Page:Castes and tribes of southern India, Volume 5.djvu/28

MARATHA district to the Nizam." The present Marātha chief of the little hill-locked Sandūr State is a minor, whose name and titles are Rāja Venkata Rao Rao Sahib Hindu Rao Ghōrpade Sēnāpati Māmalikat Madar. Of the eleven thousand inhabitants of the State, the various castes of Marāthas number over a thousand. "Three families of them are Brāhmans, who came to Sandūr as officials with Siddoji Rao when he took the State from the Jaramali poligar. Except for two short intervals, Siddoji's descendants have held the State ever since. The others are grouped into three local divisions, namely, Khāsgi, Kumbi, and Lēkāvali. The first of these consists of only some eight families, and constitutes the aristocracy of the State. Some of them came to Sandūr from the Marātha country with Siva Rao and other rulers of the State, and they take the chief seats at Darbars and on other public occasions, and are permitted to dine and intermarry with the Rāja's family. They wear the sacred thread of the Kshatriyas, belong to the orthodox Brāhmanical gōtras, have Brāhmans as their purōhits, observe many of the Brāhmanical ceremonies, burn their dead, forbid widow re-marriage, and keep their womankind gosha. On the other hand, they do not object to drinking alcohol or to smoking, and they eat meat, though not beef. Their family god is the same as that of the Rāja's family, namely, Martānda Manimallari, and they worship him in the temple in his honour which is in the Rāja's palace, and make pilgrimages to his shrine at Jejūri near Poona. [It is noted by Monier-Williams * that 'a deification, Khando-ba (also called Khande-Rao), was a personage who lived in the neighbourhood of the hill Jejūri, thirty miles from Poona.