Many Untouchable Castes

Many untouchable castes

Tan Dan about caste competition in feudal Rajasthan

by Son Lal

Copyright 2013 by Son Lal

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This is a work of fiction. The names and characters come from the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Similarly, the locations and incidents in this book, which might resemble real locations and events, are being used fictitiously and are not to be considered as real.

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Many untouchable castes

Tan Dan about caste competition in feudal Rajasthan

Village life among weavers, shoemakers, entertainers and many others who worked hard to eke out a living in the dry poor desert area of western Rajasthan in the middle of the 20th century. As narrated to Tan Dan's friend Son Lal around 1980.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Tan Dan

Chapter 2 A brush for weavers

Chapter 3 Weavers at work at Chelana

Chapter 4 Those who wore the handwoven cloth

Chapter 5 The Bajania Nats are laureates for Bhambis

Chapter 6 A Bajania Nat family and its jajman clients

Chapter 7 Some other laureate castes active in the Chelana area

Chapter 8 The many castes of Chelana

Chapter 9 Thoughts on castes and untouchability

Chapter 10 Ranking of the untouchable castes of Chelana

Chapter 11 Untouchability and water

Chapter 12 Food acceptance and caste ranking

Chapter 13 The lingering habit of discrimination against former feudal dependents

Chapter 14 The clean-shaven heads of feudal subjects

Chapter 15 The difficulties in getting a haircut for lowcaste people

Chapter 16 Leather and untouchability

Chapter 17 Tan Dan about leather-workers at Chelana

Chapter 18 How dead livestock was removed

Chapter 19 Chamar subcastes also had a caste hierarchy

Chapter 20 The year the Bhambis left their ageold caste profession

Chapter 21 Dipa Ram, the cobbler who did not obey

Chapter 22 The new cobblers at Chelana

Supplements

Conclusion

Indian words used in this book are explained here.

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Chapter 1 Tan Dan

This book is an attempt to show the life in a dry part of northwestern India, especially with regard to the custom of untouchability and oppression of weak social groups in some villages of rural western Rajasthan. Many narrations are based on Tan Dan's experience in the 1970s. Some persons may have other ways of looking at the described events, depending on background and perspective. The ultimate truth is difficult to find, but the subject deserves a thorough penetration from the angle of the untouchable villagers themselves.

Who is Tan Dan?

Tan Dan Detha was born in a farmer family of the Charan caste in 1943. His native village is Chelana in Jodhpur District of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Tan Dan has lived in the midst of his strongly traditional environment all his life. He is a critical observer rather than a follower of that tradition.

Who is Son Lal?

Son Lal is my pen name. I was born in a Scandinavian country of northern Europe in the early 1940s. I have lived in India off and on for fifty years, since I first arrived to the Gateway of India at Bombay by ship in 1963. In the 1970s I met Tan Dan. We soon found we shared many views on the world, and had the same curiosity of village life. I saw a chance to learn how he experienced his rural environment. He did his best to explain, and I am grateful to him for having shared his knowledge and thoughts with me.

How this narration was done

Tan Dan told in English and I typed, while we sat together in long sessions. His many photos became a starting point for our discussions. Our knowledge of English was on the same level and we formulated the sentences together. Sentence after sentence, day after day. Most of it we wrote around 1980, but some additions were made in later decades. Afterwards I have edited the material and supplemented some sections with information from elsewhere. Still, it is Tan Dan's voice that is heard on these pages. It is a personal narration by a village farmer, and has no connection to any university.

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Chapter 2 A brush for weavers

The Kuchia nomads and their sunvalo brush

Banjara bhat pack oxen caravan nomads got to know about wild plants and their use, as they lived close to the wilderness when moving around along caravan routes to distant land. Some of them learnt how to make useful items for sale out of wild plants. Kuchia is a caste that has been formed by a banjara ox caravan subgroup that left the caravan trade in order to make a high quality brush for weavers. Weavers in villages all over Rajasthan bought that brush from the Kuchia nomads for starching the warp, the longitudinal threads at the loom. The brush is called sunvalo and is made of a particular grass.

Village weavers all around western Rajasthan and elsewhere in north India, using the sunvalo brush, did not know how it was made. They only knew they could buy it from certain banjara traders, and that the brush could last for fifteen to twenty years if used very frequently, otherwise for more than thirty years. Such a brush cost in 1977 about ten Rupees only, in spite of its utilitiy and the amount of labour required in making it.

Kuchia banjaras told Tan Dan they used the sevan grass for the sunvalo brush, but asked him not to tell anybody. Others might start competing and ruin their trade.

Making and selling such a brush of grass roots became a full-time occupation and the kuchia kinship groups formed a caste of their own. Tan Dan met kuchia families in the 1970s moving around without cattle selling both the sunvalo brush and medicines of wild plants.

Their secret, the sevan grass roots, was already known to botanists, though. Ambasta (1986 p.317) states that the roots of Lasiurus hirsatus (Forsk.) yield a fibre used for weaver's brushes.

The trade of the sunvalo brush has almost disappeared along with the manufacture of handloom cloth in Rajasthani villages due to the competition from the textile mills, which, most likely, had their own methods of starching warp threads.

