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While the Rajputs, Leva Patidars, Anavils and Khedawals have been notorious for high dowries, and the Kolis have been looked down upon for their practice of bride price, the Vanias have been paying neither. To take one sensitive area of purity/pollution behaviour, the concern for observance of rules of commensality has greatly declined not only in urban but also in rural areas. manvar surname caste in gujarat It is important to note that the more literate and learned Brahmans lived in towns, more particularly in capital and pilgrim towns, which were, indeed, the centres of higher Hindu culture and civilization. As regards the specific case of the Rajput-Koli relationship, my impression is that, after the suppression of female infanticide in the first half of the 19th century, the later prohibition of polygyny, and the recent removal of princely states and feudal land tenures among the Rajputs on the one hand, and the increasing sanskritization as well as Rajputization among the Kolis on the other, marriage ties between these divisions have become more extensive than before. As a consequence, the continuities of social institutions and the potentiality of endogenous elements for bringing about change are overlooked (for a discussion of some other difficulties with these paradigms, see Lynch 1977). Castes which did not sit together at public feasts, let alone at meals in homes, only 15 or 20 years ago, now freely sit together even at meals in homes. Image Guidelines 5. History. To whichever of the four orders a caste division belonged, its horizontal spread rarely, if ever, coincided with that of another. The Vanias provide an example of such castes. Simultaneously, there is gradual decline in the strength of the principle of hierarchy, particularly of ritual hierarchy expressed in purity and pollution. In some other cases, mainly of urban artisans, craftsmen and specialized servants, such as Kansaras (copper and bronze smiths), Salvis (silk weavers), Kharadis (skilled carpenters and wood carvers), Chudgars (bangle-makers) and Vahivanchas genealogists and mythographers), the small populations were so small and confined to so few towns that they had few subdivisions and the boundaries of their horizontal units were fairly easy to define. It used to have a panch (council of leaders) and sometimes also a headman (patel). . There was also another kind of feast, called bhandaro, where Brahmans belonging to a lesser number of divisions (say, all the few in a small town) were invited. The significant point, however, is that there were small endogamous units which were not, like ekdas and tads, part of any higher-order division. Unfortunately, such figures are not available for the last fifty years or so. It is argued that the various welfare programmes of each caste association, such as provision of medical facilities, scholarships and jobs for caste members contribute, in however small a way, to the solution of the nations problems. The primarily rural and lower castes were the last to form associations and that too mainly after independence (1947). Census officials-turned-scholars, from Risley to Hutton, wrote many of the earlier general works on caste. There was not only no pyramid type of arrangement among the many ekdas in a second-order Vania divisionthe type of arrangement found in the Rajput, Leva Kanbi, Anavil and Khedawal divisions-but frequently there was no significant sign of hierarchical relation, except boastful talk, between two neighbouring ekdas. They then spread to towns in the homeland and among all castes. In India Limbachiya is most frequent in: Maharashtra, where 70 percent reside, Gujarat . Most associations continue to retain their non-political character. In any case, castes are not likely to cease to be castes in the consciousness of people in the foreseeable future. The degree of contravention is less if the couple belong, let us say, to two different fourth-order divisions within a third-order division than if they belong to two different third-order divisions within a second-order division, and so on. The decline was further accelerated by the industrial revolution. ), as contrasted with the horizontal unity of the caste. That Rajputs were one of the divisions, if not the only division of the first-order, not having further divisions, has already been mentioned. hu)_EYUT?:fX:vOR,4g4ce{\(wcUO %OW-Knj|qV]_)1?@{^ $:0ZY\fpg7J~Q~pHaMVSP5bLC}6+zwgv;f f^v4[|vug+vO0h t7QNP}EYm+X[x~;O|z5tq ]-39aa{g-u5n:a56&`3y.f-a@a"0v-a@$%`Z]]Iqb56aR0g 30V9EM%K"#|6uN? =O|8alCcs):~AC<5 q|om57/|Sgc}2c#)U~WL}%T]s> z. Unfortunately, although the Kolis are an important element in Gujarats population, their earlier ethnography is confusing, and there is hardly any modern, systematic, anthropological, sociological or historical study, so that the confusion continues to persist. Among the Kanbis, while there was hypergamy within the Leva division and possibly, similar hypergamy within the Kadva division, there was no hierarchy or hypergamy between the two second-order divisions. Their origin myth enshrined in their caste purana also showed them to be originally non-Brahman. I have discussed above caste divisions in Gujarat mainly in the past, roughly in the middle of the 19th century. Nowadays, in urban areas in particular, very few people think of making separate seating arrangements for members of different castes at wedding and such other feasts. professor melissa murray. Since after expansion of British textile markets and decline of Indian textile industry Vankars suffered a lot. From the 15th century onwards we find historical references to political activities of Koli chieftains. A great deal of discussion of the role of the king in the caste system, based mainly on Indological literature, does not take these facts into account and therefore tends to be unrealistic. In particular, the implications of the co-existence of lower-order divisions within a higher- order division in the same town or city