CHAPTER IV
THE VILLAGE DAIRY
This chapter will be devoted to a description of the various kinds of dairy which are found at the Toda villages. An account will be given of the daily course of the dairy operations and of the ritual accompanying it. The description of special ceremonies which occur in connexion with the dairy will be reserved till future chapters, in which ceremonies of the same nature occurring in all grades of dairy can be considered together.
A village dairy is often situated at some little distance from the huts in which the people live, though sometimes it is in their immediate neighbourhood. When of the same form as the hut, it may not at once be distinguished from the latter, but it is usually enclosed by a higher wall which surrounds the building more closely, so that there is very little room between the two. The door seemed to me to be usually smaller than that of most of the huts, and it is always capable of being closed by a shutter on the inner side.
The dairy is usually divided into compartments completely separated from one another by a partition extending to the roof, one room being entered from another by a small door of the same kind as that by which the dairy itself is entered. The majority of dairies have two rooms, an inner room called ulkkursh and an outer room called pòrmunkursh. Many dairies, especially among the kind called wursuli, have only one room. At five Tarthar villages, viz., Nòdrs, Taradrkirsi, Keradr, Akirsikòdri, and Tim, there are dairies which have [[57]]three rooms, the inner and outer rooms being separated by a third, called the nedrkursh. Each of the five villages at which these dairies are found is the funeral-place for males of the clan to which the village belongs, and the body of a dead man is placed in the outer room of the dairy at each place during the funeral ceremonies.
At Nòdrs and Tedshteiri (villages of the Nòdrs clan) it is said that there were at one time dairies each of which had seven rooms. The ruins of these, which were of the grade called kudrpali, are still to be seen.
Sometimes the same building serves for two dairies, especially at the less important villages of a clan. In these cases the building resembles that kind of hut which is called merkalars, one compartment of the hut opening at the side. At the villages at which I found dairies of this kind, the front part of the hut was a kudrpali and the part with the door at the side was a wursuli. In these cases each dairy has only one room.
In every dairy which has more than one room, the dairy vessels are kept in the inner room and the actual dairy operations are performed by the dairyman in this room. He only is allowed to go into the inner room, while other men may go into the outer room and, in those cases in which there are three rooms, into the middle room.
When a village dairy has two or more rooms, the outer room first entered from the outside is often used as a sleeping-place and in this case usually has two of the couches called tün, one on each side with a fireplace between them. That on the right-hand side as one enters is called the meitün (meiltün), or high (superior) bed, and that on the left-hand side is the kitün, or low (inferior) bed.
In the outer room is kept the kepun or kaipun (hand vessel), used to hold the water with which the dairyman washes his hands. The masth, or axe used for cutting firewood, and the tek or tekh, a basket used to bring rice or grain into the dairy, are also kept in this room.