42	THE  LUSHEI  CLANS	chap.
A stranger might live for a long time in a Lushai village
without knowing that such divisions existed. Every clan is
further subdivided into families and branches. Thus the
Lushei clan has several families. One of these is the Thangur,
and the Thangur family has six branches—Rokum, Zadeng,
Bivung, Thangluah, Pallian, and Sailo—but; none of these
branches has any further sub-division, though the descendants
of certain powerful chiefs are sometimes collectively spoken of
by their ancestor's name, showing how these clan, family, and
branch names have arisen.
During the census of 1901 an unsuccessful attempt was made
to get a complete list of the clan families and branches. The
causes of the failure were the ignorance of the people themselves
as to what clan or family they belonged to and the tendency
to claim to be true Lushais.
Everyone knew the name of the branch to which he belonged,
and as a rule the family name would be correctly given, but
in many cases the clan name was altogether omitted, or Lushei
was entered against families which had no real claim to that
distinction.
An old Lushai once asked me why I was troubling myself
about family and branch names, and on my explaining that I
hoped to make a complete list of them he muttered, " Can you
count the grains in that basket of rice ?" and turned from me
to the zu-pot.
As a sample of the constitution of a clan I give in the
Appendix a list of all the families and branches of the Lushei
clan.
My enquiries lead me to believe that practically all the clan
and a great many of the family and branch names are
eponyms. In some cases the name of a village site has been
given to its inhabitants, first probably by outsiders and
eventually adopted by the people themselves, but even in these
cases as often as not enquiry will show that the village site was
first named after some famous chief who lived there.
Before the Thangur chiefs had risen to their present pre-
dominant position there were many consanguineous communities
scattered over the hills, living under headmen of their own and
each using a dialect of its own. Some of these communities