Volume 2 / Part 2 — Dhānuk
Reading edition
1. Original and classical records.
2. Marriage.
3. Social rank and customs.
A few members of the caste are tenants and the bulk of them farmservants and field-labourers. They also act as village watchmen. The Dhānuks eat flesh and fish, but not fowls, beef or pork, and they abstain from liquor. They will take food cooked without water from a Brāhman and a Lodhi, but not from a Rājpūt; but in Nimār the status of the caste is distinctly lower, and they eat pig’s flesh and the leavings of Brāhmans and Rājpūts. The mixed nature of the caste is shown by the fact that they will receive into the community illegitimate children born of a Dhānuk father and a woman of a higher caste such as Lodhi or Kurmi. They rank as already indicated just above the impure castes.
Notes in this chapter
Note 1 · Tribes and Castes of Bengal, art. Dhānuk.Note 2 · Eastern India, i. 166, as quoted in Crooke’s Tribes and Castes.Note 3 · Cf. the two perfectly distinct groups of Paīks or foot-soldiers found in Jubbulpore and the Uriya country.Note 4 · Tribes and Castes of the N. W. P. and Oudh, art. Basor.Note 5 · The following particulars are from a paper by Kanhyā Lāl, a clerk in the Gazetteer office belonging to the Educational Department.Note 6 · Dhānuk.—A low caste of agriculturists found principally in the Narsinghpur District, which contained three-fourths of the total of nearly 70Note 7 · In the Central Provinces the Dhānuks have no subcastes.5 The names of their gotras or family groups, though they themselves cannot explain t