Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India
has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within
which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully
enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has
been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted.
This has produced something like a United States of a social federation,
whose common name is Hinduism.
India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should be,
whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into your
narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it.
In this India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in
human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of
mountains, fixed for ever--they are fluid with life's flow, they are
changing their courses and their shapes and volume.
Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not
the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions
she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous
races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive
opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it
produces diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its
world-game of infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life
in all truth where it is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever
moving. Therefore Life departed from her social system and in its place
she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless
compartments that she has manufactured.
The same thing happened where she tried to ward off the collisions of
trade interests. She associated different trades and professions with
different castes. This had the effect of allaying for good the
interminable jealousy and hatred of competition--the competition which
breeds cruelty and makes the atmosphere thick with lies and deception.
In this also India laid all her emphasis upon the law of heredity,
ignoring the law of mutation, and thus gradually reduced arts into
crafts and genius into skill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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