Note 79 — Volume II.

Mr. Risley, remarking on the wide area over which the name Bhuiya has spread, thinks we should “hesitate and demand some independent evidence of affinity before we pronounce it to be an original tribal designation, and accept the conclusion that all tribes which bear the name at the present day are sprung from a common stock.” He adds that “the advanced guard of the Aryan immigrants, pressing forward in quest of land, and seeking a name for the alien races whom they found in possession of scanty clearings in the forest-clad tract of Central India, whither they had themselves been driven, would naturally ignore the tribal names of the groups with which they came in contact, and would call the strangers Bhuiyas or children of the soil”79 (bhûmi).