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

The Hijras form apparently a separate group, and the following account of them is mainly taken from the Bombay Gazetteer.156 In Gujarāt they are the emasculated male votaries of the goddess Bouchera or Behechra, a sister of Devi. She is the spirit of a martyred Chāran or Bhāt woman. Some Chāran women were travelling from Sulkhunpur in Gujarāt when they were attacked and plundered by Kolis. One of the women, of the name of Bouchera, snatched a sword from a boy who attended her and with it cut off both her breasts. She immediately perished, and was deified and worshipped as a form of Devi in the Chunwāl.157 The Hijras usually mutilate themselves in the performance of a religious vow, sometimes taken by the mother as a means of obtaining children, and in rare cases by the boy himself to obtain recovery by the favour of the goddess from a dangerous illness.158 Hence it is clear that they worship Boucheraji on the ground that she obtained divine honours by self-mutilation and should enable her votaries to do the same. But the real reason for the Chāran woman cutting off her breasts was no doubt that her ghost might haunt and destroy the Koli robbers, in accordance with the usual practice of the Chārans.159 As a further fulfilment of their vow the Hijras pull out the hair of their beards and moustaches, bore their ears and noses for female ornaments, and affect female speech and manners. The meaning of the vow would appear to be that the mother sacrifices her great blessing of a boy child and transforms him after a fashion into a girl, at the same time devoting him to the service of the goddess. Similarly, as a much milder form of the same idea, a mother whose sons have died will sometimes bore the nose of a later-born son and put a small nose-ring in it to make believe he is a girl. But in this case the aim is also partly to cheat the goddess or the evil spirits who cause the death of children, and make them think the boy is a girl and therefore not worth taking.

The rite of mutilation is described by Mr. Farīdi as follows: “The initiation takes place at the temple of the goddess Behechra about 60 miles from Ahmadābād, where the neophyte repairs under the guardianship or adoption of some older member of the brotherhood. The lad is called the daughter of the old Hijra his guardian. The emasculation is a secret rite and takes place under the direction of the chief Hijra priest of Behechra. It is said that the operation and initiation are held in a house with closed doors, where all the Hijras meet in holiday dress. A special dish of fried pastry is cooked, and the neophyte is bathed, dressed in red female attire, decked with flower-garlands and seated on a stool in the middle of the room, while the others sing to the accompaniment of a small drum and copper cymbals. Another room is prepared for the operation, soft ashes being spread on the floor and piled in a heap in the centre. When the time for the operation approaches, the neophyte is led to the room and is made to lie on his back on the ash-heap. The operator approaches chewing betel-leaf. The hands and legs of the neophyte are firmly held by some one of the fraternity, and the operator, carelessly standing near with an unconcerned air, when he finds the attention of his patient otherwise occupied, with great dexterity and with one stroke completely cuts off the genital organs. He spits betel and areca juice on the wound and staunches the bleeding with a handful of the ashes of the babūl.160 The operation is dangerous and not uncommonly fatal.” Another method is to hold the organs in a cleft bamboo and slice them off. The Hijras are beggars like the Khasuas, and sometimes become very importunate. Soon after the birth of a child in Gujarāt the hated Hijras or eunuchs crowd round the house for gifts. If the demand of one of them is refused the whole rank and file of the local fraternity besiege the house with indecent clamour and gesture. Their claim to alms rests, as with other religious mendicants, in the sacred character which attaches to them. In Bombay there is also a belief that the god Hanumān cries out once in twelve years, and that those men who hear him are transformed into eunuchs.161 Some of them make money by allowing spectators to look at the mutilated part of their body, and also by the practice of pederasty.

