be embraced by the god. But one of them, it is said, disappeared one night, and the practice has ceased. The funeral pyre of every girl of the dancing-girl (Sáni) caste dying in the village should be lit with fire brought from the temple. The same practice is found in the Srírangam temple near Trichinopoly.
Palivela forms part of the union of Kottapéta (population 10,369), in which Vádapálaiyam and Kammareddipálaiyam are also included. Kottapéta contains the offices of a sub-registrar, a deputy-tahsildar and sub-magistrate, a local fund dispensary (founded 1892), a police-station, a small market, and an English lower secondary school for boys. The travellers' bungalow is in Palivela itself.
Pérúru : Five miles south-west of Amalápuram. Population 5,864. Contains a Sanskrit school. The place is noteworthy as being the home of a colony of Tamil Bráhmans, called Kóna Síma Drávidas, who came, at some date unknown, from Valangimán near Kumbakónam in Tanjore district. The story of their emigration is recounted (with impossible details) in the village itself and is also known in Madras. They no longer speak Tamil, but their village, both in appearance and in general arrangement, is so like a village of the south that it is popularly declared that if a Tanjore man could be suddenly transported thither and set down in the middle of it, he would think he was in his native country.
The original emigrants are said to have been fifteen families of twelve gótras, seven of which belonged to the Vadama, and five to the Brahacharnam, subdivision of the Tamil Bráhmans.
They first settled at Ráli, but difficulties arising, they eventually obtained from a rája a grant of as much land as an elephant could traverse in a given space of time. Thus they secured possession of the village of Pérúru. They increased and multiplied, and many of them emigrated to Ganjám and Vizagapatam, where they call themselves 'Pérúru Drávidas.' They are not popular in the district, and stories in disparagement of them are common. The part they play in the festival at Antarvédi in Nagaram taluk is referred to in the account of that place below.
Pérúru, like Amalápuram, is connected by legend with the Mahábhárata, for it is believed that the tank in the hamlet of Chindádu Garuvu is the identical sheet of water in which Arjuna saw the reflection of the flying fish which he shot in order to win the hand of Draupadi. A bath in this tank on
