CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE
India like China and Egypt is reputed to be a land of evasive mysteries. Like them it had a self-contained civilisation with apparently no desire to reach out from it to the greater world. To be sure, India was not shut off from outside contact as fully as China, for the Phœnicians were early drawn by its fabled treasures to visit it in a commercial capacity, and tradition relates that, at least once, Assyrian forces had invaded its bounds on a less peaceful mission. But, nevertheless, the share of the Indians themselves in such intercourse was largely passive. They received foreign traders, unlike the early Egyptians; and they repelled foreign invaders; but they themselves seemed just as little inclined as before to spread beyond national bounds. Even the Egyptians had their periods of foreign conquests, when they penetrated Asia, at least as far as the Tigris, but if the Hindus ever yielded to a like impulse there is no record of it preserved to us. Yet their influence upon the nations that traded with them must have been considerable and they thus have a larger share in the scheme of ancient history than China. Even so, however, their place is a minor one compared with that of Egypt and Babylonia. Even were it greater, the records from which to reconstruct its history are meagre and we shall be obliged to content ourselves with a sketch that is at best but fragmentary.
There is another point of view from which the Hindus have an interest exceeding that of even the most important of ancient nations that we have hitherto studied. For with them we come for the first time in contact with the great Aryan race. Hitherto we have traced the history of the Hamitic, Semitic, and Turanian races, but now with the Aryan race we enter upon what may be considered the direct channel of European history, for practically all subsequent history has to do with this race.
Turning then to the Hindus, the easternmost branch of the great Indo-Germanic or Aryan race, we find, as was to be expected, the same utter obscurity as to origin that we have seen encompassing all questions of racial beginnings elsewhere. One perhaps is justified, however, in feeling that in the case of the Hindus secure traditions carry us one stage farther back than is the case, for example, with such races as the Egyptians and Chinese. For it is accepted as a clear historic fact that the Aryan race, who came to be at a very early day,—at least 1000 B.C.,—the absolutely dominant force practically throughout the vast territory of India, had invaded this territory from the northwest; had come, in short, from that Central-Asiatic centre of distribution which we have just spoken of as the long accepted traditional cradle of the Aryan races. Whether at a still earlier period this migration had its source in more distant lands, including ultimately the Atlantic borders of Europe, is altogether problematical, but that the immediate source of invasion was Central Asia is not to be doubted.
The beginning of this invasion in which the Central-Asiatic Aryan people descended upon the northwestern regions of the land, which we now term India, date from a vaguely determined period, which can hardly be more recent than 2000 years B.C. From this beginning the invaders spread farther and farther beyond the Ganges, occupying the great fertile plains of Central India, and ultimately the plateau of the Deccan, and crowding the original inhabitants into out-of-the-way corners of the land till they seemed almost exterminated. This extermination of the original or non-Aryan population of India, however, was only relative, as even now there are many millions of their descendants still living in India; but the invaders became so utterly dominant and so enormously preponderant in numbers that the original inhabitants may practically be disregarded in treating of Indian history.
The exact details of the early history of the Aryans in India are quite unknown. So far as the history of this period can be reconstructed at all, materials for it are furnished, as in the case of the early history of almost all other nations, solely by traditions, which came ultimately, and that at a very early day, to be woven into a system of theology. Here, as elsewhere, those tales and myths of godlike heroes and hero-gods which embalmed the spirit of many aspiring generations, came ultimately, when gathered into books, to be accepted as a divine revelation made to a single early prophet. Here, as among several other nations, there was also built up a great system of national epic poetry. Parts of this are preserved to us under the titles of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and are in themselves, as is always the case with the great national epics, important sources of history if properly interpreted.
