Another census may enable us to speak with more precision with regard to these various divisions of the mass of the people of Hindustan, but meanwhile the element that seems to be most important, though the least investigated hitherto, is the extent of the aboriginal race. It has hitherto been so overlooked, that putting it at ninety millions may seem to many an exaggeration. Its intellectual inferiority has kept it in the background, but its presence everywhere seems to me the only means of explaining most of the phenomena we meet continually, especially those connected with the history of the architecture of the country. Except on some such hypothesis as that just shadowed forth, I do not know how we are to account for the presence of certain local forms of buildings we find in the north, or to explain the persistence with which they were adhered to.
When from these purely ethnographic speculations we turn to ask how far religion and race coincide, we are left with still less information of a reliable character. As a rule, the Dravidians are Saiva, and Saiva in the exact proportion of the purity of their blood. In other words, in the extreme south of India they are immensely in the majority. In Tanjore, 7 to 1 of the followers of Vishnu; in Mádura, 5 to 1; in Trichinopoly, 4 to 1; and Salem, and generally in the south, 2 to 1;[43] but as we proceed northward they become equal, and in some of the northern districts of the Madras Presidency the proportions are reversed.
In Bengal, and wherever Buddhism once prevailed, the Vaishnava sects are, as might be expected, the most numerous. Indeed if it were not that so much of the present Hindu religion is an importation into the south, and was taught to the Dravidians by Brahmans from the north, it would be difficult to understand how the Vaishnava religion ever took root there, where Buddhism itself only existed to a slight extent, and where it, too, was an importation. If, however, it is correct to assume that Saivism had its origin to the northward of the Himalayas, among the Tartar tribes of these regions, there is no difficulty in understanding its presence in Bengal to the extent to which it is found to prevail there. But, on the other hand, nothing can be more natural than that an aboriginal Naga people, who worshipped trees and serpents, should become Buddhists, as Buddhism was originally understood, and, being Buddhists, should slide downwards into the corruptions of the present Vaishnava form of faith, which is avowedly that most fashionable and most prevalent in the north of India.
One of the most startling facts brought out by the last census, is the discovery that nearly one-third of the population of Eastern Bengal are Mahomedan—20,500,000 out of 66,000,000—while in the north-west provinces the Mahomedans are less than 1-6th—4,000,000 among 25,000,000; and in Oude little more than 1-10th. It thus looks more like a matter of feeling than of race; it seems that as the inhabitants of Bengal were Buddhists, and clung to that faith long after it had been abolished in other parts of India, they came in contact with the Moslem religion before they had adopted the modern form of Vishnuism, and naturally preferred a faith which acknowledged no caste, and freed them from the exactions and tyranny of a dominant priesthood. The Mahomedan religion is in fact much more like Buddhism than are any of the modern Hindu forms, and when this non-Aryan casteless population came in contact with it, before they had adopted the new faith, and were free to choose, after the mysterious evaporation of their old beliefs, they naturally adopted the religion most resembling that in which they had been brought up. It is only in this way that it seems possible to account for the predominance of the Moslem faith in Lower Bengal and in the Punjab, where the followers of the Prophet outnumber the Hindus, in the proportion of 3 to 2, or as 9,000,000 to 6,000,000.
Where Buddhism had prevailed the choice seemed to lie between Vishnu or Mahomet. Where Saivism crept in was apparently among those races who were Turanians, or had affinities with the Tartar races, who immigrated from the north between the Christian era, and the age of the Mahomedan conquest.
To most people these may appear as rash generalisations, and at the present stage of the inquiry would be so in reality, if no further proof could be afforded. After reading the following pages, I trust most of them at least will be found to rest on the firm basis of a fair induction from the facts brought forward. It might, consequently, have appeared more logical to defer these statements to the end of the work, instead of placing them at the beginning. Unless, however, they are read and mastered first, a great deal that is stated in the following pages will be unintelligible, and the scope and purpose of the work can be neither understood nor appreciated.
1. Naga people worshipping the Trisul emblem of Buddha, on a fiery pillar.
(From a bas-relief at Amravati.)
