Book Excerpt: The relationship between the Anavils and Dublas of South Gujarat

The Dublas and Anavils mostly live in the area around Surat in South Gujarat. Map by iStock

The Dublas in south Gujarat were one of the tribal communities which, in the ancient past, had been domesticated as bonded servants to Hindu landowners. The confinement of Dublas to the bottom of the Hindu order can be traced to the settlement of peasant castes familiar with sedentary cultivation on the plain of south Gujarat. Anavil brahmans played a prominent role in the development of the agricultural economy, but there are no written sources about when and how this process came about in pre-colonial times. Did they already outrank other segments of the peasantry before the transition from shifting cultivation to regular tillage had taken place? Or was their elevation as landlords due to the introduction of more advanced agricultural techniques? A moot question also is whether the Anavils originated from the region inhabited by them, or did they move into these until then unsettled lands from elsewhere? Colonial accounts have put on record how, in a process of agrarian colonization, Hindu civilization gradually spread over a still predominantly tribal landscape.

Where agriculture is practised with crude implements and without the aid of domestic animals, where the working population is scarce, where the land must be reclaimed from the wilds and marshes, and where soil and climate act as limiting factors for the employment of imported labour – it is not capital that is wanted, but native labour to reclaim the land and cultivate it under difficult environmental conditions. Under these circumstances bond-labour of the native population is introduced and is pinned to the soil in conditions akin to slavery. (Lorenzo 1947, pp. 57–69; see also Baines 1912, Kosambi 1956, Khela 2012)

In line with brahmanical lore, the Anavils were wont to attribute their rank at the top of the caste hierarchy to divine intervention. In one version of this origin myth, brahman colonists from the Gangetic plain came to settle in the villages and cultivate the wild country to which they had been brought between the rivers Vapi and Tapi in south Gujarat. The colonists were granted domination over the local people by subjecting them to do the polluting work of tilling the soil, from which the brahmans sought to exempt themselves. Interestingly, another version of the same myth narrates how Rama or Krishna raised a segment of the hill tribes above the dark-skinned inhabitants of the region. In a purifying ritual, the Anavils articulated their elevation to ujli paraj (the twice-born or high castes) status. Anaval, the venue at which this baptism took place, is situated in the interior of Surat district, the historical heartland of the kali paraj (tribals registered as Scheduled Tribes) people and culture. This locality is venerated as their place of origin by the community at the apex of the caste hierarchy. It is a heritage that has persuaded me to lean towards the thesis that the caste hierarchy is an outcome of internal differentiation.

Rather than ascribing the origin of the caste order to interference from outside, I am inclined to relate its gradual and long-winded emergence in the pre-colonial era to the peasant–tribal frontier which started the cycle of dispossession versus accumulation of landed property. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his Memoir on Pauperism: ‘from the moment that landed property was recognized and men had converted the vast forests into fertile cropland and rich pasture . . . individuals arose who accumulated more land than they required to feed themselves and so perpetuated property in the hands of their progeny’(Breman 2019, p. 3). Under subsequent colonial rule, the caste order became more ranked in hierarchical stratification than it had been before (Dirks 2001). This interpretation signals a dynamic interdependence between upgrading and downgrading in ritual rank, social class and political power. How they managed to rise up to domination and occupy most of the arable land by depriving other communities of ownership has remained covered up in an unrecorded past. However, this dark heritage of impurity was imprinted in a customary way of life that continued to oblige the lower section of the Bhathelas to till the soil themselves until late in the colonial era while the whole Anavil caste is known as khatho-pitho brahman, i.e. meat-eating and alcohol-drinking.

The Dublas were locked at the base of the agrarian economy and its social order in the area which has been the domicile of this tribal community from time immemorial. In addition to hunting and gathering in their unsettled habitat, their ancestry may have taken to rudimentary agriculture as shifting cultivators. No recollection has survived of that predial existence. Subjugation under servitude prevented these forebears from laying claim to ownership rights of the lands on which they lived. Dispossessed from independent livelihoods, they were forced to cultivate the fields of the peasantry, which gained ascendancy as ujli paraj. Acknowledgement of their assertion of a twice-born heritage was founded on their engagement of contingents stuck at the bottom of the pile as bondsmen. All over the Gangetic plain and the river deltas in the south, these tribes got incorporated as Scheduled Castes at the ‘untouchable’ foot of the Hinduized order. In south Gujarat and many other regions where sedentary agriculture and caste-ranking along the purity–impurity axis came about at a later date, the tribal frontier continued to hold sway. In those districts, in the early colonial era, the kali paraj communities despite their degradation to a landless existence had still retained their ancestral identity. Together with other tribal communities, the Dublas inhabited the hilly and sparsely cultivated tracks between Vapi and Dahanu bordering on what is today Maharashtra. In these thinly populated subdistricts, which were never settled by the Anavils or other peasant predators, the Dublas managed to retain ownership of the land they had used as shifting cultivators in the past.  

The Anavils and the Dublas came to occupy polar ends in the agrarian economy and also in the ritual ranking, since the servitude of the latter paved the way to the brahmanization of the former. When the Mughal reign expanded over the coastal and inland tracks of west India, the Anavil elite was nominated as tax farmers in the imposed system of governance. It both expressed as well as promoted their political dominance. At the end of the eighteenth century, the East India Company started to make inroads into this feudalistic domain. In the next few decades, its officials took charge of large parts of south Gujarat while the remaining territory was established as the Baroda principality, ruled by the Gaekwad dynasty which had split away from the Maratha confederacy. The first batch of British administrators had adopted the collection of land revenue which they found upon arrival, but then replaced it with the ryotwari settlement which eliminated all intermediaries between the landowner and the colonial state. The tax farmers were dismissed, but were compensated for their loss of influence and income.  They were also allowed to keep the land they had appropriated and managed to consolidate their domination over dependent ranks of the peasantry.

Excerpted with permission from Fighting Free to Become Unfree Again: The Social History of Bondage and Neo-Bondage of Labour in India by Jan Breman @2023 by Tulika Books, Delhi

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