257. India
India is not a country, but a connected block of lands shut off from the remainder of the world by lofty mountains and harboring a population approximating those of Europe and of China. Its 300,000,000 inhabitants constitute nearly a fifth of humanity. Historically, India forms a continent as fully as does Africa. Culturally, it must be equated with the Occidental or Mediterranean area and with China as one of the three great and substantially coördinate focal points which civilization developed in the eastern hemisphere.
Racially the peoples of India are prevailingly Caucasian, but both the two other great stocks are represented. Nearly everywhere, but especially in the south, there is an evident admixture of a dark skinned, broad nosed, long headed type. This is more likely to have had Australoid than Negro affinities before its absorption; remnants of it, like the Veddas of Ceylon and Irulas and some other tribes of the Deccan, are often grouped with more easterly peoples as representatives of an original Indo-Australoid race (§ [24], [27], [260]). So far as this race can be reconstructed, it seems to have been less Negroid than the Australian of to-day; that is, it possessed more Caucasian resemblances. In fact, it might almost be described as proto-Caucasian. In this light the modern Hindu[37] would be a varying mixture of two related strains—the undifferentiated proto-Caucasian, approximating the Australian and perhaps having ultimate Negroid relations without being Negroid; and the specialized Caucasian typical of the Occident; the former strongest in the south, the latter almost pure in the northwest of India. This hypothesis has this to commend it: it squares with the facts that the Hindu in spite of his dark complexion makes almost universally the impression of being essentially “white” in race; and that he differs outstandingly from what a mulatto-like blend of Negro and Caucasian would be.
In the north and east of India, Mongolian resemblances begin to appear, as the natural result of thousands of years of contact of two stocks.
It would seem that the proportions of racial blood in India, and in the rough their geographical distribution, parallel the proportions of the numbers of speakers of tongues belonging to the several families. More than three-fourths of the Hindus speak Indo-European dialects. Most of the remainder are Dravidas in the south and Kolarians in the east central parts—the same regions in which the Indo-Australoid or proto-Caucasian element is most conspicuous. Along the northeastern edge, Tibeto-Burman speech has spilled in with the Mongolian type. However, while the races have blended, the languages have remained distinct. As almost everywhere, the linguistic classification is therefore clearer cut in India than the racial one. Consequently it is misleading to infer from a Hindu’s speaking a Sanskrit-derived language that his Caucasian blood is pure, or conversely to conclude that all Dravidians have broad noses and black skins.
The Kolarians have been thought by some to possess ancient linguistic relatives to the east (§ [50]), and certainly possess cultural ones in this direction (§ [262]). Dravidian speech has not been thus connected, even tentatively, and one indication points to its former westward extension: the Brahui language in Beluchistan, which appears to be the remnant of an old Dravidian offshoot.
The ancient culture of India is inadequately known. Archæological exploration and analysis have been insufficient; yet they have gone far enough to suggest that the prehistoric development followed different lines from those in the West, so that the findings of European prehistory cannot be applied to interpret such knowledge as there is on India. Thus the Lower Palæolithic stage is well represented in India, but there is nothing to show whether or not it was contemporaneous with that of Europe. There is some possibility that it passed into the Neolithic without the intervening Upper Palæolithic which is so important in western Europe (§ [213]). It seems dubious whether there was a true Bronze Age in India. More pre-iron implements of pure copper seem to have been found than of tin bronze.
The early Kolarian culture seems preserved in considerable degree among the modern Kolarians, who are backward hill or forest tribes, that is, internally peripheral to the prevalent higher civilization. At any rate, their culture resembles that of many less advanced populations to the east, well out into Oceania. This presumably ancient and partly surviving “Indo-Oceanic” culture is discussed below (§ [262]). As regards its history within India, this is almost certain: the old culture is nowhere any longer pure, but has regularly absorbed elements of the advanced civilization that surrounds it; and conversely has contributed to the latter. For instance, one of the great recognized cults of India is Sivaism, which tends frequently to bloodiness and obscenity and is a strange mixture of philosophical rationalization and crass superstition. One of the most frequent attributes of Siva is a necklace of skulls; a feature that looks as if it might go back to the skull cult which is a typical ingredient of Indo-Oceanic culture.
