The Brahmin Times

The following is a quote from a Muslim site. For more, read it here :

http://www.anindianmuslim.com/2007/07/hats-off-to-hindu-parents-of-muslim.html

It's an amazing story. The eight-year-old girl, Naseema, was sold in her childhood but a Brahmin couple gave shelter to her, brought her up like their own child, educated and married her off to a Muslim youth working in Middle-East.

The girl's father Ibrahim rolled 'bidis' and his wife had died. The youngest, Naseema, was one day picked up by a relative who had sold her when her father was away. For two years she worked as domestic servant until she escaped. And when she reached the Hindu couple they made sure that she was brought up as a Muslim, even wearing her burqa.

Jaya Menon tells this astounding story in Indian Express from Vellore. She reports that Naseema and her husband used detective service to trace her father recently. Ibrahim Sharif, 65, is now deaf and mute but heard his daughter Nasima's voice on phone and 'began to utter noises'.

He works at a roadside tea shop and is about to leave to Jeddah to meet her daughter and son-in-law. All these years she had remembered her father taking her to school and carrying her as a kid on her shoulders and now comes the reunion after 24 years. It is a great story and must read. Read it here:

"I know, it's a thankless job" said the Director, smoking the cigarette hardest for the last time before throwing it away in the bin.

Seated across his office table was myself in the first flush of taking classes for competitive examinations to the state recruitment aspirants. He wanted to imply that he would care about my toil and hard work in dealing with the students all of whom were well past 25 and 30. I was by then already used to the thick and thin of teaching. But the impact of the stark and straight-forward truth conveyed in his curt remark on teaching was not lost on me. True, I knew I had that feeling in my guts since long, but it strikes like education when someone puts that in apt wording as he did.

Everyone, I bet, at some or other point in his life, would have surely and certainly hated one or two of his teachers and professors, though not everyone is involved in a direct conflict with them. Direct conflicts are naturally few and far between because those hating their teachers would not allow anyone, including the teachers in question, to know of their hatred. There could be exceptions, but they are just exceptions. For that matter, anyone in a position of some authority and veneration is always a potential object of hatred for his subordinates. The hatred may not be openly manifest to be spectacularly recognized as such right now. At present, it may be mistaken for trivial issues of discontent or passing events of temporary disturbance. Nevertheless, it is nothing but hatred, pure hatred which is invariably present, lurking in the remotest corners of people's minds, waiting to get in control of them and drive them crazy the moment it seizes upon an opportunity.

In the case of the Brahmins, in spite of hailing from a humble background, some of them historically held a good number of high positions only to make themselves the unmistakable objects of hatred on such a scale as we currently witness. I have no doubt that they will continue to be hated and envied by people in the future as well, at least at a personal level, because they are sure to occupy higher positions, given their brand value of sincerety, dedication and hard work.

However, hatred and envy for the Brahmins have their historical roots not in the secular occupations they took up, but in the religious occupations of priesthood and teaching which were made mandatory for them by the Hindu scriptures. Apart from remaining eternally low-paid, these are the two uniquely worst occupations on the earth which are constantly subject to scrutiny by each and every peanut-brained Tom, Dick and Harry in the society. These are the twin activities from which people expect unearthly ethics, divine purity and an unflinching commitment to duty. People are quick to point out their shortfalls at the drop of a hat. But mistakes do happen knowingly or unknowingly. Needless to say, it has never been easy to live upto the popular expectations for the ordinary mortals called priests and teachers, in our case the Brahmins. Professional privacy is a proverbial wild goose chase in these occupations as they are required to perform publicly under the ogling eye of a multitude on a daily basis.

These professions required the Brahmin to lead a life of seclusion in some measure and deliberately distance himself from other Hindus. He was forced to keep himself ritually pure by avoiding association with all sorts of people, which was, in course of time, mistaken for his casteist arrogance. He unfortunately incurred wrath of the same people whose religion he strove to preserve by way of following its principles of holiness in their true spirit. He was hopelessly misunderstood by everyone and left with few friends in the Hindu society. But conversely, the irony is, in case he broke the rules of ritual purity and mixed freely with all sorts of people, the same society would not have taken kindly to it. He would have been considered unfit for the holy vocation of priesthood. The more a community lives higher and above the society, the more are the chances of rumours, minconceptions and misunderstandings doing rounds about it. By the time the Brahmins woke up to this bitter reality, the damage to their repute was already done irrepairably. Later they hastened to make liberal amends to their code of conduct to offset the loss. But it did not help them retrieve their lost good will in the required measure.

