the village community may be
recognised in the Vaishyas or cultivators and the Sudras or impure
serfs and labourers. The exact position held by the Kshatriyas and the
constitution of their class are not quite clear, but there is no doubt
that the Brahmans and Kshatriyas formed the early aristocracy, ranking
above the cultivators, and a few other castes have since attained to
this position. From early times, as is shown by an ordinance of Manu,
men of the higher castes or classes were permitted, after taking
a woman of their own class for the first wife, to have second and
subsequent wives from any of the classes beneath them. This custom
appears to have been largely prevalent. No definite rule prescribed
that the children of such unions should necessarily be illegitimate,
and in many cases no doubt seems to exist that, if not they themselves,
their descendants at any rate ultimately became full members of the
caste of the first ancestor. According to Manu, if the child of a
Brahman by a Sudra woman intermarried with Brahmans and his descendants
after him, their progeny in the seventh generation would become full
Brahmans; and the same was the case with the child of a Kshatriya or a
Vaishya with a Sudra woman. A commentator remarks that the descendants
of a Brahman by a Kshatriya woman could attain Brahmanhood in the
third generation, and those by a Vaishya woman in the fifth. [40]
Such children also could inherit. According to the Mahabharata, if
a Brahman had four wives of different castes, the son by a Brahman
wife took four shares, that by a Kshatriya wife three, by a Vaishya
wife two, and by a Sudra wife one share. [41] Manu gives a slightly
different distribution, but also permits to the son by a Sudra wife
a share of the inheritance. [42] Thus the fact is clear that the son
of a Brahman even by a Sudra woman had a certain status of legitimacy
in his father's caste, as he could marry in it, and must therefore
have been permitted to partake of the sacrificial food at marriage;
[43] and he could also inherit a small share of the property.

16. Hypergamy.

The detailed rules prescribed for the status of legitimacy and
inheritance show that recognised unions of this kind between men of a
higher class and women of a lower one were at one time fairly frequent,
though they were afterwards prohibited. And they must necessarily
have led to much mixture of blood in the different castes. A trace
of them seems to surv