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DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
was a time when no person of the servile class could take his food without drinking the water in which the toes of the Brahmins were washed. Sir P. C. Ray once described how in his childhood, rows of children belonging to the servile classes used to stand for hours together in the morning on the roadside in Calcutta with cups of water in their hands waiting for a Brahmin to pass ready to wash his feet and take it to their parents waiting to sip it before taking their food. Under the British Government and by reason of its equalitarian jurisprudence these rights, immunities and privileges of the Brahmins have ceased to exist. Nonetheless the advantages they gave still remain and the Brahmin is still pre-eminent and sacred in the eyes of the servile classes and is still addressed by them as ‘Swami’ which means ‘Lord.’
The second test gives an equally positive result. To take only the Madras Presidency by way of illustration. Consider Table 17 (see page 207). It shows the distribution of gazetted posts between the Brahmins and other communities in the year 1943.
Similar data from other Provinces could also be adduced to support this conclusion. But it is unnecessary to labour the point. Whether the Brahmins claim themselves to be members of the governing class or not, the facts that they control the administration and that their supremacy is accepted by the servile classes, are enough to establish the point.
History shows that the Brahmin has always had other classes as his allies to whom he was ready to accord the status of a governing class provided they were prepared to work with him in subordinate co-operation. In ancient and medieval times he made such an alliance with the Kshatriyas or the warrior class and the two ruled the masses, indeed ground them down, the Brahmin with his pen and the Kshatriya with his sword. At present, the Brahmin has made an alliance with the Vaishya class called Banias. The shifting of this alliance from Kshatriya to Bania is natural. In these days of com essence is the tying of a tali (a small piece of gold or other metal, like a locket, on a string) on a girl’s neck before she attains the age of puberty. This is done by a man of the same or of a higher caste (the usages of different classes differ), and it is only after it has been done that the girl is at liberty to contract a sambandham. It seems to be generally considered that the ceremony was intended to confer on the tali tier or manavalan (bridegroom) a right to cohabit with the girl; and by some the origin of the ceremony is found in the claim of the Bhu-devas or “Earth-Gods,” (that is the Brahmins), and on a lower plane of Kshatriyas or ruling classes, to the first-fruits of lower caste womanhood, a right akin to the mediaeval droit de seigneurie.”— Vol. I, p. 101.