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

Karan

Karan,³³¹ Karnam, Mahanti.—The indigenous writer caste of Orissa. In 1901 a total of 5000 Karans were enumerated in Sambalpur and the Uriya States, but the bulk of these have since passed under the jurisdiction of Bihār and Orissa, and only about 1000 remain in the Central Provinces. The total numbers of the caste in India exceed a quarter of a million. The poet Kālidās in his Rāghuvansa describes Karans as the offspring of a Vaishya father and a Sūdra mother. The caste fulfils the same functions in Orissa as the Kāyasths elsewhere, and it is said that their original ancestors were brought from northern India by Yayāti Kesari, king of Orissa (A.D. 447–526), to supply the demand for writers and clerks. The original of the word Karan is said to be the Hindi karāni, kirān, which Wilson derives from Sanskrit karan, ‘a doer.’ The word karāni was at one time applied by natives to the junior members of the Civil Service—‘Writers,’ as they were designated. And the ‘Writers’ Buildings’ of Calcutta were known as karāni kibarīk. From this term a corruption ‘Cranny’ came into use, and was applied in Bengal to a clerk writing English, and thence to the East Indians or half-castes from whom English copyists were subsequently recruited.³³² The derivation of Mahanti is obscure, unless it be from maha, great, or from Mahant, the head of a monastery. The caste prefer the name of Karan, because that of Mahanti is often appropriated by affluent Chasas and others who wish to get a rise in rank. In fact a proverb says: Jār nahīn Jāti, tāku bolanti Mahanti, or ‘He who has no caste calls himself a Mahanti.’ The Karans, like the Kāyasths, claim Chitragupta as their first ancestor, but most of them repudiate any connection with the Kāyasths, though they are of the same calling. The Karans of Sambalpur have two subcastes, the Jhādua or those of the jhādi or jungle and the Utkali or Uriyas. The former are said to be the earlier immigrants and are looked down on by the latter, who do not intermarry with them. Their exogamous divisions or gotras are of the type called eponymous, being named after well-known Rishis or saints like those of the Brāhmans. Instances of such names are Bhāradwāj, Parāsar, Vālmīk and Vasishtha. Some of the names, however, are in a manner totemistic, as Nāgas, the cobra; Kounchhas, the tortoise; Bachās, a calf, and so on. These animals are revered by the members of the gotra named after them, but as they are of semi-divine nature, the practice may be distinguished from true totemism. In some cases, however, members of the Bhāradwāj gotra venerate the blue-jay, and of the Parāsar gotra, a pigeon. Marriage is regulated according to the table of prohibited degrees in vogue among the higher castes. Girls are commonly married before they are ten years old, but no penalty attaches to the postponement of the ceremony to a later age. The binding portion of the marriage is Hastabandhan or the tying of the hands of the couple together with kusha grass,³³³ and when this has been done the marriage cannot be annulled. The bride goes to her husband’s house for a few days and then returns home until she attains maturity. Divorce and remarriage of widows are prohibited, and an unfaithful wife is finally expelled from the caste. The Karans worship the usual Hindu gods and call themselves Smārths. Some belong to the local Parmārth and Kumbhīpatia sects, the former of which practises obscene rites. They burn their dead, excepting the bodies of infants, and perform the shrāddh ceremony. The caste have a high social position in Sambalpur, and Brāhmans will sometimes take food cooked without water from them. They wear the sacred thread. They eat fish and the flesh of clean animals but do not drink liquor. Bhandāris or barbers will take katcha food from a Karan. They are generally engaged in service as clerks, accountants, schoolmasters or patwāris. Their usual titles are Patnāik or Bohidār. The Karans are considered to be of extravagant habits, and one proverb about them is—

 
Mahanti jāti, udhār paile kinanti hāthi,
 

or, ‘The Mahānti if he can get a loan will at once buy an elephant.’ Their shrewdness in business transactions and tendency to overreach the less intelligent cultivating castes have made them unpopular like the Kāyasths, and another proverb says—

 
Patarkata, Tankarkata, Pāniota, Gaudini mai
E chāri jāti ku vishwās nai,
 

or, ‘Trust not the palm-leaf writer (Karan), the weaver, the liquor-distiller nor the milk-seller.’

