E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Asad Razzaki, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations and maps. See 24562-h.htm or 24562-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/5/6/24562/24562-h/24562-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/5/6/24562/24562-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Text enclosed between tilde characters was in bold face in the original book (~this text is bold~). THE PANJAB, NORTH-WEST FRONTIER PROVINCE AND KASHMIR by SIR JAMES DOUIE, M.A., K.C.S.I. Seema Publications Seema Publications C-3/19, R. P. Bagh, Delhi-110007. First Indian Edition 1974 Printed in India at Deluxe Offset Press, Daya Basti, Delhi-110035 and Published by Seema Publications, Delhi-110007. EDITOR'S PREFACE In his opening chapter Sir James Douie refers to the fact that the area treated in this volume--just one quarter of a million square miles--is comparable to that of Austria-Hungary. The comparison might be extended; for on ethnographical, linguistic and physical grounds, the geographical unit now treated is just as homogeneous in composition as the Dual Monarchy. It is only in the political sense and by force of the ruling classes, temporarily united in one monarch, that the term _Osterreichisch_ could be used to include the Poles of Galicia, the Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia, the Szeklers, Saxons and more numerous Rumanians of Transylvania, the Croats, Slovenes and Italians of "Illyria," with the Magyars of the Hungarian plain. The term _Punjabi_ much more nearly, but still imperfectly, covers the people of the Panjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir and the associated smaller Native States. The Sikh, Muhammadan and Hindu Jats, the Kashmiris and the Rajputs all belong to the tall, fair, leptorrhine Indo-Aryan main stock of the area, merging on the west and south-west into the Biluch and Pathan Turko-Iranian, and fringed in the hill districts on the north with what have been described as products of the "contact metamorphism" with the Mongoloid tribes of Central Asia. Thus, in spite of the inevitable blurring of boundary lines, the political divisions treated together in this volume, form a fairly clean-cut geographical unit.