The Kafir arms are bows and arrows, battle-axe and dagger. The dagger is peculiar, of excellent fabric, with a deep 工 hilt of iron with brass studs, and slung in a triangular iron sheath. Their bows and arrows are short and weak-looking, but they make good practice up to 60 yards. Swords and matchlocks are spreading.
Among the notable and general customs are the copious use of wine, which at their feasts they drink from large silver cups which are among their most precious possessions; their sitting habitually upon stools of wicker-work, whilst they find it as difficult as we do to adopt the cramped postures usual among Asiatics; their use of slips of pine for candles; the custom of recording the deeds of a warrior by a post beside his coffin, in which a peg is driven for every man he has slain. The Islamized Chugâni people of Darah Nûr also maintain this practice.
The people are fond of dancing. Men and women join. Biddulph witnessed a village dance, wild and strange,—the men brandishing arms, with whooping and whistling and discharge of guns. At times the whole would lock arms by pairs and revolve backwards and forwards in grotesque waltz, or following in order wind in figures of 8.
Their houses are neat and clean, generally of more than one story (communicating by rough ladder beams), and sometimes of five or six on the declivity of a hill. They are much embellished with wood carving. We may assume Tanner’s striking description of a large Chugâni village to give a fairer idea of the Kafir towns than we have yet any direct means of gaining:—
“It is built on the face of a very steep slope, and the houses, of which there must be six hundred, are arranged in terraces one above another. From the roof of one of the lower ones I gazed with astonishment at a vast amphitheatre of carved wood at thousands of carved veranda-posts, and at tens of thousands of carved panels, with which the upper story of each house is constructed. . . . The carving completely covered the woodwork of the upper story of every house. The lower story is of stone and wood, and double the extent of the upper, and this allows an open roof-space on which the inhabitants mostly pass their time in fine weather.”
A newborn child is carried with its mother to a special house outside the village, where they remain secluded. After twenty days mother and child are bathed and brought back with music and dancing. The dead are placed in coffins, and, after much dancing and waking and sham fighting, are carried to some lofty spot and there deposited, but no grave is made.
The Siâh-posh dogs, cattle, sheep, fowls, and all their agricultural products are famous for quality, and much sought by their neighbours. Their cattle in appearance and size compare favourably with English breeds, but have large humps. The women are said to do much of the agricultural work.
On Kafirs, see Elphinstone’s Caubul, ed. 1839, ii. 373 sq.; Burnes, Cubool, 1842, pp. 206 sq. and 381 sq.; Masson, Journeys, 1842, chap. xi.; Lumsden’s Mission to Kandahar, Calcutta, 1860; Kaverty, in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, vols. xxviii. and xxxiii; Bellew, “Lecture,” in Journ. U. S. Inst. Ind., No. 41, Simla, 1879; Leitner, ibid., No. 43, 1880; Biddulph, Tribes of Hindoo Koosh, Calcutta, 1880; Tanner, in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., May 1881; Church Missionary Intelligencer for 1865, reprinted in same for December 1878; also Church Missionary Intelligencer for September 1874; Wood’s Oxus; Terentyef, Russia and England in Central Asia, translated by Daukes, Calcutta, 1876, i. 298 sq. (this has some amount of nonsense, deducing the Kafirs from a Slav migration through Byzantium, &c.); Quarterly Review, April 1873, p. 534 sq.; Jour. Roy. As. Soc., vol. xix. p. 1 sq.
(h. y.)
KAHLÚR, also called Biláspur, one of the petty hill states in the Punjab, India, lying between 31° 12′ 30″ and 31° 35′ 45″ N. lat., and between 76° 26′ and 76° 58′ E. long. The area is 448 square miles, and the estimated population 60,000. The principal products are opium and grain; woollen goods are manufactured. The estimated revenue is about £10,000. The Gurkhas overran the country in the early part of the century, and expelled the rájá, who was, however, reinstated by the British in 1815.
