Kayasthas, the rise of Mughal power, and the Indo-Muslim world of service

Perhaps one of the most unique social groups in South Asia, Kayasthas have been mostly concentrated in Bengal country, Orissa, Bihar and in the Doab regions, with fewer in Maratha country (such as the Prabhus), south India and the Punjab. Kayasthas traditionally trace their lineage from King Chitragupta, the Hindu deity assigned with maintaining a record of humankind's deeds in life. Their occupational histories revolved around various forms of paper-oriented service to Hindu and later to Muslim sovereigns. Kayasthas were not large landholders, which meant they were gely dependent upon the service professions for their livelihoods. Learning and literacy were indispensible as one Bhojpuri tale notes: kayastha ke bachha padha bhala, ya mara bhale (the education of a Kayastha child is literate or dead).Footnote ¹⁵ Practical and vocational learning were, figuratively and literally, a means of survival. And because of this steady literate tradition, Kayastha families usually kept extensive records and genealogies in their khandans (‘lineage’), though this was a common practice of self-styled dvija (twice born) castes. Within the traditional hierarchies of India, Kayasthas occupied a somewhat unique position. They ranked with Brahmins in terms of literacy, but were considered ritually lower. When it came to learning, Brahmins were purveyors of sacred knowledge, the shastras and Sanskrit, whereas Kayasthas primarily focused on the vocations of accounts, writing and paper-management in vernacular and court languages. They therefore commanded a great deal of importance in society due to their practical skills, which were vital to any Indian sovereign or political authority. For in a society where the learned and literate were few and far between, Kayasthas were noticeable for their fairly cohesive literacy and long histories of clerical and scribal service. And whilst they never commanded similar social worth and standing, Kayasthas were more numerous and visible in the sinews of service than were the Brahmins of the Doab, Deccan and Bengal.

The rise of Timuri political power after the sixteenth century had the effect of opening new, albeit subordinate, roles for Kayasthas. The Mughals brought with them an increased appreciation for pen and paper, due to the inherited traditions of calligraphy as both an administrative and an Islamic spiritual art form.Footnote ¹⁶ The Timuri dynasty infused Indian governance with a more regular use of paper, making it a political technology of sovereignty. Paper was needed for tabulating rent, the ranks of Mansabdars (military nobles), the dar ul-Insha (‘Department of Correspondence’) and for the wasti pens of Hindustan's pious and poetic. Pen and paper, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became permanent features of legitimate government in South Asia.Footnote ¹⁷

This expansion of more paper-oriented government went hand-in-hand with an equal, though less than full integration of various Kayasthas into an Indo-MuslimFootnote ¹⁸ administrative culture. In a way, their literate vocations benefitted from the rise of more paper-oriented forms of governance. Much of this was due to the emergence of Persian as a court language. With the expansion of Mughal power into north, east and central India, Kayasthas were some of the first groups to learn Persian more regularly; some had been loosely exposed to it under the Delhi Sultanates.Footnote ¹⁹ In Bulandshahr and the Punjab, for example, Kayasthas started learning Persian before the formal establishment of Mughal power,Footnote ²⁰ whilst in Meerut they were amongst the very first Hindus to learn the new language of India's conquerors.Footnote ²¹ Lala Jwala Prasad, a Kayastha and an Extra Assistant Commissioner in central India during the 1910s, noted that they ‘were the first to learn Persian, the language of the Muhammedan invaders of India, and to obtain the posts of accountants and revenue collectors’.Footnote ²² Kayasthas in Awadh and the middle Doab, such as the Navreens, Vermas, Rais and Narains were attracted to the gentry service opportunities under the Mughals which presented a ready template of literacy service,Footnote ²³ albeit under new rulers who bowed westwards and spoke the language of the Shahs.

Kayasthas also became known for adopting an Indo-Muslim lifestyle and availing themselves of service opportunities via patronage. But it is important to stress that they faced a limited degree of prejudice and condescension. The ulama, Muslim nobility and the Persian-poetic sometimes considered them ‘disloyal, cruel, cheats and extortionates [sic]’Footnote ²⁴ for their skills in exercising power via paper-management. Hindu munshis had sought-after skills, but they were still considered ‘lowly’ compared with the Muslim nobility. Mehta Balmukand, the Hindu munshi of Syed Abdullah Khan, whose family held immense sway at the Delhi court in the 1720s and 1730s, wrote that even though the Hindu pensman was indispensible for Muslim sovereigns, he was still a ‘humble wretch. . .impossessed of talent. . .who picks up the corns from the harvest-heaps of the masters of language’.Footnote ²⁵ Some scions of Muslim society and Mughal administration therefore kept these Hindus at a figurative and sometimes literal arms’ length.

India's various Brahmins, the more orthodox of whom largely looked down upon foreign-born Muslims and the Mughals as mlecchas (‘barbarians’), seem to have extended this to Kayasthas for their partaking in certain customary and cultural features of the Indo-Muslim world. Meat-eating and taking to drink, in Brahmin eyes, made them ritually impure.Footnote ²⁶ Their Persian skills, combined with their carnivorous tendencies, made them doubly suspect in the eyes of the orthodox. Kayasthas’ varna status was also contested as to whether they were dvija (‘twice born’) or whether they were of mixed Kshatriya and Shudra origin. Yet Kayastha lifestyles could also vary regionally. Bengali Kayasthas were far more ‘Brahmanical’Footnote ²⁷ in their lifestyles and customs with regard to diet, whereas Bihari and Awadhi Kayasthas took on much more of an Indo-Muslim lifestyle though dress, mannerisms and a shared affinity for sharab (wine) with scions of the Muslim nobility.Footnote ²⁸ And even though ‘Kayastha’ would not become a contested caste category until the later nineteenth century,Footnote ²⁹ what was more important before the 1870s was the functionality of a looser group of pensmen who identified with Chitragupta and the vocations of paper-oriented service.

This is all significant to our purposes here. Kayasthas might have been party to the Indo-Muslim world through service, literacy and paper, but they were never fully-fledged members of it. They were in close cultural orbit of the Mughal Court, but administratively in its far outer rings. And unlike various Rajput families, Kayasthas were never real stakeholders in the Court's workings. This further underscored the importance that Kayasthas attached to service and literacy, for a group which belonged to neither a Hindu nor Muslim religious elite, and who did not engage in military service, survival and adaptability were paramount. Another reason why these Kayastha pensmen appear to have inserted themselves so well into this Indo-Muslim cultural administration had, again, to do with their caste positioning. Muslim sovereigns obviously did not need Brahmanical ritual affirmation. This may have allowed Kayasthas, whose dvija status was already contestable, to have affixed themselves so easily to Muslim rule.

