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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
Citation Information
OCR Text
Chitralis are quite illiterate, and certainly not a dozen in
the country can either read or write. Even the Mehtar could
not read; and I do not suppose there has ever been a Mehtar
of Chitral who could. But these Chitralis could perfectly
well understand pictures, not of things which they had never
seen, such as ships, but pictures of men, animals, and natural
objects, with which they were acquainted. When Colonel
Lockhart's Mission visited the country in 1885–86, Dr. Giles
took several photographs of the people, and other photographs
had been taken of Chitralis who had travelled down to India.
When I showed these photos to my visitors, I found that they
could readily say who each man in the photo was; and when
they saw photos of British officers who had visited Chitral,
they were able to put the correct names to them. They had
their own very definite ideas about beauty. In the illustrated
papers, and in advertisements, there would often be fancy
pictures or portraits of princesses or actresses, over which they
would grow very enthusiastic, and they would generally select
as the most beautiful very much the same types as a European
would. But there was one very pretty picture in the advertise-
ment of a soap-maker, who shall be nameless, which I thought
they would certainly like; yet they said the lady in question
was not worth looking at, and the reason they gave for this
was because she had grey hair! There was no intention of
the artist to give her grey hair, but in our prints we have what
is really nothing more than a conventional sign for indicating
the light falling on a subject, and they thought this light falling
on the hair was grey hair.
The Mehtar used to grow very enthusiastic over some of
the advertisements. One, in the Field, of an incubator for
hatching eggs, excited his special curiosity, and when I ex-
plained to him that it was a machine for turning eggs into
chickens, he wanted me to write off at once for one for him.
A picture of a collapsible boat also won his admiration, and
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