At some very remote period in the world’s history—for reasons stated in the Appendix I believe it to have been at about the epoch called by the Hindus the Kali Yug, or B.C. 3101—the Aryans, a Sanscrit-speaking people, entered India across the Upper Indus, coming from Central Asia. For a long time they remained settled in the Punjab, or on the banks of the Sarasvati, then a more important stream than now, the main body, however, still remaining to the westward of the Indus. If, however, we may trust our chronology, we find them settled 2000 years before the Christian Era, in Ayodhya, and then in the plenitude of their power. It was about that time apparently that the event took place which formed the groundwork of the far more modern poem known as the ‘Ramayana.’ The pure Aryans, still uncontaminated by admixture with the blood of the natives, then seem to have attained the height of their prosperity in India, and to have carried their victorious arms, it may be, as far south as Ceylon. There is, however, no reason to suppose that they at that time formed any permanent settlements in the Deccan, but it was at all events opened to their missionaries, and by slow degrees imbibed that amount of Brahmanism which eventually pervaded the whole of the south. Seven or eight hundred years after that time, or it may be about or before B.C. 1200, took place those events which form the theme of the more ancient epic known as the ‘Mahabharata,’ which opens up an entirely new view of Indian social life. If the heroes of that poem were Aryans at all, they were of a much less pure type than those who composed the songs of the Vedas, or are depicted in the verses of the ‘Ramayana.’ Their polyandry, their drinking bouts, their gambling tastes, and love of fighting, mark them as a very different race from the peaceful shepherd immigrants of the earlier age, and point much more distinctly towards a Tartar, trans-Himalayan origin, than to the cradle of the Aryan stock in Central Asia. As if to mark the difference of which they themselves felt the existence, they distinguished themselves, by name, as belonging to a Lunar race, distinct from, and generally antagonistic to, the Solar race, which was the proud distinction of the purer and earlier Aryan settlers in India.
Five or six hundred years after this, or about B.C. 700, we again find a totally different state of affairs in India. The Aryans no longer exist as a separate nationality, and neither the Solar nor the Lunar race are the rulers of the earth. The Brahmans have become a priestly caste, and share the power with the Kshatriyas, a race of far less purity of descent. The Vaisyas, as merchants and husbandmen, have become a power, and even the Sudras are acknowledged as a part of the body politic; and, though not mentioned in the Scriptures, the Nagas, or Snake people, had become a most influential part of the population. They are first mentioned in the ‘Mahabharata,’ where they play a most important part in causing the death of Parikshit, which led to the great sacrifice for the destruction of the Nagas by Janemajaya, which practically closes the history of the time. Destroyed, however, they were not, as it was under a Naga dynasty that ascended the throne of Magadha, in 691, that Buddha was born, B.C. 623, and the Nagas were the people whose conversion placed Buddhism on a secure basis in India, and led to its ultimate adoption by Asoka (B.C. 250) as the religion of the State.[7]
Although Buddhism was first taught by a prince of the Solar race, and consequently of purely Aryan blood, and though its first disciples were Brahmans, it had as little affinity with the religion of the Vedas as Christianity had with the Pentateuch, and its fate was the same. The one religion was taught by one of Jewish extraction to the Jews and for the Jews; but it was ultimately rejected by them, and adopted by the Gentiles, who had no affinity of race or religion with the inhabitants of Judæa. Though meant originally, no doubt, for Aryans, the Buddhist religion was ultimately rejected by the Brahmans, who were consequently utterly eclipsed and superseded by it for nearly a thousand years; and we hear little or nothing of them and their religion till they reappeared at the court of the great Vicramaditya (490-530), when their religion began to assume that strange shape which it now still retains in India. In its new form it is as unlike the pure religion of the Vedas as it is possible to conceive one religion being to another; unlike that, also, of the older portions of the ‘Mahabharata’; but a confused mess of local superstitions and imported myths, covering up and hiding the Vedantic and Buddhist doctrines, which may sometimes be detected as underlying it. Whatever it be, however, it cannot be the religion of an Aryan, or even of a purely Turanian people, because it was invented by and for as mixed a population as probably were ever gathered together into one country—a people whose feelings and superstitions it only too truly represents.
Dravidians.