The great religious books bore the name of Vedas, and these at a relatively late stage of national evolution,—yet, perhaps as early as 800 or 900 B.C.,—were gathered into a document, which came to be known as Manu’s Code, Manu being a name which signified ethnologically the first man, and the code being of course the supposed divine revelation delivered to that first man. This code in its various departments is the chief source on which historians must draw in interpreting the early history of India. At the time when this code was written, society in India had already reached a relatively high grade of civilisation; in particular, the priests had fixed their firm hold upon the national life, and that strange system of castes, which is so typical a feature in Indian life, had become firmly established.
Some centuries later, the power of the Brahmans was for a time threatened through the advent of a new prophet and philosophical teacher in the person of the prince Buddha. This reformer lived about the 6th century B.C. He was of royal blood, but he early threw aside the prerogatives of his birth and became a peripatetic philosopher. His aim was essentially the same as that which actuated another Aryan, Socrates by name, in the distant land of Greece, at a slightly later period. He strove to inculcate lessons of right living, of practical morality. With religion, as such, he professed to have little concern, yet soon after his death his teachings served as the foundations for a new religious system, which spread rapidly under stimulus of persecution and waged a long, fierce warfare with the established creeds of Brahmanism.
As regards India itself, this religious rebellion did not prove a revolution, for the established religion of Brahmanism remained in firm possession of the field, expelling the would-be usurper. But the doctrines of Buddha thus renounced in the land of their origin, spread rapidly to the east, into Tibet and China, and are to-day accepted as the one true faith by some scores of millions of people—an appreciable proportion of the total population of the globe: perhaps as large a number as subscribe to the tenets of any other single form of religious belief.
As to the political history of India, in a narrower sense, comparatively little need be said, so closely is this history bound up with the growth and struggles of religious doctrines. The land was early divided into lesser principalities ruled by petty sovereigns, who themselves were more or less dominated by the priesthood. There were, of course, times when one or another of these principalities was aggrandised through the efforts of an unusual sovereign, and, as we shall see, there were periods and places where memorials of the power of princes and of priests were left in the form of extraordinary temples and grottos of unique design and execution. But beyond the fact of the gradual sweep of the Aryan civilisation from the northwest toward the south and east, until it gradually encompassed the entire Indian peninsula, and the further fact of the growth of Brahmanism, with all that it implied, until it dominated the entire race, there is no single main current in the evolution of the people of ancient India, which the present-day historian can trace in any such clean-cut way, as, for example, he can trace the succession of dominant dynasties in Egypt, or in Assyrio-Babylonia. [a]
THE LAND
On the southern border of that central highland which, like “a high firm rocky islet in the storm-tossed sea,” forms the centre of the Asiatic continent, rise the Himalayas, the highest mountain-range on earth, in parallel chains broken by wild abysses. Boundless fields of snow and ice which even the power of the tropical sun cannot affect and white mountain tops of shimmering brilliance surround the Himavat, “the King of rocks,” as it is termed in the Indian epic, where “nothing blooms, not a spear of grass puts forth its green, and no bird soars through the air, where not a living thing stirs save the wind alone.” The dead silence of ice-bound nature reigns everywhere, no plant, no moss springs from the steep snow-covered slopes. Vegetation commences only at the third ridge of mountains, and, making its first appearance in oaks, birches, and pines and in a scanty cultivation of corn, soon shows its full power in the mighty tree-growth of the lower forest region, which then passes into a highland on the west, and on the east into a richly watered plain, where in the tree-high jungle grass of the impenetrable primeval forest, tigers, elephants, and huge snakes abound, and in the stagnant waters and swamps the plants rot and “the air is filled with foul pestilence.” “This mountainous wall,” says Duncker, “which extends about 1750 miles from west to east, determines the nature and life of the country that stretches out southward from it as the peninsula of Italy does from the European Alps,” and gives it the character of a “continent isolated geographically, climatically, and historically.”
The Himalaya Mountains protect highland and plains from the rough north winds which blow cold and devastating over the highland of central Asia; but they also check the rain clouds, the collected moisture of the ocean which the monsoons drive hither from the southern sea. So these clouds have to pour forth their store of water on the plains at the foot of the Himalayas, “turning the sun’s heat into coolness and the parched vegetation into a luxuriant green.” Hence arises that variety of climate and vegetation which has ever caused India to appear the most blessed part of the earth, the fruit-garden of the world.