Against this backdrop, it gives me immense pleasure that an overwhelming majority of the modern Brahmins have ditched these two monstrous occupations at the long last to pursue a variety of secular professions. Now, I am a happy soul because they started using their superior intelligence on more gainful and useful professions with lots of personal and professional privacy assured. Now, you are far from the madding and envying crowd. Now, you have nobody to peep into your professional performance except your immediate boss. As they developed intimacy with the Brahmins, more and more non-Brahmins are getting convinced that the Brahmins are not such hateful figures as being made out by Brahmin-bashers. Similarly, it also dawned upon the Brahmins that they need not lose either their caste or its traditions for the simple reason of having non-Brahmin friends.

There would be cynics who lament over the loss of the virtues of the old Brahmin life style and denounce the Brahmins' present life style as degeneration. But I don't think so. What good did their old life style do to the Brahmins ? It threw a majority of them in perpetual poverty, not for a day or year, but for centuries and millenia. The Brahmins' history reads like the history of India's poverty. They suffered and struggled a lot for the sake of preserving India's common religion, its culture heritage and literature, only to be hated by everyone in the end. Who does have the magnanimity to thank them for their service ? Who did recognize their greatness ? In stead of feeling gratitude and saying a few words in appreciation, people envy and hate them, try to dispossess and demote them.

The Brahmins are votaries of Hinduism as usual and some of them will continue their services to the Hindu temples as usual. But the duty of standing guard to the religion and culture should not be something exclusive to the Brahmins alone. Let the non-Brahmin Hindus learn to defend their own faith without seeking any help from the Brahmins. As for the Brahmins, they will continue to practise their religion wherever they reside on the earth.

True, the Brahmin did his best all these centuries. He served the nation in excess of his meagre numerical strength. He thought and planned for the nation in excess of his material means. The phase is over and can not be brought back. In retrospect, it now appears that he probably did a thankless job. The contemporary Brahmin is terribly tired and fed up. He is not at all in a position to defend the ancient faith of the Hindus. Stripped of all state protection and patronage, robbed of all opportunities and isolated and attacked by his own people, he is desperately on the run for his own biological survival.

Hindus of india ! Look after the Indian culture yourselves.

The Church-incited Dalits frequently harp on a pet theme, i.e. Brahmanatva, which they interpret as the feeling of casteist superiority. Interestingly, they indiscriminately apply this Brahmanatva tag to the racial pride of each and every caste and community which are absolutely unrelated to the genre of Brahmins. Nobody knows what rationale it has.. If you apply the term Brahmanatva in the sense of racial pride to all and sundry castes which you disliked and which you wanted to paint black just because they are not reserved castes like you, then the term Brahmanatva fails to cover the fullest purport of racial pride. Then it begs for another term which can broadly convey the racial pride of all castes, communities and races in the world, because the word "Brahmin" carries a physically and materially manifest connotation which can not be applied to any race other than the Brahmins, that too in an abstract way. The Brahmins are not an extinct race, nor are they fictitious or invented group of people as in a comic book or novel, to be referred to in an abstract manner, to be used like a figure of speech. They are really present here in flesh and blood, with mind and soul, large as life, in millions and crores. Got it ?

As a Sanskrit word, Brahmanatva originally stands for nothing more than 'brahminhood' which, according to Hinduism, is very difficult to attain unless one devotes himself to God in mind, word and deed for a number of reincarnations. It denotes more than taking physical birth in a Brahmin family. The physical Brahmins came to be known as the Brahmins just because they are the descendants of such noble souls of ancient times. Almost everyone born on the soil of India, including the Muslims knew that this is the original meaning of Brahmanatva. Then, why on earth are the Church copycats using "Brahmanatva" in a negative sense ? Why on earth are they particular about creating a perverse meaning for such a noble term ? Is there nothing worth learning about the Brahmin community, barring the alleged racial pride ? If it is really so, why do the Brahmins figure in the writings of every converted copycat on 40-60 per cent of occasions ? The very fact that you chose a tree to pelt stones on, amply shows that there is something special about the tree. Why don't they write on Thakuratva, Rajputatva, Baniyatva, Marwaditva, Lingayatva, Redditva and Kammatva ? Why only Brahmanatva ? Do Thakurs, Jats, Baniyas, Marwadis and Reddys have racial pride in any lesser measure ? To be frank and fair, the contemporary Brahmins are small fry compared to the money, power and clout of the above-mentioned castes which incidentally happen to be the most numerous across their respective areas of influence too. As opposed to this, their age-old poverty apart, the Brahmins present a hopeless minority demography wherever they live.

