Halwai.—The occupational caste of confectioners, numbering about 3000 persons in the Central Provinces and Berar in 1911. The Halwai takes his name from halwa, a sweet made of flour, clarified butter and sugar, coloured with saffron and flavoured with almonds, raisins and pistachio-nuts.1 The caste gives no account of its origin in northern India, but it is clearly a functional group composed of members of respectable middle-class castes who adopted the profession of sweetmeat-making. The Halwais are also called Mithaihas, or preparers of sweets, and in the Uriya country are known as Guria from gur or unrefined sugar. The caste has several subdivisions with territorial names, generally derived from places in northern India, as Kanaujia from Kanauj, and Jaunpuria from Jaunpur; others are Kandu, a grain-parcher, and Dobisya, meaning two score. One of the Guria subdivisions is named Haldia from haldi, turmeric, and members of this subcaste are employed to prepare the mahaprasad or cooked rice which is served at the temple of Jagannath and which is eaten by all castes together without scruple. The Gurias have exogamous divisions or bargas, the names of which are generally functional, as Darban, door-keeper; Saraf, treasurer; Bhitarya, one who looks to household affairs, and others. Marriage within the barga is forbidden, but the union of first cousins is not prohibited. Marriage may be infant or adult. A girl who has a liaison with a man of the caste may be wedded to him by the form used for the remarriage of a widow, but if she goes wrong with an outsider she is finally expelled. Widow-marriage is allowed, and divorce may be effected for misconduct on the part of the wife.

The social standing of the Halwai is respectable. “His art,” says Mr. Nesfield,2 “implies rather an advanced state of culture, and hence his rank in the social scale is a high one. There is no caste in India which considers itself too pure to eat what a confectioner has made. In marriage banquets it is he who supplies a large part of the feast, and at all times and seasons the sweetmeat is a favourite food to a Hindu requiring a temporary refreshment. There is a kind of bread called puri, consisting of wheaten dough fried in melted butter, which is taken as a substitute for the chapati or wheaten pancake by travellers and others who happen to be unable to have their bread cooked at their own fire, and is made by the Halwais.”

The real reason why the Halwai occupies a good position perhaps simply results from the necessity that other castes should be able to take cakes from him. Among the higher castes food cooked with water should not be eaten except at the hearth after this has been specially cleansed and spread with cowdung, and those who are to eat have bathed and otherwise purified themselves. But as the need continuously arises for travellers and others to take a meal abroad where they cannot cook it for themselves, sweetmeats and cakes made without water are permitted to be eaten in this way, and the Halwai, as the purveyor of these, has been given the position of a pure caste from whose hands a Brahman can take water. In a similar manner, water may be taken from the hands of the Dhimar who is a household servant, the Kahar or palanquin-bearer, the Barai or betel-leaf seller, and the Bharbhunja or rice-parcher, although some of these castes have a very low origin and occupy the humble position of menial servants.

The Halwai’s shop is one of the most familiar in an Indian bazar, and in towns a whole row of them may be seen together, this arrangement being doubtless adopted for the social convenience of the caste-fellows, though it might be expected to decrease the custom that they receive. His wares consist of trays full of white and yellow-coloured sweetmeats and cakes of flour and sugar, very unappetising to a European eye, though Hindu boys show no lack of appreciation of them. The Hindus are very fond of sweet things, which is perhaps a common trait of an uneducated palate. Hindu children will say that such sweets as chocolate almonds are too bitter, and their favourite drink, sherbet, is simply a mixture of sugar and water with some flavouring, and seems scarcely calculated to quench the thirst produced by an Indian hot weather. Similarly their tea is so sweetened with sugar and spices as to be distasteful to a European.

The ingredients of a Halwai’s sweets are wheat and gram-flour, milk and country sugar. Those called batashas consist merely of syrup of sugar boiled with a little flour, which is taken out in spoonfuls and allowed to cool. They are very easy to make and are commonly distributed to schoolboys on any occasion of importance, and are something like a meringue in composition. The kind called barafi or ice is made from thick boiled milk mixed with sugar, and is more expensive and considered more of a treat than batashas. Laddus are made from gram-flour which is mixed with water and dropped into boiling butter, when it hardens into lumps. These are taken out and dipped in syrup of sugar and allowed to cool. Pheni is a thin strip of dough of fine wheat-flour fried in butter and then dipped in syrup of sugar. Other sweets are made from the flour of singara or water-nut and from chironji, the kernel of the achar3 nut, coated with sugar. Of ordinary sweets the cheaper kinds cost 8 annas a seer of 2 lb. and the more expensive ones 10 or 12 annas. Sweets prepared by Bengali confectioners are considered the best of all. The Halwai sits on a board in his shop surrounded by wooden trays of the different kinds of sweets. These are often covered with crowds of flies and in some places with a variety of formidable-looking hornets. The latter do not appear to be vicious, however, and when he wishes to take sweets off a tray the Halwai whisks them off with a palm-leaf brush. Only if one of them gets into his cloth, or he unguardedly pushes his hand down into a heap of sweets and encounters a hornet, he may receive a sting of which the mark remains for some time. The better-class confectioners now imitate English sweets, and at fairs when they retail boiled grain and ghi they provide spoons and little basins for their customers.