The Khedawals, numbering 15,000 to 20,000 in 1931 were basically priests but many of them were also landowners, government officials, and traders. 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. Literally, ekda meant unit, and gol circle, and both signified an endogamous unit. The point is that the Rajput hierarchy, with the princely families at the top, merged at the lower level imperceptibly into the vast sea of tribal and semi-tribal people like Bhils and Kolis. The members of a kings caste were thus found not only in his own kingdom but in other kingdoms as well. Traditionally, the Brahman division was supposed to provide the priests for the corresponding divisions. Nor do I claim to know the whole of Gujarat. There is enormous literature on these caste divisions from about the middle of the 19th century which includes census reports, gazetteers, [] Similarly, although the number of marriages between the second-order divisions in the Vania division, i.e., between Khadayata, Modh, Shrimali, Lad, Vayada, etc., has been increasing, the majority of marriages take place within the respective second-order divisions. The decline was further accelerated by the industrial revolution. And how flexibility was normal at the lowest level has just been shown. An important idea behind the activities of caste associations is: service to ones caste is service to the nation. This tendency reaches its culmination in the world of Dumont. There was a continuous process of formation and disintegration of such units. The urban centres in both the areas, it is hardly necessary to mention, are nucleated settlements populated by numerous caste and religious groups. The Khadayatas were divided into about 30 ekdas. The purpose is not to condemn village studies, as is caste in a better perspective after deriving insights from village studies. In each of these three divisions the top stratum was clear. x[? -E$nvU 4V6_}\]}/yOu__}ww7oz[_z~?=|nNT=|qq{\//]/Ft>_tV}gjjn#TfOus_?~>/GbKc.>^\eu{[GE_>'x?M5i16|B;=}-)$G&w5uvb~o:3r3v GL3or}|Y~?3s_hO?qWWpn|1>9WS3^:wTU3bN{tz;T_}so/R95iLc_6Oo_'W7y; Castes having continuous internal hierarchy and lacking effective small endogamous units, such as Rajputs, Leva Kanbis, Anavils and Khedawals, do not have active associations for lower-order divisions. Unfortunately, such figures are not available for the last fifty years or so. The main point is that we do not completely lose sight of the lowest boundary among these three hypergamous divisions as we do among the Rajputs. The small town sections therefore separated themselves from the respective large town sections and formed a new ekda. It is a coalescence of Kolis and Rajputs on the modern political plane based on the foundation of the traditional social and cultural symbiosis under the rubric of Kshatriya. r/ahmedabad From Mumbai. 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. 3.8K subscribers in the gujarat community. As could be expected, there were marriages between fairly close kin, resulting in many overlapping relationships, in such an endogamous unit. The lowest stratum among the Khedawals tried to cope with the problem of scarcity of brides mainly by practising ignominious exchange marriage and by restricting marriage of sons in a family to the younger sons, if not to only the youngest. endobj I have not yet come across an area where Kolis from three or more different areas live together, excepting modern, large towns and cities. They were thus not of the same status as most other second-order divisions among Brahmans. I am dealing here only with certain typical situations. Firstly, there were divisions whose population was found almost entirely in towns. He stated: hereditary specialization together with hierarchical organization sinks into the background in East Africa (293). If the first-order divisions are called jatis and castes, the second-order divisions would be called sub-jatis or sub-castes. 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). One may say that there are now more hypogamous marriages, although another and perhaps a more realistic way of looking at the change would be that a new hierarchy is replacing the traditional one. The existence of flexibility at both the levels was made possible by the flexibility of the category Rajput. % While some hypergamous and hierarchical tendency, however weak, did exist between tads within an ekda and between ekdas within a second- order division, it was practically non-existent among the forty or so second-order divisions, such as Modh, Porwad, Shrimali, Khadayata and so on, among the Vanias. Content Filtrations 6. Moreover, a single division belonging to any one of the orders may have more than one association, and an association may be uni-purpose or multi-purpose. Frequently, the urban population of such a division performed more specialized functions than did the rural one. As Ghurye pointed out long ago, slow consolidation of the smaller castes into larger ones would lead to three or four large groups being solidly organized for pushing the interests of each even at the cost of the others. Koli Patels are recognised as a Other Backward Class caste by Government of Gujarat. Gujarat did not have anything like the non-Brahmin movement of South India and Maharashtra before 1947. Hindu society is usually described as divided into a number of castes the boundaries of which are maintained by the rule of caste endogamy. The handloom weavers of Gujarat, Maharastra and Bengal produced and exported some of the world's most desirable fabrics. What may be called the census approach influenced a great deal of scholarly work. 