Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/44

 i 4 HISTORY OF INDIAN ARCHITECTURE. country in fact between the Vindhya and the Himalaya Mountains. At present they are only found in anything like purity in the mountain ranges that bound that great plain. There they are known as Bhils, Gonds, Kandhs, Mundas, Oraons, Hos, Kols, Santals, Nagas, and other mountain and forest tribes. But they certainly form the lowest underlying stratum of the population over the whole of the Gangetic plain. So far as their affinities have been ascertained, they are with the trans - Himalayan population, and it either is that they entered India through the passes of that great mountain range, or it might be more correct to say that the Tibetans are a fragment of a great population that occupied both the northern and southern slope of that great chain of hills at some very remote pre-historic time. Whoever they were, they were the people who, in remote times, were apparently the worshippers of Trees and Serpents ; l but what interests us more in them, and makes the enquiry into their history more desirable, is that it was where the people were largely of this aboriginal stock that Buddhism seems to have been most readily adopted, and it is largely among allied races that it is still adhered to. In Ceylon, Tibet, Burma, Siam, and China wherever a people allied to the Mongol or Tibetan family exists, there Buddhism flourished and still prevails. But in India a revival of Brahmanism abolished it. Architecturally, there is no difficulty in defining the limits of the Dasyu province : wherever a square tower-like temple exists with a perpendicular base, but a curvilinear outline above, such as that shown in the woodcut (No. i), there we mav feel certain of the existence, past or present, of a people of Dasyu extrac- tion. No one can accuse the pure Aryans of introducing this form into India, or of building temples at all, or of worshipping images of Siva or Vishnu, with which these temples are filled, and they consequently have little title to confer their name on the style. The Aryans had, however, become so impure in blood before these temples were erected, and were so mixed up with the aboriginal tribes whose superstitions had so influenced their religion and their arts that they accepted their temples with their gods. Be this as it may, one thing seems tolerably clear, that the regions occupied by the Aryans in India were conterminous with those of the Dasyus, or, in other words, that the Aryans conquered the whole of the aboriginal or native tribes who occupied the plains of northern India, and ruled over them to such an extent as materially to 1 See ' Indian Antiquary,' vol. iv. pp. 5f.