39
MIXTURE OF DIFFERENT RACES AND PEOPLE FROM VARIOUS
LOCALITIES.
Under the Duars sardari system, a sardar or his deputy, year after
year, visits the recruiting district and returns with a number of new
coolies. These coolies are in the majority of cases recruited from some
group of villages with which the recruiter is familiar and has some
personal connection. On their arrival on the garden, the new cooles
settle down in close proximity to coolies that have been brought up in
Former years by the same sardar, for the reasons that-
(a) They belong to the same sardar and work in his gang.
(b) They get houses given to them in his particular line.
(c) They usually find themselves among people from their own
locality.
It thus comes about that garden lines, which to casual inspection
seem to be mere collections of huts, are in reality composed of separate
colonies, each one recruited from some particular group of villages or
localities.
Some idea of the wide range from which the component colonies of
a line are drawn and the resulting mixture of peoples will be gathered
from the accompanying plan of a small portion of a line, and the projec-
tion on the map of the recruiting districts of the source of the various
colonies composing it.
Most of the recruiting localities, if we may judge by the coolies
coming from them to the Duars, are comparatively healthy; others
are more or less malarious, and some even apparently intensely so
Thus in the Duars malaria carriers from malarious districts and
susceptible people from healthy areas are mingled; and, in the
presence of anopheles, we have ready the constituents for an explosion
of epidemic malaria.
The actual conditions as they now exist are, however, even more
favourable to malaria as will be seen in the next section.