Once, during my visit to India, I got a call from one of my IT professional acquaintance working in Chicago. His parents from Chennai needed some help visiting Triveni Sangam, the confluence of three river Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna and Saraswati (historical/imaginary?) at Allahabad.

Next morning, I reached the hotel where they were staying. Soon I realized that they barely knew Hindi or English, and I barely had a smattering of Tamil. The old couple was all set to leave for ‘Sangam’. Aunt was bedecked in gold from head to toe along with a beautiful white saree with golden brocade. In sign-language I suggested aunt to take off her gold jewelry. After a long ‘dumb charade’ I was told that it was not safe to leave gold in the hotel, so she decided to go on with it. I had no clue what made this old couple come to this unglamorous, unpretentious small city-Allahabad.

As we reached the bank of Ganga a dozen of ‘pandas’ began to flock the couple. ‘Which village’, ‘which caste’, ‘which gotra’ they were barraging uncle and aunt with a series of questions. A graceful old lady swathed in gold jewelry and brocaded saree, on one hand, and those crafty, rustic ‘pandas’ in threadbare ‘dhoti’, so vigilant about new ‘jajman’ (clients) made me exceedingly nervous.  The much talked about ‘north-south’ divide made much more sense to me than ever. What a disconnect!

While I was bargaining with a boatman, I don’t know what transpired between uncle and those vendors that uncle began to walk behind one of them. I followed suit! Here I could not exchange a word with this Tamilian couple because of our ‘limited linguistic abilities’, struggling to have a word with them, and there within seconds, through a system of some advanced symbolism, the news had traveled like a wildfire among these ‘Pandas’ that the new ‘jajman’ had arrived.

It was the first time I came to know about ‘bahikhata’ or genealogy registers, another age-old, yet a significant intellectual tradition of Hindus. For centuries Sanatan culture has associated a lot of holiness with rivers like Ganga. Visiting river Ganga has been an integral part of pilgrimage as well as a place for performing the customary last rites of deceased family members. Most probably, the inherently organic custom to record the family visits emerged due to tourists’ desire to make their pilgrimage memorable or there might be some unknown motivation behind it. ‘Pandas’ are the local Brahmins who register details of all marriages, births, and deaths of the family of the visitors in a very systematic way. These registers are called ‘bahikhata’ (etymology- Vaahis- the bearer or carrier, a corrupt form is bahi and khata-account).

These genealogy registers or ‘Bahikhata’ are still maintained at some of the cities like Allahabad, Hardwar, Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, Kurukshetra in Haryana, Jawalamukhi, Chintpurni in Himachal Pradesh, Nashik, Maharashtra etc. These hand-written logs are classified according to one’s district, village, caste and sub-caste (gotra), with special designated Pandit overseeing the designated district registers. The Pandas have a system of indexing information comprehended only by them, which has made the search procedure so fast.

Maintaining ‘bahikhata’ became a family profession of Pandas. Since generations, they have been  meticulously noting the information by hands mostly in Devanagari and preserved the information from the last few centuries. Different mediums were used to record the information. For instance, paper, Bhojpatra or birch paper, tamrapatra or copper plates, cloth and special types of ink were used for the purpose.

And once the last name is traced, you will be told about who had visited that holy place hundred to four hundred years ago from your family. Unfortunately, one may be able to trace one’s paternal ancestors, records for the maternal side might be missing. But these days people are recording their wives’ and daughter’s names too.

At times, these records have also been used in settling legal cases regarding inheritance or property disputes. Some Hindus migrated to Pakistan after partition. Yet, they left behind their family history to these local genealogists called Pandas.  In several cases, some well settled Muslims and even Christians are surprised to discover their Hindu roots. Unfortunately, due to several foreign attacks in Northern India, lots of valuable records were lost. Library of Genealogy in Kashi got destroyed over time.

Over the years, the custom of visiting these holy places to update family ledgers is slowly dying as people are moving to different parts of the world. A huge effort is being made to keep these records on the internet so that people can access them online from any part of the world.  

The tradition resonates so well with Hindu religiosity which has encouraged people to stay connected with their roots and unearth them from time to time. Such traditions speak voluminously of the intelligence of our forefathers who were cognizant and sensible enough to carry forward their name to futurity.

Henceforth, uncle found the link of his paternal grandfather tracing his ancestry back to about five generations from last two hundred years!  He also saw some hand-written notes scribbled in Tamil by his great-grandfather. It was amazing to see seemingly affluent couple squatting comfortably on the ground with one of the Panda, nodding happily to their family priest’s utterances! Both the parties got the most of what they needed from each other. Uncle made sure his family record was updated, and Pandas ensured their pockets were filled up to an optimum level. Such a symbiotic relationship I witnessed. Now I knew what made this old couple come to Allahabad.

Reference

1 https://blog.eogn.com/2016/10/28/genealogy-record-keeping-in-india/