 
### Many untouchable castes

Tan Dan about caste competition in feudal Rajasthan

by Son Lal

Copyright 2013 by Son Lal

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This is a work of fiction. The names and characters come from the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Similarly, the locations and incidents in this book, which might resemble real locations and events, are being used fictitiously and are not to be considered as real.

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Many untouchable castes

Tan Dan about caste competition in feudal Rajasthan

Village life among weavers, shoemakers, entertainers and many others who worked hard to eke out a living in the dry poor desert area of western Rajasthan in the middle of the 20th century. As narrated to Tan Dan's friend Son Lal around 1980.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Tan Dan

Chapter 2 A brush for weavers

Chapter 3 Weavers at work at Chelana

Chapter 4 Those who wore the handwoven cloth

Chapter 5 The Bajania Nats are laureates for Bhambis

Chapter 6 A Bajania Nat family and its jajman clients

Chapter 7 Some other laureate castes active in the Chelana area

Chapter 8 The many castes of Chelana

Chapter 9 Thoughts on castes and untouchability

Chapter 10 Ranking of the untouchable castes of Chelana

Chapter 11 Untouchability and water

Chapter 12 Food acceptance and caste ranking

Chapter 13 The lingering habit of discrimination against former feudal dependents

Chapter 14 The clean-shaven heads of feudal subjects

Chapter 15 The difficulties in getting a haircut for lowcaste people

Chapter 16 Leather and untouchability

Chapter 17 Tan Dan about leather-workers at Chelana

Chapter 18 How dead livestock was removed

Chapter 19 Chamar subcastes also had a caste hierarchy

Chapter 20 The year the Bhambis left their ageold caste profession

Chapter 21 Dipa Ram, the cobbler who did not obey

Chapter 22 The new cobblers at Chelana

Supplements

Conclusion

Indian words used in this book are explained here.

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### Chapter 1 Tan Dan

This book is an attempt to show the life in a dry part of northwestern India, especially with regard to the custom of untouchability and oppression of weak social groups in some villages of rural western Rajasthan. Many narrations are based on Tan Dan's experience in the 1970s. Some persons may have other ways of looking at the described events, depending on background and perspective. The ultimate truth is difficult to find, but the subject deserves a thorough penetration from the angle of the untouchable villagers themselves.

Who is Tan Dan?

Tan Dan Detha was born in a farmer family of the Charan caste in 1943. His native village is Chelana in Jodhpur District of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Tan Dan has lived in the midst of his strongly traditional environment all his life. He is a critical observer rather than a follower of that tradition.

Who is Son Lal?

Son Lal is my pen name. I was born in a Scandinavian country of northern Europe in the early 1940s. I have lived in India off and on for fifty years, since I first arrived to the Gateway of India at Bombay by ship in 1963. In the 1970s I met Tan Dan. We soon found we shared many views on the world, and had the same curiosity of village life. I saw a chance to learn how he experienced his rural environment. He did his best to explain, and I am grateful to him for having shared his knowledge and thoughts with me.

How this narration was done

Tan Dan told in English and I typed, while we sat together in long sessions. His many photos became a starting point for our discussions. Our knowledge of English was on the same level and we formulated the sentences together. Sentence after sentence, day after day. Most of it we wrote around 1980, but some additions were made in later decades. Afterwards I have edited the material and supplemented some sections with information from elsewhere. Still, it is Tan Dan's voice that is heard on these pages. It is a personal narration by a village farmer, and has no connection to any university.

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### Chapter 2 A brush for weavers

The Kuchia nomads and their sunvalo brush

Banjara bhat pack oxen caravan nomads got to know about wild plants and their use, as they lived close to the wilderness when moving around along caravan routes to distant land. Some of them learnt how to make useful items for sale out of wild plants. Kuchia is a caste that has been formed by a banjara ox caravan subgroup that left the caravan trade in order to make a high quality brush for weavers. Weavers in villages all over Rajasthan bought that brush from the Kuchia nomads for starching the warp, the longitudinal threads at the loom. The brush is called sunvalo and is made of a particular grass.

Village weavers all around western Rajasthan and elsewhere in north India, using the _sunvalo_ brush, did not know how it was made. They only knew they could buy it from certain banjara traders, and that the brush could last for fifteen to twenty years if used very frequently, otherwise for more than thirty years. Such a brush cost in 1977 about ten Rupees only, in spite of its utilitiy and the amount of labour required in making it.

_Kuchia_ banjaras told Tan Dan they used the _sevan_ grass for the sunvalo brush, but asked him not to tell anybody. Others might start competing and ruin their trade.

Making and selling such a brush of grass roots became a full-time occupation and the _kuchia_ kinship groups formed a caste of their own. Tan Dan met kuchia families in the 1970s moving around without cattle selling both the _sunvalo_ brush and medicines of wild plants.

Their secret, the _sevan_ grass roots, was already known to botanists, though. Ambasta (1986 p.317) states that the roots of _Lasiurus hirsatus_ (Forsk.) yield a fibre used for weaver's brushes.

The trade of the _sunvalo_ brush has almost disappeared along with the manufacture of handloom cloth in Rajasthani villages due to the competition from the textile mills, which, most likely, had their own methods of starching warp threads.

Sevan is a three feet high plant growing in the sand of the desert, and it has a very hairy root system at least eight to ten feet long and sometimes longer, Tan told. (It might be rhizomes with root hairs at the nodes.)

A kuchia family at Chelana

Tan Dan met a family of Kuchia caste nomads at Chelana 1980. It was a small kinship group with no animals apart from two donkeys. A joint family of three children and five grown-ups, who at Chelana arranged themselves in three camping places with their _chulha_ fireplaces some fifty meters apart. For privacy and a little individualistic life. An unusual behaviour among nomads, who mostly stick together in physical closeness, to be better protected against external threats, if any.

They lived on selling wild plants and shrubs as medicine. Some plants without any change, and others after crushing and mixing into powder. It became medicine for internal and external use. The kuchia group alse knew how to make the _sunvalo_ brush, which Bhambi weavers used for starching threads.

They were nomads with a permanent adress

In 1980 the police were suspicious of people with nomadic habits and wanted to know their whereabouts. From where they had come and where they had their home. Therefore even nomadic groups such as this one had to state some adress of a permanent kind, in spite of hardly living there for more than a short time during the rainy season. This Kuchia group told Tan Dan their home village was near Mangliyavas in Ajmer District.

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### Chapter 3 Weavers at work at Chelana

The Bhambi weavers of Chelana got white mill yarn in long bundles from the baniya merchant. They started be dying the yarn. That work was done mainly by women but also by men. They used colour powder which they got from the Baniyas. They had also their own old colour making material out of vegetables and other plants.

For some colours they dipped the yarn in the boiling water die, and for other colours they dipped it in water dies without boiling. After that they dried the coloured yarn.

Then they would wind the yarn on spools. When Tan Dan visited Jogiji's angan in 1979 there were spools with red and yellow threads on one side and green on the other side. The spools were arranged on frames. The left frame had 24 spools, each spool rotating on a iron stick. These short iron sticks Jogiji's second son Genvar Ram took from old worn-out umbrellas, when he made this spool frame about ten years earlier.

It is a useful device for putting the warp threads in the right order, beside each other for forming the various colour patterns.

Then Genvar Ram and his assistent set the warp, the longitudinal thread structure of the web, fixing the thread between the pairs of sticks put on the ground in lines on Jogiji's house compound yard, the whole warp being sometimes one hundred feet long and sometimes up to two hundred feet going in a u-shaped form over his yard, starting and ending at one wall and turning in a bend at the opposite wall of the yard.

All the six weavers of Chelana used Yogiji's yarn for setting their warps. Hence, for the last ten years the other five families have used Genvar Ram's spool frame, which they borrow from him as a mutual help. The thought of charging money for it had never occurred, Tan Dan told.

Before they had the spool frame, they went by two spools at a time around the u-shaped base putting the threads in place, but now two persons working can put 24 threads in place per round, which increased the speed of the web-base setting work. Bhambi weavers, who Tan Dan has seen in other villages of the area still set their warp by going with one spool in each hand rotating on wooden sticks along the web.

How the grid frame was made

Babu, a cousin of Bagda Ram, handled a small grid frame, which also was an essential part of Genvar Ram's device.

Bagda Ram told Tan Dan that the outer square of this frame was made of a kerosine tin can, a canister, which many villagers also use as containers for _ata_ , the flour, or for grain. They always bought second-hand kerosine tins for this purpose. This Bhambi family used the top of such a tin for the frame of the grid. From a wornout umbrella the spikes for spreading it were removed and fit into the grid frame. It was done by Muhammad Safid, a Muslim _voupari_ that liked to repair and convert metal material such as kanaster boxes. He made the frame out of the materials given to him by Genvar Ram. The resulting tool was used for keeping one thread in each gap between the horizontal iron ribbons.

The problem of selling additional cloth produced with Genvar Ram's improved technique

It seems that Genvar Ram made his labour saving invention on his own, without having seen such a thing somewhere else. The device could be useful also for other handloom weavers to adopt, Tan Dan thought. However, higher efficiency would not result in more produced cloth, if the baniya did not supply them with more yarn. There was a limited amount the baniya merchant could sell to villagers still using traditional handloom cloth. In the short run Genvar Ram's device might mean that the weavers could produce the same amount of cloth in a shorter time.

The spare time they would get could be used for doing other labour work, though. They could earn extra money that way or have more leisure time. They hardly had any leisure time at all, working from morning to evening as long as there was sufficient daylight.

The way Jogi starched the warp

Tan Dan's friend Jogi was a bhambi by caste and a weaver by profession. In 1977 Tan Dan met Jogi outside his home when he starched warp threads with his sunvalo brush. It had been made of sevan grass roots by nomads of the Kuchia caste hailing from the bhat ox caravan traders. Before applying starch on the threads they had to be arranged and Jogiji's son Bagda Ram helped in this. He wore a yellow turban and his father a white one. The colour of the turban convey information to others. Jogiji's whith turban tell that his father is dead. Hence, Jogiji belongs to the oldest generation of his family, and is the family head.

Starching is done after having set all the warp threads at Jogiji's own yard and then winding the whole web base, i.e. the warp, with the wooden sticks pulled up from the ground, into a loose bundle with the wooden sticks still in it. Then they go to another place at the outskirt of the village near the Chelana school for girls. There they spread the warp in one long line. This time the threads lie beside each others horisontally, before that they were kept vertically. Then Jogiji starches the threads in order to make them strong enough to be used as the longitudinal web base in the handloom. Jogiji uses a brush made of sevan roots, which make very strong brushes, and is the only brush material used for web base starching in western Rajasthan among Bhambi village weavers, as it does not wear out easily.

In the warp there were red and green threads as a beginning of a cloth pattern, which for the cloth Jogi used to weave always was a pattern of small squares.

The longitudinal threads of the cloth web are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft or filling. The cloth is produced when the weft is woven into the warp at the loom with the shuttle.

A baby girl who died after her mother got malaria

She did not get breast milk and got insufficient care in Jogiji's angan, as all grown-ups were busy. She was Jogiji's granddaughter and the daughter of Bagda Ram. She was a baby of about 15-16 months when she died. The whole day her parents and all other grownups of this joint family of weavers were busy in their work. There were seldom anybody available for attending the children of the family, who therefore had to be on their own. Usually the eldest child, especially the eldest sister, is the main baby sitter. She runs around and plays with her little baby sister or brother sitting on her hip. But this little girl was Bagda Ram's only child, so she was left alone, often weeping and when her parents were tired of hearing her cries, they gave her something to eat, mostly crumbles (smulor) of stale rotis. She was either busy in crying or in eating the small pieces of bread. She had thin legs and arms and an unproportionately big belly. Such children were often seen in the area. Villagers told Tan Dan it is due to eating a special clay called _pili_ , and sometimes children eat _levda_ , the floor paste on the angan ground. _Levda_ is made by smearing a paste of cowdung, clay and water.

Such smearings were applied to most Chelana angan grounds, both of packa and kacha houses. Perhaps on eighty per cent of all angans at least, and also in most packa house on the floor, and always in kacha houses. Such smearings were done many times a year. When the levda coatings dry up, babies and small children pick pieces out of the coating, sometimes of innocence and sometimes of hunger.

Tan Dan once made a little poem in which an old man asked a small child, how it could be that she had so short nails. "Your father have short nails because I have exploited him so much. But how can it be that you also have so short nails?" The child replied she cut levda pieces from the ground all the time, as she was hungry.

Another reason villagers give for big stomachs is that the child has been given cereals too early. Just like the calves get big stomachs, when they are fed on green fodder too early. When a calf looses its mother early, the owner sometimes have to feed the calf on grass instead, and such a calf also get weak legs and a big belly. Therefore, when villagers see a child with a big stomachs and thin legs they sometimes say, _"Are in tabar re man koni kain?_ ", which means, 'Oh, this child does not she has a mother?', referring implicitly to the calf without a mother. People think the grain makes the stomach too much stuffed up by dry solid matter. It is often thought about as a kind of overeating, as the stomach is so big, although it swells, when the child is in a condition of starvation.

Bagda Ram's daughter had a normal health up to about seven eight months of age, as far as Tan Dan could see. Her mother gave her breast milk up to then. Around Divali 1978 both husband and wife got malaria. The child got bread and biscuits instead of breast milk. Her health deteriorated and she died some weeks before the Holi festival, which is in March.

Chelana Bhambi weaver families

In 1981 there were thirty Bhambi families at Chelana. Six families lived on weaving handloom cloth. All the grown up men of these families worked as fulltime weavers. The women were busy assisting their men in colouring the yarn, spooling the yarn, and arranging the _tana_ (warp), the basic longitudinal threads. The warp was the supporting structure on which the _bana_ (weft), the transverse threads, were woven on the loom.

The weavers worked indoors, only relying on daylight apart from the dim light of a small kerosine lamp, in Marvari called _chimni_.

Their hand looms were of age-old design.

The villagers did not buy their cloth from the weavers

These weaver families lived in stark poverty, and were completely in the hands of the baniya. From him they got cotton yarn and dye-stuff.

The yarn was made in spinning mills and brought to Chelana by Shanti Lal, the only baniya at Chelana engaged in this trade. He paid them for the work according to the amount of cloth woven. They made skirt cloth for wholesale mostly, but some of the cloth the baniya sold in his shop at the village bazar, and from there the women of low traditional castes bought their cloth. Hence, the villagers bought their handloom cloth from the bazar, not from the weavers.

The central but isolated Bhambi mohalla in Chelana

Although the Bhambi mohalla is in the centre of the village, in between the Charan mohalla to the south, Mochis to the west, Rajputs to the north and the Chelana bazaar to the east, it is still a dead end area of the village, through which nobody from the other castes used to pass.

The Charans to the south had built high walls where their compounds bordered the Bhambi mohalla, and used these walls as support for the big slanting fodder stacks of bhusa (chopped wheat straw) and other fodder such as pala, the leaf of the beri bush, and the phalgat, the pods of the guar. In addition chipta, dried leafy jovar grown for fodder (not for grain), and stacks of bajra stalks (stovers).

The traditional work tasks of the Bhambis

Therefore, in 1981, not even the Charans, the closest neighbours of the Bhambis, were aware that there were still Bhambi weavers in the village. In those days most Bhambis were labourers and smallscale farmers.

In 1952 the Bhambi families left several tasks which had given them a bad name. Pulling away dead cattle, working with hides and leather. 1952 was the year of jagir abolition and the Bhambis no longer had to carry out disgusting work as serfs for the Rathores at the Thikana.

Unfortunately, most savarn Hindu villagers continued to associate the Bhambis with leather work, even after they had left it. People did not look at them as weavers, although some of them still worked as such. Old prejudice lingered on. Most people preferred to think they knew enough about others just by hearsay, and did not bother to check the reality at places they did not want to visit.

Weaving as a nonviolent low status work

Chamar is the traditionally leather working caste all the way from Punjab to West Bengal aross the whole Gangetic plain and in Madhya Pradesh. The name refers to leather. In western Rajasthan they are called bhambis. Traditionally, bhambis have been both leather workers and handloom weavers, and both occupations have been looked down on.

Weaving of carpets is traditionally done by kumars (potters), a low caste group, but a touchable caste. Weaving carpets therefore has a higher estimation than cloth weaving in the eyes of the villagers in general. Evidently it is not the work as such which is condemned, but its association with a group of people of a low social status for some other reason.

Weaving is a slow and tedious work requiring patience and discipline. Suppressed ethnic groups such as bhambis and kumars could be assigned such work by more powerful social groups without much resistence, as they had a meek and slavish attitude living in poverty with not good job alternative.

Contempt for the weaving profession can hardly be rationalized on the basis of Hindu thinking about the sin of violence against animals. The work of weaving is not more violent than the caste profession of many high caste Hindus such as baniyas.

The roundabout logic seems to be that as leather work is sinful, and as this work is done by people of the same caste and families as those engaged in weaving, also the latter work is a contemptuous occupation.

Many may find it unnecessary to have any reason at all for their prejudice.

Objectionable colours used by weavers

Tan Dan told that villagers in western Rajasthan considered weaving a low status job as the weavers used objectionable raw materials for preparing red and green dyes called _guli_ (for red) and _rang_ , a kind of colour fixer for creating a darker shade of the red and green colour.

_Rang_ is from the inner bark of the _keekar_ tree, _Acacia arabica_ , which also produces a gum, which seems harmless enough. From where guli was obtained Tan Dan did not know.

Why the villagers objected to these raw materials for colours is difficult to understand. Some of these colours might have been used by Mlecha people, and for that reasons considered barbarian.

Anyhow, in the 1970s these natural colours had been replaced by synthetic colours, but it did not improve the status of the weaver, at least not at Chelana.

Weaving homespun cloth

Spinning and handloom weaving directly for the villagers

A century earlier all villagers had clothes of homespun handloom woven cloth. Each weaver made cloth for his group of village families on a _jajman_ client basis. They did not work for cloth merchants, but for the villagers directly, and got payment in kind, mainly foodgrain, as they lived in a barter economy. The weavers had a secure employment and a small secure income.

The weavers got their yarn from their jajman clients. Women in the whole village span cotton yarn at home before 1950, Tan Dan told.

The 1950s was a transitory phase at Chelana with half of the villagers still wearing village woven and homespun cotton cloth, while the others wore factory-made cloth.

Villagers wearing clothes of handloom cloth at Devli

When Tan Dan was at school at Devli village in the 1950s, almost all boys of his class had clothes made of cloth spun by the women of their respective housholds, and woven by their family weaver to whom they brought their homespun yarn.

In many villages of Pali District around Devli, it was still common in 1981 to wear homespun and woven cloth. Many farmers at Devli cultivated cotton on patches in the fields to get enough cotton for home consumption. They wanted enough cotton for their women spinning cotton yarn. Yarn that was given to the Bhambi village weavers for weaving cloth for the clothes of the family. But in 1981 also at Devli most villagers wore clothes of mill-made cloth bought in the bazaar.

Village weaver cloth still in demand in rural western Rajasthan in the 1970s

In the 1970s mill-cloth shops and sales increased at Chelana. Especially well-off people of comparatively high castes had switched to mill cloth, which got stitched by village tailors, the _darji_.

In villages of the area less affected by change, handloom weavers managed to pull on longer by serving traditional consumer groups. There were social groups of rural western Rajasthan that by custom still wore traditional clothes in the 1970s. Made on village hand looms. Also at Chelana.

Rebaris and charans spinning wool thread at Chelana in 1970s

Many families span wool at home, mainly rebari shepherds and some charans who also kept sheep. They placed orders with the Bhambi weavers for woolen cloth. Rebaris also span threads of goat hair and camel hair and that yarn they used for carpets woven by Matigar Kumar weavers.

The Bhambi weavers at Chelana made cloth for the villagers at an almost nominal price. They charged 0.6 Rupees per hath, i.e. a little more than one Rupee per metre of cloth.

The baniya paid even less. He was their major customer. Without him they would have been compelled to close down altogether.

The Bhambi handloom weavers earned about five Rupees per day, and if they worked hard six Rupees.

It was only now and then the Bhambi weavers did a little weaving of homespun yarn. Wool yarn. Nobody at Chelana any longer span cotton, although earlier, as late as in Tan Dan's childhood, many Chelana women span cotton, which they gave to the weavers for making home spun cloth.

Cloth for Baniyas

In the 1970s the Bhambi weavers were labourers for Baniya merchants.

The Bhambi weavers at Chelana mainly lived on producing handwoven cloth from factory-made yarn supplied to them by Shanti Lal and and his brother Tara Chand. The weavers made cloth on their behalf against remuneration for the labour work involved in weaving.

Thus the weavers neither bought yarn from the Baniyas nor sold cloth to them. They only wove the yarn after the Baniyas have given them orders. Each weaver gets on average in 1981 about five six Rupees per day working whole day from sunrise to sunset with only short regular breaks for food etc.. But Bagda Ram, Jogiji's son, earned about eight Rupees, as he was an unusually fast worker.

Sale channels of Chelana-made cotton cloth

The cloth of mill-made cotton yarn the weavers produced for the baniyas was of traditional pattern and colours meant for women of the four castes of Jat, Matigar Kumar and Khetad Kumar and Bhambis. Some cloth was sold at the shop of the baniya in the Chelana village bazar. The rest was he sold further to wholesale merchants at Merta and Jodhpur for further distribution to village bazars in western Rajasthan.

The cloth

Reja cloth used by villagers of certain castes

At Chelana handwoven cloth is called _reja_. Low-caste villagers at Chelana and the rest of Rajasthan took for granted that they should buy their own pattern of _reja_ cloth. It is sturdy and lasts for years and is the only respectable kind of cloth in the eyes of the housekeeping family members of these castes.

The price for _reja_ cloth was about the same as the price for mill cloth at Chelana. Tan thought it was due to the low wage of the handloom weavers and the high margins of the merchants for mill cloth.

Government had a scheme for subsidizing handloom cloth, khadi. It was administrated by the Khadi commission. There were khadi cloth shops in towns all over India ran by organizations associated with the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. Most likely also in Jodhpur and other towns of Rajasthan, but Tan Dan did not know about it. Evidently the weavers at Chelana did not benefit from the money distributed as subsidy by the Government through the Khadi Commission.

At Chelana handloom cloth was called _reja_. Not _khadi_. The villagers called a certain kind of mill cloth _khadi_.

Jogiji made cloth for traditional skirts

Jogi Bhambi mostly wove cloth for skirts. It had a ready sale, as by custom the women of castes such as rebari, bhambi, jat, sirvi, and kumar wore such _sari_ skirts. Each caste had its own pattern. In 1978 these traditional dresses were worn by practically all married women of these castes. Therefore the traditional weavers were able to carry on their profession at Chelana and other villages of western Rajasthan that were outside the direct vicinity of the cities.

Other items produced from handloom cloth

In these relatively low ranked traditional-minded castes such hand-woven cloth was not only in demand for women skirts, but also by men, who used such cloth for their turbans, _dhotis_ , _angarakhis_ (an open shirt).

_Khesla_ , a cotton blanket, was used by people in the nights of the warm season, and _kambal_ , a woolen blanket, in cold winter weather by relatively well-off persons. They also wrapped the _kambal_ around their body at daytime. Poor people used the khesla instead also in winter.

No stitching

Stitching was not much known nor practiced in the old days in western Rajasthan. Needle point embroidery also came late to this region. For most purposes a rectangular piece of cloth not requiring any stitching were used.

Colour patterns

When weaving cloth, colour patterns were made in the same way as patterns were woven into carpets. In women cloth especially.That was an old weaving technique.

Sujni is a special type of weaving, by which plain cotton pads are woven into the fabric. In 1978 this technique was still used in villages of Kutch, Kathiawar, Sindh and the extreme western border of Rajasthan around Barmer. Tan Dan was told by an Irish lady at the National Institute of Designing in Ahmedabad that the _sujni_ technique also is used in Baluchistan and Iran, which he also has read in pamphlets.

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### Chapter 4 Those who wore the handwoven cloth

Skirts of handloom woven cotton for married women

At Chelana in the 1970s, married women of the four castes of Jat, Matigar Kumar and Khetad Kumar and Bhambis always wore handwoven cotton skirts called _sari_.

Young girls of these four castes wore as a rule mill-made cotton cloth before _muklava_. As unsophisticated youngsters in their parents village. The handwoven sari skirt they did not wear until they moved to their in-laws village after _muklava_.

The _sari_ skirt is very different from the sari garment Indian women wear in towns and in other parts of India. In the spoken language of the villagers, _sari_ is pronounced _hari_ , both the village skirt and the long saris of the cities. The ordinary Indian _sari_ was in western Rajasthan in 1978 used only by women in urban areas having borrowed the custom from other parts of India.

Grown-up women felt that the type, colour and pattern of the sari cloth, that the Bhambi weavers in the villages made, was the right cloth for them. Wearing the same kind of clothes strengthened their feeling of caste belonging and womanhood.

A happily married Jat couple

In 1979 Tan Dan met an old Jat farmer, who asked him to take a photo of his wife. He wanted her photo, as they liked each others very much. He thought she was still worth while looking at, and was sure her photo would be a good one.

In her youth she had been very beautiful. Many young men of his caste wished they had been married to her, he said jokingly. He had been very lucky to get her.

She had been married into the Benival gotra of the Jat caste, all farmers. They belonged to one of three joint families living near each others at the same Benival dhani area to the west of Chelana. She was about fifty years.

When Tan Dan came to their dhani the farmer got very happy. Full of enthusiasm he searched the whole house for the best clothes they could find and she also put on her _tevta_ , a kind of golden necklace. But they could not find any new shoes. They did not bother much about it, though. What the shoes look like is not thought of as very important in rural Rajasthan. Even the most dignified persons can be seen walking around in worn out _pagrakhi_ , the kind of shoes made by the Mochis. It is pronounced pagarkhi, although spelt pagrakhi,which literally means 'that to keep feet in'. Similarly, people say angarkhi for the shirt when talking, but it is written angrakhi in written Marvari. 'What your body is kept in.'

Tan Dan photographed her in front of the straw roof of the cattle shed next to their house. She sat in full splendour wearing a _sari_ skirt and with a smile on her face.

Two good friends

In the same year, 1979, another Jat farmer had asked Tan Dan to take a photo. He lived at a dhani (farm homestead) three miles east of Chelana. His name was Pratap Bhakar, and he wanted Tan Dan to take a photo of his mother, who was 98 years old, according to him and other villagers. There Tan Dan met Pratap's daughter and her sister-in-law who wanted him to take their photo also, as they were good friends and liked each other. They dressed up in their best clothes.

The _bahu_ of the family, their daughter-in-law, was 17 or 18 years old. A newly married daughter-in-law in full costume.

Her friend, Pratap's daughter, wore a gold ornament on her forehead tied to her hair. It is called _rakhri_ , and is worn as a sign of being married. Married women of all castes at Chelana except Rebaris wear rakhri.

