INTRODUCTORY 



To all Hindus the important position occupied by the Sacred Conch {Turbinella 

 pyrum, Linn.), the Sankha of Sanscrit literature and the SanJcu or Chanku of Tamil 

 speech, in their religion is a commonplace of everyday knowledge ; few, however, are 

 aware of the intimate relationship it bears to a hundred common incidents in the ordinary 

 life of the people in many localities and among widely sundered races, tribes, and castes. 

 In the following pages an attempt will be made to survey this little known by-way in 

 the life and history of the Indian world, to show how superstition looks upon the Sankha 

 as an amulet against the powers of evil, how this belief is among the oldest and most 

 tenaciously held by Animist and Hindu, by Muhammadan and by Buddhist ; to indicate 

 the way this belief has brought the shell into prominence in the Hindu religion, and to 

 detail how it subserves as well, a hundred different uses in the daily lives of millions of 

 Indians — ^how it is associated with infancy, marriage and death, and finally how its 

 employment in the form of ornamental bangles was once the subject of an important 

 industry in several widely separated parts of India, prominent being Kathiawar and 

 Gujarat where to-day all memory of it has vanished. 



In connection with this latter point I trust that the attention now drawn to it, 

 may result in the revival in Kathiawar of an industry that has more good things than 

 usual in its favour if we consider other aims than that of mere money-making ; no objects 

 manufactured in India are more artistic and pleasing than the handsome milk-white 

 bangles made in Dacca workshops for the ladies of Bengal. 



In the course of collecting the materials for this essay, difficult problems have 

 taken form. Some we can solve, but others remain obscure ; among the latter may be 

 mentioned the unknown cause for the cessation and disappearance of the chank bangle 

 industry in Kathiawar, Gujarat and the Deccan, and the question whether the use of 

 chank bangles among a few sections of several castes in South India is in the nature 

 of a survival of a once universal custom. 



Another point to which I wish to draw attention is the bearing upon the antiquity 

 of trade relations between India and the Persian Gulf in the recognition I made last 

 year of several exhibits in the Louvre as consisting of objects carved from the shell of 

 the Indian conch. True it is that they go back only some 500 years B.C. but it is some- 



