8 The Ethnology of India. 



tribes who would on no account eat together or intermarry. I think, 

 however, that throughout all the great Hindoo castes, a strong ethno- 

 logical resemblance exists. I do not propose in this sketch to at- 

 tempt to notice the sub-divisions, except in any case in which they 

 may suggest marked ethnological features. 



The details of Rajpoot and Bramin heraldry and hierology have 

 been amply given in several excellent works, and I shall touch on 

 nothing of that kind. 



A caution which seems to me to be necessary is, that the accounts of 

 their origin given by many tribes, and especially by their Chiefs, must 

 be received in a very guarded way, because there is a great tendency 

 to invent origins illustrious in the eyes of men of the races and reli- 

 gions to which they belong. Among the Hindoos, the Rajpoot rule 

 is so famous, that almost all tribes which have taken to soldiering or 

 acquired power, pretend to a Rajpoot origin. At this day, some of the 

 followers of Maratta Chiefs have the impudence to tell strangers that 

 they are really Rajpoots, as if their origin was not matter of the most 

 recent history ; and almost all the aboriginal tribes who have risen to 

 any power (or at least the chief families among them) affect a Raj- 

 poot descent. As Colonel Dalton describes it, they are undergoing a 

 gradual process of ' refining into Rajpoots, a process probably founded 

 on a very small Rajpoot immigration and alliance, and a very large 

 amount of invention. Even the Jats and other tribes who need 

 hardly descend to such stories, frequently make themselves out to be 

 Rajpoots who have been separated from the orthodox for some loose- 

 ness of practice ; but my impression is, that most of these stories are 

 quite idle. Even acknowledged Rajpoots of the North- Western hills 

 who are, in an Ethnological point of view, a much finer and purer race 

 than any in the plains, assert that their ancestors came from Ajoodea 

 or Oude. So in Cashmere, the Bramins there, whose mere features at 

 once proclaim them to be one of the highest and purest races in the 

 world, instead of adopting the more ancient and better traditions 

 which would point to their country as the common origin of the 

 Bramin races of India, prefer the story that when Kashyapa dried up 

 the Lake (a geological fact patent even to Hindoos) detachments of 

 all the most famous and most sacred of the different Bramin classes 

 were brought into Cashmere, who, amalgamating, formed the present 



