What makes people who they are? Pandit networks and the problem of livelihoods in early modern Western India

Abstract

The question ‘Who is a Brahman?’ was the focus of sustained and intense debate among the many small and competing Brahman communities of western India's Konkan littoral during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This debate ranged over history, lineage, reputation, social relationships, modes of livelihood and customary practices. It was conducted along the intellectual and social networks that linked the shrine towns and sacred centres of the Maratha country with the Maratha pandit communities of Banaras, then engaged in their own allied discussions about the nature of early modern India's social order. More locally, puranic and allied genres of narrative history engaged with the same question, offering com-peting versions of the origins and moral qualities of the region's Brahman communities. The appropriateness of the different kinds of agricultural work and petty trade common amongst them lay at the heart of these debates. As the region's Brahman communities began to define themselves as a new kind of scribal and administrative elite in the early modern period, and to compete for the advantages and resources that such service livelihoods offered, associations with menial work became a key discursive marker of Brahman unfitness. These new definitions of Brahman standing and entitlement reached their culmination under the Maratha government of the peshwas.