Nevertheless, her clothes show she has not yet had her _muklava_ , but still lives with her parents, because she wears a simple blouse like a shirt. After the muklava she will wear a _kanchali_ , the kind of brassiere which her sister-in-law already wore.

Both of them wear _sari_ skirts, being married. Also the daughter, although her muklava has not yet taken place. After her muklava these two nice friends will live in different households, a sad thing for both of them.

Tan Dan took a photo of Pratap's mother also. She was still alive in 1981, then 100 years old.

A Bhambi girl celebrating her muklava in her new village in early 1981

In the Bhambi mohalla a new bahu has arrived. She has come to her in-laws house after completing the muklava ceremony in her parents's house. She was brought to Chelana by her husband and the party of her in-laws. She will be in festive dress for about a week from her arrival to Chelana. Wearing a _sari_ skirt and a golden colour _gungat._ Her _sasural_ , her in-law family, will let her remain idle for about a week, going around visiting people and making herself at home. Tan Dan met her, when she was doing such courtesy visits. She was together with two unmarried girls of her age wearing simple skirts of mill-made cloth, which these young girls might have felt more modern than the sari skirt. Perhaps cheaper, too, but less long-lasting.

The young bride was the daughter-in-law of Ram Din, a Bhambi agricultural labourer.The family mainly lived on his labour wage, but he had ten acres of land together with his brother.

The custom of distributing sweets in the sasural village

_Muklava ri hanti_ , means the sharing of the muklava festivity. It is a custom carried out in the in-law village of the _bahu_ , in this case Chelana. It means the bahu and girls of her in-law family go around distributing sweets to neighbours and others. Home-made sweets the bahu's parents had given to the in-laws party, at the end of the muklava ceremony in the girl's village. When the in-laws were about to return to Chelana together with the young newly married couple. From that day they were allowed to live as husband and wife.

It was an old custom to colour a part of the sweets yellow and pink, and sometimes red, which were taken as youthful merry colours. Mourning colours on the other hand is black, blue, dark green.

The sweets used to be coloured with local vegetable colours. In the 1970s the practice of colouring food had become more dangerous, as the villagers bought ordinary paint powder at the bazaar, which they mixed with a part of the food.

The home-made sweets _magad_ and _sakarpara_ were put on a big _thali_ tray. _Magad_ was made of roasted wheat flour, sugar and ghee and _sakarpara_ of _gur_ , wheat flour and oil. The sweets were kept in small heaps on the tray. One heap for each family visited in the _sasural_ village, as a gift and a way of showing friendship. It was the sasural family that divided the sweets in heaps for families they wanted to visit.

They walked around among the houses in the Bhambi _mohalla_. One of the girls of this little group of visitors carried on her head the thali with sweets. She still lived with her own parents, and was the introducer of her _bahu_ to her own parental village, which she a few years later was to leave on her own muklava day. On the top of the _thali_ they had put some cloth for protecting the sweets from dust.

At Chelana wives are daughters-in-law of their husbands

In 1981 Tan Dan met another woman in the Bhambi mohalla wearing a _sari_ skirt. Hapu Ram's wife. She was probably in her late thirties. With two grown-up children and two young ones still living under her care. She wore a _pila_ _odhni_ , a long yellow head cover. Women are given _pila odhni_ at the time of delivery. Hapu's wife got her children several years ago, and her odhni was old. Still she was fond of her _pila odhni_ , like most other women in the village.

Up to 1974 Hapu Ram was the head of a joint family of three grown-up brothers, their wives, children and an old mother. Then their mother died and they lived in separate households.

It is not the custom at Chelana to adress a married woman by her personal name. When talking about her she is referred to as somebody's wife. That is why Tan Dan called the Bhambi lady with the yellow odhni Hapu's wife. Her real name he did not know.

People called her _Hapu ri bahu_ , which means Hapu's daughter-in-law. She was thus identified both by her husband's name, and as their daughter-in-law. She was the daughter-in-law of them all. The Hindi word _patni_ for wife corresponds to _bindni_ in Marvari, but that word is hardly ever is used in daily village language. It may show how the _sasural_ and other villagers look upon her. In the joint family she belongs to them all, not only to her husband.

Hence, also by her name she had been made dependent on her husband and his family, not having any identity of her own. Before _muklava_ , when she still lived in her parent's village, she was always called by her own name, both in childhood and after muklava.

_"Tharo admi kiyo hai?"_ , (who is your man?), is the way Chelana women ask each others. It reflects,Tan Dan thinks, a feeling of strangeness and distance towards men in general. They are looked upon as another group.

Hapu's young son getting a bath.

When Tan Dan met Hapu's wife, she was together with her youngest son. He was called Hapu's son, being associated with Hapu in the mind of the villagers, not his mother. Tan Dan told Hapu's wife, it would be good, if her son had a bath to avoid skin disease. She thought, it was no hurry, as she had given him a good bath a few weeks earlier, on the day of Holi. The hygienic conditions for the children in the _mohalla_ could have been better. The mothers were not in the habit of giving baths to their children regularly, as they were overburdened with physical work that by tradition the women had to carry out in the household. Fetching water, cooking food, going to fields for labour work and so on. It occupied most of their time and their children had to take care of themselves. Lack of facilities for washing also hampered cleanliness.

When the mothers did give a bath, they did it in their angan with water brought from the well or a tap or the village tank. They brought it in a _gara_ , the clay pot with a narrow opening , and they carried the heavy pots on their heads. Such water was precious, being brought by hard labour.

Hapu's wife filled the _kunda_ , the big iron pan, with water. Then she splashed that water on the boy with the help of a _lotha_ or a _kathora_ to make him wet. She might also rub him with a piece of a broken clay pot where he was particularly dirty. Often rubbing hard, so it hurts, on places where the dirt had got stuck. The child screams and the water splashes, while mother and child keep wrestling with each others, until she is through with her work. Tan Dan remembers the lively scenes of many such baths. No wonder they are not given so often.

Naturally, the children try to sneak away from the house, as soon as they hear the sound of water being filled for the bath.

The busy life of female agricultural labourers at Chelana

In many occupations men and women worked together, the women as assistents to their husbands. Also in agriculture, when they worked as sharecroppers and wage-earning labourers. In the fields, they weeded the crop, they hoed the field, they helped in threshing, winnowing and grinding. They carried heavy loads on their heads, such as products for sale at the market. At home their were also much to do. Female duties not considered suitable for a man. He might rest and relax after heavy field work, and chat with other men while waiting for tea and meals. Some domestic duties were his domain, such as showing hospitality to male guests.

The overburdened wife herself could tell her husband not to do any domestic (female) work. It would spoil his reputation. If he was 'educated' _shikshit_ he should do any physical work at all but stick to his books and his office. He should not risk his health by working out in heat and sunshine in the fields like a labourer, if it could be avoided.

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### Chapter 5 The Bajania Nats are laureates for Bhambis

The Bhambis had their own praisers, their laureates, just like rajputs and other high castes had theirs. The laureates of the Bhambis were of the Bajania Nat caste. At Chelana there was one such family, that of Chogji Nat. The Bayansa Bhopi at nearby village Durthal also belonged to that caste.

They were laureates exclusively for the bhambis on a _jajman_ basis and in addition acrobats for all villagers. They used to show their skills at the open ground of the Thikana and were sometimes rewarded by the village Thakur for their daring tricks.

In western Rajasthan there were two Nat castes with circus type of performance as their traditional profession. One was Bajania Nat and the other one Kabutri Nat. Their young girls danced on a rope up in the air. They whirled around like pigeons when dancing fast, hence the name of their caste. Kabutar means pigeon.

The Bajania Nats once had a caste gathering at Chogji's house, at which several of Chogji's elder relatives told Tan Dan that the Bajania Nats had no relationship to the Kabutri Nats, neither with regard to food nor marriage. They were two completely different castes, and in their opinion the Bajania was the higher one.

They told that their _utpati_ , forefathers, had been Bahi Bhat genealogists, but had split away from that caste. Then they became laureates for the Bhambis. In that case the Banjani Nats would indirectly hail from the Banjara Bhat ox caravan transporters. They might be another small caste with their roots in the Baldia group tradition. Like the Kuchias, Niharias and many others. That is far from certain, though, as Bajania Nat was such a low untouchable caste in the Rajasthani caste hierarchy. They had habits despised by the Hindus such as eating meat of dead cattle including cows. The Nats were up to 1952 given carcass meat by Bhambis as a jajman pay. They were both laureates and drummers of the Bhambis.

The Nat-Bhambi jajman relationship

In the Nat-Bhambi relationship both castes considered Bajania Nat the lower one, being more dependent. A relationship somewhat resembling that of the Rajputs and their dependent groups in the feudal days before 1947. Although based on feudal attitudes, the Bhambi-Nat relationship is rather a jajman relationship between families of the two castes, an inherited relationship which goes on for generations. Feudal attitudes in the sense that those who were in charge of the food supply had a strong hold of those they fed from that supply.

A Bahi Bhat pedigree recorder for Bhambi farmers that might be similar to the forefathers of the Bajania Nats

In 1979 Tan Dan met a bahi bhat genealogist for families of the bhambi caste at Mevra village in Nagaur District. The village is close to a smaller village, where Tan Dan's mother-in-law lived.

When Tan Dan arrived, the bahi bhat sat on a charpai, wearing a green turban, keeping his pedigree records in front of him. His Bhambi _jajman_ client stood in front of him. The Bhambi was about to give money to the Bahi Bhat and also new yellow and white pieces of cloth for a complete dress of turban, _dhoti_ , and _kamij_ (shirt). The customary gifts for the genealogist, when he comes on routine visit to a Bhambi family. He stay in the village for a few days every two or three years.

He used to record the names of the children born in the joint family since his last visit, as well as the deaths which had occurred since then, and some event which had been very special. For example, in case somebody of the family had built a temple.

The jajman-client he visited was a farmer like all other Bhambis at Mevra. Most of them had about about 20 acres of rainfed land. None of them made shoes any longer.

What is the gotra system of the Bahi Bhats for Bhambis?

Whether the Bajania Nats stem from Bahi Bhat genealogists is difficult to know, but a section of the Bahi Bhats did keep pedigree records for the Bhambis in the 1970s. How their part of the Bahi bhat caste managed to arrange their gotras and marriage relationship Tan Dan did not know.

They might form a subgroup of the Bahi Bhats lower than the other Bahi Bhats. Together with other genealogist groups for low castes such as Bavris, Mochis, and Regars? Could the bahi bhats for Bhambis have gotras associated with old Rajput dynasties or with Bhambi gotras. If these bahi bhat genealogists have a banjara origin they should rather have clan and gotra names similar to those of the baldia group of castes. The bahi bhats for Bhambis ought to know quite well about their own clan history, being genealogists for others.

Dhadhi is another caste of laureates that may have split away from the Bahi Bhat caste of genealogists

The idea that Bajania Nat laureates hail from some branch of the Bahi Bhat caste resembles the talk about the Dhahi laureate caste of the baldia group of castes. As for the Dhadhis the Bahi Bhats claim that the Dhadhis hail from them, but Tan Dan has not heard any such claim with regard to the Bajania Nats.

Meateating as an explanation for social discrimination

The Bajania Nats who told Tan Dan about the origin of their caste, did not tell him why they thought their caste had split from the Bahi Bhats. Assuming their is some substance in the claim, the reason for the split could be eating carcass meat given by the Bhambis, their jajman-clients.

Disapproval of despised food habits was earlier an important reason for segregation and low caste status in rural Rajasthan, the villagers believe.

It is also possible that the belief that meat eating was the reason appeared later on, when the hold of vaishnav Hindu thinking deepened in Rajasthan. It could be a way of applying the accepted logic among the savarn Hindus to the Hindu society at large. A logic based on the argument that meateating is unacceptable, and therefore also meateaters are unacceptable, and should be kept under segregation. No touch.

However, small marginal groups such as Bajania Nat and Bahi Bhats had probably very little contact with _vaishnav_ Hindu thinking in the distant past, as they lived in the western outskirts of the Hindu mainland as pastorals and nomads.

Further back in history marginal isolated groups away from urban settlements in the foodgrain producing plains could fill their stomachs as animal hunters. They lived on meat and other foodstuff available in the forest landscape. For some groups meateating might have been necessary for their survival. How could they imagine that others would object to their meat diet. It was probably beyond their thinking that their eating certain kind of meat or state of meat could create so much illfeelings among persons with whom they had no contact. If they would eat animals who had died of their own, what would be the problem to others? There is no violence in it. The meateater had not killed that animal. In case that meat would be a health hazard, the consumers might suffer, not other people.

Could the strong reaction against meateating be an attempt to explain a conflict for which the real cause had been forgotten long ago?

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###  Chapter 6 A Banjania Nat family and its jajman clients

Men having a chat at Chogji Nat's angan in February 1978.

Chogji Nat was a laureate for the Bhambis. In his youth he had been a very skilled acrobat. In 1978 he had become an old man with a big white moustach, a white turban, ear rings and spectacles. His Bajania Nat caste might hail from bahi bhat genealogists and indirectly from baldia bhat pack-ox caravan transporters. Rather uncertain, though.

When Tan Dan joined the group Chogji and his son had a chat with some of their jajman clients of the Bhambi caste. The angan was full of people, both family members and visitors.

Chogji's family

In the group sitting in a ring chatting with each others was also his son Badri with a yellow shirt. Badri's wife stood behind him together with their son, a young boy. She was in pardah as Chogji, her father-in-law, was present. Chogji's daughter sat behind them on the ground. (Badri's sister.) She had passed her _muklava_ ceremony long ago and lived normally with her in-laws, having children of her own. On this occasion she was on visit to her parent's home. Therefore, she did not have to hide her face behind _pardah_ cloth. That she was forced to at her in-laws village.

Bhanvru recited glorifying poems for the Bhambi client families

Chogji had three sons. The eldest one, Bhanvru, earned a part of his living by drumming for Bhambis at marriages and other family functions at Chelana and surrounding villages. He also recited rhymes and poems about the Bhambi family he visited. These poems were full of praise and heroic deeds of the Bhambi family's forefathers, in a style imitating the Dingal poems the Charan bards used to recite for the Rajput rulers in the feudal age.

Chogji's two other sons, Badri and Renvat, worked as wage earning labourers. Badri assisted masons by making mortar and also worked as an agricultural labourer. Chogji's family had ten acres of agricultural land, which Badri cultivated together with his brother Renvat, who was about twenty years of age.

Renvat was a hardworking labourer, who worked at many places. He tried to get work, where the wage was highest for the moment.

Sometimes he worked at one of the stone quarries at the Gadsuria Ghati. It is a sandstone hill to the south-west of Chelana settlement, three to four miles away, with a pass for the old road for Jodhpur to Merta.

Renvat also worked at lime kilns situated on all sides of Chelana except to the west.

When wages were high in agriculture he worked for well owners, filling irrigation squares with water and other such jobs.

Circus tricks of Chogji family in old days

In his childhood Tan Dan saw when Chogji's family did the following circus tricks. Altogether the Nat acrobats were ten to fifteen persons doing many tricks, one after the other, just like on circus. Tan Dan especially remembers the trick with the stretcher.

Surrounded by of a big crowd of spectators standing in a wide circle they put a wooden ladder on the ground as a stretcher and asked two big strong men to lie down, one upon another, and then they tied ropes at each of the four corners of the stretcher.

If there were no volunteers for the stretcher they would put two big stone slabs on it instead. Then they would tie the four ends of the ropes to the hair of the Nats acting as acrobats.

Chogji and one of his relatives stood at each short end of the ladder. Chogji's relative tying his two long moustaches to the rope and Chogji himself at the other end of the stretcher tied his long hair to the ropes there. Then they slowly started to lift the two men on the stretcher and started to swing them from one side to the other. Very gently and carefully with three or four swings, while the crowd struck with awe looked on. Until some persons feeling the pain and strain of the actors almost unbearable for themselves to witness, suddenly would start shouting " _ghano_ , _ghano_ ", meaning 'much, much'. That is, "stop it, enough of it".

There is no custom of clapping of hands at such village shows, unlike at modern circus.

Another trick, which some other Nat of the group did, was to lie flat on the ground while lifting a bamboo pole of considerable height on which he had mounted three churi , long knives, about fifteen inches each.

They had been tied together like a tripod, resting on the top of the tall bambu stick.

Tan Dan remembers it reached as high as the opening of the Thikana gate. In that case the pole was about twenty feet long. With a sudden jerk the tripod of knives fell down over the man lying on the ground, with one knife between his legs and the two other knives at each side of his stomach. A very dangerous trick, and that was the cause of its fascination.

The tripod of knives standing over the man did not give much margin, as the knives were not very long, but the man was lying there unharmed, none of the knives touching his body.

For such tricks Chogji's relatives had been given the land still in their position. The Nats and other village entertainers had since old time by habit and custom been very alert in showing respect to the Thakur and others in feudal power, as these masters could shower gifts on them.

Chogji's Bhambi visitors, his jajman clients

In the circle of visitors sat Bagda Ram Bhambi, weaver as his father Jogiji. He was in his twenties and one of the most skilled weavers at Chelana. He sat to the left of Chogji wearing a blue shirt. To the right of Chogji sat another young man called Bagda Ram Bhambi wearing a shining black beard. His father Suntaji was employed as _chaprasi_ (peon) of the gram panchayat office at Chelana for many years. Suntaji's Bagda Ram, with the beard, was in his late teens in 1978 and like most other Bhambis, regardless of age, he had never been at school, not for a single day.

On the other side of the circle sat Ratnoji Bhambi, an old farmer with about 16 acres of land, half of it irrigated with the help of water from a well-owner, and half of it cultivated as dryland in the kharif season. It was not enough to live on, so he also let out his bullock cart to others, with himself as the driver. In addition he worked as a labourer.

Beside him sat another Bhambi peasant with white turban and clothes. Bhaguji. He lived almost as Ratnoji, having ten acres of land and a bullock cart he hired out to others. His wife and children worked as agricultural labourers, especially in the rabi season. In the monsoon season they were all busy with kharif crops in their own field. Until 1978 they had no well water for irrigation, but after that they got some water from a well owner against sharing the crop half-half.

Beside Bhaguji sat his brother Ladu Ram with a bedsheet around his neck, as it was February and the air was chilly. Ladu and Bhaguji had a third brother Hapu Ram, the wife of whom had such a trouble with bathing her son, as told above.

There were four more visitors at Chogji's angan at this time. Jairamji, Kaluji, Jivan Ram and his nephew, all Bhambis.

Jairamji was a bhambi from a poor village eight miles west of Chelana. Without irrigation water or good soil for agriculture. He was an in-law relative wearing a green sweater and blue shirt. Strong and healthy.

Beside him sat Kaluji Bhambi in khaki shirt and a turban open on the top in the old style of bhambi turbans. He was the eldest of four brother who had worked as skilled labourers on the Detha farm since their youth in the early 1950s. He had been the member of the village council since the 1960s, but in the village council election in 1978 he did not want to contest. That election would take place in a few weeks, and that is why they had come together to talk village politics.

In the middle of the circle of men sat Jivan Ram in yellow turban. He was a merchant, moneylender, shoemaker and farmer. He belonged to the Bhambi caste like the others. He did not live in the big Bhambi mohalla but in a smaller one for only his big joint family and two small Bhambi families. That house cluster touched the Rajput mohalla on two sides and some Baniya houses on the third side.

Jivan Ram was the richest Bhambi in Chelana. He liked to be together with Baniyas, and he behaved like them. He lent money on high interest and he did not help his poor Bhambi caste fellows much, Tan Dan thought. In gatherings like this one he used to be the one who was most talkative.

The gram panchayat election campaign was going on, and Jivan Ram Bhambi was on the side of the Baniyas in village politics. He did his best to persuade the men at Chogji's compound to vote for the candidate friendly to the Baniyas. Nevertheless, the other candidate won at this ward.

In a corner of Chogji's house compound sat Jivan Ram's poor and simple nephew. He was in his twenties and had accompanied his paternal uncle Jivan Ram, treating him with respect, as was the custom towards elder rich relatives. He sat as an attendent in the background, and listened while his uncle managed the conversation.

Jivan Ram's nephew owned some land, but not enough enough for supporting a family. He did some transportation work, as he owned bullocks and a cart. In addition he worked as an agricultural labourer on a daily wage basis. Thus he was a very average Bhambi.

Tan Dan had seen him working in the fields many times, and thought Jivan Ram's nephew was silent and hardworking, doing his best. He tried to live up to the expecations of others, what was considered his duty within the family.

It did not appear, as if Jivan Ram's nephew felt his innocence was exploited. Many young men taken advantage of by senior relatives feel proud of being able to serve, help and live up to expections. Praise from elder influential relatives such as Jivan Ram was also a kind of reward.

Suntaji's Bagda Ram got tuberculosis

Bagda Ram, they young man with the black beard, worked at that time as a sharecropper or agricultural labourer, depending on work opportunites. He and his wife both worked as agricultural labourers most days of the years.

They did participate in religious festivals and marriage ceremonies, though. On such days they may either take work leave completely, or work a part of the day. They rushed home to fulfill the role they were expected to play at such functions. A welcome break in their monotonous routine life, especially for the women.

Three years later Bagda Ram did not work any longer. He was completely dependent on his wife's earning and the earning of the rest of his big joint family, as he had become sick. From 1980 his health had deteriorated so much, that he had to stay at home. Not lying down all the time, but sometimes sitting and walking around a little in the village. Not because he was reluctant to work, unlike some other persons most of the time doing nothing in the village bazar, but because he had got tuberculosis, according to the diagnosis of the doctor at Chelana hospital. To get cured from that disease he would need money for medicine and good nutritious food.

He could not afford it, so he slowly got weaker and weaker, gradually eaten up by his disease. Earlier, two young Bhambi boys had died of tuberculosis, gradually getting weaker. They had been a few years older than Bagda Ram and distant relatives.

In 1978 Bagda Ram was still in good health, at the blossom of his youth. Sitting in Chogji's angan together with the others he almost looked like a maharaj, having beard and moustaches in a village hero style. He was handsome.

In 1981 he felt very depressed and told Tan Dan he felt he would die in the same way as his two relatives.

As there is medicine and treatment nowadays efficient enough to cure TB patients, it would be possible to cure Bagda Ram. Hopefully, he would get treatment in time, but who would pay?

His Bhambi friends and relatives did not feel they could afford to help him, and felt as lost as Bagda Ram. They all thought that tuberculosis is due to ill luck. Tuberculosis is in Marvari called _kansa rog_ , meaning the bronze-like disease, as the patient get a bronze pale yellow kind of colour, while the natural colour of Bagda Ram's skin was of a healthy reddish hue.

Ram Dev worshipping to cure Bagda Ram

Bagda Ram went to the Ram Devra temple at Chelana every day to get the ash forehead mark. He prayed in front of the Ram Dev _murti_. Also his wife and other relatives prayed for his health at the temple. After Bagda Ram got sick his elder brother Raju started to observe various saintly practices. He believed the Ram Dev Baba was displeased with their family, as Raju the previous year had lost his brother Geesa Ram, the next eldest brother of the family. Raju had to worship regularly, keep fast and do other pious acts in order to save Bagda Ram.

Geesa Ram had not died of tuberculosis, but of a paralysis attack.

Giving children negative names such as garbage

Kachra and bagda are Marvari words for garbage, and they were common name for boys in Baniya, Brahmin, Sonar, Dakot, Rav, Kumar, Lakhar and also among untouchable castes such as Bhambi and Bhangi. However, Tan Dan has not heard these names among the feudal lord castes of Rajputs and Charans. These negative names could also be a way of avoiding the attraction of the Gods, who might desire to call nice children to their heavenly abode, i.e. the children might die and be lost for their parents.

_Sunta_ is also a common name among villagers of the area. It means the navel. When cutting the navel cord at birth, some children, instead of getting the normal small pit, get a protruded naval spot due to negligence by the mother and the midwife attendent of the small baby. Such a protruded naval spot on the stomach is called _sunta_ in Marvari. Evidently Bagda Ram's father has got his name from having an unusually big _sunta_. People often getting such names after being teased by other children.

Bhambi children and the school

When thinking about Suntaji's son Bagda Ram and his lack of school education, Tan Dan remembered that Bagda Ram's elder brother Raju Ram was in the first batch of Chelana children who in early 1950s passed all the three classes of the small village school of that time. During the first years of the Chelana school, there were a few Bhambi boys who did go to school, in fact more Bhambi children went to school in the 1950s than in the 1960s and 1970s. Especially from those Bhambi families that lived close to Tej Dan's house and kept contact with his son Ravi Dan at the youth club. They helped in getting a village school started by sending their children, although Bhambi parents were in the background. They did not want to become a target of Rajputs and Baniyas who by violent means tried to prevent a village school from starting. They could be more harsh to untouchable Bhambis than to those of higher castes.

Although the Chelana school students kept increasing year by year, the Bhambi children deceased in number. A few boys Bhambi boys did reach matriculation, though. From 1961 it had become possible to study up to eleventh class, as there was a higher secondary school in the village.

Tan Dan could only recall five Bhambi boys who had passed all eleven classes since 1961, although there were 30 to 35 Bhambi families at Chelana in 1981. The only two Bhambi boys from Chelana who went further for university studies were Kanna Ram Deval, who became a lawyer in Jodhpur, and another boy who joined Government service.

Since the start of the girl school around 1970 only one Bhambi girl had studied there up to 1981. She went to school because her father lived outside Chelana, working in the army. Thus the family had become more independent and could face possible social harassment from those in higher castes who did not like untouchable girls at the Chelana school for girls.

Tan Dan often asked parents of Bhambi children why they did not send their children to school. No need, they used to reply, as their children would not get a Government job at any rate. The parents also felt their children would not be welcome at the school, neither by the teachers nor by most of the students.

Bhambi children would feel their school days embarassing, and were likely to drop out, as soon as there was any excuse. Small children can be of some use in most work situations at home, so it was easy to find a reason for not attending the school.

Why Kaluji Bhambi did not want to continue as a panch

Kaluji was one of the Bhambis chatting at Chogji's angan about village village politics together with Jivan Ram Bhambi. He had been a representative of the Bhambis at the gram panchayat (village council) for many years and was liked in his mohalla. Still he did not want to continue. He told Tan Dan that he did not like the fights and tension within the panchayat. Although he did not say so, Tan Dan thought he might have been quite bored at the panchayat meetings. Being meek and quite like most other Bhambis, he mainly had the role of a listener at the panchayat meetings, while others more bold and confident kept talking.

The subjects they talked about may not have had much direct relevance to the Bhambi community.

In 1978, however, there was another Bhambi who wanted to contest, Bagga Ram, one of the rich Bhambis, as he was a private contractor for building houses and doing masonry work in wells, and in addition had about fifty to sixty acres land, may be more. Bagga Ram was a friend of Kana Ram Deval, the Bhambi lawyer at Jodhpur coming from Chelana.

