The routes which lead from the east into the country of the Ganges
seem not to have been affected to the same extent by climatic changes.
seem not to have been affected to the same extent by climatic changes.
Cambridge History of India - v1
Therefore the Khyber route has been the more
frequently trodden, for it leads directly, between the desert and the moun-
tains, upon the Delhi gateway of inner India.
Another line of communication connecting India with Persia passes
through the Makrān, or the barren region lying along the coast of Baluchis-
tān. This route was much frequented by Arab traders in the Middle
Ages ; and by it at an earlier epoch Alexander the Great led back
## p. 26 (#60) ##############################################
26
[ch.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
one detachment of his forces with disastrous results. But apart from this
return march, and the Indian expeditions of Semiramis and of Cyrus which
it was designed to emulate and which may or may not be historical, this
route seems not to have been followed by any of the great invasions of
India in historical times.
The practical significance of all this geography becomes evident not
only when we study the history of Ancient India but also when we consider
the modern organisation of the Indian defensive forces. They are grouped
into a northern and a southern army. The northern army is distributed
from Calcutta past Allahābād and Delhi to Peshāwar, the garrison city on
the frontier. All the troops stationed along this line may be regarded as
supporting the brigades on the Khyber front. The southern army is
similarly posted with reference to Quetta on the Bolān route. It is dis-
tributed through the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, whence Quetta can
be reinforced by sea through the port of Karāchi.
The conditions of the defence of India have been vitally changed by
the construction of the North-Western Railway from Karāchi through the
Indus basin, with branches towards the Bolān and the Khyber. To-day
that defence could be conducted over the sea directly from Britain through
Karāchi, so that the desert of Rājputāna would lie between the defending
armies and the main community of India within.
Karāchi stands at the western limit of the Indus delta, in a position
therefore comparable to that of Alexandria beside the Nile delta. The
railway keeps to the west of the river for more than three hundred miles
as far as Sukkur, where is the Lansdowne bridge, eight hundred and forty
feet long, between Sukkur and Rohri on the east bank. This is the very
heart of the rainless region of India. During twelve years there were only six
showers at Rohri. A scheme is under consideration for damming the Indus
near this point, in order that the irrigation canals below may be fed, not
only in time of food as at present, but in the season of low water as well.
From Sukkur a branch railway traverses the desert north-westward
to the foot of the hills below the Bolān Pass. This part of the desert
occupies a re-entering angle of lowland, with the mountains of Afghānistān
to the north and those of Baluchistān to the west. On the map, the
Afghān ranges have the effect of being festooned from the Bolān eastward
and northward. The railway ascends to Quetta either by the Mushkāf
valley - the actual line of the Bolān torrent having been abandoned - or
by a longer loop line, the Harnai, which runs to the Pishin valley, north
of Quetta. The latter is the usual way. By the Mushkāf route the
line is carried over a boulder-strewn plain about half a mile broad in
the bottom of a gorge, with steeply rising heights on either side. Here
and there the strip of lower ground is trenched and split by deep canyons.
## p. 27 (#61) ##############################################
1]
PLAN OF THE INDUS
27
At first the rails follow the Mushkāf river, and the gradients are not very
severe, but once Hirok, at the source of the Bolān river, is passed, a
gradient of one in twenty-five begins, and two powerful engines are
required to drag the train up. The steep bounding ridges now close in on
either side, with cliffs rising almost perpendicularly to several hundred
feet. Occasional blockhouses high up amid the crags defend the pass.
The gradients of the Harnai route are not quite so steep as those of
the Mushkāf. Should either way be blocked or carried away by landslips
or foods, the other would be available. The Harnai line passes through
the Chappar rift, a precipitous gorge in a great mass of limestone. The
old Bolān gorge way of the caravans was dangerous because of' the sudden
spates which at times filled all the bottom between the cliffs.
Quetta lies about a mile above sea-level in a small plain, surrounded
by great mountains rising to heights of two miles and more. Irrigation
works have been constructed, so that Quetta is now an oasis amid desert
mountains. It has a population of some thirty thousand.
The Agent
General for British Baluchistān resides there. The town is very strongly
fortified, for it commands the railways leading from the Khojak pass down
into India. Quetta and Peshāwar are the twin keys of the frontier.
From Quetta there is a railway north-westward for another hundred
and twenty miles to Chaman on the Afghān frontier, where is the last
British outpost. This line pierces the Khojak ridge by a tunnel and then
emerges on the open upland plain of Irān. The rails are kept ready at
Chaman for the continuation of the track to Kandahār, seventy miles
further.
We return to Rohri on the Indus. The North-Western Railway now
runs to the east of the river and soon enters the Punjab. Not very long
ago all this land was a desert. To-day, as the result of a great investment
of British capital, irrigation works have changed the whole aspect of the
country. The plain of the Indus has become one of the chief wheat fields
of the British Empire, for wheat is the principal crop in the Punjab, in
parts of Sind, and outside the basin of the Indus itself-in the districts
of the United Provinces which lie about Agra. The wheat production of
India on an average of years is five times as great as that of the United
Kingdom, and about half as great as that of the United States. In the
three years 1910-12 the export of wheat from India to the United Kingdom
exceeded that from the United States to the United Kingdom.
The brown waste of the plains of the Punjab becomes, after the winter
rains, a waving sea of green wheat, extending over thousands of square miles.
Far beyond the area within which the rainfall alone suffices, the lower
Punjab and the central strip of Sind have been converted into a second
Egypt. Though the navigation of the Indus is naturally inferior to that of
7
## p. 28 (#62) ##############################################
28
[cu.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
the Ganges, yet communication has been maintained by boat from the
Punjab to the sea from Greek times downward. The Indus flotilla of
steam-boats has however suffered fatally from the competition of the
North-Western Railway, and the wheat exported from Karāchi is now
almost wholly rail-borne.
At Multān, a considerable mercantile city near the Chenāb, the
railway forks to Lahore and Peshāwar. From Lahore the triangle is
completed by a line to Peshāwar along the foot of the mountains, past
the great military station of Rāwalpindi. The lines from Lahore and
Multān unite on the east bank of the Indus, fifty miles east of Peshāwar,
just below the point where the Kābul tributary enters. They cross the
Indus by the bridge of Attock. Above Rāwalpindi is the hill station of
Murree. The long tongues of land between the five rivers of the Punjab
are known as Doābs, a word which in Persian has the significance of
Mesopotamia in Greek. Punjab signifies the land of five rivers.
Peshāwar is the capital of the North-West Frontier Province created
in 1901, a strip of hilly country beyond the Indus. Unlike its sister Quetta,
it lies in the Indian lowland at the foot of the Khyber pass. It has about
a hundred thousand inhabitants, chiefly Musalmān. In the Bāzār are to
be seen representatives of many Asiatic races, for Peshāwar is the market
of exchange where the great road from Samarkand and Bukhāra, over
the Hindu Kush and through Kābul, by the Khyber meets the road from
Delhi and Lahore. Here you may buy skeins of Chinese silk, brought by
the same roundabout ways that were trodden by the Chinese pilgrims in
the Middle Ages.
Jamrūd, at the entrance to the Khyber, lies some nine miles west of
Peshāwar. In the Sarāi at Jamrūd all caravans going into India or
returning to Central Asia halt for the night. The great Bactrian camels,
two-humped and shaggy, present an unwonted contrast with the smaller
Indian camels. The fort of Ali Masjid, nearly three thousand feet above
the sea, crowns the steep ascent to the crest of the pass. At Landi Kotal
begins the descent into Afghānistān. Thus the Khyber is a saddle in the
heights, not the gorge of a torrent as is the Bolān. The Kābuì river flows
through an open valley until it nears the British frontier.
Then it swerves
through a precipitous chasm by a northward loop. The road is therefore
carried over the intervening mountain spur,
The Khyber is protected by its own hill tribes, enlisted in the Khyber
Rifles. We have brought these Pathān mountaineers into the service of law
and order by enrolling them in military forces, just as the Scottish highlan-
ders were enrolled in the British army in the eighteenth century. The
Pathāns are born fighters. They love fighting for its own sake, and many a
curious tale is told of the vendettas intermittently continued when the
## p. 29 (#63) ##############################################
I]
KASHMIR: KARAKORAM ; HINDU KUSH
29
a
>
Khyber riflemen of Peshāwar return from time to time on furlough to their
homes in the hills.
The Indus river rises, like the Brahmaputra, high on the plateau of
Tibet to the north of Benares, and flows north-westward through the
elevated valley of Leh until it reaches the 36th parallel of latitude. There
it turns south-westward and cleaves its way through the Himālayas by the
grandest gorge in the world. You may stand on the right bank of the
Indus and look across the river to where the summit of Nanga Parbat
descends by a single slope of four miles - measured vertically - to the river
bank, every yard of the drop being visible.
Within the great northward angle thus made by the Indus is a second
smaller valley amid the mountains, which is also drained through a gorge
to the Punjab. This is the famous valley of Kashmir, whose central plain,
sheltered in every direction by lofty snow-clad mountains, is a sunny para-
dise of fertility. Srīnagar is the capital of Kashmir, whose Mahārāja rules
also over Ladākh (capital Leh) formerly a province of Tibet.
The northernmost outposts of the Empire are in the valleys of Gilgit
and Chitrāl, which diverge south-eastward and south-westward to the
Indus and Kābul rivers. Enframing Gilgit and Chitrāl is a great angle of
the loftiest mountain ridge, which may be likened, as it appears upon the
map, to a pointed roof sheltering all India to the south. The south-east-
-
ward limb of the angle is the Karakoram range, and the south-westward is
the Hindu Kush range. The north-western extremity of the Himālaya fits
into the angle of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, from which it is
separated by the valleys of Leh, Gilgit, and Chirtāl.
