Among the Rawats of Chhattisgarh, when a child is shortly to be born
the midwife dips her hand in oil and presses it on the wall, and it
is supposed that she can tell by the way in which the oil trickles
down whether the child will be a boy or a girl. If a woman is weak
and ill during her pregnancy it is thought that a boy will be born,
but if she is strong and healthy, a girl. A woman in advanced pregnancy
is given whatever she desires to eat, and on one occasion especially
delicate kinds of food are served to her, this rite being known as
Sidhori. The explanation of the custom is that if the mother does
not get the food she desires during pregnancy the child will long for
it all through life. If delivery is delayed, a line of men and boys
is sometimes made from the door of the house to a well, and a vessel
is then passed from hand to hand from the house, filled with water,
and back again. Thus the water, having acquired the quality of speed
during its rapid transit, will communicate this to the woman and cause
her quick delivery. Or they take some of the clay left unmoulded on
the potter's wheel and give it her to drink in water; the explanation
of this is exactly similar, the earth having acquired the quality of
swiftness by the rapid transit on the wheel. If three boys or three
girls have been born to a woman, they think that the fourth should
be of the same sex, in order to make up two pairs. A boy or girl
born after three of the opposite sex is called Titra or Titri, and is
considered very unlucky. To avert this misfortune they cover the child
with a basket, kindle a fire of grass all round it, and smash a brass
pot on the floor. Then they say that the baby is the fifth and not
the fourth child, and the evil is thus removed. When one woman gives
birth to a male and another to a female child in the same quarter of
a village on the same day and they are attended by the same midwife,
it is thought that the boy child will fall ill from the contagion
of the girl child communicated through the midwife. To avoid this,
on the following Sunday the child's maternal uncle makes a banghy,
which is carried across the shoulders like a large pair of scales,
and weighs the child in it against cowdung. He then takes the banghy
and deposits it at cross-roads outside the village. The father cannot
see either the child or its mother till after the Chathi or sixth-day
ceremony of purification, when the mother is bathed and dressed in
clean clothes, the males of the family are shaved, all their clothes
are washed, and the house is whitewashed; the child is also named on
this day. The mother cannot go out of doors until after the Barhi or
twelfth-day ceremony. If a child is born at an unlucky astrological
period its ears are pierced in the fifth month after birth as a means
of protection.