Pilinörtiti
In this ceremony a man gives a silver ring. The offering is differentiated from those already described in that it may be given to bring about the removal of misfortunes which are not due to any offence committed by the man. In some cases, however, the ceremony may be undertaken as an atonement for an offence. Kòdrner, my guide, had to give a ring to the dairy at Kiudr in the general distribution of penalties which followed my visit.
The custom of pilinörtiti is limited to certain villages or clans. According to some accounts it is only followed at the villages of Kiudr and Kanòdrs, noted for the special sanctity of their dairies. According to others the ceremony is performed by the Karsol at the dairy of Kuzhu, and at Nidrsi I was shown a small stone, almost completely buried in the ground, which was called the pilinörtkars, and this indicates that the ceremony was also at one time performed at this village. The ceremony is certainly of especial importance at Kiudr, and the following description is of the procedure at this place.
If a man has no children, or if he becomes ill, or if his buffaloes give no milk, he may make a vow to do pilinörtiti. If he is a member of the Kuudrol, the people of the kudr to which he does not belong go to the dairy. The offerer of the ring sleeps the night before in the dairy of his village and goes [[307]]in the morning with one companion to Kiudr, taking care that no one sees him by the way. Both must go without food.
On reaching Kiudr the two men go to the stream called Keikudr[12] which flows between the dairy and the dwelling-huts, and after washing hands and face in the stream they wait there. The people of the other kudr who are in the dairy light a lamp and place it between the two rooms, and then one goes to the door of the dairy and calls out three times “Pilinörtpol bon!” The men at the stream are not within sight, but they hear the summons and come to the front of the dairy. The men in the dairy lay the tuni of the dairyman at the threshold and the pilinörtpol places the ring on the cloth and bows down, touching the cloth with his forehead, and prays as follows:—
Tânenmâ, May it be well, târmâmâ; may it be well; atch little kar calf tâ give mâ, may, atch little mokh son tâ give mâ; may; kar calf kulâth, not refuse milk, kar calf kuleiti take milk tâ give mâ, may, kar calf nesâth, not kick away, neseiti stand tâ give mâ; may; opath once ûtm meal âthi it is punerd twelve kwar years arki vow madi; will; nû may there be ârk mâ; no disease; nudri may there be ârk mâ; no trouble; kazun may there be ârk mâ; no kazun; per may there be ârk mâ. no Tamil.
The free rendering of this prayer was said to be as follows:—
“May it be well; may my buffaloes have calves; may I have children; may my calves have milk, and may they not be kicked away by their mothers; as surely as I am shortly to take food, do I make my vow for ever and ever; may I and my buffaloes be free from disease; may no evil befall me; may there be no kazun (see p. [403]) to kill me; may no Tamil or other outsiders come to disturb me.”
The last clause was said by Samuel to be interpreted: [[308]]“Let me not get into trouble with the government,” but it is probably much older than this interpretation would indicate, and refers to the former dislike of the Todas to any intercourse with people other than the Badagas and Kotas. “Twelve years” is a common expression for an indefinitely long time, and may be translated “for ever.” The practice of combining positive and negative sentences as in this prayer is one which seems to be not uncommon in the Toda language. It will be noticed that several of the clauses are identical with those of the prayer ordinarily used in the dairy.
When the pilinörtpol has finished his prayer he rises, and the palikartmokh takes up the tuni and the ring and puts them in the dairy. Then the pilinörtpol and his companions go into the outer room of the dairy and take food prepared by the dairyman, after which they go to a wood near Kiudr and stay there till after nightfall, when they make their way home, taking care not to be seen by anyone.
If the ring is given by one of the Kuudrol it becomes the property of the men of the other kudr, but as its value is very small, only from four annas to two rupees, it is not divided, but is usually taken by the man of the kudr who takes the chief part in the ceremony.
The ceremony as described above resembles those of irnörtiti and tuninörtiti, in that the offering is given by a man of one division of the clan to the members of the other division.
Pilinörtiti may also be undertaken by a man as an atonement for wrong-doing, and in the only case of the kind of which I know, the wrong-doer, although he belonged to the Kars clan of the Tartharol, had to make the offering to Kiudr. In this case there was no question of the ring passing from one kudr to another, and it probably became the property of the man connected with Kiudr who took the chief part in conducting the ceremony.
