Marathi Erotic

The Marathi are the people of Maharashtra, the broad shoulder of land where the Deccan plateau meets the Arabian Sea. Roughly 80 million speak Marathi as a first language, which makes it one of the larger languages on earth, though it sits in an awkward seat geographically — Indo-Aryan in family, but pressed up against the Dravidian south, and audibly shaped by that contact. Marathi took loanwords and rhythms from Kannada and Telugu, retained an older Sanskritic vocabulary that Hindi speakers find archaic, and developed its own script, Devanagari written with a distinctive flat horizontal line that locals call shirorekha. A speaker of Hindi will catch perhaps half of a Marathi conversation and confidently mistranslate the rest.

The group's self-image is bound up with the seventeenth century — specifically with Shivaji Bhonsle, who carved a Maratha kingdom out of the Deccan in defiance of the Mughals and built a navy on a coast that had been considered indefensible. The Maratha Confederacy that followed him eventually controlled most of the Indian subcontinent before losing it to the British in 1818. That history is not abstract. It still shapes regional politics, the iconography on government buildings, the names parents give their sons, and the way Maharashtrians talk about themselves relative to the rest of India: capable, martial, slightly outside the mainstream.

Internally the group is layered by caste and occupation rather than by region, and the sub-group names reflect that older social architecture. Maratha proper were the warrior-cultivator class that supplied the kingdom's officers; Kunbi are the closely-related farming caste, and the line between the two has been politically contested for generations. Dhangar are pastoralists, traditionally shepherds of the dry uplands. Bhoi were boatmen and palanquin-bearers along the rivers and coast. Mahar, historically placed at the bottom of the caste order, produced B.R. Ambedkar — the jurist who drafted India's constitution and led a mass conversion of Mahars to Buddhism in 1956, which is why pockets of Maharashtra are now Buddhist rather than Hindu in a country where that is unusual.

Religious life for most Marathi is Hindu and weighted toward the bhakti tradition: devotional poetry in the vernacular rather than priestly ritual in Sanskrit. The pilgrimage to Pandharpur, where worshippers walk for weeks behind palanquins carrying the sandals of medieval saint-poets, is the cultural event the calendar bends around. Ganesh Chaturthi — now a national festival — was reinvented as a public, street-level affair in Pune in the 1890s as a way of organising politics under colonial rule. It has stayed political, and stayed Maharashtrian, ever since.