Fetching Home the Ears of Grain
In the days before and especially after hundi sitla, the individual houses (gulai ga) complete the ritual fetching home of the first ears of grain (ker anbar, gile re ring*) that the pujari and randari have already performed in an abbreviated form for the village as a whole (matam).
Late in the morning, the field owner (saukar)[1] [2]and sacrificer prepares a cooking hearth on the upper bank of the river and a sacrificial platform lower down in the rice paddy itself, with the two figures of jal kamni and patal kamni. One of the figures is provided with a fragment of a glass armband and so marked as a “woman.” Bidi (cigarettes), which are more often smoked by men, are also sometimes laid on the platform. Most of my informants describe jal kamni and patal kamni as a married couple. The pattern is drawn in red and black, differentiating it from the patterns for hundi and pat kanda, which are exclusively white. After an egg has been broken and a white rooster sacrificed for the river gods, the sacrificer cuts the ears of grain from two rice plants and goes to the nearby threshing floor. The ears are briefly laid down there, together with a bottle gourd and a sickle, and after a brief invocation, the sacrificer hacks the gourd in half in order to ward off potential harmful magic. At the cooking hearth, the sacrificer - here pujari and randan in one - breaks several grains of rice off of the ears and adds these grains to the rice that is already cooking. The rice and some meat are prepared at the edge of the field in a new clay pot and then, after the betisong, taken back to the house, where the rooster is fully cut up and cooked, and the tsoru is consumed by the members of the house.[3] [4] The two ears of grain are fastened to doron deli and over the entrance to the house, where they remain until they fall apart.
- [1] The Gadaba take the “bride” from kamni, but they do not ritually give a bride in return, atleast explicitly. I heard from a number of men, however, that in a certain Gadaba village, a youngGadaba girl was given alive to the river as a bride every other year. She would be laid down atthe edge of the riverbed in the rainy season, they said, and swept away by the water. Independent of the truth of this story, it makes clear that the gift of a “bride” to the river gods is atleast conceivable.
- [2] The real saukar of the field are the river gods, the Gadaba say.
- [3] The ritual is often simplified by cooking only the rice in the field, the meat having alreadybeen prepared in the house. In this case, only rice “cooked” in a folded leaf (purunge) and somemeat from the gullet are prepared and served to the gods as betisong.
- [4] As a rule, each house harvests its own fields and conducts the rituals at its own threshingfloor, which is different from the one for the dry fields. Brothers sometimes carry out the harvestand the rituals together, however, in which case the eldest brother is the sacrificer.
