The Ethnology of India. 87 
ginal villages; partly infanticide and other causes tend to diminish 
their numbers; the result of all which is, that over great tracts of 
country we find them rather a minority trying to maintain a failing 
rule over a scarcely subject majority, than forming full democratic 
bodies of free Rajpoots. Still, in some parts of the country the 
agricultural Rajpoot villages are strong and numerous; the land is 
divided among them, every Rajpoot is free and equal, and the commune 
is administered on democratic principles. Wherever this is so, their 
institutions are like those ofthe Jats. Although they have never cared 
much for Bramins, they have, unlike the Jats, the ceremonies and 
superstitions of Hindu caste. They cook once a day with great fuss 
and form, almost every man for himself after the most approved 
Hindustanee fashion, and are very particular about caste-marks, &c. &e, 
Their widows may not remarry, and it is their excessive point of 
honour to marry their daughters to none but men of the best tribes 
(a feeling allied to our chivalry no doubt) that renders the daughters 
such a burden to them, and makes female infanticide unfortunately so 
common among them. Their wives again are shut up after the 
Mahommedan fashion, and are lost for agricultural labour. Altogether 
Rajpoot females are a very unsatisfactory institution, and this goes 
far to weigh down and give a comparatively bad name to men who 
who are often industrious enough. 
Like the Jats, the Rajpoots are not found in any numbers to the 
North of the Salt Range, nor are they in any of the hill country west 
of the Jhelum.* If they ever occupied the Western Punjab, they have 
been driven forward by the Jats, and they are nowonly found about 
the Salt Range itself, where a small tribe called Jhanjhooas’ (now 
Mahommedans) represents a Rajpoot race that seems to have been 
once great in those parts. But in the North-Hastern Punjab near 
the hills, the Rajpoot population is (as I have already noticed) more 
numerous, and the Himalayas of the Jummoo and Kangra districts 
are occupied by Hindu Rajpoots who are there altogether the domi- 
nant race. I do not know if the highest Rajpoots to the south east 
* Tt was somewhere suggested that the Gadoons or Jadoons just over the 
Indus, where that river issues from the Himalayas near Torbela, are Rajpoots, 
but that seems to be a mere conjecture, founded on a fancied resemblance to 
the name of a Rajpoot tribe. There ig not the least doubt that the Gadoons 
are pure Pushtoo-speaking Pathans. 