should be worked out. To have a meaningful understanding of the system of caste divisions, there is no alternative but to understand the significance of each order of division and particularly the nature of their boundaries and maintenance mechanisms. The most important example of primarily political caste association is the Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha. As regards the rest of Gujarat, I have used various sources: my work on the caste of genealogists and mythographys and on the early 19th century village records; the available ethnographic, historical and other literature; and observations made while living m Gujarat. <>/ExtGState<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/Annots[ 9 0 R] /MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> Although the name of a Brahman or Vania division might be based on a place name, the division was not territorial in nature. The primarily urban castes and the urban sections of the rural-cum- urban castes were the first to take advantage of the new opportunities that developed in industry, commerce, administration, the professions and education in urban centres. The humble Charkha (spinning wheel) and khadi became a dominant symbol of self-reliance, self-determination and nationalist pride. It will readily be agreed that the sociological study of Indian towns and cities has not made as much progress as has the study of Indian villages. stream The tad thus represented the fourth and last order of caste divisions. Frequently, a division among Vanias corresponded to a division among Brahmans. There was another kind of ambiguity about the Brahman status or two other divisionsKayatia and Tapodhan. If the Varna divisions are taken into account, then this would add one more order to the four orders of caste divisions considered above. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. ADVERTISEMENTS: Division and Hierarchy: An Overview of Caste in Gujarat! rogers outage brampton today; levelland, tx obituaries. We shall return to the Rajput-Koli relationship when we consider the Kolis in detail. Usually, a single Koli division had different local names in different parts of Gujarat, but more about this later. r/ahmedabad From Mumbai. Real Estate Software Dubai > blog > manvar surname caste in gujarat. Hindu society is usually described as divided into a number of castes the boundaries of which are maintained by the rule of caste endogamy. Most inter-divisional marriages take place between boys and girls belonging to the lowest order in the structure of divisions. They wrote about the traditional Indian village, but not about the traditional Indian town. A comment on the sociology of urban India would, therefore, be in order before we go ahead with the discussion of caste divisions. The handloom weavers of Gujarat, Maharastra and Bengal produced and exported some of the world's most desirable fabrics. The arrival of the East India Company, however sounded the death knell for the Indian textile industry. Since Vankars were involved in production and business they were known as Nana Mahajans or small merchants. One of the clearly visible changes in caste in Gujarat is the increasing number of inter-divisional or so-called inter-caste marriages, particularly in urban areas, in contravention of the rule of caste endogamy. Apparently this upper boundary of the division was sharp and clear, especially when we remember that many of these royal families practised polygyny and female infanticide until middle of the 19th century (see Plunkett 1973; Viswa Nath 1969, 1976). so roamed around clueless. The census operations, in particular, spread as they were over large areas, gave a great impetus to writings on what Srinivas has called the horizontal dimension of caste (1952: 31f;1966: 9,44,92,98-100,114-17). In no other nation has something as basic as one's clothing or an act as simple as spinning cotton become so intertwined with a national movement. I hope to show that the integration of the study of caste in urban areas with that of rural areas is essential to a comprehensive understanding of caste and its implications for Indian society and culture. The idea of inter-caste marriage is, moreover, linked with the idea of creating such a society involves a compromise with, if not subtle negation of, the ideal. Pocock goes on to observe that diminution of emphasis upon hierarchy and increasing emphasis upon difference are features of caste in modern, particularly urban, India: there is a shift from the caste system to individual castes and this reflects the change that is taking place in India today (290). Although it has been experiencing stresses and strains and has had ups and downs on account of the enormous diversity between the royal and the tribal ends, it has shown remarkable solidarity in recent years. There was also another important correlation. Srinivas has called the unity of the village manifested in these interrelations the vertical unity of the village (1952: 31f. The Rajputs in Radhvanaj, the village I have studied in central Gujarat, had no great difficulty in establishing their claim to being Rajputs: they owned substantial amounts of land under a traditional Rajput tenure, dominated village politics and possessed certain other traditional Rajput symbols. Prohibited Content 3. The Khadayatas were divided into about 30 ekdas. If the first-order divisions are called jatis and castes, the second-order divisions would be called sub-jatis or sub-castes. There were Brahman and Vania divisions of the same name, the myths about both of them were covered by a single text. This does not solve the problem if there are four orders of divisions of the kind found in Gujarat. Such a description not only overlooks the diversity and complexity of caste divisions and the rural-urban Link- ages in them but also leads to placing them in the same category as Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists, and so on. Hypergamy was accompanied by sanskritization of at least