Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/84

KALLAN hand, if a theft should, by any chance, be committed in a house where a Kallan is employed, the articles stolen will be recovered, and returned to the owner. In Madura town, I am informed, a tax of four annas per annum is levied on houses in certain streets by the head of the Kallan caste in return for protection against theft." In the Census Report, 1901, Mr. Francis records that " the Kallans, Maravans, and Agamudaiyans are responsible for a share of the crime of the southern districts, which is out of all proportion to their strength in them. In 1897, the Inspector-General of Prisons reported that nearly 42 per cent, of the convicts in the Madura jail, and 30 per cent, of those in the Palamcottah jail in Tinnevelly, belonged to one or other of these three castes. In Tinnevelly, in 1894, 131 cattle thefts were committed by men of these three castes against 47 by members of others, which is one theft to 1,497 of the population of the three bodies against one to 37,830 of the other castes. The statistics of their criminality in Trichinopoly and Madura were also bad. The Kallans had until recently a regular system of blackmail, called kudikaval, under which each village paid certain fees to be exempt from theft. The consequences of being in arrears with their payments quickly followed in the shape of cattle thefts and ' accidental ' fires in houses. In Madura the villagers recently struck against this extortion. The agitation was started by a man of the Idaiyan or shepherd caste, which naturally suffered greatly by the system, and continued from 1893 to 1896." The origin of the agitation is said * to have been the anger of certain of the Idaiyans with a Kallan Lothario, who enticed away a woman of their caste, and afterwards her daughter, and