Malana people

Malana people
Total population
1,722 in Malana village (2011 census): 3
Regions with significant populations
India: the village of Malana in the Malana Valley, Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh
Languages
Kanashi, a Sino-Tibetan language; Kullu Pahari and Hindi as second languages
Religion
Worship of the village deity Jamlu

The Malana people, called Malanis by the anthropologist Colin Rosser and by most later writers, are the people of Malana, a village in the valley of the Malana torrent in Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh, India.^: 38 They speak Kanashi, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in no other village and cut off from the other Sino-Tibetan languages of the region by villages that speak Indo-Aryan languages.^: 3–4 The 2011 Census counted 1,722 people in Malana.

G. M. Young in 1916 and Rosser in the 1950s recorded most Malana households as Kanet; a resurvey of the village made in 2016–17 recorded all but five families as Rajput.^{: 48: §2.6.1} The state government classed the whole population of Malana among the Other Backward Classes in 2007.^: §2.6.1 The village deity is Jamlu, in whose name a council of hereditary office-holders and elected elders governs village affairs.^{: 42–43: §5.3} Commercial cannabis growing reached Malana in the late 1970s.^: 54 A charas made in the village is known as "Malana Cream".

Name and identity

Rosser used "Malanis" as the collective name for the people of the village. Richard Axelby follows him in a restudy of 2015.^: 38 An exhibition text of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), with photographs by Virendra Bangroo and Krzysztof Stronski, calls them the Malanese. The linguists Anju Saxena and Lars Borin, who documented Kanashi, call them Kanashi speakers or "the Kanashi community in Malana". They write that "both their language and their village are important identity markers".^: 5–6

When Rosser arrived in Kullu in 1951, other Kullu villagers regarded the Malanis as "a group which stands outside the main stream of social life in Kullu". The Malanis used the word Kullu for the world beyond their own valley. Rosser described Malana as "a self-contained tribal society", set against "the village or folk society of Kullu".^: 40–41 Outsiders may not touch a Malani, under pain of a fine. Malanis who travel elsewhere in Himachal Pradesh or beyond keep to the rule and do not eat with outsiders.^: 6 Axelby reads the Malanis' separateness as chosen: "Isolation is here not a social fact but rather a political strategy".^: 58

Population

Main article: Malana Valley

Malana had 376 inhabitants "at the time of the last census" before Young wrote in 1916. Rosser's household census, reported in 1952, recorded 119 households.^: 42 The resurvey found 153 households in 1981, 170 households and 954 people in 1991 and 317 households and 1,969 people in 2017.^: §4.1 Of the 1,722 people counted in 2011, 28 were recorded as members of Scheduled Castes and none as members of a Scheduled Tribe. Saxena and Borin put the number of Kanashi speakers at some 2,000. Ethnologue gives 1,400, from a source dated 2001.^: 3 Daily-wage workers from Bihar and Nepal now also live and work in the village.^: 7

Language

Main article: Kanashi language

Kanashi is an oral language with no established script. UNESCO classes it as "definitely endangered".^: 4 The Linguistic Survey of India described it in 1909, in its volume on the Tibeto-Burman family. A. H. Diack had found close affinities with Kinnauri in 1896. The exact place of Kanashi within Sino-Tibetan is not settled. Manuel Widmer classes it as a West Himalayish language close to Kinnauri; Saxena and Borin use his classification.^: 4–5 Young noted in 1916 that it shares many words with the speech of Kanawar (Kinnaur).

In the 1950s the Malanis spoke Kullu Pahari with outsiders and Kanashi among themselves.^: 38–39 Most speakers now understand Kullu Pahari and Hindi. Many younger villagers mix the three. Hindi is the language of the school, of work outside the village and of the satellite television, internet and mobile phones now found in Malana.^: 6–7 The IGNCA exhibition text states that the weaver and ironsmith families living in the village are not allowed to speak Kanashi.

Origin accounts

The resurvey records two village legends of the founding of Malana. In one, a hunter found the village. In the other, Jamlu, identified with the sage Jamadagni, came from Batant in Spiti and settled at Hamta near Naggar before coming to Malana. There he defeated a demon, Danu, who gave up Malana on condition that its people kept their language. The resurvey judged the Jamlu legend the most firmly held of the village's origin stories, "a basis of their superior origin, customs, tradition and life".^: §1.2

A story repeated in many publications makes the Malanis descendants of soldiers who deserted the army of Alexander the Great when it invaded India around 325 BC. The resurvey calls it "popular, often-repeated" and not credible.^: §1.2 The IGNCA exhibition text reports that villagers claim this descent, but adds that "there is no proved lexical link with Greek or Macedonian languages". It finds the core of Kanashi vocabulary made up of Tibetan and Hindi layers. Young wrote in 1916 that some writers had given the people "a Mongolian origin", an idea he traced to their language. He also cited Denzil Ibbetson for a tradition that a Mughal emperor had moved the Malana people from the plains for some offence. The Malanis, Young added, admitted no Muslim connection.