a section of the tribal population, their claim to the Kshatriya Varna and their economic and political symbiosis with the caste population. Indeed, a major achievement of Indian sociology during the last thirty years or so has been deeper understanding of caste in the village context in particular and of its hierarchical dimension in general. Hence as we go down the hierarchy we encounter more and more debates regarding the claims of particular lineages to being Rajput so much so that we lose sight of any boundary and the Rajput division merges imperceptibly into some other division. The point is that there was nothing like the endogamous unit but there were only several units of various orders with defined roles in endogamy. The Hindu population of Gujarat was divided first of all into what I have called caste divisions of the first order. The members of a kings caste were thus found not only in his own kingdom but in other kingdoms as well. The essential idea in the category was power, and anybody who wielded powereither as king or as dominant group in a rural (even tribal) areacould claim to be Rajput. This was dramatized in many towns at the mahajan (guild) feasts when all the members of the guild of traders would eat together. We have seen how one second-order division among Brahmans, namely, Khedawal, was marked by continuous internal hierarchy and strong emphasis on hypergamy on the one hand and by absence of effective small endogamous units on the other. The same problems would arise in the reverse direction if, as many scholars have done, the term caste cluster, caste complex or caste category is used for divisions of a higher order and the term caste or jati is used for divisions of a lower order. There were also a number of first-order divisions, mainly of artisans, craftsmen and specialized servants, with small populations. Finally, while an increasing number of marriages are taking place even across the boundaries of first-order divisions, as for example, between Brahmans and Vanias, and between Vanias and Patidars, such marriages even now form an extremely small proportion of the total number of marriages. endobj Even if we assume, for a moment, that the basic nature of a structure or institution was the same, we need to know its urban form or variant. In 1931, their total population was more than 1,700,000, nearly one-fourth of the total population of Gujarat. The Anavil, numbering 30,000 to 40,000 in 1931, were found mainly in south Gujarat. Leva Kanbis, numbering 400,000 to 500,000 m 1931, were the traditional agricultural caste of central Gujarat. The above brief analysis of change in caste in modern Gujarat has, I hope, indicated that an overall view of changes in caste in modern India should include a careful study of changes in rural as well as in urban areas in relation to their past. : 11-15, 57-75). Our analysis of caste in towns has shown how it differed significantly from that in villages. I have done field work in two contiguous parts of Gujarat: central Gujarat (Kheda district and parts of Ahmedabad and Baroda districts) and eastern Gujarat (Panchmahals district). The migration of the Kolis of north Gujarat into central Gujarat and those of the latter into eastern Gujarat was a process of slow drift from one village to another over a period of time. Many of them became the norm-setting elite for Gujaratis in the homeland. The Brahmans were divided into such divisions as Audich, Bhargav, Disawal, Khadayata, Khedawal, Mewada, Modh, Nagar, Shrigaud, Shrimali, Valam, Vayada, and Zarola. Typically, a village consists of the sections of various castes, ranging from those with just one household to those with over u hundred. However, it is well known that there were subtle arguments regarding the status of certain royal families being Rajput. So far we have considered first-order divisions with large and widely spread populations. The migrants, many of whom came from heterogeneous urban centres of Gujarat, became part of an even more heterogeneous environment in Bombay. These linkages played an important role in the traditional social structure as well as in the processes of change in modern India. Usually, these divisions were distinguished from one another by prohibition of what people called roti vyavahar (bread, i.e., food transactions) as well as beti vyavahar (daughter, i.e., marital transactions). This tendency reaches its culmination in the world of Dumont. [1], People of India Gujarat Volume XXI Part Three edited by R.B Lal, P.B.S.V Padmanabham, G Krishnan & M Azeez Mohideen pages 1126-1129, Last edited on 14 November 2022, at 23:04, Learn how and when to remove this template message, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vankar&oldid=1121933086, This page was last edited on 14 November 2022, at 23:04. More common was an ekda or tad having its population residing either in a few neighbouring villages, or in a few neighbouring towns, or in both. In the city, on the other hand, the population was divided into a large number of castes and each of most of them had a large population, frequently subdivided up to the third or the fourth order. But many Rajput men of Radhvanaj got wives from people in distant villages who were recognized there as Kolisthose Kolis who had more land and power than the generality of Kolis had tried to acquire some of the traditional Rajput symbols in dress manners and customs and had been claiming to be Rajputs. In any case, the population of any large caste was found in many kingdoms. Britain's Industrial Revolution was built on the de-industrialisation of India - the destruction of Indian textiles and their replacement by manufacturing in England, using Indian raw materials and exporting the finished products back to India and even the rest of the world. Although I have not, during my limited field work, come across hypergamous marriages between Rajputs and Bhils, ethnographic reports and other literature frequently refer to such marriages (see, for example, Naik 1956: 