Chapter 9 dradharma and legal treatments of caste

Ananya Vajpeyi

Introduction

dradharma, literally, dharma for the dra, is an old topic in the Dharmastra, part of the standard list of topics in dharma texts from the earliest period. From 1350 to 1700 CE we find a number of texts in the genre of the dharma-nibandha (digest on dharma), devoted wholly and solely to the topic of dradharma. We are able to locate several of these texts, especially those produced between 1550 and 1680 CE, a period conventionally designated as late medieval, though it is increasingly referred to as early modern. I call this corpus the “dra archive” (Vajpeyi 2004). The dharma-nibandha was a genre of text produced profusely, with much royal patronage, all across Deccan India from the early twelfth to the late sixteenth century (Table 1). As the name of the genre indicates, these texts were compendia of earlier materials on various topics in dharma. The dradharma-nibandha is a subgenre within this larger category of text.
The dra archive is interesting for many reasons. It is produced in a limited period of time, and that, too, relatively late in the history of the Sanskrit literature on dharma (Table 2). Unlike most of the early works on dharma, for this corpus we are able to find historical authors, and to tell where the texts were written. This level of historicity is simply not available for the bulk of the Dharmastra. Second, we see here one of a long list of topics gain salience and become the subject of book-length treatments. Questions arise: Why dradharma? Why did this topic suddenly become so important as to merit entire digests, and why at this time and not earlier or later? What do the choice of subject matter, and the choice of textual genre in which to process it, tell us about the dra archive? Why were late medieval Brahmins (and Brahmins alone) writing legal digests about the dra?
A third reason that makes the dra archive intriguing, besides its unprecedented historicity and its novelty, is one of its authors, and possibly
Table 1 Dharma-nibandha and smti-bhya texts in the Deccan: early twelfth to late sixteenth century. These digest texts treat a variety of topics within the broad rubric of dharma (from Ranbaore 1974).
Table 1
its last great exponent, Ggbhaa. This man not only wrote in the genre of the dradharma-nibandha, he also wrote about rjadharma, the dharma of the king, kyasthadharma, the dharma of the Kyasthas (a caste of scribes and accountants), and about jtiniraya, the adjudication of matters pertaining to jti (caste). He performed the rjybhieka or the royal consecration of the first Maratha ruler, Shivaji (1630–80 CE), in 1674 CE. Shivaji was a dra warlord who had to be made into a Katriya king, and it was Gg who improvised the rituals and composed the justificatory texts necessary for this transformation (Vajpeyi 2005).
In addition, since his scholarly and ritual work made him an authority on dharma as it was to be determined and apportioned according to vara and jti, throughout his life Gg presided over legal disputes between members of different castes. The personality and activity of Ggbhaa, no doubt one of the most important intellectuals of the Sanskrit world at the end of the medieval period, enlivens the history of the dra archive. Singling out this arcane topic from the plenitude of Sanskrit textuality, Gg brings it to our notice more than three centuries later. If the eighteenth century brings us to the death of Sanskrit, as S. Pollock (2001b) describes it, then the work of Ggbhaa is surely one of the dying breaths of this knowledge tradition.
Table 2
a No details are available; note that “dra” does not appear in the title.
b This text is noted in the Anup Sanskrit Library Catalogue. I suspect it is just a late copy of Vivevarabhaa’s text of the same name that was in fact produced in the mid-fourteenth century under the patronage of King Madanapla (see the second entry in Table 2). Calling someone “Ryamadanapla” is just the same as saying “King (= Rya) Madanapla,” and I would hazard that the original author and original patron have been conflated in the later copy.

Philology

The dradharma-nibandha texts, especially the longer and more elaborate ones, by Kaea, Kamalkarabhaa, Dinakarabhaa, and Ggbhaa, tend to follow a certain pattern in terms of topics covered. Since “dradharma” means “dharma pertaining to the dra,” the broadest questions to be addressed in these texts and providing their organizational logic are: (1) Who is a dra? (2) What is his dharma? Answering (1) means asking:
(i) What is vara and who has it?
(ii) What is dra-vara and who has it?
To answer these questions, the texts generate long lists of types of persons who do not have vara: these are the antyaja category (last-born or outcaste), some of whom count as equivalent to dra (dra-samna), while others are inferior. Women, notably, are dra-samna across the board, on account of the a priori parity between the woman and the dra (str-dra-samnat). Proposing definite answers to (i) and (ii) above entails a discussion of what vara is (varatva), and of the essence of the four vara categories – brhmaatva, katriyatva, vaiyatva, and dratva.
