CASTE AS A TRADE-GUILD. 197 and the 'Left-hand,' chiefly craftsmen who sided with the artisan opposition to Bráhman supremacy.1 Dattas In Bengal, a similar opposition came from the literary class. The The Dattas, a sept of the Káyasth or writer - caste, re- of Bengal. nounced the position assigned to them in the classification of Hindu society. They claimed to rank next to the Brahmans, and thus above all the other castes. They failed; but a native author2 states that one of their body, within the memory of men still living, maintained his title, and wore the sacred thread of the pure 'twice-born.' The Statistical Survey of India has disclosed many self-assertions of this sort, although of a more gradual character and on a smaller scale. Thus, in Eastern Bengal, where land is plentiful, the Sháhas, a section of the Suris or degraded spirit-sellers, have, The in our own time, advanced themselves first into a respectable cultivating caste, and then into prosperous traders. Some of the Telís or oil-pressers in Dacca District, and certain of the Telis, Támbulís, Támbulís or pán-growers in Rangpur, have in like manner risen above their hereditary callings, and become bankers and grain merchants. These examples do not include the general opening of professions, effected by English education-the great solvent of caste. Sháhas. etc. There is therefore a plasticity as well as a rigidity in caste. Plasticity Its plasticity has enabled caste to adapt itself to widely and rigidity in separated stages of social progress, and to incorporate caste. the various ethnical elements which make up the Indian people. Its rigidity has given strength and permanence to the corporate body thus formed. Hinduism is internally loosely coherent, but it has great powers of resistance to external pressure. Each caste is to some extent a trade- Caste, as guild, a mutual assurance society, and a religious sect. As a a system of tradetrade-union, it insists on the proper training of the youth of guilds. its craft, regulates the wages of its members, deals with tradedelinquents, and promotes good fellowship by social gatherings. The famous fabrics of medieval India, and the chief local industries in our own day, were developed under the supervision of caste or trade guilds of this sort. Such guilds may still be found in many parts of India, but not always with the same complete development.3 This subject is involved in much obscurity. The above sentences embody the explanation given in Nelson's View of the Hindu Law, as administered by the High Court of Madras, p. 140 (Madras, 1877). 2 Jogendra Chandra Ghose, Calcutta Review, cxlii. p. 279 (October 1880). The Statistical Accounts or Gazetteers of the Bombay Districts devote a special section to such trade-guilds in every District. Its regulation of wages. Working of the tradeguild. In AHMADABAD DISTRICT1 each trade forms a separate guild. All heads of artisan households are ranged under their proper guild. The objects of the guild are to regulate competition among the members, and to uphold the interest of the body in disputes with other craftsmen. To moderate competition, the guild appoints certain days as trade holidays, when any member who works is punished by a fine. A special case occurred in 1873 among the Ahmadábád bricklayers. Men of this class sometimes added 3d. to their daily wages by working extra time in the early morning. But several families were thereby thrown out of employment. Accordingly the guild met, and decided that as there was not employ ment for all, no man should be allowed to work extra time. The decisions of the guild are enforced by fines. If the offender refuses to pay, and the members of the guild all belong to one caste, the offender is put out of caste. If the guild contains men of different castes, the guild uses its influence with other guilds to prevent the recusant member from getting work. The guild also acts in its corporate capacity against other crafts. For example, in 1872, the Ahmadábád cloth - dealers resolved among themselves to reduce the rates paid to the sizers or tágiás. The sizers' guild refused to prepare cloth at the lower rates, and An Indian remained six weeks on strike. At length a compromise was arrived at, and both guilds signed a stamped agreement. 'strike.' Guild funds. Guild charities. Trade caste : Besides its punitive fines, the guild draws an income from fees levied on persons beginning to practise its craft. This custom prevails at Ahmadábád in the cloth and other industries. But no fee is paid by potters, carpenters, and inferior artisans. An exception is made, too, in the case of a son succeeding to his father, when nothing need be paid. In other cases, the amount varies, in proportion to the importance of the trade, from £5 to £50. The revenue from these fees and from punitive fines is expended in feasts to the members of the guild, in the support of poor craftsmen or their orphans, and in charity. A favourite device for raising money in Surat is for the members of a trade to agree to keep a certain date as a holiday, and to shut up all their shops except one. The right to keep open this one shop is let by auction, and the amount bid is credited to the guild-fund. Within the guild, the interests of the common trade often interests v. supersede the race element of the theoretically common caste. Thus, in Surat, each class of craftsmen, although including men 1 See the article, The Imperial Gazetteer of India. centres; of different castes and races, combine to form a guild, with a council, a head-man, and a common purse for charity and entertainments. In Ahmadábád, Broach, and many industrial in trade centres, the trade organization into guilds co-exists with, or dominates, the race-structure of caste. A twofold organization also appears in the village community. Caste regulates the in the viltheoretical position of every family within it; but the low-lage com. castes often claim the headship in the village government. munity. Heads. In Bárásat Sub-district in Bengal, of 5818 enumerated Low-caste Village Heads, only 15 were Brahmans or Rajputs, 4 were VillageKáyasths, while 3524 belonged to the Súdra or inferior castes, down to the detested cow-skinners and corpse-bearers; the residue being Muhammadans, with 13 native Christians. In Southern India, the Village Head is sometimes of so low a caste that he cannot sit under the same roof with his colleagues in the village government. He therefore hands up his staff, which is set in the place of honour, while he himself squats on the ground outside. The trade-guild in the cities, and the Caste and village community throughout the country, act, together with mutual caste, as mutual assurance