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as follows: The Brāhmaṇas obtained in India north of the Vindhyas, i.e., Aryāvartta, a premier position in society on account of their being the hereditary depository of secular and religious lore, and of being expert in priestly duties and in wielding the words of power (mantras) which almost coerced the gods to grant gifts to those who solicited them. But the Kshattriyas who were quite as learned as the Brāhmaṇas and besides, had the prestige of the royal varna, and the Vaisyas, who were rich burghers and wielded much political influence, acted as a check on the expansion of the privileges of the Brāhmaṇas. In South India, however, the Brāhmaṇas added to the intellectual qualifications they already possessed—scholarship in Tamil literature and ability to compose Tamil poetry.[1] Moreover, there was no true Kshttriya or Vaiśya Varṇa in South India. Though according to the Bhagavad Gitā[2] agticulture, tending cattle and commerce were the legitimate occupations of the Vaiśyas, the Brāhmanas did not extend the Vaiśya status to the Tamils that pursued these avocations in the Mullai and Marudam regions and did not admit them to the benefits of the fire-rite, even of the domestic variety, which was open to the three higher varņas. On the contrary they invented for them pseudo-fire-rites, usually called Purāṇoktam ceremonies, as opposed to Vedōktam rites. An example of this is the addition of circumambulating the fire, Tīvalañjeydal,[3] to the ancient marriage ritual of the Tamils, to make it look like the genuine Arya wedding-rite. At the same time the worship of Śiva and Vishṇu in temples, which was evolved from pre-vedic forms of worship and is described in the Agamas, whose vital characteristic is Bhakti, and not Jñāna such as the Vedānta Sutras teach, spread in the Tamil land, because Bhakti which neglects the Varṇa classification appealed to the democratic instincts which got the upper hand after the decay of the fire-rite. Hence the Ārya classification of four varņas never really spread in South India and Tolkāppiyar who laboured hard to equate the several classes of Tamil society to the varnas of the Āryas carefully avoids the use of the word Śūdra as referring to any section of the Tamils. This brief sketch of the history of Ārya ideals in South India explains to a large extent the prevalence of the conflict of caste in the present time.
The Five Classes: Their Modes of Life and
Religious Practices
In my Stone Age in India has been given a very brief account of the life of the five classes of people in the five regions. A more extensive account will be given here. In the Pālai lived the Kaḷḷar[4] and the Maṛavar,[5] nomad tribes of adventurous warriors; as the soil of the region where they dwell was infertile and totally unproductive, they lived by preying upon the wealth accumulated by the dwellers of other regions. They sacrificed animals and, at times, men too, to the dreaded local god or goddess; these deities have been, in comparatively recent times, idealized and turned into aspects or subordinates
