Caste and Race in India c9.57.2

c9.57.2

When Darius held sway over a part of the Punjab the country appears to have been already very populous and prosperous.¹ The physical type of the Punjab is so uniform as to preclude any possibility of large mixture. Hence we can reasonably assume that a large bulk of the present inhabitants of the Punjab are the descendants of the Vedic Aryans. Their number might have swollen by later immigrants whose physical type must have been similar to theirs but whose cultural affinities we may not be able to trace. Secondly, an objection has been levelled at Risley's classification of the Rajputs as Indo-Aryans.² It has been contended that some of the clan-names of the Rajputs are the same as those of the Gurjara tribe or caste and that the reigning dynasty of Kanauj during the ninth century and after was of the Gurjara stock. Hence it is argued that some of the Rajput clans are of non-Aryan descent.³ Even the Minas and Meos of Rajputana are not physically much differentiated from the Rajputs.⁴ The Rajputs are thus of the same race as the other peoples of Rajputana. We cannot hold that Rajputana was untenanted before the foreign tribes entered it in the sixth century A.D. Perhaps it will be said that the Gurjaras were of the same physical type as the population of Rajputana and hence their presence cannot be detected by physical anthropology, though they had come in large numbers and produced the present population of Rajputana. This supposition is not tenable;