Rosalind o Hanlon

Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010) pp. 201–240.

C Cambridge University Press 2009
doi:10.1017/S0026749X09990229 First published online 28 September 2009
Letters Home:
Banaras pandits and the Maratha regions
in early modern India∗
ROSALIND O’HANLON
Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2LE, UK

Email: rosalind.ohanlon@orinst.ox.ac.uk
Abstract
Maratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers from
the early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and
established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts.
They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, where
pressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimonious
disputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order.
Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raising
serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaras
pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of
their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. By
the early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created new
models of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolution
of such disputes.
Introduction
The development of the city of Banaras in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries exemplifies the growing ‘connectedness’ that
historians have taken to define the ‘early modern’ in South Asia.1
∗
I am extremely grateful to fellow participants in a workshop in Oxford in May
2007, on the subject of ‘Ideas in circulation in early modern India’. I particularly
thank Christopher Minkowski for sharing his insights and expertise, and Allison
Busch, Sheldon Pollock and James Benson for their comments on this draft. Madhav
Deshpande and Shailendra Bhandare kindly shared important source materials with
me. I thank Madhav Bhole and Ramesh Nimbkar for assistance in tracing the histories
of some of the sources used in this paper.
1
For this theme, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards
a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, 3, 1997,
201
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 25 Jan 2011 IP address: 125.63.100.24
202 ROSALIND O’HANLON
The consolidation from the early sixteenth century of successor states

to the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms meant a proliferation of
large and smaller courtly centres in southern and central India with
patronage to offer.2 In the north, the decade of the 1570s saw the
consolidation of Akbar’s state and the emergence of an expansive new
Mughal cultural strategy, drawing in the ambitious and talented from
different regional and religious traditions and promoting exchange
between them.3 Set between these northern and southern networks,
Banaras seems to have attracted a new wave of intellectual specialists
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading intellectuals
from these pandit communities led significant innovations in Sanskrit
learning.4 Many worked across a range of different fields rather than
producing commentaries embedded ever more deeply in individual
disciplines. Compendia and digests, often commissioned by royal
patrons and seemingly aimed at non-specialist audiences, became
commoner as literary forms. The ritual entitlements of people further
down the social scale seemed to attract attention in a new way.5 Some
writers adopted a stronger temporal sense in their ordering of the
pp. 735–762. For Benaras, see A.S. Altekar, History of Banaras (Banaras: Culture
Publication House, 1937); Diana L. Eck, Banaras, Lity of Light (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1983); Eck, ‘Kashi, city and symbol’, in Purana, Vol. 20, 2, 1978, pp.
169–92; and Eck, ‘A survey of the Sanskrit sources for the study of Banaras’, Purana,
Vol. 22, 1, 1980, pp. 81–101.
2
See Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 59–128; and Velcheru Narayana
Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State
in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992).
3
Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 126–44.
4
Sheldon B. Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals in Seventeenth Century India’, in The Indian
Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 38 (1), 2001, pp. 3–31; and Pollock, The Language
of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006); Yigal Bronner, ‘What is New and What is
Navya: Sanskrit Poetics on the Eve of Colonialism’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol.
30, 5, October 2002, pp. 441–62; Lawrence McRea, ‘Novelty of Form and Novelty
of Substance in Seventeenth Century Mı̄mām . sā’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol.
30, 5, October 2002, pp. 481–494; Johannes Bronkhorst, ‘Bhat.t.oji Dı̄ks.ita on Sphot.a’,
in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 33, 2005, pp. 3–41; and Christopher Minkowski,
‘Astronomers and their Reasons’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 30, 2002, pp.
495–514.
5
See, for example, the Śūdrakamalākara of Kamalakara Bhatta, and the slightly
earlier Śūdrācāraśiroman.i of Sesa Krsna, both prominent ‘southern’ pandits. Ananya
Vajpeyi, ‘Excavating Identity through Tradition: Who was Sivaji?’ in Satish Saberwal
and Supriya Varma (eds.), Traditions in Motion: Religion and Society in History (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 257–258.

BANARAS PANDITS AND THE MARATHA REGIONS 203
knowledges of the past, alongside a new flourishing in the discipline
of mı̄mām . sā in this period, whose foundations lay in inferring the
nature of dharma from ‘eternal’ Vedic revelation.6 The doctrine of
kāśimaran.amukti was developed in new and stronger forms, suggesting
that Banaras, as the city of Siva, held out possibilities of liberation to
the departing soul as powerful as any that a virtuous life lived in the
world could bestow.7
Also well known is the central place of ‘southern’ or daks.inātya pandits
in these developments.8 Many were migrants from learned families
in the old religious centres of the Konkan littoral, or from the shrine
towns that clustered along the Godavari, Bhima and Krishna rivers
as they flowed eastward across the plains of central and southern
India.9 Several generations of the Bhatta family of Desastha Brahmans
authored major works across a range of disciplines and acted as
intermediaries between the Mughal court and wider constituencies
of the Hindu pious in north India.10 The Devas, also Desasthas,
were a famous family of mı̄mām . sakās, descended from the great poet
Eknath (1533–1599).11 The Caturdhara or Chowdhuri family of
Desasthas established itself in Banaras when Nilakantha Caturdhara
6
For these aspects of mı̄mām . sā, see Sheldon S. Pollock, ‘Mı̄mām. sā and the Problem
of History in Traditional India’, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 109, 4,
1989, pp. 603–610.
7
Christopher Minkowski, ‘Nı̄lakan.t.ha Caturdhara’s Mantrakāśikhan.d.a’, in Journal
of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 122.2, 2002, pp. 329–344; Jonathan Parry, Death
in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 26–32. Christopher
Bayly has suggested that the easier conditions of travel under Mughal imperial rule,
and the revenues it collected from taxes on pilgrims, boosted Banaras’s importance
as a pilgrim destination during the early modern period. C.A. Bayly, ‘From ritual
to ceremony: death ritual and society in Hindu north India since 1600’, in Joachim
Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: studies in the social history of death, (London: Europa
Press, 1981), pp. 154–86.
8
M.H. Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits at Benaras’, in Indian Antiquary, Vol. XLI, January
1912, pp. 7–13.
9
For a description of Paithan in particular, this ‘Kasi of the South’, see
R.S. Morwanchikar, The City of the Saints: Paithan Through the Ages (Delhi: Ajanta
Publications, 1985). For other migrations following the fall of Vijayanagar,
see Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval
India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996), pp. 97–99.
10
For the Bhatta family, see James Benson, ‘Śam . karabhat.t.a’s Family Chronicle’
in Axel Michaels (ed.), The Pandit: Traditional Scholarship in India (Delhi: Manohar,
2001), pp. 105–118. The colonial historian of Maharashtra’s Brahman communities,
R.B.Gunjikar, identifies the Bhattas as Desasthas: R.B. Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala
(Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1884), p. 99.
11
For a history of the Deva family, see P.K. Gode, ‘Āpadeva, the Author of
the Mı̄mām . sā-Nyāyaprakāśa and Mahāmahopādhyāya Āpadeva, the Author of the
Adhikaran.acandrikā—are they identical?’ in Studies in Indian Literary History (Bombay:
Singhi Jain Sastra Siksapith, 1954), Vol. II, pp. 39–43.

came to the city from Kupergaon on the Godavari and established

himself in the latter decades of the seventeenth century as a major
commentator on the Mahabharata.12 The Punatambakar family of
Desasthas came to the city from Punatamba on the Godavari, where
Mahadeva Punatambakar emerged as a leading scholar of logic.13
Narasimha Sesa left the Sesa family home on the eastern Godaveri,
spent time at the Bijapur court, and then settled in Banaras, where his
son, Krsna Sesa, emerged as a prominent scholar in the last decades
of the sixteenth century.14 The Bharadavaja family came to Banaras
a little later: its founder was Mahadeva, who married the daughter of
Nilakantha Bhatta, grandson of Narayana Bhatta.15
To make sense of this extraordinary intellectual and social
formation, we need to look both at the urban milieu of Banaras
itself, and at the regions and localities from which many of these
pandits came. This interplay was to be vitally important. Caught
up in the rapid social transformation of this period, communities of
Brahmans back in the Maratha regions struggled to establish their own
hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, of superior and inferior degrees
of Brahmanhood. To resolve these disputes, pandit assemblies in
Banaras produced nirn.ayapatras, or letters of judgement, signed by the
pandits present, which were then sent back to the contending Brahman
parties. However, these attempts at adjudication were complicated.
As Brahman families migrated to Banaras, they were in some cases to
carry their local rivalries and resentments with them, and to find new
arenas for their expression in the intellectual life of the city. As these
local disputes intensified during the seventeenth century, the pandit
communities of Banaras were impelled to engage in new ways with
the wider question of what it meant to be a Brahman, and to search
for new ways of asserting and justifying Brahman authority. In this
century before the coming of colonialism, Brahman community and
identity were deeply conflicted constructs.
12
For a history of the Caturdhara/Chaudhuri family, see P.K. Gode,
‘Nı̄lakan.t.ha Caturdhara, The Commentator of the Mahabhārata—His Genealogy
and Descendants’ in Studies in Indian Literary History, Vol. II, pp. 475–498.
13
For references to the Punatambakar family, see Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’; B.
Upadhyaya, Kāśı̄ kı̄ pānditya paramparā (Banaras: Visvavidyalaya Prakasana, 1983), pp.
30–31; and Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, pp. 8–9. For Mahadeva Punatambakar, see
T. Aufrecht, Catalogus Catalogorum (Leipzig: FA Brockhaus, 1891), Vol. 1, pp. 437a–b.
(Hereafter CC.)
14
For a history of the Sesa family, see Ranganathasvami Aryavaraguru, ‘On the
Sheshas of Benaras’, in Indian Antiquary, Vol. XLI, November 1912, pp. 245–53.
15
For the Bharadavaja family, see Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’, 1912, p. 13.

Madhav Deshpande has explored some aspects of this interplay
between Banaras and the Maratha country.16 This paper offers a
closer exploration of the pandit assemblies and their letters of
judgement. These letters offer an unusually detailed source for this
period of India’s social history, providing important insights into social
processes not easily found in the state-centred records in Persian or
Marathi of the period.17 The judgements are analysed for what they
can tell us about the degree to which Banaras pandits were drawn
into the inter-Brahman disputes of the Maratha country. Some of
the less well-known Brahman intellectuals who signed the letters
are identified, and their names compared with other lists from the
period.18 The aim is to get a sense of what was at issue in the
assemblies, both for the pandits themselves, and for the provincial
Brahmans bringing disputes to Banaras for resolution. Finally, the
paper explores the elaborate procedures that the assemblies developed
to emphasize the supreme authority of their judgements, even as the
symbols of Brahman intellectual authority in the city began to draw
the hostile attention of the emperor Aurangzeb. An attempt is made
to explore some of these connections, and to place them in the context
of the Maratha warrior leader Sivaji’s emergence as challenger to
Mughal strategy in the Deccan.
Changing environments for Brahmans

in the Maratha country
Writing in 1884, R.B. Gunjikar, historian of western India’s Brahman

communities, identified eight subcastes of Maharashtrian Brahmans:
16
Madhav M. Deshpande, ‘Localising the Universal Dharma: Puranas, Nibandhas,
and Nirnayapatras in Medieval Maharashtra’, unpublished mss. These and related
issues have been the subject of an important new study in Gijs Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in
Seventeenth Century India (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009), which came to hand
only after this paper had gone to press.
17
A note on sources is appended to this paper.
18
In particular the names attached to the praise addresses offered to the Banaras
pandit Kavindracaraya, presented after he persuaded the emperor Shah Jehan to
abolish the tax on pilgrims to Banaras, probably in the 1630s. Har Dutt Sharma
and M.M. Patkar, Kavı̄ndracandrodaya (Pune: Oriental Book Agency, 1939). Another
collection of praise addresses, from the time of Akbar, is the Nar.asim. hasarvasavakāvyam,
in honour of the pandit Narasimhasrama: see Haraprasad Shastri, A Descriptive
Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1923), Vol. 4, ‘History and
Geography’, pp. 81–5. Unless otherwise stated, all identifications suggested below
are consistent with what are here understood to be the best accepted chronological
parameters for the life of each pandit.

