OF BHARATAVARSA OR INDIA. 
69 
and kindred races. The Pnllar are described in Dr. 
Winslow's Tamil and English Dictionary as " a low 
dependent caste employed in husbandry, &c., under their 
feudal lords, a peasant tribe dwelling in the south, supposed 
to be a change of Mallar, LDmonir." Though the Pallar, 
like the Pallis and other tribes regard themselves as the 
descendants of the Pallavas once so powerful, they them- 
selves neither produce nor possess sufficiently reliable his- 
torical evidence in support of their claims, which nevertheless 
may be perfectly well-founded. I have often but in vain 
tried to obtain some authentic information from the various 
castes in corroboration of their assertions, but I have only 
received vague and unreliable statements. 
Derivation of the word Pariah. 
If the term Pariah is considered to signify every out- 
oaste from every caste, then the Pariahs, as such, do not 
come within the scope of this discussion ; for though the 
greater part of them belong no doubt to the original or 
rather aboriginal Dravidian population, from which they have 
in later times been severed by hereditary social rules, and 
though they in their turn acknowledge among themselves 
caste distinctions, yet as every outcaste becomes to a certain 
extent a Pariah, the term Pariah does not represent now a 
strictly ethnological sub- division. 
On the other hand it miist be admitted that irrespective 
of this foreign element which has been added to the Pariah 
community, the Pariahs represent a distinctly separate class 
of the population, and as such wo have to deal with them here. 
The general name by which the Maratha Pariahs is known 
is Paravdri. 
Polanadu. Mallan is also called a rural deity which is set up on the border 
or on the ridges of rice-fields. Compare Dr. Gundert's Malayalam Diction- 
ary, p. 801, and note 21 on p, 49. 
