Indian Antiquary Vol 41

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 185

JULY, 1912.]
NOTES AND QUERIES
The state of affairs is further complicated by the fact that in the extreme north-west, amongst Pis&sha-speaking peoples-in the distant hills of Swat and Kashmir-there are at the present day wandering tribes of Gajar cattle tenders and shepherds, who have a language of their own quite different from that of the people among whom they dwell. This language also closely resembles the Rajasthani of Mêwât and Jaipur. Although it is unsafe to base ethnological theories on linguistic facts, I think that when Part IV. of Volume IX. of the Linguistic Survey is published, it will be seen that the following theory is at least not inconsistent with the linguistic facts as we now observe them.
I suggest that the earliest known Indo-Aryan, or Aryan inhabitants of the Himalaya trrct, known as Sapadalaksha, were the Khasas. These spoke a language akin to what are now the Pisacha languages of the Hindu Kush. They are now represented in the Western Pahari tract by the Khas clan of the Kanêts, and in the Central Pahari tract by the Khas tribe, which forms the bulk of the cultivating population.
In later time the Khasas were conquered by the Gurjaras. The Gurjaras are now represented by the Rajputs of the whole Sapâdalaksha tract, and also by the R& clan of the Kanets, which represents those Gurjaras who did not take to warlike pursuits, but remained cultivators. Hence .their claim to be of impure Rajpût descent. In Garhwal and Kumaun, where (for our present purposes) there are only Rajpats and Khasas, the cultivating Gurjaras became merged in the general Khas population. Over the whole of this Sapâdalaksha tract the Gurjaras and the Khasas gradually amalgamated, and they now speak one language, mainly Gurjari, but also bearing traces of the speech of the original Khasa population.
As D. R. Bhandarkar has shown, many of these Sapadalaksha Gurjaras migrated into Rajputana, carrying their language with them, which there developed into Rajasthan. In the subsequent centuries there was constant communication between Rajputââ and Sapadalaksha and, under the pressure of Mughul domination, there ultimately set in a considerable tide of emigration back from Rajputând into Sapâdalaksha. These immigrants were received with all the prestige of the high position to which they had attained in the social system of the Indian Plains. The foundation, by them of various
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Hill States is a matter of history and need not here detain us, but, from a linguistic point of view, the important fact is that they still farther strengthened the Rajasthan! element in the Pahari dialects.
There remain the nomadic Gajars of the northwestern hills. Their presence is accounted for as follows:-We have seen that those Gurjaras who did not take to warlike pursuits, but adhered to their pastoral occupation, retained the name and social status of Gurjaras or Gojars. During the period in which Rajpût rule became extended over the Punjab, the Rajpût fighting men were accompanied by their humbler pastoral brethren, and we now find a line of Gajar colonization running from Mêwâ: (the "Gujarat " of Albirani) up both sides of the Jamna valley, and thence following the foot of the Panjab Himalaya, right up to the Indus. Where they have settled in the plains they have abandoned their own language and speak that of the surrounding population, but as we enter the lower hills we invariably come upon a dialect locally known as "Gajari. " In each case this can best be described as the language of the people nearest the local Gajars, but badly spoken, as if by foreigners. The further we go into these sparsely populated hills, the more independent do we find the Gujar dialect, and the less is it influenced by its surroundings. At length, when we get into the wild hill-country of Swat and Kashmir, the nomad Gajars are found still pursuing their pastoral avocations, and still speaking the language their ancestors brought with them from Méwât. But even this shows traces of its long journey. For these Gojars, wandering over hills where the resident population speaks either Pushto or some Pisacha dialect, and separated from the Jamnâ by the wide plains of the Punjab, over which either Lahndi or Panjabi is the universal tongue, speak a language, which though nearly the same as Mêwati, also contain, like flies in amber, odd phrases and idioms belonging to the Hindostani of the Jamna valley. These they could not have taken from Pushto or from Pisacha. These are strange alike to Lahndi and Panjabi. These do not occur in Mêwâti, and they clearly show that the Gujars, on their way to Swat and Kashmir, must, at one period of their wanderings, have lived in the Jamn valley.
GEORGE A. GRIERSON. Camberley, 8th February 1912.