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Title: The Peoples of India

Author: J. D. Anderson

Release date: August 31, 2017 [eBook #55465]

Language: English

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Transcriber's Note:

Apparent typographical errors have been corrected, and the use of
hyphens has been normalized.

The author does not identify the transliteration scheme(s) used for
Indian words in the text. Macrons (as in "ā") are used extensively and
there is some use of the "diacritic dot" (as in "ṇ").

Text in italics is indicated by _underscores_ and text in black-letter
font is indicated by +plus signs+. Small capitals have been replaced by
full capitals.




The Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA


 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
 +London+: FETTER LANE, E.C.
 C. F. CLAY, MANAGER

[Illustration: university crest]

 +Edinburgh+: 100, PRINCES STREET
 +Berlin+: A. ASHER AND CO.
 +Leipzig+: F. A. BROCKHAUS
 +New York+: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
 +Bombay and Calcutta+: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.

_All rights reserved_


[Illustration:

 Brāhmans
 (_Mirzapur district_)]


[Illustration: title page

 THE PEOPLES OF INDIA
 BY
 J. D. ANDERSON, M.A.

 Teacher of Bengali in the
 University of Cambridge, formerly
 of the Indian Civil Service

 Cambridge:
 at the University Press

 1913]

 +Cambridge+:
 PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

_With the exception of the coat of arms at the foot, the design on the
title page is a reproduction of one used by the earliest known Cambridge
printer, John Siberch, 1521_




PREFACE


The writing of this little book has been delayed by the hope I once
cherished of incorporating in it some of the results of the Indian
Census of 1911. This desire was inevitable in the case of a retired
Indian official, who, like most of his kind, has taken a small part in
one or more of the decennial numberings of the Indian people. In this
country, a Census affords material chiefly for the calculations and
theories of the statistician, and the Registrar-General is not regarded
as an expert in Anthropology or Linguistics. But in India the case is
very different. If the district officer is always glad to learn as much
as possible of the people with whom he is brought into contact, his
official duties often reveal only the seamy side of Indian life, and it
is only when he is in camp, or snatching a rare and hurried holiday in
shooting, that he gets to see something of the people otherwise than as
litigants or payers of revenue. A census is an agreeable and welcome
opportunity for looking at India from another and more genially human
point of view. In the first place, it is one of the least expensive of
official operations, since it is chiefly performed by unpaid and
volunteer agency. Hence the official, a little weary of litigants,
touts, pleaders, and subordinates, who, however amiable in their private
lives, are apt to be indolent and obstructive in office, is glad to make
acquaintance with new friends, who, for the most part, take an
intelligent and amused interest in the unfamiliar task of numbering. For
many busy weeks before the actual counting takes place, the district
officer has to ride far and near, to satisfy himself that all necessary
preparations have duly been made, to issue the instructions that may be
called for by the zeal, inquisitiveness or density of his volunteer
colleagues. In the process, he has many pleasant and some amusing
experiences. On one occasion I rode into a little village on the
north-eastern frontier, inhabited by semi-savage Tibeto-Burmese people.
Official orders as to the numbering of all the house in legible figures
had apparently not been obeyed. I simulated wrath and disappointment,
but the worthy headman on whom I vented my (purely official) indignation
was not dismayed. "Bring out your drums!" he shouted. Every householder
produced the family kettle-drum, on the head of which the number of his
house had been duly inscribed in large figures. There was no paper in
the village, but parchment was invented before paper, and the headman
deserved the commendation I was glad to bestow. On another occasion, I
found a house numbered indeed, but grievously dilapidated and obviously
deserted. "Why is this empty house numbered?" I asked. "It is haunted by
a ghost, sir," answered the enumerator. I confess I felt sorry not to
allow him to include this ghostly visitant in a census of living men.
Other incidents, more ethnologically important than these, will
frequently occur. In any case the Census Report of an Indian province is
by far the most interesting official document in existence, and each
census adds something to our knowledge of Indian humanity, if only
because each Census Commissioner, always an officer of unusual ability
and attainments, looks at his task from a point of view somewhat
different from that of his predecessors, and stamps his individuality on
the work of his subordinates. Those who have read Mr E. A. Gait's
article on _Caste_ in the _Dictionary of Ethics and Religion_ will
expect the census of 1911 to contain new views and fresh information as
to the actual working of the caste system in various provinces, and its
relation to the religious ideas of the people.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was natural, then, that I should wish to learn from a new tapping of
the source from which has been compiled, for the most part, the ethnical
portion of the first volume of the Imperial Gazetteer of India, which
has been my chief authority in compiling this little book. But I know
not when Mr Gait's Report for all India will be ready, and even the
Provincial Reports come but slowly from the Press. Most of them are full
of the most interesting and valuable information, but it takes time to
assimilate so much new matter, and, in any case, not much of it could
have been utilized for so small and elementary a book. Hence I have
simply to state my debt to the late Sir H. H. Risley and Mr E. A. Gait
for the chapter on Race and Caste; to Sir G. A. Grierson for the chapter
on Languages, and to Mr William Crooke for enabling me further to
summarise his masterly summary of what is known about Indian Religions.
It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to my friend
Sir G. A. Grierson. Years ago, when we were young men, it was known that
in him the Indian Civil Service possessed a scholar and a linguist of
most unusual industry and ability. But few knew that there was
germinating in his mind the scheme for the great _Linguistic Survey of
India_, the most remarkable feat of administrative scholarship, perhaps,
that has ever been attempted, a feat that has won him the _Prix Volney_
and I know not what other appreciations of his work in France and
Germany. His learning and linguistic skill are widely known, but I must
seize the opportunity to tell of another feature of his achievement. Of
course no man knows more than a few of the hundreds of Indian languages,
but there is one man who knows something of the working and mechanism of
them all, and that is Sir G. A. Grierson. I had the privilege of helping
him with part of the Bodo volume of his _Survey_, having had occasion to
learn one or two Tibeto-Burman languages in the course of official duty.
The practised ease with which he acquired the syntactical and phonetic
peculiarities of languages with which he had no previous acquaintance
was the most surprising and delightful intellectual performance I have
ever witnessed.

I have ventured occasionally to enliven my chiefly borrowed narrative
with personal ideas or reminiscences. Such digressions have however been
few and brief, and I do not think I need apologise for them.

I have to thank Miss Lilian Whitehouse and my son, Lieut. M. A.
Anderson, R.E., for the two diagrammatic maps which will, I hope, clear
up any geographical difficulties created by a necessarily brief account
of a large and complicated subject.

I owe the illustrations of caste types to the kindness of Mr William
Crooke. They are from photographs of inhabitants of one single district
of the United Provinces and are interesting as showing how in a single
small area racial differences show themselves in such a way as to be
recognisable by the most careless observer. They prove once more how
stratified Indian humanity has become under the influence of caste rules
of marriages.

J. D. A.

_September, 1913._




CONTENTS


 CHAP.                                                       PAGE

       PREFACE                                                  v

       INTRODUCTION                                             1

    I. RACE AND CASTE                                          13

   II. THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA                                  54

  III. THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA                                  81

       BIBLIOGRAPHY                                           113

       INDEX                                                  115




ILLUSTRATIONS


PLATE

Brāhmans (_Mirzapur district_)                      _Frontispiece_

   I. Mahābrāhmans (_Mirzapur district_)        _To face page_ 12

  II. Kāyasthas—the writer caste (_Mirzapur
        district_)                                    "        24

 III. Dharkārs (_Mirzapur district_)                  "        36

  IV. Banjara women (_Mirzapur district_)             "        48

   V. Seoris or Savaras (_Mirzapur district_)         "        60

  VI. A Bhuiyār (_Mirzapur district_)                 "        72

 VII. A Ghāsiya (_Mirzapur district_)                 "        84




MAPS


The Indian Empire—Distribution of Population      _At end of book_

The Indian Empire—Distribution of Prevailing
  Languages                                               "




INTRODUCTION


It is necessary, once more, to remind the reader that the peninsula of
India has an area and population roughly equal to the area and
population of Europe without Russia. Everyone who has learnt geography
at school is familiar with the great triangle, its base in the soaring
Himalayan heights in the north, its apex jutting into the Indian Ocean,
and marked by the satellite island of Ceylon. To the north, then, is the
great mountain barrier, a tangled mass of snowy peaks, glaciers and
snowfields, separating the sunny plains of India proper from the
plateaux of Central Asia. Beneath them lie wide river basins, sandy and
dry as unirrigated Egypt to the west; moist, warm, and waterlogged to
the east. To the south of the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges is the
central plateau, home of many aboriginal races. This rises on the west
into a castellated rampart of hills facing the Arabian Sea, and on the
south slopes away into green undulating uplands. So much, at least, of
geographical description must be given as a clue to the distribution of
the peoples of India. Along the Himalayas, growing stronger in numbers
as we go eastwards, are races mostly of a Mongolian type, mingled with
purely Indian elements. In the Panjāb and the United Provinces, sending
offshoots southwards along the well-watered west coast, are the peoples
in whom the traces of Aryan immigration are most visible. In Bengal we
find a duskier race, provisionally termed Mongolo-Dravidian, but with a
strong infusion, in the upper classes, of western blood. In the south
are a still darker population almost wholly Dravidian. It is in the most
ancient part of India, in the high plateau of the Deccan, that there
still dwell the peoples who are probably the aborigines of the land and
use the most purely Indian languages, the various Dravidian dialects.
The geologically recent valleys of the Indus and Ganges are the home of
races, mingled with aboriginal peoples, whose language and physical
features show that in them is a strong strain of immigrant blood.

On the Himalayan slopes, in Assam, and especially in Burma, are
Tibeto-Burman peoples, with something of a Japanese aspect. Intermingled
with all these, in forests and on rough and hardly accessible hills, are
scattered many groups of semi-savage folk, of whom little was known till
the gradual spread of British rule carried the administrator, the
missionary, and finally the anthropologist, into regions once considered
unfit for the presence of civilised men.

So far, it may be said, the distribution of Indian humanity is not very
unlike that of the races of Europe. Even this very crude summary, it is
true, shows at least three great groups of languages, Dravidian in the
south, Indo-European in the west and north-west, Tibeto-Burman in the
north and the north-east. There are in fact five separate families of
human speech which have their homes in India; the Aryan, the Dravidian,
the Mundā, the Mon-Khmer, and the Tibeto-Chinese. The lateral spread of
these is, of course, no real indication of the present habitat of five
different races of men. But they do indicate the existence, in varying
degrees of purity, of five different origins, of which the Dravidian and
Mundā alone can be said to be purely indigenous and confined to the
Indian peninsula. Nowhere is it more easy than in India to see how
languages spread from race to race, from tribe to tribe, with a sort of
linguistic contagion; the stronger, more supple, more copious, more
cultivated languages replacing and gradually destroying weaker forms of
speech. Something of the same sort has occurred, and is even now
happening, in Europe. But the surviving European languages are mostly
sturdy and vigorous, and do not readily yield place to one another. In
India the process of linguistic invasion is going on before our eyes,
attendant on the gradual growth of Hindu civilisation and religion,
which disdains to practise open and reasoned proselytism, but extends
its borders nevertheless, and carries with it one or another of the
Aryan dialects.

In spite of the spread of the stronger languages, the five great
families of Indian speech remain and testify to more varied origins than
those of Europe. One of the first results of familiarity with Indian
peoples is a sense of their remarkable variety of aspect and culture.
When the stranger lands in India, his first feeling is one of
bewildering sameness; the dusky beings that surround him seem as like
one another as sheep, or peas. But that sensation is merely due to the
predominance of unfamiliar colour, and soon gives way to an impression
of astonishing and most interesting variety. This variety is exhibited
by the careful anthropometric investigations of the ethnologist. But
there is more variety than average measurements show, and the rough
impressions of the experienced administrator and traveller are not
without their value. For instance, Sir William Hunter, in his work on
_The Indian Empire_, classified the highlanders of Chota Nagpore as a
race apart, whom he called Kolārians. Sir H. H. Risley says that "the
distinction between Kolārians and Dravidians is purely linguistic, and
does not correspond to any differences of physical type." As a matter of
average physical measurements, this criticism is just. The average
dimensions of Sonthal skulls are the same as those of other Dravidian
races. But he would be a poor observer of racial characteristics, who
could not pick out a typical inhabitant of Chota Nagpore from a crowd of
southern Dravidians. Even in parts of Bengal where such "Kolārian" folk
have settled some generations ago, and have acquired the local language
and dress, they are almost as easily distinguished as a Hindu
undergraduate in Cambridge. If physical characters are rightly divided
into "indefinite" signs of race, which can only be described with
difficulty and hesitation in ordinary language, and the "definite" signs
which can be measured and reduced to figures, yet the general aspect of
a tribe or caste is the first thing which strikes an experienced
enquirer's eye, and leads him to make further and more detailed
investigations.

So is it also with those divisions, peculiar to India, which are known
to us by the Portuguese name of _caste_. The Indian name for caste is
_varna_, or "colour," and physical differences between different castes
were fairly obvious even before accurate averages were struck between
many individual measurements. Caste has undoubtedly tended, and for
similar reasons, to perpetuate such differences between classes of men
as we readily recognise between different breeds of horses or cattle.
The ages of men succeed one another more slowly than the generations of
domestic animals, and segregation, in spite of caste rules, has probably
at no time been so rigid as in the case of pure-bred animals. But there
is a restriction in the matter of marriage which has been more or less
efficacious, and especially so in the case of the higher castes, where
the women are more carefully guarded, and pride of birth influences the
future mothers of the race. In some rare instances, castes are still
racial, preserved from immixture by much the same feeling which leads
the white American to protect his race from a mingling of Negro or Red
Indian blood. Other castes are still recognisably the result and record
of such forbidden mixtures. Sometimes the resulting difference is so
great as to be visible in actual measurements. Often the result is a
mere peculiarity of aspect, such as enables an expert to identify a
mongrel or a crossbreed among domesticated animals. In any case, once a
caste is formed, it is fenced in by matrimonial rules, strict in
proportion to the social status and consideration of the group. Not
only, then, are the racial origins of modern India more various than
those of Europe, but such varieties of colour, stature, and culture as
exist tend to be perpetuated.

It has been said, somewhat paradoxically, that whereas in Europe the
divisions between races of men cut perpendicularly, as it were, so as to
be more or less local and geographical, in India the separating lines
run horizontally, and represent social strata. This, of course, is only
partly true. The ancient Hindu theory of caste assumes the existence of
four great divisions of Hindu humanity, extending all over India;
namely, Brāhmans or priests, Kshatriyas, or warriors; Vaiçyas, or
trading and professional folk; and Sūdras, who are most justly and aptly
to be described as "the remainder." In all parts of Hindu India may be
found representatives of this ancient and theoretical division of
humanity, the first two usually claiming a western origin as eagerly as
some of us claim a tincture of Norman blood. But it would be incorrect
to say that even the highest and purest of these four divisions is of
uniform race, or anything approaching to it, all over India. A Bengali
Brāhman, for instance, can be more or less easily distinguished from
other Bengalis, if he has the typical appearance of his caste. But he is
even more easily distinguished from Brāhmans of other Provinces. How
much of this last difference is due to mixture of blood, how much to
difference of food and climate, it is, of course, difficult to say. But
certainly caste produces a difference of breed in addition to the
ethnical varieties of origin which differentiate the Indian populations
from those of Europe.

Thirdly, some clue to Indian racial differences may be found in the
religions of the peninsula. The greatest of these is still the Indian
religion _par excellence_, the wonderful collection of varied
speculations, beliefs, and practices known to us as Hinduism, and its
daughter, the religion of Buddha. The latter has spread far and wide,
has subjugated Ceylon and Burma, and is the leading religion of the Far
East. At one time, it was supposed to be entirely or nearly extinct in
India, although students had discovered traces of its influence in the
Vishnuvite sects of Hinduism. Recent researches have shown that an
almost unaltered form of Buddhism survives in the very bosom of
Hinduism, and is practised under Hindu names among certain castes of
Bengal and Orissa. It is to be noted that the investigations into these
survivals have been for the most part conducted by Bengali Hindus, among
whom is springing up a school of ethnologists and comparative linguists,
who only need a better knowledge and understanding of European methods
to be invaluable aids to western research in such matters. In Bengal, a
work of purely anthropological interest has actually been published in
the vernacular, an interesting account of the Chakmas, a Tibeto-Burman
but partly Hinduised race on the eastern border of Bengal. Closely akin
to the lower forms of Hinduism, and often subtly blending with them, are
many Animistic religions, most of them professed by aboriginal tribes,
speaking one or other of the aboriginal languages.

Islam and Christianity are, of course, imported and proselytising
religions, and yield few if any clues to racial or social origins. Many
Muhammadans profess to be, and not a few are, of authentic foreign
origin. But during the seven hundred years of Muslim rule in India,
there was much intermarriage with native races, and even more
conversion. It is curious that, as in the case of Christianity, the
conversions have been mostly among tribes and classes of the humbler
sort. These were not denied admission into Hinduism, but they were only
admitted on terms of social and racial degradation. Islam and
Christianity alike claim to overlook the accidents of birth and status,
and hence attract those to whom Hinduism only offered a place among the
lowest ranks of its social hierarchy. But even in the case of the
religions of Christ and Muhammad, the inveterate Indian tendency to
recognise and insist on breed and social status has asserted itself
again and again. Among Muhammadans, the Arabic tribal names have come to
be the designations of social units which differ but little from the
endogamous castes of Hinduism, and the same tendency is already evident
among Christian converts. There is a marked reluctance in some quarters
among ex-Hindus to intermarry with ex-Muslims, or even to participate in
sacramental Communion with them.

As with caste, so with religion, the divisions are not strictly
horizontal. As Christianity is not one thing all over Europe, but has
differences of creed, ritual, and practice corresponding to racial
differences, so the Hinduism, and even the Muhammadanism, of different
provinces varies. There is no sharp boundary; there are elements in
common wherever we go. But just as Dravidian temple architecture can be
easily distinguished, even by the unpractised eye, from that of the
edifices of the Gangetic plains, so local peculiarities of belief or
ritual may come to the aid of the anthropologist, and may suggest or
confirm distinctions more easily verified and more capable of scientific
proof.

