Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/461

Rh generous hospitality on all great occasions, and no poor guest or Brāhman mendicant has ever had reason to complain in their houses that he is being served worse than his richer or more influential fellows. Indeed, if anything, he fares the better for his poverty. Again, they are unusually lavish in their entertainments at marriages; but their marriage feasts have the peculiarity that, whatever the total amount expended, a fixed proportion is always paid for the various items—so much per cent. for the pandal, so much per cent. for food, and so on. Indeed it is asserted that a beggar who sees the size of the marriage pandal will be able to guess to a nicety the size of the present he will get. Nor, again, at their marriages, do they haggle about the marriage settlement, since they have a scale, more or less fixed and generally recognised, which determines these matters. There is less keen competition for husbands among them, since their young men marry at an earlier age more invariably than among the other sub-divisions. The Vattimas are clannish. If a man fails to pay his dues to one of them, the word is passed round, and no other man of the subdivision will ever lend his money. They sometimes unite to light their villages by private subscription, and to see to its sanitation, and, in a number of ways, they exhibit a corporate unity. Till quite recently they were little touched by English education; but a notable exception to this general statement existed in the late Sir A. Seshayya Sāstri, who was of Vattima extraction."

The sub-divisions of the Vattimas are:—