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.Footnote 1 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 5 Some writers adopted a stronger temporal sense in their ordering of the knowledges of the past, alongside a new flourishing in the discipline of mīmāṃsā in this period, whose foundations lay in inferring the nature of dharma from ‘eternal’ Vedic revelation.Footnote 6 The doctrine of kāśimaraṇamukti 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.Footnote 7
Also well known is the central place of ‘southern’ or dakṣinātya pandits in these developments.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 10 The Devas, also Desasthas, were a famous family of mīmāṃsakās, descended from the great poet Eknath (1533–1599).Footnote 11 The Caturdhara or Chowdhuri family of Desasthas established itself in Banaras when Nilakantha Caturdhara 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 nirṇayapatras, 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.
Madhav Deshpande has explored some aspects of this interplay between Banaras and the Maratha country.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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: 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 therefore of one of the maṭhs or monasteries embodying that sectarian tradition.Footnote 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.Footnote 25
Maharashtra's most important ‘purana of place’, the Sahyādrikhaṇḍa, devoted many of its chapters to explaining the origins of the different Brahman subcastes.Footnote 26 It offered an all-India classification of Brahmans into two great classes. The pañca gauḍa were the five classes of ‘northern’ Brahmans—Saraswat, Kanyakubja, Maithila, Gauda and Utkala. Gauḍa 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 drāviḍa were the five classes of southern Brahmans: Dravidas, Tailangas, Karnatas, Gurjuras, and the inhabitants of ‘Madhyadesa’, or ‘Maharastra’ in some variant readings of these lists.Footnote 27
More locally, the texts of the Sahyādrikhaṇḍa 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.Footnote 28 Karhades, Padyas and others were represented as fallen Brahmans inhabiting wicked lands.Footnote 29 A sub-set of central chapters, the Pātityagrāmanirṇaya or ‘determination of fallen villages’ deal with subgroups of Brahmans who had come into being through fission, changes of occupation, sin or dharmic lapse.Footnote 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 gauḍa and pañca drāviḍa 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 32 The histories of the Pātityagrāmanirṇaya 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, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 40
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 gauḍa Brahmans, both their own internal caste histories and the narratives of the Sahyādrikhaṇḍa 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 maṭh, 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 maṭh also left Goa, settling first in the Konkan and then, from about 1600, in Banaras.Footnote 41 Known as Senavis in the Konkan, contemporary accounts record their pervasive presence and success as educators, administrators and political intermediaries.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 gauḍa, or ‘northern’ Brahmans, came only slowly into practical use for these Konkani Brahmans from the middle of the eighteenth century.Footnote 44
Devarukhes were also Konkani Brahmans whose nomenclature was complex. Gunjikar's 1884 account observed, ‘some say that “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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 46 A judicial case of 1723 alludes to this same episode.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 49 The Bombay Gazetteer for Ratnagiri district remarked that ‘they are said to have originally come to these parts as revenue farmers’.Footnote 50
The judgements coming out of Banaras always use the term ‘devarṣi’ for these Konkani Brahmans. How did this slippage come about? Northern dialects render the Marathi consonant ‘ṣ’ as ‘kh’. Thus ‘devarṣe’ in northern India would have been pronounced ‘devarakhe’.Footnote 51 ‘Devarṣis’ feature in the Sahyādrikhaṇḍa as stray references within its lists of the many different categories of Brahmans.Footnote 52 It is also possible that Devarukhes in Banaras at this time may have taken advantage of the pious associations of the term ‘devarṣi’ in its Sanskrit meaning of ‘godly sage’, to make the slippage from ‘devarṣe’, the local pronunciation of ‘devarukhe’, to ‘devarṣi’.Footnote 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.Footnote 54 It formed part of an array of local assemblies with different powers and purposes.Footnote 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.
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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 literary and poetic style identified with the Gauda region, also known as prācya or ‘eastern’.Footnote 59 The strengths of the southern pandits lay in mīmāṃsā, 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 maṭh 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 gauḍa and pañca drāviḍa groupings of Brahmans.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 62 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 66
Banaras also seems to have had a substantial transient population of Maratha Brahmans. Many came for education, often for extended periods.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 70 At the house of Todar Mal in Delhi, he debated with eminent pandits from Gauda and Mithila, with Vidyanivasa, the leading pandit at Navadvipa, at their head.Footnote 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.Footnote 72 The Visvesvara temple was one of the most important sacred sites in this city of maraṇamukti, 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 Tristhalīsetu, ‘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’.Footnote 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 Kāśikhaṇḍa, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 75 Narayana's own work included a selection and arrangement of passages from the Kāśikhaṇḍa.
