time. The king of Chanda proclaimed that whoever killed the kite
would be granted the adjoining lands. A Mana shot the kite with an
arrow and its remains were taken to Chanda in eight carts, and as his
reward he received the grant of a zamindari. In appearance the Manas,
or at least some of them, are rather fine men, nor do their complexion
and features show more noticeable traces of aboriginal descent than
those of the local Hindus. But their neighbours in Chanda and Bastar,
the Maria Gonds, are also taller and of a better physical type than
the average Dravidian, so that their physical appearance need not
militate against the above hypothesis. They retained their taste
for fighting until within quite recent times, and in Katol and other
towns below the Satpura hills, Manas were regularly enlisted as a town
guard for repelling the Pindari raids. Their descendants still retain
the ancestral matchlocks, and several of them make good use of these
as professional _shikaris_ or hunters. Many of them are employed as
servants by landowners and moneylenders for the collection of debts or
the protection of crops, and others are proprietors, cultivators and
labourers, while a few even lend money on their own account. Manas hold
three zamindari estates in Bhandara and a few villages in Chanda; here
they are considered to be good cultivators, but have the reputation
as a caste of being very miserly, and though possessed of plenty,
living only on the poorest and coarsest food. [176] The Mana women
are proverbial for the assistance which they render to their husbands
in the work of cultivation.

Owing to their general adoption of Maratha customs, the Manas are now
commonly regarded as a caste and not a forest tribe, and this view may
be accepted. They have two subcastes, the Badwaik Manas, or soldiers,
and the Khad Manas, who live in the plains and are considered to be of
impure descent. Badwaik or 'The Great Ones' is a titular term applied
to a person carrying arms, and assumed by certain Rajputs and also by
some of the lower castes. A third group of Manas are now amalgamated
with the Kunbis as a regular subdivision of that caste, though they
are regarded as somewhat lower than the others. They have also a
number of exogamous septs of the usual titular and totemistic types,
the few recognisable names being Marathi. It is worth noticing that
several pairs of these septs, as Jamare and Gazbe, Narnari and Chudri,
Wagh and Rawat, and