Kolām.1—A Dravidian tribe residing principally in the Wūn tāluk of the Yeotmāl District. They number altogether about 25,000 persons, of whom 23,000 belong to Wūn and the remainder to the adjoining tracts of Wardha and Hyderābād. They are not found elsewhere. The tribe are generally considered to be akin to the Gonds2 on the authority of Mr. Hislop. He wrote of them: “The Kolāms extend all along the Kandi Konda or Pindi Hills on the south of the Wardha river and along the table-land stretching east and north of Mānikgad and thence south to Dāntanpalli, running parallel to the western bank of the Prānhīta. The Kolāms and the common Gonds do not intermarry, but they are present at each other’s nuptials and eat from each other’s hand. Their dress is similar, but the Kolām women wear fewer ornaments, being generally content with a few black beads of glass round their neck. Among their deities, which are the usual objects of Gond adoration, Bhīmsen is chiefly honoured.” Mr. Hislop was, however, not always of this opinion, because he first excluded the Kolāms from the Gond tribes and afterwards included them.3 In Wardha they are usually distinguished from the Gonds. They have a language of their own, called after them Kolāmi. Sir G. Grierson4 describes it as, “A minor dialect of Berār and the Central Provinces which occupies a position like that of Gondi between Canarese, Tamil and Telugu. The so-called Kolāmi, the Bhīli spoken in the Pusad tāluk of Bāsim and the so-called Naiki of Chānda agree in so many particulars that they can almost be considered as one and the same dialect. They are closely related to Gondi. The points in which they differ from that language are, however, of sufficient importance to make it necessary to separate them from that form of speech. The Kolāmi dialect differs widely from the language of the neighbouring Gonds. In some points it agrees with Telugu, in other characteristics with Canarese and connected forms of speech. There are also some interesting points of analogy with the Todā dialect of the Nīlgiris, and the Kolāms must, from a philological point of view, be considered as the remnants of an old Dravidian tribe who have not been involved in the development of the principal Dravidian languages, or of a tribe who have not originally spoken a Dravidian form of speech.”

The family names of the tribe also are not Gondi, but resemble those of Marātha castes. Out of fifty sept names recorded, only one, Tekām, is found among the Gonds. “All their songs and ballads,” Colonel Mackenzie says, “are borrowed from the Marāthas: even their women when grinding corn sing Marāthi songs.” In Wūn their dress and appearance resembles that of the Kunbis, but in some respects they retain very primitive customs. Colonel Mackenzie states that until recently in Berār they had the practice of capturing husbands for women who would otherwise have gone unwedded, this being apparently a survival of the matriarchate. It does not appear that the husbands so captured were ever unphilosophical enough to rebel under the old regime, though British enlightenment has taught them otherwise. Widows and widowers were exempt from capture and debarred from capturing. In view of the connection mentioned by Sir G. Grierson between the Kolāmi dialect and that of the Todās of the Nīlgiri hills who are a small remnant of an ancient tribe and still practise polyandry, Mr. Hīra Lāl suggests that the Kolāms may be connected with the Kolas, a tribe akin to the Todās5 and as low in the scale of civilisation, who regard the Kolamallai hills as their original home.6 He further notes that the name of the era by which the calendar is reckoned on the Malabar coast is Kolamba. In view of Sir G. Grierson’s statement that the Kolāmi dialect is the same as that of the Nāik Gonds of Chānda it may be noted that the headman of a Kolām village is known as Nāik, and it is possible that the Kolāms may be connected with the so-called Nāik Gonds.

