The Ethnology of India. 59 



The Kashmeeree Pandits are known all over Northern India as a 

 very clever and energetic race of office-seekers. As a body they 

 excel in acuteness the same number of any other race with whom 

 they come in contact. Probably they are in no respect inferior to 

 the Maratta Bramins, but they have not in Hindustan the same ad- 

 vantage as the latter have had in their own country among inferior 

 races. The Kashmeerees, as foreigners among energetic races, have a 

 much harder struggle, and though they get a good share of good 

 things, they are nowhere dominant, nor have they usually risen to 

 such high stations as many Maratta Bramins. The most conspicuous 

 man whom I recollect was Raja Denonath, Ranjeet Sing's Financier and 

 in some respects Chief Minister. Although the Kashmeerees seldom 

 find their way as far as Calcutta, it is somewhat singular that in 

 Bengal the first native to attain very high office is a man of this 

 race, viz., Shamboonath Pandit, Judge of the High Court. Almost 

 all the secular Pandits use the Persian character freely ; they are 

 perfectly versatile, and, serving abroad, will mount a horse, gird on a 

 sword, and assume at a push a semi-military air. 



The Kashmir language is separate and distinct, and the dress, 

 manners, and fashions of the Kashmeerees mark them as in every way 

 a distinct people. Of the language we only know that it contains a 

 very large proportion of Sanscrit. The Institutions of the people 

 have nothing of the democratic character. 



In the hills also, between Kashmir and the Punjab, Bramins 

 occupy the van (or perhaps we should call it the rear) of the 

 Indian race to the west, though they have abandoned their Hindoo 

 religion and become partly Mahommedans and partly Sikhs. They 

 are in habits, language, and manners quite different from the Kash- 

 meerees, and seem now to belong to a different nation. Their 

 language is a dialect of the Punjabee (a very Pracrit tongue and cer- 

 tainly not borrowed from any Mahommedan race), while they are good 

 soldiers and altogether more Punjabees than Kashmeerees. Beyond 

 the Jhelum, the hill frontier is occupied by a tribe called Bambas, now 

 Mahommedans, but originally Bramins ; while on this side the Jhelum 

 the hills are shared with other races by a numerous tribe of Bramin- 

 Sikhs. The position of these men is curious. They became Sikhs 

 long before the extension of Sikh power to those regions, and in a 