Rules governing marriage (vivha), endogamy (savara-vivha), hyper- and hypogamy (anuloma / pratiloma), miscegenation (sakara / varasakara / jtisakara), sexuality, and the status of women, as the constitutive elements of a patriarchal caste system, must then be thoroughly explicated and debated. Taxonomies of mixed castes, together with their male and female parentage, their alternative names, their proper as well as optional professions, and any other typical characteristics are set out, usually in the very beginning of the dradharma text. The taxonomies of miscegenation have a generative aspect (utpatti) as well as a determinative or classificatory aspect (niraya). The mechanical mixture of mixed castes produces an almost uncontrollable proliferation of subgroups (sakrasakara). Like women, those of mixed caste also have either parity or inferiority with respect to the dra, and are designated dra-samna, ati-dra, antyaja, sat-dra / asat-dra, and other micro-classifications.
Most sdradharma digests are devoted to question (2) above: What is the dharma of the dra? The answer lies in numerous dos and don’ts associated with the rituals a dra must perform. In this sense, “dharma” becomes synonymous with “saskra,” and the minutiae of the various daily, monthly, annual, periodic, and life-cycle rituals prescribed for the dra extend into pages and pages of text. These portions of the dra archive are curiously static. On the one hand, we cannot tell if we are looking into the seventh or the seventeenth century, so suspended is this discourse in the timeless ether of Brahmin normativity. On the other hand, it is marked historically, because modern Indians know immediately that what they are looking at is the past, not the present. Apart from a few rites associated with major life events – birth, naming, marriage, and death – few Indians of almost any caste inhabit any longer a living, coherent social world wherein these rituals make sense.
To attempt to write the history of dharma in the narrow sense of life-cycle rites (saskra) is premised on the apprehension of a lapse in cultural memory that is disquieting. Some epistemological break has occurred in our history to inhibit us, indeed debar us, from entering in our imagination the universe where it might have mattered to someone whether or not he had the capacity to perform a certain ritual of dradharma in a certain way. Of course, one may question whether the discourse of Dharmastra ever, at any point in time, had a strong and demonstrable relationship to how people lived, thought, and acted. But suffice it to say that, from the vantage of the present, the sections of our texts dealing with dra-saskra appear archaic, if not altogether fantastic. Sarma’s recent quasi-fictional autobiography, The Last Brahmin (2007), explores the aporia that characterizes our relationship to this once vibrant world of Brahmanical rituals.
In an exhaustive treatment of the dra archive, I focus on the place of language in these texts, in order to elucidate what I call their “poetics of contempt.” Language is key in two ways: First, the dra is defined as a person who stands at a particular, exactly measured, and strictly enforced distance from Sanskrit; and second, the language used to describe, police, revile, punish, and exclude the dra from realms of upper-caste privilege is startling in its force. It should be noted that both these uses of language in the hierarchical world of varramadharma (the dharma of caste and life-stage) – as a measure of lowliness and as a weapon of humiliation – are as old as all of the phenomena under study: the category of the dra itself, the Sanskrit language, and the system of Dharmastra. There is no respite to be had from the contempt characteristically associated with the dra when the new digests are written between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century. Rather, they become reiterations of very ancient, sedimented forms of social inequality that are inscribed into the language itself.
One may investigate the language through which dharma is differentially apportioned to the twice-born and to the dra in a variety of genres. However, the relationship of the dra to Sanskrit and thence to entire realms of social prestige and political power, is most clearly and metonymically figured in the relationship of the dra to the Veda. If we diagram a paradigmatic speech situation, the dra appears as a silent listener and indirect addressee, never as a speaker or a direct addressee: a perfect image of the dra’s exclusion from or marginal status with respect to caste society as a whole. In the social world that we can project from the speech situation sketched in Sanskrit texts, the dra, mostly shut out altogether, is, at best, the designated eavesdropper. The historical depth of this contempt for the dra in the long life of Sanskrit is revealed in the sources cited by the digest authors, primarily a small set of stories from the upaniads and interpretations of these stories in major Vednta commentaries (see Vajpeyi in press). It turns out that the figure of the dra haunts the Brahmanical literature from some of its earliest phases, and always at the heart of the othering of the dra lies a set of maneuvers whose locus is language.
