Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 5.djvu/33

 CHANGARS. (232)

HE tribe to which the group depicted in the Photograph belongs, has an unenviable character for thieving and general dishonesty, and forms one of the large class of unsettled wanderers, which, inadmissible to Hindooism, and unconverted to the Mahomedan faith, live on in a miserable condition of life as outcasts from the more civilized communities. Changars are, in general, petty thieves and pickpockets, and have no settled vocation. They object to continuous labour, but contrive to support themselves as watchmen, when they are found trustworthy, or by any light work; the women make baskets, beg, pilfer, or sift and grind corn. They have no settled places of residence, and live in small blanket or mat tents, or temporary sheds outside villages, where their habits do not affect or pollute the people at large. They are professedly Hindoos, and worshippers of Devee, or Bhowanee, but they make offerings a Mahomedan shrines, and, not unfrequently, have Mahomedan names. Their own private ceremonies are separate from those of any professed faith, and are connected with the aboriginal belief, which still lingers among the descendants of the most ancient tribes of India, and is chiefly a propitiation of malignant demons and malicious sprites. These Changars are undoubtedly of aboriginal stock, and the language they speak among themselves is different in most respects from the vernacular of the locality in which they live. They marry exclusively among themselves, and polygamy is common. In appearance, both men and women are repulsively mean and wretched, the features of the women, in particular, being very ugly, and of a strong aboriginal type. The men rarely exceed five feet and a half in height, and most are much smaller, while the women are dwarfish and stunted. The costume of the women is a petticoat of coarse cotton cloth, of scanty dimensions, a bodice, and a coarse scarf over the head; the men wear little more than a scarf thrown loosely round them, and a ragged turban. The woman on the left has a basket scoop for sifting grain and a small broom before her, which indicate her usual occupations. The Changars are one of the most miserable and useless of the wandering tribes of the