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slopes of the stage as long as possible; for the more tears he shed the more abundant would be the supply of rain. Next day the body was cut to pieces.

"The flesh cut from the victim was instantly taken home by the persons who had been deputed by each village to bring it. To secure its rapid arrival it was sometimes forwarded by relays of men, and conveyed with postal fleetness fifty or sixty miles. In each village all who stayed at home fasted rigidly until the flesh arrived. The bearer deposited it in the place of public assembly, where it was received by the priest and the heads of families. The priest divided it into two portions, one of which he offered to the Earth-Goddess by burying it in a hole in the ground with his back turned, and without looking. Then each man added a little earth to bury it, and the priest poured water on the spot from a hill gourd. The other portion of flesh he divided into as many shares as there were heads of houses present. Each head of a house rolled his shred of flesh in leaves and buried it in his favourite field, placing it in the earth behind his back without looking. In some places each man carried his portion of flesh to the stream which watered his fields, and there hung it on a pole. For three days thereafter no house was swept; and, in one district, strict silence was observed, no fire might be given out, no wood cut, and no strangers received. The remains of the human victim (namely, the head, bowels and bones) were watched by strong parties the night after the sacrifice, and next morning they were burned along with a whole sheep, on a funeral pile. The ashes were scattered over the fields, laid as paste over the houses and granaries, or mixed with the new corn to preserve it from insects. Sometimes, however, the head and bones were buried, not burnt. After the suppression of the human sacrifices, inferior victims were substituted in some places; for instance, in the capital of Chinna Kimedy a goat took the place of a human victim.

"In these Khond sacrifices the Meriahs are represented by our authorities as victims offered to propitiate the EarthGoddess. But from the treatment of the victims both before and after death it appears that the custom cannot

A part

be explained as merely a propitiatory sacrifice. of the flesh certainly was offered to the Earth-Goddess, but the rest of the flesh was buried by each householder in his fields, and the ashes of the other parts of the body were scattered over the fields, laid as paste on the granaries, or mixed with the new corn. These latter customs imply that to the body of the Meriah there was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making the crops to grow, quite independent of the indirect efficacy which it might have as an offering to secure the good-will of the deity. In other words, the flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the land. The same intrinsic power was ascribed to the blood and tears of the Meriah, his blood causing the redness of the turmeric, and his tears producing rain; for it can hardly be doubted that, originally at least, the tears were supposed to bring down the rain, not merely to prognosticate it. Similarly the custom of pouring water on the buried flesh of the Meriah was no doubt a rain-charm. Again, magical power as an attribute of the Meriah appears in the sovereign virtue believed to reside in anything that came from his person, as his hair or spittle. The ascription of such power to the Meriah indicates that he was much more than a mere man sacrificed to propitiate a deity. Once more, the extreme reverence paid him points to the same conclusion. Major Campbell speaks of the Meriah as 'being regarded as something more than mortal,' and Major Macpherson says: 'A species of reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish from adoration, is paid to him.' In short, the Meriah appears to have been regarded as divine. As such, he may originally have represented the Earth-Goddess, or perhaps a deity of vegetation, though in later times he came to be regarded rather as a victim offered to a deity than as himself an incarnate god. This later view of the Meriah as a victim rather than a divinity may perhaps have received undue emphasis from the European writers who have described the Khond religion. Habituated to the later idea of sacrifice as an offering made to a god for the purpose of conciliating his favour, European observers are apt to interpret all religious slaughter in this sense, and to

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suppose that wherever such slaughter takes place, there must necessarily be a deity to whom the carnage is believed by the slayers to be acceptable. Thus their preconceived ideas unconsciously colour and warp their descriptions of savage rites." 1

human

In his Ethnographic Notes in Southern India Mr. 13. Last Thurston states: 2 "The last recorded Meriah sacrifice in sacrifices. the Ganjam Māliāhs occurred in 1852, and there are still Khonds alive who were present at it. Twenty-five descendants of persons who were reserved for sacrifice, but were rescued by Government officers, returned themselves as Meriah at the Census of 1901. The Khonds have now substituted a buffalo for a human being. The animal is hewn to pieces while alive, and the villagers rush home to their villages to bury the flesh in the soil, and so secure prosperous crops. The sacrifice is not unaccompanied by risk to the performers, as the buffalo, before dying, frequently kills one or more of its tormentors. It was stated by the officers of the Māliah Agency that there was reason to believe that the Rāja of Jaipur (Madras), when he was installed at his father's decease in 1860-61, sacrificed a girl thirteen years of age at the shrine of the Goddess Durga in the town of Jaipur. The last attempted human sacrifice (which was nearly successful) in the Vizagāpatam District, among the Kutia Khonds, was, I believe, in 1880. But the memory of the abandoned practice is kept green by one of the Khond songs, for a translation of which we are indebted to Mr. J. E. FriendPereira:

3

At the time of the great Kiabon (Campbell) Sahib's coming, the country was in darkness; it was enveloped in mist.

