Māna
Māna.[1]—A Dravidian caste of cultivators and labourers belonging to the Chānda District, from which they have spread to Nāgpur, Bhandāra and Bālāghāt. In 1911 they numbered nearly 50,000 persons, of whom 34,000 belonged to Chānda. The origin of the caste is obscure. In the Chānda Settlement Report of 1869 Major Lucie Smith wrote of them: “Tradition asserts that prior to the Gond conquest the Mānas reigned over the country, having their strongholds at Surajgarh in Ahiri and at Mānikgarh in the Mānikgarh hills, now of Hyderābād, and that after a troubled rule of two hundred years they fell before the Gonds. In appearance they are of the Gond type, and are strongly and stoutly made; while in character they are hardy, industrious and truthful. Many warlike traditions still linger among them, and doubtless in days gone by they did their duty as good soldiers, but they have long since hung up sword and shield and now rank among the best cultivators of rice in Chānda.” Another local tradition states that a line of Māna princes ruled at Wairāgarh. The names of three princes are remembered: Kurumpruhoda, the founder of the line; Surjāt Badwāik, who fortified Surjāgarh; and Gahilu, who built Mānikgarh. As regards the name Mānikgarh, it may be mentioned that the tutelary deity of the Nāgvansi kings of Bastar, who ruled there before the accession of the present Rāj-Gond dynasty in the fourteenth century, was Mānikya Devi, and it is possible that the chiefs of Wairāgarh were connected with the Bastar kings. Some of the Mānas say that they, as well as the Gowāris, are offshoots of the Gond tribe; and a local saying to the effect that ‘The Gond, the Gowāri and the Māna eat boiled juāri or beans on leaf-plates’ shows that they are associated together in the popular mind. Hislop states that the Ojhas, or soothsayers and minstrels of the Gonds, have a subdivision of Māna Ojhas, who lay claim to special sanctity, refusing to take food from any other caste.[2] The Gonds have a subdivision called Mannewār, and as wār is only a Telugu suffix for the plural, the proper name Manne closely resembles Māna. It is shown in the article on the Parja tribe that the Parjas were a class of Gonds or a tribe akin to them, who were dominant in Bastar prior to the later immigration under the ancestors of the present Bastar dynasty. And the most plausible hypothesis as to the past history of the Mānas is that they were also the rulers of some tracts of Chānda, and were displaced like the Parjas by a Gond invasion from the south.
In Bhandāra, where the Mānas hold land, it is related that in former times a gigantic kite lived on the hill of Ghurkundi, near Sākoli, and devoured the crops of the surrounding country by whole fields at a time. The king of Chānda proclaimed that whoever killed the kite would be granted the adjoining lands. A Māna shot the kite with an arrow and its remains were taken to Chānda in eight carts, and as his reward he received the grant of a zamīndāri. In appearance the Mānas, or at least some of them, are rather fine men, nor do their complexion and features show more noticeable traces of aboriginal descent than those of the local Hindus. But their neighbours in Chānda and Bastar, the Māria Gonds, are also taller and of a better physical type than the average Dravidian, so that their physical appearance need not militate against the above hypothesis. They retained their taste for fighting until within quite recent times, and in Kātol and other towns below the Satpūra hills, Mānas were regularly enlisted as a town guard for repelling the Pindāri raids. Their descendants still retain the ancestral matchlocks, and several of them make good use of these as professional shikāris or hunters. Many of them are employed as servants by landowners and moneylenders for the collection of debts or the protection of crops, and others are proprietors, cultivators and labourers, while a few even lend money on their own account. Mānas hold three zamīndāri estates in Bhandāra and a few villages in Chānda; here they are considered to be good cultivators, but have the reputation as a caste of being very miserly, and though possessed of plenty, living only on the poorest and coarsest food.[3] The Māna women are proverbial for the assistance which they render to their husbands in the work of cultivation.
Owing to their general adoption of Marātha customs, the Mānas are now commonly regarded as a caste and not a forest tribe, and this view may be accepted. They have two subcastes, the Badwāik Mānas, or soldiers, and the Khād Mānas, who live in the plains and are considered to be of impure descent. Badwāik or ‘The Great Ones’ is a titular term applied to a person carrying arms, and assumed by certain Rājpūts and also by some of the lower castes. A third group of Mānas are now amalgamated with the Kunbis as a regular subdivision of that caste, though they are regarded as somewhat lower than the others. They have also a number of exogamous septs of the usual titular and totemistic types, the few recognisable names being Marāthi. It is worth noticing that several pairs of these septs, as Jamāre and Gazbe, Narnari and Chudri, Wāgh and Rāwat, and others are prohibited from intermarriage. And this may be a relic of some wider scheme of division of the type common among the Australian aborigines. The social customs of the Mānas are the same as those of the other lower Marātha castes, as described in the articles on Kunbi, Kohli and Mahār. A bride-price of Rs. 12–8 is usually paid, and if the bridegroom’s father has the money, he takes it with him on going to arrange for the match. Only one married woman of the bridegroom’s family accompanies him to the wedding, and she throws rice over him five times. Four days in the year are appointed for the celebration of weddings, the festivals of Shivrātri and of Akhātij, and a day each in the months of Māgh (January) and Phāgun (February). This rule, however, is not universal. Brāhmans do not usually officiate at their ceremonies, but they employ a Brāhman to prepare the rice which is thrown over the couples. Marriage within the sept is forbidden, as well as the union of the children of two sisters. But the practice of marrying a brother’s daughter to a sister’s son is a very favourite one, being known as Māhunchār, and in this respect the Mānas resemble the Gonds. When a widow is to be remarried, she stops on the way by the bank of a stream as she is proceeding to her new husband’s house, and here her clothes are taken off and buried by an exorcist with a view to laying the first husband’s spirit and preventing it from troubling the new household. If a woman goes wrong with a man of another caste she is not finally cast out, but if she has a child she must first dispose of it to somebody else after it is weaned. She may then be re-admitted into caste by having her hair shaved off and giving three feasts; the first is prepared by the caste and eaten outside her house, the second is prepared by her relatives and eaten within her house, and at the third the caste reinstate her by partaking of food cooked by herself. The dead are either buried or burnt; in the former case a feast is given immediately after the burial and no further mourning is observed; in the latter the period of mourning is three days. As among the Gonds, the dead are laid with feet to the north. A woman is impure for seven days after child-birth.
The Mānas have Bhāts or genealogists of their own caste, a separate one being appointed for each sept. The Bhāt of any sept can only accept gifts from members of that sept, though he may take food from any one of the caste. The Bhāts are in the position of beggars, and the other Mānas will not take food from them. Every man must have a Bhāt for his family under penalty of being temporarily put out of caste. It is said that the Bhāts formerly had books showing the pedigrees of the different families, but that once in a spirit of arrogance they placed their shoes upon the books; and the other Mānas, not brooking this insolence, burnt the books. The gravity of such an act may be realised when it is stated that if anybody even threatens to hit a Māna with a shoe, the indignity put upon him is so great that he is temporarily excluded from caste and penalised for readmission. Since this incident the Bhāts have to address the Mānas as ‘Brahma,’ to show their respect, the Māna replying ‘Rām, Rām.’ Their women wear short loin-cloths, exposing part of the thigh, like the Gonds. They eat pork and drink liquor, but will take cooked food only from Brāhmans.
[1] This article is based on papers by Mr. Hīra Lāl and G. Padaya Naidu of the Gazetteer Office.
[2] Papers on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Central Provinces, p. 6.
[3] Rev. A. Wood in Chānda District Gazetteer, para. 96.