Page:The history of caste in India.pdf/99

 For centuries, till the arrival of European scholars on Indian soil, the people of India never meant by the word "ārya" that race of invaders who reduced the natives of the soil to servitude. The word indeed probably had such a meaning, but only for a short period antedating the concrete beginnings of civilization in India. Before the close of the period of the composition of the Rig Veda the descendants of the invading tribes had forgotten where they came from, and thought themselves to be autochthonous and men of noble qualities

high civilization and literature and enjoyed high prestige in the peninsula long before the English people conquered Bengal, gave it a sort of uniformity and raised the people to some importance in the land. In India if there are any people who are very proud of their pure Aryan blood, it is the black Bengalese of Mongoloid features, and among them especially those who can claim their descent from the five Brāhmanas and five Kāyasthas who in fact were imported from the upper valley in order to improve the local breed according to the traditions of the Kulīna system. It is amusing to observe that some educated Bengalese are now, since the Russo-Japanese war, quite willing to admit their racial connection with the Mongolian stock.

These phenomena are not peculiar to the Bengals. Some Maratha Brāhmanas also try to maintain sharp separation from the rest because they are Aryans and the rest of the castes are Dravidians, and if they fuse it would be an unspeakable sacrilege and a disaster. Some other castes below them who call themselves Brāhmanas and are very virulent in their attacks against recognized Brāhmanas and talk of the principal of equality when their betters wish to exclude them, try to separate themselves just as sharply from the population below them, because the former are Aryans and the latter are Dravidians.

The Dravidians are in fact a fine race and have produced men and women of whom any one in the world may well be proud, and the proudest races need not be ashamed of alliance with then. I shall be very sorry, if a superficial acquaintance with a half-developed and hybrid ethnology, and a wrong interpretation of ancient documents, and an invented tradition, should result in magnifying racial differences and in making the future consolidation and amalgamation of India more difficult and distant.