Widows commonly remarry, and may take for their second husband anybody they please, except their own relatives and their late husband’s elder brother and ascendant relations. In Chhattīsgarh widows are known either as barandi or randi, the randi being a widow in the ordinary sense of the term and the barandi a girl who has been married but has not lived with her husband. Such a girl is not required to break her bangles on her husband’s death, and, being more in demand as a second wife, her father naturally obtains a good price for her. To marry a woman whose husband is alive is known as chhandwe banāna, the term chhandwe implying that the woman has discarded, or has been discarded by, her husband. The second husband must in this case repay to the first husband the expenses incurred by him on his wedding. The marriage ceremony for a widow is of the simplest character, and consists generally of the presentation to her by her new husband of those articles which a married woman may use, but which should be forsworn by a widow, as representing the useless vanities of the world. Thus in Saugor the bridegroom presents his bride with new clothes, vermilion for the parting of her hair, a spangle for her forehead, lac dye for her feet, antimony for the eyes, a comb, glass bangles and betel-leaves. In Mandla and Seoni the bridegroom gives a ring, according to the English custom, instead of bangles. When a widow marries a second time her first husband’s property remains with his family and also the children, unless they are very young, when the mother may keep them for a few years and subsequently send them back to their father’s relatives. Divorce is permitted for a variety of causes, and is usually effected in the presence of the caste panchāyat or committee by the husband and wife breaking a straw as a symbol of the rupture of the union. In Chānda an image of the divorced wife is made of grass and burnt to indicate that to her husband she is as good as dead; if she has children their heads and faces are shaved in token of mourning, and in the absence of children the husband’s younger brother has this rite performed; while the husband gives a funeral feast known as Marti Jīti kā Bhāt, or ‘The feast of the living dead woman.’ In Chhattīsgarh marriage ties are of the loosest description, and adultery is scarcely recognised as an offence. A woman may go and live openly with other men and her husband will take her back afterwards. Sometimes, when two men are in the relation of Mahāprasād or nearest friend to each other, that is, when they have vowed friendship on rice from the temple of Jagannāth, they will each place his wife at the other’s disposal. The Chamārs justify this carelessness of the fidelity of their wives by the saying, ‘If my cow wanders and comes home again, shall I not let her into her stall?’ In Seoni, if a Chamār woman is detected in a misdemeanour with a man of the caste, both parties are taken to the bank of a tank or river, where their heads are shaved in the presence of the caste panchāyat or committee. They are then made to bathe, and the shoes of all the assembled Chamārs made up into two bundles and placed on their heads, while they are required to promise that they will not repeat the offence.
7. Funeral customs.
The caste usually bury the dead with the feet to the north, like the Gonds and other aboriginal tribes. They say that heaven is situated towards the north, and the dead man should be placed in a position to start for that direction. Another explanation is that the head of the earth lies towards the north, and yet another that in the Satyug or beginning of time the sun rose in the north; and in each succeeding Yug or era it has veered round the compass until now in the Kali Yug or Iron Age it rises in the east. In Chhattīsgarh, before burying a corpse, they often make a mark on the body with butter, oil or soot; and when a child is subsequently born into the same family they look for any kind of mark on the corresponding place on its body. If any such be found they consider the child as a reincarnation of the deceased person. Still-born children, and those who die before the Chathi or sixth-day ceremony of purification, are not taken to the burial-ground, but their bodies are placed in an earthen pot and interred below the doorway or in the courtyard of the house. In such cases no funeral feast is demanded from the family, and some people believe that the custom tends in favour of the mother bearing another child; others say, however, that its object is to prevent the tonhi or witch from getting hold of the body of the child and rousing its spirit to life to do her bidding as Matia Deo.[17] In Seoni a curious rule obtains to the effect that the bodies of those who eat carrion or the flesh of animals dying a natural death should be cremated. In the northern Districts a bier painted white is used for a man and a red one for a woman.
