Dr Etee Bahadur
Caste studies in historical, anthropological literature have focused on the village, its inter-caste relations, dispute settlement mechanism within the village. Studies on castes or the segments of a caste within the village have been few. Villages have been studied over time by economists, where they have conducted longitudinal research in villages in village India. Adrian Mayer’s research in the village of Jamgod (Madhya Pradesh) is an important contribution to sociology and anthropology. Mayer uses for his study the works of Gilbert Slater on South India (1918) and P.J. Thomas and Ramakrishna resurvey of the same villages (1940). “Slater Villages” as they are known were used by scholars of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (Chennai). David Pocock’s doctoral work under the supervision of Evan E. Pritchard, Pocock’s study in Gujrat and in the village of Sundarana (Bombay state in1953-56), C.J.Bailey (1969) ethnographic monographs and M.N. Srinivas whose work India’s Villages is well known. One of the contributors to the Volume is Morris Carstairs who writes about the village in Rajasthan.
The Census which has been one of the most important colonial institutions of India and has been important in the studies of British India. Several scholars have written as the caste being tied to the projects of European rule. Bernard Cohn’s essay, on the caste based colonial censuses of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paved the way towards a representation of group identities. With Cohn came a number of other studies of the Census during the nineteenth century. Richard Saumarez Smith (1985) wrote on how the census changed from an ”instrument of tax to an instrument of knowledge” during the nineteenth century. Arjun Appadurai wrote on numbers, measurement and quantification and linked caste identities to the logic of enumeration.
In Marwar however, we get records like the Marwar Ri Pargana Ri Vigat and Mardum Shumari Raj Marwarmuch earlier. With the evidence of Nainsi caste -wise population data, we can conclude that statistics on caste were collected very early on by the pre-colonial state. The presence of a caste-wise population data in Nainsi’s Vigat in the seventeenth century leads us to ascertain that caste statistics was used in pre-colonial Rajasthan. Marwar Ra Pargana Ri Vigat (Marwari Chronicle) is a seventeenth century source that entails the caste wise enumeration of households of the major qasbahs towns of Marwar between 1658-1664. Mardum ShumariRaj Marwar is a nineteenth century source which is a caste based census, it mentions about two dozen cities, and many qasbas as compared to our earlier source the seventeenth century Vigat. Report Mardum Shumari classifies the social categories into classes, and the Jats, including the Qanungo Jat, the Tejajat, the Jasnathi/Siddh Jat and the Saddh Jat, are kept under Class A, the ‘Siapahiaur Raj karnewali Kaume’; Class B includes the ‘Mazabhi Kaume’, which is inclusive of the Brahmin, Shrimali, Jogis, Nath, Kalbeliya among others; Class C includes communities who are into trade; Class D is inclusive of the sonar (goldsmith), the Nai (barber), the Khati; the Bhangi and Sasi fall into Class E, while Class F is inclusive of communities that include outsiders, like the Muslim Kaume (communities), the Sheikh Mughal, the Paths, the Afghans and moreMunhata Nainsi was then the Home Minister of Maharaja Jaswant Singh. Nainsi enumerated caste sensitive list of househlods (gharam ri vigat) however the relevant units for Nainsi were households not individuals. The population rolls covered Marwari’s district headquarters however most of the rural population is not covered, and not every caste had its household enumerated. The Vigat contains statistical details relating to the Parganas of Marwar, in reign of Jaswant Singh (1638-78). In most cases the area of an individual village, is given along with the ‘rekh’ of each village in rupees for the years 1658-1662. The Vigat even contains minor information like, the resident castes, number of household and number of ploughs used and the cultivable area.The Vigat mentions a count of ploughs in villages and the social composition as given about the number of Mahajan, Rajput , Mahajan, Brahmins, Pawan Jatis among others.
(The author is a social historian, she teaches at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.)
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