The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 3

Kahār

1. Origin and statistics

Kahār,²³⁷ Bhoi.—The caste of palanquin-bearers and watermen of northern India. No scientific distinction can be made between the Kahārs and Dhīmars, both names being applied to the same people. In northern India the term Kahār is generally used, and Mr. Crooke has an article on Kahār, but none on Dhīmar. In the Central Provinces the latter is the more common name for the caste, and in 1911 23,000 Kahārs were returned as against nearly 300,000 Dhīmars. Berār had also 27,000 Kahārs. The social customs of the caste are described in the article on Dhīmar, but a short separate notice is given to the Kahārs on account of their special social interest. Some Kahārs refuse to clean household cooking-vessels and hence occupy a slightly higher social position than the Dhīmars generally. Mr. Crooke derives the name of the caste from the Sanskrit Skandha-kāra, or ‘One who carries things on his shoulder.’ The Brāhmanical genealogists represent the Kahār as descended from a Brāhman father and a Chandāl or sweeper mother, and this is typical of the position occupied by the caste, who, though probably derived from the primitive non-Aryan tribes, have received a special position on account of their employment as household servants, so that all classes may take water and cooked food at their hands. As one of Mr. Crooke’s correspondents remarks: “This caste is so low that they clean the vessels of almost all castes except menials like the Chamār and Dhobi, and at the same time so high that, except Kanaujia Brāhmans, all other castes eat pakki and drink water at their hands.” Sir D. Ibbetson says of the Kahār: “He is a true village menial, receiving customary dues and performing customary service. His social standing is in one respect high; for all will drink water at his hands. But he is still a servant, though the highest of his class.” This comparatively high degree of social purity appears to have been conferred on the Kahārs and Dhīmars from motives of convenience, as it would be intolerable to have a palanquin-bearer or indoor servant from whom one could not take a drink of water.

2. The doli or palanquin

The proper occupation of the Kahār is that of doli or litter-bearer. When carts could not travel owing to the absence of roads this was the regular mode of conveyance of those who could afford it and did not ride. Buchanan remarks: “Few or none except some chief native officers of Government keep bearers in constant pay; but men of large estates give farms at low rents to their bearers, who are ready at a call and receive food when employed.”²³⁸ A superior kind of litter used by rich women had a domed roof supported on eight pillars with side-boards like Venetian blinds; and was carried on two poles secured to the sides beneath the roof. This is perhaps the progenitor of the modern Calcutta ghāri or four-wheeler, just as the body of the hansom-cab was modelled on the old sedan-chair. It was called Kharkhariya in imitation of the rattling of the blinds when in motion.²³⁹ The pālki or ordinary litter consisted of a couch slung under a long bamboo, which formed an arch over it. Over the arch was suspended a tilt made of cloth, which served to screen the passenger from sun and rain. A third kind was the Chaupala or square box open at the sides and slung on a bamboo; the passenger sat doubled up inside this. If as was sometimes the case the Chaupala was hung considerably beneath the bamboo the passenger was miserably draggled by dust and mud. Nowadays regular litters are so little used that they are not to be found in villages; but when required because one cannot ride or for travelling at night they are readily improvised by slinging a native wooden cot from two poles by strings of bamboo-fibre. Most of the Kahārs and Dhīmars have forgotten how to carry a litter, and proceed very slowly with frequent stops to change shoulders or substitute other bearers. But the Kols of Mandla still retain the art, and will do more than four miles an hour for several hours if eight men are allowed. Under native governments the privilege of riding in a palanquin was a mark of distinction; and a rule was enforced that no native could thus enter into the area of the forts in Madras and Bombay without the permission of the Governor; such permission being recorded in the order book at the gates of the fort and usually granted only to a few who were lame or otherwise incapacitated. When General Medows assumed the office of Governor of Bombay in 1788 some Parsis waited on him and begged for the removal of this restriction; to which the Governor replied, “So long as you do not force me to ride in this machine he may who likes it”; and so the rule was abrogated.²⁴⁰ A passage from Hobson-Jobson, however, shows that the Portuguese were much stricter in this respect: “In 1591 a proclamation of the Viceroy, Matthias d’Albuquerque, ordered: ‘That no person of what quality or condition soever, shall go in a palanquy without my express licence, save they be over sixty years of age, to be first proved before the Auditor-General of Police … and those who contravene this shall pay a penalty of 200 cruzados, and persons of mean estate the half, the palanquys and their belongings to be forfeited, and the bois or mouços who carry such palanquys shall be condemned to His Majesty’s galleys.’”²⁴¹ The meaning of the last sentence appears to be that the bearers were considered as slaves, and were forfeited to the king’s service as a punishment to their owner. As the unauthorised use of this conveyance was so severely punished it would appear that riding in a palanquin must have been a privilege of nobility. Similarly to ride on a horse was looked upon in something of the same light; and when a person of inferior consequence met a superior or a Government officer while riding, he had to dismount from his horse as a mark of respect until the other had passed. This last custom still obtains to some extent, though it is rapidly disappearing.

