How the Maratha, Kunbi identities have changed over the course of history
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The crystallisation of the term ‘Maratha’ probably occurred between 1400 and 1600 C.E. to describe a newly emerging service elite — the chiefs who brought bands of followers to serve the Bahamani kingdom and its five successor states
Since September last year, an agitation for Maratha reservation spearheaded by an emaciated, wraith-like 41-year-old activist Manoj Jarange-Patil spread like bushfire in Maharashtra’s arid Marathwada region and has been the cause of deep socio-political rumblings in the State. While the demand for a quota in jobs and education for the economically backward Maratha community members has been ongoing since the 1980s, a series of dramatic hunger strikes by Jarange-Patil (the fourth one was withdrawn last week) over the past 10 months has forcefully foregrounded the issue, vexing the ruling Eknath Shinde-led Mahayuti government.
The Maratha quota agitation has cost the Mahayuti candidates dearly on several parliamentary seats in the Marathwada region, the wellspring of the movement.
Among Jarange-Patil’s demands is that Marathas be given reservation under the Kunbi category classed as Other Backward Classes (OBCs), a demand which has predictably aggravated social tensions in the State and especially Marathwada. As a counterpoise, OBC politicos and writers have opposed Marathas eating their share of the reservation pie, arguing that the community is already the politically dominant one in the State and that more than 60% of Maharashtra’s Chief Ministers — from Y.B. Chavan to Sharad Pawar to Eknath Shinde — have all been Marathas and that nearly 70% of Maharashtra’s 288 legislators belonged to the community.
At a deeper level, this ongoing conflict has prompted introspection of the complex identities of ‘Maratha’ and ‘Kunbi’, and their fascinating and politically fraught histories.
On identity formation
Any attempt to understand the meanings of these two charged terms must begin with a study of English civil servant R. E. Enthoven’s magisterial three-volume Tribes and Castes of Bombay (1922) — a mammoth and enduring classic which is a landmark in Indian anthropology. “There is probably no difference in origin between the landholding and warrior section, the Marathas proper, and cultivators, the Maratha kunbis,” said Enthoven, noting the fluidity of the terms.
One of the most scrupulous and closest observers of western Indian society, Enthoven noted that the rise of the Maratha power under the warrior chieftain Shivaji Bhosale in the 17th century had induced the fighting classes and landholders to claim for themselves the Kshatriya rank, which was why they considered themselves superior to Kunbis, who tilled the land.
While observing that Kunbi denoted a status and not a caste and that Marathas and Kunbis are used synonymously in many cases, Enthoven distinguishes between Konkani kunbis who claim neither to be Marathas nor Kshatriyas. It is no wonder that Marathas in the Konkan today vehemently oppose Jarange-Patil’s agitation and categorically refuse to accept reservation under the OBC Kunbi category, as they fear becoming déclassé.
But when and how did the term ‘Maratha’ originate? Rosalind O’ Hanlon’s now-classic study of the process of identity formation in Maharashtra titled Caste, Conflict and Ideology (1985) is an essential masterwork in understanding this concept as well as turning the light on the Maratha-Kunbi cluster of castes.
At the simplest level, ‘Maratha’ denotes all Marathi speakers and those who had fought under Shivaji Bhosale’s banner and later in the 18th Century under the Peshwas until the decline of their power and British paramountcy in 1818 following the Third Anglo-Maratha War. Around this time, to European observers, the term was not caste-specific and all Marathi speakers be it Brahmin priests, soldiers, cultivators, artisans were indiscriminately called ‘Marathas.’
Unconsciously, it implied mastery over land and military prowess with early European writers assumed the existence of a strong regional identity focus on their heroic qualities, notes o’ Hanlon. And yet, this term was applied in a narrower, caste-specific way. Within the larger complex of Maratha peasant castes, families who called themselves ‘Marathas’ represented a small social elite, claiming a varna status of Kshatriya appropriate to rulers, while the Kunbis accepted the lower Shudra varna.
