In certain Hindu pilgrimage centers in India, genealogy registers are maintained by Brahmin priests known as pandas. Pandas are genealogists at Haridwar in Uttarakhand, India.Brahman pandas Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement, by Lise McKean, University of Chicago Press, 1996. . Page 151.Janasakhi Janamsakhis of Miharban and Mani Singh, Janamsakhi Tradition, Dr. Kirpal Singh, 2004, Punjabi University, Patiala. . www.globalsikhstudies.net.page 169. In several cases, these records known as vahis (or bahi), also known as pothis, have been used in settling legal cases regarding inheritance or property disputes. Most of these records have traced family histories for more than twenty generations. The records were created when family members of deceased people dispersed their ashes in the Ganges or visited Haridwar for a religious dip in the river. During these visits, the family priest records births, marriages, and deaths on paper scrolls. Another term for the bahi registers is bahi-khatta.

The records of a particular family contain information on place of origin, names, births, deaths, cause of death, place of residence, caste, and clan. Details about property and land-holdings are also recorded. Beyond genealogy, the records also document famines, epidemics, migration, the socio-historical details on how clans and communities were organized, and the wealth of a given community at a certain period of time (inferred from details about their donations and grants to local temples and villages).

In order to consult the records, a visiting individual must have knowledge of their family's name, place of origin, and the date of a recent visit. The pandas (using a system of indexing known only to them) will then consult the relevant record. The records also contain genealogical information of families from places now located in Pakistan (such as Sindh). Individuals consult the records for a variety of reasons: practical, religious or sentimental in nature.

History In Hinduism, Haridwar is a revered site, principally because the Ganges River leaves the Himalayas to enter the Gangetic plain at this point.Lochtefeld, J. (2018). Tīrtha and Tīrthayātrā: Haridwar. In K. A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online, Brill. Available From: referenceworks https://doi.org/10.1163/2212-5019_beh_SIM_000423 [Accessed 14 June 2025] The region of the Himalayas is also named the Devabhūmi (“Land of the Gods”), and Haridwar is where the Ganges descends to the Earth. The earliest written record from the 7th century described it as a place of religious pilgrimage: Mughal-era records, such as the Āʾīn-i Akbarī and Khulāṣat al-Tawārikh of 1695, also describe Haridwar as a place of pilgrimage, especially during the festival of Vaisakhi. The Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh stated that Haridwar was a place for bathing, almsgiving, funerary rites; two religious occasions held importance there: vaiśākhī and the kumbhamelā. A European account written by Thomas Coryat from 1617 also describes the site as one of pilgrimage. According to James Lochtefeld, the gosāīṃs (also known as nāgā saṃnyāsīs) were the earliest inhabitants of Haridwar. In 1808, Haridwar was a small settlement, as per a contemporary source by Felix Raper. The establishment of the Upper Ganga Canal and the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railroad led to the development of Haridwar into a more expansive habitation.

As Haridwar has traditionally been a site for death rites and also Sraddha amongst Hindus, it also became customary for the family pandits to record each visit of the family, along with their gotra, family tree, marriages, and present members who are grouped according to family and hometown. The pandas of Haridwar are some of the original inhabitants of the site. The familial details used to be passed down orally (by pandas memorizing the familial details of their clients) to the next generation until they were finally transcribed through the use of writing on a physical medium, initially on bhojpatra and then later on bahi paper. The earliest written records in the form of bhojpatra have mostly not survived. It is believed that the tradition of recording the details on bahi paper started with the invention of paper.

Over the centuries these registers became an important genealogical source for several families, especially after the Partition of India in 1947, and later amongst the Indian diaspora.The Greatest Mela on Earth, the Kumbh at Haridwar Rediff.com, "Tiny temples, hardly larger than phone booths, dot every 100 metres of the ghats. As do the umbrella-shaded stalls, standing on stilts, of the pandas, who apart from conducting religious ceremonies can track down the genealogy of Hindu families from their centuries-old, long, yellowing registers. Little ceremonies -- blessing of coconuts, offering of flowers, money and sweets, lighting of the oil lamps -- take place along every inch of the ghats and probably have for aeons. Pandas, alms seekers, pandits and hawkers are posted every few yards ready to shake out a few coins or notes from every newcomer they spot. Can I trace your family tree or offer you advice?"Who Do You Think You Are? BBC, "Meera's parents both originate from the farmlands of the Punjab, in north-west India. Her father, Surendra Syal, hails from a small village called Lasara. In India, it is difficult to trace your ancestry through documents like birth certificates, in the way that you can in the United Kingdom, but instead Indian family records are kept at shrines in the country's many holy cities. It is in the ancient city of Haridwar, on the riverbanks of the Ganges, that a Hindu priest is responsible for preserving the genealogy of the Syals, in a book called a Bah. It was in this book that Meera found that the Syals have been living in Lasara for the past 250 years." In the 1960s, Indian art historian B. N. Goswamy was able to connect the signatures of artists on 18th century paintings to the names recorded in the Haridwar records to uncover the history of the Seu-Nainsukh-Manaku familial atelier. Since the 1990s, the documents have been allowed to be used in Indian court cases to solve property-disputes.