Learning, shared experiences and the limits of engagement

Kayasthas were further integrated into a shared experience with their Muslim peers through the forms of learning they pursued. They were exposed to the literary sinews of the Indo-Muslim world though maktabs, which were a key component in examining their cultural and service histories. Maktabs were the equivalent of primary schools, and were where they learnt the rudiments of basic Persian literacy through the great works of Sa’di's Gulistan (Land of Flowers), Firdausi's Shahnameh (Book of Kings), the Mirzanameh (Book of the Gentleman) and the Amundnameh (Conjugation of Persian verbs).Footnote ³⁰ Often starting at the auspicious age of 4 years, 4 months and 4 days,Footnote ³¹ they were taught by akhunds (instructors) to copy and compose shikasta and nastaliq. Writing was taught first, whilst reading and comprehension came later.Footnote ³² At a more practical level, various forms of siyaqi (accountancy) were also taught,Footnote ³³ which complemented the basic accounting skills they were taught at home. Kayasthas were also a major demographic in maktabs,Footnote ³⁴ where they learnt the skills of copying and writing, which were necessary for working in various Mughal departments.Footnote ³⁵ Kayasthas from Lucknow's environs, the lower Doab and Bihar, such as the Navreens, Rais, Vermas and Srivastavas,Footnote ³⁶ quickly gravitated towards maktabs as a means of entering service. The maktab, of course, was the only way through which these groups could learn Persian with any degree of regularity, and gain any ‘pecuniary advantages’.Footnote ³⁷

These learning experiences however were qualified ones. Unlike many literate Indian Muslims, Kayasthas did not prioritize a literary approach nor emphasis on the great works of Sa’di, Hafez and the great Persian littératures. The Mathurs, Saxenas and Lals of Bihar, for example, focused on the more vocational ends of maktab schooling. They received some exposure to these great Persian works, but for these scribal groups it seems to have been much more pragmatic. They engaged with the Indo-Muslim world of learning on their own vocationally oriented terms, gaining rudimentary skills such as accountancy, reading, and basic writingFootnote ³⁸ which enabled them to manage paper. What compounded this further was that Indian Muslim nobles and administrators specialized in accountancy and revenue management skills far less frequently, though a smaller sliver of lesser Muslim gentry service families and Kayastha converts to Islam did establish such traditions as accountants and paper managers. But in the main, these Kayastha scribes were a major demographic block when it came to manning the lower tiers of the late Mughal revenue machine. The Ashrafi, in contrast, seem to have invested more in the cultural and religious pillars of this Indo-Muslim administrative culture.Footnote ³⁹ By comparison, these humble officers were the vocational mortar of the whole edifice. One Sufi pir noted that whilst the ulama despised their influence, Islam's learned were unwilling to offer them posts of a more ‘worldly’ nature, noting that they were only fit to be qazis and sadrs—the Muslim nobility consigned themselves to the ghazal, mushaira and the Court.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet it must be stressed that these Kayasthas could only be so pragmatic. They sometimes aspired to reach the commanding heights of the Islam's poetic and powerful, but they could only rise so far in the circles of Muslim power. Most did not convert to Islam,Footnote ⁴¹ and combined with their lack of landed, military and religious prowess, this naturally limited their ‘administrative worth’.

The cultural and service histories of Hindustan's pensmen

By the end of Emperor Aurangzeb's reign (1707), Kayasthas had stitched themselves into a Mughal governing culture which was bound together by literacy, service and to a looser extent Islam. Much of this was made possible through their experiences in maktabs, which were a conduit for entry into various forms of service. It was not, it must be stressed, a regularized and formal connection between learning and service; but it was the most direct one. Practical skills such as siyaqi (accountancy) were becoming exponentially important for the Mughal revenue machine and for eighteenth century, more revenue-hungry regional states. It made possible the tabulation of jama (rent rates), bhujarut (the audit of accounts)Footnote ⁴² and turned the general wheels of revenue collection. By the 1600s, various Kayasthas had converted their skills into traditions of clerical service. They had acquired enough proficiency in using the wasti pen (shaped like a snake's tongue) and writing nastaliq and shikasta to gain positions such as qanungos (registrars), khufianavis (secret letter writers), akhbarats (newswriters), jamanavis (revenue reporters), shomarnavis (revenue accountants), petition-writers, peshkars (court readers), almads (record keepers concerning capital punishment, qatil) and as surveyors.Footnote ⁴³ Kayasthas excelled particularly in the art of manqualat (copying manuscripts), which itself became an almost proto-bureaucratic function by the late-seventeenth century. Manqualat was increasingly necessary in order to make duplicates of news reports, illustrated manuscripts and secret political intelligence for a paper-driven Mughal system. Yet most importantly, these officers and their skills helped the Mughal revenue machine to pincer deeper into the taxable agrarian hinterland. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Kayasthas became closely tied to the wheel-spokes of revenue management and governance.

North Indian Kayasthas held positions which were largely within the fabric of pargana (lowest subdivision) administration. They constituted what Irfan Habib has termed the ‘second layer’ of the revenue management in Mughal India.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bernard Cohn once suggested that Kayastha groups were marginal to precolonial forms of sovereignty and revenue management.Footnote ⁴⁵ But much of the evidence presented here suggests otherwise. The most common positions for Persian literate Kayasthas were the qanungo (land registrar) and the patwari (village accountant). They dealt more with the rudiments of revenue collection, land records and paper management, where their basic Persian literacy and copying skills were put to use. Indeed, their positions were reflective of the level and type of learning they acquired in the maktabs. The qanungo-ship was nearly, though not always ‘held by one of the Kaeith class’.Footnote ⁴⁶ They were responsible for maintaining a village registrar of paper records which included: accounts of every village in a pargana, demarcations and annexations of all lands, crop yields, annual revenue returns, records of all revenue payments, countersigned receipts of payments and registration of government documents. Creative writing here was not required, but copying and collating were. It is hard to gauge the consistency of these recordings, but evidence suggestsFootnote ⁴⁷ that it became much more regularized and paper-oriented in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The qanungo also worked closely with the local patwari (village accountant). The patwari focused almost solely on accountancy, and provided statistics to be collated by the qanungo. Patwaris were lower than qanungos in ‘rank’, partially because their occupation required less Persian fluency. But they still exercised considerable power at the local level of administration, for they were often only one of two ‘revenue-learned’ in an entire district. The Saxena Kayasthas of Farrukabad were a good example. They learnt Persian and served as qanungos and patwarisFootnote ⁴⁸ and helped to extend the arm of Mughal revenue-collecting power into regions such as Sikanderapur and Amritpur. These officers served as the ‘village enforcers’ of a landed Muslim elite whose authority stemmed from an armed military camp combined with kaghaz raj (‘paper rule’).

