THE LAST PHASE IN NORTHERN INDIA 179 
in other words, that Brotherhoods did not then exist. We 
may, however, wait until this hypothetical student appears; 
for the present I prefer to take the Brotherhood as a very 
old Hindu institution, one which bears the marks of its 
antiquity on its face, and we may infer with a high degree 
of probability that many, though not necessarily all, the 
muqaddams mentioned in Moslem chronicles were repre- 
sentatives of a Brotherhood of the kind which has survived 
Moslem rule, and which is known, in some parts of India, 
to have existed before the first Moslem conquests. Whether 
some of them represented villages without a Brotherhood, 
is a question on which I have found no evidence. It is 
possible that at one time the Brotherhood was a universal 
institution, and that all the cases where it is not found are 
to be explained as instances of disintegration; it is also 
possible that in some circumstances new villages were 
established in conditions under which a Brotherhood failed 
to grow up; but, in the absence of evidence, speculation on 
these alternatives would be unprofitable. 
The remaining question, the existence during the Moslem 
period of resident peasants outside the Brotherhood, is 
also one on which I have found no direct evidence. The 
most important fact in this connection is, I think, the wide 
distribution throughout Northern India of the castes which 
have specialised in intensive cultivation—the Arain, the 
Mali, the Kachhi, the Koiri. It is conceivable that this 
distribution may have occurred in comparatively recent 
times, but it looks older; possibly the traditions of these 
castes, which, so far as I know, have never been studied 
from this point of view, might throw some light on the 
question, but for the present I must leave it open. On the 
whole, it seems to me to be reasonable to accept the current 
view that the existence of a Brotherhood was an ordinary 
feature in villages throughout the Moslem period; but, at 
the same time, it would be unsafe, in the existing state of 
knowledge, to assume either that the institution was uni- 
versal, in the sense that there was a Brotherhood in every 
village, or that it was exclusive, in the sense that there 
were no resident peasants outside its circle.