The Oraons do not now admit outsiders into the tribe. There is no
offence for which a man is permanently put out of caste, but a woman
living with any man other than an Oraon is so expelled. Temporary
expulsion is awarded for the usual offences. The head of the caste
_panchayat_ is called Panua, and when an offender is reinstated,
the Panua first drinks water from his hand, and takes upon himself
the burden of the erring one's transgression. For this he usually
receives a fee of five rupees, and in some States the appointment is
in the hands of the Raja, who exacts a fine of a hundred rupees or
more from a new candidate. The Oraons eat almost all kinds of food,
including pork, fowls and crocodiles, but abstain from beef. Their
status is very low among the Hindus; they are usually made to live
in a separate corner of the village, and are sometimes not allowed to
draw water from the village well. As already stated, the dress of the
men consists only of a narrow wisp of cloth round the loins. Some of
them say, like the Gonds, that they are descended from the subjects
of Rawan, the demon king of Ceylon; this ancestry having no doubt
in the first instance been imputed to them by the Hindus. And they
explain that when Hanuman in the shape of a giant monkey came to
the assistance of Rama, their king Rawan tried to destroy Hanuman
by taking all the loin-cloths of his subjects and tying them soaked
in oil to the monkey's tail with a view to setting them on fire and
burning him to death. The device was unsuccessful and Hanuman escaped,
but since then the subjects of Rawan and their descendants have never
had a sufficient allowance of cloth to cover them properly.