Warli

Clans and Kinship

Enthoven (1922) records four endogamous divisions: the Shuddha or 'pure' Varlis, the Murde, the Davar and the Nihir. The Murde and Davar of northern Thana ate together and intermarried, but neither ate nor married with the Nihir of Mahim, Bassein, Jawhar and Vada. The tribe is divided into clans called kul, and marriage within the kul is forbidden, as is marriage within the degree of cousinship. Villages and hamlets often had their own headman. The old woman who conducts weddings, the davleri, and the medium, bhagat, are central figures in Varli ritual.

The chief kuls as Enthoven (1922, vol. 3, p. 447) lists them, in his alphabetical order. Two names whose scanned text could not be read with confidence (one reads 'Jadhaie', one 'Pileyaua') are left out, and two are marked uncertain. Enthoven gives no totems, and the list is of the Thana Varlis of a century ago.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Maharashtra, Gujarat, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Goa, Karnataka

  Listed as: Varli

  Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu were separate union territories in 2011 and are one since 2020; the Varli are listed in both former parts.

Checked against the 2011 census tables of each state and union territory and Wikipedia's compilation of the order; amendments after 2011 were not checked.

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 meaning of the name is not settled. Enthoven (1922), following John Wilson, derives Varli from varal, a small patch of cultivated land, so 'uplander', and notes that others connect it with Varalat, one of the seven old divisions of the Konkan; he found neither convincing and wrote that nothing was known of their origin. He records that they were closely connected with the Thakur, among whom there was a Varli division.

History

Enthoven (1922) found the Varlis of 1901 in large numbers in Thana district, Jawhar, the Surat Agency, Nasik and Khandesh, with their headquarters in Dahanu; in Nasik they lived in Peint and on the Sahyadris, and in Khandesh in the hills west of Akrani. He describes them as partly settled and partly wandering, living in villages and padas, hamlets, for most of the year but moving in search of work in the dry season, and abandoning a village after a death from cholera or smallpox. Wikipedia's account, drawing on studies of Warli social history, records that the Warli held most of the land of the Umbergaon, Dahanu and Palghar talukas until the 1870s, when much of it passed to outside landlords and many Warlis became labourers and sharecroppers on it, bound to unpaid labour called begar. From 1945 Warlis organised against begar and for minimum wages in what is called the Warli revolt, and begar and most such dues were abolished by the early 1950s. By 2011 the census counted more than 1.2 million, about two-thirds of them in Maharashtra.

Faith and Worship

Enthoven (1922) describes the chief Varli god as Vaghya or Vaghoba, the tiger god, kept as a roughly carved tiger or a post daubed with red lead at the village boundary or under a banyan; every year in Kartik all Varlis go to Vaghya with offerings. The household god is Hirva, shown as a bundle of peacock feathers, a hunter or a rider, whose great day is in Margashirsha. They also worship Narayan, the goddess Humai, Bahiroba and Khandoba, and offer first fruits of the mango and the new rice. Mediums, bhagat, are possessed by Vaghya at weddings and choose names for children.

Deities named in the sources: Vaghoba, Hirva

Customs

In Enthoven's account (1922) the proposal comes from the boy's father, and a wedding lasts three days. On the first day the marriage booth is put up and liquor and coconuts offered to Hirva; on the third the davleri, an old woman of the tribe who acts as priestess, ties the couple's garments, leads them five times round the booth and chants the marriage words while a cloth is held between them, after which the guests dance round the pair raised on the shoulders of relatives. Two fairs in April drew many Varlis, at Mahalakshmi in Dahanu and at Nagar near Fattehpur in Dharampur. The dead were cremated, except those whose bodies had sores, who were buried. Warli women traditionally painted the walls inside their houses for weddings and harvests, in white rice paste on a red-brown wall of earth and cow dung, with a bamboo twig as the brush; the paintings are built from circles, triangles and squares around a central square, the chauk (Wikipedia, citing Dalmia's studies). From the 1970s Jivya Soma Mashe and others began to paint outside the ritual, and Warli painting became widely known.

Festivals

Notable Personalities