Burma: Census of India 1901 Vol. I - Khamkoo

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I 20
REPORT ON THE CENSUS OF BURMA.
and the Shans of the east is marked by divergencies of dress and dialect. The
North-Western Shans talk what Dr. Grierson has called Northern Burmese Shan,
a tongue closely related to Khamti Shan. It extends, with minor variations, into
Assam, and is represented in its purest and most archaic form in the now obsolete
Ahom of that province. In the fashion of their clothing the North-Western Shans
have assimilated themselves to the Burmans, in the midst of whom they live. Mr.
Pilcher's Nortfi-Eastern Shans are the Chinese-Shans, or, as they are called by the
Burmans, the Shan-Tayoks, who are found where Upper Burma and the Northern
Shan States border on China. Sir George Scott is of opinion that with the Shan-
Tayoks should be classified for ethnological purposes the Shans of the Northern
Shan States, whose dialect differs more from that of the Southern Shan States than
it does from the tongue of the Chinese-Shans. These latter, we learn, have very
little that is Chinese in their composition. We are not, of course, here concerned
with linguistic considerations, but Sir George Scott looks to more than dialectic
differences. Though the turban worn by the Chinese-Shan females is peculiar
to the Shan-Tayoks proper, the divergences in dress between the Hsenwi and the
Chinese Shan are not radical. But it is mainly on historical grounds that the
compiler of the Upper Burma Gazetteer has decided to classify the Northern
Shan States Tai with the Shan-Tayoks. It remains to be seen whether anthropometry
confirms this view.
The origin of the word Shan is a point which has not yet been finally settled.
Sir George Scott says :
" Whence the name Shan came is an unsolved riddle. We have seen that the Burmese
almost certainly first knew the Tai as Taroks or Tarets. It is possible that when afterwards
they heard of the Han ' Yen,' the Chinese name for themselves, they transferred ' Han' into
Shan and made a further ethnological error. * * * The name Siam is no help, for
whether it is a barbarous Anglicism derived from the Portuguese or Italian word Sciam,
or is derived from the Malay Sayam, which means brown, it can hardly be said to be a
national word."
177. The last decade has seen a very marked decline in the cult of the
Karen. In the early eighties the Karen, after a number
The Karens.
of
years q{ negiect) began to bulk large amid the non-
Burmese elements of the population of the province and attracted perhaps a trifle
more than his fair share of attention. At that time comparatively little was known
of the Shan, the Northern Chin and the Kachin ;
the Taking had lost much of his
identity and was to the ordinary observer barely distinguishable from his Burman
neighbour. The wild tribes of the Arakan Yomas were only to be studied in their
own remote mountain fastnesses. The Karen, on the other hand, was to the fore,
not less along the Eastern frontier than in the delta of the Irrawaddy. His dress,
his form of speech, his manners and customs, and his extraordinarily receptive
attitude towards the truths of Christianity singled him out as an accessible and
profitable field for the labours alike of the ethnologist and the minister of
religion, while his undoubted loyalty and his prowess as a fighter drew the
official eye upon him. The missionaries have retained their hold on the Karen
with unflagging zeal, but the interest of the' student of manners and customs has
shifted gradually northwards into fresh realms of research. Thus it is that, whereas
prior to 1887 Messrs. Mason and Smeaton and Colonels MacMahon and Spearman
had all written freely on the subject of the Karens, almost the only important
contribution to our knowledge of the people that has been vouchsafed since then is
that which Sir George Scott summarizes in that portion-of the ethnology chapter
of the Upper Burma Gazetteer which relates to the Karens of Karenni and Upper
Burma. Dr. Grierson has, on linguistic grounds, placed the speech of the Karens
in the Chinese- Siamese sub-family, and, though it appears to me doubtful whether
Dr. Mason is justified in identifying the river of running sand which the primaeval
ancestors of the race are said to have crossed with the sand drifts of the desert
of Gobi in Central Asia, there can be no doubt that the original home of the
Karens must have been, if not in, at any rate in close proximity to, China. More
than this it seems impossible to say. The Karens stand ethnically isolated in the
midst of representatives of the three great Indo-Chinese immigration waves, and
no increase to our knowledge of the Mon-Annam, the Tibeto-Burman and the Tai
races serves to help us in the solution of the problem of their origin.