In the context of current scholarship on India, the topic of the dra and, more specifically, of the relationship between the dra and language, immediately calls to mind the school of Indian historiography we know as subaltern studies. Historians of this school have worked almost exclusively on colonial India, particularly on peasant groups and their politics from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. While dradharma as a subject of Sanskrit systematic thought is strictly speaking a precolonial phenomenon, the dra should be thought of as a kind of subaltern. The question to ask of the dra archive is: “Can the subaltern speak?” in or through these texts (Spivak 1988). The answer, for the seventeenth century as for the twentieth, appears to be the same – “No.” The dradharma digests do not reveal anything about either the dra as a historical agent or the constitution of any given dra collectivity as a class in a feudal society, nor do they entextualize what Guha would describe as “subaltern mentality” (R. Guha 1998). Rather, because Brahmins, even when they write about the dra, appear to write exclusively for other Brahmins, the dradharma digests they compose embody and convey “elite mentality” par excellence.
dradharma-stra as an elite discourse successfully represses all traces of the subaltern it takes as its principal object. We may read and re-read the dra archive to try and find in it the historical conditions to which it responds; it remains almost completely unyielding. There is a complex story behind why and how Sanskrit discourses, especially those in the stra mode, achieved this near-perfect repression of subalternity or indeed alterity of any kind – in other words, what the linguistic, epistemological, and ideological features of Sanskrit discursivity are that make it so perfectly an idiom of domination. Suffice it to say that the elision of historicity from Sanskrit discourse is related to its repression of subalternity – the two reinforce one another to produce the total absence of subaltern speech, even in our texts that are entirely about the dra.
In the study of precolonial India, the trace of subaltern subjectivity has traditionally been sought in bhakti poetry and other sorts of radical texts, usually in the vernaculars rather than in Sanskrit for obvious reasons. But records of legal disputes too, when these disputes were between subalterns and elites – here, dra groups and twice-born groups – ought to provide some insight into dra mentality. A dispute, no matter how skewed its historical record, must necessarily capture two (or more) sides in a given disagreement. Unfortunately, to the extent that the modality of legal dispute resolution (i.e., law) in cases involving jtiniraya, jtidharma, and varramadharma was tied to legal disputation, precolonial caste disputes too show a tendency to assimilate to the Brahmanical repression of dra speech that characterizes the theory and practice of all stra. In this sense, the moment the dra comes into the purview of dharma, whether in stra texts (disputation) or in Marathi grmaya records (disputes), the answer to the question “Can the subaltern speak?” goes into the negative.
The evidence preserved in the documents recording the judgments given (vyavasth-patra) indicates only that the dra disputants wanted to be recognized as not really being dra at all, but instead as being Brahmin, Katriya, Vaiya, or Kyastha. This is perhaps the most successful elision of dra subjectivity: supposedly at the hands of the dra agents themselves, as it were. It would appear from the legal record that all the dra ever wants is not to be one. The dispute then becomes a contest between the presence and absence, or the assertion versus the denial, of dra subjectivity, not a contest between dra subjectivity and twice-born subjectivity over a set of rights and privileges. Even worse, the positive assertion – “This group here consists of dra individuals” – comes from the Brahmin side, while the denial – “We are not dras” – comes from the dra litigants themselves. Thus even the body of legal disputes we can recover in a fragmentary fashion from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Varanasi and in a more complete fashion from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Maharashtra does not assist us in moving from the philology of oppression to the practice of subaltern history.1

History

Even as the dra fails to speak through or in the dharma-nibandha archive, the elephant in the room, as it were, is caste. It does not matter whether we translate “vara” as “caste,” or “jti” as “caste,” or both, or if the meaning of “caste” alternates between these two indigenous terms. The question of how to translate “caste” in this context is beside the point. The fact is that within the sphere of Sanskrit intellectual production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prior to the colonial period, Ggbhaa and others like him were reflecting very deeply on the meanings of the category of the dra, and a variety of related categories that had to do with the place as well as the relative ranking of individuals and groups in a social structure. This structure – with its axes of ritual status, occupation, endogamy, power, and so on – cannot be understood except as caste society. Reflection on the subject of the dra, fittingly, was going on within the discourse of dharma, and that too within the ambit of legal and juridical literature, the Dharmastra.2
In reframing the large and variegated body of the Dharmastra within the relatively narrow genre of the dharma-nibandha, and in taking the dra as the overarching topic of discussion, jurists and scholars from 1550 to 1680 CE were engaging, precisely, in legal treatments of caste. Ggbhaa himself presided over and conducted caste-related rituals, for royals as well as laypersons; further, he adjudicated caste disputes between Brahmins and non-Brahmins. We could say that he was active in the theory, practice, and politics of caste, in his capacity as both a scholarly expert on and a respected practitioner of the law. Gg was, undoubtedly, a precolonial figure, and as such he dramatizes the centrality of caste to precolonial intellectual life, legal practice, polity, and statecraft. He was not alone in his interest in both caste and the law (via the disciplines of Dharmastra and Mms) – he came from a family of scholars and jurists, the Bhaas of Banaras. His father Dinakarabhaa began writing a text titled dradharmodyota (“Elucidation of the Dharma of the dra”) that Gg himself completed. His uncle Kamalkarabhaa wrote possibly the most important nibandha about the dra, titled drakamalkara (“Kamalkara’s Digest on the dra”) sometime between 1610 and 1640 CE, a text still taught in Sanskrit pedagogical environments today.