The study of all these matters is not without a practical and
administrative interest at the present time. A hundred and fifty years
ago, to the racial, tribal, and caste differences, accompanied by
differences of language and religion, were added political divisions,
accentuated by frequent dynastic or predatory wars. British rule
has introduced two powerful unifying influences. Our system of
administration, while it is adapted more or less effectively (more in
some cases, less in others, according to the talent and character of
local officers) to local precedents and local needs, is moulded by the
great supervising and consolidating authority of the Governor-General in
Council.

Secondly, higher education in India is conducted for the most part in
English, and educated India, rapidly growing in numbers, has English for
its second language, and is modifying local beliefs, usages,
aspirations, patriotisms in accordance with ideas more or less
consciously assimilated from European teachers and models. No one can
deny that this new unity of India is the direct result of centralised
British rule. In the far distance of time, all or nearly all India
would, for a while, accept the domination of some Hindu ruler or
dynasty. Under the Muhammadans, similarly, there were times when the
Emperor at Delhi was the ruler of all or nearly all India. Under British
rule, a much wider and more populous India, ranging from Baluchistan to
Burma, and only excepting the semi-independent states which have been
allowed to retain sovereign powers, is really and for the first time
part of the greatest administration on earth except that of China, if we
look to numbers. It is a result, as the history of British India shows,
for which we cannot claim the whole credit. The direction of the great
work of unification has been in British hands; it has chiefly been
carried out by indigenous agency, and, in matters of detail, in
deference to Indian ideas and Indian suggestions. Even fifty years ago,
few Indians supposed that the wide Empire of India could be governed
save under British guidance, or without the aid of British bayonets. The
old habitual forces of disruption were too obvious; the distrust of one
race for another was still too keenly felt to allow Indian politicians
to imagine a united India under indigenous rule. But as the educated
classes grow in power, in numbers, in self-reliance, and reliance on one
another; as some of them are promoted to posts of higher trust and
authority in India, and even in England, it is perhaps only natural that
Indians should suppose that, so far as politics and administration are
concerned, the old divisions and dissensions are obsolete, and that
united India can in future be governed by native agency. That is not a
matter with which ethnology has anything to do. It is the ethnologist's
business merely to record impartially what racial, tribal, social, and
religious differences still survive, and, if he can, to show how far
they have been, and are being, obliterated by the spread of education,
and by growing self-confidence and ambition among educated Indians.
Whether the information the ethnologist collects can be put to any
administrative use does not concern him, nor does he desire that his
impartiality shall be affected by these considerations. But, in a little
book of this kind it may not be amiss to point out that one result of
British rule has been the growth of a new type of Indian, the educated
Indian; who, whether he be Hindu or Muhammadan or Buddhist, is at least
inclined to subordinate the old hereditary divisions to common political
ambitions. These ambitions affect the fortunes and the future of some
three hundred millions of humbler Indians, at present only linked by the
accident of common British rule, and, so far as they are Hindus, by a
common Hindu sentiment.

[Illustration: _Plate I_

 Mahābrāhmans
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

In the following chapters, it will be my business to tell, as briefly
and clearly as possible, of (1) the Ethnology and Castes of the Indian
Peoples; (2) the Languages of India; (3) the Religions of India. I hope
what I have already said will sufficiently show why these three subjects
are treated in this order.




CHAPTER I

RACE AND CASTE


Curiously enough, the systematic enquiry into the physical
race-characteristics of the Indian peoples was due to a daring assertion
by Mr Nesfield, of the Indian Educational Service, to the effect that,
so far as physical signs go, there is practically only one Indian race
and one Indian caste. This was a hasty but quite natural generalisation
from experience of a part of India, the United Provinces, which is in
the heart of the Aryan settlement in the Gangetic _do-āb_ (the area
between "two rivers"). Here caste has long been a settled institution,
and innumerable sub-castes, professional or the result of outcasting,
have come into existence. Mr Nesfield was driven by his local
observations to assert the unity of one great Indian race; he denied the
truth of "the modern doctrine which divides the population of India into
Aryan and aboriginal": he sturdily declared that it was impossible to
distinguish a scavenger from a Brāhman, save by costume and other
artificial and accidental marks. Even in the United Provinces this
uncompromising statement awoke dissent. In other parts of India, as, for
instance, on the north-eastern frontier, the crowded home of many races
and languages, dissent was eager and loud. It was evident, on the face
of it, that Mr Nesfield's new dogma was based on too limited a study.
Caste, for him, was a mere matter of hereditary function and profession;
since most castes in the sacred "midland" of Hinduism have assumed that
guise. There is no reason to suppose that castes have usually or even
often been formed as professional guilds. They come into being for many
reasons, some of which will be presently stated; and in civilised
communities, where the division of labour and specialisation of
professional skill are well established, a caste gradually assumes some
distinctive means of livelihood. But on the borders of Hinduism, where
the Hindu social system is still assimilating new races, instances
abound of racial castes, tribal castes, perhaps even (though this is a
more doubtful matter) totemistic castes.

Those who had the widest experience of the Peninsula were convinced that
its races were at least as varied as those of Europe: those who, like Mr
Nesfield, had made a close study of one limited tract, might have
continued to believe that under the superficial distinctions of caste
and class lay a real unity of race. But Mr (afterwards Sir H. H.) Risley
had spent the early years of his Indian service among the Dravidian
tribes of Chota Nagpore, and was aware that they differ more widely from
the people Mr Nesfield had studied than an Englishman differs from a
Turk. The difference, indeed, was almost as great as that between a
European and a Chinaman. Could such differences be registered and
described in such a way as to convince minds accustomed to scientific
accuracy in statement? Mr Risley thought he saw his way to an
ethnological classification of Indian races and castes by means of the
then comparatively new methods of anthropometry. In 1891, he published
in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ a paper which marked
the beginning of systematic ethnological studies in India. It contained
a summary of the measurements of eighty-nine castes and tribes of
Bengal, the United Provinces, and Bihār. It dealt, therefore, with the
great alluvial plain, created by the Ganges and Indus, which lies
between the Himalayas and the _massif central_ of the Deccan. Here is
the home of the Aryan immigrants, where the great Indo-European
languages are spoken by communities as numerous as the larger European
nations. Anthropometry showed in the plainest, the most incontrovertible
way, that the caste system of marriages had sorted out men into classes
possessing definite and recognisable physical characteristics. There
were local differences, and caste differences. It only remained to
extend anthropometrical measurements to other parts of India to prove
that the many languages and religious beliefs of India are associated
with an even greater variety of physical qualities. Such enquiries are
still in progress, but many notable results have already been obtained,
especially by Mr Edgar Thurston, in his now famous investigations into
Dravidian ethnography.

The most important and significant measurement is that of the shape of
the head. It is, of course, impossible to take a man at random and to
say with certainty that the excessive length or breadth of his skull
proves him to belong to a given race. But the average skull-measurements
of a race are distinctive, and confirm, on the whole, the impressions
created by general aspect, colour, language and other vaguer
indications. The general result is as follows. At either end of the
Himalayan range, in Baluchistan on the west, and in Assam and Burma on
the east, broad heads prevail. Broad too are the heads of the mostly
Mongolian races inhabiting the valleys of the southern slopes of the
Himalayas, and in a belt of country running down the western coast at
least as far south as Coorg. In the Panjāb, Rājputānā, and the United
Provinces, tracts where the climate is dry and healthy, where great
summer heat is compensated for by a bracing winter, where wheat is for
the most part the staple food, long heads predominate. In Bihār,
travelling eastwards, medium heads are most common. In the damp and
steamy delta of Bengal, inhabited by over forty millions of rather dusky
rice-eating people, there is a marked tendency towards the Mongolian
brachy-cephaly of Tibeto-Burman races. It is visible among the
Muhammadans and Chandāls of Eastern Bengal, people who are probably
indigenous in this tract, it is more marked among the Kāyasthas, the
writer-caste of Bengal, which claims a western and Aryan origin. It
reaches its maximum development among the Bengali Brāhmans. South of the
Vindhya mountains, where the population is chiefly Dravidian, with a
comparatively small and ancient mixture of northern blood, the prevalent
type is mainly long-headed or medium-headed. The coast-population has
been much affected by foreign influences. On the east coast Malayan,
Indo-Chinese and even Portuguese settlers have altered the local type.
On the west coast, Arab, Persian, African, European, and Jewish
immigrants have mingled with local races, and have changed their
physiognomy, stature, and character of mind and body.

It is still a moot point, which the Mendelists may some day settle for
us, whether head-form is a true hereditary race-characteristic, whether
the osseous structure of the body generally is not a result of climate,
food and other such circumstances of environment. Yet the shape of the
head as shown by average measurements does mark off races of men which
are separated by other differences than those of habitat. They do
correspond to those vaguer yet unmistakeable characteristics which
enable us to tell one race from another. The Mongolian, even when he
settles in the plains of Assam, Bengal, or Burma and takes to a diet of
rice and fish, keeps his round head and his smooth hairless face. The
Aryan of the north-west has a markedly long head, which, in his case,
goes with a fair complexion and luxuriant beard. The Dravidian, darkest
of Indian races, with a tendency to crinkly or curly hair, has also a
long or medium head. The mixed races of Bengal have, it is not
surprising to find, medium heads, which tend in the upper castes to
become broad.

Another significant index to race is the measurement of the nose. The
results of nose-measurements roughly divide the peoples of India into
three classes—those having narrow or fine noses (leptorrhine), in which
the width is less than 70 per cent. of the height; those having medium
noses (mesorrhine), with an average index of from 70 to 85; and
broad-nosed (platyrrhine) people, the width of whose noses exceed 85 per
cent. Here we get a physical means of distinguishing between the
long-headed people of north-western India, fair and stalwart, and the
almost equally long-headed dusky folk of the south. For the average nose
of southern India, in Madras, the Central Provinces, and Chota Nagpore,
is broad. In the Panjāb and Baluchistan we get fine noses of what, to us
Europeans, seems an aristocratic type. In Afghanistan, noses are so long
and hooked as to give the tall and vigorous Afghan a Jewish aspect. In
the rest of India, and especially down the west coast, noses are of
medium type. A still more interesting discovery is the fact that
anywhere outside the Aryan tracts of the north-west, the broad nose is a
distinct sign of aboriginal blood. In Bengal, for instance, the lower
castes have broad noses. The priestly and writer castes, for all their
broad heads, have fine noses, which support their claim to a western
origin. Roughly speaking, the broad nose goes with primitive forms of
social organisation, with totemistic exogamous clans. Finer noses are
usually associated with communities of a more modern type; and above
these again come social units, castes and tribes, which claim descent
from eponymous saints and heroes.

A third physical measurement enables us to effect a further sorting out
of Indian races. What is called the "flatness" of the Mongolian face is
plain to the most careless observer. This is due chiefly to the
formation of the cheekbone, and its relation to the socket of the eye
and the root of the nose. This can be measured and expressed in figures,
with the result that the Mongoloid people of the north-east and the
Himalayan region can be definitely distinguished from the broad-headed
races of Baluchistan, Bombay, and Coorg.

Finally, it is possible to arrive at the average stature of various
Indian races and communities. The tallest races are found in the
north-west, in Baluchistan, the Panjāb and Rājputānā. A progressive
diminution is seen as we go down the valley of the Ganges, until we find
very short folk among the Assam hill tribes. The Dravidians of the south
are shorter than the Aryans of the north. The smallest Indian tribe is
that of the Negritos of the Andaman Islands, whose average height is
only 4 feet 10½ inches.

From a careful comparison of these measurements, Sir Herbert Risley
arrived at the classification of Indian humanity, which, for the moment,
is the accepted division, into seven main physical types. Beginning with
the north-western frontier, these are as follows:—

(1) The _Turko-Iranian_ type, which comprises the Baloches, Brāhuis and
Afghans of Baluchistan and the north-west Frontier Province. These are
probably the result of a fusion of Turkī and Persian blood, and are all
Muhammadans. The general aspect is wholly different from that of other
Indian races, and no one who has ever seen an Afghan or Baloch, with his
long Jewish nose and plentiful hair and beard, can ever confuse this
type with any other. In temperament also these men of the border differ
from other Indians. They are a fierce and warlike race, engaged in
constant blood-feuds with one another.

(2) The _Indo-Aryan_ type, with its home in the Panjāb, Rājputānā and
Kashmir, has as its most conspicuous members the Rājputs, Khattris and
Jāts. These, in all but colour (and even in colour they are hardly more
dusky than the races round the Mediterranean) closely resemble the
well-bred European in type. In stature they are tall, their complexion
is fair; "eyes dark; hair on face plentiful; head long; nose narrow and
prominent, but not specially long." One significant peculiarity of this
group is that there is little difference in physical character between
the upper and lower classes. This, as we shall presently see, is what we
should expect from what is known of the history of these peoples. The
upper social ranks probably represent the blood, but little diluted with
indigenous mixture, of the Aryan immigrants. Even in the lower classes,
the typical Aryan characteristics are now so prominent that any
indigenous strain that exists is no longer noticeable in average
measurements. Only in height, a quality especially sensitive to
differences of food and sanitation, are the lower castes inferior. Here
we get a remarkable modern instance of transformation of type. The
preaching of the Sikh reformers, involving a change of food and the
inculcation of martial discipline and fervour, has converted the
despised scavenging Chuhrā into the soldierly Mazhabi, once a
redoubtable foe of the English, and now one of the finest soldiers in
the British army.

(3) The _Scytho-Dravidian_ type, including the Marāthā Brāhmans, the
Kunbīs, and the Coorgs of western India. These peoples differ from the
Turko-Iranian races in being shorter, in having longer heads, higher
noses, and flatter faces.

(4) The _Aryo-Dravidian_ or Hindostāni type, which exists in the United
Provinces, in parts of Rājputānā, and in Bihār. This type appears to be
due to a mixture of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian strains. The higher classes
resemble Indo-Aryans, the lower have a distinctly Dravidian aspect. Yet,
even to the eye, they form a type apart and are easily recognised. In
this type, the average nose-index corresponds exactly to social status.
The noses grow broader as we go downwards in the social scale.

(5) The very interesting _Mongolo-Dravidian_ or _Bengali_ type which is
found in Bengal and Orissa. Here Aryan influences may still be detected
in the upper classes, but there has been extensive mingling with
Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian peoples, and other aboriginal inhabitants.
The main distinguishing feature is the broad head, which is most
conspicuous in the upper classes. It is shared equally by the Bengali
Brāhman, who claims a western origin, and the Chittagong Mag, whose
Tibeto-Burman origin is not denied. The Brāhman, on the other hand,
inherits a fine and narrow nose, which may very well be due to
Indo-Aryan ancestry. Recent investigations tend to show that Buddhism
survived till a comparatively recent date in Bengal. Hence, no doubt, a
temporary disregard of caste restrictions and a freer mixture with local
strains.

(6) The _Mongoloid_ type of the Himalayas, Nepāl, Assam, and Burma. "The
head is broad: complexion dark, with a yellowish tinge; hair on face
scanty; stature short or below average; nose fine to broad; face
characteristically flat; eyelids often oblique." Here we have races
which, if somewhat dark, correspond to the ideas most of us entertain
about the external aspect and temperament of the Siamese or Japanese. In
intellectual ability, and what we may call the artistic faculty, they
are inferior to the Bengali. Most Europeans, however (or is it,
therefore?) find them among the most congenial of Indian races. They are
social, good-natured, straightforward people. In the western Himalayas,
there has been intermixture with Aryan invaders, as in the Kangra Valley
and Nepāl, and the ruling dynasties claim Rājput origin, for the
Indo-Aryans loved to settle in the cool hills, much as the Anglo-Indian
does to this day. But on the mountainous frontiers of North-East Bengal
and Assam, the Mongoloid peoples have remained undisturbed till our own
time. Linguistically, this group is peculiarly interesting, since they
speak many tongues, many of which still remain to be recorded and
studied by European scholars.

(7) The _Dravidian_ type, which extends from Ceylon to the valley of the
Ganges and covers all South-Eastern India. It is found in Madras,
Hyderabad, the Central Provinces, most of Central India, and Chota
Nagpore. Its purest representatives dwell on the Malabar coast and in
Chota Nagpore. Here we have probably the original inhabitants of India,
now modified in some degree by an infiltration of Aryan, Scythian and
Mongoloid elements. "The stature is short or below mean; the complexion
very dark, approaching 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."

[Illustration: _Plate II_

 Kāyasthas—the writer caste
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

It must, of course, be understood, that these types and the names
allotted to them merely show that in certain areas the average
characteristics of the peoples dwelling there can be sufficiently
separated to be recognisable not only by eye but by the callipers of the
anthropologist. The names, it will be noticed, in some cases, imply
theories as to the origin of the races thus grouped together. These
theories are partly based on measurements, partly on tradition, partly
on linguistic considerations. It remains for me to state, very rapidly,
what these theories are.

That the Dravidians are the oldest race in India is rendered _primâ
facie_ probable by the fact that they inhabit the southernmost part of
the peninsula, between races who can with some certainty be called
invaders—and the deep sea. There is a remarkable uniformity of physical
characteristics among the lower specimens of this type. They have in
common an animistic religion, their distinctive language, their peculiar
stone monuments, and a primitive system of totemism. They do not
resemble Europeans on the one hand, or the races of the Far East on the
other. Until proof to the contrary is forthcoming they may well be
regarded as the autochthones of India.

There is more room for difference of opinion as to the origins of the
brilliant and highly civilised Indo-Aryans of the Panjāb and Rājputānā.
As I have said before, we have here a population closely resembling that
of modern Europe in many respects. I might have added that it still more
closely resembles the Europe of the Roman empire. Nowhere else in Hindu
India does caste sit so lightly, or approach so nearly to the social
classes of Europe. Though there are rules, or rather customs, forbidding
intermarriage between different castes, yet these are mitigated by the
custom, not unknown to ourselves, of _hypergamy_. This simply means that
a man may take a wife from a lower caste, but will not give his
daughters to men of that caste. The result is a uniformity of physical
type found nowhere else in India. Moreover these people speak a language
of the Indo-European family, and have many words and idioms in common
with ourselves. The present theory of their origin is simply that they
are in the bulk immigrants into India, immigrants who came into the land
from the north-west with their herds and families, as the Jews entered
into and possessed Palestine.

