cribed the
Bhils as follows: "The Muhammadan Bhils are with few exceptions a
miserable lot, idle and thriftless, and steeped in the deadly vice
of opium-eating. The unconverted Bhils are held to be tolerably
reliable. When they borrow money or stock for cultivation they seldom
abscond fraudulently from their creditors, and this simple honesty
of theirs tends, I fear, to keep numbers of them still in a state
little above serfdom." [346]

14. Language.

The Bhils have now entirely abandoned their own language and speak a
corrupt dialect based on the Aryan vernaculars current around them. The
Bhil dialect is mainly derived from Gujarati, but it is influenced
by Marwari and Marathi; in Nimar especially it becomes a corrupt
form of Marathi. Bhili, as this dialect is called, contains a number
of non-Aryan words, some of which appear to come from the Mundari,
and others from the Dravidian languages; but these are insufficient
to form any basis for a deduction as to whether the Bhils belonged
to the Kolarian or Dravidian race. [347]

Bhilala

1. General notice.

_Bhilala_, [348]--A small caste found in the Nimar and Hoshangabad
Districts 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 alliances of immigrant Rajputs with the
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 acquired small estates in the Bhil country, or to those who
took the daughters of Bhil chieftains to wife, the second course being
often no doubt a necessary preliminary to the first. Several Bhilala
families hold estates in Nimar and Indore, and their chiefs now claim
to be pure Rajputs. The principal Bhilala houses, as those of Bhamgarh,
Selani and Mandhata, do not intermarry with the rest of the caste, but
only among themselves and with other families of the same standing in
Malwa and Holkar's Nimar. On succession to the _Gaddi_ or headship of
the house, representatives of these families are marked with a _tika_
or badge on the forehead and sometimes presented with a sword, and
the investiture may be carried out by cu