the Desasthas of the Deccan uplands, and the multiple small

communities of the Konkan littoral: Chitpavans or Chiplunas,
Karhades, Senavis or Saraswats, Devarukhes, Kiravants, Padyas and
Palshes.19 As might be expected, the histories of these names are
difficult to identify with certainty. Some seem to derive from towns
where there were large settlements of those subgroups, such as
Chiplun, Karhad, Devarukhe and Palshe. Some appear to be titles
derived from a particular mode of livelihood. Kiravants, for example,
were said to be Saraswat Brahmans fallen from their high status
by taking on the ritual work of many Sudra menials, hence their
name kriyāvanta or ‘possessed of many rituals’.20 Saraswat community
histories explain the title ‘Senavi’, applied to Saraswat Brahmans who
had moved up from Goa into the Konkan, as a derivation from the
Sanskrit term śahāna, meaning clever or learned, referring to their
clerical and scholarly pursuits.21 Desasthas were another regional
category. It was to this ‘utterly boundless Brahman class’, as the
nineteenth-century reformer Visnu Sastri Pandit described them, to
which almost all of the southern pandit families who moved to Banaras
belonged.22
Other affiliations were important too. Besides family and lineage, all
Brahmans were members of a gotra and a pravara, exogamous groupings
defined by notional shared descent from one of the ancient sages.23
They were also defined by a śākhā or Vedic affiliation, denoting the
particular branch of Vedic learning to which the community had
dedicated itself. Some southern Brahmans were also identified by
sectarian affiliations, as Smartas or as Madhvas, and as adherents
19
Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, pp. 179–180. It is difficult to find evidence for
widespread use of the term ‘Chitpavan’ for Brahmans from Chiplun, before the
seventeenth century. P.K. Gode, ‘The origin and antiquity of the caste-name of the
Karahāt.aka or Karhād.ā Brahmins’, in Studies in Indian Cultural History (Pune: Prof. PK
Gode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1969), Vol. III, p. 7.
20
Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, pp. 177–179. For a Chitpavan attempt to reduce
the ritual entitlements of Kiravants made in the northern Konkan in March 1757,
see R.V. Oturkar, Peśvekālin sāmājik va arthik patravyavahāra (Pune: Indian Council for
Historical Research, 1950), pp. 123–124. I am extremely grateful to Sumit Guha for
this reference.
21
M.G. Sharma, Sārasvata Bhus.an.a (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1950), pp. 70–
71, and P.K. Gode, ‘Antiquity of the caste name ‘Śen.avi’, in Journal of the University of
Bombay, Vol. 5, no. 6, 1937, pp. 152–155.
22
Visnusastri Pandit, Devarukhyām . vı̄s.ayı̄m . mata Vicāra (Bombay: Indu
. Śāstrasam
Prakash Press, 1874), p. 39.
23
For these divisions, see Thomas Trautmann, Dravidian kinship (Cambridge:

therefore of one of the mat.hs or monasteries embodying that sectarian
tradition.24
It is difficult to know what processes of fission and fusion may have
shaped these Brahman ‘subcastes’ before the early modern period.
They are likely to have involved migrations, new settlements in villages
gifted as tax-free land to Brahmans, changes of livelihood, shifting
patterns of commensality and marriage relations, and occasions of
dharmic transgression. It seems likely too that this group of eight
subcastes, identified in the late nineteenth century, was in fact
mutable over time, as some split and others merged.25
Maharashtra’s most important ‘purana of place’, the Sahyādrikhan.d.a,
devoted many of its chapters to explaining the origins of the
different Brahman subcastes.26 It offered an all-India classification
of Brahmans into two great classes. The pañca gaud.a were the five
classes of ‘northern’ Brahmans—Saraswat, Kanyakubja, Maithila,
Gauda and Utkala. Gaud.a in this setting therefore referred both to
the general grouping of Brahman communities found north of the
Vindhya mountain range, and to Gauda deśa, the ancient country
of northeastern India. The pañca drāvid.a were the five classes of
southern Brahmans: Dravidas, Tailangas, Karnatas, Gurjuras, and the
24
For these affiliations amongst Saraswats, for example, see Frank F. Conlon,
A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans 1700–1935 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977), pp. 20–22.
25
An 1832 survey of ‘Maharasthr’ Brahmans in Banaras reveals these multiple
affilations. It listed eleven categories, described as Dravir, Tylang, Chitpaur,
Yujurbedi, Raghurbedi, Sanwai, Kan no, Prabhu, Kanhare, Karhare, and Abhir.
Dravir (Dravida) Tylang (Telenga), Chitpaur (Chitpavan), Kan no (Kanoja), Kanhare
(Kannada) and Karhare (Karhade) are local or regional affiliations. Sanwai is
an occupational affiliation. Yujurvedi and Raghurbedi (Rgvedi) represent śākhās.
‘Desastha’ does not appear here as a significant designation. James Prinsep, ‘Census
of the Population of the City of Banaras’, in Asiatic Researches, xvii, 1832, p. 491. See
also M.A. Sherring, Tribes and Castes as Represented in Banaras (London: Trubner and Co,
1872).
26
Notionally a part of the Skandapurān.a, one of the 18 ‘great’ puranas, the
Sahyādrikhan.d.a is a heterogeneous collection of texts, written over a very long period.
The only edition is J. Gerson da Cunha, Sri Sahyādrikhan.d.a Skandapurān.a (Bombay:
Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1877). Da Cunha’s edition is based on 14 manuscripts collected
from different parts of India and collated to produce his edition. These contain
references to the king Mayurasarma dating to 345–370 AD, to Madhavacarya of
the 13th Century AD, while one of the manuscripts is dated 1700. See also Stephan
H. Levitt, ‘The Sahyādrikhan.d.a: some problems concerning a text-critical edition of a
Puranic text’, in Purana, Vol. 9, 1, 1977, pp. 8–40; and Levitt, ‘Sahyādrikhan.d.a: style
and content and indices of authorship in the Pātityagrāmanirn.aya’, in Purana, Vol. 24,
1, 1982, pp. 128–145.

inhabitants of ‘Madhyadesa’, or ‘Maharastra’ in some variant readings

of these lists.27
More locally, the texts of the Sahyādrikhan.d.a describe how the sage
Parasurama wrested the lands of the Konkan littoral from the sea,
and then set about populating these lands with their many different
Brahman communities. Some, like the Chitpavans and Saraswats,
were described as migrants into the region.28 Karhades, Padyas and
others were represented as fallen Brahmans inhabiting wicked lands.29
A sub-set of central chapters, the Pātityagrāmanirn.aya or ‘determination
of fallen villages’ deal with subgroups of Brahmans who had come into
being through fission, changes of occupation, sin or dharmic lapse.30
The texts contain many names of Brahman subgroups no longer in
existence by the time Gunjikar compiled his list in 1884.
Deshpande has suggested that the pañca gaud.a and pañca
drāvid.a classifications encapsulate the early struggles of Brahman
intellectuals to maintain systems of social classification and ranking as
some communities began to settle in new regions south of the Vindhya
mountains.31 For migrants, the chance to shape more local narratives
of community origin may have offered a means of defence against
the hostility of local Brahman communities towards outsiders.32 The
histories of the Pātityagrāmanirn.aya are likely to reflect social strains
within villages originally settled by Brahman families, or given as
tax-free land, and may point to the origin of some of the Konkan’s
Brahman subcastes in particular village settlements.
If the older puranic accounts suggest elements of strain and struggle
in the shaping of Brahman subgroups and communities, the early
modern period was to bring its own new elements of turbulence. First,
27
Da Cunha, Sri Sahyādrikhan.d.a, uttarāradha, adhyāya 1, vss. 2–4 and Madhav
M. Deshpande, ‘Pañca Gaud.a und Pañca Drāvid.a. Umstrittene Grenzen einer
traditionellen Klassifikation’ in M. Bergunder and R.P. Das, (eds), ‘Arier’ und ‘Draviden’,
Konstruktionen der Vergangenheit als Grundlage fur Selbst-und Fremdwahrnehmungen Sudasiens
(Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2002), pp. 57–78.
28
Da Cunha, Sri Sahyādrikhan.d.a, uttarāradha, adhyāya 1, ‘Origins of the
Chitpavans’, vss. 39–45.
29
Ibid., adhyāya 2, ‘Origins of the Karastras’, vss. 1–8, and 16–20, and adhyāya
20, vs. 24.
30
Stephan H. Levitt ‘The Pātityagrāmanirn.aya: A Puranic History of Degraded
Brahman Villages’, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation, 1974, pp. 175–289.
31
Deshpande, ‘Pañca Gaud.a’, pp. 74–75.
32
Paul Axelrod and Michelle A. Fuerch. ‘Portugese Orientalism and the making
of the village communities of Goa’ in Ethnohistory, Vol. 45, 3, 1998, pp. 439–476; and
Axelrod and Fuerch, ‘Flight of the Deities: Hindu Resistance in Portugese Goa’, in
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, 2, 1996, pp. 387–421.

as Fukazawa, Richards and others have demonstrated, the states of
the Deccan Sultanate drew many local Hindu scribal specialists into
state service. The Bijapur court in particular took steps to establish
the office of deśakulkarni, or accountant, as an independent office.
Brahman families came to hold most of these hereditary posts as they
took clearer shape over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. This gave rise to powerful new classes of Brahman ‘men of
the pen’ in the bureaucracies of the Deccan sultanate states, who
became indispensable in courts and great households as much as
in their local roles as village accountants responsible for revenue
assessment and collection.33
Second, as Frank Perlin has argued, the Maratha countryside saw
the consolidation of wealth and prestige into the hands of particular
families, well before the eighteenth-century growth of Brahman
financial power under the government of the Peshwas. Some families
were able to build up scattered accumulations of offices and rights
as village and regional heads, accountants and holders of military
estates.34 Brahman families as well as Marathas accumulated rights
in this way, deploying their combination of scribal skills, religious
prestige and access to cash to assemble substantial holdings in land
and local office, as well as developing widespread credit operations.35 In
the Konkan littoral, khoti tenures were offered as a form of hereditable
revenue farm, granted as an incentive to boost cultivation particularly
after periods of drought and dearth. Chitpavan Brahmans in the
33
Hiroshi Fukazawa, ‘The local administration of the Adilshahi Sultanate (1484–
1686)’ in Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems and States (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1–48; J.F. Richards, Mughal administration in
Golconda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan;
Andre Wink, Land and sovereignty in India: agrarian society and politics under the eighteenth-
century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 296–
304; Gijs Kruijtzer, ‘Madanna, Akkanna and the Brahmin Revolution: A Study of
Mentality, Group Behaviour and Personality in Seventeenth Century India’, in Journal
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 54, 2, 2002, pp. 231–67. For an
indispensable account of the growth of Brahman power in the eighteenth century, see
Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 64–96.
34
Frank Perlin, ‘Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth Century
Maratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights and the problem of Rural
Autonomy in the eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan’, in Journal of Peasant Studies,
Vol. 5, 1978, pp. 172–237; and Perlin, ‘The Pre-Colonial Indian State in History and
Epistemology: A Reconstruction of Societal Formation in the Western Deccan from
the Fifteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century’ in H.J.M. Claessen and P. Skalnik
(eds), The Study of the State (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), pp. 275–302.
35
Perlin, ‘Of White Whale and Countrymen’, p. 198.

Konkan held khoti rights at least as early as the seventeenth century,

while ‘Javal’, the name of a subcommunity of Brahmans in the southern
Konkan, was simply another term for a khoti landlord.36 Brahman
families granted revenue-exempt lands in return for their religious
services found that their combination of piety and access to cash gave
them formidable strength as providers of credit.37 These developments
certainly disturbed some contemporaries: the Marathi poet Tukaram,
for example, complained that the Brahmans were deserting their
older roles as priests and village servants, to take up profitable new
occupations as revenue farmers and moneylenders.38
Third, Brahman migration into the Konkan littoral in particular
continued and intensified. SuklaYajurvediya community histories
document their migration to the Konkan from the Paithan and
Punatamba districts on the Godavari. Ramadevaraya of Devagiri
(1271–1309) recruited local Desastha families to serve his son as
ritual officiants in the Konkan, where they were granted valuable lands
and offices. From the late-seventeenth century, however, Chitpavans
attacked them as a species of local and inferior Brahman, ‘Palshes’
from the town of Palshi where many lived, denying their identity as
respectable Desasthas of the Yajurvedi śākhā.39 The arrival of the
Portuguese in the Konkan from the 1520s resulted in a substantial
displacement of Brahmans from Goa into the Konkan and Deccan.
There are also seventeenth-century complaints against Karhades as
interlopers from above the ghats seeking to appropriate local rights
and livelihoods.40
36
James Molesworth, Marathi-English Dictionary (Bombay: Bombay Education
Society’s Press, 1857), p. 216. See Gode, ‘The Origin and Antiquity’, p. 9, for a
document of 5 April 1676 referring to a Chitpavan khot. The family of the Chitpavan
nationalist leader Tilak had for three centuries been khoti landlords in the Ratnagiri
village of Chikhalgaon. D.V. Tahmankar, Lokamanya Tilak: Father of Indian Unrest and
Maker of Modern India (London: J. Murray, 1956), p. 7. See also A.R. Kulkarni, Medieval
Maharashtra (New Delhi: Books and Books, 1996), pp. 162–72.
37
In 1705, for example, the Dev family of Cincvad near Pune were supplying cash to
the Maratha ruler Shahu, who was being held hostage at Aurangzeb’s court. Laurence
W. Preston, The Devs of Cincvad. A Lineage and the State in Maharashtra (Cambridge,
38
Tukaram Tatya Padaval, Samagra Tukārām Gāthā (Pune: Varada Press, 1996),
Vol. II, nos. 6163–6166. For other observations about Maratha Brahmans and
service, see Surendra Nath Sastri (ed.), Viśvagun.ādarśacampū of Venkatadhvari (Varanasi:
Vidyabhavana Sanskrit Series, 1963), pp. 111–117.
39
Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, pp. 82–91; Narayana Vitthal Vaidya, Abhiprāyāval.ı̄
(Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1885).
40
Gode, ‘Origin and Antiquity’, p. 13.

