Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 7.djvu/238

 NAWAB MOIZ MAHOMED KHAN AND SON. (393)

NAWAB FOUJDAR MAHOMED KHAN AND SONS. (394)

HE two elderly gentlemen represented, Moiz Mahomed Khan and Foujdar Mahomed Khan, are uncles of Her Highness Sekunder Begum, and both hold high offices in the Bhopal state.

These Afghans are a fine-looking tall race of men; they have remarkably handsome features, piercing dark eyes, aquiline noses, and a proud independent bearing. They are a very haughty-, cruel, and vindictive race, and treacherous. iie Bhopal Afghans have not in any degree lost the appearance or the character of their parent race, though the latter may have become somewhat softened by intercourse with Hindoos and English, but they are very bigoted Mussulmans. The Pathans of Bhopal are not distinguished by activity in manly sports or exercises; they are grown indolent and sensual, and their time is passed in eating, smoking, and sleeping. Owing to the dissipated lives they lead they are not very long lived, but moulvecs, and others who lead temperate lives, attain a good old age. There are very few others beside the military classes of Mussulmans at Bhopal, and the religious rites and belief of none of them differ from other Mussulmans of India. But they permit a very limited jurisdiction on the part of the state over their families, which are managed, after the Afghan custom, by themselves. As a rule, with the exception of the higher classes, they are generally illiterate.