The Caste Panchayat, Caste Governance, and the Role of the State: The Long View

Abstract

The chapter tries to trace the evolution of caste panchayats from their earliest available records to the present. Rather than trying to develop a temporally continuous or an all-India-level narrative, it focuses on developing a timeline of the character of these bodies from the available records in particular regions. I rely for the information about the early period on the Vedic religious texts, later written records from the Bahamani kingdom, Maratha Kingdom, and the Vijayanagara Kingdom, actual documents of the cases tried by these panchayats or their records present in the Mughal arhsattas, the Maratha mazhars and nivadpatras, and the pothis of the religious mathas in Southern India. For the British period and immediately after, the census records and other anthropological records compiled by both English and Indian anthropologists are employed. The works published in the Anthropological survey of India are used by me to analyse caste panchayats in the immediate post-independence period. As the records of caste panchayats as caste panchayats become rare after this period, I use primary sources and analysis of the secondary literature, in order to present my analysis of the latter in postcolonial and contemporary India.