n
the surface it presents a close resemblance to the unrest in the Deccan,
and there have been constant contact and co-operation between the
leaders. Except as a geographical expression, Bengal is practically a
creation of British rule and of Western education. The claim of the
modern Bengalees to be regarded as a "nation" has no historical basis.
The inhabitants of Bengal are of mixed Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan
origin, and in no other speech of India, writes Sir H. Risley, is the
literary language cultivated by the educated classes more widely
divorced, not only from the many popular dialects spoken in the
province, but from that of ordinary conversation. Literary Bengalee is
not even an altogether indigenous growth. It owes its birth mainly to
the labours of English missionaries, like Carey, in the first half of
the last century, assisted by the Pundits of Calcutta. Yet it is upon
this community of language that the Bengalees mainly found their claim
to recognition as a "nation"; or, to put it in another form, their claim
rests upon education as they understand it--i.e., upon the high
proportion of literacy that exists in Bengal as compared with most parts
of India. Education is unquestionably a power in Bengal. It has not
superseded caste, which in all essentials is still unbroken, but it has
to some extent overshadowed it.

The Brahmans of Bengal have never within historical times been a
politically dominant force. They did not condescend to take office even
in the remote days when there were Hindu Kings in Bengal, and still less
under Mahomedan rule. They were content to be learned in Sanscrit and in
the Hindu Scriptures, and they left secular knowledge to the Kayasthas,
or writer caste, with whom they preserved, notwithstanding certain rigid
barriers, much more intimate relations than usually exist between
different Hindu castes. There is a tradition that the highest Brahman
septs of Bengal are the descendants of five priests of special sanctity
whom King Adisur of Eastern Bengal in the ninth century attracted to his
Court from the holiest centres of Hinduism, and that the servants who
accompanied them founded the septs to which precedence is still accorded
amongst the Kayasthas of Bengal, and both have been at pains to preserve
the purity of their descent by a most exclusive and complicated, and
often unsavoury, system of matrimonial alliances known as Kulinism.
Hence in Bengal the Brahmans share their socia