List of Chitpavan Brahmins

This is a list of notable members of the Chitpavan Brahmin community.

• Balaji Vishwanath and his descendants, Bajirao I, Chimaji Appa, Balaji Bajirao, Raghunathrao, Sadashivrao Bhau, Madhavrao I, Narayanrao, Madhavrao II, and Bajirao II ^[1]
• Nana Fadnavis (1742–1800), regent to Madhavrao II ^[2]
• The Patwardhans, military leaders under the Peshwa ^[3] and later rulers of various princely states
• Balaji Pant Natu, spied for the British against the Peshwa era Maratha Empire and raised the Union Jack over Shaniwar Wada. ^[4]
• Lokhitwadi (Gopal Hari Deshmukh) (1823–1892), social reformer ^{[5] [6]}
• Vishnubawa Brahmachari (1825–1871), 19th-century Marathi Hindu revivalist ^[7]
• Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), ^[8] judge and social reformer. Given the title of Rao Bahadur. ^[9]
• Vishnushastri Krushnashastri Chiplunkar (1850–1882), ^[10] essayist, editor of Nibandha Mala, a Marathi journal, educator, mentor to Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, founder of the Chitrashala press ^[11]
• Vasudev Balwant Phadke (1845–1883), ^[12] a petty government clerk in Pune who led an armed rebellion against the British. Later an Educator. ^[13]
• Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), ^[14] educator, writer and early nationalist leader with widespread appeal. Described by British colonial administration as the "Father of Indian Unrest" ^{[15] [16]}
• Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856 – June 1895), ^[17] journalist, educator and social reformer
• Keshavsut (Krishnaji Keshav Damle) (15 March 1866 – 7 November 1905), Marathi-language poet ^[18]
• Vaman Shivram Apte (1858–1892), Indian lexicographer ^[19]
• Dhondo Keshav Karve (1858–1962), ^[20] social reformer and advocate of women's education
• Anandibai Joshi (1865–1887), first Indian woman to get a medical degree from a university in the west – Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania – in 1886 ^[21]
• Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), ^[22] early nationalist leader on the moderate wing of the Congress party
• Ramabai Mahadev Ranade (1862–1925), woman social acitivist, reformer, founder of Seva Sadan Pune and wife of Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade
• Chapekar brothers (1873–1899), (1879–1899), brothers who assassinated British plague commissioner Walter Rand for his heavy-handed approach to plague relief in Pune in 1897 ^[23]
• Gangadhar Nilkanth Sahasrabuddhe, a social reformer, who, along with two other reformers – Chairman Surendranath Tipnis of the Mahad Municipality and A. V. Chitre – helped Ambedkar during the Mahad Satyagraha ^{[24] [25] [26]}
• Narasimha Chintaman Kelkar (1872–1947), ^[27] writer, journalist, nationalist leader. served on the Viceroy's Executive Council (1924–29)
• Vinayak Damodar Savarkar ^{[28] [29]} (28 May 1883 – 26 February 1966), freedom fighter, social reformer and formulator of the Hindutva philosophy. Popularly known as Veer Savarkar ("Brave" Savarkar) ^[30]
• Senapati Bapat (12 November 1880 – 28 November 1967), prominent Indian freedom fighter who acquired title of Senapati, meaning "Commander" ^[31]
• Dadasaheb Phalke (30 April 1870 – 16 February 1944), pioneer of Indian film industry ^[32]
• Krushnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar (25 November 1872 – 26 August 1948), editor of Kesari and Navakal ^[33]
• Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936), eminent maestro of Hindustani classical music ^[34]
• Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade (1863–1926), historian ^[35]
• Pandurang Vaman Kane (1880–1972), Indologist and Bharat Ratna awardee ^[36]
• Anant Laxman Kanhere (1891–1910), Indian nationalist and revolutionary, hanged for the assassination of British Collector of Nashik, A. M. T. Jackson in 1910 ^[a]
• Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982), Gandhian leader and freedom fighter ^[40]
• Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre (1896–1981), poet and writer in the Kannada language. Winner of the Jnanpith Award ^[41]
