Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 3.djvu/117

 DULEEP SINGH. (137)

ULEEP SINGH is a landholder of Kullianpoor, in the Allyghur district, where the family have been located for five or six hundred years. They are cultivators, with settled habits, subsisting on the produce of their lands; seldom, except in instances of the younger male members of families, now taking military service abroad. Their religion is Hindoo; they are Chohan Rajpoots, and are reckoned a brave warlike race, ranking next below Brahmins in caste. Then diet is ordinarily vegetables, grain, milk, &c.; but they do not object to eat the flesh of sheep, goats, or wild hog, except when they have become "Bhugut," or avowed religious professors, when they adhere to a vegetable diet, and live in all respects as Brahmins. Owing to their temperate habits, the Chohans of the district are remarkably long lived, attaining the ages of eighty and ninety years in many instances. They are "Soorujbunsi," or children of the Solar race, and are perhaps the haughtiest and most exclusive of all the great Rajpoot famines which derive their existence from original Aryan stock. In contracting marriages, the pedigrees on both sides are investigated with curious interest; nor is the slightest family taint, either of illegitimacy, or inter-marriage with a lower tribe, wittingly passed over. The extreme exclusiveness and sensitiveness of the Chohan Rajpoots on this subject, and the difficulty of obtaining pure connections, led, previous to the British rule, to the practise of female infanticide, the official measures adopted for the suppression of which have been already detailed under the head "Rajpoots of Bareilly," Nos. 119, 120.

It may not be out of place here to sketch the ancient legend which is attached to the origin of the Chohans. This is still remembered with what may be termed national pride, and has been the theme of countless recitations by their poets and bards from remote periods of time; and being continued with untiring interest to the present, has, no doubt, conduced to maintain that high chivalrous spirit by which this tribe has ever been distinguished in India. The legend runs as follows:— At a very remote period. Brahmins engaged in the holiest rites on Mount Aboo,