The Gonds have scarcely any restriction on diet. They will eat fowls,
beef, pork, crocodiles, certain kinds of snakes, lizards, tortoises,
rats, cats, red ants, jackals and in some places monkeys. Khatola
and Raj-Gonds usually abstain from beef and the flesh of the buffalo
and monkey. They consider field-mice and rats a great delicacy, and
will take much trouble in finding and digging out their holes. The
Maria Gonds are very fond of red ants, and in Bastar give them fried
or roasted to a woman during her confinement. The common food of the
labouring Gond is a gruel of rice or small millet boiled in water,
the quantity of water increasing in proportion to their poverty. This
is about the cheapest kind of food on which a man can live, and the
quantity of grain taken in the form of this gruel or pej which will
suffice for a Gond's subsistence is astonishingly small. They grow the
small grass-millets kodon and kutki for their subsistence, selling the
more valuable crops for rent and expenses. The flowers of the mahua
tree are also a staple article of diet, being largely eaten as well as
made into liquor, and the Gond knows of many other roots and fruits of
the forest. He likes to eat or drink his pej several times a day, and
in Seoni, it is said, will not go more than three hours without a meal.
Gonds are rather strict in the matter of taking food from others, and
in some localities refuse to accept it even from Brahmans. Elsewhere
they will take it from most Hindu castes. In Hoshangabad the men may
take food from the higher Hindu castes, but not the women. This, they
say, is because the woman is a wooden vessel, and if a wooden vessel is
once put on the fire it is irretrievably burnt. A woman similarly is
the weaker vessel and will sustain injury from any contamination. The
Raj-Gond copies Hindu ways and outdoes the Hindu in the elaboration
of ceremonial purity, even having the fuel with which his Brahman
cook prepares his food sprinkled with water to purify it before it is
burnt. Mr. A. K. Smith states that a Gond will not eat an antelope if
a Chamar has touched it, even unskinned, and in some places they are
so strict that a wife may not eat her husband's leavings of food. The
Gonds will not eat the leavings of any Hindu caste, probably on account
of a traditional hostility arising out of their subjection by the
Hindus. Very few Hindu castes will take water or food from the Gonds,
but some who employ them as farmservants do this for convenience. The
Gonds are not regarded as impure, even though from a Hindu point of
view some of their habits are more objectionable than those of the
impure castes. This is because the Gonds have never been completely
reduced to subjection, nor converted into the village drudges, who
are consigned to the most degraded occupations. Large numbers of them
hold land as tenants and estates as zamindars; and the greater part
of the Province was once governed by Gond kings. The Hindus say that
they could not consider a tribe as impure to which their kings once
belonged. Brahmans will take water from Raj-Gonds and Khatola Gonds
in many localities. This is when it is freshly brought from the well
and not after it has been put in their houses.