This collection of articles developed from a full-day symposium hosted at the Fiftieth Annual Conference for South Asian Studies at Madison, Wisconsin, in 2023. It was conceived amid calls to return to the critical study of caste, to decentre hegemonic perspectives, and to recover the archives of oppressed caste groups.Footnote ¹ While an efflorescence of research on colonial and post-colonial India brought the caste question and Dalit politics back to the fore, we felt that scholars working on precolonial South Asia had much to offer in rethinking assumptions that persist in social scientific writing.Footnote ² We are not the first to do so. The articles in this collection build on existing discussions in South Asian studies that have examined the historical construction and contestation of caste categories in the premodern world. Still, prescriptive Sanskrit legal texts from the early first millennium continue to overdetermine academic questions. The present collection brings together scholars who look beyond such texts to recover histories of contestation with respect to caste in premodern India. We hope it helps to open a dialogue across historic periods and areas of expertise that too often remain siloed.

But what exactly does the broad category of the ‘premodern’ have to offer the study of caste writ large? This collection covers materials from the earliest Vedic period to the eve of colonialism. This is a long time. These articles are united not by temporal uniformity, but by a shared methodological commitment to close reading; each is a pointed intervention that provides fine-grained analyses of textual sources to historicize contemporary notions. We align with recent interventions in the social history of early modern South Asia (circa 1500–1800) that identify this era as central to the identities and institutions of colonial and post-colonial life.Footnote ³ This reperiodization of South Asian history has added texture to the past while productively blurring the boundaries that have traditionally divided modern history from everything else, and it has revolutionized the study of caste.Footnote ⁴ For example, Divya Cherian has shown how notions of ‘untouchability’ were legally enforced in Marwar.Footnote ⁵ Sumit Guha has argued that this period saw the consolidation of a social hierarchy around village life.Footnote ⁶ And Rosalind O’Hanlon has traced the legal and philosophical disputes initiated by brahmans in the changing social reality of early modern western India.Footnote ⁷ Collectively, this scholarship demonstrates the historical emergence of what an earlier generation of scholars would have called ‘traditional institutions’, shifting focus away from both ancient Sanskrit and colonial English legal codes without denying the importance of either.

Of note in scholarship on the early modern period are studies that investigate how, in the centuries that led up to colonial rule, brahman identity was intensely disputed. Sometimes, brahman identity was often disputed by brahmans themselves. In Maharashtra, brahmans criticized brahman-centric ideologies of caste through the medium of dramatic performances.Footnote ⁸ Early modern philosophers writing in Sanskrit debated the identification of brahmans in both theoretical and applied settings.Footnote ⁹ Meanwhile, it is possible to read the works of brahmans against the grain to retrieve discourses that fall beyond the pale of what brahmans explicitly present as transcendent, universal, and ahistorical. This is the path that Anand Venkatkrishnan follows for ‘provincializing brahmanism’.Footnote ¹⁰ His methodology allows us to see how local, regional traditions of bhakti left their traces on Sanskrit scholarship even as they presented a vision of the inviolable caste purity of brahmans. While such studies in the early modern period focus on how brahmans theorized their identity, other scholars of the same period explore the theorization of marginalized caste identities, such as ‘untouchable’, as legal categories.Footnote ¹¹

But the premodern is more than simply the early modern. Somewhat separate from the abovementioned social histories of early modern South Asia has been a return to the philological study of older sources from ancient South Asia and the medieval period through the lens of caste. The foundational work of scholars such as Ram Sharan Sharma, Aloka Parasher-Sen, and Chitrarekha Gupta provided reconstructions of the lives of people outside of the brahman fold based on classical sources, which has allowed a flourishing of studies highlighting the complexity of caste in the ancient and medieval periods.Footnote ¹² This scholarship has shown that precolonial sources are much richer and more diverse than is commonly assumed, as such sources provide ample resources for reconstructing the diverse social worlds of the past. Further, in the precolonial period as much as in the present, caste has never existed alone. It has been intercalated with other forms of hierarchy, such as enslavement, gender domination, religious exclusion, and professional differentiation, which is why Aloka Parasher-Sen has preferred to refer to the broader notion of subordinate and marginal groups.Footnote ¹³ More recently, scholarship in this careful tradition of textual analysis has begun to assert its importance for fields of Dalit Studies and Critical Caste Studies that tend to focus on the contemporary present.Footnote ¹⁴ These have, in a sense, begun to ‘deprovincialize anticaste thought’.Footnote ¹⁵

