ass Brahmans as priests, and worship the
Hindu deities. When a man wishes to arrange a match for his son he
takes a basket of wheat-cakes and proceeding to the house of the girl's
father sets them down outside. If the match is acceptable the girl's
mother comes and takes the cakes into the house and the betrothal
is then considered to be ratified. At the wedding the bridegroom
smears vermilion seven times on the parting of the bride's hair,
and the bride's younger sister then wipes a little of it off with
the end of the cloth. For this service she is paid a rupee by the
bridegroom. Divorce and the remarriage of widows are permitted. After
the birth of a child the mother is given neither food nor water for
two whole days; on the third day she gets only boiled water to drink
and on the fourth day receives some food. The period of impurity
after a birth extends to twelve days. When the navel-string drops
it is carefully put away until the next Dasahra, together with the
child's hair, which is cut on the sixth day. On the Dasahra festival
all the women of the village take them to a tank, where a lotus plant
is worshipped and anointed with oil and vermilion, and the hair and
navel-string are then buried at its roots. The dead are burned, and the
more pious keep the bones with a view to carrying them to the Ganges
or some other sacred river. Pending this, the bones are deposited in
the cow-house, and a lamp is kept burning in it every night so long
as they are there. The Rajwars believe that every man has a soul or
Pran, and they think that the soul leaves the body, not only at death,
but whenever he is asleep or becomes unconscious owing to injury or
illness. Dreams are the adventures of the soul while wandering over
the world apart from the body. They think it very unlucky for a man
to see his own reflection in water and carefully avoid doing so.

Ramosi

1. General notice

_Ramosi, Ramoshi._--A criminal tribe of the Bombay Presidency, of which
about 150 persons were returned from the Central Provinces and Berar
in 1911. They belong to the western tract of the Satpuras adjoining
Khandesh. The name is supposed to be a corruption of Ramvansi, meaning
'The descendants of Rama.' They say [584] that when Rama, the hero of
the Ramayana, was driven from his kingdom by his step-mother Kaikeyi,
he went to the forest land south of the Nerbudda. His brother Bharat,
who had been raised to the throne, could not bear to part