Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 3.djvu/28

 KHUNJURS. (115)

HE Khunjurs inhabit the forest in the north-west of Shahjehanpore. Their chief occupation is to collect and sell forest produce, wild honey and jungle fruits. They manufacture grass fans, screens, and ropes. They delight in snaring game, trapping hares, foxes, &c. Their habits are migratory, living in temporary sheds in the forests, and they profess the Hindoo religion. They have a peculiar mystic ceremony on the admission of a person into then clan. The proselyte is made to sit in a hole, over which a wooden bed-frame, with a bottom of rope, is placed, and upon which the headman of the tribe takes his seat, and has water thrown over him, which washes the man below, and is supposed to have a purifying effect. Khumjurs are liars, dacoits, thieves, and fortune-tellers, and they live in the merest sheds, and shift from place to place.

Their women simulate pain and suffering, and excite commiseration at fairs and large meetings of people. They eat all kinds of annual food, even of the grossest kind—foxes, jackals, snakes, lizards, &c., but are said to be very long lived, frequently attaining the age of eighty years.

The Khunjurs are not confined to the forests of Shahjehanpore, or northern India, but are found in the Deccan and south of India generally, and in many cases have become members of settled communities, following their hereditary profession of rope, mat, and basket-making, together with cotton bowing or cleaning. These classes have apparently separated from the migratory portions, whose condition and occupations do not vary in any part of India, and have relinquished the habits of dacoity and petty thieving for which the northern portions of the tribe are still distinguished.