Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/294

 272 Reviews.

One special question upon which investigation was invited by the Census Commissioner was the institution of the Panchayat or caste council as bearing upon internal organisation. The most valuable contribution on this subject is contained in Mr. Blunt's excellent report.^ With this may be associated the elaborate review of Hindu domestic rites by Pandit Harikishan Kaul, and Mr. Latimer's account of the constitution of caste and tribe on the North- West Frontier.^ Mr. Bray's report is, as he says, uncon- ventional. He abandons the familiar, stodgy style of the official writer, and his notes on the folklore of Baluchistan, from which extracts are given elsewhere, are novel and interesting, and are written in a witty and graphic style.

I need not dwell upon the protests from Baluchistan and the Panjab, as representing the so-called "Indo-Aryan" and "Turko- Iranian " groups, against this method of race classification. A revolt was certain to occur against the cruder methods of anthro- pometry ; but the protest is sometimes based upon inadequate grounds. We may, for instance, admit that the Baloch mother, by use of pressure and manipulation, secures that form of head v/hich satisfies the tribal conception of beauty, without assuming that every peasant woman elsewhere finds time from her dairy, her corn-mill, and her cooking pots to force the skull of her child to assume a shape which race, — or may I add environment? — has impressed upon it. But sporadic cases of skull manipulation do not touch the real difficulty.

What are the morals to be drawn from this great collection of anthropological and folklore material ? I venture to think that it illustrates the danger of imposing systems of race classification, of far-reaching hypotheses which, somewhere or other in the vast area of India, are certain to conflict with ascertained conditions. The Census officer of the future will be well advised to adopt less ambitious methods. The patient accumulation of facts, the inten- sive study of the smaller groups, the exploration of the village shrine and local cults in search for the key to the strange religious complex which we, not the people themselves, call Hinduism, will

- United Pi-ovinces Report, vol. i., pp. 332 et seq.

^Panjab Report, vol. i., pp. 263 et seq.; North-West Frotitier Province Report, vol. i., pp. 322 et seq.