ASSAM, SYLHET AND CACHAR. V 



indifferently. The hills in which the Manipur level is set, and 

 which are under the control of the inhabitants of this, are 

 both on the north, east and south, only portions of a vast hilly 

 tract inhabited by the great races — the Nagas on the north, 

 the Lushaies and Kukis on the south, &c. As already re- 

 marked, those portions of this great congeries of hills, which 

 are included in the Manipur state, and are under the control 

 of the dwellers in the level, are inhabited by some twenty or 

 more clans, most of whom cannot understand even their 

 nearest neighbours — people whose greatest delicacy is roast dog 

 (they buy the dogs from the people of the plains), and who 

 have no intelligible (if any) religion. 



In the level dwell the ruling race, the true Manipuris, 

 a comparatively civilized race, well clothed, good agricultu- 

 rists, Hindoos by religion, abstaining from flesh food, par- 

 taking largely of milk ( which the hill savages, a sure sign that 

 they are savages, will not touch), and by sheer force of intel- 

 lectual superiority keeping fairly in order some ten times 

 their number of the hill savages. 



Now there are people who want to persuade us that this 

 ruling race is a mere hybrid derived from the fusion of the 

 savage clans — gold in fact, produced by mixing lead, iron, tin 

 and copper. I unhesitatingly reject this orthodox view, and 

 accept the people's own account, which is that in remote times 

 a large Hindoo army which had been sent to invade Burmah, 

 and had there come to grief, on its retreat, ashamed to return 

 to India, re infecta, settled in this fertile level, in many 

 respects resembling portions of the Gangetic plains, and having 

 no women with them, seized for themselves wives from amongst 

 the best looking women of all the surrounding clans, which 

 they rapidly subjected, and so started the present Manipur 

 race, which, after the first generation or two, ceased to 

 intermarry with the subject clans, though they still often 

 kept their handsomest women as concubines. That there 

 is Naga and Kuki blood in their veins, that their language 

 may be affined in many respects to that of the Lushaies 

 (though it contains a vast number of words clearly derived 

 from the Sanscrit) I do not for a moment deny ; but I assert 

 that they can truly boast of a large admixture of Aryan blood 

 also, and that to this they owe their comparatively high civi- 

 lization, and their marked intellectual superiority. 



[The subsequent sections of the Introduction loill he pub- 

 lished when the viaps necessary to illustrate them can be 

 prepared ; with these will also appear my comparison of the 

 Sindh and Manipur Avifaunas. — A. 0. H.] 



