Introduction

The famed ICS ethnographer William Crooke and Ram Gharib Chaube, a major contributor to the Linguistic Survey of India, noted in their co-authored Folktales from North India the story of a Kayastha clerk who started a quarrel with a soldier (sipahi). The soldier badgered and threatened the humble Kayastha clerk: ‘I will knock out your teeth’. The protocol for dispensing pay included establishing a physical description of each soldier. So the un-amused Kayastha military paymaster (mir bakshi) inserted in the margins ‘two teeth missing’. When the verbally abusive soldier returned to collect his pay, the Kayastha refused, pointing out that his appearance did not match the form’s requirements. Frustratingly, the soldier was only able to collect his pay after he smashed out his own two teeth. ¹ This was, perhaps, the scribe’s preferred method of resolving conflict: vicarious, passive-aggression through the pen.