714 Account of the Origin, etc. of the [July, 



status, creed and customs of the Bodo and Dhimal. Upon these 

 points the two people have so much in common that though I have 

 myself gone through each particular separately in regard to each people, 

 I shall spare the patience of my readers by aggregating what is com- 

 mon, and separating only what is particular, to the Bodo and Dhimal. 

 Satus — Condition. — The condition or status of the Bodo and Dhimal 

 people is that of erratic cultivators of the wilds. For ages transcend- 

 ing memory or tradition, they have passed beyond the savage or hunter 

 state, and the nomadic or herdsman's estate, and have advanced to the 

 third or agricultural grade of social progress, but so as to indicate a not 

 entirely broken connexion with the precedent condition of things ; for, 

 though cultivators, all and exclusively, they are nomadic cultivators, so 

 little connected with any one spot that neither the Bodo nor Dhimal 

 language possesses a name for village.* Though dwelling in those wilds, 

 wherein the people of the plains (Ahirs and Gwallas) periodically graze 

 immense numbers of buffaloes and cows, they have no large herds or 

 flocks of their own, to induce them to wander ; but, as agriculturists 

 little versed in artificial renovative processes, they find in the exhaus- 

 tion of the worked soil necessity, or in the high productiveness of the 

 new, a temptation, to perpetual movement. They never cultivate the 

 same field beyond the second year, or remain in the same village be- 

 yond the fourth to sixth year. After the lapse of 4 or 5 years they 

 frequently return to their old fields and resume their cultivation, if in 

 the interim the jungle has grown well, and they have not been antici- 

 pated by others, for there is no pretence of appropriation other tha n 

 possessory, and if, therefore, another party have preceded them, or> 

 if the slow growth of the jungle give no sufficient promise of a good 

 stratum of ashes for the land when cleared by fire, they move on to 

 another site, new or old. If old, they resume the identical fields they 

 tilled before, bat never the old houses or site of the old village, that 

 being deemed unlucky. In general, however, they prefer new land to 

 old, and having still abundance of unbroken forest around them, they 

 are in constant movement, more especially as, should they find a new 



* Arva in annos mutant et superest ager ! So immutable is human nature that 

 the descriptions applied to our ancestors in their pristine state are absolutely and 

 most significantly true of similarly circumstanced races now abiding in the forest 

 jungles of India. 



