[INDOLOGY] Religious Literature with Political Purposes

Nagaraj Paturi nagarajpaturi at gmail.com
Wed Jul 8 10:18:23 UTC 2015


Sharing a bar diagram of Brahmin population represented state-wise. This
may not be highly accurate. But gives a rough idea.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Arlo Griffiths <arlogriffiths at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Professor Paturi,
>
> Thanks for this email and separate correction. By "Brahmin jātis" I mean
> endogamous groups who all claim Brahmin status but do not now (or did not
> traditionally) intermarry. To stay with your example, if it is true that
> Vaidikis and Niyogis do not intermarry, then they would in my understanding
> be separate jātis. In Orissa, among the Vaidikas certainly do not
> intermarry with non-Vaidika Brahmins, and even among the Vaidikas, I
> believe that at least in the past Brahmins of the different Vedas tended
> not to intermarry, so that each Veda forms an endogamous group. I suppose
> this is what you mean by sub-caste, but it has always seemed to me most
> useful to retain the term 'caste' for any single endogamous group, to take
> 'caste' as English translation of 'jāti', and to consider Brahmins as
> together forming a varṇa (i.e., not a 'caste' but a superordinate
> category); if this works, then I am not sure we need to use a term like
> 'sub-caste'. Please let me know if you have any objection.
>
> Would anybody be able to confirm that also for North India, census reports
> give only very low percentages of the total population as claiming Brahmin
> status?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Arlo Griffiths
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2015 12:03:13 +0530
> From: nagarajpaturi at gmail.com
> To: indology at list.indology.info
> Subject: [INDOLOGY] Religious Literature with Political Purposes
>
>
> >And if indeed we pool all Brahmins jātis together, I had thought that
> this pool ends up representing substantial percentages of population in
> given regions.
> Dear Prof. Arlo Griffiths,
>
> Can you elaborate more on what you mean by all Brahmin jatis?
>
> Among Telugu speaking Brahmins, there is the distinction between Vaidikis
> (Brahmins who did not move into administrative occupation) and Niyogis
> (Brahmins who moved into administrative occupation). Similar such
> distinctions appear to exist in other parts of India too.
>
> Are you keeping such sub-caste categories in mind?
>
> At least in south India, there are a big number of villages where there is
> no Brahmin of any variety.
>
> The small percentages of Brahmins shown for statistical purposes are all
> from census where a person belonging to any sub-variety of Brahmin to have
> claimed during census enumerations to be non-Brahmin.
>
> You probably have some other kind of data in mind when you say Brahmin
> jatis. Can you please elaborate?
>
> --
> Prof.Nagaraj Paturi
> Hyderabad-500044
>
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-- 
Prof.Nagaraj Paturi
Hyderabad-500044


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