Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/451

Rh Raja is sufficient to cover most social and religious irregularities. No one who knows anything of the Manipuris and the tribes which surround them will deny that the introduction of Hinduism has done much for them. It has made them into a nation of teetotallers, cleanly in person and polite to the verge of ceremonious. After all, I think that a close study of the history of many other communities which are now considered of unsullied Hindu descent would reveal that they had all been through very much the same stages as the Meithei, and that their Hinduism is only better than that of the Manipuris because it is a little older.

I now come to the ancient religion of the country, the worship of the Umanglais, or Forest gods, and other lesser supernatural beings, such as the Sa-roi-nga-roi, evil spirits which are always on the lookout to injure human beings; the Helloi, beautiful female forms which lure foolish men into waste places and then disappear, leaving their victims bereft of reason; and Hingchabis or witches. Originally there were only nine of these Forest gods and seven goddesses, but these have now increased to 364, and the pundits claim that from their books they can trace the pedigree of every one of these 364 divinities back to one or other of the original nine gods or seven goddesses. It is said that the Raja Khāgenba, who reigned between 1597 and 1652, appointed five gurus to reduce to writing all that was known regarding these deities and other supernatural beings. The pundits own thick piles of unbound sheets of rough paper of local manufacture covered with archaic Manipuri characters, which are said to be the work of these old-world compilers, and it is from these records that I have obtained much of my information; but I have also picked up much of interest from the village folk, who are freer of Hindu influences than the learned men. The increase in the deities is said to have occurred in three ways. In some cases a god is said to have children; Wāngpurel, the guardian of the South, is said to have