Chapter RADAREE to RAJPOOT of R by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

and Javanese chiefs and princes.

It is curious that the term Raja cannot be traced, so far as we know, in any of the Greek or Latin references to India, unless the very questionable instance of Pliny’s Rachias be an exception. In early Mahommedan writers the now less usual, but still Indian, forms Rao and Rai, are those which we find. (Ibn Batuta, it will be seen, regards the words for king in India and in Spain as identical, in which he is fundamentally right.) Among the English vulgarisms of the 18th century again we sometimes find the word barbarised into Roger.

c. 1338.—“…Baha-uddin fled to one of the heathen Kings called the Rai Kanbilah. The word Rai among those people, just as among the people of Rum, signifies ‘King.’ ”—Ibn Batuta, iii. 318. The traveller here refers, as appears by another passage, to the Spanish Rey.

[1609.—“Raiaw.” See under GOONT.]

1612.—“In all this part of the East there are 4 castes…. The first caste is that of the Rayas, and this is a most noble race from which spring all the Kings of Canara….”—Couto, V. vi. 4.

[1615.—“According to your direction I have sent per Orincay (see ORANKAY) Beege Roger’s junk six pecculles (see PECUL) of lead.”—Foster, Letters, iv. 107.

[1623.—“A Ragia, that is an Indian Prince.”—P. della Valle, Hak. Soc. i. 84.]

1683.—“I went a hunting with ye Ragea, who was attended with 2 or 300 men, armed with bows and arrows, swords and targets.”—Hedges, Diary, March 1; [Hak. Soc. i. 66].

1786.—Tippoo with gross impropriety addresses Louis XVI. as “the Rajah of the French.”—Select Letters, 369.

RAJAMUNDRY, n.p. A town, formerly head-place of a district, on the lower Godavery R. The name is in Telegu Rajamahendravaramu, ‘King-chief(’s)-Town,’ [and takes its name from Mahendradeva of the Orissa dynasty; see Morris, Godavery Man. 23].

RAJPOOT, s. Hind. Rajput, from Skt. Rajaputra, ‘King’s Son.’ The name of a great race in India, the hereditary profession of which is that of arms. The name was probably only a honorific assumption; but no race in India has furnished so large a number of princely families. According to Chand, the great medieval bard of the Rajputs, there were 36 clans of the race, issued from four Kshatriyas (Pa rihar, Pramar, Solankhi, and Chauhun) who sprang into existence from the sacred Agnikunda or Firepit on the summit of Mount Abu. Later bards give five eponyms from the firepit, and 99 clans. The Rajputs thus claim to be true Kshatríyas, or representatives of the second of the four fundamental castes, the Warriors; but the Brahmans do not acknowledge the claim, and deny that the true Kshatriya is extant. Possibly the story of the fireborn ancestry hides a consciousness that the claim is factitious. “The Rajpoots,” says Forbes, “use animal food and spirituous liquors, both unclean in the last degree to their puritanic neighbours, and are scrupulous in the observance of only two rules,—those which prohibit the slaughter of cows, and the remarriage of widows. The clans are not forbidden to eat together, or to intermarry, and cannot be said in these respects to form separate castes” (Ras-mala, reprint 1878, p. 537).

An odd illustration of the fact that to partake of animal food, and especially of the heroic repast of the flesh of the wild boar killed in the chase (see Terry’s representation of this below), is a Rajput characteristic, occurs to the memory of one of the present writers. In Lord Canning’s time the young Rajput Raja of Alwar had betaken himself to degrading courses, insomuch that the Viceroy felt constrained, in open durbar at Agra, to admonish him. A veteran political officer, who was present, inquired of the agent at the Alwar Court what had been the nature of the conduct thus rebuked. The reply was that the young prince had become the habitual associate of low and profligate Mahommedans, who had so influenced his conduct that among other indications, he would not eat wild pig. The old Political, hearing this, shook his head very gravely, saying, ‘Would not eat Wild Pig! Dear ! Dear ! Dear !’ It seemed the ne plus ultra of Rajput degradation ! The older travellers give the name in the quaint form Rashboot, but this is not confined to Europeans, as the quotation from Sidi ’Alí shows; though the aspect in which the old English travellers regarded the tribe, as mainly a pack of banditti, might have made us think the name to be shaped by a certain sense of aptness. The Portuguese again frequently call them Reys Butos, a form in which the true etymology, at least partially, emerges.

1516.—“There are three qualities of these Gentiles, that is to say, some are called Razbutes, and they, in the time that their King was a Gentile, were Knights, the defenders of the Kingdom, and governors of the Country.”—Barbosa, 50.

1533.—“Insomuch that whilst the battle went on, Saladim placed all his women in a large house, with all that he possessed, whilst below the house were combustibles for use