According to W.Rowe's account (that later scholars disagreed with), during the British Raj era, certain law cases in Calcutta, led to courts classifying Kayasthas as shudras to diminish their influence with Indian royalty, based largely upon the pseudo-theories of Herbert Hope Risley who had conducted studies on castes and tribes of the Bengal Presidency. According to Rowe, the Kayasthas of Bengal, Bombay and the United Provinces repeatedly challenged this classification by producing a flood of books, pamphlets, family histories and journals to pressurize the government for recognizing them as Kshatriya and to reform the caste practices in the directions of sanskritisation and westernisation. However, scholars from the University of Berkeley as well as the University of Cambridge have disagreed with Rowe's research by pinpointing 'factual and interpretative errors' in his study as well as criticizing his study for making 'unquestioned assumptions' about the kayastha movement of sanskritisation and westernisation.