IN the Indian world the social horizon of the average man hardly extends beyond the rural hamlet. Individuals sprung from a common origin continue to live together according to certain rules, and the group consists in theory of kinsmen. Janman, the line of descent, is the same or almost the same as grāma, the village.
Yet the Aryan invaders, being nomads, had no villages, but only lines of descent, to which they clung all the more keenly because they found in this attachment to family traditions a means of preserving their specific character. To preserve the race (kula) unchanged was to them the great social duty, and classical literature is deeply stamped with that feeling. The Dravidians whose country they invaded, on the other hand, had long been settled on the soil, and they possessed agricultural centres and probably towns. So we find that the Dravidian religions continue through history to be local cults, and they imposed a religious village-life on Hinduism. It seems, therefore, that the identification of grāma and janman points to that mixture of population henceforward characteristic of the country.
The family rested on different foundations in the two racial environments. Matriarchy and polyandry must have existed in the original Dravidian element; traces or memories of them have survived. The Indo-Europeans, on the other hand, seem very generally to have maintained the agnatic principle in defining relationships, and they imposed it on later ages. Agricultural communities tend to give women a high social position, harmonizing with cults of natural fruitfulness, whereas conquering peoples need rather a masculine form of authority.
The Indian family of Indo-European type, composed of cousins and second cousins, corresponds to the Greek 
and the Latin gens, and has the same name—jana, janman. The co-ordination of several lines in a wider group forms the tribe, sabhā, a union of villages. It is what the Southern Slavs call pleme, in opposition to bralstvo—a crowd as opposed to a brotherhood. Their zadruga, a family group smaller than the bratstvo, has an Indian equivalent, the viś or clan. A jana is divided into viś as, in the vocabulary of Iran, the zañtu is divided into vīses, this last word vīs being identical with the Indian. We shall only go astray if we try to press similarities among the institutions of the many Indo-European societies, which are only approximate likenesses and are the result of long independent development. The three degrees, clan (German Sippe), stock or line (Stamm), and tribe (Versammlung), are distinguished to different degrees according to the environment, and on this point the discussions of the modern schools of sociology contain as much theory as history, if not more. The earliest Indian institution at which we can arrive is a social group, varying in size, of kinsmen or of juxtaposed lines of descent, and it does not much matter whether we call this group a " clan " or a "line".1
The criterion of membership of this group does not he in consanguinity—what I have said of the kinsmen of the woman is proof of this—but in the practice of a common religion. Kinsfolk are those who pay the same honours to the same ancestor. They are sapiṇḍa, as in Greece the people making the same offering of milk to the same dead were 
The social rather than biological character of kinship is well illustrated by the fact that when a husband was sterile he would obtain sons to carry on the family worship by the union of his wife with another man.
The father, grandfather, or great-grandfather is the head of the family, pati. There are also heads of clans, viśpati, and it is from among these, who in theory are all equal, that the military head of the tribe, the King, is chosen. His function is to maintain order, rājati (Avestic rāzayeiti), The power which elects the King is the association of lines which is called a tribe, sabhā, and that is how this term also has the meaning of "assembly". Such are the primitive rudiments from which later institutions were to develop.
The central point round which the Indo-European or Indo-Europeanized family is grouped is the hearth. The hearth makes its unity and dominates its worship. So through all the ages of India a prehistoric Aryan religion of fire is perpetuated.
There are as many fires as there are families. The fire, like the father, is the master of the house, gṛihapati, or the head of the village, viśpati, according to the size of the group. As once that fire, burning by the tents of nomads, kept away wild beasts, so, now that they are settled, it guards herdsmen and flocks, like a true pastor, gopa. It is essentially polymorphic and flames and crackles not only on the hearth but in the sky. It is the lightning and it is the sun. It is a formidable power and a friend of man, the thunderbolt which destroys and the heat which gives life. The divine, deva, is by its name heat and light; it is over mortals as the sky is over them. But on the other hand nothing is more within man's reach than the hearth which cooks his food, serves for his rites, and presides over all the acts of his life. It springs not only from the cloud, as the Son of the Waters (āpam napāt), but from the wood of the araṇi, the fire stick and board. Therefore it can be produced. But blessed are those who do not allow the fire of the tribe to die out, and keep it up for ever. The most ancient Indo-Iranian priesthood is that of the atharvans, the fire-priests.