Kayasthas’ service histories were undoubtedly weighted towards lesser clerical service, which meant that they rarely became famed munshis and literary figures. They all engaged in what was considered munshi-gari (‘munshi-work’),Footnote ⁴⁹ but this was an appendage due to their skills in copying, accounts and an outward culture of pen and paper. Some non-Kayastha scribes such as Chandar Bhan, Anand Ram MukhilsFootnote ⁵⁰ and Ram Mulchand of DelhiFootnote ⁵¹ reached the height of Indo-Muslim administrative and poetic achievements through their mastery of Insha (which included the coding of dates of events with the numerical values of Arabic lettering),Footnote ⁵² but it was not a common trait amongst Hindustan's more lowly revenue managers. A telling example can be seen in a Persian commentary on early nineteenth century Awadh. In the township of Sultanpur, it was noted that there were few who could write Insha as khosh-khat (‘good writing’). The author Muhammad Faiq saw this seemingly trite skill as crucial to the legitimacy of a sovereign's court.Footnote ⁵³ He noted that most clerical Hindus were good at manqulat (copying manuscripts), but lacked the intricate skills of khatoot-navisis (handwriting) and were unable to communicate subtle, coded political messages. Hindu munshis, he wistfully observed, were in the main good at mokatabbat-e-munshianet (basic communication).Footnote ⁵⁴ Such broad observations were later echoed by British settlement officers in the eighteenth century, who noted that the ‘shrewd Kaith and putwaree’ who could still sign their name in the Persian script, were worlds away from the Muslim learned in the art of insha and sophisticated letter writing. But these former skills, rather than good writing, were what would ultimately matter most to the new farangis consolidating their domain in Bengal country.

In spite of being considered more ‘lowly’ than the Muslim nobility, and rarely reaching the heights of poetic and stylistic mastery, Kayasthas were still looser participants in an Indo-Muslim culture of governance. Their obvious Persian literacy, whilst rarely reaching the commanding heights of a mushair, translated into shared experiences with literate Muslims. For example the late eighteenth century eunuch of Faizabad, Jawahar Ali Khan, possessed a common bond with Munshi Lakshmi Narayan, which according to Khan distinguished them from the raiyat (who were ‘no better than cattle’).Footnote ⁵⁵ The Karkari Kayasthas of Bihari country were another example of those who had ‘seemingly adopted Islam’Footnote ⁵⁶ in their lifestyles as Persian-literate paper managers, whilst the Ambastha and Srivastava Kayasthas of the middle and lower Doab were, more crudely, known for spending more time with Muslims than Brahmins. Even Jhau Lal, a Saxena Kayastha who was Asaf ud-Daula's favourite naib (‘deputy’), was someone about whom people would ‘say [sic] he is a Muslim though he bares a Hindu name’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Kayasthas also appear to have adopted Persian and Arabic pennames over the centuries. These adaptations were not mere anecdote, for they enabled them to better navigate and become partially accepted within an Indo-Muslim circle of service and literacy.Footnote ⁵⁸ Examples included Raizada (‘Son of a Rais’, or ‘boss’), whilst more common adaptations included Umid (‘Hope’), Khush (‘Beautiful’, or ‘pleasant’), Gulab (‘Rosewater’), Mukhlis (‘sincere’), Daulat (‘wealth’, or ‘power’), Fateh (‘Victory’), Khushvaqt (‘beautiful time’), Ajab (‘of interest’), Farhad (‘elation’, ‘happiness’), and sometimes even the title Malik (‘chief’).Footnote ⁵⁹ The Karan Kayasthas of Bihari country, for example, learnt Persian, adopted Islamic pennames and served as qanungo paper managers in Tirhut.Footnote ⁶⁰ Individual qanungos such as Khushal Singh in the first decade of the 1800s drew upon service traditions in Ghazipur that reached back into the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶¹ Kayasthas also incorporated Islamicate terminology into their prayers. The qalam dauwat puja (pen and inkpot prayer) was a veneration of the skills and materials essential for a group which depended upon the patronage and good favour of sovereigns. These were all bound up with Kayasthas’ family status, honour and, most importantly, livelihoods, especially when income from landholdings or military service were neither large nor guaranteed.

Sufism was another experience which bound together these groups with the Indo-Muslim cultural world. The Rai Kayasthas of Lucknow, for example, maintained a tradition of attending qawwalis at the dargahs (‘Sufi tombs’) of Allahabad and Lucknow.Footnote ⁶² This fostered circles of association with the world of Indian Islam. The Verma Kayasthas of the middle Doab also participated in qawwalis. Some even held the position of Nazr-o-Niyaz (Collector of Wishes/Donations) at various dargahs.Footnote ⁶³ The Muslim reformer Shah Wali Ullah certainly had this in mind when he grumbled that ‘all [of India's] accountants and clerks [are] Hindus. . .they control [sic] the country's wealth’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Even Lakshmi Narayan had to plead with his Persian-literate Muslim readership that all the Hindu munshis, diwans, qanungos and khufia navis did not, as some members of the ulama claimed, represent infidelity over Islam.Footnote ⁶⁵ Of course, not all Muslims were devoid of accounting skills, as some families established careers in gentry service over generations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶⁶ But compared with Kayasthas, they were far less cohesive in terms of their occupational traditions as revenue managers.

Another reason why Kayasthas slotted comfortably into the Indo-Muslim cultural and service world had to do with their own traditions and how these overlapped with Islamic ones. Kayasthas’ patron deity, Chitragupta, was revered as the register and keeper of all deeds who maintained a ledger which would be opened at the end of time.Footnote ⁶⁷ This bore a resemblance, even if only on the surface, to the Islamic concept of Yawm al-Qiyamah (Judgment Day) with every individual being held accountable for their life's actions. This was another, though smaller, reason why Kayasthas fitted so easily into the implicit spiritual undertones of an Indo-Muslim culture. These were all religious and spiritual perspectives and experiences which enabled Hindustan's qanungos, patwaris and peshkars to become partial (though never full) members of an Indo-Muslim governing culture.

