The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History

by Manu S. Pillai

referring to Shakuntala as ‘a star that makes the night more agreeable than the day’.

‘Loaded with the burden of the Vedas,’ he pithily remarked, ‘the brahmin is a veritable donkey.’

Basava

‘Hindi was commonly perceived to be an underdeveloped and underprivileged language, fragmented into several competing dialects, backward and dusty by association with its largely rural constituency’.

Gandhi, in fact, went to the extent of advising south Indians that the ‘Dravidians being in a minority… they should learn the common language of the rest of India’—a patronising remark that inspired C.N. Annadurai to quip that by this fallacious logic of numbers, the best candidate for national bird in India was not the minority peacock but the majority crow.

When brahmins claimed that they were high because they were born from Brahma’s mouth, Jyotirao enquired if the creator also menstruated from that area, before deploying Darwin to demolish his scandalised interlocutors.

when that first meeting of the Indian National Congress was convened in 1885, the circular inviting participants insisted that while delegates ‘from all parts’ of India were welcome, they would need to be ‘well acquainted with the English language’ in order to be able to communicate with one another.