The Parwars abstain from eating any kind of flesh and from drinking liquor. They have a _panchayat_ and impose penalties for offences against caste rules like the Hindus. Among the offences are the killing of any living thing, unchastity or adultery, theft or other bad conduct, taking cooked food or water from a caste from which the Parwars do not take them, and violation of any rule of their religion. To get vermin in a wound, or to be beaten by a low-caste man or with a shoe, incidents which entail serious penalties among the Hindus, are not offences with the Parwars. When an offender is put out of caste the ordinary deprivation is that he is not allowed to enter a Jain temple, and in serious cases he may also not eat nor drink with the caste. The Parwars are generally engaged in the trade in grain, _ghi_, and other staples. Several of them are well-to-do and own villages.
_Bania, Srimali._--This subcaste takes its name from the town of Srimal, which is now Bhinmal in Marwar. They numbered 600 persons in the Central Provinces in 1911, most of whom belonged to the Hoshangabad District. More than two-thirds were Hindus and the remainder Jains. Colonel Tod writes of Bhinmal and an adjoining town, Sanchor: "These towns are on the high road to Cutch and Gujarat, which has given them from the most remote times a commercial celebrity. Bhinmal is said to contain about 1500 houses and Sanchor half that number. Very wealthy _mahajans_ or merchants used to reside here, but insecurity both within and without has much injured these cities." From Bhinmal the Srimalis appear to have gone to Gujarat, where they are found in considerable numbers. Their legend of origin is that the goddess Lakshmi created from a flower-garland 90,000 families to act as servants to the 90,000 Srimali Brahmans, and these were the ancestors of the Srimali Banias. [168] Both the Jain and Hindu sections of the Srimali Banias employ Srimali Brahmans as priests. Like other classes of Banias, the Srimali are divided into two sections, the Bisa and Dasa, or twenty and ten, of which the Bisa are considered to be of pure and the Dasa of somewhat mixed descent. In Gujarat they also have a third territorial group, known as Ladva, from Lad, the old name of Gujarat. All three subdivisions take food together but do not intermarry. [169] The two highest sections of the Oswal Banias are called Sri Srimal and Srimal, and it is possible that further investigation might show the Srimals and Oswals to have been originally of one stock.