Punan people

“ All the pounhas were doubtless religious, who practised certain duties not regarded as obligatory by ordinary people, and lived under certain regulations, which separated them more or less from society, and distinguished them from those who followed the ordinary pursuits of life. ”

“ Yet no one who is acquainted with these amiable folk could doubt that, although their group consciousness is highly developed, they enjoy also a well developed individual self-consciousness. How otherwise can we interpret the fact that a Punan who suffers malicious injury from a member of another tribe will nurse his vengeful feeling for an indefinite period and, after the lapse of years, will find an opportunity to bring down his enemy secretly with blow-pipe and poisoned dart? ”

“ The Punans are simple-minded, shy, and retiring people, and the other nomads even more so. The first-named are more attractive on account of their superior physique, their candid manners, and somewhat higher intellect. ”

“ The Punans, among whom we include, beside the Punans proper, the Ukits and a few other closely allied but widely scattered small groups, are the only people who do not dwell in villages established on the banks of the rivers. They live in small groups of twenty or thirty persons, which wander in the jungle. Each such group is generally made up of a chief and his descendants. ”

“ As he truly says, a foreigner and a person of a different religion cannot advise with such good effect. Indeed, such an one would not venture to come before an Indian audience saying that the Puranas were intended for the uneducated and common classes of people, and are equal to the words of a woman. Nor indeed would every author have the courage to add, "If one entirely depends on what a woman says one knows the result well enough." ”

“ The man need not have come at all; but with that fidelity so often found among the lower people of India who serve their superiors, he remained faithful to the son of the house whom he had known and worshipped from a distance as a child and boy.
When the lights were extinguished and voices ceased murmuring in the women's rooms, the untouchable, as the caste people termed the pariah, crept softly into the little yard and entered the room where Ananda slept. ”

“ It is fitting that a chronicle of social life in England in the Victorian age, drawn in its essentials from the pages of Punch, should begin with the People. For Punch began as a radical and democratic paper, a resolute champion of the poor, the desolate and the oppressed, and the early volumes abound in evidences of the miseries of the "Hungry 'Forties" and in burning pleas for their removal. ”

“ Men and women and girls, they wore the set look of people who had espoused an unpopular and even perilous cause and were resolved to carry it through. They seldom looked happy, and they had little cause for it. In ten years the physiognomy of the Salvationists had changed, and they went about their work unmolested with serene and cheerful faces. Punch could at least plead this extenuation of his hostility, that it was shared by learned and excellent men. ”

“ But the Indian, if he understands, cannot make use of his intelligence. The fate of his people is against it, and Pontiac and Philip have no more chance than Julian in the times of old.
The Indian is steady to that simple creed which forms the basis of all his mythology; that there is a God and a life beyond this; a right and wrong which each man can see, betwixt which each man should choose; that good brings with it its reward, and vice its punishment. ”

“ In its triumphant course it attacked idolatry in its strongholds, and that idolatry, though fortified by habit and prejudice, and sanctioned by classic learning, and entwined with the beautiful in architecture and song, and venerable for its wondrous age, and imperial in the dominion which it had exercised over a vassal world, fell speedily, utterly, and for ever. And in each succeeding age, obscured sometimes by the clouds of persecution, and sometimes by the mists of error, its progress has been gradual and sure. ”

“ We have seen that Punch did not belittle the Chartist movement, but admitted the evils, political, social, and economic, out of which it sprang. So did some of the leaders of the Young England group (see Sybil) , but Punch ridiculed their remedies. He was out of touch alike with Whigs, Tories, and Churchmen, especially the Tractarians, who denounced the men who tempted the people to rail against their rulers and superiors. ”

“ In a matter so personal as the marriage relation, the wishes or preferences of the parties were not consulted. No better evidence is needed of the barbarism of the people.
We are next to notice some of the influences which developed this family from the punaluan. In the latter there was more or less of pairing from the necessities of the social state, each man having a principal wife among a number of wives, and each woman a principal husband among a number of husbands; so that the tendency in the punaluan family, from the first, was in the direction of the syndyasmian. ”

“ But the wealth, the prosperity, the independence, and the self-government, are to be met with in one class of communities, under one form of authorities, among one kind of holders only. These oases in the desert of Indian native existence are those in which Punch—the Punch—the Mr. Punch—in one word the Indian representative of OURSELVES—bears sway! ”

“ Their apostles made their way to Rome and Jerusalem, to New England and Egypt; and some were even moved to go toward China and Japan in search of the unknown realms of Prester John." * Democracy, in its largest sense, was their political creed. "We lay a foundation," said Penn, "for after ages to understand their liberty as Christians and as men, that they may not be brought into bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people." With such views he framed his government; with the simplicity of honest truth and love he made the treaty with the Indians. ”

“ Punch's picture was true of a time now rapidly passing away, and furnishes a valuable comment on the solution of a century-old problem. The French master, generally a refugee in the old days, was never accorded a proper status and very seldom recognized as one of themselves by his colleagues. He was generally poor, and he was a standing proof of the saying of the Latin satirist that there is nothing more cruel about poverty than the fact that it makes people ridiculous. ”

“ The institutions of William Penn had been sacredly preserved by the descendants of the first settlers, with whom the remembrance of the causes which had led their ancestors to forsake their native country, was cherished like the traditions of religion, and became a motive to themselves, for indulging in the exercise of those blameless principles, which had been so obnoxious to the arrogant spirit of the Old World. ”

