descendants,--of those men, in fact, whose immediate ancestors, employed at
first as messengers or spies of Maratha chieftains, by innate cleverness,
tact, and faculty for management gradually welded together the loose
Maratha confederacy and became directors of the internal and external
politics of the Peshwa's dominions. For to this day the true Chitpavan
perserves the fair skin, the strange grey eyes, the aspect of refined
strength and intelligence, which must have characterized the shipwrecked
mariners of old fable and marked them out in later years as strangers in a
strange land. But whence came they, these foreign immigrants, who after
long sojourn in the country of their adoption moved upwards to the Deccan
and stood within the shadow of the Peshwa's throne? Much has been written
of their origin, much that is but empty theory: but, as 'Historicus' has
remarked in the columns of a local journal, the lesson to be learned from
their home dialect and from their strange surnames,--Gogte, Lele, Karve,
Gadre, Hingne and so on,--is that the Chitpavan Brahmans of Western India
came in legendary ages from Gedrosia, Kirman and the Makran coast, and that
prior to their domicile in those latitudes they probably formed part of the
population of ancient Egypt or Africa. That they were once a seafaring and
fishing people is proved by the large number of words of oceanic origin
which still characterize their home-speech, while according to the
authority above mentioned the "Chandrakant" which they recognize is not the
sweating crystal of Northern India and ancient Sanskrit lore, but a fossil
coral found upon the Makran coast. Forty years ago Rao Saheb V. N. Mandlik
remarked that "the ancestors of the tribe probably came by ships either
from some other port in India or from the opposite coast of Africa;" and in
these later days his theory is corroborated by General Haig, who traces
them back to the great marts on the Indus and thence still further back to
the Persian Gulf and Egypt. Why or at what date they left the famous
country of the Pharaohs, none can say: but that these white-skinned
Brahmans are descendants of such people as the Berbers, who belonged of