It is worth noting also, that in earlier times it involved loss of caste
to go away South, even within India itself, among the Dravidean peoples
beyond the known Aryan pale in the North. Thus, slowly the cords of
serfdom lengthen.

Towards the fourth of the offences against caste, namely, the adoption
of a new religion, the general attitude has likewise changed, although
to a less degree. In large towns, at least, the convert to Christianity
is not so rigidly or so instantaneously excluded from society as he used
to be, and the Indian Christian community, although small, is now in
many places one of the recognised sections of the community.

This certainly may be asserted, that the modern Hindus are being
familiarised as never before with non-brahman leaders, religious and
social. Neither of the recent Br[=a]hma (Theistic) leaders, the late
Keshub Chunder Sen and the late Protap Chunder Mozumdar, was brahman by
caste. The great Bombay reformer, the Parsee, Malabari, is not even a
Hindu. The founder of the Arya sect, the late Dyanand Saraswati, was out
of caste altogether, being the son of a brahman father and a low-caste
mother. The late Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath _Dutt_, B.A.), who
represented Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893,
was not a brahman, as his real surname plainly declares. While, most
wonderful of all, the accepted leaders of the pro-Hindu Theosophists,
champions of Hinduism more Hindu than the Hindus, after whom the
educated Hindus flock, are not even Indians; alas, they belong, the most
prominent of them, to the inferior female sex! I mean the Russian lady,
the late Madame Blavatsky, the English ladies Mrs. Annie Besant and Miss
Noble [Sister Nivedita], and the American, Colonel Olcott. Which side of
that glaring incongruity is to give way--brahman and caste ideas, or the
buttressing of caste ideas by outcastes, Feringees, like Mrs. Besant?