The following is excerpted from the chapter "The Impact of Religiosity upon
Caste", in Volume IV - The Breakdowns of Civilizations, of A.J.Toynbee's "A
Study Of History" (1939).
I have omitted the material on racism in the US of A and apartheid in
South Africa to keep focus on caste in Hinduism (as well as to keep this mail
within reasonable length).
Shiva Shankar.
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IV. The Breakdowns of Civilizations
13. The Impact of Religiosity upon Caste
The Lucretian and Voltairean view that Religion in itself is an evil - and
perhaps the fundamental evil in human life - might be supported by citing, from
the annals of Indic and Hindu history, the sinister influence which Religion
has ascertainably and incontestably exercised, in the lives of two
civilizations, upon the institution of Caste.
This institution, which consists in the social segregation of two or
more geographically intermingled groups of human beings or social insects, is
apt to establish itself wherever and whenever one community makes itself master
of another community without being able or willing either on the one hand to
exterminate the subject community or on the other hand to assimilate it into
the tissues of its own body social. In the recent history of our own Western
World a caste-division has arisen in the United States between the dominant
element of White race and European origin and the subject Negro element ..... A
similar caste-division has arisen between the two corresponding elements in the
population of the Union of South Africa ..... In the sub-continent of India
the institution of Caste seems to have arisen out of the irruption of the
Eurasian Nomad Aryas into the former domain of the so-called "Indus Culture" in
the course of the first half of the second millenium B.C.; and in this Indian
case the resulting situation has been still more unhappy than it is in the two
cases just cited; for in India there was not only an original diversity of race
between the dominant caste and the subject caste - a diversity which has
continued to produce its estranging effect socially and morally, long after it
has been physically obliterated - but the relative material power ofthe two
castes was in inverse ratio to their relative civilization. The Aryan
conquerors of the Indus Basin in the second millenium B.C. were barbarians,
like the "Dorian" conquerers of Crete and the Lombard conquerers of Italy,
while their victims, like the Minoans and the Romans, were the heirs of a once
great civilization. ....
..... In the Indian case, on the other hand, we may conjecture that from the
beginning the castes were distinguished by certain differences of religious
practice, since the Aryan intruders who constituted the dominant caste were
presumably still in the primitive social stage at which the religious and the
secular side of life are not yet distinguished from one another, and at which
the possession of a distinct and separate life as a community consequently
implies the practice of a distinct and separate religion as well. It is
evident, however, that this hypothetical religious ingredient in the original
form of the local Indian version of the institution of Caste must have been
accentuated when the Indic Civilization developed the religious bent which it
has bequeathed to a Hindu Society that is related to it by "affiliation". It is
further evident that this impact of Religiosity upon the Institution of Caste
in India must have aggravated the banefulness of the institution very
seriously. Caste is always on the verge of being a social enormity; but when
Caste is "keyed up" by recieving a religious interpretation and a religious
sanction in a society which is hag-ridden by Religiosity, then the latent
enormity of the institution is bound to rankle into a morbid social growth of
poisonous tissue and monstrous proportions.
In the actual event the impact of Religiosity upon Caste in India has
begotten the unparalleled social abuse of "Untouchability"; and since there has
never been any effective move to abolish or even mitigate "Untouchability" on
the part of the Brahmans - the hieratic caste which has become master of the
ceremonies of the whole caste-system and has assigned to itself the highest
place in it - the enormity survives, except in so far as it has been assailed
by revolution.
The earliest known revolts against Caste are those of Mahavira the
founder of Jainism (occubuit prae 500 B.C.) and Siddhartha Gautama, the founder
of Buddhism (vivebat circa 567-487 B.C.): two creative personalities who were
non-Brahmans themselves and who ignored the established barriers of Caste in
recruiting the bands of disciples whom they gathered round them to wrestle with
the moral problems of the Indic "Time of Troubles". If either Buddhism or
Jainism had succeeded in captivating the Indic World, then conceivably the
institution of Caste might have been sloughed off with the rest of the social
debris of a disintegrating Indic Society, and an affiliated Hindu Civilization
might have started life free from this incubus. As it turned out, however, the
role of the universal church in the last chapter of the Indic decline and fall
was played not by Buddhism but by Hinduism - a parvenu archaistic syncretism of
things new and old; and one of the old things which Hinduism resuscitated was
Caste. Not content with resuscitating this old abuse, it embroidered upon it.
The Hindu Civilization has been handicapped from the outset by a considerable
heavier burden of Caste (a veritable load of karma) than the burden that once
weighed upon its predecessor; and accordingly the series of revolts against
Caste has run over from Indic to Hindu history.
In the Hindu Age these revolts have no longer taken the form of
creative philosophical movements of indigenous origin like Buddhism or Jainism,
but have expressed themselves in definite secessions from Hinduism under the
attraction of some alien religious sytem. Some of these secessions have been
led by Hindu reformers who have founded new churches in order to combine an
expurgated version of Hinduism with certain elements borrowed from alien
sources. Thus, for example, Kabir and the founder of Sikhism, Nanak, (vivebat
A.D. 1469-1538) created their syncretisms out of a combination between Hinduism
and Islam, while Ram Mohan Roy (vivebat A.D. 1772-1833) created the Brahmo
Samaj out of a combination between Hinduism and Christianity. It is noteworthy
that, in all these three syncretisms alike, the institution of Caste is one of
the features of Hinduism that has been rejected. In other cases the
secessionsts have not stopped at any half-way house but have shaken the dust of
Hinduism off their feet altogether and have entered outright into the Islamic
or the Christian fold; and such conversions have taken place on the largest
scale in districts in which there had previously been a high proportion of
members of low castes or depressed classes in the local Hindu population. The
classic instance is the latter-day religious history of Eastern Bengal, where
the descendents of former barbarians who had been admitted just within the pale
of Hinduism on sufferance, with an extremely low status, have become converts
to Islam en masse.
This is the revolutionary retort to the enormity of "Untouchability"
which has been evoked by the impact of Religiosity upon Caste; and, as the
masses of the population of India are progressively stirred by the economic and
intellectual and moral ferment of Westernization, the trickle of conversions
among the outcasts seems likely to swell into a flood, unless the abolition of
the stigma of "Untouchability" is achieved at the eleventh hour by the
non-Brahman majority of the Caste-Hindus themselves, in the teeth of Brahman
opposition, under the leadership of the Banya Mahatma Gandi.
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