MUNDARI POETRY, MUSIC AND DANCES. 119 



but favourable to poetry. True they continue to sing and to dance, but as already 

 stated, in a less decent and a less intelligent way, and many young people no longer 

 understand all the songs handed down by the preceding generations. 



To us their jingling adjectives and predicates may seem childish, their repeti- 

 tions tedious and as means of generalizing or idealizing they may appear rather 

 absolutely embryonic or abnormally clumsy ; the method by which the synonyms are 

 got is so absolutely alien and uncongenial that we can hardly accept them as genuine 

 synonyms, so that they may make .on us a more unfavourable impression than the 

 efforts of a rhymster, who, for the sake of his rhymes, drags all kinds of words together 

 into some sort of rhythm with an utter disregard of ideas or aesthetic fitness. 



But it is not by our standards that we must judge these songs, if we want to 

 estimate their character with objective correctness. Looked at and judged by our 

 standard they must, of course, stand condemned as rude attempts, as products of a 

 lower mental culture, even as their material culture can stand no comparison with 

 that of the West. Compared with European agricultural machinery, the Mundas' 

 implements are children's toys, the product of childrens' wits and hands. Before an 

 English residence or an ordinary hotel the Munda's house is abject poverty, and his 

 village is a hygienic horror if compared with the sanitary and other arrangements of 

 any decent Municipality. But to the Munda his implements, his hut and his village 

 appear in a very different light ; he cannot make the comparison which depreciates 

 these things in our eyes, because the European term of comparison does not exist for 

 him. To him, his primitive implements and fields mean security against want and 

 famine, his hut means comfort and a cosy shelter against cold and rain, and his village 

 stands for all the amenities and safeguards afforded by a regulated communal life. 

 If we consider these things in themselves, we too shall realize that the field, the hut, 

 and the village embody the thought and the experience of generations, and they will 

 appear to us an immense advance on the state of those who lived by the chase and 

 had to face their prey with crude stone weapons ; we shall see in them elevating 

 factors that made the lives of generations better and happier, we shall in a word ap- 

 preciate them as living evidences of that spirit and reason in man which ever urges 

 onwards and upwards in all directions without rest and without discouragement even 

 in the face of the greatest obstacles. 



Similarly we must consider the poetry embodied in these songs in itself and not as 

 compared with that of more advanced and more highly gifted races, if we wish to realize 

 what it is to the Mundas and what it is in itself. 



There is first the mere fact of its existence at all, which is full of meaning. If bare 

 language, as has been so well said, constitutes an impassable barrier between man and 

 beast, then poetry must be admitted to do so in a much higher degree. For it takes a 

 view of life which we cannot by any stretch of imagination or any effort of thought 

 attribute to the dumb animal. The beast may be, and indeed is, in its way very busi- 

 ness-like, but it is never a poet. 



Secondly there is the fact of its abundance among the Mundas. These songs are 

 endless and spring up on all sides. 



