Monday, July 16, 2007

The Origin of Bengali Brahmins

Ancient Bengal did not have any Brahmins in its community. It is popularly believed that Brahmins were brought in to preach Hindutva, though really not the Vedic Hinduism as it is commonly believed, but more of the Pouranik Hinduism type, which evolved after Buddhism flourished. This Pouranik Hinduism is what we know as Brahmanism .
It was circa 686 BC , when Bengalee society was under the direct influence of the Buddhists and the Jainis. The then king of Bengal, Aadishoor, son of Shashanka, started the procedure of luring Brahmins into the delta. King Shashanka never liked the Buddhists and Jainis, and his son followed in his father's way of thinking. Aadishoor is the first king of Bengal, who planned to spread Brahminism into the delta area to curb the increasing influences of the Buddhists and Jainis of that time.
It was he who took the initiative and brought in five families or group of families from the area called Brahambartya , specifically Kanauj and generally from the area between the Ganges and the Yamuna, which includes present day Haryana and a good chunk of Western Uttar Pradesh.
He brought in those five families or caste groups and helped them to settle down in five villages of the Rahr Bhoomi , i.e. the land south of the confluence of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in Bengal. The five villages were :
Chatto
Mukhoti
Bandoghati
Gango
Ghoshan
The families which migrated became the pundits of the local villages under the auspicies and support of the King. These pundits were known as Upadhyays. From the names of the villages they worked in, these families got their titles over a period of time. These titles later on were adopted as the surnames of modern Bengalee Brahmins.
Thus the Upadhayay from Chatto village came to take on the title of Chattopadhyay and similarly the others came to be known as Mukhopadhyay, Bandopadhyay, Gangopadhyay and Ghoshal. These brahmins came to be known also as the Rahri Brahmins .
Barendra Bhumi , i.e. modern day North Bengal, similarly had its Brahminism awakening soon after the south got its share. Many years after Adishoor, Shyamal Varma, a Kshatriya King also brought five Brahmanas from Kanouj----
Sanaka; Bhardwaja; Savarna; Sandilya; Vasistha.
The Bhatariya,
Maitreya,
Satar,
Baghshree and
Laheria
villages soon gave birth to the Brahmin clans of Bhaduri, Moitra, Sanyal, Bagchi and Lahiri. These came to be known as the Barendra Brahmins .
Apart from the above two classes of Brahmins, there is another one called the Vedic Brahmins . They came in much later into the fold of the Bengalee society. They mainly dealt in performance of religious activities. These were the Bhattacharya and the Chakraborty. The Bhattacharyas became both the pujari and religious Gurus to the common people. The Chakrabortys restricted themselves to perform religious ritualistic activities only.

10 comments:

Baibaswata Chatterjee said...

DNA study of Bengali brahmins will be greatly useful in finding ancestry. Modern DNA examination methods will ascertain the similarities and/or differences between different Bengali brahmins. I am not sure if any data already exists in this regard. But it would surely be interesting to.

Arundhati said...

Good piece of work .Specially helpful for the Bengalee Brahmin kids brought up in foreign lands to trace their ancestory.
Please keep on writing .
Arundhati Bagchi

sunirmal.... said...

In 683 BC neither mahavir nor Buddha was born, So no question of Buddhist or Jaina influence on Bengalies at that time
Sunirmal Maiti
15th August 2013

Unknown said...

The last point (by Sunirmal) is significant; the poster of this piece more than likely meant to write 683 AD (and not BC). What is unresolved (among other things) is whether the Bhattacharyas and Chakrabortys were also brought in from NW India and assimilated into Bengal. Nothing is stated about this.

Vishal said...

Is "Rakshit" is bengali brahman

Unknown said...

U missed another 2 sects of bramhins.. Kulins & Rudrajas..!!

raja said...

I DEVRAJ LAHIRI S/O SAMIR KUMAR LAHIRI FIND IT INTERESTING

Unknown said...

I believe you tried to mean 686 AD and not BC. However found the post very much informative.

Supriyo said...

Lumbini, the Birthplace of the Lord Buddha. Siddhartha Gautama, the Lord Buddha, was born in 623 B.C. in the famous gardens of Lumbini, which soon became a place of pilgrimage

Supriyo said...

+

The Origins of Buddhism
A Buddha statue in Sakya Monastery, Seattle, WA. (Wonderlane/flickr)
Buddhism, founded in the late 6th century B.C.E. by Siddhartha Gautama (the "Buddha"), is an important religion in most of the countries of Asia. Buddhism has assumed many different forms, but in each case there has been an attempt to draw from the life experiences of the Buddha, his teachings, and the "spirit" or "essence" of histeachings (called dhamma or dharma) as models for the religious life. However, not until the writing of the Buddha Charita (life of the Buddha) by Ashvaghosa in the 1st or 2nd century C.E. do we have acomprehensive account of his life. The Buddha was born (ca. 563 B.C.E.) in a place called Lumbini near the Himalayan foothills, and he began teaching around Benares (at Sarnath).