Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/561

 Correspondence. 523

the people has received from Hinduism and those which it has retained from the days when their forefathers were as the Hill people now are. As regards the things that are seen, the Mani- puri is — to a great extent — a Hindu, but when we get below the surface, to the real man, I firmly assert that "Let but his inmost vital depths be touched, the Manipuri — like the Burman — stands forth an Animist confessed."

There are one or two minor matters which I venture to criti- cise, but only in a spirit of very great gratitude for the care and sympathy with which the facts have been collected and the skill with which they are recorded and presented to us. I was not wrong when I said that " There is yet a rich harvest to be gathered in, and, if the workers are few, their labour will be justified by its reward."

The names of the goddesses and their offspring preserve the archaic form of the feminine, ;///, which is found in cognate dialects to this day.8 Bi (or //) is not only used in modern Meithei as the feminine suffi.x, but as in other dialects it is the honorific or magnitive suffix.^

The details of the human sacrifice recorded by Colonel Shake- spear have great interest for me, because I failed to elicit any definite information on this very point. Some parallels between the Meithei belief in Pakhangba and the Khasi belief in U Thlen were noted by me.^'^ I stated, too, that I had been told that in dire extremity the blood of some captive would bring rain.^^

I cannot agree with the orthography of chei-taba. It should, I think, be chahi taba}- The main thing, surely, is the selection of the person who gives his name to the year, and for that year {chahi, year) determines the fortune of the State. No doubt all sorts of methods of divination are employed on this occasion, rhabdomancy among them, but without stronger reasons than those that are advanced here I am not prepared to abandon a form which, though difticult of explanation, has behind it the great authority of Colonel McCulloch.

T. C. HODSON.


 * Lmhei Grammay, p. 154, s.r. "Cf. The Mikirs, p. 162.

'0 The Meilheis, p. lOl. " Il'id-, P- 108.

'2 See McCulloch, Accoimt of Munnipore etc., p. 57, and The Meitheis, pp. 104 et seq.