One central theme of the new historical scholarship on caste has been an attempt to chart the rise of brahman power. Working with the assumption that brahman hegemony was a historical accomplishment rather than a given, Suvira Jaiswal, Johannes Bronkhorst, and Jason Schwartz have—in different ways—provided revisionist accounts of early South Asia that challenge the inevitability of the image of caste as presented in Sanskrit juridical literature.Footnote ¹⁶ When we do turn to the classical Sanskrit juridical texts themselves, these sometimes bring with them surprises. For example, varṇa, the Sanskrit term often translated into English as ‘caste’, is not cited as an identity inherited at birth prior to the composition of the dharmasūtras.Footnote ¹⁷ The term varṇa is also absent from inscriptions before the Common Era.Footnote ¹⁸ When it comes to the articulation of brahmanhood in the dharmaśāstras, numerous scholars have shown disagreements within that corpus over questions big and small, and these texts rarely discuss purity as an abstract state.Footnote ¹⁹ This is all to say that a return to the premodern past can bring with it surprises, in addition to showing the historical emergence of patterns that continue to the present. The special issue builds on this sense of surprise in approaching constructions of caste afresh.

Here, the so-called śramaṇa movements—Ājīvika, Jain, and Buddhist—afford a useful entryway into the questions that this collection takes up. These traditions have provided the classic case for thinking about caste critique in ancient India, and, following B. R. Ambedkar’s conversion and the rise of the Navayāna movement, they have also provided an important resource to contemporary anti-caste activists.Footnote ²⁰ Recent studies have grappled with the question of whether early Buddhism is concomitant with caste rejection. For example, some texts talk of Buddhist brahmans. In the earliest Pali suttas, brahmanhood was in fact an identification for Buddhist ascetics.Footnote ²¹ Some of these suttas also reinforce brahmanical prejudice towards outcastes while simultaneously expressing a consistent rejection of a brahmanical caste system.Footnote ²² Such sources complicate the binary opposition that is often imposed between Buddhism, on the one hand, and brahmanism, on the other.

Similarly, caste identity and religious identity are intertwined in the historiography of devotional movements known as bhakti. Devotional traditions often valorize the songs and sayings of individuals from caste-oppressed backgrounds who critiqued the prevalent social order of the day. Here too, ambiguities arise when these caste discourses and their authors are historicized. Recent scholarship about caste critique in devotional contexts from the second millennium has transformed our understanding of these movements. But again, it is not at all clear whether these bhakti movements—if it is even correct to refer to them as a coherent ‘movement’—affected the social change they so often lauded.Footnote ²³ This is demonstrated in a recent volume of essays which is framed around the question, ‘Is Bhakti a language of power or protest?’.Footnote ²⁴ There, the contributors bring into focus the complexities that surround our understandings of bhakti and its social consequences. Other studies have shown that certain anti-brahman sentiments to arise from these movements were produced by brahmans.Footnote ²⁵ And just as we can talk of Buddhist brahmans, we can also talk of Vīraśaiva brahmans.Footnote ²⁶

Each article in the ‘Provincializing brahmans’ special issue extends the paths already paved in the study of premodern caste. Together, the contributors draw on a diverse array of disciplinary methods, from social history to philology to the history of religion and the history of technology, and they cover a vast swathe of time. Nowhere do the contributors aim to provide comprehensive accounts of caste in each of these moments. Rather, each article makes a pointed historiographic intervention relying on close, contextual reading of primary sources, most of which remain untranslated into European languages.

To provincialize brahmans does not mean to ignore brahmans. There are, in fact, brahmans studied within the pages of this special issue. Brahmans have, after all, played a significant role in defining caste in premodern India. The articles in this special issue do not underplay the systems of oppression enforced through brahman caste ideologies. But we wish to bracket the voices of Sanskrit-speaking brahmans in an effort to retrieve the voices of those who were homogenized, ignored, or subordinated through caste structures. To adapt the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, our narratives of caste cannot merely treat brahmans as ‘the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories’.Footnote ²⁷ So we ask: how do authors other than Sanskrit-speaking brahmans interpret caste identities? By centring these voices, we interrogate the relationship between caste identity, on the one hand, and religious identity, occupation, and linguistic practices, on the other.

The collection starts at what is usually taken to be the foundational text in defining caste: the Ṛgveda. Even though the Ṛgveda famously narrates the dismemberment of the cosmic man into four identities, kṣatríya is not one of them. Rājanyà is. Caley Charles Smith argues that in the Veda, the terms rājanyà and kṣatríya are not synonyms, as has been previously assumed by scholars. Rājanyà and kṣatríya are conceptually distinct identities in which the former represents a ritual subjectivity and the latter a seasonal office of leadership. Smith reconstructs the early history of identities that would later become grouped together under the umbrella of kṣatríya identity. In doing so, he argues that a gulf exists between theorizations of varṇa in the early Vedic collections and the later dharmasūtra and dharmaśāstra literature. The Veda conveys a different understanding of political and ritual identities that cannot be reconciled with the conceptualization of varṇa identity in the later texts.

