The Ethnology of India. 113 
Aryan days the Bramins of Kero may first have become literary 
and civilised, and ruled on the Saraswatee by peaceful arts, after the 
fashion of the earliest Egyptians before the art of war was invented, 
(See M. Renan’s abstract of recent Egyptian inquiries); and that 
later a cognate tribe of Khatrees of the Cabul country, rougher and 
more warlike, may have come down upon them like the Shepherd 
Kings, and assumed the rule of the Military caste of early Hindu his- 
tory ? That warlike conquerors of one age should become astute 
money-dealers of another, is but the ordinary course of history—Jews, 
Greeks, Lombards and others are instances in point, and perhaps 
when the New Zealanders rule in England, the English may be known 
as the Khatrees of those parts, 
Tue Bonneaus, Bantans, Banzxs, orn WANEES. 
No race is more important in India than the Banees. What I 
have described the Khatrees to be in a mercantile point of view in 
the Punjab, that the Banees are in the whole of Hindustan and Wes- 
tern India. No village can get on without them. Unlike the Kha- 
trees, they are for the most part confined to their proper mercantile 
business. A few of them are found in Government offices and such 
service, more properly the domain of the Kaists, but these are only 
rare exceptions. They have also under our system acquired by pur- 
chase large rights in the land, and take farms of more, but this is in 
fact with them a mere mercantile operation; they do not cultivate 
the land, but make the most of the rents payable by the ryots, and 
the ejected proprietors reproachfully term the British Government 
“ Bunneah ka Raj” or the shopkeepers’ rule. Bunneahs may cultivate 
a few fields, like any one else, or even reduced individuals may earn 
their livelihood as ryots or labourers, but so far as I know, a proper 
Bunneah village is nowhere to be found. 
There is no doubt that in their own way the Banees are a people 
of wonderful energy and enterprise, and it is their energy that gives 
tone and sinew in a commercial, and to a great degree an industrial 
sense, to the greater part of India. Without the Banee to supply the 
sinews of war, little would be done. ‘Their function permeates every 
operation of every village. In all the great cities of Hindustan, they 
are found ina position commanding much respect as Bankers and 
