FIG. 10.—KÒDRNER PERFORMING THE SALUTATION CALLED ‘KAIMUKHTI.’ HIS RIGHT ARM IS BARED (‘KEVENARUT’), AND HE HAS REMOVED HIS TURBAN.
On rising in the morning, the men salute the sun with the gesture called kaimukhti, shown in [Fig. 10], and then they turn to their work of milking the buffaloes and churning the milk.
When the dairy operations of the morning are over, the buffaloes are driven to the grazing ground, the people take their food and go about any business of the day. Some may [[32]]collect firewood and procure the leaves used as plates and drinking vessels; others may carry out any necessary tendance which the buffaloes require, or may go to fetch grain or rice from Badaga villages or from the bazaar. The chief men of the village may perhaps have to attend a meeting of the naim, or council, which holds very frequent sittings to adjudicate upon the many disputed points which arise in connexion with the intricate social organisation of the people.
While the men are doing their work, the women will have been seeing to their special tasks, of which three, represented in [Fig. 11], have come to be regarded as pre-eminently woman’s work.
They pound the grain with the wask in a hole situated in the middle of the floor of the hut,[4] and when the pounding is finished the grain is sifted with the murn, or sieve, and the hut is swept with the kip. It seemed that pounding grain is normally performed wearing the tadrp only.
Though these are the three operations which are regarded as pre-eminently woman’s work, the women have other things to do. They rub the seats or beds both inside and outside the hut with dried buffalo-dung, and use the same material to cleanse the various household utensils. They mend the garments of the family, and some women devote much time to the special embroidery with which they adorn their cloaks.
FIG. 11.—WOMEN POUNDING AND SIFTING. THE BROOM IS ON THE GROUND TO THE RIGHT.
The ordinary routine of the day is often broken by the visits of people from other villages, who may have come to talk over a proposed marriage or transference of wives; to announce some approaching ceremony; to discuss some business connected with the buffaloes, or perhaps, but probably rarely, to pay a friendly call. Such a visit will probably give the opportunity of observing the characteristic Toda salutation shown in [Fig. 12].[5] This is essentially a salutation between a woman and her male relatives older than herself. If a man [[33]]visits a village in which he has any female relatives younger than himself, these will go out to meet him as he approaches the house, and each bows down before the man, who raises his foot, while the woman places her hand below the foot and helps to raise it to her forehead, and the same salutation is repeated with the other foot. This mode of greeting is [[34]]called kalmelpudithti,[6] or “leg up he puts.” It is usually a salutation in which women bow down before men, but it may also take place between two men or between two women, while on certain occasions a male may bow down and have his forehead touched by the feet of a woman.
In the evening the buffaloes again find their way to the milking-place, and the operations of the morning are repeated. When these are finished the buffaloes are shut up in the enclosure, or tu, for the night; the lamp is now lighted and saluted by the men who use the same gesture as that with which the sun had been saluted in the morning. The people then take their food and retire to rest.