Page:The history of caste in India.pdf/125

 What does all this mean to an historical critic? Would a critic be justified in declaring that the occupations mentioned herein as peculiar to certain jātis are entirely an invention by the author, without any ground for it? Certainly not. We can find enough evidence to show that the various jātis were engaged in peculiar occupations just mentioned. It is not difficult to see that engaging in these various occupations by the said jātis must have been a fact well known in the period which our author wanted to explain. One critic ridicules our author by showing that the occupations mentioned herein did exist long before the date of our text, but this evidence does not in any way conflict with the statements of our text so as to impair their value. Our writer never meant that any of the castes named above came into existence to engage in a certain occupation. He has noticed, for example, various castes who had hunting for their occupation, and has noticed two castes as people who had working in leather for their occupation.

The fancifulness of the origin of various castes which our writer has given is a fact beyond dispute, but we need not, for that reason, be blind to the truth involved in the statement, though such a blindness may help us to form and maintain a very pleasing theory which lays at the door of Mohammedan conquest all the sin of splitting up the whole "Vaishya caste," which caste, as I have shown, is nothing but a creation of fancy.

Whether the guilds were degraded into castes at this period is a question which I regard as unsettled.