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4. Social customs.

5. Occupation.

are not shaved until the last day of mourning. Balls of rice are then offered to the dead, and the caste people are feasted. Oblations of water are offered to ancestors in the month of Kunwar (September-October).

The caste do not admit outsiders. In the matter of food they eat flesh and fish, but abstain from liquor and from eating fowls, except in the Maratha country. They will take pakka food or that cooked without water from Gūjars, Raghuvansis and Lodhis. In the Nagpur country, where the difference between katcha and pakka food is not usually observed, they will not take it from any but Maratha Brāhmans. Ahīrs and Dhīmars are said to eat with them, and the northern Brāhmans will take water from them. They have a caste panchayat or committee with a hereditary president called Sethia, whose business it is to eat first when admitting a person who has been put out of caste. Killing a cat or a squirrel, selling a cow to a butcher, growing hemp or selling shoes are offences which entail temporary excommunication from caste. A woman who commits adultery with a man of another caste is permanently excluded. The Kirārs are tall in stature and well and stoutly built. They have regular features and are generally of a fair colour. They are regarded as quarrelsome and untruthful, and as tyrannical landlords. As agriculturists they are supposed to be of encroaching tendencies, and the proverbial prayer attributed to them is, “O God, give me two bullocks, and I shall plough up the common way." Another proverb quoted in Mr. Standen's Betül Settlement Report, in illustration of their avarice, is " If you put a rupee between two Kirārs, they become like mast buffaloes in Kunwar." The men always wear turbans, while the women may be distinguished in the Maratha country by their adherence to the dress of the northern Districts. Girls are tattooed on the back of their hands before they begin to live with their husbands. A woman may not name her husband's elder brother or even touch his clothes or the vessels in which he has eaten food. They are not distinguished for cleanliness.

Agriculture and the service of the village headman are the traditional occupations of Kirārs. In Nagpur they are considered to be very good cultivators, but they have no

II

KOHLI

493

special reputation in the northern Districts. About a thousand of them are landowners, and the large majority are tenants. They grow garden crops and sugarcane, but abstain from the cultivation of hemp.

Kohli.-A small caste of cultivators found in the 1. General

1

Marathi-speaking tracts of the Wainganga Valley, comprised notice. in the Bhandāra and Chanda Districts. They numbered about 26,000 persons in 1911. The Kohlis are a notable caste as being the builders of the great irrigation reservoirs or tanks, for which the Wainganga Valley is celebrated. The water is used for irrigating rice and sugarcane, the latter being the favourite crop of the Kohlis. The origin of the caste is somewhat doubtful. The name closely resembles that of the Koiri caste of market-gardeners in northern India; and the terms Kohiri and Kohli are used there as variations of the caste name Koiri. The caste themselves have a tradition that they were brought to Bhandāra from Benares by one of the Gond kings of Chanda on his return from a visit to that place; and the Kohlis of Bhandāra say that their first settlement in the Central Provinces was at Lānji, which lies north of Bhandara in Bālāghāt. But on the other hand all that is known of their language, customs, and sept or family names points to a purely Maratha origin, the caste being in all these respects closely analogous to the Kunbis. The Settlement Officer of Chanda, Colonel Lucie Smith, stated that they thought their forefathers came from the south. They tie their head-cloths in a similar fashion to the Gāndlis, who are oilmen from the Telugu country. If they belonged to the south of India they might be an offshoot from the wellknown Koli tribe of Bombay, and this hypothesis appears the more probable. As a general rule castes from northern India settling in the Maratha country have not completely abandoned their ancestral language and customs even after a residence of several centuries. In the case of such castes as the Panwars and Bhoyars their foreign extraction can be detected at once; and if the Kohlis had come from Hindustān the rule would probably hold good with them. On

1 Mr. Lawrence's Bhandara Settlement Report (1867), p. 46.

the other hand the Kolis have in some parts of Bombay now taken to cultivation and closely resemble the Kunbis. In Satāra it is said that they associate and occasionally eat with Kunbis, and their social and religious customs resemble those of the Kunbi caste. They are quiet, orderly, settled and hard-working. Besides fishing they work ferries along the Krishna, are employed in villages as watercarriers, and grow melons in river-beds with much skill. The Kolis of Bombay are presumably the same tribe as the Kols of Chota Nagpur, and they probably migrated to Gujarāt along the Vindhyan plateau, where they are found in considerable numbers, and over the hills of Rājputāna and Central India. The Kols are one of the most adaptive of all the non-Aryan tribes, and when they reached the sea they may have become fishermen and boatmen, and practised these callings also in rivers. From plying on rivers they might take to cultivating melons and garden-crops on the stretches of silt left uncovered in their beds in the dry season, which is the common custom of the boating and fishing castes. And from this, as seen in Satāra, some of them attained to regular cultivation and, modelling themselves on the Kunbis, came to have nearly the same status. They may thus have migrated to Chanda and Bhandara with the Kunbis, as their language and customs would indicate, and retaining their preference for irrigated and gardencrops have become expert growers of sugarcane. The description which has been received of the Kohlis of Bhandara would be rather favourable than otherwise to the hypothesis of their ultimate origin from the Kol tribe, allowing for their having acquired the Maratha language and customs from a lengthened residence in Bombay. It has been mentioned above that the Kohlis have a legend of their ancestors having come from Benāres, but this story appears to be not infrequently devised as a means of obtaining increased social estimation, Benāres being the principal centre of orthodox Hinduism. Thus the Dangris, a small caste of vegetable- and melon-growers who are certainly an offshoot of the Kunbis, and therefore of Marātha extraction, have the same story. As regards the tradition 1 Bombay Gazetteer, Satāra, p. 106.

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