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 On the Original Inhabitants of Bharatavarşa or India.

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL REMARKS.

No one who undertakes to study the ancient history of India can fail to be impressed by the scantiness of the material at his disposal. In fact such an undertaking would 800n appear to be futile, were he to depend solely on Indian accounts and records. Fortunately, however, we possess some writings of foreigners who visited India ; and their reports of what they actually saw during their stay in this country, and of what they were able to gather from trustworthy sources, furnish us with materials of a sufficiently reliable character. If we except Kashmir and Ceylon, regarding the latter as belonging to India, no part of India possesses anything like a continuous historical record. The prepond- erance of caste and the social prejudices it creates are disabili- ties such as no Hindu who wishes to relate the history of his country can entirely overcome. The natives of India have, as a rile, little sympathy with people outside their own class, and when it is believed that persons belonging to the highest caste oan by their piety ensure final beatitude, if they simply remember and revere the memory of their three immediate predecessors---father, grandfather, and great grandfather- we need not wonder at the apathy displayed towards history by them and by others who are beneath them in the social scale.