118 REV. FR. HOFFMANN, S.J., ON 



to the national taste and clothed their ideas in the form of popular songs as the only 

 chance of getting a hearing at all. 



(3) In certain songs it is pretty evident that it is not so much the individual nature 

 which reveals its own personal emotions, but rather the philosophy or wisdom of the 

 race which shows how the individual of the community should feel under certain 

 circumstances. There are plainly didactic features traceable among the really poetic 

 features of the songs. To quote but one example : In the last stanza of the song given 

 above, pp. 108 and 109, the consolation which the young man suggests to himself 

 over the loss of his sweetheart may be very disinterested and highminded, it may 

 even be the only real consolation available in such a case. But it certainly is not the 

 common feeling of the disappointed lover. Here it is the communal system with its 

 racial marriage laws which tells the young man that that is the way he has to feel if 

 he wants to be wise at all. 



(4) There exist some songs which are rigorously excluded from the dancing ground 

 because they are not decent enough, because they contain either a lewd expression or 

 an unbecoming allusion. 



I have never myself heard any of these songs and could so far not even obtain a 

 sample of them. I am credibly informed that there are very few of the kind and that 

 only here and there some young men will venture to sing them when out alone about 

 the fields, but never in company. 



If that be so, it is a proof that the community as such exercises a rigorous control 

 over the songs. It would hardly do this if it did not consider them as valuable means 

 of inculcating the racial wisdom and maintaining it on a high moral level. 



It is easy to see how such a control discourages and practically reduces to a mini- 

 mum indecent and inferior productions. 



Now-a-days a great many Sudani songs are in vogue (chiefly Karam-songs), especial- 

 ly in those parts where Mundas live side by side with Hindus or Hinduized aborigines 

 and Uraons. 



But with them the present paper has no concern. Song-making, as already remark- 

 ed, is in recent times at a very low ebb. The race is going through a crisis which it has 

 but scanty chances of surviving. Its very ancient and primitive civilization contains 

 no safeguards against great and sudden changes, such as the British occupation has 

 brought on it by its judicial and executive system and by allowing and favouring an 

 unlimited influx of Hindus and Mahomedans. The unequal struggle with the latter 

 for the ancestral rights in their village lands, and that by means of legal technicalities 

 about which they understand nothing, the unhealthy and often frightfully demoralizing 

 influences of labour recruiting agencies, keep them in constant alarm and apprehension 

 of losing what they naturally cherish most : their lands, their children and even their 

 wives or husbands.^ 



Add to this the efforts of missionaries trying to substitute different and antago- 

 nistic forms of Christianity in place of their old beliefs and practices. It is easy to 

 see how entirely all these influences, however different and opposed to each other, must 

 dislocate the whole mental and moral balance. And such a state of things is anything 