Although, therefore, as was hinted above, there might be no great difficulty in recovering all the main incidents and leading features of the history of the Aryans, from their first entry into India till they were entirely absorbed into the mass of the population some time before the Christian Era, there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that their history would fully represent the ancient history of the country. The Dravidians are a people who, in historical times, seem to have been probably as numerous as the pure Aryans, and at the present day form one-fifth of the whole population of India. As Turanians, which they seem certainly to be, they belong, it is true, to a lower intellectual status than the Aryans, but they have preserved their nationality pure and unmixed, and, such as they were at the dawn of history, so they seem to be now.
Their settlement in India extends to such remote pre-historic times, that we cannot feel even sure that we should regard them as immigrants, or, at least, as either conquerors or colonists on a large scale, but rather as aboriginal in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Generally it is assumed that they entered India across the Lower Indus, leaving the cognate Brahui in Belochistan as a mark of the road by which they came, and, as the affinities of their language seem to be with the Ugrians and northern Turanian tongues, this view seems probable.[8] But they have certainly left no trace of their migrations anywhere between the Indus and the Nerbudda, and all the facts of their history, so far as they are known, would seem to lead to an opposite conclusion. The hypothesis that would represent what we know of their history most correctly would place their original seat in the extreme south, somewhere probably not far from Madura or Tanjore, and thence spreading fan-like towards the north, till they met the Aryans on the Vindhya Mountains. The question, again, is not of much importance for our present purposes, as they do not seem to have reached that degree of civilisation at any period anterior to the Christian Era which would enable them to practise any of the arts of civilised life with success, so as to bring them within the scope of a work devoted to the history of art.
It may be that at some future period, when we know more of the ancient arts of these Dravidians than we now do, and have become familiar with the remains of the Accadians or early Turanian inhabitants of Babylonia, we may detect affinities which may throw some light on this very obscure part of history. At present, however, the indications are much too hazy to be at all relied upon. Geographically, however, one thing seems tolerably clear. If the Dravidians came into India in historical times, it was not from Central Asia that they migrated, but from Babylonia, or some such southern region of the Asiatic continent.
Dasyus.
In addition to these two great distinct and opposite nationalities, there exists in India a third, which, in pre-Buddhist times, was as numerous, perhaps even more so, than either the Aryans or Dravidians, but of whose history we know even less than we do of the two others. Ethnologists have not yet been even able to agree on a name by which to call them. I have suggested Dasyus,[9] a slave people, as that is the name by which the Aryans designated them when they found them there on their first entrance into India, and subjected them to their sway. Whoever they were, they seem to have been a people of a very inferior intellectual capacity to either the Aryans or Dravidians, and it is by no means clear that they could ever of themselves have risen to such a status as either to form a great community capable of governing themselves, and consequently having a history,[10] or whether they must always have remained in the low and barbarous position in which we now find some of their branches. When the Aryans first entered India they seem to have found them occupying the whole valley of the Ganges—the whole country in fact between the Vindhya and the Himalayan Mountains.[11] At present they are only found in anything like purity in the mountain ranges that bound that great plain. There they are known as Bhîls, Coles, Sontals, Nagas, and other mountains tribes. But they certainly form the lowest underlying stratum of the population over the whole of the Gangetic plain.[12] So far as their affinities have been ascertained, they are with the trans-Himalayan population, and it either is that they entered India through the passes of that great mountain range, or it might be more correct to say that the Thibetans are a fragment of a great population that occupied both the northern and southern slope of that great chain of hills at some very remote pre-historic time.
Whoever they were, they were the people who, in remote times, were apparently the worshippers of Trees and Serpents; but what interests us more in them, and makes the inquiry into their history more desirable, is that they were the people who first adopted Buddhism in India, and they, or their congeners, are the only people who, in historic times, as now, adhered, or still adhere to, that form of faith. No purely Aryan people ever were, or ever could be, Buddhist, nor, so far as I know, were any Dravidian community ever converted to that faith. But in Bengal, in Ceylon, in Thibet, Burmah, Siam, and China, wherever a Thibetan people exists, or a people allied to them, there Buddhism flourished and now prevails. But in India the Dravidians resisted it in the south, and a revival of Aryanism abolished it in the north.