In the Madras Presidency, never swept to the same degree as Bengal or Bombay by the waves of political unrest, the electoral struggle assumed a form, peculiar to Southern Indian conditions, in which "Non-co-operation" entered very little. For Southern India has its own life-history which differentiates it in many respects from other parts of India, and in none more so than in the survival of the Brahman's ancient ascendancy, until recently almost unchallenged in this stronghold of Hinduism.
Mostly of the primitive Dravidian stock that inhabited the peninsula before the great Aryan inflow from the north, and still speaking Dravidian languages, the people of Southern India have preserved in its most archaic form the social system of Hinduism which the Aryan conquerors, probably never more than a small minority, imposed upon them by the relative superiority of their civilisation quite as much as by force of arms. Of a much fairer complexion, the Aryans became the ruling "white" race of those days, and to preserve their racial prestige they enforced the most rigid laws for the differentiation of caste--which originally meant colour. The Brahmans, being the law-givers, naturally framed laws to secure the pre-eminence of their own caste, and to the present day, for instance, in the more remote parts of Southern India, men of the lower castes may be seen retiring hastily from the road at his approach, lest they should pollute the air he breathes by coming within a forbidden distance of him.
In Southern India, where Buddhist influence never secured any firm footing, Hinduism had its golden age during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whilst the tide of Mahomedan invasion was pouring in successive waves into Northern and Central India. The last and greatest of the Hindu kingdoms of Southern India did not succumb to the sword of Islam till 1565, and the splendid ruins of Vijianagar bear out, if we make allowance for oriental hyperbole, the contemporary testimony of a Persian Ambassador that "the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the whole world." The Moslem conquerors laid Vijianagar low. But, by the curious irony of fortune, it was from a descendant of its royal house, some remnants of which escaped destruction, that the British, by whom Mahomedan domination was to be in turn overthrown, received their first grant of land on the Carnatic coast close to where Madras now stands.