The handing down of fire is not merely symbolical of the maintenance of the ancestral line; it is the same thing. The fire is equivalent to the "ancestor", representing whom the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, the tripatores of the Greeks, the sapiṇḍa-pitaras of classical India, have authority in the family. Just as the hearth now burning continues the fire of past years, so these " fathers " preserve to-day the sacred character which belonged to the mightiest of the dead, who still exist in a mysterious abode. The food offered to these dead is thrown into the fire, and so comes to them.
In virtue of this consubstantiality of the hearth-fire and the line, the cosmic extensions of each are equivalent. Since there is fire also in nature, where the sky is luminous, the sky too is a father, Dyaus-pitar. This fundamental belief of the Indo-Europeans, familiar to us in its Græco-Latin form (Zeus Pater, Jupiter), marks the point at which cosmology and mythology link up with the most essential rites of the family. Communication is made with the heavenly beings or gods (deva) as it is with the ancestors, through fire, and among all fires that of the hearth keeps a pre-eminence which is very significant.
Every head of a family is a sacrificer. His religious duties are set forth particularly in the Gṛihya Sūtra, the book of domestic ritual, in which he is the sole or principal actor, but also, in part, in the revealed ritual described in the Śrauta Sūtra, which requires the offices of professionals. The fire of the hearth is sufficient in the first case; in the second, two other fires are needed, the āhavanīya and the dakshina, which stand respectively on the east and north of the household altar, but must both be kindled at the hearth. The altar is a mere patch of grass, strewn in a rough rectangle with incurving sides. On this the fires and the offerings are arranged, the latter being milk, butter, corn, meat, and fermented liquors. On this vedi the gods come and take their places. Such is the simple material apparatus of sacrifice, but the rites are highly complicated.
From morning to night the master of the house performs religious duties. The morning sandhyā includes various practices—bathing in running water, cleaning of the teeth, arranging of the hair, breathing exercises, and the recitation of the gāyatrī, the most sacred of all formulas,1 and other Vedic texts. Then come five "great sacrifices" (mahāyajña)— offerings to the gods (deva), demons (bhūta), and ghosts of the dead (pitṛi), to men (nṛi) by the exercise of hospitality, and to the Brahman by the reading of a Vedic text. This word "Brahman" will be explained later; what we have here is veneration paid to scriptural revelation. After that, honour is paid to five idols of the home (āyatana), which are stones symbolizing the deities Vishnu, Siva, Durga, Ganesa, and Surya. Morning and evening there is an agnihotra, a sacrifice of fire in its three forms. At the midday meal food is thrown on the fire for the benefit of all the gods (vaiśvadeva). Then little heaps of cooked rice are placed inside and outside the house for the gods, the spirits, and the beasts. Then, and then only, do the men of the house take their meal, sitting on their hunkers; the women, who serve them, do not eat till afterwards. At sunset there is another sandhyā. This simplified account hardly gives an idea of the number of the daily formalities by which the master of a house contributes to the universal order, promoting the movements of the sun by the regularity of his worship, nourishing the various kinds of spirits, including the gods and the dead, and keeping his group in harmony with the whole of nature. But one can see what a part fire plays in this religion of the household.
Now let us look at this religion in the course of the characteristic phases of individual life. Forty saṃskāras, or sacraments, should be enumerated, but we may be content to note those marking the principal epochs. Even before a child is born there are ways of facilitating the event, warding off evil influences, and obtaining the arrival of a male offspring (puṃsavana). The new-born baby is given ablutions and a spoonful of honey in a golden spatula, and speech and thought are breathed into his ear by the muttering of pious words. The constellation under which he was born is written down in a record of his birth (janmapatra), and this document will be consulted at the critical epochs of life. At the giving of his name (nāma-karaṇa), at least ten days after his birth, he receives an every-day name and another, which will be kept secret, which depends on astrological conjunctions. At the age of six the child gets his first solid nourishment (annaprāshana), which is rice. Between the ages of three and seven a boy is given his proper tonsure (chūḍākaraṇa). Between eight and twelve he is taken as a novice or scholar by a teacher (upanāyana). This is the occasion of a second birth. Wrapped in an antelope's hide, he is invested with the sacred cord of the free man (yajñopavīta) and he is taught the gāyatrī, as an initiation into the Veda, which is all the spiritual nourishment which he will receive in his education. In theory he should serve an apprenticeship of twelve years for each Veda, or forty-eight years in all, but it is obvious that the exigencies of life, even for a man destined to the priesthood, make such a time impossible. Special rites emancipate the young adult from his student-hood and reintroduce him into the world (samāvartana). Marriage (vivāha) then becomes necessary; we shall see the forms which it takes presently. Now begins life as the head of a house, whose chief daily obligations we have just seen. It is recommended that at the age when a man has grown-up sons he should retire into the forest, or at least adopt the habits of a hermit, in expectation of the day when the funeral rites shall make him in his turn an ancestor. The ancestors at the start, the state of ancestor at the end, and the central part played by the father in the time between —that is the course of a cycle of family life based on the agnatic type. All the sacraments governing this evolution consist in prescribing a mode of life for a certain age, an action for a certain moment. The rite is nothing more than the suitable action required at the time, kalpa. It would be as idle to try to go on to a later time without performing the necessary rite as to hope to go from winter to summer without passing through spring.