Munshi Daulat Rai Shauk was a prime example of such a pensman. Shauk's work, Jawahir-e-Manzoumeh va Merat al-Sarf (The Treasure of oral tales and the Mirror of Morphology), gives a rough genealogy of his family and their entry into the Indo-Muslim service world. Shauk's lineage suggests that families such as his drew upon a long-standing tradition of Persian literacy and paper service which reached back into India's precolonial past. Shauk's third removed grandfather was Raja Bhakari Das, a Kayastha who had roots in Bihari country from the early 1600s.Footnote ⁶⁸ Over the next few generations, they learnt enough Persian to work as farman navis (writers of orders) and in general correspondence for Muslim sovereigns. Later in the early nineteenth century, Shauk benefitted from the patronage of Nawab Muhammad Ali Shah (1837–1842) in Awadh, where Shauk wrote for the Beit ul-Insha ye Sultani (Department of Correspondence). The Nawab, as Shauk recalled, encouraged him to practice khosh-ghat (good writing), and Shauk wrote manuals for conjugating verbs (amundnameh) and Persian literacy for Lucknow's and Faizabad's learned in the 1830s. His Persian skills were so well-known that his Muslim peers commented on his unrivalled skills and suasion of the words which flowed from his pen. Yet Shauk was not just a literary man. He copied manuscripts for the Nawab, and also wrote secret correspondence in his dealings with the British and their intriguing, peering guests based in the Residency.

Munshi Lakshmi Narayan was another good example. From his brief history we can gain an insight into how and on what terms paper-managers navigated their cultural and service worlds. Born in Lahore, Narayan's father was Munshi Rai Ram, who had learnt Persian in a maktab. In the 1730s, Narayan migrated to an area of Delhi known as vakilpur and sought out employment. But his stay was cut short by Nadir Shah's invasion (1739) and Narayan fled to Aurangabad in Bihar, where he made acquaintances with one Kayastha, Rai Bahadur Sange.Footnote ⁶⁹ He encouraged Narayan to move to Lucknow and then to Faizabad, where in his third year he mastered the prized (and remunerative) art of Insha Footnote ⁷⁰ under the patronage of the eunuch Jawahar Ali Khan. Khan and Narayan both shared a common identity mark of literacyFootnote ⁷¹ which came from their experiences in the maktab and knowledge of the Shahnameh, Gulistan, and the Terikh Ferishta.Footnote ⁷² Narayan permeated the circle of the city's poetic and gentlemanly by attending ghazals, and was able to ‘write [sic] Persian with a degree of elegance and freedom so great that he was unequalled in his day’.Footnote ⁷³ Narayan also worked in Faizabad's revenue offices, and benefitted from Asaf ud-Daula's patronage, to the tune of Rs. 100 per month. Yet Narayan's work was also an indication of the types of literacy which were prioritized by Indian states by the mid-1700s. Narayan admitted that his poetic skills were scant and that his work Ruqat was simply a compilation of various scattered histories, statements, and khutba-rivaj (‘word of mouth gossip’).Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet these skills of compilation, cataloguing and collection represented a more practical engagement with political authority. It was one which, before too long, would take priority over poetry and Insha by the more literal-minded British.

Shauk and Narayan, though, were only the latest in a series of ‘proto-bureaucrats’ who supported the Shia Nawabs and other Muslim ruled kingdoms between Patna and Delhi. Ratan Singh (circa 1830s) was a Kayastha who served Nawab Muhammad Ali Shah (1777–1842) and whose grandfather had been the diwan of Asaf ud-Daula (1747–1797).Footnote ⁷⁵ Even regional upstarts such as Safdarjang (1708–1754) could rely upon the services of the Saxena Kayastha Nawab Rai,Footnote ⁷⁶ who helped Jung document military finance, extend cultivation and assessment in his efforts to consolidate his own regional domain. This trend of raising assessment and taxation, based upon paper records, was increasingly being made possible by such officers. They were central for maintaining the lineages between the agrarian world and the court in late Mughal India. Nawab Sa’adat Khan, for example, used the dauls (estimates) rolls of various Kayastha qanungos in the Baiswara region to raise the jama during the 1730s from Rs. 70 lakh to Rs. 2 Crores.Footnote ⁷⁷ Before British rule, paper authority was already vitally important for the late Mughal ‘fiscal expansive state’ and emergent forms of taxation and assessment.

Revenue and raiyat: the germination of bureaucratic administration, circa 1770–1830

The mid to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a period which saw increased scope for Indian sovereigns in documenting and tabulating authority through taxation and paper. These eighteenth century state formation processes were vital in vaulting Kayasthas into positions to mould regional politics and patterns of administration, even if they were far from the courts of power. Middling subordinate officers quickly realised that their skills in paper, penmanship and accounting were invaluable to any aspiring regional power, be they Nawabi, Maratha or British. If anything, the regionalization of Mughal power enhanced the political value of paper, pen and, by extension, those who were masters of such. It turned the ‘second layer’ of revenue administration into an almost primary one during the first five decades of colonial rule. What is remarkable is that between 1770 and 1830 so many of these scribes found a ready demand for their services not simply by creating themselves anew, but by drawing upon select skills which they had honed over generations. And it was in the period of the British penetration into north India's agrarian wealth after 1780 where these ‘lowly wretches’ would find the substantial increase in their political-fiscal utility. A close analysis of how the Company gained its grip on north India's agrarian wealth reveals that these pensmen helped to extend an agrarian tax base that would eventually fund Britain's Indian empire. The first few decades of the nineteenth century saw the early colonial state's revenue tentacles and the early formation of the modern colonial state.

Pre-British Awadh provides a good starting point for analysis, from which we can draw some initial comparisons. Richard Barnett, for example, has pointed to a general trend of increased cultivation and taxation in pre-British Awadh in which documentation and paper management expanded markedly.Footnote ⁷⁸ One particular Persian treatise, Insha-ye-Faiq, gives further insight into how revenue collection worked in precolonial mode. Muhammad Faiq, whose son Abdul Ahmad (d. 1851) later worked as a sheristadar for the British Resident at Lucknow,Footnote ⁷⁹ describes the middle Doab district of Sultanpur in the 1820s. Faiq argued that for any locale to be adabat (inhabitable, or civilized) the raiyat (peasants) needed to pay agricultural taxes. For this, sophisticated and accurate records were neededFootnote ⁸⁰ which documented who paid, when payments were made and, most importantly, who defaulted.Footnote ⁸¹ Prompt taxpayers were equated with dignity, and were subjects who glorified a Muslim sovereign. Faiq argued that non-payers needed to be ‘persuaded’ to pay with the arrival of 50 horsemen.Footnote ⁸² Yet Faiq also understood the powerful entrenchment and fabric of local society. It took time to persuade zamindars to reveal their full holdings, knowing full well that qanungos and patwaris played a mischievous role in helping them to shield their lands from the taxman. It is tough to gauge how consistent this was, yet it does seem that Awadh, like the Marathas and Ranjit Singh's Punjab, was moving towards more paper-based forms of political authority via increased agrarian taxation. And it is here were the histories of Hindustan's scribal groups come into focus.

