MUNDARI POETRY, MUSIC AND DANCES 87 



Whether such lines may or may not be called verses is a mere question of 

 terminology. 



So much for what, from our point of view, may be called the negative side of 

 Mundari poetry. 



In describing its positive side, its national characteristics, we might conveniently 

 distinguish between its soul, or the ideals which it pursues, and its body, or the out- 

 ward form in which the poets or bards clothe those ideals. 



As to the first, we could hardly expect to meet with either the heights of the Aryan 

 epos and drama, or with the variegated charms of the lighter kinds of Aryan poetry. 

 For these suppose a degree of intellectual culture which the Mundas were partly too 

 indolent and partly too unfavourably circumstanced to work out for themselves. Ever 

 since the great Munda or Kherwarian race was broken up , and its unabsorbed remnant 

 driven in small fragments into the various mountain fastnesses of Central India by the 

 northern invaders, the mental horizon of the fraction who are now called Mundaris or 

 Mundas has been limited to the joys and sorrows of a very simple life. Their world 

 is a narrow circle of villages hidden away in forest-clad mountains, where the appearance 

 of an alien has, till recently, been quite an extraordinary sight. And they are quite 

 content to leave the wide world and its wonders to such races as may care for them. 

 Their only desire regarding that world has been, and still is, to be left alone by it. 



Hence, of the shock of nations and of races impinging on each other, of the un- 

 bounded longings of soaring minds after a nobler life and a higher world, of the mystic, 

 the melancholic, or the fairy dreams of the romantic school, which form the subject- 

 matter of so much of our poetry, little or no traces are to be found in theirs. 



And yet it would be wronging them to suppose that they are devoid of poetic 

 instinct. It is not as mere animals, or as incipient men, that they move through their 

 simple life. They see it, they look at it in an intensely human way. It cannot be said 

 that they allow themselves to be smothered by the hard struggle for existence. They 

 see the joys and sorrows of life ; they perceive them as such, and, culling them as it 

 were, they clothe them in a profusion of songs which seem almost inexhaustible. 



Besides the old and ever new theme of poesy, the fairy dreamland of first love, 

 with its counterpart, the poignant grief of the disappointed lover, the following are the 

 ordinary subjects of their songs : — the golden worth of friendship, the fitness or becom- 

 ing nature of the good old customs, the pleasures of the chase, the terrors of the tiger- 

 infested forests, the horrors of war the pangs of poverty, the complaint of the servant, 

 the foolishness of forming unsuitable attachments, the reprehensible ways of the giddy- 

 headed village belle who seeks to attract attention in a manner which stands condemned 

 by the social customs, the more pardonable little vanities of youth, the chaff and banter 

 between youths and maidens, the chiding between husband and wife, the remembrance 

 of some stirring event, such as a battle, a great panchayat, etc., the surprise and 

 delight caused by the occasional sight of a so-called Rajah's gaudy suite, and even the 

 amusement caused by the somewhat comical appearance of the itinerant Hindu mer- 

 chant as he jogs along astride the bulging pack-saddle of his wretched little country 

 " tattoo " (pony). 



