ABSTRACT
The literary material which informs our knowledge of ancient Indian religion constitutes an enormous, if not daunting, mass of evidence which has been, and can be, read in a variety of different ways. A commonplace view asserts that the cultures giving rise to this literature were highly pluralistic and consisted of several self-consciously different linguistic, racial, social and religious groups. Scholars have always worked on the assumption that Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism do constitute separate sets of beliefs and separate cultural entities, even if the family resemblances between all three are much greater than their differences. The brahmins’ own perception of themselves is based in large measure on social pretension deriving from status in a society rapidly becoming highly stratified. A concern for social purity is apparent from the existence of a test that is to be applied to anyone suspected of not being a brahmin.
