Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 3.djvu/150

Rh police, or heads of villages. A Kunjur will probably term himself a Hindoo, but no Hindoo would acknowledge that he is one. He belongs to the class "M'lécha," which is strictly without the pale of Hindooism. He frequents no temple, he has no teachmg of any kind; he worships a legendary saint named Mana Kunjur, of whom he only knows that he is to be invoked in cases of disease; and when cholera, or other mortality prevails, sacrifices are made to him and to Dévi, whom every one endeavours to propitiate. Unlike other aborigines Avho have been absorbed mto the mass of Aryan Hindooism, the Kunjnrs, with some other wild and perhaps untameable tribes, have been left to themselves, and will remain as they are: thieves and dacoits,—or, at the best, what the foregoing description will convey to the reader's mind—probably for generations to come, and in spite of Act XI. of 1840. With all this, the Kunjur will declare he has a caste, and that there are classes of a lower grade than himself, with whom it would be infamy to associate, and from whose hands he could not take food or water; moreover, if he transgressed the rides of his own caste, he would be denied its privileges, which are marriage, burial, and caste feasts, and could not be restored to them without paying a heavy fine, in the shape of a dinner to his fellow Kunjnrs, with unlimited supplies of liquor. What are railways, and telegraphs, and education to him? As he was five thousand years ago, in the days of early Hindooism, so he is now, amidst the Christian civilization of the nineteenth century—an outcast; and yet he is an intelligent fellow with gentle manners, apparently fit to do anything, except to become a civilized being.