As a means of conveyance the litter would be held sacred by primitive people, and Mr. Crooke gives an instance of the regard paid to it: “At the Holi festival eight days before Diwāli in the western Districts the house is plastered with cowdung and figures of a litter (doli) and bearers are made on the walls with four or five colours, and to them offerings of incense, lights and flowers are given.”²⁴² Even after passable roads were made tongas or carts drawn by trotting-bullocks were slow in coming into general use owing to the objection felt by the Hindus to harnessing the sacred ox.

3. Female bearers

At royal courts women were employed to carry the litters of the king and the royal ladies into the inner precincts of the palace, the male bearers relinquishing their charge outside. “Another class of attendants at the palace peculiar to Lucknow were the female bearers. Their occupation was to carry the palanquins and various covered conveyances of the king and his ladies into the inner courts of the harem. These female bearers were also under military discipline. They had their officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. The head of them, a great masculine woman of pleasing countenance, was an especial favourite of the king. The badinage which was exchanged between them was of the freest possible character—not fit for ears polite, of course; but the extraordinary point in it was that no one hearing it or witnessing such scenes could have supposed it possible that a king and a slave stood before him as the two chief disputants.”²⁴³ Similarly female sepoys were employed to guard the harem, dressed in ordinary uniform and regularly drilled and taught to shoot.²⁴⁴ A battalion of female troops for guarding the zenāna is still maintained in Hyderābād.²⁴⁵

4. Indoor servants

From being a palanquin-bearer the Kahār became the regular indoor servant of Hindu households. Originally of low caste, and derived from the non-Aryan tribes, they did not object to eat the leavings of food of their masters, a relation which is naturally very convenient, if not essential, in poor Hindu houses. Sir H. Risley notes, however, that in Bengal a Kahār engaged in personal service with a Brāhman, Rājpūt, Bābhan, Kāyasth or Agarwāl, will only eat his master’s leavings so long as he is himself unmarried.²⁴⁶ It seems that the marriage feast may be considered as the sacrificial meal conferring full membership of the caste, after which the rules against taking food from other castes must be strictly observed. Slaves were commonly employed as indoor servants, and hence the term Kahār came to be almost synonymous with a slave. “In the eighteenth century the title Kahār was at Patna the distinctive appellation of a Hindu slave, as Maulazādah was of a Muhammadan, and the tradition in 1774 was that the Kahār slavery took its rise when the Muhammadans first invaded northern India.”²⁴⁷

As the Kahār was the common indoor servant in Hindu houses so apparently he came to be employed in the same capacity by the English. But he was of too high a caste to serve the food of a European, which would have involved touching the cooked flesh of the cow, and thus lost him his comparatively good status and social purity among the Hindus. Hence arose the anomaly of a body servant who would not touch his master’s food, and confined himself to the duties of a valet; while the name of bearer given to this servant indicates clearly that he is the successor of the old-time Kahār or palanquin-bearer. The Uriya bearers of Bengal were well known as excellent servants and most faithful; but in time the inconvenience of their refusal to wait at table has led to their being replaced by low-caste Madrasis and by Muhammadans. The word ‘boy’ as applied to Indian servants is no doubt of English origin, as it is also used in China and the West Indies; but the South Indian term boyi or Hindi bhoi for a palanquin-bearer also appears to have been corrupted into boy and to have made this designation more common. The following instances of the use of the word ‘boy’ from Hobson-Jobson²⁴⁸ may be quoted in conclusion: “The real Indian ladies lie on a sofa, and if they drop their handkerchief they just lower their voices and say ‘Boy,’ in a very gentle tone” (Letters from Madras in 1826). ‘Yes, Sāhib, I Christian Boy. Plenty poojah do. Sunday time never no work do’ (Trevelyan, The Dawk Bungalow, in 1866). The Hindu term Bhoi or bearer is now commonly applied to the Gonds, and is considered by them as an honorific name or title. The hypothesis thus appears to be confirmed that the Kahār caste of palanquin-bearers was constituted from the non-Aryan tribes, who were practically in the position of slaves to the Hindus, as were the Chamārs and Mahārs, the village drudges and labourers. But when the palanquin-bearer developed into an indoor servant, his social status was gradually raised from motives of convenience, until he grew to be considered as ceremonially pure, and able to give his master water and prepare food for cooking. Thus the Kahārs or Dhīmars came to rank considerably above the primitive tribes from whom they took their origin, their ceremonial purity being equal to that of the Hindu cultivating castes, while the degrading status of slavery which had at first attached to them gradually fell into abeyance. And thus one can understand why the Gonds should consider the name of Bhoi or bearer as a designation of honour.