“ Two causes, however, seem to be the generators and supporters of the religious sentiment that influences the people,—education, and the political institutions. The male portion of the community is brought up in the monasteries by the Phongyies. ”

“ But these very peaceful relations between parents and children are no doubt, in a great measure, due to the listless and apathetic character of the race, which never leads the younger members into serious opposition to the elders; while the harsher discipline of the Papuans may be chiefly due to that greater vigour and energy of mind which always, sooner or later, leads to the rebellion of the weaker against the stronger,—the people against their rulers, the slave against his master, or the child against its parent. ”

“ With an earnest eloquence Pontiac, in the lodges and at the council fires of his people, whether of his own immediate tribe or of representative warriors of other tribes, set before them the demonstration that security and happiness, if not peace, depended for them on their renouncing all reliance upon the white man’s ways and goods, and reverting with a stern stoicism to the former conditions of their lot. ”

“ I heard Thomas Paine once assert in the presence of Mr. Wolcott, better known, in this country, by the facetious name of Peter Pindar, that the minority, in all deliberative bodies, ought, in all cases, to govern the majority. Peter smiled. You must grant me, said Uncommon Sense, that the proportion of men of sense, to the ignorant among mankind, is at least as twenty, thirty, or even forty-nine, to an hundred. The majority of mankind are consequently most prone to errour; and if we atchieve the right, the minority ought in all cases to govern. ”

“ There is no body of men more jealous of their privileges than the Commons: Because they sell them."
Paine wrote three letters in reply to "Cato," the last of which contained a memorable warning to the people on the eve of the Declaration of Independence: "Forget not the hapless African." ”

“ It was as Gunga had said, just under a window. He signed to his son to sit on the same bench by his side.
"No harm will have been done by your having called yourself a Christian in a foreign land," continued Pantulu, resolutely looking away from his companion's face, that he might not be discouraged by what was so manifest there. "The ceremonies will be of a character to restore you even if you have sinned greatly. I have money enough to satisfy the purohits. There are worse offences than the one you have committed. You have not killed a Brahman, for instance." ”

“ If, in case of disagreement, one or more of the members of a band refuses to accept the judgment of the leader and of the majority, he, or they, will withdraw from the community together with wife and children, to form a band which, though in the main independent of the parent group, will usually remain in its near neighbourhood and maintain some intercourse. Fighting between Punans, whether of the same or of different communities, is very rare; the only instances known to us are a few in which Punans have been incited by men of other tribes to join in an attack on their fellows. ”

“ In these years, and for a good many years to come, Punch hunted in couples with The Times.
Neglect of Native Talent
The neglect of native talent and the encouragement of foreign artists, musicians, men of letters, is harped upon in number after number for year after year. Here again the method is sometimes direct, sometimes oblique, as in the fictitious list of people invited to the Court: Dickens, Hood, Mrs. ”

“ The original groups, the stems of the wild and barbarian people, were more strongly united than the animal groups. Family relationship and a common language strengthened this union further. Every individual had the support of the entire tribe. ”

“ Discontent, malignant hatred of a government in which they themselves were not promoted according to their fancied merits, made others encourage the writings and principles of Paine, however much they might have despised his illiterature and sophistry. But not the ignorant only, writers of respectable talents and erudition declared the ravings and vagaries of Paine to be the invincible energy of truth and sense, to combine history and philosophy. ”

“ They were busy, hard-worked, often overworked, journalists and officials, and their recreations and diversions did not bring them into intimate contact with the dwellers in Mayfair or Belgravia. They kept a watchful eye upon the extravagances and vagaries of High Life, but mainly as it revealed itself in its public form or in politics. In the study of the Geology of Society, which appeared in one of his earliest numbers, Punch subdivides the three main strata of Society—High Life, Middle Life, Low Life—into various classes. ”

“ To the one it has ascribed felicity and affluence; to the other hardship and want. But, however our imagination may be impressed by painting and comparison, it is nevertheless true, that a great portion of mankind, in what are called civilised countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian. I speak not of one country, but of all. It is so in England, it is so all over Europe. ”

“ It was fortunate that at the breaking out of the mutiny the Governor of the Punjaub was Sir John Lawrence, who had a great ascendancy over the natives, and by his courage and prompt measures he succeeded not only in keeping them quiet, but in mustering here a considerable force to restore English authority in the rest of India. The Punjaubees took part in the siege of Delhi. From that day they have been the most trusted of natives for their courage and their fidelity. ”

“ But Punnu died six days before Pertab Singh succeeded to the Chiefship, and the people, overjoyed at their deliverance from the man whom they believed their sole tyrant, are probably indifferent to the change of rulers, and will remain quite in confident anticipation of early relief from their burdens. Another fortunate circumstance for the new Chief is the general prosperity of the country, as far as it can be prosperous. ”

“ Indeed, it was just here that the Panoukians, male and female, were so astonishing. For generations in England personal ambition had been the only motive force, the sole measure of virtue, and it was personal ambition that they utterly ignored. ”

“ Campbell, on the nature and effects of the authority and administration of Punch in India. Where Punches preside, "the system" he tells us "is infinitely better than anything we have hitherto seen." The revenue is larger and more easily collected; the condition of the cultivator more flourishing; property more secure, and the police better administered. Each village, under the beneficent and equal rule of its Punch, "is one community, composed of a number of families, all possessing rights in the soil, and responsibilities answering to their rights." Still Punch is no tyrant. ”