Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 6.djvu/422

SHANAN kind to do purōhit's work for them; had poems composed on their kingly origin; gone through a sort of incomplete parody of the ceremony of investiture with the sacred thread; talked much but ignorantly of their gōtras; and induced needy persons to sign documents agreeing to carry them in palanquins on festive occasions." [During my stay at Nazareth in Tinnevelly, for the purpose of taking measurements of the Shānāns, I received a visit from some elders of the community from Kuttam, who arrived in palanquins, and bearing weapons of old device.] Their boldest stroke was to aver that the coins commonly known as Shānāns' cash were struck by sovereign ancestors of the caste. The author of a pamphlet entitled 'Bishop Caldwell and the Tinnevelly Shānārs' states that he had met with men of all castes who say that they have seen the true Shānār coin with their own eyes, and that a Eurasian gentleman from Bangalore testified to his having seen a true Shānār coin at Bangalore forty years ago. The coin referred to is the gold Venetian sequin, which is still found in considerable numbers in the south, and bears the names of the Doges (Paul Rainer, Aloy Mocen, Ludov Manin, etc.) and a cross, which the Natives mistake for a toddy palm. " If," Mr. Fawcett writes,* "one asks the ordinary Malayāli (native of Malabar) what persons are represented on the sequin, one gets for answer that they are Rāma and Sīta: between them a cocoanut tree. Every Malayāli knows what an Āmâda is; it is a real or imitation Venetian sequin. I have never heard any explanation of the word Āmâda in Malabar. The following comes from Tinnevelly. Āmâda was the consort of Bhagavati, and he suddenly appeared one day