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.Footnote 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 Kāśikhaṇḍa describes the Mukti, Srngara, Aisvarya and Jnana mandapams, to the south, east, north and west respectively of the central sanctuary housing the Siva linga.Footnote 77 Narayana's own work the Tristhalīsetu makes it even clearer that these were physical spaces, with the Mukti mandapam having special significance. Drawing on selected passages from the Kāśikhaṇḍa, 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 Kāśikhaṇḍa's writing already associated with discussions in matters of law. Narayana quotes from the Kāśikhaṇḍa: ‘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.’Footnote 78
As Narayana makes his arrangement of passages from the Kāśikhaṇḍa, 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, dakṣinamanḍape, just as many of the Brahmans who now deliberated there were themselves ‘southerners’.Footnote 79
There is also an important contemporary parallel. The Gajapati king of Orissa, Prataparudra Deva, erected a Mukti mandapam during the 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.Footnote 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 Nirṇayapatra of 1583: Devarsis and Chipolanas
The first detailed record dates from 1583 and concerns the Devarukhe or Devarsi Brahmans.Footnote 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 agnihotrīs, priests whose task it was to maintain a perpetual sacrificial fire. Having learned their craft, they sought the agreement of Banaras's whole assembly of Brahmans, ‘samasta kāśīkara 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 (pakṣa), 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.’Footnote 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 annasaṃbandha 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 muktimaṇdapama nirṇaya’. Kozhrekar ended his letter with a report that a copper-plate enshrining this decision was being despatched from Banaras and sending his greetings to Krsnaji and Kanhoji Raja at their court in Srngarpur.Footnote 83
The names listed as ‘heads of the Konkana Devarsi Brahmans’, to whom Kozhrekar addressed his letter, are all Devarukhe family names.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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, 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.Footnote 87 Sesa Krsnabhatta pandita, ‘head of the Maharastras’, is the great grammarian of the Sesa family noted above.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 bestowed on them, as opposed to the single marks of honour given to everyone else.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 94 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.Footnote 95
Bhatta Anantaramasarma, Bhattopakhyadadambhatta, Dharmadhikarimahidharasarma, Sesopakhyavisvesvarasarma, Jadaypanamno Gangarama; Sesopakhyacakrapane, Punyasthambopakhyasomanathasarma, Gangaramamaitropanamaka, Devopakhyamahadevasarma, Staropakhyasakharama, Dasaputropakhyalaksmanapanta, Punyastambhopakhyavaijanatha, Pauranikopakhyatmaramabhatta, Jyotirvidupanamakagurjarasiddevesvara, Kakaropakhyaganesasarma, Nagesasastri Andhrasya, Ganga Diksita Ayacitopanamaka, Babu Diksita Ayacita, Ramakrsna Agnihotri.
Represented are the Bhatta, Sesa, Dharmadhikari, Deva and Punatambe families.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 Paramatakhaṇḍana, written as a rebuttal to Bhattoji Diksita's controversial Prauḍha-Manoramā.Footnote 98 ‘Nagesa Sastri of Andhra’ is clearly a ‘southerner’. Other names in this list are Maratha Brahman family names.Footnote 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 maṭh, which had been destroyed by the Portugese in 1564. Bhavananda Saraswati, sixty-second guru of the maṭh, 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 maṭh. The assembly addressed its judgement to the Brahmans of the Sahyadri region.Footnote 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 gauḍas 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 maṭh. 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 maṭh, Bhavananda Saraswati and Laksmana Bhatta.
Thirty-four names were appended to the judgement.
Bhavanandasarasvati, Kamalakarabhatta, Dharmadhikarirambhatta, Agnihotri Raghunathabhatta, Haribhattadiksita, Purandararamacandrabhatta, Aradilaksmanabhatta, Kasipurivasipuranandasarasvati, Anandavana, Hariharasrama, Aradopanamaka Narayanabhatta, Kolasekaropanamaka Mahadevabhatta, Bhavanandasarasvati, Raghunathabhattapandita, Narayanbhattapandita, Muralidharajayakrsnabhatta, Radheyagopalabhatta, Mayapurvasino Badariyadamodarbhatta, Kedarbhattasunoramaheswara, Godavaritryambakavasino Ganesabhattakadamba, Anantadaivajnya, Haridiksita, 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 maṭh: 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.Footnote 101 Gode identifies Narayanbhatta Arade as Narayanbhatta Laksmidhara Arade, a Karhade Brahman from the southern Konkan and writer on dharmaśāstra topics.Footnote 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.Footnote 103 Haridiksita may be the grandson of the great grammarian Bhattoji Diksita.Footnote 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.Footnote 105 Kovai is a Karhade family name, but this Vasudevabhatta does not seem to have left any writings.Footnote 106 There are also members of the Sesa and Dharmadhikari families here.Footnote 107
