Kharwar

Abstract

Kharwar is a small and little-known Mundari tribe of Odisha numbering little over 2000 persons. They are also known as Lulkidihi. They are largely found scattered in the Sundergarh and Jajpur districts of Odisha. They claim of a Kshatriya origin as the descendants of Suryabanshi dynasty of a Rajput king who being divinely cursed had been exiled and lived a life of chandala, the flesh-eater. Etymologically the term Kharwar denotes catechu (khaira) maker or inhabitants Khairagarh, their original habitat in Chhatisgarh from where they have migrated to Odisha. 'Kherwari' a Mundari language is their mother tongue which they have forgotten at present. Now they speak the common local language 'Sadri' and Odisha's State language, Odia and use the Odia script for writing. Racially they belong to Proto-Australoid stock. The community is endogamous and divided into six endogamous subgroups, i.e. Suryabansi, Daulatbandi, Kheri/Chero, Bhogati/Ganju and Manjhia, which is again divided into a number of totemistic exogamous clans. There is nothing very spectacular about their pattern of dress and ornaments, settlement, and housing. They live both in homogenous and heterogeneous settlements. In the case of the latter, they exclusively dwell in separate hamlets keeping their own ethnic identity as well as maintaining distance from the neighbouring ethnic groups. They generally live among other tribal communities whom they consider socially at par with them but construct their own houses detached from the houses of other communities. Being a landowning community, settled cultivation is the mainstay of their subsistence economy supplemented by wage-earning, livestock rearing, forest collection, small business, sharecropping, and seasonal hunting and fishing etc. As their croplands lies in uplands generally devoid of irrigation facilities they resort to mono-cropping.