In many of these saṃskāras there are sacrifices made at the hearth, or gravitating round it. When the young bride enters the house, she is accompanied by a special fire which indicates that a new element has been grafted on to the family tree.
Whether burned or buried, the dead live on in the existence appropriate to them, provided that they are fed by the offerings poured on the hearth. That hearth is plainly far more than the chief instrument in worship; it incorporates the essence of the family.
The Śrauta Sūtras lay down sacrifices requiring three fires and various categories of priests. We shall touch on them when we come to consider the priesthood.
The distinction of religion and law can be justified only from the European point of view; the two notions are one in Indian dharma.
But before going further we should note that, without losing their intimate connexion with religion, legal rules gave rise to a special literature. In the great age of the Brāhmaṇas, between the eighth and third centuries before Christ, thought began to concentrate on laying down legal relationships. This new interest was based, not on the Veda or on revelation (śṛuti), but on tradition (smṛiti).
The corpus of customs (dharma-śāstra) was drawn up in close connexion with the books of ritual. So far from setting forth codes which, in the European sense, have "the force of law", it defines a religious ideal of social order. It lays down duties much rather than rights—again two notions which in India are never opposed, but are enveloped in the intermediate notion of dharma. The books are drawn up like sutras, but are full of maxims in verse. They bear the names of schools or traditions, like the ritual books.
The most ancient is the Dharmaśastra of Gautama, which is quoted as an authority by Baudhayana and Vasishtha; it is attached to the Sāmaveda. The Dharma Sūtras of Vasishtha, which belong to a northern school, cite Dharma Sūtras of Manu, which must have been the origin of the later Mānava-dharmaśāstra. The Sūtras of Apastamba, which are connected with a Black Yajurveda of Southern India, go back to about 400 B.C., a date slightly earlier than that of the composition of the Sūtras of Baudhayana, which have the same origin. These two works are the best preserved among the earlier legal literature. They quote the Sūtras of Harita, which belong to the same Veda but are of the Maitrāyaṇīya school.
Now we come to treatises which cannot have been written before 200 B.C. First there is the Dharmaśāstra of the Vaishṇavas, called the Vishṇu-smṛiti, which is founded on ancient Sutras of the Kāṭhaka school belonging to the Black Yajurveda. Next comes several other Smṛitis, the most celebrated of which is the Manu-sṃriti or Mānava-dharmaśāstra, known in the West as the "Laws of Manu". This new literature has much in common with the epic Mahābhārata. It is strongly marked by the influence of popular religions, and belongs to the centuries in which the epic was written (between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200); indeed, the epic refers to it (Mahabh., bk. xiii). In character it is at once didactic, poetic, and philosophic, and has none of the dryness of the old Sūtras. The Smṛiti of Yajñavalkya, which dates from nearly the same time, is related to the Gṛihya Sūtras of the White Yajurveda of Eastern India. In expression it is more condensed, more systematic, and more lucid than the work of Manu, and therefore seems to have been written rather later. This late character is still more marked in the Smṛiti of Narada, certain interpolations in which (e.g. dīnāra, the Latin denarius) bear the stamp of the fourth century of our era. The Smṛiti of Brihaspati is, in substance, later than that of Narada, but it is presented as a commentary on Manu, definitely earlier than that of Medhatithi, the first of the classical commentators (ninth century).
These different works of "tradition" incorporate not only the early Dharmaśāstras, but very ancient maxims— the didactic aspect of a folklore diffused over Eurasia, no less than the semi-historical wisdom of the epics or the Purāṇas.
