Put a corpse at the feet, taking out the intestines through the mouth. The principal thing for this country, and for the Singhalese, is the worship of the planets.[55]
In the centre of the island is the kingdom of Kandy; naturally fortified by impervious forests, and long independent. This creates a variety; the Kandyans being somewhat ruder than the other Singhalese. It is not, however, an important one. The really important ethnology of Ceylon is that of the Vaddahs, in the eastern districts, inland of Battacaloa. They are still unmodified by either the Hindú habits, or the great Indian creeds,—the true analogues of the Khonds, and Kóls, and Bhils, &c. Their language, however, is Singhalese; an important fact, since it denotes one of two phenomena,—either the antiquity of the conquest of Ceylon supposing the extension of the Singhalese language to have been gradual, or the thorough-going character of it, if it be recent.[194]
Who were the Padæi of the following extract from Herodotus?[56]—"Other Indians there are, who live east of these. They are nomads, eaters of raw flesh; and called Padæi. They are said to have the following customs. Whenever one of their countrymen is sick, whether man or woman, he is killed. The males kill the males, and amongst these the most intimate acquaintance kill their nearest friends; for they say that for a man to be wasted by disease is for their own meat to be spoilt. The man denies that he ails; but they, not letting him have his own way, kill and feast on him. If a female be sick, the women that are most intimate with her treat her as the males do the men. They sacrifice and feast upon all who arrive at old age. Few, however, go thus far, since they kill every one who falls sick before he reaches that stage of life."
Name for name, the Vaddahs of Ceylon have a claim to be Padæi. Besides which they are Indian.
But, name for name, the Battas[57] of Sumatra have a claim as well; and although they are not exactly Indian, they are cannibals of the sort in question—or, at any rate, cannibals in a manner quite as remarkable.
This gives us a conflict of difficulties. The solution of them lies in the fact of neither Vaddah[195] nor Batta being native names; a fact which leaves us a liberty to suppose that the Padæi of Herodotus were simply some wild Indian tribe sufficiently allied in manners to the Vaddahs of Ceylon, and the Battas of Sumatra, to be called by the same name, but without being necessarily either the one or the other; or even ethnologically connected with either.
Now look at the gipsies of Great Britain. They are wanderers without fixed habitations; whilst, at the same time, they are more abundant in some parts of the island than others. They have no very definite occupation; yet they are oftener tinkers and tinmen than aught else equally legal. They intermarry with the English but little. All this is caste, although we may not exactly call it so. Then, again, they have a peculiar language, although it is so imperfectly known to the majority of the British gipsies, as to have become well-nigh extinct.[58] These gipsies are of Indian origin, and a wandering tribe of Hindostan, called Sikligurs, reminded Mr. Pickering of the European gipsies more than any other Indians he fell in with. Like these, the Sikligurs are coves, or tinkers.
This, however, is by the way. Although it is as well to make a note of the Indian extraction of the English and other European gipsies, it is not for this reason that they have been mentioned. They find a place here for the sake of illustrating what is meant by the wandering tribes of India, whilst at the same time they throw a slight illustration over the nature of castes. Lastly, they are essentially parts of an ethnological investigation—ethnological rather than either social or political. Their characteristics are referable to a difference of descent; and they are tinkers, wanderers, poachers, and smugglers, not so much because they are either gipsies, or Indians, as because they are of a different stock from the English. They are foreigners in the fullest sense of the term; and they differ from their fellow-citizens just as the Jew does—though less advantageously.