My mother was a descendant of the ruling family of Chandrakona. Her family used the ancient Chakravarty title sported by the great monarchs of northern India once upon a time in the hoary past. The family shifted to Calcutta almost 300 years ago, soon after the City was erected by Job Charnock. The old Calcutta home still survives and houses the family deity from Chandrakona.
If her story is correct, as there is no written record, my mother’s side might have actually been of Rajput lineage, which subsequently acquired a Brahmin identity, as did most of the Bengal rajas (proves that caste interchangeability was prevalent until fairly recently among the ruling elite... Maratha warlord Shivaji himself of questionable caste was sanctified as a Suryavanshi Kshatriya by Brahmin priests from Varanasi).
The Rajput kings of Rajasthan, on their part, were actually Thakur-Kshatriya warlords of what is now UP/Bihar, remnants of the ancient Magadhan empire. They joined the military market of medieval India as mercenaries, after being evicted from their fiefdoms by the early Delhi Sultans.
Their adventures and bravery soon helped them erect magnificent empires in desert wilderness.
Many of the rajas of Bengal-Bihar, on their part, were relocated to the deltaic plains, from the surviving Brahmin-Kshatriya nobility of the Gangetic uplands around modern Punjab, Haryana and UP, by
Maharaja Man Singh of Jaipur, during his expedition to eastern India, commanding Mughal emperor Akbar’s army. In a way, Mansingh himself may have been retracing the steps of his ancestors who had been evicted from the fertile plains of eastern India for the arid deserts of western India.
This was done because their fiefdoms had to be redistributed among accompanying Moghul warlords from central Asia who were being settled in estates in the upper Gangetic basin.
Mansingh, on his part, is also believed to have relocated the Gaur Brahmins from Bengal (Gaur was the capital City of Bengal well into Jehangir’s rule), to western UP and eastern Rajasthan, because they were considered to be among the country’s oldest Brahmin stock pushed into the eastern extremities of India since time immemorial.
One such Bengali Bhattacharya Brahmin was the town planner of the Pink City of Jaipur for Man Singh’s descendant, Jai Singh.
Such has been the crisscrossing migration of citizens, castes, cultures and civilisations through the twilight hours of time.
In the last 30 years of India’s history, we have witnessed large scale migration from Bharat to India. From our villages to cities in search of livelihood opportunities in the wake of economic reforms.
If you explore your neighbourhood hovels and talk to these ‘small people,’ you will note that much of the caste and community rigidities they inherited from their forefathers have broken down in the urban ghettos they inhabit.
Here, Brahmins have become scavengers and housemaids and rickshaw pullers to eke out a living.
Kshatriyas sell vegetables to feed their children. The Dalit are celebrated as politicians and entrepreneurs in the columns of The Economic Times. The nawab has become the hatchet man of the crooked politician. And Hindu electricians share bed and breakfast with Muslim auto mechanics in one-room tenements.
Which is all very good in the great equalisation game.
But these migrations have also brought in their wake massive social turmoil and the horrors of post-modern civilisation, replacing the horrors of their feudal past.
Till the 1980s, newspapers in Delhi religiously reported bride burning as ploys to settle dowry disputes across religious and cultural divides.
Bride humiliations still happen, in hushed tones, within multicultural and multi-ethnic condominiums. But they no longer occupy as much media mindspace, as rape cases do.
While brutalising of women in the upper echelons of Lutyens’s Delhi go unreported behind silken curtains and Venetian blinds, post-mortems and shaming involving slumdogs occupy kilometres long newsprint columns for people living in ivory towers to split hair over.
But now that the Virus has brought another horror story home, of migrants deserting our dystopian world in droves to safety of their villages, ensconced in the primordial past, another major civilisational dialogue is set to take place in this twilight saga.
The back-to-roots relocation of populations will take with it modern technology driven nuclear enterprise to our villages.
It will also break down social and caste prejudices back home as men and women walk back hand-in-hand with the Outlander they married in the cities. And with that will emerge a new race of citizens freed of their millennial old birthmarks.
The pandit may well be taking home his Muslim wife. The harijan girl may light the lamp in the haveli of her Brahmin in-laws. The Christian adivasi woman from Jharkhand may well become the lady of the manor in the Punjabi jat’s farmland. The delicate Naga maiden may return home with her Rajput beau to begin life all over again, taking online music lessons for the Hyderabad code writer’s son in distant Pune.
And so, the dystopia that haunts us today may birth a new utopia that we celebrate tomorrow.
Let’s cherish this new beginning. Not mourn what was!
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