Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/256

 alternate white and red bands, with which the east coast women love to adorn a marriage house or temple wall. These, with the regularly laid out and carefully embanked water-courses and streams, lend an air of enchantment to the whole scene. The ignorance prevailing among the women of the richer section of the landed classes (on the east coast) is so great that it is not uncommon to ridicule a woman by saying that what she knows about paddy (rice) is that it grows on a tree. But, in a district like South Canara, the woman that does not know agriculture is the exception. I have often come across respectable women of the landed classes like the Bants, Shivallis, and Nairs, managing large landed estates as efficiently as men. The South Canara woman is born on the land, and lives on it. She knows when to sow, and when to reap ; how much seed to sow, and how much labour to employ to plough, to weed, or to reap. She knows how to prepare her seed, and to cure her tobacco, to garner her grain, and to preserve her cucumbers through the coming monsoon. She knows further how to feed her cow, and to milk it, to treat it when sick, and to graze it when hale. She also knows how to make her manure, and how to use it without wasting a bit of it. She knows how to collect green leaves for her manure, and to help the fuel reserve on the hill slope above her house grow by a system of lopping the branches and leaving the standards. She knows also how to collect her areca nuts, and to prepare them for the market, and to collect her cocoanuts, and haggle for a high price for them with her customers. There is, in fact, not a single thing about agriculture which the South Canara man knows, and which the South Canara woman does not know. It is a common sight, as one passes through a paddy flat or along the adjoining slope, to see housewives bringing out handfuls