Note 80 — Chapter III · THE GODLINGS OF DISEASE.

Again, writing of the customs prevailing among the Râjput tribes of Oudh which practise female infanticide, Gen. Sleeman writes:80—“The infant is destroyed in the room where it was born, and there buried. The room is then plastered over with cow-dung, and on the thirteenth day after, the village or family priest must cook and eat his food in this room. He is provided with wood, ghi, barley, rice, and sesamum. He boils the rice, barley, and sesamum in a brass vessel, throws the ghi over them when they are dressed, and eats the whole. This is considered as a Homa or burnt offering, and by eating it in that place, the priest is supposed to take the whole Hatya or sin upon himself, and to cleanse the family from it.”