[1] The social and religious patterns of Bengal had historically been distinctively different from those in the orthodox Hindu heartland of North India and this impacted on how the caste system developed there.

According to Swarupa Gupta, "this legend was fitted into a quasi-historical, sociological narrative of Bengal and deployed to explain the realities of caste and sub-caste origins and connections during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century".

So there is every probability that a number of brahmana families were mixed up with members of other varnas in forming the present Kayastha and Vaidya communities of Bengal.

The Kulin communities suffered particularly badly because their ritual role was to serve a Hindu king via appointments to high state and religious offices, which were denied to them by Muslim rule.

Those Hindus, including some Kulins, who did assist, co-operate or mingle with the Muslim rulers were often shunned by the increasingly conservative Hindu community, which was intent on self-preservation and withdrew into its own cultural norms in order to achieve that.

Thomas J. Hopkins has said that In relations with Muslims, it was clear that high-caste Hindus played a zero-sum game in which the degree of involvement with non-Hindu rulers meant a corresponding loss in Hindu social ranking.

These non-Kulin communities also were the first to take steps towards Westernisation, in part because they realised that alignment with Western ideas would provide a route by which they could advance their social status, and that was something which could never occur under the Hindu ritual system as they would always be ranked lower than the Kulins.