Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/801

777 HISTORY.] INDIA 777 Thrust back by the Aryans from the plains, these primi tive peoples have lain hidden away in the recesses of the mountains, like the remains of extinct animals which zoologists find in hill-caves. India thus forms a great museum of races, in which we can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture. Among the rudest fragments of mankind are the isolated Anda man islanders in the Bay of Bengal. The old Arab and European voyagers described them as dog-faced man-eaters. The English officers sent to the islands in 1855 to establish a settlement found themselves surrounded by quite naked cannibals of a ferocious type, who daubed themselves when festive with red earth, and mourned in a suit of olive-coloured mud. They used a noise like weeping to express friendship or joy, bore only names of common gender, which they received before birth ; and their sole conception of a god was an evil spirit who spread disease. For five years they repulsed every effort at intercourse by showers of arrows ; but the officers slowly brought them to a better frame of mind by building sheds near the settlement, where these poor beings might find shelter from the tropical rains, and receive medicines and food. The Anamalai hills, in southern Madras, form the refuge of a whole series of broken tribes. Five hamlets of long-haired wild- looking Puliars live on jungle products, mice, or any small animals they can catch, and worship demons. Another clan, the Munda- vars, shrink from contact with the outside world, and possess no fixed dwellings, but wander over the innermost hills with their cattle, sheltering themselves under little leaf-sheds, and seldom re- ma ning in one spot more than a year. The thick-lipped small- bodied Kaders, &quot;Lords of the Hills,&quot; are a remnant of a higher race. They file the front teeth of the upper jaw as a marriage cere mony, live by the chase, and wield some influence over the ruder forest-folk. These hills, now very thinly peopled, abound in the great stone monuments (kistvaens and dolmens) which the primi tive tribes used for their dead. The Nairs of south-western India still practice polyandry, according to which a man s property de scends not to his own but to his sister s children. That system also appears among the Himalayan tribes at the opposite extremity of India. In the Central Provinces the aboriginal races form a large pro portion of the population. In certain districts, as in the feudatory state of Bastar, they amount to three-fifths of the inhabitants. The most important race, the Gonds, have made some advances in civi lization ; but the wilder tribes still cling to the forest, and live by the chase, and some of them are reported to have used, within a few years back, flint points for their arrows. The Marias wield bows of great strength, which they hold with their feet while they draw the string with both hands. A still wilder tribe, the Man s, fly from their grass-built huts on the approach of a stranger. Once a year a messenger comes to them from the local raja to take their tribute of jungle products. He does not enter their hamlets, but beats a drum outside, and then hides himself. The shy Maris creep forth, place what they have to give in an appointed spot, and run back again into their retreats. Further to the north-east, in the tributary states of Orissa, there is a poor tribe, 10,000 in number, of Juangs or Patuas, literally the &quot; leaf -wearers,&quot; whose women formerly wore no clothes. Their only vestige of covering was a few strings of beads round the waist with a bunch of leaves tied before and behind. Those under the British influence were clothed in 1871 by order of Government, and their native chief was persuaded to do the same work for the others. This leaf-wearing tribe had no knowledge of the metals till quite lately, when foreigners came among them, and no word exists in their native language for iron or any other metal. But their country abounds with Hint weapons, so that the Juangs form a remnant to our own day of the Stone Age. &quot; Their huts,&quot; writes the officer who knows them best, &quot;arc among the smallest that human beings ever deliberately constructed as dwellings. They measure about 6 feet by 8. The head of the family and all the females huddle together in this one shell, not much larger than a dog-kennel.