1 16 PANJAB CASTES.
2 the Eastern Hills, Thakars and E^this, Kanets, and Hill Menials. The whole
3 matter is summed up in the quotation from Mr. Lyall ^iven on page 175.
4 Here the Rajput is the fountain of honour, and the very Brahman is content
5 to accept rank at his hands. Mr. Barnes writes of the Kangra Brahmans : —
6 " The hills, ns I have already stated, were the seats of petty independent princes, and in every
7 " principality the Brahmans are arranged into classes of differeiit degrees of purity. The Raja was
8 " always considered the fountain of all honour, and his classification, made probably at the counsel
9 " of his religious advisers, was held binding upon the brotherhood. In these graduated lists no
10 "account was ever taken of the zamindar Brahmins, as they were contemptuously styled; — tliey
11 " were left to themselves in ignoble obscurity. Thus, in the days of Raja Dharm "Chand, the two
12 " great tribes of Kangra Br.'lhmins,— the ' Nagarlcotias ' (from Naga'rkot, the ancient name of
13 " Kiingra) and the ' Batehrus,'— were formally sub-divided into clans. Of the Nagarkotias
14 " Dharm Chand established 13 diiTerent families, of which, at the risk of being considered tedious,
15 " I Subjoin a catalogue."
16 So we find the R^ja of Kdngra bribed to elevate a caste in the social
17 scale ; and the Raja of Alwar making- a new caste of a section of the Minas,
18 and prescribing limits to their intermarriage with those who had till then been
19 considered their brothers.
20 Under Mahomedan rale the Rajput disappeared, and for the Hindu
21 population the Brahman took his place. Hence the wide differences between
22 caste in Kangra and caste in the Dehli Territory. In the Hills, the very
23 stronghold at once of Rajput power and of Hindusim in its most primitive
24 form, we have the Brahman, but with a wide difference between the Brahman
25 who prays and the Brahman who ploughs ; we have the Rajput, a name strictly
26 confined to the royal families and their immediate connections, and refused to
27 such even of those as soil their hands with the plough ; we have the great
28 cultivating class, including the Thakars and Rathis of acknowledged and
29 immediate Rajput descent who furnish wives even to the Rajputs themselves,
30 and the Rawats, Kanets, and Ghii-aths of somewhat lower status ; we have
31 the Kirar or Mahajan, including not only traders, but all the Kayaths and the
32 clerkly class, and even Brahmans who tnke to these pursuits ; we have the
33 respectable artisan class, the carpenter, mason and water-carrier ; and finally we
34 have the Koli or Dagi, the outcast or Mlechchha of the hills. And from top to
35 bottom of this social scale, no single definite line can be drawn which shall
36 precisely mark off any one caste or grade fi-om the one below it. Each one
37 , takes its wives fi-om and eats with the one immediately below it, and the
38 j members of each can, and they occasionally do, rise to the one immediately
39 I above it.
40 349. Tribal divisions among tln) landowning castes.— Within the
41 caste the first great division of the landowning classes is into trilies ; and the
42 ti-ibe appears to me to be far more permanent and indestructible than' the caste.
43 J have already shown how in the west of the Panjab the broader distinctions
44 of caste have become little more than a tradition or a convenient symbol for
45 social standing, while the tribal groups are the practical units of which the com-
46 munity is composed. There is, I fancy, little doubt that when a familv or
47 section of a caste rises or sinks in the social scale, while it changes the name of
48 its caste,_it often retains its tribal designation ; indeed it is probable that that
49 designation not imseldom becomes the name of a new caste by which it is to
50 be known in future. Thus the widow-mairying Chauhan Rajputs of Dehli are
51 now known as Chauhans, and not as Rajputs ; while then- Ijrethren of the next
52 district, Karnal, who have not infringed the caste nile, are known as Rajputs
53 and only secondarily as Chauhan Rajputs. This theorv is in accordance with
54 the tradition by which the constant recnnence of tribal names in different