Bagga Ram would probably have become a more active Bhambi panch, as he was keen on politics and intrigues on the personal level, but he did not get a chance as Shambu Dan Mehru was put up as a candidate in this ward by Ravi Dan's party, which hoped that in addition to the Mehru Charans to whom Shambi Dan himself belonged, also some people of the other various castes of this election ward including Bhambis would vote for him rather than for Bagga Ram Bhambi, a most unwelcome candidate for Ravi Dan and his party in village politics. And that was also what happened, as Shambu Dan got elected. Shambu Dan, a landlord and one of the tallest persons in the village, was mostly seen going around on his scooter in fancy clothes.

Most Bhambi families had some land

Many of the Bhambis that gathered in Chogjis had some land. Ratnoji and 16 acres and Bhaguji had 10 acres. That so many Bhambis owned land, about ten to fifteen acres each, and in some cases even more, was not much appreciated until the 1960s or 1970s. In the feudal age there had been ample stretches of land not used by anybody for cultivation. Most land was just considered banjar, i.e. barren land, on which animals grazed and further away there were wild animals.

The tendency to die early among Bhambis and Bhangis

Ratnoji Bhambi died in 1980 at the age of about 60 years. Two years earlier his brother died at about the same age. Also others of the family Tan Dan knew died at sixty. They did not die of any disease, Tan Dan thought, but rather of old age in spite of not being very old. Many other Bhambis at Chelana died early in the same way. Also in Kanpur, Chanda's mother's village, Tan Dan noticed that the Bhambis in general died at a comparatively young age.

Also men and women of the Bhangi caste at Chelana often die due to only aging out at the age of about sixty.

Why did these lowcaste villagers tended to die early without being sick? Was it related to living in so much submissiveness?

Naming elders

Within a caste group younger men adress elder ones with the suffix -ji to their name , but those who are younger then them are called by their plain name. Ratnoji was the oldest Bhambi in the group at Chogji's _angan_. All the Bhambi men of the group would therefore called him with the polite form Ratnoji. Only Chogji was even older, and could call him Ratna, but even he was likely to call him Ratnoji, as Ratnoji is Chogji's jajman.

But young people of a high caste group like Rathore youngsters by tradition call even old men of low castes without -ji, while on the other hand even old men with grey hair of low castes use the -ji suffix when adressing small children of a high caste, even girls. Or they use other high respect additions, such as _sa_.

Uda Bhangi may say Navrattanji sa, and Navrattan Singh calls him only Uda in return. Tan Dan heard some Jat call him Udio, a distorted form of his name used as a way of showing contempt.

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###  Chapter 7 Some other laureate castes active in the Chelana area

Sargara caste brass horn players became laureates for low castes and Sirvis

To entertain others by singing their praise in return for a reward is an ageold way to eke out a living for marginal groups in western Rajasthan. In years of famine multitude of helpless families went around singing and begging at the very verge of death, as can be understood from the moving _dingal_ poem about the famine year Vikram Samvat 1956 (1899 A.D.) by Umar Dan Lalas from Dhadharvala in Bikaner District.

The Sargara caste was a group of entertainers similar to the Bajania Nat. Also the Sargaras had old jajman relations to Bhambi families. And to Mochis. In 1980 they had become laureates to Sirvi farmers in the Jalagarh area, too.

For villagers at large the Sargaras were known as blowers of the _bankia_ , a three to six feet long brass horn with a very dark tone. The Sargaras play on the bankia at weddings and other functions for any person who likes to pay for it.

Since old days the Sargaras are also known in western Rajasthan for their dummy horse shows. The Sargaras do make a very skilled and lively horse dance. Their horse is called _kachi gori_ and is stuffed with straw and covered with elaborated colourful cloth. It is quite big, not much smaller than a real horse.

Sargara were treated as untouchable shudras, as they were associated with the Bhambis, untouchables they also, in the eyes of savarn Hindus. Sargaras were musicians and singers for the Bhambi caste, singing praise and a bit personal songs about the listeners and their family people some generations back.

The sargara laureate musicians did this work on jajmani relationships with their client Bhambi families. In a similar way that _merasi_ laureates sing and play for Charans. For example about Tan Dan's and Chanda's marriage, as was done in their home in 1977. Another group of entertainers for the Charans is Raval. A group of Ravals visited Chelana in January 1981 and they had a night show at Tan Dan's mohalla for a big audience.

In the Chelana Jalagarh area the Sargaras work as agricultural landless labourers most of the time. Therefore, they are not very esperienced in their laureate work, Tan Dan thought. For most Sargaras it is a marginal activity.

It did not matter so much, though, as their entertainment only filled a need among low caste people such as Bhambis and they were not so demanding. They wanted somebody to play and sing for them on their marriages and similar funtions. They imitated higher castes with established jajmani relationships of this kind.

A local tradition developed in the Sirvi caste region of Jalagarh in the 1970s. The Sargara caste entertainers started to sing and play auspicious songs for the Sirvis. The Sirvi farmers in Jalagarh evidently hang on to the Sargaras, as they had nobody else as laureates.

The Sargara girl who protected her wheat crop

In February 1980 Tan Dan happened to pass some agricultural fields a few kilometres to the northwest of the Chelana village settlement. One of the fields was owned by a Rajput with one of the first tubewells at Chelana. He had leased the field to a sharecropper of the Sargara caste, and he managed the field with the help of his family. His daughter had got as her duty to scare away sparrows. The end of the rabi crop season was approaching and there used to be plenty of sparrows flying around in thick clouds over the wheat field, attracted by the seed maturing in the earheads.

The girl scared away the sparrows by throwing stones at them. With a sling in her right hand she could throw stones on the birds with much force. The sling is a leather strip which is wider in the middle and there the stone is put. Both leather strip ends are held with the same hand. One of the ends has a loop, which is held by the forefinger, and the stone is thrown by making a jerk when swinging the gofan, so that the other end of the leather strip, which is kept inside the palm, is let loose when the jerk is made. The sling is called _gofan_ and is used all over Rajasthan and surrounding areas such as Gujarat and Madhya Pardesh. That Tan Dan had seen himself. In the old days they had the same kind of stone-throwing device as weapon used in warfare. Even in the 1970s villagers many times used them as weapons in village fights. With this weapon Jugti Dan's family had defended themselves many times against Rajput enemies in the early 20th century.

For several weeks she had come to the field every day to scare away birds all day long, but two days earlier a hail storm had passed through the Chelana area from south-west to north-east. It had passed in a one kilometre broad belt and many fields within this belt had been damaged completely.

There were hardely any earheads left in the field guarded by the girls. The crop was gone and no birds had to be scared away any longer, but the Sargara girl still continued her bird watching duties, as it had been her routine for a long time. She realised, though, that her work was of no use.

They sat down feeling helpless, and the elder sister was crying. They belonged to a family from another village, who had come to Chelana to work as sharecroppers, and now there was no wheat crop to share and the future for this poor Sargara family was uncertain.

A Mochi sharecropper family at their hut destroyed by hailstorm.

In another field of that area Tan Dan met Bhanvru Mochi, also a sharecropper, who lived out at his field together with his wife and children and some goats which they kept behind the bush. Also his wheat field had been hit by the hail storm. Besides, there had been delays in irrigation due to negligence in handling by the sons of the Rajput landowner, relaxing and drinking liquor at the well site and in the village.

Tan Dan saw the remnants of their improvised hut of thatch and wooden branches. It was completely blown away in the hail storm. The family had a real stone house inside the village settlement, but they lived in this hut during the rabi crop season. Bhanvru Mochi, in between his agricultural work, made shoes outside the hut. The sun had reappeared after the hailstorm and the family dried their wet quilts. His wife cooked food next to the cradle for the smallest child of the family.

Raval entertainers at the Detha mohalla in Chelana

In a chilly night in January 1981 a man from Nundra village in Nagaur district in western Rajasthan had a dance and song show for the villagers. He and his two musicians performed in front of the Karni shrine at the Charan house cluster in the village. Nearby houses belonging to some families of the Mehru gotra. The man danced and sang songs all night long about the deeds of Karni godess.

He was dressed both as a man and a woman. He had a turban and a sword. But the lower half of his body had a skirt and an odhni tied at the waist as if he was a woman. The Hinglaj godess, and her divine incarnations, such as Karni, appeared like this in many episodes, when they had to fight for their cause.

They belonged to the Raval cast. It is their traditional caste profession to entertain Charans. They only visit Charans, who pay in kind or cash for the performance. Those of other castes can look, if a Charan pays. They move in between villages where Charans live, and perform Charan mohallas on some common ground. They often make satires of other castes and groups. Also of oldtime maharajas and modern governments.

There was darkness all around, but the audience could see the dancer, as he held a traditional oil lamp in his hand. It was made by twisting a piece of rope drenched in sweet oil. An edible oil of til (sesamum), which burns slowly and nicely.

The show started about ten o'clock in the evening and continued the whole night non-stop up to about eleven o'clock in the forenoon next day. Then the Ravals had food and went to sleep. In the evening they left Chelana for another village with Charans. There they would again put up a show. The same evening, if possible, but normally after a gap of two or three days. Such a show always started in the evening and went on the whole night until forenoon next day. The show started with light subjects, and towards late night there were literary recitations of Dingal poems.

About one third of all Charans at Chelana looked at the show, and in addition there were many from other castes in the audience. They were even more, Tan Dan thought. He saw the show for about two hours. Most Charans stayed the whole night until morning.

Villagers were in the habit of staying awake for the whole night and then go straight to work next day, taking rest later instead, as this was the only kind of theatre entertainment for many villagers. Also Ramlila shows belong to this category of religious drama performance for the common man.

In the morning the singer and the two musicians went from house to house in the Charan mohallas, playing a little at each place, and collected their money.

They played a few songs also at Tan Dan's angan before being paid, and the compound got full of women and children following the Ravals from house to house taking the last chance to enjoy the show.

The Dholi caste of drummers at Chelana in 1981

Two Dholi families at Chelana lived on drumming, while the third Chelana Dholi family supported itself by being employed in a music band and a drama company somewhere else.

One of the drummers was Badri, who had a big drum on which he played for all his _jajmans_ on festivals and family functions such as weddings. Also on the third day after death, when relatives of a dead person leave for Ganges and Hardvar for the ash ritual. Drumming on request for ceremonial purpose is mostly done in the evenings or early mornings. In the daytime Badri used to whitewash houses in the village. He earned more on drumming, though.

At a function at Chelana in 1981 Badri Dholi played on his drum while his son sitting on the floor made side beats and a Muslim Lohar (blacksmith) called Javru played on a _kansi thali_ , a bronze plate. Javru works with agriculture both as a small landholder and as a farm labourer.

Badri and other drummers of the Dholi cast worked by tradition only for Rajputs in a jajman relationship. Other castes have to found their own drummers. Such as Bika Ram who was called a Jat drummer, as he drummed for farming castes such as Jats. Bika Ram was a popular drummer in the village in the early 1970s, and Tan Dan also enjoyed listening to him at dances and such functions. He created a special beat, a difficult one, by changing the side of his drum. His small daughter was one of his fans.

Bika Ram did not serve lower castes such as untouchables. They had their own drummers. The Bhambis had Nat caste drummers and the Bhangis had drummers from their own caste.

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### Chapter 8 The many castes of Chelana

People used to ask strangers about their caste in the following way in the villages of western Rajasthan:

_"Kun dud me ho"._ Literally 'In what milk are you? It means, "In what caste have you got your mother's milk?, i.e. To what caste do you belong?

The villagers used to say that a third of the families at Chelana were Rajputs, another third were Jats and the rest belonged to many small castes. They had the original Chelana population in mind, those who lived in the village during the feudal age. About 600 families in 1950, Tan Dan told. In addition, various marginal groups who lived a rather unsettled life in the wilderness between the villages.

Then new families settled in the village. Nomadic groups as Rebaris started to live there already in the 1950s. From 1960 Malis of the area started to work as labourers at the new irrigation farms. In the 1970s there were about eight hundred families at Chelana. The newcomers belonged to a wide range of castes. Many of them were agricultural labourers who kept moving back and forth between their native villages and Chelana. Most of them were poor and had come in search of employment. There were better-off newcomers, too, such as Baniya merchants of the region, who found expanding Chelana a suitable place for business. Teachers and salaried staff of Government organizations such as the small rural bank also started to live in the village.

Of the 600 original Chelana families about 140 to 150 families belonged to the Jat caste (25%) and an equal number of Rajputs (25%). There were 15 to 20 Charan families (3%) and an equal number of Mali families (3%). The Bhambis (traditionally leather workers) were 40 families (6%), and also the Chawkidars (previously traditional thieves, nowadays stonecutters, agricultural labourers, and owners of small farmholdings), and 8 bhangi (sweeper) families (1-2%).

That was Tan Dan's estimate and it tallied more or less with official figures given in various development and welfare scheme reports of Government offices at Jalagarh and Jodhpur.

The old established upkeepers of feudal habits and customs at Chelana were about two hundred strongly dominating families, mostly of Rajput, Charan, Brahmin, and Baniya castes. There was another group of about three hundred families in the village who felt themselves to be better than the Shudras, i.e. the untouchable castes. It included Jats and Malis that after 1952 had got land ownership status. Also migratory Mali labourers were a part of that group, although they were poor. This medium group did its best to imitate Rajput practises rather than opposed the traditions as oldfashioned. They were full of respect for their still powerful former feudal lords in the first group and their life style.

It is this group of families, mainly Jats and Malis, who in the 1970s took an increasingly keen interest in protecting the reputation of their families. For example, their young widows remarried less freely than earlier in the attempt to keep up with the Rajputs.

Many families of these medium ranked castes adopted Rajput practices of this kind, when their economic standard was on the increase in the post-feudal decades after 1960. It increased their status within their caste and in the village as a whole.

The third group of some 300 families had the lowest rank of the hierarchical caste society. Hardly any of these families had in the 1970s any ambition to improve their reputation in the society by preventing their widows from remarrying, but there were other ways.

In order to rise in the society, people of despised low ranked castes could stop doing things which people of higher castes looked down upon. For example, removing dead cattle and eating meat. The bhambis did stop working with leather, and a few low caste families adopted vegetarian habits.

In the 1980s there lived some one thousand families at Chelana. Two thirds of them belonged to the original population, but the remaining one third of the villagers had settled at Chelana in the period 1955-1980 attracted by brisk growth of irrigation agriculture and the limestone industry. The one thousand families belonged to more than forty castes. The biggest ones were Jat and Rajput with more than two hundred families each. Then followed a few castes with some fifty families. Many castes were much smaller, some had just one or a few families each.

The many castes of the village were skewed not only with regard to size but also in social status. Traditionally, there were two ranking systems in western Rajasthan, the feudal one headed by the Rajputs and the religious one with the Brahmins at the top. The two overlapping systems strengthened each others. The village elite also included the Baniya business castes and the small but active Charan caste.

The three main ranking groups of Chelana castes

The social respect ( _ijat_ ) of a family largely depends on the caste it belongs to, although other factors are important, too. Within in a caste there could be big diversity between families as for wealth, income and education. Especially, in big castes.

An hierarchical ranking of all the 40-50 castes of Chelana might be made with the Brahmins at the top and the Bhangis at the bottom. There was a broad consensus among the villagers about the relative position along that ranking ladder, but the exact order was under dispute, especially in the middle.

The castes may simply be divided in high, middle and low castes. The castes could also be classified as for traditional interaction. There were the Savarn Hindus, Lower Savarn Hindus, Untouchable Hindus and the Muslims. Also the latter were untouchables from a Savarn Hindu perspective.

At the top were the Savarn Hindu castes. The Brahmin, Rajput and Baniya castes of Chelana. Also the Charans passed as Savarn Hindus in feudal Marvar, as Charan warriors and bards were so closely associated with the Rajputs, that many considered them to be a Rajput subcaste.

They trace their origin to the three upper varnas of the ancient Hindu myths. Below them is the shudra varna, the scriptures tell.

In addition to these clear cases of Savarn Hindu castes, there were others which might be called Low Savarn Hindus, as they enjoyed the prestige of fullfledged Hindus, although considered lower than the four castes mentioned above. Among these Low Savarn Hindus were Kumar, Rebari, Teli, and Kalal. They were the middle group of castes in the village. Also the former feudal tenants belong to the middle caste group. Jats had constituted eighty per cent of the agricultural tenants in feudal Rajasthan, Tan Dan thought. From a strictly religious point of view they were treated as savarn Hindus, he told, as the Brahmins carried out the _namkaran sanskar_ ritual for them, which they did not do for Kumhars and other touchable shudras. But the Jats normally do not carry out the _mundan_ ceremony.

The Untouchable Hindus, and the Muslims, who also are untouchables from a savarn Hindu point of view, are in the lowest of the three groups.

The status of a caste as for the traditional master-servant relationship was also considered, when the villagers ranked castes. Master castes with feudal dependents, and those served by others in a jajman relationship, were as a rule higher ranked than the dependents.

Tan Dan grouped all the Chelana castes into these three categories to give a broad idea of their social prestige and influence, viewed from the angle of the Chelana villagers.

There are families of low ranked castes at Chelana but no "casteless" families or individuals. Even the lowliest villager belongs to a caste, even those very few who at times have been completely boycotted from their caste fellows.

Also the Muslims at Chelana have their definite caste-like social groups. Intermarriage between individuals of different Muslim "castes" was not accepted by the Chelana Muslims.

The English word caste is not used at Chelana but the Marvari word _kom_. In Hindi _jati_. The villagers mean a social group that do not marry with outsiders. Hence Muslim and Christian groups in India which do not marry with outsiders are _kom_ , i.e. castes, for them. Not only Hindu groups with gotra systems.

The word caste comes from the Portuguese word casta, I have read somewhere. The Portuguese came to India very early in the colonial age and some common Hindi words such a kamra (room) has a Portuguese origin.

The approximate ranking order of all the Chelana castes in 1981.

Below is a list of all the 46 castes (jati) and caste-like communities, including the Muslim ones, at Chelana in 1981. The ones at the top of the list are ranked as highest and those at the bottom as lowest in the caste hierarchy of the village.It is order the villagers themselves agree upon, more or less, according to Tan Dan.

He put the castes in three groups and as masters, servants or without such a feudal type relationship.

1. High, 2. Middle, 3. Low caste group.

A. Master caste in master-servant relationships

B. Dependent caste in master-servant relationships

Castes marked with B serve castes marked with A in the traditional village setup. On the whole, the B castes are Low Savarn Hindus and the A castes are High Savarn Hindus.

Group 3 is the untouchable group, according to village tradition. Tan Dan has included the castes he thinks villagers in general consider to be untouchables.

Castes marked with B in Groups 1 and 2 treats Bs in Group 3 as untouchables, but they treat non-Bs, i.e. independent families in Group 3, as their equals. The Detha Charan clan was a high savarn Hindu group from a social (feudal attitude) point of view in Chelana of 1981, in spite of its origin as a pastoral group.

In the caste list Tan Dan have grouped all the different gotras of a caste at Chelana as one caste only. For example families of the Rathore, Bhati and Daiya gotras are all Rajputs.

Group(1,2 or 3) and Master-servant relationship (A or B) /

/ Caste name/ occupation and characteristics

1 A/ Rajput/ earlier feudal landlords and professional warriors, they were _samanti_ , feudal masters.

1 A/ Jain / bania, businessmen, moneylenders

1 A/ Brahmin/ traditionally family priests

1 B/ Rav/ genealogists for brahmans

1 B/ Sunar/ goldsmiths, craftsmen in gold and silver jewellery.

1 A(B) / Charan/ ex-feudal landlords, cattlebreeders, traditionally bards for Rajput feudal lords.

1 A/ Sevak/ priests at jain temples, jain priests ( _pujari_ )

1 A/ Guran/ a jain caste, a clan of learned jains, ( _vachak_ ) traditional jain teachers

1 / Sad/ Hindu temple priests ( _pujari_ ).

1 A/ Agraval/ a baniya caste ( _vyapari_ ), businessmen

1 A/ Maheswary (Mesri)/ another Baniya caste of merchants and moneylenders. ( _vyapari_ )

2 B/ Mali/ gardeners, farmers (kheti)

2 B/ Jat/ farmers (kheti)

2 B/ Kumavat/ farmers (kheti)

2 B/ Nai/ barbers, also work as cooks

2 B/ Kumar/ potters

2 B/ Rebari/ breeders of sheep and camels

2B/ Khati / carpenters

2B/ Chinpa / textile printers

2B/ Daroga / servants of Rajputs and Charans

2B/ Lakhara / bangle makers, also sell other female outfits.

2B/ Teli / extract vegetable oil

2B/ Kalal / producers and sellers of alcoholic drinks

3B/ Bhambi / leather workers and weavers, also labourers in agriculture

3B/ Bavari / stone cutters, watchmen, wasteland dwellers. Earlier registered as a criminal caste _(jurayam pesha)._

3 / Gadolia Lavar, Lohar / blacksmith nomads

3B / Jatia/ tanners and leather workers

3/ Gavaria/ make tents, ropes, combs, sell bangles, needles

3B / Gurda/ priest for chamars.

3B / Sansi/ traditionally wasteland dwellers. Earlier registered as a criminal caste _(jurayam pesha)._

3 / Rangrej/ cloth dyers

3 / Dakot/ low ranked Hindu priest caste

3B / Nat/ acrobatics and entertainers

3 / Merashi/ singers

3B / Dholi / drummers

3 / Lavar / blacksmiths

3 / Sani/ Muslim priest of shrine

3B / Janglia / wasteland dwellers, village watchmen

3B / Dhobi/ washermen

3 / Bheldar / stonebreakers

3 / Gosi / lime makers

3 / Vopari / Chelana Muslims, butchers

3 / Binjara / ox caravan carriers, cattle traders, nowadays labourers and peddlers

3B / Sargara/ musicians for Bhambis.

3 / Nayat / surgeons for villagers

3B / Bhangi/ sweepers

These 46 castes (including Muslim groups) constitute a hierarchical spectrum, a kind of diffuse ranking ladder. The order along that ladder from top to bottom was more or less agreed upon in broad terms, but with regard to individual castes many different claims and opinions of a contradictory kind did exist. So their was no clearcut order. In spite of that there were three broad groups of castes, as indicated in the caste list.

At the top were the main savarn Hindu castes, the Brahmins, the Rajputs and the Baniyas. Immedietely below these were the Charans, Rebaris and Ravs. Also some agrarian castes, who had increased in influence after the end of the jagirdar rule in Rajasthan. In 1981 the former agricultural tenant castes Jat, Mali, and Khetad Kumar had rosen considerably on the caste ladder, after two to three decades of intensive agricultural development at Chelana. Nowadays even Jats are more or less recognized as savarn Hindus, although they were very poor and exploited by the feudal elite until 1950.

Below these castes there was a host of mostly small service castes. They were by tradition craftsmen rather than agriculturists, and most of them did not own much land. Their handicraft work was of a socalled clean type.

These castes were Matigar Kumar (pottery makers), Sutar, also called Khati (carpenters), Teli (oil makers), Nai (barbers) and the other Bs in Group 2 of the caste list above. Also the Sunar caste (goldsmiths) belongs to this category, although most people of this caste has a better financial situation than other craftsmen. Therefore, Tan Dan has put the Sunars in Group 1. Also Rav in Group 1 is a service caste of good status. The Ravs are genealogists for the Chelana Brahmin. They are therefore called Brahmin Ravs.

Also Bahi Bhat genealogists are called Rav, but no such family lived at Chelana. Rathore Rajputs of Chelana were served by Bahi Bhat genealogists called Rathore Ravs. These Ravs lived in another village and only visited Chelana with long intervals.

The ranking of the high castes

In ritual and religious contexts Rajputs and Charans and similar feudal lord groups were in many ways treated as lower than Brahmins and Baniyas in western Rajasthani villages. Although the Baniyas belonged to the third varna of the Shastras etc.. Below the kshatriya varna of the Rajputs, ranked as number two in Hindu traditional society.

In worldly life, however, the Rajputs was the most powerful caste in the old age , and around that group the whole feudal life was organized. They forced _jajman_ relationships on others, and made the other castes including the Brahmins their servants and tools.

Brahmin and Baniya kitchen discrimination against all including Rajputs

Brahmins and Baniyas have in their kitchen a _chauka_ , a raised platform on which food is cooked and kept. The _chulha_ fireplace stands on that platform. In a Brahmin house only Brahmins and Baniyas are allowed to enter the chauka in addition to the family members and the same is the case in Baniya house.

Thus at Chelana neither Rajputs nor Charans were allowed to the _chaukas_. Even in the old days, altought they were feudal lords with worldly power and could create difficulties to both Brahmins and Baniyas, if not shown respect.

The reason is, most likely, due to the difference in food habits. Brahmins and Baniyas are by tradition vegetarians (shakahari), and the Rajputs and Charans eat meat (masahari). There are deviations, though, as Charan women are vegetarians and many men also. By only considering caste no heed is given to individual choice in food habits.

Permission to angan as a way of ranking castes at Chelana

Dhobis can go and sit in the angan of high caste savarn Hindus such as Brahmins and Baniyas. They are allowed to sit in all parts of the angan apart from those in which the water of the household is kept, where food is cooked, and where people sit and eat. It means that they are on the whole restricted to the outer part of the angan, but even that is better social recognition than what the Bhangis get from higher castes, as Bhangis are not allowed to enter the angan at all. Other castes who are not allowed to enter any part of the angan of savarn Hindus are Kalbelia, Satia, Gurda, Sargara, Beldar, and Rangrej. Persons of all these castes have to stand outside the angan, when talking to people living in the house.

The Charan status in Rajput and Brahmin dominated village life

The B within parenthisis at the Charan caste indicates a feudal service relationship to Rajputs. Since early feudal history they served the Rajput warrior lords by delivering cattle and horses, being livestock breeders. By the passage of time some Charan clans came close to the forts and royal courts, first as defenders of the gate of the forts, then by wit-minded advisers and orators at the royal court and finally as bards glorifying the martial deeds of the ruling Rajput clan. Hence, Charan was a service caste with a good standing in the feudal setup. By time, some Charan gotras were formed from Rajput clans. It happened, when new Rajputs conquored an area, and there were no Charan court bards available, as the Charan bards at the conquored fort were loyal to the old dynasty. Ujval and Ratnu are two Charan gotras at Marwar that stem from a Rathore clan and a Brahmin groupt respectively, according to Kailash Dan Ujval and Durga Dan Ratnu. It was a change of caste with an official backing and has nothing to do with getting outcasted. According to custom, it was necessary for the Rajput rulers to have an officially sanctioned Charan bard and advisor at the Rajput court.

