mporary and
closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and
perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease
of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically quite
unimportant sect. But indomitably powerful as a social amalgam, Hinduism
failed to generate any politically constructive force that could endure
much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The
Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the
centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for
mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all
in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and
climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at
strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone
always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding pantheon of gods and
goddesses for the multitude, with its subtle and elastic philosophies
for the elect, with the doctrine of infinite reincarnations for all,
and, bound up with it, the iron law of caste.

The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to
the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its
essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life
even by the Western-educated classes. It divides up Indian society into
thousands of water-tight compartments within which the Hindu is born and
lives and dies without any possibility of emerging from the one to which
he has been predestined by his own deeds in his former lives. Each caste
forms a group, of which the relations within its own circle, as well as
with other groups, are governed by the most rigid laws--in no
connection more rigid than in regard to marriage. These groups are of
many different types; some are of the tribal type, some national, some
sectarian, some have been formed by migration, some are based upon a
common social function or occupation past or present, some on
peculiarities of religious beliefs and superstitions. A distinguished
French writer, M. Senart, has described a caste as a close corporation,
in theory at any rate rigorously hereditary, equipped with a certain
traditional and independent organisation, observing certain common
usages, more particularly as to marriage, food, and questions of
ceremonial pollution, and ruling its members by the sanction of certain
penalties of which the most si