Antiquities of Indian Tibet : vol.2 / Page 294 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

0294	Antiquities of Indian Tibet : vol.2

XXI. The Song of the Dard Colonization of Baltistan and Ladakh

The following song is taken from a collection of Dard songs called Bono-ná-yi-

glu-'a-thrun, " the eighteen songs of the Bono-ná. festival." When I discovered this

collection at Mdah (Dah), in Lower Ladakh, the natives told me that they had written

it down about thirty to forty years ago at the request of the famous traveller R. Shawe.

No reference to it can, however, be found among Shawe's publications. I published

this interesting hymnal in my Ladakhi Songs, where it is found under Nos. xxxi—xliv,

together with a Tibetan translation ; and again in the Indian Antiquary, where it was

furnished with an English translation. The " Colonization song " is No. vi of the

hymnal, and is found under No. xxxvi of Ladakhi Songs. As I am not satisfied with

my previous translation of this song, I propose to publish a new attempt at solving

its difficulties. I have come to the conclusion that several words which I believed to be

terms of a descriptive character are in reality local names. These places cannot yet all

be traced on modern maps ; but a tour along the Indus from Skar-rdo to Ha-nu would

probably help us to identify them all. On the whole the song follows the natural

course of the Indus in enumerating them. If several places are mentioned together

in a single line, we may expect to find them close together in the district. As I believe,

the hymnal contained in earlier times several more Ladakhi names than it does now.

Probably some of the names were dropped when the Dard language became extinct

in those places. But a study of Ladakhi ethnography and archæology leads to the

conviction that several villages which nowadays appear to be entirely Tibetan were in

former centuries Dard.

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