THE ABORIGINAL TEIBES. 137 



Brahmans to cook their food, sprinkling the faggots employed 

 for the purpose with holy water. Thus they have gradually 

 separated themselves from the mass of their aboriginal sub- 

 jects, and formed a separate caste of their own, either inter- 

 marrying among families similarly situated, or if possible 

 seeking brides, as I have said, in houses superior to them- 

 selves. Some of them have thus succeeded in almost eradi- 

 cating the aboriginal taint; and by continued reversion to the 

 purer stocks have attained to an equality of physical type with 

 the higher races. Their social status has come to be acknow- 

 ledged as that of the Kajpiit rather than the aborigine ; 

 and many have assumed the sacred thread, the wearing of 

 which denotes membership of one of the twice-born castes. 

 Most of them, however, whether from motives of policy or of 

 superstition, still concede something to their semi-aboriginal 

 descent ; worshipping perhaps in secret the tribal deities, 

 and, in cases, placing at certain festivals the flesh of cows, 

 abhorred of Hinduism, to their lips, wrapped in a thin cover- 

 ing of cloth. Many of them also require to be installed on 

 their succession to the chiefship by a ceremony which includes 

 the touching of their foreheads with a drop of blood drawn 

 from the body of a pure aborigine of the tribe they belong to. 

 Such an example on the part of their influential chiefs was 

 certain to be followed by large sections of their subjects ; and 

 in particular by such of them as were themselves in some 

 degree of mixed descent. Accordingly we find the tribes 

 much subdivided into clans, or castes, distinguished from each 

 other by a more or less close adoption of Hindii customs 

 and religious forms. A theory has arisen that the Gonds are 

 divided into twelve and a half formal castes according to the 

 number of the gods they worship, after the pattern of the 

 Hindus ; but, as in the case of the latter such a division is 



