The tribes and castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Volume 1 (of 4)Crooke, William
History
The tribes and castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Volume 1 (of 4)
Crooke, William
Caste -- India -- History; Hindus -- India; Tribes -- India -- History
[The family and the sept.] 13. We have seen that it is in the groups or
camps of the vagrant tribes like the Beriya, Hâbûra and Sânsiya, that
we must look to find what is perhaps the most primitive form of human
association, and that the family was almost certainly not the primitive
unit, but the sept. The family, in short, arose out of the sept when
the stage arrived at which paternity and the incidents connected with
it came to be recognised. But of the real tribal form of caste in which
the association is based on actual or assumed community of blood
through a common ancestor, we find little or no trace, except as Mr.
Ibbetson [30] showed to be the case among the Pathâns and Bilûches of
the western frontier, who are foreigners in this part of India. But
even here the fiction of common descent is being gradually weakened by
the wholesale admission of outsiders into the fraternity, who do not
even pretend to be able to establish a genealogical connection with the
original founder of the sept. Here, too, the differentiation of
industries is leading to a distinction, even among the members of the
association linked together in theory by the bond of blood. In theory
any Pathân, Mughal or Sayyid may marry any girl of his tribe; but if he
falls in social position or adopts any degrading occupation his
difficulty in marrying into a respectable family is as difficult as it
would be in Germany or even in some grades of English society for a
parvenu to marry into a family whose claims to rank are undisputed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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