GRANDONIC. (See [GRUNTHUM] and [SANSKRIT]).
GRASS-CLOTH, s. This name is now generally applied to a kind of cambric from China made from the Chuma of the Chinese (Boehmaria nivea, Hooker, the Rhea, so much talked of now), and called by the Chinese sia-pu, or 'summer-cloth.' We find grass-cloths often spoken of by the 16th century travellers, and even later, as an export from Orissa and Bengal. They were probably made of Rhea or some kindred species, but we have not been able to determine this. Cloth and nets are made in the south from the Neilgherry nettle (Girardinia heterophylla, D. C.)
c. 1567.—"Cloth of herbes (panni d'erba), which is a kinde of silke, which groweth among the woodes without any labour of man."—Caesar Frederike, in Hakl. ii. 358.
1585.—"Great store of the cloth which is made from Grasse, which they call yerua" (in Orissa).—R. Fitch, in Hakl. ii. 387.
[1598.—See under [SAREE].
[c. 1610.—"Likewise is there plenty of silk, as well that of the silkworm as of the (silk) herb, which is of the brightest yellow colour, and brighter than silk itself."—Pyrard de Laval, Hak. Soc. i. 328.]
1627.—"Their manufactories (about Balasore) are of Cotton ... Silk, and Silk and Cotton Romals ...; and of Herba (a Sort of tough Grass) they make Ginghams, Pinascos, and several other Goods for Exportation."—A. Hamilton, i. 397; [ed. 1744].
1813.—Milburn, in his List of Bengal Piece-Goods, has Herba Taffaties (ii. 221).
GRASS-CUTTER, s. This is probably a corruption representing the H. ghāskhodā or ghāskāṭā, 'the digger, or cutter, of grass'; the title of a servant employed to collect grass for horses, one such being usually attached to each horse besides the [syce] or [horse-keeper]. In the north the grasscutter is a man; in the south the office is filled by the horsekeeper's wife. Ghāskaṭ is the form commonly used by Englishmen in Upper India speaking Hindustani; but ghasiyārā by those aspiring to purer language. The former term appears in Williamson's V. M. (1810) as gauskot (i. 186), the latter in Jacquemont's Correspondence as grassyara. No grasscutters are mentioned as attached to the stables of Akbar; only a money allowance for grass. The antiquity of the Madras arrangement is shown by a passage in Castanheda (1552): "... he gave him a horse, and a boy to attend to it, and a female slave to see to its fodder."—(ii. 58.)
1789.—"... an Horsekeeper and Grasscutter at two pagodas."—Munro's Narr. 28.