Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BADAGA SONGS, In the cluster of hills, where the eastern and western Ghauts meet, are embosomed many charming valleys. They afford to the Europeans in India a climate perhaps the most perfect in the world, equally removed from extremes of heat and cold. Coorg and the Wynaad have attracted the planter ; and the virgin forest enframes, so to speak, hundreds of plantations or " estates," chiefly devoted to the growth of coffee, but now containing many an acre of tea and cinchona. The Ooty valley is the best of Indian sanitaria, lacking only, for perfect beauty, such snowy hills as surround and overtop the viceregal Simla. These hills and green plateaus are the home of several mountain tribes. The Kurgis are the highest, the Kotas the lowest in the tribal scale. Below the noblest are the Todas. Above the basest are the Badagas. Other tribes are called Kurumbers and Irulas. They all speak varieties of Hali Cannadi or ancient Canarese, and doubtless represent, almost unchanged, the condition, speech and occupation of the great original stock which has progressed and become civilized in Mysore until it has become what we now see in the Canarese nation. The vocabulary of the dialects is almost pure Aryan, and presents the most startling affinities with the grand Teutonic stock. The grammar is only nowbeginning to be studied, but will doubtless claim the same relationship. It seems proper, therefore, that the songs of these older races should follow the Canarese songs previously given, neglecting for the moment the more polished tongues of the plains. We commence, therefore, with a few of the very beautiful chants of the Badaga tribe. Though not so high in the social scale as the Todas, the Badagas are the most numerous and prosperous tribe in the Neilgherry hills. -They number ab...