3-047-039 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Looshais on the frontier of Bengal, 1872. 'The little war that was carried on last winter by our [British] Indian Government against the Looshais, in the Border country between the eastern frontier of Bengal and the kingdom of Burmah...was provoked...by the inroads of those predatory tribes into the British territories of Sylhet and Cachar, where they kidnapped a little girl named Mary Winchester, after killing her father, the manager of a tea plantation. Four thousand Bengal troops, under General Bourchier and General Brownlow, marched up into the highlands,...chastised the marauders, and fetched the child safe home...It is to be hoped that the Looshais will give no further trouble; but our readers may like to see the picturesque figures of those amiable savages; the sketch we have engraved, sent us during the campaign by Lieutenant R. G. Woodthorpe, affords a good notion of their appearance...the name "Looshais," or "Looswais and very loose ways are those of the people in question - is a general term given by the Burmese to all these foreign wild men, who belong to different races, in the mountainous region bounded by Cachar and Manipoora on the north, Hill Tipparah and Chittagong on the west, and Burmah Proper on the east side'. From "Illustrated London News", 1872.