Vishwakarma (caste)

The Vishwakarma community refer to themselves as the Viswabrahmin, and are sometimes described as an Indian caste. The community comprises five sub-groups—carpenters, blacksmiths, bronze smiths, goldsmiths and stonemasons—who believe that they are descendants of Vishvakarman, a Hindu deity.

They worship various forms of this deity and follow five Vedas—Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, Atharvaveda, and Pranava Veda.

The communal name of Vishwakarma is of fairly recent usage. The British Raj misunderstood the Indian caste system as being an inflexible concept based on varna, ignoring all evidence of caste creation and disintegration caused by processes of social fission and fusion. This flawed interpretation, formed in part by heeding the work of Brahmin scholars, resulted in many communities aspiring to official recognition of a higher social status than was traditional, based on claims of descent from elite groups such as the Brahmins or Kshatriyas. Among the changes that occurred during this period, the census administrator John Henry Hutton recorded in 1931 a caste called the Vishwakarma, which was an administrative creation defined as a community of artisans who were geographically disparate but shared fairly similar occupations. Like the similarly-created Yadavs, who were an administrative grouping of grazers, herders and dairymen, the Vishwakarma comprised numerous previously diverse castes.

The community prefer the new name, which has evidential support in 12th-century inscriptions that refer to smiths and sculptors belonging to the Vishwakarma kula, although Vijaya Ramaswamy notes that "... the Vishwakarma community is obviously cutting across caste lines" and "... comprises five socially and economically differentiated jatis". Prior to the Raj period, these communities were referred to names such as Kammalar in present-day Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Panchalar in Karnataka and Panchanamuvaru in Andhra Pradesh, while there are also medieval inscriptions that refer to them as the Rathakara and Kammala-Rathakarar.

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