Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/113

 CHAP. I. INTRODUCTORY. land whose boundaries cannot yet be fixed with precision. Till they are, a conventional name that does not mislead is all that can be hoped for. If it were allowable to adopt the loose phraseology of philological ethnography, the term Aryan might be employed, as it is the name by which the people practising this style are usually known in India, and it would be particularly convenient here, as it is the correct and direct antithesis of Dravidian. It is evident, however, that any such term, if applied to architecture, ought to be descriptive of some style practised by that people, wherever they settled, all across Europe and Asia, between the shores of the Atlantic and the Bay of Bengal ; l and it need hardly be said that no such style exists. If used in conjunction with the adjective Indian or Indo-Aryan, it becomes much less objectionable, and has the advantage of limiting its use to the people who are generally known as Aryans in India in other words, to all those parts of the country where Sanskrit was spoken, or where the people now speak tongues so far derived from Sanskrit as to be distinguishable as offsets of that great family of languages. Its use, in this respect, has the great convenience that any ordinary ethnographical or linguistic map of India is sufficient to describe the boundaries of the style. It extends, like the so-called Aryan tongues, from the Himalayas to the south of the Vindhya mountains. On the east, it is found prevalent in Orissa ; and on the west in Maharashtra. Its southern boundary between these two provinces will only be known when the Nizam's territory is architecturally surveyed. Another reason why the term Aryan should be applied to the style is, that the country just described, where it prevails, is, and alv/ays has been, called Aryavarta by the natives themselves. They consider it as the land of the pure and just meaning thereby the Sanskrit-speaking peoples as contra- distinguished from that of the casteless Dasyus, and other tribes, who, though they may have adopted Brahmanical institutions, could not acquire their purity of race. The great defect of the term, however, is that the people inhabiting the north of India are not Aryans in any reasonable sense of the term, whatever philologists may say to the contrary. The Sanskrit-speaking people, who came into India 2000 1 In 1848 Gen. Cunningham applied the term Aryan to the architecture of Kashmir, apparently on the strength of a pun ('Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' vol. xvii. pt. ii., 1848, p. 242). This, however, was limiting a term that belongs to two continents to an insignificant valley in one of them. It was, besides, wholly uncalled for. The term Kashmiri was amply sufficient, and all that was wanted for so strictly local a style.