The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies Part 19

Make two figures of a goose, one on each side. Make a lion and a dog to stand at the left-leg, bearing four drinking-cups on four paws--and make a moon's image, and put it in the burying-place.

Comb the hair, and tie up a large bunch with a black string. Put round the neck a cobra-capella, and dress him in the garments by making nine folds round the waist. He stands on a rock eating men's flesh. The persons that were possessed with devils are put in the burying-place.

Put a corpse at the feet, taking out the intestines through the mouth. The princ.i.p.al thing for this country, and for the Singhalese, is the wors.h.i.+p of the planets.[55]

In the centre of the island is the kingdom of Kandy; naturally fortified by impervious forests, and long independent. This creates a variety; the Kandyans being somewhat ruder than the other Singhalese. It is not, however, an important one. The really important ethnology of Ceylon is that of the _Vaddahs_, in the eastern districts, inland of Battacaloa.

They are still unmodified by either the Hindu habits, or the great Indian creeds,--the true a.n.a.logues of the Khonds, and Kols, and Bhils, &c. Their language, however, is Singhalese; an important fact, since it denotes one of two phenomena,--either the antiquity of the conquest of Ceylon supposing the extension of the Singhalese language to have been gradual, or the thorough-going character of it, if it be recent.

Who were the _Padaei_ of the following extract from Herodotus?[56]--"Other Indians there are, who live east of these. They are nomads, eaters of raw flesh; and called Padaei. They are said to have the following customs. Whenever one of their countrymen is sick, whether man or woman, he is killed. The males kill the males, and amongst these the most intimate acquaintance kill their nearest friends; for they say that for a man to be wasted by disease is for their own meat to be spoilt. The man denies that he ails; but they, not letting him have his own way, kill and feast on him. If a female be sick, the women that are most intimate with her treat her as the males do the men. They sacrifice and feast upon all who arrive at old age. Few, however, go thus far, since they kill every one who falls sick before he reaches that stage of life."

Name for name, the _Vaddahs_ of Ceylon have a claim to be _Padaei_.

Besides which they are Indian.

But, name for name, the _Battas_[57] of Sumatra have a claim as well; and although they are not exactly Indian, they are cannibals of the sort in question--or, at any rate, cannibals in a manner quite as remarkable.

This gives us a conflict of difficulties. The solution of them lies in the fact of neither _Vaddah_ nor _Batta_ being _native_ names; a fact which leaves us a liberty to suppose that the _Padaei_ of Herodotus were simply some wild Indian tribe sufficiently allied in manners to the _Vaddahs_ of Ceylon, and the _Battas_ of Sumatra, to be called by the same name, but without being necessarily either the one or the other; or even ethnologically connected with either.

Now look at the _gipsies_ of Great Britain. They are wanderers without fixed habitations; whilst, at the same time, they are more abundant in some parts of the island than others. They have no very definite occupation; yet they are oftener tinkers and tinmen than aught else equally legal. They intermarry with the English but little. All this is _caste_, although we may not exactly call it so. Then, again, they have a peculiar language, although it is so imperfectly known to the majority of the British gipsies, as to have become well-nigh extinct.[58] These gipsies are of Indian origin, and a wandering tribe of Hindostan, called Sikligurs, reminded Mr. Pickering of the European gipsies more than any other Indians he fell in with. Like these, the Sikligurs are _coves_, or tinkers.

This, however, is by the way. Although it is as well to make a note of the Indian extraction of the English and other European gipsies, it is not for this reason that they have been mentioned. They find a place here for the sake of ill.u.s.trating what is meant by the _wandering tribes of India_, whilst at the same time they throw a slight ill.u.s.tration over the nature of _castes_. Lastly, they are essentially parts of an ethnological investigation--ethnological rather than either social or political. Their characteristics are referable to a difference of descent; and they are tinkers, wanderers, poachers, and smugglers, not so much because they are either gipsies, or Indians, as because they are of a different stock from the English. They are foreigners in the fullest sense of the term; and they differ from their fellow-citizens just as the Jew does--though less advantageously.

Now India swarms with the a.n.a.logues of the English gipsy; so much so as to make it likely that the latter is found as far from his original country as Wales and Norway, simply because he is a vagabond, not because he is an Indian.

Of the chief of the tribes in question a good account is given by Mr.

Balfour. This list, however, which is as follows, may be enlarged.

1. The _Gohur_ are, perhaps, better known under the name of _Lumbarri_, and better still as the _Brinjarri_, the bullock-drivers of many parts of India, but more especially of the Dekhan. They are corn-merchants as well. Their organization consists of divisions called _Tandas_, at the head of which is a _Naek_. Two Naeks paramount over the rest, reside permanently at Hyderabad, on the confines of the Mahratta and Telugu countries. The bullock, _Hatadia_, devoted to the G.o.d _Balajee_, is an object of wors.h.i.+p. In a long line of Brinjarri met by Mr. Pickering,[59]

one of the females was carrying a dog, which neither a Hindu nor a Parsi would have done. Many of them are Sikhs. There are, certainly, three divisions of the Gohuri--the Chouhane,[60] the Rhatore, and the Powar, and probably--

_The Purmans_ are another branch of them; consisting of about seventy-five families of agriculturists on the Bombay islets.

