Minor Professional Castes

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This article is an extract from PANJAB CASTES SIR DENZIL CHARLES JELF IBBETSON, K.C. S.I. Being a reprint of the chapter on The Races, Castes and Tribes of the People in the Report on the Census of the Panjab published in 1883 by the late Sir Denzil Ibbetson, KCSI Lahore: Printed by the Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1916. Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees with the contents of this article. Secondly, this has been scanned from a book. You can help by sending the corrected version to the Facebook page, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be duly acknowledged.

The minor professional castes

I have felt great doubt as to how I should class and where I should place the castes which I have included in this group, and the distribution of which is shown in Abstract No. 90 on the next page. Many of them are in some measure allied to the priestly classes they have functions t o perform in connection with weddings and similar 33. ceremonies, they receive customary fees for the peformance of those functions, and they are invested with a sort of quasi sacred character. On the other hand, they have many points in common with the menials ; their social status is very low, and many of them are retained by the villagers on the same footing as the ordinary village servants, their rights and duties being regulated by custom. The castes of the group may be divided into three classes, the Nai, Bbtit, and Mirasi who are real village servants though of a very special character ; the Jogis and RaAvals who are for the most part astrologers and semi-religious ; and the Bahrupias and Bhands who are actors and story-tellers, and purely professional.

See The Nai