Note 167 — K (continued 5)

It was stated by the officers of the Meriah Agency that there was reason to believe that the Rāja of Jeypore, when he was installed on his father’s death in 1860–61, sacrificed a girl thirteen years of age at the shrine of the goddess Durga in the town of Jeypore.167 It is noted, in the Gazetteer of the Vizagapatam district (1907), that “goats and buffaloes now-a-days take the place of human Meriah victims, but the belief in the superior efficacy of the latter dies hard, and every now and again revives. When the Rampa rebellion of 1879–80 spread in this district, several cases of human sacrifice occurred in the disturbed tracts. In 1880, two persons were convicted of attempting a Meriah sacrifice near Ambadāla in Bissamkatak. In 1883, a man (a beggar and a stranger) was found at daybreak murdered in one of the temples in Jeypore, in circumstances which pointed to his having been slain as a Meriah; and, as late as 1886, a formal enquiry showed that there were ample grounds for the suspicion that the kidnapping of victims still went on in Bastar.” As recently as 1902, a petition was presented to the District Magistrate of Ganjam, asking him to sanction the performance of a human sacrifice. The memory of the abandoned practice is kept green by one of the Kondh songs, for a translation of which we are indebted to Mr. J. E. Friend-Pereira.168