“10. One must wait three days (called the pantang tuai) before one may clip or cut any more of the rice. At first only one or two basketfuls of rice are cut; the rice is dried in the sun, winnowed in a winnowing basket, and cleaned in a fanning machine, pounded to free it from the husk, so that it becomes bĕras (husked rice), and then boiled so that it becomes nasi (cooked rice), and people are invited to feast on it.
“11. Then a bucket is made for the purpose of threshing the rest of the rice, and a granary built to keep it in while it remains in the field, and five or six labourers are engaged to reap and thresh it (banting).[201] Their hours of working are from 6 to 11.30 A.M., and all the rice they thresh they put into the granary.
“12. If the crop is a good one a gallon of seed will produce a hundredfold. Each plot in a field takes about a gallon of seed.
“13. When the rice has all been cut it is winnowed in order to get rid of the chaff, and then laid out in the sun till quite dry, so that it may not get mouldy if kept for a year.
“Then the wages of the labourers are taken out of it at the rate of two gallons out of every ten. When that is settled, if the rice is not to be sold, it is taken home and put into the rice-chest.
“Whenever you want to eat of it, you take out a basketful at a time and dry it in the sun. Then you turn it in the winnowing basket, and clean it in the fanning machine, pound it to convert it into bĕras, and put a sufficiency of it in a pot and wash it. Enough water is then poured over it to cover it, and it is put on the kitchen fire till it is boiled and becomes nasi, when it can be eaten.
“14. The custom of reaping with a sickle (sabit) and threshing the rice as described in paragraph 11 is a modern method, and is at present mainly practised by the people living in the neighbourhood of the town of Malacca, in order to get the work done quickly; but in olden times it was not allowed, and even to this day the people who live in the inland parts of the territory of Malacca prefer to clip their rice with a tuai,[202] and put it into their baskets a handful at a time [i.e. without threshing it]. (If labourers are employed to do this their wage is one-tenth of the rice cut.) It takes ever so many days to get the work done, but the idea is that this method is the pious one, the ‘Soul of the Rice’ not being disturbed thereby. A good part of the people hold this belief, and assert that since the custom of threshing the rice has been introduced, the crops have been much less abundant than in years of olden time when it was the custom to use the tuai only.
“15. If a man has broad fields so that he is unable to plant them all by his own labour, he will often allow another to work them on an agreement, either of equal division of the produce (each bearing an equal share of the hire of a buffalo and all other expenses incidental to rice-planting), or of threefold division (that is, for example, the owner bears all expenses, in which case the man who does the work can get a third of the produce; or the latter bears all expenses, in which case the owner only gets a third of the produce). Or again, the land can be let; for instance, a field which ordinarily produces a koyan[203] of rice a year will fetch a rent of about two hundred gallons more or less.
“16. Every cultivator who does not act in accordance with the ordinance laid down in paragraphs 9 and 10 above, will be in the same case as if he disregarded all the prohibitions laid down in connection with planting. If a man does not carry out this procedure he is sure to fail in the end; his labour will be in vain and will not fulfil his desires, for the virtue of all these ordinances and prohibitions lies in the fact that they protect the rice, and drive away all its enemies, such as grubs, rats, swine, and the like.”[204]
I will now deal with the ceremonies indicated in the foregoing article from the ceremonial point of view exclusively.