The term Panjábi much more nearly, but still imperfectly, covers the people of the Panjáb, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir and the associated smaller Native States.
The Sikh, Muhammadan and Hindu Jats, the Kashmiris 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. |
