In 1860, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, that genteel architect of American elitism, coined the term ‘Boston Brahmin’ in The Atlantic Monthly. With a flourish of poetic licence and a dash of cultural appropriation, he likened New England’s patrician class to India’s priestly caste. The Boston Brahmin, as Holmes imagined, was a creature of cultivated restraint, old money and older prejudices. A caste of codfish and Cabots, sipping tea with the solemnity of scripture and the exclusivity of a country club.
Fast forward to today, and the phrase still floats through the corridors of East Coast academia and dinner-party discourse like a perfumed ghost. It is a term that wears its privilege like tweed — quiet, itchy and self-congratulatory. It assumes that education and prosperity alone confer cultural superiority. But alas, as we’ve learned from the increasingly polarised and performative landscape of American society, development without depth is just decoration.
Enter Bhubaneswar.
Here, we propose a new term — not to stratify, but to satirise: the Bhubaneswar Brahmin. Not a caste. Not a club. Not a curated elite. The Bhubaneswar Brahmin is everyone. The street vendor who recites Jayadeva. The civil servant who plants rooftop gardens in Cuttack. The artist who paints silence into murals. The climate advocate who blends legacy with innovation. In Bhubaneswar, Brahminhood is not a birthright — it’s a birthlight. A quiet illumination of shared dignity, not a spotlight of inherited entitlement.
Unlike the Bostonian obsession with lineage and gated intellect, Bhubaneswar breathes in pluralism. Odisha does not need to flaunt its development, it lives it. India, too, in its sprawling, imperfect brilliance, refuses to be boxed into binaries. We are not red or blue, we are rangoli. We are not caste-stratified, we are caste-defied. We do not divide, we dialogue.
So carry on, Boston Brahmin. Enjoy your curated exclusivity and your antique notions of civility. Good luck to the minds who coined the term — perhaps they truly believe in what it stands for: a genteel segregation dressed as sophistication. But here in Bhubaneswar, we sip our pakhala and smile. Because we know that true development isn’t measured in degrees or dollars — it’s measured in dignity.
In Bhubaneswar, every citizen is a Brahmin — not by birth, but by breadth. By the ability to hold contradiction with grace, to honour tradition without weaponising it, and to dream without dividing.
And that, dear Boston, is what culture looks like.
