Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/76

 46 HISTORY OF INDIAN ARCHITECTURE. The census results for all India may be briefly stated as follows : British Provinces in India. 221,409,000 Burma .... 10,490,000 Native States. . . 62,462,000 TOTAL. . 294,361,000 Notwithstanding difficulties or defects, it may be useful to state here that the population of the whole of India, inclusive of Burma when arranged by religions was found to stand as follows : Hindus of all sects. . 207,147,000, or 7-1 oths Musalmans. . . 62,458,000, or fully i-5th Buddhists mostly in Burma 9,477,000, scarcely i-soth Primitive or Animistic. 8,584,000, about i-34th Christians .... 2,923,200, about i-ggth Sikhs .... 2,195,300, about i-i34th Jains 1,334,200, about r-22Oth Parsis, Jews, and others. 242,300, about i-i2ooth The tables of this census also afford us some information with regard to the distribution of races among the people, though it could not be expected that the ethnological survey should yet be able to organise a satisfactory census of the races, though the distribution of languages helps us somewhat. Here, however, it is to be borne in mind that, especially in northern India, many aboriginal or non-Aryan tribes have changed their language for one of the Sanskritic family spoken by their neighbours. Hence we must regard the Indo- Aryan group of languages as including a vast number of people of Turanian and mixed descent. The tables show that upwards of 221,000,000 speak Indo- Aryan tongues including Baloch, Pashtu, Marathi, Bengali, etc. that is about three-fourths of the entire population, whilst close on 60,000,000 or a fifth are Dravidians and Kolarians, Gonds, Brahuis, etc., which the census has grouped together as a Dravida - Munda group. Lastly, the Indo-Chinese and Malayan, including Tibetan, Burmese, etc., number 11,720,000, or about four per cent, of the whole. The first linguistic group includes, of course, the Muham- madans ; but we know that many of the Moslims of India were recruited from slaves purchased and brought up in the creed of their masters. In Bengal especially, where they are most numerous, they are Bengalis pure and simple, many perhaps most, of whom have adopted that creed quite recently from motives it is not difficult to understand or explain.