Jawāb among the natives is often applied to anything erected or planted for a symmetrical double, where
"Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other."
"In the houses of many chiefs every picture on the walls has its jawab (or duplicate). The portrait of Scindiah now in my dining-room was the jawab (copy in fact) of Mr. C. Landseer's picture, and hung opposite to the original in the Darbar room" (M.-Gen. Keatinge). ["The masjid with three domes of white marble occupies the left wing and has a counterpart (jawāb) in a precisely similar building on the right hand side of the Tāj. This last is sometimes called the false masjid; but it is in no sense dedicated to religious purposes."—Führer, Monumental Antiquities, N.W.P., p. 64.]
JAY, s. The name usually given by Europeans to the Coracias Indica, Linn., the Nīlkanṭh, or 'blue-throat' of the Hindus, found all over India.
[1878.—"They are the commonality of birddom, who furnish forth the mobs which bewilder the drunken-flighted jay when he jerks, shrieking in a series of blue hyphen-flashes through the air...."—Ph. Robinson, In My Indian Garden, 3.]
JEEL, s. Hind. jhīl. A stagnant sheet of inundation; a mere or lagoon. Especially applied to the great sheets of remanent inundation in Bengal. In Eastern Bengal they are also called [bheel] (q.v.)
[1757.—"Towards five the guard waked me with notice that the Nawab would presently pass by to his palace of Mootee jeel."—Holwell's Letter of Feb. 28, in Wheeler, Early Records, 250.]
The Jhīls of Silhet are vividly and most accurately described (though the word is not used) in the following passage:—
c. 1778.—"I shall not therefore be disbelieved when I say that in pointing my boat towards Sylhet I had recourse to my compass, the same as at sea, and steered a straight course through a lake not less than 100 miles in extent, occasionally passing through villages built on artificial mounds: but so scanty was the ground that each house had a canoe attached to it."—Hon. Robert Lindsay, in Lives of the Lindsays, iii. 166.