The Bhaas had moved to Banaras from Paithan, in Maharashtra, in the fifteenth century. Paithan used to be a center of Brahmin learning during Ydava rule, but upon the fall of the Ydava capital of Devagiri between 1295/6 and 1325 CE, its intellectuals began to migrate north to Banaras. By Gg’s lifetime, Banaras had entirely replaced Paithan as the headquarters, in northern India, of Brahmin intellectualism, much of it diasporic. Besides his own family, the eas of Banaras, another family of migrants from Paithan, were also famous as legal scholars. Gg’s uncle Kamalkara’s older contemporary eaka wrote yet another significant digest on the dra, titled drcrairomai (“Crest Jewel of dra Conduct”) sometime in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century (Benke 2010).
Ggbhaa participated in the institution of the brahmasabh, a council of Brahmins called to adjudicate various sorts of disputes, including caste disputes. Both late medieval Banaras and, before that, early medieval Paithan knew this institution, and it appears that local rulers, whether Hindu or Muslim, would often direct disputing parties to these learned assemblies in order to have their issues settled according to the rules of the Dharmastra.3 On matters of dharma, including vara and jti, non-specialist administrative and legal functionaries of regional courts, lacking in Sanskrit knowledge, deferred to specialist Brahmins living in places like Paithan and later Banaras. Dalmia describes Banaras as a “supra-regionally recognized” locus of juridical authority (Dalmia 1996: 322–3). The brahmasabh would issue a decision, recorded in a document called a vyavasth-patra (“document [patra] bearing the decision [vyavasth]”) or vijaya-patra (“document spelling out the victory [vijaya] of the authoritative claim [siddhnta]”).4 The disputants would carry out the injunctions of this document, and their local political authority would not object.
Ggbhaa’s ancestor Rmevara migrated from Paithan to Banaras in the early sixteenth century. S. Pollock records the names of several prominent Marathi scholars resident in seventeenth-century Banaras (2001a and 2001b). Gg lived in Banaras but, nonetheless, probably because he spoke Marathi and had family ties with his ancestral homeland, he became involved in a number of cases surrounding the ritual status of a caste belonging to coastal Maharashtra, the Cndrasenya Kyastha Prabhu (CKP).5 This caste, today referred to in Maharashtra’s caste politics as “CKP,” was traditionally a highly literate group associated with scribal and accountancy work, and connected, therefore, with royal courts and their administrative divisions. One of Shivaji’s closest ministers, Blj Citnis, was a CKP.
The CKP is one of a group generically referred to in the dharma literature as Kyastha, a caste, as already mentioned, of scribes and accountants. Like Brahmins, historically Kyastha communities can be found in many parts of the subcontinent, and in different places they have distinct jti names, as well as localized stories about their origins, their proper work, their true status, their position relative to other local castes, and so on. In Shivaji’s reign the CKP were politically powerful, and Gg was enlisted to establish, textually as well as through his judgments on particular cases, that the CKP shared characteristics with the Brahmin as well as the Katriya, both high castes, but not with the lowly dra. Sometime between 1669 and 1672 CE he presided over a case involving the CKP (Bendrey 1960). Probably in this same period, Gg wrote Kyasthadharmadpa (“Elucidation of the Dharma of the Kyastha”), which is a nibandha text about kyasthadharma. It closely resembles, in purpose as well as form, the digests about dradharma written by Gg and other authors.
