turn overthrown, received their first grant of land on the Carnatic
coast close to where Madras now stands.

Mahomedan domination came so late to Southern India and lasted for such
a brief period that it never disturbed, even to the small extent that it
did in Northern India, the social stratifications of Hinduism, which
have equally withstood there more than anywhere else the subtler
pressure of Western civilisation under British rule. Take, for instance,
a small town like Tirupati, only a few miles from Chatnagiri, where the
Rajahs, whose forebears made that momentous grant to Francis Day a
little less than three centuries ago, still live in modest state. Were
Tirupati still ruled by the Vijianagar kings in all their splendour, it
could hardly present a better-preserved picture of ancient Hindu life.
At the foot of a steep range of hills crowned with venerable temples
whose sanctity has from times immemorial attracted a constant stream of
pilgrims, and possessing some famous temples of its own, it is
essentially a Brahman town, and lives almost entirely by ministering, at
more or less extortionate rates, to the material and spiritual needs of
pilgrims, averaging about a thousand a day in ordinary times and scores
of thousands at the special festival seasons, on their way to and from
the sacred hill-top. There are whole streets of lodgings for their use,
consisting chiefly of small bare cubicles, and rows of shops at which
they can purchase their simple vegetarian food and innumerable religious
trifles as mementoes of their pilgrimage. When I approached Tirupati,
early in the morning, a few groups of pilgrims were already on their way
to the hill-sanctuaries and peasants were starting work on the temple
lands outside the town. Sacred monkeys gambolled about the trees and
still more sacred cows had begun to exercise their daily privilege of
browsing for food wherever their fancy leads them, even amongst the
vegetables exposed for sale in the public market-places. The Brahmans
themselves were still engaged in performing their elaborate morning
devotions and ablutions, but the members of their household had already
swept the approach to their low, one-storied, flat-roofed houses and
stencilled on the threshold with white liquid chalk the geomantic
patterns, finished off with scattered marigolds, which keep away the
evil spirits. The Brahman quarters surround the temples, of which of
course only the outer courtyards are acc