Kasai

1. General notice of the caste

Kasai, Kassāb.—The caste of Muhammadan butchers, of whom about 4000 persons were returned from the Central Provinces and Berār in 1911. During the last decade the numbers of the caste have very greatly increased owing to the rise of the cattle-slaughtering industry. Two kinds of Kasais may be distinguished, the Gai Kasai or cow-killers and the Bakar Kasai or mutton butchers. The latter, however, are usually Hindus and have been formed into a separate caste, being known as Khatīk. Like other Muhammadans who have adopted professions of a not too reputable nature, the Kasais have become a caste, partly because the ordinary Muhammadan declines to intermarry with them, and partly no doubt in imitation of the Hindu social system. The Kasais are one of the lowest of the Muhammadan castes, and will admit into their community even low-caste Hindu converts. They celebrate their weddings by the nikāh form, but until recently many Hindu rites were added to it. The Kāzi is employed to conduct the marriage, but if his services are not available a member of the caste may officiate instead. Polygamy is permitted to the number of four wives. A man may divorce his wife simply for disobedience, but if a woman wishes to divorce her husband she must forego the Meher or dowry promised at the time of the wedding. The Kasai women, perhaps owing to their meat diet, are noticeably strong and well nourished, and there is a saying to the effect that, ‘The butcher’s daughter will bear children when she is ten years old.’ The deities of the Kasais are a number of Muhammadan saints, who are known as Aulia or Favourites of God. The caste bury the dead, and on the third day they read the Kalma over some parched grain and distribute this to the caste-fellows, who eat it in the name of the deceased man, invoking a blessing upon him. On the ninth day after the death they distribute food to Muhammadan Fakīrs or beggars, and on the twentieth and fortieth days two more feasts are given to the caste and a third on the anniversary of the death. Owing to what is considered the degrading nature of his occupation, the social position of the Kasai is very low, and there is a saying—

 
Na dekha ho bāgh, to dekh belai;
Na dekha ho Thag, to dekh Kasai,
 

or, ‘If you have not seen a tiger, look at a cat; and if you have not seen a Thug, look at a butcher.’ Many Hindus have a superstition that leprosy is developed by the continual eating of beef.

2. The cattle-slaughtering industry

In recent years an extensive industry in the slaughter of cattle has sprung up all over the Province. Worn-out animals are now eagerly bought up and killed; their hides are dried and exported, and the meat is cured and sent to Madras and Burma, a substantial profit being obtained from its sale. The blood, horns and hoofs are other products which yield a return. The religious scruples of the Hindus have given way to the temptation of obtaining what is to them a substantial sum for a valueless animal, and, with the exception perhaps of Brāhmans and Banias, all castes now dispose of their useless cattle to the butchers. At first this was done by stealth, and efforts were made to impose severe penalties on anybody guilty of the crime of being accessory to the death of the sacred kine, while it is said that the emissaries of the butchers were sent to the markets disguised as Brāhmans or religious mendicants, and pretended that they wished to buy cattle in order to preserve their lives as a meritorious act. But such attempts at restriction have generally proved fruitless, and the trade is now openly practised and acquiesced in by public opinion. In spite of many complaints of the shortage of plough cattle caused by the large numbers of animals slaughtered, the results of this traffic are probably almost wholly advantageous; for the villages no longer contain a horde of worn-out and decrepit animals to deprive the valuable plough and milch cattle of a share of the too scanty pasturage. Kasais themselves are generally prosperous.

3. Muhammadan rite of zibah or halāl

When killing an animal the butcher lays it on the ground with its feet to the west and head stretched towards the north and then cuts its throat saying:

 
In the name of God;
God is great.
 

This method of killing an animal is known as zibah. The Muhammadan belief that an animal is not fit for food unless its throat has been cut so that the blood flows on to the ground is thus explained in Professor Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites³³⁴: “In heathen Canaan all the animals belonged to the god of the country; but it was lawful to kill them if payment was made to the god by pouring out their life or blood on the ground.” The Arabs are of the same Semitic stock, and this may be partly the underlying idea of their rite of zibah. It seems doubtful, however, whether the explanation suffices to explain its continuance for so long a period among the Muhammadans who have long ceased to reverence any earth-deity, and in a foreign country where the soil cannot be sacred to them; and a short summary of Dr. Robertson Smith’s luminous explanation of the underlying principle of animal sacrifice in early times seems requisite to its full understanding.

