JUANGS (Patuas, literally "

See also:

• LEAF (O. Eng. leaf, cf. Dutch loof, Ger. Laub, Swed. lof, &c.; possibly to be referred to the root seen in Gr. Ma-eta, to peel, strip)

leaf-wearers ")  , a jungle tribe of Orissa, India . They are found in only two of the tributary states, Dhenkanal and Keonjhar, most of them in the latter . They are estimated to amount in all to about 1o,000 . Their language belongs to the Munda family . They have no traditions which connect them with any other race, and they repudiate all connexion with the Hos or the Santals, declaring themselves the aborigines . They say the headquarters of the tribe is the Gonasika . In manners they are among the most primitive people of the world, representing the Stone age in our own day . They do not till the land, but live on the game they kill or on snakes and vermin . Their huts measure about 6 ft. by 8 ft., with very low doorways . The interior is divided into two compartments . In the first of these the father and all the females of a family huddle together; the second is used as a store-room . The boys have a separate hut at the entrance to the village, which serves as a guest-house and general assembly place where the musical instruments of the village are kept .

Physically they are small and weak-looking, of a reddish-

brown colour, with flat faces, broad noses with wide nostrils, large mouths and thick lips, the hair coarse and frizzly . The women until recently wore nothing but girdles of leaves, the men, a diminutive bandage of cloth . The Juangs declare that the river goddess, emerging for the first time from the Gonasika rock, surprised a party of naked Juangs dancing, and ordered them to wear leaves, with the threat that they should die if they ever gave up the custom . The Juangs' weapons are the bow and arrow and a primitive sling made entirely of cord . Their religion is a vague belief in forest spirits . They offer fowls to the sun when in trouble and to the earth for a bountiful harvest . Polygamy is rare . They burn their dead and throw the ashes into any running stream . The most sacred oaths a Juang can take are those on an ant-hill or a tiger-skin . See E . W . Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872) .