Kotwar
ethnic group
The Kotwar are a community found in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. They are a sub-group of the Panika caste. The word Kotwar is a corruption of kotwal, which means a keeper of the castle in Hindi. They are said to have acquired the name because they were traditionally village watchmen. The Panika were a caste traditionally associated with weaving, and the change of occupation by the Kotwar led to them becoming a distinct endogamous sub-group of the Panika.
The Kotwar are one many former tribal communities that have now been incorporated into the Hindu caste system. They are now found mainly in the districts of Sonbhadra and Mirzapur. Their habitat is hilly undulating terrain, and extremely forested. They speak Hindi and have scheduled caste status. They are now a community of small- and medium-sized farmers.
The public source identifies “Kotwar” as ethnic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kotwar, ethnic and group.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6434395. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kotwar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.