One chief objection to this theory is that the lands through which they
must have passed are in no way fitted to be an _officina gentium_, being
now dry, barren, and all but deserted. But abundant indications remain
to show that the climate of South-Eastern Persia and the tracts to the
north has changed within comparatively recent times. The relics of
crowded populations and ancient civilisations abound in regions now
sandy desert, and there is evidence in the tales told by Greek and
Chinese travellers that the Panjāb itself, most of it comparatively
arid, was once well wooded. The theory then is that the homogeneous and
handsome population of the Panjāb and Rājputānā represents the almost
pure descendants of Aryan settlers, who carried the Indo-European
languages now prevailing over Northern India, just as our own emigrants
took the English language to America.

But we have also to account for the Aryo-Dravidians who inhabit the
sacred "midland" country of Hinduism, and here we have Dr Hoernle's now
famous theory, remarkably confirmed by the researches of Sir George
Grierson's _Linguistic Survey_. This theory supposes that a second swarm
of Aryan-speaking people, perhaps driven forward by the change of
climate in central Asia, entered India through the high and difficult
passes of Gilgit and Chitral, and established themselves in the fertile
plains between the Ganges and the Jumna. They followed a route which
made it impossible for their women to accompany them. They took to
themselves wives from the daughters of dusky Dravidian aborigines. Here,
by contact with a different, and in their sentiment, inferior race,
caste came into being. Here most of the Vedic hymns were composed. Here,
by a blending of imported and indigenous religious ideals, the ritual
and usages of Hindu religion came into being, to spread in altered forms
east and west and south. The necessity for this second hypothesis is
twofold. It accounts for the marked ethnical barrier which separates
western from eastern Hindustan. Elsewhere the various types melt
imperceptibly into one another. Here alone is a definite racial border
line. Again, the theory accounts for the fact that the Vedic hymns
contain no description whatever of the earlier Aryan migration, and for
the fact that the inhabitants of the middle land always felt a dislike
for the early immigrants as men of low culture and barbarous manners.
For the present, at all events, and perhaps for all time, Dr Hoernle's
ingenious theory holds the field.

No special theory is required to account for the physical and mental
qualities of the Mongolo-Dravidians of Bengal. No doubt the original
population was Dravidian with a strong intermixture of Tibeto-Burmese
blood, especially in the east and north-east. But the Hindu religion,
developed in the sacred Midlands round Benares, spread to Bengal,
bringing with it the Indo-European speech which in medieval times became
the copious and supple Bengali tongue. From the west too came what we in
Europe would call the gentry, the priestly and professional castes.
These have acquired most of the local physical characters, dusky skin,
low stature, round heads. But in nearly all cases, the fineness and
sharp outline of the nose shows their aristocratic origin, and in some
instances a Bengali Brāhman has all the physical distinction of a
western priest or sage.

When we turn to the Scytho-Dravidian group we have again to fall back on
records of ancient invasions from the north. Ancient some of them were,
but far less ancient than the settlement of the Aryans in the
north-west. The Sakas have provided India with one of its many
chronological eras; they founded dynasties which have left coins behind
them, they have left vague but widely spread traditions. They were what
we Europeans call Scythians. They were known to the Persians, the
Parthians, and the Chinese. Their original home seems to have been in
the south of China, a land of pre-eminently round-headed races. We know
that they established their dominion over portions of the Panjāb, Sind,
Gujarāt, Rājputānā and Central India. If they have left traces of their
settlement on their descendants we may reasonably expect to find
round-headed races and tribes in regions mostly surrounded by
long-headed peoples. Such a zone of broad-headed people does in fact
extend from the western Panjāb right through the Deccan, till it finally
ends in Coorg. Sir H. H. Risley's theory is that the Scythians first
occupied the great grazing country of the western Panjāb, and finding
their progress eastwards blocked by the Indo-Aryans, turned southwards,
mingled with the Dravidians, and became the ancestors of the warlike
Marātha race. Such an origin forms a tempting explanation of the
well-known predatory habits of the Marātha hordes, and of their frequent
raids all over the peninsula under the decaying administration of the
later Mogul Emperors. It is an interesting and fascinating speculation,
since it accounts not only for the physical aspect of the Marāthas but
for their characteristic political genius, for their wide-ranging
forays, their guerilla warfare, their unscrupulous dealings, their
inveterate love of intrigue, their clannish habits.

I must here boldly borrow Sir H. H. Risley's summary of the historical
record of Scythian invasions into India, since that is the main
justification for his theory. "In the time of the Achaemenian kings of
Persia," he says, "the Scythians, who were known to the Chinese as Sse,
occupied the regions lying between the lower course of the Sillis or
Jaxartes and Lake Balkash. The fragments of early Scythian history which
may be collected from classical writers are supplemented by the Chinese
annals, which tell us how the Sse, originally located in southern China,
occupied Sogdiana and Trans-oxiana at the time of the establishment of
the Graeco-Bactrian monarchy. Dislodged from these regions by the
Yueh-chi, who had themselves been put to flight by the Huns, the Sse
invaded Bactriana, an enterprise in which they were frequently allied
with the Parthians. To this circumstance, Ujfalvy says may be due the
resemblance which exists between the Scythian coins of India and those
of the Parthian kings. At a later period, the Yueh-chi made a further
advance, and drove the Sse or Sakas out of Bactriana, whereupon the
latter crossed the Paropamisus and took possession of the country called
after them Sakastān, comprising Segistān, Arachosia, and Drangiana. But
they were left in possession only for a hundred years, for about 25 B.C.
the Yueh-chi disturbed them afresh. A body of Scythians then emigrated
eastwards, and founded a kingdom in the western portion of the Panjāb.
The route they followed in their advance upon India is uncertain; but to
a people of their habits it would seem that a march through Baluchistan
would have presented no serious difficulties.

"The Yueh-chi, afterwards known as the Tokhari, were a power in Central
Asia and the north-west of India for more than five centuries, from 130
B.C. The Hindus called them Sakas and Turushkas, but their kings seem to
have known no other dynastic title than that of Kushan. The Chinese
annals tell us how Kitolo, chief of the Little Kushans, whose name is
identified with the Kidara of the coins, giving way before the incursion
of the Ephthalites, crossed the Paropamisus, and founded, in the year
425 of our era, the kingdom of Gandhāra, of which, in the time of his
son, Peshawar became the capital. About the same time, the Ephthalites
or Ye-tha-i-li-to of the Chinese annals, driven out of their territory
by the Yuan-yuan, started westward, and overran in succession Sogdiana,
Khwarizan (Khiva), Bactriana, and finally the north-west portion of
India. Their movements reached India in the reign of Skanda Gupta
(452-80) and brought about the disruption of the Gupta empire. The
Ephthalites were known in India as Huns. The leader of the invasion of
India, who succeeded in snatching Gandhāra from the Kushans and
established his capital at Sākala, is called by the Chinese Laelih, and
inscriptions enable us to identify him with the original Lakhan
Udayāditya of the coins. His son Toramāna (490-515) took possession of
Gujarāt, Rājputānā, and part of the Ganges valley, and in this way the
Huns acquired a portion of the ancient Gupta kingdom. Toramāna's
successor, Mihirakula (515-44), eventually succumbed to the combined
attack of the Hindu princes of Mālwā and Magadha."

I now come to the ethnography as distinguished from the ethnology of
India. Of anthropometry and the lessons to be learnt from it, I have no
personal experience, and have had to borrow my materials at second-hand.
But with the great system of caste, its workings, its manifold
ramifications, everyone who has lived in India has come into more or
less close contact. How important caste is in the social life of the
country may be easily inferred from this little fact. I once asked the
late Navin Chandra Sen, then the most popular of Bengali poets, if he
would attempt a definition of what a Hindu is. After many suggestions,
all of which had to be abandoned on closer examination, the poet came to
the conclusion that a Hindu is (1) one who is born in India of Indian
parents on both sides, and (2) accepts and obeys the rules of caste.
Hinduism is, roughly speaking, the religion of the Aryo-Dravidians, the
upper and fairer classes among whom regarded the aborigines,
matrimonially, much as white Americans regard their negro fellow
citizens. It has spread over nearly the whole of India and is still
spreading, usually but not always, carrying with it one of the
Indo-European languages of India. It is the religion and social system
of races and classes which consider themselves intrinsically superior,
and practise a traditional kind of eugenics, of race preservation.
Humbler or more barbarous races are admitted on various conditions into
caste, sometimes into higher, sometimes into lower positions. The
process is one of that kind of "legal fiction" with which students of
Roman law are familiar. It is a process of unification and, at the same
time, of social segregation. I have already alluded to the suggestion
that caste-divisions are horizontal, as it were, compared with the
geographical divisions of races. But it is always dangerous to make
general statements about three hundred millions of people scattered over
so large an area as India. There are Brāhmans in every part of India,
and these usually trace their origin back to the sacred midland where
Hinduism came into being. They may be, and probably are, the descendants
of the missionaries by whom the religion of the Hindus is, imperceptibly
and without open proselytism, spread abroad. Something corresponding to
a warrior caste and a caste of scribes is to be found in most provinces,
and many of these either claim to be migrants, or have been admitted by
adoption into the privileges of warrior or writer blood.

But there are many castes which are purely local, even in name, and are
not found elsewhere than in the places where they were admitted into the
Hindu community. Many closely printed pages in the Census Reports of
each province and state enumerate and describe the thousands of castes
revealed by the numbering of the people. It is, of course, only possible
to give a very vague and general idea of some of the classes into which
the castes of India may conveniently be divided.

I am tempted here to borrow Sir Herbert Risley's definition of caste.
But it is a highly abstract definition, and one that cannot be easily
carried in the head, even by those who have a practical and familiar
acquaintance with members of Indian castes. Roughly a caste is a group
of human beings who may not intermarry, or (usually) eat, with members
of any other caste. There are also sub-castes which are also endogamous.
Very frequently, especially in the parts of India where caste is already
an institution of immemorial antiquity, a caste has allotted to it a
profession or occupation.

Before we discuss castes properly so called, it is convenient to speak
of the tribes of India, since tribes have a tendency to become castes
when they come under the pervasive influence of Hindu social ideas. In
the south of India are Dravidian tribes, of which the best example are
the tribes of Chota Nagpore. These are divided into a number of
exogamous groups or clans, calling themselves by the name of an animal
or plant, which may be regarded as their totem. The Khonds of Orissa,
who once bore an evil name for their practice of human sacrifices to
propitiate the earth-goddess, are divided into fifty _gochis_ or
exogamous clans, each of which bears the name of a village, and believes
itself to be descended from a common ancestor. These _gochis_ are the
nearest known approach to the local exogamous tribe which Mr McLennan
and the French sociologists believe to be the earliest form of human
society.

The Mongoloid tribes of Assam are much of the same kind, but in many
cases, as among the head-hunting Nagas, live at perpetual warfare with
one another. In such cases they usually capture their wives in war. It
is interesting to note that when population grows too dense for the
profitable pursuit of the chase, their principal means of livelihood,
such a tribe breaks up into two or more "villages," which immediately
begin waging war with one another, which is quite what a French
sociologist would expect them to do. I can tell of a case within my own
experience in which the headman of a parent village invited the chief of
a colony village (his own nephew) to a feast and palaver with his young
warriors. The guests were all treacherously put to the sword, as a means
of acquiring heads and concubines. I could not get the headman to see
that he had been guilty of an atrocious crime. For him, it was lawful
strategy. And indeed Naga warfare is merely a series of artfully planned
ambushes in which not a few of our own officers perished before we
undertook the direct administration of the Naga Hills. Sir H. Risley
remarks of this group of tribes that "no very clear traces of totemism
have been discovered among them." Subsequent enquiries, however, show
that totemistic clans do exist in some of the Assam tribes.

[Illustration: _Plate III_

 Dharkārs
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

Of the Turko-Iranian tribes of the north-western frontier I need not
speak at any length, since these tribes are all sturdy followers of the
Prophet, and save that they are under British rule can hardly be said to
belong to India at all. There is no likelihood that they will ever be
received into the tolerant bosom of Hinduism, since, to the Indian
proper, the Baloch and the Afghan are disagreeable and swaggering
caterans, who have an innate scorn for the typical Hindu hierarchy of
caste. Among these tribes it is martial ability and valour that win a
man consideration and wives.

Let us now turn to caste properly so called, the traditional social
divisions of the Hindus. And first it is necessary to say something of
the ancient Hindu theory of what caste is, and how it came into
existence.

As with the Hebrews, the religious literature of India contains a vast
mass of what can only be called law, and perhaps, the most famous of
Indian law books is the Institutes of Manu, a compilation of rules
relating to magic, religion, law, custom, ritual and metaphysics. Even
to this day, these branches of speculation and enquiry, so distinct to
western imaginations, are apt to be confused together as a result of the
pantheistic feeling which pervades Hinduism. The Institutes is a
comparatively modern book, but it repeats ideas which are found in a
more or less explicit form in early authorities[1]. In this book we are
told that in the beginning of things the Pan-theos who "contains all
created things and is inconceivable" produced by effort of thought a
golden egg, from which he himself was born as Brahmā, the creator of the
known universe. From his mouth, his arms, his thighs, and his feet
respectively he created the four great leading castes, the Brāhman, the
Kshatriya, the Vaiçya, and the Sūdra. These were, briefly, the priests,
the warriors and gentlefolk, the traders, and the servile classes of
human society. The other castes were gradually formed, the theory
states, by intermarriages between these. The three higher castes were
allowed to take wives from lower castes. When the caste of the mother
was next below that of the father, the child took the caste of his
mother and no new caste was formed. But where the difference of
condition was greater than this, new castes were formed, lower than
those of either parent. Some discrepancies of rank produced unions which
were regarded as peculiarly offensive to human feelings and as
tantamount to incestuous intercourse. These resulted in very degraded
castes. Where the father married beneath him, the marriage was described
as _anuloma_ or "with the hair." When a woman was guilty of a
_mésalliance_, the marriage was called _pratiloma_ or "against the
hair." The most disgraceful union of this kind was that between a
Brāhman woman and a Sūdra man, the resulting offspring being relegated
to the caste of Chandāl. The unfortunate Chandāl is described as "that
lowest of mortals," and is condemned, as Sir H. Risley says, to live
outside the village, to clothe himself in the garments of the dead, to
eat from broken dishes, to execute criminals, and to carry out the
corpses of friendless men.

The most superficial acquaintance with existing caste divisions shows
that this theory is not so much a hypothesis as a fanciful fiction. In
eastern Bengal, for instance, the Chandāl is evidently a Mongoloid
aboriginal, with a considerable strain of Dravidian and perhaps even of
Aryan blood. Yet the fiction shows plainly enough the estimation in
which one of the numerically largest divisions of local society is held.
Some thirty years ago, when I was a young magistrate, a comely Chandāl
girl appeared before me, her face streaming with blood from a scalp
wound. She asserted gravely that a Sūdra of higher caste had struck her
on the head with a stick, because he had found her reading a book as she
sat in the doorway of her father's cottage. I was disinclined to believe
this story, but her assailant was promptly sent for, and being brought
straight to me, admitted the truth of the charge, and seemed surprised
at my indignation at a cowardly assault.

As an attempt to account for the origin and explain the nature of caste
the theory of Manu is obviously a failure. But it contains a picture of
the early castes. It is also interesting because the idea of four
original _varnas_ or "colours" of men may have been borrowed from the
old Persian social organisation. The early scriptures, the Vedas, show
that this conception of four original castes was not brought to India by
Aryan immigrants. But when caste came into being as a result of the
contact of Aryan settlers with Dravidian aborigines, this mythological
explanation, which gave such conspicuous eminence to priests and
warriors, an eminence already conceded to them on account of the
importance of their functions, was readily accepted as a convincing
explanation of the hereditary differences between men in society, a
difference not merely of function, but of colour, aspect, gesture,
speech, breeding, and intelligence. It is necessary to mention this
theory, however briefly, since it still holds ground, except among those
Indians who have had a European education and even among them has the
interest of early and sacred associations which, in Europe, belongs to
the cosmological speculations of the book of Genesis.

What, next, are castes as they appear to the eye of the European
ethnologist, free from preconceived prejudice, and only anxious to come
as near the truth as is possible in his dealings with ancient
institutions round which has gathered a vast mass of venerable
superstition and religious speculation? In the first place, castes are
often still recognisably _tribes_. Sometimes the leading men of an
aboriginal tribe will acquire sufficient wealth and social consideration
to wish to obtain the stamp of recognition as reputable Hindus. They
will call themselves, for example, and induce their neighbours and the
priests of these to call them, Rājputs. They may not at first succeed in
intermarrying with true hereditary Rājputs, but in time they will be
just Rājputs like any other Rājputs. Or, again, a number of non-Hindus,
animists, will join one of the many Hindu sects or fraternities and will
intermarry with Vaishnavas, Lingayats, Rāmayats, or other devotees of
some favourite deity. Or again, a whole tribe or a considerable portion
of a tribe, usually one of some political importance, will enter
Hinduism by means of some plausible fiction. The instance quoted by Sir
H. Risley is that of the Koches of north-eastern Bengal. These people
are Tibeto-Burmans and until recent times spoke a dialect of the
agglutinative Bodo language. They now call themselves Rājbansis, "of
royal birth," or Bhāngā Kshatriyas, "broken warriors," names which
enable them to claim an origin from the traditional dispersion of the
Aryan warrior caste by the hero Parasu Rāma, "Rāma of the battle axe."
They claim descent from the epic monarch Dasarath, father of Rāma, have
their own Brāahmins, and have begun to adopt the Brāhminical system of
exogamous _gotras_. But, as Sir H. Risley remarks, they are in a
transitional state, since they have all hit upon the same _gotra_, and
are therefore compelled to marry within it, except in the rare instances
in which they contract unions with Bengali women.

