The below is from “An Empire of Books : The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India by Ulrike Stark”:
In its complexity it reflects the fluid nature and flexibility of jāti and varņa norms prevailing during the first half of the century, while also illustrating the emergence of caste consciousness and a more homogeneous ‘caste society’ in the second half. His story is in short that of a Dhusar turned Bhargava, involving a shift in varna affiliation from Kshatriya to Brahmin. While many of the actual forces at work in the process remain obscure, an attempt will be made here to trace this development in its successive stages.
What renders the issue of Naval Kishore’s caste even more complicated is a widely prevailing notion that he was born in a family of North Indian Kayasthas. While Nurani (Nurani 1995: 20) and with him several Western scholars seem to unquestioningly accept this notion. I have not come across any conclusive evidence in support of it. There is a conspicuous absence of references to Naval Kishore’s caste in contemporary sources pre-dating the 1880s, with the single exception of an entry on the title page of the first Sanskrit book published from the NKP.a Bhāgavata Purāna edition of 1869. which expressly refers to Naval Kishore as being ‘born in a family of Kshatrivas’ (ksatrivyakule jātah). It can be assumed with some certainty that the publication, being an important one, went through Naval Kishore’s own hands and that the statement found his implicit consent, reflecting the family’s self-perception as Kshatriyas. From this it could indeed be inferred that he was a Kshatriya Kayastha, as many Upper Indian Kayasthas had begun claiming Kshatriya status at the time.
Yet Kayasthas were by no means the only ones to claim Kshatriya descent: various merchant castes also did so. As Kuar Lachman Singh noted in his Historical and Statistical Memoir of Zila Bulandshahar in 1874: “The Banias are now considered pure Vaisya, although the majority of them claim their descent from Kshattri progenitors’ (Singh 1874: 167). Nor does the fact that Naval Kishore maintained close links with the Lucknow Kayastha community automatically make him a Kayastha. In the 1870s several important pamphlets on Kayastha caste history and the controversial issue of the community’s varņa affiliation were printed at his press. Significantly, not one of these texts identifies the publisher as a Kayastha. Furthermore, if Naval Kishore’s Kayastha affiliation were true, it is surprising that there is not a single reference to his subcaste in either private or official records. In view of the fact that North Indian Kayasthas generally identified themselves by one of their twelve subdivisions, this silence in contemporary documents seems odd indeed. British records of the time make no mention of Naval Kishore’s caste, while extant late nineteenth-century biographies fail to provide any conclusive evidence on the question, for they are works commissioned at a later point in time when Naval Kishore’s identity as a Bhargava Brahmin was already consolidated.
- 7 See Carroll 1978: 233-50.
It is only from the 1880s that we are on firmer ground. From that time various documents can be found which expressly identify Naval Kishore as a member of the Dhusar (dhūsar, also: dhūmsar), and subsequently, Bhargava caste. The Dhusars of the NWP constitute an interesting hitherto little-studied instance of an upwardly-mobile North Indian merchant caste. They were a traditional trading caste whose homeland lay in the region of Gurgaon in Haryana (then Punjab), with Rewari as their main religious centre. From there the community migrated to the towns of the NWP where, much like the Agarvals, they entered into trade with the colonial rulers. This migration seems to have taken place in the early decades of the nineteenth century, leading to high concentrations of Dhusars in the towns and trading centres of the north-west: Kanpur, Mathura, Farrukhabad, Fatehpur, Jaunpur, Hamirpur, and Lucknow. Reverend M.A. Sherring, in his Hindu Tribes and Castes as Represented in Benares (1872), remarks that “Their occupation, like that of the majority of Vaisyas, is trade and commerce; some take to the profession of soldiers. Under Mahomedan rule the caste was in a flourishing condition” (Sherring (1872] 1974: 293). A quarter century later, the ethnographer William Crooke described the Dhusars as a ‘rising, ambitious, thriving class, excellent clerks and men of business’(Crooke). The Mathura Dhusaras, especially, were known for their great wealth and influence.
- 8 The 1865 provincial Census counted a total of 4239 members of the ‘Dhoosur’ community. Census of the NWP 1865, vol. r: General Report and Appendices, Allaha bad 1867, app. B: 22-3. The ‘Dhusar Baniahs’ of Sahranpur district were said to have come from Rewari about 1840 (Elliott 1859: 284). See also Census of India, 1891, vol. XVIII: The NWP&Oudh, pti, Allahabad 1894.