Disputed entitlements:
Saraswats and Devarukhes
These social shifts emerge in a particularly marked way in the

histories of two Brahman subgroups. Saraswats constituted one of the
groups of northern or gaud.a Brahmans, both their own internal caste
histories and the narratives of the Sahyādrikhan.d.a describing them
as having migrated to Goa at an early date. Their status as village
heads and controllers of temple resources enabled them to establish
themselves both as political intermediaries and important revenue
contractors under the Portugese. Portugese religious pressures,
particularly the destruction in 1564 of their important mat.h, or
monastery, at Kusasthal in Goa, drove many to migrate northwards
into the Konkan and south into the Kanara regions. The gurus
of the Kusasthal mat.h also left Goa, settling first in the Konkan
and then, from about 1600, in Banaras.41 Known as Senavis in the
Konkan, contemporary accounts record their pervasive presence and
success as educators, administrators and political intermediaries.42
They were also important traders. In a document of 24 October 1643
recording local revenue rights, we find Lakha Senavi, Badul Senavi,
Narayan Senavi and Raghunath Senavi mentioned as merchants from
Revadandha, who had set up warehouses to trade in every different
kind of commodity between the Konkan and the passes into the
Deccan.43 The term ‘Senavi’ applied to the families from particularly
prestigious Saraswat settlements in Goa, and seems to have been
generalised in the Konkan to apply to all Brahmans from Goa. The
term ‘Saraswat’, with its overt associations with the five groups of
gaud.a, or ‘northern’ Brahmans, came only slowly into practical use for
these Konkani Brahmans from the middle of the eighteenth century.44
Devarukhes were also Konkani Brahmans whose nomenclature
was complex. Gunjikar’s 1884 account observed, ‘some say that
41
Sharma, Sārasvata Bhus.an.a, p.189.
42
See 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 Review, Vol. 45, 3, 2008, pp.
381–416.
43
SV Avalaskar, Konkanāca Itihāsācı̄ Sādhanem
. (Pune: Bhārata Itihāsa Sam
. śodhaka
Man.d.ala Sviya Granthamāla, 1953), pp. 2–5.
44
N.K. Wagle, ‘The History and Social Organisation of the Gauda Saraswata
Brahmanas of the West Coast of India’, in Journal of Indian History, Vol. 48, 1, 1970,
pp. 8–25, and Vol. 48, 2, 1970, pp. 295–333, and Deshpande, ‘Pañca Gaud.a’, p. 69.

“Devarukhe” is a corruption of the word ‘Devarsi’; but there is a very

well known town called Devarukhe, so there can be no doubt that their
name came about from that’.45
A number of different sources refer to an early dispute between
Devarukhe and Chitpavan Brahmans. The Śatapraśnakalpalatā, a mixed
purana and local chronicle by one Madhav, who dated his manuscript
to 1690, described it in detail. Some two hundred years earlier, a
wealthy Chitpavan Brahman, Vasudeva Citale, was overseeing the
digging of a tank near Vasai in the Thane district of northern Konkan,
and pressing local people into serving as labourers in the project. A
group of Brahmans from the town of Devarukhe were travelling along
the road past the tank. They refused the Chitpavan’s pressure to join
in the work unless he was willing to get his hands dirty along with the
other labourers. The infuriated Chitpavan cursed the whole Brahman
community of Devarukhe, since which time other Konkani Brahmans
had withdrawn from social relations with them, regarding association
with them as unlucky.46 A judicial case of 1723 alludes to this same
episode.47
This history drew the interest of colonial commentators. On
the evidence of their gotras or exogamous subgroups, the social
commentator and reformer Vishnu Sastri Pandit argued in 1874 that
the Devarukhes must originally have been part of the larger Desastha
Brahman community. He cited many contemporary examples of
intermarriage between Devarukhes and Desasthas, although always
on the principle of the upward movement of brides: Devarukhes
married their daughters to Desasthas, but not vice-versa.48 He
recounted the history of Vasudeva Citale’s attempt to make the
Devarukhes work, and offered the theory that Devarukhes were
originally Desastha Brahmans who had moved into the Konkan in
search of local offices as khoti revenue farmers. Local Chitpavans had
seen them as rivals and endeavoured to turn them into labourers
on their own lands, stigmatising them when the Devarukhes refused
to work.49 The Bombay Gazetteer for Ratnagiri district remarked
45
Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, p. 176.
46
Madhava, Śatapraśnakalpalatā, P.M. Joshi Collection, Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute, mss 19, ff. pp. 16–18.
47
V.K. Rajwade, ‘Devarukyāci Mūlotpatti’ in Bhārata Itihāsa Sam . śodhaka Man.d.ala,
1914, reprinted in M.B. Saha, Itihāsacāraya VK Rājavād.e Samagraha Sāhitya (Dhulia:
Rajwade Samsodhana Mandala, 1998), Vol. 7, pp. 186–94.
48
Pandit, Devarukhyām. vı̄s.ayı̄m . mata Vicāra, pp. 39–41.
. Śāstrasam
49
Ibid., p. 18.

that ‘they are said to have originally come to these parts as revenue
farmers’.50
The judgements coming out of Banaras always use the term ‘devars.i’
for these Konkani Brahmans. How did this slippage come about?
Northern dialects render the Marathi consonant ‘s.’ as ‘kh’. Thus
‘devars.e’ in northern India would have been pronounced ‘devarakhe’.51
‘Devars.is’ feature in the Sahyādrikhan.d.a as stray references within
its lists of the many different categories of Brahmans.52 It is also
possible that Devarukhes in Banaras at this time may have taken
advantage of the pious associations of the term ‘devars.i’ in its Sanskrit
meaning of ‘godly sage’, to make the slippage from ‘devars.e’, the local
pronunciation of ‘devarukhe’, to ‘devars.i’.53
What kinds of local mechanism would have been available in
the Maratha country to deal with uncertainties of identity and
entitlement of this kind? Within the Marathi speaking regions, the
local dharmasabhā, composed of local learned Brahmans and religious
office-holders, had a very long history as arbiters of customary
ritual practice and entitlement through letters of judgement of the
kind under discussion here.54 It formed part of an array of local
assemblies with different powers and purposes.55 These institutions
considered local rights and precedents. It seems to have been the
more fundamental questions about the place of Brahman subgroups
within the larger classification of Brahmans, which were referred to
the southern pandit assemblies of Banaras.
50
Bombay Gazetteer, Vol. X, Ratnagiri and Savantvadi (Bombay: Government
Central Press, 1880), p. 114.
51
I am very grateful to Sumit Guha for pointing out this link.
52
Da Cunha, Sri Sahyādrikhan.d.a, uttarāradha, adhyāya 5, ‘Consideration of
Brahmans’, pp. 6–12.
53
Prinsep’s survey of 1832 does not mention ‘Devarsis’ or Devarukhes. Like
Desasthas, they may have been represented under their śākhā affiliation, or they
may by this period no longer have been a significant presence in Banaras. Prinsep,
Census, p. 491.
54
For these assemblies, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Narratives of Penance and
Purification in Western India, c. 1650–1850’ in The Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 2,
2009, pp. 48–75. For the correspondence of the Prabhu dharmādhikārı̄s of Nasik,
see D.V. Potdar and G.N. Muzumdar, Śivacaritra Sāhitya, Bhārata Itihāsa Sam . śodhaka
Man.d.ala Svı̄ya Granthamālā, No. 33, Vol. 2, (Pune: BISM, 1930), pp. 285–317; and for
the Gijare dharmādhikārı̄s of Karhad, see B.V. Bhat, ‘Acāra, vyavahāra, prāyascitta’, in
. śodhaka Man.d.ala Quarterly, Vol. XIII, 3, December 1932, pp. 91–105.
Bhārata Itihāsa Sam
55
For other assemblies with judicial roles, the majlis, gotasabhā and jātisabhā, see
V.T. Gune, The Judicial System of the Marathas (Pune: Sangam Press, 1953), pp. 65–66,
110.

The ‘southern’ Brahman community in Banaras
What might the ‘southern’ pandits, who formed the majority of those
sitting in the assemblies, have shared in common? The evidence
suggests multiple and overlapping affiliations. One lay in vernacular
language. For the majority this was Marathi, although some would
have had Konkani or its local variants, and others, Telugu or Kannada.
Another lay in Brahman subcaste. Some Brahman communities—
Karhades, Chitpavans, Devarukhes—clearly came from towns of
those names in Marathi or Konkani-speaking regions. This affiliation
was much less straightforward in the case of Desasthas. Brahman
migrations from the Deccan into central and southern India produced
a substantial community of Kannada-speaking Desastha Brahmans,
some of whom wrote in Marathi but actually spoke Kannada, or
wrote Kannada using the Marathi bālbodha script.56 These migrations
explain Prinsep’s 1832 listing described above, which included
Dravida, Telanga and Kannada amongst its categories of Maharashtra
Brahmans.
Another affiliation may have been with the Godavari river itself,
the ‘Ganga of the south’. As Anne Feldhaus has described, long
established elements in regional religious culture, expressed in the
Godāvari Mahātmya in particular, identified the river itself as a great
body, homologous to other great bodies in the cosmos, whose ‘limbs’
were represented by towns near major tirthas, such as Tryambakesvar,
Punatamba, Paithan and others further east along the river in
Andhra Pradesh. Brahmans living in or hailing from these towns may
have been aware of themselves as sharing this sacred geography.57
Intellectually too, the ‘southern’ schools of Brahmans seem to have
constituted in some ways a recognised set of intellectual positions,
particularly when juxtaposed to those of ‘eastern’ India.58 ‘Easterners’
had their strong base in the discipline of nyāya or logic, pursued in the
scholarly communities of Mithila and then of Navadvipa and in the
56
Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, pp. 104–106. Most of these Brahmans are likely to
have been Desasthas.
57
Anne Feldhaus, ‘Religious Geography and the Multiplicity of Regions in
Maharashtra’, in Rajendra Vorah and Anne Feldhaus, Region, Culture and Politics in
India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), pp. 194–195. See also Feldhaus, Connected Places:
Region, Pilgrimage and Geographical Imagination in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), For Banaras itself as both a microcosm of the universe and a macrocosm of
the human body, see Parry, Death in Banaras, pp. 30–31.
58
Deshpande, ‘Pañca Gaud.a’, p. 57.

literary and poetic style identified with the Gauda region, also known
as prācya or ‘eastern’.59 The strengths of the southern pandits lay in
mı̄mām . sā, grammar and in dharmaśāstra.
A late seventeenth-century primer used to teach simple
conversational Sanskrit may give, through its fictionalised account, a
glimpse into the way in which contemporaries employed some of these
overlapping categories. It depicted a Maratha Brahman householder
of Banaras who seeks out a sannyasi from the mat.h where sannyasis
stayed in Banaras, and invites him to dine. The sannyasi first enquires
what his caste is. The householder replies that he is a Maharashtrian
Brahman, although both he and his father before him had actually
been born in ‘Gauda desa’, having gone there for an education in
logic. Hearing that he is a Maharashtrian Brahman, the sannyasi says
he will be very glad to come. The two men then survey the durācāra
or evil practices that may lie in wait for the unwary in different parts
of India, and they discuss India’s regions very much in terms of the
pañca gaud.a and pañca drāvid.a groupings of Brahmans.60
‘Southern’ pandits in sixteenth and seventeenth century Banaras
were members of wider family networks, often with pre-existing
traditions of learning. Mahadeva Punatambekara, for example, who
completed his vast treatise on logic in 1646, had settled in Banaras, but
his father still lived back in Punatamba on the Godavari.61 Nilakantha
Caturdhara left Kopargaon on the Godavari for Banaras, where his
son Govinda also resided; but his grandson Siva Chowdhuri was back
in Paithan when he composed his work on dharmaśāstra in 1746.62
59
Satischandra Vidyabhusana, A History of Indian Logic (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas,
1971), pp. 521–527. For the poetic style associated with the Gauda region, see Pollock,
Language of the Gods, pp. 210–212.
60
P.K. Gode, ‘An Echo of the Seige of Jinji in a Sanskrit Grammatical Work
(Between AD 1690 and 1710)’ in Studies in Indian Literary History (Pune: Prof. PK
Gode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1965), Vol. III, pp. 161–162. The
Gı̄rvān.apadamañjārı̄ of Dhundiraja was an imitation of an earlier work written in the
first half of the seventeenth century by Varadaraja, pupil of Bhattoji Diksita. In this
earlier work, the Brahman householder identifies himself as a Kanyakubja Brahman:
P.K. Gode, ‘Some Provincial Customs and Manners Mentioned as Duracārās by
Varadarāja (A Pupil of Bhat.t.oji Dı̄ks.ita ca. 1600–1660)’ in Studies in Indian Cultural
History (Pune: Prof. PK Gode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1969), Vol.
III, p. 74. For a further discussion of regionalism in Sanskrit literary genres in this
period, see Yigal Bronner and David Shulman, ‘A Cloud Turned Goose: Sanskrit in
the Vernacular Millenium’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 43, 1,
2006, pp. 1–30.
61
Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, p. 8.
62
Gode, ‘Nı̄lakan.t.ha Caturdhara’, pp. 480–485.

