1. Origin and traditions.
Khangār,[1] called also Kotwāl, Jemādār or Darbānia (gatekeeper).—A low caste of village watchmen and field-labourers belonging to Bundelkhand, and found in the Saugor, Damoh, Narsinghpur and Jubbulpore Districts. They numbered nearly 13,000 in 1911. The Khangārs are also numerous in the United Provinces. Hindu ingenuity has evolved various explanations of the word Khangār, such as ‘khand,’ a pit, and ‘gar,’ maker, digger, because the Khangār digs holes in other people’s houses for the purposes of theft. The caste is, however, almost certainly of non-Aryan origin, and there is little doubt also that Bundelkhand was its original home. It may be noted that the Munda tribe have a division called Khangār with which the caste may have some connection. The Khangārs themselves relate the following story of their origin. Their ancestors were formerly the rulers of the fort and territory of Kurār in Bundelkhand, when a Bundela Rājpūt came and settled there. The Bundela had a very pretty daughter whom the Khangār Rāja demanded in marriage. The Bundela did not wish to give his daughter to the Khangār, but could not refuse the Rāja outright, so he said that he would consent if all the Khangārs would agree to adopt Bundela practices. This the Khangārs readily agreed to do, and the Bundela thereupon invited them all to a wedding feast, and having summoned his companions and plied the Khangārs with liquor until they were dead drunk, cut them all to pieces. One pregnant woman only escaped by hiding in a field of kusum or safflower,[2] and on this account the Khangārs still venerate the kusum and will not wear cloths dyed with saffron. She fled to the house of a Muhammadan eunuch or Fakīr, who gave her shelter and afterwards placed her with a Dāngi landowner. The Bundelas followed her up and came to the house of the Dāngi, who denied that the Khangār woman was with him. The Bundelas then asked him to make all the women in his house eat together to prove that none of them was the Khangārin, on which the Dāngi five times distributed the maihar, a sacrificial cake which is only given to relations, to all the women of the household including the Khangārin, and thus convinced the Bundelas that she was not in the house. The woman who was thus saved became the ancestor of the whole Khangār caste, and in memory of this act the Khangārs and Nadia Dāngis are still each bidden to eat the maihar cake at the weddings of the other, or at least so it is said; while the Fakīrs, in honour of this great occasion when one of their number acted as giver rather than receiver, do not beg for alms at the wedding of a Khangār, but on the contrary bring presents. The basis of the story, that the Khangārs were the indigenous inhabitants of Bundelkhand and were driven out and slaughtered by the immigrant Bundelas, may not improbably be historically correct. It is also said that no Khangār is even now allowed to enter the fort of Kurār, and that the spirit of the murdered chief still haunts it; so that if a bed is placed there in the evening with a tooth-stick, the tooth-stick will be split in the morning as after use, and the bed will appear as if it had been slept in.[3]