Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/36

family gather together, and a great feast is prepared. All her friends and relations give her a small present of money, according to their means. The girl is decorated with the family jewelry, and made to look as smart as possible. For the first menstrual period, a special hut, called mutthu salai or ripe house, is constructed for the girl to live in during the period of pollution; but at subsequent periods, the ordinary menstruation hut, or unclean house, is used. All girls are said to change their names when they reach puberty. For three months after the birth of a child, the woman is considered unclean. When the infant is a month old, it is named without any elaborate ceremonial, though the female Friends of the family collect together. Sexual inter-course ceases on the establishment of pregnancy, and the husband indulges in promiscuity. Widows are not allowed to re-marry, but may live in a state of concubinage. Women are said to suckle their children till they are two or three years old, and a mother has been seen putting a lighted cigarette to the lips of a year old baby immediately after suckling it. If this is done with the intention of administering a sedative, it is less baneful than the pellet of opium administered by ayahs (nurses) to Anglo-Indian babies rendered fractious by troubles climatic, dental, and other. The Kādir men are said to consume large quantities of opium, which is sold to them illicitly. They will not allow the women or children to eat it, and have a belief that the consumption thereof by women renders them barren. The women chew tobacco. The men smoke the coarse tobacco as sold in the bazars, and showed a marked appreciation of Spencer's Torpedo cheroots, which I distributed among them for the purposes of bribery and conciliation.