The chief minister's call was not well received by members of other castes, local observers said.
Such ceremonies are still performed by upper castes to eradicate "pollution" left by lower-caste visitors.
Marriages between castes are increasingly common but remain rare.
Last October a roadside bomb killed Sunil Pandey, a landowner who was alleged to be a senior figure in a militia formed in 1994 to enforce the interests of higher castes in the state, but which has been largely dormant recently.
In India, where caste and ethnic conflict are pushing tokenism to extremes, a fifth of the seats in parliament are reserved for low castes and a third may soon be assigned to women.India, you may say, is special.
Attempts to extend this to cover the further 25% or so of the population deemed "other backward castes" ran into furious opposition in the early 1990s.
The government of Maharashtra, India's richest state, has already drafted legislation that would "reserve" more than half the jobs in some companies for tribes, dalits and "other backward castes".
This makes them merely one subculture in a country of 100-odd castes and clans, some of whom are at each others' throats, where the government is unstable.
A later source of anxiety was India's affirmative action (or "reservation") policies, which set aside university slots and civil-service jobs for people from recognised historically stigmatised groups, known as "scheduled castes and tribes".
These castes have controlled the country since it was unified in the 18th century.
Ant colonies are founded on two main "castes" of ant: queens, whose sole function is reproduction, and their industrious, sterile, worker daughters.