The areas surrounding Awadh, which between 1770 and 1830 rapidly fell under Company rule, witnessed similar trends in enhanced revenue collection, which were made possible by north India's scribal groups. The Company worked with these paper-pensmen dynamics upcountry from Bengal, first in Benares after 1775, and then in the large swathes of Awadhi territory ceded in 1801 which wrapped around the remaining Nawabi domains. Northwest of Bengal the British by the 1780s knew pitifully little about the workings of revenue collection in the lush Gangetic plains, especially in townships such as Etawah, Kanpur, Allahabad and Farrukabad. The British gleaned some knowledge of the working of revenue from their experience in Bengal. But upcountry one of the main ways they worked the revenue machine was through an extant, looser group of officers and paper-managers who were the ‘go-to’ scribes of the early Company's fiscal claws. Jonathan Duncan's settlement of Benares District in the 1780s offers particular insight into the role these record-keepers played in the initial establishment of the Company's empire. Qanungos were some of the first recognizable officers the British worked with in order to enact legitimate (yet ruthless) rent demands. Paperwork and documentation were needed by the British to make such extractions of agrarian wealth possible. These records were also necessary for putting the Company's assessments on a legitimate paper footing. This paper obsession drove revenue administration. Duncan, for example, sought out jama records going back ten years as a basis for new negotiations.Footnote ⁸³ He tellingly noted in the early years of the Settlement that qanungos,

Duncan's correspondence with various Collectors in Benares District reveals an instructive role for these groups. He allowed the qanungos in the parganas outside Benares to determine and fix the rental rates for new pattas (leases for cultivation). This gave them a hand in shaping the local rates of assessment since they would serve as the ‘paper intermediaries’ between cultivators and the Company.Footnote ⁸⁵ The jama of 1787, which increased nearly 10 per cent, itself was based upon a modified base of qanungo records which Duncan procured.Footnote ⁸⁶ For disputes over land-holding rights, particularly for smaller zamindari holdings, ‘the general rule for deciding such cases was the doul or estimate of the Qanoongoe of the pergunnah. . .nothing could in general be fairer than this rule, and accordingly few of the complainants objected to it’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Even famed revenue-farmers such as Sheo Lal Dube of JaunpurFootnote ⁸⁸ could be frustrated by the ‘paper authority’ these qanungos could exert. Dube accused the Benares qanungos of forging dauls (estimates) which effectively took villages in Rauri out of his legal ownership.Footnote ⁸⁹ This led to a protracted paper battle between Dube and the qanungos which lasted through at least three harvests. Duncan, often enough, sided with the lowly pensmen. Some late Mughal revenue dynamics were even borne out. In learning the ropes of revenue collection, Duncan noted that ‘the Officers or Judges [of the Audalat] were Mussalmans, unacquainted with matters of revenue and whose habits and studies bore no affinity to such disquisitions’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Though simplistic, it still may have partially explained why the British, and their obsession with punctual and exact revenue, found qanungos, patwaris and their paper records so useful. Moreover, qanungos were abolished in Bengal after Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement.Footnote ⁹¹ This put a premium on these skills further upcountry, particularly in the Ceded and Conquered Districts. All of this quickly enhanced the revenue administrative worth of this looser group of precolonial officers. With the British seeking the most expedient form of sanction for their revenue demands, the cooperation of these humble officers—and the documentation they provided—were essential.

From Saharanpur in the north to Ballia in the east, and the townships which wrapped around Nawabi Awadh, qanungos were quickly attracted to the Company's paper-obsessive accounting and relentless drive for accuracy. Their Persian records and rolls were the foundations for settlement negotiations and rent assessments and, ultimately, the Company's fiscal might. In Etawah after 1803, Kayastha qanungos provided William Salmon with records that documented accurate jamas and kistibandis (arrangements for payment in installments) during the last eight years of Nawabi administration. Salmon noted that qanungos could already be considered the Company's first generation of ‘native Mofussil officers’ who helped enable the actual realization of revenue.Footnote ⁹² Another qanungo, Daulat Rai, provided Salmon documents which attested to the veracity of various parwanahs (written orders), jamas, and kistibandis.Footnote ⁹³ Salmon wrote of his desire to ‘know the state of the cultivations [in past years]’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Since they possessed jamabandis (revenue agreements), wasil baki accounts and historical rates of kharaj (revenue), it was perhaps unsurprising that Salmon admitted that ‘the realisation of the Revenue depends on the permanence of the office of [the] Qanongoe’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Allahabad was another area where Hindustan's paper-managers influenced the early patterns of revenue administration. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Allahabad's qanungos worked with various British Collectors and provided physical paper records and histories of revenue returns which served as a basis for negotiations with cultivators, tehsildars, zamindars and, particularly, those who held either inam (assigned as extra) or khas (assessment free) lands. One Collector, Edward Cuthbert, found them indispensible and noted that ‘at present the Qanoongoes. . .are the only constituted authorities to which to refer in questions of the Revenue of the Country and the only regular persons who keep the accounts of the receipts for the Pergunnah's [sic] actual produce’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The new Collector two years later, Richard Ahmuty, worked closely with Udai Rai and Khudai Lal, whom he called ‘absolutely necessary’Footnote ⁹⁷ in enforcing the measurement of land holdings via rods which ‘provide[ed] against sundry abuses and irregularities in the system of measuring the lands’.Footnote ⁹⁸ This in turn standardized the working of revenue collection. Of course, the British had a keen interest in peeling these officers over to Company governance. In the Allahabad District particularly, it was noted that one main service qanungos’ provided to reluctant zamindars was to shield their holdings from assessment by the Nawabs through outright paper manipulation.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was naturally in British interest to employ these record-holders and managers to help give factual sanction for their unrelenting taxation demands.

These extant officers could sometimes more forcefully assist the Company in ensuring payment of revenue. Udai Lal, the Kayastha qanungo of Singrauli, worked with a powerful Zamindar, Raja Adil Shah, to get the malguzars to enter qabooliyats (revenue agreements) with the Company in the late 1780s. These malguzars refused to recognize British authority, but ultimately yielded (and paid) after Lal suggested to the British Collector: ‘if you despatch a company of sepoys and a gun to punish the aforesaid rebels, the Government money will be realised’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Lowly masters of paper, who rarely graced the Mughal court, let alone the presence of either Cornwallis or Wellesley, were quickly becoming vital links between British power and Hindustan's agrarian wealth. The qanungo could sometimes exercise subtle, razor-like bureaucratic power. The Raja of Benares, Bulwant Singh, went as far as to destroy the qanungos’ records that contravened his claims to khas landsFootnote ¹⁰¹ which kept his revenue liabilities to a minimum. For the Raja, these physical papers, held by lowly paper-managers, were the only things which stood between himself and the fiscal authority of colonial government.

