The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India Volume II Part 45

After a birth the mother is allowed no food for some days except country sugar and dates. The child is given some honey and castor-oil for the first two days and is then allowed to suckle the mother. A pit is dug inside the lying-in room, and in this are deposited water and the first cuttings of the nails and hair of the child. It is filled up and on her recovery the mother bows before it, praying for similar safe deliveries in future and for the immunity of the child from physical ailments. After the birth of a male child the mother is impure for seven days and for five days after that of a female.

4. Religion.

The princ.i.p.al deity of the Dhobis is Ghatoia, the G.o.d of the _ghat_ or landing-place on the river to which they go to wash their clothes. Libations of liquor are made to him in the month of Asarh (June), when the rains break and the rivers begin to be flooded. Before entering the water to wash the clothes they bow to the stone on which these are beaten out, asking that their work may be quickly finished; and they also pray to the river deity to protect them from snakes and crocodiles. They worship the stone on the Dasahra festival, making an offering to it of flowers, turmeric and cooked food. The Dhobi's washing-stone is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of departed Dhobis when revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and is held to have magical powers. If a man requires a love-charm he should steal a _supari_ or areca-nut from the bazar at night or on the occasion of an eclipse. The same night he goes to the Dhobi's stone and sets the nut upon it. He breaks an egg and a cocoanut over the stone and burns incense before it. Then he takes the nut away and gives it to the woman of his fancy, wrapped up in betel-leaf, and she will love him. Their chief festivals are the Holi and Diwali, at which they drink a great deal. The dead are buried or burnt as may be convenient, and mourning is observed for three days only, the family being purified on the Sunday or Wednesday following the death. They have a caste committee whose president is known as Mehtar, while other officials are the Chaudhri or vice-president, and the Badkur, who appoints dates for the penal feasts and issues the summons to the caste-fellows. These posts are hereditary and their holders receive presents of a rupee and a cloth when members of the caste have to give expiatory feasts.

5. Occupation: washing clothes.

Before washing his clothes the Dhobi steams them, [551] hanging them in a bundle for a time over a cauldron of boiling water. After this he takes them to a stream or pond and washes them roughly with fuller's earth. The washerman steps nearly knee-deep into the water, and taking a quant.i.ty of clothes by one end in his two hands he raises them aloft in the air and brings them down heavily upon a huge stone slab, grooved, at his feet. This threshing operation he repeats until his clothes are perfectly clean. In Saugor the clothes are rubbed with wood-ashes at night and beaten out in water with a stick in the morning. Silk clothes are washed with the nut of the _ritha_ tree (_Sapindus emarginatus_) which gives a lather like soap. Sir H. Risley writes of the Dacca washermen: [552] "For washing muslins and other coloured garments well or spring water is alone used; but if the articles are the property of a poor man or are commonplace, the water of the nearest tank or river is accounted sufficiently good. Indigo is in as general use as in England for removing the yellowish tinge and whitening the material. The water of the wells and springs bordering on the red laterite formation on the north of the city has been for centuries celebrated, and the old bleaching fields of the European factories were all situated in this neighbourhood. Various plants are used by the Dhobis to clarify water such as the _nirmali_ (_Strychnos potatorum_), the _piu_ (_Basella_), the _nagphani_ (_Cactus indicus_) and several plants of the mallow family. Alum, though not much valued, is sometimes used." In most Districts of the Central Provinces the Dhobi is employed as a village servant and is paid by annual contributions of grain from the cultivators. For ordinary washing he gets half as much as the blacksmith or carpenter, or 13 to 20 lbs. of grain annually from each householder, with about another 10 lbs. at seedtime or harvest. When he brings the clothes home he also receives a meal or a _chapati_, and well-to-do persons give him their old clothes as a present. In return for this he washes all the clothes of the family two or three times a month, except the loin-cloths and women's bodices which they themselves wash daily. The Dhobi is also employed on the occasion of a birth or a death. These events cause impurity and hence all the clothes of all the members of the family must be washed when the impurity ceases. In Saugor when a man dies the Dhobi receives eight annas and for a woman four annas, and similar rates in the case of the birth of a male or female child. When the first son is born in a family the Dhobi and barber place a bra.s.s vessel on the top of a pole and tie a flag to it as a cloth and take it round to all the friends and relations of the family, announcing the event. They receive presents of grain and money which they expend on a drinking-bout.

