Identifier: castestribesofso03thuruoft (find matches)
Title: Castes and tribes of southern India. Assisted by K. Rangachari
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Thurston, Edgar, 1855-1935 Rangachari, K
Subjects: Caste -- India Madras (Presidency) Ethnology -- India Madras (Presidency) India -- Social conditions
Publisher: Madras Government Press
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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eeth make an ugly man orwoman handsome, and that a person, whose teeth havenot been thus operated on, has teeth and eats like a cow.Whether this practice is one which the Kadir, and MalaVedar of Travancore, have hit on spontaneously incomparatively recent times, or whether it is a relic of acustom resorted to by their ancestors of long ago,which remains as a stray survival of a custom once morewidely practiced by the remote inhabitants of SouthernIndia, cannot be definitely asserted, but I incline to thelatter view. A friendly old woman, with huge discs in the widelydilated lobes of the ears, and a bamboo five-prongedcomb in her back-hair, who acted as spokesman on theoccasion of a visit to a charmingly situated settlement ina jungle of magnificent bamboos by the side of a moun-tain stream, pointed out to me, with conscious pride,that the huts were largely constructed by the females,while the men worked for the sircar (Government).The females also carry water from the streams, collect
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KADIR BUY WITH CHIPPED TEETH. 27 kAdir firewood, dig up edible roots, and carry out the sundryhousehold duties of a housewife. Both men and womenare clever at plaiting bamboo baskets, necklets, etc.I was told one morning by a Kadir man, whom I met onthe road, as an important item of news, that the womenin his settlement were very busy dressing to come andsee me—an event as important to them as the dressingof a debutante for presentation at the Court of St.James. They eventually turned up without their hus-bands, and evidently regarded my methods as a hugejoke organised for the amusement of themselves andtheir children. The hair was neatly parted, anointedwith a liberal application of cocoanut oil, and deckedwith wild flowers. Beauty spots and lines had beenpainted with coal-tar dyes on the forehead, and turmericpowder freely sprinkled over the top of the heads of themarried women. Some had even discarded the racrg^edand dirty cotton cloth of every-day life in favour of acolour-print

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