The Hindu Bhīls say that they do not admit outsiders into the caste, but the Muhammadans will admit a man of any but the impure castes. The neophyte must be shaved and circumcised, and the Kāzi gives him some holy water to drink and teaches him the profession of belief in Islām. If a man is not circumcised, the Tadvi or Muhammadan Bhīls will not bury his body. Both classes of Bhīls employ Brāhmans at their ceremonies. The tribe eat almost all kinds of flesh and drink liquor, but the Hindus now abjure beef and the Muhammadans pork. Some Bhīls now refuse to take the skins off dead cattle, but others will do so. The Bhīls will take food from any caste except the impure ones, and none except these castes will now take food from them. Temporary or permanent exclusion from caste is imposed for the same offences as among the Hindus.
12. Appearance and characteristics.
The typical Bhīl is small, dark, broad-nosed and ugly, but well built and active. The average height of 128 men measured by Major Hendley was 5 feet 6.4 inches. The hands are somewhat small and the legs fairly developed, those of the women being the best. “The Bhīl is an excellent woodsman, knows the shortest cuts over the hills, can walk the roughest paths and climb the steepest crags without slipping or feeling distressed. He is often called in old Sanskrit works Venaputra, ‘child of the forest,’ or Pāl Indra, ‘lord of the pass.’ These names well describe his character. His country is approached through narrow defiles (pāl), and through these none could pass without his permission. In former days he always levied rakhwāli or blackmail, and even now native travellers find him quite ready to assert what he deems his just rights. The Bhīl is a capital huntsman, tracking and marking down tigers, panthers and bears, knowing all their haunts, the best places to shoot them, the paths they take and all those points so essential to success in big-game shooting; they will remember for years the spots where tigers have been disposed of, and all the circumstances connected with their deaths. The Bhīl will himself attack a leopard, and with his sword, aided by his friends, cut him to pieces.”[35] Their agility impressed the Hindus, and an old writer says: “Some Bhīl chieftains who attended the camp of Sidhrāj, king of Gujarāt, astonished him with their feats of activity; in his army they seemed as the followers of Hanumān in attendance upon Rām.”[36]
13. Occupation.
The Bhīls have now had to abandon their free use of the forests, which was highly destructive in its effects, and their indiscriminate slaughter of game. Many of them live in the open country and have become farmservants and field-labourers. A certain proportion are tenants, but very few own villages. Some of the Tadvi Bhīls, however, still retain villages which were originally granted free of revenue on condition of their keeping the hill-passes of the Satpūras open and safe for travellers. These are known as Hattiwāla. Bhīls also serve as village watchmen in Nimār and the adjoining tracts of the Berār Districts. Captain Forsyth, writing in 1868, described the Bhīls as follows: “The Muhammadan Bhīls are with few exceptions a miserable lot, idle and thriftless, and steeped in the deadly vice of opium-eating. The unconverted Bhīls are held to be tolerably reliable. When they borrow money or stock for cultivation they seldom abscond fraudulently from their creditors, and this simple honesty of theirs tends, I fear, to keep numbers of them still in a state little above serfdom.”[37]
14. Language.
The Bhīls have now entirely abandoned their own language and speak a corrupt dialect based on the Aryan vernaculars current around them. The Bhīl dialect is mainly derived from Gujarāti, but it is influenced by Mārwāri and Marāthi; in Nimār especially it becomes a corrupt form of Marāthi. Bhīli, as this dialect is called, contains a number of non-Aryan words, some of which appear to come from the Mundāri, and others from the Dravidian languages; but these are insufficient to form any basis for a deduction as to whether the Bhīls belonged to the Kolarian or Dravidian race.[38]
[1] The principal authorities on the Bhīls are: An Account of the Mewār Bhīls, by Major P. H. Hendley, J.A.S.B. vol. xliv., 1875, pp. 347–385; the Bombay Gazetteer, vol. ix., Hindus of Gujarāt; and notices in Colonel Tod’s Rājasthān, Mr. A. L. Forbes’s Rāsmāla, and The Khāndesh Bhīl Corps, by Mr. A. H. A. Simcox, C.S.
[2] The old name of the Sesodia clan, Gahlot, is held to be derived from this Goha. See the article Rājpūt Sesodia for a notice of the real origin of the clan.