Castes and Tribes of Southern India/Pindāri
Pindāri.——In the Madras Census Report, 1901, fifty-nine Pindāris are returned as a Bombay caste of personal servants. They are more numerous in the Mysore province, where more than two thousand were returned in the same year as being engaged in agriculture and Government service. The Pindāris were formerly celebrated as a notorious class of freebooters, who, in the seventeenth century, attached themselves to the Marāthas in their revolt against Aurangzīb, and for a long time afterwards, committed raids in all directions, extending their operations to Southern India. It is on record that "in a raid made upon the coast extending from Masulipatam northward, the Pindāris in ten days plundered 339 villages, burning many, killing and wounding 682 persons, torturing 3,600, and carrying off or destroying property to the amount of £250,000."*[1] They were finally suppressed, in Central India, during the Viceroyalty of the Marquis of Hastings, in 1817.
- ↑ * Yule and Burnell. Hobson-Jobson.