Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/584

 2/4 Taugkhiil Folk Tales and Notes on some

Lushais, who were my first-love among these tribes, there exists a series of progressive feasts by the giving of which a man obtains social consideration in this world and greater comfort in the next. The term applied to one who has completed the series is Thangchhuah, and the outward and visible sign of his having attained this proud position is that he is allowed to wear a special cloth and to have a window in the side of his house. When I moved to Manipur, and got into touch with the medley of tribes round that beautiful valley and with these further north, I found that practically in every one there was a system of feasts very similar to the Thangchhuah series of the Lushais ; and the three scholarly and comprehensive books just produced by my friends Messrs. Hutton and Mills on the Angami, Sema and Lhota tribes show that, though the furthest off from the Lushais, the Thangchhuah system and idea exists among them, and, indeed, in some respects the resemblance between their festivals and those of the Lushais is closer than between those of the Lushais and some intervening tribes. Furthermore, Mr. Hutton has drawn attention to the resemblance between the posts which are erected to commemorate these feasts and the carved stones found on the site of the ancient Kachari capital at Dimapur.^ It has, therefore, occurred to me that it may be worth while to collect together a few facts about these feasts.

Full descriptions of them as practised among the Lushais, Angamis, Semas and Lhotas are, or very shortly will be, available in the monographs of those tribes.^ I have there- fore chosen the Maring series of feasts as an illustration for to-night.

The Marings are a small tribe of some 300 households, living in about twenty small villages in the hills on the

1 The Lhota Nagas, Introduction, xxv.

^ The Angami Nagas. pp. 230-233; The Sema Nagas, pp. 227, 228; The Lhota Nagas, pp. 136-144 ; The Lushei-Kuki Clans, pp. 87-91, 141, 145, 170, t86. 207, 222.