Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 2.djvu/426

IRULA is kept by the higher classes for cattle. This gruel is also highly appreciated by the Yānādis. While husking rice, they eat the bran, and, if not carefully watched, will steal as much of the rice as they can manage to secrete about themselves. As an addition to their plain dietary they catch field (Jerboa) rats, which they dig out with long sticks, after they have been asphyxiated with smoke blown into their tunnels through a small hole in an earthen pot filled with dried leaves, which are set on fire. When the nest is dug out, they find material for a meat and vegetable curry in the dead rats, with the hoarded store of rice or other grain. They feast on the bodies of winged white-ants (Termites), which they search with torch-lights at the time of their seasonal epidemic appearance. Some years ago a theft occurred in my house at night, and it was proved by a plaster cast of a foot-print in the mud produced by a nocturnal shower that one of my gardeners, who did not live on the spot, had been on the prowl. The explanation was that he had been collecting as a food-stuff the carcases of the winged ants, which had that evening appeared in myriads. Some Irulas are herbalists, and are believed to have the powers of curing certain diseases, snake-poisoning, and the bites of rats and insects. Occasionally the Irulas collect the leaves of the banyan, Butea frondosa or lotus, for sale as food-platters, and they will eat the refuse food left on the platters by Brāhmans and other higher classes. They freely enter the houses of Brāhmans and non-Brāhman castes, and are not considered as carrying pollution. They have no fixed place of abode, which they often change. Some live in low, palmyra-thatched