Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/505

Rh Māndi (cow). — A sept of Poroja.  Māndiri.— A sub-division of Dōmb.  Mandula.— The Mandulas (medicine men) are a wandering class, the members of which go about from village to village in the Telugu country, selling drugs (mandu, medicine) and medicinal powders. Some of their women act as midwives. Of these people an interesting account is given by Bishop Whitehead,* who writes as follows. " We found an encampment of five or six dirty-looking huts made of matting, each about five feet high, eight feet long and six feet wide, belonging to a body of Mandalavāru, whose head-quarters are at Masulipatam. They are medicine men by profession, and thieves and beggars by choice. The headman showed us his stock of medicines in a bag, and a quaint stock it was, consisting of a miscellaneous collection of stones and pieces of wood, and the fruits of trees. The stones are ground to powder, and mixed up as a medicine with various ingredients. He had a piece of mica, a stone containing iron, and another which contained some other metal. There was also a peculiar wood used as an antidote against snake-bite, a piece being torn off and eaten by the person bitten. One common treatment for children is to give them tiles, ground to powder, to eat. In the headman's hut was a picturesque-looking woman sitting up with an infant three days old. It had an anklet, made of its mother's hair, tied round the right ankle, to keep off the evil eye. The mother, too, had a similar anklet round her own left ankle, which she put on before her confinement. She asked for some castor-oil to smear over the child. They had a good many donkeys, pigs, and fowls with them, and made, they said, about a rupee 