Anti-Brahminism

Anti-Brahminism is a term used in opposition to caste-based hierarchical social order which places Brahmins at its highest position. Initial expressions of Anti-Brahminism emerged from instances of pre-colonial opposition to the caste system in India, ideological influences during the colonial period,} and from a colonialist Protestant Christian understanding of religion in the 19th century, which viewed "Brahminism" as a corrupted religion imposed on the Indian population. Reformist Hindus, and also Ambedkar, structured their criticism along similar lines following the 19th century criticism of "Brahminism," opposing the dominant position Brahmins had acquired by the time of British rule in the 19th century.

Quotes

• When they see a Hindu, their eyes grow red and they wish to bury him alive; they also desire to completely uproot the Brahmans, who are the leaders of kufr and shirk and owning to whom kufr and shirk are spread and the commandments of kufr are enforced…
  • Ziauddin Barani , Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi writing about Shykh Nuruddin Mubarak Ghaznavi's doctrine.

• The Brahmans, says Ibn Batitah, “are revered by the infidels and inspire hatred in the Muslims” (p. 188).
  • Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta), quoted from The History and Culture of the Indian People, Delhi Sultanate, vol.6. page 627-8

• The Chaitanya-mangala of Jayananda describes as follows the plight of the Brahmans of Navadvipa, the birth-piace of Chaitanya, shortly before his birth (A.D. 1485): “The king seizes the Brahmanas, pollute their caste, and even take their lives. If a conchshell is heard to blow in any house, its owner is made to forfeit his wealth, caste and even life. The king plunders the houses of those who wear sacred threads on the shoulder and put sacred marks on the forehead, and then bind them. He breaks the temples and up- roots Tulasi plants, and the residents of Navadvipa are in perpetual fear of their lives. The bathing in the Ganga is prohibited and hundreds of sacred Aésvattha and jack trees have been cut down. The numerous Yavanas (Muslims) who reside in.the Piralya village ruined the Brahmanas. The feud between the Yavanas and the Brahmanas is everlasting, and the terrible village of Piralya is close to Navadvipa. Misled by the false report of (the people of) Piralyz that a Brahmana was destined to be the king of Navadvipa...the king (of Gauda) ordered the destruction of Nadiya (Navadvipa). Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya left Gauda with his family and kinsmen and fled to Orissa where he was honoured by its ruler Prataparudra.” Some time later, the king of Gauda changed his attitude and had the broken houses and temples repaired, but the Brahmanas whose caste was polluted remained for ever outside the fold of Hinduism.”’
  • Chaitanya-mangala of Jayananda,quoted from The History and Culture of the Indian People, vol 6, Delhi Sultanate, p 632

• The Third Concilio Provincial which met in 1585 passed the following resolution : ‘His Majesty the king has on occasions ordered the vice- roys and governors of India that there, should be no Brahmins in his lands, and that they should be banished therefrom together with the physicians and other infidels who are prejudicial to Christianity, after taking the opinion of the Archbishop and other religious persons who have experience in the matter. As the orders of His Majesty in this regard have not been executed, great impediments in the way of conversion and the community of New Christians have followed and continue to follow. Having regard to this, this Concilio orders that from now onwards at certain times in each year the Archbishop should obtain information regarding Brahmins, physicians and any other infidels who might be prejudicial to the conversion to Christianity, and in consultation with the Christian priests prepare a roll of their names which should be signed by him. This should be presented to the viceroy or the governor in order that the latter might issue orders for banishing them from the lands of the king, as His Majesty has ordered. The Prelates should do the same in their respective bishoprics as well as their ministers in consultation with the captains of the fortresses, and in case the local secular authorities do not comply with their requests, as His Majesty has ordered, they should send the rolls of the prejudicial infidels to the Archbishop in order that he may secure orders for the banishment of such infidels from the viceroy or the governor.
  • Cunha Rivara, Archivo Portuguez Oriental, in :Priolkar Anant Kakba and Gabriel Dellon. 2008. The Goa Inquisition : Being a Quatercentenary Commemoration Study of the Inquisition in India.

• Vijaya Gupta, one of the eulogists of Husain Shah, gives a gruesome detailed description of the outrage on Hindus by the Muslim qazis, Hasan and Husain. These two made a pastime of baiting the Hindus in all possible ways. Anyone found with the sacred Tulsi leaf on bis head (an obligatory Vaishnava custom) was taken to the qazi with hands and feet bound, and heavy blows were administered to him. The piyada (peon) tore away the sacred thread from a Brahman and spat saliva in his mouth...
  • Majumdar R. C. and K. M. Munshi. 1990. The History and Culture of the Indian People The Delhi Sultanate. 4. ed. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. p 632ff. also quoted (partially/paraphrased) in Bostom, A. G. M. D., & Bostom, A. G. (2010). The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus. quoting KS Lal, Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India, pp. 238-39n124. also in SR Goel, Story of Islamic Imperalism. Also quoted in Ibn Warraq, Defending the West.

