26 SOCIAL SCIENTIST on kings and the Ksatriyas making Brahmins powerful by their patronage—is predominantly the story of Brahmin ideology in premodem India.5 We should pause briefly to observe the nature of this Brahmin class, without understanding which we cannot get an idea of the power of ideology in pro-modem India. Here is a class of people, unlike any other class, who are unusually mobile, in a sense uninterested in acquiring roots in any locality, and therefore no threat to any local peasant or landowner. What they carried with them is an obsessive dedication to the vedic chants—which they preserved in oral tradition with phenomenal patience— to the Sastra texts, especially grammar, to the great epics of Mahabharata and the Rdmayana, and to a host of literary texts of poets like Kalidasa. The power of Sanskrit is partly derived from the wide distribution of Brahmins all over the Indian subcontinent and the cultural influence they wielded' in working with the local religious and political groups—in some sense "converting" them and their deities to what we now call, for lack of a more suitable word, Hinduism. While preserving their Sanskrit intact, the Brahmins were also proficient in learning the local languages, sometime more than one, and composing poetry in them. Images of a cultural militia, or of an ideological army, would not be too far-fetched to apply to the Brahmins of premodem India, when one sees the scale of their operation and the constancy of their ideological message. Kr$nad@v araya thus showed profound pragmatism in demonstrating his expertise in Sanskrit and his patronage of Brahmins both as political allies and religious leaders. There was considerable evidence of history before him to show the wisdom of this move. Nearly every family who have aspired to royal status on a scale larger than their limited native locality—Colas, Calukyas, and K^katiyas—sought the support of Sanskrit-chanting Brahmins to elevate themselves to the status of K$atriyas. Elite and wealthy establishments such as the Srivaisnava maths (monasteries) patronized and expounded in Sanskrit. Moreover, Brahmins and their Sanskrit texts were predominant in imaging a pan-Indian empire, an empire "encircled by four oceans," which includes a wide geographical/mythological area—an area that could be as large as South Asia. In a curious way, the distance and the aura that S anskrit had acquired were related to its unintelligibility. The Vedas and all the prescriptive texts of Sanskrit, including its venerated grammar, derived their power precisely from their being distanced from the ordinary person. However, their ideological impact would not be felt if they were not made somehow accessible. In fact a number of Sanskrit texts, like the Vedas, were considered too pure to be made accessible to the uninitiated, that is, the non-B rahmins. It was in this context that the marga poet—the elevated S anskritized author—came in. He wrote and commented, interpreted retellings of such texts that could be brought closer to the people—without defiling their purity. Massive retellings ofpurana texts, among which the Mahabharata was the first, were undertaken by a host of Brahmin poets between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, an activity that has gone on virtually unabated right into the twentieth century. The puranas were not just translated, they were performed in temples and other religious establishments for public hearing, thus bringing the retold Telugu texts closer to the