Various unfortunate events which occurred during my visit to the Todas illustrate very well the working of the regulations which have been described in this chapter. One of these misfortunes befell Kutadri, who went with me to visit the Kundahs, the headquarters of the Pan clan. Mr. [[309]]Mackenzie, with whom I was staying, had shot a sambhar, and Kutadri joined others in making a hearty meal on the flesh of the animal. The next day he felt far from well, and searching in his mind for the cause of his sufferings, his suspicions did not fall on the sambhar, but wavered between sorcery of the Kurumbas and the anger of the gods of the locality, because he had shown me certain sacred features of the land. He was unable to continue to act as my guide, rendering my visit to the Kundahs largely fruitless, and on his return home he frightened himself into serious illness.
Teitnir, who had told me many things, but, above all, had dared to show me the erkumptthpimi sacrifice, lost his wife a few days after this ceremony. She had given birth to a dead child, and in spite of obviously serious fever, she had gone through a trying ceremony connected with removal to the seclusion-hut, and had walked a long way to this hut. Two days later she died.
Kaners, who had been my chief informant on the procedure of the ti dairy, awoke one morning to find the dairy of his village burnt. No human agency seemed possible, and no doubt was entertained that it was another manifestation of the displeasure of the gods.
Numerous councils were held, and the diviners were consulted, on this occasion Midjkudr and Tadrners. They found that Kutadri’s misfortunes were due to his having revealed to me secrets about Pan, although, as a matter of fact, his illness had prevented his telling me anything of importance. It was decided that he was to give a buffalo to the Pan ti.
The death of Teitnir’s wife was found to have two causes.[13] The first was that Teitnir had shown me the erkumptthpimi ceremony; the second was that he had gone with his wife to Lake View, the house of the Zenana mission, and had stayed there for several months, Teitnir having done this in order to avoid losing his wife according to the terersthi custom (see [Chap. XXII]). For the first offence Teitnir was to do irnörtiti to his clan, the Kuudrol, and for the second offence he was to give a buffalo to the Amatol, [[310]]his pia, or grandfather, being especially singled out among them. The latter penalty was paid before I left the hills. Teitnir devoted a sacred buffalo (pasthir) to his grandfather, and as a sign that he had done so, he did kalmelpudithti to Ivievan (52), one of the chief men of his family. The giving of the buffalo was followed by a feast.
The teuol were also consulted on account of the burning of the dairy belonging to the village of Kaners. They decided that the loss of the dairy was due to spontaneous combustion, “had burnt of itself,” because Kaners had revealed to me the secrets of the ti, and, as he had told me chiefly the procedure of the Nòdrs ti, he was sentenced to do irnörtiti to this institution.
Kòdrner, who had been my general assistant, was directed to perform pilinörtiti to Kiudr, and the teuol also said that all the Todas were to do irnörtiti to the ti dairies because the elders had not intervened and put an end to the revelations which the people had been making to me.
Unfortunately these decisions of the teuol were only given out very shortly before I left the hills. Indeed, the divination appeared to be still going on when I left, probably in order to obtain further light on the troubles. I had therefore no opportunity of witnessing the various ceremonies which were to result from my visit. I hoped that Samuel might have been able to see some of them, but the only proceedings of which he was able to give me any account took place on January 5th, nearly a month after my departure, when all the Todas assembled at the ti mad of Mòdr, where the buffaloes of the Nòdrs ti were standing, and prayed to the ti to pardon them for the sins they had committed in revealing its secrets. After praying, they took food in the pül of the dairy, and did not return home till the evening. I was not told of the existence of any such ceremony of atonement by prayer only, and I strongly suspect it was an innovation adopted in order to avoid the expense of the general irnörtiti to the ti which the diviners had prescribed.
Several of the offerings which were thus ordered by the teuol seem clearly to have been of the nature of punishment. Kòdrner was to do pilinörtiti because he had helped me, and [[311]]the Todas in general were to give buffaloes to the ti dairies. When I was first told about these offerings, I was inclined to regard them in general as punishments and to treat them as if they were social regulations. With further knowledge it seemed clear that they were distinctly of a religious nature, and were really sin offerings designed to propitiate the gods and bring about the removal of misfortunes which had come upon the offenders. I have therefore described these offerings in the same chapter as the ceremony which is clearly a sacrifice.
