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,J. HORNELL ON 
in which a large proportion of the totems are still capable of being identified. Risley 1 
enumerates 60 totemistic sections or septs among this caste, among which is one termed 
Sankhawar whose members are prohibited from wearing chank-shell ornaments. 
Among the Santals, the place of this sept is taken by one called Sankh, wherein all 
individuals are forbidden, under pain of caste punishment, the use of the chank shell 
in any form ; they may neither cut, burn, nor use the shell, nor may the women of 
this sept use it in personal adornment. 2 
The prevalence of the use of chank bangles among these Dravidian races, the 
present animistic beliefs of the Santals and Chota Nagpur Kurmis, and the com- 
paratively recent renunciation of the same cult by the great Kochh tribe, taken in 
conjunction with other facts and especially with the widely spread archaeological finds 
detailed elsewhere in these pages, point to the use of chank bangles as having had a 
purely Dravidian origin and as having been a custom prevalent and solidly established 
among at least certain sections of the race throughout India anterior to the advent 
of the Aryan invaders and the rise of the Brahmanic faith. The cult of the chank 
would therefore appear to be one adopted (and modified) by the Brahmans from the 
religious beliefs which they found indigenous to India. 
Finally, in the hill tracts of Chittagong, we find the women of the Maghs, a race 
of Indo-Mongolian extraction and Buddhists by religion, using very broad unorna- 
mented sections of chank shells as bracelets in similar manner as we shall next see is 
the habit in Thibet and Bhutan, inhabited by other Mongolian races. To supply the 
needs of the Maghs, bangle cutters are established in Chittagong ; these workpeople 
are chiefly Muhammadans and the work they do is of the roughest and crudest descrip- 
tion in conformity with the undeveloped artistic tastes of their customers who appear 
to wear these bracelets rather as charms than as ornaments. Broad arm ornaments 
of similarly simple form are used by the Papuans and by the inhabitants of several 
groups of the Melanesian islands ; sometimes round the wrist, sometimes on the upper 
arm above the elbow. I do not know, however, whether the shell employed in these 
instances be Turbinella or not. Among these island tribes it is the rtien who wear 
these shell ornaments. 
Outside of Bengal and Assam the only considerable demand for chank bracelets 
comes from Thibet and Bhutan. The trade is one of long standing for Tavernier in 
1666 found Bhutanese merchants taking home from Pabna and Dacca bracelets sawn 
from “ sea-shells as large as an egg.’’ He also states that 2000 men were occupied 
in these two places in making tortoise shell and sea-shell bracelets, and “all that is 
produced by them is exported ’ to the kingdoms of Bhutan , Assam, Siam and other 
countries to the north and east of the territories of thegreat Moghul” ( loc . cit ., p. 267). 
Now ‘ ‘ Bhot ’ ’ happens to be the native name for the southern section of Thibet 
inhabited by a settled population, in contradistinction to Chang, the northern region 
inhabited by nomads, while Bhutea is still used to denote people of Thibetan race 
l Risley, loc. cit., vol. ii, appendix, p. 88. 
5 Ibid., vol. i, p. xliii. 
Evidently a lapsus pennae as the custom of wearing chank bangles was even more prevalent in Tavernier’s day 
among Bengali women than it is to-day. 
