Modern Asian Studies 51, 2 (2017) pp. 432–461.


C Cambridge University Press 2017
doi:10.1017/S0026749X16000408

Caste and its Histories in Colonial India:

A reappraisal∗
ROSALIND O’HANLON

Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Email: [email protected]

Abstract
David Washbrook’s influential early work on South India set the terms for
much subsequent debate about caste, with its exploration of the key role of
the colonial state in shaping caste ideologies and institutions. Over subsequent
decades, historians and anthropologists have come increasingly to emphasise the
‘colonial construction’ of caste and its enduring legacies in post-colonial India.
Yet there were also significant continuities linking the forms of colonial caste
with much earlier regional histories of conflict and debate, whose legacies can
be traced into the late colonial period. In particular, the juxtaposition between
Brahman and non-Brahman itself was anticipated in a tradition of conservative
social commentary that emerged in the Deccan Sultanate state of Ahmadnagar,
and came to circulate widely through Banaras and western India during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tradition of commentary acquired
new salience during the nineteenth century. It entered the colonial archive as
an authoritative source of knowledge, and also provoked early ‘non-Brahman’
intellectuals into a fresh engagement with its conservative social vision. In their
attempts to rebut this vision, these intellectuals displayed a detailed knowledge
of its social history and a deep familiarity with the judicial decisions through
which it had been upheld in earlier centuries.

Caste, state, and society: shifting perspectives

David Washbrook was an early and very important contributor to

studies of the history of caste under colonialism. When he embarked on
his study of Madras Presidency, caste was almost universally perceived
as an unchanging inheritance of the pre-colonial tradition. One of
the signal achievements of his work has been to locate the caste

∗
I thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article for their valuable suggestions
as to how to improve and clarify the arguments here. All errors are my own.

432
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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 433
institutions of South India within their different agrarian as well as
urban contexts, and to trace the ways in which both colonial economic
impacts and initiatives of the state reshaped these institutions.1 With
Christopher Baker, Washbrook was also one of the earliest scholars
to draw attention to the impact of the Indian government’s decennial
census reports, new methods of public communication, and policies
of reservation in stimulating the rise of caste associations, bringing
together sub-castes which had hitherto emphasized their separation
into larger and often supra-regional collectives.2 Along with the work
of his contemporaries, Eugene Irschick, Marguerite Ross Barnett, and
Christopher Baker, Washbrook’s study posed new and provocative
questions, and provided some, at least, of the answers.3 Since then, his
work has ranged very widely. He has explored fundamental aspects
of colonial law and property rights and traced the place of South
India in the global economy from the early modern period to the
present. He has looked back to the eighteenth-century formation of
many South Indian institutions, and forward to explain the forces
that have made present-day South India into India’s economic and
educational powerhouse.
This article returns to two of the perspectives that have particularly
marked Washbrook’s work: his concern with colonial caste and his
interest in uncovering the early modern antecedents of some key
nineteenth-century Indian social and political institutions. It does so
both because his contribution here was so significant, and because
caste in its many forms has remained such a continuing challenge
and conundrum in India’s present society. Washbrook brought out his
first monograph and essays in the mid-1970s, just a few years after
the publication of Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus.4 Washbrook’s
work on caste in South India was very much a study of local social
and political history, rather than an attempt at a larger social theory.
Both, of course, entered a field already rich in studies of caste from

1
David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: the Madras Presidency 1870–
1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
2
C.J. Baker and D.A. Washbrook, South India: political institutions and political change,
1880–1940. Delhi: Macmillan, 1975.
3
Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: the Non-Brahman Movement
and Tamil Separatism 1916–1929. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969;
Marguerite Ross Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1976; Christopher Baker, The Politics of South India.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
4
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.

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 434 ROSALIND O’HANLON

a variety of different perspectives, including those of anthropology,

Indology, sociology, and Marxist history. Although widely influential,
Dumont’s work was also the subject of significant scholarly reservation.
Critics objected particularly to his depiction of the all-pervasive and
‘encompassing’ nature of the values of purity and pollution within
Hindu Indian society, and the apparent absence of solid contextual
evidence for his model.5 In this setting, social historical studies of
caste such as that of Washbrook, and the model of Dumontian
sociology, seemed to emerge out of entirely different intellectual
frameworks.
From the mid-1980s, the two moved more closely together. Drawing
on the perspectives opened up by Edward Said’s analysis of the
intellectual heritage of Indology and of colonial knowledge-gathering,
Appadurai, Inden, Cohn, Dirks, and others from the Chicago School
argued that Dumont’s was a quintessentially ‘Orientalist’ view, which
understood Indian society to be derived from caste as a single
unchanging essence, itself described in the works of classical Indology.
What Dumont was seeing was actually caste after its transformation
in the era of colonialism. Here, Brahmans had been recruited as
authoritative guides to the Hindu social order, other axes of power such
as that of kingship had been emptied of real meaning, and initiatives
of the colonial state such as its census operations and its schemes of
positive discrimination in favour of ‘backward’ communities impelled
colonial subjects to identify, and to organize themselves, principally in
terms of caste.6 In this context, the prescience of Washbrook’s work
on the role of the colonial state in shaping caste political organization
became sharply apparent. These developments moved the debate
very much towards the colonial shaping of caste, and away from its
eighteenth century and older histories. If anything, the very success of

5
See, for example, reviews by C.J. Fuller in Modern Asian Studies 5, 4 (1971): pp.
405–06; McKim Marriott in American Anthropologist 71, 6 (1969): pp. 116–75; R.S.
Khare in Journal of Asian Studies 30, 4 (1971): pp. 859–68, and the scholars who
contributed to the critiques in T.N. Madan (ed.), ‘On the nature of caste in India: a
symposium’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology 5, 1 (1971).
6
Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Is Homo
Hierarchicus?’ in American Ethnologist 13, 4 (1986): pp. 745–61; Ronald B. Inden,
Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990; Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms
of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996; and Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes
of Mind: colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001. The best synoptic assessment of these processes remains Susan Bayly, Caste,
Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 435
these ‘post-colonial’ critiques reinforced the turn away from the pre-
colonial, in their suggestion that our understandings of older historical
periods were likely to be the tainted legacies of colonial knowledge.
Scholarship since the 1990s has focused even more firmly on more
recent changes in the form and significance of caste.7 The market
liberalization of the 1990s helped bring new and aspirant middle
classes into being, opened avenues of social mobility out of ‘traditional’
occupations for many, and gradually reduced the significance of
the village as a social focus. The affirmative action programme
of the Mandal Commission, progressively implemented from 1990,
identified ‘Other Backward Classes’ as a new caste category in need
of their own quota of reservations in government employment and
education. The ‘Mandalization’ of Indian politics has brought new
caste solidarities and political alliances into being under the ‘Other
Backward Classes’ label, some of which have made common cause
with Dalit parties. Regional parties across India have in turn drawn
strength from these new collectives. The rising power of Hindu
nationalist parties from the 1990s likewise deeply affected caste
in political discourse and social life. Although the Bharatiya Janata
Party and its affiliates provided an outlet for upper-caste resentments
against Mandal, the Party nonetheless lent its support in principle to
affirmative action.
As many observers have now noted, therefore, caste in contemporary
India has continued to develop away from its ‘traditional’ form as
ritual, hierarchy, and daily observance. It finds public legitimacy and
visibility instead in the political and judicial fields of public life. It
is visible in India’s very widespread state-sponsored programmes of
positive discrimination, and in the development of what are now
termed ‘ethnicized’ regional caste communities through which ‘Other
Backward Classes’ and Dalits have found new means of political
mobilization.8 Caste in this new setting has continued to attract close
scholarly scrutiny. At the local level, caste and class disadvantage
deeply affect everyday contact with agents of the state. A fresh class
of political entrepreneurs—‘naya netas’, often men of Other Backward
Class or Dalit backgrounds—have emerged as intermediaries between

7
For an overview, see Stuart Corbridge, John Harriss and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Does Caste
Still Matter in India?’. In Stuart Corbridge et al. (eds), India Today: Economy, Politics
and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, pp. 239–57.
8
Good treatments of these broad themes are in Surinder Jodhka (ed.), ‘Caste
matters’ in Seminar, Special issue, 633, May (2012). See also the important treatment
in C.J. Fuller (ed.), Caste Today. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 1–31.