• In the wake of Gandhi’s murder, the violent repercussions were felt by organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS and particularly the Brahmin community of Maharashtra. Within a few hours of the assassination, the details of the murderer and his caste too miraculously trickled down to different parts of the country. While the press in India did not divulge too many details about the wave of communal violence that erupted the very night of the murder, the New York Times of 31 January 1948 reported through its journalist Robert Trumbull that ‘communal riots quickly swept Bombay when news of Mr. Gandhi’s death was received. The Associated Press reported that fifteen persons were killed and more than fifty injured before an uneasy peace was established’. The death toll in the hometown of Nathuram and Apte, Poona, stood at around fifty. The office of the Hindu Rashtra was obviously set on fire. ...
  Scholar Maureen L.P. Patterson who was researching on the aftermath of Gandhi’s murder on the Maharashtrian Brahmins, especially the Chitpawans to which sub-caste Nathuram and even Savarkar belonged, notes that she was refused access to relevant police files when she began her research in the 1950s. ‘Even today,’ she says, ‘scholars cannot get access to Maharashtra’s archival material for period since independence. So, the definitive study is yet to come.’ Consequently, the exact numbers of the Brahmin casualties might have been lost in history forever.
  • about the violent repercussions against the Brahmin community of Maharashtra, and Chitpavan Brahmins in the aftermath of the murder of Gandhi. Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• There also came the news of the manhunt of Maharashtrian Brahmins, irrespective of their party allegiance by non-Brahmins in Poona and other districts of Maharashtra. Some of my close relatives living in southern districts of Maharashtra were being made the victims of this manhunt only because they were Maharashtrian Brahmins. They escaped being lynched only by the sheer chance of not being found in their houses at the time of the raids. Gwalior also did not lag behind. Apart from the mass arrests of persons belonging to the Hindu Mahasabha or the R.S.S. the Maharashtrian Brahmins were generally looked down upon. Even in the Bar Room of Gwalior, we were insulted as Godsewallas! Leaders and workers of the Gwalior Hindu Mahasabha, prominent or otherwise, were arrested en bloc . . .
  • P.L. Inamdar, The Story of the Red Fort Trial 1948-1949, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1979, p. 4.
  • about the violent repercussions against the Brahmin community of Maharashtra, and Chitpavan Brahmins in the aftermath of the murder of Gandhi, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• Although hardly half a dozen Maharashtrian Brahmans were involved in Godse’s crime, a very large number of them had to pay for it. The murder of the Father of the Nation provided non-Brahmans with an opportunity to vent their wrath upon the Brahmans, who, though a mere four per cent of the population, had come to dominate every sphere of life in Maharashtra. No sooner the news of the Mahatma’s murder was flashed than they protested that the murderer, Godse, should have been described as a ‘Maharashtrian’ [which in those days meant a Brahman only] and not a ‘Maratha’, a word exclusively used for the numerically largest section of the non-Brahman community, which claims a Kshatriya origin and into which Shivaji had been born.
  • 23.Dwarka Prasad Mishra, Living an Era, New Delhi: Har Anand Publications, 2001, p. 72.
  • about the violent repercussions against the Brahmin community of Maharashtra, and Chitpavan Brahmins in the aftermath of the murder of Gandhi, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• Godse’s act, which first set off anti-R.S.S. attacks, before long became the opportunity non-Brahmans [sic] had been waiting for to retaliate against Chitpavans for long years of real or imagined domination. Crowds in lorries reportedly owned by leading Maratha politicians and hundreds on foot surged through Brahman [sic] wards bent on revenge . . . In February 1948, one thousand of their houses were officially reported as having been burnt down, and an unspecified number were killed . . . one family named Godse was said to have lost three male members.28
  • 28.Maureen L.P. Patterson, ‘The Shifting Fortunes of Chitpavan Brahmins: The Focus on 1948’, in D.W. Atwood et al. (eds.). City, Countryside and Society in Maharashtra, pp. 39–40.
  • about the violent repercussions against the Brahmin community of Maharashtra, and Chitpavan Brahmins in the aftermath of the murder of Gandhi, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• The anti-Brahmin feeling in the State, which existed for a long number of years was brought to a head in the speeches of Madhavrao Bagal29 and the activities of his immediate followers . . . although it is on record that the initial outburst, in the sense that the first attack was made on the Hindu Mahasabha office and some members . . . of the R.S.S. were also objects of attacks, a scrutiny of the evidence . . . shows that this was only on a very small scale [and] that the opportunity was taken by the mobs for a concerted and general attack on the Brahmin community as a whole . . . the object was in fact to attack the community of Brahmins residing in the city of Kolhapur and in the State.30
  • 30.Stated by Patterson, pp. 43–44 ‘The Shifting Fortunes of Chitpavan Brahmins: The Focus on 1948’, in D.W. Atwood et al. (eds.), City, Countryside and Society in Maharashtra, and quoted from ‘Kolhapur State, Report of the Commission of Enquiry appointed by H.H. the Chhatrapati Maharajasaheb of Kolhapur and presided over by the Hon’ble Justice N.H.C. Coyajee, Kolhapur Government Press, 9 October 1948’.
  • about the violent repercussions against the Brahmin community of Maharashtra, and Chitpavan Brahmins in the aftermath of the murder of Gandhi, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• Besides attacking Brahman [sic] hearths and homes [in Nagpur], attempts had been made to set fire to the buildings housing Brahman [sic] educational institutions. When a municipal fire-brigade tried to save the Joshi High School it was forced to beat a retreat by the mob . . . in the rural areas orange trees in Brahman [sic] plantations were uprooted and their owners harassed . . . The Nagpur incidents were not isolated as more harrowing scenes of violence against Brahmans [sic] were enacted in many parts of Marathi-speaking areas, particularly in Southern Maharashtra. Those who indulged in these unlawful activities also included a large number of Congressmen belonging to non-Brahman [sic] communities. In fact, in Nagpur and Berar the troublemakers were mostly Congressmen, some being even office bearers of the various Congress Committees. Among those arrested by the police, there were more than a hundred Congressmen and I was immediately subjected to pressure for their release. In a meeting of prominent Congressmen of Nagpur, I had to face severe criticism. When they threatened to take their complaint to Home Minister Patel that I had to tell them to bring a directive for me from Delhi . .
  The assassin of Gandhi was a Brahman and as such, no Brahman, be he a Maharashtrian, Gujrati, Marwari or from UP could be entrusted with the responsibility of governance... [that the] CP was being governed by Brahman Ministers is a challenge of the purity of the Congress.
  • Dwarka Prasad Mishra, Living an Era, New Delhi: Har Anand Publications, 2001, p. 73ff
  • about the violent repercussions against the Brahmin community of Maharashtra, and Chitpavan Brahmins in the aftermath of the murder of Gandhi, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• Within the Portuguese territories, physical persecution of Paganism naturally hit the Brahmins hardest. Treaties with Hindu kings had to stipulate explicitly that the Portuguese must not kill Brahmins. But in the case of Christian anti-Brahminism, these physical persecutions were a small matter compared to the systematic ideological and propagandistic attack on Brahminism, which has conditioned the views of many non-missionaries and has by now been amplified enormously because Secularists, Akalis, Marxists and Muslims have joined the chorus. In fact, apart from anti-Judaism, the anti-Brahmin campaign started by the missionaries is the biggest vilification campaign in world history.
  • Elst, K. 1994, St. Thomas and Anti-Brahminism , also in in Ishwar Sharan. The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple. Third edition. 2010.

