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Updated: May 4, 2025
The toddy-drawer binds into one rod the numerous shoots, which are garnished with embryo nuts, and he then cuts off the ends, leaving an abrupt and brush-like termination. Beneath this he secures an earthen chatty, which will hold about a gallon.
This remains undisturbed for twenty-four hours, from sunrise to sunrise on the following morning; the toddy-drawer then reascends the tree, and lowers he chatty by a line to an assistant below, who empties the contents into a larger vessel, and the chatty is replaced under the productive branch, which continues to yield for about a month.
My father was a toddy-drawer. We were very poor. Sometimes my uncles would give me a cent or two for mounting guard to give them warning about anybody's approach while they were slaughtering stolen cattle in the jungles. Once, being very hungry, I climbed up a palm tree to steal cocoanuts, but was caught by the owner and handed over to the police. The magistrate sent me to jail for three weeks.
The distance between the notches is so great that his knee goes up to his chin at each step, but he is as supple as he is sinewy and feels no inconvenience. For he is a Bhundaree, or Toddy-drawer, and his forefathers have been Bhundarees since the time, I suppose, when Manu made his immortal laws.
It appears that when the tiger charged, one of the party, a toddy-drawer, at once climbed up a tree, and when the party retreated, carrying off the wounded, he was afraid to come down.
And I may also mention here that I have slept in the veranda of a farmer's house, in which members of the family slept close to some of my people, who were of the toddy-drawer caste above alluded to, and who, I am sure, were quite as welcome as members of their own caste would have been.
The influence of caste was here most perceptible, and he could always pick out the work done by boys whose caste had been employed in that particular work, and he further informed me that boys showed poor proficiency in work out of the line of their particular caste. And that, I may observe, was a case in which a toddy-drawer, the third caste in Manjarabad, was concerned.
In the other case I saw a snake on bare ground upwards of 100 yards away which had evidently seen me, for it made off in the way which a disturbed snake always does. I was this year surprised to hear tigers and snakes classed together as to running away by a toddy-drawer a class of people who are often out in the jungle at dusk, and sometimes later.
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