"
The Kapus or Reddis are a large caste of cultivators and landowners
in the Madras Presidency. When rain fails, women of the caste will
catch a frog and tie it alive to a new winnowing fan made of bamboo.
On this fan they spread a few margosa leaves and go from door to
door singing, "Lady frog must have her bath. Oh! rain-god, give a
little water for her at least." While the Kapu women sing this song,
the woman of the house pours water over the frog and gives an alms,
convinced that by so doing she will soon bring rain down in
torrents.
Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the
usual hocus-pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too
angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and
curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of
heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off
at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity had
long been deaf to the peasants' prayers for rain, they at last threw
down his image and, with curses loud and long, hurled it head
foremost into a stinking rice-field.
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