Brahmin

The brahmin differs from every conferrable office in this atlas in that membership is by birth, and in the traditional view nothing can grant it and nothing can remove it.

Birth and the sacred thread

Ritual eligibility follows from birth and from the upanayana, the initiation with the sacred thread, after which a man is dvija, twice-born, and eligible to study the Veda and to perform rites reserved to him. Not all brahmins are priests, the varna has supplied scholars, administrators and landholders, but the priestly function is reserved to it in the classical scheme, and temple priesthood in most large Hindu temples remains restricted to particular brahmin communities.

Contested, and litigated

The restriction is contested and has been challenged in law. Temple-entry movements from the 1920s, the abolition of untouchability in the Indian constitution, and state legislation in Tamil Nadu and Kerala permitting priests from any caste have all pushed against it; the Supreme Court has held that appointment cannot be restricted by caste but that a priest must be trained in the relevant agamic tradition, and temples have continued to resist in practice. Anti-caste critique, and that of Ambedkar in particular, treats the brahmin ritual monopoly as the foundation of the caste system rather than an incident of it, and an account of this office that leaves that out is not describing it honestly.

The brahmin varna described in the classical texts, including the Purusha Sukta hymn that derives the four varnas from the body of a cosmic being, is a single category in theory but has always been realised as a large number of distinct, often mutually exclusive regional communities in practice: the Namboothiris of Kerala, the Iyers and Iyengars of Tamil Nadu, the Saraswat brahmins of the western coast, and the Kashmiri Pandits of the Himalayan north, among many others, differ from each other in ritual practice, language, marriage custom and social history as much as they resemble each other in varna status, and marriage across these regional brahmin communities has historically been uncommon.

The modern history of one such community illustrates how much the general label can obscure: the Kashmiri Pandits, a small brahmin community distinct in language and custom from brahmin communities elsewhere in India, were displaced from the Kashmir Valley in large numbers amid the violence of the insurgency that began in 1989 and 1990, a documented exodus whose scale and causes remain a live and contested subject in Indian politics. Brahmin communities have also migrated well beyond India over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a global diaspora now maintains temple priesthood, classical learning and ritual practice in North America, Europe and elsewhere far from any of the regional homelands the varna's internal communities trace themselves to.