Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/334

 SOME NĀGA CUSTOMS AND SUPERSTITIONS.

BY T. C. HODSON, EAST LONDON COLLEGE.

(Read at Meeting, June 1st, 1910.)

I was busy with the census of 1900, a Nāga once asked me what the census was for. Shrewdly enough he suspected an increase of taxation, but I was not to be drawn. I was near the truth when I told him that the Maharani was so interested in her Nāga subjects that she had sent me to find out how many of them she ruled over. It must have seemed to my questioner that I was engaged in rather a useless task if I was merely satisfying the curiosity of that distant mysterious personage whom many of them believed to be the wife of John Company, and therefore called Kumpinu, the feminine form of Kumpini. We are living in an age in which social problems are rigorously investigated by statistical and scientific methods. The interest of the State in the conservation and enhancement of the forces, social and economic, which repair continuously the wear and tear of the fabric of society, is now vivid and direct. More and more are we devoting our energy to the task of organising and preserving the raw material of the