• Narhar Vishnu Gadgil (10 January 1896 – 12 January 1966), Congress leader and Member of Nehru's cabinet ^[40]
• Babasaheb Apte (1903–1971), an early RSS pracharak ^[42]
• Irawati Karve (1905–1970), anthropologist ^[43]
• Nathuram Godse (19 May 1910 – 15 November 1949), Mahatma Gandhi's assassin ^[44]
• Narayan Apte (1911–1949) – co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi ^[44]
• Gopal Godse (1919–2005) – co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi and Nathuram Godse's younger brother ^[45]
• Ramachandra Dattatrya Ranade (1886–1956) was an  Indian  philosopher, spiritual leader, and social revolutionary ^[46]
• Pandurang Shastri Athavale  (1920–2003) was an  Indian  activist philosopher, spiritual leader, social revolutionary and religion reformist who founded the  Swadhyaya Parivar  (Swadhyaya Family) in 1954 ^[47]
• Madhuri Dixit (born 1967) – Bollywood actress ^[48]
• Chintaman Ganesh Kolhatkar (12 March 1891 – 23 November 1959), also known as Chintamanrao Kolhatkar, was a well known Marathi stage actor, director, producer, and playwright. He was awarded Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1957 ^[49]

References

1. Collector A. M. T. Jackson, a Sanskrit scholar was affectionately called"Pandit Jackson".Kanhere assassinationed him for Ganesh Damodar Savarkar's trial and an acquittal of a British Engineer in the death of a farmer caused by rash driving. ^{[37] [38] [39]}

1. Gokhale, B.G. (1998). The Fiery Quill: Nationalism and Literature in Maharashtra. Popular Prakashan. p. 40. ISBN   978-81-7154-805-7.
2. Chaurasia, R.S. (2004). History of the Marathas. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors. p. 9. ISBN   9788126903948.
3. Gordon, Stewart (1 February 2007). The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9780521033169 – via Google Books.
4. O'Hanlon, Rosalind (2002), Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge South Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, p. 27-28, ISBN   978-0-521-52308-0
5. Kavlekar, K., 1983. Politics of Social Reform in Maharashta. Political Thought and Leadership of Lokmanya Tilak, p.202
6. Bal Ram Nanda (1977). Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj. Princeton University Press. p. 17. ISBN   9781400870493. His[Deshmukh's] family of Chitpavan Brahmans, one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Peshwa regime...
7. Jones, Kenneth W. (January 1992). Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages. SUNY Press. p. 238. ISBN   9780791408278 . Retrieved 14 September 2020.
8. Wolpert, Stanley A. (April 1991). Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 32. ISBN   978-0195623925.
9. Mahadev Govind Ranade (Rao Bahadur) (1992). The Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Hon'ble Mr. Justice M.G. Ranade. Sahitya Akademi.
10. Wolpert, Stanley A. (April 1991). Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 9. ISBN   978-0195623925.
11. Pinney, Christopher (2004). Photos of the gods : the printed image and political struggle in India. London: Reaktion. p. 48. ISBN   9781861891846.
12. Bayly, Susan (2000). Caste, society and politics in India from the eighteenth century to the modern age (1st, Indian ed.). Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press. p. 236. ISBN   978-0-5217-9842-6. The true nature of these groups, said fearful Bombay officials, had been revealed in 1879 in the response of the region's politically active intelligentsia to the actions of W.B.Phadke, a chitpavan ex-government clerk from Pune.
13. Pinney, Christopher (2004). Photos of the gods : the printed image and political struggle in India. London: Reaktion. pp. 46–47. ISBN   978-1861891846. a petty government clerk in Poona, Vasudev Balvant Phadke, led an uprising that would anticipate the revolutionary terrorism that would come to mark India in the first half of the twentieth century. Like B.G. Tilak, Phadke was a Chitpavan brahman...
14. Hansen, Thomas Blom (2001). Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton University Press. p. 29. ISBN   978-0-69108-840-2.
