DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

2.4] 37
STONE MICROLITHS
which has reached a thickness of about 30 millimetres. Sacrifices are
occasionally made here too by those who do not mind the hard walk
up a steep hill and a couple of miles into the scrub jungle. The spot
seemed to have a surprising sanctity, for on Caitra (April) full-moon,
the Vetala’s birthday (any Vetala’s, not only of this particular one),
many people come to worship from a considerable distance ; not
only villagers, but solid bourgeois, even a fat, English-speaking official
could be seen struggling breathlessly up the hill with four gallons of
water in a copper vessel, and flowers, to give the god a bath followed
by another coat of red lead in oil, and to perform the rites of worship.
Fig. 1. Quartzite
microliths, surface
finds about Poona : 3
and 5 carnelian,
4 agate, rest
chalcedony.
Certainly, this Vetala has seniority over jthe middle-class Hanuman
shrine established by the Law college about 1934, over a feebler
women’s cult under a specially planted vada tree and a Mang Ceda
which consists of about two dozen lime-daubed stones which
guarantee the destruction of an enemy, if the enemy’s name be
pronounced with imprecations while turning the stones over - all on
the same hill near-by. When I learned that at least two murders had
been committed there since 1925 to avenge blood-feuds, the victims
having been caught at a distance, probably killed in front of the god,
the bodies left within the enclosure, it seemed highly probable that
the place had associations far above those due to a mere boundary deity.
Looking above the hilltop, there emerged a remarkable fact: small
stone tools (Figs. 1-3) of the late stone age, were found in profusion
on the hump, about the Vetala sanctuary. These flakes are made by