Legal Limbo and Caste Consternation: Determining Kayasthas’ Varna Rank in Indian Law Courts, 1860–1930
Keywords:
colonial law, India, caste rank, varna, Kayasthas, Hindu law, inheritance disputes, dvija, twice-born status, colonial courts, legal history,Abstract
This article explores how colonial law in India interacted with the construction of caste
rank (varna) between 1860 and 1930. It specifically tracks contestations over Kayasthas’
legal varna rank in northern and eastern India through various inheritance disputes,
threading them together to shed light on how courts sought to anchor their interpretations of Hindu law around the Indian jurisprudential conceptions of varna. It examines
the successes and failures of Kayasthas to have favorable legal rulings that would uphold
their status as “twice-born”/dvija, demonstrating that colonial law was limited in its
ability (and often indifferent) to construct caste ranks. Inconsistent ruling in provincial
courts pushed Kayasthas to seek taxonomic recognition as “twice-born” in the colonial
census, demonstrating how colonial law and taxonomy intersected in novel ways. This
article argues that by taking a novel approach to Indian social history through the prism
of law, we can enrich our understanding of how modern notions of caste and social rank
were constructed in colonial India.
References
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Unfortunately, the pandit's name is not mentioned in the summary of the proceedings.
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Mitākṣarā is a “school” of jurisprudence within dharmaśāstra that is predominant in northern, southern, and western India, with various “sub-branches.”
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Adoption in Indian/Hindu tradition has a rich history compared with Islamic and Common Law. The former was largely not permitted in Muslim personal law. In Common Law, adoption was only legally recognized in 1926. For twice-born/dvija families, adoption was jurisprudentially permissible for a practical reason: continuing the patrilineal line of the family. The son usually had to be from a comparable varna or of a comparable social standing, and the adoption normally had to come through male lineages. Varying opinions existed over how much of a share an adopted male heir could claim of an estate, hence the debates over the 1878 suit.
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Harakh & Jaimangal vs. Musammat Subdha and Alopa Mirzapur, cited in Kayasthsa Samachar, 96; Kayastha Samachar, July, 1901, 65–98.
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29
The “Hindu Joint Family” as a legal entity.
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The references to a “school” of Mitākṣarā was common in Anglo-Hindu law, but there are various disagreements among scholars as to whether it was a distinct “school.” See Ludo Rocher, “Schools of Hindu Law,” in India Maior: Congratulatory Volume Presented to J. Gonda, ed. Johannes Ensink, Jan Gonda, and Peter Gaeffke (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 167–76; and, recently, Christopher Fleming, Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), ch. 2, 5.
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Raj Coomar Lall.
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Ibid., 691.
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Ibid., 693–94.
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For further discussion about the Dāyabhāga “school” of jurisprudence within dharmaśāstra that has been predominant in Bengali-speaking regions of eastern India, see Fleming, Ownership and Inheritance, ch. 3, 5.
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Sapiṇḍa relationships were classified for both living/blood relationships and also funerary ones. This was a matter of dispute between the Dāyabhāga and Mitākṣarā “schools” of jurisprudence. See Fleming, Ownership and Inheritance, ch. 1–3.
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Ibid., 693–94.
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Ibid., 695.
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Kayastha Samachar, August, 1901, 173; Nabaparna Ghosh has recently worked on Bengali Kayasthas, fashioning a Bengali cultural nationalism; see Nabaparna Ghosh, “Inheriting Caste: The Judicial Construction of Bengali Kayastha Caste Identity in Inheritance Settlements in Colonial Calcutta,” South Asian History and Culture, accessed July 5, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1086/679411.
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42
One reason that Bengali Kayasthas were treated separately seems to have been the application of different legal “schools” between north India (Mitākṣarā) and Bengal (Dāyabhāga). These “schools” were distinctive in their commentary on two different texts: the Mitākṣarā was a commentary on the Yājñavalkyasmṛti, while the Dāyabhāga was a Bengali monograph on inheritance by Jīmūtavāhana (twelfth century). As to debates over the distinction between the two “schools,” Robert Lingat and Ludo Rocher interpreted Henry Colebrooke's classification of distinct Hindu legal “schools” as a foreign imposition, but more recent scholarship has argued that these schools of jurisprudence predated the British in some form. See Lingat, Robert, The Classical Law of India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Rocher, “Schools of Hindu Law,” 167–76; and recently, Fleming, Ownership and Inheritance.
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Home Dept/No. 45/30/Public, “Sub-Castes of Kayasthas in the Forthcoming Census,” December 21, 1931, National Archives of India, New Delhi (hereafter NAI).
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