Indische Palaographie von circa 350 a. Chr. – circa 1300 p. Chr. c48.s1.11.2

c48.s1.11.2

A similar colonisation was begun by the same agency in the Dekkan, but the local Brāhman was there too numerous and too well-established throughout the country to leave room for a rival, and the offshoot from the main Kāyasth branch, under the name of Prabhu, forsook the tableland for the coast, and settled in Bombay and its vicinity. Here they were found so useful by the early British merchants and officials that until a generation or so ago, Prabhu and clerk were synonymous terms in those parts. In the present day the main stronghold of the Kāyasth is in Lower Bengal, into which they were introduced from upper India. Distance, however, as usual in India, has entirely divided the two communities, and there is no intermarriage between the Kāyasth of Bengal and his caste-fellows of Bihār and the north any more than with those of the west coast. Even the local bodies of this caste are much subdivided into smaller endogamous sections, generally territorial. The position of the Kāyasth and other writer castes in the social hierarchy has long been a matter of heated controversy. In what may be called the primary distribution of rank according to function no place could be assigned to a body which was not then recognised as distinct from others. Literary qualifications which may well set off a Brāhman, are, by themselves, of little value as a passport to the esteem of a public deliberately illiterate.