The Bugla differs very little from the Kortia, except she is usually of heavier build and construction, especially about the stern, which is handsomely carved and fitted with after cabin windows and stern galleries. The larger vessels of this type carry as many as forty hands, including the native Nakoda or Captain, and are the ocean tramps among the country craft of the Middle East, often making voyages as far as Mauritius, Zanzibar or Aden.

One of the most wonderful things about the native craft is, their primitive methods of navigation. On the sea-going craft you will usually find an old compass (heaven knows of what deviation—it is quite certain her captain does not), a prehistoric quadrant and a chart; and yet, with this very primitive navi gating equipment, her long-robed Nakoda (Captain) will take her from Bombay to Mauritius or Zanzibar and back, the strangest part of the whole matter being that you will very seldom find these men very far out in their reckoning.

As for the native coasting craft, they do not even carry a compass, except in exceptional cases.

OF

INDIAN STATUTORY & CUSTOMARY LAWS.1

BY J. A. SALDANHA, ESQ., B.A., LL.B.

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

Indian statutory laws-apart from constitutional and revenue enactments-practically breathe the spirit of English common law or equity or are based on English statutes with modifications suitable to Indian conditions. Even the Parsis have gone in for marriage and divorce legislation approximating the statutory law applicable to Christians. It is only the Roman Catholics that have stuck fast to their canon law in respect to sacramental indissoluble monogamy, a system far stricter than the Hindu polygamy combined with an indissoluble sacramental marriage, confined however to the higher castes of Hindus under brahminical influence. Endogamy and exogamy are almost universal among all classes of Hindus. Polyandry and totemism alongside exogamy were almost universal in Dravidian India. They are now confined to some castes in Malabar—but survive in various shapes in Southern and South-Western India as far as Bombay. In the Bombay Presidency the exceptional property rights of females reflects probably the freedom of women among a seafaring people, where males had to be far away and long across the ocean. The Punjab has its own non-brahminic legal customs, being the cockpit of races and nations warring for supremacy in India and having had little time to come under the paramount influence of any Brahminic school. Brahminism had its full sway in developing the principle of spiritual efficacy as the basis

1 These broad outlines of what I may call the science of Comparative Ethnical Jurisprudence are sketched out in the hope of further light coming from those learned in ethnology, folklore, history and legal lore, to whom I shall feel thankful for hints and suggestions for a more comprehensive and scientific werk.

J. A. SALDANHA.

of succession to property of the deceased and in effecting a disintegration of the joint family system in Bengal, that felt the least the impact of foreign invasions. The ancient Madya-desha between the Punjab and Bengal took a midway course in the formation of its customary laws. In this essay an humble at tempt will be made in tracing the ethnical factors in operation in the growth of these laws.

II. THE RACIAL FACTORS IN OPERATION.

Racial types of India.

2. There is perhaps no country in the world where there can be found so many different races settled as in India. Though shut in on the north by the barrier of the earth's highest mountain range and on the east and the west by broad seas, India's surpassing fertility and wealth attracted outside peoples through the passes of those mountains and over the expanse of those seas. So great has been this at traction that there are found here racial types, languages and diatlects in various stages of development and progress, so numerous and varied as to bewilder the ethnologist. Another importan feature in the ethnical condition of the country is that the tribes, classes and professions have crystallized into castes, which in stead of fusion show always a tendency to fission, if I may employ the term, whenever there is the least friction within a class or tribe, or intermarriage among members of different classes or tribes. Indeed, as the late Sir William Hunter correctly remarked: "India forms a great museum of races, in which we can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture." The races that have contributed to make up the population of India are the Turanian, the Dravidian, the Aryan, the Semitic and the Ethiopic. The Turanians are believed to be the most ancient known people that settled in India. They came down through the north-east passes from the Thibetan regions. The chief feature of their religion was worship of the spirits of ancestors, that were believed to preside over families, clans, tribes and to reside especially in trees. They are represented at pre

The

sent by the Santals, with their oval faces and flat noses. Dravidians, a branch perhaps of Turanians, are supposed to have forced their way into India through the passes of the mountains in the north-west. In addition to the spirits they worshipped the earth as their chief god, and the serpent (sheshna) as its emblem. They are represented at present by the Kandhs and Gondhs of Central India and the tribes of Southern India speak. ing Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kanarese, Tulu, and other languages. Of these languages, Tamil is supposed to have been as early advanced as Sanskrit, or even earlier. We should not lose sight of the fact that many of the Dravidian and other local tribes had in all probability, even in those early days, attained to a high state of civilization and appear to have carried on extensive trade with Chaldea and Assyria, which had developed a civilization more ancient than that of the Aryans (vide Story of Chaldea by Z. A. Ragozin, pp. 214-5, 246, 287, and Story of Vedic India, by the same author, pp. 300-310).

Aryanization of
Indian

North tribes.

3. When the Aryan hordes invaded Hindustan about the year 2000 B.C., they found the aboriginal tribes of India able to offer them a stout resistance. Among the more famous are described in the Rig-Veda (IV, 7, 17, 30 and VI, 6, 12, 20) to have been Yadu and Turuvasu, who it is stated in the same book were once dwellers on the seashore carried across the sea to India. The Aryans conquered many of the tribes only after severe fighting. From dasyus (at first meaning "people," "foreign people ") the Indian tribes became dasyus, enemies; " then dasyus, slaves of theirs. Yet there were occasions when, during internal civil strife, the Aryan tribes allied themselves with the dasyus, like the Purus and Gandharas and Bharatas. Later on we find a confederacy of ten tribes including the non-Aryan Purus and Bharatas, under the leadership of the Puru king Kutsa, formed against the Aryan tribe Tritsu. The Rishi Vasistha was the high priest of the Tritsu, and the Rishi Vishvamitra is found to take sides with the ten tribes.

Here is a description of the parties given in the Story of Vedic India (pp. 327-9), which bears being quoted-

66

The names of both the enemies and the allies of the Tritsu and their King Sudas have been preserved for us by the bards of the Rig-Veda. The confederacy, consisting of ten powerful tribes, was headed by the Puru under their hero, the great Kutsa, and by the Bharatas who, already converted by Vishvamitra, were to become so thoroughly aryanized, and to take such a prominent position that, in after days, "the land of the Bharatas" was to become a synonym for Aryan India." The names of several other famous chieftains are mentioned as having perished in the decisive battle. Neither were the Tritsu unprovided with allies, and in the array of the latter we are startled to find two very familiar names-those of the Parthians and the Persians-Prithu and Parsu, though there is really nothing so very wonderful in the fact that chips of the two chief Eranian tribes should have, like others wandered south of the Himalayas. A people named Vishanin, i.e., followers of Vishnu, is also mentioned, almost certainly Aryan sun-worshippers, showing that Vishnuism as a distinctive worship-a sect that had its roots in a remoter past than was hitherto suspected. As though to complete the connection, we find in the list of the Tritsu's allies the Vishanin bracketed with the Shiva, which is thought to be a name of the Tugra, one of the oldest aboriginal Dravidian peoples, whom the Aryas had specially nicknamed "Sons of the Serpent," and who, under the religious designation of Shiva, were very probably the originators of the worship of Shiva under the form or with the attribute of a snake. That all these peoples had even then already become much mixed, partly with Aryan element, is more than likely. At all events it takes one's breath away to find the three component elements of modern Hinduism: Brahmanism, Vishnuism, and Shivaism arrayed before us in the Rig-Veda in precisely the same juxtaposition Tritsu, Vishanin, Shiva!"