Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/40

 to HISTORY OF INDIAN ARCHITECTURE. entered India across the Upper Indus, coming from Central Asia. They were a fair complexioned people as compared with the Aborigines, and for a long time they remained settled in the Panjab, or on the banks of the Sarasvati, then a more important stream than now, the main body, however, still remaining to the westward of the Indus. If, however, we may trust our chronology, we find them settled 150x3 to 2000 years before the Christian Era, in Ayodhya and then in the plenitude of their power. Naturally we look for some light on their early history in the two great Indian epics the Ramayana recording the exploits of Rama, King of Ayodhya, of the Solar race, and in much later times regarded as an incarnation of Vishnu ; and the Mahabharata celebrating the contest between the Kurus and Pandus, of the Lunar family. Both are steeped in Brahman doctrines, almost certainly inserted in later ages among the original legends. It thus becomes very difficult to separate what belongs to the original spirit and aim of the works from the interpolated materials. The Ramayana is so largely allegorical and cast in the form it has reached us so long after the period to which it refers that it is doubtful whether we can draw any inference with safety from its contents, except that it relates to the spread of Aryan civilisation which had probably then occupied most of the country north of the Vindhyan range into southern India, and as far as Ceylon. 1 From a very early period the Aryans had, doubtless, become mixed with aboriginal races, and could not be regarded as pure at this period. But whether they formed settlements in the Dekhan or not, it was opened up to them, and by slow degrees imbibed that amount of Brahmanism which eventually pervaded the south. By B.C. 700, or thereabouts, they had begun to be tolerably well acquainted with the whole of the peninsula. The events that form the theme of the western epic the Mahabharata may have occurred almost as early as, or even several centuries later than the times of Rama. It opens up an entirely new view of Indian social life. If the heroes of that poem were Aryans at all, they were of a much less pure type than those who composed the songs of the Vedas, or are depicted in the verses of the Ramayana. Their polyandry, their drinking bouts, their gambling tastes, and love of fighting, mark them as a very different race from the peaceful shepherd immigrants of the earlier age, and point much more distinctly towards a Tartar, trans- Himalayan origin, than to the cradle of 1 For some account of the probable spread of the Aryas southwards, see Dr. R. G. Bhandarkar's 'Early History of the Dekhan,' in Bombay Gazetteer (1895), vol. i. pt. ii. pp. I32tf.