Reforms Edwin Montagu and Chelmsford, the Secretary of State for India and Viceroy respectively, announced their scheme of constitutional changes for India which came to be known as the Indian Councils Act of . The Act enlarged the provincial legislative councils with elected majorities. The governments in the provinces were given more share in the administration under ‘Dyarchy.’ Under this arrangement all important subjects like law and order and finance ‘reserved’ for the whitemen and were directly under the control of the Advent of Gandhi and Mass Mobilisation their caste brethren and helped their educated youth in getting jobs. In the meantime, introduction of electoral politics from the 1880s gave a fillip to such organisations.
The outcome of all this was the expression of socio-economic tensions through caste consciousness and caste solidarity. Two trends emerged out of the non- Brahmin movements. One was what is called the process of ‘Sanskritisatian’ of the ‘lower’ castes and the second was a radical pro-poor and progressive peasant–labour movements. While the northern and eastern caste movements by and large were Sanskritic, the western and southern movements split and absorbed by the rising nationalist and Dravidian–Left movements.
However all these movements were critical of what they called as ‘Brahmin domination’ and attacked their ‘monopoly’, and pleaded with the government through their associations for justice. In Bombay and Madras presidencies clear-cut Brahmin monopoly in the government services and general cultural arena led to non-Brahmin politics. The pattern of the movement in south was a little different. The Brahmin monopoly was quite formidable as with only .
% of the population they had % of all graduates. They came to be challenged by educated and trading community members of the non-Brahmin castes. They were elitist in the beginning and their challenge was articulated by the Non- Brahmin Manifesto issued at the end of . They asserted that they formed the ‘bulk of the tax payers, including a large majority of the zamindars, landlords and agriculturists’, yet they received no benefits from the state.
The colonial government made