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168
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(JUNE, 1898.
NOTES AND QUERIES. BURNING IN EFFIGY.
India. The measurements are probably reserved LATELY three convicts in Port Blair from for an anthropological journal, but he gives Northern India had a dispute with a fourth, and good many interesting facts about the uncivilised were caught trying to wreak vengeance ou him as bill peoples. follows:
In some instances he could note a gradual ameThey made a figure of straw, to which they lioration of condition and a slight rise in the scale gave his name, and abused and beat it with of civilisation compared with a century or so ago. shoes. Finally, they took it to a latrine where For instance, the Kamkars of the Tinnovolly they made water on it, and were about to burn it, District no longer abandon a whole village when when the authorities came upon the scene and a death takes place and form a new settlement at necessarily interfered.
a distance from the old one; nor do they build R. C. TEMPLE. their straw hnts in trees to be out of the reach of
tigers and wild elephants, as they did at a very A NOTION AS TO THE PLAGUE IN BOMBAY.
recent date. Like many other degraded races, This is what I recently heard from the mouth
their muscular system is weak, and, curiously of an old woman from Bandra, a village some ten enough, for a jungle people, they seem to be very miles from Bombay.
poor shots with a bow and arrow. Almost their " It is believed that disease says it will go in only industry is basket-making, at which they advancu, but so also say the wind and the rain. are proficient. Other necessaries, such as knives, And thus a constant struggle between the three arrow-heads, pottery, and woven stuffs are obtainhas always gone on. At length it bappened that ed from Muhammadan pedlars. disease got the better of the other two, and it At Cochin on the west coast, the Black Jews (to wit: the plague) came in advance, and played are so despised by their white co-religionists that sad havoc throughout the Bombay Presidency.
regular marriages never take place between them. This dire disengo had been hardly got rid of, when Yet concubinage between white males and black another followed, namely, cholera, which also Jewesses is far from uncommon, with the result carried away people by handreds. The conflict that every gradation of colour from lightest to now only remained between the wind and the the darkest is to b
the darkent is to be found among the Hebrew rain, both of which wanted to be in advance of
population. the other. The monsoons began early, but as
The Maleers of the Anamala Hills - a short, quickly as cloude gathered and it was about to rain,
slight-built, brown, forest people the wind came howling and pressed the clouds
are not, as we
might imagine, hunters, but live on roots, chance onwards, 80 that the falling of the rain was
Carcases, and fish, which they catch in their checked: at least it did not fall in ench quanti. ties as it otherwise would have fallen. At times
hands, as they have no nets. They always the rain prevailed over the wind, in which case
marry within the village. About a hundred years there was a good downpour, with good results to
ago they used to burn their dead, but now this is
only done with old people, and the young are raan and beaat."
Gro. F. D'PENBA.
buried with the head to the south.
When a Badaga of the Eastern Nilgiri Hills CORRUPTION OF CHRISTIAN NAMES. is on the point of death, a small piece of money THERE is a Christian prisoner at Port Blair is placed in the dying man's mouth. He ought returned as “Venkatasawmy alias Chowtean, son to swallow it if possible; but if too weak to do so, of Samuel." Chowtean stands for Béwatian = it is wrapped up in a piece of cloth and tied to Sebastian. The ch in Chowtonn arises from the his arm. When dead his body is laid on a pile of well known difficulty that Dravidians have in wood with his ornaments and implements. Next distinguishing between ch and s.
morning a dance, lasting till midday, is perform
R. C. TEMPLE. ed by men in front of the pile; the sins of the NOTES ON SOUTHERN INDIA.
deceased are then transferred to a calf and the The purpose of Herr Schmidt's visit to the
pyre is ignited. On the following day the ashes Madras Presidency seems to have been to obtain
are thrown into a stream, and the larger bones anthropological measurements of the wilder hill
are covered with large stones. tribes still found there, and, generally speaking,
Geo. F. D'PENHA. to study the characteristics of the different races
[This is a characteristic also of all the Andamanete and classes of people that inhabit the South of Tribes. -ED.)
