The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India

The Tribes and Castes of the
Central
by R.V. Russell

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tribes and Castes of the Central
Provinces of India--Volume I (of IV), by R.V. Russell This eBook is
for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India--Volume
I (of IV)
Author: R.V. Russell
Release Date: February 15, 2007 [EBook #20583]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIBES
AND CASTES ***

Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net/

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
Published Under the Orders of the Central Provinces Administration
In Four Volumes Vol. I.
Macmillan and Co., Limited St. Martin's Street, London.
1916

PREFACE
This book is the result of the arrangement made by the Government of
India, on the suggestion of the late Sir Herbert Risley, for the
preparation of an ethnological account dealing with the inhabitants of
each of the principal Provinces of India. The work for the Central
Provinces was entrusted to the author, and its preparation, undertaken
in addition to ordinary official duties, has been spread over a number of
years. The prescribed plan was that a separate account should be
written of each of the principal tribes and castes, according to the
method adopted in Sir Herbert Risley's Tribes and Castes of Bengal.
This was considered to be desirable as the book is intended primarily as
a work of reference for the officers of Government, who may desire to
know something of the customs of the people among whom their work
lies. It has the disadvantage of involving a large amount of repetition of
the same or very similar statements about different castes, and the
result is likely therefore to be somewhat distasteful to the ordinary
reader. On the other hand, there is no doubt that this method of
treatment, if conscientiously followed out, will produce more
exhaustive results than a general account. Similar works for some other
Provinces have already appeared, as Mr. W. Crooke's Castes and

Tribes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Mr. Edgar Thurston's
Castes and Tribes of Southern India, and Mr. Ananta Krishna Iyer's
volumes on Cochin, while a Glossary for the Punjab by Mr. H.A. Rose
has been partly published. The articles on Religions and Sects were not
in the original scheme of the work, but have been subsequently added
as being necessary to render it a complete ethnological account of the
population. In several instances the adherents of the religion or sect are
found only in very small numbers in the Province, and the articles have
been compiled from standard works.
In the preparation of the book much use has necessarily been made of
the standard ethnological accounts of other parts of India, especially
Colonel Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Mr. J.D. Forbes'
Rasmala or Annals of Gujarat, Colonel Dalton's Ethnology of Bengal,
Dr. Buchanan's Eastern India, Sir Denzil Ibbetson's Punjab Census
Report for 1881, Sir John Malcolm's Memoir of Central India, Sir
Edward Gait's Bengal and India Census Reports and article on Caste in
Dr. Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Colonel (Sir
William) Sleeman's Report on the Badhaks and Ramaseeana or
Vocabulary of the Thugs, Mr. Kennedy's Criminal Classes of the
Bombay Presidency, Major Gunthorpe's Criminal Tribes of Bombay,
Berar and the Central Provinces, the books of Mr. Crooke and Sir H.
Risley already mentioned, and the mass of valuable ethnological
material contained in the Bombay Gazetteer (Sir J. Campbell),
especially the admirable volumes on Hindus of Gujarat by Mr.
Bhimbhai Kirparam, and Parsis and Muhammadans of Gujarat by
Khan Bahadur Fazlullah Lutfullah Faridi, and Mr. Kharsedji Nasarvanji
Seervai, J.P., and Khan Bahadur Bamanji Behramji Patel. Other Indian
ethnological works from which I have made quotations are Dr.
Wilson's Indian Caste (Times Press and Messrs. Blackwood). Bishop
Westcott's Kabir and the Kabirpanth (Baptist Mission Press,
Cawnpore), Mr. Rajendra Lal Mitra's Indo-Aryans (Newman & Co.,
Calcutta), The Jainas by Dr. J.G. Bühler and Mr. J. Burgess, Dr. J.N.
Bhattacharya's Hindu Castes and Sects (Thacker, Spink & Co.,
Calcutta), Professor Oman's Mystics, Ascetics and Saints of India, Cults,
Customs and Superstitions of India, and Brahmans, Theists and
Muslims of India (T. Fisher Unwin), Mr. V.A. Smith's Early History of

India (Clarendon Press), the Rev. T.P. Hughes' Dictionary of Islam
(W.H. Allen & Co., and Heffer & Sons, Cambridge), Mr. L.D. Barnett's
Antiquities of India, M. André Chevrillon's Romantic