Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 7.djvu/74

KOORMEES. and only resorted to in case of barrenness of the first wife. The women are excellent mothers and housewives, generally neat and clean in their persons, and keeping their houses well; they do not affect fine clothes or many ornaments, though they have some for great occasions. The wife helps her husband in much of the field work, weeding, picking cotton, watching the fields, and helping at harvest time. She is not much of a needlewoman, but can make her own bodices and her husband's ordinary jackets; other more ambitious garments, such as the wadded coats worn by the figure in the Photograph, being committed to the village tailor. Home occupations are various, for she gets up early and helps to grind the daily corn, and to make the bread, to have hot water ready for her husband's bath, and to bathe herself; to provide breakfast, after the little family worship, when she receives the pure caste mark with her children from her husband. When he is gone, she may have to go to the well, or tank, or brook, to wash the clothes of the house, to wash the floors with liquid mud, plastered on by her hands; to churn butter, if there be cows or buffaloes, and to boil the butter into ghee; and after all is finished, she can sit in the shade of her house wall, or under a tree or porch, and join a party of gossips who spin, and her wheel goes merrily round till evening, when she lights the house lamp, and her hungry husband has to get his dinner. This is the everyday life of a Koormee woman wherever she is found. She is rarely handsome, but she is strong, and, if much exposed, becomes hard-featured. Certainly hers is no life of sloth or luxurious indulgence, and though there are many Koormee dames, whose position enables them to keep both male and female servants, she never shrinks from her own share of the household work, but performs all the delicate portions of it herself, and some of the rougher, too, in her turn.

In some parts of the country Koormees are averse to bearing arms, or to using them. Many have none in their possession; but there are others where the general population is of a more martial character, and the Koormee takes his place among them; for there were troublous times long ago, when his ancestors ploughed their fields with their matchiocks hanging at their backs, and when they watched their ripening crops armed with sword and buckler. Time and change have not altered the simple, manly, patient Koormee; what he was, 3,000 years ago, nay, more perhaps, he is now.

The Kabir Punthi faith, to which so many of the Koormee population of Central India belongs, rose about 420 to 450 years ago, from one Kabir or Kubeer, who preached against the Brahminical faith and distinction of caste, idolatry, and the Pooranic belief, and thus established a sect which has increased far and wide, and extended to many parts of the Deccan. The apostle of the sect in succession now lives in Kawarda, a town of the province of Chattees Gurh, and has numerous priests and disciples under him; and its votaries have continued to