# Castes and Tribes of Southern India/Mandula

​Mandula.— The Mandulas (medicine men) are a wandering class, the members of which go about from village to village in the Telugu country, selling drugs (mandu, medicine) and medicinal powders. Some of their women act as midwives. Of these people an interesting account is given by Bishop Whitehead,* who writes as follows. " We found an encampment of five or six dirty-looking huts made of matting, each about five feet high, eight feet long and six feet wide, belonging to a body of Mandalavāru, whose head-quarters are at Masulipatam. They are medicine men by profession, and thieves and beggars by choice. The headman showed us his stock of medicines in a bag, and a quaint stock it was, consisting of a miscellaneous collection of stones and pieces of wood, and the fruits of trees. The stones are ground to powder, and mixed up as a medicine with various ingredients. He had a piece of mica, a stone containing iron, and another which contained some other metal. There was also a peculiar wood used as an antidote against snake-bite, a piece being torn off and eaten by the person bitten. One common treatment for children is to give them tiles, ground to powder, to eat. In the headman's hut was a picturesque-looking woman sitting up with an infant three days old. It had an anklet, made of its mother's hair, tied round the right ankle, to keep off the evil eye. The mother, too, had a similar anklet round her own left ankle, which she put on before her confinement. She asked for some castor-oil to smear over the child. They had a good many donkeys, pigs, and fowls with them, and made, they said, about a rupee ​a day by begging. Some time ago, they all got drunk, and had a free fight, in which a woman got her head cut open. The police went to enquire into the matter, but the woman declared that she only fell against a bamboo by accident. The whole tribe meet once a year, at Masulipatam, at the Sivarātri festival, and then sacrifice pigs and goats to their various deities. The goddess is represented by a plain uncarved stone, about four-and-a-half or five feet high, daubed with turmeric and kunkuma (red powder). The animals are killed in front of the stone, and the blood is allowed to flow on the ground. They believe that the goddess drinks it. They cook rice on the spot, and present some of it to the goddess. They then have a great feast of the rest of the rice and the flesh of the victims, get very drunk with arrack, and end up with a free fight. We noted that one of the men had on an anklet of hair, like the woman's. He said he had been bitten by a snake some time ago, and had put on the anklet as a charm."
The Mandula is a very imposing person, as he sits in a conspicuous place, surrounded by paper packets piled up all round him. His method of advertising his medicines is to take the packets one by one, and, after opening them and folding them up, to make a fresh pile. As he does so, he may be heard repeating very rapidly, in a sing-song tone, " Medicine for rheumatism," etc. Mandulas are sometimes to be seen close to the Moore Market in the city of Madras, with their heaps of packets containing powders of various colours.