The Historians' History of the World 02

Yet every Sudra is not necessarily the slave of an individual; for it has been seen that they are allowed to offer their services to whom they please, and even to exercise trades on their own account: there is nothing to lead to a belief that they are the slaves of the state; and, indeed, the exemption of Sudras from the laws against emigration shows that no perfect right to their services was deemed to exist anywhere.

Their right to property (which was denied to slaves) is admitted in many places. Their persons are protected, even against their masters, who can only correct them in a manner fixed by law, and equally applicable to wives, children, pupils, and younger brothers.

That there were some Sudra slaves is indisputable; but there is every reason to believe that men of the other classes were also liable to fall into servitude.

The condition of Sudras, therefore, was very much better than that of the public slaves under some ancient republics, and, indeed, than that of the villeins of the Middle Ages, or any other servile class with which we are acquainted.

MIXTURE OF CLASSES

Though the line between the different classes was so strongly marked, the means taken to prevent their mixture do not seem to have been nearly so much attended to as in after times. The law in this respect seems rather dictated by jealousy of the honour of the women of the higher classes than by regard for the purity of descents.

Men of the first three classes are freely indulged in the choice of women from any inferior caste, provided they do not give them the first place in their family. But no marriage is permitted with women of a higher class; criminal intercourse with them is checked by the severest penalties, and their offspring is degraded far below either of its parents. The son of a Brahman, by a woman of the class next below him, takes a station intermediate between his father and mother; and the daughters of such connections, if they go on marrying Brahmans for seven generations, restore their progeny to the original purity of the sacerdotal class; but the son of a Sudra by a Brahman woman is a Chandala, “the lowest of mortals,” and his intercourse with women of the higher classes produces “a race more foul than their begetter.”

The classes do not seem to have associated at their meals even in the time of Manu; and there is a striking contrast between the cordial festivity recommended to Brahmans with their own class, and the constrained hospitality with which they are directed to prepare food after the Brahmans for a military man coming as a guest.

But there is no prohibition in the code against eating with other classes, or partaking of food cooked by them (which is now the great occasion for loss of caste), except in the case of Sudras; and even then the offence is expiated by living on water gruel for seven days.

Loss of caste seems, in general, to have been incurred by crimes, or by omitting the prescribed expiations for offences.

It is remarkable that, in the four classes, no place is assigned to artisans: Sudras, indeed, are permitted to practise mechanic trades during a scarcity of other employment, but it is not said to whom the employment regularly belongs.

From some of the allotments, it would appear that the artisans were supplied, as they are now, from the mixed classes: a circumstance which affords ground for surmise that the division into castes took place while arts were in too simple a state to require separate workmen for each; and also that many generations had elapsed between that division and the code, to allow so important a portion of the employments of the community to be filled by classes formed subsequently to the original distribution of the people.c