Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/194

KURUMBA OR KURUMAN spread race, who may have erected dolmens. As bearing on the connection between Kurumbas and Kurubas, it is worthy of note that the latter, in some places, erect dolmens as a resting-place for the dead. (See Kuruba.)

It is noted, in the Gazetteer of the Nīlgiris, that the Kurumbas "trade largely on the extraordinary dread of their supposed magical powers which possesses the Todas and the Badagas — the latter especially. Stories are told of how they can summon wild elephants at will, and reduce rocks to powder merely by scattering mystic herbs upon them."

"The Kurumbas," Harkness writes, "have a knowledge of herbs and medicinal roots, and the Burghers (Badagas) say that they limit their knowledge thereof to those which are noxious only, and believe that, with the assistance of their magic, they are able to convey them into the stomachs of those to whom they have any dislike. The violent antipathy existing between the Burghers and the Kurumbas, and the dread and horror which the former entertain of the preternatural powers of the latter, are, perhaps, not easily accounted for; but neither sickness, death, nor misfortune of any kind, ever visit the former, without the latter having the credit of producing it. A few years before, a Burgher had been hanged by the sentence of the provincial court for the murder of a Kurumba. The act of the former was not without what was considered great provocation. Disease had attacked the inhabitants of the hamlet, a murrain their cattle. The former had carried off a great part of the family of the murderer, and he himself had but narrowly escaped its effects. No one in the neighbourhood doubted that the Kurumba in question had, by his necromancy, caused all this misfortune, and, after several fruitless attempts, a party of them succeeded in surrounding