5. Occupation and mode of living.
The caste are cultivators and labourers, while some are employed as village watchmen, and others are hereditary pālki-bearers to the Rāja of Bastar, enjoying a free grant of land. They practise shifting cultivation, cleaning a space by indiscriminate felling in the forest, and roughly ploughing the ground for a single broad-cast crop of rice; in the following year the clearing is usually abandoned. Their dress is simple, though they now wear ordinary cloth. Forty years ago it is said that they wore coverings made from the bark of the kuring tree and painted with horizontal bands of red, yellow and blue.[7] A girdle of the thickness of a man’s arm made from fine strips of bark is still worn and is a distinguishing feature of the Gadba women. They also carry a circlet round their forehead of the seeds of kusa grass threaded on a string. Both men and women wear enormous earrings, the men having three in each ear. The Gadbas are almost omnivorous, and eat flesh, fish, fowls, pork, buffaloes, crocodiles, non-poisonous snakes, large lizards, frogs, sparrows, crows and large red ants. They abstain only from the flesh of monkeys, horses and asses. A Gadba must not ride on a horse under penalty of being put out of caste. Mr. Thurston[8] gives the following reason for this prejudice:—“The Gadbas of Vizagapatam will not touch a horse, as they are palanquin-bearers, and have the same objection to a rival animal as a cart-driver has to a motor-car.” They will eat the leavings of other castes and take food from all except the impure ones, but like the Mehtars and Ghasias elsewhere they will not take food or water from a Kāyasth. Only the lowest castes will eat with Gadbas, but they are not considered as impure, and are allowed to enter temples and take part in religious ceremonies.
[1] This article is compiled from an excellent monograph contributed by Surgeon-Major Mitchell of Bastar State, with extracts from Colonel Glasfurd’s Report on Bastar (Selections from the Records of the Government of India in the Foreign Department, No. 39 of 1863).
[2] India Census Report (1901), p. 283.
[3] Madras Census Report (1891), p. 253.
[4] Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, p. 22.
[5] Madras Census Report (1891), p. 253.
[6] Report on the Dependency of Bastar, p. 37.
[7] Report on the Dependency of Bastar, p. 37.
[8] Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, p. 270.