These agrarian revenue settlements, importantly, stimulated an extant political culture of paper to unseen degrees. Most new revenue regulations, guided by British frugality, made paper volume balloon. This in turn benefitted Hindustan's paper managers. In Farrukabad, they had to keep duplicate copies of all jamabandis (revenue agreements), which instantly doubled the circulation of paperwork in the pargana.Footnote ¹⁰² In the regions bordering Nawabi Awadh, British Collectors insisted on ten years’ worth of qanungo records for the mofussil bandobast (country settlement),Footnote ¹⁰³ which increased the scope for them to shape the emergent tax structures of British India. This also gave historical precedent to the base minimum of Company revenue demands. In 1806 Edward Cuthbert, the Collector of Allahabad, increased the number of ‘Persian and Hindoostanee writers’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ in his employment in order to grapple with the volume of land records needed for assessing land rates and historical yields. According to Cuthbert, in order for the British to fully realise revenue demands, paper and documentation on an unprecedented scale were needed. In Bundelkhand, zamindars were required to deposit duplicate copies of their paperwork and land records with the local qanungos.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The overall volume of government paper in circulation reached almost absurd heights. By the 1830s, as William Sleeman observed, the qanungo-ship had become infused with volumes of paperwork in which ‘records of great bulk are annually prepared which give the most minute details about every holding and each field’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From all this management, and extraction of India's agrarian revenue, can be discerned a few early trends. First, the beginnings of the modern Indian bureaucratic organization, which aimed to account for every ‘grain’ of India's wealth, and second, the early formation of the ‘colonial archive’,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ which documented land assessments, surveys and a critical mass of paperwork, later to be trawled by Indian Civil Service officers, historians, caste defenders and nationalists alike.

Paper records, landholding, and the extension of taxable cultivation

The qanungos, patwaris and peshkars who British Collectors first encountered were indispensable in collecting the Company's early revenue settlements. They also enabled the Company to consolidate its holdings more rapidly and efficiently than in other regional states by being able to extract more of India's agrarian wealth. Qanungo records, papers and accounts increasingly helped settle land disputes and proprietary rights after the 1780s. In Benares for example, Duncan gave qanungos the authority to eject zamindars and pattadars (leasing cultivators) who refused to enter qabooliyats (revenue engagements) with the Company.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Allahabad, a dispute broke out between a zamindar named Ganga Parshad and the British Collector. Parshad claimed his individual jama was Rs. 50 less than the previous year's. Cuthbert proceeded to consult the qanungo, whose papers demonstrated (and which Parshad tried hard to conceal from this new figure of authority) that Parshad relinquished his zamindari lands, which had in effect shielded him from the Rs. 50 liability. Parshad ended up paying when faced with this paper evidence.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In judicial cases, qanungo records often decided the difference between legitimate and spurious land claims.Footnote ¹¹⁰ And in places such as Kanpur and Allahabad their papers were used by British Magistrates in adjudicating suits over land ownership.Footnote ¹¹¹ Mohammadabad's tehsildars, for example, were ejected from their holdings and had their lands put up for auction on the basis of the inadequate documentation on which ‘they rest[ed] their claims to have the lands free of assessment’.Footnote ¹¹² Here, simple paper records were used to alter landholding patterns in order to maximize their taxable value for the insatiable British revenue demands.

These paper managers also facilitated bringing further agrarian tracts under cultivation and assessment. This increased the overall volume of taxable agrarian wealth for the early colonial state. Here, the question of how cultivation was extended, particularly out from major districts such as Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Etawah and Kanpur, sheds interesting light upon the working of this paper-oriented revenue system. Kayasthas paper-managers regularly provided the necessary information to penetrate deeper into Hindustan's agrarian wealth. In Benares, qanungos provided Duncan with soil information gleaned from their rolls that a further 5,000 bighas (roughly 4.8 square miles)Footnote ¹¹³ of new land could be farmed. Duncan quickly sanctioned this in the parganas of Dhoos KhasFootnote ¹¹⁴ and Bulea.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Kayastha qanungos helped identify wells and clearable jungle tracts in Kanpur, Allahabad, Meerut and Shahabad, scouring through kistbandis, revenue returns and land surveys.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In Etawah, Saxena Kayasthas were the main pivot in helping the British Collector to raise the jama by over 15 per cent in 1807.Footnote ¹¹⁷ They helped identify uncultivated lands, locations for well-digging and lands which had previously been unassessed. To the fiscally obsessive British, shielded lands might have amounted to tax evasion. In some cases qanungos helped boot out old Muslim families from their holdings. In Ghazipur in 1821, qanungos identified unassessed estates held by female descendants of old Muslim jagirs and brought them to the attention of the Collector Robert Barlow.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This brought a further 19 villages under taxable cultivation—the following year's jama was then ramped up by 20 per cent.Footnote ¹¹⁹ British Collectors largely worked with qanungo records because their ‘actual measurement generally gave [sic] a greater quantity [of assessed lands] than the [original] estimate’.Footnote ¹²⁰ These might have been smaller cases, but the cumulative effect enabled the British, perhaps aside from the Baiswara famines of 1833–1838, to pump out significant portions of Hindustan's agrarian wealth between 1770 and 1840.

Kayasthas, of course, stood to benefit from the extension of cultivation. They were the ‘mofussil officers’ in whom the British placed any vestige of trust regarding paper records and documentation. They would also be the main officers to manage the paperwork so valuable to the early colonial state. It elevated their importance in the eyes of India's new rulers who constantly had a ‘want of necessary records’Footnote ¹²¹ to tax as they saw fit. Andrew Cockburn, the Collector for Allahabad, noted that qanungos were ‘the only Mofussil Officers upon whose accounts any dependence can be placed and as they are fully capable of affording such useful information respecting the resources. . .of the different mehals’.Footnote ¹²² Their importance was further underscored by the fact that most zamindars who benefitted from the Permanent Settlement (1793) in Bihar maintained Kayasthas as diwans.Footnote ¹²³ Indeed the importance of this office, and the enforcement capabilities of the new colonial state, was cemented by the arm of law. In most parganas between Bareli and Patna, all dastaks (summons for payment) had to be drawn upon the qanungo daftar (qanungo's office).Footnote ¹²⁴ Revenue documents and the pensmen who possessed and managed them quickly became the legal teeth in the jaws of an extractive revenue machine. These agrarian settlements, the spearheads of modern, emergent forms of government, allowed Kayasthas to reassert their local influence under these paper-minded sovereigns from across the seas.