The Karakoram is backed by the heights of the Tibetan plateau,
here it is true at their narrowest, but none the less almost inaccessible, ex-
cept for one or two passes at heights of 18,000 feet, which are traversed in
the summer time by a few Yak caravans. In the Karakoram is mount
Godwin Austen, second only to Everest among the mountains of the world.
There also are the largest glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The Hindu Kush, notwithstanding its elevation, is in marked con-
trast to the Karakoram. It is a single broad ridge, backed by no plateau,
and is notched by some relatively low passes. The ridge itself may be
crossed in a few days or even hours at heights of twelve and thirteen thou-
sand feet. The difficulties of access from the valley head of Kābul to the
lowland of Bactria on the Oxus lie rather in the approaches to the passes
than in the passes themselves. But human patience has in all ages suc-
ceeded in surmounting these difficulties ; and the Hindu Kush, although
the natural boundary of India north-westward, has been no effective
barrier either in a military or a commercial sense.
There is lateral communication between the Khyber and Bolān routes
## p. 30 (#64) ##############################################
30
[CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
a
outside the Indian frontier and yet within the Hindu Kush. The route
follows a chain of valleys between Kābul and Kandahār through Ghazni.
Along it from Kandahār to Kābul the army of Alexander the Great marched
to his Bactrian and Indian campaigns : and it again became famous in the
last generation because of the march of General Roberts from Kābul to
the relief of Kandahār during the Afghān war of 1882. From this Kābul-
Kandahār road several passes penetrate the mountainous belt of the Indian
frontier, presenting alternative exits from the two trunk routes. But amid
the maze of mountains north of the Kābul-Kandahār line, there are no
practicable alternatives to the two ways-over the Hindu Kush and over
the plateau from Seistān.
The long barrier of the Hindu Kush seems as if it were designed by
nature to be the protecting boundary of India on the north-west. It is the
'scientific frontier' which in the last century British policy sought in vain
to secure. At the present time it lies mostly within the 'buffer state of
Afghānistān which was created as the best alternative. But there have
been periods in history when it has formed the actual, as well as the ideal,
limits of the Indian empire. In the last quarter of the fourth century
B. C. , within a few years of the departure from India of Alexander the
Great, it separated the dominions of the Maurya emperor of India, Chandra-
gupta, from those of Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in the eastern
portion of his vast empire. In about the middle of the third century B. C.
the Seleucid province of Bactria, which lay immediately to the north of the
Hindu Kush, became an independent kingdom, from which, when the
Maurya empire declined and the barrier was no longer adequately pro-
tected, a second series of Greek invasions poured into India about 200 B. C.
The river Indus also appears at first sight to form a natural boun-
dary between India and Irān ; but in this case it would be more correct
historically to say that the country through which it flows has more fre-
quently been the cause of contention between India and Irān. The very
name India, the country of the Indus,' was first known to the West as
that of a province of the Persian empire. In Herodotus, the Greek his-
torian of the wars between the Persian empire and Greece in the early part
of the fifth century B. c. , it bears its original meaning. At a later date, Greek
and Roman writers, as so often happens in geographical nomenclature, ,
transferred the name of the best known province to the whole country and
set an example which has since been followed universally.
Thus we conclude a rapid survey of the historical and political geo-
graphy of a vast region. The south and centre of India is structurally an
island, whose steep brinks, the Western and Eastern Ghāts, are continued -
beyond the coastal selvage and the strip of shallow water off shore-by
renewed steep descents into the abysses of the Arabian sea and the Bay of
## p. 31 (#65) ##############################################
I
CONTROLLING GEOGRAPHICAL FACTS
31
-
Bengal, two miles deep. This great island has granitic foundations, although
it is clothed in places with volcanic rocks. Its landward brinks are marked
by mount Abu, the Aravalli hills, the ridge of Delhi, and the long low east-
ward curve of hills ending at Rājmahāl, where the principal coal seams of
India rest on the granitic base. The salient angles at Delhi and Rājmahāl
are received, at a distance, by the great re-entering angles of the main
framework of Asia, constituted by the brink of Irān beyond the Indus, the
Himālayan brink of Tibet, and the mountains of the Burmese border.
Between these rocky limits--salient on the Indian side and re-entering on
the Asiatic side-extends a broad alluvial plain, two hundred miles in
average breadth, and two thousand miles long, from the mouths of the
Ganges northward to the foot of the mountains, then north-westward along
that foot to the Punjab, and then south-westward to the mouths of the
Indus.
The Indian heights proper are so relatively low, attaining to eight or
nine thousand feet only in the far south, that the whole geography of India
seems to be dominated by the Himālayas. We recover our sense of the
true proportions only when we reflect that even the Himālayas are only
five or six miles high, and that India is two thousand miles long. None the
less the Himālayas and Tibet are in very real sense the controlling fact of
Indian geography. They pierce upward through more than half the atmos-
phere into highland climates, and therefore constitute for man a mighty
natural boundary. They also guide and limit the winds of the lower air, and
thus govern the Indian climate. India is an agricultural land, whose tillage
is everywhere dependent, either directly or indirectly, upon the moisture
brought from the southern ocean by the great wind swirl of the summer
and autumn monsoon. That swirl strikes the Malabar coast as a south-west
wind, sweeps over Bengal as a south wind, and drives up the Ganges
plains as a south-east wind. The whole movement is induced by suction to
where the air is rising over the hot plains of the Middle Indus. There in the
summer is one of the hottest places, if not the hottest place in the world.
The winds which come down to it off the Irānian plateau, thus completing
the swirl, stream off a dry land, and bring no moisture. In the winter a dry,
bright wind, the north-east monsoon, descends from Tibet over all India.
Only in the Punjab and in the far south are there considerable winter rains.
The Punjab is in Mediterranean latitudes, where it rains in the winter.
By these physical characteristics India is made fruitful, and is at the
same time more than half isolated from the rest of the world.
The most
primitive of its inhabitants are the Gonds and other tribes, who have been
driven into the forest recesses of the hills eastward of the Deccan plateau
and into other regions difficult of access throughout the sub-continent. The
Dravidian languages have been preserved in the southern promontory. The
## p. 32 (#66) ##############################################
32
(CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
Āryan and later invaders from western and central Asia have come from the
north-west through the passage of Delhi, and have thence dispersed south-
eastward down the Ganges to Bengal, and south-westward to the fertile
Gujarāti and Marāthā countries. Through the eastern mountains, which
sever the Indian Empire from China, have penetrated in historical times
few great invasions ; and these have not been far-reaching in their politi-
cal results. But if we may judge from the physical types and languages of
the populations, and from their social characteristics, there has been from
prehistoric times onwards a constant infiltration of Mongolian stock, not
only abundantly into Burma, and along the Tsan-po valley to the foot-
hills of the Himālaya, but also in lesser degree into Assam and into the
eastern parts of Bengal about Dacca.
From the days of the Greek pilot Hippalus, the monsoons have carri-
ed some sea traffic to and fro over the Arabian sea from the direction of
Aden. Sind was raided by Muhammadans overseas. But Sind lies outside
the desert of Rājputāna. The Malabar coast long had commerical inter-
course with the Nearer East, and thus indirectly with Christendom. But
the Western Ghāts lie behind the Malabar coast. In the south of India, on
the coast, are two curious relics of this traffic, two small ancient communi.
ties of Jews and of Christians. But these are exceptional. The one gateway
of India which signified, until modern times, was the north-western land-
gate. Most of the history which is to be narrated in these volumes bears,
directly or indirectly, some relation to that great geographical fact.
## p. 33 (#67) ##############################################
CHAPTER II
A. PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
The Indian Empire is the abode of a vast collection of peoples who
differ from one another in physical characteristics, in language, and in
culture more widely than the peoples of Europe. Among them the three
primary ethnographical divisions of mankind-the Caucasian or white
type, with its subdivisions of blonde and dark, the Mongolian or yellow
type, and the Ethiopian or black type-are all represented : the
first two by various races in the sub-continent itself, and the last by the
inhabitants of the Andaman Isles. Four of the great families of human
speech - the Austric, the Tibeto-Chinese, the Dravidian, and the Indo-
European-are directly represented among the living languages of India,
of which no fewer than two hundred and twenty are recorded in the Census
Report for 1911 ; while a fifth great family, the Semitic, which has been
introduced by Muhammadan conquerors in historical times, has, through
the medium of Arabic and Persian, greatly modified some of the Indian
vernaculars. The Austric, Tibeto-Chinese, and Indo-European families are
widely spread elsewhere over the face of the earth. The Dravidian has not
been traced with absolute certainty beyond the limits of the Indian Empire;
but there is evidence which seems to indicate that it was introduced into
India in prehistoric times,
The drama of Indian history, then, is one in which many peoples of
very diverse origin have played their parts. In all ages the fertility and
the riches of certain regions, above all the plain of the Ganges, have attrac-
ted invaders from the outside world ; while over-population and the desic-
cation of the land have given an impulse to the movements of peoples from
the adjacent regions of Asia. Thus both the attracting and the explusive for-
ces which determine migrations have acted in the same direction. It is true
indeed that the civilisations which have been developed in India have react-
ed, and that Indian religions, Indian literature, and Indian art have spread
out of India and produced a deep and far-reaching influence on the countries
33
## p. 34 (#68) ##############################################
34
[CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
of Further Asia ; but the migrations and the conquests which provided
the human energy with which these civilisations were created have invaria-
bly come into India from the outside. And the peninsular character
of the sub-continent has retained invaders within its borders, with the result
that racial conditions have tended to become ever more and more complex.
The outcome of the struggle for existence between so many peoples possess-
ing different traditions and different ideals is to be seen in the almost in-
finite variety of degrees of culture which exists at the present day. Some
types of civilisation have been progressive ; others have remained station-
ary. So that we now find, at one extreme of the social scale, communities
whose members are contributing to the advancement of the literature,
science, and art of the twentieth century, and, at the other extreme, tribes
still governed by their primitive constitutions, still using the implements
and weapons, and still retaining the religious ideas and customs of their
remote ancestors in the Stone Age.