While Gg was clearly a caste expert, living in Banaras (then a late medieval university town), and regularly traveling to his hereditary place of origin, Maharashtra, to pronounce on legal matters there, the biggest case of his long and illustrious career, surely, was that of Shivaji. To crown Shivaji king was quite a complicated legal problem, and one that Gg was given very little time – though rather a lot of money! – to solve to his patron’s satisfaction. In a scarce few days in the summer of 1674 CE, he had to make one argument from genealogy, another one from ritual, and yet another one from textual authority, to be able to transform Shivaji, a Maratha chieftain of the Bhosae clan, heretofore deemed a dra, into Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, a Katriya king (Vajpeyi 2005). In June 1674 CE Gg hastily composed a Sanskrit text titled rivarjbhiekaprayoga (“Manual for the Royal Consecration of Shivaji”).
Gg’s interest and expertise in jtiniraya (the adjudication of caste) notwithstanding, rjadharma, dharma for kings, and rjybhiekapaddhati, technique for royal consecration, were nonetheless areas that he knew relatively less about, and perhaps never expected to have to know for any practical purpose. Banaras at the time fell within the vast sweep of Aurangzeb’s Mughal Empire, and most of what is today Maharashtra was portioned out to the various Deccan Sultanates. Only when Shivaji presented the actual historical possibility of establishing in Maratha country a kingdom that is today retrospectively characterised as “Hindu” did the need arise for Gg to research the precedents for Katriya kingship in the dharma texts of the Brahmin traditions. In order to write rivarjbhiekaprayoga he had to hurriedly consult his friend and fellow Maharashtrian scholar Anantadevabhaa, who directed Gg’s attention to the Viudharmottarapura (“Viu’s Lore on the Higher Dharma”), the locus classicus of discourse about royal dharma, as well as to his own work on the same subject, Rjadharmakaustubha (“Crest Jewel of Royal Dharma”).6 There is evidence to suggest that Anantadeva joined Gg in presiding over the caste disputes involving Kyastha and Brahmin groups in coastal Maharashtra.
The legacy of men like Gg and Anantadeva carried on through the unstable years of Maratha rule following Shivaji’s death in 1680 CE, and continued well into the Peshwa period in the eighteenth century, when caste disputes and their settlement became routine affairs in Maharashtra. Examining the Peshwa archives, collectively called the Daftar, N. K. Wagle (1970, 1980, 1982, 1987, 1998, 2005) has documented these disputes about the ritual status of a variety of groups (a monumental task that is ongoing even today). These include Brahmin, non-Brahmin, and Kyastha litigants. In 1827 CE the CKP cited an old Banaras vyavasth-patra to bolster their claims to high-caste ritual privileges, specifically, the permission to recite Vedic mantras during certain ceremonies, a privilege called “vedokta” (literally: “the enunciation of Vedic syllables”). Ultimately, by 1830 CE, even the descendant and heir of Shivaji, the Chatrapati Bhosae of Satara, Pratpasiha, was having to (re)claim and (re)establish his Katriya credentials in the face of opposition that sought to demote him and his family back to the very dra status that Shivaji had hired Ggbhaa to consign to the past a good 150 years earlier.
Right from the first texts of the dra archive, as early as 1350 CE, through to the difficulties of the Satara Chatrapati in 1830 CE, for 500 years before the establishment of the rule of the British Crown in India in 1857 CE, both before and after the arrival of the colonial powers on the subcontinent, caste, especially dradharma, was the subject of intense intellectual, legal, and political activity. I have traced this history of the legal treatment of caste, along with related intellectual and political developments, only in Banaras and in Maharashtra, through the figure of Ggbhaa who lived in both places and traveled constantly between them in connection with his work. But similar histories can be discovered for medieval and late medieval Mithil, Bengal, and large parts of the peninsular south, all of which had long-running traditions of Dharmastra scholarship, plenty of Sanskrit intellectuals, a range of high, low, and middling castes in fluctuating relationships with structures of political power, and historical memories if not continuing experiences of “Hindu” rule of one sort or another.
