it necessary, when his king touched him, to wash from
head to foot.[21] Alexander the Great found no castes in the Punjab, but
Megasthenes had left an account of the ryots and tradesmen, the military
order and the gymnosophists (including the Buddhist Germanes) whom he
found in the country of the Ganges.[22] From his use of the word
gymnosophist it is probable that Megasthenes confounded the Brahmans
with the hermits or fakirs; and this explains his statement that any
Hindu might become a Brahman. Megasthenes spent some time at the court
of Sandracottus (Chandragupta Maurya), a contemporary of Seleucus
Nicator. All the later Greeks[23] follow his statement and concur in
enumerating seven Indian castes--sophists, agriculturists, herdsmen,
artisans, warriors, inspectors, councillors. On the revival of
Brahmanism it was found that the second and third castes had
disappeared, and that the field was now occupied by the Brahmans, the
Sudras, and a host of mixed castes, sprung from the original twelve,
Unulum and Prutilum, left-hand and right-hand, which were formed by the
crossing of the four original castes. Manu himself gives a list of these
impure castes, and the Ain-i-Akbari (1556-1605) makes the positive
statement that there were then 500 tribes bearing the name of Kshatriya,
while the real caste no longer existed. Most of these subdivisions are
really trade-organizations, many of them living in village-communities,
which trace descent from a pure caste. Thus in Bengal there are the
Vaidya or Baidya, the physicians, who, Manu says, originated in the
marriage of a Brahman father and a Vaisya mother.

As Colebrooke said, Brahmans and Sudras enter into all trades, but
Brahmans (who are profoundly ignorant even of their own scriptures) have
succeeded in maintaining their monopoly of Vedic learning, which really
means a superficial acquaintance with the Puranas and Manu. Though they
have succeeded in excluding others from sacred employment, only a
portion of the caste are actually engaged in religious ceremonies, in
sacred study, or even in religious begging. Many are privates in the
army, many water-carriers, many domestic servants. And they have, like
other castes, many subdivisions which prevent intimate association and
intermarriage. The ideal Brahman is gone: the priest "with his hair and
beard clipped, his passions subdued, his mantle white, his body pure,
golden rings in his ear." But the hold which caste has on the Hin