These people, speaking Indo-Chinese languages, surround India proper on the north and east in a crescent-shaped curve, mostly in the valleys of lofty and rugged mountains. From the eastern mountains projects into the midst of the modern province of Assam a range of hills, dividing the valley of the Brahmaputra from that of Sylhet, which is watered by the Surma. Readers of Sir W. W. Hunter's delightful little book on The Thackerays in India will not need to be told where Sylhet is, or what sort of a place it is. This range of hills is inhabited by the Garos on the west, and the Nagas on the east, both Tibeto-Burman races. Between them, on one of the most beautiful plateaus in the world, are the Khāsis, once, as I have said elsewhere, regarded as being as isolated and unique as our European Basques, but now proved to be, linguistically at least, connected with the Mons in Burma, and many races and tribes in Further India and Australonesia.
All these Indo-Chinese people seem to have come originally from north-western China, following the beds of great rivers in their travel; down the Chindwin, the Irrawaddy, and the Salween into Burma, down the Brahmaputra into Assam, and up the Brahmaputra into Tibet. There seem to have been at least three waves of migration. First, in prehistoric times, there was a Mon-Khmer invasion into Further India and Assam. Next, also at an unknown date, was a Tibeto-Burman invasion into the same regions and Tibet. Next the Tai branch of the Siamese-Chinese entered eastern Burma about the sixth century A.D. A fourth Tibeto-Burmese invasion, that of the Kachins, when in Lord Dufferin's time, the British annexed Upper Burma.
I think I have now said enough to show how the languages of India are distributed. It only remains to give a brief and cursory account of the Indian Religions. This is a subject on which big books might be, and have been, written. But, even in so small a book on the Peoples of India it seems necessary to give some account of their religious divisions.
[4] As in Europe, the modern Aryan languages differ from one another chiefly in survivals from the indigenous earlier speech which preceded each of them.
CHAPTER III
THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA
(1) Animism. At the base of all the religions, perhaps at the base of all religions all over the world, lies a mass of primitive beliefs, not perhaps yet consciously classed by the holders of them as distinctly religious, which are called by the question-begging name of Animism. By this statement, I mean merely that many of the more ignorant and simple folk who profess and call themselves Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muhammadans, or Christians, are in fact at the animistic stage of intellectual evolution. The religious impulse is there, but has not become specialised. There is no religious theorising, but merely communal and transmitted beliefs about the nature of things in general. Perhaps I had better quote Sir H. H. Risley's definition of Hinduism as it exists in India. "It conceives of man," he says, "as passing through life surrounded by a ghostly company of powers, elements, tendencies, mostly impersonal in their character, shapeless phantasms of which no image can be made and no definite idea can be formed. Some of these have departments or spheres of influence of their own: one presides over cholera, another over small pox, another over cattle disease; some dwell in rocks, others haunt trees, others, again, are associated with rivers, whirlpools, waterfalls, or strange pools hidden in the depths of the hills. All of them require to be diligently propitiated by reason of the ills which proceed from them, and usually the land of the village provides the means for their propitiation."
If this definition, that of a kindly and experienced student of primitive thought and emotion, be correct, there is already an attempt at analysis and classification. But the analysis is feeble, the classification very elementary. The differences which seem obvious to the civilised man, who inherits the analytic inventions and investigations of long series of ancestors, are not yet realised. There is practically no distinction between things animate and inanimate, since all may be maleficent and must therefore, on occasion, be propitiated. There is no sense of things subter-human, human, and superhuman. Still less, of course, is there any recognition of the difference between things religious and things secular. Grown men face the facts of life as children do, and receive the impressions life conveys to them en masse, without making much effort to sort them out. In our own case, we learn to classify from our elders, and classification, literary, scientific, social, religious, is a large part of what we call education. How does primitive man begin to sort out the facts of life, to remember them in classes, to discriminate between human beings and other animals, to place animals above inanimate things, himself above animals, and, finally, the gods above himself? The history of the evolution of Hinduism throws some light on this evolution as it occurred in India.
Meanwhile, it is worth noticing that the Census returns of 1901 returned the Animists of India at only about 8½ millions, or less than 3 per cent. Those who returned themselves as Hindu or Musalmān were so recorded, whatever their degree of mental and social culture. An attempt has been made in the Census of 1911 to distinguish between true Hindus and Animists who call themselves Hindu. How far the attempt was successful, I do not know. I can well believe that it was not welcomed even by educated and intelligent Hindus. Many years ago, I remember a highly educated Hindu in Bengal telling me that there is no distinction between Animists and Hindus; that an Animist is merely a Hindu "in the making" as it were. But perhaps that assertion only amounted to an admission that the Hindu mind is averse from the kind of intellectual evolution by conscious analysis and classification which is dear to Western imaginations. Yet the history of Hinduism and its branches shows that such an evolution has taken place.
Plate VII