MUNDARI POETRY, MUSIC AND DANCES. 117 



and it is quite conceivable that among them those which seemed best suited to inculcate 

 the moral and social precepts, grown on and out of that system, should have been 

 preferred and have received the public sanction of being allowed as standard poetry on 

 the dancing ground. 



It is a striking feature of the whole social and religious life of the Mundas that they 

 have no ex officio teachers of either secular or religious knowledge and no schools of any 

 description. What there is of teaching is done by the family in the most primitive 

 way. Besides, children and young people are constantly in requisition for grazing 

 cattle and for other domestic and field work. Hence the only time that they could 

 all gather and would do so willingly is after the day's work for dance and song. The 

 idea of using these gatherings for the purpose of impressing on the minds of the young 

 nearly all they had to teach them socially and morally may, therefore, have quite 

 naturally suggested itself to the community. 



These dances are no longer what they used to be but a couple of decades ago, and 

 still are here and there in a few isolated villages hardly touched by alien influences. 

 They have lost so much in good form and decency that the older folk are complaining of 

 what they call the wild and unseemly character of both the dance and the reckless, 

 rowdy drum accompaniment. Even if with regard to this complaint we make an 

 allowance for that propensity of old age which gained for it the somewhat sarcastic 

 title of laudator temporis acti , it is certain that it contains more regrettable truth than 

 exaggeration. 



In " the good old times " of which the elders speak, the dancing ground was 

 always in the village itself and was never the exclusive domain of the young people, 

 whereas now-a-days they but too often gather for a dance outside the village. The 

 whole community would be there. Parents and grand-parents would sit around listen- 

 ing to the songs and the drums and sharing in the joy of the young people, and the 

 children would be there, learning on the dancing ground itself the songs and the melo- 

 dies and the steps of the various dances. It need hardly be said that all this consti- 

 tuted by itself alone a great safeguard of decency and morality. 



If such a school be very primitive, it cannot be denied that it is an attractive one 

 and in its way effective in bringing home the social and moral wisdom of the race to a 

 light-hearted and not a very highly gifted youth. In its way it may be an ornament 

 for the civilization which developed it, inasmuch as " Omnetulit punctumqui miscuit 

 utile dulci." 



The following may perhaps be adduced in support of the view advanced above :— 



(i) The songs as well as the dances are classified according to different periods, 

 beginning with the year's chief festivals, and this classification is strictly adhered to 

 so that songs and dances belonging to one period are never sung during another. 



(2) The Karam-feast of Hindu origin is even now-a-days not universally accepted 

 by the Mundas. The Karam-songs are, however, pretty generally known. 



Many of these songs contain distinctly philosophic teachings, which, as already 

 stated, seem but little palatable to the Mundas. It would appear as though the new 

 alien teachers, despairing of the success of their methods of oral teachings, conformed 



