Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057345).pdf/214

 206 KHE and divided by the exercise of separate trades, each of which, according to the Hindu system, must be followed exclusively by the children of those who from generation to generation have practised it. The tendency to make trades-unions into permanent family preserves with peculiar customs and rites always existed in the east, and has been regularly organized by Hinduism. On this latter class, however, we must remark that there are in several instances two or more castes following the same profession. The Kahár and the Manjhi are both fishermen. The Kurmi, the Kachhi, the Lodh, the Muráo, the Gújar, are all cultivators. But the complication generally arises from the action upon each other of the two caste factors, the ethnic or national and the trade-union. In Oudh several different kingdoms, which had existed separately for many hundred years during Buddhist times, were crushed together by the pres- sure of Moslem empire. In this the Hindu polity was more or less elabo- rate or wanting ; civilization, the division of labour and trades-unions, were in full force in one and absent in others. The Pásis, for instance, were a race who had no trades-unions; every man was a hunter, a shepherd, and a cultivator. When the Hindu system enveloped them in its folds, these three trades were already occupied by Kisáns, Gwálas, and Bahelias respectively. The Pási found that be could not compete with professionals, and he gradually retired betaking himself to cultivation, comblried with the task of protecting the crops from wild beasts and thieves. It was a system of union between different races, of severance between different trades, followed by natural selection of the fittest, through further combination or division, Thus the Ahirs and the Bhars, the seats of whose nationality were in or near Oudh, had attained it is probable bigher civilization, and a certain division of labour unknown among the Pasis. Each different kingdom had its cultivating class, its shepherd class; in the process of time each bad acquired a distinct name in its own dialect; foreign conquest and Hinduism crushed all together, so the Gararia of one nation, the Gwalbans of another, continued to exercise wherever they could their trade of herdsman. Similarly the Gújar, the Kişán, the Kurmi, the Lodh, the cultivating classes of different nations, all intermingled and pursued their comnion toil. It is remarkable that the professions which belong to a higher state of civilization, those of the jewellers, oil-pressers, grain-parchers, washerman, carpenters, blacksmiths, have not each a double or treble set of followers among modern Hindus, and this would show that they did not exist as separate trades in the little rude kingdoms, which were brought under the Hindu system, or else that the trade feeling in these more skilled and technical arts was so strong as to overcome national feeling and combine in one the followers of each trade. There is abundant evidence that in different nations of Hindustan, in which the Hindu system had been introduced, the different trades were called by different names derived from the vernaculars of the country. The distiller in the north is called Kalwár, in the south Kalál, although these may be modifications of the same words. The low caste Weaver is named Kori in Oudh, but Parls in the Central Proviaceo, Panka in ather places ; the curious double combination of pata quin bearing and fishing is followed by the Kabár in the north and the Dhimgar in the sortb.