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adjustment of the personalities’ The daughters are taught from late child-
hood the household tasks to be theirs in thelr husband's homee The Hindu
women do the cooking, grind the rice, assist in blowing the chaff, and
other household tasks that one would expect to fall tothe “lot.

However, the men, women, and children from around the ages of
eight or nine work in the paddy fields during the planting season in late
June, and the harvesting season of November to Jamary. The men plow the
fields, doing it early in the morning after the monsoons start when the
baked earth has been softened by the drenching rains. They use erude hand-
fashicned wooden plows, although one occasionally sees & plow with a home=
mademetal edge from some scavenged metal’ They close the dikes around the
paddy fields and allow them to become inundated from the rains. The men
also thresh the rice in their own courtyards by the aid of the cattle they
possesse This is apparently the only practical use to which their cattle
are. puts They are not used for hauling in this part of the country, and the
cows have such small udderg that they necessarily wean their calves at an
early age! ly husband, Oiice say a coolie milking a cow. He could only ap-
ply two fingers to the smallteat, and was using a snall brass bowl about
the size of @ drinking glass to catch the milk’

Another of the men's duties, and one which they teach their sons
at an early age, is the catching of fish for the family. If there are
several grown men in the family, they dam off their section of the strean,
and drain it, then picking the fish out by hand$ shen fishing alone they
have various ingenious homemade bambcootraps they set in the water. The males
Of the family take the produce to town to sell it in the bazaar. It is sold
on & direct grower-consumer basis. Usually the women stay at home. However,
on Sundays the women are frequently seen in the bazaars in their best sarees
a8 it is more or less a holidayfor everyone. On some festivals the men and
women appear together to celebrate the occasbon, howerer, there are 2 number
of festivals and cerémonial days that arg celebrated publicly by the men
alone. In public the woman always remains in the backzround, allowing the
man to shine in full glory.

Perhaps one of the most amazing abilities of the coolies is their
developed ability to carry tremendous weights on their shoulders or on their
headse Both the men and women carry in tremendous loads of rice from the
fields on their shoulders. Two large bundles of unthreshed rice are tied to
each end of a specially fashioned pole. The individual then places his shoul-
der under the pole and lifts the load shifting the pole from shoulder to
shoulder as he or she carries it homee Mr. Bee estimated the weight between
seventy-five and one hundred pounds, and this for the malnourished coolie of
decidedly smaller stature than the average American.

The general? the Assamese coolie is rather poor. The above-men-
tioned occupation has produced unusually éeveloped legs, but commonly has
produced an extreme condition of huge varicosities along with it! Huge gciters
are frequent smong adult women, and all the children show varying degrees of
malmtrition. Severe rickettsia is not uncommon among the children. Congeni-
tal malformsatbons of the newborn, and blindness are also frequent. It is
probably a blessing that the infant mortality rate is so highs It is highest
up to the age cf five years. These conditions go uncorrected largely because
of the superstitious of fear of modern medical treatment. There are a few
Indian army hospitals in the area, and some dispensaries set up by missicns,
and british concerns for their workers, but the lack of necessary social edu-
cation has caused complete ignorance, and even fear in the minds of the aver-
age coolicee ,