8. Childbirth.
Among the better-class Chamārs it is customary to place a newborn child in a winnowing-fan on a bed of rice. The nurse receives the rice and she also goes round to the houses of the headman of the village and the relatives of the family and makes a mark with cowdung on their doors as an announcement of the birth, for which she receives a small present. In Chhattīsgarh a woman is given nothing to eat or drink on the day that a child is born and for two days afterwards. On the fourth day she receives a liquid decoction of ginger, the roots of the orai or khaskhas grass, areca-nut, coriander and turmeric and other hot substances, and in some places a cake of linseed or sesamum. She sometimes goes on drinking this mixture for as long as a month, and usually receives solid food for the first time on the sixth day after the birth, when she bathes and her impurity is removed. The child is not permitted to suckle its mother until the third day after it is born, but before this it receives a small quantity of a mixture made by boiling the urine of a calf with some medicinal root. In Chhattīsgarh it is a common practice to brand a child on the stomach on the name-day or sixth day after its birth; twenty or more small burns may be made with the point of a hansia or sickle on the stomach, and it is supposed that this operation will prevent it from catching cold. Another preventive for convulsions and diseases of the lungs is the rubbing of the limbs and body with castor-oil; the nurse wets her hands with the oil and then warms them before a fire and rubs the child. It is also held in the smoke of burning ajwāin plants (Carum copticum). Infants are named on the Chathi or sixth day, or sometimes on the twelfth day after birth. The child’s head is shaved, and the hair, known as Jhālar, thrown away, the mother and child are washed and the males of the family are shaved. The mother is given her first regular meal of grain and pulse cooked with pumpkins. A pregnant woman who is afraid that her child will die will sometimes sell it to a neighbour before its birth for five or six cowries.[18] The baby will then be named Pachkouri or Chhekouri, and it is thought that the gods, who are jealous of the lives of children, will overlook one whose name shows it to be valueless. Children are often nicknamed after some peculiarity as Kānwa (one-eyed), Behra (deaf), Konda (dumb), Khurwa (lame), Kāri (black), Bhūri (fair). It does not follow that a child called Konda is actually dumb, but it may simply have been late in learning to speak. Parents are jealous of exposing their children to the gaze of strangers and especially of a crowd, in which there will almost certainly be some malignant person to cast the evil eye upon them. Young children are therefore not infrequently secluded in the house and deprived of light and air to an extent which is highly injurious to them.
9. Religion.
The caste worship the ordinary Hindu and village deities of the localities in which they reside, and observe the principal festivals. In Saugor the Chamārs have a family god, known as Marri, who is represented by a lump of clay kept in the cooking-room of the house. He is supposed to represent the ancestors of the family. The Seoni Chamārs especially worship the castor-oil plant. Generally the caste revere the rāmpi or skinning-knife with offerings of flour-cakes and cocoanuts on festival days. In Chhattīsgarh more than half the Chamārs belong to the reformed Satnāmi sect, by which the worship of images is at least nominally abolished. This is separately treated. Mr. Gordon states[19] that it is impossible to form a clear conception of the beliefs of the village Chamārs as to the hereafter: “That they have the idea of hell as a place of punishment may be gathered from the belief that if salt is spilt the one who does this will in Patāl—or the infernal region—have to gather up each grain of salt with his eyelids. Salt is for this reason handed round with great care, and it is considered unlucky to receive it in the palm of the hand; it is therefore invariably taken in a cloth or in a vessel. There is a belief that the spirit of the deceased hovers round familiar scenes and places, and on this account, whenever it is possible, it is customary to destroy or desert the house in which any one has died. If a house is deserted the custom is to sweep and plaster the place, and then, after lighting a lamp, to leave it in the house and withdraw altogether. After the spirit of the dead has wandered around restlessly for a certain time it is said that it will again become incarnate and take the form of man or of one of the lower animals.”
10. Occupation.
The curing and tanning of hides is the primary occupation of the Chamār, but in 1911 only 80,000 persons, or about a seventh of the actual workers of the caste, were engaged in it, and by Satnāmis the trade has been entirely eschewed. The majority of the Chhattīsgarhi Chamārs are cultivators with tenant right, and a number of them have obtained villages. In the northern Districts, however, the caste are as a rule miserably poor, and none of them own villages. A very few are tenants, and the vast majority despised and bullied helots. The condition of the leather-working Chamārs is described by Mr. Trench as lamentable.[20] Chief among the causes of their ruin has been the recently established trade in raw hides. Formerly the bodies of all cattle dying within the precincts of the village necessarily became the property of the Chamārs, as the Hindu owners could not touch them without loss of caste. But since the rise of the cattle-slaughtering industry the cultivator has put his religious scruples in his pocket, and sells his old and worn-out animals to the butchers for a respectable sum. “For a mere walking skeleton of a cow or bullock from two to four rupees may be had for the asking, and so long as he does not actually see or stipulate for the slaughter of the sacred animal, the cultivator’s scruples remain dormant. No one laments this lapse from orthodoxy more sincerely than the outcaste Chamār. His situation may be compared with that of the Cornish pilchard-fishers, for whom the growing laxity on the part of continental Roman Catholic countries in the observance of Lent is already more than an omen of coming disaster.”[21]