The shape of India can be compared to two triangles, which, coinciding at their base, extend their two apexes to opposite points of the compass, northward and southward. The northern triangle, whose sides are intersected by lofty chains of mountains, while broad lowlands and plains stretch over the middle, is Hindustan proper. Across it the mightiest rivers in the country, the Indus in the west, the Brahmaputra in the east, and the Ganges in the middle, after bursting forth from the icefields of the Himalayas, follow their tortuous courses to the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal.
The southern triangle, on the other hand, the sides of which consist of flat coast and the middle of broad plateaus and chains of mountains, is formed by the Deccan, the middle one of the three great peninsulas which extend from the mainland of Asia toward the south.
Hindustan is composed of the two river valleys of the Indus and Ganges, which are quite distinct in nature and history. Both rivers have their source in the northern mountains, in the vicinity of the sacred lakes, where Kailasa, the mountain of the gods, rises to an unmeasured height, in the same district where the three other great streams of India, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Jumna, have their rise.
The Indus at first turns westward, then, not far from the famous vale of Kashmir, it takes a southerly direction, and increased by the Jhelum, Sutlej, and three other tributaries, it flows on through the Punjab (“Land of the Five Rivers”) to the Indian Ocean.
The Ganges, on the contrary, which with its tributary the Jumna takes a southerly course, soon reaches the Indian plains, but, checked in its course by the rugged Vindhya Mountains, it turns to the east, and increased by many tributaries from north and south, it pours its fertilising waters over its low banks, producing that luxuriant vegetation which manifests itself both in the mighty tree-growth with its shady boughs and tops, and in the richness of the splendid products and the tropical flora.
With this fertility, however, is combined an enervating sultry atmosphere and a foul pestilential air, arising from the heat and moisture of the climate, which has most disastrous effects in the alluvial district of Bengal, where the waters of the Brahmaputra in their southerly course approach the wide stream of the Ganges.
“The district above the Delta,” says Lassen, “where the still undivided Ganges is so wide that one can scarcely see from bank to bank, is a most rich and fertile country, but of an enervating and sultry climate. In the Delta itself an even more luxuriant power of production manifests itself. The earth brings forth such mighty, impenetrable thickets of trees and climbing plants that man, unable to contend with it, is obliged to give it over to the wild beasts for a dwelling, to the tiger for sovereignty.”
The Indus first follows, in a westerly direction, the great rock-gorge which runs with a depth of ten thousand feet between the parallel mountain chains of the Karakoram (Muz-Tagh) and the Himalayas. After breaking through the Hindu Kush mountains in a narrow bed, it flows in a southerly direction from the point where, not far from the city of Attock, at the west of the flowery Vale of Kashmir, its waters are increased by the river Kabul.
The Vale of Kashmir, which from snowfield to snowfield has a width of only ten to twelve miles, once enjoyed a great fame as the seat of the original paradise of the human race. And although more exact investigations have stripped off much of its poetic charm, it may nevertheless, on account of the fertility of its soil, its glorious climate, and the beauty of its mountain scenery be regarded as one of the most blessed spots upon earth. It forms an isolated world by itself, is favourably situated for trade with the north and the west, and was in earliest times one of the principal seats of Indian culture. In the mountains of Kashmir rises the Jhelum (Hydaspes) [the ancient Vitasta], one of those famous four rivers which together with the Indus have given the country the name of Punjab (or Land of the Five Rivers). The most easterly river is the Sutlej, called in its lower course Garra, and by the Greeks, Hyphasis.
After the Indus has received these rivers, its valley is bounded on the west by the mountain chains of Persia, and on the east by a wide waterless steppe, which extends from the foothills of the Himalayas to the sea, and which gives only sparse nourishment to the buffalo herds, asses and camels. Near the mouth of the river, inundations of the sea, the dense growth of rushes and reeds and the want of fresh water prevent better cultivation and a denser population.
