FAIR, called in India a meta or assemblage, is held periodically at many places. The system exists in full force in Turkestan, north of Hindu Kush. It is not unknown in some parts of the Kabul dominions, and has long been familiar to the natives of India. At the great Dehli fairs, 50,000 persons assemble, some of them from 500 miles' distance. In 1861, at the great solar eclipse, 200,000 persons assembled at Thaneswar in Ambala, some from 1000 miles away. About 130 fairs are held in the Panjab, and the Hindu custom of assembling at shrines, and taking the opportunity of displaying merchandise, prevails throughout India. In Asia they flourish as the only means by which nations distant from each other, and the population of which is often widely spread, can be readily supplied with articles of home and foreign produce. The merchants who carry on the trade from Indio, to Kabul are principally the Povindah or Lohani Afghans, whose country lies westward of the Indus between Dchra Ismail Khan and Kabul. They make annual journeys to and from these places, bringing with them the productions of Afghanistan, and taking back those of India and Europe. They are a race, and
require no protection but their own arms. They leave the rugged mountains of the west at Drabund, and assemble at Dehra Istnail Khan, where they dispose of some of their property ; others proceed lower down the Indus to Debra Ghazi Khan, or cross to Multan and Bahawulpur, where their wants in a return supply of goods are sometimes to be procured. Failing this, they pass into India, and even to Calcutta and Bombay. The Lohani and all other traders descend from Bokhara and Kabul about the month of November, and set out on their return in' the end of April. In the Russian empire, fairs have been founded in the memory of man, at which business to the amount of 200,000,000 of roubles, or about £10,000,000 sterling, is now tranaacted, and this is even on the increase. The removal of the great fair of Maccaire to Nijni has only served to give commerce a greater impetus.—Burnes, in East India Papers, Cabool and Afghanistan, p. 103.