1. The ecology of collectives
As I spent many days loitering around the village lanes in my
effort to establish a rapport with the villagers, I came to realise that the name Ghatalpada is derived from the family name of the locals residing there: Ghatal. Quite a few padas in the region are named after the families living in those padas: an entire pada is just one big family. On further investigation, I realised that smaller settlements in the vicinity of this pada were also named after the family names. How did this community find its way into the landscape in the first place? How did such a settlement pattern of kin relations get produced?
The Bombay Gazetteer for Thana district of 1882 vividly speaks
of an unusually strong presence of native tribes in the northern and north eastern tracts of Konkan. The 1872 census identifies the presence of about nine distinct social groups who were indigenous to the lands. They were the Agris, Koli, Warli, Thakur, Katkari, Dubla, Vaiti, Kukna and Dhodia. The Mahadeo Koli were an exception to these aforementioned communities. They are said to have descended from the Deccan plateaus of Central India in the fourteenth century.1 Rest 1 30
Bombay Gazetteer, Thana, Volume XIII, Part I, p. 68 The ecology of collectives
