I find it truly extraordinary that in the billions of words that have been written on various facets of the British Raj in India, it is difficult to find even a casual reference to its impact on the Chaturvarna (the four order) system which is central to the Hindu order. It is possible that the issue has been discussed somewhere at some stage by someone. But I have not come across such a discussion in the four decades of my concern with the subject of the Raj and I have not met a scholar, Indian or Western, who regards that impact as significant for an understanding of developments in the past 100 years or so, beginning with the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885.
Unified Rule
The Raj, it is well known, marked a radical departure from the state models in Indian history as we have been able to reconstruct that history on the basis of the available evidence. It brought the whole of the peninsula under the unified and centralised administration for the first time; it effectively connected all parts of the land with one another through a vast rail-road network; it established a uniform codified legal system for the subcontinent; it created a civil service which was recruited on the basis of examinations divorced from considerations of the social status of candidates and was, therefore, expected and able to function impartially, unconcerned with the power distribution among different social segments and individuals.
The Raj was the first truly “authoritarian” state in India, that is, a state which was not based essentially on the support of the local notables and which could, therefore, act independently of them if and when it chose to do so. Even where it did not abolish the old notables, as in the case of the hundreds of princes and princelings, and where it created new ones or strengthened the existing ones, as in Bengal under the permanent settlement, it did not need to treat them with respect, not to speak of equality. They depended for their survival on the goodwill or tolerance of the Raj and they acted accordingly. There was no change in this power correlation till the time of independence in 1947.
The implications of this arrangement for the Chaturvarna system should be obvious if we add that the British managed, also for the first time in Indian history, to totally disarm the Indian people after the 1857 mutiny and thus make the rise of an armed challenge to their authority well nigh impossible, something no Muslim ruler, including the great Mughals, had been able to achieve. One implication clearly is that the Kshatriyas were eliminated as a meaningful factor in the new power arrangement – for the first time on a durable basis. This had never happened under the Muslim rule beginning in the 11th century AD.
The Kshatriya, I might add, is a relatively nebulous concept in the Hindu social arrangement in that this order has been open to outside (foreign) and lower (Indian) groups who were strong enough to carve out kingdoms of whatever size for themselves. The leaders of these successful armed groups were given suitable genealogies by the Brahmins and made into Kshatriyas. All Rajput rulers in Rajasthan and elsewhere, for instance, belonged to this category.
The Kshatriyas, in plain terms, were a collection of elite formations who depended for their rise and survival on conditions which allowed armed competitions for power. Such conditions prevailed in India in varying degrees up to the beginning of the consolidation of British rule in the later part of the 18th century. The British put an end to those conditions and they rendered infructuous the Kshatriyahood of the existing Kshatriyas. The Rajputs could and did join the British Indian army but in subordinate positions. The leadership role was monopolised by the British. They were India’s new Kshatriyas in the comprehensive sense in which the Afghans and Turks had not been. For the Afghans and the Turks had not been able to gain a monopoly of control over instruments of war and coercion. Maharana Pratap, for example, could challenge Akbar the great and Shivaji, Aurangzeb.
This eclipse of the Kshatriyas would not deserve the attention which, in my opinion, it does in connection with the current political discourse if it had not been accompanied by the rise of the Brahmins under the Raj. But it was so accompanied, and inevitable. The British just could not prevent it, try as they did. They encouraged anti-Brahmin movements in the South and Maharashtra which have made an impact on the regional scene. But on the national scene as a whole, they had to take recourse to promoting a Hindu-Muslim conflict which, if anything, strengthened the position of the Brahmins among the Hindus.
Idealised Picture
The relationship between the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas in ancient (Hindu) India has been idealised by modem Indian historians as part of Hindu society’s self-defence against the Christian-Western onslaught. This idealised picture bears no relation to the one that emerges from a study of myths such as that of Parasurama, the Brahmin saint who, to avenge an insult to his father (Jamadagni), killed all Kshatriyas and yet finally handed over power to the Kshatriyas, or the one relating to the conflict between the Brahmin ascetic, Vashistha, and the Kshatriya Vishwamitra engaging in tapas (austerities) to acquire powers which could “rightly” belong only to the Brahmins, or of the dread of Indra, the father god of the Kshatriyas, of Brahmin ascetics such as Gautama whose wife, Ahilya, he tried to seduce. Essentially, this relationship was characterised by ambivalence of which hostility was as much a part as cooperation.
In our times the point is illustrated by the difficulties Shivaji had in getting a Brahmin from Banaras to perform his coronation ceremony according to vedic rites even after he had declared himself king of substantial territory and secured proof of his Kshatriya origins from the Udaipur ruling house, the refusal of the Brahmins to perform Rajasuya yagna according to vedic rites for the Kolhapur branch of the Shivaji family, which had to be content with Puranic rites, and the seizure of effective power by the Brahmin peshwas, reducing Shivaji’s descendants merely to the position of titular kings.
Power Struggle
The ambivalence in the relationship between the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas involved a never-ending power struggle between the two in both the spiritual and the political realms, the Brahmins trying to seize secular (state) power and the Kshatriyas trying to gain occult powers. This must account for the weakness and instability of political authority in Hindu India, especially in north India where the Brahmins have always been far more numerous and stronger. Though I am not sure, it appears to me that this conflict accounts for the lowly status of warrior groups in south India where they have been treated as sudras.
In view of the non-resolution of the Brahmin-Kshatriya struggle for supremacy, some leading Western scholars such as Heesterman and Shulman have concluded that there is no theory of legitimate political authority in Hinduism. This is clearly a highly complex issue which cannot be discussed in this context. Here, we have to content ourselves with noting the fact that the Raj ended this millennia-old Brahmin-Kshatriya conflict in favour of the Brahmins. But this could not be a permanent resolution. The old conflict is re-emerging in today’s India in a new guise which I hope to take up in a subsequent piece.
In addition to the “pacification” (disarming) of India, several factors strengthened the ascendancy of the Brahmins under the Raj. One of these – the alacrity with which the Brahmins took to the Western system of education from the beginning of the 19th century – has attracted so much attention that it has come to appear as if this factor alone accounted for the rise of the Brahmins. In reality this was not so. Nineteenth-century India witnessed not only the spread of Western-secular education but also what has been called the rise of the process of “Sanskritisation” whereby the lower castes took to the mores and values of the upper castes. This process in turn was accompanied by the discovery by Western orientalists of ancient scriptures such as the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita, their translation into English and their publication in book form which made them accessible to hundreds of thousands of people – for the first time. The resulting movements such as the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj sought to Brahminise the Hindus by undermining “popular” Hinduism. As I see things, a Brahminical ideology took over in India in the 19th century.
This is the second article in the series beginning with ‘The Congress Coalition’, July 20
The Times of India, 27 July 1988