Ghasia
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From The Tribes And Castes Of The Central Provinces Of India
By R. V. Russell
Of The Indian Civil Service
Superintendent Of Ethnography, Central Provinces
Assisted By Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, Extra Assistant Commissioner
Macmillan And Co., Limited, London, 1916.
NOTE 1: The 'Central Provinces' have since been renamed Madhya Pradesh.
NOTE 2: While reading please keep in mind that all articles in this series have been scanned from the original book. Therefore, footnotes have got inserted into the main text of the article, interrupting the flow. Readers who spot these footnotes gone astray might like to shift them to their correct place.
Ghasia
Ghasia, Sais
A low Dravidian caste of Orissa and 1. Descrip- Central India who cut grass, tend horses and act as village t j° e n c ° ste musicians at festivals. In the Central Provinces they numbered 43,000 in 191 1, residing principally in the Chhattlsgarh Division and the adjoining Feudatory States. The word Ghasia is derived from g/tds (grass) and means a grass-cutter. Sir H. Risley states that they are a fishing and cultivating caste of Chota Nagpur and Central India, who attend as musicians at weddings and festivals and also perform menial offices of all kinds. 2 In Bastar they are described as an inferior caste who serve as horse-keepers and also make and mend brass vessels.
They dress like the Maria Gonds and subsist partly by cultivation and partly by labour.3 Dr. Ball describes them in Singhbhum as gold-washers and musicians. Colonel Dalton speaks of them as " An extra- ordinary tribe, foul parasites of the Central Indian hill tribes and submitting to be degraded even by them. If the Chandals of the Puranas, though descended from the union of a Brahmini and a Sudra, are the lowest of the low, the Ghasias are Chandals and the people further south who are called Pariahs are no doubt of the same distin- guished lineage." 4 1 This article is compiled partly from 3 Central Provinces Gazetteer ( 1 87 1 ), papers by Munshis Pyare Lai Misra and p. 273. Kanhya Lai of the Gazetteer Office. 4 Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, 2 Tribes and Castes of Bengal, art. p. 325. Ghasi. 27
a. sub- The Ghasias generally, however, appear now to be a harmless caste of labourers without any specially degrading or repulsive traits. In Mandla their social position and customs are much on a par with those of the Gonds, from whom a considerable section of the caste seems to be derived. In other localities they have probably immigrated into the Central Provinces from Bundelkhand and Orissa.
Among their subdivisions the following may be mentioned : the Udia, who cure raw hides and do the work of sweepers and are generally looked down on; the Dingkuchia, who castrate cattle and ponies ; the Dolboha, who carry dhoolies or palanquins ; the Nagarchi, who derive their name from the nakkara or kettle-drum and are village musicians ; the Khaltaha or those from Raipur ; the Laria, belonging to Chhattlsgarh, and the Uria of the Uriya country ; the Ramgarhia, who take their name from Ramgarh in the Mandla District, and the Mahobia from Mahoba in Bundelkhand. Those members of the caste who work as grooms have become a separate group and call themselves Sais, dropping the name of Ghasia.
They rank higher than the others and marry among themselves, and some of them have become cultivators or work as village watchmen. They are also called Thanwar by the Gonds, the word meaning stable or stall. In Chota Nagpur a number of Ghasias have become tailors and are tending to form a separate subcaste under the name of Darzi. 3 . Exo- Their septs are of the usual low-caste type, being named fectionl after animals > inanimate objects or nicknames of ancestors. One of them is Panch-biha or ' He who had five wives,' and another Kul-dlp or ' The sept of the lamp.' Members of this sept will stop eating if a lamp goes out.
The Janta Ragda take their name from the mill for grinding corn and will not have a grinding-mill in their houses. They say that a female ancestor was delivered of a child when sitting near a grinding-mill and this gave the sept its name. Three septs are named after other castes : Kumharbans, descended from a potter ; Gandbans, from a Ganda ; and Luha, from a Lohar or blacksmith, and which names indicate that members of these castes have been admitted into the community. Marriage is forbidden within the sept, but is permitted
between the children of brothers and sisters.
Those 4. Mar- members of the caste who have become Kablrpanthis may nage' also marry with the others. Marriages may be infant or adult. A girl who is seduced by a member of the caste is married to him by a simple ceremony, the couple stand- ing before a twig of the umar 1 tree, while some women sprinkle turmeric over them. If a girl goes wrong with an outsider she is permanently expelled and a feast is exacted from her parents. The boy and his relatives go to the girl's house for the betrothal, and a present of various articles of food and dress is made to her family, apparently as a sort of repayment for their expenditure in feeding and clothing her. A gift of clothes is also made to her mother, called dudh-sari, and is regarded as the price of the milk with which the mother nourished the girl in her infancy. A goat, which forms part of the bride-price, is killed and eaten by the parties and their relatives. The binding portion of the marriage is the bhdnwar ceremony, at which the couple walk seven times round the marriage -post, holding each other by the little fingers.
