370 



NATURE 



[August 20, 1903 



of deeper research, in' which the present author and 

 others Hving in Chutia Nag-pore may try to disentomb 

 from below the present surface the ancient history of 

 the country which was once the treasury of the Naga 

 rulers of India, and will undoubtedly be in the future 

 its richest manufacturing- province. It contains about 

 5000 square miles of coal-fields, only worked on its 

 eastern rim, inexhaustible supplies of iron ore, red and 

 brown haematite, mag-netite and limestone, immense 

 wealth in other minerals, and in the remote past the 

 gold of its g-old-bearing river-sands and its diamonds 

 filled the coffers of the Naga-Kushika kings. The 

 central mountain of their realm was Parisnath, de- 

 scribed in chap, vi., which was first the Marang Buru 

 or Great Mother Hill of the Mundas and Santals. The 

 Kushikas called it Mandara, the revolving mountain, 

 and it was finally consecrated as the sacred mountain 

 in the east of the trading Jains of the west, who gave 



There the seasonal dances are held, a separate step 

 and figure being set apart for each season, and thither 

 in the primitive age the women of each village invited 

 to these dances the men of one adjoining it in the 

 same province or Parha, and there the children ot 

 each village were begotten as the offspring of the 

 mother trees of the sacred grove. Their Spartan 

 education, in separate establishments for each sex, by 

 the women and men of each village to whom their 

 mothers were sisters, still exists among the Ooraons 

 of Chutia Nagpore, the Nagas of Assam, the islanders 

 of Melanesia in the Indian Archipelago, and other 

 races. They were taught to repeat the national 

 educational and historical stories, and made thorough 

 proficients in all their tribal duties. 



We can trace in Chutia Nagpore the stages ot 

 advance from the simple primitive villages of- the 

 Mundas and Marvas to the elaborate Ooraon villages 



it its present name of the Lord (nath) of Traders 

 (Panris). 



The history of the country told in the legends, ritual 

 and customs of its numerous tribes, takes us back 

 through layer after layer of deposit beneath the surface 

 of to-day to the first age of Indian village life surviving 

 in Jushpore and Sirgoojya among the Korwas, who 

 are nomad agriculturists living in rude huts of tree 

 branches in forest encampments, vacated every two or 

 three years. Their women add to the tribal food they 

 collect in the woods and the animals killed by the men 

 of the tribe, the produce of the crops they sow in their 

 clearing until the soil is exhausted. Their successors 

 were the Mundas and Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, 

 living in permanent villages under the shade of the 

 Sarna or village grove of old forest trees left standing 

 in the ring of cleared rice land, the Gond tribal sacred 

 snake. Beside the Sarna is the Akhra or dancing- 

 ground, well depicted in the illustration here repro- 

 duced of Girls and Musicians at a Santal dance (p. 128). 



NO. 1764, VOL. 68] 



with allotments for village servants, in which the lands 

 are divided into Manjhus or Lord's land, the 

 Bhuinhiari land of privileged tenants eligible as Head- 

 man, Pahn or Village Priest, and Mahto or Accountant 

 and the land of ordinar\^ tenants, whose duty it is to 

 till the landlord's Manjhus land. We can further 

 study local history in the ritual customs and traditions 

 of the laughter-loving and indomitably independent 

 Mundas and Ho Kols, the Irish of India, of the silent 

 and dogged Bhuyas, the musical Ooraons, forming 

 a mixture of these two types, in the farming skill of 

 the Kaurs and the feudal customs of the Chiroos and 

 Kharwars, the ancestral rulers of Magadha, who 

 attached Chutia Nagpore to their confederacy and 

 ended the chain of aboriginal rulers, in which Mundas, 

 Bhuyas, Gonds, Ooraons, and Kaurs were the suc- 

 cessive links. 



The three last, Ooraons, Kaurs^ and Chiroo-Khar- 

 wars, were the sons of the barley as their predecessors 

 were sons of the rice. Their national birthday is the 



