Geneologies - Rank, Gender and Patriarchy:-
Maithil Brahmans are famous for the genealogical records which
have been maintained for the last twenty-four generations. All
Srotriyas and Jogya, and many Jaibar are recorded in these books
which are kept by a class of experts known as panjikars. The
books themelves are known as panjis.
They are still kept in the manner of ancient manuscripts on
pages 16" by 3", connected by a single string on the left hand side.
Once they were kept on palm leaf, but paper is now used. They are so
fragile that each generation the panjikar must copy them all over.
However, the best panjikars rarely have to consult them, for they
have eacn lineage entirely memorized and can recite them from memory
at the important ceremony preceding marriage called siddhant.
The worst thing that can happen to a Maithil Brahman is to have his
name and line struck from the books. This is, essentially,
outcasting, for it will be impossible for him to marry his children
to Brahman families recorded in the panjis.
Male Immortality
"Immortality," which may be no more than the memory of a name
in a genealogy, is commonly a masculine privilege. It is through
fathers and sons, not through mothers and daughters,
that "eternal" social continuity is maintained. --Nancy Jay, 1991
Maithil Brahman men, through the patrilineage, gain a kind of
immortality. An infant male is born with a pedigree of known, named
ancestors and the assurance of constancy of identity at his unique
point in a long, intergenerational chain. The keepers of his
genealogy can chant his ancestors beginning with a viji purusha, a
"seed man," twenty-four generations ago, so that he knows his
origins, which are located in a man and a village and a century. In
the books of the generations, all these names are inscribed and
every half-century they get carefully transcribed again to protect
against annihilation by decay, pests, and the short memories of
mortal men. The books, and the experts who keep them, insure his
immortality.
Female Mortality
An infant girl is born to a man whose name is in the books. She
will marry a man whose name and whose ancestors are in another book.
But her name is not there, and will never be inscribed, neither in
her father’s nor her husband’s books. Her mother’s name is not in
any book. No ancestress is in any book. What is the relation of
these anonymous girls to those named and rooted men? How does she
see herself in a world where men, like bamboo with which they
compare themselves, have roots and grow in replenishing clusters,
but women do not?
The patrilineages have constructed themselves, both symbolically and
institutionally, as eternal. They go on endlessly into the future,
generation after generation of sons, maintaining a mystique of pure
patriliny. Since many societies, including those in the West, have
not managed to institute such thorough-going patriarchy, it is
interesting to ask how the Maithil Brahmans have managed to do this.
The written texts, and the expert class of genealogists, of course
are a major method. But these are supported by other devices.
The "Seed Man" and the Patrilineage
Every major patrilineage, called mul by Maithil Brahmans, was
founded by an "apical ancestor," the viji purusha, in the thirteenth
century. These founding ancestors were settled in a particular
village, which generally was the name given to the mul. In some
cases the viji purusha founded more than one mul if his sons and
grandsons at a critical juncture had resettled in a different
village, as Brahmans sometimes did, when given land-gifts or called
to a village as purohit to a major landowner. The association of a
mul with a village, however, was critical.
The word mul literally means "roots of a tree." Roots are founded in
the earth; territoriality is implicit in the very concept. The viji
purusha, or the "seed man" who founded the mul, is a kind of eternal
father of an eternal lineage, housed more or less permanently in a
village.
The question is, is there an eternal mother?
The King and the Genealogies of Maithil Brahmans
In 1310, Raja Harisingh Deva ordered the creation of written
genealogies for all the superior castes of the kingdom. This event
was known as panji prabandha, the founding of the panji
(genealogical) system.
Genealogists went to all the principal castes to write down each
family’s ancestors for the last six generations. These were the
relatives who had to be remembered in order to avoid incest. There
were other reasons, as well: All the descendants from a common
ancestor had to observe certain ritual restrictions, such as death
tabus.
One of the original 13 Srotriya muls, Kharoraya Bhaur
The "apical ancestor," or the founding ancestor, of each family
was called the viji purusha, or "seed man" of the lineage. The
lineage itself was known as the mul.
Eight generations later , one of the descendants of Gangadhar Jha,
whose name was Mahesh Thakur, became an important official under the
Mughals. Mahesh Thakur was responsible for collecting revenues for a
vast territory for forwarding to Akbar; a percentage of this fund he
could keep for his own reward. He was thus on the way toward
founding a new dynasty. At this point he and the Brahmans initiated
a reorganization of the muls.
As a part of this reorganization, a caste-wide re-evaluation of
the quality of all the branches which had emerged in the previous
eight generations was undertaken by the genealogists. It was made
effective as of the 12th generation. Each newly re-evaluated branch
was called a gram, meaning "local branch" (literally, "village").
The newly identified sublineages were called mulgrams, and ranked as
Srotriya, Yogya, or Bans (a "good family"). Unsurprisingly, the
family of Mahesh Thakur, whose mulgram was called Kharoraya Bhaur,
became Srotriyas. This became the royal line of Darbhanga Raj.