The variety of the irnörtiti ceremony in which a buffalo is given to the ti dairy is that which approaches most nearly to a sacrifice; the offered animal is not killed, but in going to the sacred herd of the ti, it may clearly be regarded as devoted to the service of the gods. The ceremony of pilinörtiti to the sacred dairy of Kiudr is again an example of an offering to a higher power in those cases in which the ring is given by a man of another clan so that the mechanism of the kudr does not come into play.
These clear examples of offerings to gods or sacred places are, however, very closely related to the other cases in which offerings simply pass from one division of the clan to another. It seems that we have in these offerings a good example of something which is midway between a social regulation of the nature of punishment and a definitely religious rite of propitiation of higher powers.
There are two chief possibilities. The idea of offering to a higher power may be primary, and the ceremonies of irnörtiti, &c., in which the property merely passes from one division of the clan to the other may be secondary modifications to keep property within the clan. On the other hand, the mechanism of the kudr may be primary, and irnörtiti to the ti dairy and pilinörtiti to Kiudr may be religious developments of what was originally a social regulation.
I have no information which enables me to say that one of the two possibilities is more probable than the other. The solution probably depends on the much larger question, whether the Todas are people whose religious system has developed out of the state of many primitive people where [[312]]social regulations exist without anything which can clearly be called a religious sanction, or whether they are a people whose religious system has degenerated from one higher than that they now possess.
If the former supposition is correct, it is probable that the religious sanction has been added to the system of social punishment, which seems to be all which clearly exists in the offerings when these are kept within the clan. If the latter supposition is correct, it seems more likely that the whole mechanism of the kudris a device by which offerings which should be made to a higher power may remain the property of the clan.
The fact that the giving of the buffalo or other offering is accompanied by prayer and the various restrictions of a more or less religious nature which accompany the ceremonial show that at the present time the ceremony has in all cases a very definitely religious character, but it is quite possible to regard these features in two ways, either as accretions to a system of social punishment or as vestiges of what was once a purely religious sacrifice in which the offerings were given to the gods. [[313]]
[1] Our final difficulty, the laughter over which seemed to overcome Teitnir’s scruples, was in the identification of the spleen, which was described as “a little tongue.” [↑]
[2] This and the succeeding photographs were taken in a badly lighted wood, and represent the actual ceremony. [↑]
[3] The importance of the omentum in Indian animal sacrifices suggests that the tütmîis might have been the omentum, or have included part of the omentum. At this stage of the proceedings, so many operations were going on simultaneously that exact observation became very difficult. [↑]
[4] Andropogon Schœnanthus, a strongly-scented grass. [↑]
[6] This estimate included the value of the calf four years hence! [↑]
[7] Haug’s Aitareya Brahmanam, Bombay, 1863, vol. ii., p. 85, note II. [↑]
[8] I have some reason to think, however, that er may be used as a term for ‘buffalo’ in general, whether male or female. [↑]
[9] From the nature of this formula it might be expected that the ceremony would only be performed if the man’s wishes are fulfilled, but, in practice, I think it is clear that the performance is not conditional on the recovery of himself or his buffaloes. [↑]
[10] The special mention of uncut ears and tail in this and the erkumptthpimi ceremony suggests that the widely spread practice of cutting the ears of animals may occur among the Todas, but I have no other notes on the subject. [↑]
[11] Or irnörtpuspimi, “buffalo giving have we come.” The whole formula runs, “Swami, Teikirzi, the kudrpali, the wursuli, the buffalo pen, may it be well; may it be well with the buffaloes and calves; buffalo giving have we come, may it be well.” [↑]
[12] This is mentioned in the prayer of the Kiudr dairy (see p. [220]). [↑]
[13] According to a later finding of the teuol, the death of Tersveli was due to sorcery (see p. [261]). [↑]
CHAPTER XIV
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD CEREMONIES
The ceremonies connected with childbirth begin before the birth of the child. These ceremonies are only performed for the first child or when the woman obtains a new husband, so that they may, from one point of view, be regarded as marriage ceremonies. Nevertheless, I prefer to consider them here, and to leave the ceremonies more strictly connected with marriage till a later chapter. These latter ceremonies are far less elaborate than those to be described in this chapter, and may be more fitly considered in connexion with the social regulation of marriage.
At or about the fifth month of pregnancy, a ceremony is performed which is called ûr patitth kaitütitthpimi, “village left, hand we burnt,” or more shortly, ürvatpimi, “village we leave,” or kaitütitthpimi. The ceremony is named from its two essential features; the woman leaves the village and lives secluded in a hut and her wrists are burnt.
