[4] Ibbetson’s Census Report (1881), p. 297.
[5] Nāgpur Settlement Report, p. 24.
Kohli
1. General notice.
Kohli.—A small caste of cultivators found in the Marāthi-speaking tracts of the Wainganga Valley, comprised in the Bhandāra and Chānda Districts. They numbered about 26,000 persons in 1911. The Kohlis are a notable caste as being the builders of the great irrigation reservoirs or tanks, for which the Wainganga Valley is celebrated. The water is used for irrigating rice and sugarcane, the latter being the favourite crop of the Kohlis. The origin of the caste is somewhat doubtful. The name closely resembles that of the Koiri caste of market-gardeners in northern India; and the terms Kohiri and Kohli are used there as variations of the caste name Koiri. The caste themselves have a tradition that they were brought to Bhandāra from Benāres by one of the Gond kings of Chānda on his return from a visit to that place;[1] and the Kohlis of Bhandāra say that their first settlement in the Central Provinces was at Lānji, which lies north of Bhandāra in Bālāghāt. But on the other hand all that is known of their language, customs, and sept or family names points to a purely Marātha origin, the caste being in all these respects closely analogous to the Kunbis. The Settlement Officer of Chānda, Colonel Lucie Smith, stated that they thought their forefathers came from the south. They tie their head-cloths in a similar fashion to the Gāndlis, who are oilmen from the Telugu country. If they belonged to the south of India they might be an offshoot from the well-known Koli tribe of Bombay, and this hypothesis appears the more probable. As a general rule castes from northern India settling in the Marātha country have not completely abandoned their ancestral language and customs even after a residence of several centuries. In the case of such castes as the Panwārs and Bhoyars their foreign extraction can be detected at once; and if the Kohlis had come from Hindustān the rule would probably hold good with them. On the other hand the Kolis have in some parts of Bombay now taken to cultivation and closely resemble the Kunbis. In Satāra it is said[2] that they associate and occasionally eat with Kunbis, and their social and religious customs resemble those of the Kunbi caste. They are quiet, orderly, settled and hard-working. Besides fishing they work ferries along the Krishna, are employed in villages as water-carriers, and grow melons in river-beds with much skill. The Kolis of Bombay are presumably the same tribe as the Kols of Chota Nāgpur, and they probably migrated to Gujarāt along the Vindhyan plateau, where they are found in considerable numbers, and over the hills of Rājputāna and Central India. The Kols are one of the most adaptive of all the non-Aryan tribes, and when they reached the sea they may have become fishermen and boatmen, and practised these callings also in rivers. From plying on rivers they might take to cultivating melons and garden-crops on the stretches of silt left uncovered in their beds in the dry season, which is the common custom of the boating and fishing castes. And from this, as seen in Satāra, some of them attained to regular cultivation and, modelling themselves on the Kunbis, came to have nearly the same status. They may thus have migrated to Chānda and Bhandāra with the Kunbis, as their language and customs would indicate, and retaining their preference for irrigated and garden-crops have become expert growers of sugarcane. The description which has been received of the Kohlis of Bhandāra would be rather favourable than otherwise to the hypothesis of their ultimate origin from the Kol tribe, allowing for their having acquired the Marātha language and customs from a lengthened residence in Bombay. It has been mentioned above that the Kohlis have a legend of their ancestors having come from Benāres, but this story appears to be not infrequently devised as a means of obtaining increased social estimation, Benāres being the principal centre of orthodox Hinduism. Thus the Dāngris, a small caste of vegetable- and melon-growers who are certainly an offshoot of the Kunbis, and therefore of Marātha extraction, have the same story. As regards the tradition of the Bhandāra Kohlis that their first settlement was at Lānji, this may well have been the case even though they came from the south, as Lānji was an important place and a centre of administration under the Marāthas. It is probable, however, that they first came to Chānda and from here spread north to Lānji, as, if they had entered Bhandāra through Wardha and Nāgpur, some of them would probably have remained in these Districts.
Old type of sugarcane mill