Paramananda Kavindra, later to be ‘court poet’ of the Maratha leader

Sivaji, came from Nevasa on the Godavari. He spent the decades of
the mid-seventeenth century in Banaras, where he was a close friend
of Gagabhatta of the Bhatta family. By 1674, he had taken up his
position at the Maratha court in Raigad and was present at Sivaji’s
consecration in 1674.63
This sense of connection with family and locality is evident in the
lives of less well-known pandits too. Narasimha was the son of a
family of Chitpavan astrologers and mathematicians from Palshet
in the Konkan, whose father, Kesava, was learned in mathematics.
Narasimha moved to Banaras during Akbar’s time, and received
honours from the emperor for his accomplishments as an astrologer.
His son Raghunath described the family’s Konkani origins:
In the daksina desa there is a most happy town called Palshet, an arrow’s flight
from the port of Dabhol, where Laksmi as well as Saraswati have made their
homes. In that town lived a Brahman named Kesava, learned in mathematics,
of the sandilya gotra, who was an ornament to the line of the Chitpavans,
honoured by Parasurama.64
These few lines were a triumph of condensed reference. They
evoked the wealth of the Konkan and the reputation of its towns
for learning, the association of Chitpavans with the god Parasurama,
and even, with the reference to an arrow, of the story of Parasurama’s
winning from the sea lands as far as the bow from his arrow would
carry.65 Other connections with the Marathi-speaking regions lay in
patronage. Mudhoji Vangoji Nimbalkar of the Naik-Nimbalkar rulers
of Phaltan, family of the wife of Sivaji, issued a letter in October 1614
granting a village to the learned Brahman Bhattacharya Gosavi from
Nevasa on the Godavari so that he could reside in Banaras and carry
out a daily routine of bathing, praying and listening to recitations of
the puranas.66
63
G.S. Sardesai (ed.), Paramānandakāvya (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1952), pp.
13–14.
64
P.V. Kane, ‘Kāśı̄ks.etrātı̄la akbarakālı̄na konkan.astha gharān.e’, in Bhārata Itihāsa
Sam. śodhaka Man.d.ala Quarterly, Vol. VII, nos. 11–4, 1926–7, pp. 4–5. See also David
Pingree, Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit (Philadelphia: American Philosophical
Society, 1970–1994), Vol. 5, p. 374.
65
For another Chitpavan in Banaras who was careful to mention his family and
subcaste, see P.K. Gode, ‘Viśvanātha Mahādeva Rānad.e, A Cittapāvan Court-Poet of
Raja Ramsing I of Jaipur And His Works—Between AD 1650 and 1700’, in Studies in
Indian Literary History, Vol. II, pp. 258–273.
66
G.S. Sardesai (ed.), Selections from the Peshwa Daftar (Bombay: Government Central
Press, 1934), Vol. 31, pp. 4–5.

Banaras also seems to have had a substantial transient population
of Maratha Brahmans. Many came for education, often for extended
periods.67 Maratha Brahman pilgrims might stay for a long period.
We gain insights into these histories, particularly when prolonged
stays in Banaras could cause trouble back home. The Golavalikara
Padhye family of Karhade Brahmans from the Konkan brought a court
case in 1600 against another local family, the Purohitas, alleging
that the latter had tried to move in on their priestly offices while
Padhye family members had been away on a māhāyātra, a great
pilgrimage to Banaras and other holy cities, which had lasted for nine
years.68
Authority and the Visvesvara temple
It was from the 1570s that the southern pandit community came
to prominence in Banaras, under the leadership of Narayana of the
Bhatta family.69 Well-known stories emphasize his advocacy of the
intellectual positions of ‘southern’ Brahmans, as well as his role as
protagonist for the larger community of Hindu pious. Some of these
stories are well documented. The family history written by Narayana’s
second son, Samkara, describes how the lord of Utkala in Orissa invited
him to debate with pandits from the ‘eastern’ schools. After a month,
he established the supremacy of the southern schools.70 At the house
of Todar Mal in Delhi, he debated with eminent pandits from Gauda
67
Visiting Banaras in the 1660s, the traveller Bernier was told that students stayed
with their teachers for ten to twelve years. Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire,
AD 1565–1668 (London: H. Milford, 1914), pp. 334–335. This may equally reflect
classical conventions about the period of Vedic studentship proper to young Brahmans:
F.E. Keay, Indian Education in Ancient and Later Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1938), p. 30.
68
This family was later to produce the eminent dharmasastri Kasinatha
Upadhyaya, who completed his famous digest the Dharmasindhu in 1790, in which he
stated clearly at the start of the work was aimed at a lay rather than a scholarly
audience. Kasinatha Upadhyaya, Dharmasindhu (Banaras: Chowkhamba Sanskrit
Series Office, 1968), pp. 1–2; P.V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra (Pune: Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Vol. 1, pp. 463–465; and Potdar and Muzumdar,
Śivacaritra Sāhitya, Vol. 2, pp. 333–353.
69
Richard Salomon, ‘Biographical Data on Nārāyan.a Bhat.t.a of Benaras’ in
Samaresh Bandhopadhyay, Acarya-Vandana: D.R. Bhandarkar Birth Centenary Volume
(Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1982), pp. 326–336.
70
Benson, ‘Śam . karabhat.t.a’s Family Chronicle’, p. 112.

and Mithila, with Vidyanivasa, the leading pandit at Navadvipa, at

their head.71
The most celebrated episode of Narayana’s life, attested by a number
of different sources, was his involvement, probably during the 1580s,
in the rebuilding of Banaras’s great temple to Siva as Visvesvara, ‘Lord
of All’, and the reinstallation of its great Siva linga.72 The Visvesvara
temple was one of the most important sacred sites in this city of
maran.amukti, where Siva’s teachings, whispered into the ear of the
dying, brought certain liberation to the soul. There is much solid
evidence of Narayana’s close interest in the temple. His Tristhalı̄setu,
‘Bridge to the Three Holy Cities’, offered in convenient and compact
form a guide to the spiritual merits that pilgrims to the holy cities
of Banaras, Gaya and Prayag could accrue in different sacred places
in these cities. The long central section of the guide, dealing with
Banaras, suggests that the temple was at one point in some state of
dilapidation, since Narayana explains that pilgrims might well find
empty shrines when they visited it, ‘owing to the bad actions of the
mlecchas’.73
Narayana’s involvement naturally raises the wider question as to
the ‘southern’ pandits’ role in developing the stronger claims for the
unique spiritual powers of Banaras, and of the Visvesvara temple itself
as their centre and sacred source. These claims were already set out
in the Kāśikhan.d.a, the most important of the puranic texts celebrating
the virtues of the city, probably compiled in the fourteenth century
out of earlier texts and traditions.74 In Siva’s praise poem of Banaras,
spoken on his return to the city after a long exile, he celebrates the
Visvesvara linga as the linga of lingas, the force behind all other
lingas in the world, the lingas of Banaras themselves standing, in a
great cosmic homology, for other lingas all over India.75 Narayana’s
own work included a selection and arrangement of passages from the
Kāśikhan.d.a.
71
Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’, p. 10.
72
Salomon, ‘Biographical Data’, pp. 333–334.
73
R. Gokhale and H.N. Apte (eds), Nārāyan.abhat..taviracitah. Tristhalı̄setuh. (Banaras:
Anand Asram Press, 1915), p. 208. See also Richard Salomon, The Bridge to the Three
Holy Cities. The Samanya-praghattaka of Narayana Bhatta’s Tristhalı̄setu (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidas, 1985).
74
This question is discussed in Minkowski, ‘Nı̄lakan.t.ha Caturdhara’s
Mantrakāśikhan.d.a’, pp. 336–337.
75
Kāśikhan.d.a (Banaras: no press given, 1908), adhyāya 99, ‘The mahatmya of the
Visvesvaralinga’.

As we shall see below, the pandit assemblies were emphatic in their
emphasis that their meetings took place in the Mukti mandapam or
‘Mukti pavilion’ of the Visvesvara temple. Was this a poetic reference
to an imagined space, or a physical location? Questions of this kind
are notoriously difficult to answer for Banaras. We do have a good
idea of the temple’s structure at the point at which the emperor
Aurangzeb ordered its destruction in 1669, because the mosque then
built on the site retained the basic ground plan of the temple.76 It had
a central square sanctuary housing the linga of Visvesvara, measuring
32 ft on each side. Each side of the square led to an antechamber
measuring 16 ft by 10 ft and leading from these antechambers were
four mandapams, or pavilions, each measuring 16 ft by 16 ft.
The Kāśikhan.d.a describes the Mukti, Srngara, Aisvarya and Jnana
mandapams, to the south, east, north and west respectively of the
central sanctuary housing the Siva linga.77 Narayana’s own work the
Tristhalı̄setu makes it even clearer that these were physical spaces, with
the Mukti mandapam having special significance. Drawing on selected
passages from the Kāśikhan.d.a, he highlights the special merit conferred
by recitation and study of the Vedas, dharmaśāstras, puranas and
histories in the Mukti mandapam. These passages suggest that the
Mukti mandapam was at the time of the Kāśikhan.d.a’s writing already
associated with discussions in matters of law. Narayana quotes from
the Kāśikhan.d.a: ‘Because one can worship in the Mukti mandapam,
and converse on matters of law there, as well as listen to the Puranas,
a man who is a receptacle of dharma should live in Kasi.’78
As Narayana makes his arrangement of passages from the
Kāśikhan.d.a, moreover, he seems deliberately to emphasise the theme
of ‘southern’-ness. The Mukti mandapam, associated with the kinds
of study that Brahmans in particular undertake, is the ‘southern’
mandapam, daks.inamand.ape, just as many of the Brahmans who now
deliberated there were themselves ‘southerners’.79
There is also an important contemporary parallel. The Gajapati king
of Orissa, Prataparudra Deva, erected a Mukti mandapam during the
76
James Prinsep, Banaras Illustrated in a Series of Drawings (Calcutta: Baptist Mission
Press, 1833), p. 68; Altekar, History of Benaras, p. 51.
77
Kāśikhan.d.a, adhyāya 79, vss. 54–74; adhyāya 98, ‘Celebration of the entry of
Visvesvara into the Mukti mandapam’.
78
Nārāyan.abhat..taviracitah. Tristhalı̄setuh., p. 189; Kāśikhan.d.a, adhyāya 3, vs. 92.
79
Nārāyan.abhat..taviracitah. Tristhalı̄setuh., pp. 188–190. These passages from the
Tristhalı̄setu are taken from Kāśikhan.d.a, adhyāya 79, vss 53–94. I am particularly
grateful to Vincenzo Vergiani and Jim Benson for their assistance with these sections.

1520s, building it on the south side of the main Jagannatha temple

at Puri. It was both a pillared hall, and a ‘college’ of learned Utkala
Brahmans, who met regularly in the Mukti mandapam to adjudicate
in matters of social and religious law.80 Narayana’s son, Samkara,
attests that ‘the lord of Utkala’, or Orissa, invited Narayana to debate
with these eastern pandits. We cannot be certain that Narayana was
aware of these conventions, although it seems very possible that he
was, having spent a month in debate with them. We also cannot know
whether other ‘southern’ pandits were aware of this Puri model when
they consciously revived the old tradition of learned meetings in that
part of the reconstructed Visvesvara temple, or whether indeed the
Puri model was itself adopted from the Visvesvara temple. But it does
seem striking that when they issued their judgements, the Banaras
pandits advertised themselves as meeting in the powerful spiritual
centre recently reconstructed by their own leading pandit, and in a
well-known part of it associated both with ‘southern’-ness, and with
learned deliberations in matters of law.
The Nirn.ayapatra of 1583: Devarsis and Chipolanas
The first detailed record dates from 1583 and concerns the Devarukhe
or Devarsi Brahmans.81 This is an observer’s account of the assembly,
written by one Ganesa Sastri Kozhrekar, a resident of Banaras,
to ‘the heads of the Konkana Devarsi Brahmans’: Ganesaprabhu
Bhudasavale, Haradeprabhu Tere, Visvanathaprabhu Chaphekar,
Balaprabhu Khalagaonkar and Arekar Mahajan. Kozhrekar’s letter
was written in Marathi, but with greetings expressed in Sanskrit at
the start and at the end of the letter. Two ‘devarsi’ Brahmans, Vitthal
Jyotisi and his son Krsna, had trained in Banaras as agnihotrı̄s, priests
whose task it was to maintain a perpetual sacrificial fire. Having
80
These Brahmans enjoyed specific local rights as village proprietors, in return for
their services. G.N. Dash, ‘The Evolution of Priestly Power: the Suryavamsa Period’
in Anncharlott Eschmann et al. (eds), The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of
Orissa (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), pp. 209–222; G. Pfeffer, ‘Puri’s Vedic Brahmans:
Continuity and Change in their Traditional Institutions’, in Eschmann, Cult of
Jagannath, pp. 421–438; and Chandrika Panigrahi, ‘Muktimandap Sabha of Brahmans,
Puri’ in Nirmal Kumar Bose, Data on Caste in Orissa (Calcutta: Anthropological Survey
of India, 1960), pp. 179–192.
81
Ramakrsna Sadasiva Pimputkar, Cital.ebhat..ta Prakaran.a (Bombay: Karnatak Press,
1926), pp. 76–77.

learned their craft, they sought the agreement of Banaras’s whole
assembly of Brahmans, ‘samasta kāśı̄kara brāhmana’. Then ‘sacrificer
Viresvara Bhatta Abhyankar, Haribhatta Bhavye, Govindabhatta
Godbole, and Kesavabhatta Abhyankar said, we are all agreed, and
it should be known that you are made agnihotris by consent of the
whole Brahman community’.
Then Anantabhatta’s amatya, Govindabhatta Abhyankar, Dhonda the jyotisi

and Ramakrsnabhatta Pauranik, of Anantabhatta’s party (paks.a), spoke.
Janardhanbhatta Citale said that Anantabhatta wrote a letter of release
at our house concerning the Devarsi Brahmans, and the letter was brought
for the assembly to see.’82
The letter appears to be a kind of confession: ‘Anantabhatta wrote

that he had pursued hostilities (dveśa kelā hotā) against the Devarsi
Brahmans, which was against the śāstras. There is exchange of food
between us (tyāsa āmhāsa annasam . bandha āhe).’ Having heard all
this, the assembly reaffirmed that Anantabhatta had been correct in
his confession.
It was determined that all this community of Brahmanas (he samasta

brāhmana), the Chiplunas, Devarsis and Maharastras, have the same vedic
karmas (samāna vaidika karmi) and that there is authority for sharing of food
together. It was also agreed that Brahmans should not conduct hostilities with
each other.
Kozhrekar described the pandits who had affirmed this decision.