Kaikāri

1. Origin and traditions

Kaikāri, Kaikādi (also called Bargandi by outsiders).²⁴⁹—A disreputable wandering tribe, whose ostensible profession is to make baskets. They are found in Nimār and the Marātha Districts, and number some 2000 persons in the Central Provinces. The Kaikāris here, as elsewhere, claim to have come from Telingāna or the Deccan, but there is no caste of this name in the Madras Presidency. They may not improbably be the caste there known as Korva or Yerūkala, whose occupations are similar. Mr. Kitts²⁵⁰ has stated that the Kaikāris are known as Korāvars in Arcot and as Korvas in the Carnatic. The Kaikāris speak a gipsy language, which according to the specimen given by Hislop²⁵¹ contains Tamil and Telugu words. One derivation of Kaikāri is from the Tamil kai, hand, and kude, basket, and if this is correct it is in favour of their identification with the Korvas, who always carry their tattooing and other implements in a basket in the hand.²⁵² The Kaikāris of the Central Provinces say that their original ancestor was one Kānoba Ramjān who handed a twig to his sons and told them to earn their livelihood by it. Since then they have subsisted by making baskets from the stalks of the cotton-plant, the leaves of the date-palm and grass. They themselves derive their name from Kai, standing for Kānoba Ramjān and kādi, a twig, an etymology which may be dismissed with that given in the Berār Census Report²⁵³ that they are the remnants of the Kaikeyas, who before the Christian era dwelt north of the Jalandhar Doāb. Two subcastes exist in Nimār, the Marāthas and the Phirasti or wandering Kaikāris, the former no doubt representing recruits from Marātha castes, not improbably from the Kunbis. The Marātha Kaikāris look down on the Phirastis as the latter take cooked food from a number of castes including the Telis, while the Marāthas refuse to do this. In the Nāgpur country there are several divisions which profess to be endogamous, as the Kāmāthis or those selling toys made of palm-leaves, the Bhāmtis or those who steal from bazārs, the Kunbis or cultivators, the Tokriwālas or makers and sellers of baskets and the Boriwālas or those who carry bricks, gravel and stone. Kunbi and Bhāmti are the names of other castes, and Kāmāthi is a general term applied in the Marātha country to Telugu immigrants; the names thus show that the Kaikāris, like other vagrant groups, are largely recruited from persons expelled from their own caste for social offences. These groups cannot really be endogamous as yet, but as in the case of several other wandering tribes they probably have a tendency to become so. In Berār²⁵⁴ an entirely different set of 12½ subcastes is recorded, several of which are territorial, and two, the Pungis or blowers of gourds, and the Wājantris or village musicians, are occupational. In Nimār as in Khāndesh²⁵⁵ the Kaikāris have only two exogamous clans, Jādon and Gaikwār, who must marry with each other. In the southern Districts there are a number of exogamous divisions, as Jādon, Māne, Kūmre, Jeshti, Kāde, Dāne and others. Jādon is a well-known Rājpūt sept, and the Kaikāris do not explain how they came by the name, but claim to have fought as soldiers under several kings, during which occasions the name may have been adopted from some Rājpūt leader in accordance with the common practice of imitation. Māne and Gaikwār are family names of the Marātha caste. The names and varied nomenclature of the subdivisions show that the Kaikāris, as at present constituted, are a very mixed caste, though they may not improbably have been originally connected with the Korvas of Madras.

