Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/42

KADIR Perhaps the most interesting custom of the Kādirs is that of chipping all or some of the incisor teeth, both upper and lower, into the form of a sharp-pointed, but not serrated cone. The operation, which is performed with a chisel or bill-hook and file by members of the tribe skilled therein, on boys and girls, has been thus described. The girl to be operated on lies down, and places her head against a female friend, who holds her head firmly. A woman takes a sharpened bill-hook, and chips away the teeth till they are shaded to a point, the girl operated on writhing and groaning with the pain. After the operation she appears dazed, and in a very few hours the face begins to swell. Swelling and pain last for a day or two, accompanied by severe headache. The Kādirs say that chipped teeth make an ugly man or woman handsome, and that a person, whose teeth have not been thus operated on, has teeth and eats like a cow. Whether this practice is one which the Kādir, and Mala Vēdar of Travancore, have hit on spontaneously in comparatively recent times, or whether it is a relic of a custom resorted to by their ancestors of long ago, which remains as a stray survival of a custom once more widely practiced by the remote inhabitants of Southern India, cannot be definitely asserted, but I incline to the latter view. A friendly old woman, with huge discs in the widely dilated lobes of the ears, and a bamboo five-pronged comb in her back-hair, who acted as spokesman on the occasion of a visit to a charmingly situated settlement in a jungle of magnificent bamboos by the side of a mountain 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