Westward of the upper Indus lies the rich beautiful mountain land of Afghanistan, intersected by branches of the Hindu Kush Mountains, and since remote antiquity the great caravan route—“a long gateway between Iran and India, through which the products of the land as well as those of the spirit passed for exchange.” In the south of Afghanistan the western boundary of India is formed by some chains of mountains that tower above the low narrow banks of the Indus; first by the Sulaiman chain, with the “Throne of Solomon,” 11,317 feet high, many narrow passes and bare heights, and then by the Brahui Mountains with a southern branch stretching to the sea, and harbouring in its roadless, secluded valleys a black race of strange form and language. In the west these mountains traverse the plateau of Kelat, whose narrow rocky gorges afford the sole pass to the traveller who desires to go from the central Indus valley to Persia. The eastern side of the mountains as far as the bank of the Indus, Sewestan and Kakha Gardara, with its splendid date palms, is still reckoned as Indian territory.
The southern triangle, the Deccan, a tableland of a tropical character, is quite different from Hindustan, which with the exception of the mountainous district in the south of the Himalayas and in the north of Vindhyas, mainly embraces the plains in the two river valleys of the Indus and the Ganges.
From the girdle of the Vindhya Mountains which lie like a great bulwark in front of the Deccan, the bold rugged chain of the Aravalli, rich in myths, branches off to the northwest, while the Ghats stretch along the western coast, leaving only a narrow strip of land with small, westerly flowing streams. The tableland slopes gradually to the east until it forms a rich, well-watered, sea-washed valley near the Bay of Bengal, which receives most of the rivers, like the Mahanadi, the Godavari, the Krishna [Kistna], the Kaveri, etc. Only two of the rivers of the Vindhya, the Narbada and the Tapti, flow westward.
As Lassen says: “The Deccan can be described as a strip of coast in the west, another in the east and in the middle among the Ghats, a mountainous land cut up by streams into several small districts.” The highland in the centre, intersected by many river valleys and wild defiles, “has on the whole no very great elevation, and still it is entirely within the cooler mountain district and removed from the sultry heat of the lowlands; it is only quite in the south that it is high enough for the formation of snow.”
The peninsula, therefore, presents an extremely varied natural aspect, a “grand alternation of waste shifting sands and rich alluvial deposits, of bare mountain-sides and densely wooded swampy lowlands, of narrow defiles and open river beds; and yet it lacks the many indentations of the sea with their navigable rivers which have made western Europe such a populous land.”
The Vindhya Mountains, although only of moderate height, formed a wide barrier between Hindustan and the Deccan, and with their impassable ruggedness, luxuriant forests, and wild beasts afforded the aborigines a safe refuge from the northern conquerors. And thus, even in the splendid period of Brahmanism, unconquered races maintained themselves in independence in these impenetrable defiles and wild forests of the central country, and did not give up their language, their savage nature, and their rude religious cult with its human sacrifices, for the orderly life, the settled state, and the mild Brahmanic religion of the Aryan Hindu.
The alternation of highland and valley, the pleasant mixture of mountain air and tropical heat, the invigorating influence of the moisture, which the nearness of the sea, the countless streams, and the regularly recurring rains of the monsoon season spread over the whole land, produced that richness of vegetation, that fertility of soil, and that fulness and variety of every kind of natural product which even in antiquity caused India to be praised as a land of happiness and blessing, made it the aim of the world’s commerce, but at the same time aroused the cupidity of the conqueror.
Whilst the snow valleys and mountain districts of the Himalayas with their temperate climate, produce plants and cereals, fruit and forest trees corresponding to southern European species, in the plains of the Jumna and the Ganges the vegetation of the tropical climate grows along with that of the temperate zones. By the side of corn, legumes, and fruit in most luxuriant abundance there is here rice and cotton, sugar and indigo, and a wonderful southern flora of a marvellous richness of colour; and in the districts of the Deccan, where, as on the coast of Malabar, the monsoons and the mountain streams bring an abundance of moisture, the noble products of India ripen to a threefold harvest.