Kaikaris making baskets

2. Marriage

Marriage within the same gotra or section is prohibited, but with one or two exceptions there are no other restrictions on intermarriage between relatives. A sister’s son may marry a brother’s daughter, but not vice versa. A man may not marry his wife’s elder sister either during his wife’s lifetime or after her death, and he may marry her younger sister, but not the younger but one. Girls are generally married between 8 and 12 years of age. If a girl cannot get a partner nothing is done, but when the marriage of a boy has not been arranged, a sham rite is performed with an akao plant (swallow-wort) or with a silver ring, all the ceremonies of a regular marriage being gone through. The tree is subsequently carefully reared, or the ring worn on the finger. Should the tree die or the ring be lost, funeral obsequies are performed for it as for a member of the family. A bride-price is paid which may vary from Rs. 20 to Rs. 100. In the southern Districts the following custom is in vogue at weddings. After the ceremony the bridegroom pretends to be angry and goes out of the mandap or shed, on which the bride runs after him, and throwing a piece of cloth round his neck, drags him back again. Her father then gives him some money or ornaments to pacify him. After this the same performance is gone through with the bride. The bride is taken to her husband’s house, but is soon brought back by her relatives. On her second departure the husband himself does not go to fetch her, and she is brought home by his father and other relations, her own family presenting her with new clothes on this occasion. Widow-marriage is permitted, and the widow is expected to marry the next younger brother of the deceased husband. She may not marry any except the next younger, and if another should take her he is expelled from the caste until the connection is severed. If she marries somebody else he must repay to her late husband’s brother a half of the expenses incurred on the first marriage. In the southern Districts she may not marry a brother of her husband’s at all. A widow cannot be married in her late husband’s house, but is taken to her parents’ house and married from there. In Nimār her family do not take anything, but in the south they are paid a small sum. Here also the marriage is performed at the second husband’s house; the woman carries to it a new earthen pitcher filled with water, and, placing it on the chauk or pattern of lines traced with flour in the courtyard, touches the feet of the Panch or caste committee, after which her skirt is tied to her husband’s cloth. The pair are seated on a blanket and new bangles are placed on the woman’s wrist, widows officiating at the ceremony. The couple then leave the village and pass the night outside it, returning next morning, when the woman manages to enter the house without being perceived by a married woman or unmarried girl. A bachelor marrying a widow must first go through the ceremony with a ring or akao plant, as already described, this being his real marriage; if he omits the rite his daughters by the widow will not be considered as members of the caste, though his sons will be admitted. Polygamy is allowed, but the consent of the first wife must be obtained to the taking of a second, and she may require a written promise of good treatment after the second marriage. A second wife is usually only taken if the first is barren, and if she has children her parents usually interfere to dissuade the husband, while other parents are always averse to giving their daughter in marriage to a man under such circumstances. Divorce is permitted for the usual reasons, a deed being drawn up and attested by the panchāyat, to whom the husband pays a fine of Rs. 8 or Rs. 10.

3. Religion

The tutelary god of the Kaikāris is the Nāg or cobra, who is worshipped at marriages and on the day of Nāg-Panchmi. Every family has in the house a platform dedicated to Khandoba, the Marātha god of war. They also worship Marīmāta, to whom flowers are offered at festivals, and a little ghī is poured out in her honour by way of incense. When the juāri harvest is gathered, dalias or cakes of boiled juāri and a ewe are offered to Marīmāta. They do not revere the Hindu sacred trees, the pīpal and banyan, nor the basil plant, and will readily cut them down. They both burn and bury the dead. The Jādons burn all married persons, but if they cannot afford firewood they touch the corpse with a burning cinder and then bury it. The Gaikwārs always bury their dead, the corpse being laid naked on its back with the feet pointing to the south. On returning from the burial-ground each relative of the deceased gives one roti or wheaten cake to the bereaved family, and they eat, sharing the cakes with the panchāyat. Bread is also presented on the second day, and on the third the family begin to cook again. Mourning lasts for ten days, and on the last day the house is cleaned and the earthen pots thrown out; the clothes of the family are washed and the males are shaved. Ten balls of rice cooked in milk are offered to the soul of the dead person and a feast is given to the caste. After a birth the mother remains impure for five weeks. For the first five days both the mother and child are bathed daily. The navel cord and after-birth are buried by the midwife in a rubbish heap. When the milk teeth fall out they are placed in a ball of the dung of an ass and thrown on to the roof of the house. It is considered that the rats or mice, who have very good and sharp teeth, will take them and give the child good teeth in exchange. Women are impure for five days during the menstrual period. When a girl attains maturity a ceremony called god-bharni is performed. The neighbours are invited and songs are sung and the girl is seated in the chauk or pattern of lines traced with flour. She is given new clothes and bangles by her father, or her father-in-law if she is married, and rice and plantains, cocoanuts and other fruits are tied up in her skirt. This is no doubt done so that the girl may in like manner be fruitful, the cocoanuts perhaps being meant to represent human heads, as they usually do.