Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/93

Rh Among the Badagas, bride and bridegroom pour water on each other's feet; the bride makes small pools of water, and when asked by her relatives who made them, replies "My father and my mother". Among the Patānē Prabhus, the kinsmen of the bride wash the feet of the bridegroom before he starts for the wedding. Among the Chakmas, an elder sprinkles rice water over the bride and bridegroom, pronounces them man and wife, and says a charm used for fruitfulness. The use of water in gift-giving, and in particular for the giving of the bride, may be connected with the same idea.

The colouring of the water with red or yellow dyes adds to the efficacy of the charm.

The sexual conflict, the fight between men and women in the Mathura observances, and the combat round the pole by the Gonds and allied tribes, seem to rest on varied modes of thought. It is, in part, probably merely orgiastic, associated with the license and relaxation of moral control which is common in such observances, the apotropaeic power of indecency being familiar in primitive ritual. The Bhīls, as we have seen, abduct girls at the Holi festival. Or, again, the blows administered by the women to the men in the Gond rite may be interpreted as a fertility charm.

The object of the pole-climbing is obscure. In one sense, it may be grouped with the custom of leaping over the fire as a mode of promoting the growth of crops: the higher the man climbs, the more vigorous is the life of the plant. A similar belief may account for the custom in the Central Provinces, when children and young men swing and walk