The Himālayas form an effective barrier against direct invasions from
the north : the exceedingly toilsome passes in their centre are traversed
only by a few patient traders or adventurous explorers. But at the
western and eastern extremities, river valleys and more practicable mountain
passes afford easier means of access. Through these gateways swarms of
nomads and conquering armies, from the direction of Persia on the one
hand and from the direction of China on the other, have poured into India
from time immemorial.
By routes passing through Baluchistān on the west and Afghānistān
on the north-west, the country of the Indus has been repeatedly invaded
by peoples belonging to the Caucasian race from Western Asia, and by
peoples belonging to the Northern or Mongolo-Altaic group of the Mongo-
lian race from Central Asia. But these immigrations were not all of the
same nature, nor did they all produce the same effect on the population of
India. In the course of time their character became transformed. At the
most remote period there were slow persistent movements of whole tribes, or
collections of tribes, with their women and children, their flocks and herds :
at a later date they were little more than organised expeditions of armed
men. The former exercised a permanent influence on the racial conditions
of the country which they invaded : the influence of the latter was political
or social rather than racial.
This change in the nature of invasions was the gradual effect of natural
causes. Over large tracts of Asia the climate has changed within the his-
torical period. The rainfall has diminished or ceased; and once fruitful lands
have been converted into impassable deserts. Both Irān and Turkestān, the
two reservoirs from which the streams of migration flowed into the Indus
valley, have been affected by this desiccation of the land. Archaeological
## p. 35 (#69) ##############################################
II]
WESTERN AND EASTERN INVADERS
35
>
investigations in Seistān and in Chinese Turkestān have brought to light the
monuments of ancient civilisations which had long ago passed into oblivion.
Especially valuable from the historical point of view are the accounts given
by Sir Aurel Stein of his wonderful discoveries in Chinese Turkestān.
From the chronological evidence, which he has so carefully collected from
the documents and monuments discovered, we are unable to ascertain the
dates, at which the various ancient sites were abandoned because of the
progressive desiccation during a period of about a thousand years (first
century B. c. to ninth century A. D. ). We may thus realise how it has come
to pass that a region which once formed a means of communication not
only between China and India, but also between China and Europe, has now
become an almost insuperable barrier. The same causes have tended to
separate India from Irān. The last irruption which penetrated to Delhi,
the heart of India, through the north-western gateway was the Persian
expedition of Nădir Shāh in 1739.
The routes which lead from the east into the country of the Ganges
seem not to have been affected to the same extent by climatic changes.
The invaders from this quarter belonged to the Southern group of the
Mongolian race, the home of which was probably in N. W. China. They
came into India partly from Tibet down the valley of the Brahmaputra,
and partly from China through Burma by the Mekong, the Salween, and the
Irrawaddy. To other obstacles which impeded their progress were add-
ed the dense growth of the jungle and its wild inhabitants. Tribal migra-
tions from these regions can scarcely be said to have ceased altogether even
now. But they are held in check by the British occupation of Upper Burma.
The movements to the south-west and south of the Kachins, a Tibeto-
Burman tribe, from the north of Upper Burma have in recent times afford-
ed an illustration of the nature of these migrations (Imp. Gaz. xiv, pp. 253-5).
Thus have foreign races and foreign civilisations been brought into
India, the history of which is in a large measure the story of the struggle
between newcomers and the earlier inhabitants. Such invasions may be
compared to waves breaking on the shore. Their force becomes less the
farther they proceed, and their direction is determined by the obstacles
with which they come in contact. The most effective of these obstacles,
even when human effort is the direct means of resistance, are the geogra-
phical barriers which nature itself has set up. We shall therefore best
understand the distribution of races in the sub-continent if we remember
its chief natural divisions.
The ranges of the Vindhya system with their almost impenetrable
forests have in all ages formed the great dividing line between Northern and
Southern India. In early Brāhman literature they mark the limits beyond
which Āryan civilisation had not yet penetrated, and at the present day the
two great regions which they separate continue to offer the most striking
## p. 36 (#70) ##############################################
36
[CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
contrasts in racial character, in language, and in social institutions. But
the Vindhyas can be passed without difficulty at their western and eastern
extremities, where lowlands form connecting links with the plains of the
Indus and the Ganges. The coastal regions are therefore transitional.
They have been more directly affected by movements from the north than
the central plateau of the Deccan.
In Northern India, natural boundaries are marked by the river
Indus, by the Thar or Great Desert of Rājputāna, and by the sub-Himāla-
yan fringe which is connected on the east with Assam and Burma.
The seven geographical regions thus indicated form the basis for the
ethnographical classification of the peoples of India which is now generally
accepted. The scheme was propounded by the late Sir Herbert Risley in
the Census Report for 1901. Its details are the result of careful measure-
ments and observations extending over many years. It is conveniently
summarised in the Imperial Gazetteer (new edition, vol. 1, pp. 29. ff. ) from
which the descriptions in the following account are quoted. The physical
types are here enumerated in an order beginning from the south, instead of
from the north-west as in the original scheme :
1. The Dravidian type in the larger section of the peninsula which
lies to the south of the United Provinces and east of about longitude 76°E.
“The stature is short or below mean ; the complexion very dark, approach-
ing black; hair plentiful, with an occasional tendency to curl; eyes dark ;
head long; nose very broad, sometimes depressed at the root, but not so as
to make the face
appear
flat. '
This was assumed by Risley to be the original type of the popula-
tion of India, now modified to a varying extent by the admixture of Āryan,
Scythian, and Mongoloid elements'. It must be remembered, however, that,
when the term 'Dravidian' is thus used ethnographically, it is nothing more
than a convenient tabel. It must not be assumed that the speakers of
the Dravidian languages are aborigines. In Southern India, as in the North,
the same general distinction exists between the more primitive tribes of the
hills and jungles and the civilised inhabitants of the fertile tracts ; and
some ethnologists hold that the difference is racial and not merely the
result of culture. Mr. Thurston, for instance, says :
It is the Pre-Dravidian aborigines, and not the later and more cultured Dravi.
dians, who must be regarded as the primitive existing race. . . . . . These Pre-Dravidians
. . . . . . are differentiated from the Dravidian classes by their short stature and broad
(platyrhine) noses. There is strong ground for the belief that the Pre-Dravidians are
ethnically related to the Veddas of Ceylon, the Talas of the Celebes, the Batin of
Sumatra, and possibly the Australians. (The Madras Presidency, pp. 124-5. )
It would seem probable, then, that the original speakers of the Dravi-
dian languages were invaders, and that the ethnographical Dravidians are
a mixed race. In the more habitable regions the two elements have fused,
while representatives of the aborigines are still to be found in the fastnesses
9
## p. 37 (#71) ##############################################
II]
DRAVIDIANS
37
to which they retired before the encroachments of the newcomers. If this
view be correct, we must suppose that these aborigines have, in the course
of long ages, lost their ancient languages and adopted those of their con-
querors. The process of linguistic transformation, which may still be obser-
ved in other parts of India, would seem to have been carried out more
completely in the South than elsewhere.
The theory that the Dravidian element is the most ancient which we
can discover in the population of Northern India, must also be modified by
what we now know of the Muņdā languages, the Indian representatives
of the Austric family of speech, and the mixed languages in which
their influence has been traced (p. 43). Here, according to the evidence now
available, it would seem that the Austric element is the oldest, and that it
has been overlaid in different regions by successive waves of Dravidian and
Indo-European on the one hand, and by Tibeto-Chinese on the other. Most
ethnologists hold that there is no difference in physical type between the
present speakers of Muņdā and Dravidian languages. This statement has
been called in question ; but, if it be true, it shows that racial conditions
have become so complicated that it is no longer possible to analyse their
constituents. Language alone has preserved a record which would other-
wise have been lost.
At the same time, there can be little doubt that Dravidian languages
were actually flourishing in the western regions of Northern India at
the period when languages of the Indo-European type were introduced by
the Āryan invasions from the north-west. Dravidian characteristics have
been traced alike in Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, in the Prākrits, or early
popular dialects, and in the modern vernaculars derived from them. The
linguistic strata would thus appear to be arranged in the order-Austric,
Dravidian, Indo-European.
There is good ground, then, for supposing that, before the coming of
the Indo-Aryans speakers of the Dravidian languages predominated both
in Northern and in Southern India ; but, as we have seen, older elements
are discoverable in the populations of both regions, and therefore the
assumption that the Dravidians are aboriginal is no longer tenable. Is there
any evidence to show whence they came into India ?
No theory of their origin can be maintained which does not account for
the existence of Brāhūī, the large island of Dravidian speech in the moun-
tainous regions of distant Baluchistān which lie near the western routes into
India. Is Brāhūſ a surviving trace of the immigration of Dravidian-speaking
peoples into India from the west ? Or does it mark the limits of an overflow
from India into Baluchistān ? Both theories have been held ; but as all the
great movements of peoples have been into India and not out of India, and
| as a remote mountainous district may be expected to retain the survivals of
## p. 38 (#72) ##############################################
38
(CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
ancient races while it is not likely to have been colonised, the former view
would a priori seem to be by far the more probable. The reasons why it has
not been universally accepted is that the racial character of the Brāhūis is
now mairly Irānian, and not Dravidian in the Indian sense of the term.