The Kolāms have no subtribes, but are divided for purposes of marriage into a number of exogamous groups. The names of these are in the Marāthi form, but the tribe do not know their meaning. Marriage between members of the same group is forbidden, and a man may not marry two sisters. Marriage is usually adult, and neither a betrothal nor a marriage can be concluded in the month of Poush (December), because in this month ancestors are worshipped. Colonel Mackenzie states that marriages should be celebrated on Wednesdays and Saturdays at sundown, and Monday is considered a peculiarly inauspicious day. If a betrothal, once contracted, is broken, a fine of five or ten rupees must be paid to the caste-fellows together with a quantity of liquor. Formerly, as stated above, the tribe sometimes captured husbands, and they still have a curious method of seizing a wife when the father cannot procure a mate for his son. The latter attended by his comrades resorts to the jungle where his wife-elect is working in company with her female relations and friends. It is a custom of the tribe that the sexes should, as a rule, work in separate parties. On catching sight of her the bridegroom pursues her, and unless he touches her hand before she gets back to her village, his friends will afford him no assistance. If he can lay hold of the girl a struggle ensues between the two parties for her possession, the girl being sometimes only protected by women, while on other occasions her male relatives hear of the fray and come to her assistance. In the latter case a fight ensues with sticks, in which, however, no combatant may hit another on the head. If the girl is captured the marriage is subsequently performed, and even if she is rescued the matter is often arranged by the payment of a few rupees to the girl’s father. Nowadays the whole affair tends to degenerate into a pretence and is often arranged beforehand by the parties. The marriage ceremony resembles that of the Kunbis except that the bridegroom takes the bride on his lap and their clothes are tied together in two places. After the ceremony each of the guests takes a few grains of rice, and after touching the feet, knees and shoulders of the bridal couple with the rice, throws it over his own back. The idea may be to remove any contagion of misfortune or evil spirits who may be hovering about them. A widow can remarry only with her parents’ consent, but if she takes a fancy to a man and chooses to enter his house with a pot of water on her head he cannot turn her out. A man cannot marry a widow unless he has been regularly wedded once to a girl, and once having espoused a widow by what is known as the pāt ceremony, he cannot again go through a proper marriage. A couple who wish to be divorced must go before the caste panchāyat or committee with a pot of liquor. Over this is laid a dry stick and the couple each hold an end of it. The husband then addresses his wife as sister in the presence of the caste-fellows, and the wife her husband as brother; they break the stick and the divorce is complete.

The tribe bury their dead, and observe mourning for one to five days in different localities. The spirits of deceased ancestors are worshipped on any Monday in the month of Poush. The mourner goes and dips his head into a tank or stream, and afterwards sacrifices a fowl on the bank, and gives a meal to the caste-fellows. He then has the hair of his face and head shaved. Sons inherit equally, and if there are no sons the property devolves on daughters.

The Kolāms, Colonel Mackenzie states, recognise no god as a principle of beneficence in the world; their principal deities are Sīta, to whom the first-fruits of the harvest are offered, and Devi who is the guardian of the village, and is propitiated with offerings of goats and fowls to preserve it from harm. She is represented by two stones set up in the centre of the village when it is founded. They worship their implements of agriculture on the last day of Chait (April), applying turmeric and vermilion to them. In May they collect the stumps of juāri from a field, and, burning them to ashes, make an offering of the same articles. They have a curious ceremony for protecting the village from disease. All the men go outside the village and on the boundary at the four points pointing north-east, north-west and opposite place four stones known as bandi, burying a fowl beneath each stone. The Nāik or headman then sacrifices a goat and other fowls to Sīta, and placing four men by the stones, proceeds to sprinkle salt all along the boundary line, except across one path on which he lays his stick. He then calls out to the men that the village is closed and that they must enter it only by that path. This rule remains in force throughout the year, and if any stranger enters the village by any other than the appointed route, they consider that he should pay the expenses of drawing the boundary circuit again. But the rule is often applied only to carts, and relaxed in favour of travellers on foot. The line marked with salt is called bandesh, and it is believed that wild animals cannot cross it, while they are prevented from coming into the village along the only open road by the stick of the Nāik. Diseases also cannot cross the line. Women during their monthly impurity are made to live in a hut in the fields outside the boundary line. The open road does not lead across the village, but terminates at the chauri or meeting-house.

