Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 8.djvu/147

 YENADIES. (441-2)

O Official Report accompanies the Photographs of the Yenadies, nor any description of their habits and customs; they are, however, one of the jungle tribes who, with Veddars, Puliars, Chensu Kurrir, Saligara, Male Aravars, Kurumera, and other divisions, inhabit the Animalli, the Pulnay, and other ranges of mountains which lie between the break at Coimbatoor and Cape Comorin. The Photographs show this tribe to be squalid, and in the last degree uninfluenced by the civilization with which they are in contact. Some of them scarcely wear clothing of any kind, and are described (Balfour and others) as wearing leaves and twigs, living in holes of trees, and subsisting upon roots, game, forest fruits, honey, and, in some instances only, as in the Irulas, cultivating patches of land. The Ramayan describes them as wild men, savages, and monkeys, and that when all Southern India was a vast forest, named Dandaka, these tribes were its inhabitants. They speak rude dialects of Tamil and Canarese, sometimes of one and sometimes of the other, and not infrequently of both. They are utterly ignorant, and have no legends or traditions.

These aboriginal tribes of India may be distinctly traced by their presence from Cape Comorin northwards through the mountains and forests as far as Coorg. They then cross Mysore to the Eastern Ghauts, or cling round the bases south and east of the plateau, and are found as Chenchas or Chenchowars in the hills and jungles of Kurnool and Caddapa, in time same condition as those of the Western Ghauts. Thence they are followed into the Khond mountains west of Vizagapatam, and so through Eastern Orissa under various names, till they meet the Gond of Gondwana, and the Kols, Hos, and Oraons of Chola Nagpoor and the central provinces, ending with the Sonthals at the Ganges. All these tribes are of much the same ethnological character and modes of life: they are Dravidian, and their several languages are either dialects of Dravidian tongues, or have Tamnil or Teloogoo words mixed with others.