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 favoured 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 all 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 Pathans 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 ; 



