98 
ON THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS 
" tants of Chota - Nagpore for ages. It includes many 
" tribes ; the people of this province to whom it is generally 
" applied are, either Moondah or Oraon ; and though these 
" races are now found in many parts of the country occupying 
" the same villages, cultivating the same fields, celebrating 
" together the same festivals, and enjoying the same amuse- 
" ments, they are of totally distinct origin and cannot inter- 
" marry without loss of caste. "'^ 
Sir George Campbell is the inventor of the term Kolarian, 
and I shall now quote his arguments in favor of it : " The 
" generic name usually applied to the Aborigines of the 
" hUl country of Chota-Nagpore, Mirzapore^ and Rewah 
" is ' Coles ' or ' Koles.' Europeans apply the term to the 
" Dravidian Oraons as well as to the others, but perhaps 
"erroneously. It is difficult to say to which tribes the 
" name is properly applied, for most of them have other 
*' distinctive names. But in the south of the Chota-Xagpore 
*' country, about Singbhoom, &c., it is certainly applied to 
" the • Lurka Coles,' and I can myself testify that on the 
" Mirzapore-Jubbulpore road, the Aborigines are called by 
" the natives Coles or Kolees, which they volunteered to 
" explain to me to be the same word ' which you call 
*' Coolee.' On the Bombay side again a very numerous class 
" of Aborigines are styled Kolees. In the Simla hills also, 
" the inferior people are known as Kolees. Altogether I 
" have myself little doubt that the ordinary word Coolee, as 
" applied to a bearer of burdens or labourer, is the same word, 
" and that in short it is the word generally applied by the 
" Northern Indians to the Aboriginal tribes, most of whom 
" they reduced to the condition of Helots. There seems to 
'* be good reason to suppose that the original form of the 
''See Colonel Dalton's article "The Kols of Chota-Nagpore," in the 
Supplement to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. XXXV, 
1887, Part II, p. 154. 