Homosexual practices are believed to be distinctly rare among Hindus, and not common among Muhammadans of the Central Provinces. For this the early age of marriage may probably be considered a principal cause. The Hindu sacred books, however, do not attach severe penalties to this offence. “According to the Laws of Manu, a twice-born man who commits an unnatural offence with a male, or has intercourse with a female in a cart drawn by oxen, in water or in the daytime, shall bathe, dressed in his clothes; and all these are reckoned as minor offences.”162 In his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas Dr. Westermarck shows that, apart from the genuine cases of sexual perversion, as to the frequency of which opinions differ, homosexual love frequently arises in three conditions of society. These are, when women are actually scarce, as among the Australian aborigines and other primitive races; when the men are frequently engaged in war or in predatory expeditions and are separated from their wives for long periods, a condition which accounts for its prevalence among the Sikhs and Pathāns; and lastly, when women are secluded and uneducated and hence their society affords little intellectual pleasure to men. This was the case in ancient Greece where women received no education and had no place at the public spectacles which were the chief means of culture;163 and the same reason probably accounts for the frequency of the vice among the Persians and modern Egyptians. “So also it seems that the ignorance and dulness of Muhammadan women, which is a result of their total lack of education and their secluded life, is a cause of homosexual practices; Moors are sometimes heard to defend pederasty on the plea that the company of boys, who have always news to tell, is so much more entertaining than the company of women.”164

The Christian Church in this as in other respects has set a very high standard of sexual morality. Unnatural crimes were regarded with peculiar horror in the Middle Ages, and the punishments for them in English law were burying and burning alive, though these were probably seldom or never enforced.165 The attitude of the Church, which was reflected in the civil law, was partly inherited from the Jews of the Old Testament, and reinforced by similar conditions in mediaeval society. In both cases this crime was especially associated with the heathen and heretics, as shown in Dr. Westermarck’s interesting account:166

“According to Genesis, unnatural vice was the sin of a people who were not the Lord’s people, and the Levitical legislation represents Canaanitish abominations as the chief reason why the Canaanites were exterminated. Now we know that sodomy entered as an element in their religion. Besides kedēshōth, or female prostitutes, there were kedēshīm or male prostitutes, attached to their temples. The word kādēsh, translated ‘Sodomite,’ properly denotes a man dedicated to a deity; and it appears that such men were consecrated to the mother of the gods, the famous Dea Syria, whose priests or devotees they were considered to be. The male devotees of this and other goddesses were probably in a position analogous to that occupied by the female devotees of certain gods, who also, as we have seen, have developed into libertines; and the sodomitic acts committed with these temple prostitutes may, like the connections with priestesses, have had in view to transfer blessings to the worshippers. In Morocco supernatural benefits are expected not only from heterosexual, but also from homosexual intercourse with a holy person. The kedēshīm are frequently alluded to in the Old Testament, especially in the period of the monarchy, when rites of foreign origin made their way into both Israel and Judah. And it is natural that the Yāhveh worshipper should regard their practices with the utmost horror as forming part of an idolatrous cult.

“The Hebrew conception of homosexual love to some extent affected Muhammadanism, and passed into Christianity. The notion that it is a form of sacrilege was here strengthened by the habits of the Gentiles. St. Paul found the abominations of Sodom prevalent among nations who had ‘changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the creator.’ During the Middle Ages heretics were accused of unnatural vice as a matter of course. Indeed, so closely was sodomy associated with heresy that the same name was applied to both. In La Coutume de Touraine-Anjou the word hérite, which is the ancient form of hérétique, seems to be used in the sense of ‘sodomite’; and the French bougre (from the Latin Bulgarus, Bulgarian), as also its English synonym, was originally a name given to a sect of heretics who came from Bulgaria in the eleventh century and was afterwards applied to other heretics, but at the same time it became the regular expression for a person guilty of unnatural intercourse. In mediaeval laws sodomy was also repeatedly mentioned together with heresy, and the punishment was the same for both. It thus remained a religious offence of the first order. It was not only a ‘vitium nefandum et super omnia detestandum,’ but it was one of the four ‘clamantia peccata,’ or crying sins, a ‘crime de Majestie, vers le Roy celestre.’ Very naturally, therefore, it has come to be regarded with somewhat greater leniency by law and public opinion in proportion as they have emancipated themselves from theological doctrines. And the fresh light which the scientific study of the sexual impulse has lately thrown upon the subject of homosexuality must also necessarily influence the moral ideas relating to it, in so far as no scrutinising judge can fail to take into account the pressure which a powerful non-volitional desire exercises upon an agent’s will.”

