The Mundah Kol or Ho comprise about two thirds of the population of the five parganas of Silli, Tamar, Bartmcla, Rabey, and Bundu, all others being recent settlers. But many of the Mundah Kol have been dispossessed of their ancestors' lands by middlemen, Brahmans, and Rajpnts. Mundah settlements are chiefly in the eastern and southern parts of Chutia Nagpur. The Mundah and Sautal arc amongst the ugliest of mankind, the Santal being remarkable for good nature and ugliness. They are more like Hottentots than Negroes. The extreme featured of the Mundah race have high cheek-bones, small orbits, often with an oblique setting, fiat faces, without much beard or whisker, and in colour from brown to tawny yellow. Mundah features are flat and broad. The richer people of the Mun dah, who aspire to be zamindars, wear the poita, reverence Brahmans, and worship Kali ; but the mass continue in their original faith. The great propitiatory sacrifices to the local deities are carousals, at which they dance, and make love, and the Hindus settled in the province propitiate the local deities. The Mundah country is arranged into Purha or divisions, each consisting of twelve or more villages under a chief, and the chiefs meet at times for consultation. Many of the Onion, and some of the Mundah clans or Kili, are called after animals, the eel, hawk, crow, heron, and the clans do not eat the animal whose name they bear. The Mundah and Ho dead are placed in a coffin along with all the clothes and ornaments used, and all the money the deceased had, and all burned. Tho larger bones are pre served till a large monumental stone can be obtained, and the bones are interred below it the Ho near the houses, the Oraon separate from the village. They are taken to the tomb in a procession, with young girls with empty and partly broken pitchers, which they reverse from them to him to show that they are empty. The collection of these massive grave-stones under the fine old tamarind trees is a remarkable feature in Kol villages. The stones are sometimes so largo that tho men of several villages arc required to move one. Tho bones are put with some rice into a new earthen vessel, deposited into the hole prepared for them, and 'covered with the big stone. The Mundah and Orson races are fond of field sports, and all game, largo and small, dis appear from near them. They form great hunting parties. Fishing and cock-fighting are also resorted to. The Mundah and Ho have a shames site' re ligion. Tliey have no worship of material idols, hut Singbliongu, the sun, is the supreme being, the creator and preserver, beneficent deityi.and they have secondary gods all invisible, and generally malevolent. Sacrifices to Singbliongu are made of fowls, pigs, a white goat, the ram and buffalo.
The Kol and Sura dwell towards'the northof the Gond and Kond in Central India ; their languages contain Dravidian words, but they belong to a totally different family of languages. The Kol also inhabit the forest and mountain tracts of Benares, South Behar, and Chutia Nagpur on the north of the Kond iu Gondwana, and border on the people in the Rajinahal Hills, dwelling in the east at Sumbulpur, Sirguja, Gangpur, Chutia Nagpur, Ramgarh, and Mongir. The Kol were described by Lieutenant Tickell in 1840 in the Bengal Asiatic Society's Journal. One tribe, called Oraon, was driven at an early period from the neighbourhood of the Ganges, and found the Mundah Kol tribe in possession of Chutia Nagpur. Tho Mundah call themselves Ho, though more generally known as Kol. The Kol are physically Ultra-Indian more than Dravidian, and the occu pation of the Eastern Vindhya and hills on the opposite side of the Gangetic valley by Ultra Indians implies that the valley itself was at one time possessed by the same race ; the simplest conclusion is that tho Kol were an extension of the ancient Ultra-Indo Dravidian population of the Lower Ganges and of the highlands on its eastern margin. The Kol and Larka Kol and Sum, in Singbhum, north of the Gond, are regarded by all writers as of the prior Scythic stock.
