Soppitt, C. A. “A short account of the Kuki-Lushai tribes on the North-East Frontier Districts: Cachar, Sylhet, Naga Hills, &c., and the North Cachar Hills.” Shillong, 1887.
I believe this is a useful accurate work, but have not been able to obtain it.
Sneyd-Hutchinson, R. “Gazetteer of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.”
As regards Lushais there is not much of value, as they are beyond the scope of the work, but few being found in the Hill Tracts.
Besides the above there are notes in the Census Reports of 1891 and 1901, various military publications and gazetteers by Mr. A. W. Davis, I.C.S., and Mr. B. C. Allen, I.C.S., all of which contain a certain amount of useful information, but do not pretend to be more than notes giving succinctly the knowledge then obtained of what was then practically new ground. Colonel Woodthorpe’s account of the Silchar columns’ march to Champhai, though not professing to be an account of the people, is interesting reading. Round Champhai I met several men who had been there when the column arrived, and they all remember the little sahib who drew pictures; and would sit long looking at the pictures in his book and chatting to each other of the good old days.
[Note.—On p. 6 of the present work the Author refers to a passage in Lewin’s Hill Tracts of Chittagong and the Dwellers therein, in which is cited an account of “the Cucis or inhabitants of the Tipperah Mountains written by J. Rennel, Chief Engineer of Bengal in 1800.” In reading through the proofs of the present work, it occurred to me that it would be important to discover whether the “J. Rennel” referred to by Lewin was or was not the famous Major James Rennell, Surveyer-General of Bengal, who is so often described as “the Father of Modern Geography.” Major Rennell with his wife (née Jane Thackeray—a great aunt of the novelist W. M. Thackeray) left Bengal in March, 1777, and reached England in February 1778. He died on March 29, 1830. It seemed to me possible that the great Rennell might have obtained the information about the Kukis during his period of service in East Bengal, and that he might have published a memoir on the subject in 1800. Mr. W. Foster of the Record Department of the India Office very kindly informed me that no such a memoir could be traced at Whitehall, and drew my attention to Lewin’s heading of the memoir, “From the French of M. Bouchesiche, who translated the original from the English of J. Rennel, Chief Engineer of Bengal.... Published at Leipsic in 1800.” Mr. Edward Heawood, Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, to whom I am indebted for much trouble taken in satisfying my curiosity, informed me that Bouchesiche gave what purported to be an extract, translated into French, from Rennell’s well-known work on India, and that the Frenchman’s book was printed in Paris in 1800, although there may perhaps have been a Leipzig issue also. The account of the Kukis given in Bouchesiche’s work, however, is not taken from any known work by James Rennell. Dalton in his Ethnology of Bengal refers to what has been supposed to be the earliest account of the Kukis—a memoir by Surgeon McCrea, which appeared in 1799 in Volume vii of Asiatic Researches. Mr. Heawood most kindly hunted up McCrea’s memoir, and found in it a reference to a memoir which appeared in Volume ii of Asiatic Researches, 1790. The title of the memoir of 1790 runs “On the Manners, Religion, and Laws of the Cucis, or Mountaineers of Tipra.... Communicated in Persian by John Rawlins, Esq.” On investigation, Mr. Heawood found that the Memoir of 1790 is undoubtedly the original from which Bouchesiche drew his account in French, and of this the account, attributed to “J. Rennel” by Colonel Lewin, is a rough paraphrase. Note by the Rev. Walter K. Firminger.]
GLOSSARY
Only the terms which occur often are given.