Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/452

KONDH was rewarded with a silver bangle. At a meeting held at the village of Balwarpur, it was decided that the Kultas should all be killed and swept out of the country. As a sign of this, the Kondhs carried brooms about. At Asurgarh the police found four headless corpses, and learnt from the widows all that they had to say about the atrocities. The murders had been committed in the most brutal way. All the victims were scalped while still alive, and one had an arm and a leg cut off before being scalped. As each victim died, his death was announced by three taps on a drum given slowly, followed by shouting and dancing. The unfortunate men were dragged out of their houses, and killed before their women and children. Neither here nor anywhere else were the women outraged, though they were threatened with death to make them give up buried treasure. One woman was in this way made to dig up a thousand rupees. On a tamarind tree near the village of Billat, affixed to it as a trophy, there was the scalped head of a Kulta, hacked about in the most horrible way.* The fact is noted by Mr. Jayaram Moodaliar that the Kondh system of notation is duodecimal. Thirteen is twelve and one, forty three twelves and four, and so forth. Rh Aborigines of the Eastern Ghâts. Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, XXV, 39-52, 1856. Caldwell, R. Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, 2nd edn.,appendix, 516-17, 1875.