8. Occupation
The traditional occupation of the caste is to wash gold from the sandy beds of streams, while they formerly also washed for diamonds at Hirākud on the Mahānadi near Sambalpur and at Wairāgarh in Chanda. The industry is decaying, and in 1901 only a quarter of the total number of Sonjharas were still employed In it. Some have become cultivators and fishermen, while others earn their livelihood by sweeping up the refuse dirt of the workshops of goldsmiths and brass-workers; they wash out the particles of metal from this and sell it back to the Sunārs. The Mahānadi and Jonk rivers in Sambalpur, the Banjar In Mandla, the Son and other rivers in Bālāghāt, and the Wainganga and the eastern streams of Chānda contain minute particles of gold. The washers earn a miserable and uncertain livelihood, and indeed appear not to desire anything beyond a bare subsistence. In Bhandāra[3] it is said that they avoid any spot where they have previously been lucky, while in Chānda they have a superstition that a person making a good find of gold will be childless, and hence many dread the search.[4] When they set out to look for gold they wash three small trayfuls at three places about five cubits apart. If they find no appreciable quantity of gold they go on for one or two hundred yards and wash three more trayfuls, and proceed thus until they find a profitable place where they will halt for two or three days. A spot[5] in the dry river-bed is usually selected at the outside of a bend, where the finer sediment is likely to be found; after removing the stones and pebbles from above, the sand below is washed several times in circular wooden cradles, shaped like the top of an umbrella, of diminishing sizes, until all the clay is removed and fine particles of sand mixed with gold are visible. A large wooden spoon is used to stir up the sediment, which is washed and rubbed by hand to separate the gold more completely from the sand, and a blackish residue is left, containing particles of gold and mercury coloured black with oxide of iron. Mercury is used to pick up the gold with which it forms an amalgam. This is evaporated in a clay cupel called a ghariya by which the mercury is got rid of and the gold left behind.
[1] F. glomerata.
[2] Bālāghāt Gazetteer, C.E. Low, p. 207.
[3] Bhandāra Settlement Report (A.J. Lawrence), p. 49.
[4] Major Lucie Smith’s Chānda Settlement Report (1869), p. 105.
[5] The following account of the process of gold-washing is taken from Mr. Low’s Bālāghāt Gazetteer, p. 201.