Mahratta kunbi

Kunbi identity formed over centuries as the peasant layer of Maratha society, farming the land while other branches of the same lineage turned to warfare and government. This division of roles, between those who tilled and those who commanded, helped shape two social identities that are close but distinct within the same ethnic root.

Over time, internal migrations carried Kunbi families beyond Maharashtra, settling in Gujarat and reaching as far as the province of Sindh, now in Pakistan. This dispersion explains why the people today speak more than one language and live under different regional customs, while sharing in common their tie to agriculture and the memory of a single origin.

Life revolves around farming: families cultivate their own land with the help of working animals, and many hold small plots passed down from generation to generation. Alongside agriculture, it is not uncommon to find Kunbis working as traders, soldiers or civil servants, a sign of a community that has learned to diversify its livelihood without abandoning its rural roots.

They hold an elevated social position within the caste system, which grants them respect and a degree of mobility, even though many families remain among the more modest in income. Village life, with strong bonds of neighborliness and kinship, remains the center of existence for most.

The Hindu faith permeates nearly the entire community, with devotion to Shiva, Vishnu and Devi, along with the various incarnations associated with these deities. The agricultural calendar and the religious calendar move together: festivals, rituals and offerings mark the seasons of planting and harvest, joining spiritual life to the life of the land.

Being Kunbi is, for the vast majority, inseparable from being Hindu: the faith confirms the family’s place within the caste and the village, and is lived less as an individual choice and more as an inheritance received and passed on.

Gujarati, the people’s main language, has one of the oldest Bible translations in India: an initial version was already circulating in the early nineteenth century, and a revision of the complete text became a standard reference in the following century. Today the Bible in Gujarati is also available in audio and mobile apps, widening access even in rural areas. Despite this, among the Mahratta Kunbi Scripture practically does not circulate, and few have ever had direct contact with the text in their own language.

Among the Mahratta Kunbi, following Jesus means breaking with an identity that binds caste, family and Hindu faith into a single social fabric. Abandoning the village gods is read as abandoning one’s own lineage, something that weighs on any individual who draws near the gospel. Add to this the physical and social distance from Christian communities, and the result is a numerous people with very little real contact with a living Christian witness.

Being mostly farmers, the Mahratta Kunbi face the uncertainties typical of rural life, such as harvests dependent on weather and the constant search for better income amid the small plots they cultivate. Basic health and education infrastructure is also lacking in many of the villages where they live, especially in the more remote areas of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Sindh. More than this, it is the near total absence of church and discipleship in their own language and culture that marks this people’s greatest spiritual need: a community with Scripture available in Gujarati, but with no one nearby to open that book with them and walk alongside them in faith.