topics: |  india | bengal | social | marriage

Excerpts

Bengali kula-pan~jikAs

The genealogical records of the Brahmans and Kayasthas, the major sources for
this study, are referred to in Bengali as kulaji, kula-kArikA, or
kula-pan~jikA, all of which terms mean "book of clan rank". These texts,
written either in Bengali or Sanskrit, were not the property of individual
families but the corporate property of the subcastes and were recited,
usually from memory, on the occasions of weddings and kept up to date by
professional genealogists (ghaTakas).
Their contents were judged for accuracy at the time of recitation by the
persons of the subcaste assembled for the wedding, and their contents had to
be approved before the genealogists received remuneration.  p.2

kulajis were divided into three sections (prakaraNas):

 - first, relating the "creation of the clans" (kula- srsti), beginning
	with the creation of the world and ending with the division of the
	Brahman and Kayastha castes of Bengal into their territorial
	subcastes and the arrangement of the clans into high and low at the
	outset of the middle period (ca. 1500).
 - second section: codes of the clans: (kula-kArya, kula-karma,
	kula-dharma, DhAkuri) - mostly to do with the rules (vidhAna) for
	kanyAdAna, and also the honorific gifts (paNa) to be made on the
	occasion of marriage.  Rules based on skt texts - dharma-shAstras
	etc.
 - third section: genealogy : births (vaMsha) and marriage (aMsha, karma) -
	largest portion - 50-100 manuscript folios - over ten to twenty
	generations in the middle period.  Sometimes the villages where they
	lived; but very seldom their livelihood (vr^tti) - but moral
	evaluations of the marriages - whether it brought sammAna or apamAna
	or prashaMsA etc.

nagendranAth vasu  [early 19th c. bengali scholar; author of the 22
vol. bAnglA vishwakosh, and a dozen other texts,banglapedia ]
was probably the most important of the Bengalis who did research on caste
history.  Although many of his arguments about the origin of the kAyasthas
of Bengal cannot be taken too seriously, I have relied heavily on the
hundreds of texts which he collected and published in his extensive history
of the castes of Bengal, vaMger jAtiya itihAsa.  After his death, the
historian RC Majumdar, VC of U. Dacca, bought for the university most of
the manuscripts that Vasu had collected.  It is these manuscripts which
form the foundation of this study. p.4

The early British ethnographer Denzil Ibbetson observed in 1881 that the
"tribes" (clans) in the higher castes of PunjAb - brAhmaN, rAjput, and khatri
- were ranked high and low and that the pattern of marriages between clans or
lineages of equal rank differed from that obtaining between clans of unequal
rank.  Ibbetson was the first to use use the terms "isogamy" and "hypergamy"
to refer to these two patterns: 

    They also may be referred to two laws, which I shall call the laws of
    isogamy and hypergamy.  By isogamy or the law of equal marriages, I mean
    the rule which arranges the local tribes in a scale of social standing
    and forbids the parent to give his daughter to a man of any tribe which
    stands lower than his own.  By hypergamy or the law of superior marriage,
    I mean the rule which compels him to wed his daughter with a member of a
    tribe which shall be actually superior in rank to his own.  In both
    cases a man usually does not scruple to take his wife or any rate his
    second wife from a tribe of inferior standing. 
		- [Denzil Ibbertson, Punjab Castes, 1916, pp.23-24]

Western attempts to understand caste as aristocracy

[Western scholars' attempts] to understand clan rank in
terms of an aristocratic model rooted in European cultural concepts, but
"modified" to take into account Hindu concerns for purity and ritual
status, looked more and more like Ptolemy's attempt to account for the
motion of the heavenly bodies by adding epicycles. - p. 8

Eurocentric distinctions:
	ritual / religious / ceremonial  vs
	secular / political / economic
were distinctions that Brahmans and Kayasthas appeared not to make, at
least not in the same ways.

e.g. emphasis on the concept of "pure" and "impure".
     centrality of the Hindu concern for the body.
     no distinction between natural substance and moral code - i.e. the
	   code of conduct is determined by (inherited in) the bodily substances.

Thus the cultural connotations of bAngla concepts jAti and kUla are
much broader than and also different from conventional "caste" and "clan".
These criteria are in fact much closer to the natural units used by
biologists to classify plants and animals...  p.9