Indo-Aryans

“ And it is a commonplace of history that one of the main streams of this great migration of the pioneers of the world's civilization entered India through her north-western mountain passes to build up her spiritual character, even as the Indus and the Ganges have broken through the Himalayas to create her physical character. For centuries these Indo-Aryans pushed on their work of colonizing India amid struggles and conflicts with the original inhabitants of the country, and developed a civilization that is reflected in the literature they have created. ”

“ The Indo-Aryans, who had occupied India many centuries before, vainly attempted to stem the torrent of these fresh invaders from the north, and waged constant war with them until, according to ancient legendary history, they gained a great victory in the middle of the sixth century a.d. ”

“ There is more room for difference of opinion as to the origins of the brilliant and highly civilised Indo-Aryans of the Panjāb and Rājputānā. As I have said before, we have here a population closely resembling that of modern Europe in many respects. I might have added that it still more closely resembles the {26} Europe of the Roman empire. Nowhere else in Hindu India does caste sit so lightly, or approach so nearly to the social classes of Europe. ”

“ In later days, that is, since the beginning of our era, undoubtedly much that has been looked upon as the outcrop of Chinese culture is due to the Indo-Aryans. My own conclusion is that in all important elements the ancient Chinese civilization was a home product, a spontaneous growth of an intellectually gifted people, but one whose capacity of development was limited, and that 200 later generations were satisfied to borrow and appropriate from the nations with whom commerce brought them into contact. ”

“ The high advancement to which the Indo-European art, literature, painting, music, and architecture attained was due to the leadership of the Brahman civilization. It was an aristocracy to rule and educate the masses, which everywhere exhibited a uniform inferiority. But even with all the help of caste and the inflexible code of Manu to preserve them on every side, the proud white-faced Aryans did not long escape the [Pg 159] deteriorating influences both of the climate in which they had settled and the debasing usages of the non-Aryan populations around them. ”

“ Several writers who have treated of the origin and spreading of Indo-European stories and fables, have mixed up two or three questions which ought to be treated each on its own merits.
The first question is whether the Aryans, when they broke up their pro-ethnic community, carried away with them, not only their common grammar and dictionary, but likewise some myths and legends which we find that Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Slaves, when they emerge into the light of history, share in common? ”

“ CHAPTER II. PEOPLE AND LAND. The Aryan Hindus, whose religions we describe in this volume [1] , formed one of the Aryan or so-called Indo-European peoples. To the other peoples of this stock, Persians, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Kelts, Teutons, Slavs, the Hindus were related closely by language, but very remotely from the point of view of their primitive religion. Into India the Aryans brought little that was retained in their religious systems. A few waning gods, the worship of ancestors, and some simple rites are common to them and their western relations ”

“ These vast regions of India were at some unknown time invaded by tribes of Aryan or Indo-Germanic race. While among the aborigines of India women were subjected to all the hardships and bad treatment of primeval times, the women of the Aryans enjoyed, as stated above, a far higher position. ”

“ If the civilisation was the same the religion also was the same. How the Indo-Iranian religion was developed in India, we have seen. At first a worship of active and militant deities, it became by degrees a religion of a passive type, in which a suffering, acquiescent, and brooding humanity presented to heaven its needs and problems, and received a corresponding answer. The Aryans who remained in Iran retained their active and practical disposition. ”

“ The picture is that of the first historic Indo-Europeans elsewhere, in eastern and central Europe; with whom the Aryans undoubtedly were or had been in connection through the countries north of the Black and Caspian seas.
A few centuries after the Vedas, the culture depicted by the literary remains is profoundly altered. The scene has shifted to the Ganges valley. There are cities and palaces, wealth and pomp. There are kings, priests, townsmen, peasants, hermits and ascetics. Caste is in vogue. Cotton and rice are in use. There is a deal of philosophizing; life appears complex and difficult ”

“ It seems very doubtful whether an Aryan emigration from India to China took place at any time. India always offered full scope for all Aryan energies; indeed we know that the Aryans by no means became so universally predominant, even in India, as one might gather from the early and wide extension of their language and religion. If there really is an Aryan element among the tribes of western China it would be curious to speculate on the possibility of its having come by a non-Indian route. ”

“ The home of the Aryans, instead of being found in Central Asia, is traced to Europe, so that the Aryan invaders of India, many centuries before Christ, were men of European descent who pushed their way eastward and gradually extended their dominion first over Iran and subsequently over Northern India, having scaled the snowclad Himalayas, literally in search of “fresh fields and pastures new.” When they reached India, after a long sojourn in Eastern countries, they were a mixed European and Asiatic race, with probably a large share of Turanian blood, [7] speaking a language of Aryan origin. ”

