Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/277

Rh Out of the mass of interesting material collected in this monograph I can refer only to a few of the more important points.

In the first place, Sir C. Lyall's excellent summary shows that "their social organisation is one of the most perfect examples still surviving of matriarchal institutions, carried out with a logic and thoroughness which, to those accustomed to regard the status and authority of the father as the foundation of society, are exceedingly remarkable. Not only is the mother the head and source, and only bond of union, of the family; in the most primitive part of the hills, the Synteng country, she is the only owner of real property, and through her alone is inheritance transmitted. The father has no kinship with his children, who belong to their mother's clan; what he earns goes to his own matriarchal stock, and at his death his bones are deposited in the cromlech of his mother's kin. In Jowai he neither lives nor eats in his wife's house, but visits it only after dark. In the veneration of ancestors, which is the foundation of the tribal piety, the primeval ancestress and her brother are the only persons regarded. The flat memorial stones set up to perpetuate the memory of the dead are called after the woman who represents the clan, and the standing stones ranged behind them are dedicated to the male kinsmen on the mother's side." In conformity with this social arrangement goddess worship is predominant, and the founder of their civilisation is a culture heroine.

Next come the "memorial" stones rightly so called, many of which were unhappily overthrown in the recent disastrous earthquake. Major Gurdon shows that they closely resemble those of Chota Nagpur, which are familiar to us from the accounts by Colonel Dalton and Dr. Ball. He adopts the following classification of them: (a) those which serve as seats for the spirits of departed clansfolk on their way to the clan cromlech; (b) those erected to commemorate a parent or some other near relation; (c) those which mark tanks, the water of which is supposed to cleanse the ashes and bones of those who have died unnatural deaths; (d) flat table-stones, often accompanied by menhirs, which are not devoted to the dead,