1 80 PANJAB CASTES.
2 greatest abundance in the south-western districts ; not because commerce is
3 there peculiarly extensive, but because the Aroras, the principal mercantile
4 castes of these parts, are_ not mere traders, but largely follow all sorts of
5 occupations both industrial and agricultural. Setting these districts aside
6 the trading-castes are least numerous in the hills, where commerce is very
7 much in the hands of the Brahmans. The miscellaneous class is largely
8 composed of Kashmiris, who are chiefly to be found in th? districts on the
9 Kashmir border, and in the great Kashmiri colonies of Ami-itsar and
10 Ludhiana.
11 362. General distribution of menial castes. — The last of the three
12 groups comprises all the lower strata of society, the vagrant, criminal, and
13 gipsy tribes, the village menials, and the industrial classes. I shall show
14 when I come to discuss these castes in greater detail, how wholly impossible
15 it is to class them by occupation with even approximate accuracy. Thus
16 the classes into which I have divided them in the abstract have no very
17 definite significance. Still certain l>road facts ai*e brought out by the figures.
18 The vagrant tribes are chiefly to be found in two parts of the Province, on
19 the Rajputana border and under the central and western hills. Among' the
20 village menial castes who perform so large a pai-t of the agricultm-al labour
21 in the Panjah, namely the leather-workers, scavengers and watermen, the
22 leather-workers prevail throughout the eastern districts, the hills and the
23 great Sikh states. In the centre of the Panjab, and to a less degree in the
24 Western Plains, their place is taken by the scavengers, and partly by the
25 watermen. The menial and industrial class as a whole is most numerous in
26 the hills where they have iiiueh of the cultivation in their hands, and in the sub-
27 montane and central districts where wealth is greatest and the standard of
28 cultivation highest. It is curiously scanty in the west, and particularly on
29 the Indus frontier ; and this partly because, as I have already pointed out,
30 the hereditary restrictions upon occupation are more lax, and the poor Pathan
31 thinks it no shame to earn his Ijread by callings which would involve social
32 degradation whei'e caste-feeling is stronger ; but also very largely because on
33 the lower Indus the menial who cultivates becomes a Jat by mere virtue of
34 the fact, and is classed as such, whereas in the rest of the Panjali he would
35 have retained his menial caste unaltered. In Sirsa, and to a less degree in
36 Hissar, the exact opposite is the case. There the menial classes are more
37 numerous than in the neighbouring districts because the tract is to a great
38 extent newly sett.led, and land is so plentiful and the demand for agricultui-al
39 labour so gi-eat that the lower classes have flocked into these districts, and
40 though retaining at present their caste unaltered, have risen in the social
41 scale by the acquisition of land or at least by the substitution of husbandry for
42 menial callings.
43 368. Arrangement and contents of the caste-chapter. — The rough
44 classification adopted in Abstract No. 64 on the opposite page* will serve as a
45 clue to tl^e arrangement of the detailed description of ' he various castes. A
46 complete index of castes and tribes mil be found at the end of the volume.
47 I shall close this part of the chapter by discussing the system adoijted for
48 the record of castes and tribes and their sub-division at the present Census,
49 and the natm-e of the results obtained. The matter is one of considei-able
50 moment, and the system followed has been the subject of adverse criticism
51 both within and without the Province. The tribal constitution of the popu-
52 lation possesses much more political and administrative importance in the