ABSTRACT
THE CHAPTER SHOWING HOW THE POLIARI AND H IR A V A PEED TH E IR CHILDREN.
The women of these two classes of people* that is, the Poliari and Hirava, suckle their children for about three months, and then they feed them upon cow’s milk or goat’s milk. And when they have crammed them, without wash ing either their faces or their bodies, they throw them into the sand, in which they remain covered up from the morn ing until the evening, and as they are more black than any other colour, they cannot be distinguished from little buf falos or little bears; so that they appear misshapen things, and it seems as though they were fed by the devil. Their mothers give them food again in the evening. These people are the most agile leapers and runners in the world.1 I
1 See note on p. 142 ante. That this is not an exaggerated picture of the mode in which the offspring o f these wretched outcasts are nurtured, may be fairly inferred from the following description o f the class which they compose:— “ The creatures in human form, who constitute the number o f 100,000, the agrestic slave population o f Malabar, are dis tinguishable, like the savage tribes still to be found in some of the forests in India, from the rest o f the human race by their degraded, diminutive, squalid appearance, their dropsical pot-bellies contrasting horribly with their skeleton arms and legs, half-starved, hardly clothed children, and in a condition scarcely superior to the cattle that they follow at the plough.” ( T h o r n t o n ’s Gazetteer, sub voce Malabar.) Buchanan says : “ The only means they employ to procure a subsistence is by watching the crops, to drive away wild hogs and birds. Hunters also employ them to rouse game ; and the Achumars, who hunt by profession, give them one-fourth part o f what they kill. They gather a few wild roots, but can neither catch fish, nor any kind o f game. They sometimes procure a tortoise, and are able, by means o f hooks, to kill a crocodile. Both these am phibious animals they reckon delicious food. A ll these resources, how ever, are inadequate to their support, and they subsist chiefly by begging. They have scarcely any clothing, and every thing about them discloses want and misery. They have some wretched huts built under trees in remote places; but they generally wander about in companies of ten or twelve persons, keeping at a little distance from the road ; and when they see any passenger they set up a howl, like so many hungry dogs.”
