Nai

Clans and Kinship

Nai society is divided into endogamous sub-castes, most named after a region. William Crooke (1896) recorded the Kanaujiya, Mathuriya, Sribastab, Ummare, Bhojpuriya, Awadhiya, Magahiya, Sarwariya and others in the North-Western Provinces, with a Muslim branch apart, and Russell and Hira Lal (1916) twenty-six divisions in the Central Provinces, among them the Pardeshi, Marathe, Telange, Bundelkhandi, Malwi and Nimari. The exogamous groups, Russell and Hira Lal write, are called khero or kul, and marriage within one's own group is forbidden; some are named after Brahman sages, some after Rajput clans, and some are titles or the names of animals. Crooke found that Nais bar marriage in their own family and in the families of the mother's brother and father's sister as long as a relationship is remembered, and in Jalaun they would not marry within their own village.

Examples of the exogamous groups of the Central Provinces, in the order Russell and Hira Lal (1916) give them; they do not give a full list. Crooke (1896) found Nai families in the hills with gotras such as Chanwal, Kashyapa and Bharadwaja, and recorded 888 sub-divisions of the Hindu branch at the 1891 census.

In the Official Lists

• Other Backward Class (central list)

  Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh

  The wording differs by state, and some entries join Nai with regional names; the exact wording of each entry was not checked.

The states are those Wikipedia gives for the Nai in the central list of the National Commission for Backward Classes, citing the NCBC state lists (accessed 2012 to 2016); the lists change by resolution, so confirm the current entries. Wikipedia also names Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Puducherry, Tripura, West Bengal and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, where the community has its own regional names; those entries are not shown here. Each state also keeps its own OBC list, not checked here.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

The name is usually derived from the Sanskrit napita (William Crooke, 1896; Russell and Hira Lal, 1916). The community's own tradition, as Crooke recorded it, holds Sain (or Sen) Bhagat as its saint: a devotee of Vishnu whose story is told in the Bhaktamala, he was so absorbed in worship one day that he missed his service at the court of the Raja of Bandhogarh, and the Raja later learned that the god had come in his place. A legend reported on Wikipedia traces the Nai to Nabhi, a king of the Ikshvaku line in Puranic literature. In the hills Crooke found Nai families with gotras such as Kashyapa and Bharadwaja.

History

Russell and Hira Lal counted nearly 190,000 Nais in the Central Provinces in 1911, in every district. In the census era the community sought a higher standing: Wikipedia records claims to be returned as Thakurs in 1921 and as Brahmins in 1931, and a petition to be named Nai Brahmin in 1941. Sain, remembered as a contemporary of Kabir, has become the centre of the community's identity, a process the historian Jagpal Singh calls Sainization; in 1992 the Akhil Bharatiya Sain Bhaktipith Trust was set up at the Ujjain Kumbh, with its seat at Pushkar, and Achlanandji Maharaj became the first Sainacharya.

Faith and Worship

Crooke (1896) found Nais among the Vaishnava, Shaiva and Shakta sects: in the west of the province they honoured Sain Bhagat, and in the east they kept the worship of Phulmati, a form of Devi, and Bhairon Baba. Some Nais are Sikhs. A hymn of Bhagat Sain, in Raag Dhanasari, is in the Guru Granth Sahib.

Customs

Crooke records the three forms of marriage usual in the region: the full rite, the dola, and a simpler rite for widows; in the first two the binding acts are the bride's father's worship of the groom's feet and the sindurdan, when the groom marks the bride's parting with vermilion. Widow remarriage was allowed in all sub-castes except the Byahta. Russell and Hira Lal write that Nai weddings in the Central Provinces follow the local rite and that divorce could be granted before the caste committee.

Notable Personalities