Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 of 7Thurston, Edgar
History
Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 of 7
Thurston, Edgar
Caste -- India, South; Ethnology -- India, South; India, South -- Social life and customs; Tribes -- India, South
At about 8 P.M., the house
is set fire to, and burnt. Every house, in which there has been a death
within the last two years, is on this occasion burnt. After this,
the Kulba gives no more trouble, and does not come to reside in the
new hut that is built on the site of the burnt one. It never hurts
grown people, but may cause some infantile diseases, and is easily
driven away by a small sacrifice. In other parts of the Saora country,
the funeral rites and ceremonies are somewhat different to what they
are in Kolakotta. The burning of bodies, and burning of the fragments
of the bones, is the same everywhere in the Saora country. In one
village the Saoras said the bones were buried until another person
died, when the first man's bones were dug up and thrown away, and the
last person's bones put in their place. Perhaps they did not correctly
convey what they meant. I once saw a gaily ornamented hut, evidently
quite new, near a burning-place. Rude figures of birds and red rags
were tied to five bamboos, which were sticking up in the air about
8 feet above the hut, one at each corner, and one in the centre,
and the bamboos were split, and notched for ornament. The hut was
about 4 1/2 feet square, on a platform three feet high. There were
no walls, but only four pillars, one at each corner, and inside
a loft just as in a Saora's hut. A very communicative Saora said
he built the hut for his brother after he had performed the Limma,
and had buried the bones in the raised platform in the centre of the
hut. He readily went inside, and showed what he kept there for the
use of his dead brother's Kulba. On the loft were baskets of grain,
a bottle of oil for his body, a brush to sweep the hut; in fact
everything the Kulba wanted. Generally, where it is the custom to
have a hut for the Kulba, such hut is furnished with food, tobacco,
and liquor. The Kulba is still a Saora, though a spiritual one. In a
village two miles from that in which I saw the gaily ornamented hut,
no hut of any kind is built for the Kulba; the bones are merely covered
with grass. Weapons, ornaments, etc., are rarely burned with a body
outside the Kolakotta villages. In some places, perhaps one weapon,
or a few ornaments will be burned with it. In some places the Limma
and Guar feasts are combined, and in other places (and this is most
common) the Guar and Karja are combined, but there is no burning
of houses. In some places this is performed if crops are good. One
often sees, placed against the upright stones to the dead, pieces
of ploughs for male Kulbas, and baskets for sifting grain for female
Kulbas. I once came across some hundreds of Saoras performing the Guar
Karja. Dancing, with music, fantastically dressed, and brandishing
their weapons, they returned from putting up the stones to the village,
and proceeded to hack to pieces with their axes the buffaloes that
had been slaughtered--a disgusting sight. After dark, many of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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