Valmiki

Clans and Kinship

Rose's Glossary (1911), writing under an older name for the community in the Punjab, records that its gots were numerous and some widespread. Families did not marry within their own got but took wives from all the others; children of different mothers inherited equally, and all took their father's got. The community's governing body was the panchayat, whose members were chosen by the people and whose head, the pir panch or sar panch, was chosen by the members; the office was held for life and in some places passed by inheritance. In the south-east of the province chaudhris at meeting places in Hansi, Hissar, Barwala, Sirsa and Bhiwani presided over councils and spoke for families at weddings. Crooke (1896), writing under an older name for the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, quotes an account from Benares in which each sub-caste married within itself and was divided into exogamous gotras, the Lal Begis recognising three. In towns and abroad the community is organised through Balmiki sabhas, the first founded in 1932; in the United Kingdom a Council of Balmiki Sabhas was set up to represent it.

No list is given. Rose's Glossary (1911, vol. 2, pp. 183-189) and Crooke (1896, vol. 1, pp. 272-273) name gots and gotras for particular districts, but most are names that other Punjabi and north Indian communities also carry, and a got name alone says nothing about a family's community, so they are not reproduced here.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Caste

  Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab, Chandigarh, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir

  Listed as: Balmiki

  Listed as Balmiki alone in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. In Haryana, Punjab, Chandigarh, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, Balmiki is part of a combined entry that also carries one or more older names (Census 2011, Table A-10 Appendix).

Checked in Census 2011 Table A-10 Appendix for the eight states and union territories, and against Wikipedia's compilation of the Scheduled Castes order. Combined entries that include Balmiki also exist in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal; they are not shown, as they also carry older names and whether each names this community was not checked. Lalbegi, the name of the older devotion, is a separate small entry in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi and several eastern states. The Valmiki of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, who speak Kupia, are not covered by this page.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

The community claims descent from Valmiki, the sage and poet of the Ramayana, who is also known in the community as Lal Beg or Bala Shah. Before the twentieth century much of the community kept a religious tradition of its own centred on Lal Beg, which drew on Hindu, Muslim and later Christian elements; Rose's Glossary (1911) records Balmiki and Lal Begi as equivalent names in its day, though in the account it gives Lal Beg was Valmiki's disciple rather than another name for him.

History

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the community's religious life divided. The Arya Samaj drew most families towards mainstream Hinduism; others became Sikhs, known as Mazhabi Sikhs; and others became Christians or Muslims. Between the 1870s and the 1930s large numbers in the Punjab and the United Provinces joined Christian churches, and the historian Jeffrey Cox concludes that a large majority of the Indian Christians counted in the Punjab in that period came from this community. In 1932 the Balmiki Sabha was founded to work for the community's rights. In the 2001 census the community made up about 11 per cent of the Scheduled Caste population of Punjab and was the second-largest Scheduled Caste in Delhi.

Faith and Worship

Most Hindu families of the community honour Bhagwan Valmiki as their guru, and some keep the older devotion to Lal Beg. Many families of the same history are Sikh (the Mazhabi Sikhs) or Christian, and some are Muslim.