Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 5.djvu/41

 KAKKAZYE. (234)

HE Kakkazyes were originally Hindoo Kullals (vide ante No. 227) who, though at some distant period converted to the Mahomedan faith, have yet retained the hereditary occupation of their ancestors. They are numerous at Lahore, and maintain themselves as well by selling spirits, as by farming, trading in grain and wood, and the poorer classes as domestic servants. It is, perhaps, a strange illustration of the force of habit and attachment to caste profession, to find the Kakkazyes, though converts to Islamism, continuing a trade, or pursuit in life, which is expressly forbidden by the tenets they have adopted, under the most emphatic denunciations of divine wrath. It is probable that their Mahomedan faith, in a country like the Punjab, where Mahomedans of all classes were kept down, if not persecuted, by the Sikhs, sat lightly upon them; but the contradiction between precept and practice in this case has, perhaps, no other example in India. In other respects the Kakkazyes do not differ from ordinary Mahomedans; but they marry only among themselves, not having attained to the proper rank of " true believers," and are, therefore, a limited and exclusive sect. Many of them are wealthy and thrifty, and the subject of the Photograph, richly dressed as he is, is a proof that he is in comfortable, if not affluent circumstances. His tunic is of cloth of gold on a crimson silk ground; his outer garment also of red silk, embroidered with gold and trimmed with silver lace, and his trousers of striped satin.

A parallel instance of converted Kullals adhering to their hereditary profession is furnished by the Kullals of Cheetapoor, a considerable town in the South-West portion of His Highness the Nizam's dommions in the Deccan. They were converted to Christianity by Jesuit missionaries from Goa in the sixteenth century, and since then have preserved their faith in a very steadfast and creditable manner. They have a small church, in which, in the absence of any regular priest, one of the lay deacons reads daily the prayers of the Catholic Church, and a homily on saints' days and every Sunday. The Portuguese missionaries must have been admirable Canarese scholars, for they hot only furnished their converts with an excellent