Indische Palaographie von circa 350 a. Chr. – circa 1300 p. Chr. c48.s7.1

c48.s7.1

§ 103. Of the total Muslim population of India nearly 58 per cent bear the titles of races foreign to the country. Those whose names imply Arab descent amount to 30,442,000. About 4,239,000 nominally belong to the tribes on the north-west frontier, and the remaining 434,000 affiliate themselves to races introduced by the Central Asian dynasties which successively ruled from Delhi. It must not be supposed, however, that the proportion of foreign blood is that indicated by the prevalence of the above titles, except in the case of the frontier races, who have naturally overflowed into Sindh and upper India. On the contrary, in some parts of the country, it is said that converts from Brāhmanism are so deeply imbued with the notion of a fourfold division of society, fostered by the traditional sacerdotal partition of the Indian world into Brāhman, Kṣatriya, Vaiśya and S'ūdra, that they consider themselves bound, when accepting Islām, to enrol themselves as either Sēkh, Saiyad, Mughal or Paṭhān. In eastern Bengal, accordingly, the name of Sēkh is practically assumed to connote native, instead of foreign, origin. In the Panjab, again, and the region round Delhi, the long supremacy of the Mughal has endowed that race with a halo which is still attractive to the local convert. Nearly nine tenths of the Turk, too, belong to a subdivision of Banjārā, which, as already stated above, adopted Islām en masse; and, finally, nearly all the Arabs of Sindh bear the title of Kalhōrā, the ruling race before the Talpur. The figures now to be reviewed, then, must be taken with the above qualifications. The latter, it will have been seen, apply most extensively to the communities purporting to belong to the native land of the Prophet, which ought to be the most honourable, as they are the most numerous on the record.