I pity the failed efforts of the copycats, for they tried their best all these years at the behest of their Church leaders to malign the high word 'Brahmanatva', to make it sound abusive on par with obscene taboo words, to artificially generate public aversion to it. But mind you, here is the catch. You are woefully ill-equipped to malign Brahmanatva because it is originally God's (Brahma the Creator) holy name and He does never allow it to be disparaged, Brahmins or no Brahmins ! Even as they failed on one hand, to paint Brahmanatva black, they have, on the other, started viewing their own nomenclature "Dalit" with deep disdain. Recently, the Union Government of India announced plans to ban the usage of "Dalit" as some belonging to the community complained that the word sounded abusive. Here, the curious thing is, just a decade ago, blanket usage of 'Dalit' was made mandatory in place of its well-known traditional and local equivalents, as the same people then complained to the government that Mahatma Gandhi's coinage "Harijan" was sounding derogatory. Funnily, now, they robbed themselves of a common identity to call themselves by. Sadly, this is the retributive paapa karma of the people who went over-board to tarnish Brahmanatva. Amen ! It serves them right.

Given the contemporary situation, any honest champion of the oppressed will fight the leaders of the above-mentioned castes who are in total control of India's public and private life. But the act of relentlessly attacking the Brahmins in newspapers, on TV Channels and Internet ? What does it mean ? What is the intention behind it ? Are these assailants and critics crazy ? What is the actual motive behind this mindless hate campaign against a poor minority community, which had for the most part long stopped participating in India's public life ?

The first and foremost thing to bear in mind is, that the copycats are not acting on their own. They are just handy tools and present a political front for the seditious class of the foreign-funded Christian evangelist clergy who are not yet tired of trying the stale modus operandi of ostracising, isolating and alienating the Brahmins from the rest of the Indian population. The local copycats are instigated and hired by the Church to indulge in this hate campaign which aims at discrediting and weakening the rival faith and turning its followers to its own fold by hook or crook. What a downfall for a religion which ostentatiously claims to be spreading love and peace ? In their eyes, the Brahmins do still pose a formidable obstacle on the way to converting the Hindus en masse. One beggar is always the enemy of another. Similarly, if a Christian cleric looks around for possible enemies in india, the first creature that engages his attention is the Brahmin who has been representing Hinduism for millenia. Thus, the impoverished Brahmin priest stands as the worst enemy of the dollar-rich Christian evangelists, who deserves be finished off on a priority basis. This, they can not do directly and openly. So, they employ the ignorant, half-knowing, impressionable local converts and their descendants whose sole claim to distinction is their graduation on state subsidies given out of the tax money paid by the upper castes.

The entire argument of anti-Brahminist ideology is woven around perceived Brahmin ego. The ultimate objective of this argument is to wipe out all traces of the Brahmin defence, subject the Brahmins to guilty consciousness and effectively shout them down. It is singularly aimed at distancing the entire Hindu society from the Brahmins and silencing them for good so that they dare not question any more the missionary activities in India.

Brahmins have self-esteem just like all other civilized races. They value their religion and its age-old practices just like the adherents of all other religions. By temperament, they like to keep the company of the accomplished and cultured as they have been an educated race since time immemorial. Everyone is entitled to a right to decide for himself who he should move and interact with. If a Brahmin keeps aloof from a non-Brahmin, it must always be either because of his likes and dislikes at a personal level or because he is unable to mix with those of a dissimilar upbringing. Should it be construed as the Brahmin ego ? If it is true, what about lakhs and millions of the Brahmins who mix freely with their classmates and colleagues in colleges and offices across the vast expanse of India ? Why is their instance not highlighted anywhere by these converted copycats ? If nationalism and nationalistic pride are acceptable to you, casteism and caste pride too are equally acceptable to me, because the former are no way better than casteism in their pandering to narrow interests,

Again, whenever a Brahmin expresses his respect for his caste, it is being construed as casteist arrogance. Then again we witness a hectic campaign to shout him down as if he has committed a horrendous crime against humanity. I think this campaign aims at robbing the Brahmins of their self-respect and keeping them subjugated so that they should not raise again. I don't understand what wrong is there in loving one's own caste in which one was born. Actually, it is there in the very nature of man to love all the things in his immediate surroundings to which he got accustomed as a child. One's own parents, house, locality, friends, relatives, caste, religion and language and first music he listened to as a child - all these are objects of love for every innocent kid. They have got an unassailable sanctity about them. Innocent love of one's own surroundings need not necessarily mean any offense to anybody. It is only natural because we have all originally descended to the earth as holy beings of pure bliss and pure love with mental impurities making their entry only later. If anyone gets offended at others' expression of self-esteem, it just lays bare his deep-rooted psyche of inferiority complex. It is way cynical to dub a natural sentiment as something condemnable, for it amounts to asking people to behave themselves in a way they are not naturally inclined to.

