In addition to Stack's notes, I received from Assam three sets of replies to ethnographical questions which had been circulated to persons acquainted with the tribe. These were from Mr. W. C. M. Dundas, Subdivisional Officer of North Cachar, and the Rev. P. E. Moore and Mr. Allen of the American Baptist Mission. [4] These replies, which were not very detailed, while quite independent in origin, agreed closely with Stack's data, and showed that the lapse of years had not made the latter inapplicable to the present time. In the following pages any information drawn from these sources has been duly acknowledged.
It was explained in the Introduction to Major Gurdon's Monograph on the Khasis (1907) that the order and arrangement of subjects to be treated in dealing with each tribe had been prescribed by authority; and Stack's notes had to be brought within this framework. As will be seen, under certain heads not much information is forthcoming; and perhaps the more searching standard of inquiry applied by ethnologists in the present day might demand more exhaustive treatment of some points in this presentment of the Mikir people. This, however, must be left for our successors.
Section I has been expanded by adding numerical data from the last Census (1901), and measurements from Lieut.-Colonel L. A. Waddell's Tribes of the Brahmaputra Valley (1900). Section II (Domestic Life) is entirely due to Stack. The same is the case with Section III (Laws and Customs), except the Appendix. Section IV (Religion) is wholly Stack's; reading the careful and minute account which it contains of the funeral ceremonies, one is strongly impressed by the thoroughness which he brought to his investigations. Section V (Folk-lore) contains translations of three of the folk-tales written down in Mikir by Stack, of which the original text, with an interlinear rendering, is given in Section VI. These translations, in both Sections, have been made by me. Stack's manuscript supplied the Mikir text, which has been faithfully copied, and a number of explanatory notes, but no connected rendering. I have therefore had to depend upon my study of the language in the linguistic materials collected by him, and those contained in Mr. Neighbor's vocabulary and Sardoka's dictionary and phrase-book. I had hoped to have the assistance of Sardoka himself in revising the translations. He served for many years in the Assam Secretariat after Stack's death, and helped in the preparation of the specimens of Mikir for the Linguistic Survey in 1902; but in September, 1904, he was transferred as mauzadar, or Revenue collector and administrator, to the important mauza or territorial division in the Mikir Hills called Duar Baguri, now divided between the districts of Nowgong and Sibsagar; and on the 8th March, 1905, he most unhappily died there of cholera. Other help was not forthcoming. I must, therefore, ask for the indulgence of those better acquainted than I with Mikir in regard to these renderings. Probably they contain many errors of detail; but at least they seem to hang together as a whole, and to be consistent with what I could ascertain elsewhere of the fashion of Mikir speech. The notes are chiefly from Stack. The sketch of the Grammar in Section VI is reproduced (in a somewhat abridged form) from that which I contributed to the Linguistic Survey. Stack himself had drawn up no grammar, though he had put together much illustrative material from which the mechanism of the language could be deduced. The main facts are clear and comparatively simple, though there are not a few idiomatic expressions in the texts of which it is difficult to give a satisfactory account.