When it is known that the ceremony is to take place, a special hut, called puzhars ([Fig. 45]), is built in a prescribed place at some little distance from the village, or if this building already exists, it is put into good order. The word puzhars means “mud-house” or “earth-house,” which would seem to point to a time when a temporary hut of mud was used, but at the present time it is built of wood, though it is of much simpler and rougher construction than the ordinary house.
The distance of the puzhars from the huts in which the people live depends on the degree of sacredness of the village. According to Breeks, the distance is greatest in those villages [[314]]which have a dairy of the conical kind, but it seems that there is no real difference between these villages and any other etudmad. In some cases when the dairy has a high degree of sanctity, the puzhars may be at an adjacent village; thus, a pregnant woman of Kiudr goes into seclusion at Molkush, about a quarter of a mile away, and at this village the seclusion-hut ([Fig. 45]) is about a hundred yards from the house in which the people live.
FIG. 45.—THE ‘PUZHARS’ AT MOLKUSH.
I may mention here that the objection to the presence of a pregnant woman in one of the more sacred villages may extend to a time when she is not in the seclusion-hut. When I [[315]]visited Kiudr for the purpose of testing the people of the village for colour-blindness, Sintagars, who was pregnant and was living at Molkush, was not allowed to come to the hut to be tested like the rest, but sat on the mound shown in the foreground of [Fig. 7], about thirty yards away.
The features of the hand-burning ceremony as performed by the Tartharol differ considerably from those for a Teivali woman, and I will begin with a description of the former.
On the day of the new moon, the woman goes to the puzhars. The husband (or in his absence his brother or other near male relative) cuts six sticks of the kind called kwadrikurs and sets them up so as to represent a dairy with two rooms, which is called pülpali. He then cuts four bamboo-reeds called wadr, about eighteen inches long, which represent dairy vessels; two of them are called patatpun, and the other two ertatpun. He fills these with water taken neither from the pali nipa nor from the ars nipa, for if he touched the water of either of the streams, they would be defiled and their water could not be used. He therefore fetches the water from a stream at some distance from the village.
The husband brings the reeds half filled with water and places those called patatpun in the inner room of the pülpali. He takes the other two—the ertatpun—to a two-year-old female calf (pòl), and pours out the water from one reed on the left side of the middle of the back (ûv) of the calf, and catches the water in the other. He then gives two leaves (kakuders) to the woman, who makes a leaf vessel, into which he pours three times from the ertatpun the water which has flowed from the back of the calf. The woman raises the leaf vessel to her forehead and then drinks, and the man puts the two ertatpun into the outer room of the pülpali.[1] The woman then bows down with her forehead to the threshold of the pülpali, and the man takes up the sticks forming the imitation dairy and the four reeds and throws all away. [[316]]
The woman has brought with her a new earthenware pot called mâtkûdrik, into which she puts food (rice or grain) and water, and places it on a small oven made on the spot with stones. When the food is cooked, the woman takes two leaves called pelkkodsthmuliers, i.e., leaves used in the ordination of the palikartmokh, and portions out the food on the leaves. She then brings two pieces of wood called parskuti (Eleagnus latifolia), puts them in the ground and covers them with a blanket. The two leaf-plates with the food are now placed on the two pieces of wood, one on each, and the woman asks Pîrn podia, Piri podia? (podia = have you come?) My informants could tell me nothing about Pirn or Piri, except that the former was supposed to be male and the latter female.
The woman throws the parskuti into the bushes, this procedure being called tapi kûrs vutpimi, “bushes stick throw we,” and then makes a little roll of threads which is called pashti, puts it in the fire and burns herself with the roll in four places, two on each hand, once on the prominence formed by the carpo-metacarpal joint of the thumb, and once on the prominence formed by the styloid process of the radius. The burning is sometimes done for her by the woman who is to stay in the puzhars with her[2] during her period of seclusion. When the ceremony is over, the woman goes into the hut with her companion and stays there for nearly a month, till three or four days before the next new moon. While in the seclusion-hut, the woman is visited by relatives and friends, who do not, however, come near the hut, but stand some way off and say kaitütudpatia? (“Have you had hand-burning?”) They leave a present of rice for the woman and go to the people of the village, by whom they are entertained.
