Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/491

Rh a first-born child dying within a year of its birth is termed hlamzuih (hlam, afterbirth, and zuih, to follow), and is buried without any ceremony under the house. The spirits of such children cannot be shot at by Pupawla, the dreaded archer whose house is at the junction of the seven roads to Mi-thi-khua, the dead men's village, whence he shoots with his pellet bow at all poor souls hurrying by. In Maram, a Naga village to the north of the Manipur valley, the corpse of a child dying within ten days of its birth is buried at the foot of the centre post of the house, instead of outside. The Kolhen, another small tribe living near the Manipur valley, also fix ten days as the unlucky period, and children dying within it are buried under the eaves of the house. Among the Route, children dying within a year of birth are buried without ceremony to the east of the village, whereas the regular cemetery is to the west. It will be seen that, though all these clans treat such deaths as abnormal, and bury the bodies of such children in a manner different to those of persons dying in the ordinary way, it is only amo.ng the Manipuris, the people of Andro, the Shans, and the Ronte that the difference in procedure denotes a fear of the spirit of the dead child. All the other clans, while observing no ceremony, bury the body either in or near the house, as if to encourage the return of the spirit. The absence of ceremony may be due to a belief that the spirit which sojourned so short a time has hardly acquired a distinct personality, which would account for the omission of all reference to such spirits at the Tangkhul annual ceremony in honour of the dead.

We will next consider the cases in which women die in childbirth or soon after. Among the Kabui a death occurring within two months of the birth is classed as "unlucky." Among the people of Andro a death occurring before the removal of the afterbirth is counted as an unnatural death. In Phayeng, a village closely allied to Andro, deaths occurring on the day of the birth are unnatural. In other clans the periods are less clearly defined, but in all clans such deaths are considered unlucky, and there is a general belief that it is possible, so to speak, to catch the disease from the corpse, and therefore, in nearly every clan, the funeral has to be carried out by very old men and women. Other precautions are taken to remove the "infection." Among