Holia

Holia.167—A low caste of drummers and leather-workers who claim to be degraded Golars or Telugu Ahīrs, under which caste most of the Holias seem to have returned themselves in 1901.168 The Holias relate the following story of their origin. Once upon a time two brothers, Golar by caste, set out in search of service, having with them a bullock. On the way the elder brother went to worship his tutelary deity Holiāri Deva; but while he was doing so the bullock accidentally died, and the ceremony could not be proceeded with until the carcase was removed. Neither a Chamār nor anybody else could be got to do this, so at length the younger brother was prevailed upon by the elder one to take away the body. When he returned, the elder brother would not touch him, saying that he had lost his caste. The younger brother resigned himself to his fate and called himself Holu, after the god whom he had been worshipping at the time he lost his caste. His descendants were named Holias. But he prayed to the god to avenge him for the treachery of his brother, and from that moment misfortunes commenced to shower upon the Golar until he repented and made what reparation he could; and in memory of this, whenever a Golar dies, the Holias are feasted by the other Golars to the present day. The story indicates a connection between the castes, and it is highly probable that the Holias are a degraded class of Golars who took to the trade of tanning and leather-working. When a Holia goes to a Golar’s house he must be asked to come in and sit down or the Golar will be put out of caste; and when a Golar dies the house must be purified by a Holia. The caste is a very numerous one in Madras. Here the Holia is superior only to the Mādiga or Chamār.169 In the Central Provinces they are held to be impure and to rank below the Mahārs, and they live on the outskirts of the village. Their caste customs resemble generally those of the Golars. They believe their traditional occupation to be the playing of leathern drums, and they still follow this trade, and also make slippers and leather thongs for agricultural purposes. But they must not make or mend shoes on pain of excommunication from caste. They are of middle stature, dark in colour, and very dirty in their person and habits. Like the Golars, the Holias speak a dialect of Canarese, which is known as Golari, Holia or Komtau. Mr. Thurston gives the following interesting particulars about the Holias:170 “If a man of another caste enters the house of a Mysore Holia, the owner takes care to tear the intruder’s cloth, and turn him out. This will avert any evil which might have befallen him. It is said that Brāhmans consider great luck will wait upon them if they can manage to pass through a Holia village unmolested. Should a Brāhman attempt to enter their quarters, the Holias turn him out, and slipper him, in former times it is said to death.”

Injhwār

1. Origin of the caste

Injhwār.171—A caste of agricultural labourers and fishermen found in the Marātha tract of the Wainganga Valley, comprised in the Bhandāra and Bālāghāt Districts. In 1901 they numbered 8500 persons as against 11,000 in 1891. The name Injhwār is simply a Marāthi corruption of Binjhwār, as īs for bīs (twenty) and Ithoba for Bithoba or Vithoba. In his Census Report of 1891 Sir Benjamin Robertson remarked that the name was often entered in the census books as Vinjhwār, and in Marāthi B and V are practically interchangeable. The Injhwārs are thus a caste formed from the Binjhwārs or highest subdivision of the Baiga tribe of Bālāghāt; they have adopted the social customs of the Marāthi-speaking people among whom they live, and have been formed into a separate caste through a corruption of their name. They still worship Injha or Vindhya Devi, the tutelary deity of the Vindhyan hills, from which the name of the Binjhwārs is derived. The Injhwārs have also some connection with the Gowāri or cowherd caste of the Marātha country. They are sometimes known as Dūdh-Gowāri, and say that this is because an Injhwār woman was a wet-nurse of the first-born Gowāri. The Gowāris themselves, as a low caste of herdsmen frequenting the jungles, would naturally be brought into close connection with both the Baigas and Gonds. Their alliances with the Gonds have produced the distinct caste of Gond-Gowāri, and it is not improbable that one fact operating to separate the Injhwārs from their parent tribe of the Baigas was an admixture of Gowāri blood. But they rank higher than the Gond-Gowāris, who are regarded as impure; this is probably on account of the superior position of the Binjhwārs, who form the aristocracy of the Baiga tribe, and, living in the forests, were never reduced to the menial and servile condition imposed on the Gond residents in Hindu villages. The Injhwārs, however, admit the superiority of the Gowāris by taking food from their hands, a favour which the latter will not reciprocate. Several of the sept or family names of the caste are also taken from the Gonds, and this shows an admixture of Gond blood; the Injhwārs are thus probably a mixed group of Gonds, Gowāris, and Binjhwārs or Baigas.

