whatever, but not like women of high castes." "Shortly after 1858, pamphlets began to be written and published by people of the caste, setting out their claims to be Kshatriyas. In 1874 they endeavoured to establish a right to enter the great Minakshi temple at Madura, but failed, and they have since claimed to be allowed to wear the sacred thread, and to have palanquins at their weddings. They say they are descended from the Chera, Chola and Pandya kings; they have styled themselves Kshatriyas in legal papers; labelled their schools Kshatriya academy; got Brahmans of the less particular kind to do purohit's work for them; had poems composed on their kingly origin; gone through a sort of incomplete parody of the ceremony of investiture with the sacred thread; talked much but ignorantly of their gotras; and induced needy persons to sign documents agreeing to carry them in palanquins on festive occasions." [During my stay at Nazareth in Tinnevelly, for the purpose of taking measurements of the Shanans, I received a visit from some elders of the community from Kuttam, who arrived in palanquins, and bearing weapons of old device.] Their boldest stroke was to aver that the coins commonly known as Shanans' cash were struck by sovereign ancestors of the caste. The author of a pamphlet entitled 'Bishop Caldwell and the Tinnevelly Shanars' states that he had met with men of all castes who say that they have seen the true Shanar coin with their own eyes, and that a Eurasian gentleman from Bangalore testified to his having seen a true Shanar coin at Bangalore forty years ago. The coin referred to is the gold Venetian sequin, which is still found in considerable numbers in the south, and bears the names of the Doges (Paul Rainer, Aloy Mocen, Ludov Manin, etc.) and a cross, which the Natives mistake for a toddy palm. "If," Mr. Fawcett writes, [167] "one asks the ordinary Malayali (native of Malabar) what persons are represented on the sequin, one gets for answer that they are Rama and Sita: between them a cocoanut tree. Every Malayali knows what an Amâda is; it is a real or imitation Venetian sequin. I have never heard any explanation of the word Amâda in Malabar. The following comes from Tinnevelly. Amâda was the consort of Bhagavati, and he suddenly appeared one day before a Shanar, and demanded food. The Shanar said he was a poor man with nothing to offer but toddy, which he gave in a palmyra leaf. Amâda drank the toddy, and performing a mantram (consecrated formula) over the leaf, it turned into gold coins, which bore on one side the pictures of Amâda, the Shanar, and the tree, and these he gave to the Shanar as a reward for his willingness to assist him."