The Panji Tradition

Detailed chapter description

The Panji tradition transformed genealogy into an institution of social memory, territorial identity and marriage regulation in Mithila. This chapter treats the Panji neither as an timeless survival nor as a single document created once and thereafter unchanged. It reconstructs a layered archive: a fourteenth-century process of formalisation associated with the Tirhut court; genealogical and territorial categories elaborated through repeated copying; professional interpretation by Panjikars; later rank vocabularies and marriage procedures; and modern preservation, digitisation and search. The method is chronological and source-critical. Surviving manuscripts, later copies, ethnographic descriptions and modern digital collections are used together but never collapsed into one evidentiary moment. Genealogy exists in many societies as remembered descent, but the Panji tradition is historically distinctive because descent became a maintained documentary system tied to social decisions. A lineage statement could identify ancestors; a Panji institution could preserve, compare and adjudicate relationships across households. That difference matters. The emergence of a corporate genealogical archive created new forms of expertise, because only persons who knew how to read the record, reconcile variant pedigrees and connect family histories could make the archive socially effective. It also created new forms of dependence on writing. Memory did not disappear, but written pedigrees increasingly structured how memory was verified. The Panji therefore belongs simultaneously to the history of manuscripts, marriage, professional knowledge, territorial identity and social classification.