4. Animism

Primitive man did not recognise any difference of intelligence and self-consciousness between himself and the lower animals and even plants, but believed them all to be possessed of consciousness and volition as he was. He knew of no natural laws of the constitution of matter and the action of forces, and therefore thought that all natural phenomena, the sun, moon and stars, the wind and rain, were similarly appearances, manifestations or acts of volition of beings conscious like himself. This is what is meant by animism. Among several races the community was divided into totem-clans, and each clan held sacred some animal or bird, which was considered as a kinsman. All the members of the clan were kin to each other through the tie formed by their eating their totem animal, which in the hunting stage was probably their chief means of subsistence, and from which they consequently thought that they derived their common life.³³⁵ In process of time the animals which were domesticated, such as the horse, the sheep, the cow and the camel, acquired a special sanctity, and became, in fact, the principal deities of the community, such as the calf-god Apis, the cow-goddess Isis-Hathor, and the ram-god Amen in Egypt, Hera, probably a cow-goddess, and Dionysus, who may be the deified bull or goat (or a combination of them) in Greece, and so on.

5. Animal-gods. The domestic animals

It is easy to see how these domestic animals would overshadow all others in importance when the tribe had arrived at the pastoral or agricultural stage; thus in the former the camel, horse, goat or sheep, and in the latter pre-eminently the bull and cow, as the animals which afforded subsistence to the whole tribe, would become their greatest gods. It must be presumed that men forgot that their ancestors had tamed these animals, and looked on them as divine helpers who of their own free will had come to give mankind their aid in gaining a subsistence. Those who have observed the reverence paid to the cow and bull in India will have no difficulty in realising this point of view. Many other instances can be obtained. Thus in the Vedic religion of the Aryans the Ashvins, from ashva, a horse, were the divine horsemen of the dawn or of the sun. The principal sacrifice was that of the horse, considered, perhaps, as the representative of the sun or carrier of celestial fire. In a hymn the horse is said to be sprung from the gods. In Greece Phaethon was the charioteer of the horses of the sun. Mars, as the Roman god of war, may perhaps have been the deified horse, as suggested later. The chieftains of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England, Hengist and Horsa, were held to be descended from the god Odin, to whom horses were sacrificed; Hengist means a stallion and Horsa a horse, the word having survived in modern English. Other mythical kings in Bede’s chronicle have names derived from that of the horse (vicg.).³³⁶ The camel does not seem to have become an anthropomorphic god, but the Arabs venerated it and refrained from killing it except as a sacrifice, when it was offered to the Morning-Star and partaken of sacramentally by the worshippers as will be seen subsequently. The ox as the tiller of the ground, with the cow as milk-giver and mother of the ox, are especially venerated by races in the early agricultural stage. Egyptian and Greek instances have already been given. In modern Egypt, as in India, bulls are let loose and held sacred. “Sometimes a peasant vows that he will sacrifice, for the sake of a saint, a calf which he possesses, as soon as it is full grown and fatted. It is let loose, by consent of all his neighbours, to pasture where it will, even in fields of young wheat; and at last, after it has been sacrificed, a public feast is made with its meat. Many a large bull is thus given away.”³³⁷ Dionysus Zagreus was a young bull devoured by the Titans, whom Zeus raised again to a glorious life.³³⁸ The Babylonians had a bull-god, Ninit.³³⁹ Brazen images of bulls were placed in Babylonian temples. The Pārsis hold the bull sacred, and a child is made to drink a bull’s urine as a rite of purification. After a funeral the mourners free themselves from the impurity caused by contact with the dead in a similar manner.³⁴⁰ The monotheistic religion of Persia, Mitraism, which was an outcome of the faith of Zoroaster, and being introduced by the Emperors Commodus and Julian into the Roman world contended for some time with Christianity, was apparently sun-worship, Mitra being the sun-god of the ancient Aryans and Iranians; M. Reinach says: “Mitra is born from a rock; he makes water flow from the rock by striking it with an arrow, makes an alliance with the sun, and enters into a struggle with a bull, whom he conquers and sacrifices. The sacrifice of the bull appears to indicate that the worship of Mitra in its most ancient form was that of a sacred bull, conjoined to or representing the sun, which was sacrificed as a god, and its flesh and blood eaten in a sacrificial meal. Mitra, the slayer of the bull, figures in a double rôle as one finds in all the religions which have passed from totemism to anthropomorphism.”³⁴¹ In Scandinavia the god Odin and his brothers were the grandsons of a divine cow, born from the melting ice in the region of snow and darkness.³⁴² In Rome a white bull was sacrificed to the Feriae Latinae, apparently the spirit of the Latin holy days, and distributed among all the towns of Latium.³⁴³ Altars of the ancient Celts or Gauls have been found in France carved with the image of a bull.³⁴⁴ In Palestine there is the familiar instance of the golden calf. In the open court of Solomon’s temple stood the brazen sea on twelve oxen, and figures of lions, oxen and cherubim covered the portable tanks.³⁴⁵ The veneration of the bull survived into Christian England in the Middle Ages. “At St. Edmundsbury a white bull, which enjoyed full ease and plenty in the fields, and was never yoked to the plough nor employed in any service, was led in procession in the chief streets of the town to the principal gate of the monastery, attended by all the monks singing and a shouting crowd.³⁴⁶ “Such remedies as cowdung and cow’s urine have been used on the continent of Europe by peasant physicians down to our times”;³⁴⁷ and the belief in their efficacy must apparently have arisen from the sanctity attaching to the animal. In India Siva rides upon the bull Nandi, and when the Kunbis were too weak from famine to plough the fields, he had Nandi castrated and harnessed to the plough, thus teaching them to use oxen for ploughing; the image of Nandi is always carved in stone in front of Siva, and there seems little reason to doubt that in his beneficent aspect of Mahādeo the god was originally the deified bull. Bulls were let loose in his honour and allowed to graze where they would, and formerly a good Hindu would not even sell a bull, though this rule has fallen into abeyance. The sacred cow, Kāmdhenu, was the giver of all wealth in Hindu mythology, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is considered to have been the deified cow. Hindus are purified from grave offences by drinking the five products of the sacred cow, milk, curds, butter, dung and urine; and the floors of Hindu houses are daily plastered with cowdung to the same end.

