The Panjab, North- West Frontier Province, and Kashmir by Sir James McCrone Douie : Free e Book

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 cleancut geographical unit.
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