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Bengali Kayastha is a community in Bengal. It is a regional subgroup of the Kayastha caste of India. ==History== According to Tej Ram Sharma, an Indian historian, the office of Kayastha in Bengal was instituted before the Gupta period ( to 550 CE), although there is no reference to Kayastha as a caste at that time. He says some scholars have noted that: Historians P. C. Choudhuri, K. R. Medhi and K. L. Barua are of the opinion that "the Brahmins noted in the Nidhanpur and Dubi inscriptions of king Bhaskaravarman", who bore surnames "which are at present used by Kayasthas of Bengal and Nagara Brahmins of Gujarat, were either of the Alpine origin or pre-Vedic Aryans", and similarly the Kayasthas and Kalitas of Assam "are also supposed to be descendants of extra-Vedic Aryans". According to André Wink, another historian, the caste is first referred to around the 5th or 6th century CE and may well have become so identified during the period of the Sena dynasty. Between that time and the 11th-12th century this category of officials or scribes was composed of "putative" Kshatriyas and, "for the larger majority", Brahmins, who retained their caste identity or became Buddhists. As in South India, the Bengal region did not adhere to the four-fold varna system of Vedic Hinduism and instead comprised two groups, the Brahmins and the Shudras. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay also places their emergence as a caste after the Gupta period. Referring to the linkages between class and caste in Bengal, he mentions that the Kayasthas along with the Brahmins and Baidyas, refrained from physical labour but controlled land, and as such represented "the three traditional higher castes of Bengal". Eaton mentions that the Kayasthas continued as the "dominant landholding caste" even after the Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent, and absorbed the descendants of the region's old Hindu rulers. The Pala, Sena, Chandra, and Varman dynasties and their descendants, which claimed the status of Kshatriya, "almost imperceptibly merged" into this caste, which in this way became "the region's surrogate Kshatriya or warrior class". Wink says that they "also ranked as shudras". Professor Julius J. Lipner mentions that the caste status of the Bengali Kayasthas is disputed and says that while some authorities consider that they "do not belong to the twice-born orders, being placed high up among the Sudras; for other authorities they are on a level with Ksatriyas, and are accorded twice-born status." In Bengal between 1500 and 1850 CE, the Kayasthas were regarded as one of the highest of Hindu castes in the region. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bengali Kayastha」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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