Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/300

BEDAR OR BOYA have kept up social intercourse. They do not, however,eat fowl or pork, but partake of beef; and the Myāsa Bēdas are the only Hindu class among whom the rite of circumcision is performed,* on boys of ten or twelve years of age. These customs, so characteristic of the Mussalmans, seem to have been imbibed when the members of this sub-caste were included in the hordes of Haidar Ali. Simultaneously with the circumcision,other rites, such as the pānchagavyam, the burning of the tongue with a nim (Melia Azadirachta) stick, etc. (customs pre-eminently Brahmanical), are likewise practised prior to the youth being received into communion. Among their other peculiar customs, the exclusion from their ordinary dwellings of women in child-bed and in periodical sickness, may be noted. The Myāsa Bēdas are said to scrupulously avoid liquor or every kind, and eat the- flesh of only two kinds of birds, viz., gauja (grey partridge), and lavga (rock-bush quail)." Of circumcision among the Myāsa Bēdars it is noted, in the Gazetteer of the Bellary district, that they practise this rite round about Rayadrūg and Gudekōta. "These Myāsas seem quite proud of the custom, and scout with scorn the idea of marrying into any family in which it is not the rule. The rite is performed when a boy is seven or eight. A very small piece of the skin is cut off by a man of the caste, and the boy is then kept for eleven days in a separate hut, and touched by no one. His food is given him on a piece of stone. On the twelfth day he is bathed, given a new cloth, and brought back to the house, and his old cloth, and the stone on which his food was served, are thrown away. His relations in a body then take him to a tangēdu