A still more interesting, because more recent, instance of this sort is
that of the Meithei, now known to Hindus as Manipuris. In the
Mahābhāarata is told the tale of how the hero Arjuna wandered from his
brethren into Southern and Eastern India, and, among other adventures,
met (as Æneas with Dido) with Chitrangadā, the fair daughter of the King
of Manipur, somewhere near the eastern coast. Some 150 years ago, the
then king of the beautiful valley of Imphāl, between Assam and Burma,
was thinking of becoming a Muhammadan, by way of courting the favour of
the Muhammadan rulers of Bengal. But Hindu priests persuaded him that a
better way of linking his fortunes with those of India, rather than with
Ava (with whose royal family his dynasty had usually intermarried), was
by becoming Hindu with all his people. Imphāl was identified with
Manipur, and many of the Meithei race became Vishnuvite Hindus with
their ruler, though they retain their primitive Tibeto-Burman language.
I may mention a little personal reminiscence to show how completely the
change by fictitious adoption was accepted in Bengal. In 1891, my old
friend and chief, Mr Quinton, with all his staff, was treacherously
murdered at Manipur. Subsequently when I was magistrate of Chittagong, I
found that my head clerk, an extremely mild and intelligent Bengali
Kāyastha, had celebrated the easily suppressed mutiny at Manipur by
writing a drama based on the ancient legend of Arjuna's amours with
Chitrangadā!

Sometimes an aboriginal tribe will become a Hindu caste without losing
its old tribal designation. They will worship Hindu gods without daring
wholly to neglect tribal deities, which, as might perhaps be expected,
are left chiefly to the women of the tribe. Such a tribe will rapidly
assimilate itself to the beliefs and practices of Hindu neighbours, and
finally only its name and (except in case of occasional intermarriage
with other castes) its physical aspect will remain to testify to its
origin.

Castes are at present classified as follows:

(1) What Sir H. Risley calls _the tribal type_, instances of which have
been given above. Such tribal castes abound in all parts of India. It is
not improbable that the great Sūdra division of Hindu tradition was
originally the whole mass of Dravidian aboriginals as they came into
contact with Aryan immigrants, and were conceded a subordinate place in
their social system. It would be useless to give a list of the names of
such castes, but I cannot refrain from mentioning the excellent Doms of
the Assam Valley, whose name unfortunately associates them with very
different people in India proper. They are obviously of Tibeto-Burman
origin, and deserve closer study than they receive. Their long thatched
places of worship, true synagogues for meeting together and curiously
unlike the tiny _cellæ_ of Hindu temples, are among the most conspicuous
features of Assam villages. They have no idols, and place a _puthi_, a
holy book, on what may pass for the village altar. They are vaguely
Hinduised, but will humbly declare "_āmi hindu na hô_," "we are not
Hindu folk." Yet they are well on their way towards acceptance into
caste, and have already a strong infusion of Hindu blood.

Other border races, though they are still too savage and independent to
become Hindu, are marked down for absorption. Such, for instance, are
the Daflas of the northern border of Assam, cousins of the Abors to whom
attention has been drawn by recent events. The Daflas are still frankly
animistic; their love of strong spirits and other intoxicants, their
addiction to their favourite diet of roast pork, their extremely
uncleanly habits and barbarous speech, all make them very offensive to
the gentle vegetarian Hindus their neighbours. But it happens that the
tribal costume closely resembles the traditional dress of Mahādēva, the
Destroyer, the most active and formidable member of the Hindu Trinity,
and already some Hindus speak of these genial Highlanders as Siva-bansa,
as "of Siva's race." Many other examples, with interesting details of
fictional methods, will be found in Mr E. A. Gait's admirable _History
of Assam_.

(2) _The functional or occupational type_ of caste. This is the form of
caste best known to Europeans, because, since the first European
missionaries and traders visited those parts of India where the caste
system has had the longest opportunity to evolve, they came most into
contact with this, which is probably the oldest and most elaborated form
of caste. The Hindu theory of caste encouraged the adoption of special
occupations, and now the evolution has proceeded so far that change of
occupation may usually result in a change of caste. A remarkable
instance of this is found in the Marāthi districts of the Central
Provinces. Here is a separate and newly formed caste of village servants
called Gārpagāri, "hail-averters," whose business it is to protect the
village crops from hailstorms. Shepherds who take to tillage break away
from their pastoral brethren, and so on. Even those who retain their
traditional occupations are wont to adopt more seemly-sounding names
than those that belong to their trade. I have known barbers who called
themselves Chandra-vaidyas[2], which is a promotion more subtle than a
mere ascent to the status of "hair-dresser," and washermen who have
followed suit by dubbing themselves Sukla-vaidya, a word of which
"white-worker" is a crude but sufficiently suggestive translation.

(3) The _sectarian type_ is a singularly interesting example of the
strong social influence of Hindu sentiment. Nearly all new Hindu sects
begin by renouncing caste in the enthusiastic following of some single
deity, some new explanation of the mysteries of life, and love, and
death. These sects are usually the followers of some reforming theorist,
whose leadership is apt to become hereditary. Such sects almost always
believe that all men are equal, or at all events, that all who accept
their doctrines are equal. One of my most interesting recollections is
of a now distant interview with a buxom middle-aged lady, the hereditary
leader of the Kartā-bhajās of Central Bengal. She sat unveiled, and was
accessible to all who, like myself, were interested in the community
over which she exercised a firm but good-natured control. It is a
picturesque detail that her chosen seat when receiving visitors was an
ancient European four-poster bedstead. Her followers (and revenues) were
growing rapidly, increased chiefly by the democratic instinct which,
even in India, revolts against social prestige. But it would seem that
when such a sect grows and spreads, the old separatist ideas reassert
themselves, and the sect breaks up into smaller endogamous communities,
whose status depends on the original position of the members in
Hinduism. The most remarkable instance of this kind is furnished by the
great Lingayat caste of Bombay, which contains over two and a half
millions of members. In the twelfth century the Lingayats were a sect
who believed in the equality of all men. In Mr P. J. Mead's Bombay
Census Report for 1911 is a very interesting account of the present
condition of the Lingayats, an account which shows how the scholar, the
linguist, and the administrator can work together to find materials for
the anthropologist. Dr Fleet's examination of ancient inscriptions has
thrown much light on the origin of the sect, but the author of the
Report holds that there may be some reason to think that the sect is
much older than is commonly supposed. In any case, they are already
divided into three great groups, comprising many subdivisions.

(4) _Castes formed by crossing_ come aptly to show that there was some
basis for Manu's theory of caste after all. Castes, nowadays, increase
by fission, by throwing off sub-castes, and one species of these
sub-castes is created by mixed marriages. This tendency, curiously
enough, is most evident in Dravidian tribes, such as the Mundās, which
are not yet wholly Hinduised, but have been affected by Hindu example.
So far as I know, these mixed castes do not occur among the Mongoloid
peoples, and I have come across cases where a member of an aboriginal
tribe has been accepted into the caste of a Hindu girl he has married.
In one case, within my own experience, the bridegroom had begun as an
animist, had become Christian, and finally entered by marriage into the
quite respectable Koch caste. One interesting caste in Bengal, that of
the Shāgirdpeshas, owes its origin to concubinage with the so-called
slaves, the women of tenants surrounding a homestead who pay their rent
in service. This, it will be observed, is a caste of illegitimacy, in
which the relationship between the legitimate and illegitimate children
of a man of good caste is recognised, but the two are not allowed to eat
together. The classical instance of a mixed caste is the Khas of Nepāl,
said to be the result of very ancient intermarriages between Rājput or
Brāhman immigrants and the Mongolian "daughters of men."

[Illustration: _Plate IV_

 Banjara women
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

(5) _Castes of the national type._ This somewhat daring title we owe to
the great authority of Sir H. Risley. As one instance, he mentions the
Newārs, a Mongoloid people, who were once the ruling race in Nepāl, till
the Gurkha invasion in 1769, and have now become a caste. Other
instances might be found on the north-eastern frontier. But the people
Sir Herbert Risley had in mind when he invented this term was
undoubtedly the remarkable Marātha race, once the most daring warriors
and freebooters in India, and now the rivals of the Bengalis in
intellectual ability, and probably more than their equals in political
sagacity. Sir Rāmkrishna Gopāl Bhandārkar is our authority for the
statement that the Rattas were a tribe who held political supremacy in
the Deccan from the earliest days. In time they became Mahā-rattas,
"Great Rattas," and the land in which they lived was called Mahārattha,
which, by a common linguistic habit of mankind, was Sanskritised into
Mahā-rāshtra. Their marriage customs show marked traces of totemistic
institutions. An extremely interesting account of the present condition
of this warlike and enterprising race will be found at pp. 289, 290 of
the Bombay Census Report for 1911. It neither supports nor discourages
Sir H. Risley's ingenious theory of the Scythic origin of the Marāthas,
which is at least a theory which recognises the respect in which our
ancestors held their martial prowess and talents[3].

(6) _Castes formed by migration._ These are new castes which serve to
enforce the warning against a too ready acceptance of the definition of
caste as a "horizontal" division of humanity. It is a method of forming
new communities of Hindus which is very easily intelligible to us,
seeing that our own race is split into sections only differing from
castes in not being strictly endogamous, such as Anglo-Indians,
Australians, New Zealanders, and so forth. Members leave home and settle
among strangers. They are assumed to have formed foreign habits, eaten
strange food, worshipped alien gods, and have a difficulty—an expensive
difficulty—in finding wives in the parent caste. After a time they marry
only among themselves, become a sub-caste, and are often known by some
territorial name, Bārendra, Rārhi, or what not. Such seemingly are the
remarkable Nāmbudri Brāhmans of Malabar, and the Rārhi Brāhmans of
Bengal. Sometimes change of habitat brings about loss of rank, sometimes
promotion. These are matters on which the Census Reports now being
published are full of interesting details. But they are matters which
are not easily summarised. No doubt Mr Gait's Report on the combined
results of Census operations in India will show the progress of castes
of this type during the last ten years.

(7) _Castes formed by changes of custom._ This is a fruitful cause of
new divisions of Hindu society. It is, for the moment, more than usually
operative, owing to the spread of education, and often represents a
difference of social opinion which corresponds, more or less closely, to
Conservative and Radical ideas among ourselves. It evidently was always
a cause of fissiparous tendencies. The most notable instance is the
distinction between Jāts and Rājputs, both apparently sprung from the
same stock, but separated socially, amongst other causes, by the fact
that the former practise and the latter abjure infant marriages.

       *       *       *       *       *

This is a very rapid and highly summarised account of the races and
castes of India. There are many obvious omissions. Nothing has been said
of the Sikhs, little or nothing about the numerous races of the
north-eastern frontier. But enough has been said to give a fair general
impression of what the physical characters of the Indian peoples are,
and what kind of institution caste is in its practical working. More
might have been said about totemistic clans, but on this subject those
who would pursue their studies further have only to turn to Dr J. G.
Frazer's work on the subject. In the next chapter, I have to borrow my
materials from Sir G. A. Grierson, and show how the peoples of India are
divided by differences of language. On the whole, those linguistic
divisions correspond with remarkable accuracy to the orographical and
climatic structure of the country and the racial divisions which we owe
to the learning and ingenuity of Sir H. H. Risley. Where there are great
open plains, watered and fertilised by mighty rivers, we get large
populations speaking the great literary languages of India. In the
rugged recesses of the mountains we find small communities, divided from
one another by physical obstacles which have produced rigid local
patriotisms and enmities, and a wonderful variety of savage speeches.
The linguist has usually worked independently of the ethnologist, and
has come to his own unprejudiced conclusions. It is interesting to find
how closely the results of their separate enquiries agree.


_Postscript._

Sir H. H. Risley's theory as to the Scythian origin of the Marāthas has
not passed unquestioned, and those who wish to see a brief and clear
account of the latest theories on the subject should read Mr Crooke's
paper on "Rājputs and Marāthas" in Vol. XL. (January—June, 1910) of the
_Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_. Mr Crooke, who gives
copious references to the latest literature on the subject, holds that
"the theory that a Hun or Scythian element is to be traced in the
population of the Deccan is inconsistent with the facts of tribal
history, so far as they can now be ascertained." Mr Crooke thinks that
the anthropometrical facts can be explained otherwise than by Saka
invasion and an infusion of Scythian blood. "The presence of a
brachycephalic strain," he says, "in Southern and Western India need not
necessarily imply a Mongoloid invasion from Central Asia. The western
coast was always open to the entry of foreign races. Intercourse with
the Persian Gulf existed from a very early period, and Mongoloid Akkads
or the short-headed races from Baluchistan may have made their way along
the coast or by sea into Southern and Western India. But it is more
probable that this strain reached India in prehistoric times, and that
the present population is the result of the secular intermingling of
various race types, rather than of events within the historical period."
Mr Crooke's view is supported by the recently issued Census Report of
the Bombay Presidency, which says, "the term Marātha is derived by some
from two Sanskrit words, _mahā_, 'great,' and _rathi_, 'a warrior.'"
According to Sir Rāmkrishna Gopāl Bhandārkar it is derived from Rattas,
a tribe which held political supremacy in the Deccan from the remotest
time. "The Rattas called themselves Mahā Rattas or Great Rattas, and
thus the country in which they lived came to be called Mahārāttha, the
Sanskrit of which is Mahā-rāshtra."

Indigenous names are frequently Sanskritised, much as we turn French
_chaussée_ into "causeway." Sometimes the change is so complete that the
original cannot be identified. In some cases the alteration is easily
recognised. In Northern Bengal, for instance, is the river _Ti-stā_, a
name which belongs to a large group of Tibeto-Burman river names
beginning with _Ti-_, or _Di-_, such as _Ti-pai_, _Di-bru_, _Di-kho_,
_Di-sāng_, etc., etc. Hindus say the name _Ti-stā_ is either a
corruption of Sanskrit _Tri-srotas_, "having three streams," or of
Tṛṣṇā, "thirst." Etymology and legend, in fact, give but doubtful
guidance to the ethnologist, and the best hope of acquiring some real
knowledge of Rājput and Marātha origins lies in the possible discovery
of coins and inscriptions in the absence of direct historical records.

[1] The actual date is very uncertain. Dr Burnell thinks the book was
composed so late as A.D. 500, but it was probably much older.

[2] "Moon-physicians," an allusion to the crescent-shaped brass basin of
the barber, such as the helmet of Don Quixote, familiar to us all.

[3] But see the postscript to this chapter.




CHAPTER II

THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA


It is quite possible to live many years in one province or another of
India without obtaining more than the vaguest conception of the
linguistic riches of the country. It was Sir G. A. Grierson who rendered
it impossible for any but the most careless to ignore the fact that
India has not only more languages than Europe, but many more kinds and
families of speech. Most Europeans in India live in the populous areas
where ethnical and geographical conditions are favourable to the
evolution and spread of one of the great literary languages. In Madras,
the European comes into contact with one or other of the cultivated
Dravidian tongues. In Bombay, he learns that Marāthi and Gujarāti have
ancient and interesting literatures. In Calcutta, he is surrounded by
millions of Bengalis, who in modern times have as many varieties of
literary expression as the most advanced of European races. In Rangoon,
he hears the most highly organised of Tibeto-Burman speeches. In
Allahabad, Benares, Lahore, Patna, he acquires some smattering of the
beautiful and expressive languages which are closest to the model of the
original Indo-Aryan idiom. These are the exact counter parts of the
great literary languages of Europe, of English, French, German, Italian,
etc. But while the European mountains contain one or two shy survivals
at most of primitive ways of talking, India has many languages of the
type of Basque. In the little frontier province of Assam alone, dozens
of grammars and vocabularies have been printed, and much more remains to
be done. Happily, an appetite for more information has been aroused by
the feast spread before linguists in Sir G. A. Grierson's great
_Survey_. He himself is at work on a book which will tell us all that is
at present known about the many languages of India, and their relations
with one another. But in addition to his own labours, Sir George
Grierson has been an apostle of linguistic research and has gathered
round him many disciples, not all of whom recognise whence came the
impulse that has set them to an examination of the history and growth of
Indian languages. Most promising sign of all, native scholars no longer
disdain the living tongues of India, nor confine their studies to the
classics of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. In Bengal alone, the
Proceedings of the _Vangiya Sāhitya Parisat_, a society for the pursuit
of linguistic and ethnological research, now form a goodly library of
books, and the poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose own English version of
his charming _Gitanjali_ is in the hands of all who love poetry or are
interested in Indian matters, is also a very keen and competent student
of his native language on lines suggested by the enquiries of European
scholars. Much has been learnt, but linguistic research in India has
still many interesting secrets for the zeal of European students to
reveal. In Scandinavia, Germany, France, a new sense of the value of
such studies has been aroused. All that can be attempted in the
following pages is to show, very summarily and briefly, what is known at
present.

We have already seen that there are seven more or less recognisable
types of Indian humanity. To these roughly correspond five great
families of living vernaculars. The Turko-Iranian, the Indo-Aryan, the
Scytho-Dravidian, the Aryo-Dravidian, and the Mongolo-Dravidian races
have for the most part acquired Aryan languages which, in their
relations to Sanskrit and Persian, may be compared with the Romance
languages of Europe in their relations to literary Greek and Latin. The
Dravidian races speak one or other of the great Dravidian dialects, or
some idiom of the Mundā languages of Chota Nagpore. Among the Mongoloid
races of the extreme north and east of India, we find the Mon-Khmer and
the Tibeto-Chinese families of speech. Of these, the Dravidian family
seems to be confined to India—to the high tablelands of Southern India,
with one outlying settlement among the Brāhuis of Baluchistan. This
Dravidian speech would seem to be the original and indigenous language
of India. The Mundā languages of Chota Nagpore, again, are plainly very
ancient Indian tongues and are, in all probability, as aboriginal as the
true Dravidian speech. But Mundā tongues have elements in common with
the Mon-Khmer languages of Further India, Malacca, and Australonesia.
The present explanation of this fact is provided by the supposition
that, in prehistoric times, these distant regions shared a common
language with great part of Northern India. But, for all practical
purposes, the relations of the Mundā languages with the Far East are
still so vaguely defined, that they may be provisionally regarded as
being as indigenous as their neighbours, the Dravidian languages. The
connection of the Mon-Khmer languages with Further India and the Pacific
have formed the subject of the now famous researches of Pater Schmidt of
Vienna and other German investigators. The Indo-Chinese family of
languages is obviously connected with the many dialects of Southern
China. An Indian journalist once told me that he thought that the
tumbled mountain ranges which separate India from China and form, for
the time, a semi-savage "no man's land" of primitive social customs and
administration, are the most interesting area on earth. It is an Asiatic
and a huger Albania, of whose ethnological and linguistic condition much
has yet to be learned. Those who heard Mr Archibald Rose's lectures in
London and Cambridge on his travels in these regions will easily realise
how much room there is here for anthropological and linguistic research
among the rough but attractive races of this quarter.

