Brahmins Quotes

“Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“There is one thing that unites India, Hate for Brahmins.”
― Anupam S Shlok

“Then Buddha points out how even an excommunicated Kshatriya is socially considered superior to a Brahmana while an excommunicated Brahmana falls below a Kshatriya.

Buddha says, "So even if a Kshatriya has suffered extreme humiliation, he is superior and the Brahmins inferior."

Buddha quotes a verse he attributes to Brahma Sanatkumara: The Kshatriya's best among those who value clan, he with knowledge and conduct is best of gods and men.”
― Aravindan Neelakandan, A Dharmic Social History of India

“Ancient India gave to to the world its religions and philosophies: Egypt and Greece owe India their wisdom and it is known that Pythagoras went to India to study under Brahmins, who were the most enlightened of human beings.”
― Pierre Sonnerat

“Evidently the narrator himself, who at one level can be identified with the historical author of the text, heard the text presumably from the seers; or he has been eavesdropping on Bhṛgu’s instruction of the seers. This narrator is the fourth ‘hearer’. There is then the implied fifth ‘hearer’, that is, all those who listen to or read this text, including modern scholars. The last verse of the book, possibly part of an interpolated section, is directed at this audience: ‘When a twice-born recites this Treatise of Manu proclaimed by Bhṛgu, he will always follow the proper conduct and obtain whatever state he desires.34
It may also be worth noting that Manu was not a brāhmaṇa but a kṣatriya, a king. Did this also play a role in the invocation of his authority by the brāhmaṇas?”
― Arvind Sharma, From Fire to Light: Rereading the Manusmriti

“A hint of this approach is offered by the historian K.M. Panikkar when he writes:
The service which a small priestly class rendered to a whole people at the time of the destruction of their political power is paralleled only by the action of the Jewish rabbis when the Temple was destroyed and Jews dispersed by the Romans. At the time when the Jewish people sank into despair, a group of learned men under Johanan ben Zakkai established the great academy at Jabneh in the heart of Roman Palestine itself and guarded zealously the doctrine of Judaism. It sent its messages to the Jewish people dispersed all over the world and thus saved Judaism for the future. That is what the Brahmins did in the 13th and the 14th centuries in the Gangetic Valley.43
Panikkar is referring here to the second crisis created by the loss of political power that the Hindu community had to face under Muslim rule, but he drops a hint which might prove helpful for us as we investigate the first crisis, to which the Manusmṛti constituted a response.
It so happens that the Jewish community also faced a crisis caused by the loss of political power in the first century, when the Romans destroyed its Temple in Jerusalem. Panikkar, in the passage cited earlier, refers to this incident and as to how the community was saved at this moment by the creation of Rabbinic Judaism, which was centred not on worship in the Temple, but in following Jewish Law as collected in the Mishnah, a compendium of oral law which was compiled through the efforts of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai. The fact that the Manusmṛti was similarly compiled around the same time provides an interesting parallel. This was especially so as its goal was also to save a community which had lost political power, by placing its focus on what we might call ‘social power’ as a counterblast to it—a society so”
― Arvind Sharma, From Fire to Light: Rereading the Manusmriti

“Perhaps the most immediately impressive of all Guptan sculptures is the Great Boar, carved in relief at the entrance of a cave at Udayagiri near Bhīlsā. The body of the god Viṣṇu, who became a mighty boar to rescue the earth from the cosmic ocean, conveys the impression of a great primeval power working for good against the forces of chaos and destruction, and bears a message of hope, strength and assurance. The greatness of the god in comparison with his creation is brought out by the tiny female figure of the personified earth, clinging to his tusk. The deep feeling, which inspired the carving in this figure, makes it perhaps the only theriomorphic image in the world’s art, which conveys a truly religious message to modern man.45
There is virtually no historical element in Basham’s appreciation of this piece. This emerges in the interpretation by H.C. Raychaudhuri, who writes:
According to sacred legends Viṣṇu in the shape of a Boar had rescued the earth in the aeon of universal destruction. It is significant that the worship of the Boar Incarnation became widely popular in the Gupta-Chalukya period. The poet Viśākhadatta actually identifies the man in whose arms the earth found refuge when harassed by the Mlechchhas, who ‘shook the yoke of servitude from the neck’ of his country, with the Varāhītanu (Boar form) of the Self-Existent Being. Powerful emperors both in the north and south recalled the feats of the Great Boar, and the mightiest ruler of a dynasty that kept the Arabs at bay for centuries actually took the title of Ādivarāha or the Primeval Boar. The Boar Incarnation then symbolized the successful struggle of Indians against the devastating floods issuing from the regions outside their borders that threatened to overwhelm their country and civilization in a common ruin.46
The reference to the poet Viśākhadatta in the passage just cited is an allusion to the concluding verse of Viśākhadatta’s drama Mudrārākṣasa which, while dealing with events of the time of Candragupta”
― Arvind Sharma, From Fire to Light: Rereading the Manusmriti

“They were far less extreme about the fate of the rich, because their congregations were made up of comparatively well- of people. The really poor, who mostly belonged to castes that were considered ‘untouchable ’ and had converted to Christian-ity relatively recently, hoping to escape the stigma of the Hindu caste system, were not allowed in Syrian Christian churches. Caste pursued them into Christianity. On the subject of caste, the Syrian Christians of Kerala (many of whom like to believe, with no real basis, that their forefathers were Brahmins who had been converted to Christianity by St Thomas the Apostle when he travelled east after the Crucifxion) and the Hindus in the rest of India are similarly hidebound.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me