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"The people of Lahul are a mixed race; and linguistic research
indicates that in remote times (c.B.C. 2,000), the country was inhabited by an aboriginal
tribe, in language, and perhaps also in stocks, analogous to the Munda speaking tribes of
Bengal and Central India.* This tribe must have borrowed, in very early times, from the
vocabulary of their Tibetan neighbors on the, north-east and east, who must have
constantly come in contact with them as nomad graziers, traders, or invaders.
Survivors of the same ethnological stock
are to be found in the Kanawar Kothi of Rupi Waziri in Kulu, in the isolated village of
Malana and in the Bashahr tract on the Satluj. At a later period, Tibetan settlers came in
from the north and east-from Rup3hu and Ladakh into the head of the Bhaga Valley, and from
Spiti and Tibet into the head of the Chandra Valley near Koksar, where the Tibetan spoken
approximates rather to that of Spiti than to that of Ladakh.
Aryans and semi-Aryans also came from the
west and south, and the Lahulis at the present time are the ultimate product of the
amalgamation of these different races. Their peculiar languages, three in number- Bunan,
Tinan and Manchat-are found to have strong affinities with the languages of the
Munda-speaking tribes, but are not related to the Aryan languages of India, and only in
vocabulary related to the Tibetan, which is the vernacular of the Upper Chandra and Bhaga
Valleys around Koksar and Kolong, and also the written language in most of the country.
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