Lastly, in the great alluvial plain which separates the Himalayas from
the tableland of the south, and along the western coast, are the peoples
who use one or other of the great Aryan vernaculars, languages of much
the same type as the modern languages of Europe, sharing much of their
vocabulary, and ultimately derived from similar if still obscure
origins. It is of all these languages, and of some of their innumerable
dialects (not all of them even now known by name), that some account
must be given in this chapter.

       *       *       *       *       *

The history of the languages of India has reflected the long struggle
for pre-eminence between the indigenous Dravidian culture of the south
and the Aryan civilisation of the north. The Mundā languages are those
of an isolated group of highlanders, who, till quite recent times,
hardly came into contact with or were influenced by the speech or
thought of other races. The Mon-Khmer-speaking people of the Khasi Hills
were similarly wholly isolated, and were long supposed to be absolutely
aboriginal and separate from other races of men, till quite recent
investigations discovered their linguistic affinities with the Mons of
Southern Burma and races in French Indo-China. The Tibeto-Burman
languages of the north-eastern frontier are the simple and primitive
speech of semi-savage men. For such languages, contact with the Aryan
languages means rapid decay and dissolution.

Hindu civilisation and Hindu religion find easy converts in the rude and
simple Mongoloid people of the north-east, and acceptance of Hindu
manners and customs almost always results in a rapid change of language.
So again, the Iranian languages represent the final stage in the advance
of Islam and its languages as a conquering religion. The Iranian tongues
of the north-western frontier are only Indian in the fact that they
happen to fall within the administrative border of British India. If we
omit all consideration of these races and languages for the present, we
shall be free to consider the long struggle between the Aryan and the
Dravidian. The Aryan religion, the religion of the Hindus, has spread
all over India, and as the Dravidian temples of the south are among the
glories of Hindu religious architecture, so the Hinduism of the south is
now, in many ways, the most typical and interesting form of the
religion. The spread of the Aryan blood has been far less wide in
extent, as the previous chapter sufficiently shows. The Aryan languages
have spread all over the north of India, up to an irregular line running
obliquely across the peninsula from near Vizagapatam on the east coast
to near Goa on the west coast. Into the Aryan area projects the rocky
plateau of Chota Nagpore, where the Mundā dialects still survive, and
there are a few other outlying areas where Dravidian tribes still use
the original language of India. With these exceptions, Northern India,
from Bombay to Calcutta now speaks Aryan languages.

[Illustration: _Plate V_

 Seoris or Savaras
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

Let me then begin by giving a brief account of the two ancient and
indigenous families of language in India, the Dravidian and Mundā
families. Sir G. Grierson's _Survey_ has definitely established the fact
that, in spite of the close physical resemblance between the Dravidian
races properly so called and the inhabitants of Chota Nagpore, there is
no linguistic affinity between them. In Sir George Grierson's own words
"they differ in their pronunciation, in their modes of indicating
gender, in their declensions of nouns, in their method of indicating the
relationship of a verb to its objects, in their numeral systems, in
their principles of conjugation, in their methods of indicating the
negative, and in their vocabularies. The few points in which they agree
are points which are common to many languages scattered all over the
world."


_The Dravidian Languages._

These are, as aforesaid, the languages of Southern India. Two of them
survive further to the north in Chota Nagpore and the Sonthal Parganas,
where they exist side by side with Mundā dialects. One curiously
isolated Dravidian language is Brāhui, an extraordinary survival, far to
the north-west, in the midst of the Iranian and Muhammadan languages of
Baluchistan. The Sanskrit writers knew of two great southern languages
which they named the Andhra-bhāshā and the Drāvida-bhāshā. The first
corresponded to what is now Telugu and its cognates, the latter to the
rest of the southern languages. Sir George Grierson classifies the
Dravidian family thus:

                                               Number of speakers
                                                      (1901)

A. Drāvida group:

     Tamil                                             16,525,500
     Malayalam                                          6,029,304
     Kanarese                                          10,365,047
     Kodagu                                                39,191
     Tulu                                                 535,210
     Toda                                                     805
     Kota                                                    1300
     Kurukh                                               592,351
     Malto                                                 60,777

B. Intermediate languages:

     Gond, etc.                                         1,123,974

C. Andhra group:

     Telugu                                            20,696,872
     Kandh                                                494,099
     Kola-i                                                  1505

D. Brāhui                                                  48,589

                                                       56,514,524

Sir G. Grierson borrows the following general account of the main
characteristics of the Dravidian forms of speech, with slight verbal
alterations, from the _Manual of the Administration of the Madras
Presidency_:

"In the Dravidian languages all nouns denoting inanimate substances and
irrational beings are of the neuter gender. The distinction of male and
female appears only in the pronoun of the third person, in adjectives
formed by suffixing the pronominal terminations, and in the third person
of the verb. In all other cases, the distinction of gender is marked by
separate words signifying 'male' and 'female.' Dravidian nouns are
inflected, not by means of case terminations, but by means of suffixed
postpositions and separable particles. Dravidian neuter nouns are rarely
pluralized; Dravidian languages use postpositions instead of
prepositions. Dravidian adjectives are incapable of declension.
It is characteristic of these languages, in contradistinction to
Indo-European, that, wherever practicable, they use as adjectives the
relative participles of verbs, in preference to nouns of quality or
adjectives properly so called. A peculiarity of the Dravidian (and also
of the Mundā) dialects is the existence of two pronouns of the first
person plural, one inclusive of the person addressed, the other
exclusive. The Dravidian languages have no passive voice, this being
expressed by verbs signifying 'to suffer' etc. The Dravidian languages,
unlike the Indo-European, prefer the use of continuative participles to
conjunctions. The Dravidian verbal system possesses a negative as well
as an affirmative voice. It is a marked peculiarity of the Dravidian
languages that they make use of relative participial nouns instead of
phrases introduced by relative pronouns. These participles are formed
from the various participles of the verb by the addition of a formative
suffix. Thus 'the person who came' is in Tamil literally 'the who-came'."

It is worth while, for once, to quote this somewhat technical
description because it shows that though the Aryan languages have driven
the Dravidian languages out of Northern India, the latter may have
affected the Aryan speech in the transition which, in common with the
corresponding speeches of Europe, it has undergone from inflected to
analytic ways of talking.

_Tamil._ Tamil, or Arava, is spoken all over the south of India and the
northern part of Ceylon. It extends as far as Mysore on the west coast
and Madras on the east coast. It has been carried all over Further India
by emigrant coolies. As might be expected from its geographical
position, it is the oldest, richest, and most highly organised of
Dravidian languages. It has an extensive literature written in a
literary dialect called "Shen" or "perfect" as compared with the
colloquial "Kodum" or "rude" speech of ordinary men. The words "Tamil"
and "Drāvida" are both corruptions of an original "Drānida." Tamil has
an alphabet of its own.

_Malayalam._ Malayalam is a branch of Tamil which came into existence in
the ninth century A.D. It is the language of the Malabar coast, and has
one dialect, Yerava, spoken in Coorg. This language has borrowed its
vocabulary freely from Sanskrit. It differs from the mother tongue in
having dropped the personal terminations of verbs. Its alphabet is the
Grantha character, much used in Southern India for writing Sanskrit.

_Kanarese._ Kanarese is the language of the Kingdom of Mysore and the
adjoining British territory. It has an ancient literature written in a
character resembling that of Telugu. Its dialects of Badaga and Kurumba
are spoken in the Nīlgiri hills. Kodagu, the language of Coorg, is said
by some to be a dialect of Kanarese, and is the link between it and
Tulu, the language of part of South Kanara in Madras. Toda and Kota will
always have an interest for anthropologists in connection with Dr
Rivers' now classical investigation into the social life of the Todas.

_Gond._ The Gond language is spoken outside the true Dravidian area, in
the hill country of Central India. It is intermediate between the
Drāvida and Andhra languages, and like most hill languages has many
dialects. It is unwritten and has no literature.

_Telugu._ Telugu is the only important Andhra language now surviving. It
is the language of the eastern coast from Madras to near the southern
border of Orissa. It has an extensive literature written in a character
of its own, adapted from the Aryan Devanāgari. This character, like the
writing of Orissa, is easily recognised by its loops and curves, said to
be due to the difficulty of writing straight lines with a stylus on a
palm leaf without splitting the leaf.

Finally there remains the isolated and distant Brāhui language in
Baluchistan. Its separate existence has led to a very pretty quarrel
between linguists and ethnologists. Dr Haddon in his work on the
_Wanderings of Peoples_, in this series, says that "the Dravidians may
have been always in India: the significance of the Brāhui of
Baluchistan, a small tribe speaking a Dravidian language, is not
understood, probably it is merely a case of cultural drift." Sir George
Grierson says "if they (the Dravidians) came from the north-west, we
must look upon the Brāhuis as the rear-guard; but if from the south,
they must be considered as the advance guard of the Dravidian
immigration. Under any circumstances it is possible that the Brāhuis
alone retain the true Dravidian ethnic type, which has been lost in
India proper by admixture with other aboriginal nationalities such as
the Mundās." My own diffident suggestion is that the Brāhuis may be a
Dravidian race as a survival of emigration when Northern India was also
Dravidian, as the French are a "Latin" race.

Of the Mundā languages I need not speak at any length, interesting as
they are to students of spoken speech. They are spoken by over three
millions of people, and, besides numerous dialects of each, are six in
number. They have been carefully studied by missionaries and others, and
many of them are now recorded in the Roman character.

I must apologise for a somewhat dull and detailed account of the
Dravidian languages. It seemed necessary to explain what manner of
languages they were that fought an unequal and not always losing fight
with the great Aryan languages of the north. The account of the struggle
between the two, on the other hand, has an enduring interest. Dravidian
and Aryan languages now face one another much as do French and Breton in
Brittany, English and Gaelic in the Highlands, Flemish and French in
Belgium. But in the Indian plains the contest was waged on a much vaster
scale, and some of the incidents of the long struggle can still be
recovered. One point should be carefully borne in mind. In Northern
India the Aryan languages and the Hindu religion are openly and
completely victorious. The peculiar philosophic and religious ideas of
Hinduism find apt and copious expression in the Aryan vocabulary of the
north. But Dravidian India, too, in accepting Hinduism, perforce
accepted with it much of the Aryan vocabulary. It is Dravidian still, as
England is still mainly Germanic. But without Aryan words it could
hardly give expression to Hindu speculations and aspirations. As our own
language, as these words I write, have a strong intermixture of Latin
phrase and idiom, so the Aryan influence has in a greater or less degree
penetrated to Ceylon itself, once held by Aryan poets to be the home of
demoniac and barbarian races. There are Dravidian traces in the north,
survivals of old days of Dravidian supremacy. In the south, a veneer of
Aryan culture has been added to the ancient Dravidian civilisation. This
was strong to resist a change of idiom: it clung sturdily to most of its
vocabulary; but there has been an infusion of Aryan words, needed for
ritual and, in some cases, for administrative purposes. The use of the
word "administrative" reminds me to say, before passing on, that nowhere
in India is English so freely used as in the Dravidian south. Originally
Englishmen seem to have found Dravidian languages too difficult a means
of communication. But Dravidians themselves soon discovered that English
was a convenient _lingua franca_. All India is now making the same
discovery, and English is binding the educated classes into a new
pan-Indian race.


_The Aryan Languages._

We now return to the fascinating story of the spread of the Indo-Aryan
languages over the north and west of the peninsula. In the tale,
captured from the patient study of words and idioms, and finding only
occasional support from legend, and practically none from history, since
history had not yet begun to exist, we get a singularly moving and
interesting picture of the social existence of vanished tribes of men.
We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men
whom we may conveniently call Indo-Europeans who spoke the parent-speech
of the modern languages of Europe, Armenia, Persia, and northern India.
Probably the Panjāb in very early times was occupied by several
immigrations of Indo-European folk, for in the earliest days of which we
have any knowledge, the land of the Five Rivers is already the home of
many Indo-Aryan tribes, who live at enmity with one another, and have a
fraternal habit of speaking of one another as unintelligible barbarians.

In the Sanskrit geography of somewhat later times, India is divided into
the sacred Madhya-deça, the "Midland," and the rest. Already this
Midland country, the home of the latest immigrants, is considered to be
the true habitat of civilised Aryans, all the rest of the peninsula
being more or less barbarous. It is important that the reader should
understand exactly where this Midland lay. On the north it ended below
the foot-slopes of the Himalayas. On the south, it was bordered by the
Vindhyā hills, the southern boundary of the Gangetic plain. On the west
it extended to Sirhind on the eastern limits of what is now the Panjāb.
On the east its limit was the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. Its
inhabitants, of mixed Aryan and Dravidian origin, had spread eastwards
from the upper part of the _do-āb_, the watershed between the two
rivers. Their language gradually became the current speech of the
Midland. It was cultivated as a literary tongue from early times and
came to be known as Sanskrit, the "purified" language. Purified and
systematised it was by the labours of grammarians and phoneticians, the
most famous of whom is Pānini, who lived and wrote about 300 B.C.

To the phonetic acumen of these early grammarians the existing alphabets
of northern India, singularly different in arrangement from the confused
order of European and Semitic letters, bear testimony. In the Indian
alphabets the letters are arranged in order, according to the vocal
organs chiefly used in their pronunciation, as Gutturals, Palatals,
Cerebrals, Dentals, and Labials. All the phonetic changes which occur in
the formation of the numerous compound words are carefully reduced to
rule, and the spelling professes to be (what perhaps no spelling ever
has been or can be) phonetic.

[Illustration: _Plate VI_

 A Bhuiyār
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

It is a moot point whether Sanskrit was in Pānini's time a spoken
vernacular. It is more probable that it was, what it still remains in
most parts of Hindu India, a second and literary language, used much as
Latin was used in medieval Europe. The spoken form of the archaic
language found in the older Vedas developed into Prākrit, which existed
side by side with Sanskrit as the spoken dialects of Italy existed side
by side with literary Latin. As the Italian dialects developed into the
modern languages of Europe, so the Prākrits gave birth to the Aryan
modern languages of India. Thus the latter were not in any accurate
sense derived from Sanskrit, but only shared a common origin with it[4].
It remained, however, as a standard of literary perfection and was
destined to play an important part in the enrichment of many of the
modern languages of India, when contact with western culture brought
about what may fairly be called a literary renaissance. This was
particularly the case with Bengali. Its medieval literature was all but
confined to rhymed hymns and tales. English education led to a revival
of Sanskrit studies. From England Bengal learnt that it was possible to
write prose in many varied forms, in novels, essays, histories,
journalism, and so forth. The medieval literary language, derived from
the Prākrit, had grown insufficient for the expression of anything but
the simplest devotional or amatory emotion, and Bengali borrowed freely
from the rich treasury of Sanskrit.

In the "Midland," then, were various forms of Prākrit, side by side with
the sacred and literary Sanskrit. Round the Midland, on the west, south,
and east lay territories inhabited by other Indo-Aryan tribes. This
country included what is now the Panjāb, Sind, Gujarāt, Rājputānā and
the country to its east, Oudh and Bihār. The tribes inhabiting this
semicircular tract had each of them its own dialect. But it is important
to note that the dialects of this "Outer Band" were much more closely
related to one another than to the spoken language of the "Midland." It
was this circumstance which suggested Dr Hoernle's ingenious theory,
already mentioned, of the second and separate invasion of Aryans into
the Midland over the mountainous passes of Gilgit, too high, arduous,
and difficult to be traversed by the families and herds of the nomad
newcomers.

In course of time the population of the Midland grew in numbers and
valour and pressed closely on the food supplies of the tract. It was
already the centre of a vigorous and widely influential civilisation. It
contained the imperial cities of Delhi and Kanauj, and the sacred city
of Mathura (Μόδουρα ἡ τῶν θεῶν, as Ptolemy calls it). This crowded,
vigorous, and martial population was bound to expand. It spread
into the eastern Panjāb, Rājputānā, Gujarāt and Oudh, carrying with it
its language. Hence, as Sir George Grierson points out, we get in this
"Outer Band" mixed languages, of the Midland type near the "Midland"
centre, but fading into local dialects as we go further west, south, and
east. Finally as the Midlanders crowded into the territories of the
Outer Band, the inhabitants of these took refuge among the Dravidians of
the south and east, and so gave birth to dialects which ultimately
became Marāthi in the south and Oriyā, Bengali and Assamese on the east,
all of them characteristic languages of the "Outer Band."

I am borrowing so freely and unscrupulously from Sir George Grierson
that it is a relief to pause for a moment to interpose a very diffident
suggestion of my own. Vocabulary, and even idiom, have become a dubious
guide to the constituent elements of the "Outer Band" languages which
have almost entirely destroyed the original vocabularies of the
Dravidian or Mongolo-Dravidian races who use them. But it is just
possible that accentuation, rhythm, metre may furnish some clue to these
vanished dialects, which may have bequeathed a characteristic tone of
voice to their Aryan successors. Bengali, for instance, has a very
peculiar initial phrasal accent which strongly distinguishes it from the
etymologically cognate speech of Bihār, much as the characteristic
_accent tonique_ of French distinguishes it from Italian and Spanish.
Native scholars in Bengal are, I am glad to say, beginning to work at
the Dravidian elements in their expressive and copious language, and
will, I hope, soon investigate the Mongolian elements, whether of idiom
or pronunciation, in the Bengali of the north-eastern part of the
province.

To return to Sir George Grierson, he holds that the present linguistic
condition of northern India is this:—there is, firstly, a Midland
Indo-Aryan language which holds the Gangetic Doāb. Round it on three
sides is a band of Mixed languages, in the eastern Panjāb, Gujarāt,
Rājputānā and Oudh. With these Sir George includes the Indo-Aryan
languages of the Himalayan slopes north of the Midland, which have been
introduced in comparatively recent times by immigrants from Rājputānā.

