Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 6.djvu/88

PANIYAN allowed their hair to grow long, shave. The ordinary Paniyan does not profess to know the meaning of the funeral orations, but contents himself with a belief that it is known to those who are initiated. The women attend the ceremony, but do not take part in the dance. In fact, the nearest approach to a dance that they ever attempt (and this only on festive occasions) resembles the ordinary occupation of planting rice, carried out in dumb show to the music of a drum. The bodies of the performers stoop and move in time with the music, and the arms are swung from side to side as in the act of placing the rice seedlings in their rows. To see a long line of Paniyan women, up to their knees in the mud of a rice field, bobbing up and down and putting on the pace as the music grows quicker and quicker, and to hear the wild yells of Hou! Hou! like a chorus of hungry dogs, which form the vocal accompaniment as they dab the green bunches in from side to side, is highly amusing. The foregoing account of the Paniyan death ceremonies was supplied by Mr. Colin Mackenzie, to whom, as also to Mr. F. Fawcett, Mr. G. Romilly, and Martelli, I am indebted for many of the facts recorded in the present note. From Mr. Fawcett the following account of a further ceremony was obtained: —

At a Paniyan village, on a coffee estate where the annual ceremony was being celebrated, men and boys were dancing round a wooden upright to the music of a small drum hanging at the left hip. Some of the dancers had bells round the leg below the knee. Close to the upright a man was seated, playing a pipe, which emitted sounds like those of a bagpipe. In dancing, the dancers went round against the sun. At some little distance a crowd of females indulged in a dance by themselves. A characteristic of the dance, specially noticeable among