In spite of the high standing of the Charans at the Rajput courts, the old Hindu socio-religious establishment of an urban Baniya-Brahmin orientation looked down upon the cattle breeding Charans and their warrior-like semi-nomadic traditions. Charans of the Detha type seemed rustic, wild and jungly to them. For the Brahmin priests the religious traditions of the Baldia group were alien and not much known. In Rajasthan of the Midieval Age the two castes became rivals in ideology and status at the royal courts. There were many clashes between the court Brahmins and the high gotra Charan bards. (Cf. Joshi, 1994) Also in villages such as Chelana the Charan cattlebreeders were thoroughly anti-brahmin towards the end of the feudal era.

Later on the Charan attitudes towards the Brahmins became less challenging. Their position as staunch upholders of the kshatriya code for warriors had weakened by the absence of war. In 1950 there had hardly been any war for 150 years in Rajputana due to the hegemony of the British rulers. (Pax Brittanica)

At Chelana the Detha Charans fell in line with general high caste Hindu behaviour as a result of increased income, higher education and urban savarn Hindu influence. Charan women at Chelana showed much respect to the Brahmins out of pious Hindu sentiments. It pleased the Brahmin priests visiting their homes, but some Detha men, including Tan Dan himself, continued their resistence. They could be rude to visiting priests and sadhus also in the 1970s.

Marriage partners to Rathore and Charan gotras

As a large part of the Rajputs in Marvar belong to the Rathore gotra, perhaps some 90%, many Rajput families have to find marriage partners in other parts of Rajasthan. At Chelana most Rathores have marriage relationships with Rajputs of the Shekhavat gotra living in villages of the former Jaipur state, now eastern Rajasthan.

Tan Dan told that the Shekavats were a subclan of the Kachavah ruling dynasty of Jaipur like the Chelana Rathores are Mertias of the Rathore ruling dynasty of Jodhpur. Regional marriage arrangements like this are also common among other castes at Chelana such as the Charans, who get many of their partners from Deshnok and other villages in that part of former Bikaner state.

The Rajput Daroga community attempting to develop their own genealogy records

As for genealogy, and the felt need of keeping track of ones lineage.

In 1980 Tan Dan read a pamphlet of the caste organization of Rajput Darogas, telling they would have a conference about getting genealogists for their caste, as it did not have any up to then. The author felt concerned about that humiliating situation, as other high castes all had a well organized genealogy system for their gotra marriage relationships. The conference was to take place in Kalidher near Raipur _kasba_ in Pali District. When we talked about it one year later Tan Dan had not yet found out what was the outcome of the conference and how they would manage the pedigree records. That the need of genealogy had developed at that time, a few decades after the jagirdar feudal system had been abolished in India, shows that this group, which earlier was just like extra offspring to the Rajputs, had reached such an independence from the Rajput caste, that they were about to break away from their semi-slave relationship. They had started to imitate Rajputs and other feudal lords in a way resembling that of the Jats, the former feudal tenants. In 1981, with independence and a better economic situation , the landowning Jat farmers were very active in imitating the customs of their earlier lords as for marriage customs etc. Nevertheless, most Darogas were still dependent on the Rajputs. The new ideas showed more a will to freedom than already achieved freedom, Tan Dan thought in 1981.

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### Chapter 9 Thoughts on castes and untouchability

Castes, varnas and shudras

People in India tend to group castes into the four varnas of the ancient Sanskrit literature. The Brahmins was superior to the varna of the warriors, the Kshatriyas, according to these hymns of almost magical force, composed largely by Brahmin priests and saints. In ancient time the Sanskrit hymns told about these four varnas, as if they were social classes rather than walled-in castes.

Some urban savarn Hindus talk about castes, as if they mean these four varnas, and as if all other castes are subcastes of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. The Shudra castes they rank lower than the castes of the other varnas.

In modern India there might be some three to four thousand castes, but the varnas are still used as a means of simple classification of all these castes. Although popular, it is a too simple and scholarly approach to the heterogenous caste system, as practiced among the people. The _varna vyavasthan_ or caste system as described in the Sanskrit Shastras is probably an attempt to give a priestly interpretation of an already existing social order, rather than being the cause of that order. Radhakrishna, has given a most sympathic and lofty explanation of the caste system and its presumed Vedic origin, whereas other authors concerned about the oppressive aspects of the system from the point of view of low caste people have emphasized the religious fraud inserted in the seemingly innocent and divine texts. Among these critical authors are Sagar (1975) and Ambedkar (1946).

The three upper varnas constituting the non-shudra Hindus are jointly called the savarn Hindus as opposite to Shudra Hindus. Many but not all of the Shudra castes (i.e. the fourth varna) have been untouchables for the Hindus of the upper three varnas during many centuries.

In the traditional Hindu society the various Shudra castes have been serving the three upper varnas in various specialized tasks. Each caste has got its own task. The three upper varnas had the hegemony of the Indian society of the 1970s and individuals from these social groups filled the administration, the business houses, and the growing industrial sector. Also the majority of the professional occupations such as doctors and engineers. Although most of those belonging to Brahmin and Kshatriya castes do not carry out their specific caste occupation, people of these castes/varna were still strongly attached to the values and social customs of their caste, which in turn were conditioned by the traditional occupation.

The Hindu custom of untouchability seems to be linked to colour prejudice

Colour prejudice was common in India in the 19th century and earlier. Aversion against those of dark complexion were expressed already in the ancient Vedic hymns.

Up to the present time dark skin has been considered something inferior among dominating groups in northern India. It is considered a serious drawback in marriage negotiations, as many a dark complexioned bride of savarn Hindu castes bitterly has experienced.

If a very dark baby is born in a Rajasthani village such as Chelana, everybody would feel sad, also the mother. Kind people might comfort her by saying, "Oh, look! Krishna Bhagvan has been born in the family!", referring to the general belief among Hindus that Lord Krishna, the popular Vishnu avatar, was very dark. Krishna is depicted as dark blue rather than black, though. That is how he looks on the colourful annual calenders sold at kasbas and village bazars in great number each year after Divali.

Also Lord Shiva (Mahadev) was very dark, more or less dark blue. Even Rama, the hero of the Ramayana epic had that divine bluish tinge with the help of make-up at the Ramlila shows I saw in rural Haryana in the 1970s.

In temples Krishna, Rama and Shiva idols have the same dark blue colour.

It is a paradox that these important darkskinned Hindu gods should be worshipped by millions of savarn Hindus who firmly believed in colour prejudice and untouchability in their own life.

Black face as an abuse

'Buri nazar vale, tera muh kala', is a common expression in north India. It is written on lorries, at wells, on construction sites and elsewhere, where it is important to deter jealous people from doing any harm. It means:"You with the evil eye, your face will become black."

_Kala muh_ is an expression in Hindi used all over North India, but not in South India, where people are darker in complexion generally, Tan Dan told. It means that somebody has insulted you and spoilt your reputation, and you have to punish him to keep your honour. It resembles the expression 'nak katna', i.e. 'to cut somebody's nose', which also was a kind of punishment to people who had harmed somebody's honour in Rajasthan in the feudal age.

To have a black face was a great shame, so much that people used to paint the face of a culprit black and then show him around in public as a punishment. It seems to express a very old colour prejudice. The person treated like that was called _Harbhangi_ , Tan Dan told. It means "sweeper for all", i.e. the person is lower than the lowest untouchable, even those who are untouchables to the sweepers.

It was very shameful to be accused of being a blackfaced Bhangi.

For keeping certain castes in a depressed condition at the bottom of the caste hierarchy there might have been a number of reasons in the old days, and colour prejudice seems to have been one of them. Black people were thought of as bad people.

Reasons for untouchability and caste rank competition

Ambedkar's study of the untouchables

Untouchability as a custom might have its roots in a number of social conditions such as a desire to keep defeated enemies in a supressed state. These aspects have discussed in many books. Ambedkar (1948) thinks the birth of untouchability was intimately connected with the ban on cow-killing and on eating beef in the 4th century A.D. It was the age when the Brahmanism managed to reassert its hold over most of India after a long spell of Buddhist domination. (Ibid. p.155) It happened when Gupta kings ruled north India.

The Hindu village life is full of rites

Also those belonging to the low ranked Shudra castes at Chelana are Hindus in the sense that they live within the ritual system of Vaishnav dharm, the most widespread Hindu system in village India through which the life of the followers are regulated. Vaishnav dharm refers to the God Vishnu, the upholder of the Universe, with the help of whom all Hindus are made to carry out their ritual life. The Brahmin priests prescribe how that should be done, partly by following written instructions in the Sanskrit literature, but largely through oral tradition handed down locally from generation to generation by village Brahmins, who often are not even literate. (Tan Dan in 1981)

Hindu rituals as a means of discriminating against the low castes

As told in Sagar (1975) and Ambedkar (1946) the Brahmin refusal to serve the low caste Hindus in the performance of Hindu rites, has been an effective way of lowering the social prestige of these groups. The argument is that they are Shudras and that those belonging to castes which are considered Shudra have no right to such religious service, according to the ancient religious texts.

Among these many rites considered necessary for real Hindus are the _janeu_ thread, the death rites, and the ceremonies when the child is getting a name, the _namkaran samskar_ , and at the same time gets his head clean shaven, a rite called _mundan_. Most Hindu rituals are expensive and socially elaborate involving the giving away of gifts and inviting many guests for food.

The _namkaran samskar_ is the naming ceremony of both Hindu boys and girls. A Brahmin determines the first letter of the child's name with the help of an astrological calender. Then the parents are free to choose any name starting on that letter. Also this ceremony makes the child a Hindu of his own caste and is no longer considered a shudra, as the Brahmins from that day accepts _dan_ (religious charity) in his name, which they never does from a Shudra. In some places the namkaran sanskar ceremony is compulsory for all savarn Hindu boys. They get their heads clean-shaven by an ordinary barber under the supervision of a Hindu priest, who sometimes are non-Brahmins. When the hair cutting starts the priest takes the first tuss of hair and throws it in a corner of the temple, which is a symbolic way of expressing that the boy has become a devotee of the god and has surrendered to the Hindu way of living. The sacrifice of the hair tuss is the real meaning of mundan. By that act the boy becomes a Hindu. The barber leaves another tuss of hair up on his head. It is called _choti_. According to Tan Dan, the choti is a sign of being a Hindu only, not of being a savarn Hindu of the upper three varnas. Hence, it can be used by shudra Hindus, too, just like the _kandori_ thread.

The _kandori_ thread is used by all Hindus from the _suraj pujan_ ceremony ten to fifteen days after birth up to death, and is not taken off before cremation. On the day of the suraj pujan ceremony the baby is cleaned thoroughly, and the thread is tied around its waiste. Then the sun is worshipped by the mother, having the child in her lap when the sun is rising from the horizon. Near relatives sing songs on the occasion and decorate the floor of the angan outside the house with baby foot prints, symbolising the new arrival in the house. The kandori thread is mostly of cotton in black colour, but rich families sometimes use kandori threads of gold or silver. The kandori thread is worn both by men and women.

At Chelana low caste Hindus very seldom carry out the Mundan ceremony, as the Brahmins say that the tuss of the hair of a Shudra is not accepted by the god. The Hindu priests do not help the Shudras to carry out the ceremony. In spite of that they sometimes do it on their own without any help of priests or temples. They put a stone as an idol of god at a place outside the view of the Brahmins, and there they carry out the ritual on their own. They cut the hair and sacrifice the hair tuss, and make the Mundan feast of Sava Mani (equivalent to fifty kilograms, i.e. the total food of the feast should way fifty kilograms of wheat, _gur_ and _ghee_.) Among the Shudras the Mundan ceremony is mostly done when the child is sick, if it is a boy. For girls it is not done at all.

The importance of the sacred janeu thread

All Hindus are born as Shudras and only become Hindus of their respective savarn caste after a Brahmin has performed the _namkaran samskar_ and the _janeu_ ceremonies. It can be done by any Brahmin, and not necessarily a Brahmin priest.

The _janeu_ ceremony is only for boys, and it is done when the boy is a few years old. Several threads of handspun cotton are tied diagonally over the chest and sholder of the boy, after which he is accepted as a Hindu of his own caste.

According to the discriminating rules ordained by the Brahmins and the shastra literature, the low ranked castes considered to belong to the Shudra varna are neither allowed to perform the _janeu_ ceremony, nor the _namkaran sanskar_.

Castes, in which people manage to get the cooperation of the Brahmin priests, or other Hindu priests of high status, are considered to be above the Shudras, Tan Dan told. These middleranked castes were more or less savarn Hindus in public opinion, even if they did not fit into any of the three upper varnas in a clear way.

Untouchability and the Jat peasant caste

The Jat caste was the biggest tenant caste. Other tenant castes in the area was Khetad Kumar and Sirvi. As a rough estimate eighty percent of all tenants were Jats.

Brahmin priests carried out the namkaran samskar ritual for the Jat families, which they did not do for castes they considered to be touchable Shudras. Thus the Brahmins at Chelana treated the Jats as low savarn Hindus rather than Shudras, Tan Dan thought, although the Rajput masters of the village were as harsh to the Jat tenants as they were to the untouchables, extracting all sorts of compulsory labour from them and extracting so much agricultural produce from them that the Jat peasants only were left with a bare minimum for subsistence.

It was not convenient to treat Jats as ritually polluting, as they were the producers of foodgrain, the main means of payment in the village. Brahmin priests and jagirdars got a never ending flow of food items and money from the Jat peasants. Several ex-tenant families had became wealthy landholders in the 1990s and generous donors of dan to the Brahmins, i.e. religious gifts to Brahmins for their various services as family Priests.

Castes of craftsmen not considered untouchables

Some serving castes were touchables

It was in the interest of the highcaste savarn Hindus to treat people of some of the low castes as enough ritually clean to be able to carry out certain tasks at family functions and other social and religious gatherings. Among these were the Nais, the Kumars, and the Suthar.

Men of the Nai caste worked as barbers mainly, but they also served the higher castes as cooks and messengers. They even went to villages far away to invite guests in times of feasts.

The potters of the Kumar caste filled water at the functions and also supplied the host family with clay pots.

The carpenters (Suthar) provided wood work and materials for feasts such as weddings. For example, the carpenters make, bring and mount the _toran_ gate, a wooden structure of seven birds beautifully decorated. It hang over the main entrance of the bride's house. When the bridegroom arrived, during the wedding ceremony, he knocked at the _toran_ with a sword and a green branch, held together in his fist, while sitting on his wedding horse.

In the feudal age the village elite of savarn Hindus were served by a number of specialized castes, which were considered to belong to the Shudra varna, but all the same were treated as touchables. They were Shudras considered ritually cleaner than the untouchable Shudras, and were therefore ranked in between the savarn Hindus and the untouchables. Some of these castes were more or less regarded as low ranked savarn Hindus, at least in their own eyes, although Brahmins and other higher ranked Hindus thought they were Shudras and nothing above that.

Among these Shudra castes with clean professions were Suthar (carpenter), Kumar (potters), Nai (barbers), and Sonar (goldsmiths).

Other castes on this level of touchable Shudra or low savarn Hindu were Teli (oilseed crushers) and Lohar (blacksmiths). Lohars were ordinary Hindu blacksmiths. People of the other blacksmith castes were generally considered untouchable. These were Muslim Lohar, Gadolia Lohar, and Sikligar Lohar, a caste living an itinery life as sharpeners of knives, swords, scissors etc.

At Chelana the liqour selling caste is called Kalal. It is also a fairly clean profession in the eyes of many villagers, although Baniyas and some other groups do object to alcoholics and the handling of liqour and other drugs. Hence the Kalals were near the dividing line between touchable and untouchable castes all over western Rajasthan. Their status varied according to region, according to Tan Dan. To the west of Jodhpur they were regarded as untouchables, whereas east of Jodhpur they were considered ritually clean, i.e. 'touchable' by villagers in general. Therefore, Kalals at Chelana passed as touchable Hindus of low savarn Hindu status.

Classification of the castes in the oversimplified scheme of the _varna vyavastha_ thus left many castes close to the transgression zones between the fourth varna and the three upper varnas. For many castes it is difficult to say, if they are savarn Hindus, somehow, or just comparatively 'clean' Shudras.

One more attempt to group the Chelana castes

In Tan Dan's list of Chelana castes, the castes which served the village elite as feudal dependents in the old days have been marked with letter B. The elite castes having dependent castes has got an A mark.

In the old days handicraft castes of Group 2 marked B were feudal dependents of the A castes. After 1960 many of these craftsmen carried out their caste profession more independently, but the old jajman ties still lingered on.

Castes of Group 3 marked with B were the untouchable castes who lived as direct dependents of village elite families. The untouchable service castes were called _neech kom,_ which means low caste. Bhangi, Bavri, Bhambi, and Mochi were the four main untouchable castes. Most typical were the Bhangis and Bhambis. The villagers considered the low position of these castes as undisputable and tried to keep away from them.

Mochis had a higher rank than the Bhangi, Bhambi and Bavri castes, but savarn Hindus were not prepared to drink their water or eat their food either.

In between the bottom ranked castes in Group 3 and the top ranked savarn Hindus of Group 1 there were many castes with a rather uncertain position in the caste hierarchy. Their origin could not easily be explained by the old Brahmin myth of the four varnas told about in the Sanskrit shastras.

The medium ranked castes of Group 2 considered themselves closer to Group 1 than to the untouchable castes of Group 3, but the village elite was suspicious of middled ranked castes with claims to be of high status. In their eyes upstart claims of equality were unreasonable and dangerous. However, the main social division was between the savarna Hindus of Group 1 and 2, and the Untouchables of Group 3.

We may divide the Chelana castes in the following four groups with regard to caste ranking and ritual pollution:

• High savarn Hindus, i.e. Brahmins, Baniyas, Rajputs, Charans etc. (Group 1)

• Low savarn Hindus, i.e. Kumar, Nai, Rebari, Teli, Kalal etc. (Group 2)

• Untouchable Hindus, i.e. Bhangis, Bavri, Bhangis etc. (Group 3)

• Muslims. In the eyes of the savarn Hindus they are also untouchables. (Group 3)

High and low savarn Hindus are touchable castes and the other two categories untouchables.

The concept of untouchability, as well as the customs and rites associated to that tradition, is called _bhint_ in Rajasthani. (In Hindi _chuachut_ and _asprashyata_.)

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### Chapter 10 Ranking of the untouchable castes of Chelana

In 1981 about 180 families at Chelana were regarded as untouchable (achut) by the villagers in general, Tan Dan told. More than 130 families of these were Hindus and the rest Muslims. Almost one fifth of the total village population, as altogether 800 families lived at Chelana more or less permanently. There were also migratory labourers at lime kilns etc. with a loose and temporary association to the village.

Tan Dan made the following attempt to rank Chelana's untouchable castes in the order the villagers in general agree upon. As it is easier to be definite about the caste rank at the bottom of the hierarchy than higher up, he has listed the castes from the bottom upwards. Below is also estimated how many families of each caste lived in the village at that time.

Families and castes at Chelana considered untouchable

What they do and how they interact

Bhangis. 10 families.The Bhangis treated Dhobis and Dholis as untouchables, although these two castes considered the Bhangis to be their untouchables. Among the villagers in general the Bhangis ranked the lowest.

Jetia. 2 families. The Jetia caste, the leather tanners, also called Regars and Jatavs. The tanners are called Jetias in Pali and Jodhpur Districts, Regars around Jaipur all the way up to Delhi, although the names of Jetia and Regar are partly used overlappingly in Rajasthan. At Chelana there are two families of the Jetia caste.

Sargara. 4 family. Entertainers and laureates for Bhambis.

Bajania Nat. 1 family. That of Chogji. The men of this caste are laureates and drummers for Bhambis. They also work as genealogists for Bhambis and as acrobats.

Bavri. 30 families. In the 1980s mainly stone cutters. They were traditionally known as local thieves living in the shrub jungle in between the villages. The feudal village lords sometimes employed them as watchmen over their property against other thieves for a small remuneration. (Chawkidar means watchman, and is another name of the Bavri caste.) Then the Bavris built their own mohalla in the outskirt of the village. They were always suspected for doing thefts in a secret way. Such thefts were usually done on a petty scale unlike the dacoits.

Sansi. 1 family. They lived out in the wilderness in the old days. For generations people have regarded the Sansi to be thieves and outlaws. Tan Dan told that the Bhangis considered this caste to be lower than themselves. When Bhangis were angry at each others, they sometimes used the word Sansi as an abuse.

Janglia. 2 families. They lived outside the village at homesteads (dhani) near the bush jungle. People of this caste had a reputation of eating all kinds of animals including wild big animals such as bluebull.

Bhambi. 35 families. Bhambis were earlier general purpose leatherworkers in western Rajasthan, but left that profession on a mass scale in the early 1950s. Still they were considered _shudras_. From the point of view of elevating the social status of the caste, they were only partly successful. That they all left leather work shows the strength of the caste organization of the Bhambis. The caste panchayats throughout large parts of northern India evidently managed to implement this step very fast around 1952, i.e. at the time of jagir system abolition.

Mochi. Several families. The caste has a higher rank than the Bhambi, although they continued to make shoes. However, the Mochis made only new shoes, no other leather work. Unlike the Bhambis they were neither feudal serfs nor tied as dependents in jajman relationships.

Gurda. 2 families. They were priests for the Bhambis.

Gadolia Lohar. 8 families. Nomadic blacksmiths who have settled at Chelana.

Gavaria Binjara. 6 families. They make combs, ropes, and hut material and mats of sarkanda reed. Gavaria Binjara in general worship Mataji and similar godesses, calling Mataji Jogmaya. Some Gavaria Binjara tell that Jogmaya is the same as Karni. Gavaria Binjara considered the Bhangis, their neighbourers at Chelana, to be untouchables.

Nayta. 4 families. Traditional self-educated healers called Nayta also belong to the Shudra group of castes. They healed bone fractures, and could heal wounds by simple dressing. Naytas were the ones in western Rajasthan who made circumscisions of Muslims.

Beldar. 10 families. They are contractors for stone-breaking and earth-work. Digging ponds have been their traditional profession. It is the caste the Pushkaran Brahmins are supposed to stem from.

Rangrej. 4 families. Colouring and dying all materials is their traditional profession. However, the Bhambis coloured the threads themselves, when weaving. Rangrej colour other kinds of cloth such as odhnis, turbans, and skirt material. Factory-made cloth.

Dakot. 20 families. By tradition palmists and astrologers, i.e. fortune readers. The only caste of that profession in Rajasthan, although there may be a few Brahmins also doing palmistry and astrology, on an individual basis, as their own choice . Most Chelana dakots have Joshi as their surname. It is also a Brahmin title. Sharma is also a Brahmin title used by Dakots. Also Vyas and Pandit is in this category and are adopted by both Brahmins and Dakot, which shows the priestly aspirations of the Dakot caste, although generally considered untouchable. They carry out priestly functions, but have no _jajman_ relationship with other caste groups. The reason is probably that they aspire to raise on the caste ladder, and therefore do not want to be _jajman_ priests for low castes, whereas highcaste Hindus consider Dakots too low to be their priests.

Dholi. 3 families. They were village drummers and singers. They drummed on social functions. In the feudal days it was the task of the Dholi drummer to proclaim official news on the order of the Thikana administration.

Dhobi. 1 family. Traditionally, Dhobis are washermen, but the family at Chelana was not. The husband had a chaprasi work at a Chelana office of some kind, and his wife worked as an agricultural labourer. The family had come from a city to do dhobi work at Chelana, thinking it was a big village. It was their bad luck that most Chelana villagers washed their cloths themselves, while having a bath. Dhobis are for city people, who can afford to have many clothes, Tan Dan thought. To the disappointment of this family, they did not succeed in getting any _jajman_ for Dhobi work. Tan Dan's family, for example, only had used this dhobi service thrice in the 1970s.

Merasi (Muslim). 1 family. The Merasis are a Muslim group of singers. They are only allowed to sit in the outer parts of the angan, where the savarn family of the house keep neither food nor water. Other Muslims are treated in the same way.This family lived a part of the year at Chelana, and the rest of the year at a big village south of Chelana.

Muslim Vouparis. 40 families. Traditionally sheep traders. They also trade other things, if possible.

Muslim Lohars. 6 families. Blacksmith work.

Chelana Muslim groups and untouchability

The were more Muslim groups in the Chelana area. In addition to the Vouparis and the Muselman Lohars there were Naytas, Muslim Telis and Gosis.

Muslim Gosis had milk production and the sale of dairy products as their traditional profession, but the Muslim Gosis living at Chelana in 1981 all worked at the lime kilns around Chelana. They had settled in the village in the 1960s.

From the 1970s also Sindhi Muslims from Barmer District worked at Chelana as labourers. They had come to the village in drought years. They lived in temporary arrangements, but stayed on year after year.

All the Muslims at Chelana joined religious functions as equals and brothers, but they only married within their own group, just like Hindus only married within their own caste. The custom of marrying close relatives among western Rajasthani muslims, including Sindhis, became more pronounced later on after strong Saudi Arab influence and many pilgrim journeys by air to Mecka. Earlier, Sindhis used to marry unrelated clans within their own Muslim group and at the wedding the brides were dressed in traditional costumes of western Rajasthani design with mirror embroidery and strong red colours. Tan Dan's Sindhi friends at Talavas village in Barmer district stemmed from Hindu Rajputs, who had converted to Islam many centuries ago. Still, their Hindu customs, such as gotras for marriage, were still a part of their caste tradition in the 1970s.

Savarn Hindus treated also the Muslims as untouchables. They were not allowed to touch water or pots or lothas of savarn Hindus or their food. Savarn Hindus did not accept food from any Muslim. They did not accept even _siddo_ food. Such food could not be given to savarn Hindus, high or low by any untouchable caste either. The jajman relationships had made food transactions betweeen savarn Hindus and Hindu untouchables an open demonstration of social discrimination.

However, give and take of food did not exist between savarn Hindus and Muslims, at least not as a normal feature. Therefore the Muslims did not feel the humiliation of food discrimination as strongly as the untouchable Hindus.

The Muslims did not have any jajman relationships with savarn Hindus.

It was different, though, for Muslim agricultural labourers working in the fields of savarn Hindu farmers. There, they had to observe the same rules and restrictions regarding food, water and utensils, as the untouchable Hindus suffered from.

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### Chapter 11 Untouchability and water

In dry hot Rajasthan it is important to drink much water. Denying people of untouchable castes free access of drinking water has been one of many ways the savarn Hindus have kept the untouchables in a state of submission and misery.

The rest of the population was anxious to help each others from suffering from thirst. It was considered a good deed, a pious act or _punni_ that would get its reward in future life. In towns and along the roads there were water kiosks called _piao_. These were maintained by people of a religious mind. Travellers could drink there free of cost.

