Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/85

Rh kept both women simultaneously under his protection.The story of this anti- Kallan agitation is told as follows in the Police Administration Report, 1896. " Many of the Kallans are the kavalgars of the villages under the kaval system. Under that system the kavalgars receive fees, and in some cases rent-free land for undertaking to protect the property of the villagers against theft, or to restore an equivalent in value for anything lost. The people who suffer most at the hands of the Kallars are the shepherds (Kōnans or Idaiyans). Their sheep and goats form a convenient subject for the Kallar's raids. They are taken for kaval fees alleged to be overdue, and also stolen, again to be restored on the payment of black- mail. The anti-Kallar movement was started by a man of the shepherd caste, and rapidly spread. Meetings of villagers were held, at which thousands attended. They took oath on their ploughs to dispense with the services of the Kallars; they formed funds to compensate such of them as lost their cattle, or whose houses were burnt; they arranged for watchmen among themselves to patrol the villages at night; they provided horns to be sounded to carry the alarm in cases of theft from village to village, and prescribed a regular scale of fines to be paid by those villagers who failed to turn out on the sound of the alarm. The Kallans in the north in many cases sold their lands, and left their villages, but in some places they showed fight. For six months crime is said to have ceased absolutely, and, as one deponent put it, people even left their buckets at the wells. In one or two places the Kallans gathered in large bodies in view to overawe the villagers, and riots followed. In one village there were three murders, and the Kallar quarter was destroyed by fire, but whether the fire was the work of Kōnans or Kallars has never been discovered. In