Discourses of caste over the longue durée: Gopīnātha and social classification in India, ca. 1400–1900

Abstract

We know relatively little about the responses of conservative Brahman scholars to the demise of the Yādava state and the coming of the Sultanate kingdoms in western India. Gopīnātha, from a little-known Śaivite family near Ahmadnagar, saw it as imperative to protect dharma, both from the challenge of bhakti and from the unrestrained social mixing he saw in the world around him. His Sanskrit manual, the Jātiviveka, ‘Discernment of Jātis’, employed older templates but produced detailed new elaborations of them. It envisaged a social world now made up almost entirely of ‘mixed’ people. The implication was that in a world where the presence of Kṣatriya kings seemed to have receded, it fell more to scholars to help maintain, through the information gathered in their texts, the proper order of castes and life stages. Gopīnātha’s work formed part of the longer-term process whereby the ‘discernment of jātis’ emerged as a more elaborated and independent field of scholarly expertise. His treatise, and its later wide influence through into the colonial nineteenth century, suggests that the demise of Hindu courts as arenas within which caste and corporate identities could be mediated contributed to the sharpening of caste hierarchies in contemporary social theory. It helped shape them into the ranked jātis that we have come to think of as ‘caste’, as a free-standing principle of social organization separated from the state.