6. Social position.

The Dhobi is considered to be impure, and he is not allowed to come into the houses of the better castes nor to touch their water-vessels. In Saugor he may come as far as the veranda but not into the house. His status would in any case be low as a village menial, but he is specially degraded, Mr. Crooke states, by his task of washing the clothes of women after child-birth and his consequent a.s.sociation with puerperal blood, which is particularly abhorred. Formerly a Brahman did not let the Dhobi wash his clothes, or, if he did, they were again steeped in water in the house as a means of purification. Now he contents himself with sprinkling the clean clothes with water in which a piece of gold has been dipped. The Dhobi is not so impure as the Chamar and Basor, and if a member of the higher castes touches him inadvertently it is considered sufficient to wash the face and hands only and not the clothes.

Colonel Tod writes [553] that in Rajputana the washermen's wells dug at the sides of streams are deemed the most impure of all receptacles. And one of the most binding oaths is that a man as he swears should drop a pebble into one of these wells, saying, "If I break this oath may all the good deeds of my forefathers fall into the washerman's well like this pebble." Nevertheless the Dhobi refuses to wash the clothes of some of the lowest castes as the Mang, Mahar and Chamar. Like the Teli the Dhobi is unlucky, and it is a bad omen to see him when starting on a journey or going out in the morning. But among some of the higher castes on the occasion of a marriage the elder members of the bridegroom's family go with the bride to the Dhobi's house. His wife presents the bride with betel-leaf and in return is given clothes with a rupee. This ceremony is called _sohag_ or good fortune, and the present from the Dhobin is supposed to be lucky. In Berar the Dhobi is also a Balutedar or village servant. Mr. Kitts writes of him: [554] "At a wedding he is called upon to spread the clothes on which the bridegroom and his party alight on coming to the bride's house; he also provides the cloth on which the bride and bridegroom are to sit and fastens the _kankan_ (bracelet) on the girl's hand. In the Yeotmal District the barber and the washerman sometimes take the place of the maternal uncle in the _jhenda_ dance; and when the bridegroom, a.s.sisted by five married women, has thrown the necklace of black beads round the bride's neck and has tied it with five knots, the barber and the washerman advance, and lifting the young couple on their thighs dance to the music of the _wajantri_, while the bystanders besprinkle them with red powder."

In Chhattisgarh the Dhobis appear to have partly abandoned their hereditary profession and taken to agriculture and other callings. Sir Benjamin Robertson writes of them: [555] "The caste largely preponderates in Chhattisgarh, a part of the country where, at least to the superficial observer, it would hardly seem as if its services were much availed of; the number of Dhobis in Raipur and Bilaspur is nearly 40,000. In both Districts the washerman is one of the recognised village servants, but as a rule he gets no fixed payment, and the great body of cultivators dispense with his services altogether. According to the _Raipur Settlement Report_ (Mr. Hewett), he is employed by the ryots only to wash the clothes of the dead, and he is never found among a population of Satnamis. It may therefore be a.s.sumed that in Chhattisgarh the Bareth caste has largely taken to cultivation." In Bengal Sir H. Risley states [556] that "the Dhobi often gives up his caste trade and follows the profession of a writer, messenger or collector of rent (_tahsildar_), and it is an old native tradition that a Bengali Dhobi was the first interpreter the English factory at Calcutta had, while it is further stated that our early commercial transactions were carried on solely through the agency of low-caste natives. The Dhobi, however, will never engage himself as an indoor servant in the house of a European."