But the argument from race is not so conclusive as may appear at first
sight. The area in which the Dravidian Brāhūi is still spoken forms part of
the region which is occupied by Turko-Irānian peoples ; and the peculiar
tribal constitution of the Brāhūis, is one which, unlike the caste-system,
does not insist on social exclusiveness, but, on the contrary, definitely
invites recruitment from outside. This is clear from the account given in
the Gazetteer of the ‘Baloch and Brāhūi type of tribe' :
The second type of Turko-Irānian tribe is based primarily not upon agnatic, kin-
ship, but upon common good and ill : in other words, it is cemented together only by
the obligations arising from the blood-feud. There is no eponymous ancestor, and the
tribe itself does not profess to be composed of homogeneous elements. . . . . . The same
principles hold good in tl e case of the Brābūſ. . . whose numbers have been recruited
from among Afghāns, Kūrds, Jadgāls, Baloch, and other elements. (Imp. Gaz. I. p. 310)
Such circumstances must necessarily change the racial character of the
tribe by a gradual process which might well in the course of ages lead to a
complete transformation. There is therefore nothing in the existing racial
conditions, and equally nothing in the existing physical conditions, to
prevent us from believing that the survival of a Dravidian language in
Baluchistān must indicate that the Dravidians came into India through
Baluchistān in prehistoric times. Whether they are ultimately to be traced
to a Central Asian or to a Western Asian origin cannot at present be decid-
ed with absolute certainty ; but the latter hypothesis receives very strong
support from the undoubted similarity of the Sumerian and Dravidian eth-
nic types.
2. The Indo-Aryan type in Kashmir, the Punjab from the Indus to
about the longitude of Ambāla (76° 46'E. ), and Rājputāna. 'The stature is
mostly tall ; complexion fair ; eyes dark ; hair on face plentiful ; head long;
nose narrow and prominent, but not specially long. '
The region now occupied by people of this type forms the eastern
portion of the wide extent of territory inhabited by Aryan settlers in the
earliest historical times—the period of the Rigveda, probably about 1200 B. C.
Their oldest literature, which is in a language closely connected with ancient,
Persian, Greek, and Latin, supplies no certain indication that they still
retained the recollection of their former home ; and we may reasonably
conclude, therefore, that the invasions, which brought them into India,
took place at a date considerably earlier.
1 For the remains of ancient culture in this region, sro Imp. Guz. I, p. 302 ; XIV,
p. 3: 0.
2 Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East (4th ed. ), pp. 173-4. The converse
view is, however, held by the author, viz. that the Sumerians came into Western Asia
from India.
## p. 39 (#73) ##############################################
II]
INDO-ARYANS
39
2
The Indo-Aryans came from Bactria, over the passes of the Hindu
Kush into S. Afghānistān, and thence by the valleys of the Kābul river, the
Kurram, and the Gumal, all of them rivers well known to the poets of the
Rigveda-into the N. W. Frontier Province and the Punjab. In the age of
the Rigveda they formed five peoples, each consisting of a number of tribes
in which the women were of the same race as their husbands. This is proved
conclusively by their social and religious status. We may be certain, there.
fore, that the invasions were no mere incursions of armies, but gradual
progressive movements of whole tribes, such as would have been impossible
at a later date, when climatic causes had transformed the physical conditions
of the country (p. 34). On this point the evidence of literature receives the
support of ethnology : for only thus, according to Risley, can be explained
the uniform distribution of the Indo-Aryan racial type throughout the region
which it occupies, and the strongly marked contrasts which it presents to
types prevailing in regions to the east and south. Later settlements neces-
sarily consisted almost entirely of men. Such modifications of the racial
character as would be produced by inter-marriage with the women of the
country would, in course of time, cease to be recognisable. They would be
as difficult to trace as the Roman factor in the population of Britain.
3. The Turko-Irānian type in the N. W. Frontier Province, Baluchis-
tān, and those districts of the Punjab and Sind which lie west of the Indus.
'Stature above mean ; complexion fair ; eyes mostly dark, but occasionally
grey ; hair on face plentiful ; head broad ; nose moderately narrow, promi-
nent, and very long. '
The northern section of the region now inhabited by peoples of this
type, that is to say, the country of the north-western tributaries of the Indus,
was, in the times of the Rigveda, occupied by Indo-Aryans. The predomi-
nant racial character of the whole region is due to the invasion of Mongolo-
Altaic peoples from Turkestān on the one hand, and of Persian Aryans or
Irānians on the other. The Indus is the ethnographical boundary between
the Turko-Irānian and Indo-Aryan types, just as in history it has often been
the political boundary between Irān and India.
4. The Scytho-Dravidian type in Sind east of the Indus, Gujarāt, and
the western section of the peninsula as far as about longitude 76° E. , that is
to say, the Bombay Presidency or Western India generally. "The type is
clearly distinguished from the Turko-Irānian by a lower stature, a greater
length of head, a higher nasal index, a shorter nose, and a lower orbitonasal
index. '
This type, of which the Marāthās are the chief representatives, occupies
a position between the broad-headed Turko-Irānians and the long-headed
Dravidians. Its designation assumes that the foreign broad-headed element
was introduced during the period of Scythian (Çaka) rule in western India
## p. 40 (#74) ##############################################
40
(CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
(c. 120-380A. D). But there can be little doubt that its origin must be traced
to a period far more remote. The çakas were among those military con-
querors who broke into the Punjab after the downfall of the Maurya Empire:
and it can scarcely be supposed that the extension of their power to Wes-
tern India materially affected the race. The fact that their Scythian names,
as is shown by coins and inscriptions, became Hinduised after a few gene-
rations, is conclusive proof that they were forced to adapt themselves to
their social environment. We must therefore seek the disturbing racial in-
fluence in some earlier tribal immigration of which no other memorial now
remains. The invaders probably belonged to the broad-headed Alpine race
which inhabited the plateaus of Western Asia (Anatolia, Armenia, and
Irān)" ; and they would seem to have come into Western India, as the
Dravidians also most probably came, through Baluchistān before desiccation
had made the routes impassable for multitudes.
5. The Āryo-Dravidian or Hindustāni type in the plain of the Ganges
from about longitude 76° 30' E. to 87° E. ; that is to say, in the eastern
fringe of the Punjab, in the United Provinces, and in Bihār. "The head-
form is long, with a tendency to medium ; the complexion varies from light-
ish brown to black, the nose ranges from medium to broad, being always
broader than among the Indo-Aryans ; the stature is lower than in the latter
group, and usually below the average' (i. e. it ranges from 5' 3" to 5'5").
The Āryo-Dravidian type occupies the ancient Madhyadeça, or the
Midland Country,' extending, according to Manu (II, 12) from Vinaçana,
where the river Sarasvati loses itself in the Great Desert, to Allahābād, to-
gether with some five degrees of the country farther east. It is a mixed type
caused apparently by the Indo-Aryan colonisation of a region previously
held by a population mainly Dravidian. The Indo-Aryan type does not, as
might have been expected from analogous instances, shade by imperceptible
degrees into the Āryo-Dravidian type ; but a marked change from the for-
mer to the latter is observable about the longitude of Sirhind. It is evident,
then, that the waves of tribal migration must have been impeded at this
point, and that the Indo-Āryan influence farther east must be due rather
to warlike or peaceful penetration than to the wholesale encroachment of
multitudes.
To explain this abrupt transition, the theory of a second Āryan in-
vasion, which is supposed to have come into the plain of the Ganges from
the Pāmirs through Gilgit and Chitrā), was propounded by the late Dr.
Hoernle and has been generally accepted in the official publications of the
Government of India. This theory is made improbable by the physical
difficulties of the route suggested, and some of the arguments adduced in
its favour are demonstrably mistaken. There is no such break of continuity
Haddon, The Wanderings of Peoples, pp. 12, 17,
## p. 41 (#75) ##############################################
II)
ĀRYO-DRAVIDIANS
41
between the tribes of the Rigveda and the peoples of the later literaturę aş
it presupposes! . At the same time it seemed to be supported by the existing
distribution of the Indo-Aryan languages ; but, as will be seen (p. 44), an
equally satisfactory explanation of this distribution may be suggested.
Apart from this theory, the conclusions of ethnology are entirely in
accord with the historical indications of the literature. The ethnographical
limit is also the dividing line between the geography of the Rigveda and the
geography of the later Vedic literature. In the Rigveda Āryan communities
have scarcely advanced beyond the country of the river Sarasvati (Sirhind),
which for ever afterwards was remembered with especial veneration as
Brahmāvarta, 'the Holy Land. ' In the Brāhmaṇās the centre of religious
activity has been transferred to the adjacent country on the south-east, i. e.
the upper portion of the doāb between the Jumna and the Ganges, and the
Muttra District of the United Provinces. This was Brahmarshideça - 'the
Country of the Holy Sages. ' Here it was that the hymns of the Rigveda,
which were composed in the North-West- the country of the 'Seven Rivers'
as it is called (Rv. VIII, 24, 27), were collected and arranged ; and here it
was that the religious and social system which we call Brāhmanism assumed
its final form--a form which, in its religious aspect, is a compromise bet-
ween Āryan and more primitive Indian ideas, and, in its social aspect, the
result of the contact of different races. After Brāhman culture had thus
occupied what has in all ages been the commanding position in India, its
trend was still eastwards ; and the country of the 'Seven Rivers,' though not
altogether forgotten, occupies a place of less importance in the later
literature.
Both of the facts above mentioned - the abrupt transition from the
Indo-Aryan to the Āryo-Dravidian type, and the extension of Āryan influ-
ence from Brahmăvarta to Brahmarshideca - are best understood if we
remember the natural feature which connects the plain of the Indus with the
plain of the Ganges. This is the strait of habitable land which lies between
the desert and the mountains. Its historical significance has already been
noticed? . It is in this strait that the decisive battles, on which the fate of
India has depended, have been fought ; and here too we may suppose that
the progress of racial migrations from the north-west in prehistoric times
must have been checked. Both politically and ethnographically it forms a
natural boundary. In the age of the Rigveda the Āryans had not yet broken
through the barrier, though the Jumna is mentioned in a hymn (vii, 18, 19)
in such a way as to indicate that a battle had been won on its banks. It
was only at some later date that the country between the Upper Jumna and
Ganges and the district of Delhi were occupied. A record of this occupa-
tion has been preserved in some ancient verses quoted in the catapatha
1 See Chapters V. p. 106 and XIII.
Chapter I, pp. 20 f.
