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MAY, 1904.)
MUNDAS AND DRAVIDAS.
121
MUNDAS AND DRAVIDAS. BY STEN KONOW, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHRISTIANIA, NORWAY, TT is now an established fact that the various tribes known as Kols, Mundas, Santals, and 1 so forth, do not differ in anthropological features from the Dravidians. Muidas and Dravidas belong to the same race. Mr. Risley has called the type represented by those tribes Dravidian.
The languages spoken by the Dravidian race fall into two distinct groups, Dravidian and Monda. The Dravidian languages have been the vehicles of an old civilisation, and the most important of them are known from an early period. Our knowledge of the various Mundà dialects, on the other hand, only dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Some notes on the language of the Hos of Singbhum were published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal as early as 1840. The author was the well-known Colonel Tickell. The indefatigable Hodgson also extended his investigations to the Mundâ dialects. In his paper on the Aborigines of Central India in the Bengal Journal for 1848, he communicated vocabularies of Bhumij, Maņdari, Ho, and Santali. He considered those dialects as Tamulian, and, together with Kurukh, as "dialects of the great Kol language."
Mr. J. R. Logan, in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago for 1852 and 1853, also considered the Mundâ dialects as Dravidian. He says : -
"The Kol is Dravidian considerably modified by ultra Indo-Gangetic, particularly in its glossary, and very slightly by Tibetan. The latter element is so small as to render it certain that the Kol was originally a pure Dravidian language, which was deeply influenced by the ancient Mon-Gangetic. The phonetic basis of the language and many particles and words are Dravidian, but the pronouns, several of the numerals, and
a large portion of the words, are Mon-Anam."
The first who clearly distinguished between the Mundâ and Dravidian languages was Prof. Max Müller in his Letter to Chevalier Bunsen on the Classification of the Turanian Languages. He states that he is unable to see any coincidences between Santali, Mundari, Bhumij, and Ho on one side and the Dravidian dialects on the other. In the former dialects he sees " traces of a language spoken in India before the Tamulian conquest." That old language he calls Manda, and I have retained that denomination, becanse it will be adopted in the Linguistic Survey, and is far more suitable than the phantastical Kolarian proposed by Sir George Campbell.
Max Müller's view that the Mundâ and Dravidian languages belong to different philological families has been adopted by most scholars in Europe. The Rev. Ferd. Hahn, on the other hand, in his Rurukh Grammar, Calcutta, 1900, tried to show " that the Mundári grammar bears & genuine Dravidian stamp on its brow." Mandari is a typical Mundâ language, and if Mr. Hahn's view is correct, we must infer that the Mundâ and Dravidian languages are related to each other. The question is of some importance, and I have therefore thought it worth while to examine Mr. Hahn's arguments.
In the first place, he gives a list of words which are common to Mundâri and Kurukh. The list contains several Aryan loan-words, and also some comparisons which do not correctly represent the real state of affairs. Thus Mundári enga, mother, is compared with Kurukh ingyô. The latter word, bowever, means "my mother," and ing is the personal pronoun of the
The Rev. L. Skrefsrud bas proposed to call the family Kherwarian, and that name has been adopted by Prof. Thomsen of Copenhagen. Kherwar is used in the traditionary tales of the Santals as a common designation of the Santale, Mundas, Hos, Bhumij, and Birhos. It does not, however, include the western and southern tribes such as Korka, Juang, Khari, Savara, and Gadaba, and I cannot therefore see the advantage of adopting it for the whole family. - S. K.