2. _The Bhowri_, called also _Hirn-s.h.i.+karri_ and _Hern-pardi_, though Bhowri is the native name, are hunters. They also fall into subordinate divisions.

3. _The Tarremuki_; so-called by themselves, but known in the Dekhan as _Ghissaris_, or _Bail-k.u.mbar_, and amongst the Mahrattas, as _Lohars_, are blacksmiths.

4. _The Korawi_, fall in tribes which neither eat with each other, nor intermarry, _viz._:--

_a._ The Bajantri, who are musicians.

_b._ The Teling--basket-makers and prost.i.tutes.

_c._ The Kolla.

_d._ The Soli.

5. _The Bhattu_, _Dummur_, or _Kollati_, are exorcists and exhibitors of feats of strength.

6. _The Muddikpur_, so called by themselves, though known under several other names, follow a variety of employments; some being ferrymen.

All these tribes wander about the country without any permanent home, speak a peculiar dialect with a considerable proportion of Non-Sanskritic words, and preserve certain peculiarities of creed; though in different degrees--the Muddikpur being wholly or nearly pagan, the Tarremuki Brahminic.

The wandering life of these, and other similar tribes is not, by itself, sufficient to justify us in separating them from the other Hindus. But it does not stand alone. The fragments of an earlier paganism, and the fragments of an earlier language are phenomena which must be taken in conjunction with it. These suggest the likelihood of the Gohuri, the Bhatti, and their like, being in the same category with the Khonds and Bhils, &c., _i.e._, representatives of the earlier and more exclusively Tamulian populations. If the gipsy language of England had, instead of its Indian elements, an equal number of words from the original British, it would present the same phenomena, and lead to the same inference as that which is drawn from the Bhatti, Bhowri, Tarremuki, and Gohuri vocabularies,[61] _viz._: the doctrine that fragments of the original population are to be sought for amongst the wanderers over the face of the country, as well as among the occupants of its mountain strongholds.

In a country like India, where differences of habit, business, extraction, and creed, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of separation between different sections and subsections of its population, and where slight barriers of diverse kinds prevent intermixture, the different sects of its numerous religions requires notice. This, however, may be short. As sectarianism is generally in the direct ratio to the complexity of the creed submitted to section, we may expect to find the forms of Brahminism and Buddhism, not less numerous than those of either Christianity or Mahometanism. And such is really the case. The sects are too numerous to enlarge upon. The Sikh creed has been noticed from its political importance. That of the Jains is also remarkable, since it most closely resembles Buddhism, without being absolutely Buddhist in the current sense of the word. It is, possibly, the actual and original Buddhism of the continent of India--supposed to have been driven out bodily by Brahminism, but really with the true vitality of persecuted creeds, still surviving in disguise. Again, in India, though in a less degree than in China, Philosophy replaces belief--so much so, that the different forms of one negation--Natural Religion--must be cla.s.sed amongst the creeds of Hindostan; by the side of which there stand many kinds of simple philosophy; just as was the case in ancient Greece, where, in one and the same city, there were the philosophers of the Academy and the believers in Zeus.

There is, then, creed within creed in the two great religions of India--to say nothing about the numerous fragments of modified and unmodified paganism.

And besides these there are the following introduced religions--each coinciding, more or less, with some ethnological division.

1. Christianity from, at least, four different sources--

_a._ That of the Christians of Thomas on the Malabar Coast. Here the doctrine is that of the Syrian Church, and the population being _perhaps_ (?) Persian in origin.

_b._ The Romanism of the French and Portuguese; the latter having its greatest development in the Mahratta country, about Goa.

_c._ Dutch and Danish Protestantism.

_d._ English and American Protestantism. To which add small infusions of the Armenian and Abyssinian churches.

Of these it is only the Christians of St. Thomas that are of much ethnological importance.

2. Judaism on the coast of Malabar; or the Judaism of the so-called _Black Jews_.

3. Pa.r.s.eeism in Gujerat; of Persian origin, and, probably, nearly confined to individuals of Persian blood.

4. Mahometanism.

Of foreign blood there are numerous infusions.

1. _Arab._--On the western coast, more especially amongst the Moplahs of the neighbourhood of Goa; where the stock seems to be Arabian on the father's, and Indian on the mother's side.

2. _Persian._--Amongst the Pa.r.s.ees and Saint Thomas Christians (?); and, far more unequivocally, and in greater proportions, amongst the _Moghul_ families--these being always more or less Persian; but Persian with such heterogeneous intermixtures of Turk and Mongol blood besides as to make a.n.a.lysis almost impossible.

3. _Afghan._--The Rohillas of Rohilcund are Afghan in origin; so are the Patani--indeed, the term _Patan_ means an Afghan of Hindostan wherever he may be.

4. _Jewish._

5, 6, 7.--_Chinese_, _Malay_, _Burmese_, &c.

8. _European._

Of the _Indians out of India_, by far the most are--