Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/310

 288 The Veneration of the Cozv in India.

to procure milk in their country because the cows were never milked.'*^

The same is the case with the Indo-Chinese races, like the Burmans and Shans, the latter using milk only for medicine, and not for food, regarding its taste as unpleasant and its smell as disgusting.^^ The same feeling prevails in Java and Sumatra, and in Bali, where Hinduism still prevails, the people use coco-nut liquid instead of ghi in offerings to their gods, though some Pandits are now beginning to make ghi out of milk.^*^ One tribe of Malay hereditary bards will not touch milk, and, when M. Grand- jean told the Laos of Siam that Europeans liked and used milk, they laughed, and from that time held his country- men in contempt.^^

It is a question deserving investigation whether the Indo- Chinese races brought this taboo with them from their original home, because, if this be the case its appearance in India and its borderlands may turn out to be a fact of some ethnological importance. Hence it is relevant to push the enquiry beyond the Himalaya. In Tibet custom seems to vary, the people in the neighbourhood of Lhasa never drinking milk, while in the western districts, probably through Hindu or Buddhist influence, there seems to be little objection to its use.^- The late Sir H. Yule, a first- rate authority, asserted that the Chinese do not use milk.^^ The evidence is not quite conclusive, but I am indebted to Lieut.-Col. L. A. Waddell and Professor E. H. Parker for

Life in India, pp. 165 et seq.
 * ^ E. T. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, p. 195 ; V. Ball, Jungle

■•^ Mrs. L. Milne, The Shans at Home, p. 48.

5" Sir H. Yule, The Jonrnal of the Anthropological Institute, vd\. ix., p. 290.

51 W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 673 ; Sir J. Bowring, The Kingdotn and People of Siatn, vol. ii., p. 12.

52 L. A. Waddell, Lhasa and its Mysteries (3rd ed.), p. 172 ; C. A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, p. 298; S. Turner, An Account oj an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, ift Tibet, pp. 1S8, 195.

°^ See note 50 supra.