Kamar.--A small Dravidian tribe exclusively found in the Raipur
District and adjoining States. They numbered about 7000 persons
in 1911, and live principally in the Khariar and Bindranawagarh
zamindaris of Raipur. In Bengal and Chota Nagpur the term Kamar
is merely occupational, implying a worker in iron, and similarly
Kammala in the Telugu country is a designation given to the five
artisan castes. Though the name is probably the same the Kamars of
the Central Provinces are a purely aboriginal tribe and there is
little doubt that they are an offshoot of the Gonds, nor have they
any traditions of ever having been metal-workers. They claim to be
autochthonous like most of the primitive tribes. They tell a long
story of their former ascendancy, saying that a Kamar was the original
ruler of Bindranawagarh. But a number of Kamars one day killed the
bhimraj bird which had been tamed and taught hawking by a foreigner
from Delhi. He demanded satisfaction, and when it was refused went to
Delhi and brought man-eating soldiers from there, who ate up all the
Kamars except one pregnant woman. She took refuge in a Brahman's hut
in Patna and there had a son, whom she exposed on a dung-heap for fear
of scandal, as she was a widow at the time. Hence the boy was called
Kachra-Dhurwa or rubbish and dust. This name may be a token of the
belief of the Kamars that they were born from the earth as insects
generate in dung and decaying organisms. Similarly one great subtribe
of the Gonds are called Dhur or dust Gonds. Kachra-Dhurwa was endowed
with divine strength and severed the head of a goat made of iron with
a stick of bamboo. On growing up he collected his fellow-tribesmen
and slaughtered all the cannibal soldiers, regaining his ancestral
seat in Bindranawagarh. It is noticeable that the Kamars call the
cannibal soldiers Aghori, the name of a sect of ascetics who eat
human flesh. They still point to various heaps of lime-encrusted
fossils in Bindranawagarh as the bones of the cannibal soldiers. The
state of the Kamars is so primitive that it does not seem possible
that they could ever have been workers in iron, but they may perhaps,
like the Agarias, be a group of the Gonds who formerly quarried iron
and thus obtained their distinctive name.