15. Married Bairāgis.
Large numbers of Bairāgis now marry and have children, and have formed an ordinary caste. The married Bairāgis are held to be inferior to the celibate mendicants, and will take food from them, but the mendicants will not permit the married Bairāgis to eat with them in the chauka or place purified for the taking of food. The customs of the married Bairāgis resemble those of ordinary Hindu castes such as the Kurmis. They permit divorce and the remarriage of widows, and burn the dead. Those who have taken to cultivation do not, as a rule, plough with their own hands. Many Bairāgis have acquired property and become landholders, and others have extensive moneylending transactions. Two such men who had acquired possession of extensive tracts of zamīndāri land in Chhattīsgarh, in satisfaction of loans made to the Gond zamīndārs, and had been given the zamīndāri status by the Marāthas, were subsequently made Feudatory Chiefs of the Nāndgaon and Chhuikhadan States. These chiefs now marry and the States descend in their families by primogeniture in the ordinary manner. As a rule, the Bairāgi landowners and moneylenders are not found to be particularly good specimens of their class.
[1] This article contains material from Sir E. Maclagan’s Punjab Census Report (1891), and Dr. J. N. Bhattachārya’s Hindu Castes and Sects (Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta).
[2] Dictionary, s.v.
[3] Sir E. Maclagan’s Punjab Census Report (1891), p. 122.
[4] Memoir of Mathura.
[5] Hindu Castes and Sects, p. 449.
[6] Lit. the birth on the eighth day, as Krishna was born on the 8th of dark Bhādon.
[7] Mr. Crooke’s Tribes and Castes, art. Vallabhachārya.
[8] Hindu Castes and Sects, p. 457.
[9] From laskkar, an army.
[10] This paragraph is taken from Professor Wilson’s Account of Hindu Sects in the Asiatic Researches.