The Larka Kol were subdued in 1821, and an agreement was made with them by which they bound themselves to be subject to the British Government, and to pay a fixed tribute to their chiefs. In 1857, a large number of the Larka Kol espoused the cause of the raja of Porahat, a Rajput chieftain near the Kolehan, but on the restoration of order they reverted to peaceful pursuits. The estate of the raja of Singbhum,
afterwards styled the raja of Porahat, was then confiscated for rebellion. The total revenue from the district is about Rs. 45,000. The expenditure, including a police battalion, amounts to about Rs. 30,000. Kol arms are the bow, a piece of bamboo with bamboo string, the arrow barbed, and battle-axe. The Kol intermixed with the Gond on the Sumbulpur borders are said to be called Kirki.
In British India and on its borders are four distinct branches of the family of languages spoken by members of the Turanian race. In the north are the Himalayan tribes, with their dialects, occupying from the Kanawars on the Sutlej to the Bhoti of Bhutan in the extreme east. Then there are the Lohitic class of languages, com prising with the Burmese and others of the Malay Peninsula the dialects of the Naga tribes and of the Mikir in Assam, and of the Bodo, Kachari, Kuki, and Garo in Eastern Bengal. Another class is the Kol or Mundah family of languages, including the Kol, Santa], and Bhumi of Singbhum and Western Bengal, and the Mundah of Chutia Nagpur, the ICur, or Korkii, or Muasi in Hoshang abad, Ellichpur, and westward in the forests of the Tapti and Nerbadda until they come in con tact with the Mill of the Vindliya Hills. Mr. Ilislop held that the word Kur or Kor is identical with Kol.
The fourth branch is Tamilic or Dravidian, to which beloiig the language of the Omens and of the Rajmahal hilimen, the Gondi, the Tuluva of Kanada, the Karnata of the Southern Mahratta country, the Todava of the Neilglierries, the Malealum of Travancore, the Tamil, the Telugu, and the Canarese. The Brahui of Baluchistan is also said to be allied to this family.
The Kur and the Santa! are closely related, and are separated from the Dravidian. The Kur or Muasi and the Korku or Kurku, to the north west and west of the Mahadeva Hills, are, in lan guage at least, quite distinct from the Gond tribes.
Mr. Hodgson is of opinion that the Tamilian, Tibetan, Indo-Chinese, Tungus, Chinese, Mongol, and Turk are so many branches of the Turanian family, and he regards the aborigines of British India as northmen of the Scythic stem, but he remains undecided whether they owe their Scythic physiognomy to the Tungus, the Mongol, or the Turk branch of the Tartars or Scythians, and whether they emigrated from beyond the Him alaya at one period and at one point, or at several periods and at as many points. Professor Huxley, on the other hand, considers these people to be allied to the aborigines of Australia. All writers are of opinion that when the Aryans entered India, they found the country occupied by prior races, to whom their writers apply such contemp tuous expressions as Dasya, M'hleeha, etc. These prior races seem to have been driven largely out of Northern India into and through the Vindhyan mountains into the Peninsula of India and Ceylon, where their idiom, the Tamil, Telugu, Malealam, and Karnatica are sister dialects of one speech ; and Dr. Pritchard concurs in opinion with Pro fessor Rask, who regards the languages of the mountain tribes of India, the Bhil, the Gond, the 'rods, and others, as also of the Tartar stock, and mentions that some curious analogies have been observed between the Tamilian and other dialects of the Peninsula and the languages of Australia. Mr. Logan, however, who has had great oppor tunities of contrasting and comparing the Dravid ians from various parts of India, inclines to call them South Indian. He remarks that, physically, the population of Southern India is one of the most variable and mixed which any ethnic pro vince displays. A glance at a considerable num ber of Kling (Teling) and Tamilar of different castes and occupations, shows that the varieties, when compared with those of similar assemblages of men of other races, such as Europeans, Ultra Indians, or Indonesians (including Negroes in the last two cases), are too•great to allow of their being referred to a single race of pure blood. Some are exceedingly Iranian, some arc Semitic, others Australian, some remind us of Egyptians, while others again have Malaya, Polynesian, and even Semang and Papuan features. This varied cha racter of the races of the south of the Peninsula may be seen daily in Madras, to which all the races from the south of India resort.