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For to this day the true Chitpavan perserves the fair skin, the strange grey eyes, the aspect of refined strength and intelligence, which must have characterized the shipwrecked mariners of old fable and marked them out in later years as strangers in a strange land.
Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahman of considerable erudition, who had graduated with honours at Bombay, had, however, inherited his full share of Chitpavan hostility to British ascendency.
The Chitpavan Brahmans are undoubtedly the most powerful and the most able of all the Brahmans of the Deccan.
Jackson was murdered last December at Nasik; his accomplices were with one exception Chitpavan Brahmans, and to the same sept of Brahmans belong nearly all the defendants in the great conspiracy trial now proceeding at Bombay.
Under Chitpavan rule the interests of the people of the soil were systematically neglected in Kolhapur, as they had been throughout the Deccan in the later days of the Chitpavan theocracy at Poona, and privileges and possessions were showered upon members of the favoured caste.
It was not, however, till about two centuries ago that the Chitpavan Brahmans began to play a conspicuous part in Indian history, when one of this sept, Balaji Vishvanath Rao, worked his way up at the Court of the Mahratta King Shahu to the position of Peshwa, or Prime Minister, which he succeeded even in bequeathing to his son, the great Bajirao Balaji, who led the Mahratta armies right up to the walls of Delhi.
Not to go back to the exploits of Nana Sahib, himself a Chitpavan, and his followers during the Mutiny, or to the Ramoshi rebellion round Poona in 1879, it was in Poona that the native Press, mainly conducted by Brahmans, first assumed that tone of virulent hostility towards British rule and British rulers which led to the Press Act of 1879, and some of the worst extracts quoted at that time by the Government of India in support of that measure were taken from Poona newspapers.
He, too, was a Chitpavan Brahman, and it was under his reign that his fellow caste-men acquired so complete a monopoly of all the chief offices of State that the Mahratta Empire became essentially a Chitpavan Empire.
Amongst these there is plenty of loyalty to the ruling chief, for his Mahratta subjects have not wholly forgotten the tyranny of Chitpavan Brahman rule either under Shivaji IV.'s Prime Minister or in the less recent times of the Poona Peshwas.
Its population is only about 25,000, but of these about 9,000 belong to the Brahmanical caste, though only about 1,000 are Chitpavan Brahmans, the rest being mainly Deshastha Brahmans, another great sept of the Deccanee sacerdotal caste. It is a city of peculiar sanctity with the Hindus.
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