The old Dravidian culture was probably more advanced than the Kolarian but is more difficult to reconstruct because of its extensive blending with the culture brought in or developed by Indo-Europeans. The Dravidians, perhaps because they were the more advanced and populous, were able to accept the intrusive culture and yet maintain themselves, whereas the Kolarians either preserved themselves by resisting civilization or had their speech and identity absorbed by it. When the Dravidians first begin to creep into history, shortly before the Christian era, they already possess cities, kingdoms, commerce, writing, and philosophy. They have on the whole contributed less to Indian civilization than the Indo-Europeans: its center always lay in the north; but they have long formed an integral part of it.
The Indo-Europeans are first known to us from their religious hymns, the Vedas, which have been preserved as sacrosanct by succeeding ages, and constitute the oldest continuously transmitted documents in history. They date from 2000 or 1500 to not after 1000 B.C., and are in Sanskrit, which is fairly close to Avestan or Old Persian, the two languages and their descendants constituting the Indo-Iranian or proper Aryan branch of Indo-European. When Indo-European as a whole is designated as Aryan, it is by an extension of the term. The region of India to which the Vedas almost wholly refer is the Indus drainage, that is the northwest, the parts adjoining the Iranian highland, whence the invaders came or through which they passed.
Vedic Aryan culture was of late Bronze Age type. Whether the bronze was really such, or copper, it is mentioned more frequently than iron, as in Homer and the older books of the Bible. Grains, cattle, horses, chariots and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. The temples and writing, walled towns and kingdoms, district gods and royal tombs of Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Minoan Greece are wanting. The picture is that of the first historic Indo-Europeans elsewhere, in eastern and central Europe; with whom the Aryans undoubtedly were or had been in connection through the countries north of the Black and Caspian seas.
A few centuries after the Vedas, the culture depicted by the literary remains is profoundly altered. The scene has shifted to the Ganges valley. There are cities and palaces, wealth and pomp. There are kings, priests, townsmen, peasants, hermits and ascetics. Caste is in vogue. Cotton and rice are in use. There is a deal of philosophizing; life appears complex and difficult; pessimism is abroad, soul rebirth taken for granted, spirituality emphasized. Concepts to which western science later returned, the atom and ether, are familiar. In all essentials, post-Christian Hinduism had been blocked out in this pre-Christian period. Only a few elements like money and writing are lacking.
This change from the Vedic age is not fully accounted for, and the time usually allowed for its occurrence is insufficient. Buddha was born B.C. 563 or 557. His religion assumes ideas which are part of the Sankhya philosophy—in many ways the subtlest philosophy of all India and one of the great thought systematizations of the world. Its founder Kapila is placed about 600 B.C., and must have had predecessors. Caste seems a thing of development. It is absent in the Vedas, but Buddhism is already in a measure a protest against it. It seems difficult to squeeze such growths into a few hundred years. It is true that the florescence of Greece came with a rush; but Greek civilization rose from the debris of the older Minoan one and was in contact with the cultures of Asia. In India there is no sign of an antecedent high civilization, and a greater dearth of known foreign influences between 1000 and 600 B.C. than at any other period. The transposition of the cultural center eastward must enter into the problem. Perhaps a larger and wealthier pre-Aryan population was encountered by the Aryans along the Ganges, contact and mixture with whom proved provocative of innovation. Or possibly the movement and development in the east began while the Vedas were still being composed along the Indus, and were ignored by them. Or, conceivably, the Aryans on the Ganges may have been the first comers, who quickly altered in the direction of their future civilization but remained obscure to our vision during the period in which the Vedas were being made or retained by the later comers of the Punjab, in whose memories and sub-arid environment their former steppe culture remained more unmodified. These are only speculations: they emphasize the gap in our understanding of this important chapter of world culture history.