Here the most varied tropical plants thrive in rare abundance, here with industry three rice harvests can be obtained, here grow the sugar-cane and the pepper plant, the banana and the mango; here rise stately forests of the Indian oak, called teak, of the precious sandal-wood, of palm and fig trees with their cool shady avenues; this is the home of the betel-nut tree and the nutmeg tree; here the land is redolent of spices and sweet odours; here blooms the vari-coloured water lily, the sacred lotus plant in whose seed the form of the future plant is visible, wherefore it was to the Indian a symbol of the evolution of the world from its original germ.
The streams carry gold sand, in the mountains are diamond mines, and precious stones and crystals of the most beautiful brilliancy, the seas furnish pearls for the adornment of temples and for jewelry. A numerous fauna, particularly the cow, the horse and the elephant, has the most varied relations with man, and hence also occupies an important place in the religious conceptions of the Hindu; the goat of the Himalayas supplies the fine wool for the cashmere shawls, the musk deer gives perfume, the silkworm spins the noble thread for the most costly fabric; and the great dogs of some of the western states were trained by the Indians and Persians for the chase and for war. The bright-feathered birds (parrots), which even learn the language of man, the peacocks with their broad tails of dark blue and emerald, and the countless family of monkeys excited the admiration of Greek antiquity from Herodotus and Ctesias down to the authors of the Alexandrian period [Megasthenes]. India was always the land of wonders, where fancy established her kingdom, where legend and poetry loved to tarry.[b]
This then is the theatre of India’s history. What of the strange people who have dwelt there so little changed by time? The ethnology of the Indians has been debated fiercely and long.
THE EARLY PEOPLES OF INDIA
The population of India amounts to about a fourth part of that of the globe and consists of various races. In the Vindhyas the Munda tribes are still to be found to a great extent in their original condition and without the knowledge of the use of metal. They seem to be the original inhabitants, related to the other coloured peoples of southern Asia, and appear to have been driven from the plains into the mountains by nations who immigrated at a later period. Their religion is fetish-worship. Their clothing is limited to what is absolutely indispensable.
To them belong the Kols who inhabit the highlands of Chota Nagpur in southern Behar, northwest of Calcutta: they are divided into various sections, the Santals, the Kols of Singbum or Larka Kols, the Kols of Bhumij, and the Munda Kols south of Ranchi in the Kolhan, and others; the Khamti, a kindred people, live on the borders of further India: the Ramusi, who live between Poona and Kolapur and the Warali, southeast of Damaun (between Bombay and Surat), speak the Sanskrit tongue of the Mahrattas; the Bhils dwell in the woods on the Tapti and Nerbudda and in Guzerat, but have also adopted civilisation together with the Aryan language. The Mairs in the Aravalli hills southwest of Ajmir and the Mina in the neighbourhood of the Jumna are also Munda tribes.
The Deccan is inhabited mainly by the Dravidians, whose languages are entirely different from the Munda and Sanskrit tongues. Like the Munda they have dark skins, but with the exception of a few mountain peoples they are civilised and they possess voluminous writings. They include the Tamil in the southernmost part of the Deccan, extending from Palikat (north of Madras) to Cape Comorin and east of a line drawn to the same cape from Bangalore through Coimbatore. The Telinga or Telugu (Sanskrit, Andhra) inhabit the country between Palikat and Orissa, and are bordered on the northwest by the Mahratta country. Inscriptions tell us of Andhra kings of the first century B.C. The Telugu names of many towns on the east coast show that this people were once extended over an area which reached much further north and even to Bengal. Like the Tamil they have both a popular and a literary language. The Tulu in the neighbourhood of Mangalore, formerly also reached to the coast, where the Malabar are now to be found; the latter received Christianity from Persia at an early period and wrote their language in Syrian characters called Karshunish.