societies, and under normal conditions allow none of their members to starve. Caste, and the No poorlaw' in trading or agricultural guilds concurrent with it, take the place India. of a poor-law in India. insurance.' rewards. Those Caste pun It is obvious that such an organization must have some Caste weapons for defending itself against lazy or unworthy members. The responsibility which the caste discharges with regard to feeding its poor, would otherwise be liable to abuses. As a matter of fact, the caste or guild exercises a surveillance over each of its members, from the close of childhood until death. If a man behaves well, he will rise to an honoured place in his caste; and the desire for such local distinctions exercises an important influence in the life of a Hindu. But the caste has its punishments as well as its rewards. punishments consist of fine and excommunication. The fine ishments. usually takes the form of a compulsory feast to the male members of the caste. This is the ordinary means of purification, or of making amends for breaches of the caste code. Excommunication inflicts three penalties: First, an interdict Excommuagainst eating with the fellow members of the caste. Second, an interdict against marriage within the caste. This practically amounts to debarring the delinquent and his family from respectable marriages of any sort. Third, cutting off the delinquent from the general community, by forbidding him. the use of the village barber and washerman, and of the nication. Recapitulation of caste. The religi ous basis ism. priestly adviser. Except in very serious cases, excommunication is withdrawn upon the submission of the offender, and his payment of a fine. Anglo-Indian law does not enforce caste-decrees. But caste punishments exercise an efficacious restraint upon unworthy members of the community, precisely as caste rewards supply a powerful motive of action to good ones. A member who cannot be controlled by this mixed discipline of punishment and reward is eventually expelled; and, as a rule, an out-caste' is really a bad man. Imprisonment in jail carries with it that penalty; but may be condoned after release, by heavy expiations. Such is a brief survey of the nature and operation of caste. But the cross-divisions on which the institution rests; its conflicting principles of classification according to race, employment, and locality; the influence of Islám in Northern India; of the right-handed' and 'left-handed' branches in the South; and the modifications everywhere effected by social or sectarian movements, render a short account of caste full of difficulties. Hinduism is, however, not only a social organization resting of Hindu- upon caste; it is also a religious federation based upon worship. As the various race elements of the Indian people have been welded into caste, so the simple old beliefs of the Veda, the mild doctrines of Buddha, and the fierce rites of the non-Aryan tribes have been thrown into the melting-pot, and poured out thence as a mixture of alloy and dross to be worked up into the Hindu gods. In the religious as in the social structure, the Bráhmans supplied the directing brainIts stages power. But both processes resulted from laws of human of evolu- evolution, deeper than the workings of any individual will; tion. and in both, the product has been, not an artificial manufacture, but a natural development. Hinduism merely forms one link in the golden chain of Indian religions. We have seen that the career of Buddha was but a combination of the ascetic and the heroic Aryan life as recorded in the Indian epics. Indeed, the discipline of the Buddhists organized so faithfully the prescribed stages of a Bráhman's existence, that it is difficult to decide whether the Sarmanai of Megasthenes were Buddhist clergy or Bráhman recluses. If accurate scholarship cannot accept Buddhism as simply the Sánkhya philosophy turned into a national religion, it admits that Buddhism is a natural development from Bráhmanism. An early set of 1 See Crole's Statistical Account of Chingleput District, pp. 33, 34 (1879). BUDDHIST ELEMENTS IN HINDUISM. 201 intermediate links is found in the darsanas, or philosophical systems, between the Vedic period and the establishment of Buddhism as a national religion under Asoka (1400? to 250 B.C.). A later set is preserved in the compromises effected during the final struggle between Buddhism and Bráhmanism, ending in the re-assertion of the latter in its new form as the religion of the Hindus (700 to 1000 A.D.). on Hin Buddhism not only breathed into the new birth its noble Buddhist spirit of charity, but bequeathed to Hinduism many of its influences institutions unimpaired, together with its scheme of religious duism. life, and the material fabric of its worship. At this day, the mahájan or bankers' guild, in Surat, devotes part of the fees that it levies on bills of exchange to animal hospitals; true Beast survivals of Asoka's second edict, which provided a system hospitals. of medical aid for beasts, 250 years before Christ. The cenobitic life, and the division of the people into laity and clergy, have passed almost unchanged from Buddhism into the present Hindu sects, such as the Vaishnavs or Vishnuites. teries. The Hindu monasteries in our own day vie with the Buddhist Monasconvents in the reign of Síláditya; and Purí is, in many respects, a modern unlettered Nalanda. The religious houses of the Orissa delta, with their revenue of £50,000 a year,1 are but Hindu developments of the Buddhist cells and rock-monasteries, whose remains still honeycomb the adjacent hills. If we examine the religious life of the Vishnuite communities, we find their rules are Buddhistic, with Brahmanical reasons attached. Thus the moral code of the Kabir-panthis The reliconsists of five rules: 2 First, life, whether of man or beast, gious life. must not be violated; because it is the gift of God. Second, humanity is the cardinal virtue; and the shedding of blood, whether of man or beast, a heinous crime. Third, truth is the great principle of conduct; because all the ills of life and ignorance of God are due to original falsehood (máyá). Fourth, retirement from the world is desirable; because the desires of the world are hostile to tranquillity of soul, and to the undisturbed meditation on God. Fifth, obedience to the spiritual guide is incumbent on all. This last rule is common to every sect of the Hindus. But the Kabir-panthís direct the pupil to examine well his teacher's life and doctrine before 1 Report by the Committee of native gentlemen appointed to inquire into the Orissa maths, dated 25th March 1869, par. 15. 2 H. H. Wilson's Religion of the Hindus, vol. i. p. 94 (ed. 1862). |