2
.
## p. 42 (#76) ##############################################
42
[CH.
frequently trodden, for it leads directly, between the desert and the moun-
tains, upon the Delhi gateway of inner India.
Another line of communication connecting India with Persia passes
through the Makrān, or the barren region lying along the coast of Baluchis-
tān. This route was much frequented by Arab traders in the Middle
Ages ; and by it at an earlier epoch Alexander the Great led back
## p. 26 (#60) ##############################################
26
[ch.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
one detachment of his forces with disastrous results. But apart from this
return march, and the Indian expeditions of Semiramis and of Cyrus which
it was designed to emulate and which may or may not be historical, this
route seems not to have been followed by any of the great invasions of
India in historical times.
The practical significance of all this geography becomes evident not
only when we study the history of Ancient India but also when we consider
the modern organisation of the Indian defensive forces. They are grouped
into a northern and a southern army. The northern army is distributed
from Calcutta past Allahābād and Delhi to Peshāwar, the garrison city on
the frontier. All the troops stationed along this line may be regarded as
supporting the brigades on the Khyber front. The southern army is
similarly posted with reference to Quetta on the Bolān route. It is dis-
tributed through the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, whence Quetta can
be reinforced by sea through the port of Karāchi.
The conditions of the defence of India have been vitally changed by
the construction of the North-Western Railway from Karāchi through the
Indus basin, with branches towards the Bolān and the Khyber. To-day
that defence could be conducted over the sea directly from Britain through
Karāchi, so that the desert of Rājputāna would lie between the defending
armies and the main community of India within.
Karāchi stands at the western limit of the Indus delta, in a position
therefore comparable to that of Alexandria beside the Nile delta. The
railway keeps to the west of the river for more than three hundred miles
as far as Sukkur, where is the Lansdowne bridge, eight hundred and forty
feet long, between Sukkur and Rohri on the east bank. This is the very
heart of the rainless region of India. During twelve years there were only six
showers at Rohri. A scheme is under consideration for damming the Indus
near this point, in order that the irrigation canals below may be fed, not
only in time of food as at present, but in the season of low water as well.
From Sukkur a branch railway traverses the desert north-westward
to the foot of the hills below the Bolān Pass. This part of the desert
occupies a re-entering angle of lowland, with the mountains of Afghānistān
to the north and those of Baluchistān to the west. On the map, the
Afghān ranges have the effect of being festooned from the Bolān eastward
and northward. The railway ascends to Quetta either by the Mushkāf
valley - the actual line of the Bolān torrent having been abandoned - or
by a longer loop line, the Harnai, which runs to the Pishin valley, north
of Quetta. The latter is the usual way. By the Mushkāf route the
line is carried over a boulder-strewn plain about half a mile broad in
the bottom of a gorge, with steeply rising heights on either side. Here
and there the strip of lower ground is trenched and split by deep canyons.
## p. 27 (#61) ##############################################
1]
PLAN OF THE INDUS
27
At first the rails follow the Mushkāf river, and the gradients are not very
severe, but once Hirok, at the source of the Bolān river, is passed, a
gradient of one in twenty-five begins, and two powerful engines are
required to drag the train up. The steep bounding ridges now close in on
either side, with cliffs rising almost perpendicularly to several hundred
feet. Occasional blockhouses high up amid the crags defend the pass.
The gradients of the Harnai route are not quite so steep as those of
the Mushkāf. Should either way be blocked or carried away by landslips
or foods, the other would be available. The Harnai line passes through
the Chappar rift, a precipitous gorge in a great mass of limestone. The
old Bolān gorge way of the caravans was dangerous because of' the sudden
spates which at times filled all the bottom between the cliffs.
Quetta lies about a mile above sea-level in a small plain, surrounded
by great mountains rising to heights of two miles and more. Irrigation
works have been constructed, so that Quetta is now an oasis amid desert
mountains. It has a population of some thirty thousand.
The Agent
General for British Baluchistān resides there. The town is very strongly
fortified, for it commands the railways leading from the Khojak pass down
into India. Quetta and Peshāwar are the twin keys of the frontier.
From Quetta there is a railway north-westward for another hundred
and twenty miles to Chaman on the Afghān frontier, where is the last
British outpost. This line pierces the Khojak ridge by a tunnel and then
emerges on the open upland plain of Irān. The rails are kept ready at
Chaman for the continuation of the track to Kandahār, seventy miles
further.
We return to Rohri on the Indus. The North-Western Railway now
runs to the east of the river and soon enters the Punjab. Not very long
ago all this land was a desert. To-day, as the result of a great investment
of British capital, irrigation works have changed the whole aspect of the
country. The plain of the Indus has become one of the chief wheat fields
of the British Empire, for wheat is the principal crop in the Punjab, in
parts of Sind, and outside the basin of the Indus itself-in the districts
of the United Provinces which lie about Agra. The wheat production of
India on an average of years is five times as great as that of the United
Kingdom, and about half as great as that of the United States. In the
three years 1910-12 the export of wheat from India to the United Kingdom
exceeded that from the United States to the United Kingdom.
The brown waste of the plains of the Punjab becomes, after the winter
rains, a waving sea of green wheat, extending over thousands of square miles.
Far beyond the area within which the rainfall alone suffices, the lower
Punjab and the central strip of Sind have been converted into a second
Egypt. Though the navigation of the Indus is naturally inferior to that of
7
## p. 28 (#62) ##############################################
28
[cu.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
the Ganges, yet communication has been maintained by boat from the
Punjab to the sea from Greek times downward. The Indus flotilla of
steam-boats has however suffered fatally from the competition of the
North-Western Railway, and the wheat exported from Karāchi is now
almost wholly rail-borne.
At Multān, a considerable mercantile city near the Chenāb, the
railway forks to Lahore and Peshāwar. From Lahore the triangle is
completed by a line to Peshāwar along the foot of the mountains, past
the great military station of Rāwalpindi. The lines from Lahore and
Multān unite on the east bank of the Indus, fifty miles east of Peshāwar,
just below the point where the Kābul tributary enters. They cross the
Indus by the bridge of Attock. Above Rāwalpindi is the hill station of
Murree. The long tongues of land between the five rivers of the Punjab
are known as Doābs, a word which in Persian has the significance of
Mesopotamia in Greek. Punjab signifies the land of five rivers.
Peshāwar is the capital of the North-West Frontier Province created
in 1901, a strip of hilly country beyond the Indus. Unlike its sister Quetta,
it lies in the Indian lowland at the foot of the Khyber pass. It has about
a hundred thousand inhabitants, chiefly Musalmān. In the Bāzār are to
be seen representatives of many Asiatic races, for Peshāwar is the market
of exchange where the great road from Samarkand and Bukhāra, over
the Hindu Kush and through Kābul, by the Khyber meets the road from
Delhi and Lahore. Here you may buy skeins of Chinese silk, brought by
the same roundabout ways that were trodden by the Chinese pilgrims in
the Middle Ages.
Jamrūd, at the entrance to the Khyber, lies some nine miles west of
Peshāwar. In the Sarāi at Jamrūd all caravans going into India or
returning to Central Asia halt for the night. The great Bactrian camels,
two-humped and shaggy, present an unwonted contrast with the smaller
Indian camels. The fort of Ali Masjid, nearly three thousand feet above
the sea, crowns the steep ascent to the crest of the pass. At Landi Kotal
begins the descent into Afghānistān. Thus the Khyber is a saddle in the
heights, not the gorge of a torrent as is the Bolān. The Kābuì river flows
through an open valley until it nears the British frontier.
Then it swerves
through a precipitous chasm by a northward loop. The road is therefore
carried over the intervening mountain spur,
The Khyber is protected by its own hill tribes, enlisted in the Khyber
Rifles. We have brought these Pathān mountaineers into the service of law
and order by enrolling them in military forces, just as the Scottish highlan-
ders were enrolled in the British army in the eighteenth century. The
Pathāns are born fighters. They love fighting for its own sake, and many a
curious tale is told of the vendettas intermittently continued when the
## p. 29 (#63) ##############################################
I]
KASHMIR: KARAKORAM ; HINDU KUSH
29
a
>
Khyber riflemen of Peshāwar return from time to time on furlough to their
homes in the hills.
The Indus river rises, like the Brahmaputra, high on the plateau of
Tibet to the north of Benares, and flows north-westward through the
elevated valley of Leh until it reaches the 36th parallel of latitude. There
it turns south-westward and cleaves its way through the Himālayas by the
grandest gorge in the world. You may stand on the right bank of the
Indus and look across the river to where the summit of Nanga Parbat
descends by a single slope of four miles - measured vertically - to the river
bank, every yard of the drop being visible.
Within the great northward angle thus made by the Indus is a second
smaller valley amid the mountains, which is also drained through a gorge
to the Punjab. This is the famous valley of Kashmir, whose central plain,
sheltered in every direction by lofty snow-clad mountains, is a sunny para-
dise of fertility. Srīnagar is the capital of Kashmir, whose Mahārāja rules
also over Ladākh (capital Leh) formerly a province of Tibet.
The northernmost outposts of the Empire are in the valleys of Gilgit
and Chitrāl, which diverge south-eastward and south-westward to the
Indus and Kābul rivers. Enframing Gilgit and Chitrāl is a great angle of
the loftiest mountain ridge, which may be likened, as it appears upon the
map, to a pointed roof sheltering all India to the south. The south-east-
-
ward limb of the angle is the Karakoram range, and the south-westward is
the Hindu Kush range. The north-western extremity of the Himālaya fits
into the angle of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, from which it is
separated by the valleys of Leh, Gilgit, and Chirtāl.
The Karakoram is backed by the heights of the Tibetan plateau,
here it is true at their narrowest, but none the less almost inaccessible, ex-
cept for one or two passes at heights of 18,000 feet, which are traversed in
the summer time by a few Yak caravans. In the Karakoram is mount
Godwin Austen, second only to Everest among the mountains of the world.