_The Prākrits._ Before I leave the Aryan languages of India, I must give
a brief summary of what Sir George Grierson says of the Prākrits, the
spoken speeches which have always, implicitly or explicitly, been
distinguished from the artificial and literary Sanskrit. The Primary
Prākrits of the Midland and Outer Band (of which latter no record
survives) were of the same type as the Latin known to us in literature.
They were synthetic and inflected languages. These gradually decayed (or
developed) into what Sir G. Grierson calls the Secondary Prākrits. These
are still synthetic, but diphthongs and harsh combinations of consonants
are avoided, "till in the latest developments we find a condition of
almost absolute fluidity, each language becoming an emasculated
collection of vowels hanging for support on an occasional consonant."
These Secondary Prākrits lasted from the days of the Buddha (550 B.C.)
to about 1000 A.D.

One at least of these Secondary Prākrits, Pāli, has obtained world-wide
fame as the language of the Buddhist scriptures. Thus crystallised, it
underwent the same fate as Sanskrit and became more or less what we call
in Europe a "dead" language. In the Midland was a great and famous
Prākrit called Sauraseni, after the Sanskrit name, Surasena, of the
country round Mathura. In Bihār was Māgadhī; in Oudh and Baghelkhand was
Ardha-māgadhī or "half Māgadhī"; south of these was Mahārāshtri, which
is best known to students of the ancient Indian drama as the vehicle of
the lyrics with which the plays are studded. Kings, sages, heroes and
other noble characters speak Sanskrit. Inferior personages use Sauraseni.

The Secondary Prākrits themselves degenerated into what Indian
grammarians call Apabhramsas, "corrupt" or "decayed" tongues, which were
used for literary purposes and finally became the parents of the great
Aryan languages of the present time.

For comparison with the preceding table of the Dravidian languages, I
give below the census table of the Aryan languages as recorded in 1901:—

                                                        Number of
                                                         speakers

A. Language of the Midland:

   Western Hindi                                       40,714,925

B. Intermediate languages.

   _a._ More nearly related to the Midland language:
          Rājasthānī                                   10,917,712
          The Pahārī (or 'mountain')
            languages of the Himalaya                   3,124,981
          Gujarāti                                      9,439,925
          Panjābi                                      17,070,961

   _b._ More nearly related to the Outer languages:
          Eastern Hindi                                22,136,358

C. Outer languages.

   _a._ North-western group:
          Kāshmīrī                                      1,007,957
          Kohistānī                                            36
          Lahndā                                        3,337,917
          Sindhī                                        3,494,971

   _b._ Southern language:
          Marāthī                                      18,237,899

   _c._ Eastern group:
          Bihārī                                       34,579,844
          Oriyā                                         9,687,429
          Bengali                                      44,624,048
          Assamese                                      1,350,846

Of all these modern languages, their idioms, their characters, their
literature, I do not venture to give even a summarised account. Those
who have any curiosity to learn more about them cannot do better than
consult Sir George Grierson's work on _The Languages of India_, until
it, in its turn, is superseded by the book he is now writing from the
materials collected in his _Linguistic Survey_. But everyone who has
read _The Newcomes_ will want to know what Hindustāni is, especially as
it is one of the languages prescribed for the study of probationers for
the Indian Civil Service and is taught at the universities of Oxford,
Cambridge, London, and Dublin. In the strictest sense Hindustāni is the
dialect of western Hindi spoken between Meerut and Delhi. It was much
cultivated, as a literary dialect, by both Hindus and Musalmāns. The
latter wrote, and write it, in the Persian character, and have added a
large number of Persian and Arabic words. In this Persianised form it is
known as Urdū, "a name derived from the _Urdū-e mu 'alla_, or royal
military bazaar outside the imperial palace at Delhi, where it is
supposed to have had its origin." Under Muhammadan rule Urdū was almost
as much the _lingua franca_ of India as English has come to be in modern
times.

Another point is worth noting here. The Aryan languages of northern
India are, in a very real sense, Hindu languages. Perhaps I shall make
myself clearer by asserting that the languages of Western Europe are
Christian languages. For historical reasons, their religious phraseology
has a Christian connotation and allusiveness. But in the west, the
distinction between things secular and things religious has become so
familiar that the Christian element in our speech is not recognisable in
our ordinary talk. In Hindu India, on the other hand, almost every act
of a man's life has some religious or superstitious significance, and
hence all the Aryan languages in the mouths of Hindus are markedly
different from the shape they assume when spoken by Musalmāns. In the
case of western Hindi we have the recognised Muhammadan dialect of Urdū,
but in other languages too there is a Muhammadan dialect or _patois_,
even if it has no separate name. A curious exception, however, occurs in
eastern Bengal, where the bulk of the population is Musalmān. In this
region the Muhammadans are comparatively recent converts from the lower
aboriginal or Mongoloid castes, whose Muhammadanism sits very lightly on
their habits and consciences, and so far as my own experience goes,
there is little difference between the speech of the lower Musalmāns and
their friends and cousins the Chandāls and other indigenous castes.


_The Indo-Chinese Languages._

Finally, I must say a few words about the Indo-Chinese and Mon-Khmer
languages. I spent most of my official life among people speaking these
languages, and find, somewhat shamefacedly, that Sir G. A. Grierson
makes me responsible for sundry vocabularies compiled in my distant
youth. Naturally, I feel a personal interest in the people of the
north-eastern border, and am tempted to enlarge on their qualities of
speech and character. But I have left myself little space, and the
Mongoloid races of the frontier are hardly Indian in any proper sense of
the word. Moreover, though their total number is not great, they speak
many languages. The Census of 1901 recognises 119 such languages. The
most important of them all is, of course, Burmese, which is spoken by
about seven and a half millions of people. There are nearly 900,000
Karens in Burma, and about 750,000 Shans. The Meithei (now Manipuris)
mentioned above are 272,997 in number. The Boro or Kachari people of the
Assam valley, a most attractive and delightful race, number somewhat
less than 250,000. The other languages of this type have mostly a much
smaller number of speakers than these. But mention should be made of
250,000 Mons, Palungs and Was in Burma, and 177,827 Khāsis in Assam,
since these constitute the only members of the Mon-Khmer family still
found within the limits of British India.

These people, speaking Indo-Chinese languages, surround India proper on
the north and east in a crescent-shaped curve, mostly in the valleys of
lofty and rugged mountains. From the eastern mountains projects into the
midst of the modern province of Assam a range of hills, dividing the
valley of the Brahmaputra from that of Sylhet, which is watered by the
Surma. Readers of Sir W. W. Hunter's delightful little book on _The
Thackerays in India_ will not need to be told where Sylhet is, or what
sort of a place it is. This range of hills is inhabited by the Garos on
the west, and the Nagas on the east, both Tibeto-Burman races. Between
them, on one of the most beautiful plateaus in the world, are the
Khāsis, once, as I have said elsewhere, regarded as being as isolated
and unique as our European Basques, but now proved to be, linguistically
at least, connected with the Mons in Burma, and many races and tribes in
Further India and Australonesia.

All these Indo-Chinese people seem to have come originally from
north-western China, following the beds of great rivers in their travel;
down the Chindwin, the Irrawaddy, and the Salween into Burma, down the
Brahmaputra into Assam, and up the Brahmaputra into Tibet. There seem to
have been at least three waves of migration. First, in prehistoric
times, there was a Mon-Khmer invasion into Further India and Assam.
Next, also at an unknown date, was a Tibeto-Burman invasion into the
same regions and Tibet. Next the Tai branch of the Siamese-Chinese
entered eastern Burma about the sixth century A.D. A fourth
Tibeto-Burmese invasion, that of the Kachins, when in Lord Dufferin's
time, the British annexed Upper Burma.

I think I have now said enough to show how the languages of India are
distributed. It only remains to give a brief and cursory account of the
Indian Religions. This is a subject on which big books might be, and
have been, written. But, even in so small a book on the Peoples of India
it seems necessary to give some account of their religious divisions.

[4] As in Europe, the modern Aryan languages differ from one another
chiefly in survivals from the indigenous earlier speech which preceded
each of them.




CHAPTER III

THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA


(1) _Animism._ At the base of all the religions, perhaps at the base of
all religions all over the world, lies a mass of primitive beliefs, not
perhaps yet consciously classed by the holders of them as distinctly
religious, which are called by the question-begging name of Animism. By
this statement, I mean merely that many of the more ignorant and simple
folk who profess and call themselves Hindus, Buddhists, Jains,
Muhammadans, or Christians, are in fact at the animistic stage of
intellectual evolution. The religious impulse is there, but has not
become specialised. There is no religious theorising, but merely
communal and transmitted beliefs about the nature of things in general.
Perhaps I had better quote Sir H. H. Risley's definition of Hinduism as
it exists in India. "It conceives of man," he says, "as passing through
life surrounded by a ghostly company of powers, elements, tendencies,
mostly impersonal in their character, shapeless phantasms of which no
image can be made and no definite idea can be formed. Some of these have
departments or spheres of influence of their own: one presides over
cholera, another over small pox, another over cattle disease; some dwell
in rocks, others haunt trees, others, again, are associated with rivers,
whirlpools, waterfalls, or strange pools hidden in the depths of the
hills. All of them require to be diligently propitiated by reason of the
ills which proceed from them, and usually the land of the village
provides the means for their propitiation."

If this definition, that of a kindly and experienced student of
primitive thought and emotion, be correct, there is already an attempt
at analysis and classification. But the analysis is feeble, the
classification very elementary. The differences which seem obvious to
the civilised man, who inherits the analytic inventions and
investigations of long series of ancestors, are not yet realised. There
is practically no distinction between things animate and inanimate,
since all may be maleficent and must therefore, on occasion, be
propitiated. There is no sense of things subter-human, human, and
superhuman. Still less, of course, is there any recognition of the
difference between things religious and things secular. Grown men face
the facts of life as children do, and receive the impressions life
conveys to them _en masse_, without making much effort to sort them out.
In our own case, we learn to classify from our elders, and
classification, literary, scientific, social, religious, is a large part
of what we call education. How does primitive man begin to sort out the
facts of life, to remember them in classes, to discriminate between
human beings and other animals, to place animals above inanimate things,
himself above animals, and, finally, the gods above himself? The history
of the evolution of Hinduism throws some light on this evolution as it
occurred in India.

Meanwhile, it is worth noticing that the Census returns of 1901 returned
the Animists of India at only about 8½ millions, or less than 3 per
cent. Those who returned themselves as Hindu or Musalmān were so
recorded, whatever their degree of mental and social culture. An attempt
has been made in the Census of 1911 to distinguish between true Hindus
and Animists who call themselves Hindu. How far the attempt was
successful, I do not know. I can well believe that it was not welcomed
even by educated and intelligent Hindus. Many years ago, I remember a
highly educated Hindu in Bengal telling me that there is no distinction
between Animists and Hindus; that an Animist is merely a Hindu "in the
making" as it were. But perhaps that assertion only amounted to an
admission that the Hindu mind is averse from the kind of intellectual
evolution by conscious analysis and classification which is dear to
Western imaginations. Yet the history of Hinduism and its branches shows
that such an evolution has taken place.

[Illustration: _Plate VII_

 A Ghāsiya
 (_Mirzapur district_)]

I should like to suggest that at the stage of human evolution which we
call animistic, man takes the facts of life in the lump, as it were, and
does not sort them out into classes. If we are to judge by what we know
of the history of Hinduism, the evolution of primitive man from this
unclassifying stage is something as follows. Art comes into play. The
practice of song and draughtsmanship introduces specialisation. From
singing comes verse, from drawing comes some kind of rude writing. The
first trains the memory, the second aids memory. Then comes the social
classification which results from the breaking up of clans, and contact
with other clans and communities. All men are not the same, and the
difference is grasped and finds expression in language. The new power of
classification is extended to other things. The difference between
animate and inanimate things is understood, and their relative powers of
helping or hurting the tribal community. When classification has
proceeded thus far, the inference is easy that as what is known of the
faculties of subter-human beings and things to benefit or hurt humans
does not by any means account for the joys and calamities of life, there
must be a class of superhuman beings who are to be conciliated. By their
supposed deeds they are judged. If they are, on the whole, kindly and
easily placated, they will be classified by some title which they will
usually share with great and good men. If their action on mankind be
harmful, they will bear the names given to malicious or inimical races
or individuals. At a subsequent stage of analytical evolution their
generic names will be confined to their own class; they will be gods or
demons. Many Hindus have hardly gone beyond this stage, and we can
hardly be surprised that some objection should be taken to too rigid a
distinction between Hindus and Animists. In practice, it is often
difficult to say whether a given observance is Animistic or Hindu. Here
is one case, out of thousands that occur in India, from my own
experience. In the seaport town of Chittagong is the shrine of the
famous Muhammadan saint Pir Badr, a holy man often invoked by travellers
on sea or river. In a niche in a little pillar in the open air,
Christians and Buddhists, Hindus and Musalmāns alike place lighted
candles by way of propitiation. This, surely, is an observance of the
Animistic type. It has no part in any theorised or classified religious
system. It is merely the attempt to gratify an influence which may help
or harm. Animism is consistent with the most vivid, if childlike,
curiosity. All is grist that comes to that primitive mill. But the
resulting flour of thought is, as it were, coarse and unsifted. Artistic
specialisation, the birth of literature, brings a need of
classification. Out of propitiation comes ritual, a belief in the
efficacy of sacramental gestures, offerings, formulæ. But, as time goes
on, they are appropriated to the service of highly specialised deities.
As man learns the advantage of a division of labour and a specialisation
of function, so his gods become "departmental." The classification will
not be that of modern times. Among animate things will be reckoned fire,
and air, the sun and moon and the twinkling stars. But the process of
analysing and sorting will have begun.

(2) _The Vedas._ The Aryan immigrants seem to have brought a scanty and
summary theology with them, or it may be that in different surroundings
they forgot their old religious ideas, and, with the help of Dravidian
and other aboriginal speculations, evolved new ones. Sir G. Grierson has
suggested that the fact that they migrated in two afterwards hostile
bodies finds its reflection, in the Vedas, in the fabled antagonism of
the rival priests Visvāmitra and Vasishta; in the Mahābhāratā in the
famous war between the Kauravas and Pāndavas, the Eastern counterpart of
the siege of Troy.

The Vedas are four collections of ritual hymns, used in connection with
the oblation of the intoxicating juice of the Soma, the moon-plant, or
with the sacrificial Fire. The Rig-veda (the oldest) and its supplement
the Sāma-veda are now held to have been composed when the Aryans had
reached the junction of the Panjāb rivers with the Indus: the Black and
White Yajur-veda when they reached the Sutlej and the Jumna; the
Atharva-veda, which contains the lower beliefs of aboriginal races, when
they had reached Benares. There are gods and goddesses of the sky, the
most important being the Sun, and Varuna (the Greek οὐρανός), afterwards
a kind of Hindu Neptune, but in these early days represented as sitting
in the vault of heaven, and having the sun and stars as the eyes with
which he watches the doings of men. His function was to encourage
personal holiness as a human ideal. In the mid-air Indra became
pre-eminent on Indian soil, where the dependence of an agricultural
people on periodical rains made the rain-god an important deity. On
earth the most important deities are Soma and Agni (fire) already
mentioned. There was also Yama, the beautiful and stately god of death,
who though naturally immortal chose to die, and lead the way for mortal
successors to the abodes of the dead. Besides the departmental gods,
there is in the Vedas a distinct foreshadowing of Pantheism.

(3) _The Brāhmanas._ When the Aryans reached the "Midland," the upper
Gangetic valley, the Vedic hymns were supplemented by new Scriptures,
called Brāhmanas, which were digests of dicta on matters of ritual for
the guidance of priests. These were the beginning of Brāhmanism. The
elementary Pantheistic theory of the Vedas was developed into a belief
in one Spiritual Being or Ātman. When manifested and impersonal, this
Being was the neuter Brahma; when regarded as the Creator, he was the
masculine Brahmā; but when manifested in the highest order of
intellectual men, he was Brāhman, the Brāhman priestly class. Following
the Brāhmanas, was a third order of religious literature, the
Upanishads. Dr Hopkins has thus summarised the teaching of these three
Scriptures. "In the Vedic hymns, man fears the gods. In the Brāhmanas
man subdues the gods, and fears God. In the Upanishads man ignores the
gods and becomes God." Not that these three kinds of Scripture, these
three evolutions of religious speculation, followed one another in
chronological order. But this was, roughly, the logical evolution.
Finally the doctrine was established that knowledge leads to the supreme
bliss of absorption into Brahmā, and with this was combined the theory
of transmigration.

Even from this extremely crude and simplified statement, it will be
evident that the priesthood had secured for themselves an unexampled
supremacy, and, in the Midland at least, had placed the administrator
and warrior in a state of marked inferiority. But in the surrounding
territories, success in arms and government won men the consideration
still considered their due among ourselves. In the Midland itself the
territory was divided among a number of petty chiefs, who waged
perpetual warfare with one another. They were not likely to ignore the
prestige won by valour and warlike skill. One of them was Gautama, the
Buddha (_c._ 596-508 B.C.). Another was Vardhamāna, his contemporary,
the founder of Jainism. This is not the place to tell of Buddhism,
which, as a recognised creed, though it has spread far to the north and
east, and is the religion of Ceylon and Burma, only survives in India
proper in faint influences on the belief and practice of various Hindu
sects.

(4) _Jainism._ The Jain Reform still exists and numbers over a million
of followers. Its doctrines have a vague and general resemblance to
those of Buddhism, not because either copied the other, but because they
sprang from a common origin. In both Nirvāna, the "blowing out," as it
were, of the lamp of life is the goal aimed at. But to the Buddhist,
Nirvāna means the peace of extinction; to the Jain, it is final escape
from the body after various metamorphoses. Mr Crooke defines the
fivefold vow of the Jains as prescribing (1) the sanctity of human life;
(2) renunciation of lying, which proceeds from anger, greed, fear or
mirth; (3) refusal to take things not given; (4) chastity; (5)
renunciation of worldly attachments. The Jain pantheon consists of
deified saints who are either Tīrthan-kara, "making a passage through
the circuit of life," or Jina, "the victorious ones."

