on the side of the head: both men and women wear ornaments of iron or bone, or of dyed wood. Agriculture is considered the only honourable employment, and, drawing to itself the people's greatest energy, is exceedingly productive. The land of every community is apportioned into a great number of petty free-holds; and each proprietor cultivates for himself. Several kinds of rice, yams, millet, turmeric, tobacco, and mustard are the staple produce. They possess large herds of buffaloes, bullocks and swine, numerous fowls, and flocks of goats. But the people are also warlike: from early youth they are trained to use the sling, the bow and arrow, and the tangi or hill-axe; and so constant are their quarrels as almost totally to suspend cultivation at some periods. No indigenous manufactures are produced among them: the employment is considered low. The cloth and brass vessels which they require, as well as their salt, they procure in the plains, in exchange for the produce of their fields. Various Hindu outcasts have from time immemorial acted for them as potters, blacksmiths, weavers and distillers, and have performed various menial services. Their houses are made of strong boards, well fastened, and are sometimes plastered inside ; the roof is thatched. Forty or fifty such houses arranged in two rows, with the doors fronting the street, constitute a village. These houses are all alike for rich and poor. The Khonds never repair them; but when they grow old, as they do in about fourteen years, a new village is built of entirely new materials. Intellectually the Khonds are rather quick in perception, firm in their resolutions, and good-humoured. They have an unconquerable love of personal freedom and are very impatient of restraint. They are faithful to their engagements when made; but have no idea of any rights except their own. Hence their readiness, both singly and in bands, to make a foray on others' territories or districts, and seize "whatever they like best" (as they term it): which means, the most valuable property of others. They are selfish, ferocious, and dreadful drunkards. Like the Arabs, they are remarkable for their hospitality, and rather suffer loss and danger than violate its sacred rites. Marriages only take place between the members of different tribes. The women, though they do not eat with their husbands, are yet treated with some respect; they attend to domestic duties; hold ammunition for their tribe on the battle field; and by their advice exercise much influence on their Councils. A wife can quit her husband's house and return to that of her parents when she likes; (in which case her dowry must be repaid); and if she choose another man for a husband from among the unmarried men of a tribe, he is compelled to marry her. The license thus allowed to the women is productive of great evil. Their judicial customs are very simple. Murder, manslaughter and wounding are generally settled privately according to the law of retaliation, which in the case of blood is binding on the nearest relative: (as was the law of the Goel or blood-avenger among the Hebrews.) Important cases are settled by the Patriarchal Council. Witnesses are then examined and many kinds of ordeal appealed to. At the close of all trials, the members of the tribunal are well feasted with rice, meat and spirits, at the expense of the losing party. Throughout their social and political constitution, the Patriarchal principle prevails. All the members of a family are subject in every thing to the supreme control of its head, called "Abbaya." A collection of families makes a village, over which is a village abbaya, selected from the abbayas of families. A collection of villages is called a mutah or district, over which is a muliko chosen from the village Patriarchs. A number of mutahs make a tribe, which is governed by a tribal muliko. Tribes are grouped together in a confederacy, over which is appointed a chief federal Patriarch. This is the form of their constitution; but breaks and anomalies here and there occur, produced by the disorganisation which wars and other events have produced among them. These Patriarchs of various grades possess authority to settle disputes in the sphere over which they are respectively appointed and in difficult cases they consult with those of their own rank what is to be done. They receive no emoluments. At these councils, the members of each society may be present and vote, though they do not speak. Upon very important public matters a General Council of the whole people is held, when the matter is discussed by the Abbayas of mutahs and tribes; and the votes of the whole assembly are taken to decide it. The chief Federal Patriarch stands at the top of this social pyramid. His first duty is to consult the interests of the whole people by maintaining as far as possible the closest union between all the sections into which they are divided. Boundary questions are his especial care; but as he has no force at his disposal to compel submission to his sentence, tribal feuds arising from them are constantly bursting out. This Federal Patriarch has been hitherto the channel of communication between the Khonds and the zemindars in the lower Máliás: and through him all arrangements have been usually made. His position is therefore a most important one both to his people and to the zemindars. In relation to this position and the duties it involves, the Patriarchs receive a distinctive name. In Boad, they are called Khonro: in Suradah, Majee : in Goomsur, Bisaye : in other districts, Muliko. Their immediate descendants also bear the same name. The Bisayes of Goomsur are a family of Hindus, who long since ascended above the Ghauts, and settled in the district of Hodzo. ghoro. Sám Bisaye, so often mentioned in the correspondence of the Government officers, was formerly Federal Patriarch of the Goomsur tribes and Chokra Bisaye, who occasioned the rebellion in the Boad Máliás, was his nephew. THE KHOND LANGUAGE. As may be well imagined from the circumstances of the people, the Khond language is not a single fixed tongue, like Bengali or English, which all the people speak. As we survey the whole extent of their country, it seems to have more than one chief dialect with many local varieties. Unwritten languages naturally fluctuate much, according to the different degrees of intercourse which are maintained amongst the several branches of the tribes that speak them. A very interesting example of this change is thus described by the Rev. R. Moffat, in connection with a servile portion of the Bechuana nation, termed Balala. "Connected with each of the towns among that