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 436 ROSALIND O’HANLON

the village and the state, replacing older patron-client dependencies.9

At broader levels, as Christophe Jaffrelot and many others have
suggested, the large Other Backward Classes political combines of the
1990s are now—in many Indian states—giving way to individual castes
or jatis, and state-level parties now rest increasingly on the political
mobilization of a single caste. This makes the coalition-building
of the all-India parties infinitely more challenging, reinforcing the
drift of power away from central government and towards India’s
states.10 Dalit parties have likewise transformed the potential of
caste as a vehicle for mobilization, combining the assertion of new
political identities with attempts to build broad anti-caste alliances
within and across India’s states.11 Once deemed an immoveable part
of India’s political architecture since the linguistic reorganization
of states in 1956, state boundaries are now once again open to
successful campaigns for their redrawing, in part as a consequence
of state-level movements of caste assertion.12 Many scholars have
described the force and pride with which large and small caste
communities throughout India now assert their histories, identities,
and legitimate political rights and expectations. Puranic texts, oral
traditions, sectarian histories, colonial ethnographies, archaeological
records, and sacred geographies furnish the political energy for these
modern caste identities, providing a remarkably effective basis for
political cohesion, the mobilization of community resources, and

9
There is a large literature here, but see in particular Stuart Corbridge et al., Seeing
the State: governance and governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005; Anirudh Krishna, ‘Politics in the Middle: mediating relationships between
the citizens and the state in rural north India’. In Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I.
Wilkinson, Patrons, Clients and Policies: patterns of democratic accountability and political
competition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 141–58.
10
These processes are well described in Christophe Jaffrelot, Region, Caste and Politics
in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
11
Some good recent regional studies are Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits
and the politics of modern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2009; Badri Narayan, The Making of the Dalit Public in North India: Uttar Pradesh, 1950 to
the present. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011; Hugo Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens:
Dalit movements and democratisation in Tamilnadu. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005;
Sohini Guha, ‘From ethnic to multi-ethnic: the Bahujan Samaj Party in north India’
in Ethnopolitics 12, 1 (2013): pp. 1–29.
12
Asha Sarangi and Sudha Pai (eds), Interrogating Reorganisation of States: culture,
identity and politics in India. London: Routledge, 2011; Louise Tillin, Remapping India:
new states and their political origins. London: Hurst and Co., 2013.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 437
adaptability to the varying circumstances of state-level political
competition.13

Family, gender, and the reproduction of caste in liberal India

This striking energization of caste in politics and public life has

brought not only new confidence but new political leverage, most
often to communities who had earlier struggled for political influence
and resources. Yet these developments have in turn brought their
own problems, particularly in the context of liberalized India.
The contraction of the state, the move of middle-income groups
increasingly to private provision in education and health, and the
emergence of a small ‘creamy’ layer of Other Backward Classes
and Dalit middle classes has deepened social inequality. In turn
this has created political tensions between Other Backward Classes
and Dalits as often as political solidarities. Even in the form of
larger regional combines, caste continues to be more significant in
accentuating social and economic deprivation than in offering tools
for combating them. This is so for three principle reasons. First,
and most obviously, the practice of caste endogamy remains the
norm rather than the exception. As very many historians and social
anthropologists have noted, this gives caste a close connection with
the reproduction of class difference. Material wealth, educational
advantage, occupational experience, and social connections are passed
on within family and caste community, enabling new generations to
make the transition from older forms of landed privilege to urban
professional competencies.14
Second, caste retains enormous social force in the realm of belief
and affect. Family, community, and many areas of religious practice
are home not only to caste as apprehended cultural difference, but to

13
See in particular Dipankar Gupta (ed.), ‘The certitudes of caste: when identity
trumps hierarchy’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Special issue, 38, 1–2, January–
August (2004). For a superb regional discussion of North India’s Yadava communities,
see Lucia Michelutti, The Vernacularisation of Democracy. Politics, caste and religion in India.
London: Routledge 2008.
14
There is a very large literature here. Some outstanding regional studies are: C.J.
Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: the making of a middle class caste.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014; C. Jeffrey, P. Jeffrey and R. Jeffrey,
Degrees Without Freedom: education, masculinities and unemployment in North India. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008; Amita Bhaviskar and Raka Ray (eds), Elite and
Everyman: the cultural politics of the Indian middle class. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011.

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 438 ROSALIND O’HANLON

caste as hierarchy, disowned in public while assiduously maintained in

private. M.S. Pandian, Ramesh Bairy, and Adheesh Sathaye have all
described Brahman private life as a domain where a sense of Brahman
uniqueness is preserved, arising out of long-established personal and
spiritual disciplines, which are readily translatable into success in the
world of bureaucracy and the professions, while defended at home as
intimate practices of personal life which are part of cultural heritage.15
James Manor and many others have noted that it is much more
difficult for powerful rural castes to exert control in many mundane
social relationships.16 At the same time, however, as Diana P. Mines
and many others have noted, purity and prestige on public religious
occasions such as temple festivals are still intimately tied up with
dominant caste status.17
Third, caste as hierarchy is also reproduced in the domain of gender.
While the persistence of gender inequalities in India has long been a
focus of attention, their essential link with the maintenance of caste
hierarchies has not always been sufficiently appreciated. Hypergamous
or anuloma—‘with the hair’—marriage, in which women marry men
who are their social equals or superiors, has historically been a core
principle of dharmic Hinduism. It is connected with the belief that
at marriage, a wife takes on her husband’s identity and substance.
From this perspective, an anuloma marriage preserved or enhanced the
worth of a woman and consequently that of her family. A pratiloma—
‘against the hair’—marriage, in which a woman married a man of
lesser status, simply degraded the woman and her family, while doing
nothing to raise the status of the man. Hypergamy was also connected
with the belief in dharmic Hinduism that the most virtuous form of
marriage was that of kanyādān, a father’s ‘gift’ of a suitably decked
and ornamented girl to her husband’s family and, among the least
virtuous, a marriage in which a father took money or bride-price in
exchange for the woman.18 The gradual displacement of bridewealth

15
See in particular M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: geneaologies of the Tamil
political present. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007, pp. 61–101; Ramesh Bairy T.S.,
Being Brahmin, Being Modern: exploring the lives of caste today. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010;
Adheesh Sathaye, Crossing the Lines of Caste: Viśvāmitra and the construction of Brahmin
power in Hindi mythology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
16
James Manor, ‘Prologue: Caste and Politics in Recent Times’. In Rajni Kothari
(ed.), Caste in Indian Politics. Delhi: Orient Longman, 2011, pp. xi–lxi.
17
Diane P. Mines, Fierce Gods: inequality, ritual, and the politics of dignity in a South
Indian village. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005.
18
Murray Milner Jr, Status and Sacredness: a general theory of status relations and an analysis
of Indian culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 149–56; Srimati Basu

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 439
at marriage by demands for dowry has been a very long-term historical
process in India, pre-dating the coming of colonialism and reflecting
the spread of the values of dharmic Hinduism both to new regions and
social classes, and the status of hypergamous marriage as a route to
upward social mobility within the framework of those values.19
These dimensions of gender hierarchy in Hindu marriage have
given gender its key and continuing role in the maintenance of caste
as hierarchy, helping shape what Tambiah has called ‘the general
Indian aspiration for maintaining and increasing status and honour
through the institution of marriage’.20 The setting for hypergamous
marriage in securing the hierarchy of caste has worked most often at
the fluid margins of large dominant landed castes, whose permeable
boundaries could often absorb wife-givers from a range of smaller
peasant and pastoralist communities, and where women marrying
upwards reinforced other relationships of power and dependency.
There is a rather different interplay between hypergamy and caste
in the larger conglomerates of ‘modern’ ethnicized caste. In these
settings, as Osella and others have argued, the erosion of sub-
caste barriers and the increasing use of socio-economic factors to
measure status effectively opens up a caste-wide marriage market, in
which hypergamous competition for desirable alliances has escalated,
and with it, demands for dowry.21 While in some ways, therefore,
ethnicization weakens caste as hierarchy, in others it strengthens
the wider social framework which sustains caste. The development of
wider caste identities gives fresh impetus to the place of hypergamous
marriage as a key element in family strategy. This in turn reinforces
the Hindu understanding that women are ‘gifted’ in marriage, so
becoming the bearers of the relationship between their own and their
husband’s families, and the subordinate partners in the marriage
relationship itself. These trends are reversed only at the level of India’s

(ed.), Dowry and Inheritance: issues in contemporary Indian feminism. London: Zed Books,
2005.
19
For an example of the decline of bridewealth and inflation in dowry demands
in eighteenth-century India, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Disciplining the Brahman
Household: the moral mission of empire in the eighteenth century Maratha state’. In
Kumkum Roy (ed.), Looking Within, Looking Without: exploring households in the subcontinent
through time. Essays in memory of Nandita Prasad Sahai. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2014,
pp. 367–87.
20
S.J. Tambiah, ‘From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions’. In Jack Goody (ed.),
The Character of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 223.
21
Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, Social Mobility in Kerala: modernity and identity
in conflict. London: Pluto Press, 2000, pp. 81–116.

