pagris

Noun

pagri (plural pagris)

1. (India) A headdress worn by men in India, comprising a several-metre-long band of fabric wound around the head.
   • The poor labourer was at first somewhat astonished, and frightened by this sudden metamorphosis, but soon overcoming the new feeling, he carefully tied the ruby in his pagri or turban, and returned home […]1913, Shaikh Chilli, "The Story of Hira and Lal" in Folk-tales of Hindustan, Bahadurganj, Calcutta: Abinash Chandra Sarkar, p. 98, https://archive.org/details/cu31924023979721
2. (India) A puggry.
   • I recognized the eldest Miss Copleigh, because she had a pagri round her helmet, and the younger had not.1888, Rudyard Kipling, “False Dawn”, in Plain Tales from the Hills
3. (India, Pakistan) A payment made to secure the long-term rental of a property.
   • A pagri was a form of "illegal payment" that had developed to circumvent colonial rent restrictions. Landlords demanded a large lump-sum payment in lieu of the low monthly rent, and this also made it very difficult for refugees without means to rent houses in the city.2010, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, chapter 2, in The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, page 64