Though the Kolāms retain some very primitive customs, those of Yeotmāl, as already stated, are hardly distinguishable from the Kunbis or Hindu cultivators. Colonel Mackenzie notes that they are held to be lower than the Gonds, because a Kolām will take food from a Gond, but the latter will not return the compliment. They will eat the flesh of rats, tigers, snakes, squirrels and of almost any animals except dogs, donkeys and jackals. In another respect they are on a level with the lowest aborigines, as some of them do not use water to clean their bodies after performing natural functions, but only leaves. Yet they are not considered as impure by the Hindus, are permitted to enter Hindu temples, and hold themselves to be defiled by the touch of a Mahār or a Māng. A Kolām is forbidden to beg by the rules of the tribe, and he looks down on the Mahārs and Māngs, who are often professional beggars. In Wardha, too, the Kolāms will not collect dead-wood for sale as fuel.

Here their houses contain only a single room with a small store-house, and all the family sleep together without privacy. Consequently there is no opportunity at night for conjugal intimacy, and husband and wife seek the solitude of the forest in the daytime. Colonel Mackenzie states: “All Kolāms are great smokers, but they are not allowed to smoke in their own houses, but only at the chauri or meeting-house, where pipes and fire are kept; and this rule is enforced so that the Nāik or headman can keep an eye on all male members of the community; if these do not appear at least once a day, satisfactory reasons are demanded for their absence, and from this rule only the sick and infirm are exempt. The Kolāms have two musical instruments: the tāpate or drum, and the wāss or flute, the name of which is probably derived from the Sanskrit wāunsh, meaning bamboo (of which the instrument is made). In old times all Kolāms could read and write, and it is probably only poverty which prevents them from having all their children educated now.” This last statement must, however, be accepted with reserve in the absence of intimation of the evidence on which it is based. At present they are, as a rule, quite illiterate. The Nāik or headman formerly had considerable powers, being entrusted with the distribution of land among the cultivators, and exercising civil and criminal jurisdiction with the assistance of the panchāyat. His own land was ploughed for him by the villagers. Even now they seldom enter a court of justice and their disputes are settled by the panchāyat. A strong feeling of clannishness exists among them, and the village unites to avenge an injury done to one of its members. Excommunication from caste is imposed for the usual offences, and the ceremony of readmission is as follows: The offender dips his head in a river or stream and the village barber shaves his head and moustaches. He then sits beside a lighted pile of wood, being held to be purified by the proximity of the holy element, and afterwards bathes, and drinks some water into which the caste-fellows have dipped their toes. A woman has to undergo the same ceremony and have her head shaved. If an unmarried girl becomes with child by a member of the caste, she is married to him by the simple rite used for widow-remarriage. A Kolām must not swear by a dog or cat, and is expelled from caste for killing either of these two animals. A Kolām does not visit a friend’s house in the evening, as he would be suspected in such an event of having designs upon his wife’s virtue. The tribe are cultivators and labourers. They have not a very good reputation for honesty, and are said to be addicted to stealing the ripe cotton from the bolls. They never wear shoes, and the soles of their feet become nearly invulnerable and capable of traversing the most thorny ground without injury. They have an excellent knowledge of the medicinal and other uses of all trees, shrubs and herbs.

