Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 7.djvu/428

VELLALA inhabitants of the Pāndyan Kingdom of Madura and Tinnevelly, which division also uses the title of Pillai; and (4) Konga, or those who resided in the Konga country, which corresponded to Coimbatore and Salem, the men of which are called Kavandans. The members of all these four main territorial divisions resemble one another in their essential customs. Marriage is either infant or adult, the Purānic wedding ceremonies are followed, and (except among the Konga Vellālas) Brāhmans officiate. They all burn their dead, observe fifteen days' pollution, and perform the karumāntaram ceremony to remove the pollution on the sixteenth day. There are no marked occupational differences amongst them, most of them being cultivators or traders. Each division contains both Vaishnavites and Saivites, and (contrary to the rule among the Brāhmans) differences of sect are not of themselves any bar to intermarriage. Each division has Pandārams, or priests, recruited from among its members, who officiate at funerals and minor ceremonies, and some of these wear the sacred thread,while other Vellālas only wear it at funerals. All Vellālas perform srāddhas (memorial services), and observe the ceremony of invoking their ancestors on the Mahālaya days (a piece of ritual which is confined to the twice-born and the higher classes of Sūdras); all of them decline to drink alcohol or to eat in the houses of any but Brāhmans; and all of them may dine together. Yet no member of any of these four main divisions may marry into another, and, moreover, each of them is split into sub-divisions (having generally a territorial origin), the members of which again may not intermarry. Thus Tondamandalam are sub-divided into the Tuluvas, who are supposed to have come from the Tulu country; the Poonamallee (or Pundamalli) Vellālas, so called from the