Caste and Race in India c9.119

c9.119

The Scytho-Dravidian type: What Risley exactly meant by the term Scythian is not clear. He could not have meant Mongoloid, for then there would have been no point in distinguishing this type from the Mongolo-Dravidian. Perhaps he used the word as equivalent to the Śakas of Sanskrit writers. That there is no evidence of the Śakas having reached so far as this type stretches is amply proved.³ We must, therefore, give up this designation of the type. We propose to call it the Western type, because it characterizes the Western Coast from Gujarat to South Canara, and thence spreads inwards into Coorg, Mysore, the Deccan, and the Telugu country and through Orissa into Bengal. The head is mostly medium with a slight tendency towards broad; the nasal index in most communities is below 78. Representatives of this type are: Sale, Bant, Vakkaliga, Coorga, Shenvi, Prabhu, Nagar, Chitpavan, Mala, Madiga, and Holeya. Chanda seeks to connect the Gujaratis, the Marathis, and the Bengalis with a people of the Alpine Race that, he supposes, came from Chinese Turkistan. And he has the support of no less an authority than Dr. Haddon, who first postulated an immigration of the Alpine folks to account for the "strongly marked brachycephalic element in the population of Western India".⁴ Against this route of immigration it must be objected that if the Alpine people came through Kashmir and the Punjab, how is it that we have no trace of either brachycephaly or mesaticephaly in the intervening area till we come to Gujarat? Further, the highest cephalic indices are recorded from the southern part of the region characterized by this type, i.e. from Bellary. The distribution of the type sketched above suggests quite a different route of immigration, i.e. on the western coast by sea. Most of the castes are mesaticephalic and nine of the castes of the Marathi region, pooled together, give 77.84 as the mean cephalic index. It is therefore more reasonable to seek the origin of this type in a mixed stock rather than in a purely Alpine one, for the latter has a very broad head, the cephalic index being often 85 and upwards.¹ Western Asia seems to provide us with such a people; for there we notice a prolonged process of mixture between the Brown race and the Alpine race.² Dr. Schoff sees in Cutch or Kachh reminiscences of the Kassites who migrated from Elam about 2200 B.C.³ Mr. H. J. E. Peake thinks that about 2000 B.C. some of the Nordics had made their appearance in Asia Minor.⁴ If some of them accompanied the people who landed on the western coast of India, we can explain the colour of the eyes of the Chitpavans of Bombay. It is greenish grey rather than blue. Their eyes are known in Marathi as "cat-eyes".⁵