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 440 ROSALIND O’HANLON

most affluent and educated middle classes. As Fuller and Narasimhan

have noted in their study of Tamil elites, in these social settings it
is the outward expression of gender equality, rather than the older
‘Sanskritic’ premium placed on asymmetric valuations of men’s and
women’s independent social worth, that has come to be the stronger
index of social status.22

Regional difference in the transition to colonial caste

All of these arguments point to significant elements of continuity,

both direct and indirect, in caste as a form of privileged hierarchy
in present-day India. Modern institutions of the state have certainly
fostered new caste collectivities, which figure prominently in the public
realms of politics and the law. Yet caste in these new guises continues
to be sustained through complex patterns of personal, family, and
religious life, many of them with much longer histories. It is certainly
true that few scholars today posit a straightforward ‘colonial invention’
of caste. Yet many continue to assume that the links between caste
and state power are a distinctive feature of the colonial state and
the consequence of its legal and administrative interventions, which
drew on Sanskrit texts and varna categories to order the caste status
of its subjects. Similarly, many scholars continue to believe that ‘non-
Brahman’ critiques of Brahman hegemony are very much the outcome
of colonial rule. As I suggest below, however, neither the use of
Brahman expertise in Hindu textual law, nor the idea of an oppressive
Brahman minority bent on depriving others of a dignified ritual and
religious life, originated—in Maharashtra at least—with the colonial
state.
At one level, of course, it is the different longer term histories
of caste across the subcontinent that is most striking. Historically,
Kshatriya and Vaishya varna identities were less strongly represented
in southern India.23 However, Sudra status embraced a wide range
of meanings. Sudras could be kings, expressing their royal power not
so much through the Vedic ritual associated with twice-born status,
but rather in their role as first worshippers of the temple goddess.
Likewise, dominant rural castes demonstrated their prestige in the

22
Fuller and Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans, pp. 123–52.
23
Romila Thapar, Early India: from the origins to A.D. 1300. Gurgaon: Penguin Books
India, 2002, pp. 389–92.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 441
order of precedence in temple honours.24 Real social marginality
lay not in Sudra status, but in the unfree labour of Paraiyans,
although even here labour shortages and the flourishing maritime
economies of pre-colonial South India offered many possibilities for
social mobility.25 The coalitions of ‘Right’- and ‘Left’-hand castes in
South India also cut across the conventional Sanskritic model of the
varna order, with its emphasis on Vedic ritual as the distinctive marker
of the dignities of the first three ‘twice-born’ varnas.26
In many parts of North India, on the other hand, a number of
factors bolstered this model. Mughal imperial power created new
idioms of centralized royal authority, which were in turn emulated by
North India’s most successful Rajput elites, who sought to transform
Rajput identity from an open-ended status group into a closed royal
lineage linked to India’s ancient Kshatriya dynasties.27 The ‘military
labour market’ from which North Indian states drew their armies
meant that the prestige of martial identity continued nonetheless
to be available to agrarian communities right across the Gangetic
plains, and many of these articulated their own claims to Rajput and
Kshatriya identity. North Indian traditions of military monasticism

24
See Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, ‘The South Indian temple:
authority, honor and redistribution’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS) 10, 2
(1976): pp. 187–211; Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: ethnohistory of an Indian kingdom.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; and Velcheru Narayana Rao, David
Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: court and state in Nayaka
period Tamilnadu. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; C.J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame:
popular Hinduism and society in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; David
West Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: the Nattukottai Chettiars. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994.
25
Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: caste, religion and the social in modern India. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014; David Washbrook, ‘Land and Labour in Late
Eighteenth Century South India: the Golden Age of the pariah’. In Peter Robb (ed.),
Dalit Movements and the Meaning of Labour in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993,
pp. 66–86.
26
Niels Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: right and left hand castes in early
colonial South India. London: Curzon Press, 1999, pp. 1–102.
27
Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Pre-Colonial India. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003; Norman P. Ziegler, ‘Rajput Loyalties During
the Mughal Period’. In John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 242–84; Frances Taft, ‘Honor and Alliance:
reconsidering Mughal-Rajput marriages’. In Karine Schomer, Joan L. Erdman, Deryck
Lodrick and Lloyd I. Rudolph (eds), The Idea of Rajasthan: explorations in regional identity.
New Delhi: Manohar, 1994, Vol. 2, pp. 217–41; Ramya Sreenivasan, ‘Kingship and
authority reconsidered: Amber (Rajasthan), circa 1560–1615’, Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient 57 (2014): pp. 549–86.

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 442 ROSALIND O’HANLON

reinforced these developments.28 The flourishing of Sanskrit literature

and learning that took place all over India during the Mughal period
itself contributed to the resilience of the conventional varna order,
both by offering new defences against the levelling appeals of North
Indian devotionalist movements, and by supplying new idioms of
specifically Hindu kingship.29
As Jaffrelot has suggested, the colonial state accentuated the
differences. The coming of European ideas in particular shaped the
formation of new caste identities in the South and West. The Aryan
racial theory of Orientalist scholars found a ready audience among
those who were beginning to think of themselves as members of a broad
lower caste collective. Out of these processes emerged a range of non-
Brahman movements in the South and West, including Ambedkar’s
campaign in the Maratha regions and Dravidian movements in the
South. New ethnicized caste identities went hand in hand with the
emergence of caste associations, as British policies of reservation in
education and local government further stimulated the emergence
of a caste-based associational culture. In North India, on the other
hand, these processes developed very much within the framework
of Sanskritization. The Arya Samaj was able to garner very wide
influence, drawing castes from Yadavas to Chamars. There were
anti-caste movements in North India, but they tended to draw their
ideas principally from the other-worldly forms of religious devotion.
Consequently, North India’s lower castes directed their energies
principally to caste associations rather than to the formation of large
non-Brahman groupings, or the assertion of rights on the basis of broad
ethnic identities. The latter emerged only very recently, as successive
governments expanded their schemes of caste reservation in the wake
of the Mandal Commission.30

28
Dirk Kolf, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: the ethnohistory of the military labour market
of Hindustan, 1450–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; William
Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006; Richard G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule: state-hinterland relations in preindustrial
India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.
29
Theodore Benke, ‘The Śūdrācāraśiroman.i of Kr.s.n.a Śes.a: a sixteenth century
manual of dharma for Śūdras’, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2010; Monika
Horstmann, Der Zusammenhalt der Welt; Religiöse Herschaftslegitimation und Religionspolitik
Maharaja Savai Jaisings (1700–1743). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009.
30
See in particular Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Sanskritisation vs. Ethnicisation in India:
changing identities and caste politics before Mandal’. In Christophe Jaffrelot, Religion,
Caste and Politics in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 449–58.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 443
Vernacular critiques of caste in colonial India: a derivative
discourse?
This formulation is very much in line with the work of historians who
have emphasized the colonial ‘invention’ of caste. As noted above,
however, this perspective may be worth re-examining, in that it
underestimates the degree of continuity into the colonial period, and
portrays the vernacular critiques of caste developed in colonial India as
essentially derivatives of colonial discourse. Yet many colonial
intellectuals and activists were actually engaged in caste contests with
much longer histories. They were deeply familiar with the complexities
of these histories and with the issues at stake in them. Nor was the
importance they ascribed to texts merely a second-hand reflection
of Orientalist scholarship. They were aware that written texts of
dharmasastra, caste puranas, the rulings of local judicial institutions,
and local vernacular histories had been deeply consequential in past
struggles, and in many cases continued to be so. Pre-colonial states
as well as local caste communities took texts seriously as part of the
apparatus of justice. The settings in which texts circulated, and the
performance of the ritual dignities they confirmed or withheld, were
often close to the muscular politics of the street and temple precinct.
In some respects at least, the category of ‘non-Brahman’ was not just
a catch-all absurdity of colonial caste discourse, but reflected deeper
social histories and older contests, which continued to be significant
well into the colonial period.
The history of caste in the Marathi-speaking regions of western India
illustrates many of these characteristics. The states of the Deccan
Sultanate inherited from the medieval Yadava kingdom a layer of
conservative Brahman administrators in the countryside. Their
scribal skills, religious prestige, and access to cash enabled them to
amass extensive landed rights and rights over labour, which they
enjoyed alongside the local Maratha gentry and military servants of
the Deccan states. Caste identities in this setting were fluid. Their
early pastoral origins gave Marathi-speaking peasant communities
strong horizontal solidarities.
‘Maratha’ was an open-ended social category, associated with
martial honours, and therefore open in principle to a wide range
of socially aspirant rural communities who supplied military labour
to local states during the campaigning season.31 Maratha domestic

31
Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993, pp. 14–17.

