Teli Sribastab

The Teli caste has documented roots going back to medieval India, when oil pressers supplied a product essential to daily life and to temples, earning a prominent role in the cities where they worked. The Sribastab emerged as one branch of this larger caste, distinguished by surname and lineage, but preserving the same occupational origin.

In the early twentieth century, part of the Teli community sought social advancement by adopting surnames associated with higher-prestige castes, a movement that reflects how the group's identity has always been negotiated against the surrounding social hierarchy. This history of adaptation helps explain the diversity of names and status the Teli carry today depending on the region of India.

For generations, the Teli’s livelihood came from pressing and trading vegetable oil, a craft that required their own mills and knowledge passed from father to son. Industrialization changed that picture: today many Sribastab work in public service, education, small trade, and agriculture, also reflecting the internal migration and urbanization that has spread the people across different states of northern India.

Hindi is the everyday language of most Sribastab, alongside regional languages such as Chhattisgarhi and Bhojpuri, spoken depending on the state where the family lives. Even far removed from the oil mill that gave rise to the caste, the Sribastab of today still recognize this occupational past as part of who they are, a thread linking generations even as the profession itself has changed.

The Teli Sribastab profess Hinduism and trace their origins to Shiva, the deity associated with destruction and transformation in the Hindu pantheon. This claimed origin gives the group a sense of purpose and identity that goes beyond everyday religious practice, weaving faith, caste, and family history into a single fabric.

As with many Indian occupational castes, devotion is expressed both in temples and collective rituals and in household practices passed down from generation to generation. Religious belonging also functions as a mark of social belonging: being Teli and being Hindu are, for most, practically the same thing.

Hindi, the lingua franca of the Sribastab, is one of the languages with the most Christian material available in the world: printed Bibles, apps, audio, and video in abundance. The barrier, then, is not a lack of text but real access: few Teli read the Scriptures on their own or have ever had someone explain their content to them, and faith remains, in practice, a subject that rarely reaches them through a personal, trustworthy path.

Being Teli, in the region where they live, is tied to a Hindu identity that spans generations: changing faith is seen as breaking with the caste, the family, and the support network that sustains the trade and marriage within the group. Add to this the near total absence of a core of followers of Christ among the Sribastab: without an already-formed local community, starting from zero requires someone willing to cross over alone, which makes the first step especially difficult.

As with many traditional-trade castes, the shift to an urban, industrial economy has left part of the Sribastab in search of new educational and professional opportunities that have not yet reached everyone equally. There is real room to grow in skills and income, especially among the younger generation who are leaving the family’s inherited trade without, as yet, a clear path ahead.

In the spiritual realm, the deepest need is simply an encounter: someone who lives nearby, speaks the same language, and can present Jesus in a way that makes sense within the Sribastab’s life of caste and family, without requiring them to abandon who they are in order to know who He is.