Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 6.djvu/228

DAPHERS OR SHIKAREKS.—SHIKARKE WOMAN. In his History of Sind Captain Burton, pp. 306–307, gives additional particulars, which are interesting and characteristic.

"The Shikarees (huntsmen) or Daphers are even a more degraded race than the Bale Shahee. Their second name is probably derived from the dapho, or broad-headed javelin, with a shaft six or seven feet long, their favourite weapon. The Shikarees are neither Moslem nor Hindoo. They are very numerous about Oomerkote and the Thurr, where they subsist by manual labour, agriculture, and hunting. In these regions there is something remarkably wild and savage in their appearance. The only garment worn is a cloth round the waist, except in winter, when a tattered blanket preserves them from the cold. Armed with his usual weapon, the Shikaree generally seeks the wildest part of the country, where he can find the greatest number of hogs, jackals, lynxes, and a kind of lizard called Giloi. At night he sleeps, and during the day he squats, under a cloth spread over some thorny bush, to defend him from chilly dews and the burning rays of the sun. His food is the produce of the chase, and whatever carrion he can pick up; his only drink, the small quantity of water he carries about him in a leather pouch. Thoroughly a wild man, the Shikaree will seldom exchange his roving and comfortless life for any other. He knows no mental exercise, and is ignorant of the elements of education, yet he is not professionally a robber or an assassin, although the inducements to such crimes must sometimes prove too strong for him to resist."—P. 307.

Such as the Shikaree is in Sind, such also is he in India, having no settled place of residence, roaming hither and thither, nominally a Moslem, but directed by his superstition to Hindoo shrines; an adept at snaring game, large and small, animals as well as birds; never working except at his hereditary trade, which is freedom itself He speaks a language of his own, which is unintelligible to others except his brethren, and is undoubtedly, whether in India or in Sind, a renmant of some very ancient aboriginal tribe.

Photograph 326–2 requires no particular description. It is of a Shikaree woman, who, like most of her sisters, is mean-looking, if not forbidding. Yet in their youth some Shikaree girls are pretty, and have lithe elegant figures, and Captain Burton speaks to some extent of their personal attractions in Sind.