In Haridwar, around 2,000 pandas, priests of the holy city, “preserve the lineages of their clients in the ‘Bahi khatas’,” the registers they keep. “The clientele of a particular panda is decided on the basis of the village, district and the state they come from,” DT Next reported in 2021.
Before written records, the pandas “used to memorise the names, clans and places of origin, and pass down the information orally to their next generations.”