Nagar Brahmin

The Nagar Brahmin are a Hindu caste of India. They are primarily found in Gujarat but have a history of migration to Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, in the north and central, Maharashtra and Karnataka further west and into the south, and as far as West Bengal in the east.

This article is about the social caste. For the moth family, see Brahmaeidae. For similarly spelled words, see Nagar (disambiguation).

Nagar Brahmins
Nagar Brahmins in Western India (c. 1855-1862)
ReligionsHinduism
LanguagesGujarati, Hindi, English
CountryIndia
Populated statesGujarat, Rajasthan
RegionNorth West India
EthnicityIndian

In North India, the Bias Brahmin community includes Nagar Brahmins and two other Brahmin groups from Gujarat: the Audichya Brahmins and the Bardai Brahmins.

One notable member of the community was the educationist Hansa Jivraj Mehta, whose inter-caste marriage to Jivraj Narayan Mehta in the 1920s provoked what historian John R. Wood describes as a "mild sensation". Her husband was from the Bania caste.[1]

They are known for travelling and settling across the subcontinent, adopting the local language but writing in their own Nagari-variant of Kaithi instead.[2] This is the case in Sindh, Multan, Sylhet and Varanasi. Baitali Kaithi was a former script used to write Hindustani at a similar time, and it was identical to Sylhet Nagri with the exception that the latter had a matra (upper horizontal line used in Brahmic scripts).[3] During the invasions of Ghori and Ghazni, as noted by Turkish historians, many of them in Uttar Pradesh converted and became Nagar Muslims along with their Barnwal overlords in order to save the remaining people from mass executions, mass forced conversion and other consequences, though they retained the practice of the Nagri script (named after them) for poetry.[4]

Origin

The oldest account of the Nagars, who originally belong to Vadnagar, is given in the Nagar Khand, a part of the Skanda Purana, considered to be written in the 4th century CE, though some consider that the Nagar Khand may have been incorporated much later between 1000 and 1200 CE. The Nagar Brahmins controversially claim superiority over other Brahmin groups; the basis of such claims remain uncertain.[5]

According to historians P. C. Choudhuri, K. R. Medhi and K. L. Barua, the Brahmins mentioned in the Nidhanpur and Dubi inscriptions of king Bhaskaravarman bore surnames "which are at present used by Kayasthas of Bengal and Nagara Brahmins of Gujarat", and they seem to belong to a distinct branch of Indo-Aryans.[6]

References
  1. Wood, John R. (November 1984). "British versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat". The Journal of Asian Studies. 44 (1): 65–99. doi:10.2307/2056747. JSTOR 2056747.
  2. Nagendranath Basu (ed.). "Devanagar". Bangla Bishwakosh (in Bengali). Vol. 12. p. 731.
  3. Saha, RN (1935). "The Origin of the Alphabet and Numbers". In Khattry, DP (ed.). Report of All Asia Educational Conference (Benares, December 26-30, 1930). Allahabad, India: The Indian Press Ltd. pp. 751–779.
  4. Basu, Nagendranath (1933). "Bengali Section: Presidential Address". Proceedings And Transactions Of The Sixth All India Oriental Conference, December 1930. Patna, Bihar: Bihar and Orissa Research Society. pp. 262–264.
  5. Dhirendra Narain (1989). Research in Sociology: Abstracts of M.A. and Ph. D. Dissertations Completed in the Department of Sociology, University of Bombay. Concept Publishing Company. p. 100. ISBN 978-81-702-2235-4.
  6. S. R. Bakshi; S. R. Sharma; S. Gajrani (1998). "Land and the People". Contemporary Political Leadership in India. APH Publishing Corporation. pp. 13–14. ISBN 81-7648-008-8.
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