THE ANTIQUE IN INDIA
By PROFESSOR H. F. HUMPHREYS
()NE of the principal attractions of the Indian countryside is the unique series of pictures it provides of manners and customs, which, if they are in some respects singular, in others resemble in a remarkable way the rural economy of England in the Middle Ages. Here are the unfenced open fields that were ours till the Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth century gave us the now familiar pattern of pasture and ploughland ; and here, in default of fencing, are the small boys and girls set to keep the cattle from the growing crops much as Dorothy Osborne describes the village wenches skipping off to the same task in u55o. The primitive one-storied village hovels of unbaked mud-brick with their thatched roofs resemble the wattle- and-daub huts of mediaeval Britain, the houses of whose destruction Froissart records that the peasants made so light, saying that with a few stakes they would soon build themselves new homes. For it was only the growing prosperity of the Elizabethan age that per- mitted the provision for the village labourer of those more sub- stantial half-timbered cottages that still survive.
Ploughing and sowing, the hoeing and the harvest, all the familiar traffic of the Indian field, show an almost startling similarity to those marginal illustrations of the Luttrell Psalter that reveal to us the English scene in the fourteenth century. And the village craftsmen, the potter and the smith, the spinner and the weaver, are not less in accord with what we know of rural England before the Industrial Revolution came to change it all. Their simple pleasures, the gossip and the tales told on warm evenings beneath the village tree, the occasional family visits to a fair or religious festival are much as Chaucer described them long ago. The myriad kites remind us that these birds were the scavengers of London up to Tudor times, and if the jungle trees and birds are different, the wild boar is there, and
a morning's pig-sticking has many features in common with a mediaeval boar-hunt as described in the ballad of Gawayne and the Green Knight.
But if these resemblances hold true of the plains, the visitor who penetrates into the more remote valleys of the great Himalayan ranges will encounter at times manners that recall a remoter past. In Eastern Asia myth and superstition, cult and custom have never suffered that abrupt breach with tradition which Christianity and Islam imposed further west. Hinduism grew by natural development out of primitive belief, and Buddhism, the only reforming religion of Indian origin, was in its essence never persecuting, always pacific —so much so that it is everywhere more adulterated with superstition than the other two. The writer once witnessed in the lamasery of Kyelong the masked devil dances which the lamas hold on special occasions, they themselves executing the dances while other lamas form a light orchestra. The dances were a sort of ballet lasting for hours, and explained by a lama as illustrating a story of two thousand years ago when Buddhism was spreading into China, the tale of a Chinese noble who persecuted all propagators of the new faith.
But the incidents as narrated and mimed suggested a more ancient origin, and were akin to those widely reported in primitive folk-lore. There was the potentate, like the sultan in the Arabian Nights, who enjoyed a virgin nightly and had her slain on the morrow ; another invulnerable except for a narrow band round the belly ; the per- secutor turned into a pillar of stone by the invocations of the faithful ; men transmuted into animals and vice versa. The dancers wore masks, sometimes of terrifying aspect, like ritual dancers the world over, and their movements embraced twirls and leaps so athletic that the sweat poured off them, albeit the altitude was nt,000 feet. No greater contrast could be imagined with the sedate swayings and posturings of Indian or Burmese nautch, and the movements recalled some of the Cossack dances embodied in classical Russian ballet so clearly as to prompt the speculation that these may well have been brought west by Tartars from Central Asia.
In the wild hills that separate India from Burma, Buddhism, if it ever penetrated, died out leaving no trace, and paganism prevailed there till recent times. In the Naga hills megalithic monuments— stone avenues, circles and menhirs—exactly on the pattern of those found in Wales and Western England are a common feature. Their most remarkable characteristic is the evidence of their erection in quite recent times. Though the rock is soft and the rainfall the highest in the world-400 inches or more in the four monsoon months—the carvings are fresh and clear-cut, and the villages still in many cases decorate them with garlands or lay food-offerings before them. Here, then, is a cult which flourished in Britain four thousand years ago still practised by these primitive hill-tribes.
At the other end of the Himalayas there is a curious custom which appears to point to an even more distant date. Pastoral peoples the wide world over who live near mountain ranges have the habit of summer migration with their flocks to the high pastures above the tree-line as these become unmasked by the melting snow. There they construct temporary quarters for themselves, and if need be for their flocks, till the advent of winter drives them down again to their permanent villages—the need of night-shelter for the flocks being not so much climatic as conditioned by the dread of dangerous carnivores like panthers or wolves. The summer quarters con- structed by the migratory Gujar shepherds of Kashmir are in most cases rock-shelters, recalling those employed by palaeolithic man in the last ice age of Europe ; they are made by improving and en- larging the partial protection provided by great fallen masses of rock split off from a precipice by the ice of winter, and both the herd and the herdsmen huddle there at night for mutual warmth and protection from prowling panthers. If Nature neglects to provide such a nook, one is constructed by assembling a number of felled trees in a framework covered with turf, to form a room tapering to nothing at the back but open in front in exact imitation of a rock- shelter's inconvenient shape.
The polyandry and matriarchal habits of Himalayan hill-men have been often recorded. Indeed, there is no end to the list of customs which could be cited to illustrate the inexhaustible interest of India as a panorama of the past
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