Landlords at Chelana often helped their sharecroppers and other workers to get drinking water by providing a big clay pot full of water and a small metal mug called _loto_. Such a clay pot for storing water was called _ghara_. There the labourers could help themselves to water, whenever they felt thirsty. The _loto_ was kept as a lid on the ghara to prevent dust and insects into the water. They all drank from the same _loto_ witout any hesitation with regard to hygiene. Infectious diseases might spread that way, but nobody had heard about microbes. Diseases were regarded as a divine punishment or the act of evil spirits.

On the other hand, all touchable Hindus were very particular that persons of untouchable castes should touch neither _ghara_ nor _loto_. Most villagers were firm believers in this aspect of the caste system. Very few touchable Hindus dared to touch water vessels that had been polluted by the touch of an untouchable. High caste Hindus who did touch ritually polluted water, would be treated as a source of ritual infection themselves. Other savarn Hindus would treat them as untouchables, until they had gone through some kind of ritual purification.

Gold for ritual purification

A simple method used by Tan Dan's relatives and others at Chelana was to sprinkle water on the person afflicted. Water got purifying power, if a golden object had been dipped into it. Such water became sacred, as gold is pure and sacred, according to popular belief.

The villagers kept gold in very high regard. To amass gold was a pious activity, not something selfish or materialistic. It was not only expensive, it was sacred, too.

Also with regard to gold the people of the low ranked dependent castes in the village were discriminated in the feudal age.

Neither untouchable Shudras, nor the traditional agricultural tenant castes such as the Jats, nor the medium ranked handicraft castes except goldsmiths, were allowed to wear any gold ornaments, Tan Dan told. They were only allowed to wear silver ornaments, in order not to hurt the prestige to the upper castes, and to maintain a clearly visible gulf between the two classes.

"If the low castes would show off in golden clothes and ornaments, what would be left for us to wear?"

This rule was strictly observed and controlled by the higher castes. Force was used, if necessary.

(There are passages in Manu Smriti and other ancient Sanskrit texts prohibiting Shudras to own property. Any property could be taken away from them by a Brahmin without being considered theft, it is declared in these ancient texts, according to Sagar, 1975, and Ambedkar, 1946.)

Also the use of brass pots were forbidden for Shudras and agricultural tenants of the feudal lords with the same logic. If "these people", i.e. the untouchables, were allowed to use brass pots instead of the clay and iron pots, what would savarn Hindus such as we use?

Horses and wheat chappati bread were two other items denied to the Shudras according to old feudal customs at Chelana and other villages of Marvar state. They should walk on foot and go by camels or oxen, but they should not use horses, the animal of warriors and village masters.

Similarly, the grey crude bajra roti or _sogram_ , was considered more fit for simple people than the light almost cream coloured wheat chapati.

In dry rainfed sandy parts of Rajasthan wheat chapati was rare and regarded as a delicacy.

Such feudal customs were general rules all over the princely states of India before 1947, Tan Dan told.

In backward and isolated villages of Rajasthan the customs lingered on for many decades more.

How the untouchable drank water

Untouchable labourers who got thirsty when working were not supposed to pick up the _loto_ mug and drink water from the _ghara_ pot as the others. These items were often kept by the farm family at the side of the field as a service for all who worked on the farm.

The untouchable labourers, men, women or children, were expected to ask a touchable Hindu for help, instead of handling these utensils on their own. Perhaps another labour, equally poor, but of a higher caste. Somebody filled the mug with water and let it pour down into the hand of the untouchable, who drank from his or her palm formed into a little cup. It happens that also other people drink like that, but in the case of untouchables it is a must.

In case there was no "touchable" person around, a thirsty _achut_ , i.e. untouchable, would have to suffer his thirst in patience, until some helping hand eventually turned up. An untouchable bold enough to touch the drinking vessels in order to help himself could get a severe beating, if others found out. Prolonged thirst can be very unpleasant and even dangerous in a climate as hot, dry and sunny as that of western Rajasthan.

Such expressions of dependence contribute to cement a feeling of social unequality among labourers belonging to castes of different rank, although they as labourers have very similar economic position in the village.

One day in 1976 Tan Dan visited a chillie field a few kilometres from the Chelana village settlement. A woman of the Bhambi caste got thirsty and asked a savarn Hindu woman of the Sad caste to help her to some water. She did help her. All the same, it was a worry, anxiety and humiliation for the woman who had to ask. Not once, but many times, day after day, as long as the harvesting work was going on.

The ageold custom of untouchability in western Rajasthan did not die

Untouchables all over western Rajasthan have been used to drink water in that humble way, wherever there was a risk, that their touch of water vessels would create problems for savarn Hindus. In daily life it has been a common sight at public places for generations.

Considerable social and economic changes took place in western Rajasthan during the second half of the 20th century. The feudal power structure was replaced by a commercial one. Still, the traditional way of degrading people of low ranked Hindu castes continued. Denying them the right to touch water vessels used by other Hindus was one of the most spectacular expressions of the long tradition of ritual segregation, and in Tan Dan's opinion it had not become less to any considerable extent even in the 1980s, as far as villages such as Chelana were concerned. Very few villagers heard any political agitation against discrimination of untouchables, although such messages were spread by urban intellectuals and wellfare-orientated politicians at other places in India.

All groups at Chelana considered the restrictions put to untouchables with regard to drinking water as natural. Also the untouchables themselves, including the Muslims who got the same treatment.

The Sad woman who helped the Bhambi woman to drink water in the Chillie field in 1976

As mentioned above a Sad woman helped the Bhambi woman to drink water in the chillie field Tan Dan visited in 1976. Sad is a caste of temple priests. It is below Brahmins in rank, but fairly high up in the Chelana caste hierarchy. The woman was the wife of the priest of two temples in front of the Chelana Thikana fortress.

The Sad family to which this woman belongs was about as poor as that of the Bhambi woman, in spite of the difference in caste rank. That is why both women worked as labourers on this farm, and they were good friends.

They pick chillies, _Capsicum anuum_ , in a field owned by a well-off Chelana merchant of a Baniya caste. He had a deep well in the limestone ridge area. It yielded plenty of irrigation water, enough for growing the profitable but water demanding chillie crop. He was not a farmer, so he carried out all farm work through a poor but experienced sharecropper of the Mali caste.

The Baniya just visited the farm now and then, leaving work management and supervision to his sharecropper.

Also the son of the Bhambi woman who got water to drink, worked partly as a sharecropper. He had earlier been a tractor driver, but in 1976 he had started to cultivate some land he leased on his own. He was partly a smallscale sharecropper and partly a tenant with land on fixed rent. In addition, he worked as labourer at a stone quarry. That way he managed to support his family fairly well to be an ordinary landless labourer.

A small Bhambi girl drinking water

In a warm day in 1980 Tan Dan saw a small girl drink water very heartily in her own angan compound in the middle of the Bhambi mohalla at Chelana. She could drink as much as she liked from her _loto_ mug, without getting her joy disturbed by persons scolding her for polluting the water. If she had drunk in the same way at a public place, she would have been stopped, most likely.

Beside her was a very big clay pot kept on the ground. A _moun_. It is a storage vessel for drinking water. It was kept on the ground in order to be within easy reach of all members of the household including children. That was important, as all villagers had the habit of drinking water all day long in the hot dry climate of Chelana.

Her grandfather was Sujaji, a skilled masonry worker, who had been employed by many villagers during his life for building houses.

Her father was a plumber called Shankarji. He was an employee of the Rural Water Supply Department of the Rajasthan Government. It had drilled a deep tubewell at Chelana in the 1970s in order to supply the whole village with drinking water from taps. Therefore, by 1980 the old system of fetching drinking water in pots of clay and brass at the Chelana village well had been replaced by a water distribution system consisting of pipes and taps spread over the whole village settlement area.

The village had at least fifty water taps, most of them at the village lanes but several better-off families installed taps within their house compounds, too. Not inside houses or angans, though. The drainage system was too poor. Instead, the tap was often kept in a remote corner of the compound near the inlet. The owner saved pipe that way, an expensive item.

Although the tap system for drinking water within the village housing area was an improvement, there were many snags such as unscheduled breaks due to tubewell breakdowns. Even when all worked according plan, water was very sparingly supplied, just an hour in the morning and another one in the evening. Hence, the villagers had to store drinking water in the big moun clay pots as before.

Water taps had been installed in most mohallas of the village including those of untouchable castes. It was no longer necessary for women of untouchable castes, such as Bhangi and Bhambi, to listen to scoldings at the village well from high caste Hindus afraid of being polluted.

The girl's father, the plumber, was one of those who had installed the pipes and taps in the village. It was also his duty to repair the plumbing system, when something went wrong. Nobody objected, although he belonged to the Bhambi caste, and therefore was an untouchable in the eyes of most villagers.

However, if he would dare to touch the vessels of drinking water in the home of a savarn Hindu family observing the rules of untouchability, he would be stopped and perhaps even beaten.

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### Chapter 12 Food acceptance and caste ranking

The local caste hierarchy as reflected in food transactions

Merriot (1968) found in a village study made in 1952 in Uttar Pradesh that the opinions of the villagers about the order of the castes in the local caste hierarchy was closely related to the way they carried out food transactions. Each villager who received food from a villager of another caste or gave food to such a person did so according to rules which were strictly followed by all members of the two castes concerned. To receive food was to accept dependence and inferiority for one's own caste in relation to the caste of the person who gives the food. Hence, the way to get high status and rank in the caste hierarchy was to avoid receiving food from as many other castes as possible, and to try to get people of so many other castes as possible to accept food from you.

The most degrading food to receive was partly eaten food leavings ( _jutha khana_ ). _Kaccha khana_ , i.e. food cooked without _ghee_ (clarified butter) was also received by those who accepted subordination, although it was not as bad as accepting _jutha khana._

It was easier to accept _packa khana_ from those of other castes without loosing prestige. Such food was prepared in ghee. Sidha food, i.e. raw food and milk sweets could be accepted with least loss of prestige.

Hence, the life in the village was like a never ending tournament, in which the castes of the village were the teams of the game. Each caste carefully observed that there were no changes in the intercaste food transactions in the village. A change could imply that the village caste hierarchy had changed. A caste who tried to change food exchange customs sometimes succeeded, but was bound to face tough resistence, as the rise of one caste automatically meant lowering of one or more other castes, Merriot concluded.

Different food types at Chelana

Caste prestige was involved when villagers of different castes carried out food transactions also at Chelana. Their willingness to accept food as gifts depended on the state of the food. Just as in the village studied by Merriot in Uttar Pradesh, the Chelana villagers thought of four different states of food:

• raw food,

• food cooked in ghee (butter oil),

• food prepared with water instead of oil, and

• food on which others had eaten

Raw food was most acceptable to receive as gifts and reward for service. After that came food cooked in ghee. On the third place was food prepared with water. The fourth category was not at all acceptable to most people. Food on which others had eaten, and had been touched by the mouth of others at least to some extent. Only really poor persons were prepared to accept such food gifts. Among these poor people were bottom ranked untouchable castes such as the Bhangi Sweepers. They accepted food leavings, which in Hindi was called _jutha khana_ and in Marvari _enthvado_ , and so did also some poor nomadic castes such as Sathia and Kanjria.

On the other hand, close relatives, in-laws and friends of the same caste used to eat from the same thali (big steel plate) to show friendship and affection. That was also _jutha khana,_ but in a positive sense.

Raw food

_Siddo_ in Marvari means food in a raw uncooked state. In Hindi _sidha khana_. Especially the Brahmins preferred to get food in that state, when people of other castes offered food.

Cooked food without and without dairy products

To Hindus the cow was sacred and milk products were highly esteemed. The positive attitude to the useful milk products was reinforced by adding ritual values. Similarly, the aversion towards sweepers, leatherworkers and their work was strengthened by the ritual concept of untouchability created by the Hindu elite.

Food prepared with milk products had a higher ritual value than other cooked food, and Hindus of high castes felt less risk of lowering their status by accepting food, if the food was cooked with _ghee_ , butteroil.

Food cooked with ghee is called _packi rasoi_ , and that cooked in water is _kacchi rasoi_. Rice, dal, and bread. Plain unleaven bread, _roti_ , only made of water and flour. Many practically lived on _sogram_ , the big roti of pearl millet flour. Chapati, the small thin roti bread was also made with only water and wheat flour, whereas _parata_ was packa bread with ghee butteroil, and therefore had a more ready acceptance than plain roti.

Food acceptance at Chelana in 1981

Several medium Chelana castes could offer _parata_ bread to Brahmins and other high caste people, but to offer _kaccha_ bread without ghee would have been an insult. _Kaccha rasoi_ was offered sweepers and other untouchables as payment for their work.

Touchable Shudras such as the Nai, the Kumhar and the Sonar could eat _pakka_ food (i.e. food fried in ghee and milk products) together with savarn Hindus at Chelana as well as in other Rajasthani villages, even the Brahmins.

According to Tan Dan, some savarn Hindus will accept eating _kaccha_ food from touchable Shudras. Not the top ranked Hindus, though. The twice-born Hindus who had passed the _janeu_ thread ceremony. They only accepted _kaccha_ food from each others. At Chelana all Brahmins and most Baniyas wore the _janeu_ thread.

Brahmins at Chelana only accepted _kachi rasoi_ from other Brahmins, but _pakki rasoi_ from Baniyas, Rajputs, Charans, Daroga, Mali, Ravs, Khati (carpenters) and a few other castes. There might be touchable castes, however, from which the Brahmins did not accept pakki rasoi, but Tan Dan was not sure.

_Enthvado_ food refusals were normally only accepted by Bhangis among the villagers, but could also be accepted by other very low caste groups passing by the village such as Kalbelias, Satias (the nomadic group castrating cattle) and Kanjria, a poor nomadic non-pastoral group of entertainers. Their women did gymnastics, singing and begging, also sometimes prostitution, Tan Dan told.

The status of meateaters

When low caste people in western Rajasthan explain their inferior status in the local caste hierarchy they sometimes tell they had fallen in status, as their forefathers had started to eat meat, and therefore had been excluded from their caste of origin.

Food discrimination is a common explanation to caste splits in western Rajasthan. That is how low ranked untouchable groups are supposed to have been formed.

These stories of food discrimination would not have been told, unless there was a strong savarn Hindu influence on these low caste groups.

The process that can be observed nowadays is rather that untouchable castes try to raise in the hierarchy by abandoning their meat-eating habits. That they do under savarn Hindu influence.

Castes and sects who stop eating meat-eating, usually start discriminating against those who continue to eat meat.

The Brahmins did so, when they left animal sacrifice and meateating some one to two thousand years ago as a way of counteracting the Buddhist influence on the Indian subcontinent, judging from hymns, legends and religious narrations of that time.

In the old days meateating groups lived on the margin of, or completely outside, the savarn Hindu society. Also in the modern age few of the low castes have as strong feelings against eating meat as the high ranked Brahmins and Baniyas.

All over Rajasthan it is accepted that the Rajput caste has a very high rank in the Hindu caste hierarchy, although they have no itentions to abandon their meat diet. Their former feudal strength, their strong political influence, and their large number, ensure the Rajputs a strong standing also nowadays. It is evidently a wrong conclusion that animal hunting and slaughtering and a non-vegetarian diet as such is the reason for a low rank in the caste hierarchy.

Eating wild animals as an explanation of caste discrimination and untouchability

The story of the Kalbelia origin told by Binj Nath at Jalagarh and others close to the Kalbelias is based on the widespread view that groups in the bush jungle are inferior because they live as hunters eating wild animals, especially predatory animals. Also the Bavria hunters in the Rajasthan desert who lived on desert lizards in the 1970s belonged to that category.

Carcass meat as jajman payment

The Nats at Chelana were up to 1952 given dead carcass meat by the Bhambis as a jajman payment. The Nats served the Bhambis as laureates and drummers. However, the Bhambis in western Rajasthan and surrounding regions stopped eating meat of dead cattle around 1952 in an attempt to raise the status of their caste in the local caste hierarchies of that region. The Nats too.

A change in intercaste food relationship at Chelana

In Tan Dan's childhood around 1950 the Jats were still agricultural tenants badly suppressed by their feudal lords. At that time the Brahmins did not accept _pakki rasoi_ from Jats. Instead they got the ingredients from them as _siddo_. That is what Tan Dan both saw himself and has been told by other villagers.

In the 1980s the status of the Jats had increased considerably, as they had become independent landowning farmers. Moreover, the Jat caste had a strong position in state politics, as it was a big caste. In the 1980s the Bramins did accept pakki food from Jats at Chelana, which their women prepared at their dhani homesteads.

In earlier periods Brahmins might have thought the poor rustic Jat women did not have much skill as cooks, and therefore preferred raw food ingredients to readymade food, from which the Brahmin womenfolk could cook the food at home. It might have been both a practical step and a _bahana_ (excuse), Tan Dan thought. The Brahmins told they had their own customs and rules for cooking food and therefore preferred to cook food themselves.

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### Chapter 13 The lingering habit of discrimination against former feudal dependents

Forced labour at feudal Chelana

In the feudal age many of the middle and low ranked castes formed a class of depressed people called _kameen karu_. They were forced to carry out work for jagirdars and other influential families of the high castes.

Many castes on Tan Dan's list of Chelana castes belonged to the _kameen karu_ class of feudal dependents. The handicraft castes of Group 2, the middle ranked castes, were kameen karus but not the agricultural tenant castes such as Jat. The castes of Group 3 except the Bhangis Sweepers were also _kameen karus_. People of all these castes could be made to serve by force, on the order of their feudal masters.

It was not the tradition to keep the Bhangis as _kameen karu_ (feudal serf), though, asit was the sweepers who approached their _jajman_ for work and then divided the jajman work among themselves. The sweepers were therefore called _bhagi_ , i.e. the one who takes shares.

_Kameen karu_ workers were called _lagi_ , which means 'those who are attached for service', i.e. those who are forced to serve their feudal masters and will be remunerated for the work in the way prescribed by tradition.

The difference between Jat tenants and the _kameen karu_ people was that Jats could go away from there feudal duty without punishment, but a _kameen karu_ worker could not. He was kept as a serf.

The _kameen karus_ in worst situation were the Bhambis, who were forced to do all kinds of odd jobs for their feudal lords in an almost slavelike relationship.

Feudal customs for showing respect lingered on in western Rajasthan

After the end of jagir rule in the early 1950s, the feudal dependents became more independent. All the same, the respect for the village lords did not go, and for several decades the social position of the low caste people continued to be depressed in the erstwhile Marvar state, especially in small isolated villages.

Such a village was Gadsuriya six kms to the south-west of Chelana. Up to the 1970s it had still no motorable road or school. The Rajput and Charan landlords were still the supreme rulers of the village. At that village the ladies of the Shudras and Jat castes had to take off their shoes and carry them in their hands, while passing by on the lane outside the houses of the Rajputs and Charans, in order to show their respect. Otherwise they would get a scolding from those living there. According to Tan Dan, this custom was still followed in the 1970s.

Durthal was another village in the Chelana area where strict semi-feudal dominance continued for several decades after 1952. Although Durthal was only eight kilometers to the west of Chelana, life there was quite different from that of Chelana in the 1970s, as Chelana had changed more than Durthal due to irrigation farming and the limestone industry.

In 1981 200 to 300 families lived at Durthal. The ex-Thakur was still at the top and the Bhambis at the bottom. The personal bonds between the ex-feudal village lords and the low caste people were to a large extent maintained. Persons of the low castes were questioned, if they did not abide to the old social norms. Trespassers of established rules could be punished by traditional methods such as shoe beatings.

Such was the life within the village settlement area. The same feudal like relationship as before. The ties were still there between the Rajput ex-jagirdars and the low ranked service castes, the _kameen karu_ group of people which included the many handicraft castes, touchable and untouchable.

It did not apply to Jat farmers living at their dhani homesteads in the open area around the village. As independent landowners they had got a powerful position in village politics. They were a part of the same widespread Jat network in Rajasthani politics as the Jats at Chelana.

Several novelties had entered also Durthal life in the 1970s such as tractors, electricity and a small primary school for both boys and girls. (Very few girls attended.) A small private bus passed the village regularly eight months a year on its way between the Bhopalgarh _kasba_ and Merta town. It was a mud road, so there was no traffic during the monsoon season and some time thereafter. In spite of these technical improvements the same old stagnant feudal life continued inside Durthal village, as the Chelana villagers had experienced up to the 1950s.

Other villages around Chelana where feudal customs continued

There were several other villages near Chelana where Rajput ex-feudal lords still dominated village life in 1981. Villages such as Savania, Sambaria, Bhagasni, Ber and Lototi. There, Rajputs formed the most populous caste group and owned most of the village land.

Low caste people, and especially those of untouchable castes, continued to live in poverty and social discrimination.

Strangely enough, they faced difficulties also in villages, where the biggest caste was the Jat one, the caste of the formerly so badly suppressed feudal tenants. In the newly introduced village democracy numbers meant strength, and a Jat became usually the sarpanch in villages with a large Jat population. Much of political influence and economic benefits went to the Jats, especially to the Jat families with the largest landholdings. They ruled over village life in a style that imitated that of the old Rajput village lords, Tan Dan thought. Poor landless villagers of low castes including the untouchables continued to be treated as inferiors. Their earlier dependence on the feudal elite had become replaced by a new dependence. Jat farmers had become their new masters and employers. Well-off owners of large landholdings did their best to compete in status with their former lords, the Rajput ex-jagirdar class, in maintaining old feudal village customs. The Jats in these village took a pride in being new influential members of the village elite.

They wanted people of low castes such as Bhambi and Bhangi to follow the old social customs of meekness and humility towards the high caste elite of which many Jat leaders had become new confident members.

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###  Chapter 14 The clean-shaven heads of feudal subjects

Shaving at the time of mourning

Shaving the hair on the head has a great symbolic importance among Hindus. At the _mundan_ ceremony the hair is cut on the child and offered to the god. Also on other occasions the hair on the head was cut in a ritual way, such as at the time of mourning.

When a Maharaja died, it was a tradition in the old princely states around India, that all his male subjects shaved their heads clean from all hair, as a sign of mourning. Also beards and moustaches were removed. If anyone would disobey, he would be beaten and forcibly shaved by the Rajputs of the village and other villagers loyal to the throne, who felt they were the representatives of the maharajah in the village.

Before independence in 1947 any such disbedience would have been reported to the local Thakur. He would have sent for either his own soldiers of for soldiers from the nearest royal force. Such cases were very rare, though.

As late as 1952, when the Maharaja of Jodhpur died in an aircrash, hair-shaving was carried out in all the district of the erstwhile the Marwar state in Rajasthan. At Chelana village no head was left unshaven.

_Bal dena_ , the giving of hair, was not only done when the Maharaja died. All subjects of local Thakurs and Jagirdars also had to shave their heads, when their own Thakur or Jagirdar died, and when some near relative of these feudal lords died, such as brothers, wives or mothers. All male Hindus also shaved their hair, when a member of their own family had died, except when a child or an unmarried girl had died.

Urbanized Hindu families living under modern influence in the 1970s did not carry out the custom that thoroughly. In such families only the eldest male person of the family shaved his hair, the others did not.

Haircutting customs among low caste Hindus in feudal Rajasthan

In feudal Marvar subordinate groups had to show their meekness in a number of ways. By an old custom menfolk always kept a cleanshaven strip on the top of the head. It was taken as a way of showing respect to the Marvar ruler. Therefore, the strip was called _raj ro marg_ , i.e. the royal path. Those with such a strip on their head had their turbans tied with an opening in the middle, so that the clean shaven strip was clearly visible. That way it was easy for the Rajputs and others to see that the person belonged to the dependent class.

The _raj ro marg_ strip was a sign of respect and submission not only to the Marvar ruler but to the whole class of feudal lords including the village Thakur. At Chelana it was especially the Rathores who had to be respected in this way. The Chelana Rathores all belonged to the same clan. Each jagirdar family had his own group of lowcaste dependent families to boss around with.

The Bhambi caste was a typical group of such feudal dependents who had to cut their hair with a _raj ro marg_ strip from the forehead to the neck. In the old feudal days it was done by all Bhambi men in Marvar and similar Rajput states. If a Bhambi was daring enough to let his hair grow to normal length instead of keeping a raj ro marg strip on his head, he could expect a severe punishment from the Rathores.

It happened to Harji, a young Bhambi, around 1950. He got a very cruel treatment for his resistence to the custom.

In the feudal age ending in the 1950s not only untouchables such as Bhambis had to keep royal strips and turbans with holes, but also a number of service castes and agricultural tenant castes of middle rank.

Hence, peasants of the Jat, Sirvi, Khetad Kumar castes had to cut the _raj ro marg_ in their hair. Not always and everywhere, Tan Dan told, but in areas and times with exceptionally hard and suppressing local rulers.

The Royal Path hairstyle was kept by all Bhambi men up to the end of the jagirdar rule in western Rajasthan and many continued the custom for a few decades more. It faded away in the 1950s in villages exposed to modern life, such as Chelana, but lived on longer in conservative villages with a Rajput Thakur in full strength. In such villages the Rajput lords might punish lowcaste trespassers of social customs by shoe beating also in the 1970s, according to Tan Dan.

At that it was still rather common that old Bhambis kept tying their turbans with a big whole in the middle. Such as the Bhambi _bhopa_ from village Kuchipalla in Nagaur District who Tan Dan met in 1978. This saintly Bhambi tied his turban in the loose way with a big opening in the middle without thinking much about the social message it once carried and to some extent still did. For him it was just the way his parents had taught him to tie his turban. Still he knew that villagers in general considered this way of tying a turban only fit for inferior people.

He did not keep any cleanshaven strip on his head. In the 1970s just a few old persons still continued that hair style. Out of habit rather than feudal sentiments.

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### Chapter 15 The difficulties in getting a haircut for lowcaste people

The barber profession followed old traditions all over Rajasthan. Most village families had their own barber families of the Nai caste. They kept a jajman relationship with each others for generations. The barbers and their clients were all men. Children got haircuts at Mundan and at other infrequent occasions. Women used to keep long hair and did not use the service of any Nai hair cutter.

Hindu men with cleanshaven faces went to their barber more frequently than the Muslims with beards. Also many Hindus kept beards. Hindu Rajputs had the custom of wearing big curly moustaches who could be quite impressive.

At Chelana the Nais were ranked as touchable Shudras in the local caste hierarchy, or possibly as low savarn Hindus. Around 1980 seven Nai families served their own groups of savarn Hindu families. As the client were anxious to avoid ritual pollution from untouchables, it was out of question that these barbers should cut the hair of an untouchable Hindu.

Therefore, most lowcaste people cut the hair of each others within their families without any special formalities or training. Scissors, blades and knives were all used in Rajasthani villages such as Chelana, and these cutting tools were in many cases rusty. It happened that the person being shaved got a cut by unexperienced haircutters. Now and then rural people in western Rajasthan died of the Tetanus disease as a result of such poorly performed haircuts.

