dealing with the Indian Races and their history. does not so clearly disclose the ethnical elements of the people. This difference will be more fully explained in the next chapter. According to the Census of 1881, the comparatively pure descendants of the Aryan race (the Bráhmans and Rájputs) still numbered 16 millions in British India; the mixed population, including lower caste Hindus, Aboriginal Tribes, and Christians, 138 millions; and the Muhammadans, 45 millions. These make up the 199 millions in British India in 1881. In the Feudatory States there appear to have been 5 millions of Bráhmans and Rájputs; 46 millions of lower caste Hindus and Aboriginal Tribes; and 5 millions of Muhammadans,-making up the 56 millions in Feudatory India in 1881. The aboriginal element of the population was chiefly returned as low-caste Hindus. Only 4 millions were separately registered as non-Aryans, or Aborigines in British India; and 1 millions in the Feudatory States; making 6 millions for all India in 1881. Plan of this The following chapters first treat of each of these four classes volume in separately, namely the non-Aryan or so-called aboriginal tribes; the Aryan immigrants from the north; the mixed population or Hindus; and the Muhammadans. These are the four elements which make up the present population. Their history, as a loosely-connected whole, after they had been pounded together in the mortar of Muhammadan conquest, will next be traced. A narrative of the events by which the English nation became answerable for the welfare of this vast section of the human family, will follow. Finally, it will be shown how the British Government is trying to discharge its solemn responsibility, and the administrative mechanism will be explained which has knit together the discordant races of India into a great pacific Empire. The two races of pre-historic India. Our earliest glimpses of India disclose two races struggling for the soil. The one was a fair-skinned people, which had lately entered by the north-western passes; a people of ARYAN, literally noble,' lineage, speaking a stately language, worshipping friendly and powerful gods. The other was a race of a lower type, who had long dwelt in the land, and whom the lordly new-comers drove back before them into the mountains, or reduced to servitude on the plains. The comparatively pure descendants of these two races were in 1872 nearly equal in numbers, total 33 millions; the intermediate castes, sprung chiefly from the ruder stock, make up the mass of the present Indian population. CHAPTER III. THE NON-ARYAN RACES. ARYANS or Abori. THE present chapter treats of the lower tribes, an obscure The NONpeople, who, in the absence of a race-name of their own, may be called the non-Aryans or Aborigines. They have left no gines. written records; indeed, the use of letters, or of any simplest hieroglyphs, was to them unknown. The sole works of their hands which have come down to us are rude stone circles, and the upright slabs and mounds, beneath which, like the primitive Kistvaenpeoples of Europe, they buried their dead. From these we builders. only discover that, at some far-distant but unfixed period, they knew how to make round pots of hard, thin earthenware, not inelegant in shape; that they fought with iron weapons, and wore ornaments of copper and gold. Coins of Imperial Rome have been dug up from their graves. Still earlier remains prove that, long before their advent, India was peopled as far as the depths of the Central Provinces, by tribes unacquainted with the metals, who hunted and warred with polished flint Flint axes and other deftly-wrought implements of stone, similar to weapons. those found in Northern Europe. And even these were the successors of yet ruder beings, who have left their agate knives and rough flint weapons in the Narbadá valley. In front of this far-stretching background of the early Metal and Stone Ages, we see the so-called Aborigines being beaten down by the newly-arrived Aryan race. described The struggle is commemorated by the two names which the The Nonvictors gave to the early tribes, namely, the Dasyus, or 'enemies,' Aryans as and the Dásas, or 'slaves.' The new-comers from the north by the prided themselves on their fair complexion, and their Sanskrit Aryans. word for 'colour' (varna) came to mean 'race' or 'caste.' Their earliest poets, 3000 years ago, praised in the Rig-Veda their bright gods, who, 'slaying the Dasyus, protected the Aryan colour;' who 'subjected the black-skin to the Aryan man.' The They tell us of their 'stormy deities, who rush on like furious Blackbulls and scatter the black-skin.' The sacrificer gave thanks to his god for 'dispersing the slave bands of black descent,' skin.' Flat nosed. Raweaters. The race. More civilised non-Aryan tribes. The nonAryans as they are. and for sweeping away 'the vile Dasyan colour.' Moreover, the Aryan, with his finely-formed features, loathed the squat Mongolian faces of the Aborigines. One Vedic singer speaks of them as 'noseless' or flat-nosed, while another praises his own 'beautiful-nosed' gods. Indeed, the Vedic hymns abound in scornful epithets for the primitive tribes, as 'disturbers of sacrifices,' 'gross feeders on flesh,' 'raw-eaters,' 'lawless,' 'notsacrificing,' 'without gods,' and 'without rites.' As time went on, and these rude tribes were driven back into the forest, they were painted in still more hideous shapes, till they became the 'monsters' and 'demons' of the Aryan poet and priest. Their race-name Dasyu, 'enemy,' thus grew to signify a devil, as the old Teutonic word for enemy (still used in that sense in the German feind) has become the English 'fiend.’ Nevertheless, all of them could not have been savages. We hear of wealthy Dasyus, and even the Vedic hymns speak of their 'seven castles' and 'ninety forts.' In later Sanskrit literature, the Aryans make alliance with aboriginal princes; and when history at length dawns on the scene, we find some of the most powerful kingdoms of India ruled by dynasties of non-Aryan descent. Nor were they devoid of religious rites, or of cravings after a future life. 'They adorn,' says an ancient Sanskrit treatise,' 'the bodies of their dead with gifts, with raiment, with ornaments; imagining that thereby they shall attain the world to come.' These ornaments are the bits of bronze, copper, and gold which we now dig up from beneath their rude stone monuments. In the Sanskrit epic which narrates the advance of the Aryans into Southern India, a non-Aryan chief describes his race as 'of fearful swiftness, unyielding in battle, in colour like a dark-blue cloud." 