There also are the largest glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The Hindu Kush, notwithstanding its elevation, is in marked con-
trast to the Karakoram. It is a single broad ridge, backed by no plateau,
and is notched by some relatively low passes. The ridge itself may be
crossed in a few days or even hours at heights of twelve and thirteen thou-
sand feet. The difficulties of access from the valley head of Kābul to the
lowland of Bactria on the Oxus lie rather in the approaches to the passes
than in the passes themselves. But human patience has in all ages suc-
ceeded in surmounting these difficulties ; and the Hindu Kush, although
the natural boundary of India north-westward, has been no effective
barrier either in a military or a commercial sense.
There is lateral communication between the Khyber and Bolān routes
## p. 30 (#64) ##############################################
30
[CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
a
outside the Indian frontier and yet within the Hindu Kush. The route
follows a chain of valleys between Kābul and Kandahār through Ghazni.
Along it from Kandahār to Kābul the army of Alexander the Great marched
to his Bactrian and Indian campaigns : and it again became famous in the
last generation because of the march of General Roberts from Kābul to
the relief of Kandahār during the Afghān war of 1882. From this Kābul-
Kandahār road several passes penetrate the mountainous belt of the Indian
frontier, presenting alternative exits from the two trunk routes. But amid
the maze of mountains north of the Kābul-Kandahār line, there are no
practicable alternatives to the two ways-over the Hindu Kush and over
the plateau from Seistān.
The long barrier of the Hindu Kush seems as if it were designed by
nature to be the protecting boundary of India on the north-west. It is the
'scientific frontier' which in the last century British policy sought in vain
to secure. At the present time it lies mostly within the 'buffer state of
Afghānistān which was created as the best alternative. But there have
been periods in history when it has formed the actual, as well as the ideal,
limits of the Indian empire. In the last quarter of the fourth century
B. C. , within a few years of the departure from India of Alexander the
Great, it separated the dominions of the Maurya emperor of India, Chandra-
gupta, from those of Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in the eastern
portion of his vast empire. In about the middle of the third century B. C.
the Seleucid province of Bactria, which lay immediately to the north of the
Hindu Kush, became an independent kingdom, from which, when the
Maurya empire declined and the barrier was no longer adequately pro-
tected, a second series of Greek invasions poured into India about 200 B. C.
The river Indus also appears at first sight to form a natural boun-
dary between India and Irān ; but in this case it would be more correct
historically to say that the country through which it flows has more fre-
quently been the cause of contention between India and Irān. The very
name India, the country of the Indus,' was first known to the West as
that of a province of the Persian empire. In Herodotus, the Greek his-
torian of the wars between the Persian empire and Greece in the early part
of the fifth century B. c. , it bears its original meaning. At a later date, Greek
and Roman writers, as so often happens in geographical nomenclature, ,
transferred the name of the best known province to the whole country and
set an example which has since been followed universally.
Thus we conclude a rapid survey of the historical and political geo-
graphy of a vast region. The south and centre of India is structurally an
island, whose steep brinks, the Western and Eastern Ghāts, are continued -
beyond the coastal selvage and the strip of shallow water off shore-by
renewed steep descents into the abysses of the Arabian sea and the Bay of
## p. 31 (#65) ##############################################
I
CONTROLLING GEOGRAPHICAL FACTS
31
-
Bengal, two miles deep. This great island has granitic foundations, although
it is clothed in places with volcanic rocks. Its landward brinks are marked
by mount Abu, the Aravalli hills, the ridge of Delhi, and the long low east-
ward curve of hills ending at Rājmahāl, where the principal coal seams of
India rest on the granitic base. The salient angles at Delhi and Rājmahāl
are received, at a distance, by the great re-entering angles of the main
framework of Asia, constituted by the brink of Irān beyond the Indus, the
Himālayan brink of Tibet, and the mountains of the Burmese border.
Between these rocky limits--salient on the Indian side and re-entering on
the Asiatic side-extends a broad alluvial plain, two hundred miles in
average breadth, and two thousand miles long, from the mouths of the
Ganges northward to the foot of the mountains, then north-westward along
that foot to the Punjab, and then south-westward to the mouths of the
Indus.
The Indian heights proper are so relatively low, attaining to eight or
nine thousand feet only in the far south, that the whole geography of India
seems to be dominated by the Himālayas. We recover our sense of the
true proportions only when we reflect that even the Himālayas are only
five or six miles high, and that India is two thousand miles long. None the
less the Himālayas and Tibet are in very real sense the controlling fact of
Indian geography. They pierce upward through more than half the atmos-
phere into highland climates, and therefore constitute for man a mighty
natural boundary. They also guide and limit the winds of the lower air, and
thus govern the Indian climate. India is an agricultural land, whose tillage
is everywhere dependent, either directly or indirectly, upon the moisture
brought from the southern ocean by the great wind swirl of the summer
and autumn monsoon. That swirl strikes the Malabar coast as a south-west
wind, sweeps over Bengal as a south wind, and drives up the Ganges
plains as a south-east wind. The whole movement is induced by suction to
where the air is rising over the hot plains of the Middle Indus. There in the
summer is one of the hottest places, if not the hottest place in the world.
The winds which come down to it off the Irānian plateau, thus completing
the swirl, stream off a dry land, and bring no moisture. In the winter a dry,
bright wind, the north-east monsoon, descends from Tibet over all India.
Only in the Punjab and in the far south are there considerable winter rains.
The Punjab is in Mediterranean latitudes, where it rains in the winter.
By these physical characteristics India is made fruitful, and is at the
same time more than half isolated from the rest of the world.
The most
primitive of its inhabitants are the Gonds and other tribes, who have been
driven into the forest recesses of the hills eastward of the Deccan plateau
and into other regions difficult of access throughout the sub-continent. The
Dravidian languages have been preserved in the southern promontory. The
## p. 32 (#66) ##############################################
32
(CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
Āryan and later invaders from western and central Asia have come from the
north-west through the passage of Delhi, and have thence dispersed south-
eastward down the Ganges to Bengal, and south-westward to the fertile
Gujarāti and Marāthā countries. Through the eastern mountains, which
sever the Indian Empire from China, have penetrated in historical times
few great invasions ; and these have not been far-reaching in their politi-
cal results. But if we may judge from the physical types and languages of
the populations, and from their social characteristics, there has been from
prehistoric times onwards a constant infiltration of Mongolian stock, not
only abundantly into Burma, and along the Tsan-po valley to the foot-
hills of the Himālaya, but also in lesser degree into Assam and into the
eastern parts of Bengal about Dacca.
From the days of the Greek pilot Hippalus, the monsoons have carri-
ed some sea traffic to and fro over the Arabian sea from the direction of
Aden. Sind was raided by Muhammadans overseas. But Sind lies outside
the desert of Rājputāna. The Malabar coast long had commerical inter-
course with the Nearer East, and thus indirectly with Christendom. But
the Western Ghāts lie behind the Malabar coast. In the south of India, on
the coast, are two curious relics of this traffic, two small ancient communi.
ties of Jews and of Christians. But these are exceptional. The one gateway
of India which signified, until modern times, was the north-western land-
gate. Most of the history which is to be narrated in these volumes bears,
directly or indirectly, some relation to that great geographical fact.
## p. 33 (#67) ##############################################
CHAPTER II
A. PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
The Indian Empire is the abode of a vast collection of peoples who
differ from one another in physical characteristics, in language, and in
culture more widely than the peoples of Europe. Among them the three
primary ethnographical divisions of mankind-the Caucasian or white
type, with its subdivisions of blonde and dark, the Mongolian or yellow
type, and the Ethiopian or black type-are all represented : the
first two by various races in the sub-continent itself, and the last by the
inhabitants of the Andaman Isles. Four of the great families of human
speech - the Austric, the Tibeto-Chinese, the Dravidian, and the Indo-
European-are directly represented among the living languages of India,
of which no fewer than two hundred and twenty are recorded in the Census
Report for 1911 ; while a fifth great family, the Semitic, which has been
introduced by Muhammadan conquerors in historical times, has, through
the medium of Arabic and Persian, greatly modified some of the Indian
vernaculars. The Austric, Tibeto-Chinese, and Indo-European families are
widely spread elsewhere over the face of the earth. The Dravidian has not
been traced with absolute certainty beyond the limits of the Indian Empire;
but there is evidence which seems to indicate that it was introduced into
India in prehistoric times,
The drama of Indian history, then, is one in which many peoples of
very diverse origin have played their parts. In all ages the fertility and
the riches of certain regions, above all the plain of the Ganges, have attrac-
ted invaders from the outside world ; while over-population and the desic-
cation of the land have given an impulse to the movements of peoples from
the adjacent regions of Asia. Thus both the attracting and the explusive for-
ces which determine migrations have acted in the same direction. It is true
indeed that the civilisations which have been developed in India have react-
ed, and that Indian religions, Indian literature, and Indian art have spread
out of India and produced a deep and far-reaching influence on the countries
33
## p. 34 (#68) ##############################################
34
[CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
of Further Asia ; but the migrations and the conquests which provided
the human energy with which these civilisations were created have invaria-
bly come into India from the outside. And the peninsular character
of the sub-continent has retained invaders within its borders, with the result
that racial conditions have tended to become ever more and more complex.
The outcome of the struggle for existence between so many peoples possess-
ing different traditions and different ideals is to be seen in the almost in-
finite variety of degrees of culture which exists at the present day. Some
types of civilisation have been progressive ; others have remained station-
ary. So that we now find, at one extreme of the social scale, communities
whose members are contributing to the advancement of the literature,
science, and art of the twentieth century, and, at the other extreme, tribes
still governed by their primitive constitutions, still using the implements
and weapons, and still retaining the religious ideas and customs of their
remote ancestors in the Stone Age.
