Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India May 1927

Rabindranath has devoted the greater part of his essay to the consideration of the merits and demerits of the caste system and the above is his con4usion. [...] All this creation was evolved as it were out of Vdc the Word the First to have been manifested in the dark and limitless void of the Kdrana Samudra and appropriately called Ssrasvati the One who has the Saras or the Causal Ocean for Her birth-place and the First to have manifested Brahman. [...] There is also evidence in the Rigveda to show that the whole of the Gangetic provinces down to Assam was covered by a sea extending along the foot of the Himalaya in Rigvedic times and the Ganga the most sacred river pf the Aryans in later times was only a very small stream in those days discharging her waters into the Eastern Sea (the Pdrva Samudra as it is cared in the Rigveda) not very f [...] Geologists have admitted that with the upheaval of the sea-bed in Rajputana and Ed formation of the Gangetic plains by the accumulated alluvium brought down into the Pdrva Samudra by the Himalayan rivers the climate of the Punjab changed from cold to fict 4rain-fall became scanty and the glaciers on the lower slopes fit the Himalaya disappeared With the disappearance of seas froth the vicinity [...] This spirit of enterprise was subsequently cramped by illiberal laws and narrow restrictions that sought to maintain"THE MESSAGE OF THE VEDAS 213 the purity of the Aryan people by isolating them from the contact and contamination of the outer world and of those communities in India itself whiCh were mostly non-Aryan and regarded as untouchables." The inevitable result was the division of the In