National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

feature in the Bashahr State; for it marks the ancient boundary between Bashahr and
Tibet. In fact, the West Tibetan Empire reached as far as Wangtu up to 1650 A. D.,
when the Satluj valley from Wangtu to Namgya was made over to Bashahr. Although
Tibetan is not yet spoken for several marches up the Satluj, the former Tibetan influence
makes itself felt in the frequency of personal Tibetan names. We could not escape
making this observation, because we had to jot down on our vouchers the names of all
the coolies in our employ.

We are now outside the area of the Pahāṛī dialects of the Satluj valley and have
entered that of the Kanāwari language. This language was noticed as early as 1817 by
Gerard, who published a vocabulary of it.¹ Mr. Diack made a beginning in the study of
its grammar; but the true nature of this language was not recognised, until the Rev. J.
Bruske, of the Moravian Mission, began to study the language thoroughly and
made a translation of the gospel of St. Mark into it. It was then recognised, as pointed
out by Dr. Sten Konow,² that the grammar of this language shows close affinities to
Muṇḍārī (spoken in Chota Nagpur), and that in very early times in these mountain
valleys an amalgamation must have taken place between Muṇḍa aboriginal tribes and
Tibetans. Within the fifty miles of road between Chini and Poo, one meets with several
more languages of probably a similar type which have not yet been properly studied,
although notes on them can be found in various books of travel. The study of the folk-
lore literature of the Kanāwari language has been taken up by Mr. H. A. Rose, who is
also compiling a dictionary of this language. Mr. Rose's collection contains historical
as well as lyrical pieces. With regard to the former it is strange to note that they all
refer to very modern times only. In the course of our journey we heard a song about
the Kyahar castle, but it also contained the name of a very modern personage, that
of the Ṭikā Sāhib of Bashahr, who died a few years ago. One of the most interesting
of Mr. Bruske's collection is the song on Mr. Minniken, forest officer of Bashahr. This
officer is praised in this song as the ideal master of the woods who gives the petitioner as
much wood as he wants to get. As regards metre and parallelism, these songs are of the
same character as the Tibetan songs.

The result of the blending of the Muṇḍa and Tibetan population with a super-
ficial sprinkling of Indian Aryans is not at all bad, and many of our coolie women were
of very attractive appearance. I must add a few words with regard to the latter. Among
the population of these mountain valleys the cooly caste is not very numerous, and for
this reason the villagers, also those of good caste, have to take up cooly work. This kind
of forced labour is felt as humiliating by most of the people, and for this reason the male
population will not participate in it. They press it on the women of their families, and
do not see that they disgrace themselves even more by this arrangement. Our transport
therefore was for the greater part of our journey to Poo the work of women carriers.
This has its great advantages, as has been observed also by other travellers, for these
women are pleasant to deal with, they never grumble, and do their utmost to please the