Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of
powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth
century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and
politics. This paper examines the changing professional ...
Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of
powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth
century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and
politics. This paper examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal
household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis
household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment
under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682-1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles,
appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomized by the
career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative
political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments.
Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from within the Chitnis
household itself, forced members of later generations to adopt creative and sometimes risky
strategies to defend their claims to property. This paper explores how the profound dislocations
of political transformation in eighteenth-century South Asia enabled distinctive modes of
individual and collective self-fashioning amongst skilled, upwardly mobile groups.