Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/803

779 HISTORY.] INDIA 770 isolated of the aboriginal races have thus kept themselves apart, by far the greater portion submitted in ancient times to the Aryan invaders, and now make up the mass of the Hindus. In Bengal and Assam the aborigines are divided into nearly sixty distinct races. In the North-Western Pro vinces sixteen tribes of aborigines are enumerated in the census of 1872. In the Central Provinces they number 1| millions, the ancient race of Gonds, who ruled the central table-land before the rise of the MarhattAs, alone amounting to 1^ millions. In British Burmah the Karens, whose traditions have a singularly Jewish tinge, number 330,000. In Oudh the nationality of the abori ginal tribes has been stamped out beneath successive waves of Rajput and Mahometan invaders. In centres of the ancient Hindu civilization, the aboriginal races have become the low-castes and out-castes on which the social fabric of India rests. A few of them, however, still preserve their ethnical identity as wandering tribes or jugglers, basket-weavers, and fortune-tellers.- Thus the Nats, Bediyas, and other gipsy clans are recognized to this day as distinct from the surrounding Hindu population. The aboriginal races on the plains have supplied the hereditary criminal classes, alike under the Hindus, the Mahometans, and the British. Formerly organized robber communities, they have, under the stricter police adminis tration of our days, sunk into petty pilferers. But their existence is still recognized by the Criminal Tribes Act, passed in 1871, and occasionally enforced within certain localities of northern India. The non- Aryan hill races, who figured from Vedic times downwards as marauders and invaders, have ceased to be a disturbing element. Many of them appear as pre datory clans in Mahometan and early British India. They sallied forth from their mountains at the end of the autumn harvest, pillaged and burned the lowland villages, and retired to their fastnesses laden with the booty of the plains. The measures by which many of these wild races have been reclaimed mark some of the most honourable episodes of Anglo Indian rule. Cleveland s Hill-Rangers in the last century, and the Bhils and Mhairs in more recent times, are well-known examples of marauding races being turned into peaceful cultivators and loyal soldiers. An equally salutary transformation has taken place in many a remote forest and hill tract of India. The firm order of British rule has rendered their old plundering life no longer possible, and at the same time has opened up to them new outlets for their energies. Their char acter differs in many respects from that of the tamer population of the plains. Their truthfulness, sturdy loyalty, and a certain joyous bravery, almost amounting to playfulness, appeal in a special manner to the English mind. There is scarcely a single administrator who has ruled over them for any length of time without finding his heart drawn to them, and leaving on record his belief in their capabilities for good. Primitive Hinduism. We have seen that India may be divided into three regions. Two of these, the Himalayas in the north and the three-sided table-land in the south, still form ths retreats of the non-Aryan tribes. The third, or the great river plains, became in very ancient times the theatre on which a nobler race worked out its civilization. That race belonged to the splendid Aryan or Indo- Germanic stock, from which the Brahman, the Rajput, and the Englishman alike descend. Its earliest home seems to have been in Central Asia. From this common camping- ground certain branches of the race started for the east, others for the west. One of the western offshoots founded the Persian kingdom ; another built Athens and Lacedae- mon, and became the Greek nation ; a third went on to Italy, and reared the city on the seven hills which grew into imperial Rome. A distant colony of the same race excavated the silver-ores of prehistoric Spain ; and, when we first catch a sight of ancient England, we see an Aryan settlement fishing in willow canoes, and working the tin- mines of Cornwall. Meanwhile other branches of the Aryan stock had gone forth from the primitive home in Central Asia to the east. Powerful bands found their way through the passes of the Himalayas into the Punjab, and spread themselves, chiefly as Brahmans and Rajputs, over India. The Aryan offshoots to the east and to the west alike asserted their superiority over the earlier peoples whom they found in possession of the soil. The history of ancient Europe is the story of the Aryan settlements around the shores of the Mediterranean ; and that wide term, modern civilization, merely means the civilization of the western branches of the same race. The history and development of India consist of the history and development of the eastern offshoots of the Aryan stock who settled in that land. In the west, the Aryan speech has supplied the modern languages of Europe, America, and England s island empires in the southern Pacific. In the east, Hinduism and Buddhism, the religions of the Indian branch of the Aryans, have become the faiths of more than one- half of the whole human race, and spread Aryan thought and culture throughout Asia to the utmost limits of China and Japan. We know little regarding these noble Aryan tribes in Its home their early camping-ground in Central Asia. From words in Cen - preserved in the languages of their long-separated descend- a * ants in Europe and India, scholars infer that they roamed over the grassy steppes with their cattle, making long halts to rear crops of grain. They had tamed most of the domestic animals, were acquainted with some metals, under stood the arts of weaving and sewing, wore clothes, and ate cooked food. They lived the hardy life of the tempemte zone, and the feeling of cold seems to be one of the earliest common remembrances of the eastern and the western branches of the race. Ages afterwards, when the Vedic singers in hot India prayed for long life, they asked for &quot; a hundred, winters.&quot; The forefathers of the Greek and the Roman, of the Englishman and the Hindu, dwelt together in Asia, spoke the same tongue, worshipped the same gods. The languages of Europe and India, although at first sight they seem wide apart, are merely different forms of the original Aryan speech. This is especially true of the common words of family life. The names for father, mother, brother, sister, and ividow are the same in most of the Aryan languages, whether spoken on the banks of the Ganges, of the Tiber, or of the Thames, Thus the word daughter, which occurs in nearly all of them, has been derived from two Sanskrit roots meaning &quot; to draw milk,&quot; and preserves the memory of the time when the daughter was the little milk-maid in the primitive Aryan household. The ancient religions of Europe and India had a similar origin. They were to some extent made up of the sacred stories or myths which our common ancestors had learned while dwelling together in Central Asia. Some of the Vedic gods were also the gods of Greece and Rome ; and to this day the Deity is adored by names derived from the same old Aryan root by Brahmans in Calcutta, by Protestant clergymen at Westminster, and by Catholic priests in Peru. The Vedic hymns exhibit the Indian branch of the Aryans on its march to the south-east and in its new homes. The earliest songs disclose the race still to the