‘Ganesa Diksita Bhavye, head of the Chipolanas, Krsnabhatta
Bakhale, head of the Karhades’ represented the two leading Konkani
communities. Others represented some of the five northern and
five southern divisions: ‘Sesa Krsnabhatta pandit, head of the
Maharastras, Gopibhatta, head of the Gurjaras, Vidyanivasa, head
of the Gaudas, Raghupati Upadhyaya, head of the Tailabhaktas’. To
reinforce its judgement, the assembly also invoked the authority of
Visvesvara. ‘He who says that there should not be exchange of food, let
him be brought to the place of Srivisvesvara.’ Thus was the judgement
in the Mukti mandapam: ‘iti muktiman.dapama nirn.aya’. Kozhrekar
ended his letter with a report that a copper-plate enshrining this
82
An amatya is a minister or counsellor. ‘Letter of release’: the term used here
is ‘udvārapatra’, implying release, from a debt, for example, a social boycott or a
curse.

decision was being despatched from Banaras and sending his greetings
to Krsnaji and Kanhoji Raja at their court in Srngarpur.83
The names listed as ‘heads of the Konkana Devarsi Brahmans’,
to whom Kozhrekar addressed his letter, are all Devarukhe family
names.84 The hostilities he describes seem in outline at least to match
the other histories of the quarrel between Devarukhes and a member
of the Citale family back in the Konkan. Now, however, the suggestion
is that the rift has been carried with the Citale move from the Konkan
to Banaras, to create a ‘party’ of Anantabhatta within the pandit
community of the city.
The account makes it clear that Anantabhatta Citale was not himself
at the assembly, although his amatya or ‘minister’ was, indicating
that Anantabhatta was a man of wealth and position. He is not the
Vasudeva Citale described as the original party to the dispute. It
may be possible to identify Anantabhatta. One Anantabhatta Citale
from the Konkan is referred to in the Bhatta family chronicle written
by Samkara, the son of Ramesvara, first member of the family to
move to Banaras. Anantabhatta is described there as the first student
whom Ramesvara took on after his arrival in Banaras around 1520.85
Anantabhatta also appears in a Bhatta family history written at the end
of the nineteenth century, where he is described as having obtained
particular proficiency in dharmaśāstra.86 If the Anantabhatta Citale
mentioned at the meeting had been a student in Banaras in the 1520s
or 1530s, he would have been a very old man, or deceased, by the
time of the meeting in 1583, but it would be quite possible for the
Govindabhatta Abhyankar named here as his minister or counsellor, to
have been at this assembly. If they were the same, Anantabhatta may
have been a descendant of Vasudeva Citale, moving from the Konkan
to Banaras in the second or third decades of the sixteenth century,
and becoming an accomplished scholar in the rules of dharmaśāstra,
83
Kanhoji Raja presided over the 1600 judicial assembly that decided the dispute
between the Padhye and Purohita families over rights to local priestly offices: see
below, fn 92.
84
See Pandit, Devarukhyām
. vı̄s.ayı̄m . mata Vicāra, pp. 35–38. We are not able
. Śāstrasam
to identify this Kozhrekar. Abhyankar and Citale are both old Chitpavan family
names: Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, p. 115.
85
Benson, ‘Śam
. karabhat.t.a’s family chronicle’, p. 12. Anantabhatta Citale of the
Konkan is listed in V. Raghavan et al., New Catalogus Catalogorum (Madras: University
of Madras, 1949–2000), Vol. 1, p. 136. (Hereafter NCC.) No works have been traced.
86
S.S. Tripathi (ed.), Bhat..tavam . śakāvyam (Allahabad: Bhartiya Manisha Sutram,
1983), p. 11. I am very grateful to James Benson for this reference.

even as he pursued the family animosity against the Devarsis of the
city.
Leading intellectuals from Banaras and beyond were present at the
assembly. P.K. Gode has identified Bhavye Ganesh Diksita, ‘head of
the Chipolanas’, as Bhava Ganesa Diksita the pupil of Vijnanabhiksu,
the celebrated philosopher of Banaras.87 Sesa Krsnabhatta pandita,
‘head of the Maharastras’, is the great grammarian of the Sesa
family noted above.88 Vidyanivasa, ‘head of the Gaudas’, is likely
to be the Vidyanivasa Bhattacaraya, leader of the Bengal pandits
with whom Narayana Bhatta debated at the house of Todar Mal.89
Interestingly, Narayana Bhatta himself is not mentioned as being
present at the meeting: Sesa Krsna here is described as ‘head of the
Maharastras’.
The Visvesvara temple and its Mukti mandapam, possibly newly
reconstructed around this time, appear together here as the source
of a particular sacralised intellectual authority. Anyone who tried to
defy it had to reckon not only with the authority of the assembly, but
of Visvesvara, god of the temple, himself. The assembly also seems
deliberately constituted as a kind of ‘panel’, in which subgroups of
Brahmans are represented by their heads or pramukha. Judgements
given in other assemblies also emphasised that Brahmans of every
region were present, in a way that seems designed to enhance their
authority.
What do we know about the form of these assemblies as corporate
events? There are certainly indications that their proceedings
included elaborate ceremonies of precedence. Later histories describe
Narayana Bhatta and his family as being accorded the rights of
agrapūjā, ‘the first place of honour in the assembly of learned
Brahmanas and at the recitations of the Vedas’.90 The Sesa family
were also reported to receive particular honours at every assembly
they attended, two sambhāvanas or gifts and marks of honour being
87
P.K. Gode, ‘The Chronology of Vijñānabhiks.u and his Disciple Bhāvā Gan.eśa,
the Leader of the Citpāvan Brahmins of Benares’, in Adyar Library Bulletin, Vol. viii,
Pt 1, 17 February 1944, pp. 20–28. See also CC Vol. 1, p. 144.
88
Krsna Sesa: NCC, Vol. IV, pp. 364–366.
89
For Vidyanivasa Bhattacarya see also Upadhyaya, Kāśı̄ ki pānditya paramparā,
p. 30, and Shastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts, Vol. 6, ‘Vyākaran.a’,
p. lxxxiii, and CC, Vol. 1, p. 574a.
90
P.V. Kane and SG Patwardhan, Vyavahāramayūkha of Bhat..ta Nı̄lakan..tha (Pune: PV
Kane, 1926), p. vii; R.N. Dandekar (ed.) Sanskrit and Maharashtra (Pune: University of
Pune, 1972), p. 31.

bestowed on them, as opposed to the single marks of honour given to

everyone else.91
How effective was this judgement back in the Konkan? The evidence
suggests that the local social hierarchies of the Konkan were not as
tractable as the pandit communities of Banaras might have hoped. A
dispute some two decades later over rights to priestly office, heard at
the court of Kanhoji raja at Srngarpur in the Konkan in 1600, reveals
the Devarukhes still complaining that the local Karhade Brahmans
refused to take food at their houses.92
The letters of 1630 and 1631: Saraswats
In the spring of 1630, a Banaras pandit assembly met to consider

a complaint they had received from Brahmans of Mumbai.93 The
Sanskrit letter of judgement, dated Vaiśāka 1552, or April–May 1630,
was addressed as follows: ‘To the Desastha, Citapavana, Karnata,
Gurjara and others living in Mumbapuri, Dadambhatta Bhatta and
others from Kasi send their homage and greetings.’
You posed an objection that in your country the members of the Kusasthali
and Sasasti families are performing the six karmas. But it is impossible to
say that they are ineligible for the actions, since it is seen in the desa that
they take sannyas, and everywhere they are seen performing the Srauta
and Grhya Vedic rituals such as the Agnihotra. This much is heard from the
mouths of the learned. And what is more, Kamalakara Bhatta has established
the greatness of the fourth stage of life [sannyas] for these castes. They are
part of the gauda category of Brahmins, and to be honoured within their own
caste. And everyone has seen that document.
A successful community, then, in Mumbai (as we know the Saraswats

to have been), had attracted the hostility of other local Brahmans,
protesting against the Saraswats’ insistence that they were entitled to
perform all of the six karmas allowed to those of full Brahman status.94
91
Aryavaraguru, ‘On the Sheshas of Benaras’, p. 247.
92
Potdar and Muzumdar, Śivacaritra Sāhitya, Vol. 2, p. 341.
93
D.V. Apte, ‘Sārasvatāce Brāhmanatva’, Bhārata Itihāsa Sam . śodhaka Man.d.ala
Quarterly, Vol. XV, no 4, March 1935, pp. 2–3.
94
A ‘full’ Brahman was a .sat.karmı̄, entitled to perform the six karmas of adhyāyana
and adhyāpana, ie studying the Vedas for oneself and teaching them to others;
yajana and yājana, ie conducting a sacrifice and procuring sacrifice through another;
and dāna and pratigraha, ie giving gifts and accepting gifts. A trikarmı̄ Brahman was
entitled to do only the lesser three of these six, ie studying the Vedas for themselves,

But the Banaras assembly defended their claims. It did so both on the
ground of their observable customs, and from the fact that members
of their communities were known to become sannyasis or ascetics,
the fourth and final stage of life traditionally assumed for Brahmans.
Kamalakara Bhatta is said to have emphasized this as a significant
marker of Brahmanhood, and ‘everyone has seen that document’. It is
not clear which of Kamalakara’s works this is, but it is interesting that
it is said to have circulated so widely in this way. Nineteen signatures
were appended to the judgement.95
Bhatta Anantaramasarma, Bhattopakhyadadambhatta, Dharmadhikari-
mahidharasarma, Sesopakhyavisvesvarasarma, Jadaypanamno Gangarama;
Sesopakhyacakrapane, Punyasthambopakhyasomanathasarma, Gangarama-
maitropanamaka, Devopakhyamahadevasarma, Staropakhyasakharama,
Dasaputropakhyalaksmanapanta, Punyastambhopakhyavaijanatha, Paura-
nikopakhyatmaramabhatta, Jyotirvidupanamakagurjarasiddevesvara, Kaka-
ropakhyaganesasarma, Nagesasastri Andhrasya, Ganga Diksita Ayacitopana-
maka, Babu Diksita Ayacita, Ramakrsna Agnihotri.
Represented are the Bhatta, Sesa, Dharmadhikari, Deva and

Punatambe families.96 Visvesvara Sarma Sesa may be the Viresvara
Sesa who was the son of Krsna Sesa: in south Indian texts, his
name is often written as Visvesvara.97 This would make him the
teacher of some of Banaras’s most distinguished pandits of the first
half of the seventeenth century: Panditaraja Jagannatha, Bhattoji
Diksita and Annambhatta. It is possible that Cakrapani Sesa here is
Cakrapani Sesa, the son of Visvesvara Sesa, and author of the Parama-
takhan.d.ana, written as a rebuttal to Bhattoji Diksita’s controversial
procuring sacrifice through others, and giving gifts. V.M. Apte, Social and Religious Life
in the Grhya Sutra (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1931), p. 11.
95
There are small variations in the Sanskrit prefixes and suffixes attached to each
signature as it appears on the documents in the printed versions examined for this
paper: samatam; samati; patrārtha samata; samatārtha; asminartha samata; anumata. These
translate variously as ‘agreed’, ‘agreed to the letter’, ‘in favour’ ‘content in the matter’,
etc.
96
‘Bhatta’ is both the family name of the Bhattas of Banaras, and an honorific title
given to a learned Brahman, usually attached to the given name as a suffix. ‘Diksita’
may be an honorific, or description of a role, applied to a Brahman initiated as a
sacrificer or other ritual role. The same is true of ‘Pauranik’, ‘versed in the Puranas’,
‘Jyotisi’, ‘astrologer’, ‘Agnihotri’, ‘keeper of the sacrificial fire’ and so on. As the use
of family names became common from the late seventeenth century, some pandits
adopted these occupational titles as family names. Others derived family names from
their places of origin, adding the distinctive Marathi suffix ‘-kar’. These overlaps
frequently make certain identification difficult.
97
Aryavaraguru, ‘On the Sheshas of Benaras’, p. 251.

Praud.ha-Manoramā.98 ‘Nagesa Sastri of Andhra’ is clearly a ‘southerner’.

