286 An Account of GiirJnval, [Sess. 



three kinds of songs : (1) Bharav — songs in praise of local 

 gods and demigods ; (2) Josa — comic songs on local events ; 

 (3) Bairi — love-songs, generally put into the form of a duet, 

 to be sung alternately by a man and a woman, like the Scotch 

 song " Huntingtower." It is a proverb that no female heart 

 can resist a young man who sings hairis well. 



Dancing is a great institution. Once every year, at least, 

 the local idol is brought into the open air, and everybody 

 dances round him. He is made to dance himself by being 

 put on to a sort of bed, held at the four corners by four men, 

 who then jerk the bed up and down, as high as possible, to the 

 sound of drums and pipes — taking care, of course, that the 

 god does not tumble off. Intellectually, the Eajpoot does not 

 stand high. He dances and sings and composes poetry, but 

 does not read much, and dislikes new ideas. Like some of 

 the members of the Art Congress who lately visited Edinburgh, 

 he loves beauty, but does not care for science, with its array 

 of factory chimneys, telegraph wires, and Darwinian theories. 

 With regard to Board of Manufacture schools and female 

 education, I am afraid the Gurhwal peasant-proprietor would 

 agree with Mr J. E. Hodson and Mr J. C. Horsley in con- 

 demning them. If he had the same command of the English 

 language, he would agree with the latter in saying that women 

 should not aspire to the higher walks of art. He might, 

 perhaps, go further even than Mr Horsley, and exclude them 

 from the decorative arts also, and maintain that painting idols 

 of a blue or red colour can be better done by men than it can 

 be by women. I had an illustration of this at Niti, the most 

 northern village of Gurhwal, which is one of the highest in- 

 habited places in the world. I was there on a festival day, 

 and saw all the men (boys, adults, and greybeards) dancing 

 round the local idol, but I noticed no women were present. 

 I asked the reason, and was told that the local idol of Niti liked 

 to see men dancing in his honour, but as regards women, he 

 liked to see them working in the fields. Men should dance 

 and women should work — such was the Horsleyan view of 

 life taken by the Niti deity. With regard to another burning 

 question of the day, prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquors, 

 the state of things in Gurhwal is extremely satisfactory. 

 In this great province, 5000 miles square, there are only 



