Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 7 of 7Thurston, Edgar
General
Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 7 of 7
Thurston, Edgar
Caste -- India, South; Ethnology -- India, South; India, South -- Social life and customs; Tribes -- India, South
four was quickly caught by the horns, and, with arms interlocked,
the men brought it down on its knees, amid a general scuffle. In
spite of marked objection and strenuous resistance on the part of
the animal--a barren cow--it was, by means of sticks freely applied,
slowly dragged up the hill, preceded by the Kota band, and with a
Toda youth pulling at its tail. Arrived at the open space between
the kraals, the buffalo, by this time thoroughly exasperated, and
with blood pouring from its nostrils, had a cloth put on its back,
and was despatched by a blow on the poll with an axe deftly wielded
by a young and muscular man. On this occasion no one was badly hurt
by the sacrificial cow, though one man was seen washing his legs in
the swamp after the preliminary struggle with the beast. But Colonel
Ross-King narrates how he saw a man receive a dangerous wound in the
neck from a thrust of the horn, which ripped open a wide gash from
the collar-bone to the ear. With the death of the buffalo, the last
scene, which terminated the strange rites, commenced; men, women, and
children pressing forward and jostling one another in their eagerness
to salute the dead beast by placing their hands between its horns,
and weeping and mourning in pairs; the facial expression of grief
being mimicked when tears refused to flow spontaneously.
The ceremonial connected with the final burning of the relics and
burial of the ashes at the stone circle (azaram) are described in
detail by Dr. Rivers.
A few days after the ceremony just described, I was invited to be
present at the funeral of a young girl who had died of smallpox five
days previously. I proceeded accordingly to the scene of the recent
ceremony, and there, in company with a small gathering of Todas from
the neighbouring mands, awaited the arrival of the funeral cortége,
the approach of which was announced by the advancing strains of
Kota music. Slowly the procession came over the brow of the hill;
the corpse, covered by a cloth, on a rude ladder-like bier, borne
on the shoulders of four men, followed by two Kota musicians; the
mother carried hidden within a sack; relatives and men carrying bags
of rice and jaggery, and bundles of wood of the kiaz tree (Eugenia
Arnottiana) for the funeral pyre. Arrived opposite a small hut,
which had been specially built for the ceremonial, the corpse was
removed from the bier, laid on the ground, face upwards, outside
the hut, and saluted by men, women, and children, with the same
manifestations of grief as on the previous occasion. Soon the men
moved away to a short distance, and engaged in quiet conversation,
leaving the females to continue mourning round the corpse, interrupted
from time to time by the arrival of detachments from distant mands,
whose first duty was to salute the dead body. Meanwhile a near
female relative of the dead child was busily engaged inside the hut,
collecting together in a basket small measures of rice, jaggery, sago,
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