This extension of cultivation went hand-in-hand with a process of smaller-scale land acquisition by Kayasthas from the mid eighteenth century onwards. In the early days of the Company, they took advantage of increased assessment and paper-oriented government in order to register smaller holdings through their skills in paper-management. Their ‘land record manipulation’ reached such a noticeable degree that Munshi Ratan Chand, agent of Syed Abdullah at the Delhi Court in the 1710s, noted early on that ‘by fraud and force [Hindu scribes] had acquired rank beyond their deserts, and accumulated in their hands all the most profitable jagirs. . .after this the Hindus put every obstacle in the diwan's [treasurer's] way’.Footnote ¹²⁵ This might have been an overstatement, but Kayasthas were already translating their skills and vocations into consolidated landholdings, which were made possible by the ascendency of more paper-oriented administrations after the 1750s. This was achieved first under regional states, and later under the British more rapidly through the extension of taxable cultivation deeper into India's hinterlands. The extension of cultivation, after all, required paper-arbiters with local knowledge and rent rolls to make revenue collection actually work. And since they were ‘an important personage among an unlettered population’,Footnote ¹²⁶ Kayastha families were able to register disparate land holdings into a wider extended family and certify that such holdings were inherited. For example in the qasbah of Mainpuri in the 1830s, Kayasthas, the original Muslim owners of large jagirs, had codified their deeds and rights in the qanungo's registrar which gave their holdings legal sanction.Footnote ¹²⁷ The Collector, G. F. Edmonstone, allowed these qanungos to select their own gomashtas (agents) and to pay all patwari and chaukidar wages.Footnote ¹²⁸ This underscored Kayasthas’ ability to maintain local loyalty via paper and work the system to their own advantage. In some instances, qanungos exposed rent-free holdings which the British then quickly brought under cultivation and assessment. Many of these lands were held by old Muslim landed families. Unable to meet British revenue demands, some old families saw their lands fall into the management hands of the Kayastha pensmen, who often leased out the cultivation to revenue farmers. There was, though, a grain of truth in Chand's prior quibble. Since qanungos held the paper repositories upon which all revenue, assessment and land holdings were made, they were in the best position to shield and adjust these records to their advantage: whether via patronage or outright manipulation. Qanungos, after all, provided the stamp of officialdom on all public documents related to revenue. Few were in a position to question such authenticity.

Continuity and change in revenue administration

Early British agrarian settlements unleashed new forces of regularity into Indian revenue administration. Yet at the same time they lent weight to forces which encouraged an uneasy, though interdependent degree of both continuity and change. Firstly, there was undeniable change in the fabric of revenue administration under the early Company. By putting qanungos on a permanent and regular footing backed by Benares Treasury funds, the British welded these old officers to the emergent state. The skills of paper and revenue management became closely tied to state prerogatives. The Company achieved this by severing the links between qanungo appointments and their supervision by the amils (collectors). Amils in the eighteenth century had started compensating qanungos via monies and smaller land allowancesFootnote ¹²⁹ which replaced the system of direct salaries established under Emperor Akbar. British settlements outdid the amils by immediately paying qanungos from the Benares Treasury. This bound them to regulation. What British collectors constantly wrote of after the 1810s was to ‘continue the office of the Canoongoe. . .under a liberal system and appropriate regulation’.Footnote ¹³⁰ As early as the 1780s in Benares, Duncan achieved this swiftly by issuing new sanads (titles of recognition), salaries, and by ‘releasing [sic] them from any dependence upon the Amils over whom they stood as the natural and constitutional checks’.Footnote ¹³¹ By simply buying them out, the British immediately linked qanungos to the machinery of revenue collection and administration.

Qanungos were clearly indispensable to early agrarian settlements. But this came at the expense of other ‘old officers’. Amils, the equivalent of a ‘Collector’ before Company rule, initially worked well with British settlements. In large tracts of Awadh before 1801, amils acquired extensive local authority in bringing the raiyat to heel under the Nawabs and in enforcing payment.Footnote ¹³² But amils quickly lost out to qanungos, who in the eyes of the British were far more malleable. British settlement officers went straight for the ‘statistical jugular’ by bypassing a constellation of middling officials which had sustained localized revenue administration since Mughal times. The new British Collector theoretically negated the amil's very administrative existence. This was made official by Warren Hastings in Bengal after 1772. But this was also achieved by paying qanungos directly and regulating their pay. Between Bareli and Benares, British Collectors severed these links by issuing the qanungos salaries and making them take oaths to bear honest and impartial accounts under penalty of adharma (loss of dharma).Footnote ¹³³Amils were made irrelevant to the new working of revenue collection almost overnight, for they neither possessed records nor issued salaries to those who did. Chaudhuris and mirhads (‘headmen’) also seem to have lost out. For example in Etawah after 1803, it became clear that they were some of the first ‘native officers’ to be axed under the Company's new paper and economically-obsessed revenue demands.Footnote ¹³⁴Chaudhuris themselves were often powerful zamindars, but they had little management over the revenue papers that mattered to the British. This was particularly the case in Kumaon.Footnote ¹³⁵ And because they either possessed or were made to work with ‘any. . .paper relative to the public revenue’,Footnote ¹³⁶qanungos’ skills and training were exactly what was required to harness India's vast agrarian wealth. Often at a pen's stroke, the British shook up the fabric of revenue administration. Here, the ‘limited Raj’Footnote ¹³⁷ was invasive and intrusive, shaking up the fabric of an Indo-Muslim revenue administration which was premised on an interdependent constellation of officers and middlemen. The more literal-minded British possessed little patience for such complex and human-oriented methods of administration.

There were, though, important geographic variations in agrarian settlements. The salaries qanungos commanded often reflected regional demographics. Kayasthas were far more concentrated in the townships and villages of the middle and lower Doab. Further up the Grand Trunk Road, qanungos commanded higher salaries due to their limited availability. The Bareli qanungos Gulab Rai, Nathwud Misra Lal and Munna Lal received annual salaries of Rs. 1,500 under the Company.Footnote ¹³⁸ Some could earn as much as Rs. 4,800.Footnote ¹³⁹ Farther down country, they earned smaller sums. In Benares and Patna, their greater supply brought down average salaries, so the British could pick and choose. This region is where most of the ‘cutting down’ of excess ‘qanungo-ships’ took place. Here most qanungos commanded payment in the mid Rs. 600–800 range annually.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Whilst the British paid them less than they earned under Muslim sovereigns, Kayasthas were still paid lower salaries than the few Muslim qanungos, chaudhuris and tehsildars. The British quickly found the smaller number of Muslim paper managers ‘exorbitant in [their] demands for fees’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This made Kayasthas, who knew enough Persian to work the actual machinery of revenue, even more attractive and economical. Still, the effects could be uneven. The closer the British got to Delhi, the less frequently revenue proceedings were punctuated with the ‘Canoongoe's records’. Yet this still made Kayasthas as valuable as their counterparts farther down the Doab to a sprawling regime which based its initial legitimacy on the right to collect revenue.