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. The sub- the manner in which the ideas of free marriages and castles society are used by both the old and the young in modern India and how a number of new customs and institutions have evolved to cope with these new ideas is a fascinating subject of study. In the meanwhile, it is important to note that there does not seem to have been any attempt to form small endogamous units (ekdas, gols) at any level among the Rajputs unlike attempts made as we shall see, among some other hypergamous castes in Gujarat. No analytical gains are therefore likely to occur by calling them by any other name. Use census records and voter lists to . James Campbell (1901: xii), the compiler of gazetteers for the former Bombay presidency comprising several linguistic regions, wrote about Gujarat: In no part of India are the subdivisions so minute, one of them, the Rayakval Vanias, numbering only 47 persons in 1891. For example, a good number of villages in central Gujarat used to have both Talapada and Pardeshi Kolis and Brahmans belonging to two or three of their many second-order divisions. In central Gujarat, for example, one and the same division, freely arranging marriages within it, was known by several names such as Baraiya, Dharala, Khant, Kotwal, Pagi, Patelia, Talapada, Thakarada, and Thakor. The three trading castes of Vania, Lohana and Bhatia were mainly urban. It is easy to understand that the pattern of change would be different in those first-order divisions (such as Rajput) or second-order divisions (such as Leva Kanbi) which did not have within them subdivisions of lower orders and which practised hypergamy extensively. We shall return to this issue later. Today majority of these community members are not engaged in their ancestral weaving occupation still some population of these community contribute themselves in traditional handloom weaving of famous Patola of Patan, Kachchh shawl of Bhujodi in Kutch, Gharchola and Crotchet of Jamnagar, Zari of Surat, Mashroo of Patan and Mandvi in Kutch, Bandhani of Jamnagar, Anjar and Bhuj, Motif, Leheria, Dhamakda and Ajrak, Nagri sari, Tangaliya Shawl, Dhurrie, Kediyu, Heer Bharat, Abhala, Phento and art of Gudri. They are described by the ruling elite as robbers, dacoits, marauders, predators and the like. While certain first-order divisions were found mainly in towns, the population of certain other first-order divisions was dispersed in villages as well as in towns, the population of the rural and the urban sections differing from one division to another. 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. Hypergamy tended to be associated with this hierarchy. What I am trying to point out, however, is that greater emphasis on division (Pococks difference, Dumonts separation. 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. I should hasten to add, however, that the open-minded scholar that he is, he does not rule out completely the possibility of separation existing as independent principle. 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. //]]>. The incidence of exchange marriages and of bachelors in the lowest stratum among the Anavils also was high. In central Gujarat, at least from about the middle of the 18th century, the population of the wealthy and powerful Patidar section of the Kanbis also lived in townsan extremely interesting development of rich villages into towns, which I will not describe here. The method is to remove first the barriers of the divisions of the lowest order and then gradually those of one higher order after another. 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. Advances in manufacturing technologies flooded markets in India and abroad with cheap, mass-produced fabrics that Indian handlooms could no longer compete with. They also continued to have marital relations with their own folk. There were Brahman and Vania divisions of the same name, the myths about both of them were covered by a single text. It has already been mentioned that every first-order division was not divided into second-order divisions, and that every second-order division was not divided into third-order divisions, and so on. The primarily rural and lower castes were the last to form associations and that too mainly after independence (1947). In the case of some of them the small population was so dispersed that a division such as that of barbers, blacksmiths, or carpenters, would be represented by only one or two households in each village and by a significant number of households in towns. rogers outage brampton today; levelland, tx obituaries. There was apparently a close relation between a castes internal organization and the size and spatial distribution of its population. This was about 22% of all the recorded Mehta's in USA. State Id State Name Castecode Caste Subcaste 4 GUJARAT 4001 AHIR SORATHA 4 GUJARAT 4002 AHIR 4 GUJARAT 4003 ANSARI 4 GUJARAT 4004 ANVIL BRAHMIN 4 GUJARAT 4005 ATIT BAYAJI BAKSHI PANCH 4 GUJARAT 4006 BAJANIYA 4 GUJARAT 4007 BAJIR . No sooner had the village studies begun that their limitations and the need for studying caste in its horizontal dimension were realized. Sometimes a division could even be a self-contained endogamous unit. We will now analyze the internal structure of a few first-order divisions, each of which was split into divisions going down to the fourth order. In the second-order divisions of the Vanias the small endogamous units functioned more effectively and lasted longer: although the hypergamous tendency did exist particularly between the rural and the urban sections in a unit, it had restricted play.