Brahmins have never been narrow-minded and closed on account of their caste. Just like all other inhabitants of India, they too carry the age-old baggage of caste on their back. But they have always been open to new people and new ideas regardless of the considerations of sectarian significance. The plain physical fact remains that - it is highly impossible for narrow-minded ones to become intelligent and dominate others. If the Brahmins are really narrow-minded and opposed to reform, they would have been just there where the mullahs of Pakistan find themselves now, training terrorists and asking people to lead a bigoted life dating back to middle ages. All the gods that the Brahmins worship and advise others to worship are non-Brahmins. There is not a single Brahmin god in Hinduism. Was Rama a Brahmin ? Was Krishna a Brahmin ? Was Shirdi Saibaba a Brahmin ?

By virtue of their priestly vocation as also their traditional dependence on the non-Brahmin castes, Brahmins have personally been associated with each and every household in their locality since time immemorial. As priests and ayurvedic doctors, they always stood by the people of all castes in the society through their joys and sorrows, inspite of living in their own Brahmin neighbourhoods. I fail to see any scope for displaying one's casteist arrogance in all this. Traits like ego and arrogance are purely personal and it ill-behoves one to attribute them to an entire race, especially when the race in question is a widely distributed one. That kind of attribution reflects poorly on the intelligence of the attributors. Everyone on the earth has got pride and ego, not just Brahmins. Dalits have an SC,ST (Prevention of Arocities) Act to show their ego whenever they feel offended by perceived poor manners of others. Of late, they started wearing their caste on their sleeve every now and then in the name of Dalit self-respect and Dalit literature etc. But curiously, the Brahmin is barred from declaring his Brahminhood and expressing his sense of satisfaction at the fact of being born as one. He has no right to make a public claim of his ancient saintly heritage. He should not practice his family customs, nor should he express his deep reverence for them. If he does, he is dubbed as an unpardonable casteist. How fair ?

The sheer one-sided-ness of this propaganda with no matching provocation, protest or retaliation on the part of the Brahmin community clearly brings in to focus how mean, misguided and motivated all this is.

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.

It is certainly NOT for the much bandied about reason of the Brahmanist superiority. It is a much misunderstood compulsion. If the propaganda holds even a modicum of truth, the Brahmins must be living in a fools' paradise of a false sense of self-importance, for every Brahmin perfectly knew that it is the non-Brahmin masters he is destined to please for life. But we know for sure that the Brahmins are not that foolish race.

The real and hard reasons lie elsewhere. One, ever since non-Brahmins started hating them, the Brahmin community has been feeling vulnerable and insecure. The once-extended royal protection to the Brahmins caste under the Hindu kings now stands withdrawn. In addition to this, they lost all state patronage and emerged as the weakest link of the social chain. They have grown financially weaker than ever and therefore, completely voiceless, though highly educated as usual. Now, they have no one to turn to for protection in the event of a conflict. As a cumulative outcome of all this, now, they just can't freely trust or move with a non-Brahmin, as they used to do before the British came and sowed the seeds of hatred between different communities, especially against the Brahmins.

THE EARLIER RESPECT FOR THE BRAHMINS IS SADLY MISSING AMONG NON-BRAHMINS

As everyone is aware, it is difficult to co-exist with the people who don't care a heck for you. Some non-Brahmin tenants add to the insecurity of the Brahmins by trying to take undue liberties with the owner's (Brahmin's) daughters or sometimes. with the landlady herself. Some refuse to vacate the rented portion even after being served with a prior long notice, and bring in their caste people to fight the helpless Brahmin owner. By their genes, upbringing, life-style and mindset, it is not in the nature of the Brahmins to be rough and belligerent. Added to this, they don't have anyone among them to fight such elements. Naturally, they are ill-prepared for these embarassing situations. Had they been accorded either social or state support like in the olden times, some magnanimity on the part of the Brahmins towards the non-Brahmins can be expected. But unfortunately, it was not to be.

Also many a time, non-Brahmin tenants fail to understand the owner's sensibilities on ritual purity (शुचि-शुभ्रता) and pollute his house with non-vegetarian stuff et al. Or, sometimes, they simply refuse to heed to his do's and don'ts on a regular basis. Predictably, under these circumstances, the typically calm-going, soft-spoken and dignified Brahmin is left with no choice other than waiting for a tenant of his own ilk. Money-wise, it is not the least profitable for him because he will have to wait until he finds a Brahmin tenant and obviously the Brahmin brethren who are moneyed enough to pay him as handsomely as a non-Brahmin are hard to come by. But however long, the wait is worth it, for the true Brahmin always prefers mental peace to money.

The non-Brahmins who wish to refuse rented accommodation to a Brahmin should spare a thought or two over these circumstances before blindly acting in sheer vengeance and retaliation. And even the Brahmins should know better than citing the unsophisticated communal reason for refusing rented accommodation to non-Brahmins. In the midst of this communally sensitive and volatile society, this plain candour of their grand fathers' generation will only blow up on their own face. In stead, they can play safe by claiming that it was already promised to some other family.