15. Donald Mackenzie Brown"The Congress." The Nationalist Movement: Indian Political Thought from Ranade to Bhave (1961): 34
16. Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: revolution and reform in the making of modern India (1962) p ix
17. Wolpert, Stanley A. (April 1991). Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 19. ISBN   978-0195623925.
18. Keshavsut, Prabhakar Machwe, Indian Literature, Vol. 9, No. 3 (July–September 1966), pp. 43–51
19. Cashman, Richard I. (14 June 2024). The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra. Univ of California Press. p. 222. ISBN   978-0-520-41485-3.
20. Karve, Dinakar D. (1963). The New Brahmans: Five Maharashtrian Families (1st ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. p. 13.
21. Kumari Jayawardena (1995). The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule. Routledge. p. 104. ISBN   9781136657146. By the early 1880s, Indian women started to benefit from the opening of medical studies to women in Europe and the United States, the first being Anandibai Joshi (1865–1887), born in Pune to a Chitpavan Brahmin family. She was married (according to custom) when she was nine years old. In 1883, at age eighteen, she went to the United States (with her husband)and studied medicine at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where she graduated in medicine in 1886
22. Wolpert, Stanley A. (April 1991). Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 2. ISBN   978-0195623925.
23. Echenberg, Myron (2006). Plague ports : the global urban impact of bubonic plague,1894–1901. New York [u. a.]: New York Univ. Press. p. 66. ISBN   978-0-8147-2232-9.
24. Shailaja Paik (11 July 2014). Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. Routledge. ISBN   9781317673309.
25. Omvedt, Gail (30 January 1994). Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India. SAGE Publications. p. 138. ISBN   9788132119838.
26. Arundhati Roy (May 2017). The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Haymarket Books. p. 129. ISBN   9781608467983. According to Teltumbde, "There was a deliberate attempt to get some progressive people from nonuntouchable communities to the conference, but eventually only two names materialised. One was Gangadhar Nilkanth Sahasrabuddhe, an activist of the Social Service League and a leader of the cooperative movement belonging to the Agarkari Brahman caste, and the other was Vinayak alias Bhai Chitre, a Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu. In the 1940s, Shasrabuddhe became the editor of Janata- another of Ambedkar's newspapers.
27. Sri Narasimha Chintaman "Alias" Tatyasaheb Kelkar, K. N. Watve, Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 28, No. 1/2 (January–April 1947), pp. 156-158, published by Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
28. Wolf, Siegfried O. "Vinayak Damodar Savarkar: Public Enemy or national Hero?" (PDF). Retrieved 3 May 2016.
29. Wolf, Siegfried, ed. (2009). Heidelberg Student papers, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar:: Public Enemy or national Hero (PDF). Dresden: Heidelberg University. p. 10. ISBN   978-3-86801-076-3.
30. Lise McKean (15 May 1996). Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement. University of Chicago Press. p. 72. ISBN   978-0-226-56010-6.
31. Y. D. Phadke (1981). Portrait of a revolutionary: Senapati Bapat. Senapati Bapat Centenary Celebration Samiti. p. 2. Among such young men initiated into revolutionary activities was Pandurang Mahadeo Bapat who later on became widely known as Senapati (General) Bapat. On 12 November 1880, Pandurang Bapat was born in a Chitpavan or Kokanastha Brahmin family at Parner in the Ahmednagar
32. Jain, Kajri (2007). Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Duke University Press Books. p. 151. ISBN   978-0822389736.
33. Richard I. Cashman (25 September 2018). The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra. University of California Press. p. 222. ISBN   9780520303805 . Retrieved 25 September 2018.
34. Subramanian, L., 2000. The master, muse and the nation: The new cultural project and the reification of colonial modernity in India∗. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 23(2), pp.1–32.
35. Kulkarni, A.R., 2002. Trends in Maratha Historiography: Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade (1863–1926). Indian Historical Review, 29(1–2), pp.115–144.
36. Murthy, A.V. Narasimha (13 November 2020). "Bharat Ratna P. V. Kane: An Embodiment of Dharmasastra". Star of Mysore . Retrieved 16 May 2022.
