How social media broke reservations for Brahmin men in reciting Hindu scriptures

“People think anybody can recite the Bhagavata [Purana] and become famous,” Hemant Mani, 42, grumbled over the phone from his monastery in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. “Social media is giving people the freedom to pursue any profession they wish to.”

At the age of 16, Mani began training to become a reciter of Hindu religious scriptures, known as katha vachaks in the Hindi belt. He likened his craft to a yajna, or a ritual, which only Brahmin males could perform and scorned self-taught katha vachaks from any other caste or gender.

But, countered Manorama Singh Yadav, a katha vachak from Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh, why shouldn’t women recite kathas? “Many Brahmins come to listen to my kathas wherever I go,” she said. “They treat me like their own daughter.”

Yadav was born in a farming family but her interest in religion led her to kathas. She did not receive formal training in a gurukul – a traditional Hindu school – like Mani. Instead, she taught herself by reading books and listening to popular katha vachaks, first on television and then on the internet.

The flux in the profession came under the spotlight in June, when some Brahmins assaulted a band of backward-caste katha vachaks in Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah district. The state...

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