Mana, caste
This article was written in 1916 when conditions were different. Even in Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly |
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.
Mana
1 This article is based on papers by Mr. I lira Lul and G. Padaya Naidu of the Gazetteer Office.
A Dravidian caste of cultivators and labourers belonging to the Chanda District, from which they have spread to Nagpur, Bhandara and Balaghat. In 191 1 they numbered nearly 50,000 persons, of whom 34,000 belonged to Chanda. The origin of the caste is obscure. In the Chanda Settlement Report of 1869 Major Lucie Smith wrote of them : " Tradition asserts that prior to the Gond conquest the Manas reigned over the country, having their strongholds at Surajgarh in Ahiri and at Manikgarh in the Miinikgarh hills, now of Hyderabad, and that after a troubled rule of two hundred years they fell before the Gonds. In appearance they are of the Gond type, and are strongly and stoutly made ; while in character they are hardy, industrious and truthful. Many warlike traditions still linger among them, and doubtless in days gone by they did their duty as good soldiers, but they have long since hung up sword and shield and now rank among the best cultivators of rice in Chanda." Another local tradition states that a line of Mana princes ruled at Wairagarh.
The names of three princes are remembered : Kurumpruhoda, the founder of the line ; Surjat Badwaik, who fortified Surjagarh ; and Gahilu, who built Manikgarh. As regards the name Manikgarh, it may be mentioned that the tutelary deity of the Nagvansi kings of Bastar, who ruled there before the accession of the present Raj-Gond dynasty in the fourteenth century, was Manikya Devi, and it is possible that the chiefs of Wairagarh were connected with the Bastar kings.
Some of the Manas say that they, as well as the Gowaris, are offshoots of the Gond tribe ; and a local saying to the effect that ' The Gond, the Gowari and the Mana eat boiled juari or beans on leaf-plates ' shows that they are associated together in the popular mind. Hislop states that the Ojhas, or soothsayers and minstrels of the Gonds, have a subdivision of Mana Ojhas, who lay claim to special sanctity, refusing to take food from any other caste.^
The Gonds have a subdivision called Mannewar, and as war is only a Telugu suffix for the plural, the proper name Manne closely resembles Mana. It is shown in the article on the Parja tribe that the Parjas were a class of Gonds or a tribe akin to them, who were dominant in Bastar prior to the later immigration under the ancestors of the present Bastar dynasty. And the most plausible hypothesis as to the past history of the Manas is that they were also the rulers of some tracts of Chanda, and were displaced like the Parjas by a Gond invasion from the south.
In Bhandara, where the Manas hold land, it is related 1 Papers on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Central Provinces, p. 6.
that in former times a gigantic kite lived on the hill of Ghurkundi, near Sakoli, and devoured the crops of the surrounding country by whole fields at a time. The king of Chanda proclaimed that whoever killed the kite would be granted the adjoining lands. A Mana shot the kite with an arrow and its remains were taken to Chanda in eight carts, and as his reward he received the grant of a zamlndari.
In appearance the Manas, or at least some of them, are rather fine men, nor do their complexion and features show more noticeable traces of aboriginal descent than those of the local Hindus. But their neighbours in Chanda and Bastar, the Maria Gonds, are also taller and of a better physical type than the average Dravidian, so that their physical appearance need not militate against the above hypothesis. They retained their taste for fighting until within quite recent times, and in Katol and other towns below the Satpura hills, Manas were regularly enlisted as a town guard for repelling the Pindari raids.
Their descendants still retain the ancestral matchlocks, and several of them make good use of these as professional shikaris or hunters. Many of them are employed as servants by landowners and moneylenders for the collection of debts or the protection of crops, and others are proprietors, cultivators and labourers, while a few even lend money on their own account. Manas hold three zamlndari estates in Bhandara and a few villages in Chanda ; here they are considered to be good cultivators, but have the reputation as a caste of being very miserly, and though possessed of plenty, living only on the poorest and coarsest food.^ The Mana women are proverbial for the assistance which they render to their husbands in the work of cultivation.
Owing to their general adoption of Maratha customs, the Manas are now commonly regarded as a caste and not a forest tribe, and this view may be accepted. They have two subcastcs, the Badwaik Manas, or soldiers, and the Khad Manas, who live in the plains and are considered to be of impure descent. Badwaik or ' The Great Ones ' is a titular term applied to a person carrying arms, and assumed by certain Rajputs and also by some of the lower castes. ' Rev. A. Wood in Chanda District Gazetteer, para. 96.
A third group of Manas are now amalgamated with the
Kunbis as a regular subdivision of that caste, though they
are regarded as somewhat lower than the others. They
have also a number of exogamous septs of the usual titular
and totemistic types, the few recognisable names being
Marathi. It is worth noticing that several pairs of these
septs, as Jamare and Gazbe, Narnari and Chudri, Wagh and
Rawat, and others are prohibited from intermarriage. And
this may be a relic of some wider scheme of division of the
type common among the Australian aborigines.
The social customs of the Manas are the same as those of the other lower Maratha castes, as described in the articles on Kunbi, Kohli and Mahar. A bride-price of Rs. 12-8 is usually paid, and if the bridegroom's father has the money, he takes it with him on going to arrange for the match. Only one married woman of the bridegroom's family accompanies him to the wedding, and she throws rice over him five times.
Four days in the year are appointed for the celebration of weddings, the festivals of Shivratri and of Akhatij, and a day each in the months of Magh (January) and Phagun (February). This rule, however, is not universal.
Brahmans do not usually officiate at their ceremonies, but they employ a Brahman to prepare the rice which is thrown over the couples. Marriage within the sept is forbidden, as well as the union of the children of two sisters. But the practice of marrying a brother's daughter to a sister's son is a very favourite one, being known as Mahunchar, and in this respect the Manas resemble the Gonds. When a widow is to be remarried, she stops on the way by the bank of a stream as she is proceeding to her new husband's house, and here her clothes are taken off and buried by an exorcist with a view to laying the first husband's spirit and preventing it from troubling the new household.
If a woman goes wrong with a man of another caste she is not finally cast out, but if she has a child she must first dispose of it to somebody else after it is weaned. She may then be readmitted into caste by having her hair shaved off and giving three feasts ; the first is prepared by the caste and eaten outside her house, the second is prepared by her relatives and eaten within her house, and at the third the caste
reinstate her by partaking of food cooked by herself. The dead are either buried or burnt ; in the former case a feast is given immediately after the burial and no further mourning is observed ; in the latter the period of mourning is three days. As among the Gonds, the dead are laid with feet to the north.
A woman is impure for seven days after child-birth. The Manas have Bhats or genealogists of their own caste, a separate one being appointed for each sept. The Bhat of any sept can only accept gifts from members of that sept, though he may take food from any one of the caste. The Bhats are in the position of beggars, and the other Manas will not take food from them. Every man must have a Bhat for his family under penalty of being temporarily put out of caste.
It is said that the Bhats formerly had books showing the pedigrees of the different families, but that once in a spirit of arrogance they placed their shoes upon the books ; and the other Manas, not brooking this insolence, burnt the books.
The gravity of such an act may be realised when it is stated that if anybody even threatens to hit a Mana with a shoe, the indignity put upon him is so great that he is temporarily excluded from caste and penalised for readmission. Since this incident the Bhats have to address the Manas as ' Brahma,' to show their respect, the Marra replying ' Ram, Ram.' Their women wear short loincloths, exposing part of the thigh, like the Gonds. They eat pork and drink liquor, but will take cooked food only from Brahmans.