North of them are the Kanarese, inhabiting the coast and the inland districts towards Mysore, where they join uncivilised mountain peoples, the Kota, Badaga, and Koduga (Coorg). The Toda in the Nilgiris north of Coimbatore, represent the unmixed type of the race; they are taller than the other peoples and practise polyandry. Their religion consists in the fear of spirits, whose malignity is opposed by magic; the grand function of the village priest is the milking of the cows. The Uraon Kols and the Rajmahal Kols of the Lower Ganges as far as Gondwana are also of Dravidian origin. They are the pariahs of the social system; the Gonds speak Hindi, a Sanskrit language. They worship two gods, from whom proceed the good and evil in creation.
Other Dravidian peoples are the Ku or Kandhs in the mountains of Orissa, and finally, the Brahuis in the mountains of Baluchistan, south of Kelat in eastern Iran—the Ethiopians of the Greeks. Their presence in this remote territory is a token of the wide extension of the race in former times, and they perhaps migrated from the highlands of Asia.
Yet another nationality is represented by the original inhabitants of Ceylon (called in Sanskrit Sinhaladvipa, or the Island of the Sinhalas), the Vaddas, i.e. hunters, east of the Mahawalliganga who are still preserved from the admixture of foreign blood; ethnologically they show a resemblance to the ancient Dravidian peoples, but their language, the Elu, is quite peculiar to themselves.
It is supposed that about the year 2000 the immigration of Aryan (Indo-European) tribes started from the northwest. At some undefined period these Aryans formed one people with the Iranians, and their language, Sanskrit, is closely related to the Iranian. About 1500 years before Christ they had spread over the territory of the Indus, but it was not till five hundred years later that they began to conquer the plain of the Ganges, and the severe struggles which they had to sustain against the population are reflected in the epic as well as in countless legends; for in virtue of a peculiar love of the fantastic and thanks to the diligence of Brahman priests, the Aryan Indians have enveloped their ancient history in a cloud of myths and literally revelled in the construction of chronological systems covering immeasurable periods of time.
At the time of the Ophir voyage, when Solomon sent to India for ivory, apes, and peacocks, there were as yet no Aryans in southern India, for the name for apes, in Hebrew “qof,” and in Sanskrit “kapi,” cannot be an Aryan word; it first comes to hand in the latest book of the Rig-Veda, but also appears in the form “qaf” as early as the IVth Dynasty in Egypt, and the name for peacocks, “tuki,” has been borrowed from the Malabar “togei.” From an ethnological point of view the Aryans of India are not a pure race, as they appear to have been when they dwelt in the valley of the Indus; for in the Veda a contrast is often drawn between a clear complexion and the dark skin of the indigenous peoples. They must on the contrary have mixed with natives at some period when a peculiar civilisation and, in consequence, an increasing separation of the different classes was in course of development; and not only has the physical type greatly altered its original Indo-European character, but the whole civilisation of the Indians has received the stamp of southern and eastern Asia, which makes them appear to us even stranger than the Asiatic Semites or the Egyptians. This fact is often overlooked, because the use of the Aryan speech continually reminds us of the close relationship between the Indian Aryans and the Persians and Europeans. And it is not merely that the Aryans have assumed the racial marks of the Dravidian, but on the other hand the pure type of the indigenous population has only been preserved in the uncivilised mountain peoples. In later centuries the course of history introduced still further elements, as the Indo-Scythians in the northwest, the Persians and Arabians, and, finally, the Europeans, including those Mohammedans who have had so much influence on religious development.
In the territory in which the Aryan population preponderated, the Sanskrit language superseded the native one. The most widely diffused language of India is the Hindi, whose sphere is bordered in the west by the languages of the Punjab and of Sind with that of Cutch, in the south by the Guzerati language, the Mahratta, and the Telinga, and in the east by the tongues of Orissa and Bengal, to which the Asami is added. With the exception of Telinga, these are all Aryan languages.
