Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/45

 ÔḌIKAL AND OTHER CUSTOMS OF THE MUPPANS.

BY F. FAWCETT.

(Read at Meeting, June 1st, 1910.)

Muppans are a hill-tribe of Wynaad, Malabar. They live by cultivation and by collecting jungle produce. Their villages usually consist of a few huts of rude construction, but I have seen one in which there were about twelve in sets of four as near to each other as the uneven surface of the ground allowed. The huts, with the exception of a roof of grass thatch, are constructed entirely of bamboos, which, for the walls, had been opened out flat and, as it were, woven. As there is no plastering of mud, these dwellings must be very cold and comfortless in the monsoon. Each one is merely a covered-in room about twelve to fourteen feet in length and about eight feet high to the top of the ridge of the roof. The doors of some of the huts face south, while in Malabar generally houses never face the south,—the unlucky quarter where the dead are buried or burned.

Like most jungle people the men are familiar with the bow and arrow, but they are not regular hunters. On one occasion I saw a number of boys playing a game called Chôrâyyi, the players standing in a row and shooting with small bows and unfeathered arrows at a roughly-fashioned disc of bark which a man, standing some twenty yards in front and a little to the right of the row of boys, threw in front of them. The man threw the disc overhand, and,