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 444 ROSALIND O’HANLON

culture was also shaped by long traditions of service to the Sultanate

states, creating Islamicized models for elite identity such as the
seclusion of women and the practice of eating from a common dish.32
Other dimensions of Deccani culture also made for social cohesion.
The region’s great bhakti devotional traditions developed very much
in the interplay between textual cultures, oral performance, and the
routines of pilgrimage and worship associated with the tradition’s
major temples. As the Deccan Sultanate states pioneered the use
of vernacular language for local justice and state administration,
Marathi helped forge a new discursive community and new kinds of
local familiarity with these states’ documentary regimes. All of these
processes strengthened the region’s sense of a distinctive historical
identity, sometimes encapsulated in the idea that there existed a
‘dharma’ of Maharashtra.33
At the same time, there were many strains. The emergence of the
Deccan Sultanate states strengthened links with the Sufi devotional
traditions of Islamic North India already forged under the Bahmanis,
and opened the region more directly to the economies and cultures
of the Indian ocean. Many heterodox sects flourished in this milieu.
The social critique of bhakti poets, transmitted through hagiographies
and collections of hymns as well as through oral tradition, gained
a new and sharper edge.34 The literate skills of bhakti poets from
humble backgrounds often formed a flashpoint of contest with
conservative Brahman scholars.35 There were further frictions. Other
newcomers to the Deccan, such as Kayastha scribal people from North

32
Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and low caste
protest in nineteenth century Western India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985,
pp. 18–20.
33
Sumit Guha, ‘Mārgı̄, Deśı̄ and Yāvanı̄: high language and ethnic speech in
Maharashtra’. In M. Naito, I. Shima and H. Kotani (eds), Mārga: ways of liberation,
empowerment and social change in Maharashtra. Delhi: Manohar, 2008, pp. 129–46;
Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: historical memory and identity in western India. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 19–39; Irina Glushkova, ‘A Philological
Approach to Regional Ideologies’. In Rajendra Vora and Anne Feldhaus (eds), Region,
Culture and Politics in India. Delhi: Manohar, 2006, pp. 52–83.
34
Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: a cultural history of Saint
Namdev in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011; John Keune, ‘Eknath
Remembered and Reformed: Bhakti, Brahmans and Untouchables in Marathi
historiography’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2011.
35
Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: eight Indian lives.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 141–50, 129–54; Gail Omvedt,
‘The Bhakti Radicals and Untouchability’. In Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus
(eds), Speaking Truth to Power: religion, caste and the subaltern question in India. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 11–29.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 445
India, found themselves in direct competition with Brahmans for
administrative employment, sparking a fierce contest over Kayastha
ritual entitlements.36 Brahman identity itself appeared less secure
in this milieu, as expanding agrarian opportunities sharpened social
divisions within Brahman.37 In turn, Brahman scholars mounted a
vigorous defence of conventional caste and varna hierarchies.

Vernacular sociologies of caste in early modern India

One of the most successful of these was Gopı̄nātha, from a Saivite

scholar family living in the Nizam Shahi town of Paranda. He wrote
his Sanskrit Jātiviveka, (‘Discernment of Jātis’) somewhere between the
middle of the fourteenth and the later fifteenth centuries. He took as
his model the caste classification sections of the ancient founding text
of Hindu dharmasastra, the Manusmr.ti.38 However, he modified it to
reflect the local caste communities of his own region, their occupations,
their ritual entitlements, their proper place in the hierarchy of varna
and the Marathi as well as the Sanskrit names by which they were
known. He presented it as a handy local compendium in a convenient
abbreviated form: ‘This book of Jātiviveka was expounded by the wise
Gopı̄śvara in the world, extracting [the subject] from a great corpus
of texts, including Manu and other smr.tis and śāstras.’ Gopı̄nātha laid
emphasis on the ‘mixed’ character of the world he observed.39
Here, only Brahmans and Sudras stood out as having maintained a
purity of varna descent. Most of the jatis he described—which included
every community and occupation he observed in the world around
him—he listed as having come from fallen and hybrid parentages,
often the result of transgressive pratiloma marriages. In other ways, too,
Gopı̄nātha’s treatise expressed his own very doctrinaire observations

36
Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmans, Kayasthas and
the social order in early modern India’ in Indian Economic and Social History 47, 4
(2010): pp. 563–95.
37
Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski, ‘What Makes People Who They
Are? Pandit networks and the problem of livelihoods in early modern Western India’
in Indian Economic and Social History 45, 3 (2008): pp. 381–416.
38
Patrick Olivelle (ed.), The Law Code of Manu. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
39
Jātiviveka of Gopı̄nātha. British Library Sanskrit manuscript no. 1969, f. 2r. For a
fuller discussion, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, Gergely Hidas and Csaba Kiss, ‘Discourses
of Caste Over the Long Duree: Gopı̄nātha and social classification in India, c. 1400–
1900’ in South Asian History and Culture 6, 1 (January 2015): pp. 102–29.

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 446 ROSALIND O’HANLON

on the world around him. He assigned Kayastha scribes and many

communities of skilled craftsmen to the category of Sudra or even
lower in rank. He was sharply aware of the challenge of bhakti,
criticizing those he called ‘Vais.n.avas’. Citing the Vis.n.upurān.a, he
asserted: ‘Those who abandon their karma and just recite “Kr.s.n.a,
Kr.s.n.a!” are sinners in the eyes of Hari. The birth of Hari is for the sake
of Dharma. If you follow your varn.a, āśrama, and the prescribed conduct,
you actually worship Vis.n.u, the Highest Man.’ He was sharply aware
of the local presence of ‘Turus.ka’ rulers in the Deccan, rulers who
supported themselves by their cruelties, and whose ‘Mleccha language’
good men should not learn or speak.40
What Gopı̄nātha offered, in effect, was a vernacular sociology of
caste of a new kind. The Jātiviveka reflected his sense of the important
role that Brahman scholars such as himself, armed with his handy
compendium, should play in maintaining the proper orders of caste
in the fallen era of the Kaliyuga, where people mixed and mingled
promiscuously with one another, and Mleccha kings could not be
counted on to protect dharma in the world. It was a consciously
traditional treatment, reflecting on one level the views of a provincial
Brahman scholar who found himself on the margins of the expansive
and cosmopolitan new societies of the Deccan Sultanate states.
For all its uncompromising approach, however, many of Gopı̄nātha’s
contemporaries and successors appear to have found his treatise
extremely useful. Communities of scholars and intellectuals—many
of them of Maratha origin—flourished in sixteenth and seventeenth
century Banaras. They came to exercise a subcontinent-wide role in
matters of religious law, their authority enhanced by their prestigious
place of meeting in the city’s great temple to Siva.41 They drew on
Gopı̄nātha’s social classifications, but modified them to suit their
own local purposes. Perhaps more sharply aware of the competing
popular appeal of North Indian bhakti, scholars such as Śes.a Kr.s.n.a
and Kamalākarabhat.t.a, famous son of the Banaras Bhat.t.a pandit
dynasty, composed manuals such as the latter’s Śūdrakamalākara,
which offered a comprehensive ritual life for virtuous Sudras.42

40
O’Hanlon et al., ‘Discourses of Caste’, pp. 110–11.
41
Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Speaking from Siva’s Temple: Banaras scholar households
and the Brahman “ecumene” of Mughal India’ in South Asian History and Culture 2, 2
(2012): pp. 253–77.
42
Benke, ‘The Śūdrācāraśiroman.i of Kr.s.n.a Śes.a’; Ananya Vajpeyi, ‘Politics of
Complicity, Poetics of Contempt: a history of the Sūdra in Maharashtra, 1650–1950’,
PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2004.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 447
Kamalākarabhat.t.a and his father, Rāmakrs.nabhat.t.a, likewise took
a more accommodating attitude to the question of whether, in the
modern fallen era of the Kaliyuga, there could still be said to be
intermediate varnas in the world, between Brahman and Sudra.
From the vantage point of Banaras, it was difficult to overlook the
power and status of North India’s Kayastha, Khattri, and other
scribal communities. Seventeenth-century Rajput courts, with their
own emerging new discourse and rituals of kingship, were key sources
of patronage for Sanskrit intellectuals. These concerns were reflected
in the ways in which leading Banaras scholars adapted Gopı̄nātha’s
basic template of caste classification. They suggested that there were
such varnas, and among them some Kayasthas of pure descent, as
well as Kshatriya kings who had fallen away from their proper Vedic
rituals but could still be purified and redeemed. Scholars from the
Bhat.t.a family, as well as others, composed Vedic consecration texts
for Kshatriya kings from the early part of the seventeenth century.43
By this time, Gopı̄nātha’s treatise had been reproduced, in part or
in whole, in a further range of authoritiative texts of dharmasastra.
The Brahman Dalāpatirāyā served Ahmad Nizam Shah (1490–
1510) as chief minister and record keeper, and he commissioned a
compendium of religious law—the Nr.sim . haprasāda—which referred
to ‘the Jātiviveka’ as one of its sources. The Brahman military
officer, Pratāp Rai, served his successor, Burhan Nizam Shah
(r. 1510–1533), and commissioned in his honour a much more
substantial compendium of religious law—the Paraśurāmapratāpa—
which incorporated almost the whole of the Jātiviveka in its pages.
Written in the late sixteenth century, and part caste purana, part
sectarian polemic, the Śatapraśnakalpalatā or ‘Wishing Tree of 100
Questions’ of Mādhava, offered both ‘condensed’ and ‘expanded’
versions of Gopı̄nātha’s text. Sometime in the later seventeenth
century, one Rāmacandra Bāpat wrote a Br.hajjātiviveka (‘Expanded
Jātiviveka’), which reworked many of Gopı̄nātha’s classifications. His
text also circulated in Banaras as part of another genre entirely, that
of the Sanskrit genre of Vāstuśāstra, reflecting the importance of

43
Sheldon Pollock, The Ends of Man at the End of Premodernity. Amsterdam: Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2004, pp. 63–78; Madhav Deshpande,
‘Ks.atriyas in the Kali Age? Gāgābhat.t.a and His Opponents’ in Indo-Iranian Journal 53,
2 (2010): pp. 96–100, 110–16; O’Hanlon, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes’, pp. 571–73.