The Himālayas form an effective barrier against direct invasions from
the north : the exceedingly toilsome passes in their centre are traversed
only by a few patient traders or adventurous explorers. But at the
western and eastern extremities, river valleys and more practicable mountain
passes afford easier means of access. Through these gateways swarms of
nomads and conquering armies, from the direction of Persia on the one
hand and from the direction of China on the other, have poured into India
from time immemorial.
By routes passing through Baluchistān on the west and Afghānistān
on the north-west, the country of the Indus has been repeatedly invaded
by peoples belonging to the Caucasian race from Western Asia, and by
peoples belonging to the Northern or Mongolo-Altaic group of the Mongo-
lian race from Central Asia. But these immigrations were not all of the
same nature, nor did they all produce the same effect on the population of
India. In the course of time their character became transformed. At the
most remote period there were slow persistent movements of whole tribes, or
collections of tribes, with their women and children, their flocks and herds :
at a later date they were little more than organised expeditions of armed
men. The former exercised a permanent influence on the racial conditions
of the country which they invaded : the influence of the latter was political
or social rather than racial.
This change in the nature of invasions was the gradual effect of natural
causes. Over large tracts of Asia the climate has changed within the his-
torical period. The rainfall has diminished or ceased; and once fruitful lands
have been converted into impassable deserts. Both Irān and Turkestān, the
two reservoirs from which the streams of migration flowed into the Indus
valley, have been affected by this desiccation of the land. Archaeological
## p. 35 (#69) ##############################################
II]
WESTERN AND EASTERN INVADERS
35
>
investigations in Seistān and in Chinese Turkestān have brought to light the
monuments of ancient civilisations which had long ago passed into oblivion.
Especially valuable from the historical point of view are the accounts given
by Sir Aurel Stein of his wonderful discoveries in Chinese Turkestān.
From the chronological evidence, which he has so carefully collected from
the documents and monuments discovered, we are unable to ascertain the
dates, at which the various ancient sites were abandoned because of the
progressive desiccation during a period of about a thousand years (first
century B. c. to ninth century A. D. ). We may thus realise how it has come
to pass that a region which once formed a means of communication not
only between China and India, but also between China and Europe, has now
become an almost insuperable barrier. The same causes have tended to
separate India from Irān. The last irruption which penetrated to Delhi,
the heart of India, through the north-western gateway was the Persian
expedition of Nădir Shāh in 1739.
The routes which lead from the east into the country of the Ganges
seem not to have been affected to the same extent by climatic changes.
The invaders from this quarter belonged to the Southern group of the
Mongolian race, the home of which was probably in N. W. China. They
came into India partly from Tibet down the valley of the Brahmaputra,
and partly from China through Burma by the Mekong, the Salween, and the
Irrawaddy. To other obstacles which impeded their progress were add-
ed the dense growth of the jungle and its wild inhabitants. Tribal migra-
tions from these regions can scarcely be said to have ceased altogether even
now. But they are held in check by the British occupation of Upper Burma.
The movements to the south-west and south of the Kachins, a Tibeto-
Burman tribe, from the north of Upper Burma have in recent times afford-
ed an illustration of the nature of these migrations (Imp. Gaz. xiv, pp. 253-5).
Thus have foreign races and foreign civilisations been brought into
India, the history of which is in a large measure the story of the struggle
between newcomers and the earlier inhabitants. Such invasions may be
compared to waves breaking on the shore. Their force becomes less the
farther they proceed, and their direction is determined by the obstacles
with which they come in contact. The most effective of these obstacles,
even when human effort is the direct means of resistance, are the geogra-
phical barriers which nature itself has set up. We shall therefore best
understand the distribution of races in the sub-continent if we remember
its chief natural divisions.
The ranges of the Vindhya system with their almost impenetrable
forests have in all ages formed the great dividing line between Northern and
Southern India. In early Brāhman literature they mark the limits beyond
which Āryan civilisation had not yet penetrated, and at the present day the
two great regions which they separate continue to offer the most striking
## p. 36 (#70) ##############################################
36
[CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
contrasts in racial character, in language, and in social institutions. But
the Vindhyas can be passed without difficulty at their western and eastern
extremities, where lowlands form connecting links with the plains of the
Indus and the Ganges. The coastal regions are therefore transitional.
They have been more directly affected by movements from the north than
the central plateau of the Deccan.
In Northern India, natural boundaries are marked by the river
Indus, by the Thar or Great Desert of Rājputāna, and by the sub-Himāla-
yan fringe which is connected on the east with Assam and Burma.
The seven geographical regions thus indicated form the basis for the
ethnographical classification of the peoples of India which is now generally
accepted. The scheme was propounded by the late Sir Herbert Risley in
the Census Report for 1901. Its details are the result of careful measure-
ments and observations extending over many years. It is conveniently
summarised in the Imperial Gazetteer (new edition, vol. 1, pp. 29. ff. ) from
which the descriptions in the following account are quoted. The physical
types are here enumerated in an order beginning from the south, instead of
from the north-west as in the original scheme :
1. The Dravidian type in the larger section of the peninsula which
lies to the south of the United Provinces and east of about longitude 76°E.
“The stature is short or below mean ; the complexion very dark, approach-
ing black; hair plentiful, with an occasional tendency to curl; eyes dark ;
head long; nose very broad, sometimes depressed at the root, but not so as
to make the face
appear
flat. '
This was assumed by Risley to be the original type of the popula-
tion of India, now modified to a varying extent by the admixture of Āryan,
Scythian, and Mongoloid elements'. It must be remembered, however, that,
when the term 'Dravidian' is thus used ethnographically, it is nothing more
than a convenient tabel. It must not be assumed that the speakers of
the Dravidian languages are aborigines. In Southern India, as in the North,
the same general distinction exists between the more primitive tribes of the
hills and jungles and the civilised inhabitants of the fertile tracts ; and
some ethnologists hold that the difference is racial and not merely the
result of culture. Mr. Thurston, for instance, says :
It is the Pre-Dravidian aborigines, and not the later and more cultured Dravi.
dians, who must be regarded as the primitive existing race. . . . . . These Pre-Dravidians
. . . . . . are differentiated from the Dravidian classes by their short stature and broad
(platyrhine) noses. There is strong ground for the belief that the Pre-Dravidians are
ethnically related to the Veddas of Ceylon, the Talas of the Celebes, the Batin of
Sumatra, and possibly the Australians. (The Madras Presidency, pp. 124-5. )
It would seem probable, then, that the original speakers of the Dravi-
dian languages were invaders, and that the ethnographical Dravidians are
a mixed race. In the more habitable regions the two elements have fused,
while representatives of the aborigines are still to be found in the fastnesses
9
## p. 37 (#71) ##############################################
II]
DRAVIDIANS
37
to which they retired before the encroachments of the newcomers. If this
view be correct, we must suppose that these aborigines have, in the course
of long ages, lost their ancient languages and adopted those of their con-
querors. The process of linguistic transformation, which may still be obser-
ved in other parts of India, would seem to have been carried out more
completely in the South than elsewhere.
The theory that the Dravidian element is the most ancient which we
can discover in the population of Northern India, must also be modified by
what we now know of the Muņdā languages, the Indian representatives
of the Austric family of speech, and the mixed languages in which
their influence has been traced (p. 43). Here, according to the evidence now
available, it would seem that the Austric element is the oldest, and that it
has been overlaid in different regions by successive waves of Dravidian and
Indo-European on the one hand, and by Tibeto-Chinese on the other. Most
ethnologists hold that there is no difference in physical type between the
present speakers of Muņdā and Dravidian languages. This statement has
been called in question ; but, if it be true, it shows that racial conditions
have become so complicated that it is no longer possible to analyse their
constituents. Language alone has preserved a record which would other-
wise have been lost.
At the same time, there can be little doubt that Dravidian languages
were actually flourishing in the western regions of Northern India at
the period when languages of the Indo-European type were introduced by
the Āryan invasions from the north-west. Dravidian characteristics have
been traced alike in Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, in the Prākrits, or early
popular dialects, and in the modern vernaculars derived from them. The
linguistic strata would thus appear to be arranged in the order-Austric,
Dravidian, Indo-European.
There is good ground, then, for supposing that, before the coming of
the Indo-Aryans speakers of the Dravidian languages predominated both
in Northern and in Southern India ; but, as we have seen, older elements
are discoverable in the populations of both regions, and therefore the
assumption that the Dravidians are aboriginal is no longer tenable. Is there
any evidence to show whence they came into India ?
No theory of their origin can be maintained which does not account for
the existence of Brāhūī, the large island of Dravidian speech in the moun-
tainous regions of distant Baluchistān which lie near the western routes into
India. Is Brāhūſ a surviving trace of the immigration of Dravidian-speaking
peoples into India from the west ? Or does it mark the limits of an overflow
from India into Baluchistān ? Both theories have been held ; but as all the
great movements of peoples have been into India and not out of India, and
| as a remote mountainous district may be expected to retain the survivals of
## p. 38 (#72) ##############################################
38
(CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
ancient races while it is not likely to have been colonised, the former view
would a priori seem to be by far the more probable. The reasons why it has
not been universally accepted is that the racial character of the Brāhūis is
now mairly Irānian, and not Dravidian in the Indian sense of the term.
