. In after times, at any rate, the name of "Bouddha" alone was generally equivalent to the English "Saint." |