Pālamala.—Pālama is recorded as a sub-division of the Kānikars of Travancore and Palamalathillom, said to denote the mountain with trees with milky juice, as an exogamous sept of the same tribe.
Pālāvili.—A gōtra of Gollas, who are not allowed to erect pālāvili, or small booths inside the house for the purpose of worship.
Pālayakkāran.—See Mutrācha.
Paligiri.—A sub-division of Mutrācha.
Palissa (shield) Kollan.—A class of Kollans in Malabar, who make leather shields. It is recorded, in the Gazetteer of Malabar, that, at the tāli-kettu ceremony, “the girl and manavālan (bridegroom) go to the tank on the last day of the ceremony. The girl, standing in the tank, ducks her whole body under water thrice. As she does so for the third time, a pāndibali or triangular platter made of cocoanut fronds and pieces of plantain stem and leaf plaited together and adorned with five lighted wicks, is thrown over her into the water, and cut in half as it floats by an enangan, who sings a song called Kālikkakam. Lastly, the girl chops in two a cocoanut placed on the bank. She aims two blows at it, and failure to sever it with a third is considered inauspicious. Among Palissa Kollans and some other castes, the lucky dip ceremony is performed on the last day (called nālām kalyānam or fourth marriage). An enangan, drawing out the packets at random, distributes them to the manavālan, the girl, and himself in turn. It is lucky for the manavālan to get the gold, and the girl the silver. A significant finish to the ceremony in the form of a symbolical divorce is not infrequent in South Malabar at all events. Thus, among the Palissa Kollans the manavālan takes a piece of thread from his mundu (cloth), and gives it, saying ‘Here is your sister’s acchāram’ to the girl’s brother, who breaks it in two and puffs it towards him. In other cases, the manavālan gives the girl a cloth on the first day, and cuts it in two, giving her one half on the last; or the manavālan and an enangan of the girl hold opposite ends of a cloth, which the manavālan cuts and tears in two, and then gives both pieces to the girl.”
Paliyans of Madura and Tinnevelly. In a note on the Malai (hill) Paliyans of the Madura district, the Rev. J. E. Tracy writes as follows. “I went to their village at the foot of the Periyar hills, and can testify to their being the most abject, hopeless, and unpromising specimens of humanity that I have ever seen. There were about forty of them in the little settlement, which was situated in a lovely spot. A stream of pure water was flowing within a few feet of their huts, and yet they were as foul and filthy in their personal appearance as if they were mere animals, and very unclean ones. Rich land that produced a luxuriant crop of rank reeds was all around them, and, with a little exertion on their part, might have been abundantly irrigated, and produced continuous crops of grain. Yet they lived entirely on nuts and roots, and various kinds of gum that they gathered in the forest on the slopes of the hills above their settlement. Only two of the community had ever been more than seven miles away from their village into the open country below them. Their huts were built entirely of grass, and consisted of only one room each, and that open at the ends. The chief man of the community was an old man with white hair. His distinctive privilege was that he was allowed to sleep between two fires at night, while no one else was allowed to have but one—a distinction that they were very complaisant about, perhaps because with the distinction was the accompanying obligation to see that the community’s fire never went out. As he was also the only man in the community who was allowed to have two wives, I inferred that he delegated to them the privilege of looking after the fires, while he did the sleeping, whereas, in other families, the man and wife had to take turn and turn about to see that the fire had not to be re-lighted in the morning. They were as ignorant as they were filthy. They had no place of worship, but seemed to agree that the demons of the forest around them were the only beings that they had to fear besides the Forest Department. They were barely clothed, their rags being held about them, in one or two cases, with girdles of twisted grass. They had much the same appearance that many a famine subject presented in the famine of 1877, but they seemed to have had no better times to look back upon, and hence took their condition as a matter of course. The forest had been their home from time immemorial. Yet the forest seemed to have taught them nothing more than it might have been supposed to have taught the prowling jackal or the laughing hyæna. There were no domesticated animals about their place: strange to say, not even a pariah dog. They appeared to have no idea of hunting, any more than they had of agriculture. And, as for any ideas of the beauty or solemnity of the place that they had selected as their village site, they were as innocent of such things as they were of the beauties of Robert Browning’s verse.”
In a note written in 1817, Mr. T. Turnbull states that the Madura Pulliers “are never seen unless when they come down to travellers to crave a piece of tobacco or a rag of cloth, for which they have a great predilection. The women are said to lay their infants on warm ashes after delivery, as a substitute for warm clothing and beds.”
The Palayans, or Pulleer, are described by General Burton[9] as “good trackers, and many of them carried bows and arrows, and a few even possessed matchlocks. I met one of these villagers going out on a sporting excursion. He had on his head a great chatty (earthen pot) full of water, and an old brass-bound matchlock. It was the height of the dry season. He was taking water to a hollow in a rock, which he kept carefully replenished, and then ensconced himself in a clump of bushes hard by, and waited all day, if necessary, with true native patience, for hog, deer, or pea-fowl to approach his ambush.”
In the Madura Manual, it is noted that “the Poleiyans have always been the prædial slaves of the Kunuvans. According to the survey account, they are the aborigines of the Palni hills. The marriage ceremony consists merely of a declaration of consent made by both parties at a feast, to which all their relatives are invited. As soon as a case of small-pox occurs in one of their villages, a cordon is drawn round it, and access to other villages is denied to all the inhabitants of the infected locality, who at once desert their homes, and camp out for a sufficiently long period. The individual attacked is left to his fate, and no medicine is exhibited to him, as it is supposed that the malady is brought on solely by the just displeasure of the gods. They bury their dead.”
The Paliyans are described, in the Gazetteer of the Madura district, as a “very backward caste, who reside in small scattered parties amid the jungles of the Upper Palnis and the Varushanād valley. They speak Tamil with a peculiar intonation, which renders it scarcely intelligible. They are much less civilised than the Pulaiyans, but do not eat beef, and consequently carry no pollution. They sometimes build themselves grass huts, but often they live on platforms up trees, in caves, or under rocks. Their clothes are of the scantiest and dirtiest, and are sometimes eked out with grass or leaves. They live upon roots (yams), leaves, and honey. They cook the roots by putting them into a pit in the ground, heaping wood upon them, and lighting it. The fire is usually kept burning all night as a protection against wild beasts, and it is often the only sign of the presence of the Paliyans in a jungle, for they are shy folk, who avoid other people. They make fire with quartz and steel, using the floss of the silk-cotton tree as tinder. Weddings are conducted without ceremonies, the understanding being that the man shall collect food and the woman cook it. When one of them dies, the rest leave the body as it is, and avoid the spot for some months.