(5) _Hinduism Proper._ These reforms, joined with the spread of the
Brāhmanical faith into lands where the authority of Aryan priests was
not recognised, produced something which, in its way, resembles the
Protestant Reformation. The Vedic religion had come to be the monopoly
of a limited order of hereditary priests. This ritual supremacy was
broken up by two influences. A new national ideal of worship found
expression in the Epics, which to this day, in metrical translations,
are the layman's scripture all over India. Secondly, the Vedic pantheon
was enormously enlarged by the admission of non-Aryan deities and
aboriginal modes of worship. Hence arose the body of writings known as
the Purānas, or "ancient" books, not all really old in the trace of
their composition, but perhaps deserving their title as containing very
old beliefs. Of all these books and their teaching other authorities
have written recently in various works on the early history and
religious poetry of India, and it would therefore be presumptuous for me
to say anything about the religious literature of Hinduism. It is
sufficient to say that the Epics introduced, in place of the vague and
shadowy Vedic gods, heroic incarnations of divine virtue, wisdom and
valour, and thus led to the sectarian worship of the two active members
of a new supreme triad of gods, Brahmā, the creator, Vishnu, the
preserver, and Siva, the destroyer. Most Hindus are now followers of one
or other of the two latter in some incarnation. In early times this
sectarian rivalry led to wars and persecutions, but Hinduism is
singularly tolerant in matters of belief and doctrine. A Saiva is not a
disbeliever in the divinity of the incarnations of Vishnu; a Vaishnava
recognises the ascetic powers of Siva. But each has his favourite deity
and chiefly studies the scriptures relating to him. The principal
incarnations of Vishnu are Krishna and Rāma, who seem to have been
originally deified heroes of the Midland. There were many Vishnuvite
reformers, some of whom, it is interesting to note, may have derived
suggestions from the early Christianity of Southern India.

The first of these was Rāmānuja, who lived in the eleventh century A.D.
Fifth in succession to him was Rāmānanda, who lived in the fourteenth
century and was the missionary of popular Vaishnavism in Northern India.
To him that tract owes the prevalence of the cult of Rāma and his wife
Sītā, the hero and heroine of the Epic known as the Rāmāyana. His chief
innovation was the admission of low-caste disciples into the communion.
His disciple, the famous Kabir (1380-1420 A.D.), went further. He even
linked Hinduism with Islam. Himself a humble weaver, he taught the
spiritual equality of all men. God is one, he argued, by whatever name
men choose to call Him. The accidents of life, social station and caste,
happiness and grief, prosperity and misfortune, are all the results of
Māya or Illusion. Happiness comes not by formula or sacrifice but by
passionate adoration (_bhakti_) of God. Kabir's chief importance in the
history of Hindu evolution is in the fact that his doctrines were the
origin of Sikhism.

Another great name in the democratic Vaishnava reformation was that of
Chaitanya (1485-1527 A.D.). Mr E. A. Gait writes of him that he was "a
Baidik Brāhman. He preached mainly in Central Bengal and Orissa, and his
doctrine found ready acceptance among large numbers of the people,
especially among those who were still, or had only recently ceased to
be, Buddhists. This was mainly due to the fact that he drew his
followers from all sources, so much so that even Muhammadans followed
him. He preached vehemently against the immolation of animals in
sacrifice, and the use of animal food and stimulants, and taught that
the true road to salvation lay in bhakti, or fervent devotion to God. He
recommended Rādhā worship, and taught that the love felt by her for
Krishna was the highest form of devotion. The acceptable offerings were
flowers, money, and the like; but the great form of worship was the
Sankirtan, or procession of worshippers playing and singing. The
peculiarity of Chaitanya's cult is that the post of spiritual guide, or
Goshain, is not confined to Brāhmans, and several of those best known
belong to the Baidya caste[5]."

_The Sikhs._ As a religious system, the creed of the Sikhs originated
from the Hindu teaching of Kabir, and may yet be reabsorbed into
Hinduism, though the Census of 1911 shows that it still flourishes as a
separate religion. It began as a religious reform and ended by being a
political organisation. It was founded by the Guru Nānak (1469-1538
A.D.) in the Panjāb. Its formula was the Unity of God and the
Brotherhood of Man. Ultimately it became a martial brotherhood, one of
whose objects was by training, diet, and self-denial to present a strong
front to the encroachments of Muhammadan invaders from across the
north-west frontier. Circumstances led the Sikh confederacy to try its
fortune in arms in two fiercely fought campaigns with the growing power
of our East India Company. Defeat was followed by a loyal acceptance of
British supremacy, and the Sikhs rival the Gurkhas as the best soldiers
in the Indian army. Their services during the mutiny of 1857 will never
be forgotten.

_The Sāktas._ One other great Hindu sect, that of the Sāktas, must be
briefly mentioned. It worships the active female principle (_prakriti_)
of one or other of the forms of the Consort of Siva—Durgā, Kāli, or
Pārvati. This cult arose in Eastern Bengal or Assam about the fifth
century, A.D., and has its own scriptures in the Tantras. This sect is
probably due to the recrudescence of very ancient aboriginal cults. It
is associated with blood-offerings and libidinous rites. It was
denounced by the Vaishnava reformers, but still survives, even among
educated men. It affected the later forms of Buddhism.

Finally, by omitting all mention of numerous modern Vaishnava sects, we
come to the modern Theistic sects. The Brahmo Samāj of Bengal was
founded by the celebrated Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1774-1833) who died and
was buried at Clifton. His teachings were continued and developed by his
successors Maharshi Devendranāth Tagore (the father of the poet
Rabindranāth Tagore), Keshav Chandra Sen, and Pratāp Chandra Majumdār.
All of these were men of much piety, eloquence, and learning. Sir Alfred
Lyall says that "Brahmoism, as propagated by its latest expounders,
seems to be unitarianism of a European type, and as far as one can
understand its argument, appears to have no logical stability or _locus
standi_ between revelation and pure rationalism; it propounds either too
much or too little to its hearers." It has, however, been an effectual
bar to the spread of Christianity among the educated classes in Bengal.
It enables them to remain in touch with Hinduism, from which an adoption
of any European creed would effectually divide them. Its services of
praise and prayer, with a sermon or discourse, are held on Sundays, and
in form resemble those of the Christian free churches. Its creed
consists in a belief in the Unity of God, the brotherhood of man, and
direct communion with God without the intervention of any mediator. It
may fairly be claimed for it that it has satisfied the religious needs
of men most of whom lead exemplary and in some cases saintly lives,
without compelling them to join what is regarded as a foreign and
uncongenial religion. But for Ram Mohan Roy, educated Bengal might well
have furnished the nucleus of a Christian Church of India, since, before
his time, many distinguished and able converts were made. I need only
mention the late Rev. K. M. Bannerjee. The Brahmo Samāj is divided into
three sections. The Ādi Samāj, as its name indicates, is the original
church. It is the most conservative of the three, and takes its
inspiration wholly from the Hindu scriptures, and especially from the
Upanishads. The Navavidhān Samāj, founded by Keshav Chandra Sen, "the
Church of the New Dispensation," is much more eclectic and has borrowed
what it considers acceptable, not only from the holy books of Hinduism,
but from Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. The Sādhāran (or "general")
Brāhmo Samāj is the most advanced of the three Churches. It rejects
caste and the seclusion of women, allows inter-caste marriages, and is
seemingly as far from orthodox Hinduism as from orthodox Christianity.
It has even allowed one of its lady members to be married to an
Englishman by Brāhmo rites. If it can hardly be called Hindu in ritual
or in belief, it is Hindu in what is probably regarded as the more
important sense of being a purely Indian sect and not a direct product
of European missionary zeal.

Another new sect, the Ārya Samāj, or Aryan Society, has much influence
in the Panjāb and North-Western India generally. It was founded by
Dayānand Saraswati (1827-53). Its only scriptures are the Vedas. It
professes pure monotheism, repudiates idol worship, and is much
interested in social reform. It has also at times been mixed up, more or
less directly, with political agitation. Like the Brāhmo Samāj, it is
probably due in its inception to the influence of European religious
teaching, but, as is perhaps natural, its acceptance of European ethics
is marked by a sturdy resistance to European dogma.

The great bulk of Hinduism, however, remains still but little removed
from the Animistic stage of religious evolution, and one of the results
of the spread of British rule into wild and savage tracts has been the
extension of the borders of Hinduism in competition with Christianity.
In the rougher and wilder races, not yet sufficiently softened and
civilised for the acceptance of the Hindu social system, the Christian
missionary prevails. He has been most successful among the Gonds of
Central India, among such savage tribes as the Nāgas, Gāros, and Lushais
on the Assam border. Elsewhere Hinduism pursues its quietly
imperturbable course and admits savage races to its lower castes as it
has always admitted them during the last two thousand years.

_Islam in India._ Since King George V has more Muhammadan subjects than
any other ruler on earth—some 75,000,000 in number, it would not be
proper to close a little book on the Peoples of India without saying
something of those of their number who are Musalmāns. The early
Muhammadan invasions of the tenth century were mere predatory raids, and
were attended neither by settlement nor conversion. But at the end of
the twelfth century Muhammad Ghori overthrew the Hindu dynasties of
Delhi and Kanauj and thus opened the way to future Muhammadan conquests.
In the sixteenth century Moghal rule was established under Babar and his
successors. During the preceding five centuries Hindu India suffered
much oppression and wrong at the hands of Muhammadan invaders, but Islam
had made no attempt to become an Indian religion. The early Moghal
emperors were too busy in consolidating their conquests and organising
their administration to have much leisure or inclination for
proselytising. Their policy depended largely on co-operation with Rājput
princes, whose daughters they married. The influence of Rājput empresses
and princesses made for kindly tolerance. It was only under the zealot
Aurangzeb that any tendency to forcible conversion showed itself.

The final result of some seven hundred years of Muhammadan rule in
various parts of the country is that Musalmāns are in excess of Hindus
only in the Western Panjāb, which is in contact with a purely Muhammadan
country, and in Eastern Bengal, where the aboriginal low-caste Hindu was
glad to get social promotion by accepting Islam, and where he thrives
and prospers at the expense of his Hindu brother, partly because his
diet is more nutritious, partly because he does not practise
infant-marriage and other debilitating customs.

As has been said above, Animism has affected Islam as well as Hinduism.
From the old religion of the country Musalmāns have borrowed demonology,
a belief in witchcraft, and the worship of departed Pirs or saints. The
most remarkable instance of the latter is the sect of the Pachpiriyas of
Bengal, the worshippers of the Five Saints, a cult which some have
traced to the cult of the five Pāndava heroes of the Mahābhārata. The
five Pirs, however, vary in name from district to district. In Eastern
Bengal, no one, whether Hindu or Musalmān (or, I had almost said,
Christian), begins a journey by boat without a loud and hearty
invocation of the Ganges, the Wind, the Five Pirs, and Pir Badr before
mentioned.

Of the two great sects of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias, the former
are by far the most numerous in India. The Sunnis or Traditionalists
accept the Sunnat or collected body of Arabic usage as possessing
authority concurrent with that of the Koran, which is the sole scripture
of the Shias. Yet in Eastern Bengal the annual procession of the Tazias,
or representations of the tombs of the martyred grandsons of the
Prophet, is much attended by Sunnis (though for them the practice is
unorthodox), and indeed by Hindus also. In other parts of India, the
Mohurram festival has often led to serious encounters between Hindus and
Musalmāns, and even in Calcutta and Bombay has been the cause of
dangerous riots.

The sects of Islam in India, unlike the Hindu sects, are not due to the
instinct for differentiation, for obvious reasons. They are, in Mr
Crooke's words, either puritanical or pietistic. Consequently, followers
of them are apt to show a tendency to fanaticism. The Hindu sectarian
adores some favourite deity, but does not deny the merits, or the
Hinduism, of other deities or their followers. The Musalmān sectarian is
one who has discovered a higher orthodoxy than others, or a straighter
road to religion, and regards those who do not share his views as an
enemy of God and the true faith. Of the puritanical sects, the best
known is that of the Wahābis, founded by Ibn Abdul Wahāb at Nejd in
Arabia, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was an attempt to
revive primitive Muhammadanship without the corruptions and accretions
of later ages and foreign lands. It was brought into India by Sayid
Ahmad Shāh, who proclaimed a Jihād, or holy war, against the Sikhs in
1826. The Wahābis hold that the doctrine of the Unity of God has been
endangered by the excessive reverence paid to the Prophet, to his
successors the Imāns, and to shrines. At times Wahābis have given
trouble to the administration, especially in Bengal. In recent years,
however, they call themselves Ahl-i-hadīs, or "followers of tradition,"
and employ themselves chiefly in endeavouring to eradicate modern
superstitions.

The pietistic sects tend towards Sūfi-ism, a combination of Aryan
pantheism with Semitic monotheism, which takes the form of ecstatic
devotion. Something of the same kind may be found in the Vaisnav sects
of Hinduism, and in both cases ultimate absorption in the divinity is
the goal aimed at.

Very interesting local communities of Muhammadans are the Moplahs of the
Malabar coast, descendants of Arab settlers; the Bohras or "traders" of
Western India; and the Khojās, followers of the "Old Man of the
Mountain," whose present representative is H.H. the Agha Khān of Bombay,
who has many friends in England.

_The Pārsīs._ The word Pārsī simply means Persian, and the Pārsī
religion is the dualistic faith, combined with fire-worship, of the
ancient Persians. It is also called Mazdaism from Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd),
who is in perpetual conflict with Angro Mainyush (Ahriman), the spirit
of evil. It is also called Zoroastrianism, from the reformer Zoroaster,
the Greek form of the old Iranian Zarathushtra, the modern Persian
Zardusht. The religious phraseology of the Pārsīs shows that their faith
must have had a common origin with the Aryan religion of India before
the Iranian and Indo-Aryan migrations parted company. By a curious trick
of language, the Devas, who in India and Europe are beneficent gods, in
Persia become evil spirits. In India by a corresponding inversion, the
word Asura, which in the Rig-veda is still a name of gods, was applied
to hostile (generally aboriginal) demons. By a further process Asura was
regarded as a negative word, and gave birth to a tribe of beneficent
Suras. In the earlier times, there were both Ahura and Daeva
worshippers, the former being socially superior, cattle-breeders, who,
like the Indian Hindus, venerated the cow. It was Zoroaster's mission to
fuse these two cults into a dualistic creed, whose main principle was
the continuous struggle between the powers of good and evil. Submerged
for a time during the Greek occupation, the Mazdaist faith revived under
the Sassanids, but was finally overthrown by the advent of Islam, which
persecuted and strove to extirpate the worship of fire.

Many of the survivors migrated to India, where they secured the
tolerance of Hindu and Muhammadan rulers alike, and increased and
multiplied. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, Surat, Nausāri,
and the neighbouring parts of Gujarāt were their home. When, under
British rule, Bombay became a great commercial port, large numbers of
Pārsīs migrated thither, and in many cases won great wealth and
influence.

In the early days of their dispersion, the weak colonies of Pārsīs
assimilated themselves with the lower classes of Hindus by whom they
were surrounded. But fresh accessions from Irān, and a growth of
national prosperity and self-confidence brought about a restoration of
the ancient faith. On Indian soil, the Pārsīs now number 94,000. But
owing to their intelligence and wealth, due to their remarkable success
in trading, the Pārsīs command a much wider political and social
influence than their numbers would seem to show. According to Pārsī
belief, the soul passes after death to paradise (Bihisht) or a place of
punishment (Dozakh) according to a man's conduct in life. Much
importance is attached to the performance of rites to the _manes_ of
ancestors. Fire, water, the sun, moon, and stars were created by Ahura
Mazda, and are venerated, as is Zarathushtra the Prophet. Soshios, his
son, will some day be reincarnated as a Messiah, and will convert the
world to the true faith. As with other Indian religions, contact with
Europeans tends to produce laxity of belief and conduct.

_Christianity._ It is interesting to remember that there were Christians
in India before the Christian faith reached our islands. The tradition
that St Thomas was the Apostle of India, and suffered martyrdom there,
is indeed discredited. This tradition originated with the Syriac _Acta
Thomae_, and was accepted by Catholic teachers from the middle of the
fourth century. The Indian King Gundaphar of the _Acta_ is undoubtedly
the historical Gondophares, whose dynasty was Parthian, though his
territories were loosely considered to extend to India. A full account
of the traditions connecting St Thomas with India (by W. R. Philipps)
will be found in vol. XXXII. of the _Indian Antiquary_, 1903, pp. 1-15,
145-160.

The term "Christians of St Thomas" is often applied to the members of
the ancient Christian churches of Southern India which claim him as
their first founder, and honour as their second founder a bishop called
Thomas, who is said to have come from Jerusalem to Malabar in 345 A.D.
According to local tradition, St Thomas went from Malabar to Mylapur,
now a suburb of Madras and the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop. Here
still exists the shrine of his martyrdom on Mount St Thomas. A
miraculous cross is shown with a Pahlavi inscription which is said to be
as old as the end of the seventh century. The old churches of the south
were certainly of East Syrian origin. They never wholly lost their sense
of connection with their mother church, for it is known that they sent
deputies in 1490 to the Nestorian patriarch Simeon, who provided them
with bishops. Under Musalmān rule, they suffered severely, and welcomed
the advent of the Portuguese to India. They were, however, recalcitrant
to Roman influence, and it was with much difficulty that in 1599 they
were induced to submit to a formal union with Rome at the synod of
Diamper (Udayamperur in Cochin). During the following century and a half
the Thomasine churches were under foreign Jesuit rule, but yielded an
unwilling and intermittent obedience. In 1653, there was a great schism,
and of about 200,000 Christians of St Thomas only 400 remained loyal to
Rome, though some of their churches were soon won back by the
Carmelites. The remainder fell under the influence of the Jacobite Mar
Gregorius, styled patriarch of Jerusalem, who reached Malabar in 1665 as
an emissary from Ignatius patriarch of Antioch. From this time, the
independent churches of Southern India have been Jacobite. At the
present time, they are on friendly terms with the Anglican church in
India, and are loosening their dependence on the Jacobite patriarch of
Antioch.

