Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/288

266 One is apt to think the king's highway free to all and everyone. It is not so at all, and people who are even higher in the social scale than Nayâdis dare not use it on the ultra-conservative south-west coast of India. As for the Nayâdis, their sole métier in life is standing in the fields 100 to 150 yards away from a high-road, howling at the top of their voices to passers-by to throw alms into their little cloth, which is spread out by the roadside. When no one is in sight, the Nayâdi runs and collects his harvest of small copper coins. A Nayâdi cannot approach a Brahman nearer than 300 feet without polluting him; that is to say, a Brahman finding himself ever so little within this distance from the Nayâdi would be obliged to bathe and change his clothes, putting on clean ones, and performing various ceremonies before he could mix with his fellows, enter his house, partake of food, or engage in any of the ordinary affairs of life. And, of course, if a Nayâdi were to approach a Brahman within ordinary conversation distance, the consequences to the latter would be unspeakable. It is odd that it is the young male Nayâdi, and not the female, who wears a token denoting eligibility for marriage; a fact not found in this book. Although the bride price is only one rupee (one shilling and fourpence), the young Nayâdi is often obliged to wear for a long time his white shell ring, suspended to a string, round his neck. One does not wish to multiply omissions, however important, but there is one more which it would be as well, perhaps, to state here. It is this, and probably a sign of racial differentiation; the people of all the very inferior castes of the plains, as well as the genuine hill folk of the Malabar coast, are unable to pronounce the Malayâli guttural 'r,' transliterated by 'zh'; they make it 'l.' It is always so, even though the Malayâli language has been the vernacular for generations. Mr. Anantha Krishna Iyer speaks of the Puliyans as Hindus; but they are never classed as Hindus: the line between Hindus and those outside the pale is drawn far above Puliyans. He classes Tîyyans and Chôvans with Izhuvans. It is invariably a claim of the latter that they are identical with the Tîyyans, but surely there is racial difference between, say, the N. Malabar Tîyyan, whose stature averages 165.0, and nasal index 77.7°, and the Izhuvan, whose stature is 159.6, and nasal index 82°? The Chovans are probably lower in the scale; there has