We have seen that the preservation of the blood of the race, symbolized by the perpetuity of the domestic fire, is the fundamental idea of the Indian family. So the forms of conjugal union hold a central place in the law of the household.
Dravidian polyandry has left even in the epics a queer trace, which is a valuable historical record of bygone manners. In the Mahābhārata, Draupadi is the wife of the five Pandava brothers. But nothing could be more contrary to Brahman law, which is so strictly agnatic.
Polygamy is not forbidden; it is even sanctioned by the various kinds of regular union, all equally lawful, which we shall consider. Yet the peculiar importance of the wife, who contributes, with the father, to the observation of the household ritual, and who is expected to produce sons to continue the worship of the ancestors, entails a sort of monogamy. Nor should we forget that on the whole India has, in every age, been a poor country. For the vast majority of men the maintenance of one wife is the utmost that can be borne, especially since sacrifices are very costly. In practice, only the nobles, if they are rich, can allow themselves the luxury of a harem.
In the Vedic ages woman seems to have had the power of choosing her husband (svayaṃvara), but that trace of a time and an environment in which her sex was predominant disappeared in the classical period. Far from a union being the result of elective affinities between individuals, it was normally arranged by the families and consecrated in the childhood of the future husband and wife. The Dharma Sūtras of Gautama already declare that girls should be married before puberty, and eventually children were married in their very early years, long before the girl, aged about eleven or twelve, went to live in her husband's house. In consequence, many women are widows when quite young, before the union has been physically consummated.
The same work allows a childless widow to remarry, but greater esteem is enjoyed by the woman who resigns herself to lifelong widowhood, even if her husband died at the age of three or four years of measles or whooping-cough. This feeling is so strong that a woman who loses her husband when he is grown up is encouraged to allow herself to be burned on his funeral pyre.1 The Atharvaveda (18, 3, 1) already mentions the ancient custom of widow-burning. The custom was never enforced, but always highly commended. Belief in the next world, where the union of husband and wife is supposed to continue, justifies a practice in which it is hard for us to see anything but barbarity or pathetic self-sacrifice. We should remember, too, that the widow, being unable to return to her former family, to which she has ceased to belong, can no longer perform religious duties, whereas in following her husband, in the words of Sita in the Rāmāyaṇa, she rejoins "her god".
Be she daughter, wife, or mother, the woman is always a minor. "Na strīsvātantryam," says Manu (xi, 1); there is never any independence for her. This subjection results from the absolute authority assumed by the head of the family in Aryan India. No doubt, in the previous age the mother could rule the family, but the exclusive capacity of the father to make offerings to the ancestors created patriarchy.
The transmission of name and clanship on the distaff side, of which there are vestiges in antiquity,1 is the exception. The rule is that no man regards his wife's relations as being of his own family, and children do not regard their mother's relations as their own. This is an inevitable conception if marriage is the purchase of a woman, or rather of the children to be born of her; and it is equally inevitable if marriage is also regarded as the consecration of an abduction. The very principle of conjugal union requires that the woman should be a stranger to the family; for, while it is obligatory to marry in one's own caste, it is forbidden to marry a sapiṇḍa girl, that is, one whose father or brother would sacrifice to the same ancestors as the prospective husband. According to Gautama (iv, 1), a man cannot marry his kinswoman (sagotrā, samānapravarā) within six degrees on the paternal side, or within four degrees of his mother (as sapiṇḍa of the same gotra or family). This prohibition of incest is in marked contrast to the "sacred" marriages between close relations—parents and children, brothers and sisters—practised in the Iranian branch of the Aryans.