7. Proverbs about the Dhobi.

Like the other castes who supply the primary needs of the people, the Dhobi is not regarded with much favour by his customers, and they revenge themselves in various sarcasms at his expense for the injury caused to their clothes by his drastic measures. The following are mentioned by Sir G. Grierson: [557] '_Dhobi par Dhobi base, tab kapre par sabun pare_', or 'When many Dhobis compete, then some soap gets to the clothes,' and 'It is only the clothes of the Dhobi's father that never get torn.' The Dhobi's donkey is a familiar sight as one meets him on the road still toiling as in the time of Issachar between two bundles of clothes each larger than himself, and he has also become proverbial, '_Dhobi ka gadha neh ghar ka neh ghat ka_,'

'The Dhobi's donkey is always on the move'; and 'The a.s.s has only one master (a washerman), and the washerman has only one steed (an a.s.s).' The resentment felt for the Dhobi by his customers is not confined to his Indian clients, as may be seen from Eha's excellent description of the Dhobi in _Behind the Bungalow_; and it may perhaps be permissible to introduce here the following short excerpt, though it necessarily loses in force by being detached from the context: "Day after day he has stood before that great black stone and wreaked his rage upon shirt and trouser and coat, and coat and trouser and shirt. Then he has wrung them as if he were wringing the necks of poultry, and fixed them on his drying line with thorns and spikes, and finally he has taken the battered garments to his torture chamber and ploughed them with his iron, longwise and crosswise and slantwise, and dropped glowing cinders on their tenderest places. Son has followed father through countless generations in cultivating this pa.s.sion for destruction, until it has become the monstrous growth which we see and shudder at in the Dhobi."

8. Wearing and lending the clothes of customers.

It is also currently believed that the Dhobi wears the clothes of his customers himself. Thus, 'The Dhobi looks smart in other people's clothes'; and '_Rajache shiri, Paritache tiri_,' or 'The king's headscarf is the washerman's loin-cloth.' On this point Mr. Thurston writes of the Madras washerman: "It is an unpleasant reflection that the Vannans or washermen add to their income by hiring out the clothes of their customers for funeral parties, who lay them on the path before the pall-bearers, so that they may not step upon the ground. On one occasion a party of Europeans, when out shooting near the village of a hill tribe, met a funeral procession on its way to the burial-ground. The bier was draped in many folds of clean cloth, which one of the party recognised by the initials as one of his bed-sheets. Another identified as his sheet the cloth on which the corpse was lying. He cut off the corner with the initial, and a few days later the sheet was returned by the Dhobi, who pretended ignorance of the mutilation, and gave as an explanation that it must have been done in his absence by one of his a.s.sistants." [558]

And Eha describes the same custom in the following amusing manner: "Did you ever open your handkerchief with the suspicion that you had got a duster into your pocket by mistake, till the name of De Souza blazoned on the corner showed you that you were wearing some one else's property? An accident of this kind reveals a beneficent branch of the Dhobi's business, one in which he comes to the relief of needy respectability. Suppose yourself (if you can) to be Mr. Lobo, enjoying the position of first violinist in a string band which performs at Parsi weddings and on other festive occasions. _n.o.blesse oblige_; you cannot evade the necessity for clean shirt-fronts, ill able as your precarious income may be to meet it. In these circ.u.mstances a Dhobi with good connections is what you require. He finds you in shirts of the best quality at so much an evening, and you are saved all risk and outlay of capital; you need keep no clothes except a greenish-black surtout and pants and an effective necktie. In this way the wealth of the rich helps the want of the poor without their feeling it or knowing it--an excellent arrangement. Sometimes, unfortunately, Mr. Lobo has a few clothes of his own, and then, as I have hinted, the Dhobi may exchange them by mistake, for he is uneducated and has much to remember; but if you occasionally suffer in this way you gain in another, for Mr. Lobo's family are skilful with the needle, and I have sent a torn garment to the wash which returned carefully repaired." [559]

