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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[SEPTEMBER, 1898.
Among Gujarat Musalmâns when a house mother finds any of her family sick or troubled by bad dreams, she orders a chicken, preferably a black chicken, and passes it seven or eleven times over the body of the sufferer. The person who waves the chicken over the patient carries it away without looking back, and gives it to a fakir or religious beggar. If no one is willing to take the chicken it is carried out of the town and let loose.43
(To be continued.)
DISCURSIVE REMARKS ON THE AUGUSTAN AGE OF TELUGU LITERATURE. BY G. R. SUBRAMIAH PANTULU.
MR. CAMPBELL, in his Telugu Grammar, thus describes the Telugu Language and the area over which it is spoken :
"The language is commonly, but improperly, termed by Europeans the Gentoo. It is the Andhra of Sanskrit authors, and, in the country where it is spoken, is known by the name of Trllings, Telinga, Telugu or Tenugu.
"This language is the vernacular dialect of the Hindus, inhabiting that part of the Indian Peninsula, which, extending from the Dutch Settlement of Pulicat on the coast of Coromandel, inland to the vicinity of Pangalore; stretches northwards, along the coast as far as Chicacole, and in the interior to the source of the Tapti; bounded on the east by the Bay of Bengal, and on the west by an irregular line, passing through the western districts belonging to the Subadar of the Deccan, and cutting off the most eastern provinces of the new State of Mysore; a tract including the five Northern Circars of Ganjam, Vizagapatam, Rajahmundry, Masulipa. tam and Guntur; the greater portion of the Nizam's extensive territories, districts of Cuddapah and Bellary ceded by him to the British; the eastern provinces of Mysore; and the northern portion of the Carnatic: nor is this language unknown in the southern parts of India, for the descendants of those Telugu families which were deputed by the kings of Vidyanagara to control their southern conquests, or which occasionally emigrated from Telingâna to avoid famine or oppression, are scattered all over the Dravida and Carnataka provinces, and ever retaining the language of their fore-fathers, have diffused a knowledge of it throughout the Peninsula.
"The Telugu language, as has already been shewn, is not a mere derivative from Sanskrit, but has an independent origin and is of independent cultivation. The radicals, according to Mr. Ellis (Disen. p. 19), are the same as in the cognate dialects of Tamil, Kanarese, etc., and it differs from them only in the affixes used in the formation of the words from the roots. Although, however, it is not the offspring of Sanskrit, it is very extensively blended with that language in the states known as Tatsama or Tadbhava, the words in the former being the very same, taking only the Telugu inflexions, and those of the latter being mediately or immediately derived from Sanskrit. The rest of the language, exclusive of other foreign terms, is the pure native language of the land, and is capable of expressing every mental and bodily operation, every possible relation and existing thing, and with the exception of some religious and technical terms, no word of Sanskrit origin is necessary to the Telugu."
Mr. Lingam Lakshmaji Pundit, in his lecture on The Disillusion, p. 7, says as Theorem I. :"If any of the few fundamentals or elements of a language, namely, the numerals, the pronouns, the case endings, and the verb endings are demonstrated to be derived from another language, it follows that that language is derived from the other language, and that the people speaking the parent and derived languages were originally one and the same." A similar idea is maintained by Prof. Whitney in his Language and Study of Languages, p. 195. But Mr. Lakshmaji essays to controvert the opinion of Mr. Ellis by saying at p. 26 of the same lecture :
"Although the Telugu language is widespread and the people speaking it, if we include the Telugu population of the Nizam's dominions, outnumber the Tamilians, its original area is more circumscribed, as we learn from the following Telugu distich from an Andhrabháshábhi48 Information from Mr. Fazlullah Faridi,
