98 The Ethnology of India. 
it will also, I think, be proper to mention the Indian Pathans, 
before I leave my present class of Fighting-Farmers. 
I do not now touch on the proper Pushtoo-speaking Pathans. I do 
not reckon them as Indian, and all the Pathans beyond the Indus, as 
well as a few on this side (in the north of the Hazareh District and 
west of that of Rawal Pindee), are Pushtoo-speakers. The Pathans 
are the only Central-Asiatic people who have in comparatively 
modern times colonised to a considerable extent in India. They have 
never come in large bodies, nor occupied any large tracts at any one 
spot, but Affghanistan has always been as it were the base of opera- 
tions of all the successive Mahommedan Empires in India; and from 
that base Pathans have immigrated in the service or under the pro- 
tection of Mahommedan rulers, and have settled themselves here and 
there at many places throughout Northern India and even in some 
places in Southern India. They are not nearly so much mere Urban 
fortune-seekers as other Mahommedans, but are generally settled in_ 
villages, in many of which they own and cultivate the soil, and in 
some of which they form large brotherhoods, approaching those of 
Jats and Rajpoots. Their constitution and modes of government also 
seem to me to be in these villages very similar. They have been 
generally a fayoured class who have had in places a good deal of 
jagheer and rent-free land, and still look a good deal to service, but 
many of them pay their rent or revenue by honest cultivation like 
any one else. Indian society is a wonderful solvent and absorbent; 
every one who long lives in it, becomes Indianised; and so ali the 
Pathan colonists, even those whose immigrations are matter of recent 
history, are essentially Indian, not Affghan. Among Indians, they 
have very marked characteristics, but their nationality is changed, and 
the Pathans from the Frontier, who came down in the mutiny times, 
utterly refused to acknowledge the proudest Indian Pathans as 
having anything in common with themselves, and chopped off their 
heads with the utmost non-chalance. In many respects, however, the 
Indian Pathans are a very great improvement on the wilder Pathans 
of the Frontier. They are very much more civilised and educated, 
In India, in fact, the Pathang are quite an aristocratic class. Not- 
withstanding the wide door to corruption of blood opened by the 
Mahommedan laws of marriage, they are still a very handsome people ; 