Having sent paiks to collect the people of the land, they, having surrounded them, caught the Meriah sacrificers.

Having caught the Meriah sacrificers, they brought them; and again they went and seized the evil councillors.

Having seen the chains and shackles, the people were afraid; murder
and bloodshed were quelled.

Then the land became beautiful; and a certain Mokodella (Macpherson)
Sāhib came.

He destroyed the lairs of the tigers and bears in the hills and rocks, and
taught wisdom to the people.

1 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 241 sq.

2 Pages 517-519. Published 1906.

3

Journal, A. S. of Bengal, 1898.

14. Khond rising in 1882.

After the lapse of a month he built bungalows and schools; and he advised them to learn reading and law.

They learnt wisdom and reading; they acquired silver and gold. Then all the people became wealthy.

The

In 1882 an armed rising of the Khonds of the Kālāhandi State occurred as a result of agrarian trouble. The Feudatory Chief had encouraged the settlement in the State of members of the Kolta caste who are excellent cultivators and keenly acquisitive of land. They soon got the Khonds heavily indebted to them for loans of food and seed-grain, and began to oust them from their villages. The Khonds, recognising with some justice that this process was likely to end in their total expropriation from the soil, concerted a conspiracy, and in May 1882 rose and murdered the Koltas of a number of villages. The signal for the outbreak was given by passing a knotted string from village to village; other signals were a bent arrow and a branch of a mahua tree. When the Khond leaders were assembled an axe was thrown on to the ground and each of them grasping it in turn swore to join in the rising and support his fellows. taint of cruelty in the tribe is shown by the fact that the Kutia Khonds, on being requested to join in the rising, replied that if plunder was the only object they would not do so, but if the Koltas were to be murdered they agreed. Some of the murdered Koltas were anointed with turmeric and offered at temples, the Khonds calling them their goats, and in one case a Kolta is believed to have been made a Meriah sacrifice to the earth god. The Khonds appeared before the police, who were protecting a body of refugees at the village of Norla, with the hair and scalps of their murdered victims tied to their bows. To the Political Officer, who was sent to suppress the rising, the Khonds complained that the Koltas had degraded them from the position of lords of the soil to that of servants, and justified their plundering of the Koltas on the ground that they were merely taking back the produce of their own land, which the Koltas had stolen from them. They said that if they were not to have back their land Government might either drive them out of the country or exterminate them, and that Koltas and Khonds could no more live together than tigers and goats. Another grievance

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was that a new Rāja of Kālāhandi had been installed without their consent having been obtained. The Political Officer, Mr. Berry, hanged seven of the Khond ringleaders and effected a settlement of their grievances. Peace was restored and has not since been broken. At a later date in the same year, 1882, and independently of the rising, a Khond landholder was convicted and executed for having offered a five-yearold girl as a Meriah sacrifice.

The Khond or Kandh language, called Kui by the 15. LangKhonds themselves, is spoken by rather more than half of uage. the total body of the tribe. It is much more nearly related to Telugu than is Gondi and has no written character.1

2

and

Kir. A cultivating caste found principally in the 1. Origin Hoshangābād District. They numbered about 7000 persons traditions. in 1911. The Kirs claim to have come from the Jaipur State, and this is borne out by the fact that they still retain a dialect of Marwari, though they have been living among the Hindi-speaking population of Hoshangābād for several generations. According to their traditions they immigrated into the Central Provinces when Rāja Mān was ruling at Jaipur. He was a contemporary of Akbar's and died in A.D. 1615.3 This story tallies with Colonel Sleeman's statement that the first important influx of Hindus into the Nerbudda valley took place in the time of Akbar.* The Kirs are akin to the Kirārs, and at the India Census of 1901 were amalgamated with them. Like the Kirārs they claim to be descended from the mythical Rāja Karan of Jaipur. Their story is that on a summer day Mahādeo and Pārvati created a melon-garden, and Mahādeo made a man and a woman out of a piece of kusha grass (Eragrostis cynosuroides) to tend the garden. From these the Kirs are descended. The name may possibly be a corruption of karar, a river-bank.

The Kirs have no endogamous divisions. For the pur- 2. Marpose of marriage the caste is divided into 12 gotras or riage. sections. A man must not marry within his own gotra or in

1 Sir G. A. Grierson's Linguistic Survey, Munda and Dravidian Languages.

2 This article is compiled principally from a paper by Pandit Sakhāram, VOL. III

Revenue Inspector, Hoshangābād
District.

3 Tod's Rajasthān, vol. ii. p. 327.
4 Elliott's Hoshangabad Settlement
Report, p. 60.

2 I

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