A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c18.13

c18.13

In civil life the Brahmins occupied a highly respected position. With the exception of the few who entered the state service in the army and elsewhere, they generally devoted themselves to religious and literary pursuits and stood outside the race for wealth and power. They lived on voluntary gifts from all classes of people from the king downwards. Hundreds of inscriptions proclaim the continued solicitude of kings, nobles and merchants for the maintenance and encouragement of a class of men who devoted themselves exclusively to learning and teaching, who were capable of detached thinking on all problems of social welfare, and whose presence in every town and village was calculated to provide not only patterns of ethical and religious conduct for the rest of the population, but active helpers and disinterested arbitrators in the numerous concerns of their daily life. ‘The intellectual superiority of the Brahmans as a caste’, says Sir Charles Eliot, ‘was sufficiently real to ensure its acceptance and in politics they had the good sense to rule by serving, to be ministers and not kings. In theory and to a considerable extent in practice, the Brahmans and their gods are not an *imperium in imperio* but an *imperium super imperium*.’ It cannot be denied that the Brahmin did not always live up to the ideals of his vocation, and that some movements, like that of the Lingāyats, raised a protest against the position accorded to the Brahmin in society; but as a rule he proved true to his trust, and the rest of the community willingly acknowledged the justice of it in every way.