The Ethnology of India. 113 



Aryan days the Bramins of Kashmere may first have become literary 

 and civilised, and ruled on the Saras watee by peaceful arts, after the 

 fashion of the earliest Egyptians before the art of war was invented, 

 ( See M. Kenan'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. 



The Bunneahs, Banians, Banees, or 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 in a position commanding much respect as Bankers and 



