om he should revere as his _guru_ or preceptor. She
named a man and the husband went out and bowed to him and he then
went in to the woman and lay with her. The process would be repeated,
the woman naming different men until she was exhausted. Sometimes,
if the head priest of the sect was present, he would nominate the
favoured men, who were known as _gurus_. Next morning the married
couple were seated together in the courtyard, and the head priest or
his representative tied a _kanthi_ or necklace of wooden beads round
their necks, repeating an initiatory text. [389] This silly doggerel,
as shown in the footnote, is a good criterion of the intellectual
capacity of the Satnamis. It is also said that during his annual
progresses it was the custom for the chief priest to be allowed
access to any of the wives of the Satnamis whom he might select,
and that this was considered rather an honour than otherwise by the
husband. But the Satnamis have now become ashamed of such practices,
and, except in a few isolated localities, they have been abandoned.

6. Divisions of the Satnamis.

Ghasi Das or his disciples seem to have felt the want of a more ancient
and dignified origin for the sect than one dating only from living
memory. They therefore say that it is a branch of that founded by Rohi
Das, a Chamar disciple of the great liberal and Vaishnavite reformer
Ramanand, who flourished at the end of the fourteenth century. The
Satnamis commonly call themselves Rohidasi as a synonym for their name,
but there is no evidence that Rohi Das ever came to Chhattisgarh,
and there is practically no doubt, as already pointed out, that Ghasi
Das simply appropriated the doctrine of the Satnami sect of northern
India. One of the precepts of Ghasi Das was the prohibition of the
use of tobacco, and this has led to a split in the sect, as many of
his disciples found the rule too hard for them. They returned to their
_chongis_ or leaf-pipes, and are hence called Chungias; they say that
in his later years Ghasi Das withdrew the prohibition. The Chungias
have also taken to idolatry, and their villages contain stones covered
with vermilion, the representations of the village deities, which the
true Satnamis eschew. They are considered lower than the Satnamis,
and intermarriage between the two sections is largely, though not
entirely, prohibited. A Chungia can always become a Satnami if he
ceases to smoke by breaking a cocoanut in the presence of