True, it is difficult to find a monarch as charismatic as Shivaji in any part of the subcontinent during or immediately after the high era of Mughal rule (ending with Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 CE), or during Britain’s slow ascendancy, first through the Company in the eighteenth century, and then through the Crown in the nineteenth century. But Shivaji, as pointed out earlier, was an exception, even for his personal pandit, Ggbhaa. Apart from the individual and exceptional case of Shivaji, the larger trend that I have tried to sketch here, of treating caste as a matter of law, can and must be generalized over many parts of the subcontinent, throughout the medieval, late medieval, and early colonial periods. I say “must be generalized” by historians because there is every reason to believe that the dra archive, which was generated along the full swath of the Gangetic Plain – from areas close to Delhi in the west, to Almora in the Himalayan foothills, via Banaras and Mithila, to Bengal in the east – both reflected pan-regional concerns about the place of jtidharma in intellectual discourse, and fed back into legal practice as well as political activity on the ground.7
Whether or not dra warlords had to be made into Katriya potentates, the status claims of a plethora of powerful or aspirant groups – entrenched Brahmin elites as well as on-the-make Kyastha, dra, and other castes – had to be adjudicated. When canonical Dharmastra texts did not provide specific enough indications, specialist nibandha texts were written to address problems concerning the absolute and relative ritual status, marriage, inheritance, property, occupations, nomenclature, diet, dress, worship, punishments, expiations, duties, and so on of the dra, as well as other castes. It is noteworthy that these dradharma-nibandha texts were produced entirely before the Orientalizing and essentializing gaze of the European colonists encountered India with its numerous cultures, and set out to comprehend caste society through the multiple operations of Indology, linguistics, and the ethnographic state. The legal treatment of caste was by no means the outcome exclusively of India’s long engagement with the colonizing Other.
1 Chapter 5 of Vajpeyi (2004) deals with the history of caste disputes in detail, building on N. K. Wagle. Madhav Deshpande, Christopher Minkowski, Rosalind O’Hanlon, and Lawrence McCrea have been incrementally extending the work on caste disputes.
2 Dharmastra is traditionally only one of many loci for the entextualization of dharma in Sanskrit knowledge systems, but it became the preferred locus at this time. In remoter phases of premodernity, the discourse of dharma and, specifically, of dradharma, was not confined to the Dharmastra. I have followed the discussion on dradharma in a number of genres of text: Veda, Mms, Vednta, Itihsa, etc., at least insofar as those discussions are referred to in the dra archive (Vajpeyi 2004). From the Purua Skta (“Hymn to the Cosmic Man”) in the g Veda (10.90), to stories in the upaniad texts, to the treatises of akara and Rmnuja, to episodes in the Mahbhrata, the problem of the dra is a very old one in the Sanskrit discourse on dharma (Vajpeyi in press).
3 Telang (1900: 278–9 [126–7 in the 1961 edition]) has an account of how, when a group of disputing CKPs and Brahmins from coastal Maharashtra went before the Muslim law officer of Bijapur for redress, he referred them to the Banaras pandits, saying he was ignorant of the dharma texts and therefore not competent to judge this particular case, but he promised to enforce the pandits’ judgment.
4 We find reference to two vyavasth-patra documents, of 1583 and 1658 CE, signed by councils of scholars resident in Banaras but originating from different parts of the subcontinent: Maharashtra, the Deccan, the South, Gujarat, etc. The second of these documents is a judgment about the actual caste status of a jti called the Devari, who were, in their own estimation, Brahmin (S. Pollock 2001b: 21 and 21n).
5 In 1663 Gg adjudicated a dispute about the ritual status of one of the Brahmin communities of this same region, coastal Maharashtra, called the Srasvata (Bayly 1999; Wagle 1970).
6 Anantadeva, who was a great-great-grandson of the Marathi saint-poet Eknth, lived in Banaras but was patronized by the Cnd king of Almora, Bj Bahdur. Ananta’s great-grandfather Haripaita migrated to Banaras from Paithan. Gg also had a kinsman – Kamalkarabhaa’s son and Gg’s first cousin – Anantabhaa, who may have assisted Gg in his scholarly and legal work. We find traces of both men with the name “Ananta” in connection with Gg in the historical sources of the period. Lawrence McCrea has suggested to me that the best way to distinguish them is to think of one as Anantadeva (Eknth’s descendant) and the other as Anantabhaa (Gg’s relative).
7 D. Davis’s work on deamaryd or locally valid customs and conventions that were made authoritative (which means “prescribed,” though still not “enforceable,” unlike modern laws) by translating them into the idiom of Dharmastra (Davis 2002) indicates that more empirical work is necessary to see whether the dradharma texts of the late medieval period were intended to authorize local practices connected to the dra (D. R. Davis 1999). What would be the relevant dea or locality, if the new precepts were conceived as an instance of deamaryd? What independent evidence can we garner of local customs with regard to the dra – in, say, Banaras, Mithil, Bengal, or Maharashtra, where our texts were produced and circulated – which we could then argue were fixed into the stra idiom via these texts?