Page:A Comprehensive History of India Vol 1.djvu/49

 BOOK I.

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE YEAR 1600,

WIIKN THE FIRST CROWN CHARTER INCORPORATING

AN EAST INDIA COMPANY WAS GRANTED.

CHAPTER I.

Ancient India — Tiie pre-historic period — Native sources oi intormation — Other accounts — Invasion of India by Sesostris, Serairamis, Darius Hystaspes, Alexander the Great — Subsequent statu of India.

)N tracing the early history of a country, tlie natural course is to No proper apply to the sources of information which tlie country itself may toryofin- be able to furnish. In this respect India might be presumed to be rich. Long before the nations of Western Europe had begun to emerge from barbarism, it was in possession of a language remarkable for the completeness of its grammatical forms, fcjr copiousness, and for the number and variety of the works which had been written in it. Several of these works were of a scientific and metaphysical character, requiring talent of a higher order than would have been neces.sary for historical compilation ; and yet, strange to say, while the more difficult intellectual effoit was successfully made, the less difficult, the more useful, and, as one would have imagined, the more attrac- tive, was so entirely neglected, that with the exception of a work on Cashmere of no very ancient date, the literature of India has failed to furnish a single production to which the name of history can in any proper sense of the term be applied. In dealing with the past, ages are heaped upon ages till the years amount to millions; and endless details are given of gods and demigods, children of the sun and moon, and creatures still more monstrous, combining divine, human, and bestial forms — but men as they really hved; and the events pro- duced by their agency are entirely overlot)ked, or treated as if they were unfit to be recorded until they had been moulded into some fantastic shape. In short, the Brahmins, the only depositories of learning, abusing their trust, have made everything subser ent to an extravagant mHhology, obviou-sly designed, and in many respects skilfully framed, to secure their own aggrandizement.

In the absence of direct information from historical records in India, it is sources of proper before abandoning the search there as hopeless, to in<|uire whether it may tion. not be possible to discover other native som'ces from which some amount of