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 448 ROSALIND O’HANLON

occupation in the construction of different wards and quarters in the

early modern city.44
It was against this background of disagreement about what orders
of varna could be said to exist in the modern age of the Kaliyuga
that Gāgābhat.t.a, nephew of Kamalākarabhat.t.a and himself equally
persuaded of the legitimate existence of Kshatriyas, came to the
Maratha court of Raigad in 1673 for the consecration of the Maratha
warrior ruler, Sivaji. This now famous occasion entailed many days of
complex ritual, in which the Bhosle family’s early lapses from Vedic
observance were repaired, and the way opened for Sivaji’s ‘rebirth’
as a royal Kshatriya and a dharmic king.45 During Gāgābhat.t.a’s visit,
he also drew on Gopı̄nātha’s text to compose a ritual manual for
Kayasthas at the court. It was a disappointment to them, because it
prescribed only a lesser form of quasi-Vedic ritual for them, which
left their varna status open to doubt. The issues continued to provoke
sharp debate early in the following century, particularly with the rise
of Rajput demands for their own new forms of royal and Vedic ritual.
The Rajput ruler, Savai Jai Singh of Jaipur (1688–1743), hosted a
debate at his court specifically to determine the question of whether
lapsed Kshatriyas could recover their Vedic ritual dignities by suitable
penances. Most local pandits followed the older position of Gāgābhat.t.a
and agreed that they could. But the conservative position still found its
supporters, notably in Gāgābhat.t.a’s junior contemporary, the leading
grammarian of Banaras, Nāgeśabhat.t.a, who refused to appear at the
debate, but set out his objections to any presence of pure Kshatriyas
in the Kaliyuga in a lengthy treatise, the Vrātyatāprāyaścittanirn.aya
(‘Judgement of penances by those who have fallen from caste’).46

Caste and elite violence in the Maratha state

These arguments about the structure of varna took on new dimensions

in the eighteenth-century Maratha state. Many developments
reinforced the older Sultanate-inflected model of elite Maratha status.
North Indian cultural influences were strengthened with the rise of
new Maratha lordly families under the leadership of the peshwas.

44
For circulation of the Jātiviveka, see O’Hanlon et al., ‘Discourses of Caste’,
pp. 112–14.
45
V.S. Bendrey, Coronation of Shivaji the Great. Bombay: P.P.H. Bookstall, 1960.
46
Deshpande, ‘Ks.atriyas in the Kali Age?’, pp. 110–12.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 449
The new Maratha families based themselves in their military estates
in North and central India, and their heterogeneous armies came to
include many North Indian troopers. By the 1730s, these Islamicate
models were affecting even the women of elite Maratha Brahman
families. Radhabai, matriarch of the peshwa’s own family, found
herself asked to don purdah for the marriage of her daughter, Anubai,
to the Brahman, Sardar Venkatrao Ghorpade of Ichchalkaranji.47
In other respects, however, the older arguments about Vedic ritual
and Kshatriya status acquired new salience in the eighteenth-century
Maratha state, particularly as power passed from the Satara court
of the Maratha ruler, Shahu I (1688–1749), into the hands of his
Chitpavan Brahman peshwa ministers in Pune. As Pune city expanded
and its ranks of state servants, skilled artisans, and gentry flourished
with the inward flow of wealth from the new Maratha domains in
central and northern India, the peshwas sought to enhance their
authority and their powers of social regulation by emphasizing their
role as guardians of dharmic propriety. They imposed tighter social
disabilities on those judged to be Sudras, explicitly denying them
entry to important temples and in some cases issuing detailed orders
for their permitted social and bodily comportment.48 The question
of Maratha rights to Vedic ritual continued to have some political
traction. The peshwa, Nanasaheb, ensured that the descendants of
Sivaji at the Satara court had their life-stage rituals performed with
puranic, rather than Vedic, ritual.49 In her drive to recruit political
support after Shahu’s death, the veteran Maratha queen, Tarabai
Shinde of Kolhapur, raised the royal Kshatriya status of Sivaji and
his descendants—Maratha kings now deprived of their authority by
upstart Brahmans.50 Older established Brahman subcastes in turn
resented this new Chitpavan role as arbiters of religious rectitude,
particularly when it extended, as it sometimes did, into local disputes
between different Brahman communities over priestly rights.

47
V.V. Khare (ed.), Ichalkaranjı̄ Sansthānca Itihāsa vā Ichalkaranjı̄ Daftarātı̄l nivad.ak
patre va yādı̄. Miraj, 1913, p. 28.
48
Sudha Desai, Social Life in Maharashtra Under the Peshwas. Bombay: Popular
Prakashan, 1980, pp. 28–40; N.K. Wagle, ‘The government, the jāti and the individual:
rights, discipline and control in the Pun.e Kotwal papers, 1766–94’ in Contributions to
Indian Sociology 34, 3 (2000): pp. 321–60; Hiroshi Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan:
peasants, social systems and states, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1991, pp. 91–113.
49
Dhananjay Keer, Rājrs.ı̄ Śāhū Chhatrapatı̄. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1979,
p. 86, and M.G. Dongare (ed.), Siddhāntavijaya. Kolhapur: Mission Press, 1905.
50
Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, pp. 196–97.

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 450 ROSALIND O’HANLON

It was in these factional settings and struggles for political

advantage that the politics of caste took on new significance. One
important arena lay at the Satara court. Following a long-established
principle of Maratha statecraft, the Maratha raja, Shahu, maintained
a powerful constituency of Kayastha administrators at court, to
offset the influence of Brahman state officials and to ensure that
neither achieved a dominating influence.51 As the raja’s health
worsened during the late 1740s, leaders within the two communities
manoeuvred more intently for advantage. In this setting, it became a
key Brahman tactic to attack the varna status of the Kayasthas, and
have them declared to be menial Sudras, without rights to the dignity
of Vedic ritual and, by implication, unfit to be the confidential servants
and advisers of the king. By early 1749, this produced a crisis. A party
of Kayasthas journeyed to Banaras and then on to Prayag, where they
persuaded local Brahman priests to perform the Atirudra ritual for
them, a great Vedic sacrifice that would publicly confirm their twice-
born status. To keep the ritual from being disrupted, the party also
employed a posse of Muslim foot-soldiers belonging to the Muslim
governor of Prayag around the fire-pit. But the Brahman leaders in
Pune and Satara had their own allies among the long-established
Maratha scholar families in North India. As soon as news of the
rite leaked out, they rallied these supporters, and the priests who
had agreed to perform the Kayastha ritual were declared to have
transgressed so gravely as to be banished from the caste.52
Under these pressures, the raja and his advisers convened a great
gathering of pandits from different parts of the Deccan to determine
the real identity of Satara’s Kayasthas. Tension in the city grew as
some 10,000 Brahmans gathered in the streets around the court
to await the verdict. Among the textual authorities produced at the
debate were Gopı̄nātha’s Jātiviveka and the manual that Gāgābhat.t.a
had written for the Kayasthas, both conveying the same vision of a
world containing no pure varnas between Brahman and Sudra. On the
strength of these and other authorities, the pandit assembly found
against the Kayasthas, as ‘the offspring of mere Sudras’. The pandits

