3. The or Axis, or mercantile class, from the thigh of Brahma. Their grand duties are to keep cattle, carry on trade, lend on interest, cultivate the soil, and turn their attention to every description of practical knowledge. They are to be perfect men of business.
The Sudras, or Sooders, or servile class, came from the foot of Brahma. They are to serve the three superior classes, more especially the Brahmans. Their condition is never to be improved; they are not to accumulate property, and are unable by any means to approach the dignity of the higher classes. Utter and entire submissiveness to the Brahmans is the spirit of all the Sudra's duties, and this is to be enforced by penalties as severe as they are ridiculous. Yet, withal, the Sudras were not to be slaves, either public or private, and to occupy a position much higher than the Chandalas.
Mixture of castes, though not absolutely forbidden, entails disadvantages on the children, and the offspring of a Brahmanical woman and a Sudra becomes a Chandala, or outcast.
Such—omitting. the minute and childish laws and penalties, many hundreds in num ber, by.which it is proposed to carry the principle of C. into the pettiest affairs of life is a brief outline of it, as gathered from the code of .Menu. There is no historical evi dence that it ever existed in this form, and, from the nature of the case. we may con clude that it never did. In the Toy-cart, the oldest Hindu drama, no extravagant vene ration for Brahmans anywhere appears. In fact, one of them is condemned to death; and the arrangements of society appear to have been the same as at present. The laws of C. form, it is true, a part of what is reputed to be Hindu law, but they have remained in a11 the states of India, Hindu as well as Mohammedan, to a great extent a dead-letter. There is nothing to show that the code of Menu was drawn up for the regulation of any particular state. Some have even conjectured that it may have been the work of some learned man, designed to set forth his idea of a perfect commonwealth under Hindu institutions, just as Plato in The Republic gives us his idea of a model government under Greek institutions.
Be this as it may, the C. which at present exists throughout the greater part of India is very different from that described in the code of Menu, though to this it owes, no doubt, much of its stability and its importance in the eyes of Europeans. With the
exception of the Brahmans, the pure castes have disappeared, and out of the intermix ture of the others have sprung innumerable classes, many of them unauthorized except by the people themselves. So ingrained in the whole community is this tendency to class distinctions, that Mussulmans, Jews, Parsecs, and Christians fall, in some degree, into it; and even excommunicated or outcast Pariahs form castes among themselves. Most of the existing castes partake of the nature of associations for mutual support or familiar intercourse, and are dependent upon a man's trade, occupation, or profession. Many of them have been described by Mr. Colebrook in the Asiatic Transactions, vol. v. Many have had their origin in guilds, in schism from other castes, in the possession of a particular sort of for instance, landlords are spoken of as the C. of zemindars), and similar accidental circumstances. Their names are often due to the district in which the C. took its rise, to their founder, to their peculiar creed, or any random circumstance. In the Bengal presidency, there are many hundreds of such castes, almost every district containing some unknown in those adjacent. Among the lowest classes, and especially among the servants of the English at Calcutta, it has degenerated into a fastidious tenacity of the rights and privileges of station. For example, the man who sweeps your room will not take an empty cup from your band; your groom will not mow a little grass; a coolie will carry any load, however offensive, upon his head, but even in a matter of life and death, would refuse to carry a man, for that is the business of another caste. Such and many other regulations are described in every work on C., but are as unworthy of serious regard as are the assertions of self importance found among little people all the world over. When an English servant pleads that such a thing " is not his place," his excuse is analogous to that of the Hindu servant when lie pleads his caste. When an Englishman of birth or profession, which is held to confer gentility, refuses to associate with a tradesman or mechanic—or when members of a secret order exclude all others from their meetings—or when any other similar social distinction arises, it would present itself to the mind of the Hindu as a regulation of caste.