olution in the tenure of land, and
mainly to the detriment of an essentially peaceful and law-abiding class
that furnished a large and excellent contingent to the Native Army. The
wretched landowner who found himself deprived of his land by legal
process held our methods rather than his own extravagance responsible
for his ruin, and on the other hand, the pleaders and their clients, the
moneylenders, who were generally Hindus, resented equally our
legislative attempts to hamper a process so beneficial to themselves.

But all these were only contributory causes. There were still deeper
influences at work which have operated in the Punjab in the same
direction as the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, but
differ from them nevertheless in their origin and in some of their
manifestations. In the Punjab too the keynote of unrest is a spirit of
revolt not merely against British administrative control, but, in theory
at least, against Western influence generally, though in some respects
it bears very strongly the impress of the Western influence which it
repudiates. The motive force is not conservative Brahmanism as in the
Deccan, nor does it betray the impetuous emotionalism of Bengal. It is
less rigid and purely reactionary than the former, and better
disciplined than the latter.

Orthodox Hinduism ceased to be a dominant factor in the Punjab when the
flood of Mahomedan conquest swept over the land of the Five Rivers. Even
Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of
caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself. But nowhere
has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of
sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure
of its disintegration. Sikhism still represents the most successful
revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism. Hence the
relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans in the Punjab
amongst the Hindus themselves, even the Brahmans having split up into so
many sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that many a non-Brahman Hindu will
hardly accept food cooked by the lower order of Brahmans--and, next to
inter-marriage, food is the great test of caste. Nevertheless it is
amongst the Hindus of the Punjab that one of the earliest apostles of
reaction against the West has found the largest and most enthusiastic
body of followers. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya
Samaj, was a Brahman of Kathiawar