The country where Tirāhī is spoken belongs to that border region between India and Eastern Irān which since my youth has never ceased to attract me by its varied historical, geographical, and linguistic interest. So when after my first Central-Asian expedition my hope of being employed in the newly constituted North-West Frontier Province was realized, I was anxious to use whatever chance might offer for securing materials concerning that old language of Tirāh, to the supposed survival of which Sir George Grierson had first called my attention. The inquiries I made with this object during 1904–5 both from the side of Peshāwar and from that of Kohāt and the Kurram valley proved, however, fruitless. The Political Agents of the Khyber and Kurram, whom their duties as Wardens of the Marches keep in close contact with the tribes occupying the valleys of Tirāh and the tracts of Afghānistān adjoining towards the Kābul river, uniformly asserted that their local informants knew of no other language but Paṣḥtō being spoken between the Kurram and Kābul rivers. Other Frontier Officers to whom I applied were equally unable to help. It seemed, indeed, as if that Tirāhī speech, of which Leech in 1838 had heard as a “ relict ” preserved by a small tribal community outside its original home, and had collected a very brief vocabulary, had since become completely submerged by the steadily spreading tide of Paṣḥtō. Nor did I fare better in 1912, when archæological work brought me back for some months to the Peshāwar border before my third Central-Asian expedition.

Tirāhī is a Dardic language of which, till now, hardly anything has been known. Our only materials have been the contents of a short vocabulary compiled by Leech in the year 1838. According to him, its speakers once inhabited the Tirāh country, now the home of the Afrīdi Pathāns, and, in consequence of a feud breaking out between the Ōrakzāīs and the Afrīdīs, they left that tract and settled in the Ningrahār country in independent Afghānistān, where they are now found.

The existence of poets in Arabia before the rise of Islam is certified by the Qur'an, which contains one Surah named after them, and occasionally alludes to them elsewhere. Among the descriptions of the Prophet given by his opponents there was “ a Jinn-ridden poet” (xxxvii, 35), to which he replies that he has brought the truth. In another passage (lii, 29) the suggestions that he was a kāhin, a jinn-ridden man, and a poet are offered as alternatives. Since those who described him as a poet said they would wait to see what would happen to him (lii, 30) it might be inferred that poets were in the habit of foretelling the future. Elsewhere he asserts that his language is not that of a poet, but rather of an honourable messenger (lxix, 41), and that God had not taught him poetry, which would have been of no use to him (xxxvi, 69); his utterances were “ statement and clear lesson ”, whence we should infer that poetry was obscure. These hints about the poets are summarized in the Surah that bears their name (xxvi, 224, foll.), where we are told that they are followed by the misguided, rave in every valley, and say what they do not do. The sequel might seem to except certain pious bards from this condemnation, but the style of the Qur'an renders it uncertain whether this exception really applies to bards.

The selection of a title is sometimes a choice of evils. Which shall most move us, the desire to attract the many, or the fear of offending the few?

For the heading of this paper, the original aim had been laudable. Pith, brevity, and point were to combine with brilliant exactness of definition, alluring to the reader and doing justice to the theme. “ That,” as they say in the street, “ was the idea.” Followed an interval for intellectual refreshment and repose, and then, “ sudden in a minute,” in a flash, was captured the caption. But the disillusion of it! Gone were the pith and the brevity, and in their stead appeared a sesquipedalian pomposity. But however ponderously, the present title has the merit that it does precisely formulate the baffling and hitherto little noticed phenomena of substitutional types to which this paper essays to call attention by the illustration of a few out of many examples.

Two sannyāsī problems have long troubled me, first, how it was that the early rule, Any educated twice-born man can become a sannyāsī, was supplanted by the rule, Only Brāhmans can enter the order, and secondly, how it came about that, in North India, seven of the ten sub-orders of sannyāsīs became flooded with non-Brāhmans and lost their purity.