Note 200 — K (continued 6)

According to Balfour,200 the Koravas, or a certain section of them, i.e., the Kunchi Koravas, were known as Yerkal Koravar, and they called the language they spoke Yerkal. The same authority, writing of the Yerkalwadu, alludes to them as Kurshiwanloo, and goes on to say that they style themselves Yerkal, and give the same appellation to the language in which they hold communication. The word Yerkal here undoubtedly stands for Yerukala, and Kurshi for Korcha. It is evident from this, supported by authorities such as Wilson, Campbell, Brown and Shortt, that the doubt mentioned by the Census Superintendent in regard to the identity of the Yerukala and Korava had not arisen when the Cyclopædia of India was published, and it is the subsequent reports of later investigators that are responsible for it. The divergencies of practices reported must be reckoned with, and accounted for. They may be due to local customs existing in widely separated areas. It is contended that the Koravas and Yerukalas do not intermarry or eat together. A Korava, who has made a permanent home in a village in the south, if asked whether he would marry a Yerukala, would most 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 rises in a common ratio with other commodities in a time of scarcity.