The Ethnology of India. 67 
Besides serving as soldiers, they may be found among the lower 
hangers-on of courts, jails, @&c., as process servers, guards over 
prisoners, and so on, but little in anything higher. As I have said, 
they turn their hands to many miscellaneous occupations not peculiar 
to any one else, and of course occasionally rise. 
Sir H. Elliott calls the bastard Bramins of Benares and Bahar 
* Bhoonhars’ and seems to consider them a branch of the Sarwarea or 
Transgogra Bramins. Again he speaks of them (quoting from the 
*‘ Harivansa’) as Military Bramins descendants of Kasya Princes, and 
here he seems to connect the term Kasya with Kashee, the Hindoo 
name for Benares. I do not know the derivation of Kashee, or whether 
it is connected with Kashupya. 
Bramins are numerous in Kumaon and Gurwhal. The great tribe 
of those Provinces are however ‘ Khassias’”’ who now claim to be 
Rajpoots, but whose title to that character is more than doubtful. 
Education is, I think, more general here than in the plains, and’ 
the Nagaree or ordinary Sanscrit character is always used. Again 
the Goorkhas, the dominant tribe in Nepal, are properly called ‘ Khas,’ 
whence Gor-khas. They are certainly for the most part of Arian 
and Hindoo origin, and pretend to be Rajpoots; but, according to 
Mr. Hodgson, they are really bastard Bramins, the offspring of a 
cross between Bramin immigrants and the people of the hills. Both 
the Khassias of _Kumaon and the Khas of Nepal assert that they are 
comparatively recent immigrants from the plains, but this is probably 
in a great degree connected with their claim to the blue blood of the 
Rajpoots of the plains. The latter by no means acknowledge the 
connection. The circumstance that a bastard Bramin race is dominant 
in the plains immediately under the Central parts of Nepal gives 
much colour to Mr, Hodgson’s account of a similar race in the hills. 
May it not be that the Rajpoots have never got’so far east in the 
hills, and that the hill country was occupied by pre-Rajpoot Bramins ? 
May it be that the names Kashee, Khassia, and Khas, point to a time 
when the Bramins were known as Khasas or Kashmeerees, just as 
English colonists are known as Anglo-Saxons ? 
Mr. B. Colvin, long Deputy Commissioner of Almorah, tells me a 
curious circumstance, viz. that in Kumaon, although the hill dialect 
is in the main Hindee, it has some curious grammatical affinities to 