Young's own conjecture was that Kanashi survived from a language once common to the Kanets of Lahul, Kulu and Kanawar. On that view Malana was settled from the Beas valley before Rajput settlement carried Indo-Aryan speech up to the mid-Himalayan chain. V. Bhalla and P. C. Sharma, writing in the People of India series in 1996, held that the Malanis' ancestors came from several places in the Parvati and Kullu valleys; the resurvey summarises their argument that the names of five of the village's eight clans point that way.^: §1.4 Saxena and Borin think that Indo-Aryan influence on Kanashi probably began before its speakers settled in Malana.^: 6

A genetic study of 48 Malanis, published in 2010, found less genetic variability than in the caste and pastoral populations of India it compared them with, but no sign of a severe bottleneck. Two closely related Y-chromosome haplotypes made up a large share of the men sampled. Haplogroups J2 and R1a were the most common. The authors put the pattern down to drift and limited gene flow in "the highly endogamous Malana village".

Society

Caste

Young wrote that the community consisted "mainly of Kanets", with a few Dagi families. Rosser's thesis of 1956 counted 109 Kanet households, one household of Julaha weavers and two of Lohar ironsmiths.^: 48 He found that "the Malanis do not bother very much about the finer distinctions of caste differentiation" among themselves. Towards other Kullu villagers, though, they appeared "to act as if they belonged to a caste apart from all others".^: 39

The 2016–17 resurvey divides the population into Rajputs and non-Rajputs. All families but five, three of weavers and two of blacksmiths, are Rajput. Rajputs conduct the village's religious ceremonies themselves, without Brahmin priests. They practise untouchability towards the families of the Scheduled Castes.^: §2.6.1 The IGNCA exhibition text names four Rajput sub-divisions: the Dhamyani and Dhurani in upper Malana and the Nagvani and Pachani in lower Malana, who intermarry. It states that the Lohar and Julaha families came to the village as drummers.

Clans and marriage

Rosser's census of 1952 grouped the village's families into eight patrilineal clans. Each clan was exogamous, while the village as a whole married within itself.^: 42 A. F. P. Harcourt wrote in 1871 that the inhabitants kept to themselves, "neither eating nor intermarrying with the people of any other village". A study published in 1985 traced the genealogies of all 141 families then living in Malana and found that "93.13% of all marriages took place between locals".^: 5–6 Young recorded in 1916 that men of each half of the village married women of the other half. Brides were also taken from Rashol when needed. The IGNCA exhibition text names Rasol, whose people worship Renuka, in its account Jamlu's wife, as the one outside village into which Malana girls may marry.

The resurvey describes marriage with non-Malanis as forbidden. Since 1992 the only exceptions it records are a "harijan girl" who married a government doctor posted to the village's Ayurvedic dispensary and a Malana family's daughter married to a Nepali. Parents arrange marriages, preferably for August or September. Either spouse may end a marriage simply, the husband forfeiting the mehar he has deposited with the wife's parents.^: §2.6.3 Joint families are the rule, but nuclear families are becoming more common as younger people choose to live separately.^: §2.6.2

Religion

Main article: Jamlu

The resurvey describes the Malanis as Hindus who worship none of the gods of the neighbouring parts of Kullu, only Jamlu.^: §2.6.1 Rosser saw Jamlu as the village made divine and the source of all authority in it.^: 42 Jamlu stays apart from the other gods of Kullu: he does not enter Kullu town for the Kullu Dussehra and visits no other place.^{: 36: §2.6.5} The main festival is Malana Shauni, on 15 August. Two Phagli festivals are held in March and April.^: §2.6.5 The village's Devta Committee banned liquor in 1986. A Malani found drinking is fined Rs 500. Fines go into Jamlu's treasury.^: §2.6.6

Village government

Main article: Malana Valley

In Rosser's account, village decisions were taken by three hereditary office-holders and eight elected elders, then put to an assembly of household heads, where they had to be unanimous.^: 43 The resurvey describes a council of two houses: an upper house of three permanent office-holders and eight elders elected from four wards and a lower house of the heads of families. A decision of the upper house goes to the lower house for approval.^: §5.3 The panchayat of the state system works separately from this council.^: 54

Economy and livelihood

In the 1950s every household combined farming with herding.^: 42 Rosser found that the Malanis would not take money for wool and often not for ghi, holding out for their customary barter rates.^: 40 Jamlu held land in villages of the Beas valley and of Waziri Rupi to the south. Twice a year a party of Malanis went down to collect his share of the rice and barley grown there, the kar.^: 48–49 The 2016–17 resurvey found animal husbandry the mainstay of the household economy. Families also depended on fodder, fuelwood, timber, medicinal herbs and wild foods from common land. Some ran restaurant huts for tourists.^: §6.41 The Malana hydroelectric plant, commissioned in July 2001, was built on the village's traditional land. Villagers told Saxena and Borin of land lost to the construction company because they had no written documents to support their claims.^: 6–7

Cannabis

Main articles: Malana Cream and Malana Valley

Axelby dates commercial cannabis growing in Malana to the late 1970s. Charas is made there by hand-rubbing, drawing the resin "by massaging each flowering leaf between the palm and fingers".^: 53–54 The resurvey found that the whole population spent two to three months a year collecting cannabis from the wild.^: §2.8 Malanis also grow it on their arable land.^: §6.20 Its authors describe the resin as a large source of income that they could not measure.^: §6.41 In 2017 older people still wore khobe, shoes made from cannabis fibre.^: §2.3

Axelby, visiting the village after a police raid in September 2013, was told that every family grew cannabis, so the police could never destroy the whole harvest. Families whose fields were destroyed were compensated by the others. Villagers believed the police feared to attack the village "because of the power of Jamlu".^: 56

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

See also

• Jari
• Kullu District
• Kullu Valley
• Malana
• Malana Valley
• Parvati Valley
• Rasol