some extent even in modern practice. It was perhaps based on
the virtue assigned to concrete facts; just as the Hindus think that a
girl is properly married by going through the ceremony with an arrow
or a flower, and that the fact of two children being suckled by the
same woman, though she is not their mother, establishes a tie akin
to consanguinity between them, so they might have thought that the
fact of a boy being born in a man's house constituted him the man's
son. Subsequently, however, the view came to be held that the clan
blood was communicated directly through the father, to whom the life
of the child was solely assigned in the early patriarchal period. And
the chastity of married women then became of vital importance to the
community, because the lack of it would cause strangers to be born
into the clan, which now based its tie of kinship on descent from
a common male ancestor. Thus the adultery of women became a crime
which would undermine the foundations of society and the state,
and as such was sometimes punished with death among communities
in the early patriarchal stage. It is this view, and not simply
moral principle, which has led to the severe caste penalties for the
offence. Some of the primitive tribes care nothing about the chastity
of unmarried girls, but punish unfaithful wives rigorously. Among the
Maria Gonds a man will murder his wife for infidelity, but girls are
commonly unchaste. Another rule sometimes found is that an unmarried
girl becoming with child by an outsider is put out of caste for the
time. When her child, which does not belong to the caste, has been
born, she must make it over to some outside family, and she herself
can then be readmitted to the community. Out of the view of adultery
as a religious and social offence, a moral regard for chastity is
however developing among the Hindus as it has in other societies.

94. The status of impurity.

It has been seen that the Sudras as well as the plebeians were regarded
as impure, and the reason was perhaps that they were considered to
belong to a hostile god. By their participation in the sacrifice
and partaking of the sacrificial food, the Indian Aryans and other
races considered that they were not only in fellowship with, but
actually a part of the god. And similarly their enemies were part
of the substance of a hostile god, whose very existence and contact
were abhorrent to their own. Hence their enemies should as far as
p