Castes, tribes and culture of India: the castes,tribes and culture of India

In a previous volume of the Caste, Tribes and Culture of India series, the central portion of the Indian Peninsula which was known previously as the Central Provinces and Berar has been covered. The present study relates to the area lying towards the west of the old Central Provinces which comprised the erstwhile Bombay Province.
India has been subject to invasion from land and sea right from the beginning. Aryans, Muslims, Mongols and Europeans, who were perhaps themselves of mixed origin, all entered India and sometimes intermarried with the indigenous people they found. This led to a great complexity of racial types.
Religious influences, too, were a decisive factor in the development of the tribal patterns of the Bombay Province. Jainism, the Lingayat faith, Islam and Christianity, each had some influence. The Lingayats, who are taken up for study in this book, were converted from Hindus and formed a separate endogamous division. In fact this picturesque region has a surprising variety of castes and tribes. The Imperial Gazetteer says: 'The Bombay Presidency intersects many of the social strata deposited by early invasions of India, and contains with in its limits a variety of castes and tribes hardly equalled by any of the other great provinces."