Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/468

KORAGA landholders. Some were set to watch the crops and cattle, some to cultivate, others to various drudgeries, which are still allotted to the existing slave-castes, but the Koragars, who had been raised by Habāshika to the highest posts under his government, were stripped and driven towards the sea-shore, there to be hanged, but, being ashamed of their naked condition, they gathered the leaves of the nicki bush (Vitex Negundo) which grows abundantly in waste places, and made small coverings for themselves in front. On this the executioners took pity on them and let them go, but condemned them to be the lowest of the low, and wear no other covering but leaves. The Koragas are now the lowest of the slave divisions, and regarded with such intense loathing and hatred that up to quite recent times one section of them, called Andē or pot Koragars, continually wore a pot suspended from their necks, into which they were compelled to spit, being so utterly unclean as to be prohibited from even spitting on the highway; and to this day their women continue to show in their leafy aprons a memorial of the abject degradation to which their whole race was doomed." It is said that in pre- British days an Andē Koraga had to take out a licence to come into the towns and villages by day. At night mere approach thereto was forbidden, as his presence would cause terrible calamity. The Koragas of those days could cook their food only in broken vessels. The name Vastra, by which one class of Koragas is called, has reference to their wearing vastra, or clothes, such as were used to shroud a dead body, and given to them in the shape of charity, the use of a new cloth being prohibited. According to another account the three divisions of the Koragas are (1) Kappada, those who wear clothes, (2) Tippi, who wear ornaments made