NANDI

Kalenjin-speaking people of the Southern Nilotic language group who inhabit the western part of the Kenya highlands. The Nandi are primarily intensive cultivators; their major crops are millet, corn (maize), and sweet potatoes. Cattle are important, providing food and bride-price payments and holding great ritual importance. The people are divided among 17 patrilineal and exogamous clans that are dispersed throughout Nandi territory. The most important traditional social groups are the age sets, to one of which every male belongs from birth. The Nandi age-grade system is of the cyclical type, with seven named grades covering approximately 15 years each, a single full cycle being 105 years. Men advance through the warrior grades and, upon entering the grade of elder, hold political and juridical authority. No political authority transcends this local council of elders. General polygyny is the rule, with substantial bride-price in livestock expected. Nandi society was traditionally egalitarian; no slaves were kept. bull vahana (mount) of the Hindu god Siva. Some scholars suggest that the bull was originally the zoomorphic form of Siva, but from the Kusana (Kushan) age onward (c. 1st century AD), he is identified as the god's vehicle. Every Siva temple has the figure of a white, humped bull reclining on a raised platform and facing the entrance door of the shrine so that, according to tradition, he may perpetually gaze on the lord in his symbolic form, the linga (phallus). Nandi is considered to be one of Siva's chief attendants and occasionally is depicted in sculpture as a bull-faced dwarf figure. Nandi is known also in a wholly anthropomorphic form, called variously Nandikesvara, or Adhikaranandin. Sculptures of him in human form, found at the entrance door of many Siva temples in South India, are frequently confused with images of the deity because they are alike in such iconographic features as the third eye, crescent moon in the matted locks, and four arms, two of which hold the battle-ax and an antelope. Usually a distinguishing feature is that Nandi's hands are pressed together in adoration. The respect shown the bull in modern India is due to his association with Siva. In sacred Hindu cities such as Benares (Varanasi), certain bulls are given the freedom to roam the streets. They are considered to belong to the lord, and they are branded on the flank with the trident insignia of Siva.