Rethinking “Brahmanization” and Caste Politics in Late Ancient South Asia

Abstract This article contributes to the body of scholarship that is critical of overreliance on what Johannes Bronkhorst has called the “Brahmanization” model of historical transformation in late ancient South Asia (ca. 200 BCE–ca. 600 CE). By Brahmanization, the author refers to the process by which Brahmin communities of late ancient South Asia became managers of a socioeconomic order defined by the purity politics of caste. In particular, this article proposes to rethink the preponderant conceptions of power relations during the early first millennium CE by focusing on textual descriptions of outcaste groups that late ancient hegemonic forces collectively referred to as Caṇḍālas. This article will demonstrate that the Buddhist monastic governmentality was a critical institutional battleground upon which the combat between Brahmanizing forces across South Asia and those subaltern communities resistant to caste-based hegemony played out in the early centuries of the common era. This article argues that the Caṇḍāla communities that joined these Buddhist monasteries successfully carved out within these institutions spaces of relative social autonomy from Brahmanical power structures.