Abstract
Ethnology of Mysore The Baron von Eichstedt, who himself has recently visited Mysore, contributes an introductory chapter on the racial history of Mysore in relation to that of India to “The Mysore Tribes and Castes”, vol. 1 (Bangalore: Government Press). Mysore, like India as a whole, presents a fundamental contrast of open landscape and preponderantly mountainous jungle districts. Here also there is the same racial parallel: in the open country, settlements of a people of a progressive type, who are fair in the north of India and dark in the south and in certain refuge areas; and in the jungle districts primitive peoples who are fair in the western areas and dark in the eastern. Thus in India as a whole there are three main groups, each subdivided into two:—(1) The racially primitive peoples of the jungle region, the Ancient-Indians or Weddid racial group, divided into the Gondid race, a dark-brown curly (wide) haired people with totem-istic mattock-using culture; and the Malid type, a black-brown curly (narrow) haired people with originally ancient culture. (2) The racially mixed group Black-Indians, or Melanids, divided into the black-brown progressive people in the most southern plains with strong foreign matriarchy, the southern Melanids; and a black-brown primitive people of the northern Deccan with strong foreign (totemistic and matriarchal) influence, the Kolid type. (3) The racial progressive people of the open regions, New Indians or Indid group, divided into a gracile-brown people with enforced patriarchy, Gracile-Indid race; and a coarser light brown people with possible original patriarchal herdmanship, the North Indid type. So in Mysore is found the best preserved and most primitive of the primitive inhabitants of India, the Malids, with the later Gondids intruding, pre-Aryan North Indid herdsmen in the remnant of the Todas and traces of North-Indids all over the State, mixing with the older and partly younger intruders foreign to India, Palæomongolids, ‘West-Brachids’ and orientaloid Mohammedans.
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Research Items. Nature 135, 438–440 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135438a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135438a0