There is a tradition that the highest Brahman septs of Bengal are the descendants of five priests of special sanctity whom King Adisur of Eastern Bengal in the ninth century attracted to his Court from the holiest centres of Hinduism, and that the servants who accompanied them founded the septs to which precedence is still accorded amongst the Kayasthas of Bengal, and both have been at pains to preserve the purity of their descent by a most exclusive and complicated, and often unsavoury, system of matrimonial alliances known as Kulinism.
Hence in Bengal the Brahmans share their social primacy to an extent unknown in other parts of India with the Kayasthas, and also with another high caste, the Vaidhyas, who formerly monopolized the practice of Hindu medicine.

The _nexus_ is education, and that _nexus_ has been strengthened since the advent of British rule and of Western education.
When the educational enterprise of the early British missionaries was followed up, under the impulse of Dr.Duff, the greatest figure in the missionary annals of India, and of Ram Mohun Roy, the most learned and earnest of all reforming Brahmans, by the famous Government Minute of March 7, 1835, many distinguished members of all these three castes responded to the call and began to qualify for employment under Government and for the liberal professions that were opening out in the new India we were making.

They were first in the field, and, though other castes have followed suit, it is they who have practically monopolized the public offices, the Bar, the Press, and the teaching profession.

It was they who were the moving spirits of the Brahmo Samaj and of Social Reform when progressive ideas seemed to be on the point of permeating Hinduism.

But when the reaction came which first found public expression in the resistance provoked by the Age of Consent Act of 1891 for mitigating the evils of Hindu child marriage, and the spirit of reform was deflected from the social and religious into the political domain, it was they again who showed the most aptitude to clothe the new political movement in all the forms of Western political activities.