HORNELL THE INDIAN CONCH 71 



Palk Bay, the most important source of supply of the raw material then and now, and 

 it is a curious vagary of trade that the present seat of the industry should be situated 

 1,500 miles from the scene of the fishery. 



From the fact that among a few widely separated castes, sub-castes and tribes of the 

 extreme south of India, including among others the Kotas of the Nilgiri Hills and certain 

 sections of the Vellalans and Idaiyans in the inland Coimbatore district, the custom 

 prevails of wearing chank bangles for ceremonial reasons, we may also reasonably infer 

 the former wider prevalence of the custom. Indeed it is probable that the custom was 

 at one time prevalent throughout a large section of Southern India. 



Kathiawar and adjacent Gujarat are also both maritime provinces and this 

 geographical situation is the key to the location of a chank-bangle industry in those 

 provinces in early times ; the coast of Kathiawar is the only considerable source of chank 

 shells apart from the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay. No chank-cutting is now done 

 either in Kathiawar or Gujarat ; the women there have abandoned their former habit 

 of wearing chank bangles and all the shells fished in this locality are exported from 

 Bombay to Bengal where they are known in trade as " Surti " shells, Surat having been 

 the port of shipment prior to the rise of Bombay. 



Why the Southern Deccan should once have been the home of a shell-cutting industry 

 is not so easy of explanation, seeing that it is situated in the heart of the country and 

 distant from 400 to 500 miles from the nearest sources of supply (Eameswaram and the 

 Tanjore coast). Possibly the location of this trade in the Deccan was due to the superior 

 skill as craftsmen of the people in this region inherited from stone-using ancestors 

 who found in the quartzite and trap rocks of the district more suitable material for their 

 weapons and tools than the men to the southward where intractable gneiss constitutes 

 all the rocky outcrops. Certainly in prehistoric times, Bellary, Kurnul and Cuddapah 

 were more thickly populated than the country to the south if we may judge from the 

 evidence of the number of stone implements found respectively in these two sections 

 of India. The neolithic remains of these Deccan craftsmen show their makers to have 

 been comparatively highly-skilled workers and with the discovery of the use of iron, 

 haematite ore being abundant in Bellary, the men of this district may reasonably be 

 supposed to have developed special skill in the working of the new material into tools 

 and in the manufacture of many articles, ornamental as well as useful, with the aid 

 of these improved tools. Add to this the natural conservatism of tribes isolated from 

 the coast by hill ranges the customs and manners of the Deccan tribes have been 

 less changed by contact and intermixture with surrounding races than the majority 

 of the tribes or races living in the coastal plains. To these inland people the wonder 

 of the great shell honoured by their gods would appeal vividly ; the mystery to them 

 of its origin would confer added importance and, as we find the wild hill tribes of Thibet, 

 Assam, and Bhutan do at the present day, they would end by endowing ornaments made 

 from it with mysterious powers of ensuring well-being and good luck, even as the 



