Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/77

 INTRODUCTION. 47 Though there may consequently be 62,458,000 of Musalmans in India at the present day, we may feel quite certain that not one-half of this number are immigrants or the descendants of emigrants who entered India during the last eight centuries. The same is probably true of the Turanian races, who entered India in the first ten centuries after our era. It is scarcely probable that they were sufficiently numerous to be the progenitors of thirty millions of people, and, if they were so, the mothers, in nine cases out of ten, were most probably natives of India. Of the Aryans we know less ; but, if so great a number as forty millions can trace anything like a direct descent from them at the present day, the amount of pure Aryan blood in their veins must be infinitesimally small. Yet, though their blood may be diluted, the influence of their intellect remains so powerfully impressed on every institution of the country that, had they perished altogether,, their previous presence is still an element of the utmost importance in the ethnic relations of the land. Another census may enable us to speak with still more precision with regard to these various divisions of the mass of the people of Hindustan, but meanwhile the element that seems to be most important, though the least investigated hitherto, is the extent of the aboriginal race. It has been so overlooked, that putting it at a hundred millions may seem an exaggeration. Its intellectual inferiority has kept it in the background, but its presence everywhere seems to me the only means of explaining most of the phenomena we meet con- tinually, especially those connected with the history of the architecture of the country. Except on some such hypothesis as that just shadowed forth, I do not know how we are to account for the presence of certain local forms of buildings we find in the north, or to explain the persistence with which they were adhered to. When from these purely ethnographic speculations we turn to ask how far religion and race coincide, we are left with still less information of a reliable character. As a rule, the Dravidians are 6aivas, and .Saiva in the exact proportion of the purity of their blood. In other words, in the extreme south of India they are immensely in the majority. In some districts of the Madras Presidency they are as 6 or 7 to I of the followers of Vishnu, and generally in the south, 2 to I ; but as we proceed northward they become equal, and in some of the northern districts of the Madras Presidency the pro- portions are reversed. In Bengal, and wherever Buddhism once prevailed, the