Koli.—A primitive tribe akin to the Bhīls, who are residents of the western Satpūra hills. They have the honorific title of Nāik. They numbered 36,000 persons in 1911, nearly all of whom belong to Berār, with the exception of some 2000 odd, who live in the Nimār District. These have hitherto been confused with the Kori caste. The Koris or weavers are also known as Koli, but in Nimār they have the designation of Khangār Koli to distinguish them from the tribe of the same name. The Kolis proper are found in the Burhānpur tahsīl, where most villages are said to possess one or two families, and on the southern Satpūra hills adjoining Berār. They are usually village servants, their duties being to wait on Government officers, cleaning their cooking-vessels and collecting carts and provisions. The duties of village watchman or kotwār were formerly divided between two officials, and while the Koli did the most respectable part of the work, the Mahār or Balāhi carried baggage, sent messages, and made the prescribed reports to the police. In Berār the Kolis acted for a time as guardians of the hill passes. A chain of outposts or watch towers ran along the Satpūra hills to the north of Berār, and these were held by Kolis and Bhīls, whose duties were to restrain the predatory inroads of their own tribesmen, in the same manner as the Khyber Rifles now guard the passes on the North-West Frontier. And again along the Ajanta hills to the south of the Berār valley a tribe of Kolis under their Nāiks had charge of the ghāts or gates of the ridge, and acted as a kind of local militia paid by assignments of land in the villages.1 In Nimār the Kolis, like the Bhīls, made a trade of plunder and dacoity during the unsettled times of the eighteenth century, and the phrase ‘Nāhal, Bhīl, Koli’ is commonly used in old Marāthi documents to designate the hill-robbers as a class. The priest of a Muhammadan tomb in Burhānpur still exhibits an imperial Parwāna or intimation from Delhi announcing the dispatch of a force for the suppression of the Kolis, dated A.D. 1637. In the Bombay Presidency, so late as 1804, Colonel Walker wrote: “Most Kolis are thieves by profession, and embrace every opportunity of plundering either public or private property.”2 The tribe are important in Bombay, where their numbers amount to more than 1½ million. It is supposed that the common term ‘coolie’ is a corruption of Koli,3 because the Kolis were usually employed as porters and carriers in western India, as ‘slave’ comes from Slav. The tribe have also given their name to Colāba.4 Various derivations have been given of the meaning of the word Koli,5 and according to one account the Kolis and Mairs were originally the same tribe and came from Sind, while the Mairs were the same as the Meyds or Mihiras who entered India in the fifth century as one of the branches of the great White Hun horde. “Again, since the settlement of the Mairs in Gujarāt,” the writer of the Gujarāt Gazetteer continues, “reverses of fortune, especially the depression of the Rājpūts under the yoke of the Muhammadans in the fourteenth century, did much to draw close the bond between the higher and middle grades of the warrior class. Then many Rājpūts sought shelter among the Kolis and married with them, leaving descendants who still claim a Rājpūt descent and bear the names of Rājpūt families. Apart from this, and probably as the result of an original sameness of race, in some parts of Gujarāt and Kāthiawār intermarriage goes on between the daughters of Talabda Kolis and the sons of Rājpūts.” Thus the Thākur of Talpuri Mahi Kāntha in Bombay calls himself a Prāmara Koli, and explains the term by saying that his ancestor, who was a Prāmara or Panwār Rājpūt, took water at a Koli’s house.6 As regards the origin of the Kolis, however, whom the author of the Gujarāt Gazetteer derives from the White Huns, stating them to be immigrants from Sind, another and perhaps more probable theory is that they are simply a western outpost of the great Kol or Munda tribe, to which the Korkus and Nāhals and perhaps the Bhīls may also belong. Mr. Hīra Lāl suggests that it is a common custom in Marāthi to add or alter so as to make names end in i. Thus Halbi for Halba, Koshti for Koshta, Patwi for Patwa, Wanjāri for Banjāra, Gowari for Goala; and in the same manner Koli from Kol. This supposition appears a very reasonable one, though there is little direct evidence. The Nimār Kolis have no tradition of their origin beyond the saying—

or ‘The Koli was born from Siva’s wallet.’

In the Central Provinces the tribe have the five subdivisions of Sūrajvansi, Malhār, Bhilaophod, Singāde, and the Muhammadan Kolis. The Sūrajvansi or ‘descendants of the sun’ claim to be Rājpūts. The Malhār or Pānbhari subtribe are named from their deity Malhāri Deo, while the alternative name of Pānbhari means water-carrier. The Bhilaophod extract the oil from bhilwa7 nuts like the Nāhals, and the Singāde (sing, horn, and gādna, to bury) are so called because when their buffaloes die they bury the horns in their compounds. As with several other castes in Burhānpur and Berār, a number of Kolis embraced Islām at the time of the Muhammadan domination and form a separate subcaste.

