y, letting her hair hang
down. This is because they have become impure. But if there is no
other woman in the house and she must continue to do the household
work herself, she does not throw them away until the last day. [29]
Similarly she must not sleep on a cotton sheet or mattress during
this time because she would defile it, but she may sleep on a woollen
blanket as wool is a holy material and is not defiled. At the end of
the period she proceeds to a stream and purifies herself by bathing
and washing her head with earth. When a woman is with child for the
first time her women friends come and give her new green clothes and
bangles in the seventh month; they then put her into a swing and sing
songs. While she is pregnant she is made to work in the house so as
not to be inactive. After the birth of a child the mother remains
impure for twelve days. A woman of the Mang or Mahar caste acts as
midwife, and always breaks her bangles and puts on new ones after she
has assisted at a birth. If delivery is prolonged the woman is given
hot water and sugar or camphor wrapped in a betel-leaf, or they put
a few grains of gram into her hand and then someone takes and feeds
them to a mare, as it is thought that the woman's pregnancy has been
prolonged by her having walked behind the tethering-ropes of a mare,
which is twelve months in foal. Or she is given water to drink in
which a Sulaimani onyx or a rupee of Akbar's time has been washed;
in the former case the idea is perhaps that a passage will be made
for the child like the hole through the bead, while the virtue of the
rupee probably consists in its being a silver coin and having the image
or device of a powerful king like Akbar. Or it may be thought that as
the coin has passed from hand to hand for so long, it will facilitate
the passage of the child from the womb. A pregnant woman must not
look on a dead body or her child may be still-born, and she must not
see an eclipse or the child may be born maimed. Some believe that if
a child is born during an eclipse it will suffer from lung-disease;
so they make a silver model of the moon while the eclipse lasts and
hang it round the child's neck as a charm. Sometimes when delivery
is delayed they take a folded flower and place it in a pot of water
and believe that as its petals unfold so the womb will be opened
and the child born; or they seat the woman on a wooden bench and
pour oil on her head, her forehead being afterwards rubbe