In the Dhendigal and neighboring Wynadd Hills appear other tribes, apparently the oldest of all the primitive races of India, and of the lowest type of humanity. They are called Shanars, and are clothed, if at all, with the bark of trees, using bows and arrows, and subsisting chiefly on roots, wild honey, and reptiles. Short in stature and agile as monkeys, living without habitations among trees, they penetrate the jungle with marvellous speed, and seem only a step removed from the orang-outang of Borneo and Sumatra. There is no doubt that these wild people, if not indigenous to the soil, occupied at one time a large portion of this country, and are the remains of that "monkey race" whom the first Aryan invaders met with, and who, with their leader Hanuman, figure so largely in the old poems as the allies of Rama in his conquest of Ceylon.
Among these numerous but isolated relics of aboriginal populations there is another and superior race, divided into several distinct nationalities, such as the Tamuls, Telingus, and Canarese, who people the greater part of Southern India. Nevertheless, between them and those still later Aryans the difference, both mental and physical, is plainly seen.
There are still current in Southern India a number of languages and dialects, which, though largely intermixed with Sanskrit terms in consequence of Aryan conquest and civilization, belong to distinct families of languages. The most comprehensive of these are the Tamul, Telingu, and Carnatic, showing the existence of separate nations at the time of the Aryan conquest. The Tamul language has no inconsiderable literature of its own.
The Mahrattas, whose chief seat is in the Deccan, belong to still another race, although there is now among them a larger infusion of Aryan blood than is to be found farther south in India.
In the van of Aryan immigration settling along the plains of the Ganges from Hurdwar down to the eastern frontier of Oude and the Raj-Mahal Hills were the Brahmans, founders of the great cities Hastinapoora ("abode of elephants"), Indraspatha, Delhi, Canouge on the Doab, Ayodhya (Oude), Benares, and Palibothra (Patna). They concentrated themselves in the upper part of the Ganges valley, but did not attempt to pass into Lower Bengal, as may be seen to-day by the physical and mental inferiority of the Bengalees to the populations of Northern Hindostan.
All travellers and historians agree in stating that the early Aryan settlers in the valley of the Ganges closely resembled the Hellenic race in Greece in almost every feature of their military, domestic, and social life. They were split up into a number of small states or communities. The Kshatryas, though originating in their military profession, and not in a single family, were not unlike the Heraclidæ, who became the royal race of the Peloponnesus. But in process of time these Kshatryas were absorbed into the Rajpoots, who are supposed to have arrived in India about the time of Alexander's invasion of the Panjaub. They settled where we find them to-day, in the neighborhood of Rohilcund and Bundelcund, and shortly after them came the Jâts, another branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family, thus completing the four great waves of the so-named Pandya, or white-faced, immigration—the Brahmans, Kshatryas, the Rajpoots, and the Jâts. It was the Brahmans who founded the celebrated Pandhya kingdom, so called from their white skins, and established the "Meerassee" system—i. e. an aristocracy of equality among the four conquering races. They shared the land equally among themselves, and regarded all others as servants or subjects.
In this primitive village-system the Brahman, or priest and poet, the Pundit, or schoolmaster, the Vakeel, or pleader, were as essential as food and drink to the community. Priest, teacher, and pleader by virtue of their high functions enjoyed peculiar and unquestioned privileges: land free of all tax was religiously assigned to them, and servants to cultivate it for their use were attached to the grant.
In each and every Hindoo village or town which has retained its old form the children even to-day are able to read, write, and cipher. But wherever the village-system has been swept away by foreign and other influences there the village school has also disappeared with it. A trial by jury, called "punchayet," was also a part of the primitive system of self-government instituted by the early Brahmans: each party named two or more arbitrators, and the judge one; the jury could not in any case be composed of less than five persons, whence the name "punchayet"—five just ones. In difficult cases the influence of the heads and elders of the village was brought to bear upon the contending parties, and the administration of justice was so pure in those days that the saying "In the punchayet is God" became proverbial.
Out of these marked mental and physical differences grew up the monstrous and extraordinary system of caste in India. Not that caste does not exist in some degree everywhere throughout the world. In the British Isles it is as fixed and absolute as a Medo-Persic law, and even among Americans a marked social inequality exists. Caste naturally sprang up with the first mingling of the conquering and conquered races on Indian soil. At first the distinctions of class and rank were no more marked than that of an English peasant and the lord of a domain, or that of the negro girl and her mistress in the United States to-day. But the proud, white-skinned Brahmans, in order to guard the purity of their own "blue blood," and to rivet their own ascendency, invented at length a distinct and most binding code of laws, and then claimed for them the divine authority of the Vèdas.
Of the four great castes that we read so much about, three only were fixed—Brahmans, Kshatryas, and the Vaisyas. This last was the common Aryan people, and they were not separated from their superiors by any harsh distinctions. But the Sudras, "the threefold black men," among whom the Aryan population established themselves, all the non-Aryan races and tribes of the peninsula of Hindostan, were kept off by a wide gulf and the most galling marks of inferiority. The Sudra could not read the Vèdas nor join in their religious meetings. He could not cook their food, or even serve in their houses; he was unclean, gross, sensual, irreligious, and therefore an abomination to the noble white-faced Aryan.