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THE PEOPLE
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FOOD
Cultivators in Bhandara eat ambil, a gruel of boiled jovari and water at about ten and two O'clock. Tamarind vinegar is mixed with this to add to its relish and it is eaten with salt, onions and chillies. For the evening meal they have bhakar or thick chapatis made of Jvari with vegetable and pulse, or besan, i.e., gram flour cooked in water with salt, chillies and onions. Landed gentry and other white-collared people have chapatis of jowari and wheat or boiled rice with pulse and vegetables. The well-to-do eat ghee with their food and the poorer classes til oil or mahua oil. Kohlis and Koshtis are very fond of crabs. The people generally smoke home-grown tobacco and the bidis made in Tirora are sent outside the district also. Most men smoke
and a good many chew tobacco and some take it in the form of snuff. Women do not usually smoke but many of them chew tobacco. There is a general tendency to abstain from drink. With the exception of Rajputs, Banias and Brahmans, all castes eat their food in the fields. If a man is eating food and he is touched by a person of any caste other than from which he is allowed to accept food, the meal is polluted and must be thrown away. Mahars and Gonds were not permitted to draw water from the well before long. Also Mahar boys were not allowed to sit in the school with Hindu boys and were taught in the verandah but those days have gone now. The days when Brahmans did not eat at all in railway trains are gone. Now, they eat, drink water without caring who is seated next. Even now after a journey, they come home and bathe first but that is from notions of cleanliness and not of pollution.
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