Bhil Mama

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The Mama are a sub-division of the Bhil community found indigenous to the current state of Rajasthan in India. They are known as Mama Bhil because they are followers of the Mama Baleshwar Dayal sect. The sect gets its name from Mama Baleshwar Dayal, who starting preaching to the Bhils of Kushalgarh tehsil of Banswara District. Their clans are referred to as ataks. [1]

Rajasthan State in India

Rajasthan is a state in northern India. The state covers an area of 342,239 square kilometres (132,139 sq mi) or 10.4 percent of the total geographical area of India. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. Rajasthan is located on the northwestern side of India, where it comprises most of the wide and inhospitable Thar Desert and shares a border with the Pakistani provinces of Punjab to the northwest and Sindh to the west, along the Sutlej-Indus river valley. Elsewhere it is bordered by five other Indian states: Punjab to the north; Haryana and Uttar Pradesh to the northeast; Madhya Pradesh to the southeast; and Gujarat to the southwest.

India Country in South Asia

India is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.

Mama Baleshwar Dayal was a social worker and socialist politician from India. He is remembered for his work among the Bhil tribes of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh whom he organised to fight for their rights to jal, jungle aur jameen.

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The Maman are a community of small and medium-sized farmers. Most of their settlements are exclusively Kataria, and each of them contains an informal caste association. This acts as an instrument of social control, punishing those who transgress current community norms. They are now Hindu and unlike other Bhil groups do not have lost their ancestral non Brahminical tribal deities. The Kataria speak the Bagri dialect of Rajasthani. [1]

Bagri language Indian language

The Bagri language (बागड़ी) forms something of a dialect bridge between Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Punjabi and takes its name from the Bagar tract region of Northwestern India. It has about two million speakers, mostly in India, with pockets in the Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar districts of the Punjab in Pakistan.

Rajasthani refers to a group of Indo-Aryan languages spoken primarily in the state of Rajasthan and adjacent areas of Haryana, Punjab, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh in India. There are also Rajasthani-speakers in the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab. The Rajasthani language is distinct from neighbouring related Hindi languages as it a western Indo-Aryan language.

Marriage

Like other Bhil groups, they are endogamous and practice clan exogamy. This despite the recent but comparatively greater level of Brahminical Sanskritisation.

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific social group, caste or ethnic group, rejecting those from others as unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships.

Exogamy is the social norm of marrying outside one's social group. The group defines the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. One form of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which two groups engage in continual wife exchange.

Sanskritisation or Sanskritization is a particular form of social change found in India. It denotes the process by which caste or tribes placed lower in the caste hierarchy seek upward mobility by emulating the rituals and practices of the upper or dominant castes. It is a process similar to passing in sociological terms. This term was made popular by Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas in the 1950s. According to Christophe Jaffrelot a similar heuristic is described in Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development by B. R. Ambedkar. Jaffrelot goes on to say, "While the term was coined by Srinivas, the process itself had been described by colonial administrators such as E. T. Atkinson in his Himalayan Gazetteer and Alfred Lyall, in whose works Ambedkar might well have encountered it."

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 People of India Rajasthan Volume XXXVIII Part One edited by B.K Lavania, D. K Samanta, S K Mandal & N.N Vyas pages 165 to 169 Popular Prakashan
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