Page:Castes and tribes of southern India, Volume 5.djvu/537

Rh men by flogging or expulsion from the caste. In the Karūr tāluk, the ordinary Pallans are called Manvettaikārans (mamoty or digging-tool men)."

The Pallans have their own washermen and barbers, who are said to be mainly recruited from the Sōzhia section, which, in consequence, holds an inferior position; and a Pallan belonging to another section would feel insulted if he was called a Sōzhian.

When a Pallan girl, at Coimbatore, attains puberty, she is bathed, dressed in a cloth brought by a washer-woman, and presented with flowers and fruits by her relations. She occupies a hut constructed of cocoanut leaves, branches of Pongamia glabra, and wild sugarcane (Saccharum arundinaceum). Her dietary includes jaggery (crude sugar) and milk and plantains. On the seventh day she is again bathed, and presented with another cloth. The hut is burnt down, and for three days she occupies a corner of the pial of her home. On the eleventh day she is once more bathed, presented with new cloths by her relations, and permitted to enter the house. It is stated by Dr. G. Oppert * that "at a Pallar wedding, before the wedding is actually performed, the bridegroom suddenly leaves his house and starts for some distant place, as if he had suddenly abandoned his intention of marrying, in spite of the preparations that had been made for the wedding. His intended father-in-law intercepts the young man on his way, and persuades him to return, promising to give his daughter as a wife. To this the bridegroom consents." I have not met with this custom in the localities in which the Pallans have been examined.