CHAPTER VII

THE PEOPLE OF INDIA

“ONE of the greatest difficulties that exist,” says
Fergusson, “perhaps the greatest, in exciting an interest
in Indian antiquities, arises from the fact that India has
no history, properly so called, before the Muhammadan
invasion of the thirteenth century. Had India been a great
united kingdom, like China, with a long line of dynasties
and well-recorded dates attached to them, the task would
have been comparatively easy; but nothing of the sort
exists, or ever existed, within her boundaries. On the
contrary, so far as our knowledge extends, India has
always been occupied by three or four different races of
mankind, who have never amalgamated so as to become
one people, and each of these races has been again subdivided
 into numerous tribes or small nationalities nearly,
sometimes wholly, independent of each other ; and, what
is worse than all, not one of them ever kept a chronicle
or preserved a series of dates commencing from any wellknown
 era.” Thus the history of Indian nationalities has
had to be built up from such records as may be found
in Indian architecture, in coins, inscriptions, and other
forgotten relics, and the building is necessarily imperfect
in construction and wanting in continuity. But although
there is no ancient history there is abundant literature—
«a literature extending, in fact, to some 10,000 or 11,000
works—and buried amidst innumerable and unreadable
treatises on law, astronomy, grammar, metaphysics, and
mathematics are two great epics, which, if rightly understood,
 appear to throw a certain amount of light on the
ievelopments of Indian ethnography.”
All that can be deduced with certainty from such
anpromising material is that at some very remote pre-