Musahar

Musahar or Mushahar (मुसहर जाति) are a Dalit community found in the eastern Gangetic plain and the Terai. They are also known as Rishidev, Sada, Manjhi, Banbasi. The other names of the Musahar are Bhuiyan and Rajawar. Their name literally means 'rats-ridder' due to their main former occupation of catching rats, and there are many who are still forced to do this work due to destitution and poverty. In Bihar, the word Musahar is said to be derived from the Bhojpuri mūs+ahar (literally rat eater), on account of their traditional occupation as rat catchers. According to a local legend, Lord Brahma created man and gave him the horse to ride. The first Musahar decided to dig holes in the belly of the horse to fix his feet as he rode. This offended Lord Brahma, who cursed him and his descendants to be rat-catchers. Herbert Hope Risley, in his 1881 survey of castes and tribes of Bengal, speculated that the Musahars were an offshoot of the hunter-gatherer Bhuiya from the Chota Nagpur Plateau who migrated to the Gangetic plains approximately 6-7 generations prior to his survey, around 300-350 years before present. It is now believed that this theory is generally correct. Modern genetic studies have found Musahars cluster very closely with Munda peoples like the Santhals and the Hos, and demonstrate similar haplogroup frequencies for both maternal and paternal lineages. Some Musahars have claimed that they once had their own language but it was lost when they migrated. This process has been observed in another tribal population, the Baiga, who also once spoke a Munda language but shifted to an Indo-European language in the distant past. However, unlike the Musahar, the Baiga remained isolated from Brahminical society at large and so were seen as a tribe rather than a caste. The Musahar consists of three endogamous clans: Bhagat, Sakatiya and Turkahia. They are now mostly landless agricultural labourers and sometimes still have to resort to rat catching to survive during lean times. They are one of the most marginalised castes in India, even among Dalits.