Pilinörtiti
In this ceremony a man gives a silver ring. The offering is differentiated from those already described in that it may be given to bring about the removal of misfortunes which are not due to any offence committed by the man. In some cases, however, the ceremony may be undertaken as an atonement for an offence. Kòdrner, my guide, had to give a ring to the dairy at Kiudr in the general distribution of penalties which followed my visit.
The custom of pilinörtiti is limited to certain villages or clans. According to some accounts it is only followed at the villages of Kiudr and Kanòdrs, noted for the special sanctity of their dairies. According to others the ceremony is performed by the Karsol at the dairy of Kuzhu, and at Nidrsi I was shown a small stone, almost completely buried in the ground, which was called the pilinörtkars, and this indicates that the ceremony was also at one time performed at this village. The ceremony is certainly of especial importance at Kiudr, and the following description is of the procedure at this place.
If a man has no children, or if he becomes ill, or if his buffaloes give no milk, he may make a vow to do pilinörtiti. If he is a member of the Kuudrol, the people of the kudr to which he does not belong go to the dairy. The offerer of the ring sleeps the night before in the dairy of his village and goes [307]in the morning with one companion to Kiudr, taking care that no one sees him by the way. Both must go without food.
On reaching Kiudr the two men go to the stream called Keikudr12 which flows between the dairy and the dwelling-huts, and after washing hands and face in the stream they wait there. The people of the other kudr who are in the dairy light a lamp and place it between the two rooms, and then one goes to the door of the dairy and calls out three times “Pilinörtpol bon!” The men at the stream are not within sight, but they hear the summons and come to the front of the dairy. The men in the dairy lay the tuni of the dairyman at the threshold and the pilinörtpol places the ring on the cloth and bows down, touching the cloth with his forehead, and prays as follows:—
Tânenmâ, May it be well, târmâmâ; may it be well; atch little kar calf tâ give mâ, may, atch little mokh son tâ give mâ; may; kar calf kulâth, not refuse milk, kar calf kuleiti take milk tâ give mâ, may, kar calf nesâth, not kick away, neseiti stand tâ give mâ; may; opath once ûtm meal âthi it is punerd twelve kwar years arki vow madi; will; nû may there be ârk mâ; no disease; nudri may there be ârk mâ; no trouble; kazun may there be ârk mâ; no kazun; per may there be ârk mâ. no Tamil.
The free rendering of this prayer was said to be as follows:—
“May it be well; may my buffaloes have calves; may I have children; may my calves have milk, and may they not be kicked away by their mothers; as surely as I am shortly to take food, do I make my vow for ever and ever; may I and my buffaloes be free from disease; may no evil befall me; may there be no kazun (see p. 403) to kill me; may no Tamil or other outsiders come to disturb me.”
The last clause was said by Samuel to be interpreted: [308]“Let me not get into trouble with the government,” but it is probably much older than this interpretation would indicate, and refers to the former dislike of the Todas to any intercourse with people other than the Badagas and Kotas. “Twelve years” is a common expression for an indefinitely long time, and may be translated “for ever.” The practice of combining positive and negative sentences as in this prayer is one which seems to be not uncommon in the Toda language. It will be noticed that several of the clauses are identical with those of the prayer ordinarily used in the dairy.
When the pilinörtpol has finished his prayer he rises, and the palikartmokh takes up the tuni and the ring and puts them in the dairy. Then the pilinörtpol and his companions go into the outer room of the dairy and take food prepared by the dairyman, after which they go to a wood near Kiudr and stay there till after nightfall, when they make their way home, taking care not to be seen by anyone.
If the ring is given by one of the Kuudrol it becomes the property of the men of the other kudr, but as its value is very small, only from four annas to two rupees, it is not divided, but is usually taken by the man of the kudr who takes the chief part in the ceremony.
The ceremony as described above resembles those of irnörtiti and tuninörtiti, in that the offering is given by a man of one division of the clan to the members of the other division.
Pilinörtiti may also be undertaken by a man as an atonement for wrong-doing, and in the only case of the kind of which I know, the wrong-doer, although he belonged to the Kars clan of the Tartharol, had to make the offering to Kiudr. In this case there was no question of the ring passing from one kudr to another, and it probably became the property of the man connected with Kiudr who took the chief part in conducting the ceremony.
Various unfortunate events which occurred during my visit to the Todas illustrate very well the working of the regulations which have been described in this chapter. One of these misfortunes befell Kutadri, who went with me to visit the Kundahs, the headquarters of the Pan clan. Mr. [309]Mackenzie, with whom I was staying, had shot a sambhar, and Kutadri joined others in making a hearty meal on the flesh of the animal. The next day he felt far from well, and searching in his mind for the cause of his sufferings, his suspicions did not fall on the sambhar, but wavered between sorcery of the Kurumbas and the anger of the gods of the locality, because he had shown me certain sacred features of the land. He was unable to continue to act as my guide, rendering my visit to the Kundahs largely fruitless, and on his return home he frightened himself into serious illness.
Teitnir, who had told me many things, but, above all, had dared to show me the erkumptthpimi sacrifice, lost his wife a few days after this ceremony. She had given birth to a dead child, and in spite of obviously serious fever, she had gone through a trying ceremony connected with removal to the seclusion-hut, and had walked a long way to this hut. Two days later she died.