• One immediate consequence of the murder which is usually left unmentioned in the numerous hagiographies of the Mahatma is the wave of revenge which hit the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS and most of all, the Chitpavan Brahmin caste. It seems that most hagiographers were embarrassed with the way the apostle of non-violence was mourned by his fans as well as by others who merely used the opportunity for, as in Red Fort Trial (p. 4) P.L. Inamdar puts it, ‘the manhunt of Maharashtrian Brahmins irrespective of their party allegiance by non-Brahmins in Poona and other districts.’ Offices and houses were burnt down, numerous people were molested and at least eight people were killed, according to an official tradition. However the article ‘Gandhi is killed by a Hindu’, published by The New York Times on 31 January 1948, puts the number of mortal victims in Bombay (now called Mumbai) alone, and on the first day alone, already at fifteen. Locals in Pune (where of course the Hindu Rastra office was set on fire, along with the offices of other pro-Hindu papers) told me they estimated the death toll in Pune alone at fifty. One of the rare studies of the event, by Maureen Patterson, concludes that the greatest violence took place not in the cities of Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur, centres of Hindu nationalism, but in ‘the extreme southwest of the Deccan plateau—the Desh—of the Marathi linguistic region’, including Satara, Belgaum and Kolhapur. Then, as now, press reporting on communal rioting was under strict control, and Maureen Patterson reports that even decades after the facts, she was not given access to relevant police files. So, we may not know the exact magnitude of this ‘Gandhian violence’ until all the records are opened, but the death toll may well run into several hundreds.... But unlike in the case of the anti-Sikh pogrom, where a few local Congress leaders were brought to trial after a long delay, and where references to the events keep on being made in studies of ‘communalism’, the Mahatma riots had no consequences for the perpetrators and were flushed down the memory hole, probably because the accused in the latter case did not have a high profile.
  • About mass killings of Brahmins in the aftermath of the assassination of Gandhi by Godse. P.L. Inamdar , M. Patterson. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2018). Why I killed the Mahatma: Uncovering Godse's defence. New Delhi : Rupa, 2018.