51
Surendranath Sen, Extracts and Documents Relating to Maratha History. Vol. 1, Śiva
Chhatrapati. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920, pp. 29–30.
52
Viśn.u Māhādev Āt.halye (ed.), Āt.halye Gharan.yācā Itihās. Pune: Viśn.u Māhādev
Āt.halye, pp. 61–66. A more detailed account is in ‘Parabhūjātinirn.aya’, unpublished
Sanskrit and Marathi mss, no. 567 of 1883–4, Bhandarkar Oriental Research
Institute, Pune.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 451
drove home the point in relation to the Maratha ruler, Sivaji himself,
invested as Kshatriya by the priest, Gāgābhat.t.a, some 80 years earlier:
‘The late Gāgābhat.t.a, learned in the Vedas and Śāstras, performed
the King’s sacred thread ceremony as a Kshatriyas, with the Gāyatri
mantra. That rite did not succeed in its aims. The lineages of both
died out. This is the consequence of bad behaviour.’53 Shahu’s death in
November 1749 and the transfer of political authority to the peshwa’s
court in Pune represented a further blow to the Kayastha position.
Nonetheless, they remained powerful rivals, and the dispute impelled
at least one of their leaders, Sakharam Bapu Gupte, to conspire in
the murder of the peshwa, Narayanrao, in 1773. Their varna status,
with all its symbolism, continued to be the focus of struggle. Further
assaults followed in 1789–90, when many dozens of Kayastha leaders
were forcibly confined to their houses until they agreed to an order
accepting a long list of ritual disabilities, which was then sent out to
state officials to enforce.54 By the end of the century, many Kayasthas
left to serve as administrators in Maratha states elsewhere in India.
Varna standing and other forms of ritual entitlement continued
to be the touchstones in other elite political and factional struggles.
Ritual standing, social dignity, and material interest blended together
in these struggles. Some communities of Sonar goldsmiths had
prospered very substantially under the peshwas. They were aided by
the flourishing of Pune as a financial centre and the proliferation
of state-licensed private mints, often in the hands of Sonars.55 Elite
Sonars sought the dignity of Vedic ritual and twice-born status,
claiming to be lineal descendants of Viśvākarma the divine artificer,
entitled as ‘minor Brahmanas’ to Vedic ritual, and to employ priests
of their own caste. Their transgressions attracted severe corporal
punishments.56 The Bombay government was drawn in to prevent
the Sonars from using the dignified ‘Namaskār’ mode of salutation

53
V.S. Bendrey, Mahārā retihāsāci Sādhane. Mumbai: Mumbai Marathi Grantha
Sangrahalaya, 1966, Vol. II, pp. 491–95. For this episode, see also Deshpande,
‘Ks.atriyas in the Kali Age?’, pp. 103–04.
54
Narendra Wagle, ‘The Cāndrasenı̄ya Kāyastha Prabhus and the Brahmans:
ritual, law and politics in Pune: 1789–80’. In Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer and
Paramesvara Arthal (eds), Indology and Law: studies in honour of J. Duncan M. Derrett.
Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982, pp. 303–28; Ganesh Chimnaji Vad, Selections
from the Satara Raja’s and the Peshwa’s Diaries. Vol. 8, no. 3: Selections from the Diaries of Sawai
Madhavrao Peshwa. Pune: Deccan Vernacular Translation Society, 1911, pp. 287–92.
55
D.C. Sircar, Studies in Indian Coins. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1968, pp. 274–75.
56
Desai, ‘Social Life in Maharashtra’, p. 39; V.K. Rajwade (ed.), Marat.hyancya
Itihāsāci Sādhane, Pune: Chitrasala Press, 1918, Vol. XXIV, nos 13, 22, 23.

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 452 ROSALIND O’HANLON

appropriate to the twice-born. A 28 July 1779 Resolution recorded

that ‘the exercise of such ceremony by the Goldsmiths is a great
breach of the Gentoo Religion, and repeated complaints have been
made to us by the Brahmins and the Peishwa also several times having
written to the President requesting [that] the use of the Namascar
might be prohibited to the Goldsmiths’. The head of the community
was instructed to desist accordingly, the resolution went on, ‘as a
compliment to the Peishwa’.57 Contests continued among smaller
regional Brahman communities such as the Shenvis and the White
Yajurvedis, very often when more dominant Brahmans challenged
their status as ‘pure’ Brahmans and, with it, their entitlement to
the livings attached to priestly work. These conflicts sometimes
degenerated into violence, as when a pair of Chitpavan Brahmans
broke into a White Yajurvedi temple and forcibly removed the deities
which, they said, the Yajurvedis had no right to serve.58
Here, then, older conflicts over the nature of the varna order
received fresh impetus as the peshwa governments sought to extend
the central reach of the state into matters of caste regulation, and to
weaken other powerful groups in the state by depriving them of the
public dignities of Vedic ritual. Local caste leaders also exploited the
nexus between caste and politics by using their connections in Pune
to pursue local ambitions and grievances.
Texts, both in the form of sastric treatises such as that of Gopı̄nātha,
and the written judgements of pandit assemblies, mattered deeply
to the outcome of these struggles. They informed judgements of the
state, which state officials as well as community leaders frequently
enforced, and they were taken seriously as one of the indices of a
community’s social rights and standing. So too, however, did the
ability to field muscular supporters on the street, to protect a disputed
ritual, to focus the mind of a pandit assembly, or to manhandle deities
out of a contested temple. Social dignity, political leverage, and
material livelihoods were all at issue in these conflicts over the Vedic
dignities allowed to the twice-born, and the fundamental question as
to whether any but Brahmans and Sudras remained in the fallen era
of the Kaliyuga.

57
Resolution of the Government of Bombay, 23 July 1779.
58
R.B. Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala. Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1884, Appendix
2, no. 2; Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Contested Conjunctures: Brahman communities and
“early modernity” in India’ in American Historical June (2013): pp. 781–86.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 453
Brahmans and Sudras: Gopı̄nātha in the colonial archive

The social world that the colonial state inherited in western India was
not, therefore, simply a geographical region in which ‘intermediate’
castes were poorly represented. Rather, the question itself was a
bitterly contested one, in which the ascent of Brahman power during
the eighteenth century had enabled the orthodox advocates of a society
polarized between Brahmans and Sudras to entrench their views.
Although the move to the ethnicization of caste identities was to come
later in the nineteenth century, the Brahman/non-Brahman divide
itself lay already implicit in those contests. When, therefore, Marathas,
Kayasthas, Sonars, and other elite ‘non-Brahmans’ turned to social
campaigning during the 1820s and 1830s, the issue of Vedic dignities
continued to lie at the heart of their programmes. Pandit assemblies
were convened to debate what had now become the ‘Vedokta’ issue
in Satara, Bombay, Pune, and Baroda. The Bombay government was
drawn in: in April 1824, the Bombay Sonars, led by the influential
banker, Jagannath Shankarseth, petitioned the Bombay government
for help in securing their rights.59 The campaigns culminated in a
major debate about Vedic rights sponsored at his court by the Satara
raja, Pratapsinh (1793–1847). Again, sastric texts and religious
judgements figured prominently in the proceedings. The Kayastha
scholar, Ābā Sāheb Pārasnı̄s, led the case for the raja, compiling a large
digest of relevant documents, the Siddhāntavijaya, which contained
many of the texts of dharmasastra and legal judgements from the
eighteenth century and earlier.60 Led by Nilakan.t.a Śāstri That.t.e,
the Brahman party likewise drew for its arguments on its own deep
intellectual roots. That.t.e belonged directly to the scholarly lineage of
the Banaras grammarian, Nāgeśabhat.t.a, who, as we have seen, had
championed the conservative position against the arguments of Savai
Jai Singh of Jaipur in the early decades of the eighteenth century.61

59
For the elite non-Brahman social campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s, see
Narendra Wagle, ‘A Dispute between the Pancal Devajna Sonars and the Brahmins
of Pune Regarding Social Rank and Ritual Privileges: a case-study of the British
administration of jati laws in Maharashtra, 1822–1825’. In N.K. Wagle (ed.), Images
of Maharashtra. London: Curzon Press, 1980, pp. 129–59; Narendra Wagle, ‘Ritual
and Change in Early Nineteenth Century Society in Maharashtra: Vedokta disputes
in Baroda, Pune and Satara, 1824–1838’. In Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds),
Religion and Society in Maharashtra. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1987, pp. 145–81.
60
Dongare, Siddhāntavijaya, p. 6.
61
Deshpande, ‘Ks.atriyas in the Kaliyuga?’, pp. 110–13.

