Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/131

 of Sociology and Folklore. 1 2 i

males there is a separate dormitory." ^ The doorway of an Oraon hut is about five feet high, and above it is a log which supports the roof, called by the significant name of " the forehead-breaker."^

In the Hill Tracts of Eastern India we meet another type of house. The people " build their houses of bamboo, raised from the ground about ten feet, with numerous smaller bamboo props supporting the floor, the roof, and the walls, in every conceivable direction. The floor and the walls are made of bamboo split and flattened out ; the numerous crevices give access to every breeze, and render a hill house one of the coolest and most pleasant of habita- tions. The roof is of bamboo cross-pieces, thatched with palmyra. . . . This forms an impervious and lasting roof, which need only be renewed once in three years, whereas the ordinary grass-thatched roof has to be repaired every year."^ In Orissa the Khond house is made entirely of wood, not a single nail being used, and its owner erects it himself, his only tools being a hatchet and a chisel.*. In South India the Malayalams and Ulladans build their houses raised above the ground on clumps or short posts of bamboo to avoid damp.^

When we come to the houses of the peasantry and of the artizans and labourers in towns, the form varies from the mere shed, open in front, with three mud walls, and roofed with a sloping thatch of grass and reeds, up to the more pretentious house in which the landlord or his more pros- perous tenant lives. If you see a good brick house in a

' Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, 153 ct seq. In Persia a poor man's door is scarcely three feet in height, the object being to prevent servants of the nobles from forcing their way in on horseback, Morier, op. cit. 135.

2 Census Report, Bengal, 191 1, i. 47. The beam over the door in the Oraon hut is known as Kaparphora, "skull-breaker," P. Dehon, Memoirs Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1 906, p. 171.

^T. H. Lewin, Wild Races of South-eastern India, 42 et seq.


 * Census Report, Bengal, 191 1, i. 47.

^ L. K. Anantha Krishna Iyer, Cochin Tribes and Castes, i. 2qet seq., 59.