Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/559

 Correspondence. 521

essence of Hinduism they are absent from Manipur ; at least they are not touched upon in Colonel Shakespear's paper, save by the statement that the educated Manipuri would come up to the Travancore standard of the belief in kanna and up to the theism of the Mysore Census Report. Are we to regard only the educated class of Meithei as Hindu? Thanks to Colonel Shake- spear education has made great progress in Manipur since I left the State twelve years ago, and I am prepared to believe that there are more people there now than then who understand the meaning of kar7>ia and are theists. But even yet they are surely a small minority,^ and I can well imagine that a man may understand and believe the doctrine of karma and remain at heart and in practice an animist. Neither the belief in karma nor in reincarnation are after all characteristic of Hinduism. What is characteristic is the social ideal of mukti, the orientation of the belief in reincarnation, its importance in the scheme of life, and that again is after all an expression of social ideals in another mode.

The only scrap of evidence of theism in Manipur in the paper is the statement that the enumeration by the itiaiba of all the animals used on every occasion of sacrifice without regard to which particular god is being addressed permits the inference that the Umanglais are thought only to be different forms of one almighty Creator. That ingenious argument I have heard used by Hindus in like case, but it is an error. The real, and much the simpler, explanation is, I think, that, as any evil can be averted by naming the proper spirit, it is essential that "the roll of spirits should have no omissions." One can " make assurance doubly sure by naming all."^

Animism in India is described by Sir Herbert Risley as "an essentially materialistic theory of things which seeks by means of magic to ward off or to forestall physical diseases, which looks no further than the world of sense and seeks to make that as tolerable

'^The Hindus of Manipur are the least literate of all Hindu groups in Assam. See table in ^J5a//i Census A^efor^igii), p. 92, Subsidiary Table HI.

•'See F. B. Jevons, Introduction to PlutarcWs Koniane Questions, p. Ivii., and E. Clodd, Tom Tit Tot, p. 177 and footnote to p. 178.

2 L