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Updated: May 4, 2025
The Brahmans of Kunauj continue to hold the highest rank in the Brahmanical hierarchy, but I believe only a few reside in Kunauj and its neighbourhood. As we learned it was only a few miles off the Trunk Road, we determined to halt a day for the purpose of visiting it.
And yet a great many people in the West think of these people as the pure worshippers of the highest type of the Brahmanical faith! And it should not be forgotten that all over India there are probably fifty millions of people who are the so-called outcasts of the land, the miserable product of the caste system of Hinduism. They are "the submerged tenth" of India.
"Try!" laughingly advised the Takur. "In this state of religious trance it is easier to break a man to pieces than to remove him from his place." To touch an ascetic in the state of trance is a sacrilege in the eyes of the Hindus; but evidently the Takur was well aware that, under certain circumstances, there may be exceptions to every Brahmanical rule.
He was himself learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred books to be translated into Persian the cultured language of his court so that he could study them for himself; and he invited Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his presence the relative merits of their religious systems.
The three great schools of Brahmanical thought and philosophy the Sankya, the Yoga, and the Vedanta were founded more than twenty-five centuries ago and have wielded resistless power in the shaping of religious thought in India. And perhaps this power was never more manifest than at the present time. But these schools are, in their main issues, mutually antagonistic.
It accepts God, but without personality or interference with the world's affairs, not a God to be loved, scarcely to be feared, but a mere abstraction of the mind. The theology which is thus taught in the Brahmanical Vedas, it would seem, is the result of lofty questionings and profound meditation on the part of the Indian sages or priests, rather than the creation of poets.
When the Brahmanical power was at its zenith, such acts as deceiving, robbing and even killing this wretch were encouraged, as he was beyond the pale of the laws.
Even during the period of Buddhism's greatest triumphs, say, two or three centuries before Christ, changes of great moment were going on in the Brahmanical faith. The old sacrificial system had lost its power, but the flexible and inexhaustible resources of Brahmanical cunning were by no means dormant.
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