Note 158 — K (continued 5)

In the course of a lament over the change which has come over the Kondhs who live in the range of hills near Berhampore, Mr. S. P. Rice writes as follows.158 “Here they live in seclusion and in freedom, but also in the lowest depths of squalor and poverty. Once they loved gay colours. True Khond dresses, both male and female, are full of stripes and patterns, in blue, yellow, and red. Where has gone the love of colour? Instead of the long waistcloth ending in tails of blue and red, the man binds about him a wretched rag that can hardly be called a garment. Once the women took a delight in decking themselves with flowers, and a pride in the silver ornaments that jangled on their naked breasts. Where are now the grasses that adorned them, and the innocence that allowed them to go clothed only to the waist? Gone! withered by the blast of the breath of a ‘superior civilization.’ Gone are the hairpins of sāmbur bone—an inestimable treasure in the eyes of the true hill Khond. Gone are the floral decorations, and the fantastic head-dresses, which are the pride of the mountain tribes. In dull, unromantic squalor our Khond lives, moves, and has his being; arid, ever as he moves, is heard the clanking upon his wrists of the fetters of his debt. Yet for all that he is happy.” The hairpins referred to above are made from sāmbur (deer: Cervus unicolor) bones, and stuck in the hair of male Kondhs. Porcupine quills are sometimes used by them as hairpins.