In the north, Hindi reaches as far as the Terai, a vast prairie and forest inhabited by elephants, rhinoceros, tigers and other wild beasts, beyond which, extended over the southern slope of the Himalayas, dwells a whole series of peoples. In the high mountains and beyond them these peoples adjoin the Tibetans; the Rong or Lepcha in Sikkim, whose language, a Tibetan dialect, became known a few years ago; the Kiratis and Limbus of eastern Nepal; the Murmis and Newars in Nepal; the Kumaunis, and others.
The Mohammedan Indians have enriched Hindi with Arabic and Persian words and make use of the Arabic writing. This language which differs greatly from Hindi in grammar and syntax, is called Hindustani and is the chief speech current in India. Within the Hindi, Kellogg distinguishes eleven idioms, and these are again subdivided into dialects. Besides the Sanskrit languages already mentioned which border on Hindi, there are also some to be found in the Himalayas, especially in Kashmir and in Dardistan, a country bordered on the north by Muztagh (Karakoram), on the west by the mountain chain which divides it from the country of Chitral in the north, on the east by a similar range between the Indus and Krishnaganga, and on the northeast by the territories of Rongdo and Baltistan. According to Ujfalvy the inhabitants of the latter are also Aryans who have adopted the Tibetan language. Dardistan is inhabited by various races, who only immigrated in the Middle Ages and at a still later period, and even now are still in an unsettled condition. It was not explored till recent times by Schlagintweit, Leitner, Hayward and Biddulph. Whilst in ancient times the Darada (Dardæ) were spread over the valley of the Indus as far as the gold-fields of Thok Jalung, the name of Dard was found by Biddulph only opposite the entrance to the Kandia valley, where the Indus turns its course southward.
Another widespread people are the Shins, whose special seat is Gilgit and their language a Sanskrit tongue, closely related to those of the Punjab and Kashmir and to Hindustani. These people found their way from Shinkari between the Indus and Krishnaganga, and form the main population of the Indus valley from Ghor to Ghorband: their language has several dialects and in Baltistan they call themselves Rom, as the gypsies do.
Another daughter-language of Sanskrit is spoken by the tribes in the southwest of Dardistan, who claim to have come from Swat. This language has also different dialects as the Gowro, the Narisati and the language of the Siah-posh in Wamastan. On the other hand the people in Hunza, Nagar and Yassin speak Burishki, which Biddulph regards as the language of the Yuechi. The Yidghah, a Persian idiom, is also found in Dardistan.
The oldest monuments of Indo-Aryan literature, namely the Veda hymns, contain many allusions to historical conditions, which the poet, however, assumed to be well known, or they may have been related in prose passages inserted between the verses which are all that now remain. They mention five peoples, the Turwasa, Jadu, Anu, Druhju and the Puru, who finally won the upper hand after the battle of the ten kings and are called Kuru in the epic. Besides this they mention a series of kings and priests who can, however, be assigned to no definite time or place.
The social conditions are primitive, and whilst the original inhabitants had advanced so far in civilisation that they possessed fortified towns and great wealth in herds, furniture, metal ornaments and good weapons, the Aryans were still in the condition of cattle-breeders, to whom the possessions of the enemy were a welcome spoil. Even in the epic, the Danawa Maja, a Daitja, or enemy of the (Aryan) gods, and architect of the Asuras, builds a palace for the sons of Pandu; for it was from the natives that the Aryans learnt the art of building in stone, they themselves, like other Indo-Europeans, understanding only how to build in wood and piles, or they dwelt in caves.
The Aryan prayers for the prosperity of their own cows, for a rich produce of butter, grass and crops, were directed to divine beings in whom natural phenomena and the elements are personified, but which also embody moral conceptions. But the songs of the Rig-Veda date from such various periods that, side by side with these ideas of a simple age, we also discern a detailed picture of sacrificial rites and an advanced culture, and even the appearance of doubt of the religious verities; it is quite comprehensible that new poems might at any time come into existence, or new families of singers (Rishis) appear on the scene with their store of hymns for sacrificial purposes, until a general collection of songs had been drawn up and adapted to a form of worship regulated in perpetuity by agreement between all the families of Rishis whom their class interests made anxious to be reconciled with one another.
