The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.27

v1.c26.27

⁴ Lieutenant Prendergast, quoted in the *Asiatic Journal*, New Series, v (1831), p. 161, was assured by a Gond that in his native village cannibalism of this kind was still practised. This may have been the isolated survival of a more general cannibalism among the Gonds. As Lieutenant Prendergast's statement, now more than 80 years old, is still quoted in evidence for the practice among these tribes, one presumes that later evidence is hard to find. E. T. Dalton, *Ethnology of Bengal* (1872), p. 220, mentions a tribe called Birhors, accused of cannibalism. Some of them had assured him that they had themselves given up the practice, but 'they admitted that their fathers were in the habit of disposing of the dead in the manner indicated, viz. by feasting on the bodies; but they declared they never shortened life to provide such feasts, and shrank with horror at the idea of any bodies but those of their own blood relations being served up to them!’ The *Cyclopaedia of India* (Quaritch, 1885), which quotes the passage from Dalton, under ‘Birhor,’ omits to note that Dalton himself says, ‘I have no faith in the story.’