Tlie 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 of the 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. &c. 

 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 arc 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 now only 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-Eastern 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 



# It 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 is not the least doubt that the Gadoons 

 are pure Pushtoo-speaking Pathans. 