Other names in this list are Maratha Brahman family names.99
Another pointer here to the Marathi language influence is the
indicator used for the family name. Sometimes the Sanskrit upākhya,
‘surname’, is used to indicate the family name, and sometimes the
Marathi term upanāma.
Just a year later, in 1631, Vitthal, a resident of Kusasthal, journeyed
to Banaras to ask its pandit communities for help in reviving the town’s
great mat.h, which had been destroyed by the Portugese in 1564.
Bhavananda Saraswati, sixty-second guru of the mat.h, was living in
Banaras in 1631. Vitthal wanted to assume the status of renouncer so
that he could take up the headship of the revived mat.h. The assembly
addressed its judgement to the Brahmans of the Sahyadri region.100
In the city of Visvesvara, the whole community of the excellent Pancadravidas,

that is to say, Dravidas, Andras, Karnatakas, Maharastras and Gurjaras,
these who live in the seven cities, send greetings to the Pancadravidas
and Pancagaudas who live in the region of the Sahyadri mountains of the
Daksina Desa. Recently there came to Banaras a pilgrim, one Vitthal, son of
Syamaraja, from Kusasthal. He made a plea to our whole community that he
should be allowed the fourth stage of life.
The whole Dravida community had gathered ‘in the Mukti

mandapam of Srisvami’s temple’, and conducted a very thorough
investigation. There had been a difficulty, that these Brahmans
customarily ate fish. But this was not an insuperable bar. In eating
fish, they were simply following the prescriptions of Parasurama, who
allowed all those who came to settle in the Konkan to follow their long
established customs. The pandits thus determined that these pañca
gaud.as were fully Brahmans, entitled to all of the six karmas and
hence able to assume the status of a sannyasi, or renouncer, required
by headship of the mat.h. The path was thus cleared for Vitthal to
assume the headship, under the new name of Sachchidanda Saraswati,
his initiatory gurus being the previous head of the mat.h, Bhavananda
Saraswati and Laksmana Bhatta.
Thirty-four names were appended to the judgement.
98
Cakrapani Sesa: NCC, Vol. VI, p. 283. A Cakrapani Pandita also contributed to
the Kavı̄ndracandrodaya: p. 10.
99
Ayacita and Jade are Karhade names. Dharmadhikari and Dasaputra are
Desastha names; Pauranik may be Chitpavan or Desastha.
100
Gunjikar, Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, Appendix 2, pp. 22–24.

Bhavanandasarasvati, Kamalakarabhatta, Dharmadhikarirambhatta, Agni-
hotri Raghunathabhatta, Haribhattadiksita, Purandararamacandrabhatta,
Aradilaksmanabhatta, Kasipurivasipuranandasarasvati, Anandavana, Hari-
harasrama, Aradopanamaka Narayanabhatta, Kolasekaropanamaka Maha-
devabhatta, Bhavanandasarasvati, Raghunathabhattapandita, Narayan-
bhattapandita, Muralidharajayakrsnabhatta, Radheyagopalabhatta,
Mayapurvasino Badariyadamodarbhatta, Kedarbhattasunoramaheswara,
Godavaritryambakavasino Ganesabhattakadamba, Anantadaivajnya, Hari-
diksita, Ramacandrasastri, Tailanganavisvesvarasastri, Laksmana Bhatta,
Ganesabhatta Somayaji, Kovaivasudevbhatta, Visvesvaradiksita, Agnihotri
Dinkarabhatta, Janardanbhatta, Ambikabhatta, Indoravasisesabhatta,
Yogisvarajayarama, Raghunathakasinatha.
We can identify Bhavananda Saraswati, the head of the Kusasthal

mat.h: there is a second Bhavananda Saraswati, whose identity is
uncertain. Also at the head of the list is the great scholar Kamalakara
of the Bhatta family.101 Gode identifies Narayanbhatta Arade as
Narayanbhatta Laksmidhara Arade, a Karhade Brahman from the
southern Konkan and writer on dharmaśāstra topics.102 Another
member of this family is also listed. Raghunathabhatta pandita may
be Raghunathabhatta, the grandson of Ramesvara Bhatta, the first
of the Bhatta family to settle in Banaras.103 Haridiksita may be
the grandson of the great grammarian Bhattoji Diksita.104 Laksmana
Bhatta, recorded as the initiatory guru of Sachchidananda Saraswati,
may be the Laksmana Bhatta who is the brother of Kamalakara
Bhatta, and author of works on dharmaśāstra.105 Kovai is a Karhade
family name, but this Vasudevabhatta does not seem to have left any
writings.106 There are also members of the Sesa and Dharmadhikari
families here.107
The Mukti mandapam is the site for this deliberation. The assembly
makes sweeping claims for its broad representation, although most
101
Kamalakara Bhatta: NCC Vol. III, pp. 161–165.
102
See P.K. Gode, ‘Some Karhād.e Brahmin Families at Benares Between AD 1550
and AD 1660’ in Studies in Indian Cultural History, Vol. III, pp. 33–6; and Gode, ‘Some
Authors of the Ārd.e Family and their Chronology between AD 1600 and 1825’, in
Journal of the Bombay University, September 1943, Vol. XII, Pt 2, pp. 63–69; and S.L.
Katre, ‘Nārāyanabhat.t.a Ārd.e, His Works and Date’, in Bhāratı̄ya Vidyā, March-April
1945, pp. 74–86.
103
Raghunatha Bhatta: CC Vol. 1, p. 484a. His dates are usually given as c. 1545–
1625, making this identification a possibility only.
104
Haridiksita: CC Vol. 1, pp. 756a-b.
105
Laksmana Bhatta: CC Vol. 1, p. 537a.
106
Gode, ‘Some Karhād.e Brahmin Families’.
107
Dharmadhikari and Purandare here are Desastha names.

of the names are in fact of Maratha Brahmans. Both letters

of decision return favourable verdicts on the entitlements of the
Saraswats, brushing aside the objections of other local Brahmans. They
emphasize the significance of current and widely observed practice
as determining entitlement, and the importance of widely accepted
authorities like Kamalakara Bhatta. There is not much overlap with
the previous list, indicating a rapid turnover in their membership.108
Some of the pandits here indicate a residence elsewhere, although as
indicated above, stays in Banaras could extend over many years.
‘Pandits of Kings and Kingdoms’: Belgaum, 1656–1658
Were disputes about the entitlements of other caste communities

referred to Banaras in the same way? A disagreement between the
Jain and Lingayat communities of Athani in Belgaum, recorded in
the family papers of the Shetti family of the town, provides an
interesting comparison. At issue was the question of whether the
Jains, like the Lingayats, had a right to bring their spiritual leaders in
procession through the town. In a letter of 29 October 1656, Abdul
Ali, the havaldar of Athani, wrote to the faujdar of Banaras. His letter
contained the depositions of both parties, both requesting that the
matter be sent for a decision to Banaras, where there were ‘great
people learned in all the four Vedas and hundred śāstras, learned in
logic, people who are the pandits of kings and kingdoms’, ‘rājya rājyāce
pan.dita’. Abdul Ali concluded his letter with a request to the faujdar
‘to call together the great pandits who are learned in the śāstras, tell
them the narrative of the case, get a decision based on the vedas and
śāstras from this Brahma sabha of pandits learned in the Vedas and
śāstras, write down the reply accordingly, and send it’.109
But if the people of Athani hoped for an unambiguous verdict, they
were to be disappointed. A further meeting in the town, of 3 December
1658, recorded that the leaders of the Lingayat community had been
to Banaras, had managed to get a jayapatra, or ‘letter of victory’, and
had brought it back to Athani to present before the senior officials
of the town. But, perplexingly, ‘after five months, the Jaina gurus
108
1630 to 1632 were years of exceptionally severe famine in Maharashtra, which
may account for shifts in the Maratha population of Banaras. See A.R. Kulkarni,
Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (Pune: Deshmukh and Co., 1969), pp. 94–104.
109
Potdar and Muzumdar, Śivacaritra Sāhitya, Vol. 2, pp. 354–355.

and Jaina people went and brought back their own jayapatra’. Within
the space of five months, each party had been to Banaras, and each
had returned with an authoritative letter favourable to itself. With
matters brought thus to an impasse, the officials of the town decided
to resolve the contest themselves. A further meeting was held on 30th
December 1658, at which both parties presented their cases. The
meeting decided in favour of the Lingayats: ‘the guru of the Lingayats
may go in procession, and the guru of the Jainas may not’. A mazhar
was issued to this effect.110
We do not have the names of the Banaras pandits who issued these
decisions. Nor do we know whether the parties presented their case to
the same pandit assemblies or sought out different ones, likely to be
more favourable to their individual cases. At issue was a disagreement
about entitlement to ritual display—clearly important to the prestige
and identity of each of the two contending parties. We do not have the
grounds of the argument for the Athani case, but it may be significant
that the Banaras pandits consulted returned favourable verdicts to
both of the contending parties in quick succession. As in the cases
examined above, this might have stemmed from a reluctance to open
up divisions among the greater community of Brahmans. The case also
suggests the reputation Banaras had in the mid-seventeenth century
for learning in matters of dharmic dispute, even for the Muslim
havildar of a south Indian town. There is a significant contemporary
ring to this, an allusion to the close associations between the Banaras
pandits of this period and their royal and imperial patrons: these are
not just learned pandits, but ‘pandits of kings and kingdoms’.
Devarukhes, 1657
Around 1657 the pandits of Banaras were again being consulted about
the Devarsis/Devarukhes. It seems to have been the largest assembly
yet, and the stakes particularly high. It produced just a short letter of
decision.111
Victory to Visvesvara. So now, at the Mukti mandapam in Kasi, the question
of the status as real Brahmins of the Devarsi Brahmins is decided, by the
mixed company of learned Brahmins and ascetics. With respect to this point,
110
Ibid., pp. 357–358. A mazhar is a letter of decision from a majlis or assembly of
senior officials convened to hear disputes: see fn. 55 above.
111
Pimputkar, Cital.ebhat..ta Prakaran.a, pp. 78–81.

having reflected on what the Vedas, the Sastras, and worldly evidence provide,
by agreement among the whole collection of householders of all the families
and castes of Maharastra, Karnataka, the Konkan, the Tailanga region, and
of the Dravida and other places, and also of the collection of sannyasis who
are of the high degree of Paramahamsa, and possessed of adorable feet, the
truth about the Devarsi Brahmans is learned from the Vedas, Sastras and
Puranas. They are of the nature that they can perform Vedic sacrifices on
their own behalf and on behalf of others, they purify the line in which they
dine, they are worthy people as family relations, and are of the nature of
being absolutely excellent Brahmins. And it is decided that the community
of people who set the standard for what is dharmic do have family relations
with them. And this was seen by Raghunatha Bhatta, a Bhatta mı̄mām . sakā.
The daughter of Anantabhatta Manikarni, was made the wife of a Vajapeya,
having been married to a Devarsi.
And we ourselves among many others belong to that vamsa, who are of
that sort. Anyone who speaks against this decision, reached by the wise, is
a desecrator of the god Visvanath and a murderer of Brahmins. This is the
decision.
This was written by Bhatta Laksmana, the mı̄mām . sakā. It was written with
the permission of the learned. This was done in the Samvat year 1714 and
the Saka year 1579.
In the most forceful manner, then, the assembly invokes Visvesvara’s
divine power in support of its learned pronouncements. The judgement
is particularly interesting for the evidence it offers in support of
the contention that the Devarsis were unimpeachable Brahmans.
Raghunatha Bhatta, ‘the mı̄mām . sakā’, had been satisfied that they
were equal. There is no Raghunatha Bhatta amongst the signatories
to the letter. The reference therefore is to some past expression
of approval. It is possible therefore that this is the Raghunatha
Bhatta, grandson of Ramakrsna, who (as already noted) may have
signed the 1631 decision on Saraswats above, but was now deceased.
In addition, the assembly declared, Anantabhatta Manikarni had
given his daughter into a Devarsi family. We cannot identify this
Anantabhatta: ‘Manikarni’ suggests a possible connection with the
Manikarnika ghat, cosmic centre of Banaras.112 The context, however,
suggests that Anantabhatta was a local Brahman of good repute, whose
112
The Kāśikhan.d.a describes the Manikarnika ghat as the place where Visnu
performed the austeries that brought the universe into being at the beginning of
time, and where Siva, trembling with delight at the sight, dropped his ear-ring,
man.ikarn.ı̄, into Visnu’s tank. Visnu asked for a boon: since Siva’s earring was set with
pearls, mukta, this sacred place should thenceforth confer mukti on souls. Parry, Death
in Banaras, pp. 11–15.