Manu (iii, 21) enumerates eight forms of conjugal union, which I shall give in order of dignity. It is a theoretical classification, in which the caste-spirit is displayed, but various principles can be discerned—mutual consent, real or fictitious purchase, abductions, or even violation. The term common to all these various modes is vivāha, which means etymologically a "carrying off", with or without violence; in any case a snatching of the girl from her parents' house. The four most estimable forms, which are really orthodox, are suitable to the priestly caste, being of such a kind that the wife, on dying, obtains heaven, and the husband is then entitled to inherit his wife's property (strīdhana). These are brāhma vivāha, where the bride is given of her own will, daiva vivāha, where the bridegroom is a sacrificing priest (ṛitvij), ārsha vivāha, where the bride's father receives, fictitiously, two cattle, and prājāpatya vivāha, where the proposal of marriage comes from the man. The āsura form is suited to the Vaiśya and Śūdra castes, the merchants and craftsmen, for it is a purchase, though fictitious; the "hundred cows" which are supposed to constitute the payment are in fact given back to the husband. Lastly there are inferior forms, in which passion predominates— the gāndharva form, that of the spirits of the air, the love-match, which dispenses with the parents' consent (the privilege of the nobility); the fashion of the Rākshasas, which is devilish, namely rape, likewise characteristic of the warrior caste (kshātra vivāha); and lastly a contemptible form, that of the demons, paiśācha, which is a trap, violence suffered in a state of artificially produced drunkenness. Nobles may permit themselves this licence, but it bears the stamp of the low castes.
Common family life implies common abode, common meals, common religion, and common property. Indian law knows nothing of the will, so that if there is a division of property, it is done by the wish of the father, or by that of the sons with his consent. In theory, wives and daughters have no right to anything but their food and, only by tolerance, what they have received as gifts from relations. Yajñavalkya (ii, 123 and 115) allows the father to grant his wives a "son's share". But women have no right to inherit unless there are no male descendants at all.
There is no sign of village communism, even in the Vedic period, but one can see or infer both individual ownership and family communism. The head of the family is also the owner of the family property; but individuals can possess not only cattle, weapons, jewels, and slaves, but even land The terms urvarāsā, "one who obtains arable land," and kshetrasā, " one who obtains a field," are clear evidence of this. Besides, the Jātakas reveal a system of rural economy based on the ownership of the fields by the peasants. Landed property does not seem to have been marketable. The immense extent of the country and the fact that the Aryan conquest was never complete maintained certain survivals from early times in the classical period. "He who clears a piece of land," Manu says (ix, 44), "is the owner of it." Beyond a distance of 600 feet round a village begins a common zone, not that it belongs to the community, but because it is a "no man's land".
From many signs it appears that the village community varied little from the earliest days of the Aryan conquest to the establishment of the British. Andre Philip describes it as follows1:—
"A typical village contains, according to the region, from fifty to two hundred families; that is, a population of from 200 to 800 inhabitants. The houses, which are of wood or dried mud, consist of one or two rooms with a veranda, standing round a small open court, like the Roman atrium. Behind there is an open space where rubbish is thrown and which is used as a latrine. There are one or two outstanding houses with several rooms and perhaps two stories, with painted pillars by which one at once recognizes the home of an influential family, that of the head of the village or the accountant or the usurer. There are two or three parallel streets, each occupied by a special caste or trade. In the middle is the bazaar, where the whole collective life of the place centres, with a temple of Siva, Vishnu, or some other avatar of Brahma near by. A hundred yards away from the mass of houses stand the huts of branches and dried leaves in which live the untouchables, who are usually from 10 to 20 per cent of the population of the village. These huts contain only one room, often with no other opening than a narrow entrance, and in them human beings and domestic animals live all together in a state of disgusting filth. Most of the inhabitants of the village are agriculturists, and they usually belong to one single caste, but they need a few craftsmen" who "belong each to a hereditary professional caste, and are the servants of the community, attached to the village and obliged to perform solely the duties considered indispensable to collective life. They are paid by the grant of an inam, or right to collect, in the place of the government, the revenues of a determined piece of land, and by a portion of the baluta, a determined amount of the produce of each harvest, which every peasant has to provide to the whole body of craftsmen."
In ancicnt India the land system was of the type now called ryotwari, "under which the peasants cultivate their land individually, making common use of the services of the craftsmen of the village and paying land revenue to the state through the village."1 "No doubt there has always been a strong sense of unity in the village communities, but it does not seem to have been ever accompanied by collective ownership of the land. It seems rather that when India was invaded by the Aryan tribes the land was assigned to a certain number of families or of groups of families formed into clans. In exceptional cases a family constitutes a village, with common ownership of the surrounding land. Usually villages were founded by several families, each of which had its own land and cultivated it separately, while all remained collectively responsible to the sovereign for the payment of tax. But ... what is the legal nature of the peasant family's right to its land? Is it a right of ownership, the land revenue being a tax, or is it not rather a mere right of occupation, the king ... being the sole owner and collecting the rent of his land? The latter view has aways been preferred by the central power."