Dhuri

1. Origin and Subdivisions.

_Dhuri._ [560]--A caste belonging exclusively to Chhattisgarh, which numbered 3000 persons in 1911. Dhuri is an honorific abbreviation from Dhuriya as Bani from Bania. The special occupation of the caste is rice-parching, and they are an offshoot from Kahars, though in Chhattisgarh the Dhuris now consider the Kahars as a subcaste of their own. In Bengal the Dhuriyas are a subcaste of the Kandus or Bharbhunjas. Sir H. Risley states that "the Dhurias rank lowest of all the subcastes of Kandus, owing either to their having taken up the comparatively menial profession of palanquin-bearing, or to their being a branch of the Kahar caste who went in for grain-parching and thus came to be a.s.sociated with the Kandus." [561] The caste have immigrated to Chhattisgarh from the United Provinces. In Kawardha they believe that the Raja of that State brought them back with him on his return from a pilgrimage. In Bilaspur and Raipur they say they came from Badhar, a pargana in the Mirzapur District, adjoining Rewah. Badhar is mentioned in one of the Rajim inscriptions, and is a place remembered by other castes of Chhattisgarh as their ancestral home. The Dhuris of Chhattisgarh relate their origin as follows: Mahadeo went once to the jungle and the damp earth stuck to his feet. He sc.r.a.ped it off and made it into a man, and asked him what caste he would like to belong to. The man said he would leave it to Mahadeo, who decided that he should be called Dhuri from _dhur,_ dust. The man then asked Mahadeo to a.s.sign him an occupation, and Mahadeo said that as he was made from dust, which is pounded earth, his work should be to prepare _cheora_ or pounded rice, and added as a special distinction that all castes including Brahmans should eat the pounded rice prepared by him. All castes do eat _cheora_ because it is not boiled with water. The Dhuris have two subcastes, a higher and a lower, but they are known by different names in different tracts. In Kawardha they are called Raj Dhuri and Cheorakuta, the Raj Dhuris being the descendants of personal servants in the Raja's family and ranking above the Cheorakutas or rice-pounders. In Bilaspur they are called Badharia and Khawas, and in Raipur Badharia and Desha. The Khawas and Desha subcastes do menial household service and rank below the Badharias, who are perhaps later immigrants and refuse to engage in this occupation. The names of their exogamous sections are nearly all territorial, as Naugahia from Naogaon in Bilaspur District, Agoria from Agori, a pargana in Mirzapur District, Kashi or Benares, and a number of other names derived from villages in Bilaspur. But the caste do not strictly enforce the rule forbidding marriage within the _gotra_ or section, and are content with avoiding three generations both on the father's and mother's side. They have probably been driven to modify the rule on account of the paucity of their numbers and the difficulty of arranging marriages. For the same reason perhaps they look with indulgence on the practice, as a rule strictly prohibited, of marriage with a woman of another caste of lower social rank, and will admit the children of such a marriage into the caste, though not the woman herself.

2. Marriage.

Infant-marriage is in vogue, and polygamy is permitted only if the first wife be barren. The betrothal is cemented by an exchange of betel-leaves and areca-nuts between the fathers of the engaged couple. A bride-price of from ten to twenty rupees is usually paid. Some rice, a pice coin, 21 cowries and 21 pieces of turmeric are placed in the hole in which the marriage post is erected. When the wedding procession arrives at the girl's house the bridegroom goes to the marriage-shed and pulls out the festoons of mango leaves, the bride's family trying to prevent him by offering him a winnowing-fan. He then approaches the door of the house, behind which his future mother-in-law is standing, and slips a piece of cloth through the door for her. She takes this and retires without being seen. The wedding consists of the _bhanwar_ ceremony or walking round the sacred pole. During the proceedings the women tie a new thread round the bridegroom's neck to avert the evil eye. After the wedding the bride and bridegroom, in opposition to the usual custom, must return to the latter's house on foot. In explanation of this they tell a story to the effect that the married couple were formerly carried in a palanquin. But on one occasion when a wedding procession came to a river, everybody began to catch fish, leaving the bride deserted, and the palanquin-bearers, seeing this, carried her off. To prevent the recurrence of such a mischance the couple now have to walk. Widow-marriage is permitted, and the widow usually marries her late husband's younger brother. Divorce is only permitted for misconduct on the part of the wife.