Kaners, who had been my chief informant on the procedure of the ti dairy, awoke one morning to find the dairy of his village burnt. No human agency seemed possible, and no doubt was entertained that it was another manifestation of the displeasure of the gods.
Numerous councils were held, and the diviners were consulted, on this occasion Midjkudr and Tadrners. They found that Kutadri’s misfortunes were due to his having revealed to me secrets about Pan, although, as a matter of fact, his illness had prevented his telling me anything of importance. It was decided that he was to give a buffalo to the Pan ti.
The death of Teitnir’s wife was found to have two causes.13 The first was that Teitnir had shown me the erkumptthpimi ceremony; the second was that he had gone with his wife to Lake View, the house of the Zenana mission, and had stayed there for several months, Teitnir having done this in order to avoid losing his wife according to the terersthi custom (see Chap. XXII). For the first offence Teitnir was to do irnörtiti to his clan, the Kuudrol, and for the second offence he was to give a buffalo to the Amatol, [310]his pia, or grandfather, being especially singled out among them. The latter penalty was paid before I left the hills. Teitnir devoted a sacred buffalo (pasthir) to his grandfather, and as a sign that he had done so, he did kalmelpudithti to Ivievan (52), one of the chief men of his family. The giving of the buffalo was followed by a feast.
The teuol were also consulted on account of the burning of the dairy belonging to the village of Kaners. They decided that the loss of the dairy was due to spontaneous combustion, “had burnt of itself,” because Kaners had revealed to me the secrets of the ti, and, as he had told me chiefly the procedure of the Nòdrs ti, he was sentenced to do irnörtiti to this institution.
Kòdrner, who had been my general assistant, was directed to perform pilinörtiti to Kiudr, and the teuol also said that all the Todas were to do irnörtiti to the ti dairies because the elders had not intervened and put an end to the revelations which the people had been making to me.
Unfortunately these decisions of the teuol were only given out very shortly before I left the hills. Indeed, the divination appeared to be still going on when I left, probably in order to obtain further light on the troubles. I had therefore no opportunity of witnessing the various ceremonies which were to result from my visit. I hoped that Samuel might have been able to see some of them, but the only proceedings of which he was able to give me any account took place on January 5th, nearly a month after my departure, when all the Todas assembled at the ti mad of Mòdr, where the buffaloes of the Nòdrs ti were standing, and prayed to the ti to pardon them for the sins they had committed in revealing its secrets. After praying, they took food in the pül of the dairy, and did not return home till the evening. I was not told of the existence of any such ceremony of atonement by prayer only, and I strongly suspect it was an innovation adopted in order to avoid the expense of the general irnörtiti to the ti which the diviners had prescribed.
Several of the offerings which were thus ordered by the teuol seem clearly to have been of the nature of punishment. Kòdrner was to do pilinörtiti because he had helped me, and [311]the Todas in general were to give buffaloes to the ti dairies. When I was first told about these offerings, I was inclined to regard them in general as punishments and to treat them as if they were social regulations. With further knowledge it seemed clear that they were distinctly of a religious nature, and were really sin offerings designed to propitiate the gods and bring about the removal of misfortunes which had come upon the offenders. I have therefore described these offerings in the same chapter as the ceremony which is clearly a sacrifice.
The variety of the irnörtiti ceremony in which a buffalo is given to the ti dairy is that which approaches most nearly to a sacrifice; the offered animal is not killed, but in going to the sacred herd of the ti, it may clearly be regarded as devoted to the service of the gods. The ceremony of pilinörtiti to the sacred dairy of Kiudr is again an example of an offering to a higher power in those cases in which the ring is given by a man of another clan so that the mechanism of the kudr does not come into play.
These clear examples of offerings to gods or sacred places are, however, very closely related to the other cases in which offerings simply pass from one division of the clan to another. It seems that we have in these offerings a good example of something which is midway between a social regulation of the nature of punishment and a definitely religious rite of propitiation of higher powers.
There are two chief possibilities. The idea of offering to a higher power may be primary, and the ceremonies of irnörtiti, &c., in which the property merely passes from one division of the clan to the other may be secondary modifications to keep property within the clan. On the other hand, the mechanism of the kudr may be primary, and irnörtiti to the ti dairy and pilinörtiti to Kiudr may be religious developments of what was originally a social regulation.
I have no information which enables me to say that one of the two possibilities is more probable than the other. The solution probably depends on the much larger question, whether the Todas are people whose religious system has developed out of the state of many primitive people where [312]social regulations exist without anything which can clearly be called a religious sanction, or whether they are a people whose religious system has degenerated from one higher than that they now possess.
If the former supposition is correct, it is probable that the religious sanction has been added to the system of social punishment, which seems to be all which clearly exists in the offerings when these are kept within the clan. If the latter supposition is correct, it seems more likely that the whole mechanism of the kudris a device by which offerings which should be made to a higher power may remain the property of the clan.
The fact that the giving of the buffalo or other offering is accompanied by prayer and the various restrictions of a more or less religious nature which accompany the ceremonial show that at the present time the ceremony has in all cases a very definitely religious character, but it is quite possible to regard these features in two ways, either as accretions to a system of social punishment or as vestiges of what was once a purely religious sacrifice in which the offerings were given to the gods. [313]