While the above extracts have been given to show how the Panwars
migrated from Dhar to different parts of India in search of fortune,
this article is mainly concerned with a branch of the clan who
came to Nagpur, and subsequently settled in the rice country of the
Wainganga Valley. At the end of the eleventh century Nagpur appears
to have been held by a Panwar ruler as an appanage of the kingdom of
Malwa. [388] It has already been seen how the kings of Malwa penetrated
to Berar and the Godavari, and Nagpur may well also have fallen to
them. Mr. Muhammad Yusuf quotes an inscription as existing at Bhandak
in Chanda of the year A.D. 1326, in which it is mentioned that the
Panwar of Dhar repaired a statue of Jag Narayan in that place. [389]
Nothing more is heard of them in Nagpur, and their rule probably came
to an end with the subversion of the kingdom of Malwa in the thirteenth
century. But there remain in Nagpur and in the districts of Bhandara,
Balaghat and Seoni to the north and east of it a large number of
Panwars, who have now developed into an agricultural caste. It may be
surmised that the ancestors of these people settled in the country
at the time when Nagpur was held by their clan, and a second influx
may have taken place after the fall of Dhar. According to their own
account, they first came to Nagardhan, an older town than Nagpur,
and once the headquarters of the locality. One of their legends is
that the men who first came had no wives, and were therefore allowed
to take widows of other castes into their houses. It seems reasonable
to suppose that something of this kind happened, though they probably
did not restrict themselves to widows. The existing family names of
the caste show that it is of mixed ancestry, but the original Rajput
strain is still perfectly apparent in their fair complexions, high
foreheads and in many cases grey eyes. The Panwars have still the
habit of keeping women of lower castes to a greater degree than the
ordinary, and this has been found to be a trait of other castes of
mixed origin, and they are sometimes known as Dhakar, a name having
the sense of illegitimacy. Though they have lived for centuries among
a Marathi-speaking people, the Panwars retain a dialect of their own,
the basis of which is Bagheli or eastern Hindi. When the Marathas
established themselves at Nagpur in the eighteenth century some of the
Panwars took military service under them and accompanied a general
of the Bhonsla ruling family on an expedition to Cuttack. In return
for this they were rewarded with grants of the waste and forest lands
in the valley of the Wainganga river, and here they developed great
skill in the construction of tanks and the irrigation of rice land,
and are the best agricultural caste in this part of the country. Their
customs have many points of interest, and, as is natural, they have
abandoned many of the caste observances of the Rajputs. It is to
this group of Panwars [390] settled in the Maratha rice country of
the Wainganga Valley that the remainder of this article is devoted.