put it in her mouth. She found it
had a saltish taste, and spat it out on the ground, and this enraged
the tutelary goddess of the village, who considered herself insulted,
and swore that all the bride's descendants should excavate salt in
atonement; and thus the caste arose.

In Bilaspur the caste permit a girl to be married to a boy younger
than herself. A price of five rupees has to be paid for the bride,
unless her family give a girl in exchange. The bridegroom is taken to
the wedding in a palanquin borne by Mahars. After its conclusion the
couple are carried back in the litter for some distance, after which
the bridegroom gets out and walks or rides. When he goes to fetch
his wife on her coming of age the bridegroom wears white clothes,
which is rather peculiar, as white is not a lucky colour among the
Hindus. The Nunias employ Brahmans at their ceremonies, and they have
a caste _panchayat_ or committee, whose headman is known as Kurha. The
Bilaspur section of the caste has two Kurhas. Here Brahmans take water
from them, but not in all places. They consider their traditional
occupation to have been the extraction of salt and saltpetre from
saline earth. At present they are generally employed in the excavation
of tanks and the embankment of fields, and they also sink wells,
build and erect houses, and undertake all kinds of agricultural labour.

Ojha

_Ojha._--The community of soothsayers and minstrels of the Gonds. The
Ojhas may now be considered a distinct subtribe, as they are looked
down upon by the Gonds and marry among themselves. They derive their
name from the word _ojh_ meaning 'entrail,' their original duty
having been, like that of the Roman augurs, to examine the entrails
of the victim immediately after it had been slain as an offering to
the gods. In 1911 the Ojhas numbered about 5000 persons distributed
over all Districts of the Central Provinces. At present the bulk
of the community subsist by beggary. The word Ojha is of Sanskrit
and not of Gond origin and is applied by the Hindus to the seers or
magicians of several of the primitive tribes, while there is also a
class of Ojha Brahmans who practise magic and divination. The Gond
Ojhas, who are the subject of this article, originally served the
Gonds and begged from them alone, but in some parts of the western
Satpuras they are also the minstrels of the Korkus. Those who beg
from the Korkus play on a kind of drum called _dhank_ while the Gond
O