They crowded also into all the new liberal professions fostered by Western education, and, above all, into the legal profession for which they showed, as most Indians do, a very special aptitude.  But, like all monopolists, they were tempted to abuse their monopoly, the more so as they regarded it merely as a legitimate adaptation to the new conditions imported by British rule of the ancient privileges always vested in their caste.  They resented any attempt on the part of Hindus belonging to inferior castes to follow in their footsteps along the new paths of Western learning and to qualify for a share of employment in the public services, for which under the British dispensation all Indians are entitled to compete on equal terms irrespective of all caste discriminations.  The non-Brahmans were slow to start, and when they did start, they had to contend with the jealous opposition of the Brahmans, who combined, as Hindu castes know how to combine, against unwelcome intruders into a profitable field of which they had secured early possession.  When the Public Services Commission was in Madras eight years ago, we heard many bitter complaints from non-Brahmans that, whenever one of them did succeed in getting an appointment under Government, the Brahmans with whom or under whom he had to work would at once unite to drive him out, either by making his life intolerable or by turning against him the European superior to whose ear they had easy access.  For it is one of the weaknesses of an alien bureaucracy that, in regard to routine work at least, its weaker members are apt to be far too much in the hands of their native assistants.  The Brahmans later on formed the bulk of the new Western-educated and “politically-minded” class, and the Madrasee Brahmans played a considerable part in the Indian National Congress before it broke away from its constitutional moorings.

The non-Brahmans, nevertheless, under the leadership of such resolute men as the late Dr. Nair, fought their way steadily to the front, and, being of course in a large majority, they had only to organise in order to make full use of the opportunity which a relatively democratic franchise afforded them for the first time at the recent elections.  They can hardly themselves have foreseen how great their opportunity was, for they regarded the reforms at first with deep suspicion as calculated merely to transfer substantive power from a British to a Brahman bureaucracy, and so deep was their dread of Brahman ascendancy even in the new Councils that they clamoured to the very end for a much larger number of seats than the sixteen that were ultimately reserved as “communal” seats for non-Brahman electorates.  They never needed such a reservation, for they actually carried the day in so many of the “general” constituencies that out of ninety-eight elected members of the new Provincial Council only fourteen are Brahmans, and it is the Brahmans now who complain, not without reason, that their representation falls short of their legitimate