I must leave this point uncertain, but I have little doubt that with fuller information about the customs of different clans we should find that the choice of days for ceremonies is chiefly, if not entirely, determined by the necessity of holding these on some day other than the madnol or palinol.
At the same time, there can be no doubt that Sunday is one of the days appointed for a festival or ceremony very frequently, and this is especially the case at the ti, the procedure of which is to a large extent uninfluenced by considerations concerned with the madnol and palinol. Even here, however, these days are not altogether without influence, for certain ceremonial days at the ti are feast days for the clan to which the ti belongs, and this would make it necessary that the ceremonies should not be held on the madnol of the clan. Certain days were said to be feast-days throughout the whole Toda community, but I have no knowledge as to how these [[410]]days would be kept by those clans on whose madnol they might fall.
Several previous writers, when recording the choice of certain days for the funeral ceremonies, have ascribed to the Todas a belief in lucky and unlucky days, in days of good or evil omen. One man, when telling me that Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday were days on which the irpalvusthi ceremony might be performed at the tarvali, referred to them as lucky days.
I think it is extremely doubtful whether the Toda in general has any such belief, and if he has, it is probable that the idea is a recent importation borrowed from the Hindus, among whom the belief in lucky or unlucky days is of course very prevalent. The distinction among the Todas is rather into feast and fast days, using the latter term in a wide sense.
It is possible that the institutions of madnol and palinol have grown out of the belief in unlucky days; that certain things were not done on these days because they were unlucky days, and that so there came into existence a code of rules prescribing what might and what might not be done.
The chief difficulty in the way of this view is the fact that the different clans of the Todas have different sacred days. One would expect lucky and unlucky days to be the same for the whole community. The sacred days place very definite restrictions on the intercourse between different clans, and this inconvenience must be increased by the fact that the different clans have different madnol, and there is no obvious reason why this difference in the choice of sacred days should have come about.
The distinction between madnol and palinol is, again, one which can hardly have grown out of the belief in unlucky days, though perhaps, given a village day, it is not an unnatural step for the Todas to have decided that they would have a dairy day also.
Whatever the origin of the laws regulating Toda custom in this respect, I think there is little doubt that when at the present time a given act is done or not done on a given day, the action is not based on a belief in lucky or unlucky days, [[411]]but, as nearly always among the Todas, on custom prescribing that the act shall or shall not be done on that day.
There are, however, other restrictions or relaxations connected with certain days of the week which have probably arisen out of a belief in lucky and unlucky days.
There is a regulation (now almost a dead letter) that the Todas must not cross the Paikara and Avalanche rivers on Tuesdays, Fridays, or Saturdays. Sundays and Wednesdays, on the other hand, are the days on which the wursol is allowed to sleep in the hut with ordinary people, and Mondays and Thursdays are the days on which the palol is visited by Todas other than the mòrol. Such facts suggest that the three days on which the rivers should not be crossed are unlucky days, but, on the other hand, the days which I was once told were lucky days included Saturday. The evidence at our command is conflicting, and does no more than suggest that the restrictions or relaxations common to the whole community may be connected with the belief in lucky and unlucky days.