Festivities.
The Ròngkēr is the annual compulsory village festival, held at the time of the beginning of cultivation (June), or in some villages during the cold season. Goats and fowls are sacrificed. Ārnàm-pārō gets a goat, and so do the local gods of hills and rivers. A small village will sacrifice two or three goats, a large village ten or twelve. The flesh of the victims is eaten, with rice and rice-beer, but only men can partake of the sacrifice. They must sleep on the hòng apart from their wives that night. The gods are invoked in the following terms: “We live in your district: save us and help us! send no tigers or sickness, prosper our crops and keep us in good health, and year by year we will sacrifice like this. We depend wholly upon you!” There is no music or dancing at the Ròngkēr.
At harvest-home there is no sacrifice, but the whole village help mutually in getting the crops in, and feast together on rice and beer, and dried fish and dried flesh saved up against this celebration, or fresh fish if procurable. No animals are killed, except in some houses a fowl, lest the paddy brought home should decrease; this fowl is eaten. On this occasion there is a little dancing on the hòng, but with this exception music and dancing take place only at funerals.
Occasionally there is a Ròngkēr-pī (“great Ròngkēr”) for the whole mauza, as, for instance, to expel man-eating tigers. Each village, headed by its gaoṅbura, brings its contribution to the great sacrifice, and repairs to the mauzadar’s or bor-gaoṅbura’s house, where the feast is celebrated.
Mr. Stack’s notes do not mention the observance by the Mikirs of general tabus, called in Assamese genna, such as are common among the Naga tribes;[10] but personal tabus of various kinds, entailing separate eating of food and abstinence from commerce of the sexes, have already been indicated. Women during menstruation are said to be unclean and unable to touch the cooking-pots.
[1] This name, which means “Jòm or Yama’s town,” is often incorrectly written Chomarong or Chumarong. [↑]
[2] Sentences enclosed in quotation marks were so written by Mr. Stack, and are probably the ipsissima verba of his informants. [↑]
[3] Sir Joseph Hooker (Himalayan Journals, ed. 1855, vol. ii. p. 182) relates that at the Donkia Pass, one of his servants, a Lepcha, being taken ill, “a Lama of our party offered up prayers to Kinchinjhow for his recovery.” Perching a saddle on a stone, and burning incense before it, “he scattered rice to the winds, invoking Kinchin, Donkia, and all the neighbouring peaks.” [↑]
[4] Such worship of objects and places of an impressive character is, of course, common throughout India. Thus, in the Pachmarhi Hills the writer has seen flowers and red lead (sindūr) offered at the brink of a terrible gulf of the kind so common in the plateau. Again, at Balhārpur, in the Chānda district of the Central Provinces, he has seen worship offered to a bastion in a solidly built ruined fort adjoining the village.—(Note by Editor.) [↑]
[5] So also among the Khasis; see Khasi Monograph, p. 119, bottom. [↑]
[6] This also is evidently borrowed from the Khasis. See Monograph, p. 221. [↑]
[7] Compare the Khasi methods of divination by the lime-case (shanam), and the bow (Monograph, p. 119). [↑]
[8] Mr. Stack notes that there was some reluctance on the part of his informant to explain what was meant. [↑]
[9] Not further explained. [↑]
[10] See, however, what is said above as to the Ròngkēr, which agrees with the observances elsewhere known as gennas. [↑]
V.
FOLK-LORE AND FOLK-TALES.
Three Mikir stories—Legend of creation (Mr. Allen).
The Mikirs are fond of telling stories, but the historical material which they contain does not appear to be of very ancient date. Reference has already been made to the deliverance of the Arlengs from slavery to the Khasis, and their contests with the Kacharis under the leadership of Thòng-Nòkbē; also to their early relations with the Ahoms. They have also myths dealing with the creation of the earth and man, one of which has been related by Mr. Allen, of the American Presbyterian Mission, and will be found in the Appendix to this Section; it seems doubtful, however, whether it is a genuine legend, or due to imagination stimulated by questions: the concluding episode strongly resembles the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. These legends have not been handled by Mr. Stack, and are therefore not reproduced here. The Rev. Mr. Moore notes that “Mikir stories in general do not agree very minutely,” and this appears to be particularly the case in respect of tales of the intervention of the gods in human affairs.
Mr. Stack wrote down, chiefly from the dictation of a Mikir named Sārdokā, who had become a Christian, a number of excellent stories, which well deserve separate publication. Three specimens of these are given here. They correspond in every respect, as will be seen, with the general characteristics of folk-literature all over the world. Folk-tales containing the same incidents, as is well known, are found from Iceland to Japan, from Alaska to Patagonia. The original source of such a tale is now incapable of identification. The same sequence of events and general form recur everywhere; what is distinctive and characteristic is not the progress of incident, but the local dressing, the narrator’s point of view, the colour of his daily life which he lends to the details of the story.
The first of the three specimens is the favourite Indian form of a sequence, well known in Sanskrit literature, but quite as popular in Europe and in general folk-lore. It is given here, because another version of the same narrative has been included by Dr. Grierson in his Linguistic Survey, vol. iii. Part III. p. 223, as found among the Aimol Kukis, a race of Tibeto-Burmans dwelling, far away from the Mikir country, in the hills bordering the valley of Manipur on the east.
The second specimen tells of the adventures of an orphan, the son of a widow, a stock figure in Mikir folk-tales, and abounds in local colour. Here too the incidents in part coincide with those of a folk-tale belonging to a very distant country, the part of Kumaon bordering on Tibet, which will be found in vol. iii, Part I. of the Linguistic Survey, pp. 483, 495, 510, 522.
The third is a remarkably complete and interesting version of the wide-spread folk-tale of the Swan-maidens. It was most probably derived from some Indian source, though, so far as known, no version of the tale in its entirety, as told by Hindus, has yet been published. The name of the hero, Hārātā-Kuṅwar, may be the Indian Sarat-Kumār, and is evidently not Mikir. But all the setting—the colloquies of the six brothers and their father, the attempt on Harata-Kuṅwar’s life, his methods in defeating his treacherous kinsmen, his device for winning his fairy wife, and many other features of the story—seems genuinely local. The narrative is an excellent specimen of Mikir diction, and shows no little skill in composition. In vol. iii. Part II. of the Linguistic Survey, there will be found, at pp. 218–220, a short story, entitled, “How Jesu got a goddess for his wife,” which is identical in motive with this tale of Harata-Kuṅwar. It is current among the Angāmī Nagas, a race much less influenced by Hindu culture than the Mikirs.
The original Mikir text of these tales will be found in the [next Section]; the English translation here given is as literal as it was possible to make it. In the Linguistic Survey, vol. iii. Part II. pp. 395–403, two other short stories of the same character, both text and translation, have been printed. The second of these, the story of the clever swindler Tèntòn, evidently belongs to the cycle of tales called Tenton-Charit, mentioned, in its Assamese version, as existing in manuscript by Mr. E. A. Gait, at page 68 of his Report on the Progress of Historical Research in Assam, 1897.