2 Let us now examine these primitive peoples, not as portrayed by their enemies 3000 years ago, but as they exist at the present day. Thrust back by the Aryans from the plains, they have lain hidden away in the recesses of the mountains, like the remains of extinct animals which paleontologists find in hill caves. India thus forms a great museum of races, in which we can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture. The specimens are not fossils or dry bones, but living communities, to whose widely-diverse conditions we have to adapt our administration and our laws. 1 Chandogya Upanishad, viii. 8. 5; Muir's Sanskrit Texts, ii. 396 (1874). 2 Rámáyana (ed. Gorresio), iii. 28. 18. THE WILDER NON-ARYANS. 55 Andaman Among the rudest fragments of mankind are the isolated The Andaman islanders in the Bay of Bengal. The old Arab and islanders. European voyagers described them as dog-faced man-eaters. The English officers sent to the islands in 1855 to establish a Settlement, found themselves surrounded by naked cannibals of a ferocious type; who daubed themselves when festive with red earth, and mourned in a suit of olive-coloured mud. They used a noise like crying to express friendship or joy; bore only names of common gender, which they received before birth, and which therefore had to be applicable to either sex; and their sole conception of a god was an evil spirit, who spread disease. For five years they repulsed every effort at intercourse with showers of arrows; but our officers slowly brought them to a better frame of mind by building sheds for them near the British Settlement, where these poor beings might find shelter from the tropical rains, and receive medicines and food. hillmen. The Anamalai Hills, in Southern Madras, form the refuge Anamalai of a whole series of broken tribes. Five hamlets of long-haired, wild-looking Puliars were found living on jungle products, mice, or any small animals they could catch; and worshipping demons. The Mundavers shrink from contact with the outside world, and possessed no fixed dwellings, but wandered over the innermost hills with their cattle, sheltering themselves under little leaf sheds, and seldom remaining in one spot more than a year. The thick-lipped, small-bodied Kaders, 'Lords of the Hills,' are a remnant of a higher race. These hills, now almost uninhabited, abound in the great stone monuments (kistvaens and dolmens) which the primitive tribes erected over their dead. The Nairs, or aborigines of South-Western India, still The Nairs. practise polyandry, according to which one woman is the wife of several husbands, and a man's property descends not to his own but to his sister's children. This system also appears among the Himalayan tribes. tribes Provinces. In the Central Provinces, the aboriginal races form a large Nonproportion of the population. In certain Districts, as in the Aryan State of Bastár, they amounted in 1872 to three-fifths of the of the inhabitants. Their most important race, the Gonds, have made Central some advances in civilisation; but the wilder tribes still cling The to the forest, and live by the chase. Some of them are Gonds. reported to have used, within our own times, flint points for their arrows. The Máriás wield bows of great strength, which they hold with their feet while they draw the string with both hands. A still wilder tribe, the Márís, fled from their grass-built Máris. Tax- huts on the approach of a stranger. Once a year a messenger gathering among the came to them from the local Rájá to take their tribute, which consisted chiefly of jungle products. He did not, however, enter their hamlets, but beat a drum outside, and then hid himself. The shy Máris crept forth, placed what they had to give in an appointed spot, and ran back into their retreats. The Juángs or Leafwearers of Orissa Hill States; Government. Farther to the north-east, in the Tributary States of Orissa, there is a poor tribe, 10,000 in 1872, of Juángs or Patuas, literally the 'leaf-wearers,' whose women wore no clothes. The only covering on the females consisted of a few strings of beads round the waist, with a bunch of leaves tied before and behind. Those under British influence were, in 1871, clothed by clothed by order of the Government, and their Chief was persuaded to do the same work for others. The English officer called together the clan, and after a speech, handed out strips of cotton for the women to put on. They then passed in single file, to the number of 1900, before him, made obeisance to him, and were afterwards marked on the forehead with vermilion, as a sign of their entering into civilised society. Finally, they gathered the bunches of leaves which had formed their sole clothing into a heap, and set fire to it. It is reported, however, that many of the Juáng women have since relapsed to their foliage attire. A relic of the Stone Age. This leaf-wearing tribe had no knowledge of the metals till quite lately, when foreigners came among them; and no word existed in their own language for iron or any other metal. But their country abounds in flint weapons, so that the Juángs Juáng form a remnant to our own day of the Stone Age. 'Their dwellings. huts,' writes the officer who knows them best, 'are among the smallest that human beings ever deliberately constructed as dwellings. They measure about 6 feet by 8. The head of the family and all the females huddle together in this one shell, not much larger than a dog-kennel.' The boys and the young men of the village live in a building apart by themselves; and this custom of having a common abode for the whole male youth of the hamlet is found among many aboriginal tribes in distant parts of India. tribes. Himalayan Proceeding to the northern boundary of India, we find the slopes and spurs of the Himalayas peopled by a great variety of rude tribes. Some of the Assam hillmen have no word for expressing distance by miles nor any land measure, but reckon the length of a journey by the number of quids of tobacco or betel-leaf which they chew upon the way. As a rule, they are fierce, black, undersized, and ill-fed. They eked out a wretched |