In the 1970s Tan Dan saw, when Motoji, an old man of the Bhambi caste, shaved the hair of his grandson with an old razor blade. (At Tan Dan's mother-in-law's village in Nagaur District.) It was mounted on a little twig. Cheap but dangerous. Motoji did work, as he and his Bhambi family were regarded as untouchable Shudras by the savarn Hindu villagers. No barber in the village was prepared to cut the hair of the small boy. Motoji was a farmer with a small rainfed landholding, only yielding crops in the monsoon season. For the rest of the year he worked as a wage-earning agricultural labourer.

In the 1970s Tan Dan met a man of the Bhil tribe, who worked at a lime kiln some ten kilometres north of Chelana. Tribal Hindus were also regarded as untouchables, so he had the same difficulty as the Bhambis in getting help from barbers. When Tan Dan met him he cut the hair of a child of his joint family with a razor blade. He shaved off all hair on the head of the child. The interval between each haircut became longer that way, and it saved trouble.

When some Bhambi youths got a hair cut at the Chelana bazar

Bhika Ram Deval was a Bhambi who had been working for Tan Dan's grandfather Jugti Dan in the 1920s. He had helped Tan Dan's cousin Hapu to search for the bodies of her dead uncles in the night after a fight about land in a neighbouring village in 1929. A few decades later, around 1950, Bhika Ram's son Harji got severely punished by the Rathores at the Thikana for not keeping a cleanshaven strip on his head, the _raj ro marg_.

In the 1970s Harji's son Arun Deval was a teenager. He and his Bhambi friends wanted to look modern and smart under the influence of the various urbanized trends which at that time also reached the increasingly commercialized village of Chelana. They wanted to look like Bombay film stars. Arun had got a colourful shirt and he also wore sunglasses sometimes. He did not wear a turban as he wanted to show off his thick black hair, which none of the barbers at Chelana wanted to touch, as he belonged to an untouchable caste. The boys thought it was not fair they should be compelled to travel all the way to Jodhpur in order to get a haircut by a professional barber. They often talked about that injustice.

In 1976 Arun Deval and seven of his Bhambi friends went as a group to all the four barbers at the village bazar and asked for a hair cut. The barbers refused, but the boys insisted. The barbers felt these boys were a nuisance who disturbed their business. They even locked their shops for some time and sneaked away.

The Bhambi boys were very insistent. When they had hang around for three days, arguing with the barbers about the haircuts time and again, the Hindu barber and some of the Muslim ones had had enough. They appealed to some Rajput youths to help them to get rid of the Bhambi boys.

The Rajputs told the Bhambis they should not harass the barbers, and threatened them by saying, "hair can be plucked but not cut", a pointed reference to the cruel fate of Arun's father Harji, who had suffered heavily a few decades earlier when he had been disobedient to the feudal masters of that time.

Next day the Rajputs gave up their threats, as Arun and his friends had got the support of some high caste friends of the village including Tan Dan. They promised to help the Bhambis in case the Rajput youths would attack.

At that point the Arun and the other Bhambis reached a breakthrough in their negotiations with the barbers. They had managed to make friends with a young Muslim barber and he cut the hair of all of them.

The barber who cut their hair was the son-in-law of Babu Khan, a middleaged Nayta who had worked as a barber in the village bazar until he got paralysis in the early 1970s. It had become impossible for Babu Khan to continue his work, and his sons were still too young for work, so Babu Khan's in-laws in the Sirohi District decided to help him. They sent his son-in-law, a barber like most other men of his clan. With his help Babu Khan and his family would manage to get enough income, his relatives thought.

The son-in-law did not get much work at Chelana, though. He felt Babu Khan favoured his own sons and felt disappointed. When he got to know that the Bhambi teenagers had difficulties in getting haircuts at the bazar, he thought it could be a chance for him to get some business. He told Arun and his friends he was prepared to help them. To do that he had to start his own shop at the bazar. Some friends helped him to hire a little hut in front of the other barber shops and to get some furniture. The barber shops were situated near the big bunyan tree in the bazar under which there was a platform, where some men used to sit chatting all day long.

The Sirohi boy was the only barber who had agreed to serve the Bhambis. He told Tan Dan that the other barbers did not like it. They criticized him and nobody else tried to copy him. After a few years he returned to Sirohi. Again there was not a single barber at Chelana who wanted to cut the hair of any Bhambi or other low caste untouchable.

The Bhangi caste was even lower than the that of the Bhambis, and nobody from that caste had ever tried to get a hair cut at the Chelana bazar barber shops. A professional hair cut for Bhangis was practically unthinkable to all concerned.

The Muslim barbers at Chelana

The Sirohi boy and his in-laws at Chelana belonged to a Muslim barber caste called Nayta. Many generations ago the Naytas might have been a part of the Nai caste, and then formed a separate caste after conversion to Islam. They cut the hair of Muslims and of people belonging to a number of medium ranked castes, but not of Hindu untouchables. Although Muslims, the Nayta barbers discriminated against untouchable Hindus just like the Hindu Nai barbers did.

Barber shops was an urban novelty

Before 1960 there were hardly any shop at Chelana. The merchant sold their items to customer at their homes. Barbers used to cut the hair of their jajman clients at the client's home. In the 1960s a village bazar emerged at Chelana near the village well. Also barber shops appeared. Small shed-like structures made of wood.

In 1981 there were four barber shops at the village bazar. Two of them had been there for a long time and the others had started in the previous year. Three of the four shops were run by Muslim Naytas and the fourth one by a Hindu family of the Nai caste.

The name of the Hindu barber was Jumarji. He had come from a village to the west of Chelana already in the 1960s. Jumarji's son was an agricultural labourer.He worked as an irrigation pump operator climbing up and down the ladder of the deep Borundi well every day for several years, until he in 1972 was bitten by a cobra down in the well and died.

The barbers at the village bazar did not depend on a faithful circle of jajman clients for their livelyhood, but had a more impersonal and businesslike relationship to their customers.

The villagers had become more influenced by city life. Most Chelana villagers had started to travel now and then by bus in the 1970s, at least the menfolk, and they saw how customers at Jodhpur and Ajmer got their hair cut by any barber. Therefore, also the Muslim barbers at Chelana could hope for customers among savarn Hindu villagers, at least among the lower savarn Hindus. If not among original Chelana villagers, so at least among the many newcomers who settled in the village more or less permanently as labourers, attracted both by the irrigation farms and the increasing number of lime kilns and limestone quarries.

Barbers of the Muslim creed in Chelana were called Naita. They were like a Muslim caste, and had no married relationships with other Musims such as Vouparis. In the past they might have been Hindu Nais, who had been converted to Islam, but continued with their old caste profession.

It might explain at least partly their unwillingness to cut the hair of untouchable Hindus, and the discrimination against Bhangis and other low untouchable Hindus in general at Chelana among the various Muslim groups, although they as Muslims had no particular reason to be afraid of ritual pollution in the Hindu sense. The reason for them to dislike Bhangis, though, was that Bhangis kept pigs.

By and large, untouchable Shudras in western Rajasthan could still only get a professional hair cut in really big towns such as Jodpur and Ajmer. Only in big towns the barber shop service had become impersonal and commercial to such an extent that nobody bothered about the castes of the customers.

Not even the barbers in small towns were prepared to cut the hair of anybody who were ritually polluting to the savarn Hindus. Even in _kasbas_ such as Pipar and Merta barbers used to have a personal relationship to his customers, which often was hereditary.

Also the Nayta midwives observed untouchability

In some parts of India midwifery is considered a Bhangi profession, but not at Chelana and other villages of western Rajasthan. There it is carried out by the comparatively high ranking Muslim Nayta group, which somehow still lives within the caste system in spite of being Muslims, as the caste system had become the natural way of living also for Muslims in western Rajasthan.

The Muslim Naytas was the only group at Chelana who worked as midwives out of tradition, although two or three women of other castes also served as midwives out of personal interest, skill and aptitude.

Most Nayta women only agreed to be midwives for savarn Hindus. At child birth within untouchable Hindu castes, these castes had to take care themselves.

Nevertheless, in 1981 there was a Nayta lady at Chelana who served all households of the village who wanted her service. That she had done for two decades. Although she was prepared to help all pregnant women right from the Bhangis to high caste Hindus, the latter continued to invite her, as she was very good at her work.

Tan Dan told in 1981 that midwifery was an activity of low social appreciation. It was the traditional caste profession of the women of several Chamar subcastes in India. Midwifery was considered an unclean work which degraded people to untouchability. Cleanliness was related to Hindu rituality, not to pathogens. The existence of pathogens and their role in the spread of diseases was unknown to ordinary villagers.

In Haryana villages such as Pattikalyana, the midwife profession was carried out by Bhangi ladies. Also in Uttar Pradesh, as is shown in Prem Chand's short story _Dudh ka dam_ , in English "The price of milk".

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### Chapter 16 Leather and untouchability

Argument for low status of leather work

Since very old time killing animals has been an important religious and moral issue in India, and social discrimination against groups associated with animal killing has got religious sanction.

Hunting was violence and those who took care of the parts of the killed animals such as hides and leather were put in the same category as the hunters. The foul smell associated with fleecing and tanning might have been enough to keep such persons at a distance. Even if the animal had died of its own it was unpleasant, and an undignified way of handling especially the sacred cows.

However, the discrimination against leather workers might be a way of justifying already existing suppression of a weak social group.

Speculations about the origin of leather work aversion in the Hindu society

Was the aversion against the leather work or against the leather worker? Was leather work associated with violence and disgraceful treatment of sacred cows after its death? Was the leather worker suppressed due to his work or had his community been forced to take up this work after being suppressed for some other reason long ago, such as defeat in warfare or similar violent confrontations with Indo-Aryan tribes?

The ruling elite might have forced leather work upon depressed groups long back in history. Leather products were required by the whole society, also by the elite, and somebody had to make them. If necessary, the leather work had to be forced upon groups too weak to resist. Were they helpless first and became leather workers when already suppressed, or leather workers first and for that reason discriminated against by the Hindu elite? Some savarn Hindus prefer to believe it was in the second way, as in that case untouchability would be a punishment for bad behaviour. The first alternative would mean that the offspring of a defeated enemy has been put in a slavelike condition for thousands of years. Perhaps after conflicts between original pre-Aryan settlers and Indo-Aryan tribes migrating into India from the north. What really happened is difficult to figure out after such a long time, but it is clear from Sanskrit Brahmin records that Chamars have been discriminated against very severely and that religious sanction has been a means to maintain that discrimination up to the present age in western Rajasthan.

That the Bhambis had been forced to do leather work by their feudal lords is evident from the fact that they all left leather work at the time of jagirdar abolition. (1952) Their aversion to the work can not be expressed more clearly.

Much thought has been given to this subject in the literature, and some of it is shown in the Supplement.

Leather not treated by chamars is accepted

Leather is in western Rajasthan divided into three different groups from the point of view of pollution. (As grouped by Tan Dan.)

1. Tanned leather, i.e leather treated with water. Tanned leather is the biggest group of leather products including even the winnowing basket.

The tanned leather of the winnowing basket is in direct contact with the foodgrain while winnowing, which no savarn Hindu bothers about while eating food made of such foodgrain.

2. Untanned leather. It is only cut. Stripes of such untanned leather are used when making ropes. Strong untanned leather ropes for lifting the leather bucket ( _charas_ ) from the bottom of deep wells. Untanned ropes were made be untouchables. Before 1952 by the Bhambis, and then by the Bhangis who handled hides after the Bhambis had left all such work.

3. Leather made of camel hide. It is not considered to have been handled by untouchables. Camel leather is obtained from anonymous people, outsiders coming from places unknown to the Chelana villagers. Villagers are not afraid of being polluted by such leather. Camel leather is used for sweet oil containers mostly.

Farmers of many castes making leather rope without getting polluted

It is the general opinion at Chelana that Hindus of savarn castes discriminate against untouchable Hindus because the latter do unclean work, which in Marvari is called _sugla kam_. _Sugla_ means dirty and _kam_ means work.

For example, the villagers discriminate against the Mochis for doing _sugla kam_ , as they handled leather, although new leather. Old worn leather is even more polluting.

Handling hides, earlier done by the Bhambis and after 1952 by the Bhangi sweepers, is also such a _sugla kam_. However, villagers in general are still discriminating against the Bhambis for being a group which have done _sugla kam_ earlier.

Villagers of other castes sometimes also made items out of leather without getting polluted at all. Why were they not treated as untouchables? Tan Dan even knew a Brahmin farmer who was proud of his skill in making leather ropes. There is something more behind Chamar untouchability than just leather.

Leather work as a cause of chamar caste untouchability is obviously a conjecture, an argument used for explaining a social relationship, which once upon a time came into existence for some other reason, long ago forgotten.

Villagers making a leather rope at Chelana

In 1979 Tan Dan was present, when some villagers made a leather rope. Among them was Gisa Maraj, the Brahmin mentioned above. He pulled the same leather rope as Ghenvarji Mochi, an untouchable by caste. Without any hesitation. Evidently Gisa Ram did not fear the risk ritual of pollution at that moment, although he was particular about following caste rules.

Gisa Maraj handled the leather with pride and enthusiasm, feeling it was nothing wrong in holding the leather rope.

Although Gisa Maraj liked making leather ropes, which was a team work, he was a Brahmin with the traditional attitude towards other leather equipments such as shoes. He discriminated against both shoes and shoe-makers and observed strict untouchability towards Bhangis and Bhambis.

With regard to food and drinking water Gisa Maraj observed strict untouchability rules towards Ghenvarji, the Mochi, too. He did not mind so much touching his hands, though. Ritual pollution through food and water is considered more serious from a religious point of view.

The leather rope was made for Shiv Ram Daroga, a Charan Daroga farmer, who required this rope for his agricultural operations. Shiv Ram had a buffalo. It died and was taken away by the Bhangi, with whom he had a jajman relationship. Shiv Ram asked the Bhangi to give him back the hide after drying it, as he wanted to make a leather rope of the hide, after getting it tanned by a Jetia. When the finished leather sheet had been returned to Shiv Ram, he applied oil to it, and asked his Mochi friend Ghenvarji to cut it into strips of proper size.

Then Shiv Ram and his friends made a strong leather rope made of six strands. The long leather rope was folded six times, while all the time twisting it. As the rope when ready had a length of about thirty metres, the original leather rope was about 180 m, and many persons were required to handle it.

Those who worked with the rope were:

Lalu, a Muslim Lohar and farmer,

Ghenvarji Mochi,

Chandu Ram Daroga, brother of Shiv Ram,

Parbu Ram Lakhar, a farmer ,

Gisa Maraj, a Brahmin farmer and friend of Shiv Ram. He is very skilled and experienced in twisting a rope,

Shakur, a Muslim Lohar.

Dhula Ram, another brother of Shiv Ramji of the Charan Daroga caste.

In additionn Shiv Ramji himself and two more helpers. So the whole team of ropemakers were ten persons. The men from other castes helped Shiv Ram out of friendship. It is a village custom to do such things jointly, expecting the return of such help some other time.

The rope was made of a buffalo, which is not considered a sacred animal by the savarn Hindus. Even if the leather would have been from zebu cattle, the savarn Hindus would have helped like this, Tan Dan told.

Lalu and his friend Shakur were farmers by profession, although they belonged to the Muslim blacksmith caste (Muslim Lohar). It may appear strange that Muslims have castes, but at Chelana and other villages of western Rajasthan, Muslims had gotras and marriages in the way typical for castes. No Muslim family could marry a Muslim family outside its caste ( _kom_ , _jati_ ) in the 1970s.

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### Chapter 17 Tan Dan about leather-workers at Chelana

Traditional Chamar work - useful but ritually polluting

To slaughter cattle was unthinkable even for Chamars. Their low reputation was due to their association dead cattle, and their habit of eating flesh of the carrion of animals who had died in the village. Including cows. Fleecing the animals, preparing their hides into leather and the manufacture of leather products such as shoes, were considered degrading work, athough useful to the whole village society. Village life was based on leather products. Leather bags for lifting up water from the depth of the well was a must for many villages of the semi-deserts of western Rajasthan. Leather was used in farm tools, in equipments for the domestic animals and in many other ways.

A Bhambi family did many different tasks for its jajman families

In the feudal era the Bhambis at Chelana worked with hides and leather and took care of dead cattle on a _jajman_ basis. It means that each Bhambi family served a group of client families, who paid the Bhambis in kind, mainly foodgrain at the time of harvest. The bonds between the families lasted for generations. Mostly joint families of three generations with a few married adult brothers who worked together. The same Bhambi family thus carried out many different tasks for a jajman family. They removed their dead animals, they wove their cloth, and repaired their shoes. In return the _jajman_ families at Chelana gave _bajra_ cereal for making bread.

The bhambis pulled away dead cattle, who had died at the homes of their jajman clients. They tied the legs of the animal with ropes and put long wooden poles in between the tied legs. Four men used to pull the dead animal, if it was a cattle or a buffalo, as it was heavy and difficult to move. They brought it to the shrub jungle outside the village, where they removed its hide. The quality of the leather suffered from scratches by pulling.

They were allowed to eat the meat of the animals they had flayed. Buffaloes and cattle including cows.

Bhambis repaired old shoes. To repair old leather items is called _ganthna_ in western Rajasthan, Tan Dan told. _Ganthna_ work makes anybody subject to discrimination. Hence, those who repaired worn-out shoes had a worse reputation in the village than those who made new shoes.

It was mainly done by the Mochis, although some Bhambis made new shoes, too.

The Mochi shoemakers

Mochis did not repair old shoes, as it was below their status to work with old used leather. They made new shoes and also other items such as leather buckets for fetching water. The Mochis who lived at Chelana hailed from Nagaur district to the north. It might have been long ago. The Mochis told Tan Dan they only knew their ancestors were Jingars, which Tan Dan during his visits to Nagaur villages has found out to be a Mochi group, who in the old days specialized on making horse saddles. Important work in those days, but of little demand in the modern age, when horses mainly are used by bridegrooms at weddings.

All the leather items the Mochis made they sold for cash in the bazar. The Mochi shoemakers had no jajmani relationship at all at Chelana, but sold their shoes on order to anybody. It indicates that they had lived fewer generations in the village than the Bhambis who most of them had been tied to their jajman clients for more generations than anybody could remember. Since long back they had accepted their role as meek feudal dependents, all the time bossed around by the Rajputs.

The Mochis had always been considered a higher caste than the Bhambis, as the Mochis did not do anything else than new shoes. Beautiful traditional shoes of an artistic design in several colours. Suitable for weddings. Merchants bought them for wholesale trade, and the shoes were distribued for sale to other parts of Rajasthan.

Plastic shoes bad for eyes?

At the bazars shoes of plastic and rubber were sold at a cheaper price than leather shoes, but could be inconvenient to wear. Most persons liked leather shoes better. In March 1977 Tan Dan stayed at Joura, a small town in Madhya Pradesh. He was present at the bazar, when a fresh load of leather shoes arrived. People got happy, as such shoes were in short supply, and the whole lot was sold in a few hours. Many of the buyers were persons wearing plastic shoes. They told Tan Dan, they got pain in their eyes from wearing plastic shoes. They felt very sure that the plastic shoes were the reason for their eye trouble.

When I told this to Jala Ram, a gardener working with Tan Dan at Chelana, he replied the villagers in western Rajasthan also thought that plastic shoes were bad for the eyes. He had plastic shoes and a headache himself. He had recently bought spectacles, which he used when grading vegetables. Then he bought leather shoes at Jodhpur and after that he felt his eye sight had become normal and he did not use his spectacles any longer.

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###  Chapter 18 How dead livestock was removed

When Chelana Bhambis removed a dead buffalo in 1950

Once in Tan Dan's childhood one of his father's buffaloes had died. Harji and three other men were called to take the animal away. They tied the legs of the dead buffalo, and put strong wooden branches in between the legs. One in between the front legs and and another in between the hind legs. They lifted the animal and carried it away, dragging and pulling the heavy animal with a lot of effort. The two men in the front carried the hind legs of the animal. In the rear the head of the animal kept rolling here and there while the four men struggled along with their load towards the place in the village where dead animals were dumped.

They carried the buffalo from a corner of the large cattle compound around which Jugti Dan had built a stone-wall fifty years earlier.

When Harji and the others carried away the buffalo in 1950, the dumping place was at some distance from the village settlement, on a waste land at the side of the road going to Jalagarh. There the animal was flayed and the hide was taken care of. They cut pieces of the meat from the carcass. Tan Dan and the other children were told to chase away all the vultures and dogs who approached, until the Bhambis had taken enough of the meat for themselves.

Then the Bhangi Sweepers used to come and tear off meat from the dead animals, as people of that caste also used to eat beef, when they got the opportunity. But the sweepers had to stand waiting, until the Bhambis were through with their work, because if the sweepers would touch the cattle carcass first, the Bhambis would not use it, as the Bhambis had a higher caste rank than the Bhangis, and therefore treated the Bhangis as their untouchables. To the savarn Hindus both castes were untouchable.

Bhambis gave carcass meat to the Bajania Nats as a part of their jajman payment. The men of the Nat caste served the Bhambis as laureates, drummers and in other ways. The Nat caste was the serving caste and therefore ranked lower than the Bhambi caste.

A few decades later, in the 1970s, meat of selfdead cattle including cows was still eaten at Chelana, but only by sweepers. The Bhambis did not eat beef any longer. The whole Bhambi caste all over western Rajasthan had stopped eating carrion beef completely in 1952 as a part of a collective attempt by the whole caste to raise its status by abandoning practices objectionable to savarn Hindus. The Bhambis also stopped moving their ageold work of removing dead cattle from their the homes of their jajman clients. Leather work of all kind was stopped.

The decision to refuse removing the cattle of their jajman village families meant that the Bhambis put their former _jajman_ clients in difficulty. Considering that the Bhambis had a very humble position in village life, it was a bold step. The new age of liberation from foreign rule and from age-old feudal lords most likely gave them courage. The Bhambis were more successful in throwing off the yoke of jajman work and forced labout than in getting the land they were entitled to. Many of them had been former agricultural tenants with mostly weak tenure during the feudal age. Due to illiteracy and lack of guidance it was difficult for most of them to get that land registered in their names. Many did get some land but not enough for full-fledged farming.

Detha family objection to Tan Dan's habit of visiting mohallas of untouchables

In his childhood Tan Dan used to move around all over the village including the mohallas of the untouchables. Now and then he were at the house of the Deval Bhambi family and played with the children there. The Deval family lived with the Dethas as farm servants and feudal dependents since the days of Jugti Dan Detha, Tan Dan's powerful grandfather. As the Deval family belonged to the Bhambi caste, they were untouchables in the eyes of the villagers in general, and people of savarn Hindu castes did not go there, unless they had some special reason.

Running around in the Bhambi mohalla and at other places where there lived untouchables was a very unusual habit among Detha children. His relatives kept scolding Tan Dan for this, and thought he was a nuisance to the family, bringing ritual pollution to all of them. As a punishment he was often forced to eat in seclusion on such occasions and forbidden to enter the kitchen. Then he got stale food and leftovers. Tan Dan did not mean the others treated him as an untouchable, they only showed their annoyance.

The other children of the Detha mohalla kept telling grown-ups, that they had seen him doing this and that at various forbidden places, such as where the Bhambis removed the skin of dead cattle. Also grown up people used to keep Tan Dan's parents informed about his whereabouts. The temple priests were most concerned. They asked his parents, why their son could not behave, and told them he was a disgrace to all savarn Hindus. The end result of all these comments and questions was that his parents tried to be more strict to him. In most cases only his mother punished him, though. Tej Dan, his father, did not bother much. He just asked his young child what he had done, and told him not to do it again.

As Tan Dan lived in a big joint family, there were many other female relatives, who felt concerned about the frequent threats to their ritual purity, as long as Tan Dan kept running here and there. When he returned to the Detha mohalla they used to stop him before he had entered any of the houses, telling him to remain where he was, so they could carry out a simple act of ritual purification right away. They sprinkled water on him, into which some item made of gold had been dipped. Gold was a sacred metal with a purifying power. Such was the general belief, and water, which had been in touch with gold, got this quality, too. The women usually had some golden jewellery around. Tan Dan's mother just put some water in one of her palms, raised her hand so the water would touch the golden ring in her ear, and then throw the water on Tan Dan. When that was done he could enter the house. He was no longer untouchable to them.

Bhangi Sweepers took care of dead cattle after 1952

Each Bhambi family at Chelana had a circle of client families for whom they carried out their traditional work. The jajman relationship.

When the Bhambi stopped removing the dead cattle of their jajman families in 1952, it disturbed the ageold working order of the village, and it would create difficulties to the cattle-owning villagers, if no other untouchable caste would be prepared to take over the work. They did not want to do it themselves. Taking care of the heavy bodies was not only unpleasant and difficult but also ritually polluting from a Hindu point of view. The villagers did not want to endanger the future of their atma (soul) by getting pap (sin) to its record.

They managed to get the Bhangi sweepers to take over the work. By custom the Bhangis already took care of dead dogs and other small animals, and for them it was not a big step to remove cattle as well.

They were even lower in status than the Bhambis in the caste hierarchy, and they had no ambition to rise in it unlike the Bhambis.

When they started the work in 1952 there was just a few Bhangi families in the village. They served about five hundred households.

According to Tan Dan the dependence of the Bhangis on the other villagers was still so strong in the closely knit feudal atmosphere that it was taken for granted by all, including the Bhangis themselves, that they would take over the work from the Bhambis.

If the Bhangis would be too much harassed, when taking away dead animals, there was a risk that also the Bhangis would leave the work.

Especially a few decades later. In the 1980s the economic activities of the village had developed to such an extent that labourers of all castes were paid in cash for new kind of jobs such as lime kiln and house constructions.

If also the Bhangis would stop removing cattle, there was hardly any other depressed community that would take it up. No other group was in such a helpless situation that this unpleasant work could be forced upon them, Tan Dan thought.

A Bhangi couple removing a goat

In early 1970s Tan Dan met Chetan Ram's brother Pipa Ram and his wife inside the village near a flour mill ( _chaki_ ) They carried a dead goat which had died of overeating dry grain at the chaki.

The goat belonged to a Muslim family who lived near the flour mill shop, and the goat got the opportunity to feed there. He ate as much as he could and the grain swelled in its stomach.

The Muslims at Chelana did not eat meat of any self-dead animal. They did not even touch such animals. The meat they used to eat had to be butchered according to a certain ritual, according to which they cut only the throat and leave the animal to die on its own by loosing blood. That way the meat will be free from blood. In their opinion the animal was killed by Allah and not they themselves, Tan Dan told.

Pipa Ram and his wife brought the dead goat to their home, and there they had a feast for themselves and their relatives.

Where the cattle carcasses were dumped

The Bhambis used to drag the dead cattle on the ground to the detriment of the hide quality. In 1980 the Bhangis carried the dead animal on an ox cart instead, as such carts had become bigger and better. There was more space on the open flat carts with rubber wheel than on the old narrow ones of traditional design and wooden wheels.