37. Sunanda Swarup (1983). "The Nasik assassination". Organiser. 35–36. Bharat Prakashan. ...Anant Kanhere, who actually killed Jackson, was a sixteen-year-old chitpavan Brahman youth...The whole episode will not be complete without mentioning about Jackson, who was assassinated. Ironically enough the records show that he was a popular Collector and liked by many. He was a Scholar of Sanskrit and was even known as Pandit Jackson. He was very fond of the theatre, dramas...Even On the eve of assassination, he had gone to watch the play "Sharada" which was organised in his honour
38. Bimanbehari Majumdar (1966). Militant Nationalism in India and Its Socio-religious Background, 1897–1917. p. 94. On December 21, A. M. T. Jackson was assassinationed at Nasik by Anant Laxman Kanhere. Jackson was a learned Indologist. He contributed many interesting papers on Indian history and culture and was popularly known as Pandit Jackson. His fault was that he had committed Ganesh Savarkar to trial and acquitted an Engineer named Williams of the charge of killing a farmer by rash and negligent driving. He was not harsh in punishing people charged with sedition. W. S. Khare, a pleader of Nasik delivered some seditious speeches. Jackson ordered him to execute a personal bond of Rs. 2,000 and to be of good behaviour for one year with two substantial and respectable sureties of Rs. 1,000 each.
39. Pramod Maruti Mande (2005). Sacred offerings into the flames of freedom. Vande Mataram Foundation. p. 27. At that time an Englishman named Jackson was the Collector of Nashik District. A cruel man by nature, he greatly harassed the people. He used to hold public assemblies to hear the people's grievances, but this was just a show, meant to put a gloss on his despotic administration. There was no justice for the people. Rather, they were subject to great tyranny.
40. Ruby Maloni; Mariam Dossal, eds. (1999). State intervention and popular response : western India in the nineteenth century. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan. p. 87. ISBN   9788171548552.
41. Amur, G.S. (1994). Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre (Ambikatanayadatta). New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. p. 7. ISBN   9788172015152.
42. Jaffrelot, Christophe (1999). The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s : Strategies of Identity-building, Implantation and Mobilisation (with Special Reference to Central India). Penguin Books India. p. 42. ISBN   978-0-14-024602-5.
43. Patricia Uberoi; Nandini Sundar; Satish Deshpande (2008). Anthropology in the East: founders of Indian sociology and anthropology . Seagull. p.  367. ISBN   9781905422784. In this general atmosphere of reform and women's education, and coming from a professional Chitpavan family, neither getting a education nor going into a profession like teaching would for someone like Irawati Karve have been particularly novel.
44. Alex Damm, ed. (2017). Gandhi in a Canadian Context: Relationships between Mahatma Gandhi and Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. p. 54. ISBN   9781771122603. Moreover, the two principal conspirators behind Gandhi's assassination, who were hung for their actions – Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte – were both Chitpavan Brahmins from Maharashtra as was Savarkar, their ideological mentor. The Chitpavans had a long history of supporting violence against the alleged enemies of Brahminical Hinduism.
45. Thomas Blom Hansen (1999). The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton University Press. Gandhi's assassin Naturam Godse, a Chitpavan brahmin from Pune, had been a member of the RSS for some years, as well as a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. In the early 1940s Godse left the RSS to form a militant organization, Hindu Rashtra Dal, aimed at militarizing the mind and conduct of Hindus, to make them "more assertive and aggressive" (interview with Naturam Godse's brother Gopal Godse, still a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, in Pune, 3 February 1993)
46. Schuler, Barbara (11 September 2017). Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China, and Japan. Brill. p. 85. ISBN   9789004352964 . Retrieved 27 November 2020.
47. Nadkarni, M.V., 2009. Social change through moral development?. Journal of Social and Economic Development, 11(2), pp.127–135.
48. "Shah Rukh is not a good dancer but has charisma: Madhuri". Times of India. Also, we both come from similar backgrounds and are Kokanastha brahmins and have had typical Maharashtrian upbringing that makes us culturally similar.
49. "Chintaman Ganesh Kolhatkar | Library Mantra".