ABSTRACT
Among the various brahminical communities in India, the Citpāvans—also known as Konkanasthas because of their roots in the western coastal region of Maharashtra— played a major role in the political field in Maharashtra and India between the beginning of the eighteenth century and 1947. From near-complete obscurity, they suddenly rose to prominence around 1700, providing the Maratha polity with a dynasty of Peshwas (prime ministers of Maratha kings and de facto rulers) between 1713 and 1818, until the British took possession of their capital of Pune. Afterwards, the community produced stalwarts in all fields of public life, notably intellectual and political figures such as P. V. Kane 1 or Bal Gangadhar Tilak. 2 A number of these individuals contributed to the construction of Hindu nationalist ideology, for which V. D. Savarkar 3 is a founding figure. One of the most remarkable features of the Citpāvans overall, in the context of this volume, is the care with which they have recorded the history of their families since the 1910s, in volumes written in Marathi and called kulavṛttāntas (family histories). 4 As the name indicates, each book concerns one family or a “clan” of Citpāvans, i.e. all the members of the group sharing the same surname, and collects a great number of public or private records regarding the male members of the kula; they do not, however, go back to an ancestor living before the sixteenth century. The interest of the Citpāvans in the recording of facts and the conservation of documents is illustrated on a larger scale under the Peshwas, whose archives are the richest of all the Indian polities before British hegemony. This richness of documentation and this awareness of history strongly contrast with the paucity of sources mentioning the Citpāvans before 1700.
