Public-domain ebook
Omens and Superstitions of Southern India
Language: en3,895 downloads on Project Gutenberg
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In: Mythology, Legends & Folklore·Archaeology & Anthropology
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #35690.
About this book
Edgar Thurston’s Omens and Superstitions of Southern India is a scholarly survey of the “psychical life” of peoples across the Madras Presidency, Travancore and Cochin. Drawing on his earlier ethnographic notes, the author expands a previously sketchy chapter on omens, animal superstitions, the evil eye, charms and sorcery, weaving together material from his massive Castes and Tribes of Southern India series, official gazetteers, society journals and personal correspondence. The book opens with a detailed preface that explains the breadth of the territory, about 182,000 square miles and nearly 48 million inhabitants, and the methodological reliance on both field observations and a wealth of documentary sources. From there it launches into a systematic catalogue, beginning with omens drawn from native calendars, literary references in Kalidasa and the Raghuvamsa, and a litany of ritual practices involving trembling animals, sacrificial goats and symbolic gestures.
Written in the early twentieth‑century colonial academic style, Thurston’s prose is meticulous, descriptive and often quoted verbatim from native informants, giving the work a tone of earnest documentation rather than sensationalism. Readers with an interest in historical anthropology, South Asian folklore, or the study of belief systems will appreciate the exhaustive lists, illustrative plates and the careful cross‑referencing of rituals across Dravidian groups. The volume also appeals to scholars of religious studies and historians of British‑India who seek primary‑source insight into how omens and superstitions shaped everyday life in the southern subcontinent.
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This book deals mainly with some aspects of what may be termed the psychical life of the inhabitants of the Madras Presidency, and the Native States of Travancore and Cochin. In my "Ethnographic Notes in Southern India" (1906), I stated that the confused chapter devoted to omens, animal superstitions, evil eye, charms, sorcery, etc., was a mere outline sketch of a group of subjects, which, if worked up, would furnish material for a volume. This chapter has now been remodelled, and supplemented by notes collected since its publication, and information which lies buried in the seven bulky volumes of my encyclopaedic "Castes and Tribes of Southern India" (1909). The area dealt with (roughly, 182,000 square miles, with a population of 47,800,000) is so vast that I have had perforce to supplement the personal knowledge acquired in the course of wandering expeditions in various parts of Southern India, and in other ways, by recourse to the considerable mass of information, which is hidden away in official reports, gazetteers, journals of societies, books, etc.
To the many friends and correspondents, European and Indian, who have helped me in the accumulation of facts, and those whose writings I have made liberal use of, I would once more express collectively, and with all sincerity, my great sense of indebtedness. My thanks are due to Mr L. K. Anantha Krishna Iyer for supplying me with the illustrations of Malabar yantrams.
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