The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India | Page 9

4. The meaning of the term 'Caste.'
The two main ideas denoted by a caste are a community or persons
following a common occupation, and a community whose members
marry only among themselves. A third distinctive feature is that the
members of a caste do not as a rule eat with outsiders with the
exception of other Hindu castes of a much higher social position than
their own. None of these will, however, serve as a definition of a caste.
In a number of castes the majority of members have abandoned their
traditional occupation and taken to others. Less than a fifth of the
Brahmans of the Central Provinces are performing any priestly or
religious functions, and the remaining four-fifths are landholders or
engaged in Government service as magistrates, clerks of public offices,
constables and orderlies, or in railway service in different grades, or in
the professions as barristers and pleaders, doctors, engineers and so on.
The Rajputs and Marathas were originally soldiers, but only an
infinitely small proportion belong to the Indian Army, and the
remainder are ruling chiefs, landholders, cultivators, labourers or in the
various grades of Government service and the police. Of the Telis or
oil-pressers only 9 per cent are engaged in their traditional occupation,

and the remainder are landholders, cultivators and shopkeepers. Of the
Ahirs or graziers only 20 per cent tend and breed cattle. Only 12 per
cent of the Chamars are supported by the tanning industry, and so on.
The Bahnas or cotton-cleaners have entirely lost their occupation, as
cotton is now cleaned in factories; they are cartmen or cultivators, but
retain their caste name and organisation. Since the introduction of
machine-made cloth has reduced the profits of hand-loom weaving,
large numbers of the weaving castes have been reduced to manual
labour as a means of subsistence. The abandonment of the traditional
occupation has become a most marked feature of Hindu society as a
result of the equal opportunity and freedom in the choice of
occupations afforded by the British Government, coupled with the
rapid progress of industry and the spread of education. So far it has had
no very markedly disintegrating effect on the caste system, and the
status of a caste is still mainly fixed by its traditional occupation; but
signs are not wanting of a coming change. Again, several castes have
the same traditional occupation; about forty of the castes of the Central
Provinces are classified as agriculturists, eleven as weavers, seven as
fishermen, and so on. Distinctions of occupation therefore are not a
sufficient basis for a classification of castes. Nor can a caste be simply
defined as a body of persons who marry only among themselves, or, as
it is termed, an endogamous group; for almost every important caste is
divided into a number of subcastes which do not marry and frequently
do not eat with each other. But it is a distinctive and peculiar feature of
caste as a social institution that it splits up the people into a multitude
of these divisions and bars their intermarriage; and the real unit of the
system and the basis of the fabric of Indian society is this endogamous
group or subcaste.

5. The subcaste.
The subcastes, however, connote no real difference of status or
occupation. They are little known except within the caste itself, and
they consist of groups within the caste which marry among themselves,
and attend the communal feasts held on the occasions of marriages,
funerals and meetings of the caste panchayat or committee for the

judgment of offences against the caste rules and their expiation by a
penalty feast; to these feasts all male adults of the community, within a
certain area, are invited. In the Central Provinces the 250 groups which
have been classified as castes contain perhaps 2000 subcastes. Except
in some cases other Hindus do not know a man's subcaste, though they
always know his caste; among the ignorant lower castes men may often
be found who do not know whether their caste contains any subcastes
or whether they themselves belong to one. That is, they will eat and
marry with all the members of their caste within a circle of villages, but
know nothing about the caste outside those villages, or even whether it
exists elsewhere. One subdivision of a caste may look down upon
another on the ground of some difference of occupation, of origin, or of
abstaining from or partaking of some article of food, but these
distinctions are usually confined to their internal relations and seldom
recognised by outsiders. For social purposes the caste consisting of a
number of these endogamous groups generally occupies the same
position, determined roughly according to the respectability of its
traditional occupation or extraction.

6. Confusion of nomenclature.
No adequate definition of caste