Note 45 — S (continued 2)

Those Shānāns who are engaged in the palmyra (Borassus flabellifer) forests in extracting the juice of the palm-tree climb with marvellous activity and dexterity. There is a proverb that, if you desire to climb trees, you must be born a Shānān. A palmyra climber will, it has been calculated, go up from forty to fifty trees, each forty to fifty feet high, three times a day. The story is told by Bishop Caldwell of a man who was sitting upon a leaf-stalk at the top of a palmyra palm in a high wind, when the stalk gave way, and he came down to the ground safely and quietly, sitting on the leaf, which served the purpose of a natural parachute. Woodpeckers are called Shānāra kurivi by birdcatchers, because they climb trees like Shānārs. “The Hindus,” the Rev. (afterwards Canon) A. Margöschis writes,45 “observe a special day at the commencement of the palmyra season, when the jaggery season begins. Bishop Caldwell adopted the custom, and a solemn service in church was held, when one set of all the implements used in the occupation of palmyra-climbing was brought to the church, and presented at the altar. Only the day was changed from that observed by the Hindus. The perils of the palmyra-climber are great, and there are many fatal accidents by falling from trees forty to sixty feet high, so that a religious service of the kind was particularly acceptable, and peculiarly appropriate to our people.” The conversion of a Hindu into a Christian ceremonial rite, in connection with the dedication of ex votos, is not devoid of interest. In a note46 on the Pariah caste in Travancore, the Rev. S. Mateer narrates a legend that the Shānāns are descended from Adi, the daughter of a Pariah woman at Karuvur, who taught them to climb the palm tree, and prepared a medicine which would protect them from falling from the high trees. The squirrels also ate some of it, and enjoy a similar immunity.