Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 125

PLEDGING OF CROPS
85
drinking and a few more for eating purposes, and some
iron farm implements.
They live in thatched mud huts,
rather more commodious and a little less filthy than those
previously described. Weavers, barbers, washermen, and
other workmen who cater for the wants of the public may
also, for the most part, be included under this head.
The cultivators of this second class, although better off
than those of the first, find it hard to make both ends
meet even in the best seasons. They are obliged to sell at
least half their crop beforehand at low prices, to enable
them to pay their taxes, and the miserly usurers who profit
by their poverty leave them hardly sufficient for the wants
of their family during six or eight months of the year
in fact, many of them have only food enough to last four
months. Some never even gather the harvest from the field
they have sown, for as soon as the corn has formed in the
ear they are day by day driven by hunger to cut off some of
the green ears, with which they make a sort of soup.
Con-
sequently, by harvest time there is nothing but stubble left
to gather, and to save themselves the trouble of cutting it
they merely turn three or four cows into the field to graze.
If by dint of self-denial they allow their crops to grow up
intact, it is not they who benefit by them, for as soon as
the grain has been threshed the money-lenders step in
and take their due, and afterwards come those who lent
them grain when they had nothing to eat, and demand
payment of the original quantity plus twenty- five per cent,
interest
that is to say, a man borrowing twenty measures
of corn has to repay twenty-five.
The grain takes about four months to ripen, and this
period is called the time of "prosperity, or sukha kala. It is
about the only season in the year when the poor have
enough of even the coarsest kinds of food, consisting of
various sorts of small pulse, much the same as that which
is used in Europe to fatten pigs and fowls, and in India
to feed horses.
Hence the well-known proverb, Do not
approach a Pariah during the sukha kala season, nor go
within range of an ox during the Divuligai
This is
;
;
'
V
1
This feast will be specially mentioned later on. Its celebration takes
November, when the country is clothed in verdure. Dubois.
It is also called Dccpavali and Divali.
Ed.
place in
—