Moving forward in time, Seema K. Chauhan examines Jaina representations of brahmanhood from the fourth century bce to the seventh century ce. Reading primarily Prakrit sources, Chauhan argues that a distinctive shift occurred between the fifth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. Prior to the fifth century ce, Jaina texts sometimes deployed the category of brahman as a foil for Jaina ascetics and at other times co-opted brahmanhood as a marker of Jaina ascetics. In both cases, brahman identity was understood in the context of Jaina ascetics. By contrast, from the fifth century ce onwards, Jains began to narrate a new story about the origin of brahmans. In this story, brahmanhood is used discuss the relationship between Jain householders and Vedic householders in the royal court. Chauhan argues that the authors of these Jaina stories and their reimagining of brahman identity are reactions to shifting patterns of royal patronage in a period that saw the consolidation of Vedic brahman identity and state power. In essence, Jainas wrote these stories to criticize, and in some cases reimagine, the ideological and institutional structures that Vedic brahmans were using to justify themselves as superior to all other members of society.

Other contributions address the role that literacy, Sanskrit, and Sanskrit-based education played in the construction of caste identity in late medieval and early modern India. This builds on the scholarship of Sheldon Pollock, who has shown that Sanskrit did not always occupy a central position in the elite political life of the subcontinent; rather, it had to be transformed from a language delimited to Vedic ritual practice into a cosmopolitan language of power and literature.Footnote ²⁸ We can follow this process closely through history in the changing languages of inscriptions and charters left behind by royal courts. From the reign of the Satavāhaṇas onwards, a new form of Sanskrit was turned into a language of worldly domination, replacing Prakrit as the linguistic medium of state expression.Footnote ²⁹ This does not mean that brahmans alone used Sanskrit. ‘Brahmans no doubt typically promoted themselves as the custodians of the language,’ Pollock argues, saying that, ‘but it is to swallow their ideology whole to equate Sanskrit and brahmanism’.Footnote ³⁰

Here, we ask: to what extent did people who were not brahmans and who were outside of elite scribal castes have access to the written word after the rise of Sanskrit as a language of political power? Eric Moses Gurevitch and Elaine Fisher offer revisions of the image of brahman-educational exclusivity. Gurevitch reads Kannada and Sanskrit texts to explicate the lives of literate artisans in medieval and early modern South India who boasted of their skill in manual labour and poetic composition. Gurevitch argues that we should treat the vast inscriptional corpus of South Asia—composed of stone epitaphs and inscribed copper plates—as an archive of the literacy of artisans: stone masons, coppersmiths, and people employed in a range of crafts. This means treating literacy not—in the first instance—as an elite cultural activity, but rather one embedded in everyday activities. Talkative stones and metal memorials can help us to move beyond post-industrial notions of literacy and development by returning to the epistemic labour of artisans and architects in late medieval and early modern South Asia.

Elaine Fisher, meanwhile, focuses on non-brahman authors who composed Sanskrit texts. While the Dharmasūtra of Gautama (12.5-7) prohibits śūdras from hearing the words of the Veda under threat of having their ears filled with molten tin or lac, Fisher shows how people from diverse social backgrounds in fact studied and commented on Vedic texts. Providing a wide-ranging reading of Vīraśaiva textual production across southern India, Fisher demonstrates how ‘Vīraśaiva initiates are circulating, reworking, and even teaching Vedic Sanskrit to communities of mixed caste origin’. What are we to make of these non-brahmans using and propagating these Vedic scriptures? We might be tempted to chalk it up to Sanskritization, the process famously described by M. N. Srinivas whereby subaltern castes emulate the rituals and strictures of dominant castes as a path towards upward social and economic mobility.Footnote ³¹ But this would be moving too quickly. Without denying the exclusion often forced upon non-brahman people, Fisher talks of pursuing ‘otherwise possibilities’, the zones for new imaginings of the past opened up by the historicist recovery of unexpected voices in the archive. Sanskrit was used for many different projects, and the use of Sanskrit does not always amount to ‘Sanskritization’. There were, as Fisher puts it, ‘other Sanskrits’.

The special issue concludes with an afterword by Indrani Chatterjee that brings together the themes of the individual contributions and puts them further into conversation with contemporary questions and concerns. Chatterjee places the arguments made in this collection within a wide historiography, and it suggests avenues of research open to future scholars. Collectively, the articles in this special issue show the complex ways that South Asians from various backgrounds navigated caste identities and hierarchies before the advent of colonialism. Some of these strategies fit into expected narratives of caste. Others do not. We aim to keep both side-by-side in presenting a complex image of the past that all historians in South Asian studies can utilize.