Bhil

The Bhils are the indigenous forest and hill people of western and central India, spread in 1337 across the Vindhya and Satpura country from Vagad in southern Rajasthan to the Dang hills of Khandesh. Their name may derive from a Dravidian word for bow; the bow and arrow remain their traditional mark. Their speech, Bhili, is a Western Indo-Aryan language related to Gujarati, with dialects shading into Marathi in the south-east.

Divided into territorial clans, they lived by shifting cultivation, hunting and forest produce, paying tribute to the surrounding Rajput and Muslim states, including the Mughals after Aurangzeb annexed Baglana in 1637. Yet they kept their value as soldiers, and four hundred Bhil archers under Rana Poonja fought beside Maharana Pratap at the Battle of Haldighati in 1576.

As Mughal power crumbled and the Marathas pressed into Khandesh, Bhil risings troubled the region; after the East India Company took Khandesh in 1818, a long series of revolts continued through the 1820s and 1830s.