13. Occupation.
The Bhīls have now had to abandon their free use of the forests, which was highly destructive in its effects, and their indiscriminate slaughter of game. Many of them live in the open country and have become farmservants and field-labourers. A certain proportion are tenants, but very few own villages. Some of the Tadvi Bhīls, however, still retain villages which were originally granted free of revenue on condition of their keeping the hill-passes of the Satpūras open and safe for travellers. These are known as Hattiwāla. Bhīls also serve as village watchmen in Nimār and the adjoining tracts of the Berār Districts. Captain Forsyth, writing in 1868, described the Bhīls as follows: “The Muhammadan Bhīls are with few exceptions a miserable lot, idle and thriftless, and steeped in the deadly vice of opium-eating. The unconverted Bhīls are held to be tolerably reliable. When they borrow money or stock for cultivation they seldom abscond fraudulently from their creditors, and this simple honesty of theirs tends, I fear, to keep numbers of them still in a state little above serfdom.”[37]