10 MODERN PIG-STICKING 



severe the famine elsewhere the greater is the pros- 

 perity of these parts. 



In our Kadir lands, with which we are now more 

 intimately concerned, the villagers are also Jats, 

 but generally of a poorer nature ; with them are 

 interspersed a certain percentage of the usual 

 lower classes, and a small sprinkling of poachers, 

 rogues, and masterless men. Their villages are poor, 

 their living precarious. For the soil is light sand, 

 giving but few and indifferent crops at best ; while 

 there is the ever-present danger that the Ganges 

 will arise in flood and carry all before it. For this 

 reason their houses are simply made of mud walls 

 with a thatch of the Kadir grass ; and in the more 

 far-sighted villages you will see a large artificial 

 mound on which the inhabitants may take refuge 

 in time of sudden flood. As is the case in most 

 native villages, the streets and surroundings are 

 without sanitation and filthy, but the courtyards 

 and interiors of the houses are kept scrupulously 

 clean. There is generally one pukka masonry 

 building, the temple, with its grotesque Indian gods, 

 which these poor people never neglect. There is 

 always a paid priest in attendance, and the weird 

 sound of his " conch " or horn calling men to prayers 

 mingles peacefully with the bells on the cattle as 

 they go out to graze at dawn or return in the dusk. 



These people own large herds of wretched cattle, 

 which they keep for what they produce when alive, 

 and for the value of their skins when dead. In 

 addition, they make ropes and cow-dung fuel, and 

 tend their scanty crops. Sugar-cane, though of 

 poor quality, grows fairly freely in the Kadir, and 

 every village has its sugar-cane press with its 

 characteristic smell, certain presage of the cold 



