MUNDA.RT POETRY, MUSIC AND DANCES. 105 



The same holds good for girls. These friendships may be thus formed also among two 

 grown-up married men or two grown-up married women. 



Parents as well as senior brothers and sisters adopt, as terms of endearment for 

 their children or juniors, chiefly the names of bright coloured birds or insects, more 

 rarely of flowers. This practice extends to close relatives such as cousins to even 

 the third or fourth degree. 



Lovers never ostentatiously use either names of flowers or of birds. They simply 

 add the general affectionate affix ga, or the more tender na, to pronominal addresses : 

 Amga ! thou dear, or am na ! thou darling, or ama. These affixes are added also to 

 proper nouns, predicates and to affirmative or negative particles he-ga he-na, 

 hea ! 



All three are ordinary terms of either affection or familiarity used currently by 

 parents to children, by relatives to each other, by friends and close acquaintances. 

 But unmarried youths and grown-up unmarried girls will never use them unless they 

 have declared their love for each other. 



Ga and a may be addressed to both boys and girls, na to girls only. 



Sometimes the occurrence of a term of endearment is the only clue to tell us who 

 the speaker or questioner is in a given song. 



From what has been said so far we may conclude that terms of endearment, 

 jingles and synonymous variants as such, constitute the sum total of poetic words in 

 Mundari. 



There now remains to be considered another factor of the outward form of their 

 poetry which is distinct both from words as such and from their arrangement with 

 regard to each other, viz., the use of metaphors and chiefly of similes sustained through- 

 out the whole of quite a number of songs. 



The Mundas exhibit a marked predilection for clothing their ideas so completely 

 in similes and symbols always taken from nature as it surrounds them, that an alien 

 might understand every word of a song without as much as guessing what idea the 

 song is meant to convey. Songs of this kind they call banita kaji "fictions" or jonoka 

 kaji " word measures," i.e., a piece where the ostensible words are used as a measure or 

 counterpart of something not expressly stated. They will symbolize an idea by 

 translating it into a different order of nature, sometimes in its more striking outlines, 

 sometimes into its details (vide p. 94) and leave to the listener the task of applying 

 the simile, and of feeling and dreaming himself into the emotion the poet intends to 

 stir up by the picture he presents. Many of these similes are chosen with a genuine 

 poetic instinct and with a correctness which reveals depth of feeling as well as a close and 

 appreciative observation of nature. The pictures themselves are generally drawn in 

 sharp, correct outlines, unencumbered by any superfluous detail. We may at times 

 think that their simplicity savours of poverty rather than of artistic purpose. However, 

 in judging them we must remember that these aborigines, living in closer contact with 

 nature than we do, have in many respects a keener eye for its details. Simply raise 

 before their mental eye, e.g., the vision of a particular tree, and they will, in their imagi- 

 nation, directly see that tree's characteristic structure together with the shape, colour 



