THE PEOPLE.
dancing and singing parties (in which the young men and maidens take opposite sides and wind up with extempore verses of a personal flavour designed to provoke equally personal repartees) and in expeditions into the jungles to gather the mohwa-blossom during which, it is said, free love is the rule among the unmarried. But the great event of the month ix the beat for game. In this all the able-bodied men take part, and they stay out, often for days together, until some male animal has been shot. Should they dare to return empty-handed, the women collect and pelt them with most unsavoury missiles.
This Chaitra Saturnalia is still observed with all its ancient enthusiasm throughout the wilder part of the Agency, but in the more civilized hill-tracts, such as the Ráyagada taluk, it is falling into desuetude.
The hill people are extraordinarily superstitious, and their beliefs and fears would fill a volume. Every ill that befalls them is attributed to witchcraft; suspected witches (see p. 205) get short shrift; charms of all sorts are widely worn; and a crowd of exorcists, medicine-men and magicians live by pretending to counteract the effects of the black art. These impostors are known in different parts and among different castes as jannis and díssaris (ordinary pújáris also bear these titles, however) and as bezzua (who are eunuchs), siras and guniyas. The powers attributed to witches are almost unlimited. They are supposed, for example,to be able to transform themselves into tigers (though one foot always still retains its human shape), to be able to wither up any limb they touch, and even to draw the life-blood from their victim by sucking at one end of a string the other end of which is laid upon his breast.
Devil-drivers, who profess to cure 'possessed' women, are common and employ much the same methods as elsewhere. They seat the woman in a fog of resin-smoke and work upon or beat her until she declares the supposed desire of the devil in the way of sacrifices; and when these have been complied with one of her hairs is put in a bottle, formally shown to the village goddess, and buried in the jungle, while iron nails are driven into the threshold of the woman's house to prevent the devil's return.
Rain-making spells are numerous, from the common plan of covering a frog with green leaves and water until he croaks, to the mysterious barmarákshasi panduga of the Kalyána Singapur Khonds, which consists in making life-size mud images of women seated on the ground and holding grinding-stones between their knees, and in offering sacrifices to them.
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