When the woman comes out of the puzhars at the end of the month, there is a ceremony called marthk maj atpimi, “To the village buttermilk we pour.” Early in the morning of the appointed day a man of the Melgars clan comes to the village and milks one of the ordinary buffaloes (putiir) into the vessel called kabanachok. The buffalo must not have [[317]]been milked by any one else since the time it last calved. The Melgars man places the milk in front of the hut where the woman usually lives, and then goes away, and the milk is taken by the people of the village. In the evening, after the day’s work is over and the buffaloes are shut up for the night, a woman is chosen who has had no contact with the secluded woman, and she takes the milk drawn by the Melgars man to the puzhars, together with the leaves of the kind called parsers. She pours out the milk three times into these leaves and gives to the pregnant woman to drink. The latter has previously bathed and put on a new mantle, and after drinking she returns to the ordinary hut and may resume her household work.
The milking is done by a Melgars man for all the Tarthar clans except that of Kwòdrdoni, where the buffalo is milked by a man of that clan. I do not know why this clan forms an exception to the general rule, but Kwòdrdoni is one of the most remote Toda villages, and it is possible[3] that the difficulty of getting a Melgars man to come to them has led the people to do this part of the ceremony themselves.
For fifteen days after leaving the seclusion-hut, the woman must drink buttermilk procured from a Melgars dairy, and must take food called peritòr,[4] viz., grain or rice which has been cooked in Melgars buttermilk. At the end of the fifteen days she gives up taking the peritòr, but continues to drink Melgars buttermilk for another fifteen days.
For a woman of the Teivaliol, the ceremony of urvatpimi is much more simple. No pülpali is made, and the husband fetches two pieces of reed only, which are called ertatpun. They are half filled with water, which is poured from one over the back of a calf into the other as in the Tarthar ceremony, and the woman drinks in the same way, but this is immediately followed by the hand-burning, and the rite with the two sticks and the invocation of Pirn and Piri is entirely omitted. [[318]]
The Teivali ceremony on coming out of the puzhars takes place in the early morning. A man (not the husband) fetches water from the ars nipa in a brass vessel called achok. He takes the vessel to a pregnant buffalo and tries to milk the buffalo over the vessel of water. Although no milk comes, the attempt is supposed to convert the water in the vessel into milk. The woman then leaves the seclusion-hut and is given two leaves (parsers), of which she makes a leaf cup, and the man pours the water which is supposed to be milk into the cup three times, and the woman drinks each time after raising the cup to her forehead. The woman and her companion then go to another special hut, called aliars, and stay there for a week, or if there is in the village a house of the kind called merkalars (see p. [29]), the woman may go to the hinder part of this house instead of to the aliars, but in this case all the household things have to be removed from the merkalars.
At the end of the week in the aliars or merkalars, there follows the ceremony called marthk maj atpimi. Early in the morning the palikartmokh brings penmaj (i.e., butter and buttermilk) in an earthenware pot and two firebrands (tütkuli) to the front of the hut, puts the brands on the ground, lays the pot on them for a time, and then puts the pot on the raised platform in front of the hut. He then goes away, and a woman brings a brass vessel (terg) and transfers the butter and buttermilk to the terg, and gives it to the woman, who drinks and goes to the ordinary hut.
While the woman is in the aliars or merkalars, she is not confined to the dwelling as when in the puzhars, but may go about. She must not, however, do any household work, nor go to any other village, nor to the ordinary huts of her own village. If in the hinder part of the merkalars, she must not go to the fore part of the house.
Thus the ritual of the Tartharol differs greatly from that of the Teivaliol in these ceremonies. The rite of making an artificial dairy is entirely omitted by the Teivaliol, and, as we shall see later, it is also omitted in a similar ceremony performed after childbirth, though the pieces of reed used to pour water over the calf are named after dairy vessels in both cases. I could obtain no explanation of the difference of [[319]]procedure, nor of the omission of the invocation of Pirn and Piri by the Teivali division. It is possible that this latter ceremony has been borrowed, but if so, there is no obvious reason why it should have been borrowed by one division, and not by the other.
In the ceremonies accompanying the return to ordinary life, it is perhaps natural that the Melgars man should only take part in the proceedings of his own division. The other chief difference in the procedure of the two divisions is that the return takes place in two stages among the Teivaliol, while the Tarthar woman goes directly from the puzhars to the ordinary hut. I was told that the difference was connected with the fact that the Tarthar women drank milk, whilst the Teivali women did not, but I could not discover why this should lead to a difference of procedure.