willingness to marry his daughter to a Devarsi put the respectable
standing of that community beyond doubt. As if further to affirm this
standing, it was recorded that the Devarsi was a sacrificer, and that
too of the rare and difficult vajāpeya sacrifice.113
The seventy-seven signatories were in the main Brahmans from the
Marathi-speaking regions, but with a significant addition of pandits
from Bengal or south India. ‘Bhatta Laksmana, the mı̄mām . sakā’, who
is recorded as having written out the document, may be a member of
the Bhatta family.114
Puranendrasaraswati, Vyasendra, Bhatta Nilakantha, Cakrapanipandit
Sesa, Auba Sukla, Kalopanamagovindabhatta, Bapuvyasa, Maunigop-
ibhatta, Raghudevabhattacarya, Dasaputragovindabhatta, Vinayakasukla,
Tenkalopakhyabapubhatta, Vidvasopakhyabahiravabhatta, Ganesadiksita,
Dataravisvanatha, Kovaivasudeva, Narayanabhatta Arde, Gadvaranarasim-
habhatta, Payasopakhyanarasimhabhatta, Vaderutamabhatta, Kunda-
lighaubhatta, yati Narasimhasrama known as Brahmendrasaraswati,
Anantadeva, Gagabhatta, Samrajayapandita, Bhayabhatta, Govindabhat-
tacarya, Balakrsnadiksita, Suklopakhyavireswara, Koradeharisamkara,
Tulasidevabhatta, Chandibhairava, Manoharavisvanatha, Appayadiksita,
Ramhradasthadhundiraja, Bhaskarajyotirvida, Mahasabdopakhyajyotirvida,
Nagarkarakrsnabhatta, Vaisapayanagiridharabhatta, Kharopanamakganes-
abhatta, Gautamrambhatta, Cintamanibhattadrona, Kavimandanabal-
akrsnabhatta, Kalabandevisvesvarabhatta, Patankaravisnudiksita, Sivara-
matirtha and Narayanatirtha, Khandadeva, Bhattanantamimamsaka,
Laksmanapanditavaidya, Caitanyamadhavadeva, Ramaramabhattacarya,
Ramhradayasyagomajibhata, Dauganesadiksita and Bapudiksita, Pal-
setkarajyotirvinnarayana, DabholkarajyotirvidaVitthala, Bhaverudradiksita,
Kasisomayaji and Laksmanasomayaji, Mahasabdedevabhatta, Ghumarema-
hadevabhatta, Polakasibhatta, Sachchidandasarasavati, Tilbhandesvara,
Maunivisnudiksita, Naraharidiksita and Visnudiksita, Laksmanadiksita,
Dinadiksita and Namudikshitasya, Vacchabhatta, Pauranikagadadhara, Ja-
yaramanyayapancana, Bharadavajamahadeva, Sathe Upanamakmahadeva,
Pote Mahadevabhatta.115
Puranendrasaraswati is likely to be the Puranendrasaraswati who is

mentioned as a leading sannyasi of Banaras in the praise addresses of
113
The Vajāpeya is the most important of the public sacrifices in which soma juice
and animals are offered as oblations to the gods. For sacrifice in the lives of Banaras
pandits, see Jan E.M. Houben, ‘The Brahman Intellectual: History, Ritual and “Time
out of Time”’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 30, 5, October 2002, pp. 463–479.
114
But too young to have been the Laksmana Bhatta, brother of Kamalakara
Bhatta, who may have signed the 1631 letter. His dates are usually given as 1585–
1630.
115
Some names occur here as pairs, suggesting a family or tutelary relationship.

the Kavı̄ndracandrodaya.116 Bhatta Nilakantha is probably the youngest

117
son of the mı̄mām . sakā Samkara Bhatta. Cakrapanipandit Sesa may
be the same as signed the 1631 letter, by now advanced in years. A
Vasudeva Kovai was at the 1631 meeting: it is possible that this
may be the same person, along with the same Narayanbhatta Arde,
also at the 1631 meeting. Gode suggests that ‘Yati Narasimhasrama
known as Brahmendrasarasavati’ is the Brahmendrasvami who
appears alongside Puranendrasarasvati as another eminent sannyasi
of Banaras, in the Kavı̄ndracandrodaya.118 Anantadeva we may identify
as the famous member of the Deva family and author of the great
compendium of the Smr.tikaustubha.119 Gagabhatta is the famous scion
of the Bhatta family.120 One Bhayabhatta also presented a praise
address.121 Appaya Diksita here is likely to be Appaya Diksita III,
grandson of the great philosopher and defender of Saiva Hinduism
Appaya Diksita.122 Two members of the Mahasabde family appear on
this list: Mahasabdejyotirvida, and Mahasabdedevabhatta, the latter
of whom P.K. Gode has identified as Devabhatta Mahasabde, father of
Ratnakarabhatta, guru of Savai Jaisingh of Amber.123 The Mahasabdes
were Desastha Brahmans from Maharashtra, who had migrated to
Banaras early in the seventeenth century. P.K. Gode here identifies
Narayanatirtha as the author of Bhāśāprakāśikā composed at Banaras,
and the guru of Nilakantha Chaturdhara in mı̄mām . sā. He appears
here with his guru Sivaramatirtha.124
The Khandadeva is likely to be Khandadeva Misra, the great
125
mı̄mām . sakā and intellectual innovator from Bengal. Anantabhatta
116
Sharma and Patkar, Kavı̄ndracandrodaya, pp. 24–25.
117
Nilakantha Bhatta: NCC Vol. 10, pp. 174–175.
118
Brahmanendrasarasavati: CC Vol. 1, p. 389a; Sharma and Patkar,
Kavı̄ndracandrodaya, p. 29, and P.K. Gode, ‘The Identification of Gosvāmi
Nr.simhāśrama of Dārā Shukoh’s Sanskrit Letter with Brahmendra Sarasvatı̄ of the
Kavı̄ndracandrodaya’, in Studies in Indian Literary History, Vol. II, pp. 447–451.
119
Anantadeva, fl. 1645–75: NCC Vol. 1, p. 127.
120
Gagabhatta: CC Vol. 1, pp. 587b–588a.
121
Sharma and Patkar, Kavı̄ndracandrodaya, p. 9, identify this Bhayyabhatta as the
son of Bhattaraka Bhatta and author of Dharmaratna: CC Vol. 1, p. 416b.
122
Appayadiksita III: NCC Vol. 1, p. 200.
123
P.K. Gode, ‘Some New Evidence Regarding Devabhat.t.a Mahāśabde, the father
of Ratnākarabhat.t.a, the Guru of Sevai Jaising of Amber, (AD 1699–1743)’, in Poona
Orientalist, Vol. VIII, 3–4, 1943–1944, p. 132.
124
Ibid., p. 137.
125
Khandadeva: NCC Vol. V, 173–4; Upadhyaya, Kāśı̄ ki pānditya paramparā, pp.
31–35; P.K. Gode, ‘Chronology of the Works of Khand.ādeva’, in Bimala Churn Law
(ed.), D.R. Bhandarkar Felicitation Volume (Calcutta: Indian Research Institute, 1940),
pp. 10–16; McRea, ‘Novelty of Form’.

‘the mı̄mām . sakā’ may possibly be the son of Kamalakara Bhatta,
but it is difficult to be certain.126 Narayana Jyotira Palsetkar may
possibly be a descendant of the family of Chitpavan astrologers
from Palshet in the Konkan described above. It is possible that
Sachchidananda Saraswati is the guru of the Goa mat.h, installed in
1631. There is a Tilbhandesvara who presents a praise address in
the Kavı̄ndracandrodaya.127 Jayarama Nyayapancanana is probably the
leading scholar of nyāya from Bengal of the same name, whose praise
address appears in the Kavı̄ndracandrodaya.128 Bharadavajamahadeva
may be the Mahadeva Bharadavaja who was the son-in-law of
Nilakantha Bhatta, and founder of the Bharadavaja family in
Banaras.129 There are many other Maharashtrian Brahman family
names here.130
It is not clear what fresh incident prompted a further declaration
about the good standing of the Devarsis, and the extraordinary
assembly of Brahman intellectuals who met to affirm it. That a
marriage between a Devarsi and another Banaras Brahman family
should be referred to is not altogether surprising. Other examples
of marriage between Desasthas and other Maharashtrian Brahman
subcastes are mentioned in this period as well as in the nineteenth
century.131 As noted above, the boundaries between these Brahman
subcastes were mutable. Also, it is no surprise that the small numbers
of ‘Devarsis’ who had come up to Banaras might have been able
to maintain their reputations as social equals, at least in the short
term. The meeting of 1583 produced a judgement emphasizing the
importance of consensus between the city’s Brahman communities, an
emphasis that runs through all the judgements examined here which
came out of Banaras. In addition, the Devarsis themselves seem to
have had some tradition of excellence as ritual specialists, which may
have added to their reputation as worthy Brahmans and marriage
partners.132
126
The NCC lists several possible identifications: NCC Vol. 1, pp. 134–135.
127
For Tilbandesvara, see Sharma and Patkar, Kavı̄ndracandrodaya, p. 29.
128
Sharma and Patkar, Kavı̄ndracandrodaya, p. 6. NCC Vol. VII, pp. 188–190.
129
Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’, p. 13.
130
Shukla, Dasaputra, Kavimandan, Pole, are Desastha names. Datar, Nagarkar,
Khare, Patankar, Dabholkar, Bhave, Pole, are Chitpavan names. Kale can be
Desastha, Chitpavan or Karhade. Pauranik can be Desastha or Karhade.
131
For a marriage between a Desastha and a Karhade in this period, see Gode,
‘Identification of Raghunātha’, pp. 414–415.
132
One of the most esteemed forms of marriage, according to Manu, was the ‘daiva’
form, in which a daughter is given to a priest who officiates at a sacrifice, during the
course of its performance. Trautmann, Dravidian kinship, p. 289.

As suggested above, however, this was a period in which

Brahmans back in the Maratha regions were becoming increasingly
differentiated from one another in the rural social order. The
Saraswats’ ability to take advantage of these changes had produced
one kind of pressure on the Banaras pandit communities, when other
Mumbai Brahmans petitioned them to rule against the Saraswats’
ritual claims. In the case of the Devarsis, it is not clear whether
Brahmans back in the Konkan had disputed their position, or whether
the challenge had come from a faction in Banaras itself. But it seems
to have struck the ‘southern’ pandit communities of the city much
closer to home. It impelled them to defend the Devarsis, with much
more personal assertions of the social connections of many respectable
families in the city with them, in a manner that seems at once
aggressive and defensive. The stakes may have been particularly high
because Banaras pandit families’ intellectual production, and their
reputations, were closely allied to the family setting of pandit houses
themselves.133
Shifting horizons in the 1660s
Political developments during the 1660s revealed the increasing

interlocking of events, not only in Banaras and the Maratha regions,
but also in Delhi. In this same year of 1657, having consolidated
his lands in the Bijapur territories, Sivaji staged his first direct
assault on the Mughal imperial forces. In 1658, the emperor Shah
Jahan was deposed. In 1659 Dara Shukoh, who had done much
to promote intellectual exchange between the learned of different
religious traditions in the imperial capital, and who had his own close
connections with the pandit communities of Banaras, was executed.134
By 1669, the Visvesvara temple and its Mukti mandapam had been
destroyed, and ‘Aurangzeb’s’ mosque constructed on the site.
As is well known, the rationales for these actions are difficult to
interpret. It is worth noting, though, that the destruction of the
133
It may also be significant that many of the ‘southern’ pandits interested
themselves in the theories governing the lineage affiliations of gotra and pravara.
Within the Bhatta family alone, Narayana, Raghunatha, Kamalakara and Laksmana
Bhatta all wrote independent treatises on the subject.
134
Bernier, Travels, p. 345; PK Gode, ‘Samudra-Sangama, a Philosophical Work by
Dara Shukoh, Son of Shah Jahan Composed in AD 1655’, in Bhārata Itihāsa Sam
. śodhaka
Man.d.ala Quarterly,Vol. 94, October 1943, pp. 75–88.

Visvesvara temple does not follow the pattern that many historians
have observed for temple destruction in this period.135 It did not take
place on a moving military frontier, and it was not a political move
aimed at the authority of a refractory royal opponent, because Banaras
was not itself a royal city. As Eaton observed, the background to the
destruction of the Visvesvara temple lay in reports to Aurangzeb’s
court of undesirable educational activities in the schools and places of
worship of the city: some ‘deviant’ Brahmans in ‘established schools’
in Banaras were attracting students from far and wide with their false
teachings.136 Further research may help us to understand what these
reported activities were, and whether they were connected in any
way either with Dara’s former networks of patronage and intellectual
exchange in the city, or with the activities of the southern pandits at
the Visvesvara temple discussed in this paper.
It is equally difficult to determine the response of the Banaras pandit
communities to these events. Events back in the Konkan between 1664
and 1674 may furnish some clues. 1664 saw yet more calls to Banaras
from disgruntled Brahmans in the Konkan in the matter of Saraswat
entitlements, and a further assembly convened to consider the matter.
The document recording this assembly tells us that a similar request
came from Sivaji himself, now holding most of the territory of the
Konkan, and exercising his kingly function of keeping the orders of
local castes in their place.137 The response of the Banaras pandits on
this occasion was to hold their assembly at Rajapur in the heart of
Sivaji’s new territory in the Konkan. Gagabhatta, Anantadeva and
Mahadeva Sesa attended, along with luminaries of Sivaji’s court and
influential local families.138
We do not know what impelled the pandits to come to the Konkan,
nor do we know what hopes they might have vested in Sivaji as
a protector of dharma and of pious Brahmans. It may not be a
135
Richard M. Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States’ in David
Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds.) Beyond Turk and Hindu: rethinking religious
identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp.
8–9, 254–260.
136
Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’, 265–266.
137
This judgement is in the Śyenavı̄jātidharmanirn.aya, Bhārata Itihāsa Sam
. śodhaka
Man.d.ala Varsika Itivrtta (Pune: BISM, 1914), pp. 296–305. See also O’Hanlon and
Minkowski, ‘What makes people who they are?’, pp. 393–397.
138
Perhaps more exposed to the pressures of provincial opinion, the 1664
dharmasabhā took a much harder line on the rights of the Senavis: they were only
trikarmı̄ Brahmans, because they had spent so much time as traders and farmers that
their dharmic entitlement had changed: see Śyenavı̄jātidharmanirn.aya, p. 300.

