88 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [March 



acquaintance, a Brahmana, steadily affirms that the Bhars were, in fact, 

 Rajputs. 



From all this, I think an inference may be fairly drawn that the 

 Bhars are the aborigines of Eastern Oudh ; that they were Rajputs in 

 Rama's time ; that when they lost their king, they became degraded ; 

 but that after the Mahommedan conquest, when the purer Rajputs 

 who had fled to the west and who had, up to that time, maintained 

 their superiority, were again driven eastwards to Oudh, they gradually 

 mixed with the Bhars or degraded Rajputs who never left their 

 homes ; probably intermarried with them by degrees, raised them in 

 the social scale, and finally absorbed them altogether ; that, in fact, 

 the suppression of Bhardom was, as I have already said, a social re- 

 formation much more than it was a Military achievement ! 



" It is always thus," remarks Sir E. Tennant, in his " Ceylon, 

 " the fate of the aborigines (viz. absorption into the dominant race) 

 was that usually consequent on the subjugation of an inferior race by 

 one more highly civilized." 



If the Ceylon Budhists, descended from a North West Brahmana, 

 could, in time, absorb the aboriginal worshippers of snakes and de- 

 mons in that island, as they are said to have done, then there is no 

 reason why the Rajputs, returning from the west, may not have, by 

 slow degrees, absorbed the aboriginal Bhars or quasi-Rajputs of 

 Eastern Oudh. 



Buchanan says that the Bais Rajputs are descended from Chirus, 

 and these, it has already been said, were akin to Bhars. 



The chief of Singrowlee in the Mirzapoor district, according to Sir 

 Henry Elliot, is also a Chirus, although he calls himself a Ben- 

 buns. 



In Tod's Rajasthan it is admitted that the Rajputs have interim 

 ried with the degraded but aboriginal tribes and have become a dis 

 tinct race. In describing themselves, they are said to unite the trite 

 of their father and mother, and of this I will now quote instance 

 within my own knowledge. 



First. Khunoma Rawat began life, in the Lucknow district, as 

 village watchman of the degraded Pasi caste. His second son was 

 named Bakhta, who had a son, Visvarama, whose son was the once no- 



