Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/343

Rh the good of mankind. They, however, refused to do so. Vishnu then called for Siva, and asked him to induce them to return. Siva brought a cow, and directed all the Kōmatis to get into its right ear. From there they saw gloriously decorated towns, with magnificent temples, pleasure gardens, etc., and begged permission to live in them. Siva assented, and they speedily began to march off to their new abodes. But, almost immediately, a huge conflagration came in view, and began to overwhelm them. Terror-stricken, they cried out to Siva to help them in their trouble. He consented on condition that they would return to the mortal world. This they accordingly did. Siva gave them the name of Gōmati, because they exhibited as much fear at the conflagration as a cow would when anything untoward happened. Yet another derivation of Kōmati is gō-mati, meaning sprung from the cow in accordance with the above legend, or cow-gored in reference to the story that the ancestors of the Kōmatis commingled in a cow-shed, where a pregnant woman was gored by a cow. The derivation ku-mati, meaning evil-minded, is grammatically impossible. The Kōmatis are said to have originally lived, and still live in large numbers on the banks of the Godāvari river. One of the local names thereof is Gōmati or Gōmti, and the Sanskrit Gōmati would, in Telugu, become corrupted into Kōmati. The Kōmatis everywhere speak Telugu, and are devoted to their mother-tongue. There is a common proverb among them, "Telugu thēta, Aravam adhvānam,"meaning that Telugu is easy (has an easy flow), and Tamil is wretched. "Of all Dravidian languages," Mr. Henry Morris writes, "Telugu is the sweetest and most musical. It is exceedingly mellifluous, and sounds