86 SOCIAL SCIENTIST should be borne in mind that the Brahmins constituted only a little over three per cent of the total population in the Presidency. What was at issue was not merely the Brahmin's excessive control over of the colonial structures of authority; but, more importantly, his stubborn refusal to constitute a modem subjectivity for himself in the new context: "The upper castes, especially the Brahmins found that their intelligence and application brought them rich rewards but at the same time did not entail any obligation which would run counter to their traditional ways of living. They could live comfortably in two worlds, the secularised, modernised atmosphere of their places of work which did not affect their everyday domestic and social life. The law along with teaching and the civil service were professions which they could well adopt and yet not infringe their caste or ritual prohibitions' (Srinivasan, 1970: 184). This Janus-faced existence of the Brahmin basically meant that he now combined his pre-existing hegemony in the 'civil society' exercised always through caste and religion, with his new found authority in the colonial 'political society'—each spilling into the other.5 This tightly-woven configuration of power in the hands of the Brahmin, which straddled both the 'private' and the 'public' domains, so to speak, was a legitimate moment of anxiety for others; and it came out in all its sharpness during the controversy surrounding the elevation of Muthuswamy lyer to a judgeship at the Madras High Court.6 When 'A Dravidian Correspondent', contesting the appointment of lyer, argued in the columns of Madras Mail (5 September 1878) that the Brahmin was 'least fitted of all castes to deal fairly with the masses .... ?ince he considers himself as a god and all others as Milechas' (Suntharalingam, 1980: 153), he was not only questioning the appointment per se but also the new coalescence of different domains of authority in the Brahmin under colonialism.7 Intimately linked to the hegemonic location of the Brahmin both in the civil and the political societies, was his bilinguality. This bilinguality was unique and was distinguished by its contempt for Tamil, the language of the ordinary, and its simultaneous enthusiasm for English and Sanskrit, both languages of distance and exclusion, and hence, of power: 'They spoke a colloquial Tamil Brahmin dialect, a slang, at home; and impeccable English in office and from on public fora; they praised Sanskrit and leamt enough to make a local show of it. They disdained to speak in their mother tongue on public occasions and never felt ashamed to admit that they could not express themselves sufficiently well in Tamil. Some of them became noted great orators in English but none of them could speak a single sentence in Tamil without using a high percentage of English words or loading it with a still higher percentage of Sanskrit. They know the Sanskrit lore, became soaked in Western intellectual tradition but remained totally ignorant of Tamil literary or cultural traditions'