Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 7.djvu/500

YANADI small, but growing settlement of Christianised Yānādis at Bapatla."

To sum up the Yānādi. It is notorious that, in times of scarcity, he avoids the famine relief works, for the simple reason that he does not feel free on them. Nevertheless, a few are in the police service. Some are kāvalgars (watchmen), farm labourers, scavengers, stone-masons or bricklayers, others are pounders of rice, or domestic servants, and are as a rule faithful. They earn a livelihood also in various subsidiary ways, by hunting, fishing, cobra-charming, collecting honey or fuel, rearing and selling pigs, practicing medicine as quacks, and by thieving. " An iron implement," Mr. F. S. Mullaly writes, * called the sikkaloo kōl, is kept by them ostensibly for the purpose of digging roots, but it is really their jemmy, and used in the commission of burglary. It is an ordinary iron tool, pointed at both ends, one end being fitted in a wooden handle. With this they can dig through a wall noiselessly and quickly, and many houses are thus broken into in one night, until a good loot is obtained. House-breakings are usually committed during the first quarter of the moon. Yānādis confess their own crimes readily, but will never implicate accomplices. . . . Women are useful in the disposal of stolen property. At dusk they go round on their begging tours selling mats, which they make, and take the opportunity of dropping a word to the women of cheap things for sale, and the temptation is seldom resisted. Stolen property is also carried in their marketing baskets to the village grocer, the Kōmati. Among the wild (Adavi) Yānādis, women [are told off to acquire information while begging, but they chiefly rely on the liquor-shopkeepers for news, which may be turned to useful account."†