essible to other than high-caste
Hindus. The low-caste "untouchables," who do the menial work of the
town, live strictly segregated in their own quarter, which consists only
of mud huts and even flimsier shelters of platted palm-leaves and
bamboos. The whole town wore an air of leisured superiority as if
conscious that there can be no need for special effort when the gods
bring pilgrims to provide for the wants of its "twice-born" inhabitants.

There are scores of other Tirupatis in which the Brahman still reigns
supreme by virtue of his _quasi_-sacerdotal caste. But in the public
life of Southern India, as British rule has moulded it, he has owed a
pre-eminence only recently disputed to a monopoly of Western education
in modern times almost as complete as the monopoly which he enjoyed of
Hindu learning and culture before the advent of the British. As soon as
he saw that the British _Raj_ threatened no curtailment of his
hereditary supremacy in the religious and social world of Hinduism, he
was quick to profit by all the material advantages which the country as
a whole derived from a new era of public security and peace. He realised
at once that Western education might open up for him opportunities of
making himself almost as indispensable, if on a somewhat humbler scale,
to the alien rulers of India as he had formerly made himself to the
indigenous rulers in the land. Thus the Brahmans acquired from the first
a virtual monopoly of all the subordinate public services in the Madras
Presidency and, as time went on, of all the higher posts gradually
thrown open to Indians. They crowded also into all the new liberal
professions fostered by Western education, and, above all, into the
legal profession for which they showed, as most Indians do, a very
special aptitude. But, like all monopolists, they were tempted to abuse
their monopoly, the more so as they regarded it merely as a legitimate
adaptation to the new conditions imported by British rule of the ancient
privileges always vested in their caste. They resented any attempt on
the part of Hindus belonging to inferior castes to follow in their
footsteps along the new paths of Western learning and to qualify for a
share of employment in the public services, for which under the British
dispensation all Indians are entitled to compete on equal terms
irrespective of all caste discriminations. The non-Brahmans were slow to
start, and when they did start, they had to contend with