Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 7.djvu/285

 WUDDURS. (405)

HE Wuddurs are one of the wandering tribes of Southern India. They have no settled habitations, and live in huts ingeniously made of a reedy grass, which is woven into a kind of mat with thread, and which, stretched over a frame, forms the roof. The sides are made of the same, an aperture being left for the door. These habitations are perfectly water-tight, even in the heaviest rain. The only furniture of the hut is a bedstead with patchwork quilts, a stool or two, and a few cooking utensils. Yet Wuddurs are not poor by any means. They are very industrious, and earn much money by their work, both in earth and in quarrying stone. Their camps are easily moved, and re-pitched, and in a very short time the huts are taken down, the mats rolled up, and the whole household property laden on their asses, which all possess, or on the small cars drawn by buffaloes which belong to the stonecutters, and are transported to another locality. There are two tribes of Wuddurs, or Wuddiwars; one, which is esteemed the highest, do stone-work and quarry stones. In granite countries they have the art of burning the granite till it rises in flakes, which are of various thicknesses, according to the grain of the rock, and these flakes are afterwards broken into building stones, square or oblong, from the size of ordinary bricks to larger sizes: the fracture is usually clean, and they require no dressing except with the hammer. In trap formations, nodules of basalt are broken with a large hammer, and dressed; but in many cases the Wuddurs make holes in the native rock from two to three inches square and deep, into which they insert steel wedges, and drive them in with hammers till the rock splits. By these means the Wuddurs can produce large monoliths, and the system of work is precisely the same as that which prevailed in the great quarries of Egypt. The stone Wuddurs also build walls of houses of a coarse kind with stone and mud, the stone facings of embankments of tanks, and, in some instances, the sluices as well. They likewise make and dress mill stones, make mortars and pestles, in short, do everything