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HISTORY OF CASTE.
the Vedic vocabulary or with the semideveloped vocabulary of the modern ethnology, in our minds, but we should try to translate the words in the sense current at the time of our writer.[1]
Our writer never defined the term "ārya." The people for whom he wrote understood perfectly what "ārya" meant. What meaning he had in mind—the meaning which was accepted by the people of India for centuries before and after the period of our writer—must be gathered from the uses of the word "ārya" in the text.
- ↑ The discovery, or rather the invention (for this is what we ought to call it), of racial lives in the present varna system of Hindu society, made by European scholars on the basis of Vedic literature, deserves severe condemnation, not so much for their unhappy mistakes (which are certainly excusable), but for the consequences which they have produced in India. Europeans have told us that Aryans and Dravidians are two different races. The again tell us that races which are widely differentiated should not mix. The present Hindus of ordinary English education (which means very poor and distorted education) seek justification and maintenance of the caste-system in the application of those principles. Modern Hindus have contempt for Brahmanical rites and are thus separated from Brāhmana orthodoxy and Brāhmana ideas. The Brähmana orthodoxy does not know what Aryan or Dravidian means, nor does it care to inquire into it for its purposes. All that the Brāhmanas care to inquire about is Sauskāra (the sacraments) and Karman (the aggregate of a man's action as determining his future fate-character), to which they attach very high value, but which they will perhaps give up with the growth of liberal sentiment. But the Hindu of English education is quite different. Hearing of the conditions in the United States, those Hindus who think themselves to be Aryans, wish to demark themselves sharply from those whom they think to be Dravidians. Again, as a great mystery hangs over the consecrated word "Aryan," almost every caste thinks itself an Aryan caste and tries to remain aloof from the rest. I have noticed the black peoples of the Bengals, with clearly Mongoloid features, who would despise Dravidians (Tamils, for instance), who had developed