In the case of the descendants of Gangadhar Jha, three main muls
were distinguished and Kharoraya was subdivided into 36 mulgrams of
varying ranks.
By mid-twentieth century, the 24th generation of Maithil
Brahmans had been born. The last maharaja, Kameshwar Singh, died in
1962. By that year the government of independent India had abolished
princely titles throughout the country. The loss of political power
has resulted in serious decline in influence of the patrilineages.
The Male Self
In explaining how the genealogist reckons who a man is, a
genealogist drew this diagram
The loop at the bottom left represents the groom, and all the other
loops are his ancestors, at least those relevant to determining a
proper marriage partner. At first I did not know what to make of the
single loops that represented the "ancestors." These were "the
fathers in all the lines," he said. But where were the mothers? The
sixteen lines on the right half of the diagram represent his
mother’s ancestors, but his own mother is not shown. The mothers
were not there, but the mothers’ fathers were. The diagram showed
all the fathers in both mothers’ and fathers’ lines. Women were
simply not represented. Nor were their names recorded in the
genealogies; all women were referred to simply as kanya (virgin
daughter) of such-and-such a man who WAS named.
The groom contains the blood of all these male ancestors. The girl
he marries must not have any of the same ancestors or the marriage
would be incestuous.It is the genealogist's responsibility to insure
no such incestuous marriages occur to stain the families or the
community. It has happened occasionally in the past; such cases are
written in the Curse Panji.
The Dangerous Gift
Marcel Mauss wrote: "To give something is to give a part of
yourself." This worries Brahmans, making them extremely cautious
about their marriage arrangements. Kanyadan quite literally takes
part of the girl's father with it---in the form of her father's
blood which will mix with the groom's in the body of the bride. On
the other hand, the gift of a girl in marriage, kanyadan, is likened
to a gift to a god. "My daughter’s husband is Vishnu to me," said
one Srotriya. A daughter is the finest gift a man has to give.
Though he loves his daughter, he cannot keep her. To keep her past
puberty was considered a great sin for a father in former times,
which was why daughters were married at a very early age, often as
young as five or six.
Still, accepting the daughter involves the receiving family in risk.
Conveniently overlooking the absolute dependence of the lineage on
her reproductive powers, the ideology of marriage focuses on the
dangerous substances the bride brings to mix with the husband’s
patrilineage. As the genealogist puts it: "The boy will enter the
householder stage and he is taking the girl to enter; hence it
depends on the girl. If she isn’t of good blood line, his whole
grhastyam is spoiled. So purity of blood is essential." The mixing
that takes place also alters the status of the future lineage by a
partial mongrelization of it in the womb. The mixing disturbs the
ideal perfection of the self-contained patriline.
The Lineage Goddess
How are the essential--but structurally invisible--wives and mothers
of all those generations represented? Perhaps it is not so easy to
mystify a world of pure fathers and sons after all. They cannot
reproduce themselves. Many a genealogy in the books ends with the
dreaded term: navald. No offspring. Line ended. It is wives who
bring life to the lineage. Female reproductivity is its
cross-generational life force. But this power, being an eternal
property of the lineage, transcends single females. This is the
power of shakti, the power of the goddess.
structural invisibility - note how, from this discussion, women who
are
perfectly visible in the everyday life of society can be
structurally invisible:
they don’t appear in the genealogies and have no name besides kanya.
Every Maithil Brahman lineage has its lineage goddess, called kul
devi. Kul Devi is worshipped by all--and only--the sons and wives of
the lineage. Daughters may not participate in her worship. At the
very founding of each lineage in a village, the founder made a home
for Kul Devi by undertaking an arduous journey to seven sites
distributed across the length and breadth of India, sites
particularly associated with the powers of the Goddess, to collect
enough soil to mix together and fill a round earthen pot. This pot
becomes the place where the goddess is rooted as the Kul Devi of the
lineage. It becomes, in the obvious metaphor of the pot, the true,
timeless, and immortal womb of the lineage. Each actual woman who
marries into the lineage is an incarnation of this immortal feminine
protector and mother of the lineage.
kul means the smallest unit of the patrilineage; kul devi thus means
"lineage goddess."The symbolism of the pot, and its association with
feminine deities in India, has long been noted by scholars. It
figures in Jungian psychology as an archetypal symbol of the human
psyche. Whether or not Jung was right about the existence of
unconscious pan-human symbols, the pot’s significance in Mithila is
unquestionable and not in the least unconscious.
Her temple is the Kul Devi shrine of each family compound. The pot
of soil is never visible in the Kul Devi shrine; it lies buried
beneath a low platform of two levels, where at the central spot an
empty plate and various other symbols are the only actual visible
signs of Kul Devi.