A man is prohibited from saying the name of his wife’s mother (mumi), but my notes do not make clear whether he is also prohibited from saying the names of other mumi—i.e., [[496]]father’s sisters, but probably this is so. In any case this restriction only applies to near relatives.
A man may not utter the name of his pian or piav.
There seemed to be some reluctance to say the name of a wife, but there did not appear to be any definite prohibition against it. It was probably part of a reluctance to utter personal names in general of which the Todas show some traces, though it is less marked among them than in the case of many uncultured people.
The taboo on names was far wider in the case of dead relatives. No one was allowed to utter the name of a dead relative, and this rule appeared to be especially stringent in the case of relatives who had been older than the speaker. As I have already mentioned, this taboo was for some time a great obstacle in my way when trying to obtain the pedigrees of the people. If a man had to refer to a dead relative, he did so by mentioning the name of the village at which he had died; thus, if the father of a Taradr man had died at Taradr, the man would say, “en in Taradr pon,” while, if he had died away from home, say at Kuudr, he would refer to his father as “en in Kuudr odthavai,” “my father who died at Kuudr.”
In the funeral lamentations, each mourner mentions the deceased by the name indicating the bond of kinship between himself and the dead, and does not utter the personal name.
Kinship Salutations
There are certain well-defined salutations which are regulated by kinship.
The characteristic Toda salutation is called kalmelpudithti, in which salutation one person kneels or bows down before another, while the latter raises each foot and touches the forehead of the other. In general this salutation is only paid by women to their elder male relatives; a woman places her head beneath the foot of her pian, in, an, or mun, using these terms in their widest sense. The salutation seems to be very largely one connected with kinship. In everyday life the salutation is only paid by women to men, but under special circumstances, men may bow down before men, and women [[497]]before women, and men even may bow down before women (see p. [502]).
Since, owing to the mokhthodvaiol connexion, a Tarthar woman may have a Teivali mun and vice versa, the kalmelpudithti salutation takes place between people of the two divisions, and I have often seen a woman of one division placing her head beneath the foot of a man of the other division.