In these ways, the influence of the brahmins, their ideas of ritual obligation and purity, the legal forms prescribed by the Dharmashastras, and the whole hierarchy envisaged by their texts filtered down from the ritual specialists into the practicalities of daily life. The brahmins controlled the interpretation of the Dharmashastras and the practices of the unwritten local law, largely by specifying the forms in which people could deal with land and take their cases to court.
