Rajwār
Rajwār.[1]—A low cultivating caste of Bihār and Chota Nāgpur, who are probably an offshoot of the Bhuiyas. In 1911 a total of 25,000 Rajwārs were returned in the Central Provinces, of whom 22,000 belong to the Sargūja State recently transferred from Bengal. Another 2000 persons are shown in Bilāspur, but these are Mowārs, an offshoot of the Rajwārs, who have taken to the profession of gardening and have changed their name. They probably rank a little higher than the bulk of the Rajwārs. “Traditionally,” Colonel Dalton states, “the Rajwārs appear to connect themselves with the Bhuiyas; but this is only in Bihār. The Rajwārs in Sargūja and the adjoining States are peaceably disposed cultivators, who declare themselves to be fallen Kshatriyas; they do not, however, conform to Hindu customs, and they are skilled in a dance called Chailo, which I believe to be of Dravidian origin. The Rajwārs of Bengal admit that they are the descendants of mixed unions between Kurmis and Kols. They are looked upon as very impure by the Hindus, who will not take water from their hands.” The Rajwārs of Bihār told Buchanan that their ancestor was a certain Rishi, who had two sons. From the elder were descended the Rajwārs, who became soldiers and obtained their noble title; and from the younger the Musāhars, who were so called from their practice of eating rats, which the Rajwārs rejected. The Musāhars, as shown by Sir H. Risley, are probably Bhuiyas degraded to servitude in Hindu villages, and this story confirms the Bhuiya origin of the Rajwārs. In the Central Provinces the Bhuiyas have a subcaste called Rajwār, which further supports this hypothesis, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary it is reasonable to suppose that the Rajwārs are an offshoot of the Bhuiyas, as they themselves say, in Bihār. The substitution of Kols for Bhuiyas in Bengal need not cause much concern in view of the great admixture of blood and confused nomenclature of all the Chota Nāgpur tribes. In Bengal, where the Bhuiyas have settled in Hindu villages, and according to the usual lot of the forest tribes who entered the Hindu system have been degraded into the servile and impure caste of Musāhars, the Rajwārs have shared their fate, and are also looked upon as impure. But in Chota Nāgpur the Bhuiyas have their own villages and live apart from the Hindus, and here the Rajwārs, like the landholding branches of other forest tribes, claim to be an inferior class of Rājpūts.
In Sargūja the caste have largely adopted Hindu customs. They abstain from liquor, employ low-class Brāhmans as priests, and worship the Hindu deities. When a man wishes to arrange a match for his son he takes a basket of wheat-cakes and proceeding to the house of the girl’s father sets them down outside. If the match is acceptable the girl’s mother comes and takes the cakes into the house and the betrothal is then considered to be ratified. At the wedding the bridegroom smears vermilion seven times on the parting of the bride’s hair, and the bride’s younger sister then wipes a little of it off with the end of the cloth. For this service she is paid a rupee by the bridegroom. Divorce and the remarriage of widows are permitted. After the birth of a child the mother is given neither food nor water for two whole days; on the third day she gets only boiled water to drink and on the fourth day receives some food. The period of impurity after a birth extends to twelve days. When the navel-string drops it is carefully put away until the next Dasahra, together with the child’s hair, which is cut on the sixth day. On the Dasahra festival all the women of the village take them to a tank, where a lotus plant is worshipped and anointed with oil and vermilion, and the hair and navel-string are then buried at its roots. The dead are burned, and the more pious keep the bones with a view to carrying them to the Ganges or some other sacred river. Pending this, the bones are deposited in the cow-house, and a lamp is kept burning in it every night so long as they are there. The Rajwārs believe that every man has a soul or Prān, and they think that the soul leaves the body, not only at death, but whenever he is asleep or becomes unconscious owing to injury or illness. Dreams are the adventures of the soul while wandering over the world apart from the body. They think it very unlucky for a man to see his own reflection in water and carefully avoid doing so.
[1] Based on the accounts of Sir H. Risley and Colonel Dalton and a paper by Pandit G.L. Pāthak, Superintendent, Korea State.