The family information of famous personalities, such as Shivaji, Maharana Pratap of Mewar, Raja Man Singh of Amber, Guru Har Rai, Hari Singh Nalwa of the Sikh Empire, Motilal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Indira Gandhi, are preserved in the Haridwar records.

Dating the records The records may stretch back 15–20 generations into the past, being maintained by generations of pandas since then. As per the Genealogical Society of Utah, the earliest genealogical records of Haridwar date to 1194. A record from the year 1264 was uncovered at Aniruddha in Jawalapur, around 8 km from Haridwar. However, according to Irfan Habib, the records only stretch back four centuries. Prakash Mishra (president of the Akhil Bhartiya Tirth Purohit Mahasabha) claims the oldest bahi collection is 700-years-old.

James Lochtefeld examined the microfilmed records of the Haridwar bahi registers held by the Genealogical Society of Utah and could not find a record dated older than the 1770s, which is in contrast to the popular narrative, that the pandas have been serving clientele at Haridwar and recording their genealogies for thousands of years. As per Lochtefeld, records dating earlier than 1800 were extremely rare, with the records becoming more consistent from 1800 onwards, which he attributes to the British control of upper India bringing regional stability. Lochtefeld discovered that the oldest records for pilgrims from particular regions of India at Haridwar were for pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan, as the inhabitants of those areas have had a longer and stronger connection to Haridwar, due to the northwest trade route, and inhabitants of Punjab and Rajasthan have been going to Haridwar for funeral rites for a long time. Records for pilgrims from Eastern India to Haridwar (such as Bihar and Bengal) only begin appearing in the 1840s. Lochtefeld attributes this to the fact that Gaya instead had long been a place of funerary pilgrimage for people of these regions and Haridwar was difficult to travel to for them, especially prior to the railways. Pilgrimage was originally confined to elite social groups, thus the earliest records at Haridwar cover pilgrims who were Brahmins and land-owners (zamindars). Brahmins were motivated by religious-concerns, such as having their rituals attested whilst the visits by land-owners and royalty were recorded by pandas to enforce future patronage, which was a strong motivating factor on behalf of the pandas to record the details. Other castes and classes later began going on religious pilgrimages, such as to Haridwar, in order to emulate the upper castes and classes in their aspirations for upward social mobility. Thus, Lochtefeld claims the panda-jajman dynamic in Haridwar only began in the late 18th century.

Further evidence cited by Lochtefeld is that the sanyasis were the original inhabitants of Haridwar, rather than the pandas. The lineages of the pandas of Haridwar mostly trace to nearby villages, but some are quite distant, which means the pandas were likely motivated to settle in Haridwar and leave their original places of habitation. Lochtefeld claims that the motivation for this was the development of a bustling north-west India trade in the late 1700s that motivated Brahmins in the general region to migrate and settle in Haridwar to take advantage of it, becoming the pandas of Haridwar. However, Lochtefeld only examined the microfilmed records of Haridwar, held by the Genealogical Society of Utah, which comprises around only 10% of the total records of the site. Yet, Christopher A. Bayly found that the earliest, extant pilgrim record from the Varanasi pilgrimage trade was a copper-plate inscription from 1658 and the earliest extant bahi ledger book was from 1665. It would be unlikely that Haridwar's pilgrimage trade would date earlier than Varanasi's, thus agreeing with Lochtefeld's assertion that the beginning of the genealogical record tradition of Haridwar dates to the late-18th century.

Description

In Hinduism, it is believed that family is eternal and comprehensive and that humans must seek out their ancestors and perform annual ceremonies for their journey to moksha. There are notable places where Shraadhs are performed for the Pitrs. At these sites, it became customary for the family pandits (priests) to record each visit of the family, along with their gotra, family-tree, marriages, and members present, grouped according to family and hometown. Over the centuries, these registers became an important genealogical source for many families; important for splintered families when tracing their family tree and family history. Haridwar is not the only place of pilgrimage in the Indian subcontinent which maintains genealogical registers in this manner, there are also other places, such as Varanasi, Ujjain, Nasik, Gaya, Gangotri, Rameshwaram, Pehowa, Trimbakeshwar, Chintpurni, Kurukshetra, Jawalapur, and Jawalamukhi. South Indian families mostly visited Rameshwaram and Varanasi to record their family details. However, Haridwar remains the most comprehensive and well-preserved repository of Hindu genealogical records. The sacred sites of India, where pandas record genealogical information, are mostly concentrated in the greater Gangetic plain.