Kohli.--A small caste of cultivators found in the Marathi-speaking
tracts of the Wainganga Valley, comprised in the Bhandara and Chanda
Districts. They numbered about 26,000 persons in 1911. The Kohlis are a
notable caste as being the builders of the great irrigation reservoirs
or tanks, for which the Wainganga Valley is celebrated. The water is
used for irrigating rice and sugarcane, the latter being the favourite
crop of the Kohlis. The origin of the caste is somewhat doubtful. The
name closely resembles that of the Koiri caste of market-gardeners
in northern India; and the terms Kohiri and Kohli are used there
as variations of the caste name Koiri. The caste themselves have a
tradition that they were brought to Bhandara from Benares by one of
the Gond kings of Chanda on his return from a visit to that place;
[528] and the Kohlis of Bhandara say that their first settlement in
the Central Provinces was at Lanji, which lies north of Bhandara in
Balaghat. But on the other hand all that is known of their language,
customs, and sept or family names points to a purely Maratha
origin, the caste being in all these respects closely analogous to
the Kunbis. The Settlement Officer of Chanda, Colonel Lucie Smith,
stated that they thought their forefathers came from the south. They
tie their head-cloths in a similar fashion to the Gandlis, who are
oilmen from the Telugu country. If they belonged to the south of
India they might be an offshoot from the well-known Koli tribe of
Bombay, and this hypothesis appears the more probable. As a general
rule castes from northern India settling in the Maratha country have
not completely abandoned their ancestral language and customs even
after a residence of several centuries. In the case of such castes
as the Panwars and Bhoyars their foreign extraction can be detected
at once; and if the Kohlis had come from Hindustan the rule would
probably hold good with them. On the other hand the Kolis have in
some parts of Bombay now taken to cultivation and closely resemble
the Kunbis. In Satara it is said [529] that they associate and
occasionally eat with Kunbis, and their social and religious customs
resemble those of the Kunbi caste. They are quiet, orderly, settled and
hard-working. Besides fishing they work ferries along the Krishna, are
employed in villages as water-carriers, and grow melons in river-beds
with much skill. The Kolis of Bombay are presumably the same tribe
as the Kols of Chota Nagpur, and they probably migrated to Gujarat
along the Vindhyan plateau, where they are found in considerable
numbers, and over the hills of Rajputana and Central India. The Kols
are one of the most adaptive of all the non-Aryan tribes, and when
they reached the sea they may have become fishermen and boatmen, and
practised these callings also in rivers. From plying on rivers they
might take to cultivating melons and garden-crops on the stretches
of silt left uncovered in their beds in the dry season, which is
the common custom of the boating and fishing castes. And from this,
as seen in Satara, some of them attained to regular cultivation and,
modelling themselves on the Kunbis, came to have nearly the same
status. They may thus have migrated to Chanda and Bhandara with the
Kunbis, as their language and customs would indicate, and retaining
their preference for irrigated and garden-crops have become expert
growers of sugarcane. The description which has been received of
the Kohlis of Bhandara would be rather favourable than otherwise
to the hypothesis of their ultimate origin from the Kol tribe,
allowing for their having acquired the Maratha language and customs
from a lengthened residence in Bombay. It has been mentioned above
that the Kohlis have a legend of their ancestors having come from
Benares, but this story appears to be not infrequently devised as a
means of obtaining increased social estimation, Benares being the
principal centre of orthodox Hinduism. Thus the Dangris, a small
caste of vegetable- and melon-growers who are certainly an offshoot
of the Kunbis, and therefore of Maratha extraction, have the same
story. As regards the tradition of the Bhandara Kohlis that their
first settlement was at Lanji, this may well have been the case even
though they came from the south, as Lanji was an important place and a
centre of administration under the Marathas. It is probable, however,
that they first came to Chanda and from here spread north to Lanji,
as, if they had entered Bhandara through Wardha and Nagpur, some of
them would probably have remained in these Districts.