6. Other animals

Of the exaltation of minor animals into anthropomorphic gods and goddesses only a few instances need be given. As is shown by Sir J. G. Frazer, Demeter and Proserpine probably both represent the deified pig.³⁴⁸ “The Greek drama has arisen from the celebrations of Dionysus. In the beginning the people sacrificed a goat totem-god, that is to say, Dionysus himself; they wept for his death and then celebrated his resurrection with transports of joy.”³⁴⁹ And again M. Reinach states: “There are more than mere vestiges of totemism in ancient Greece. We may take first the attendant animals of the gods, the eagle of Zeus, the owl of Athena, the fawn of Artemis, the dolphin of Poseidon, the dove of Aphrodite and so on; the sacred animal can develop into the companion of the god, but also into his enemy or victim; thus Apollo Sauroctonos is, as the epithet shows, a killer of lizards; but in the beginning it was the lizard itself which was divine. We have seen that the boar before becoming the slayer of Adonis had been Adonis himself.”³⁵⁰

In early Rome “The wolf was the animal most venerated. Its association with Mars, as the sacrifice most pleasing to him, leaves no doubt as to the primitive nature of the god. It was a wolf which acted as guide to the Samnites in their search for a place to settle in, and these Samnites called themselves Hirpi or Hirpini, that is to say, wolves. Romulus and Remus, sons of the wolf Mars and the she-wolf Silvia (the forest-dweller), are suckled by a she-wolf.”³⁵¹ It seems possible that Mars as the deified wolf was at first an agricultural deity, the wolf being worshipped by the shepherd and farmer because he was their principal enemy, as the sāmbhar stag and the wild buffalo are similarly venerated by Indian cultivators. At a later period, in becoming the god of war, he may have represented the deified horse as well. Races of war-horses were held at his festivals on 14th March and 27th February, and a great race on the Ides of October when the winner was solemnly slain.³⁵² “In Egypt the baboon was regarded as the emblem of Tahuti, the god of wisdom; the serious expression and human ways of the large baboons are an obvious cause for their being regarded as the wisest of animals. Tahuti is represented as a baboon from the earliest dynasty down to late times; and four baboons were sacred in his temple at Heliopolis.”³⁵³ “The hippopotamus was the goddess Ta-urt, ‘the great one,’ the patroness of pregnancy, who is never shown in any other form. Rarely this animal appears as the emblem of the god Set. The jackal haunted the cemeteries on the edge of the desert, and so came to be taken as the guardian of the dead and identified with Anubis, the god of departing souls. The vulture was the emblem of maternity as being supposed to care especially for her young. Hence she is identified with Mut, the mother-goddess of Thebes. The cobra serpent was sacred from the earliest times to the present day. It was never identified with any of the great deities, but three goddesses appear in serpent form.”³⁵⁴