The cart was mostly arranged by the cattle-owner. The Bhangis were not paid money for the job. The animal was their reward. The Bhangis could sell the hide and eat the meat and use other parts of the animals as well. They used sinews as cords in basket making.

They hauled the cattle to a place outside the village settlement area, but they did not go far. They dumped the dead animals in the extreme south, fairly close to some high caste mohalla, rather than at some very isolated dumping place far away from the village.

The dumping places were quite far away from their own locality, after they had shifted from their poorly maintained slum-like huts in the south to the new housing plot in the north around 1960.

However, it was not the Bhangis who decided where the cattle should dumped. They brought them to the place they had been ordered to by the village council, the Gram Panchayat. They would have dumped them at any other place, too, without any complaint.

The biggest dumping place was along the Jalagarh road just to the south of the village. There the animals were thrown behind some bushes in big pits not far from the new Mali mohalla.

The carrion meat

When the hides had been removed from the cattle carcass, women came forward with baskets and chhuri, i.e. long sharp knives designed for cutting meat. They filled their baskets before the animals were allowed to come near the carcass. Flocks of these animals quickly gathered. Giddh, i.e. vultures, village dogs and crows. After a few hours the carcasses were normally eaten clean to the bones. In the night foxes, hyenas, and jackals continued to eat whatever was left on the carcasses. The rest quickly dried in the hot and dry desert climate, so the heaps of cattle carcasses lying in the open at the dumping places were as a rule not much of a health hazard, Tan Dan thought. In the rainy season such carcass heaps could be more dangerous as sources of infection, but rains at Chelana did not last for many days. Besides, in the rainy seasons the carcasses were dumped a little further away from the village.

Up to 1952 the Bhangis cut meat from the carcass after the Bhambis had flayed the animal. When the Bhambis left the work that year, they also abandoned their habit of eating carrion meat. The Bhangis continued. In contrast to the Bhambis they had no ambition to raise their status in the caste hierarchy by adjusting to savarn Hindu standards. For the Bhangis the carrion beef was a welcome supplement to their meager diet and they did not want to abstain from it. When they took over the work of removing dead cattle after the Bhambis, they got better opportunities to feed themselves on such meat. Hence, they might even have been keen to take over the work left by the Bhambis.

A dead cattle meant plenty of food. More than a single family could eat, so they used to share it with their neighbours in the Bhangi mohalla. They used to boil the beef as soon as they could. Then they all ate as much as they could. It was feast for them all. If there was more meat than they could use, they cut the meat in long narrow strips which they dried in the sun outside their houses. These strips were called _bhilauri_ and they were hung on ropes arranged in lines outside their houses. They also _bhilauri_ meat strips in the nearby trees for drying.

When the _bhilauri_ strips had dried they were stored in the big clay pots called _moun_. Dried meat could be kept like this for many months in the cold season and in the hot dry season, but not very long in the monsoon season, as the weather was more humid. Tan Dan has tasted such meat at the house of his friend, Devi Ram. He is a Bhangi from Chelana who lives at Merta, where he worked as a peon (bundle lifter) at the local court. They had first boiled the beef in water and then fried it with spices. Tan Dan liked it. The animal had died on its own, of course. It had been healthy up to the end of its life, free from any infectuous disease. Practically all cattle in western Rajasthan died on its own. Slaughter was impossible in _kasbas_ and villages, where savarn Hindus were the dominating social group. However, cattle could be sold to metropolitan regions for slaughter, for example to Bombay.

The hides

The hide of the dead cattle was flayed and removed, as soon as the animal carcass had reached the dumping place. It was brought to the Bhangi mohalla and dried on branches of trees out of reach for dogs. It took about fifteen days to get it dried, or a shorter time, depending on season.

Then the hides were sold to leather tanners of the Regar and Jatia castes. In 1980 the price for a hide of a cattle or a buffalo was thirty to fifty Rupees. The jajman families did not pay the Bhangis anything, as they thought that the carcass itself was enough reward. A few decades later the villagers did pay the Bhangis for removing dead cattle and the relationship had become more businesslike.

There were neither Regars nor Jatias at Chelana, but at three villages to the southwest at various distance. At Rupnagar to the south of Nilkhedi, at Khavaspur the west of Durthal, and at Pipar some thirty kilometres away along the Jodhpur road.

Regars from these places came to Chelana now and then on their rounds in the area for buying hides.

Tan Dan visited some Regar families at Rupnagar in the 1f960s. He saw how the men tanned leather out of hides. While tanning the hide becomes smooth and the hair comes off. The whole hide was tanned, and the shape of the animal was seen.

Tanned leather of goat skin were used as water bags at the Tilvara cattle fair Tan Dan visited in 1979. Big bags full of water carried by two men. The water bags still had the shape of the goats.

In the Chelana region also tanners of the Jatia caste tanned hides of cattle and other livestock. They sold their leather to Mochis and other shoemakers.

Although Regars and Jatias were tanners in the same region, they were two different castes. The difference between the two castes was not clear to Tan Dan. Both were leather tanners by tradition.

The cattle bone business

When the Bhangis had removed the hide of the dead cattle and the carcass had been eaten clean to the bones by all kinds of animals, the skeleton was left to dry together with a heap of other such animal skeletons at the dumping place outside the village. Every two to three months the skeletons were collected by a Government contractor for the Jalagarh Panchayat Samiti. It was his task to remove the skeletons from all villages of his area by tractor trolley.

In eastern Jodhpur district there was one collector of cattle bones for each panchayat samiti of about forty to fifty villages, and he collected the bones in agreement with the Gram Panchayat of each village. The skeletons of the cattle and buffaloes were taken away free of charge by the contractor appointed by the Government.

Such contracts were given by the Government for one year at a time through open auction, Tan Dan told. Mostly Muslims, Rajputs and sometimes Baniyas got the contracts, and they had a good income from it by selling the bones to factories as raw material.

Although Bhangis worked in this field as labourers, there were very few Bhangi contractors. One exception was the contractor for Rian Panchayat Samiti area to the east of Merta. He was a Bhangi of Dangavas village near Merta, and the maternal uncle of Dula Ram, a young Bhangi at Chelana who worked as his tractor driver. First Dula Ram was paid as a labourer and then he also became a minor partner in the business. He got a share in the tractor used for hauling the heaps of cattle skeletons from the villages to railway stations. From there the bones were transported by train to bone meal factories in various parts of Rajasthan. Two of the mills were in Jodhpur, two in Jaipur and one at Phalna. To whom the bone meal was sold and how it was used, Tan Dan did not know for sure. Several years earlier he had heard that the bone meal was exported to foreign countries in two ways: as steamed bone meal and as regular bone meal. Tan Dan had heard that the sinews on the bones were separated and used for making capsules, i.e. the digestable cover of medical pills, and that much of such material was exported. The large size of the Indian cattle population of hundreds of million of cattle made it possible export bone meal and other bonebased products on a large scale. However, as India's own biochemical industry developed, more and more of the bones were used as raw material within that sector.

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### Chapter 19 Chamar subcastes also had a caste hierarchy

The Chamar subcastes varied from region to region but there was a basic pattern. The leather worker caste with the task to remove dead cattle from the homes of the villagers had the bottom rank. The tanners were somewhat above them. Even higher ranked, although still untouchable and low, was the caste working with new finished leather.

In the Chelana area of western Rajasthan these castes were:

Low ranked: The Bhambis who removed dead cattle, but stopped that work in 1952. They were also weavers.

Middle ranked:. The Regar caste of tanners. There is no such caste at Chelana but in a neighbouring village.

High ranked: The Mochi caste who make very nice leather shoes, good enough for wholesale business through merchants selling in other areas.

When Tan Dan lived in the Samalkha area of Haryana for some time in the 1970s the villagers first gave him the impression that Chamar was a single caste. Savarn Hindus did not differentiate between the various Chamar subcastes, but seemed to think that all Chamars in the villages belonged to the same caste. Then he found out from conversations with Chamars that there were three Chamar castes in the area with a similar ranking order in the caste hierarchy:

Low ranked: The Chamar Chamria caste of those who removed dead cattle.

Medium ranked: The Chamar Redasi caste of tanners.

High ranked: The Chamar Julahe caste of those who made shoes. As is indicated by the caste name, they had been weavers in the old days.

The Chamar castes of the Samalkha region of eastern Haryana

At village Pattikalyana in the Samalkha area of Haryana state Chamria Chamar men carried dead cattle to a remote place of wasteland shrub jungle bordering the next village. There the hides were tanned by the Chamar Redasis. The place was called Charmalay. There it was an awful smell, as hides were tanned and leather prepared. Then the Chamar Redasi tanners stopped their work, so the Chamria Chamars had to sell the raw hides of the animals they flayed to tanners in other villages. Chamar villagers in the area used to trade hides and leather at a weekly roadside basar along the busy Grand Trank Road, where buses and lorries passed at full speed, blowing horns.

Tanners in western Rajasthan felt above the hide flayers

Regar tanners in western Rajasthan told Tan Dan they were skilled craftsmen, who did not want to lower themselves to the level of flaying animals, which was the work of Bhambis and later on Bhangis. The Regars thought the difference in skill was the reason for two castes, one flaying the hides and the other tanning it.

In Haryana it was the Chamar Redasi tanners who argued like that. They did not want to flay, a work that was beneath them and fit for the Chamria Chamars.

Tanners of eastern Haryana tried to raise in the caste hierarchy

In the Samalkha area of eastern Haryana it was the Chamar Redasis, the medium ranked tanners among the leather worker castes, who had the ambition to raise in the caste hierarchy. They were followers of the Chamar saint Raidasi and tried to build temples for him.

The Chamar Redasi caste in Haryana corresponds both to the Regar caste in Rajasthan and to the Jatav caste of Uttar Pradesh and parts of Madhya Pradesh.

Leather tanners of the Chamar Redasi caste bought raw hides from Chamria Chamars and sold the readymade leather at the weekly market to village shoemakers of the Chamar Julahe caste. It was the established age-old practice in the Samalkha area .But in the 1970s no tanning work was done any longer. The main Chamar Redasi householders at village Pattikalyana instead had junior jobs at a Government office in Delhi, which made them independent of traditional Chamar work. They had relatives in other villages who still tanned, though. Another way of escaping leather work was agriculture. Landless chamars could work as labourers, as there was plenty of irrigation water in the area. Leather work was a more important as a last resort to the Chamars in the dry and poor regions further to the west in Haryana.

The ranking of shoemakers

As for shoemakers those who made new shoes had a higher status then those who repaired old shoes. The shoes were cleaner. At Pattikalyana in Haryana the Chamar Julahe shoemakers had restricted their work to making new shoes, whereas Chamar Redasi shoemakers repaired old shoes, thereby admitting their lower status.

Attempts of weavers to rise in the caste hierarchy in north India

The name of the highest of the three chamar subcastes at Pattikalyana village in eastern Haryana was Chamar Julahe. They did not weave any longer in the 1970s, but the name indicates they had done it in the paste.

"In the Punjab a section of the Chamars had become weavers and formed their own subcaste, Chamar Julaha, who did not work in leather nor did they do other despised menial tasks associated with the Chamars.", Briggs wrote already in 1920.

"A notable example of a caste formed from the Chamar is the Mohammadan weaver, the Julaha. He is distributed over the United Provinces in considerable numbers and is found also in other parts of India, especially in the Punjab. He is a typical illustration of how a group of people may rise in the social scale within the Bramanic system. Originally a Chamar, he secured a better position by taking to weaving. He eats no carrion, touches no carcasses, does not work in impure leather, and has separated himself entirely from the other sections of the Chamar. In taking to the comparatively high occupation of weaving, he has reached the border of the respectable artisan class."

Like the Bhambis in western Rajasthan the Chamar Julahes further to the east in India carried out many vocations right from removing dead animals to weaving. Then Chamar Julahe stuck to weaving, and left the other traditional jobs in order to rise in the caste hierarchy. Already in the 19th century, perhaps.

At western Rajasthani villages leather work and weaving was done by the members of the Bhambi family for its group of jajman families. Living in feudal serfdom all attempts to leave disliked work were doomed to fail.

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###  Chapter 20 The year the Bhambis left their ageold caste profession

In 1952 the Bhambi caste in western Rajasthan decided to abandon ritually polluting work. It was a collective decision implemented by all the castes panchayats, one for each _khera_. A khera is a caste organization comprising all caste members in 24 villages. It also took place in Haryana and elsewhere in north India. It might have involved millions of people belonging to the Bhambi caste in Rajasthan and similar leather working castes elsewhere.

The intention was to rise in the caste hierarchy, by abandoning work related to cattle carcass, hides and leather, as villagers used to tell that they treated Bhambis as untouchables because the latter carried out such ritually polluting work.

Also many Chamars in Haryana have told Tan Dan that at least one Chamar type of caste, Chamar Julahe, abandoned leather work on a large scale in the year of _unnis sau bavan_ , i.e. 1952 according to the Christian calender.

In western Rajasthan the Bhambis tell it happened in year nine, _nau ka sal_ , because they count years according to the Vikram Samvat calender starting fiftyseven years before the Christian calender. Hence, year nine means Vikram Samvat 2009.

About the event in _nau ka sal_ (year nine, i.e. Vikram Samvat 2009) Tan Dan has heard from Bhambis at his own village Chelana, his wive's native village Kanpura and at Rojas, where Tan Dan's wife was brought up as a young girl by her uncle. Tan Dan has also heard about the event in other places of Rajasthan such as Kishangarh, Ajmer and Jalagarh.

Those he has heard talking about the 1952 decision were Chamar Julahes at Pattikalyana, Samalkha and Kanjhavla villages in Haryana.

The difference in use of calenders in eastern Haryana and in western Rajasthan indicates a difference of influence of the central power on the life of the inhabitants of these two areas. Western Rajasthan was less exposed to the imperial power of the English and the Moghuls than Haryana.

In addition to the two calenders mentioned, there was a third calender in use in north and central India. It was the Shak Samvat calender which was common in regions further to the east such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa. Tan Dan has been told that inscriptions on stones found in that eastern region was mostly in Shak Samvat. Vikram Samvat was used on stones from central to western India.

Castes who abandoned traditional Chamar work in 1952

Tan Dan was told by Chamar Julahe persons of the Samalkha area in eastern Haryana that the Chamar Julahe caste earlier had removed dead cattle and buffaloes from the village, but they did not do it at all in the 1970s, as they had abandoned it through a caste panchayat decision in 1952. It happened all over Haryana, they told.

The Chamar Julahe caste in eastern Haryana evidently was a part of the same north Indian Chamar caste organization as the Bhambi caste of western Rajasthan, and had stopped removing dead cattle in the same way as the Bhambis. They did not stop doing leather work altogether, though, as they made new shoes.

In 1977 removing dead cattle from the village was done by the Chamria Chamar caste in the Samalkha area of Haryana, but at Chelana in Rajasthan it was carried out by Bhangi sweepers.

The castes who left the work of removing cattle also stopped eating the meat of dead cattle. Hence, neither Chamar Julahe in Haryana nor the Bhambi in Rajasthan did so any longer. Bhangis in Rajasthan and Chamria Chamars in Haryana continued, though, which filled their stomachs but lowered their social status.

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### Chapter 21 Dipa Ram, the cobbler who did not obey

At Chelana around 2000 several men living in the western part of the village used to keep company on the _chabutra_ platform in front of Puna Ram Bhambi's small wooden shed, serving as a rudimentary shop. There they enjoyed the shade of the big _peepal_ trees at the bend of the bus road going to Pipar.

One of Puna Ram's bidi smoking customers was Mango Ram Bhambi. Tan Dan met Mango Ram at the chabutra on a hot sunny day in April 1999. Mango Ram played cards together with his caste fellows. Earlier he had been boycotted by them, as his father had not obeyed a decision of the caste panchayat, but in 1999 he again enjoyed the company of his Bhambi friends.

This is what happened to Mango Ram's father Dipa Ram:

Dipa Ram belonged to a cobbler family of a small village some 15 kms to the west of Chelana. There he lived up to early 1950s. As he was underemployed in his native village, he decided to move to Chelana, where he started to repair shoes.

All other Bhambis had stopped repairing shoes in the village. Dipa Ram was the only cobbler at Chelana for some time, and he had a good business. He earned more money than he would have done on any other work within his reach.

Not to repair shoes was a collective decision implemented through the thousands of local _kheda_ organizations of the Bhambi caste. The purpose was to raise the status of the Bhambi caste in the caste hierarchy. Therefore, all Bhambis had to obey. It was a matter of solidarity and group discipline.

But Dipa Ram did not bother. He violated the collective decision of his caste fellows and they punished him. It happened at a large meeting to which all Bhambi men of the area was called. People of a caste in western Rajasthan used to be organized into _kheda_ units covering 24 villages each. Also Chelana Bhambis belonged to such a _kheda_ unit. The caste council of that _kheda_ decided that Dipa Ram and his family should be outcasted.

He suffered _nyat bare_ , in Hindi called _jati bahar_ and _bahishkar_ , which means to be excluded from all social activities of the _biradri_ , his caste brethren.

Now all Bhambis had to show very clearly that they had nothing to do with Dipa Ram, the selfish cobbler who refused to leave his dirty job out of a selfish hunger for money, as they looked at it.

As Dipa Ram's bahu (daughter-in-law) lived in the same household as Dipa, all Bhambis outcasted her also. There was a risk that her parents' family would be outcasted, but it managed to escape by promising the caste panchayat that they would no more bring home their daughter from Dipa Ram's house.

Dipa Ram had two married daughters. Both of them ignored their father completely in order to save their in-law families (sasural). None of them ever visited Dipa Ram. If he would have tried to visit them, which he never did being a man of self-respect, they would have treated him as an untouchable. He would not be allowed to sit in their homes, but only outside the _angan_ , the house yard. They would not allow him to drink water from their vessels.

Dipa Ram had a strong mind. He did not look worried about being outcasted, but lived on sheerfully. It almost appeared, as if he had boycotted the rest of his caste. When some wellwisher advised him to live in peace with his caste brethren and enjoy their help and support he raised his arms, looked at his hands and said: "Yes, here are my two brothers, I will never leave them". He was in the habit of taking care of himself.

He managed to maintain a better material life than most other Bhambis thanks to his forbidden cobbler work. He could afford to a little meat and liqour now and then. Sometimes Dipa Ram's family had a feast on _halva_. It was a favourite dish to all villagers, a delicious sweet dish which most villagers could afford to eat only on special occasions. It was prepared of wheat flour and solidified sugarcane juice, called gur. Dipa Ram told his wife to prepare the halva in such a way that the smell would go all around the mohalla, appetizing his Bhambi neighbours. It was his way of showing them he was fit and strong, Tan Dan thought.

From Dipa Ram's house noisy film music was always heard, because Dipa Ram had bought a transistor radio which hang on a tree in front of his house. He was one of the first in the village to buy a radio, and he kept it on full volume. He was not very fond of the music himself, but he wanted his neighbours to remember that he was rich enough to keep a radio.

The radio consumed one dozen batteries per month, so he used to keep plenty of them in stock. In between the film songs there were advertisements for household items such as soap. As Dipa Ram had little knowledge of the world outside his home region, he thought the advertisements were orders from the Government. "Now everyone has to buy soap", he shouted.

Once when Tan Dan visited Dipa Ram there was a drama on the radio, perhaps from a Bombay film. Suddenly the heroes got excited and there was a lot of noise. Somebody passing by Dipa's house got curious and asked him what was happening in the radio. He told some ministers were quarreling. "These educated people quarrel like dogs, too."

One day in the early 1960s Tan Dan saw Dipa Ram dancing in front of his spacious house together with some friends. Jolly and self-confident, although outcasted.

Dipa Ram earned enough as a cobbler for being able to improve his house step by step. In the 1950s he had cleared the bush around his house. He had been allowed by the gram panchayat to keep quite a big house plot, as it was situated close to the bushy wasteland at the the western outskirts of the village. The demand of such land was small in those days. He built a wall around his big compound with a nice gate towards the village road. His house was small to start with but kept expanding. A strong house built of stones and mortar and with a roof of sandstone slabs. In the 1970s he had built four rooms in a row, which was more than his family required. A long house three metres wide.

It was the best house in this poor locality at the outskirts of the village, from where the country road turns toward Pipar.

Dipa Ram's granddaughter

Several years before Dipa Ram had been outcasted, his eldest daughter had been married into a Bhambi family of Luniavas village about ten kms to the north-east of Chelana. In the early 1970s she and her in-law family moved to Chelana, where they worked as agricultural labourers on irrigation farms. They had to find employment outside their own village, as they were short of food. Severe drought had hit western Rajasthan several years at a stretch.

At Chelana they built a simple shed where they lived year after year. The family lived in the same locality as Dipa Ram, not because he lived there, but because they wanted to be close to other labour families, who had squatted in the bushy wasteland outside Seri like themselves.

Also their daughter Kanta worked as an agricultural labourer all day long. In 1975 Tan Dan met her on her way back from the fields at sunset. Kanta was thirteen years. Although still a child she had been working as an agricultural labourer like her parents, and she was tired after a whole day's work.

Neither Kanta nor any other member of her household ever visited Dipa Ram. Tan Dan was surprised at such a strictness.

"Why don't you live with your grandfather? His house is big enough for all of you." "Don't you know?" Kanta retorted. "He repairs shoes. We have nothing to do with his _chula-peenda."_

Chula-peenda is Marwari for food and water, or rather, fireplace for cooking food and place for drinking water. She meant her family neither wanted to eat any food at Dipa Ram's house, nor drink any water water at that place.

" Why so inflexible? You could get his help", Tan Dan suggested.

Kanta looked at Tan Dan with serious eyes, and told him slowly : "For selfish reasons, how can you ignore this world? Educated people like you do not know how to behave. You will always be in trouble."

Tan Dan: "Many treat Bhambis as untouchables, and you suffer from it. How to get rid of that curse, if you people treat each others as untouchables."

Kanta got the impression that Tan Dan had no sense at all. "Go to your brothers and learn from them. All in the village respect them, because they know how to follow caste rules."

Kanta had married many years earlier, but she stilled lived with her parents, as she had not yet celebrated her Muklava. That is a family function celebrated after puberty as a kind of second marriage, although much simpler.

Muklava takes place after menstruation has started, that means when the girl has become old enough for sexual union. Then the young husband brings her home to her in-laws. The girl is dressed in different ways before and after Muklava. That his how Tan Dan could see, that Kanta had started to live with her in-laws, when he met her a few years later. The small rakhri ornament, which young girls wear on their foreheads in western Rajasthan, had been replaced by a bigger one. She did not wear her simple shirt and skirt any longer. Instead she was dressed in the full costume of marriage Bhambi women. The handwoven traditional skirt called _sari_ , and the brassier called _kanchli_.

Dipa Ram's son

Dipa Ram's son Mango Ram did go around visiting relatives in spite of such a lack of hospitality. Mango Ram worked as a labourer and did not help his father in repairing shoes. Nevertheless, he and his wife and his children were outcastes for the other Bhambis. Their only chance to get accepted by the caste community again was to repent in front of the caste panchayat and accept punishment. The whole family. But Dipa Ram refused to do so. He had married his children long ago, and he evidently did not fear the consequences of not getting the cooperation of his caste brethren for carrying out the final rites. Dipa Ram died as an outcaste in 1976.

When Dipa Ram died in 1976 Mango Ram became the head of the family. Nobody repaired shoes in their household any longer. The boycott continued, though. For example, nobody would give them water, and nobody would accept food cooked at Mango Ram's home. Nobody in the whole caste would be prepared to sit down and eat together with Mango Ram from the same plate.

To eat the same dish from the same thali plate was called _bhelo jimno_ , and it was an old tradition which strengthened the bonds between caste friends. Caste brothers used to eat so, when they wanted to show affection and friendship.

There was another problem, more important. Mango Ram had to get his children married. They had become teenagers and were quickly getting beyond the marriagable age, according to Bhambi standards. Most Bhambi families got their children married at a very tender age, just five or six years in many cases. Mango Ram realized, he had to get back into his caste as quickly as possible. Without grandsons his family would get extinct.

Perhaps it was this threat which compelled him to try his very best to find a way back to his caste _biradri_ again. Dipa Ram did not have this problem, as all his children had been married already before he and his family had settled at Chelana.

Mango Ram started to negotiate with his in-laws soon after his father's death. As told earlier, they had cut off all contacts with Dipa Ram's family, and for them their daughter, Mango Ram's wife, was an untouchable, too. They were as keen as Mango Ram on getting their son-in-law and his family accepted by the caste again. They promised Mango Ram to give him all help they could in his difficult task to soften all those who had outcasted Dipa Ram's families two decades earlier.

Through his in-laws Mango Ram approached important persons within the caste organization ( _kheda_ ) to which the Chelana Bhambis belonged. He wanted those within the kheda who had a well-wishing attitude to his in-laws to help them.

These members of the caste panchayat could do that by telling favourable things about Mango Ram to those influential Bhambis, who had strongly disliked Mango Ram's father Dipa Ram and still had grudge to him, although he was dead. Some old Bhambis still felt bitter about all the insults they had heard from Dipa, when they had tried to persuade him not to repair shoes and to be loyal to his caste.

Mango Ram had no enemies. He had nice manners and was always meek and soft to his unfriendly _biradri_ , as he understood he had to reach an agreement with them some day.

To soften all his father's enemies was a difficult task. Several rounds of persuasion were required. Many did not want to listen to Mango Ram directly, so his in-laws and other well-wishers helped him. Mango Ram tried to keep them all at good mood by offering small gifts now and then.

After more than a year of negotiation, the caste _panchayat_ decided to call a meeting of all Bhambi men of the _kheda_ to discuss Mango Ram's case. Such _kheda_ meetings used to go on for a long time. Matters were discussed slowly and thoroughly by the leaders of the caste at such a kheda meeting. It took at least one full day, and sometimes such meetings went on for several days, as the decision should be unison. Such was the tradition.

The participants were served food at regular hours, but Mango Ram was not allowed to take part in the meals before the _khera_ meeting had reached its decision about him. He was expected to pay for the meals, though, in case he would get readmitted to the caste. Otherwise, the caste panchayat would pay from its own fund, as they could not accept to be fed by an outcaste.

When the decision to receive Mango Ram back to his caste was taken, he gave his caste fellows a simple symbolic meal of _bati_ bread and _dal_. The money he had to spend on food at the meeting was small, though in comparison to the fine they decided that he should pay as a penance for all the trouble his family had created to the caste. He should arrange a big feast for all his caste fellows at his house, and he should bear the whole cost for the feast himself. It would take place a few weeks later.

The feast of readmission to the caste

A few weeks after the meeting the whole caste celebrated the feast at Mango Ram's house. Such a feast is called 'caste feast', _nyat ro jiman_.

