morning with the same spirit
and cheerfulness as if they had spent the whole night in refreshing
sleep. At eleven o'clock they come home, eat their meal, and stretched
out in the verandah sleep like logs until two, when poked and kicked
about unmercifully by the people of the house, they reluctantly get
up with heavy eyes and weary limbs to resume their work."

27. Social rules

The Oraons do not now admit outsiders into the tribe. There is no
offence for which a man is permanently put out of caste, but a woman
living with any man other than an Oraon is so expelled. Temporary
expulsion is awarded for the usual offences. The head of the caste
_panchayat_ is called Panua, and when an offender is reinstated,
the Panua first drinks water from his hand, and takes upon himself
the burden of the erring one's transgression. For this he usually
receives a fee of five rupees, and in some States the appointment is
in the hands of the Raja, who exacts a fine of a hundred rupees or
more from a new candidate. The Oraons eat almost all kinds of food,
including pork, fowls and crocodiles, but abstain from beef. Their
status is very low among the Hindus; they are usually made to live
in a separate corner of the village, and are sometimes not allowed to
draw water from the village well. As already stated, the dress of the
men consists only of a narrow wisp of cloth round the loins. Some of
them say, like the Gonds, that they are descended from the subjects
of Rawan, the demon king of Ceylon; this ancestry having no doubt
in the first instance been imputed to them by the Hindus. And they
explain that when Hanuman in the shape of a giant monkey came to
the assistance of Rama, their king Rawan tried to destroy Hanuman
by taking all the loin-cloths of his subjects and tying them soaked
in oil to the monkey's tail with a view to setting them on fire and
burning him to death. The device was unsuccessful and Hanuman escaped,
but since then the subjects of Rawan and their descendants have never
had a sufficient allowance of cloth to cover them properly.

28. Character

"The Oraons," Colonel Dalton says, "if not the most virtuous, are
the most cheerful of the human race. Their lot is not a particularly
happy one. They submit to be told that they are especially created as
a labouring class, and they have had this so often dinned into their
ears that they believe and admit it. I believe they relish work if
the taskmaster be not ov