1 46 PAN JAB CASTES.
2 independent both of foreigners and of one another, and are held together by
3 a common nationality against outsiders only. The tribe, at least in its
4 present form, is a political and not an ethnic unit, and consists of a con-
5 glomeration of clans bound together by allegiance to a common Chief.
6 Proliably every tribe contains a nucleus of two, three, or more clans descended
7 from a single ancestor. But round these have collected a number of affiliated
8 sections ; for the cohesion between the various parts of a tribe or clan is not
9 always of the strongest, and it is not very uncommon for a clan or a portion
10 of a clan to quarrel with its brethren, and leaving its tribe to claim the
11 protection of a neighbouring Chief. They then become his hawsdi/ahs
12 or dwel](}rs beneath the same shade, and he is l)0Und to protect them and they
13 to obey him. In this manner a small section formerly belonging to the
14 Laghan tribe, and still Iieariug its name, has attached itself lo tlie Qasrani ;
15 while there is a Jiskani section in both the Drishak and the Gurchani tribes.
16 Thus too, Rind tribes are sometimes found to include Lasharl clans. So
17 when Nasir Khan, the great Khan of Kelat who assisted Ahmad Sh^h in
18 his invasion of Dehli, reduced the Hasanni tribe and drove them from their
19 territory, they took refuge with the Khetran, of which tribe they now form
20 a clan. Even strangers are often affiliated in this manner. Thus the
21 Lagh^ri tribe includes a section of Nahar Pathans (the family from whieli
22 spmng the Lodi dynasty of Dehli), who are not Biloeh liut who ;ire Khetran.
23 And the Gurchani tribe includes sections which, though Ijearing a Eiloch
24 name and talking the Bilochi language, are not allowed to be of Biloeh race
25 and are almost certainly Jat.
26 The tribe {ivmnn}) under its chief or tumanddr is sub-divided into a
27 small number of clans [para) with their it-.vqaddanis or headmen, and each
28 clan into more numerous septs [phalH) . Below the phalli come the families,
29 of which it will sometimes contain as few as a dozen. The clans are I ased
30 upon common descent ; and identity of elan name, even in two different
31 tribes, almost certainly indicates a common ancestor. The sept is of course
32 only an extended family. The tribal names are often patronymics ending
33 in the Bilochi termination dni, such as Gurchani, Balachani ; or in some few
34 cases in the Pashto zai. An individual is commonly known by the name of
35 his clan, the sept being comj)aratively unimportant. Marriage within the
36 sept is forbidden,* and this appears to be the only restriction. The Biloches
37 freely marry Jat women, though the first wife of a Chief will always be a
38 Bilochni. They say that they never give their daughters to Jats ; but this
39 assertion, though probably true on" the frontier, is most certainly not so
40 beyond the tribal limits.
41 The tract occupied by each division of a Biloeh tribe is sufficiently well
42 defined ; but within this area the people are either wholly nomad or, as is the
43 case within oui- frontier, live in small hamlets, each inhabited by only a few
44 families, having property in their cultivated lauds and irrigation works, but
45 without any actual demarcation of the i-urrounding pasture lauds. . Thus the
46 large and compact village community of the Eastern Panjab is uuknown,
47 and our village or mauznh is in these parts merely a collection of hamlets
48 included within a common boundary for administrative purposes.
49 1 A Persian (? Turkomau) word meaning 10,000 ; a body of 10,000 troops ; a district or
50 tribe furnisliing a body of 10,000 t^oopa.
51 ' But Mr. fryer says that cousins commonly intermarry.