If you went to rural, western Rajasthan before March this year, you would have seen signboards that declared certain villages as “Rajpurohitan”, or belonging to the Rajpurohit community. These boards stood on roads that are technically the property of the state government. While the signs established Rajpurohit dominance in the area, there was no indication that any other group – like, for example, the Meghwals, who are categorised as scheduled caste – could lay claim to belonging here.
Rajpurohits are brahmins and occupy a privileged position in the caste hierarchy. To locals who identified as upper caste, there was nothing casteist about the signboards.
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