es ago by the tide of Aryan conquest. Some of those
tribes, grouped together in the Indian Census under the denominational
rubric of "Animists" and numbering about 8-1/2 millions, have survived
to the present day in remote hills and jungles without being absorbed
into the Hindu social system, and have preserved their primitive
beliefs, in which fetish worship, and magic are the dominant elements.
Low as is their social _status_, it is but little lower than that of the
Panchamas who have obtained a footing on the nethermost rung of the
social ladder of Hinduism without being admitted to any sort of contact
with its higher civilization or even to the threshold of its temples.

Hinduism with all its rigidity is, it is true, sufficiently elastic to
sanction, at least tacitly, a slow process of evolution by which the
Panchama castes--for there are many castes even amongst the
"untouchables"--gradually shake off to some extent the slough of
"uncleanness" and establish some sort of ill-defined relations even with
Brahmanism. For whilst there is on the one hand a slowly ascending scale
by which the Panchamas may ultimately hope to smuggle themselves in
amongst the inferior Sudras, the lowest of the four "clean" castes, so
there is a descending scale by which Brahmans, under the pressure of
poverty or disrepute, sink to so low a place in Brahmanism that they are
willing to lend their ministrations, at a price, to the more prosperous
of the Panchamas and help them on their way to a higher _status_. Thus
probably half the Sudras of the present day were at some more or less
remote period Panchamas. Again, during periods of great civil commotion,
as in the 18th century, when brute force was supreme, not a few
Panchamas, especially low-caste Mahrattas, made their way to the front
as soldiers of fortune, and even carved out kingdoms to themselves at
the point of the sword. Orthodox Hinduism bowed in such cases to the
accomplished fact, just as it has acquiesced in later years when
education and the equality of treatment brought by British rule have
enabled a small number of Panchamas to qualify for employment under
Government.

But these exceptions are so rare and the evolutionary process is so
infinitely slow and laborious that they do not visibly affect the
yawning gulf between the "clean" higher-caste Hindu and the "unclean"
Panchama. The latter may have learned to do _puja_ to Shiva or Kali or
other members of the Hindu Pantheon,