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 454 ROSALIND O’HANLON

Again, the debates took place in an atmosphere of barely suppressed

violence, the chamber guarded by soldiers, and the raja himself armed.
There were long textual continuities in other ways too. To the
consternation of the Kayasthas, Sonars, and others, the Jātiviveka was
beginning to appear in the colonial apparatus of government as a book
of authority. H.H. Wilson, then secretary to the Committee of Public
Instruction, and soon to emerge as a distinguished Indologist in the
East India Company service, examined the Sonars’ entitlements in
1824. He had before him a range of texts of religious law, including
the Jātiviveka and the later Śūdrakamalākara, through which parts of the
Jātiviveka had circulated during the seventeenth century. Handwritten
Sanskrit quotations from these and other texts appear in the margins
of his work, revealing active guidance from local Brahman scholars
anxious to ensure that Wilson came to the right conclusions.62 Arthur
Steele, charged in the early 1820s with compiling an accurate account
of the ‘law and custom’ of Hindu communities in the Company’s new
Deccan provinces for use in the Bombay courts, cited ‘the ‘Jatiwiwek’
and other texts particularly recommended for their accurate account
of caste classification.63 Dissemination of the Jātiviveka may actually
have increased in these early years of the Company’s state. James
Molesworth first published his English-Marathi dictionary in 1831,
ably assisted by a team of learned pandits. The entry for Kayasthas
simply recorded that they were a community of writers.64 By the
time Molesworth came to publish the second edition in Bombay in
1857, however, the entry for Kayasthas was much fuller. ‘See the
book Jātiviveka,’ the entry read, and quoted at some length from
the Jātiviveka’s account of the degraded origins of Kayasthas in
transgressive marriages and degraded forms of sexual contact.65

62
‘Remarks of Mr H.H. Wilson, Secretary to the committee of Public Instruction,
communicated to the officiating Chief Judge of the Court of Sudder Dewanay Adawlut,
in December 1924.’ Bombay Judicial Department, 1825, Vol. 7/87, pp. 21–57,
Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.
63
Arthur Steele, A Summary of the Law and Custom of Hindoo Castes within the Dekhun
Provinces Subject to the Presidency of Bombay. Bombay: Courier Press, 1827, pp. xi–xii.
64
J.T. Molesworth, Dictionary, Murat.,hee and and English. Bombay, 1831, p. 148.
65
J.T. Molesworth, A Dictionary, Marát.hí and English. Bombay: Education Society’s
Press, 1857, p. 158.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 455
‘To refute my opponents with their own weapons’: Tukārām
Tātyā Pad.val. and the conservative tradition of the Jātiviveka

If continuities marked these elite concerns—and, indeed, the process

of knowledge- gathering itself during these first years of the East India
Company state—what of those early colonial intellectuals who went
on to a more radical intervention in the long-standing debate about
varna hierarchies? The dominant figure in the non-Brahman politics
of nineteenth-century western India is that of Jotirao Phule (1827–
1890). As is well known, Phule founded western India’s first non-
Brahman political organization, the Satyashodhak Samaj, in 1873.
During the 1870s, he also developed what was to become a key plank
in non-Brahman ideologies in many parts of India. This was the theory
that Brahmans were the descendants of the early Aryan invaders of
India, and caste the instrument of their subsequent social domination
of India’s indigenous peoples, its bahujan samāj or ‘community of the
majority of people’, which included Kshatriya warriors denied their
true identities as well as Sudra toilers and labourers.66 This attempt to
forge a broad jati collectivity represented the moment of ‘ethnicization’
in western India. However, its vision of a society polarized between
Brahmans and others, and its assimilation of older concerns with ritual
dignities to a new identity in which social worth lay with those who
protected the land and those who laboured to make it fruitful, were
very much a reflection of the older debates described above.
Yet the earliest work of what might be called ‘non-Brahman’ critique
in the Maratha country, and an even more direct link with the earlier
debates around the Jātiviveka, came from the pen of a young Bombay
man, Tukārām Tātyā Pad.val. (1838–1898). Pad.val. came from a
successful Bhandari family in Bombay, and was to go on to work closely
with other moderately prosperous merchant and small business people
in the movement for municipal reform in the 1870s.67 With the help
of Phule, who was named as publisher of the book, Pad.val. published
his Jātibheda Vivekasāra (‘Essence of the discernment of distinctions
between jatis’) in 1861, and republished it in 1865 in a more extended
edition.68 While Pad.val. did not mention the Jātiviveka itself, the very

66
For a summary, see Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 39–57.
67
Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India. Politics and communities in
Bombay city. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 137 and 253.
68
Jātibheda Vivekasāra. Bombay: Ganpat Krishnaji’s Press, 1865. As author, Pad.val.
identified himself simply as ‘A Hindu’. References here are to the 1865 edition.

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 456 ROSALIND O’HANLON

title of his work identified it consciously as a voice of opposition within

the larger genre. Moreover, his central polemical tactic was to take
the Jātiviveka’s vision of a social world irredeemably mixed, and turn
it against the long tradition of argumentation as it had developed
historically and into his own time. The whole notion of purity of
descent anywhere in Hindu society was a fiction. All communities,
from Brahmans to the humblest of Untouchables, were in reality
irretrievably mixed in their origins and in the motley professions and
modes of life they pursued. What gave Pad.val.’s work additional force
was his detailed knowledge of the history of conflict over caste in the
Maratha country, and the key role of ritual and of texts in that history.
His was another astute and historically aware vernacular sociology,
but this time one that aimed at undoing the whole regional discourse
of varna and caste, using its own very instruments. As he explained in
his introduction, ‘I have thought it was a good stratagem to refute my
opponents with their own weapons.’69
Pad.val.’s analysis proceeded in three broad stages. India’s caste
system, he argued, had at first been a practical division of labour in
which people were able to move flexibly according to their talents and
aptitudes. It had hardened into a rigid hierarchy from the time of the
late classical philosopher monk, Shankaracharya, who had destroyed
the influence of India’s Buddhist communities, entrenched the varna
order as the basis of all religion, and represented Brahmans at its head
as gods on earth, fit to be worshipped no matter what their conduct.
After extensive quotations from the Manusmr.ti and other epic and
puranic texts, he moved on to look at the real history of caste identities
and relations in the Maratha country. He quoted extensively from
the insulting puranic texts through which Maharashtra’s Brahman
communities had historically pursued their mutual rivalries, in which
each described menial and transgressive origins for their opponents.70
The Maratha community considered themselves Kshatriyas. But this
dated only to the time when the Marathas had acquired an empire
in the time of Sivaji. ‘At that time, Gāgābhat.t.a wrote the book that
determined him to be a Kshatriya. He invested him with the sacred
thread using the Gāyatrı̄ mantra, thus establishing his entitlement to
Vedic rituals. It is from that time that Marathas have worn the sacred
thread. But once Brahmans saw that their empire was gone, they
reverted to using puranic ritual only for them.’ Not only that, but the

69
Jātibheda Vivekasāra, p. 2 of the introduction to the second edition.
70
Ibid., pp. 40–45.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 457
Marathas had adopted many Muslim social customs, such as the veiling
of women, from their overlords in those days.71 Likewise, the claims of
Kayasthas, Sonars, and many other castes to be pure Kshatriyas were
simply impossible to prove, and belied by the visible evidence of social
mixing and merging of livelihoods and modes of life. In support of his
contention that all castes, not just those between Brahman and Sudra,
were mixed in the modern era, Pad.val. actually cited verses from the
Jātiviveka, but as these in turn had been reproduced in the work on
Sudra ritual life of the Banaras pandit, Kamalākarabhat.t.a, referred
to above.72
Pad.val. followed this upending of the inherited discourse of caste
in western India with a remarkably clear-eyed critique of the
adverse sociological consequences of caste in his own times, arranged
under a series of headings. Intellectually, caste limited educational
opportunities for all but a few, leaving the minds of the majority
cramped ‘like the bound feet of Chinese girls’. Brahmans who did have
access to education closed their minds to the knowledge of science,
such that many would tell you ‘that the earth was as flat as the leaf
of a Pipal tree, and rested on the head of the great snake, Shesha’.
Many felt they could make a good living with little effort, and so
themselves were in many cases poorly educated, limiting themselves
to rudimentary clerical knowledge.73 In ethical terms, pride of caste
made people immune to the sufferings of the poor and the starving.
It led to crimes against women, such as the killing of girl babies,
practised by Rajputs, and the custom of Kulin Brahman polygamy
in Bengal. Manu and other ancient texts of religious law laid down
savage punishments for the lower castes and the greatest leniency
for high caste transgressors, such that the latter often felt that they
were above the law.74 India’s trades and craftsmen possessed only poor
levels of skill, in many cases because caste limited mobility and forced
people simply to practise their hereditary family professions. Caste
also prevented Hindus from travelling abroad, trading, learning, and
mixing comfortably with outsiders.75 The political disadvantages of
caste were equally severe. India’s warrior classes of Kshatriyas and

71
Ibid., pp. 43–44.
72
Ibid., pp. 47–49. For the transfer of this material from Gopı̄nātha’s Jātiviveka
to Kamalākarabhat.t.a’s Śūdrakamalākara, see O’Hanlon et al., ‘Discourses of Caste’,
p. 115.
73
Ibid., pp. 61–63.
74
Ibid., pp. 63–80.
75
Ibid., pp. 80–91.

