Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/479

Rh form of ordeal has been described as occurring among the Bākutas of South Canara by Mr. Stuart. "When a man is excommunicated, he must perform a ceremony called yēlu halli sudodu, which means burning seven villages, in order to re-enter the caste. For this ceremony, seven small booths are built, and bundles of grass are piled against them. The excommunicated man has then to pass through these huts one after the other, and, as he does so, the headman sets fire to the grass " (cf. Koyi). It is suggested by Mr. R. E. Enthoven that the idea seems to be "a rapid representation of seven existences, the outcast regaining his status after seven generations have passed without further transgression. The parallel suggested is the law of Manu that seven generations are necessary to efface a lapse from the law of endogamous marriage." Of death ceremonies Mr. Walhouse tells us that "on death the bodies of all the slave castes used to be burnt, except in cases of death from small-pox. This may have been to obviate the pollution of the soil by their carcases when their degradation was deepest, but now, and from long past, burial is universal. The master's permission is still asked, and, after burial, four balls of cooked rice are placed on the grave, possibly a trace of the ancient notion of supplying food to the ghost of the deceased."A handful is said * to be "removed from the grave on the sixteenth day after burial, and buried in a pit. A stone is erected over it, on which some rice and toddy are placed as a last offering to the departed soul which is then asked to join its ancestors."

" It may," Mr. Walhouse writes, "be noted that the Koragars alone of all the slave or other castes eat the