- 9 By contrast, the Dhusar-Bhargavas did not take to Western education. The 1891 Census, in its tables showing ‘Education by caste and religion’ lists only 77 out of a total of 6557 male adults as having received an English education. Literacy among female caste members was almost nil.
Excellence in penmanship was a distinctive feature of the Dhusar community. Their scribal tradition and a shared history in clerical and service employment put them in close proximity with the Kayasthas, a circumstance that may explain why Naval Kishore is often taken to be a Kayastha. His family background perfectly corresponds to the following description of the Dhusars given by India’s eminent anthropological scholar Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya:
The Dhunsars are found chiefly in the Gangetic Doab, between Delhi on the west and Mirzapore on the east. There are many big landholders among them. They take their name from Dhusi, a flat-topped hill, near Rewari, in Gurgaon. They are all Vishnuvites, and there are no Jains among them. They do not devote themselves entirely to trade: In fact their chief profession is penmanship, and they combine in themselves the office aptitude of the Kayasth, with the Baniya’s capacity for mercantile business. Under Mahomedan rule, they occasionally filled many high offices of State. Under the present regime a good many of them hold such appointments in the public service as are open to the natives of this country now. (Bhattacharya (1896) 1968: 169-70)10
- 10 Bhattacharya evidently drew on the heavily biased account in the British Settlement Report, which identified the Dhusars as ‘mostly hard landlords and wealthy men’ and described them as combining the office aptitude of the Kayasth with the keen scent for money making and the flinty hard-heartedness to a debtor characteristic of a Banya (cited in Crooke 1974: 302).
The Dhusars are a prime example of an upwardly mobile trading caste for whom the colonial market economy meant growing prosperity and local influence. Their newly-achieved affluence, in combination with their importance in Mughal and subsequently colonial service enabled them to claim Brahminical descent. Tracing their genealogy to the mythical rsi Bhrgu, they adopted the name Bhargava, thus positioning themselves in the fold of the ancient Brahminical clan of the Bhrgus or Bhargavas, ‘descendants of Bhrgu’.11 This process of social mobility was initiated in the 1870s, a time of heightened caste and varna consciousness, demonstrated by the example of Kayasthas, Kashmiri Brahmins, and various other communities. At first the Dhusars’ claim to Brahminical status did not go uncontested by other Brahmin castes. In 1874 Kuar Lachman Singh reports that
This clan was always reckoned in the Bania division … [b]ut now they lay claim to a place in the Brahmanical list. They have made out several stories in support of the claim, but none of them is admitted by true Brahmans. Having failed in inducing the other castes to call them Brahmans, they have adopted a new name for their caste, viz. Bhargava, or descendants of Brigu [sic] …’ (Singh 1874: 169)
11 In ancient Sanskrit literature the Bhrgus come to prominence in the Mahābhārata, a major repository of Bhargava mythology and genealogy. V.S. Sukthankar was the first to discuss the formative influence of the Bhargavas upon the development of the surviving redaction of the great epic, a process for which he coined the term ‘Bhrguization’ (Sukthankar 1936). His views have been discussed by R.P. Goldman in his seminal study of the Bhrgus and Bhargava mythology in the Mahābhārata (Goldman 1977).
Merely two decades later the community’s Bhargava affiliation was widely accepted. Crooke, writing in 1896, states: “Their pretensions to Brahmanical origin are admitted by Brahmans themselves, and they are now usually known as Bhārgava or “descendants of Bhrigu” … In the hills they appear to be in some places Banyas and in others Brahmans’ (Crooke (1896] 1974: 301). Evidence for the caste’s transitory status during the period 1870–1900 is also afforded by the British Census reports. Whereas the 1865 and 1872 Census of the NWP still classified the Dhusars as vaishyas or baniās, both the Punjab Census of 1883 and the NWP Census of 1891 had extrapolated the ‘Dhusar-Bhargavas’ from the list of baniā castes, listing them as a separate category instead.12
- 12 Due to the similarity in names, in the 1872 Census the British data collectors committed a serious blunder by mixing up the Dhusars with the low-caste community of the ‘Dusar’ or ‘Dúsádd’ (dusārh). The resulting statistics were grossly incorrect. D. Ibbetson in the 1883 Punjab Census noted about the Dhusars: ‘They are of Brah minical origin, as is admitted by the Brahmans themselves, and it is possible that some of them may have recorded themselves as Brahmans in the schedules. Indeed, I find 1600 Dhusar Brahmans returned… but whether these are the same men as the Dhunsars of Rewari, I cannot say … They are almost exclusively clerks or merchants, though, like the Khattris, some of them have risen to eminence in the army, and the Court.’
