72 The Ethnology of India. 
said to be immigrants (as their very name indicates), and there are 
many Jews and Christians, though the latter I believe have not much 
trace of Western blood. All along the Bombay Coast also, from Goa 
to Kurrachee, are the descendants of Persian, Arab, Portuguese, and 
other Western immigrants. Hence I did not think it by any means 
absurd when an educated Bramin of Poonah suggested to me as a 
theory, that the Bramins owed the light eyes and light complexion 
noticed among them to an intermixture of Western blood. The Bramins 
would be less liable, however, to casual and recent intermixture than 
other races, and I incline rather to the theory that these Bramins of 
this part of the Coast may have more directly come from the original 
seats of the race by the route of the Saraswatee and the Indus, and 
thence perhaps by sea, without passing through Hindustan and Cen- 
tral India and there suffering any infiltration of Aboriginal blood. 
I have already traced the Bramins down the Saraswatee. Is it not 
probable enough that in very early days, when they were pressed by 
Rajpoots and Jats, they may have colonised the Konkan, reduced to 
subjection the rude Aborigines, and transmitted to descendants 
features preserved from great deterioration by caste rules, and forms 
only somewhat deteriorated in size and robustness by a southern 
climate and the absence of manual labour? Jf such an immigration 
took place so early as I suppose, it might well happen that, in long 
contact with southern elements and southern creeds, the colonists in 
the Maratta country would separate themselves from the old Saras- 
watee Bramins and become a separate division. 
I have seen some allusions to Konkan Bramins as distinguished 
from Maratta Bramins, but have not been able to make out the 
exact distinction. Certainly Maratta Bramins are altogether the 
dominant race in great part of the Konkan. But*it appears that 
there is a strip to the south, extending beyond the district usually 
known as the Konkan to some way beyond Goa, in which a mixed 
language called Konkanee is spoken. In this Konkan there are some 
Bramins still called ‘ Kashastala or Saraswatee’ and from the Konkan 
some of them have penetrated into the north-western part of the 
Mysore country, where they are traders and in public employment, and 
described as very clever but greatly looked down upon by southern 
Bramins who profess to be much more rigid in their rules. In the 
