Musahar Erotic

The Musahar sit at the bottom of the caste order in the eastern Gangetic plain, and the name they carry was put on them by others: musa, rat, and ahar, food. They are a Dalit community of Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, and of the Terai lowlands of southern Nepal, where the census counts them among the Madheshi Dalits. Almost everyone is landless. Households cluster in a musahari, a separate hamlet of mud and thatch on the edge of a village, and walk out to other people's fields at transplanting and harvest. Catching field rats, partly for the meat and partly for the grain rats hoard in their burrows, was real seasonal work, and it became the label the community now works to shed. In Nepal many prefer Rishidev, in Bihar the surnames Manjhi and Sada, and the claim of descent from a rishi, a sage, gives the community a standing the census label denies. Ethnographers have long grouped them with the Bhuiya and guessed at a tribal origin on the Chota Nagpur plateau, but the Musahar speak the plains languages of their neighbors: Bhojpuri in the west, Magahi around Gaya and Patna, Maithili in the north, all Indo-Aryan, with Hindi and Nepali for school and office when school and office happen at all.

Religion is Hindu in the broad sense, but practice runs through village shrines and one very particular pair of heroes. Dina and Bhadri were two Musahar brothers of the Mithila country who, in the epic sung about them, fought landlords and died for it. Their shrines stand in many hamlets and their story is still performed by the community's own singers to a drum. Pigs are kept and eaten, which higher castes hold against the Musahar and which the Musahar do not apologize for. Older women wear godna, the green-black tattooing of forearm and chin that was once the one ornament a poor woman could not have taken from her. Literacy is among the lowest of any community in South Asia, and child malnutrition, bonded labor in brick kilns and stone quarries, and kala-azar, the visceral leishmaniasis endemic to north Bihar, have shaped modern Musahar life more than any custom. The inflection points are recent. Bhagwati Devi, who broke stones in the quarries of Gaya, was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1996. In 2007 Bihar put the Musahar in a new Mahadalit category meant to steer welfare toward the most excluded castes. In 2014 Jitan Ram Manjhi became the first Musahar chief minister of Bihar, which did not change the rat-catching hamlets much but changed what the name could mean.