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"Is not that a fatal objection?" For the benefit of non-Hindu readers I may explain that Kayasthas are split into clans probably a survival of the tribal organisation which preceded the family almost everywhere. According to tradition, a King of Bengal named Ádisur imported five Brahmans, and as many Kayastha servants from Kanauj in Upper India.
Thus, whereas we have seen in Kolhapur the Brahmans of the Deccan assert that in this "age of darkness" there can be no Kshatriyas, their fellow-caste-men in Bengal are quite willing to invest Kayasthas with the sacred thread, on the ground that they are really of Kshatriya descent, in order to stimulate martial virtues amongst the Bengalees by reviving for their benefit the old Vedic caste of warriors.
There is a tradition that the highest Brahman septs of Bengal are the descendants of five priests of special sanctity whom King Adisur of Eastern Bengal in the ninth century attracted to his Court from the holiest centres of Hinduism, and that the servants who accompanied them founded the septs to which precedence is still accorded amongst the Kayasthas of Bengal, and both have been at pains to preserve the purity of their descent by a most exclusive and complicated, and often unsavoury, system of matrimonial alliances known as Kulinism.
The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age; most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas the latter a writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste. These statistics did not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped scot-free and were never brought to justice.
The more enlightened section of Kayasthas were unanimous in pronouncing him to be a true Hindu, on whose descendants the gods on high would pour down their choicest blessings. There were others, however, whose malignity found material to work on in his disregard of caste prejudices. The Rival Markets.
They were content to be learned in Sanscrit and in the Hindu Scriptures, and they left secular knowledge to the Kayasthas, or writer caste, with whom they preserved, notwithstanding certain rigid barriers, much more intimate relations than usually exist between different Hindu castes.
The time has long since passed away when arbitrary difference of clan was considered a bar to marriage among Kayasthas." "You are quite right," was Kumodini Babu's reply, "and personally I am above these old-fashioned prejudices. My daughter-in-law may be Dakhin Rárhi, Banga-ja, or Bárendri for all I care, provided she be comely, well-mannered and come of good stock.
Hence in Bengal the Brahmans share their social primacy to an extent unknown in other parts of India with the Kayasthas, and also with another high caste, the Vaidhyas, who formerly monopolized the practice of Hindu medicine. The nexus is education, and that nexus has been strengthened since the advent of British rule and of Western education.
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