Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/107

II.] the purity of the four original castes of the Hindus was lost. On an examination of skulls, the Mongolian type has been discovered in high-caste Hindus of various places in India. The Buddhists had no strict code of marriage-laws. In the Aṁbatto Sutta of the Buddhists we find that pratiloma—that reversal of ranks in marriage which is so highly condemned by Hindu law-givers—was at one time greatly in vogue in India. In the drama of Mrichchhakatika written by a Buddhist prince, we find Chāru Datta, a good Brāhmin, paying court to Vasanta Sena, a courtesan. In the Daçaratha Jātaka of the Buddhists, Sītā is represented as the sister of Rāma, who at the same time marries her. These and similar tales are told in a plain way without any comment, thus shewing that in Buddhistic society, rules of marriage were extremely loose.

The revival of Hinduism in Bengal, between the 9th and the 13th century, meant war against these laxities brought by a set of free-thinkers who would submit to no leader, but would wreck the whole fabric of society on the quicksands of their own cynicism. To preserve the purity of the Aryan blood after the admixture and corruption it had already passed through, to counteract the influence of the Tāntrikism with its obnoxious idea of indiscriminate food, in a word, to undo the great evils of that age, strict rules regarding marriage and eating required to be enacted, if society was to be ordered and disciplined and led to accept a pure ideal.