Sevan is a three feet high plant growing in the sand of the desert, and it has a very hairy root system at least eight to ten feet long and sometimes longer, Tan told. (It might be rhizomes with root hairs at the nodes.)

A kuchia family at Chelana

Tan Dan met a family of Kuchia caste nomads at Chelana 1980. It was a small kinship group with no animals apart from two donkeys. A joint family of three children and five grown-ups, who at Chelana arranged themselves in three camping places with their chulha fireplaces some fifty meters apart. For privacy and a little individualistic life. An unusual behaviour among nomads, who mostly stick together in physical closeness, to be better protected against external threats, if any.

They lived on selling wild plants and shrubs as medicine. Some plants without any change, and others after crushing and mixing into powder. It became medicine for internal and external use. The kuchia group alse knew how to make the sunvalo brush, which Bhambi weavers used for starching threads.

They were nomads with a permanent adress

In 1980 the police were suspicious of people with nomadic habits and wanted to know their whereabouts. From where they had come and where they had their home. Therefore even nomadic groups such as this one had to state some adress of a permanent kind, in spite of hardly living there for more than a short time during the rainy season. This Kuchia group told Tan Dan their home village was near Mangliyavas in Ajmer District.

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Chapter 3 Weavers at work at Chelana

The Bhambi weavers of Chelana got white mill yarn in long bundles from the baniya merchant. They started be dying the yarn. That work was done mainly by women but also by men. They used colour powder which they got from the Baniyas. They had also their own old colour making material out of vegetables and other plants.

For some colours they dipped the yarn in the boiling water die, and for other colours they dipped it in water dies without boiling. After that they dried the coloured yarn.

Then they would wind the yarn on spools. When Tan Dan visited Jogiji's angan in 1979 there were spools with red and yellow threads on one side and green on the other side. The spools were arranged on frames. The left frame had 24 spools, each spool rotating on a iron stick. These short iron sticks Jogiji's second son Genvar Ram took from old worn-out umbrellas, when he made this spool frame about ten years earlier.

It is a useful device for putting the warp threads in the right order, beside each other for forming the various colour patterns.

Then Genvar Ram and his assistent set the warp, the longitudinal thread structure of the web, fixing the thread between the pairs of sticks put on the ground in lines on Jogiji's house compound yard, the whole warp being sometimes one hundred feet long and sometimes up to two hundred feet going in a u-shaped form over his yard, starting and ending at one wall and turning in a bend at the opposite wall of the yard.

All the six weavers of Chelana used Yogiji's yarn for setting their warps. Hence, for the last ten years the other five families have used Genvar Ram's spool frame, which they borrow from him as a mutual help. The thought of charging money for it had never occurred, Tan Dan told.

Before they had the spool frame, they went by two spools at a time around the u-shaped base putting the threads in place, but now two persons working can put 24 threads in place per round, which increased the speed of the web-base setting work. Bhambi weavers, who Tan Dan has seen in other villages of the area still set their warp by going with one spool in each hand rotating on wooden sticks along the web.

How the grid frame was made

Babu, a cousin of Bagda Ram, handled a small grid frame, which also was an essential part of Genvar Ram's device.

Bagda Ram told Tan Dan that the outer square of this frame was made of a kerosine tin can, a canister, which many villagers also use as containers for ata, the flour, or for grain. They always bought second-hand kerosine tins for this purpose. This Bhambi family used the top of such a tin for the frame of the grid. From a wornout umbrella the spikes for spreading it were removed and fit into the grid frame. It was done by Muhammad Safid, a Muslim voupari that liked to repair and convert metal material such as kanaster boxes. He made the frame out of the materials given to him by Genvar Ram. The resulting tool was used for keeping one thread in each gap between the horizontal iron ribbons.

The problem of selling additional cloth produced with Genvar Ram's improved technique

It seems that Genvar Ram made his labour saving invention on his own, without having seen such a thing somewhere else. The device could be useful also for other handloom weavers to adopt, Tan Dan thought. However, higher efficiency would not result in more produced cloth, if the baniya did not supply them with more yarn. There was a limited amount the baniya merchant could sell to villagers still using traditional handloom cloth. In the short run Genvar Ram's device might mean that the weavers could produce the same amount of cloth in a shorter time.

The spare time they would get could be used for doing other labour work, though. They could earn extra money that way or have more leisure time. They hardly had any leisure time at all, working from morning to evening as long as there was sufficient daylight.

The way Jogi starched the warp

Tan Dan's friend Jogi was a bhambi by caste and a weaver by profession. In 1977 Tan Dan met Jogi outside his home when he starched warp threads with his sunvalo brush. It had been made of sevan grass roots by nomads of the Kuchia caste hailing from the bhat ox caravan traders. Before applying starch on the threads they had to be arranged and Jogiji's son Bagda Ram helped in this. He wore a yellow turban and his father a white one. The colour of the turban convey information to others. Jogiji's whith turban tell that his father is dead. Hence, Jogiji belongs to the oldest generation of his family, and is the family head.

Starching is done after having set all the warp threads at Jogiji's own yard and then winding the whole web base, i.e. the warp, with the wooden sticks pulled up from the ground, into a loose bundle with the wooden sticks still in it. Then they go to another place at the outskirt of the village near the Chelana school for girls. There they spread the warp in