people, there are great numbers of what are called 'Balala,' poor ones, who stand in the same relation to the Bechuanas in which the Bushmen formerly stood to the Hottentots, and whose origin doubtless was of the same nature. These Balala were once inhabitants of the towns, and have been permitted or appointed to live in country-places for the purpose of procuring skins of wild animals, wild honey, and roots, for their respective chiefs. "The dialect of the Sechuana spoken by these people, especially in districts remote from the towns, is so different from that spoken by the nation generally, that interpreters are frequently required. In order to account for this, it is necessary to become acquainted with their habits. In the towns the purity and harmony of the language is kept up by their pitchos or public meetings, at which the finest language is spoken; by their festivals and ceremonies; as well as by their songs and their constant intercourse. With the isolated villages of the desert, it is far otherwise. They have no such meetings, no festivals, no cattle, nor any kind of manufactures to keep their energies alive. Riches they have none, their sole care being to keep body and soul together; to accomplish this, is with them their 'chief end;' they are compelled to traverse the wilds often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or more infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the livelong day, become habituated to a language of their own. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus from this infant Babel proceeds a dialect composed of a host of mongrel words and phrases joined together without rule, and in the course of a generation the entire character of the language is changed." The Khonds are not so uncivilized a nation as these poor Balala ; in social rank and in civilization they are rather like the Bechuanas from whom the Balala spring. They too have their tribal meetings, their consultations, and speeches: and thus a knowledge of the higher terms in their language is preserved. But a change in the common language must gradually take place in the course of years: the differences between the expressions of the more distant tribes and those of the lower classes of the people increasing to the greatest degree. Where there are no authorities to determine style in the choice of words, to define their pronunciation and to maintain their grammatical relations, the wonder is not that such changes are introduced into a language, but that it can for hundreds of years maintain so many of its original forms and terms. : The Khond language remained unwritten till the people became known to Europeans. During the Goomsur war some of the military officers occasionally recorded some of the words in Oriya characters in order to facilitate their intercourse with the people, when meeting them in the markets below the ghats: or making known to them the wishes of Govern ment but no systematic effort could be made to study the language, till the country had been well settled for some time. Dr. Cadenhead, when Assistant in Khondistan, was, we believe, the first who made any endeavour to reduce it to writing and prepare for imparting information by its means in the education of the people. Amongst other things he planned the commencement of a translation of the New Testament. His residence in the country was however too brief, and his engagements too onerous, to allow him to devote much of his time to the important subject; no practical results followed from his plans, and he was unable to print any thing before he left the Agency. The honour of first making a thorough study of the language, of reducing it carefully to writing, of developing its grammar and printing the first Khond book, belongs to Capt. Frye. This able linguist after considerable intercourse with the people, drew up a vocabulary, a spelling book and other elementary works suitable for the young, which were all received with great delight by the Merias in the mission schools; and was preparing other works when ill health compelled him to leave the country. The Khond Grammar was naturally expected from his pen; but sickness delayed its appearance: and it was recently drawn out by one of the Orissa missionaries.* * In the Calcutta Christian Observer. May and June 1853. The language appears to be regular in its structure. A survey of its roots and forms at once shews that it is not, like Oriya and Bengali, of Sanskrit origin. It has a greater resemblance to the Telugu; that is, to the pure and original Telugu, freed from the admixture of Sanskrit. It is therefore connected with the most ancient tongues of Southern India, those of the aboriginal population, whose words, grammatical forms and idioms pervade the Tamil and Telugu, the Canarese and Maleali, throughout the whole of the Peninsula. Competent scholars too have declared it to be the best specimen of an original Tartar tongue to be found in all India. The conclusion is natural that the Khonds once occupied the plains at the foot of their mountains, now held by the Oriyas in the north and the Telugus in the south: and were driven from the lowlands, by the irruption of the brahminical armies that hold the soil to this day. In manners, customs and language, they greatly resemble the other hill people who are their neighbours. Mr. Inglis says, they are like the Sourahs on their south border, and the Koles on the north and a friend assured me that a description of their manner of life will extensively apply to the Santals of the Bhagulpore hills. Who can wonder that with their fierce spirit, freebooting has been a traditional custom among them, and that they now delight in making forays upon those plains, from which their forefathers were long since driven. May they not say like Roderick Dhu, as from their elevated homes above the ghauts, they survey the lowlands of Orissa: "These fertile plains, that softened vale, Were once the birthright of the Gael : The stranger came with iron hand, And from our fathers rent the land. Where dwell we now? See rudely swell Pent in this fortress of the north, And from the robber rend the prey?" Here I cannot help hazarding the conjecture, based upon the existence of these aborigines from the banks of the Ganges down to Cape Comorin, that they have had much to do with peopling the islands of the South Pacific. These islands, it is known, are occupied by two different races, of which one is the Malay. The Malay Polynesians occupy the islands to the eastward, the Navigators', Hervey, Marquesas and Society groups: and are of a fair complexion. The other race occupies the great islands |