Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/136

126 Madras, again, the intense dread of personal pollution shown by the Nambūtiri Brahmans and Nāyars causes them to build isolated houses, each enclosed in its own compound, with tank, temple, and snake-shrine, where the inmates live safe from the pollution of low-caste neighbours. With the same object an outer porch is often built where such undesirable visitors may be received. This isolation has sometimes a practical result. In the hill tracts of Mysore "human dwellings are few and far between. A cottage here and there, picturesquely situated on the rising ground bordering the rice fields, and hidden amidst plantations of areca palm and plantains, marks the homestead of a farmer and his family. Towns there are none, and villages of even a dozen houses rare. The incessant rain of the monsoon months confines the people to their own farms. Hence each householder surrounds himself with all he needs, and succeeds in making himself independent of the external world. The conditions of this isolated life are insupportable to immigrants from the plains." A Hindu dreads nothing so much as to be separated from his kinsmen and to be deprived of the protection of his local gods.

Again, among the Mughals, the splendid halls of audience, marvels of work in marble and mosaic, open rooms, the roof supported by lines of delicately carved pillars, follow the traditions of the great reception tents used by the Mongols in Central Asia. This was the pure pan-Asiatic type, common to Nineveh, Persepolis, the palace of the Great Khan who received Marco Polo, and the Winter Palace at Peking. When these Central Asian people settled in the Indian plains, the conditions of zenana life, and in some cases the dread of assassination or outrage, caused them to adopt the plan of building small rooms,