422 
J. HORNELL ON 
flourished in the early centuries of the Christian era in the Tinnevelly District, 
its geographical location in the coastal section of the Pandyan Kingdom made 
it the natural centre and home of a great chank-cutting industry. The Pandyan 
sovereigns were from time immemorial overlords of the Pearl and Chank Fisheries of 
the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay, the most important source of supply of the raw 
material then and now, and it is a curious vagary of trade that the present seat of the 
industry should be situated 1500 miles from the scene of the fishery. 
From the fact that among a few widely separated castes, sub-castes and tribes 
of the extreme south of India, including among others the Kotas of the Nilgiri Hills 
and certain sections of the Vellalans and Idaiyans in the inland Coimbatore District, 
the custom prevails of wearing chank bangles for ceremonial reasons, we may also 
reasonably infer the former wider prevalence of the custom. Indeed it is probable that 
the custom was at one time prevalent throughout a large section of Southern India. 
Kathiawar and adjacent Gujarat are also both maritime provinces, and this geo- 
graphical situation is the key to the location of a chank-bangle industry in those provinces 
in early times ; the coast of Kathiawar is the only considerable source of chank 
shells apart from the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay. No chank cutting is done either 
in Kathiawar or Gujarat ; the women there have abandoned their former habit of 
wearing chank bangles and all the shells fished on the Kathiawar coast are exported 
to Bengal where they are known in trade as ‘ ‘ Surti ’ ’ shells, as Surat was the mart 
for them prior to the rise of Bombay. 
Why the Southern Deccan should once have been the home of a shell-cutting 
industry is not so easy of explanation, seeing that it is situated in the heart of the coun- 
try and distant from 400 to 500 miles from the nearest sources of supply (Rameswaram 
and the Tanjore coast). Possibly the location of this trade in the Deccan was due to 
the superior skill as craftsmen of the people in these districts inherited from expert 
stone-using ancestors who found in the tough quartzite and trap rocks of the district 
more suitable material for their weapons and tools than the men to the southward 
where intractable gneiss constitutes all the rocky outcrops. Certainly in prehistoric 
times Bellary, Kurnul, and Cuddapah were more thickly populated than the country 
to the south if we may judge from the evidence of the number of stone implements 
found respectively in these two sections of India. The neolithic remains of these 
Deccan craftsmen show their makers to have been comparatively highly skilled workers 
and with the discovery of the use of iron, haematite ore being abundant in Bellary, the 
men of this district may reasonably be supposed to have developed special skill in the 
working of the new material into tools and in the manufacture of many articles, 
ornamental as well as useful, with the aid of these improved tools. Add to this the 
natural conservatism of tribes isolated from the coast by hill ranges — the customs and 
manners of the Deccan tribes have been less changed by contact and intermixture with 
surrounding races than the majority of the tribes or races living in the coastal plains. 
To these inland people the wonder of the great shell honoured by their gods would 
appeal vividly ; the> mystery, to them, of its origin would confer added importance 
and as we find the wild hill tribes of Assam and Bhutan do at the present day, they 