2. Subdivisions

The Injhwārs have four subcastes, three of the territorial and one of the occupational class. These are the Lānjiwār, or those living round Lānji in Bālāghāt; the Korre, or those of the Korai hill tract in Seoni; the Chāndewār or Marātha Injhwārs who belong to Chānda, and are distinguished by holding their weddings only in the evening after the Marātha custom, while other Injhwārs will perform the ceremony at any time of day; and the Sonjharias, or those who have taken to washing for gold in the beds of streams. Of their sept or family names some, as already stated, are taken from the Gonds, as Mesrām, Tekām, Marai, Ukya.172 Three names, Bhoyar, Kawara and Kohrya (from Kohli), are the names of other castes or tribes, and indicate that members of these became Injhwārs and founded families; and others are of the territorial, titular and totemistic types. Among them may be mentioned the Pīthvālyās, from pīth, flour; all families of this sept should steal a little rice from somebody else’s field as soon as it is ripe, husband and wife making a joint expedition for the purpose. They must not speak a word to each other from the time they start until they have brought back the rice, pounded and cooked it, offered it to the god and made their meal. The Paunpats, named after the lotus, will not touch the flowers or leaves of the lotus plants, or even drink water from a tank in which the lotus grows. The Dobokria Rāwats are so named because they make an offering of two goats to their gods. Some of the septs are subdivided. Thus the Sonwāni or gold-water sept, whose members readmit social culprits, is divided into the Paunpat or lotus Sonwānis; the Gurhiwāl, who revere a brass vessel tied to a bamboo on the first day of the year; the Sati Sonwāni, who worship the spirit of a sati woman ancestor; and the Mūngphātia Sonwānis, whose token is the broken mung pulse. At present these subsepts cannot intermarry, the union of any two Sonwānis being forbidden, but it seems likely that intermarriage may be permitted in the course of time.

3. Marriage and other customs

The social customs of the Injhwārs resemble those of the lower Marātha castes.173 Marriage is forbidden between members of the same sept and first cousins, and a man should also not take a wife from the sept of his brother or sister-in-law. This rule prevents the marriage of two brothers to two sisters, to which there is of course no objection on the ground of affinity. Girls are usually not married until they are grown up; but in places where they have been much subjected to Hindu influences, the Injhwārs will sometimes wed an adult girl to a basil plant in order to avoid the stigma of keeping her in the house unmarried. The boy’s father goes to make a proposal of marriage, and the girl’s father, if he approves it, intimates his consent by washing his visitor’s feet. A bride-price of about Rs. 20 is usually paid, which is increased somewhat if the bridegroom is a widower, and decreased if the bride has been seduced before marriage. The marriage is performed by throwing coloured rice over the couple. Divorce and the remarriage of widows are permitted. A bachelor who marries a widow must first go through the ceremony with an arka or swallow-wort plant, this being considered his real marriage. The Injhwārs usually bury the dead, and in accordance with Dravidian custom place the corpse in the grave with the feet to the north. When the body is that of a young girl, the face is left exposed as it is carried to the grave. The regular ceremonies are performed for the welfare of the deceased’s soul, and they try to ascertain its fate in the next incarnation by spreading flour on the ground overnight and looking in the morning for anything resembling the foot-mark of a human being, animal or bird. On the festival of Akhātīj and in the month of Kārtik (October) they offer libations to the dead, setting out a large pitcher of water for a male and a small one for a female. On the former they paint five lines of sandalwood to represent a man’s caste-mark, and on the latter five splashes of kunku or the red powder which women rub on their foreheads. A burning lamp is placed before the pitchers, and they feed a male Māli or gardener as representative of a dead man and a female for a woman.

