The pre-British days were a golden age in the history of the Brahmin community. Still the Brahmins remember with fondness those days when, on their own volition, all communities used to respect them, protect them, patronize them and deem it to be their esteemed privilege to help a Brahmin. All that changed with the British poisoning their minds that the Brahmin was the No.1 enemy of all Indians because he did not teach them his ancestral learning and profession. It must be noted that this smear campaign at the instance and instigation of the British started only in the second phase of the British rule after 1857 AD, when the Brahmins started protesting the whiteman's ruthless robbery of the nation. As long as the Brahmins did not have the hang of this inhuman robbery and blindly believed in the nobility of the whiteman, they remained the blue-eyed boys of the British. Things took a worse turn afterwards, when the discontent brewing in the community finally erupted in the form of the India's Freedom Struggle.

Actually, not only the Brahmins, no community in ancient Indian society ever taught anything to any other community, much less their own ancestral learning or profession. A kshatriya did not bother to teach a vysya the secrets of his statecraft and fighting prowess. Similarly, a vysya never taught his business secrets to a Brahmin. untouchability was practised by all communities without exception. Then, why the Brahmin alone should be under an obligation to teach his profession to all others, and why he alone should be faulted and hated for a hypothetical crime he never committed - it was never properly understood.

Perhaps, the draconian image of an all powerful Brahmin standing on an elevated pedestal and issuing ordinances to the society in military fatigues like a crude dictator was carefully cultivated in the minds of non-Brahmins by the Christian missionaries and Brahmin-bashers. But this image is pure fiction. The fact of the matter was, the Brahmins were never in a postion to command society that way. An over-whelming majority of them were always economically poor, physically weak and socially dependent on the locally influential castes. The little power they wielded can only be categorized as soft power in the form of teaching and advising the society and its rulers which they were scrupulously required to do by Hinduism. They were forbidden by the scriptures to carry weapons or exrcise hard power thereby, though we occasionally come across a few Brahmins in the history who broke this law to join the royal service for their livelihood. Even then they played subordinate to the non-Brahmin ruler of the day and were not authorized to act independently. This cock and bull story of the Brahmins oppressing the Indian society for 5,000 and odd years is a pure joke which evokes peels of laughter any number of times you tell it. No community can survive like that, that too for thousands of years, making an enemy of everyone in the society with its arrogance. Going by the available evidence, it was actually the other way round. Brahmins subjected themselves to the hardest religious rigours and continuously twisted their brains with mental work for thousands of years and carefully preserved the cultural treasures of the nation in their homes - all for the sake of doing justice to the duty they were allotted by the Hindu society.

Today they are being blamed by all for keeping certain castes outside the holy precincts of the temples. But nobody including the Brahmin is above the thought climate of his times. The kings and village headmen of those times would have severely punished the Brahmins if they ventured to grant liberal entry to outcasts. It would not have stopped at that. The very reformist Brahmins themselves ran a grave risk of getting ex-communicated from the society for polluting the temples. Similarly, if a Brahmin was kind enough to go to the hamlet of untouchables for the sake of teaching them, the society at that time was not so noble as to take kindly to the act. Chances were, they would attribute sexual motives to the Brahmin and land him in deep trouble. Basically, the outcastes became outcasts as they were criminal and rebel bands of those times. Untouchability arose from this local banishment from crime and in the later course, all the banished people combined to form what are known today as an untouchable communities.

Besides, the concept of universal education is fairly a modern one, which was unknown not only in India, but also the world over. Non-vocational education in those times was not at all an investment for the future like it is now known to be. It did not have the potential to make a person socially or economically upward-moving as it does now. The stream of education that the ancient Brahmins followed was not at all secular but strictly religious in nature and had contained little in it to evoke any material interest in a potter, blacksmith or cobbler. Except the Brahmins, it was not at all useful for any segment of the-then society. Even if it was taught, It could not make a Brahmin of a scavenger, as caste is a matter of parentage but not of knowledge. So education was able to make little difference to the lives of the lower castes in those days.

If the Brahmin is accused of failing to teach his fellow Hindus, a question automatically arises as to who taught the Brahmin in the first place. If the knowledge originated in the society, when, how and why did the society lose it to the Brahmin ? Or, if the knowledge was first originated among the Brahmins themselves, can they be faulted if they decided to transfer it to the people of their own choice ? If they were at fault on that count, how about the officially and internationally endorsed patent and IPR regimes in the modern times ?

As a matter of fact, most ancient Brahmins were on record for wallowing in dire straits of poverty in spite of all their erudition. That's why they repeatedly emphasized in their books that Lakshmi and Saraswati could not co-exist. Then, what injustice was done to the non-Brahmins of ancient times for want of education, while the so-called educated Brahmins cursed themselves for getting educated ? I don't know.