With the chest-girth of the Kādirs, as well as their general muscular development, I was very much impressed. Their hardiness, Mr. Conner writes,[14] has given rise to the observation among their neighbours that the Kādir and Kād Ānai (wild elephant) are much the same sort of animal.
Perhaps the most interesting custom of the Kādirs is that of chipping all or some of the incisor teeth, both upper and lower, into the form of a sharp-pointed, but not serrated cone. The operation, which is performed with a chisel or bill-hook and file by members of the tribe skilled therein, on boys and girls, has been thus described. The girl to be operated on lies down, and places her head against a female friend, who holds her head firmly. A woman takes a sharpened bill-hook, and chips away the teeth till they are shaded to a point, the girl operated on writhing and groaning with the pain. After the operation she appears dazed, and in a very few hours the face begins to swell. Swelling and pain last for a day or two, accompanied by severe headache. The Kādirs say that chipped teeth make an ugly man or woman handsome, and that a person, whose teeth have not been thus operated on, has teeth and eats like a cow. Whether this practice is one which the Kādir, and Mala Vēdar of Travancore, have hit on spontaneously in comparatively recent times, or whether it is a relic of a custom resorted to by their ancestors of long ago, which remains as a stray survival of a custom once more widely practiced by the remote inhabitants of Southern India, cannot be definitely asserted, but I incline to the latter view.
A friendly old woman, with huge discs in the widely dilated lobes of the ears, and a bamboo five-pronged comb in her back-hair, who acted as spokesman on the occasion of a visit to a charmingly situated settlement in a jungle of magnificent bamboos by the side of a mountain stream, pointed out to me, with conscious pride, that the huts were largely constructed by the females, while the men worked for the sircar (Government). The females also carry water from the streams, collect firewood, dig up edible roots, and carry out the sundry household duties of a housewife. Both men and women are clever at plaiting bamboo baskets, necklets, etc. I was told one morning by a Kādir man, whom I met on the road, as an important item of news, that the women in his settlement were very busy dressing to come and see me—an event as important to them as the dressing of a débutante for presentation at the Court of St. James’. They eventually turned up without their husbands, and evidently regarded my methods as a huge joke organised for the amusement of themselves and their children. The hair was neatly parted, anointed with a liberal application of cocoanut oil, and decked with wild flowers. Beauty spots and lines had been painted with coal-tar dyes on the forehead, and turmeric powder freely sprinkled over the top of the heads of the married women. Some had even discarded the ragged and dirty cotton cloth of every-day life in favour of a colour-printed imported sāri. One bright, good-looking young woman, who had already been through the measuring ordeal, acted as an efficient lady-help in coaching the novices in the assumption of the correct positions. She very readily grasped the situation, and was manifestly proud of her temporary elevation to the rank of standard-bearer to Government.
Kādir Boy with Chipped Teeth.
Dr. K. T. Preuss has drawn my attention to an article in Globus, 1899, entitled ‘Die Zauberbilder Schriften der Negrito in Malaka,’ wherein he describes in detail the designs on the bamboo combs worn by the Negritos of Malacca, and compares them with the strikingly similar design on the combs worn by the Kādir women. Dr. Preuss works out in detail the theory that the design is not, as I have elsewhere called it, a geometrical pattern, but consists of a series of hieroglyphics. The collection of Kādir combs in the Madras Museum shows very clearly that the patterns thereon are conventional designs. The bamboo combs worn by the Semang women are stated[15] to serve as talismans, to protect them against diseases which are prevalent, or most dreaded by them. Mr. Vincent informs me that, so far as he knows, the Kādir combs are not looked on as charms, and the markings thereon have no mystic significance. A Kādir man should always make a comb, and present it to his intended wife just before marriage, or at the conclusion of the marriage ceremony, and the young men vie with each other as to who can make the nicest comb. Sometimes they represent strange articles on the combs. Mr. Vincent has, for example, seen a comb with a very good imitation of the face of a clock scratched on it.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish adolescent Kādir youths with curly fringe, chests covered by a cotton cloth, and wearing necklets made of plaited grass or glass and brass beads, from girls. And I was myself several times caught in an erroneous diagnosis of sex. Many of the infants have a charm tied round the neck, which takes the form of a dried tortoise foot; the tooth of a crocodile mimicking a phallus, and supposed to ward off attacks from a mythical water elephant which lives in the mountain streams; or wooden imitations of tiger’s claws. One baby wore a necklet made of the seeds of Coix Lachryma-Jobi (Job’s tears). Males have the lobes of the ears adorned with brass ornaments, and the nostril pierced, and plugged with wood. The ear-lobes of the females are widely dilated with palm-leaf rolls or huge wooden discs, and they wear ear-rings, brass or steel bangles and finger-rings, and bead necklets.
Kādir Girl Wearing Comb.
It is recorded by Mr. Anantha Krishna Iyer that the Kādirs are attached to the Rāja of Cochin “by the strongest ties of personal affection and regard. Whenever His Highness tours in the forests, they follow him, carry him from place to place in manjals or palanquins, carry sāman (luggage), and in fact do everything for him. His Highness in return is much attached to them, feeds them, gives them cloths, ornaments, combs, and looking-glasses.”