Of missionary work in India I need not speak in a book of this size.
There are nearly three millions of Christians in India, of whom two and
a half millions are native converts. Seeing that missionary work has
been in operation since 1500, a tale of converts amounting to less than
one per cent. may seem a discouraging result of over 400 years of
contact with European religious thought. But actual conversion has taken
place chiefly among the lower classes and least advanced races. Among
the educated classes the influence of Christianity has been indirect,
and in many cases has produced a transformation in ethical belief and
social conduct as complete as could have been wrought by open
conversion. The Brāhmo Samāj, for instance, remains Hindu in a sense,
because it refuses to sever its connection with India, or to acknowledge
European authority in matters of religion. But the Brāhmo Samāj could
not have come into existence but for Rām Mohan Roy's friendly and
intimate acquaintance with European Christians and Unitarians. Even in
the matter of conversion, the rate of progress is increasing rapidly,
partly because missionary effort is being directed to savage tracts
hitherto unvisited by civilised men, but partly, also, because the
native Christian community is beginning to have sufficient
self-confidence and status to proselytise in its turn. The multiplicity
of missionary agencies, due to the accidents of European history and
development, has been an impediment. Such terms as the Church of
England, Church of Scotland, Welsh Baptists, American Baptists, etc.,
can have little signification for races who cannot be expected to know
the historical causes which brought about these local varieties of
Christian doctrine and practice. There may yet arise among one of the
rival churches in India a Christian Rāmanuja or Chaitanya, who may found
a great Church of India, with a ritual, and, perhaps, doctrines of its
own. The most successful of the Jesuit missionaries, Robert de Nobili[6]
for instance, and such men as the Abbé Dubois in later times, owed their
success to the fact that they assumed the habits, dress, and often the
titles of Brāhmanic ascetics. They could not assume the dusky skin
which, after all, is the first and easiest means of gaining an Indian's
confidence. They could not wholly accept caste, they could not wink at
polygamy in the case of men whose first wives were infertile, and who
had an hereditary sense that the lack of an heir is socially and
religiously reprehensible. Perhaps a truly indigenous Church of India
may deal with such difficulties more successfully than men who are
compelled to teach, not only the elements of the Christian faith, but
the ethical traditions belonging to their own race.

In this connection, I may be allowed to conclude my necessarily brief
story of Indian races and religions with an anecdote. Just thirty-five
years ago I was in charge of a "subdivision" in Bengal which contained a
large number of native Christians belonging to the Church of England.
There were several churches with parsonages, and the nearest of these to
my headquarters was in the charge of a young missionary who was glad to
have an occasional chat with a young magistrate. One day my missionary
friend told me that he had discovered with dismay that his flock were in
the habit of attending the Communion Service in batches, according to
their castes, so as not to be obliged to drink out of the cup with men
of alien caste. There were Hindu Christians and Muhammadan Christians
who could not eat or drink together. He decided that this state of
things must be stopped at all costs, as being wholly contrary to
Christian teaching. I ventured to suggest that spiritual equality is not
the same thing as social equality, but had to admit that caste is not
usually recognised as a Christian institution. Apparently the Christians
listened to their pastor's admonition, for, a few days after, he rode
over to say that, in consequence of ex-scavengers and ex-Brāhmans having
communicated together, his whole congregation had been put out of caste
by their Hindu neighbours. This may not, at first sight, seem a very
serious calamity. But it happened that, in the caste specialisation
which had survived among the Christians, there were none of the
community who were barbers or midwives by caste. Christian men were
going about with stubbly chins: worse still, Christian women were in
need of help which their Hindu sisters refused to supply. It was a
difficult situation for two young bachelors. However, I now confess,
after all these years, that I brought a little official pressure to bear
on the midwives, and the situation was saved for the moment. In those
days, the educational policy of Government was to give grants-in-aid to
primary schools, most of which, in this very Christian "subdivision"
were either Roman Catholic or Anglican. When next I proceeded to issue
my doles according to school-population and other educational results, I
was astonished to find that the Roman Catholic grant-in-aid had
increased greatly and the Anglican grant-in-aid had proportionally
diminished. This was the immediate (and no doubt temporary) result of my
missionary friend's zeal. Such survivals of old beliefs are common in
all the religions of India. The main social impulse of the people was
implanted on their minds at the distant epoch of the Aryan settlement,
the sense of social and racial inequality which has now hardened into
the caste system. To most Indians a recognition of the importance and
value of caste is the first step towards decent and seemly conduct,
towards civilised morality. When a semi-savage hill-man begins to
recognise his inferiority to his Hindu neighbours and makes tentative
approaches with a view to inclusion in civilised society, his first duty
is to abjure the diet of pork and rice-beer which his unregenerate
appetite loves, since these indulgences stand in the way of sharing a
meal with Hindu folk. (In other parts of India, liquor and meat are
consumed by low-caste Hindus of aboriginal origin.) In Assam, a Kachāri
first accepts the _sarana_ or "protection" of a Hindu Goshain. He is
then called a Saraniya Koch. His next step is to abandon strong drinks,
on which he is promoted to the status of a Modāhi Koch. At this stage,
he may be fortunate enough to win the hand of a bride of pure Koch
family, and, under her guidance, acquires enough of conventional habits
and beliefs to be recognised as a Kāmtāli or Bor Koch, and is a true
Hindu, a member of a genuine Hindu caste. Musalmāns and Christians have
other social conventions, and do not usually regard them as essential to
good manners or godliness. But their converts retain their social
superstitions and carry them into the new surroundings, where they
sometimes come into disagreeable contact with the ethical ideas
belonging to imported religions.

The contact of Aryan with Dravidian races, some three thousand years
ago, brought about the beginnings of caste, which, from one point of
view, may be regarded as a rude form of "race-protection," a primitive
system of eugenics. It is still most rigidly enforced in the south,
where the semi-Aryan classes are in a great minority. It is most relaxed
in the Panjāb, where, though caste rules exist, the population is, and
probably always has been, as homogeneous as our own race. French
travellers in India have sometimes said, half-humorously, that the
Anglo-Indian administrators and merchants are practically a caste unto
themselves. Bengalis have made the same remark and have said that our
Civil Service is composed of _Kali Yuger Brāhman_, "the Brāhmans of the
Iron Age." There was once some truth in the accusation, if accusation it
be. It was not our business to interfere deliberately with caste, since
British policy from the first has been one of kindly neutrality and
toleration. Whether indirect influences have mitigated the effect of the
sentiment of caste is a moot point. Educated Indians who have lived in
Europe see its irksomeness, and in some cases denounce it more
vigorously than most Europeans will care to denounce a system due to
historical causes which are still partly operative. On the other hand,
railways and other facilities for travel, though they have necessarily
introduced laxity in matters of food and contact, have probably
heightened the caste feeling by emphasising the variety of Hindu
humanity and of the customs and habits of its many races. Hence the
evolution of Indian society remains as interesting and as incalculable
as ever.

In a little book of this sort it has been necessary to make many general
and sweeping statements which are not always literally true of any given
part of India. But perhaps enough has been said to show the interesting
and significant differences between the three hundred odd millions of
Western Europe and the three hundred odd millions of India. Our business
in India has been primarily to keep the peace, to provide a
breathing-space after the social and political turmoil that followed on
the breaking-up of the Moghal empire. The principal result, so far, has
been a notable increase in Hindu self-confidence and ambition, and a
growing belief among Hindus that their ancient social system is not
incompatible with industrial, commercial, and political advance on
European lines. This belief has been much strengthened by the
modernisation of Japan, and its results. It has been fostered by the
free admission of educated Hindus to the highest and most responsible
posts in the King-Emperor's administration. Inasmuch as that statement
brings me to the most modern development of Hindu life and thought, I
cannot do better than end at this point.

[5] Some account of the development of Chaitanya's teaching in Assam may
be found in an article of mine in Dr Hastings' _Dictionary of Religion
and Ethics_.

[6] In 1606, R. de Nobili, a nephew of Bellarmine, was in charge of the
Jesuit mission at Madura, and adopted the costume of a Dravidian Brāhman.




BIBLIOGRAPHY


CHAPTER I

The standard authority on the Hindu literary theory of Caste is M. Emile
Senart's _Les Castes dans l'lnde_. Paris. Ernest Leroux. 1896.

Probably the best succinct account of Caste is Mr E. A. Gait's article
in Dr Hastings' _Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_. This will, of
course, be brought up to date in the forthcoming Report on the Indian
Census of 1911.

Sir A. C. Lyall's _Asiatic Studies_. London. John Murray. Contains a
sympathetic and learned account of Hindu social life and of the workings
of Caste in Upper India.

M. C. Bouglé's _Essai sur le Régime des Castes_. Paris. Felix Alcan.
1908. Contains much interesting matter taken from many sources, but
sometimes, from want of local knowledge, does not sufficiently
discriminate between different developments of the caste system.

There is an enormous literature on the races, tribes, and castes of
India, but references to the most important books will be found in the
above authorities.

       *       *       *       *       *

Chapter I is, in the main, a summary of Sir H. H. Risley's views as
expressed in Chapter VI of Vol. I of the _Imperial Gazetteer_. That is
inevitable, since the _Gazetteer_ contains necessarily the most
authoritative summary of what is known on the subject, pending the
appearance of Mr Gait's forthcoming Census Report.


CHAPTER II

The standard authority on the modern languages of India is Sir G. A.
Grierson's work on _The Languages of India_ (Calcutta, 1903). It will,
however, be superseded by the book which Sir G. A. Grierson is now
writing on the basis of the further materials collected in his
_Linguistic Survey_, and in the Census Reports of 1911. The eleven
volumes hitherto published of the _Survey_ itself give specimens of the
Indian languages and skeleton grammars.


CHAPTER III

Professor Macdonell's _History of Sanskrit Literature_ (Heinemann, 1905)
contains a fascinating and readable account of the Hindu scriptures from
the Vedic ages up to modern times.

Professor Hopkins' _Religions of India_ and _India Old and New_ deal
with both the literature and the actual working of Indian religions. Mr
W. Crooke's _Native Races of Northern India_ is a popular account of the
Aryan region, and Mr Thurston's _Castes and Tribes of Southern India_.
Madras, Government Press. 1908. Though it is more elaborate and
scientific in its treatment, is full of matters which are interesting
not only to the specialist.

Meredith Townsend's _Asia and Europe_. London. Archibald Constable.
1905. Is still an interesting and suggestive study of the differences
between East and West, and Sir A. C. Lyall's _Asiatic Studies_ are the
even more illuminating results of a long, intimate, and sympathetic
familiarity with Indian religious thought.

The chapter on Religion in the forthcoming Census Report for 1911 will
contain the latest fruits of research, statistical and other.

There is an enormous mass of literature dealing in detail with the
religions and sects of India. A selected list of books will be found at
p. 446 of the _Imperial Gazetteer_.




INDEX


Abor race, 44

Accent in Indian languages, 74

Ādi Brāhmo Samāj, 96

Alphabets of India, 70

Animism among Muhammadans, 99

Animistic religions of India, 81

Animists as potential Hindus, 83

_Anu-loma_ castes, 38

Apabhramsa or "decayed" languages, 75

Arjuna, supposed ancestor of Manipur dynasty, 42

Aryan settlement in Gangetic _do-āb_, 27

Aryan settlement in the Panjāb, 26

Aryo-Dravidian type of race, 22

_Assam, History of_, by E. A. Gait, 45

Assamese language, 76


Bannerjee, Rev. K. M., 95

Bengali language, 76

Bengali race, origins of, 28

Bihārī language, 76

Bohra Muhammadans, 101

Brachycephalous races, 17

Brahma, one of the Hindu Trinity, 91

Brāhmanas, sacred books, 88

Brāhmans of Bengal, 17

Brāhmo Samāj in Bengal, 94

Brāhui language, 62, 66

Buddha (Gautama) and Buddhism, 89


Caste, definition of, 35;
  functional type of, 45;
  as divided in _gotras_, 41;
  as a result of migration, 49;
  as resulting from change of custom, 50;
  as formed by mixture of blood, 47;
  of the national type, 48;
  sectarian type, 46;
  tribal castes, 40, 43;
  as including Koches and other indigenous tribes, 109

Chaitanya, Hindu reformer, 92

Chandāls, 38

Chitrangadā, supposed ancestress of Manipur dynasty, 42

Clans, exogamous, 35

Crooke, Mr W., on "Rājputs and Marāthas", 52


Dafla race, 44

Dolicocephalous races, 17

Doms in Assam, 44

Dravidian languages, 61, 62

Dravidian type of race, 24

Dravidians as probable autochthones, 25

Dubois, Abbé, 106


Fiction as an origin of caste, 33

Functional type of castes, 45


Gait, E. A., _History of Assam_, 45

Gandhara, kingdom of, 31

Gārpagāri (hail averters) as functional caste, 45

Gond language, 62, 65

_Gotras_, as branch of caste, 41

Gujarāti language, 76


Hindi (Eastern) language, 76

Hindi (Western) language, 75

Hindustāni or Urdū language, 77

Hoernle's theory of Aryan settlements, 28

Hypergamy, 26


Indo-Aryan type of race, 21

Indo-Chinese invasions, 80

Islām in India, 97


Jains, their religion, 89


Kabir, Hindu reformer, 92

Kachāri race, 109

Kāli, worship of, 94

Kanarese language, 61, 64

Kandh language, 62

Kartā-bhajās, sectarian caste, 46

Kāshmīrī language, 76

Kāyasthas of Bengal, 17

Khojā Muhammadans, 101

Koch race, 41

Koches as Hindu caste, 109

Kodagu language, 61

Kohistāni language, 76

Kolāmi language, 62

Kota language, 62

Kurukh language, 62


Lahnda language, 76

Languages of India generally, 56;
  Apabhramsa, 75;
  Assamese, 76;
  Bengali, 76;
  Bihārī, 76;
  Brāhui, 62, 66;
  Dravidian, 61, 62;
  Gond, 62, 65;
  Gujarāti, 76;
  Hindi (Western), 75;
  Hindi (Eastern), 76;
  Hindustāni, 77;
  Kanarese, 61, 65;
  Kandh, 62;
  Kashmīri, 76;
  Kodagu, 61;
  Kohistāni, 76;
  Kolāmi, 62;
  Kota, 62;
  Kurukh, 62;
  Lahnda, 76;
  Māgadhi Prākrit, 75;
  Mahārāshtri Prākrit, 75;
  Malayalam, 61, 64;
  Malto, 62;
  Marāthi, 76;
  Mon-Khmer, 78, 79;
  Mundā, 66;
  Oriyā, 72, 76;
  Pahārī, 76;
  Pāli, 75;
  Panjābi, 76;
  Prākrit, 71;
  "Primary" Prākrits, 74;
  Rājasthāni, 76;
  Sauraseni, 75;
  Sindhi, 76;
  Tamil, 61, 62;
  Telugu, 62, 65;
  Toda, 62;
  Tulu, 62

Lingayats as a sectarian caste, 47


Madhya-deça, the linguistic Midland, 69

Māgadhi Prākrit language, 75

Mags of Chittagong, 23

Mahārāshtri language, 75

Malayalam language, 61, 64

Malto language, 62

Manipur and the Meithei race, 42

Manu, Institutes of, 37

Marātha race and its origins, 29, 48

Marāthi language, 76

Meithei race of Manipur, 42

Migration as a cause of caste, 49

Mixed castes, 47

Mongolo-Dravidian race, 23

Mongolian races brachycephalous, 18

Mongoloid type of race, 23

Mon-Khmer languages, 78, 79

Moplah Muhammadans, 101

Mundā languages, 66


Nānak (Sikh reformer), 93

National castes, 48

Navavidhān Brāhmo Samāj, 96

Navin Chandra Sen, his definition of caste, 33

Nesfield, Mr, _Brief View of the Caste System
 of the N. W. P. and Oude_ quoted, 13

Nestorian Christians, 103

Newār tribe in Nepāl, 48

Nirvāna as a Buddhist, and Jain doctrine, 89

Nobili, Robert de, 106

Nose-measurements, 19


Orbito-nasal index, 19

Oriyā language, 72, 76


Pahārī language, 76

Pāli language, 75

Pānini and other grammarians, 70

Panjābi language, 76

Pantheism, 37

Parasu Rāma, 41

Pārsīs and their religion, 101

Pir Badr of Chittagong, 85

Pirs (Muhammadan saints), 99

Prākrit languages, 71

_Prati-loma_ (see _Anu-loma_) castes, 38

Primary Prākrits, 74

Purānas (sacred books), 90


Rājputs in Nepāl, etc., 24

Rāmānuja (Hindu reformer), 91

Risley, Sir H. H., his account of Marātha origins, 30;
  Article in _Journal of R. A. Institute_ quoted, 15

Roy, Rājā Rām Mohan, 94


Sādhāran Brāhmo Samāj, 96

Sāktas, a Hindu sect, 94

Saraswati (Dayānand), 96

Sauraseni language, 75

Scytho-Dravidian type of race, 22

Scytho-Dravidian, supposed origin, 29

Sectarian type of caste, 46

Sen (Keshav Chandra), 94

Shagird-peshās as a mixed caste, 48

Shia Muhammadans, 99

Sikhs and the Sikh religion, 93

Sindhī language, 76

Siva, as a member of the Hindu Trinity, 91

Sse or Sakas (Scythians), 30

Stature as an index of race, 20

Sunni Muhammadans, 99


Tagore, Maharshi Devendranāth, 94

Tagore, Rabindranāth, 94

Tamil language, 61, 64

Tantras (sacred books), 94

Telugu language, 62, 65

Thomasine Christians, 103

Tīrthan-karas (Jain saints), 90

Toda language, 62

Totems and Totemistic clans in Assam, 36

Tribal castes, 40, 43

Tribes in Assam, 35

Tribes, Turko-Iranian, 37

Tulu language, 62

Turko-Iranian type of race, 20

Turushka race, 31


Upanishads (sacred books), 88


_Vangiya Sāhitya Parisat_ (Bengal Academy of Literature), 56

Vardhamāna, the founder of Jainism, 89

Vedas, the four sacred books, 86

Vedic deities, 87

Vishnu as one of the Hindu Trinity, 91


Wahābi Muhammadans, 100


Yueh-chi race, 31


CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS


[Illustration: map

 THE INDIAN EMPIRE
 Distribution of Population
 _Camb. Univ. Press_]

[Illustration: map

 THE INDIAN EMPIRE
 Distribution of Prevailing Languages
 _Camb. Univ. Press_]






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