DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

134 HUNGRY BRAHMINS [5.7
from a man of low caste (ibhya) t food that no brahmin would admit
eating. That refreshed him, and he made a success at the king’s
assembly the next day.
The new priesthood influenced the formation of a society out of
Aryan and non-Aryan tribes. This was not deliberate, conscious, planned
action, but the; result of hunger. The sole aim was to make a livelihood.
The long, rigid training in the vedas which gave the brahmins solidarity
beyond the tribe, which helped them loosen tribal bonds to form a
society, also made them unfit to handle plough or bow. There were
too many of these new priests to live well by ritual service for tribal
and clan chiefs. Poverty gave many of them a measure of sympathy with
the poorer castes. They helped form a society better fitted to the new
concept of property—a concept not shared by all tribesmen because it
was not (like the herds) the result of their common effort—agrarian
property. The story of Baka Dalbhya or Glava Maitreya (ChUp.1.12)
shows, if it has any rational meaning, how brahmins could penetrate
non-Aryan tribes, take over new cults, and so ultimately help food-gatherers
turn into food-producers. This two-named brahmin (whose alternate names
are possible if one was patriarchal, the other matriarchal) spied upon
some “ dogs” one night during his travels as a student. These dogs
asked their leader, a white dog, “Lord, chant up some food for us”.
At dawn, the white dog performed a ritual chant, with the necessary
circumambulation and the brahminical expletive kin. The story makes
sense only as describing some rites of a clan with a dog totem, but the
silent brahmin observer is very significant. Unfortunately, there exists
far too little material to carry such investigations further.
The flexibility of the brahmin, though motivated by greed, was useful
nevertheless in the process of assimilation with minimum use of
violence, as we shall see later. The brahmins were themselves genetically
mixed at the time, as follows from Patanjali’s comment on Pan. 2.2.6 : “
When one has seen a certain black (person), the colour of a heap of black
beans, seated in the marketplace, one definitely concludes (without inquiry)
that that is not a brahmin; one is (intuitively) convinced thereof.” As
against this, there is a clear formula in BrUp.