ABSTRACT
By the early sixteenth century, a substantial community of Maratha Brahman scholar families had emerged in Mughal Banaras. These scholar households mobilized substantial cultural and practical resources to address the challenges that ‘early modernity’ posed to Brahman communities such as themselves. They provided the locale within which reputations were built up and skills passed on. Locating their assemblies in the city’s Visvesvara temple, Maratha scholar-intellectuals were able to advertise an arena where disputes could be resolved and Brahman unity restored. Drawing on older universalizing geographies of Brahman identity, they addressed their letters of judgement to Brahman communities across the ‘gauḍa’ and ‘drāviḍa’ regions of northern and southern India and appealed explicitly to a ‘we’ of the pious and discerning, the ‘good people’ of the Brahman śiṣṭa. This remarkable position of social and intellectual leadership emerged very much within the context of the Mughal imperial framework. The latter’s gradual disintegration also spelled the waning of this remarkable social formation within the city, as many of its functions passed to new regional states.
