Rajasthani tribe's barbaric test to check wife's fidelity

Bagariya tribal women in the village of Badi Sadri, Rajasthan, have to prove they have been faithful to their husbands by dipping their hands in boiling oil for five seconds. It's a weird test: If you are chaste, your hands will come out unscathed from the bowl of boiling oil; if you suffer burns, you've been cheating on your husband.

What's worse, it's an annual ritual. Every year, women in a tribal village in Rajasthan, western India, face this trial by fire - to prove their good character during the previous year.

Every year, when the country celebrates the victory of good over evil by burning effigies of the demon king Ravana and his brothers, men in this village, in wanton disregard of human life, subject women to this barbaric test.

This Dushehra, too, at least 20 women of the Bagariya tribe, in Badi Sadri village in Udaipur District, were forced to take this test. Fortunately, none of them got burned.

The men broke into gay folk songs and cooked a meal for the tribe.

On the morning of this festival, a wood fire was raised to boil mustard oil in 14 bowls outside a temple in the village. The women were then asked to immerse their hands one by one into the liquid, and to keep them submerged for five seconds.

When they remove their hands, they are checked for burns. Those who suffer burns, have been immoral in the past year. The gravity of the burns dictates the degree of infidelity.

"Our men mostly stay out during the nights for livelihood. We sustain on crime: thefts, loot. Therefore, it's quite likely women will fall for the other guy," Durgesh Bagariya, the tribe's head, defends this ritual. Yet he offers no reason for this test. Nor does he answer why men aren't subjected to the same test.

Such tests are commonplace in the tribal areas of Udaipur and adjoining districts.

A few years ago, a theft was reported. Instead of summoning the police, the village heads decided to subject all the men to a test to identify the thief. They boiled oil and made the men immerse their hands.

Three were singed, and the villagers concluded them to be the thieves. The local police also accepted this theory, and the trio were arrested without any further investigation.

But that was once-off incident. In Badi Sadri, it happens every year - ironically, on the day when the country burns the evil.

Source: gulfnews

Cannibal tribe apologises for eating Missionaries

A tribe in Papua New Guinea has apologised for killing and eating four 19th century missionaries under the command of a doughty British clergyman.The four Fijian missionaries were on a proselytising mission on the island of New Britain when they were massacred by Tolai tribesmen in 1878. They were murdered on the orders of a local warrior chief, Taleli, and were then cooked and eaten. The Fijians - a minister and three teachers - were under the leadership of the Reverend George Brown, an adventurous Wesleyan missionary who was born in Durham but spent most of his life spreading the word of God in the South Seas.

Thousands of villagers attended a reconciliation ceremony near Rabaul, the capital of East New Britain province, once notorious for the ferocity of its cannibals.Their leaders apologised for their forefather's taste for human flesh to Fiji's high commissioner to Papua New Guinea."We at this juncture are deeply touched and wish you the greatest joy of forgiveness as we finally end this record disagreement," said Ratu Isoa Tikoca, the high commissioner.

Cannibalism was common in many parts of the South Pacific - Fiji was formerly known as the Cannibal Isles - and dozens of missionaries were killed by hostile islanders.

Born at Barnard Castle, Durham, Rev Brown emigrated to New Zealand as a young man and served as a missionary in Samoa before moving with his wife and children to New Guinea.He was familiar with the cannibalistic traditions of the region and once described a visit to a village in which he counted 35 smoke-blackened human jaw bones dangling from the rafters of a hut."A human hand, smoke-dried, was hanging in the same house. And outside I counted 76 notches in a coconut tree, each notch of which, the natives told us, represented a human body which had been cooked and eaten there," he told the Royal Geographical Society.

Even so, he was shocked when told that four of his staff had been cannibalised."They were killed simply because they were foreigners, and the natives who killed them did so for no other reason than their desire to eat them, and to get the little property they had with them," he wrote.He reluctantly agreed to launch a punitive expedition, ordering his men to burn down villages implicated in the murders and destroy wooden canoes.At least 10 tribe members blamed for the attack were killed in an area known as Blanche Bay. Rev Brown claimed the raids made the region safe for Europeans.In a letter to the general secretary of the London Missionary Society he wrote: "The natives respect us more than they did, and as they all acknowledge the justice of our cause they bear us no ill will."

But the reprisals attracted fierce criticism from the press, particularly in Australia.The Australian newspaper said: "If missionary enterprise in such an island as this leads to wars of vengeance, which may readily develop into wars of extermination, the question may be raised whether it may not be better to withdraw the mission from savages who show so little appreciation of its benefits."

However, an official investigation by British colonial authorities a year later exonerated Rev Brown.

Tribes in Papua New Guinea still believe in the powers of witchdoctors and skeleton men but cannibalism is a thing of the past.