The social worth of scribes: Brahmins, Kāyasthas and the social order in early modern India

• Published in: The Indian economic and social history review 2010-10, Vol.47 (4), p.563-595
• Main Author: O’Hanlon, Rosalind
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brahmin; Brahmins; Caste; Colonial history; Colonialism; Conflict; Early modern history; India; Kayasth; Literacy; Migrants; Rituals; Scribe; Social order
• ISSN: 0019-4646; 0973-0893
• DOI: 10.1177/001946461004700406

Often migrants into western India as servants of the Bahmani kings and Deccan Sultanate states, Maratha kāyasthas were newcomers into local societies whose Brahmin communities had hitherto commanded more exclusive possession of scribal and literate skills. From the mid-fifteenth century, periodic but intense disputes developed over kāyastha entitlement to the rituals of the twice-born. The issue was debated along the intellectual networks linking the Maratha country with pandit assemblies in Banaras. The survival of K atriyas in the modern age of the Kaliyuga was a question of critical significance to these pandit intellectuals, dividing Brahmins in the Maratha regions from some of their fellow pandits in Banaras, and shaping their wider conception of the nature of the social order in their own times. Maratha Brahmins developed some of their most important arguments about these questions in the context of the early debates about kāyasthas. Both in their own guru lineages and within the pandit assemblies of Banaras, kāyasthas found able defenders of their entitlements, even as they entrenched themselves locally as a land and office-holding elite. These tensions came together during the royal consecration in 1674 of the Maratha warrior leader Sivaji. The conflict of these years cast a long shadow, helping to set the terms of debate about the nature of the social order through into the colonial period and after.