Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/286

 264 Reviews.

" Negrito traits in a very striking manner." There seems to be, nevertheless, some resemblance to the Arunta. Is it mere co- incidence that, while the head men of the Arunta are pinfiarns, the ancestral spirits of the Dravidians all along the line, from the Khonds southwards, are pefinn, or pinnu? Also that the regular Dravidian rule of marriage, (and not only Dravidian in S. India), is identical with that of some of the Australian tribes, — that a young man should marry his mother's elder brother's daughter? Amongst the Koravas an outsider wishing to marry a girl must make a specific payment to the boy who has this right to her before he can marry her.

Dr. Keane's discourse is, of course, full of interest, but in deal- ing with the question of Negroid blood in S. India what does he mean in saying that " black blood is conspicuous " amongst the Kolarians? For the Savaras, one of the two peoples of S. India always spoken of as true Kolarians, (who live, by the by, about 900 miles away from the Cochin State), are distinctly fair, even when compared with the Aryan Uriyas (mixed, no doubt, with Dravidian blood) of the plains below them ; I mean the genuine Savaras, of the inmost hills rarely penetrated by any European on account of inaccessibility and deadly fever, and not the black-looking mongrels called Savaras who are found on the fringes of the hills. He is right in classing this distinctly Mon- goloid people quite apart from Dravidians, but, as their language has never yet been mastered by any European, perhaps, after all, the term Kolarian as applied to the Savaras may be fanciful. At all events they are not black or Negroid.

Perhaps he will speak of them in a succeeding volume, but in the one before us no mention is made of the Koravas, — not west coast people or natives of the State it is true, as they came genera- tions ago from the eastward, but quite as much so as many who are described in this book as such ; for the Koravas, who are found all over the middle and south of India, from beyond Indore to Cape Comorin, designated variously, even so markedly so as Erikalas and Yanadis in what is practically the same locality, but always found to be subdivided into the same four sub-tribal divisions, are the only people of South India, — and perhaps in all India, — who practise the couvade. We cannot, therefore,.