3. Religious beliefs.

The Dhuris princ.i.p.ally worship the G.o.ddess Devi. Nearly all members of the caste belong to the Kabirpanthi sect. They believe that the sun on setting goes through the earth, and that the milky way is the path by which the elephant of the heavens pa.s.ses from south to north to feed on the young bamboo shoots, of which he is very fond. They think that the constellation of the Great Bear is a cot with three thieves tied to it. The thieves came to steal the cot, which belonged to an old woman, but G.o.d caught them and tied them down there for ever. Orion is the plough left by one of the Pandava brothers after he had finished tilling the heavens. The dead are burnt. They observe mourning during nine or ten days for an adult and make libations to the dead at the usual period in the month of Kunwar (September-October).

4. Occupation and social status.

The proper occupation of the caste is to parch rice. The rice is husked and then parched in an earthen pan, and subsequently bruised with a mallet in a wooden mortar. When prepared in this manner it is called _cheora_. The Dhuris also act as _khidmatgars_ or household servants, but the members of the Badharia subcaste refuse to do this work. Some members of the caste are fishermen, and others grow melons and sweet potatoes. Considering that they live in Chhattisgarh, the caste are somewhat scrupulous in the matter of food, neither eating fowls nor drinking liquor. The Kawardha Dhuris, however, who are later immigrants than the others, do not observe these restrictions, the reason for which may be that the Dhuris think it necessary to be strict in the matter of food, so that no one may object to take parched rice from them. Rawats and Gonds take food from their hands in some places, and their social status in Chhattisgarh is about equivalent to that of the Rawats or Ahirs. A man of the caste who kills a cow or gets vermin in a wound must go to Amarkantak to bathe in the Nerbudda.

Dumal

1. Origin and traditions.

_Dumal._ [562]--An agricultural caste found in the Uriya country and princ.i.p.ally in the Sonpur State, recently transferred to Bihar and Orissa. In 1901, 41,000 Dumals were enumerated in the Central Provinces, but only a few persons now remain. The caste originally came from Orissa. They themselves say that they were formerly a branch of the Gaurs, with whom they now have no special connection. They derive their name from a village called Dumba Hadap in the Athmalik State, where they say that they lived. Another story is that Dumal is derived from Duma, the name of a gateway in Baud town, near which they dwelt. Sir H. Risley says: "The Dumals or Jadupuria Gaura seem to be a group of local formation. They cherish the tradition that their ancestors came to Orissa from Jadupur, but this appears to be nothing more than the name of the Jadavas or Yadavas, the mythical progenitors of the Goala caste transformed into the name of an imaginary town."

2. Subdivisions.

The Dumals have no subcastes, but they have a complicated system of exogamy. This includes three kinds of divisions or sections, the _got_ or sept, the _barga_ or family t.i.tle and the _mitti_ or earth from which they sprang, that is, the name of the original village of the clan. Marriage is prohibited only between persons who have the same _got_, _barga_ and _mitti_; if any one of these is different it is allowed. Thus a man of the Nag _got_, Padhan _barga_ and Hindolsai _mitti_ may marry a girl of the Nag _got_, Padhan _barga_ and Kandhpada _mitti_; or one of the Nag _got_, Karmi _barga_ and Hindolsai _mitti_; or one of the Bud _got_, Padhan _barga_ and Hindolsai _mitti_. The _bargas_ are very numerous, but the _gots_ and _mittis_ are few and common to many _bargas_; and many people have forgotten the name of their _mitti_ altogether. Marriage therefore usually depends on the _bargas_ being different. The following table shows the _got_, _barga_ and _mitti_ of a few families:

Got. Barga. Mitti.

Nag (cobra) Padhan (chief) Hindolsai Nag Karmi (manager) Unda (a village in Athmalik) Nag Behra (Palki-bearer) Kandhpada (a village in Athmalik) Nag Mahakul (great family) Do. do.

Nag Mesua (shepherd) Dalpur (a village in Baud) Nag Karan (writer) Kandhpada (a village in Athmalik) Nag or Nagesh Mahakul (great family) Bamanda (a village in Baud) Bud (a fish) Kolta (caste) Kandhpada (a village in Athmalik) Bud (a fish) Baghar (buffalo) Do. do.

Bichhu (scorpion) Mahakul (great family) Bamada (a village in Baud)