Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/42

 iz HISTORY OF INDIAN ARCHITECTURE. kings in the 4th century A.D., when their religion began to assume that strange shape which it now still retains in India. In its new form it is as unlike the religion of the Vedas as it is possible to conceive one religion being to another ; unlike that, also, of the older portions of the Mahabharata ; but a confused mess of local superstitions and imported myths, covering up and hiding the Vedantic and Buddhist doctrines, which may some- times be detected as underlying it. Whatever it be, however, it was invented by and for as mixed a population as probably were ever gathered together into one country a people whose feelings and superstitions it only too truly represents. DRAVIDIANS. Although, therefore, as was hinted above, there might be no great difficulty in recovering the main incidents and leading features of the history of the Aryans, from their first entry into India till they were entirely absorbed into the mass of the popula- tion some time before the Christian Era, there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that their history would fully represent the ancient history of the country. The Dravidians are a people who, in historical times, seem to have been probably as numerous as the pure Aryans, and at the present day form one-fifth of the whole population of India. They belong, it is true, to a lower intellectual status than the Aryans, but they have preserved their nationality pure and unmixed, and, such as they were at the dawn of history, so they seem to be now. Their settlement in India extends to such remote pre-historic times, that we cannot feel even sure that we should regard them as immigrants, or, at least, as either conquerors or colonists on a large scale, but rather as aboriginal in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Generally it is assumed that they entered India across the Lower Indus, leaving the cognate Brahui in Baluchistan as a mark of the road by which they came, and, as the affinities of their language seem to be with the Ugrians and Northern Turanian tongues, this view seems probable. 1 But they have certainly left no trace of their migra- tions anywhere between the Indus and the Narbada, and all the facts of their history, so far as they are known, would seem to lead to an opposite conclusion. The hypothesis that would represent what we know of their history most correctly would place their original seat in the extreme south, somewhere 1 Dr. Caldwell, the author of the I and most trustworthy advocate of this ' Dravidian Grammar,' is the greatest J view.