Note 1 — Mallāh

Māna.1—A Dravidian caste of cultivators and labourers belonging to the Chānda District, from which they have spread to Nāgpur, Bhandāra and Bālāghāt. In 1911 they numbered nearly 50,000 persons, of whom 34,000 belonged to Chānda. The origin of the caste is obscure. In the Chānda Settlement Report of 1869 Major Lucie Smith wrote of them: “Tradition asserts that prior to the Gond conquest the Mānas reigned over the country, having their strongholds at Surajgarh in Ahiri and at Mānikgarh in the Mānikgarh hills, now of Hyderābād, and that after a troubled rule of two hundred years they fell before the Gonds. In appearance they are of the Gond type, and are strongly and stoutly made; while in character they are hardy, industrious and truthful. Many warlike traditions still linger among them, and doubtless in days gone by they did their duty as good soldiers, but they have long since hung up sword and shield and now rank among the best cultivators of rice in Chānda.” Another local tradition states that a line of Māna princes ruled at Wairāgarh. The names of three princes are remembered: Kurumpruhoda, the founder of the line; Surjāt Badwāik, who fortified Surjāgarh; and Gahilu, who built Mānikgarh. As regards the name Mānikgarh, it may be mentioned that the tutelary deity of the Nāgvansi kings of Bastar, who ruled there before the accession of the present Rāj-Gond dynasty in the fourteenth century, was Mānikya Devi, and it is possible that the chiefs of Wairāgarh were connected with the Bastar kings. Some of the Mānas say that they, as well as the Gowāris, are offshoots of the Gond tribe; and a local saying to the effect that ‘The Gond, the Gowāri and the Māna eat boiled juāri or beans on leaf-plates’ shows that they are associated together in the popular mind. Hislop states that the Ojhas, or soothsayers and minstrels of the Gonds, have a subdivision of Māna Ojhas, who lay claim to special sanctity, refusing to take food from any other caste.2 The Gonds have a subdivision called Mannewār, and as wār is only a Telugu suffix for the plural, the proper name Manne closely resembles Māna. It is shown in the article on the Parja tribe that the Parjas were a class of Gonds or a tribe akin to them, who were dominant in Bastar prior to the later immigration under the ancestors of the present Bastar dynasty. And the most plausible hypothesis as to the past history of the Mānas is that they were also the rulers of some tracts of Chānda, and were displaced like the Parjas by a Gond invasion from the south.