The Mukti mandapam is the site for this deliberation. The assembly makes sweeping claims for its broad representation, although most 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.Footnote 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 paṇdita’. 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’.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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, 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 mīmāṃsakā. 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 mīmāṃsakā. 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 mīmāṃsakā’, 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.Footnote 112 The context, however, suggests that Anantabhatta was a local Brahman of good repute, whose 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.Footnote 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 mīmāṃsakā’, who is recorded as having written out the document, may be a member of the Bhatta family.Footnote 114
Puranendrasaraswati, Vyasendra, Bhatta Nilakantha, Cakrapanipandit Sesa, Auba Sukla, Kalopanamagovindabhatta, Bapuvyasa, Maunigopibhatta, Raghudevabhattacarya, Dasaputragovindabhatta, Vinayakasukla, Tenkalopakhyabapubhatta, Vidvasopakhyabahiravabhatta, Ganesadiksita, Dataravisvanatha, Kovaivasudeva, Narayanabhatta Arde, Gadvaranarasimhabhatta, Payasopakhyanarasimhabhatta, Vaderutamabhatta, Kundalighaubhatta, yati Narasimhasrama known as Brahmendrasaraswati, Anantadeva, Gagabhatta, Samrajayapandita, Bhayabhatta, Govindabhattacarya, Balakrsnadiksita, Suklopakhyavireswara, Koradeharisamkara, Tulasidevabhatta, Chandibhairava, Manoharavisvanatha, Appayadiksita, Ramhradasthadhundiraja, Bhaskarajyotirvida, Mahasabdopakhyajyotirvida, Nagarkarakrsnabhatta, Vaisapayanagiridharabhatta, Kharopanamakganesabhatta, Gautamrambhatta, Cintamanibhattadrona, Kavimandanabalakrsnabhatta, Kalabandevisvesvarabhatta, Patankaravisnudiksita, Sivaramatirtha and Narayanatirtha, Khandadeva, Bhattanantamimamsaka, Laksmanapanditavaidya, Caitanyamadhavadeva, Ramaramabhattacarya, Ramhradayasyagomajibhata, Dauganesadiksita and Bapudiksita, Palsetkarajyotirvinnarayana, DabholkarajyotirvidaVitthala, Bhaverudradiksita, Kasisomayaji and Laksmanasomayaji, Mahasabdedevabhatta, Ghumaremahadevabhatta, Polakasibhatta, Sachchidandasarasavati, Tilbhandesvara, Maunivisnudiksita, Naraharidiksita and Visnudiksita, Laksmanadiksita, Dinadiksita and Namudikshitasya, Vacchabhatta, Pauranikagadadhara, Jayaramanyayapancana, Bharadavajamahadeva, Sathe Upanamakmahadeva, Pote Mahadevabhatta.Footnote 115
Puranendrasaraswati is likely to be the Puranendrasaraswati who is mentioned as a leading sannyasi of Banaras in the praise addresses of the Kavīndracandrodaya.Footnote 116 Bhatta Nilakantha is probably the youngest son of the mīmāṃsakā Samkara Bhatta.Footnote 117 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 Kavīndracandrodaya.Footnote 118 Anantadeva we may identify as the famous member of the Deva family and author of the great compendium of the Smṛtikaustubha.Footnote 119 Gagabhatta is the famous scion of the Bhatta family.Footnote 120 One Bhayabhatta also presented a praise address.Footnote 121 Appaya Diksita here is likely to be Appaya Diksita III, grandson of the great philosopher and defender of Saiva Hinduism Appaya Diksita.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 mīmāṃsā. He appears here with his guru Sivaramatirtha.Footnote 124
The Khandadeva is likely to be Khandadeva Misra, the great mīmāṃsakā and intellectual innovator from Bengal.Footnote 125 Anantabhatta ‘the mīmāṃsakā’ may possibly be the son of Kamalakara Bhatta, but it is difficult to be certain.Footnote 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 maṭh, installed in 1631. There is a Tilbhandesvara who presents a praise address in the Kavīndracandrodaya.Footnote 127 Jayarama Nyayapancanana is probably the leading scholar of nyāya from Bengal of the same name, whose praise address appears in the Kavīndracandrodaya.Footnote 128 Bharadavajamahadeva may be the Mahadeva Bharadavaja who was the son-in-law of Nilakantha Bhatta, and founder of the Bharadavaja family in Banaras.Footnote 129 There are many other Maharashtrian Brahman family names here.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 132
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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 Visvesvara temple does not follow the pattern that many historians have observed for temple destruction in this period.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 141 If this was the case, we would have here another example 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 143 In Banaras itself, there was a new kind of Maratha presence, now characterized by lavish building projects and direct charitable grants to Brahmans.Footnote 144
In 1723, the Devarukhes again pressed their claim, not to Banaras, but to the chief pandit at the Satara court.Footnote 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 maṭhs, and indeed a struggle for ascendancy between them and the regional networks of Brahman dharmasabhās.Footnote 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 maṭh, to consider the entitlements of the Kayastha Prabhus.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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 Sarasvatī Maṇḍala, published in 1884. Interestingly, this collection does not include the Śyenavījātidharmanirṇaya, 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 Citaḷebhaṭṭa Prakarana.Footnote 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.Footnote 150 Tilak mentions Pimputkar as one of a small group of assistants who helped him to prepare his Gīta Rahasya for the press.Footnote 151 The materials were not Pimputkar's own, but were made available to him by another member of the Devarukhe community, Bhikaji Moresvar Manduskar.Footnote 152 The occasion for their publication lay in the preparation during the early 1920s of the Mahārāṣṭriya Dnyānakośa, the multivolume Marathi encyclopaedia edited by S.V. Ketkar. Manduskar made the letters available to Ketkar in the hope 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]’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 156