• He was averse from shedding human blood, though he destroyed many idolatrous temples, and erected mosques in their stead. He held conversation neither with Nazarenes nor with bramins; nor would he permit them to hold civil offices under his government.
  • Firistha, writing about Sultãn ‘Alãu’d-Dîn Ahmad Shãh II Bahmanî (AD 1436-1458) Alau'd-din Ahmad Shah. in : Tãrîkh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. II, pp. 269

• By the morning meal not one soldier, not one Brãhman, remained unkilled or uncaptured. Their beads were severed by the carriers of swords. Their houses were levelled with the ground with flaming fire
  • Sultãn Abu’l Muzaffar Ibrãhîm (AD 1059-1099) at Jalandhar (Punjab). Khwaja Mas'ud bin Sa'd bin Salman:Diwan-i-Salman in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Vol. IV, pp. 520 ff.

• In short, it was the holy place of the Hindus, which the Malik dug up from its foundations with the greatest care… and heads of the Brahmans and idolaters danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet,’ and blood flowed in torrents.
  • Amir Khusrow.Khazainu’l-Futuh. Malik Kafur, general of Alauddin Khalji's army. About Sultan ‘Alau’d-Din Khalji (AD 1296-1316) and his generals conquests in Chidambaram (Tamil Nadu) Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Vol. III, p. 90-91 (S.A.A. Rizvi's translation says that temples at Birdhul touched the sky with their tapes, and reached the nether world in their foundations, but they were dug up (Khalji Kalina Bharata, p. 169) Historians have associated Brahmastpuri with Chidambaram, or with the golden temple of Sriranganatha (and the Shiva temple as Jambukesvaram, near Srirangam), see discussion in Jain, M. (2019). Flight of deities and rebirth of temples: Episodes from Indian history 258ff.

• The missionaries had sensed from the very first that it was the Brahmin who stood in their way of breaking the barriers of Hindu society. But it was St. Xavier who made anti-Brahminism the central theme of his missionary thrust. ... After that, the killing and persecuting of Brahmins became the principal programme of the Portuguese. It became such a scandal as to be noticed specifically in the treaty which the Nayakas of Keladi in Karnatak signed with the Portuguese in 1671. The treaty laid own that the Portuguese shall not force conversions, nor take orphans, nor kill Brahmins. (64)
  • Goel, S. R. (1986). Papacy: Its doctrine and history.

• The Brahmans who were custodians of the idols and idol-houses, and “teachers of the infidels”, also received their share of attention from the soldiers of Allãh. ... [it is] a chapter which has yet to be brought out in full. The Brahmans are referred to as magicians by some Islamic invaders and massacred straight away. Elsewhere, the Hindus who are not totally defeated and want to surrender on some terms, are made to sign a treaty saying that the Brahmans will be expelled from the temples. The holy cities of the Hindus were “the nests of the Brahmans” who had to be slaughtered before or after the destruction of temples, so that these places were “cleansed” completely of “kufr” and made fit as “abodes of Islam”. Amîr Khusrû describes with great glee how the heads of Brahmans “danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet”, along with those of the other “infidels” whom Malik Kãfûr had slaughtered during the sack of the temples at Chidambaram. Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq got bags full of cow’s flesh tied round the necks of Brahmans and had them paraded through his army camp at Kangra. Muhmûd Shãh II Bahmanî bestowed on himself the honour of being a ghãzî, simply because he had killed in cold blood the helpless Brãhmana priests of the local temple after Hindu warriors had died fighting in defence of the fort at Kondapalli. The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.”
  • Shourie A. et al. (1993). Hindu temples : what happened to them.