Indische Palaographie von circa 350 a. Chr. – circa 1300 p. Chr. c48.s2.6

c48.s2.6

They seem to have been originally a body of local militia enlisted from the Bhūiyā, a Kōl tribe, and commanded, probably, by officers imported from upper India. Some of the customs of the latter commended themselves to their subordinates, on the strength of which form of flattery, a claim to the caste of Rājput was subsequently advanced. The Khaṇḍāit is divided into two sub-castes, one comprising the landholders, probably endowed with estates for military services; the other the peasantry and village watchmen. The former hold a good position and rank next to and but little below the Rājputs, who, as elsewhere in Bengal, have not taken firm root in the soil. A community which once carried its arms not only into Orissa but up to the very walls of Calcutta, without leaving any enduring trace of its passage, is the Marāṭhā, the principal landed class in the Dekkan, and the dominant power in Baroda, Gwalior, and practically in Indore and several other states. The origin of the Marāṭhā is obscure. Elsewhere in this work it has been stated that recent anthropometrical observations have given rise to the conjecture that there is a Scythic element in the population of the Dekkan beyond that which can be attributed to the dynastic influence of the various Kṣatrapa Chieftains who maintained their power there long after the dissolution of the Hūṇa sovereignty in Central India. The Brāhmans of upper India, too, have the belief that the Marāṭhā are of Persian descent, and that the Citpāvan Brāhmans of the Konkan were their sun-priests, introduced in the 7th century and formally adopted into the local hierarchy. However this may be, there was not improbably some distinction between the masses and the dominant classes based upon race, as in Rājputāna; but it did not obtain prominence until the leading families were welded into a military body by the Bhonslā. S'ivajī donned the sacred cord and took the title of Kṣatriya upon his enthronement, and within a generation, his successors made a claim to definite Rājput descent, and were apparently not rebuffed even by the highest of the Rājput Chieftains. The kinship, however, has not been practically acknowledged, possibly because the political atmosphere has changed since the beginning of the 18th century. In the present day there is no definite line drawn between the Marāṭhā and the Kunbī, or cultivating peasantry, though the leading clans of the former still enjoy special consideration. Recruitment admittedly takes place from below, and any Kunbī who prospers above his neighbours, renounces widow-marriage, secludes the women of his family, marries his daughters at an early age and within a narrow circle, and puts on the sacred thread for special occasions, becomes in due course a Marāṭhā in title, with hypergamous tendencies not always ignored by the older families. Both Marāṭhā and Kunbī are distinguished by the totemistic, not Brāhmanic, character of their exogamous subdivisions, and by their worship of the same local deities, so that, like the Jāṭ, the upper classes may have assumed a distinct position without imposing the impassable barrier which exists in the north between the Rājput and the rest. Amongst the Marāṭhās as a whole the only barrier of that nature is geographical, a Dekkanī not intermarrying with a family in the Konkan, in spite of the identity of language. The climate, which entails a difference of cultivation and consequently of diet, has affected the physique, and the broad-acred grower of millet disowns the tiller of the petty rice-patch.