The four Vedas (or collections of ceremonial songs), were supplemented by an enormous mass of literature proceeding from various sections, or schools. This includes, first the Brahmana, works serving to guide the priests in the procedure relating to sacrifices, then those explaining and justifying the application of the verses to each separate part of the service on mythological or symbolic grounds. Here the view taken attains the region of philosophical speculation, so that in these Upanishads, some one hundred and fifty in number, lie the beginnings of a philosophy of religion, and the later works of this class contain a regular philosophical system. The inexhaustible knowledge laid up in these numerous works was finally epitomised in the shortest conceivable form in the so-called Sutra (manuals), which, however, are frequently written only in a language of technical symbols so that they require an explanation from the teacher or a commentary. They are intended to be learnt by heart.
The Vedas cannot have been committed to the Indian writing at a very early period, since we know of none older than the inscriptions of Asoka, which date from the middle of the third century B.C.; one of the writings which here appear, and which runs from left to right, is the Watteluta alphabet, derived from those Arabic alphabets to be seen in the inscriptions found in Harra or Safa in eastern Hauran and deciphered by Halévy in 1877. This character belongs to the Alexandrian period. In the northwest of India a second alphabet is to be found on the Asoka inscriptions and on coins. It runs from right to left and is considered to be the same which was brought here in the Persian epoch and was derived from the Aramaic used in the Persian empire; however, it too may have been introduced later, for it strongly resembles the alphabet of the Blacas papyrus (assigned to the age of the Ptolemies, or, with more probability, to that of the later Persians), and other papyruses of the Alexandrian epoch. It is not conceivable that Asoka and those who issued the coins would have made use of these alphabets if an older and more perfect one had existed in India and been used for the Vedas; but in order to commit the Vedas to writing and to fix their form in all the details of phonetics and accentuation, a character was required whose perfection is only attained by the cultured Devanagari writing, which appears to have been first used in Malwa, the kingdom of Vikramaditya: it is still less conceivable that, for instance, the Pratisakhya sutras of the four Vedas should have had before them a work in a more imperfect writing, since these compendiums of phonology descend to the most extreme subtleties and in doing so presuppose the precise text which we now possess and which must consequently have received a fixed form at least at the epoch of these grammatical works.
If we fix the conquest of the territory of the Ganges in the period at the beginning of the first millennium B.C., we do so on no historical evidence but only on the grounds of the probability that that conquest extended over hundreds of years and that in the first centuries before Christ it was an accomplished fact. The Mahabharata, that vast epic compared with which Homer seems a mere pocket-book, only received its present form some centuries after Christ, and the lists we have of the kings of those peoples who figure in the poem, especially those of the country of Magadha (Behar), are unreliable and vary in the different copies in which they are found.
The spread of the Aryans along the coast of the Deccan and as far as Ceylon, of which the Ramayana gives a fabulous account, is also not chronologically definable, for this poem in twenty-four thousand distiches is also a very late product, and that extension lay far behind it, for in the ancient geographers we already find Aryan names affixed to towns in southern India.
The first piece of information concerning Indian history whose date is certain is that of Darius’ conquest of the territory of the Indus, which formed a Persian satrapy. Since then the western countries of India have been under foreign rulers, first under the Bactrian and Indo-Scythian kings, later on under the Sassanids, as is shown both by Indian coins of contemporary kings with a Sassanian stamp and legends in Pahlavi and Sanskrit and by historical notices concerning the relations of the kings of Marwar to Peroz and Anoscharwan, so that the conquest of Mahmoud of Ghazni and later rulers only renewed the ancient claims of Iran upon Indian possessions.[c]
Ruins of Old Indian Temple at Bombay