The emergence of the term must be understood in the context of Ala-ud-din Khalji’s ferocious raids in the Deccan in the 1290s and the eventual extinction of the Marathi-speaking Yadava dynasty that ruled from the fortress-citadel of Devgiri.
In Stewart Gordon’s The Marathas (1993), part of the New Cambridge History of India series) scholar-travellers like Al-Beruni (1020 C.E.) mention ‘Marhat Des’ as the people who lived south of the Narmada while Ibn Batuta (in 1340 C.E.) said that the people who lived around Daulatabad were Marathas.
Aspiring to be a Maratha
The crystallisation of the term ‘Maratha’ probably occurred between 1400 and 1600 C.E. to describe a newly emerging service elite — the chiefs who brought bands of followers to serve the Bahamani kingdom and its five successor states which arose after the kingdom’s fragmentation, says Gordon. As certain Maratha families (including the Bhosales) gained prominence for their military service with the Bahamani successor states, their domestic and social practices differed from that of the Kunbis owing to their close association with the Muslim courts of Ahmednagar and Bijapur.
Besides aspiring to a Kshatriya status and being invested with the sacred thread, these families followed the Islamic practice of secluding their women, as well as the habit of eating from a single-dish with their caste-fellows, notes o’ Hanlon. These distinctive social practices led to the coining of the term ‘Marathmola’ (translated as ‘ways and practices peculiar to the genuine Maratha’), as given by lexicographer James Molesworth in his classic Marathi-English dictionary (1847).
In their striving for an elite status, even Shivaji Bhosale’s coronation as ‘Chhatrapati’ (June 6, 1674) was not without controversy as he had to be declared a ‘pure’ Kshatriya and admitted formally into the varna of rulers and kings. Strenuous efforts were made to persuade Brahmans and demonstrate the Bhosale family’s genealogical linkages with ancient Rajput families like the Sisodias of Udaipur. After Shivaji’s death, the later Chhatrapatis after Shahu (Shivaji’s grandson) became puppets in the hands of the Brahmin Peshwas who ruled from Pune and expanded the Maratha power. A pivotal moment came after Bajirao II’s defeat of Elphinstone and East India Company’s forces, which installed Pratapsinh Bhosale, the nominal successor of the House of Shivaji, as the Chhatrapati in Satara. This period of Pratapsinh’s rule (until his dethronement in 1839) would have momentous consequences in the debate over the Kshatriya, the tensions between Marathas and Chitpavan Brahmins, and the Maratha-Kunbi complex of castes.
Pratapsinh was ever suspicious of his Brahmin administrator Balajipant Natu, who had been assigned to him by the British who wanted to rein in the Maratha raja. The atmosphere of intense hostility seemed to confirm Pratapsinh’s suspicions that the Peshwas had undermined the rule of Chhatrapati.
When James Grant Duff, who, as resident of Satara (1818-23) was ‘monitoring’ Pratapsinh, wrote his three-volume History of the Mahrattas (1828) — the first attempt to document the exploits of Shivaji and the foundation of the Maratha state until its decline and dissolution — Pratapsinh eagerly endorsed it and had it translated in Marathi. This work, along with the conflicts and debates between the Satara ruler and Brahmans, would lead to the wide diffusion of the term ‘Maratha’ in western Indian society in the 1860s and 70s, when more and more Kunbis aspired to be called Marathas as a mark of social mobility.
As o’ Hanlon observes in her book, from the 1860s onwards the term ‘Maratha’ gained significance until it became a new identity that was applied to the whole Maratha-Kunbi grouping to the specific exclusion of Brahmins. O’Hanlon observes that the upward social mobility of many Kunbi families who aspired to gain acceptance in elite Maratha circles, was neatly summed up in the proverb kunbi majhala Maratha zhala (when a Kunbi prospers, he becomes a Maratha).
Today, in one of history’s ironies and reversals of fortune, it is the Marathas (albeit in a certain part of Maharashtra) who are demanding to be called ‘Kunbis’ to avail of OBC reservation benefits.
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