4. Occupation and social status

The Injhwārs are generally labourers and cultivators, while the Sonjharias wash for gold. The women of the Marātha or Chāndewār subcaste serve as midwives. Their social status is low, and in the forest tracts they will eat snakes and crocodiles, and in fact almost anything except beef. They will admit members of the Brāhman, Dhīmar (waterman), Māli and Gowāri castes into the community on payment of a premium of five to fifteen rupees and a dinner to the caste-fellows. The candidate for admission, whether male or female, must have his head shaved clean. Both men and women can obtain pardon for a liaison with an outsider belonging to any except the most impure castes by giving a feast to the community. To be beaten with a shoe involves temporary excommunication from caste, unless the striker be a Government official, when no penalty is inflicted. If a man kills a cat, he is required to have an image of it made in silver, which, after being worshipped, is presented to a temple or thrown into a river.

Jādam

Jādam.174—A branch of the well-known Yādu or Yādava sept of Rājpūts which has now developed into a caste in the Nerbudda valley. Colonel Tod describes the Yādu as the most illustrious of all the tribes of India, this name having been borne by the descendants of Buddha, progenitor of the Lunar race. The Yādavas were the herdsmen of Mathura, and Krishna was born in this tribe. His son was Bhārat, from whom the classical name of Bhāratavārsha for India is held to be derived. It is related that when Krishna was about to ascend to heaven, he reflected that the Yādavas had multiplied exceedingly and would probably cause trouble to the world after he had left it. So he decided to reduce their numbers, and one day he persuaded one of his companions to dress up as a pregnant woman in jest, and they took him to the hermitage of the saint Durvāsa and asked the saint to what the woman would give birth. Durvāsa, who was of a very irascible temper, divined that he was being trifled with, and replied that a rice-pestle would be born by which the Yādavas would be destroyed. On the return of the party they found to their astonishment that a pestle had actually, as it were, been born from the man. So they were alarmed at the words of the saint and tried to destroy the pestle by rubbing it on a stone. But as the sawdust of the pestle fell on the ground there sprang up from it the shoots of the Gondla or Elephant grass, which grows taller than the head of a man on horseback. And some time afterwards a quarrel arose among the Yādavas, and they tore up the stalks of this grass and slew each other with it. Only one woman escaped, whose son was afterwards the King of Mathura and the ancestor of the existing tribe. Another body, however, with whom was Krishna, fled to Gujarāt, and on the coast there built the great temple of Dwārka, in the place known as Jagat Khant, or the World’s End. The story has some resemblance to that of the sowing of the dragon’s teeth by Cadmus at Thebes. The principal branches of the Yādavas are the Yāduvansi chiefs of Karauli, in Rājputāna, and the Bhatti chiefs of Jaisalmer. The Jādams of Hoshangābād say that they immigrated from Karauli State about 700 years ago, having come to the country on a foray for plunder and afterwards settled here. They have now developed into a caste, marrying among themselves. In Hoshangābād the caste has two subdivisions, the Kachhotia who belong principally to the Sohāgpur tahsīl, and the Adhodias who live in Seoni and Harda. These two groups are endogamous and do not marry with each other. The Kachhotia are the offspring of irregular unions and are looked down upon by the others. They say that they have fifty-two exogamous groups or sections, but this number is used locally as an expression of indefinite magnitude. All the sections appear to be named after villages where their ancestors once lived, but the preference for totemism has led some of the groups to connect their names with natural objects. Thus the designation of the Semaria section may be held to be derived from a village of that name, both on account of its form, and because the other known section-names are taken from villages. But the Semaria Jādams have adopted the semar or cotton-tree as their totem and pay reverence to this.175

Infant-marriage is favoured in the caste, and polygamy is also prevalent. This is often the case among the agricultural castes, where a man will marry several wives in order to obtain their assistance in his cultivation, a wife being a more industrious and reliable worker than a hired servant. No penalty is, however, imposed for allowing a girl to reach adolescence before marriage, and this not infrequently happens. If a girl becomes with child through a man of the caste she is united to him by a simple rite known as gunda, in which she merely gives him a ring or throws a garland of flowers over his neck. A caste feast is also exacted, and the couple are then considered to be married. The remarriage of widows is permitted, but it is known by the opprobrious name of Kukar-gauna or ‘dog-marriage,’ signifying that it is held to be little or no better than a simple illicit connection. Divorce is also somewhat common in the caste, notwithstanding that the person who occupies the position of co-respondent must repay to the husband the expenses incurred by him on the marriage ceremony. Some women are known to have had ten or twelve husbands.