The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir   By: James McCrone Douie (1854-1935)

by

SIR JAMES DOUIE, M.A., K.C.S.I.

Seema Publications 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.

Sir James Douie, in this work, is obviously living over again the happy thirty five years which he devoted to the service of North West India: his accounts of the physiography, the flora and fauna, the people and the administration are essentially the personal recollections of one who has first studied the details as a District Officer and has afterwards corrected his perspective, stage by stage, from the successively higher view point of a Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, Financial Commissioner, and finally as Officiating Lieut. Governor. No one could more appropriately undertake the task of an accurate and well proportioned thumb nail sketch of North West India and, what is equally important to the earnest reader, no author could more obviously delight in his subject.

T. H. H.

ALDERLEY EDGE,

March 9th, 1916.

NOTE BY AUTHOR

My thanks are due to the Government of India for permission to use illustrations contained in official publications. Except where otherwise stated the numerous maps included in the volume are derived from this source. My obligations to provincial and district gazetteers have been endless. Sir Thomas Holdich kindly allowed me to reproduce some of the charts in his excellent book on India . The accuracy of the sections on geology and coins may be relied on, as they were written by masters of these subjects, Sir Thomas Holland and Mr R. B. Whitehead, I.C.S. Chapter XVII could not have been written at all without the help afforded by Mr Vincent Smith's Early History of India . I have acknowledged my debts to other friends in the "List of Illustrations."

J. M. D.

8 May 1916.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. Areas and Boundaries 1

II. Mountains, Hills, and Plains 8

III. Rivers 32

IV. Geology and Mineral Resources 50

V. Climate 64

VI. Herbs, Shrubs, and Trees 71

VII. Forests 86