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Introduction
The famed Indian Civil Service ethnographer, William Crooke, and Ram Gharib Chaube, a major contributor to the Linguistic Survey of India, noted in their co-authored Folktales from North India the story of a Kayastha clerk who started a quarrel with a sipahi (soldier). The soldier threatened the Kayastha: 'I will knock out your teeth'. The protocol for dispensing pay included a physical description of each soldier, and the disgruntled Kayastha mir bakshi (military paymaster) inserted in the margins 'two teeth missing'. When the sipahi returned to collect his pay, the Kayastha refused, claiming his appearance did not match the form. Frustratingly, the soldier knocked out his own two teeth, which enabled him to collect his earnings.2This was, perhaps, the Kayastha's preferred method of resolving conflict: vicarious, passive-aggression through the pen.
Though anecdotal, the stereotype of the Indian clerk in combination with the power bureaucracy exerts in contemporary South Asia, have recently encouraged scholars to explore how scribes and pensmen shaped India's past. There has been a growing body of literature on the scribe, which has ranged from examining Tamil clerks to the Persian-literate Brahmin.3These studies have done much to shed new light upon how groups with literary and paper management skills fit within the broader contexts of social order and administrative reach, and how they acted as powerful agents of historical change. This paper aims to contribute to India's social history and the concept of the 'scribe' by examining the Kayastha paper-managers who made revenue management and collection in north India possible after the seventeenth century. Other than the work of Karen Leonard,4historians have paid scant attention to Kayasthas in Indian's modern history, though Rosalind O'Hanlon has more recently demonstrated how the Prabhu Kayasthas of Maratha country had to compete with Brahmins for service posts in the 1600s.5
This paper aims to shed light upon the 'lowly' patwari and qanungo, who graced neither a Mughal court nor a Governor-General's office, but provided important links between political authority and agrarian wealth of the people. It argues that Kayasthas were essential for eighteenth century Indian regimes which sought to increasingly document, assess and tax their domains. By the early 1700s they...