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 458 ROSALIND O’HANLON

Rajputs were too divided by caste to resist the waves of conquerors

from the northwest who followed Mahmud of Ghazni. In more recent
times, caste had prevented Brahmans and Marathas from joining
forces to resist the forces of the English.76 Pad.val. concluded this part
of his treatise by listing the spiritual disadvantages of caste, quoting
extensively from Hindu devotionalist, Buddhist, and Jain writers from
different parts of India who had themselves protested against its false
values.77
In the last part of his text, Pad.val. returned to the specific
history of caste struggles in western India. He assembled a range of
eighteenth-century judicial documents through which various castes
had contested their identities. There was a Banaras pandit assembly’s
judgement from 1788, dismissing the claims of the Bombay Palashe
community to Brahman status and priestly livelihoods. There were two
judgements from the Shankaracharya of Sringeri mat.ha in Karnataka,
one of the South India’s great authorities in matters of Hindu religious
law, about the rights of Palashes to work as priests to Kayasthas, and
the claims of Shenvi communities in Bombay to full Brahman status.
There was a copy of the 1779 ruling from the governor of Bombay
referred to above, in the matter of disputed Sonar claims. He included
a very interesting order dating from 1743, from the Maratha peshwa
to the Brahman religious leaders of the town of Cheul outside Bombay.
The order described how many eminent Brahman pandits had been
assembled in Pune to rule on the claims of the Kayastha community
of Pattane Prabhus, who had been observed commissioning priests to
carry out Vedic rituals to which they were not entitled. The assembly
had judged them to be mere Sudras. The peshwa’s letter ordered that
in future the community were to be allowed puranic ritual only for
their domestic ceremonies, and were to permit widows of the caste
to remarry in conformity with the dharma proper to Sudras.78 To
these evidences of the hybrid identities of Brahman and Kayastha
communities, Pad.val. added information about India’s Rajputs and
lordly Maratha families drawn from British sources. James Tod, the
great authority on Rajput history, had traced Turkish origins in many
Rajput families. The historian, Grant Duff, had described the humble

76
Ibid., pp. 91–98.
77
Ibid., pp. 98–137.
78
Ibid., pp. 137–58.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 459
origins of Sivaji’s own family.79 The old Maratha clans who claimed
purity of Rajput descent were in fact socially mixed, as was clear from
their recent intermarriages with the lowly families of Shinde and
Holkar, ‘so it is clear how much purity remains amongst the Maratha
people’.80 Pad.val. concluded his text with a lengthy classification, very
much in the style of the Jātiviveka, of ‘the jatis which are found in the
country of Maharashtra’. As Gopı̄nātha had done, Pad.val. included a
brief description of each community’s place of origin, their occupation,
mode of life, and, in some cases, their claimed or attributed varna
identity.81
The first edition of Pad.val.’s book caused quite a stir in Bombay,
with reviews in the Marathi and the English language press, and
appeared in a second, expanded edition in 1865. The book was
promoted in Pune by the missionary, Adam White, part of the Pune
missionary circle that included Jotirao Phule.82 It made a strong
impression on the Marathi writer and social observer, Govind Nārāyan.,
who noted it in his Mumbaice Varn.an (‘Description of Bombay’),
published in 1863. Describing the intense social competitiveness
of caste communities in the city, and caste fissions occasioned by
minute disagreements over ritual observance, Nārāyan. reported that,
‘In 1861, an enquiring gentleman prepared and published a book
called the Jatibhed Viveksaar for the welfare of the people.’ The
book ‘contains numerous examples from the Vedanta and other books
regarding the futility of caste. People should certainly read this book.’83
Pad.val. therefore displayed a remarkably detailed knowledge of caste
struggles dating back two centuries and more, and a sharp awareness
of the role that texts of many different kinds could play in those
struggles, from seventeenth-century texts of dharmasastra, to the
judgements of pandit assemblies in Pune and Banaras, to orders of
the peshwa government in Pune or the government of Bombay. What
was also striking in his position was that it contained no suggestion of

79
Padval’s references here are to James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan.
London: Smith Elder, 1832, and James Grant Duff, A History of the Mahrattas. London:
Longmans, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826.
80
Jātibheda Vivekasāra, p. 153.
81
Ibid., pp. 158–70.
82
Ibid., p. 2 of Introduction to the second edition. The Pune missionary circle is
described in Murrary Mitchell, In Western India: recollections of my early missionary life.
Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1899, pp. 314–16.
83
Murali Ranganathan (ed.), Govind Narayan’s Mumbai. An urban biography from 1823.
London: Anthem Press, 2008, pp. 303–04.

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 460 ROSALIND O’HANLON

any new kind of ethnicized caste collective. He engaged closely with

Maharashtra’s long-established tradition of debate as to whether there
were any intermediate castes in the modern world. However, he used
that tradition not to suggest a new combination, but rather to attack
and undo all social unities that were built on the basis of caste, itself
a corrupting principle of social life. In this, of course, his approach
differed from that of Phule, who shortly after was helping Pad.val.
with his treatise and beginning to develop his thesis of the essential
unity of all non-Brahman castes against their Brahman oppressors. In
this, Pad.val. stands as an important and little-recognized intellectual
predecessor of Ambedkar, who began to develop his own assault on
caste some 60 years later in the 1920s.
Throughout these years, Gopı̄nātha’s Jātiviveka and the tradition
it had come to represent remained at the centre of argumentation
about caste, shaping ‘colonial knowledge’ and continuing to draw
attention from communities who found themselves classified in its
terms. It entered the literature of colonial anthropology through the
work of the missionary, John Wilson, the first volume of whose Indian
Caste was published in Bombay in 1857. It described ‘the Jati-Viveka,
the Brahajjati-Viveka, the Madhava-Kalpalita, and the Parashurama
Pratapa’ as ‘works of authority among the Maratha Brahmans’.84
In his 1877 account of his community’s history and customs, the
Bombay Kayastha, Shamrao Moroji Nayak, included the Jātiviveka,
the Paraśurāmapratāpa, the Śatapraśnakalpalatā, and the Br.hajjātiviveka
within a list of Sanskrit works that gave no proper account of his
community of Pattane Prabhus, ‘for the reason that they are written
by the Shastris and not by the sages of ancient times’.85 In 1880 the
essayist and social reformer, V.N. Mandlik, cited the ‘Jativiveka, large
and small’ in his list of authoritative works of dharmasastra in the
Maratha country.86 These pressures continued to provoke Kayasthas
and others in the new context of competitive history writing that
gathered pace from the 1870s.87 As late as 1919, the writer and
non-Brahman activist, K.T. Gupte, inveighed against the Jātiviveka, as
a text that ‘determined everyone other than Brahmans to be inferior

84
John Wilson, Indian Caste. Bombay: Times of India Office, 1877, Vol. 1, p. 64. For
the earlier publication of the work, see George Smith, The Life of John Wilson. London:
J. Murray, 1878, p. 482.
85
Shamrao Moroji Nayak, A History of the Pattana Prabhus. Bombay: Family Printing
Press, 1877, p. 30.
86
V.N. Mandlik, The Vyavahāra Mayūkha. Bombay: Education Society’s Press, p. lx.
87
Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts, pp. 126–76.

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 CASTE AND ITS HISTORIES 461
and Sudras. In its opinion, goldsmiths, carpenters, weavers, gardeners,
braziers and coppersmiths are all inferior and Sudras.’88

Afterword

By this time, of course, caste was firmly established as a dominant force

in the public spheres of law, politics, and education. Caste associations
everywhere sought to extend their memberships, and looked to the
colonial state as well as their own histories for affirmation of their
identity. Non-Brahmans in western and southern India challenged
assumptions that they could be easily assimilated into Congress-
led nationalism, and early Dalit leaders, including Ambedkar, were
beginning to demand organizations and a voice of their own. As is
well known, the political and social strategies of the late colonial
government offered many points of purchase for these pervasive forms
of caste assertion, and the latter constituted one of the major social
legacies of the colonial state to independent India’s first governments.
These are now very familiar forces. Yet there is a danger that the
very salience of ‘ethnicized’ caste and identity politics in the public life
of our modern era will lead us to overlook the longer term continuities
described above, and the sometimes obscure colonial intellectuals who
wrestled with them. Intellectuals such as Pad.val., and his predecessors
in the eighteenth century and before, were sharply aware of this long
history. They worried about texts and their very material influence,
understood the dignities of Vedic ritual, identified varna status as a
key part of social prestige, and appreciated—and sometimes deeply
deplored—the power of stigmatization that might follow if these
dignities were withheld.
Their critiques certainly drew on the intellectual resources that
became available under colonialism, but were no mere by-products
of colonial knowledge. What is valuable about their engagement with
western India’s long tradition of argumentation about caste is that it
reminds us that caste, as explicit or implicit hierarchy, is—and has
always been—very much more than an epiphenomenon of the state,
and sustained strongly in the domains of family and personal life,
bodily comportment, and religious practice.

88
Keśava Trimbak Gupte, Rājavād.yācı̄ Gāgābhat..tı̄. Pune: Indu Prakash Press, 1919,
p. 42.

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