Identifier: northwesternpro00croo (find matches)
Title: The north-western provinces of India : their history, ethnology, and administration
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Crooke, William, 1848-1923
Subjects:
Publisher: London, Methuen
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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s that its basis was the undivided patriarchal family.He assumed that the Roman was the standard type of theprimitive household, women as they married coming underthe dominion of the pater fainilias, and a number of similaro-roups gradually forming around it and ultimately organisingthemselves into tribes. Subsequent investigations have, how-ever, thrown doubt on the correctness of this analysis. Itfails to account satisfactorily for the growth of the agnaticbond, or for the forms of early marriage, such as the Beenaor polyandrous type: nor does it explain the part whichTotemism, however it may have originated, undoubtedlyplayed in their evolution. It now appears probable thatthe sept is a more primitive form of organisation than thefamily, which was evolved from it when the rule of malekinship was established. We can thus imagine the earlier stages of the colonisationof the country to have been carried out by small bodiesof invaders, who occupied the most fertile clearings in the 280
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DHANGARS. MEMBERS OF DRAVIDIAN VILLAGE COMMUNITY, MIRZAPUR. THE LAND AND ITS SETTLEMENT jungle, reduced to a state of serfdom the Autochthones, inmany cases interm.arrying with them, and thus producing theuniform craniological type which now prevails in NorthernIndia. These bodies gradually threw off other groups, whichdivided the country between them, and thus formed thevillage as we see it now. The traces of this early form of colonisation may beobserved to the present time in the local subdivisions of thePargana and Tappa, which correspond to the baronial orhundred subdivisions of some of our English and Irishcounties. These probably represent the areas originallyoccupied by the invading septs. The Tappa, for instance,as in Gorakhpur, corresponds with the natural divisionsformed by rivers or other natural features. This was acharacteristic of the Rajput settlements, where the variouscolonising bodies are separated from each other by rivers,the chief ethnical frontiers of the early

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