At an individual level the process is paralleled in Naval Kishore’s transition from Dhusar to Bhargava, as evinced in the title pages of several NKP Hindi and Sanskrit publications of the 1880s: while up to the early 1880s the publisher is usually eulogized as an ‘adornment of the Dhusar lineage’ (dhū(m)sar-vamśāvatamsa), from around 1883 the corresponding entry reads ‘adornment of the Bhargava lineage’ (bhārgava-vamsāvatamsa).13
- 13 See, e.g., the NKP Hindi translations of the Linga- and Bhavisyapurāna (1881), which identify Naval Kishore as a Dhusar. Moreover, the former title refers to him as Munshi Naval Kishore Varma. The earliest references to his Bhargava caste affiliation can be found on the title pages of the Caurāsi bārtta (1883) and the NKP Hindi prose version of the Mahābhārat (1886).
Following a typical pattern of nineteenth-century caste formation, the new caste status was consolidated by the establishment in 1889 of a national caste association, the Akhil Bharatiya Bhargava Sabha or All India Bhargava Conference. As will be shown below, Naval Kishore played a key role in this process. 14 (- 14 For a general debate of caste consciousness and the emergence of caste associations in the late nineteenth century, see Carroll 1978: 233-50. ) The community established its headquarters in Mathura; several smaller Bhargava Sabhas began operating in Agra, Sahranpur, and Jaipur. Of these, the Jaipur Bhargava Sabha appears to have been the oldest and most vibrant-it is recorded to have launched an Urdu monthly called Rudād-e Bhargava Sabhā as early as 1882.15 Later it maintained a caste journal in Hindi, Bhärgava Patrikā. The Jaipur Sabha was also instrumental in supplying British ethnographers with the caste’s own account of its history, which highlighted the historical importance of Bhargavas as family priests and ministers to Hindu kings. In its 1970 special issue on Munshi Naval Kishore, Bhārgara Patrika provides a detailed family pedigree, identify ing him as belonging to the Bhargava Sharma lineage, Cyavan sub-line age, Gaur Brahmin sub-branch, and Dhusar Bhargava Brahman division of the sub-branch. According to this account, the religious affiliation of the family was that of Sanatana Dharmis (Bhargava 1970: [24]).
- 15 RPIR 1882: 188.
- 16 Traditions within the caste regarding its origins and pedigree vary. For the dominant tradition, which traces the caste back to Bhrgu’s son Chivan (Skrt. Cyavana). see Kishori Lal, ‘Essay to be read before the Annual Bhargava Conference regarding the origin of the name of Bhargava and Nautor’, Jaipur 1916 (OIOC, VT 3890a, in Urdu).
- 17 “The practices of both Brahman and Baniya Dhusars are the same, and in one point both differ from ordinary Hindus. They take their food before puja or morning prayer, whilst ordinarily all perform their puja first and then eat. Of late years, however, they have begun to adopt the more orthodox custom. They do not eat animal or other prohibited food, nor do they drink spirits. They worship the orthodox deities and consider Brahma, Siva and Vishnu as one god under different forms, The Brahman Dhusar marries with his caste fellows, and the Baniya Dhusars with Baniya Dhusars, avoiding always the same gotra or a family having the same favourite deity” (Atkinson [1882] 1973: 443).116
Like the majority of north-western trading castes, the Dhusars were Vaishnavas. Their ascent to Brahminical status was accompanied by a strict adherence to orthodox and dharmic regulations. This process of Sanskritization’ was described by E.T. Atkinson in his Himalayan Gazetteer (1882) for the Dhusars of the hill regions, and corroborated by Crooke for the community living in the plains: ‘They regulate their lives by the most orthodox rules of Hinduism and are particularly careful in the observance of Hindu ceremonies’ (Crooke [1896] 1974: 302-3). The Sanskritization of the Dhusars also entailed the construction of a textual tradition along Sanskritic lines, of which the Dhūsi-mahātmya (1901), composed by one Mathuraprasad Bhargava, provides a typical example. Naval Kishore was to make his own distinctive contribution to the promotion of the community’s literary heritage in seeing the works of the eighteenth-century Dhusar sant poet Charandas into print.
Naval Kishore’s family boasted a tradition of Hindu scholarship, his grandfather and father were known as Sanskrit pandits. The young Naval Kishore, too, was trained in the Sanskrit scriptures and was sometimes addressed as Pandit Naval Kishore before he came to be generally known as Munshi Naval Kishore.