coincidence, though, that some of them seem to have moved swiftly

to forge links with the new Maratha court in the Konkan. It is
noteworthy in this regard that the letter of decision issued by the
assembly included an effusive praise poem to Sivaji. We have yet to
find recorded responses to the destruction of the Visvesvara temple.
These may, however, have been some of the factors that helped to
bring about Gagabhatta’s consecration in 1674 of Sivaji as a dharmic
king.139
Banaras Brahmans continued to attract appeals for adjudication
from the Maratha regions. The great assembly of 1657 provided no
final resolution to the entitlements of the Devarukhes. On 7th October
1683, one Hari Diksita wrote from Banaras to his relative, Narayana
Diksita, evidently back in the Konkan, to report that he had taken
Narayana’s order to Banaras.140
Having arrived in Banaras, the Brahman pandits and Vaidikas who are at
odds with us came to speak to me, along with your son in law, Govinda Diksita
Chowdhuri. They said that if we wanted to break the rivalry and the hatred
between us, we should give a feast for one or two hundred Brahmans, and
that would end the feud.
The feast had duly been given, and Hari reported that ‘all of
the Maharashtra Brahmans as listed below came to the feast’. One
hundred and seven names were listed, many of them family names
that appeared on earlier lists. The point of the feast, of course, was to
deliver a judgement through the occasion itself of sharing food.
Here again was an initiative from the provinces: Narayana Diksita,
evidently a leading Devarukhe from the Konkan, had commissioned
a caste-fellow Hari Diksita to go to Banaras to negotiate with
‘the Brahman pandits and Vaidikas who are at odds with us’. A
family relative already in Banaras came along as an intermediary:
Govinda Diksita Chowdhuri, son-in-law of Narayana. Interestingly,
P.K. Gode identifies this Govinda Diksita Chowdhuri with the Govinda
Diksita Chowdhuri who was the son of Nilakantha Caturdhara, the
famous commentator on the Mahabharata living at that time in
Banaras.141 If this was the case, we would have here another example
139
See V.S. Bendrey, Coronation of Sivaji the Great (Bombay: PPH Bookstall, 1960).
140
141
Gode cites Nilakantha’s family genealogies, documentation of inam land
awarded to the family and Aufrecht’s identification of Govinda Diksita as belonging
to the Caturdhara family. Gode, ‘Nı̄lakan.t.ha Caturdhara’, pp. 485–486. However,
the identification remains very much to be confirmed.

of marriage connections between the Devarukhes/Devarsis and here
the Desastha family of Nilakantha Caturdhara. If Devarukhes from
the Konkan were sending representatives to Banaras to negotiate with
its predominantly Desastha pandits, it would also have made perfect
sense for them to bring in as an intermediary a local Desashta of
influence connected to the Devarukhes through marriage.
It is difficult to know what the Banaras pandits made of it when,
pressed by Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, their verdicts
seemed to be called into question with every passing generation.
Perhaps some at least were perfectly well aware that as local
circumstances changed and new pressures and challenges developed,
so the same issues would eventually come back, in rather the same
way that local rights of other kinds in this period needed fresh defence
and certification with every change of local power-holder. Very much
in line with Madhav Deshpande’s insights, it was always under local
and particular conditions that historical agents sought to give social
form to their reading of ‘universal’ dharma.142
Conclusion
By 1683, Sivaji was already dead. In subsequent decades, the Maratha

polity fragmented under the pressures of Mughal invasion and civil
war. By the time the political situation stabilized in the 1720s, an
effective network of functioning Maratha courts had developed in
Satara, Kolhapur, Tanjore, and in Pune—the administrative and
banking centre of the new Maratha state under the new leadership
of the Chitpavan Bhatta family. A new constellation of judicial
authorities was emerging. The Pune court increasingly took over the
burden of trying to inculcate unity amongst Maharashtrian Brahmans,
and under the leadership of Ramasastri Prabhune developed its own
sophisticated judicial apparatus.143 In Banaras itself, there was a
new kind of Maratha presence, now characterized by lavish building
projects and direct charitable grants to Brahmans.144
142
Deshpande, ‘Localising the Universal Dharma’ (unpublished mss).
143
For Prabhune’s letters describing his judicial role, see Sadisiva Athavale,
Rāmaśāstri Prabhun.e, (Pune: Srividya Prakasana, 1988). For the peshwa regime’s
attempts to foster Brahman community, see O’Hanlon and Minkowski, ‘What makes
people who they are?’, pp. 410–12.
144
Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 146.

In 1723, the Devarukhes again pressed their claim, not to

Banaras, but to the chief pandit at the Satara court.145 During
the middle decades of the eighteenth century, there also appears
to have been a rising role in religious adjudication for the
Sankaracaryas of the Deccan’s religious mat.hs, and indeed a struggle
for ascendancy between them and the regional networks of Brahman
dharmasabhās.146 Banaras pandits came again to the Maratha country
in 1749, when a party came down to the Satara court, along with a
contingent from the Srngeri mat.h, to consider the entitlements of
the Kayastha Prabhus.147 Banaras of course continued to enjoy its
reputation as a place of piety and intellectual charisma. But there
was a sense by this time that other centres of judicial authority were
offering themselves for the resolution of fundamental questions of
Brahman entitlement, and now with the local reach to enforce their
decisions.148
These long term social changes in the Maratha regions, and their
effects upon ‘southern’ pandits in Banaras, do not help, in any
straightforward way, to make sense of the intellectual changes of
the period. Both the remarkable efflorescence of Sanskrit learning
in the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the decline
in intellectual production that historians have noted from the late-
eighteenth century, call for the kind of nuanced intellectual history in
which scholars of the period are already engaged. In this task, however,
it may be helpful at least to get some sense of the degree to which
pandits in Banaras were exposed to the distinctive social changes that
‘early modernity’ brought to the local societies of western and central
India, and had to grapple with the consequences for social relations in
the city. In a fundamental way, these changes opened up the question
of what it meant to be a Brahman, of the means by which practices of
collective decision-making could be developed to project and sanctify
the authority of ‘southern’ Brahmans to wider Indian audiences, and
145
146
O’Hanlon, ‘Narratives of Penance and Purification’, pp. 65–7; Bhat, ‘Acāra,
vyavahāra, prāyascitta’, pp. 91–105.
147
V.S. Bendrey, Mahārās..tretihāsaci Sādhanem
. (Bombay: Mumbai Marathi Gran-
thasangrahalaya, 1966), Vol. II, p. 491.
148
For the processes of regionalization and vernacularisation in the Maratha
regions, see Sumit Guha, ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and
Vernacular identity in the Dakhan, c. 1500–1800’, in Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 24, 2, 2004, pp. 23–31, and Eaton, A Social History
of the Deccan, pp. 41–54.

what Brahman community could signify amid the social turbulence of
the age.
Note on sources
Many of the documents cited in this paper have come down to us in

caste histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
or in other published collections of source materials for the Maratha
period. It has not been possible in most cases to examine manuscript
copies of the originals. But in many places it has been possible to
provide additional corroboration for these documents from other
contemporary sources; in others, it has been necessary to rely on
internal evidence within the documents themselves.
Material on the Saraswats is drawn principally from the
documents published with Gunjikar’s Sarasvatı̄ Man.d.ala, published
in 1884. Interestingly, this collection does not include the
Śyenavı̄jātidharmanirn.aya, whose verdict was unfavourable to the
Saraswats: this document was published by the Bharata Itihasa
Samshodhaka Mandala in 1914.
Material on the Devarukhes is drawn from the collection of
documents originally published by R.S. Pimputkar in 1926 as
Cital.ebhat..ta Prakarana.149 Pimputkar was himself a Devarukhe, working
as a Pune schoolteacher and involved in nationalist activity in the city.
He met Lokamanya Tilak at the 1907 Surat meeting of the Indian
National Congress.150 Tilak mentions Pimputkar as one of a small
group of assistants who helped him to prepare his Gı̄ta Rahasya for
the press.151 The materials were not Pimputkar’s own, but were made
available to him by another member of the Devarukhe community,
Bhikaji Moresvar Manduskar.152 The occasion for their publication
lay in the preparation during the early 1920s of the Mahārās..triya
Dnyānakośa, the multivolume Marathi encyclopaedia edited by S.V.
Ketkar. Manduskar made the letters available to Ketkar in the hope
149
These documents have been reprinted in C.Y. Mule et al., (eds), Devarūkhe
(Bombay: Ramesh Visnu Nimbkar, 1973), pp. 87–107.
150
Madhav Bhole and Chandrakant Laksman Pimputkar, personal communication.
151
B.G. Tilak, Srimadbhagavadgita-Rahasya (Pune: Kesari Office, 1936), Vol. 1, pp.
55–56.
152
Manduskar has described how he found these materials in the possession of
two Devarukhe families, the Khapadekars and Karulkars, in the Konkan village of
. śodhan, mss, ff. 7v-8.
Dahivali. Manduskar, Devarūkhe dnyāti itihāsa sam

that he would use them in preparing the entry for the Devarukhes.
Ketkar mentions seeing Manduskar’s letters, and acknowledges
Manduskar’s help in preparing the Devarukhe entry: ‘We saw copies
of letters from authorities and dharmasabhas in various different
places, to the effect that they [the Devarukhes] are not excluded from
dining [with other Brahmans]’.153 In the event, however, Ketkar’s
encyclopaedia referred only to a letter from 1723 citing puranic verses
which asserted that ‘Devarastriyas’ were unfit to dine with other
Brahmans, and identifying the Devarukhes with this community.154
This prompted Manduskar and Pimputkar to publish the documents
independently in 1926.
The possibility cannot be excluded that the letters are modern
constructions, prepared with the purpose of improving the
Devarukhes’ image in Ketkar’s encyclopaedia. However, the letters
and the lists of names attached to them, contain a mass of internal
evidence consistent with their production in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Some of the events discussed in the letters
are also alluded to in other and independent sources. In addition,
the letters were extensively used by P.K. Gode, the historian and
longstanding curator of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
in Pune, during the 1930s and 1940s. The letters were also cited
by editors of the Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, who used the pandit
signatures as a way of assigning dates to particular pandits, and by
other Indian scholars of the inter-war period.155 Because the letters
were published in Marathi caste histories, and the earliest of them
is in Marathi rather than in Sanskrit, they have not to date been
extensively used by modern Sanskrit scholars.156
153
S.V. Ketkar, Mahārās..triya Dnyānakośa (Pune: Mahārās.t.riya Dnyānakośa Mandala,
1925), Vol. 15, p. 155.
154
V.K. Rajwade developed this theme in a separate Marathi article published in
1914, ‘The origin of the Devarukhes’, published in the annual special issue of the
. śodhaka Man.d.ala Quarterly. See Rajwade, ‘Devarukyāci Mūlotpatti’,
Bhārata Itihāsa Sam
pp. 186–94.
155
Pandit Surya Narayana Sukla, Bhāt..ta Cintāman.i (Banaras: Chowkhamba Sanskrit
Series, 1933), pp. 1–2; Cinnasvami Sastri, Mı̄mām . sākaustubha (Banaras: Chowkhamba
Sanskrit Series, 1933), pp. 2–3; Dineshchandra Bhattacharyya, ‘Sanskrit Scholars of
Akbar’s Time’, in Indian Historical Quarterly, Vol. XIII, 1937, p. 35.
156
But see Deshpande, ‘Localising the Universal Dharma’, and Pollock, ‘New
Intellectuals’, p. 20.

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Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010) pp. 201–240.

Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2LE, UK

The consolidation from the early sixteenth century of successor states

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came to the city from Kupergaon on the Godavari and established

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Changing environments for Brahmans

Writing in 1884, R.B. Gunjikar, historian of western India’s Brahman

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the Desasthas of the Deccan uplands, and the multiple small

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inhabitants of ‘Madhyadesa’, or ‘Maharastra’ in some variant readings

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Konkan held khoti rights at least as early as the seventeenth century,

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These social shifts emerge in a particularly marked way in the

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“Devarukhe” is a corruption of the word ‘Devarsi’; but there is a very

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The ‘southern’ Brahman community in Banaras

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Paramananda Kavindra, later to be ‘court poet’ of the Maratha leader

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Authority and the Visvesvara temple

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and Mithila, with Vidyanivasa, the leading pandit at Navadvipa, at

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1520s, building it on the south side of the main Jagannatha temple

The Nirn.ayapatra of 1583: Devarsis and Chipolanas

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Then Anantabhatta’s amatya, Govindabhatta Abhyankar, Dhonda the jyotisi

The letter appears to be a kind of confession: ‘Anantabhatta wrote

It was determined that all this community of Brahmanas (he samasta

Kozhrekar described the pandits who had affirmed this decision.

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bestowed on them, as opposed to the single marks of honour given to

The letters of 1630 and 1631: Saraswats

In the spring of 1630, a Banaras pandit assembly met to consider

A successful community, then, in Mumbai (as we know the Saraswats

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Represented are the Bhatta, Sesa, Dharmadhikari, Deva and

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Praud.ha-Manoramā.98 ‘Nagesa Sastri of Andhra’ is clearly a ‘southerner’.

In the city of Visvesvara, the whole community of the excellent Pancadravidas,

The whole Dravida community had gathered ‘in the Mukti

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We can identify Bhavananda Saraswati, the head of the Kusasthal

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of the names are in fact of Maratha Brahmans. Both letters

‘Pandits of Kings and Kingdoms’: Belgaum, 1656–1658

Were disputes about the entitlements of other caste communities

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