VIZAGAPATAM
the country. At Bissamkatak he found in the house of the Tát Rája a boy who was being kept ready for sacrifice to the god of battles in the event, daily expected, of an outbreak of hostilities between the Tát Rája and his suzerain the Rája of Jeypore. At Ráyabijji (which, with its neighbour Chandrapur, was one of the chief strongholds of the custom and where an outpost of sibbandis was accordingly established) he rescued 69 meriahs, and at Gudári 46. In the hills north-east of the latter place his camp was attacked by some 300 Khonds, but they were driven off. In 1851-52 and 1852-53, 77 male and 115 female meriahs were rescued in this district, as well as 14 male and 8 female pússias, or children of female meriahs married temporarily to Khonds. Other reports show that on the site of the old fort at Rámagiri a victim was sacrificed every third year. The poor wretch was forced into a hole in the ground, three feet deep and eighteen inches square, at the bottom of which the goddess ('Goorbone-shanny') was supposed to dwell, his throat was cut and the blood allowed to flow into the hole, and afterwards his head was struck off and placed on his lap and the mutilated body covered with earth and a mound of stones until the time for the next sacrifice came round, when the bones were taken out and thrown away. In this taluk a sacrifice was also performed in 1855 to secure the release of the pátro, who had been confined by the Jeypore Rája. At Malkanagiri periodical sacrifices occurred at the four gates of the fort (see p. 281) and the ráni had a victim slain as a thank-offering for her recovery from an illness. In 1861 several sacrifices were made to celebrate the Jeypore Rája's recent succession to the estate and a girl was offered up in Jeypore itself to stay an epidemic of cholera. Sati was also openly practised, supposed sorceresses and witches were constantly put to death with the general approval of the people, and round Ráyagada infanticide was common.
Goats and buffaloes nowadays take the place of human meriah victims, but the belief in the superior efficacy of the latter dies hard and every now and again revives. When the Rampa rebel-lion of 1879-80 spread to this district, several cases of human sacrifice occurred in the disturbed tracts. In 1880 two persons were convicted of attempting a meriah sacrifice near Ambadála in Bissamkatak; in 1883 a man (a beggar and a stranger) was found at daybreak murdered in one of the temples in Jeypore in circumstances which pointed to his having been slain as a meriah; and as late as 1886 a formal enquiry showed that there were 'ample grounds for the suspicion' that the kidnapping of victims still went on in Bastar.
202
