the greatest probability, be regarded as forming a branch (not, however, perhaps, free from the intermixture of foreign elements,) of the great Indo-European family, of which the Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Germanic tribes were, or are, also members; and that while other branches of this great family (which seems to have had its primeval abode in some distant country to the north-west of India) separated themselves from the main stock and migrated to the westward, the progenitors of the Hindus travelled towards Hindustan, where they perhaps intermarried with some of the tribes which were previously in occupation of the country, and where their original religious ideas were gradually modified, and the system of castes and other institutions and tenets of Brahmanism were slowly developed.

The process of reasoning by which I hope to establish these conclusions is the following. First, I propose to show, by an examination of the languages and literature of India, that the Sanskrit is not (as the Hindus appear to conceive) an immutable form of speech of divine origin, but is different now from what it was when their ancestors first came into India. This will be made apparent by a comparison of the archaic diction of the Vedic hymns with the more modern language of the Itihāsas and Purāņas; and that this difference is the result of gradual development will be proved by a reference to the natural laws of speech, and to the analogous process which the tongues of other nations have undergone; by arguments drawn from the composition of such books as the Nighantu, and Nirukta, explanatory of obsolete words and phrases in the hymns, and from the existence of such liturgical commentaries as the Brahmanas, and such speculative treatises as the Upanishads, which presuppose as already antiquated, or at least antecedent, the hymns which they quote, and the sense of which they explain and develope. The difference in age between the various Indian Sastras will be further briefly adverted to, and established by pointing out the great discrepancy between the religious ideas, forms of worship,' and state of manners which they severally represent; the Vedic hymns being shown by all these various lines of proof to be the earliest of all the Indian books, and the others to follow from them by a natural course of growth and expansion. While the 1 The detailed treatment of this portion of the subject is deferred to a ater volume of this work, the fourth.

mutability and the actual mutations of the Sanskrit language are demonstrated by this historical outline of Sanskrit literature, I shall show in some introductory sections, how, through the action of the same phonetic changes as are found to have transformed most of the ancient languages of Europe into their several modern representatives, the older Sanskrit became gradually modified into the Pālī and Prakrits, of byegone centuries, till, in combination with other elements,—not traceable in its classical literature, but forming, either an original part of the spoken dialect of the Aryan Indians, or a portion of it borrowed from alien sources,--it was ultimately broken down into the modern vernacular dialects of Northern India.

Having thus shown the mutations which the Sanskrit has undergone since its introduction into India, I propose, secondly, to prove, by a comparison of that venerable language with the Zend, Persian, Greek, Latin, and other western tongues, that these forms of speech are all closely related to each other, both in respect of roots and forms of inflection; and this in such a manner as to show them to be sisterdialects, derived, by gradual modification, from some more ancient, and now extinct, parent-language. From these facts, and others derived from Zend and Greek mythology and literature, I shall proceed to argue the probability of a common origin of the different nations,— generally called the Aryan, Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European nations, -by which the above-mentioned languages have been spoken; as well as to evince the strong probability that the progenitors of the Hindus immigrated from the north or north-west into India.

I shall then endeavour to fortify the latter of these conclusions by referring to the indications which are discoverable of a collision between the Indo-Aryans, after their arrival in India, and certain barbarous tribes, speaking a different language, and belonging to a different race, who occupied that country before their immigration, and by sketching a history of their advance to the south and east. These subjects will be illustrated from the data to be found in the Vedic hymns, the most ancient monuments of Indian antiquity, as well as in the other Sastras of later date.

2 The objections which have bean raised to this statement of the origin of the Palī, etc., will be considered further on.

CHAPTER I.

THE LANGUAGES OF NORTHERN INDIA: THEIR HISTORY AND

RELATIONS.

SECT. I.-The North-Indian Dialects, Ancient and Modern.

A SURVEY of the languages of Northern India reveals to us the following facts. We find, first, a polished and complicated language, the Sanskrit, popularly regarded as sacred, and in reality of very high antiquity; which is now, however, understood only by a few learned men, and spoken in their schools as the vehicle of discussions on grammar, theology, and philosophy, while it is totally unintelligible to the mass of the people. We find, secondly, a variety of provincial dialects which are employed both by the learned and the unlearned, viz., Bengali, Hindi, Mahratti, Guzarati, etc., all bearing a close resemblance to each other, and all composed, in a great measure, of the same roots.

The words of which these vernacular dialects are formed may be divided into four classes. First, such as are pure Sanskrit, as for example isvara (god), devată (deity), svarga (heaven), stri (woman), purusha (man), jana (person); secondly, words which, though modified from their original form, are easily recognizable as Sanskrit, such as log from loka (people), istri from stri (woman), munh from mukha (mouth), bhai from bhrātṛi (brother), bhatījā from bhrātrija (brother's son), bahin from bhăgini (sister), biyāh from vivaha (marriage), bhūin from bhūmi (earth), and innumerable others in Hindi; thirdly, words which have no resemblance to any vocables discoverable in Sanskrit books, and which we must therefore either suppose to have an origin independent of that language, or to have formed part of the colloquial,

though not of the written, Aryan speech,' such as in Hindī, bāp (father), bēṭā (son), pēr (a tree), chauki (a chair), chūk (a blunder), khiṛki (a window), jhāgṛā (a dispute), bakheṛā (the same), āṭā (flour), chaṭūi (a mat), and a multitude of other instances. Fourthly, words derived from Arabic, Persian, or some other foreign language, as admi (a man), aurat (a woman), hākim (a ruler), hăkīm (a physician), durust (right), roz (day), dariyā (a river), roshanī (light), etc., etc.

