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THE PANJAB, NORTH-WEST
FRONTIER PROVINCE
AND KASHMIR
BY
SIR JAMES DOUIE, M.A., K.C.S.I.
SEEMA PUBLICATIONS C-3/19, R. P. Bagh, Delhi-110007.
First Indian Edition 1974
Printed in India at Deluxe Offset Press, Daya Basti, Delhi-110035 and
Published by Seema Publications, Delhi-110007.
EDITOR'S PREFACE
In his opening chapter Sir James Douie refers to the fact that the area treated in this volume—just one quarter of a million square miles—is comparable to that of Austria-Hungary. The comparison might be extended; for on ethnographical, linguistic and physical grounds, the geographical unit now treated is just as homogeneous in composition as the Dual Monarchy. It is only in the political sense and by force of the ruling classes, temporarily united in one monarch, that the term Osterreichisch could be used to include the Poles of Galicia, the Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia, the Szeklers, Saxons and more numerous Rumanians of Transylvania, the Croats, Slovenes and Italians of "Illyria," with the Magyars of the Hungarian plain.
The term Punjábi much more nearly, but still imperfectly, covers the people of the Panjáb, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmír and the associated smaller Native States. The Sikh, Muhammadan and Hindu Jats, the Kashmírís and the Rájputs all belong to the tall, fair, leptorrhine Indo-Aryan main stock of the area, merging on the west and south-west into the Biluch and Pathán Turko-Iranian, and fringed in the hill districts on the north with what have been described as products of the "contact metamorphism" with the Mongoloid tribes of Central Asia. Thus, in spite of the inevitable blurring of boundary lines, the political divisions treated together in this volume, form a fairly clean-cut geographical unit.