&quot; The boys and the young men of the village live in one large building apart by themselves ; and this custom of having a common abode for the whole male youth of the hamlet is found among many of the aboriginal tribes in distant parts of India. The Kandhs of Orissa, who kept up their old tribal ritual of human sacrifice until it was put down by the British in 1835-45, and theSantals in the west of Lower Bengal, who rose in 1855, are examples of powerful and highly developed non-Aryan tribes. Proceeding to the northern boundary of India, we find the slopes and spurs of the Himalayas peopled by a great variety of rude tribes. As a rule they are fierce, black, undersized, and ill-fed. They formerly eked out a wretched subsistence by plundering the more civilized hamlets of the Assam valley, a means of livelihood which they are but slowly giving up under British rule. Some of the wild est of them, such as the independent Abars, are now employed as a sort of irregular police, to keep the peace of the border, in return for a yearly gift of cloth, hoes, and grain. Their very names bear witness to their former wild life. One tribe, the Akas of Assam, is divided into two clans, known respectively as &quot; The eateis of a thousand hearths,&quot; and &quot; The thieves who lurk in the cotton- field.&quot; Whence came these primitive peoples, whom the Aryan invaders found in the laud more than three thousand years ago, and who are still scattered over India, the fragments of a prehistoric world? Written records they do not possess. Their oral traditions tell us little, but such hints as they yield feebly point to the north. They seem to preserve dim memories of a time when the tribes dwelt under the shadow of mightier hill ranges than any to be found on the south of the river jlains of Bengal. &quot;The Great Mountain&quot; is the race-god of the Santals, and an object of worship among other tribes. The Gonds, in the heart of of Central India, have a legend that they were created at the foot of Dewalagiri Peak in the Himalayas. Till lately they buried their dead with the feet turned northwards, so as to be ready to start again for their ancient home in the north, The language of the non-Aryan races, that record of a Non- nation s past more enduring than rock inscriptions or tables Aryaa of brass, is being slowly made to tell the secret of their lan &quot; origin. It already indicates that the early peoples of India gu belonged to three great stocks, known as the Tibeto- Tibeto- Burman, the Kolarian, and the Dravidian. The Tibeto- Bui-mesa. Burman tribes cling to the skirts of the Himalayas arid their north-eastern offshoots. They crossed over into India by the north-eastern passes, and in some prehistoric time had dwelt in Central Asia, side by side with the forefathers of the Mongolians and the Chinese. Several of the hill languages in Eastern Bengal preserve Chinese terms, others contain Mongolian. Thus the Nagas in Assam still usa words for three and water which might almost be under stood in the streets of Canton. The following are the twenty principal dialects of the Tibeto-Burman group: (l)Cachari or Bodo, (2) Garo, (3) Tripura or Mrung, (4) Tibetan or Bhutia, (5) Gurung, (6) Murmi, (7) Newar, (8) Lepcha, (9) Miri, (10) Aka, (11) Mishmi dialects, (12) Dhimal, (13; Kanawari dialects, (14) Mikir, (15) Singpho, (16) Naga dialects, (17) Kuki dialects, (18) Burmese, (19) Khyeng, and (20) Manipuri. &quot;It is impossible,&quot; writes Mr Brandreth, &quot;to give even an ap proximate number of the speakers included in this group, as many of the languages are either across the frontier or only project a short distance into our own territory. The languages included in this group have not, with perhaps one or two exceptions, both a cerebral and dental row of consonants, like the South-Indian languages ; some of them have aspirated forms of the surds, but not of the so nants ; others have aspirated forms of both. The languages of this group, even those which most diverge from each other, have several words in common, and especially numerals and pronouns, and also some resemblances of grammar. In comparing the resembling words, the differences between them consist often less in any modi fication of the root-syllable than in the various additions to the root. Thus in Burmese we have tin, ear; 1 Tibetan, ma-ba ; Magar, na-kcp ; Newar, nai-pcmg ; Dhimal, nu-hdthong ; Kiranti dialects, nd-pro, nd-rek, nd-jrfuik ; Naga languages, te-na-ro, te-na- rang ; Manipuri, na-kong ; Kupui, ka-nd; Suk, aka-nd ; Karen, na-khu ; and so on. It can hardly be doubted that such additions as these to monosyllabic roots are principally determinative syllables for the purpose of distinguishing between what would otherwise have been monosyllabic words having the same sound. Tluse de terminatives are generally affixed in the languages of Nepal and in the Dhimal language ; prefixed in the Lepcha language, and in tho languages of Assam, of Manipur, and of the Chittagong and Arakan hills. Words are also distinguished by difference of tone. The tones are generally of two kinds, described as the abrupt or short, and the pausing or heavy ; and it has been remarked that those languages which are most given to adding other syllables to the root make the least use of the tones, and vice versa; where the tones most prevail the least recourse is had to determinative syllables.&quot; The Kolarians, the second of the three non-Aryan stocks, Kol- seem also to have entered Bengal by the north-eastern arian - XII. 98