In Berār the principal group is that of the Mahādeo Kolis, whose name may be derived from the Mahādeo or Pachmarhi hills. This would tend to connect them with the Korkus, and through them with the Kols. They are divided into the Bhās or pure and the Akarāmāse or impure Kolis.8 In Akola most of the Kolis are stated to belong to the Kshatriya group, while other divisions are the Nāiks or soldiers, the begging Kolis, and the Watandārs who are probably hereditary holders of the post of village watchman.9

The tribe have exogamous septs of the usual nature, but they have forgotten the meaning of the names, and they cannot be explained. In Bombay their family names are the same as the Marātha surnames, and the writer of the Ahmadnagar Gazetteer10 considers that some connection exists between the two classes. A man must not marry a girl of his own sept nor the daughter of his maternal uncle. Girls are usually married at an early age. A Brāhman is employed to conduct the marriage ceremony, which takes place at sunset: a cloth is held between the couple, and as the sun disappears it is removed and they join hands amid the clapping of the assembled guests. Afterwards they march seven times round a stone slab surrounded by four plough-yokes. Among the Rewa Kāntha Kolis the boy’s father must not proceed on his journey to find a bride for his son until on leaving his house he sees a small bird called devi on his right hand; and consequently he is sometimes kept waiting for weeks, or even for months. When the betrothal is arranged the bridegroom and his father are invited to a feast at the bride’s house, and on leaving the father must stumble over the threshold of the girl’s door; without this omen no wedding can prosper.11

The remarriage of widows is permitted, and the ceremony consists simply in tying a knot in the clothes of the couple; in Ahmadābād all they need do is to sit on the ground while the bridegroom’s father knocks their heads together.12 Divorce is allowed for a wife’s misconduct, and if she marries her fellow delinquent he must repay to the husband the expenses incurred by him on his wedding. Otherwise the caste committee may inflict a fine of Rs. 100 on him and put him out of caste for twelve years in default of payment, and order one side of his moustache to be shaved. In Gujarāt a married woman who has an intrigue with another man is called savāsan, and it is said that a practice exists, or did exist, for her lover to pay her husband a price for the woman and marry her, though it is held neither respectable nor safe.13 In Ahmadābād, if one Koli runs away with another’s wife, leaving his own wife behind him, the caste committee sometimes order the offender’s relatives to supply the bereaved husband with a fresh wife. They produce one or more women, and he selects one and is quite content with her.14

The Kolis of Nimār chiefly revere the goddess Bhawāni, and almost every family has a silver image of her. An important shrine of the goddess is situated in Ichhāpur, ten or twelve miles from Burhānpur, and here members of the tribe were accustomed to perform the hook-swinging rite in honour of the goddess. Since this has been forbidden they have an imitation ceremony of swinging a bundle of bamboos covered with cloth in lieu of a human being.

The Kolis both bury and burn the dead, but the former practice is more common. They place the body in the grave with head to the south and face to the north. On the third day after the funeral they perform the ceremony called Kandhe kanchhna or ‘rubbing the shoulder.’ The four bearers of the corpse come to the house of the deceased and stand as if they were carrying the bier. His widow smears a little ghī (butter) on each man’s shoulder and rubs the place with a small cake which she afterwards gives to him. The men go to a river or tank and throw the cakes into it, afterwards bathing in the water. This ceremony is clearly designed to sever the connection established by the contact of the bier with their shoulders, which they imagine might otherwise render them likely to require the use of a bier themselves. On the eleventh day a Brāhman is called in, who seats eleven friends of the deceased in a row and applies sandal-paste to their foreheads. All the women whose husbands are alive then have turmeric rubbed on their foreheads, and a caste feast follows.

The Kolis eat flesh, including fowls and pork, and drink liquor. They will not eat beef, but have no special reverence for the cow. They will not remove the carcase of a dead cow or a dead horse. The social status of the tribe is low, but they are not considered as impure, and Gūjars, Kunbis, and even some Rājpūts will take water from them. Children are named on the twelfth day after birth. Their hair is shaved in the month of Māgh following the birth, and on the first day of the next month, Phāgun, a little oil is applied to the child’s ear, after which it may be pierced at any time that is convenient.