Chitragupta

Puranic accounts place Chitragupta's creation after Brahma, having judged the deeds of created beings for many ages, realized he needed a witness independent of himself to keep the record honest, and brought Chitragupta out of his own body for the task. Different regional and textual traditions give him two wives, most commonly named Irawati and Shobhavati or Nandini, and their sons are the ancestors different Kayastha sub groups trace themselves to: names recorded across the tradition include Srivastava, Saxena, Mathur, Bhatnagar, Nigam, Kulshreshtha and Ambashtha among others, each associated with a particular region of northern India. This is caste origin mythology in the fullest sense, a genealogy that explains and legitimizes a real social and professional community, the traditional scribes, record keepers and administrators of Mughal and later Indian bureaucracy, by rooting their occupation in a divine ancestor who performs exactly that function for the gods. Some tellings add a third strand to the genealogy, describing further sons born specifically to serve as scribes attached to regional courts across northern and eastern India, which some Kayastha sub groups outside the core twelve invoke to explain their own more localized origin within the wider community.

Chitragupta Puja falls on the second day after Diwali, in the same cluster of observances as Bhai Dooj, and its distinguishing feature is that the objects honoured are not images alone but the tools of the scribe's trade: account books, ledgers, pens and ink are cleaned, arranged before the deity and worshipped directly, and in some communities no new entry is made in the account books until the puja has been performed. This fits a wider and much older Hindu pattern of honouring the instruments of one's livelihood rather than only its patron deity, seen also in Ayudha Puja's worship of tools and weapons and in Vishwakarma Puja's worship of machinery among artisans and industrial workers.

Temples built specifically to Chitragupta are few, since he is worshipped chiefly within Kayastha households and community halls rather than through a widespread public temple network, but where they exist they function as much as sites of caste identity and professional blessing as of devotional worship in the ordinary sense. The practice has extended naturally into modern professional life: many Kayastha families and offices now include ledgers, computers or other record keeping equipment in the annual puja alongside traditional pen and paper, treating the observance as addressed to the act of accurate record keeping itself rather than to any one fixed set of tools.