But the argument from race is not so conclusive as may appear at first
sight. The area in which the Dravidian Brāhūi is still spoken forms part of
the region which is occupied by Turko-Irānian peoples ; and the peculiar
tribal constitution of the Brāhūis, is one which, unlike the caste-system,
does not insist on social exclusiveness, but, on the contrary, definitely
invites recruitment from outside. This is clear from the account given in
the Gazetteer of the ‘Baloch and Brāhūi type of tribe' :
The second type of Turko-Irānian tribe is based primarily not upon agnatic, kin-
ship, but upon common good and ill : in other words, it is cemented together only by
the obligations arising from the blood-feud. There is no eponymous ancestor, and the
tribe itself does not profess to be composed of homogeneous elements. . . . . . The same
principles hold good in tl e case of the Brābūſ. . . whose numbers have been recruited
from among Afghāns, Kūrds, Jadgāls, Baloch, and other elements. (Imp. Gaz. I. p. 310)
Such circumstances must necessarily change the racial character of the
tribe by a gradual process which might well in the course of ages lead to a
complete transformation. There is therefore nothing in the existing racial
conditions, and equally nothing in the existing physical conditions, to
prevent us from believing that the survival of a Dravidian language in
Baluchistān must indicate that the Dravidians came into India through
Baluchistān in prehistoric times. Whether they are ultimately to be traced
to a Central Asian or to a Western Asian origin cannot at present be decid-
ed with absolute certainty ; but the latter hypothesis receives very strong
support from the undoubted similarity of the Sumerian and Dravidian eth-
nic types.
2. The Indo-Aryan type in Kashmir, the Punjab from the Indus to
about the longitude of Ambāla (76° 46'E. ), and Rājputāna. 'The stature is
mostly tall ; complexion fair ; eyes dark ; hair on face plentiful ; head long;
nose narrow and prominent, but not specially long. '
The region now occupied by people of this type forms the eastern
portion of the wide extent of territory inhabited by Aryan settlers in the
earliest historical times—the period of the Rigveda, probably about 1200 B. C.
Their oldest literature, which is in a language closely connected with ancient,
Persian, Greek, and Latin, supplies no certain indication that they still
retained the recollection of their former home ; and we may reasonably
conclude, therefore, that the invasions, which brought them into India,
took place at a date considerably earlier.
1 For the remains of ancient culture in this region, sro Imp. Guz. I, p. 302 ; XIV,
p. 3: 0.
2 Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East (4th ed. ), pp. 173-4. The converse
view is, however, held by the author, viz. that the Sumerians came into Western Asia
from India.
## p. 39 (#73) ##############################################
II]
INDO-ARYANS
39
2
The Indo-Aryans came from Bactria, over the passes of the Hindu
Kush into S. Afghānistān, and thence by the valleys of the Kābul river, the
Kurram, and the Gumal, all of them rivers well known to the poets of the
Rigveda-into the N. W. Frontier Province and the Punjab. In the age of
the Rigveda they formed five peoples, each consisting of a number of tribes
in which the women were of the same race as their husbands. This is proved
conclusively by their social and religious status. We may be certain, there.
fore, that the invasions were no mere incursions of armies, but gradual
progressive movements of whole tribes, such as would have been impossible
at a later date, when climatic causes had transformed the physical conditions
of the country (p. 34). On this point the evidence of literature receives the
support of ethnology : for only thus, according to Risley, can be explained
the uniform distribution of the Indo-Aryan racial type throughout the region
which it occupies, and the strongly marked contrasts which it presents to
types prevailing in regions to the east and south. Later settlements neces-
sarily consisted almost entirely of men. Such modifications of the racial
character as would be produced by inter-marriage with the women of the
country would, in course of time, cease to be recognisable. They would be
as difficult to trace as the Roman factor in the population of Britain.
3. The Turko-Irānian type in the N. W. Frontier Province, Baluchis-
tān, and those districts of the Punjab and Sind which lie west of the Indus.
'Stature above mean ; complexion fair ; eyes mostly dark, but occasionally
grey ; hair on face plentiful ; head broad ; nose moderately narrow, promi-
nent, and very long. '
The northern section of the region now inhabited by peoples of this
type, that is to say, the country of the north-western tributaries of the Indus,
was, in the times of the Rigveda, occupied by Indo-Aryans. The predomi-
nant racial character of the whole region is due to the invasion of Mongolo-
Altaic peoples from Turkestān on the one hand, and of Persian Aryans or
Irānians on the other. The Indus is the ethnographical boundary between
the Turko-Irānian and Indo-Aryan types, just as in history it has often been
the political boundary between Irān and India.
4. The Scytho-Dravidian type in Sind east of the Indus, Gujarāt, and
the western section of the peninsula as far as about longitude 76° E. , that is
to say, the Bombay Presidency or Western India generally. "The type is
clearly distinguished from the Turko-Irānian by a lower stature, a greater
length of head, a higher nasal index, a shorter nose, and a lower orbitonasal
index. '
This type, of which the Marāthās are the chief representatives, occupies
a position between the broad-headed Turko-Irānians and the long-headed
Dravidians. Its designation assumes that the foreign broad-headed element
was introduced during the period of Scythian (Çaka) rule in western India
## p. 40 (#74) ##############################################
40
(CH.
PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES
(c. 120-380A. D). But there can be little doubt that its origin must be traced
to a period far more remote. The çakas were among those military con-
querors who broke into the Punjab after the downfall of the Maurya Empire:
and it can scarcely be supposed that the extension of their power to Wes-
tern India materially affected the race. The fact that their Scythian names,
as is shown by coins and inscriptions, became Hinduised after a few gene-
rations, is conclusive proof that they were forced to adapt themselves to
their social environment. We must therefore seek the disturbing racial in-
fluence in some earlier tribal immigration of which no other memorial now
remains. The invaders probably belonged to the broad-headed Alpine race
which inhabited the plateaus of Western Asia (Anatolia, Armenia, and
Irān)" ; and they would seem to have come into Western India, as the
Dravidians also most probably came, through Baluchistān before desiccation
had made the routes impassable for multitudes.
5. The Āryo-Dravidian or Hindustāni type in the plain of the Ganges
from about longitude 76° 30' E. to 87° E. ; that is to say, in the eastern
fringe of the Punjab, in the United Provinces, and in Bihār. "The head-
form is long, with a tendency to medium ; the complexion varies from light-
ish brown to black, the nose ranges from medium to broad, being always
broader than among the Indo-Aryans ; the stature is lower than in the latter
group, and usually below the average' (i. e. it ranges from 5' 3" to 5'5").
The Āryo-Dravidian type occupies the ancient Madhyadeça, or the
Midland Country,' extending, according to Manu (II, 12) from Vinaçana,
where the river Sarasvati loses itself in the Great Desert, to Allahābād, to-
gether with some five degrees of the country farther east. It is a mixed type
caused apparently by the Indo-Aryan colonisation of a region previously
held by a population mainly Dravidian. The Indo-Aryan type does not, as
might have been expected from analogous instances, shade by imperceptible
degrees into the Āryo-Dravidian type ; but a marked change from the for-
mer to the latter is observable about the longitude of Sirhind. It is evident,
then, that the waves of tribal migration must have been impeded at this
point, and that the Indo-Āryan influence farther east must be due rather
to warlike or peaceful penetration than to the wholesale encroachment of
multitudes.
To explain this abrupt transition, the theory of a second Āryan in-
vasion, which is supposed to have come into the plain of the Ganges from
the Pāmirs through Gilgit and Chitrā), was propounded by the late Dr.
Hoernle and has been generally accepted in the official publications of the
Government of India. This theory is made improbable by the physical
difficulties of the route suggested, and some of the arguments adduced in
its favour are demonstrably mistaken. There is no such break of continuity
Haddon, The Wanderings of Peoples, pp. 12, 17,
## p. 41 (#75) ##############################################
II)
ĀRYO-DRAVIDIANS
41
between the tribes of the Rigveda and the peoples of the later literaturę aş
it presupposes! . At the same time it seemed to be supported by the existing
distribution of the Indo-Aryan languages ; but, as will be seen (p. 44), an
equally satisfactory explanation of this distribution may be suggested.
Apart from this theory, the conclusions of ethnology are entirely in
accord with the historical indications of the literature. The ethnographical
limit is also the dividing line between the geography of the Rigveda and the
geography of the later Vedic literature. In the Rigveda Āryan communities
have scarcely advanced beyond the country of the river Sarasvati (Sirhind),
which for ever afterwards was remembered with especial veneration as
Brahmāvarta, 'the Holy Land. ' In the Brāhmaṇās the centre of religious
activity has been transferred to the adjacent country on the south-east, i. e.
the upper portion of the doāb between the Jumna and the Ganges, and the
Muttra District of the United Provinces. This was Brahmarshideça - 'the
Country of the Holy Sages. ' Here it was that the hymns of the Rigveda,
which were composed in the North-West- the country of the 'Seven Rivers'
as it is called (Rv. VIII, 24, 27), were collected and arranged ; and here it
was that the religious and social system which we call Brāhmanism assumed
its final form--a form which, in its religious aspect, is a compromise bet-
ween Āryan and more primitive Indian ideas, and, in its social aspect, the
result of the contact of different races. After Brāhman culture had thus
occupied what has in all ages been the commanding position in India, its
trend was still eastwards ; and the country of the 'Seven Rivers,' though not
altogether forgotten, occupies a place of less importance in the later
literature.
Both of the facts above mentioned - the abrupt transition from the
Indo-Aryan to the Āryo-Dravidian type, and the extension of Āryan influ-
ence from Brahmăvarta to Brahmarshideca - are best understood if we
remember the natural feature which connects the plain of the Indus with the
plain of the Ganges. This is the strait of habitable land which lies between
the desert and the mountains. Its historical significance has already been
noticed? . It is in this strait that the decisive battles, on which the fate of
India has depended, have been fought ; and here too we may suppose that
the progress of racial migrations from the north-west in prehistoric times
must have been checked. Both politically and ethnographically it forms a
natural boundary. In the age of the Rigveda the Āryans had not yet broken
through the barrier, though the Jumna is mentioned in a hymn (vii, 18, 19)
in such a way as to indicate that a battle had been won on its banks. It
was only at some later date that the country between the Upper Jumna and
Ganges and the district of Delhi were occupied. A record of this occupa-
tion has been preserved in some ancient verses quoted in the catapatha
1 See Chapters V. p. 106 and XIII.
Chapter I, pp. 20 f.
2
.
## p. 42 (#76) ##############################################
42
[CH.
