Bhilala

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Bhilala" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A Bhilala is a tribe found in the Malwa and Nimar of the Central Provinces and in Central India. The total strength of the Bhilalas is about 150,000 persons, most of whom reside in the Bhopawar Agency, adjoining Nimar. Only 15,000 were returned from the Central Provinces in 1911. The Bhilalas are commonly considered, and the general belief may in their case be accepted as correct, to be a mixed caste sprung from the invading immigrant Rajputs with Bhils of the Central India hills. The original term was not improbably Bhilwala, and may have been applied to those Rajput chiefs, a numerous body, who conquered small estates in the Bhil country, or to those who took the daughters of Bhil chieftains to wife.^[1] The bhilalas in the central province are descendants of male Rajput with female Bhils and take the name of the Rajput clan to which they trace their origin. The Bhilalas are landholders and live like mukhis, Darbar or Thakur.

Systematic anthropological research of Bhilala communities began in the 1960s with a study of two of their regional subgroups, the Rathwa Bhilala and Barela Bhilala although they had been recorded as early as 1832.^[2] In that year, John Malcolm used the term Bhilala to describe people of Bhil-Rajput descent and his usage has persisted, although in 1908 Michael Kennedy, another colonial administrator, preferred a more refined classification of such people as being any one of Baria, Dangi, Parmar, Rathwa and Rathod. The co-mingling probably has its origins in the medieval period when Rajputs fleeing southwards from the Muslim invasion of India, conquered and took control of Bhil settlements, taking Bhil women for marriage.^[3]