Historicizing the Family, Bhakti, and Brahman Sexuality in the “Brahman Raj”

The ‘Mānbhāvs,’ otherwise (and non-derisively) known as the Mahānubhāvs, worship the Hindu god Krishna. Their public and domestic comportment, contested caste-belonging, theology, and religious praxis (bhakti) had seriously upset the early modern Peśwā regime, a regime that preceded British colonialism and succeeded the Marāṭhā-Mughal administrations that governed parts of Deccan. An official mandate issued in 1782-3 suggests that the limits of caste-entrenched Hinduism came to be regulated and redefined through a remarkable collaboration between the Peśwā state and its administrative functionaries, the epistemic elite--Brahman men--as well as the landed elite of the Deccan.

My presentation contextualizes two processes across the 17th and 18th century Deccan, when former administrators and prime ministers had gained unprecedented degrees of political power and social prestige, and I argue for their centrality to the study of Brahminical or savarna sociality: 1) the emergence, and subsequent dominance, of the hetero-normative patrilineal Brahman family (kuṭumba) as a social reality and imagined ideal amidst the contours and tensions of the aforementioned collaboration, 2) and the consolidation of professional biographers (caritrakārs) as a decidedly homosocial Brahman community in Peśwā employ. What, indeed, did it mean to be a Brahman in Peśwā employ? A close examination of Brahman comportment that was beyond the normative scope of this homosocial community—tonsured heads, black robes, exogamous and inter-religious sex, ‘extreme’ asceticism, and more—promises to nuance the idea of ‘the Brahman Raj’ and its ‘Others,’ and helps place Brahman homosociality across a spectrum of bhakti praxis.