All the 35 Bhambi families at Chelana and more than a thousand Bhambis from other villages of the khera attended the feast. The guests came from villages within a radius of about 40 kms from Chelana. To feed so many persons was far beyond the means of an ordinary villager. Therefore, money had to be borrowed and Mangoji borrowed six thousand Rupees from a Baniya who charged him high interest.

At the feast Mango Ram's family managed to carry out some social functions which had been long overdue. He married away his children and arranged his father's death rites. It was a good opportunity, as so many persons had gathered.

Mango Ram's children were wedded during the first night of the feast. Next morning they had a combined wedding meal and caste meal for readmittance ( _nyat ro jiman_ ).

Up to 1950s there used to be nothing but a feast for readmittance to the caste, but in the 1970s the caste panchayats allowed also other social activities at such feasts, perhaps because they had become so expensive.

The _nyat ro jiman_ at Mango Ram's house was also a _mrityo bhoj_ , an after-death meal. That function should take place on the twelfth day after death, but it had not been possible to arrange the death feast on that day due to the non-cooperation of the other caste members. Moreover, as a social welfare measure death meal had become illegal in India in the 1970s. Persons holding _mrityo bhoj_ could be fined or imprisoned, according to law. Therefore, people used to bribe the police before a death feast, Tan Dan told. In order to get their promise not to interfere.

Child marriages were also forbidden in the law, but they were safer for the villagers, as the police could not interfere on its own. Somebody had to complain and make a case ( _chalan_ ), whereas with regard to death meals the police could launch a case on its own.

The enforcement of the law against child marriages had not been tried by court or police up 1981, as far as Tan Dan knew.

After death-meal feasts, on the other hand, were actively persued after the Jats got political power in the 1950s. The Jat leaders thought the _mrityo bhoj_ feast was a great drag on their community. In the feudal time some Jat families were in debt for generations after such death meals.

The death meal was considered important for the ability of the dead person to reach heaven and get a good life in next birth. Therefore, the _biradri_ was in most cases intent on carrying out the _mrityo bhjoj_ in spite the risks involved. It was partly in order to avoid the risk of legal consequences that they used to combine the marriage feast and the mrityo bhoj. Mostly they had the marriage feast the first day and night and the death feast on the following day, when the crowd of caste people, the _biradri_ , were still assembled.

That was the normal procedure in castes with a tradition of mass marriages, i.e. of marrying many children at the same time. Bhambi , Jat, Rebari, Mali, Bavri, Matigar Kumar and Khetad Kumar are such castes, as Tan Dan had witnessed many times himself. It was probably done by a few more including Sirvi, the farmer caste with many families in the Jalagarh area south of Chelana.

The after-death ceremony for Dipa Ram was carried out in the morning on the last day of the feast It went on for about an hour. After that the _mrityo bhoj_ meal was served to the guests. The cooking and eating went on for the whole day.

The after-death ceremony was called _ganga jal_ _bartavno_. It means water from the Ganges river and the use of such water had a central place in the function. It had been brought from Hardvar, the ancient pilgrimage place on the Ganges river near the Himalayan mountains. The water was brought to Chelana in aluminium jars by the pilgrims of the Bhambi caste. Such a vessel was opened and sprinkled on the food and the people gathered.

These Hindu rituals had been carried out by the high castes for a long time. Also untouchable castes such as Bhambis and Bhangis did so in the 1970s. Among the low castes in western Rajasthan the use of Ganga water and similar customs might be fairly recent.

Mango Ram after his return to the Bhambi caste

Tan Dan met Mango Ram in 1981, when he had become accepted by his caste again. He had longed for the company of his caste brethren during the many years of outcaste. He walked around in the village like a gentleman wearing a bright turban and clean clothes. He was met with respect everywhere. When he met his caste people at the bazar, at the bus station and other public places, they expected him to offer _bidis_ (small cigarettes), and tea. As a sign of friendship. Mango Ram told Tan Dan, he could not afford so many friends. He was poorer than ever, as he did his best to pay back his loan. More than half of it was still outstanding, and it was a constant headache to him. He worked as a tractor driver, but not regularly, as he did not get enough jobs. In between he worked as an unskilled labourer. It was hard-earned money.

Why Mango Ram's feast became so expensive

Bhambi was one of the many castes in rural western Rajasthan who arranged marriage feasts for a number of children at a time. That custom continued at Chelana and elsewhere up to the end of the 20th century. Such marriage functions were in many cases arranged by a number of families, who shared the costs. But at the marriage and after death meal feast at Mango Ram's house, he had to pay all of it. The feast was basically a punishment for getting the permission to join the caste again, so it was meant to be expensive.

The fine Mango Ram had to pay was called _khedo jimavan ri lag_ in Marvari. It means the fine ( _lag_ ) to feed ( _jimavan_ ) the caste organization ( _khedo_ ).

Other major castes such as Jat also have this fine.

The mighty brotherhood

The villagers of western Rajasthan called the brotherhood of their caste _Nyat Ganga_. Nyat means caste and Ganga is river Ganges, the sacred river. They meant that their caste brotherhood was as overwhelming as the Ganga godess. When somebody was taken back to his caste again after being outcasted, the villagers used to say: " _Nyat Ganga ujal dio_." His caste had made him shine again. He had got back his brightness, as he was no longer boycotted by caste fellow. The sins had left him, being submerged into the water of the Ganges. As for Mango Ram, it was rather his father's misdeeds he had redressed. Mango Ram's caste brothers had cleaned Mango Ram by allowing him to pay a heavy fine for the misdeeds of his father Dipa Ram.

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### Chapter 22 The new cobblers at Chelana

The land reform was the first thing the newly elected Congress Government of the state tried to implement in 1952. It was a necessary step for ending the highly exploitative rule of the Rajput village thakurs and other feudal lords. In the first place the land reform was beneficial to the big peasant castes, especially the Jat caste, but also Bhambis benefited. Bhambi families that rented land of the jagirdars and managed to become owners of such land, usually after some delay.

Many Bhambis were farm serfs and other menials rather than tenants, and they did not get any land. Neither did the Bhambis who worked as shoemakers, weavers and other traditional professions of the Bhambi caste. Nor the bonded labourers who were in debt.

In 1952 most Bhambis at Chelana were unaware of their approaching social liberation. They were badly informed feudal subjects who suffered from the social stigma of being untouchables in the eyes of other Hindus. At the time of the land reform in the early 1950s, the main concern of many Bhambi leaders in western Rajasthan was not land, but leather and dead cattle. Bhambis were always told that they lived in such a misery because of their bad habits, and now they saw a chance to do something about it. They wanted to raise the status of their caste, by showing others that Bhambis were good Hindus, who did not touch ritually polluting items such as raw hides and old leather.

Apart from Dipa Ram there was only one more Bhambi who tried to work as a cobbler at Chelana after 1952, and that was Dana Ram. He came from some other village and settled at Chelana in the 1960s. He left the work after some pressure, but he continued to live in the village.

For one or two years also Dola Ram Jetia, an outcasted Jetia from Jetaran repaired shoes at Chelana, but then he left for some other village.

There were men of castes still lower in rank than the Bhambis with criticized caste professions . Unemployed and often hungry. They tried to find new ways of supporting themselves, and for such men repairing shoes could be a good job. It was evidently the case with the Shanshis. Several men of that caste became cobblers in the Chelana area in the 1970s.

The Shanshi outlaws from the bush jungle became the new cobblers

In the old days the Shanshis lived as outlaws in the bush jungle desert of western Rajasthan, but the colonial British administration started to curb their criminal activities and they got less and less opportunities to support themselves as thieves and robbers.

Hunters of wild life in the desert also got difficulties with the advent of modern life and economic growth, as the wilderness kept shrinking in western Rajasthan. Some Shanshi men started to work as cobblers to support themselves and their families. The Bhambis considered themselves much superior to the Shanshis, and it is possible that entry of Shanshis into the cobblery profession induced Bhambi cobblers to drop out. To keep the distance between the two castes.

In the old days, when there were neither shops nor bazars in the village, the Bhambi cobblers had a personal jajmani relationship with their client families. The Shanshis of the late 20th century, on the other hand, had stray customers at the village bazar, with whom they had no mutual bonds at all.

Two brothers of the Shanshi caste worked as cobblers at the Chelana bazar already in the 1960s, Tan Dan remembered. Also in 1987 there were Shanshi shoemakers, cobblers, at the village bazar. In 1995 some cobblers of the Shanshi caste started at the Chelana new bus station. At that time there were no cobblers from any other caste at Chelana.

The Shanshi cobblers kept rubber tyres from trucks and from these they cut pieces when repairing shoes. Rubber and plastic were modern materials that hardly could be objectionable to pious high caste Hindus, as that material had no relation to the sacred cow at all.

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### Supplements

Here I have put some quotations from literature about untouchability and leather work in other regions and ages. It is an attempt to shed some light on Tan Dan's narrations from a wider perspective.

Contents:

Untouchability as a way of subduing defeated rulers alien to the Aryan Hindus

Local groups of aboriginal origin were also made untouchable chamar serfs

Thoughts in the early Sanskrit literature about the Chamars in north India

Dasyus, untouchables of the Vedic time?

Chamars might have become treated as untouchables from the Gupta age onwards

Untouchables became untouchables to the savarn Hindu due to meateating?

About the size of the Chamar population and other untouchables

Persons of the same caste were recorded under different caste names in the 1961 population census.

Caste names with a positive value loading

About caste organization and caste panchayat rules in India

Some Chamar subcastes left leather work long ago in other parts of India

Attempts to raise in the caste hierarchy by changing the name of the caste

Conclusion

Untouchability as a way of subduing defeated rulers alien to the Aryan Hindus

There were probably more reasons for discrimination than the concern for ritual purity. Some customs and beliefs of Chamars and other untouchables were different from those of high caste Hindus, which indicates a different ethnic origin of a pre-Aryan nature, as mentioned by Briggs.

"The subjugation of tribe after tribe has been a recurring phenomenon in India. These movements have occurred over wide areas, and over limited portions of the country as well. Local history fully illustrates this fact, and we may picture the flux of rising and falling tribes and clans under repeated foreign and local waves of conquest, and consequent reconstruction, in more or less detail, of the social distribution of races and clans, as a fairly constant process. This means that the fixed status of an occupational group may go hand in hand with the repeated recruitment of the group by those who have been degraded from better positions. In some instances this may mean that certain clans were unable to maintain their identity and prestige with the changing order, and that consequently they have sunk to lower levels. These contentions are borne out by many got, or family, and sub-caste names; for example, \- Ujjaini, Kanaujiya, Chauhan, Saksena, Sakarwar -- These are names of Rajput clans, and as applied to the Chamar, suggest dependency."

(Briggs, 1920, p.18)

Local groups of aboriginal origin were also made untouchable chamar serfs

Moreover, there have been large accessions to the Chamar caste from below. "Got and sub-caste names show that many Chamars have sprung from the Dom, -- the Kol, the Jaiswar, and other tribes.

\- The caste, then, has been recruited from numerous sources. Many people and even whole sections of tribes have risen up from the lower levels and entered the caste, and this process is still going on. On the other hand, various political changes have resulted in the subjugation of large groups, who consequently were forced into this lower stratum. Still, the caste is predominantly non-Aryan in character. This is accounted for by the fact that to the basal group, which was of aboriginal origin, large recruitments have been made from below." (Briggs, 1920, p.19)

"The Chamar leather workers are essentially non-Aryan. It has maintained itself through the centuries in its traditional occupation. But the caste is today a very large one, and it would be difficult to account for it merely on the ground that it has been self-propagating. As now constituted, the caste is made up of a heterogenous group of peoples. This is illustrated, in the first place, by the fact that most of the sub-castes of the Chamars are found in fairly well defined areas, and these may be described as local groups." (Briggs, 1920, p.14)

Thoughts in the early Sanskrit literature about the Chamars in north India

As told by Briggs, 1920, "The tanners of leather, the preparers of skins, the manufacturers of leather articles, and the makers of shoes belong to a well defined class in the Indian social order. Most of these workers in Upper India, are today included under the general term Chamar. This occupational group may be traced back to very early times. Tanners (Charmamna) are mentioned in the Rig Veda, in the later Vedic literature, and in the Brahmanas."

Manu tells that "all those tribes in this world, which are excluded from (the community of) those born from the mouth, the arms, the thighs, and the feet (of Brahman), are called Dasyus, whether they speak the language of the Mlecchas (barbarians) or that of the Aryas." This excluded group was composed of mixed castes and aborigines. The term Chandala was applied to those who were of "polluted" Aryan blood, and that of Dasyu (slave, native) to those whom the Aryas had conquered. The words Mlecchas, Chandala and Dasyu were sometimes used as synonyms for the degraded section of the population.

Dasyus, untouchables of the Vedic time?

Briggs writes that the Dasyu was looked upon as inferior and unclean even in Vedic times. The Dasyu lived on the outskirts of the village. (Judging from the old hymns.) He was never admitted to the Aryan community, and the discriminated Dasyu group included tanners and other leather workers. They were treated as untouchables, evidently. Already more than two thousand years ago.

Chamars might have become treated as untouchables from the Gupta age onwards

It seems Brahmins abandoned slaughtering cows and other cattle for their worshipping rites in response to the spread of Buddhism in India. Brahmanism got strong again in the Gupta age when the Brahmins became vegetarians and started to discriminate against those who continued to eat meat and especially beef some 300-500 A.D. It is possible that Chamars got a more and more humiliating treatment as untouchables, when the caste system in that age got increasingly strict in its implementation. Possibly, the inability of the Chamars to follow the change in Brahmin religion towards rules of non-violence and vegetarianism made the Chamars backward and unacceptable in the eyes of the high caste Hindus, to the extent that the Brahmin dominated elite started to treat Chamars as untouchables. (Cf. Ambedkar, 1948.)

Untouchables became untouchables to the savarn Hindu due to meateating?

Ambedkar believed that the Broken Men who became Untouchables in the course of time, originally were stray groups of defeated and split tribes who took shelter at Settled villagers and

"got the right to collect food,

the right to collect foodgrain at the harvest seasons,

the right to appropriate the dead animals belonging to the villagers."

against providing certain basic service such as being watchmen protecting the village against external dangers. (Ibid. pp. 33-34)

He argued that the Untouchables had not become untouchable to the Hindus because they belonged to a different race or because they had filthy occupations but because of killing cows and eating beef became a mortal sin or a capital offence by the Gupta Kings in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. Headed by the Brahmins the major part of the Hindus stopped eating beef, but the marginal group of Broken Men living outside the village did not, as they had become dependent on carrion beef out of poverty. The Brahmins took over the vegetarianism of the Buddhist and added the conditions about cows and beef as a means of getting back the control over the masses, according to Ambedkar's hypothesis. They had lost much of their authority to the Buddhists from the rule of Ashoka around 250 B.C. due to the vegetarianism, and now several centuries later the Brahmins won it back from the Buddhists by adding the cow and beef conditions to the dogmas of non-violence and vegetarianism.

The leather work prejudice hit all chamars regardless of their real work

Whatever the original reason, castes with leather work as their traditional occupation have been looked upon as untouchable Chamar castes, even though most people of these castes lived on completely different activities such as agriculture. Chamar was the biggest group of untouchable Hindus, comprising millions of persons in many parts of north India including Rajasthan.

"The Chamar's very name connects him with carcasses of cattle. Besides, he not only removes the skins from the cattle that have died, but also he eats the flesh. The defilement and degradation resulting from these acts are insurmountable. The fact that the Chamar is habitually associated in thought with these practices may partially explain why the large non-leather-working sections of the caste are still rated as untouchable." Briggs, 1920, p.20.

About the size of the Chamar population and other untouchables

In British India there was detailed population statistics every tenth year up to 1941 about all these untouchable Chamar castes. In Rajasthan from 1891, at least.

After India's independence from British rule in 1947, Chamar castes continued to be recorded in the official population statistics, as these castes were included among the Scheduled castes. About 15 per cent of the Indian population belonged to the Scheduled Castes, who were roughly equivalent to the untouchable Hindu castes. A large part of these were Chamars. Scheduled Castes were recorded separately, in order to make it possible for members of these depressed castes to claim certain rights and facilities, which would help them in their social and economic upliftment.

In Jodhpur District about 13 % of the population belonged to the Scheduled castes in the 1960s and 1970s. About 60% of the Scheduled caste people belonged to castes of the Chamar type. These subcastes were called Megh or Meghwal, Chamar, Bhambhi, Jatav, Jatia, Mochi, Raidass, Raigar and Ramdasia in the 1961 Population Census. (Agarwal, 1979).

Persons of the same caste were recorded under different caste names in the 1961 population census.

According to the Jodhpur Gazetteer of Jodhpur District, (Agarwal, 1979, p.77), "An analysis of the data of 1961 shows that among the Scheduled Castes, Megh or Meghwal formed the largest single caste or group (39,076) consisting of various castes like Chamar, Bhambhi, Jatav, Jati, Mochi, Raidass, Raigar or Ramdasia. The Bhangi caste formed the third largest group (7,469), followed by Bawaria (4,991), Sargara (4,957), Thori or Nayak (3,614), Dome (2,358), Sansi (1,713), Garo or Garura or Gurda (1,212) and Balai (1,158). Persons in other groups were much less. They were: Nut (797), Khatik (689), Bargi or Vargi or Birgi (465), Gavaria (452), Kalbelia (276), -- Valmiki (13)-- Among the Scheduled Tribes, the largest group (14.75) consisted of Bhils followed by Minas (179) and Garasias.--"

Evidently the recording of these caste names was a mechanical exercise with no attempt to analysis. Because Mochis were not a part of the Meghval caste. And Meghval is a synonym of the Bhambi caste in western Rajasthan. The Valmiki is a synonym of the Bhangi caste, not two different castes.

Caste names with a positive value loading

Most Bhambis called themselves Meghwals towards the end of the 20th century, both at Chelana and elsewhere in Rajasthan. Tan Dan told, that Megha was a saint of the Bhambi caste. He became famous, so all the Bhambis wanted to be known as Meghvanshis i.e. his offspring. That is why they call themselves Meghvals just as Regar often are called Raidasi.

Similarly, those of the Bhangi caste in independent India call themselves Valmiki, claiming an association with that ancient rishi. The name occurred in the population statistics in 1961 and fifty years later it had become the most popular name of the caste. At Chelana the villagers used to call them Harijans. It is an epithet Mohandas Gandhi gave untouchables in an attempt to raise their status.

Bhangi, the traditional caste name for the sweepers, was regarded as a kind of abuse even among the sweepers themselves, Tan Dan thought. Therefore, in Rajasthan, those belonging to the Bhangi Sweeper caste were normally called Harijans. Persons of no other caste were called Harijans in Rajasthan.

In my opinion there is nothing wrong with either the Bhambi or Bhangi as names. The fault is at those who discriminate and show contempt to people who carry out useful work in the society under difficult circumstances. Those who do not agree that Homo sapiens is the only species ( _jati, kom_ ) of the human beings on this planet.

About caste organization and caste panchayat rules in India

Chamars such as Bhambis showed their organizational strength and strong will-power in 1952, when they all abandoned leather work in northwestern India.

Regarding the strong caste organization of low ranked castes Hutton, 1946, p. 99, states: "It has frequently been observed that the lower the caste in the social scale, the stronger its combination and the more efficient its organization. - in northern India at any rate the fact is patent. - Indeed, the high castes rarely have any organization strictly comparable to that of the lower ones. - Generally speaking, however, the caste councils of northern India seem to operate for smaller areas than in the south. - Each panchayat has a headman commonly known as sarpanch - 'the head of five'."

"The vast majority of caste matter, however, are nowadays disposed of by the caste councils which exercise the final powers of expulsion and restoration to caste as well as imposing fines and other penalties for less serious breaches of custom.

Now it is clear, of course, that with a widely spread caste the ideal of a council for the whole caste is impossible of attainment. The whole caste may, it is true, nowadays, have a sabha, an association, that is, with branches all over India and even a central headquarter. But such an organization, if it exists, must be a recent development subsequent to the introduction of a cheap postal system and rapid communications of various kinds, and it has not replaced the old system of caste control for the purpose of the imposition of sanctions, though it may represent the caste for purposes of social or political agitation. The caste council can only act for a limited area, an area small enough for the members of the council to assemble and for members of the caste within the area to have some knowledge of each other as general rule. In practice the members of the caste in such an area will usually form a nearly related group and are spoken of collectively; in northern India, as a biradri or as bhaiband, that is, as a brotherhood, an association of kinsmen. They may, indeed, actually constitute an exogamous unit within the embracing endogamous caste, but none the less act for the caste as a whole in enforcing sanctions on the caste members within their sphere of action. In any case they will not consist of a group so large as to embrace more than one endogamous unit, since an endogamous subcaste will normally have rules varying from those of other subcastes and each must administer its own rules."

Some Chamar subcastes left leather work long ago in other parts of India

Some Chamar subcastes had stopped working with leather long before the Bhambis left such work in 1952, and it is possible that the Bhambis in western Rajasthan got some inspiration from them, when deciding to leave leather work.

"The Chamar is not now chiefly a tanner and a worker in leather," Briggs wrote already in 1920. In the United Provinces the great majority of the Chamars were agriculturists. In Punjab, they were an extensive class of low-caste cultivators.

Further to the south, in central India, the Satnami caste tried to make themselves accepted in the Hindu society, although stemming from the Chamars. The great bulk of the Satnamis, did not touch leather at all. "The Satnamis, a religious group in the Central Provinces, have become practically a new sub-caste. These Chamars, who make up the largest and oldest Chamar group in this part of India, have given up leather work entirely, and have become cultivators. Many of them have tenant rights, and a number of them have obtained villages."

Figures from the United Provinces showed that that 78% of the Chamars were cultivators. Only five per cent were leather workers. The rest had other occupations. They were field-labourers, wood-cutters, artisans, workmen and domestic servants. In central India he was also a dealer in cattle to some extent.

Dosadh was another Chamar subcaste who kept aloof from typical Chamar hide/leather work in order to raise in status. Already around 1900!

"The Dosadh or Dusadh, found in the Lucknow and Gorakhpur Divisions and in the lower Doab, is a weaver, a groom, and a field-labourer. He keeps pigs. In Bengal the Dosadh claims to be of higher standing than the Chamar. Formerly, in the east, he was reckoned as a Chamar, but now he assumes an independent position. He no longer works in leather, nor does he eat carrion, nor does his wife practice midwifery. He often works as a house-servant. He is on friendly terms with the Chamars and lives next to them in the villages. Many Dosadhs have gone to the cities to work in the factories." (Briggs, 1920, p.26.)

Attempts to raise in the caste hierarchy by changing the name of the caste

In some areas certain weavers tried to cut off their Chamar past completely. They called themselves Kori, and did not accept any caste relationship to weavers calling themselves Kori Chamars. "The Kori (Weaver) often lives alongside of him, and was undoubtedly formerly a Chamar. In some places people still remember when the Kori and the Kori Chamar ate together and intermarried." (Briggs, 1920, p.25)

Cf. Hutton, 1946, p.112: "The caste system enables the caste to act corporately and to control the behaviour of its component members. It is able in this way to raise its position in society. This may not be easy to achieve and may perhaps be accomplished only in the course of generations, but it certainly has been and can be done. By organization and propaganda a caste can change its name and in the course of time get a new one accepted, and by altering its canons of behaviour in the matter of diet and marriage can increase the estimation in which it is held. Thus the Chandals of Bengal, bearing a name despised if not abhorred in Hindu tradition, have succeeded in getting themselves generally known by a name, which at least is free from traditional obloquy. Perhaps the most usual method of procedure is to take the name of some much higher caste and qualify it by an adjective, which it is hoped, no doubt, will in the course of time to come, to have less significance than the caste name chosen."

### Conclusion

The quotations show that leather-worker castes tried to raise in the caste ridden Hindu society already in the 19th century in some parts of India. By abandoning leather work. Not in Rajasthan, though. The movement in 1952 to quit leather work in western Rajasthan was thus a part of a larger social trend, which had been going on for a long time in India, and the speed of its implementation in western Rajasthan shows it was long overdue and only held back by feudal oppression. As soon as the lid was removed, the liberated feudal serfs stopped leather work immediately, in the hope of being recognized as men of honour. Was it social disgrace or the filthiness of the work that troubled them most? Probably the first.

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_Explanation of Indian words (Hindi and Marwari)_

bajra. _Pennisetum typhoides_ , pearl millet. One of the few cereals cultivated as a rainfed crop in hot sandy semi-arid western Rajasthan.

bhambi. The name of a caste in western Rajasthan which were feudal serfs, also working with leather, removal of dead cattle and weaving. After 1952 most of them lived on agriculture and as wage-earning labourers

chamar. The name of a group of castes traditionally working with leather and hides.

chulha. The fireplace for cooking food.

dhoti. Loin cloth used as trousers. Folded and tucked in from the back.

endogamous. A group of people who marry with each others, but not with outsiders.

ghee. Butteroil, clarified liquid butter.

gur. unrefined sugar made of solidified boiled sugarcane juice.

jajman. A customary work relation going on for generations between a family providing a service and its client families.

kheda. The local organization of a caste. It covered all members of the caste in a group of 24 villages. Most Rajasthani castes were organized in kheda units, each with its own caste panchayat.

kom. Caste is called _kom_ in Rajasthani, and _jati_ in Hindi.

Marwar. The region in western Rajasthan which earlier was a separate state. It covered many districts from Nagaur in the north to Jalor in the south.

mundan. Sacrificing tuss of hair of small child to the gods.

murti. Statue of a deity.

_samanti_. Feudal lords, masters in the village.

savarn Hindu. Hindus belonging to castes of the three upper varna Brahmin, Kshatriya (Rajputs, warriors) and Vaishya (Baniyas, merchants). Ambedkar, 1946, quoting the shastras, use the word _traivarna_ for the three upper Hindu varnas, and call people of all the four varnas savarn.

varna. Varnas are the ancient classes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishya, and Shudra into which the thousands of caste groups of today somehow is being fitted. People often talk about these varnas, as if they were castes, but they are rather categories of castes.

Reference

Agarwal, 1979, Rajasthan District Gazetteers

Briggs, G.W. 1920. The religious life of India. The Chamar. Calcutta.

Hutton, J.H. 1963. Caste in India. Its nature, function, and origins. Oxford etc.

Marriott, McKim. 1968. Caste ranking and food transactions: A matrix analysis. In: Singer, M. and Cohn, B.S. Structure and change in Indian society. Chicago.

Singh, M.H., 1990, The castes of Marwar. Census Report of 1891. Jodhpur.

Cover image

Photo: Tan Dan Detha.

***

That was all for the time being, but Tan Dan has more to tell.

If you have any comments on this book, please mail to me. Any suggestion for improvement is most welcome.

My e-mail adress is sonlal41@hotmail.com

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