CASTE IN LOWER BENGAL.

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fountain of honour.25 The 'religious conceptions and sacred usages which,' to quote a noble sentence of Roth's, 'even in the hymns of the Rig Veda we can see advancing from a simple and unconnected form to compact and multiform shapes, had now spread themselves over the entire life of the people, and in the hands of the priests had become a power predominant over everything else.' At the time when the subsequent Aryan emigrants started for Lower Bengal, the priestly class had been recognised as the head of society, but no sharp distinctions among the general mass of the people seem to have been formed. The settlers in Lower Bengal naturally set up as Aryans of the highest class in their new homes, just as every Englishman in India during the last century claimed for himself the title of Esquire.26 The Aryans were the aristocracy of Lower Bengal, the Brahmans were the aristocracy of the Middle Land; and when a rigid division of the people took place in the parent country, the aristocracy of the distant province claimed the same rank and the same title as the aristocracy of the fatherland. This rank was never

25 'It is only after the Aryan tribes had advanced southward, and taken quiet possession of the rich plains and beautiful groves of Central India, that they seem to have turned all their energies and thoughts from the world without them to that more wonderful nature which they perceived within.'—Max Müller's History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, 8vo, London 1859, p. 25.

26 Witness The Humble Petition of Mr.

-' in the Calcutta Gazette of the 15th January 1789. I have seen an advertisement in an early Calcutta paper, in which a military man notifies that he disclaims the title of Esquire.

fully given, however. The mere name of Brahmans the Aryans of the south-east settlements might easily usurp, but the Brahmans of the Middle Land never admitted them to equal honour with themselves. The Brahmans of Lower Bengal bore to the Brahmans of Oudh the same relation that the landed gentry of Canada or Australia bears to the landed gentry of England. Each is an aristocracy, both claim the title of Esquire, but each is composed of elements whose social history is widely different, and the home aristocracy never regard the successful settlers as their equals in rank. The Brahmans of the Middle Land went further: they declared the Brahmans of Lower Bengal inferior not merely in the social scale, but in religious capabilities. To this day, many of the north country Brahmans do not eat with the Brahmans of the Lower Valley; and convicted felons from the north-west will suffer repeated floggings in jail for contumacy, rather than let rice cooked by a Bengal Brahman pass their lips. For ages, the Lower Bengal Brahmans were incapable of performing the more solemn sacrifices, and the jus connubii appears to have been cut off between the Brahmans of the south-east and those of the Middle Land. Later colonies of northern Brahmans could form no legal connection with Aryan women of the Lower Valley, and the children born to them by such mothers were renounced as illegitimate.

The population of Lower Bengal consists, according to the pandits, of five elements, who came into the country in the following order: 1st, The

THE ETHNOLOGY OF LOWER BENGAL. I07

aboriginal non-Aryan tribes; 2d, The Vaidic and Saraswati Brahmans, who formed the first Aryan settlements; 3d, Kshatryan refugees, who escaped the extermination of their caste by Parasu-Rama, with isolated Vaisya families, few or none of whom penetrated below Bahar; 4th, A later migration of Brahmans, circ. 900 A.D., represented by the story of the five Brahmans brought from Canouj by Adiswara; 5th, Recent emigrants and military adventurers from the north, Rajputs, i.e. Kshatryas, Afghans, and Mussulmans of diverse races. In all this there is nothing of the rigid fourfold classification described by Manu. The native legend regarding the introduction of the fourth element is briefly this. King Adiswara of Gour, wishing to perform sacrifices for which the Brahmans of the Lower Valley were not competent, brought five Brahmans from Canouj. These Brahmans first settled on the east side of the Ganges, and forming connections with the women of the country, had many children, whom they called Varindra. When they were fairly established, their lawful wives followed them from Canouj, and the husbands, leaving their concubines and illegitimate children on the east of the Ganges (at Bikrampur in Dacca), crossed the river with their legal wives and their offspring. From these legitimate children the Rari, i.e. the Brahmans of the western districts of Lower Bengal, are descended. This took place about 900 A.D., and the rival claims of the old and the new settlers soon became a source of national disquiet. Two

centuries afterwards, Ballal Sen, the last Hindu sovereign of Bengal, found it necessary to settle questions of precedence by a comprehensive classification of his Aryan subjects. Many of the older families of the province were amalgamated with the new-comers. Almost all of pure Aryan descent were admitted to equal rights, and of the ancient settlers very few recognised descendants now preserve their identity." Several mixed castes were derived from the followers of the Canouj Brahmans (such as the Cayasths); but of the other two Twice-Born castes, as described by Manu, viz. the Kshatryan and the Vaisya, scarcely a single family exists in the southern valley, which cannot trace its origin to the north within comparatively recent times, and the rigid fourfold classification of society laid down by Manu is practically unknown in Lower Bengal.

I am aware that this conclusion is capable of being misunderstood, and likely to be mis-stated. The actual condition of society, with its cruel distinctions, will be cited against me. Jagganath, Gya, nay, the Holy City within the district of Beerbhoom itself, will be enumerated as abiding testimonies to the thoroughgoing character of Hinduism in Lower Bengal. The superstitions of those celebrated shrines, however, are easily accounted for by the strong reaction in favour of Hinduism

27 This account is abbreviated from the statements of my pandits, and from reports of professional Hindu genealogists. See also Colebrooke's Examinations of the Indian Classes, As. Res. vol. v., and Essays, vol. ii. pp. 187-90, 8vo, 1837.

turies ago.

THE PRIMITIVE RACE.

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after the expulsion of Buddhism only eight cenThe social distinctions, more cruel in Lower Bengal perhaps than in any other part of India, proceed from a different cause.

The Sanskrit-speaking settlers found the land already peopled. Their predecessors are still an ethnological mystery, and except in a few frontier districts like Beerbhoom, they succumbed so completely beneath the new-comers, that their separate existence has been forgotten for more than a thousand years by the composite people which they helped to form. As countless species of animals once covered the earth's surface which have left no type in the zoology of the present day, so vast races of the human family have lived and worked out their civilisation and vanished, with regard to whom history has up to the present been mute. Geologers tell us that, in a primeval age, myriads of gigantic birds, of which no representative remains, left their footprints in the sands of Connecticut; that they waded in boundless shallows now dried up into solid stone, feeding upon mail-covered fishes, which now lie side by side with them in the rock, and preyed upon by monsters still larger than themselves, but equally extinct before man was born. The primitive races of India resemble in many ways these birds of the Lias.. Like them, they perished in prehistoric times; and of many of them, all that can with certainty be said is, that they once were and now are not. Philology, which speaks so clearly with regard to other extinct