2. Their monopoly of literature.
The hereditary monopoly of the sacred scriptures would be strengthened and made absolute when the Sanskrit language, in which they had been composed and handed down, ceased to be the ordinary spoken language of the people. Nobody then could learn them unless he was taught by a Brāhman priest. And by keeping the sacred literature in an unknown language the priesthood made their own position absolutely secure and got into their own hands the allocation of the penalties and rewards promised by religion, for which these books were the authority, that is to say, the disposal of the souls of Hindus in the afterlife. They, in fact, held the keys of heaven and hell. The jealousy with which they guarded them is well shown by the Abbé Dubois:[4] “To the Brāhmans alone belongs the right of reading the Vedas, and they are so jealous of this, or rather it is so much to their interest to prevent other castes obtaining any insight into their contents, that the Brāhmans have inculcated the absurd theory, which is implicitly believed, that should anybody of any other caste be so highly imprudent as even to read the title-page his head would immediately split in two. The very few Brāhmans who are able to read those sacred books in the original, only do so in secret and in a whisper. Expulsion from caste, without the smallest hope of re-entering it, would be the lightest punishment of a Brāhman who exposed those books to the eyes of the profane.” It would probably be unfair, however, to suppose that the Vedas were kept in the original Sanskrit simply from motives of policy. It was probably thought that the actual words of the sacred text had themselves a concrete force and potency which would be lost in a translation. This is the idea underlying the whole class of beliefs in the virtue of charms and spells.
But the Brāhmans had the monopoly not only of the sacred Sanskrit literature, but practically of any kind of literacy or education. They were for long the only literate section of the people. Subsequently two other castes learnt to read and write in response to an economic demand, the Kāyasths and the Banias. The Kāyasths, it has been suggested in the article on that caste, were to a large extent the offspring and inmates of the households of Brāhmans, and were no doubt taught by them, but only to read and write the vernacular for the purpose of keeping the village records and accounts of rent. They were excluded from any knowledge of Sanskrit, and the Kāyasths subsequently became an educated caste in spite of their Brāhman preceptors, by learning Persian under their Muhammadan, and English under their European employers. The Banias never desired nor were encouraged to attain to any higher degree of literacy than that necessary for keeping accounts of sale and loan transactions. The Brāhmans thus remained the only class with any real education, and acquired a monopoly not only of intellectual and religious leadership, but largely of public administration under the Hindu kings. No literature existed outside their own, which was mainly of a sacerdotal character; and India had no heritage such as that bequeathed by Greece and Rome to mediaeval Europe which could produce a Renaissance or revival of literacy, leading to the Reformation of religion and the breaking of the fetters in which the Roman priesthood had bound the human mind. The Brāhmans thus established, not only a complete religious, but also a social ascendancy which is only now beginning to break down since the British Government has made education available to all.