Literate Communities of Mughal India

With the help of Susan Bayly’s work we get to know that by the middle of the 18th century,in the hindu ruled kingdoms, networks of  brahman service specialists had taken over dynastic power in a number of post-mughal realms especially in the maratha domains. The brahmins anticipated purity consciousness onto an all india terrain. These brahmin priests created a caste like society around them with the support of the rulers and the scribes and merchants following brahmanical social codes. The post –mughal rulers required specialists with access to supra-local resources and information. It was useful in the context of maximising revenue,maintaining records and facilitating intelligence networks. As the europeans began to make a way into into regional trading, they attracted these people as their clients,commercial partners and informants.Therefore,men who claimed brahmin or honourable mercantile origin were privileged in terms of influence and visibility in  comparison to those scribal families who could neither claim  such an origin or status. A large number of brahmin families were becoming more and more successful as they were tied to theservice of their courts and rulers. A  brahmins was regarded as this ‘third-worldly’ representative of this supreme ideal. So whether he acted as a ritualist, scribe or celibate, his existence was considered to be promising and attractive. This was the defining condition of the ‘brahman raj’. In this period,it became equally important for the kayasthas to indicate shared blood and ‘caste-affinity’ through the adoption of certain social markers especially restrictive marriage practices. As the caste boundaries became more rigid, there was a shift away from the forms of community which had been relatively loose and open in the previous centuries. Many of these people belonging to the service gentry, whose descendants sought to stabilise their ‘caste’ status by seeking service in the colonial revenue bureaucracies, were incomers of humble origin who had moved recently to the scribal specialisms. They claimed some kind of kingship with kayasthas who were already well-known at Hyderabad, Banaras and other great courts. Those who were brahmins were well located to make use of the new prospects. Their families had specialised for many centuries in learning or rituals. In addition, people with such backdrop already had the family custom of secular record-keeping under the mughals and their predecessors. Thus it was a period of Brahman Raj.