Let us now see what is the history of these vernacular dialects. It is clear, for various reasons, that they cannot have existed for ever in their present form. When therefore, and how have they been created? What do history and the books of Indian grammarians tell us on the subject?

If we begin with the Arabic and Persian words which the NorthIndian dialects, such as Bengali and Hindi, contain, we shall find it to be universally admitted that words of this kind have only been introduced into those languages since the time when the Musulmans began to invade India. Now it is well known that Mahmud of Ghazni made his first inroad into Hindustan between eight and nine hundred years ago. Before that time, and in fact till long afterwards, when the Mahomedans had penetrated from the north-west far into India, and taken possession of that country, there could have been scarcely any intermixture of Arabic or Persian words in the Indian dialects."

1 This latter alternative supposition was suggested to me by Prof. Aufrecht. The same remark had been previously made by Mr. J. Beames, as will appear from a quotation which I shall make further on from his "Notes on the Bhojpuri dialect of Hindi," in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1868, p. 499.

2 We learn, indeed, from the works of the ancient astronomer, Varaha Mihira, that a few astronomical and astrological terms of Greek or Arabic origin had been borrowed from the Arabian astronomers, and introduced into Sanskrit books. I allude to such words as hōrā, dṛikāna, liptā, anaphā, sunaphā, āpoklima, riḥpha, which are of Greek origin, and mukāriņā, mukāvilā, tasdī, taslī, etc, which are derived from the Arabic. (Colebrooke's Misc. Essays, II., 525 ff., and Weber's Indische Literaturgeschichte, p. 227, and Indische Studien, II., pp. 254 and 263.) The following verse of Varaha Mihira proves clearly how much the Indian astronomers were indebted to the Greeks :

mlechhāḥ hi yavanās teshu samyak śāstram idam sthitam |

rishi-vat te 'pi pūjyante kim punar daivavid dvijaḥ |

"For the Yavanas are Mlechhas; yet among them this science is thoroughly cultivated;

In the preface to the popular Urdu book, the Bagh o Bahar, we have the following account by the author, Mir Amman, of Dehli (who states that his forefathers had served all the kings of Hindustan, from Humayun downwards), of the origin of the Urdu Language, which I copy in the Roman character:

...

"Haqiqat Urdu ki zabān ki buzurgon ke munh se yun suni hai kih Dilli shahr Hinduon ke nazdik chaujugi hai. Unhen ke raja parjā qadim se rahte the, aur apnī bhākhā bolte the. Hazār baras se Musulmānon kā ‘amal hūā. Sulṭān Mahmud Ghaznavī āyā. Phir Ghorī aur Lodi badshāh hūe. Is amad o raft ke ba'iş kuchh zabānon ne Hindu Musulmān kī āmezish pāī. Ākhir Amir Taimur ne. Hindustan ko liya. Unke āne aur rahne se lashkar kā bāzār shahr men dākhil hūā. Is wāsṭe shahr kā bāzār Urdū kahlāyā. Akbar bādshāh takht par baithe, tab charon taraf ke mulkon se sab qaum qadrdānī aur faizrasānī us khāndān lāṣānī kī sunkar ḥuzūr men ākar jama'a hūe. Lekin har ek ki gōyāi aur boli judi judi thi. Ikaṭṭhe hone se apas men len den saudā sulf suwāl jawāb karte ek zabān Urdū ki muqarrar hūi. Nidan zaban Urdū ki manjte manjte aisī manji

kih kisu shahr ki boli us se takkaṛ nahīn khātī.”

Jab

"I have heard from the lips of my ancestors the following account of the Urdu language :-The City of Delhi in the opinion of the Hindus has existed during the four Yugas. It was inhabited of old by their kings with their subjects, who spoke their own bhākhā (dialect). A thousand years ago the rule of the Musulmans began. Sultan Mahmud, of Ghaznī, came. Then the Ghori and Lodi dynasties held sway. In consequence of this intercourse, a certain mixture of the languages of the Hindus and Musulmans took place. At length Amir Taimur . . conquered Hindustān. In consequence of his arrival and residence, the bāzār of the army was introduced into the city, and the bāzār of the city came in consequence to be called Urdu. . . . When king Akbar ascended the throne, all races, learning the liberality of that unequalled family and its patronage of merit,

and even they are revered like Rishis: how much more a Brahman skilled in astrology!" (Colebrooke's Essays, II., 410.) This trifling exception, however, does not invalidate the assertion made in the text, that it was only after the settlement of the Musulmans in India that Arabic and Persian words came to be used in the dialects of India.