E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Asad Razzaki,
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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.
In his opening chapter Sir James Douie refers to the fact that the areatreated in this volume—just one quarter of a million square miles—iscomparable to that of Austria-Hungary. The comparison might be extended;for on ethnographical, linguistic and physical grounds, the geographicalunit now treated is just as homogeneous in composition as the DualMonarchy. It is only in the political sense and by force of the rulingclasses, temporarily united in one monarch, that the termOsterreichisch could be used to include the Poles of Galicia, theCzechs of Bohemia and Moravia, the Szeklers, Saxons and more numerousRumanians 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 thepeople of the Panjáb, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmír and theassociated smaller Native States. The Sikh, Muhammadan and Hindu Jats,the Kashmírís and the Rájputs all belong to the tall, fair, leptorrhineIndo-Aryan main stock of the area, merging on the west and south-west[Pg vi]into the Biluch and Pathán Turko-Iranian, and fringed in the hilldistricts 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 politicaldivisions treated together in this volume, form a fairly clean-cutgeographical unit.
Sir James Douie, in this work, is obviously living over again the happythirty-five years which he devoted to the service of North-West India:his accounts of the physiography, the flora and fauna, the people andthe administration are essentially the personal recollections of one whohas first studied the details as a District Officer and has afterwardscorrected his perspective, stage by stage, from the successively higherview-point of a Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, FinancialCommissioner, and finally as Officiating Lieut.-Governor. No one couldmore appropriately undertake the task of an accurate andwell-proportioned thumb-nail sketch of North-West India and, what isequally important to the earnest reader, no author could more obviouslydelight in his subject.
Alderley Edge,
March 9th, 1916.
[Pg vii]
My thanks are due to the Government of India for permission to useillustrations contained in official publications. Except where otherwisestated the numerous maps included in the volume are derived from thissource. My obligations to provincial and district gazetteers have beenendless. Sir Thomas Holdich kindly allowed me to reproduce some of thecharts in his excellent book on India. The accuracy of the sections ongeology and coins may be relied on, as they were written by masters ofthese subjects, Sir Thomas Holland and Mr R. B. Whitehead, I.