18f; Nath I960. All of this information supports the point emerging from the above analysis, that frequently there was relatively little concern for ritual status between the second-order divisions within a first- order division than there was between the first-order divisions. It reflects, on the one hand, the political aspirations of Kolis guided by the importance of their numerical strength in electoral politics and on the other hand, the Rajputs attempt to regain power after the loss of their princely states and estates. Many of these names were also based on place names. The highland Bhils seem to have provided brides to lower Rajputs on the other side of the highlands also, i.e., to those in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (see, for example, Doshi, 1971: 7f., 13-15; Aurora 1972: 16, 32f.). The most important of them was the Koli division, which was, the largest division and mainly included small landholders, tenants and labourers. The Kayasthas and Brahma-Kshatriyas, the so- called writer castes, employed mainly in the bureaucracy, and the Vahivancha Barots, genealogists and mythographers, were almost exclusively urban castes. Marriages were usually confined to neighbouring villages, so that marriage links were spread in a continuous manner from one end of the region to another. For the sake of bravity and simplicity of presentation, I have not provided detailed documentation. Further, the castes there are unable to take cognizance of each other in terms of hierarchy or of occupation, and it is in this situation that they can be said to exist by virtue of their differences (296) it is the systematic recognition of difference which is most apparent. Marco Polo a Venetian merchant on his visit to India in 13th century Gujarat observed that "brocading art of Gujarat weavers is par excellent". Tirgaar, Tirbanda. Hence started farming and small scale business in the British Raj to thrive better conditions ahead to maintain their livelihood. The Hindu and Muslim kingdoms in Gujarat during the medieval period had, of course, their capital towns, at first Patan and then Ahmedabad. It has been pointed out earlier that an emphasis on the principle of division existed in the caste system in urban centres in traditional India. The tribal groups in the highland area, such as the Bhils and Naikdas, also did not have any urban component. Firstly, there were divisions whose population was found almost entirely in towns. These divisions have, however, been kept out of the present analysis for reasons which have become well known to students of Hindu society since the 1950s. The fact that Mahatma Gandhi came from a small third-order division in the Modh Vania division in a town in Saurashtra does not seem to be an accident. The co-residence of people belonging to two or more divisions of the lower orders within a division of a higher order has been a prominent feature of caste in towns and cities. Frequently, the urban population of such a division performed more specialized functions than did the rural one. Traditionally, the Brahman division was supposed to provide the priests for the corresponding divisions. As for the size of other castes, I shall make mainly relative statements. How many sub-divisions existed in the various divisions of the various orders is a matter of empirical investigation. window.__mirage2 = {petok:"uGhRfiuY26l2oZgRlfZRFSp4BWPIIt7Gh61sQC1XrRU-3600-0"}; Kayatias and Tapodhans were considered such low Brahmans that even some non-Brahman castes did not accept food and water from them. //]]>. The hypergamous tendency was never as sharp, pervasive and regular among the Vania divisions as among the Rajputs, Leva Kanbis, Anavils and Khedawals. To give just one example, one large street in Baroda, of immigrant Kanbis from the Ahmedabad area, named Ahmedabadi Pol, was divided into two small parallel streets. Hypergamy tended to be associated with this hierarchy. There was considerable elaboration in urban areas of what Ghurye long ago called the community aspect of caste (1932: 179) and frequently, this led to juxtaposition rather than hierarchy between caste divisions of the same order. By the beginning of British rule in the early 19th century, a considerable number of these chieftains had succeeded in establishing petty chiefdoms, each composed of one, and occasionally more than one, village, in all parts of Gujarat. These prefixes Visa and Dasa, were generally understood to be derived from the words for the numbers 20 (vis) and 10 (das), which suggested a descending order of status, but there is no definite evidence of such hierarchy in action. He stresses repeatedly the primacy of the principle of hierarchy-epitomized in the title of his book. The following 157 pages are in this category, out of 157 total. It is possible that there were a few divisions each confined to just one large city and, therefore, not having the horizontal dimension at all. These and many other artisans, craftsmen and servants reflected the special life-style of the town. These marriage links do not seem to have allowed, among the Kolis, formation of well organized, small, endogamous units (ekadas, gols) as were found among some other castes. gujarati surnames castes Gujarat protests: Who are the Patidars, and why are they angry? They have been grouped in Vaishya category of Varna system. In the village strict prohibition of inter-division marriage as well as the rules of purity and pollution and other mechanisms, of which the students of Indian village communities are well aware since the 1950s, maintained the boundaries of these divisions. An important idea behind the activities of caste associations is: service to ones caste is service to the nation. The village was a small community divided into a relatively small number of castes; the population of each caste was also small, sometimes only one or two households, with little possibility of existence of subdivisions; and there were intensive relationships of various kinds between the castes.