The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c10.92.4

v1.c10.92.4

On the contrary, several primitive hill tribes in India and elsewhere, among whom the men and children go about without any covering for their persons, are particular in providing garbs of leaves or bark for their females; for there seems to exist even among them a sense of decency—a very imperfect and nebulous one no doubt, formed after their very primitive conditions—but still a sense of decency about covering the person, which prompt them to devise the means of doing so. A notable instance of this is offered by Col. Dalton in his interesting work on the *Ethnology of Bengal*. Noticing the Juāngs of Keunjhar, he says: "The females of the group had not amongst them a particle of clothing, their sole covering for purposes of decency consisted in a girdle composed of several strings of beads from which depended before and behind small curtains of leaves. Adam and Eve sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons. The Juāngs are not so far advanced; they take young shoots of the Āsan (*Terminalia tomentosa*) or any tree with young soft leaves, and arranging them so as to form a flat and scale-like surface of the required size, the sprigs are simply stuck in the girdle fore and aft, and the toilet is complete. The girls were well developed and finely formed specimens of the race, and as the light leafy costume left the outlines of the figure entirely nude, they would have made good studies for sculpture.........