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This project deals with three ethnic groups in the state of Gujarat in western India: Bhils, Rajputs, and Garasias. The Bhils are currently the largest tribe in India and have over three million members with large communities in Gujarat, Madyha Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. Their kinship structure is patrilineal and patrilocal meaning that the family lineage is passed from father to son and married couples reside in nuclear family units within the husband's village. Unlike Hindu castes, endogamy, or marriage within the lineage, is forbidden and the Bhils permit divorce and widow remarriage. The Rajputs are a Hindu caste of the Ksatriya varna. The Rajputs ruled north west India in a feudalist structure which was only dismantled after India’s independence from British control in 1947. Rajput lineages are patrilineal, exogamous, warrior clans who’s subsistence was primarily based in acquiring and holding land. The control over land was a keystone of the rajas control and was granted through kinship, loyalty, and service. The landholder was the mediator between the raja and the land’s occupants. When the British administration solidified land claims, they also made the status of lineages as a whole less mutable. The origin of the Garasias became a dispute when the Indian government created the scheduled castes and tribes classification in order to dispurse benefits to depressed classes. The British administration had categorised the Garasia as a branch of the Rajputs who were petty landholders. As land became scarce through colonisation in addition to slash and burn agriculture, the Garasia became further marginalized and associated with forest-dwelling peoples who did not practice the Hindu proscription against eating meat, for instance. The nationalist movement created further divisions between groups as the Rajput identity was grounded in traditional customs and their heritage as rulers. The Garasias themselves do not have one homogenous idea of their origins. Some Garasias see themselves as descendants of Rajput lineages who entered Gujarat in the eighth century A.D. from Rajasthan. The Rajputs had appropriated Bhil territory and in part to stregnthen their rule and to ensure peace, the Rajputs began taking Bhil women as spouses. Their offspring formed a distinct caste, the thakurs or Garasias who served as delegates between the ruling Rajputs and Bhils. These Garasias are a lower status caste than the Rajputs but consider themselves superior to the Bhils, with whom they do not intermarry. However, the Bhil-Garasias are those Garasias who married Bhils and were not accepted into Garasia society because of the lower status of the Bhils. Some Garasias see themselves as Hinduizing or Rajputising tribals, meaning that they are emulating higher status groups to raise their position. Still other Garasias see themselves as tribalised Rajputs. They believe that their Rajput ancestors move to the forest to avoid subjugation by a conquering group. By moving to the forest they could maintain their customs and autonomy, though the isolation meant that cultural processes differed from other Rajput groups. Some cultural aspects of the three groups may help in the beginning to understand the relationships between them. The religious and cultural practices which separate the Bhils and the Garasias from the Rajputs, include the isogamous and consecutive polyganous marriages for which the recieving family pays a bride price to her family or women are exchanged between lineages to avoid the financial burden. The status of the lineage as a whole is not affected by the status of incoming brides which is why many of the marriages are isogamous. For high status Rajputs, marriage is usually hypergynous and the bride is accompanied by a dowry payment. Lower status Rajputs pay a bride price to the higher status groups for hypogynous brides. The Rajputs do not practice polygyny and the proper widow would commit sati. One similarity between Rajputs and Garasias is that the woman is still responsible to her natal village even after she leaves to join her husbands family. This practice is also different from the usual Hindu practice which transfers that responsibility to the husbands clan. Indian caste hierarchies are flexible as are the boundaries of the groups themselves. Group identities and caste labels have a transitory and sometimes obscured history because they are used as tools of mobility within the supposedly rigid hierarchy. Throughout history, relocation and creative geneology have served conquerors, tribes and other upwardly mobile groups. Some types of mobility within the caste system include migration to a new area, land acquisition, and removing oneself from the caste system. Both immigration and land-ownership contribute to status elevation if the group claims a higher ritual status as well. Many groups have claimed that they were misallocated into a low varna when in actuality they descend from a twice-born varna. If the group undergoes Hinduization, they can raise their status. Methods of removal from the system include mass conversions of whole lineages to Buddhism, as witnessed with the Mahars. Determining the biological distance between these three groups in Gujarat adds genetic evidence to understanding the history of the area. Do the Garasias resemble a genetic hybrid between the Rajputs and the Bhils or is it more likely that they migrated to the area at some point in the past? Are the Bhils an indigenous tribal group, or are they descended from a Rajput sect who fled into the forests centuries ago, only to be mis- allocated upon their return? As history is recorded by the dominant group and the processes of society or time can alter the original truth, biological distance studies can be used to measure the relationships and distance between populations and records. Hereditary traits in the skeleton or teeth, and statistical methods of comparing the distance between populational frequencies, can be used to measure the relatedness of prehistoric and modern groups. These studies are not conducted to reinforce the caste system or hierarchies in modern india but serve to understand the history and the fluidity of the caste system. This study will use discrete, or non-metric traits to study the relatedness of these three groups. If the Garasias are a hybrid of Rajputs and Bhils, they will fall in an intermediate position on a linear discriminant function as they did in the metric trait analysis.
