The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1 - R. V. Russell

Part I.

Introductory Essay on Caste

List of Paragraphs

[1. The Central Provinces.]
[2. Constitution of the population.]
[3. The word ‘Caste.’]
[4. The meaning of the term ‘Caste.’]
[5. The subcaste.]
[6. Confusion of nomenclature.]
[7. Tests of what a caste is.]
[8. The four traditional castes.]
[9. Occupational theory of caste.]
[10. Racial Theory.]
[11. Entry of the Aryans into India. The Aryas and Dasyus.]
[12. The Sūdra.]
[13. The Vaishya.]
[14. Mistaken modern idea of the Vaishyas.]
[15. Mixed unions of the four classes.]
[16. Hypergamy.]
[17. The mixed castes. The village menials.]
[18. Social gradation of castes.]
[19. Castes ranking above the cultivators.]
[20. Castes from whom a Brāhman can take water. Higher agriculturists.]
[21. Status of the cultivator.]
[22. The clan and the village.]
[23. The ownership of land.]
[24. The cultivating status that of the Vaishya.]
[25. Higher professional and artisan castes.]
[26. Castes from whom a Brāhman cannot take water; the village menials.]
[27. The village watchmen.]
[28. The village priests. The gardening castes.]
[29. Other village traders and menials.]
[30. Household servants.]
[31. Status of the village menials.]
[32. Origin of their status]
[33. Other castes who rank with the village menials.]
[34. The non-Aryan tribes.]
[35. The Kolarians and Dravidians.]
[36. Kolarian tribes.]
[37. Dravidian tribes.]
[38. Origin of the Kolarian tribes]
[39. Of the Dravidian tribes.]
[40. Origin of the impure castes.]
[41. Derivation of the impure castes from the indigenous tribes.]
[42. Occupation the basis of the caste system.]
[43. Other agents in the formation of castes.]
[44. Caste occupations divinely ordained.]
[45. Subcastes. local type.]
[46. Occupational subcastes.]
[47. Subcastes formed from social or religious differences, or from mixed descent.]
[48. Exogamous groups.]
[49. Totemistic clans.]
[50. Terms of relationship.]
[51. Clan kinship and totemism.]
[52. Animate Creation.]
[53. The distribution of life over the body.]
[54. Qualities associated with animals.]
[55. Primitive language.]
[56. Concrete nature of primitive ideas.]
[57. Words and names concrete.]
[58. The soul or spirit.]
[59. The tranmission of qualities.]
[60. The faculty of counting. Confusion of the individual and the species.]
[61. Similarity and identity.]
[62. The recurrence of events.]
[63. Controlling the future.]
[64. The common life.]
[65. The common life of the clan.]
[66. Living and eating together.]
[67. The origin of exogamy.]
[68. Promiscuity and female descent.]
[69. Exogamy with female descent.]
[70. Marriage.]
[71. Marriage by capture.]
[72. Transfer of the bride to her husband’s clan.]
[73. The exogamous clan with male descent and the village.]
[74. The large exogamous clans of the Brāhmans and Rājpūts. The Sapindas, the gens and the γένος.]
[75. Comparison of Hindu society with that of Greece and Rome. The gens.]
[76. The clients.]
[77. The plebeians.]
[78. The binding social tie in the city-states.]
[79. The Suovetaurilia.]
[80. The sacrifice of the domestic animal.]
[81. Sacrifices of the gens and phratry.]
[82. The Hindu caste-feasts.]
[83. Taking food at initiation.]
[84. Penalty feasts.]
[85. Sanctity of grain-food.]
[86. The corn-sprit.]
[87. The king.]
[88. Other instances of the common meal as a sacrificial rite.]
[89. Funeral feasts.]
[90. The Hindu deities and the sacrificial meal.]
[91. Development of the occupational caste from the tribe.]
[92. Veneration of the caste implements.]
[93. The caste panchāyat and its code of offences.]
[94. The status of impurity.]
[95. Caste and Hinduism.]
[96. The Hindu reformers.]
[97. Decline of the caste system.]

1. The Central Provinces.

The territory controlled by the Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces and Berār has an area of 131,000 square miles and a population of 16,000,000 persons. Situated in the centre of the Indian Peninsula, between latitudes 17°47′ and 24°27′ north, and longitudes 76° and 84° east, it occupies about 7.3 per cent of the total area of British India. It adjoins the Central India States and the United Provinces to the north, Bombay to the west, Hyderābād State and the Madras Presidency to the south, and the Province of Bihār and Orissa to the east. The Province was constituted as a separate administrative unit in 1861 from territories taken from the Peshwa in 1818 and the Marātha State of Nāgpur, which had lapsed from failure of heirs in 1853. Berār, which for a considerable previous period had been held on a lease or assignment from the Nizām of Hyderābād, was incorporated for administrative purposes with the Central Provinces in 1903. In 1905 the bulk of the District of Sambalpur, with five Feudatory States inhabited by an Uriya-speaking population, were transferred to Bengal and afterwards to the new Province of Bihār and Orissa, while five Feudatory States of Chota Nāgpur were received from Bengal. The former territory had been for some years included in the scope of the Ethnographic Survey, and is shown coloured in the annexed map of linguistic and racial divisions.