When they return to the bride- groom's house, a cock or a goat is killed and the head buried before the door ; the foreheads of the couple are marked with its blood and they go inside the house. If the bride is not adult, she goes home after a stay of two days, and the gauna or going-away ceremony is performed when she finally leaves her parents' house. The remarriage of widows is permitted, no restriction being imposed on the widow in her choice of a second husband. Divorce is per- mitted for infidelity on the part of the wife. Children are named on the sixth day after birth, special 5. Reii- names being given to avert ill-luck, while they sometimes ^p^stl go through the ceremony of selling a baby for five cowries tions. in order to disarm the jealousy of the godlings who are hostile to children. They will not call any person by name when they think an owl is within hearing, as they believe that the owl will go on repeating the name and that this will cause the death of the person bearing it. The caste generally revere Dulha Deo, the bridegroom god, whose altar stands near the cooking place, and the goddess Devi.
Once in three years they offer a white goat to Bura Deo, the great god of the Gonds. They worship the sickle, the implement of their trade, at Dasahra, and offer cocoanuts and liquor to Ghasi Sadhak, a godling who lives by the peg to which horses are tied in the stable. He is supposed to protect the horse from all kinds of diseases. At Dasahra they also worship the horse. Their principal festival is called Karma and falls on the eleventh day of the second half of Bhadon (August). On this day they bring a branch of a tree from the forest and worship it with betel, areca- nut and other offerings. All through the day and night the men and women drink and dance together.
They both burn and bury the dead, throwing the ashes into water. For the first three days after a death they set out rice and pulse and water in a leaf cup for the departed spirit. They believe that the ghosts of the dead haunt the living, and to cure a person possessed in this manner they beat him with shoes and then bury 'an effigy of the ghost outside the village. 6. Occupa- The Ghasias usually work as grass-cutters and grooms to horses, and some of them make loom-combs for weavers. These last are looked down upon and called Madarchawa. They make the kuncJi or brushes for the loom, like the Kuchbandhias, from the root of the babai or khas-khas grass, and the rachh or comb for arranging the threads on the loom from the stalks of the bharru grass. Other Ghasias make ordinary hair combs from the kathai, a grass which grows densely on the borders of streams and springs.
The frame of the comb is of bamboo and the teeth are fixed in either by thread or wire, the price being one pice (farthing) in the former case and two in the latter. 7. Social The caste admit outsiders by a disgusting ceremony in which the candidate is shaved with urine and forced to eat a mixture of cowdung, basil leaves, dub 1 grass and water in which a piece of silver or gold has been dipped. The women do not wear the choli or breast-cloth nor the nose-ring, and in some localities they do not have spangles on the forehead. Women are tattooed on various parts of the body before marriage with the idea of enhancing their 1 Cynodon dactylon. tion customs.
beauty, and sometimes tattooing is resorted to for curing a pain in some joint or for rheumatism. A man who is temporarily put out of caste is shaved on readmission, and in the case of a woman a lock of her hair is cut.
To touch a dead cow is one of the offences entailing temporary excommunication. They employ a Brahman only to fix the dates of their marriages. The position of the caste is very low and in some places they are considered as impure. The Ghasias are very poor, and a saying about them is ' GJiasia ki jindagi hasia,' or ' The Ghasia is supported by his sickle,' the implement used for cutting grass. The Ghasias are perhaps the only caste in the Central Provinces outside those commonly returning themselves as Mehtar, who con- sent to do scavenger's work in some localities. The caste have a peculiar aversion to Kayasths and 8. Ghasias will not take food or water from them nor touch a Kayasth's kayasths bedding or clothing. They say that they would not serve a Kayasth as horse-keeper, but if by any chance one of them was reduced to doing so, he at any rate would not hold his master's stirrup for him to mount.
To account for this hereditary enmity they tell the following story : On one occasion the son of the Kayasth minister of the Raja of Ratanpur went out for a ride followed by a Ghasia sais (groom). The boy was wearing costly ornaments, and the Ghasia's cupidity being excited, he attacked and murdered the child, stripped him of his ornaments and threw the body down a well. The murder was discovered and in revenge the minister killed every Ghasia, man, woman or child that he could lay his hands on. The only ones who escaped were two pregnant women who took refuge in the hut of a Ganda and were sheltered by him. To them were born a boy and a girl and the present Ghasias are descended from the pair.
Therefore a Ghasia will eat even the leavings of a Ganda but will accept nothing from the hands of a Kayasth. This story is an instance of the process which has been called the transplantation of myth. Sir H. Risley tells a similar legend of the Ghasias of Orissa,1 but in their case it was a young Kayasth bridegroom who was killed, and before dying he got leave from his murderers to write a 1 Tribes and Castes of Bengal, art. Ghasi.
letter to his relatives informing them of his death, on con- dition that he said nothing as to its manner.
But in the letter he disclosed the murder, and the Ghasias, who could not read, were duly brought to justice. In the Ratanpur story as reported from Bilaspur it was stated that " Some- how, even from down the well, the minister's son managed to get a letter sent to his father telling him of the murder." And this sentence seems sufficient to establish the fact that the Central Provinces story has merely been imported from Orissa and slightly altered to give it local colour. The real reason for the traditional aversion felt by the Ghasias and other low castes for the Kayasths will be discussed in the article on that caste.
