11-01-175

175

GULGULI.

　The Gulgulis are a wandering non-Aryan tribe, who live by hunting, teaching monkeys to dance, selling indigenous drugs, begging, and petty thieving. Sir Herbert Risley thinks that they are a branch of the Bediys.

　At the Census of 1911, 853 Gulgulis were returned, 824 from Bihar and Orissa and 29 from elsewhere.

　No information about the language of the Gulgulis is available in Census Reports, and no such dialect was reported during the preliminary operations of this Survey. At the Census of 1901 it was, however, reported from the Hazaribagh District that the Gulgulis do not ordinarily speak a separate dialect, but that they make use of a kind of argot when they intend to prevent others from understanding what they say. Three short sentences in this jargon were forwarded to Sir Edward Gait, the then Superinten- dent of the Census operations in Bengal, and he has been good enough to place them at the disposal of this Survey. They show that this argot is of the same kind as other secret jargons. In the first place there are some peculiar words such as ebig, fell; lugig, died; kutchhi, have eaten; lir, tempest; nmru, bullock; nhkat, in the house. Some of these are well known from other argots, compare Ss au, fall; lug, die; dt, eat; nd, village; Gar nnd, house. Besides this, ordinary words are disguised by changing their initials. Thus kh is substituted for b in khh = biyh, wedding, and for p in khech = pch, five; jh for t in jhin-g = tn, three; n for g in nchh = gchh, tree, and so forth. I now give the sentences themselves with an inter- linear translation.