There were pronounced degrees of change in early patterns of revenue administration under the Company. Yet there were still some marked threads of continuity which shaped this early fiscal-taxation regime, even if their outer wrappings had changed. Jonathan Duncan, for example, refashioned the Benares qanungos into ‘Native Registrars’Footnote ¹⁴² as early as the 1780s. He saw them as indispensable in realizing land revenue and managing their paper-oriented dominion. Duncan did trim down their numbers to 2 per pargana,Footnote ¹⁴³ but they clearly helped set the standards for revenue administration for the next two generations. Kanpur after 1803 was another example. Here, British Collectors were averse to ‘inherited’ qanungo-ships, which they interpreted as license for waste and inefficiency. Yet they were so valuable in providing the statistical underpinnings to legitimize revenue that numerous Collectors allowed their replacements to come from the same families: ‘where the [heir] of any Canongo may be found capable he should be preferable by the Collector in his nomination for the Sanction of Government’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ And since qanungos regularly self-taught their offspring the required skills of accountancy and paper-management,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ in addition to their maktab schooling, they adopted well to the bureaucratic and paper orientation of the Company. Kanpur's Kayasthas were already instructing their children how to work under the new Company in order to maintain the qanungo as an inherited position.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In other parts of north India, particularly those areas which would later constitute the upper United Provinces, qanungos were rebranded as ‘Native Registrars’ after the Mutiny and Uprising. Here, Kayasthas dominated the position deep into the colonial period.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The Rai Kayastha family of Lucknow provides a good example of both the change and continuity that many of Hindustan's subordinate paper-managers experienced after the late eighteenth century. Originally from Allahabad, the Rai family were a concentration of Kayasthas who since the 1600s had worked as revenue and paper managers. Prior to 1801, the Rai family served in Nawabi Awadh and later under the British after its annexation. Between 1801 and the 1850s, the Rai forefathers continued their work as managers of paper, serving as qanungos and patwaris in Allahabad and surrounding parganas.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Later, in the tumultuous events of 1857–1858, Paramasukh Rai witnessed events ceshmadid (with his own eyes) and was clearly alert to the political realities of post-1858 north India. He noted that qaum mussalman mevati aya karte the (Muslim authority had already vanished from Delhi) and he observed that the ashrafi would forever be changed by these events—the loss of lakhs and lands with the violent re-assertion of British authority. He observed that Muslim sovereigns did little to check the rise of British power, aur unko sarkar ne hidayat hua (their leadership had already gone the wayside) far before 1857.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The Rais continued with lakhsmi ji ki puja hoti thi (prayers to the goddess Lakshmi) for their continued good fortune and hoped that farangdilli (British-ruled Delhi) would look upon them with favour.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This suggested a horizon that still pointed towards Delhi and its Indo-Muslim past. After the mid-1860s, the Rai family moved west to Lucknow where they quickly filled the void left after the city's Muslim gentry and ashrafi elites had been spiritually and literally banished from Lucknow's inner areas of power. Paramasukh Rai, who prior to 1864 was a maroof (well-known, or famed) clerk in Allahabad, continued as a paper-manager under a new English-language administrative culture. He drew upon a longer history of Persian literacy and paper-management and his family seem to have made the adjustment to the English language rather quickly. Paramasukh's grandson, Sampal Rai, argued that they had to adjust to the new realities of power, mainly because their landholdings were miniscule by zamindari standards.Footnote ¹⁵¹ They continued with a looser, albeit diminished, tradition of Persian literacy, though it seems to have tapered off after the 1890s.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Paramasukh's descendants, munshis Jagpath Rai and Shivapat Rai, were the second generation educated in angrezi jyotifi (English knowledge). But they were still taught in hunar (art), ilm (Perso-Arabic rational sciences)Footnote ¹⁵² and worked as ‘Native Registrars’ in the North-Western Provinces Government. They established bonds of patronage under Captain Hamilton in Lucknow, whose connection was secured by Ittehfaq Rai. Ittehfaq also served as a personal secretary and record-keeper to Hamilton. After Independence, this same family produced university professors and members of the Indian Administrative Service.Footnote ¹⁵³ The family history of the Rais is in itself interesting. Whilst composed in Nagri, the manuscript is copiously laced with Persian phraseology and grammar, as opposed to vocabulary: kamtarin (smallest), yaddasht (notes), karnameh (book of work) and va (and, in addition).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This suggests that whilst they were changing into English literate clerks who wrote diaries and kept lime logs, Kayasthas continued to fashion older Persian and Indo-Muslim cultural elements deep into the colonial period.

By the turn of the twentieth century Hindustan's pensmen provided the mortar for the Raj's lower tiers of authority, maintaining their roles as India's ‘service classes’. It was from this looser group that many later nineteenth century literary, administrative and even twentieth century nationalist figures were drawn. Munshi Kali Prasad was a popular example. Born in Jaunpur (1840) to a Srivastava Kayastha family, he drew upon a longer tradition of service. His ancestors had served as qanungos from Akbar's time and his father worked under the early Company collating records of jama and property. Prasad was trained in Persian, Sanskrit and English. After completing his course at Queens College, Benares, he went on to become a Sub-Deputy Inspector of Schools in Allahabad District at the age of 18 (Prasad was also elected to the Bar in 1865).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Prasad founded the Kayastha Pathshala in 1873 and maintained associations with other Kayastha organizations such as the Kayastha Institute of Lucknow and the Kayastha Sadar Sabha.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Munshi Nawal KishoreFootnote ¹⁵⁷ was perhaps a more popular example, as was the literary figure Premchand. Even some of India's future nationalists would come from this heritage. Lal Bahadur Shastri and Rajendra Prasad both drew upon histories of literacy and service which they later used to organize Working Committee reports, correspond with fellow Congressmen and, ultimately, mobilize the raiyat against British rule. Others such as Krishna Sahay founded the Patna Law College and served in the Imperial Legislative Council in the 1910s. These organizations and associations also utilized the skills of pen and paper, already indispensible to the colonial state, and solidified Kayasthas’ reputation as the ‘service classes’ of Hindustan. William Crooke later noted that ‘among castes the best educated are naturally the Kayastha[s]. . .it supplies writers and accountant[s] to all classes of the community. . .as revenue officers. . .[and] keepers of registry of property’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Some even rose to the upper layers of service: in 1913 Kayasthas held 24 out of 41 Indian Civil Service posts reserved for Hindus.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ And whilst some Bengali Kayasthas became ‘new Vaishyas’ by establishing profitable businesses,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ their counterparts upcountry maintained their role as the ‘service classes’ of Hindustan, serving as functional intermediaries between bureaucratic political authority and people.