Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 3.djvu/488

certainly answer in the negative, probably having never heard of such a person. A circular letter, submitted to a number of Police Inspectors in several districts, produced the same sort of discrepant information complained of by the Census Superintendent. But one Inspector extracted from his notes the information that, in 1895, marriages took place between the southern Koravas of a gang from the Madura district and the Yerukalas of the Cuddapah district; and, further, that the son of one of a gang of Yerukalas in the Anantapur district married a Korcha girl from a gang belonging to the Mysore State. The consensus of opinion also goes to prove that they will eat together. Yerukalas undoubtedly place a string of black beads as a tāli round the bride's neck on marriage occasions, and the same is used by the Koravas. Information concerning the use of a turmeric-dyed string came from only one source, namely, Hosūr in the Salem district, and it was necessary even here for the string to be furnished with a round bottu, which might be a bead. A plain turmeric-soaked thread appears to be more the exception than the rule. Yerukalas are both Vaishnavites and Saivites, and a god worshipped by any one gang cannot be taken as a representative god for the whole class. Yerukalas may treat their womankind better than the southern Koravas, but this is only a matter of degree, as the morals of both are slack. The Yerukalas, occupying, as they do, the parched centre of the peninsula, more frequently devastated by famine than the localities occupied by the Koravas, may have learnt in a hard school the necessity of taking care of their wives; for, if they allowed them to pass to another man, and a drought ruined his crop and killed the cattle, he would find it hard to procure another, the probability being that the price of wives