Kuki (Indic people); Lushai (Asian people); Lushai language
Besides the above there are notes in the Census Reports of 1891 and
1901, various military publications and gazetteers by Mr. A. W. Davis,
I.C.S., and Mr. B. C. Allen, I.C.S., all of which contain a certain
amount of useful information, but do not pretend to be more than
notes giving succinctly the knowledge then obtained of what was then
practically new ground. Colonel Woodthorpe's account of the Silchar
columns' march to Champhai, though not professing to be an account
of the people, is interesting reading. Round Champhai I met several
men who had been there when the column arrived, and they all remember
the little sahib who drew pictures; and would sit long looking at the
pictures in his book and chatting to each other of the good old days.
[Note.--On p. 6 of the present work the Author refers to a passage
in Lewin's Hill Tracts of Chittagong and the Dwellers therein,
in which is cited an account of "the Cucis or inhabitants of the
Tipperah Mountains written by J. Rennel, Chief Engineer of Bengal in
1800." In reading through the proofs of the present work, it occurred
to me that it would be important to discover whether the "J. Rennel"
referred to by Lewin was or was not the famous Major James Rennell,
Surveyer-General of Bengal, who is so often described as "the Father of
Modern Geography." Major Rennell with his wife (née Jane Thackeray--a
great aunt of the novelist W. M. Thackeray) left Bengal in March,
1777, and reached England in February 1778. He died on March 29,
1830. It seemed to me possible that the great Rennell might have
obtained the information about the Kukis during his period of service
in East Bengal, and that he might have published a memoir on the
subject in 1800. Mr. W. Foster of the Record Department of the India
Office very kindly informed me that no such a memoir could be traced
at Whitehall, and drew my attention to Lewin's heading of the memoir,
"From the French of M. Bouchesiche, who translated the original from
the English of J. Rennel, Chief Engineer of Bengal.... Published
at Leipsic in 1800." Mr. Edward Heawood, Librarian of the Royal
Geographical Society, to whom I am indebted for much trouble taken
in satisfying my curiosity, informed me that Bouchesiche gave what
purported to be an extract, translated into French, from Rennell's
well-known work on India, and that the Frenchman's book was printed
in Paris in 1800, although there may perhaps have been a Leipzig issue
also. The account of the Kukis given in Bouchesiche's work, however, is
not taken from any known work by James Rennell. Dalton in his Ethnology
of Bengal refers to what has been supposed to be the earliest account
of the Kukis--a memoir by Surgeon McCrea, which appeared in 1799 in
Volume vii of Asiatic Researches. Mr. Heawood most kindly hunted
up McCrea's memoir, and found in it a reference to a memoir which
appeared in Volume ii of Asiatic Researches, 1790. The title of the
memoir of 1790 runs "On the Manners, Religion, and Laws of the Cucis,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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