“ As to our own Aryan or Indo-European race, our first knowledge of it, at the remote period of which a picture has been reconstructed by the study of the Vedas, and a comparison of the Sanskrit with other Aryan tongues, shows a Bronze Age prevailing among them when they set out on their migrations from Central Asia to found the Aryan nations, the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Germans, and the rest. ”

“ Let us now examine these primitive peoples as they exist at the present day. Thrust back by the Aryan invaders from the plains, they have lain hidden away in the mountains, like the remains of extinct animals found 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. ... Among the rudest fragments of mankind are the isolated Andaman islanders, or non-Aryans of the Bay of Bengal. The Arab and early European voyagers described them as dog-faced man-eaters. ”

“ In temperament also these men of the border differ from other Indians. They are a fierce and warlike race, engaged in constant blood-feuds with one another.
(2) The Indo-Aryan type, with its home in the Panjāb, Rājputānā and Kashmir, has as its most conspicuous members the Rājputs, Khattris and Jāts. These, in all but colour (and even in colour they are hardly more dusky than the races round the Mediterranean) closely resemble the well-bred European in type. In stature they are tall, their complexion is fair; "eyes dark; hair on face plentiful ”

“ Suffice it to say that enthusiastic and patriotic Hindu scholars will not admit that the first home of the Aryans was anywhere outside of India; while equally patriotic European scholars would place the abode of the primitive Aryans on the shores of the Baltic Sea. We need hardly say that it is not our object to enter into this discussion, and we merely repeat here that it is universally granted that the civilization, religion, language, and literature of the Hindus, from the earliest ages to the present day, are centred in India, and in India alone. ”

“ The non-Aryan races of India, both on the north and on the south of the Ganges, many of whom received the Buddhistic faith, were not without a marked influence—the precise lines of which it is difficult to trace—upon the history and life of India during the period of Greek and Scythic occupation and warfare. The Dravidian people in southern India, made up of non-Aryans, number at present forty-six millions. ”

“ We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men whom we may conveniently call Indo-Europeans who spoke the parent-speech of the modern languages of Europe, Armenia, Persia, and northern India. Probably the Panjāb in very early times was occupied by several immigrations of Indo-European folk, for in the earliest days of which we have any knowledge, the land of the Five Rivers is already the home of many Indo-Aryan tribes, who live at enmity with one another, and have a fraternal habit of speaking of one another as unintelligible barbarians. ”

“ The population, which in some parts attains extraordinary density and lives almost exclusively on the fruits of the soil, is of the old Dravidian stock, industrious and frugal as in other parts of India, and of a placid and gentle temper. Nowhere else in India does one come into such close contact with its original non-Aryan peoples; and nowhere else has the earliest type of religious and social institutions evolved by the superior civilization of the Aryans been so completely preserved from the disturbing influences of later ages. ”

“ As the people spread northwest into Europe and southeast into India, they were called the Indo-Germanic race, and have now come to be called the Aryan race, said to be the name by which the Persians and Hindus knew themselves before their separation. ”

“ And from this undisputed fact it is an inevitable inference that these various races contain, along with other elements, a race-element in common, due to their Aryan pedigree. That the Indo-European races are wholly Aryan is very improbable, for in every case the countries overrun by them were occupied by inferior races, whose blood must have mingled in varying degrees with that of their conquerors; but that every Indo-European people is in great part descended from a common Aryan stock is not open to question. ”

“ All then that I wish to put clearly before you is this, that the Aryan man, who had to fulfil his mission in India, might naturally be deficient in many of the practical and fighting virtues, which were developed in the Northern Aryans by the very struggle without which they could not have survived, but that his life on earth had not therefore been entirely wasted. His very view of life, though we cannot adopt it in this Northern climate, may yet act as a lesson and a warning to us, not, for the sake of life, to sacrifice the highest objects of life. ”

“ They date from 2000 or 1500 to not after 1000 B.C., and are in Sanskrit, which is fairly close to Avestan or Old Persian, the two languages and their descendants constituting the Indo-Iranian or proper Aryan branch of Indo-European. When Indo-European as a whole is designated as Aryan, it is by an extension of the term. The region of India to which the Vedas almost wholly refer is the Indus drainage, that is the northwest, the parts adjoining the Iranian highland, whence the invaders came or through which they passed.
Vedic Aryan culture was of late Bronze Age type. ”

“ Eastern Africa was influenced, largely through the medium of Arab sea trade. Towards the north and northeast as far as Mongolia and Japan, India has been a dispenser of culture content and has taken little in return. Toward the southeast, Indian influence has been the largest component in the civilization of Indo-China and the East Indian archipelago, which as regards their higher attainments may be regarded as cultural dependencies or extensions of India. ”

“ Many of them are the descendents of Arab, Afghan, Mogul and Persian invaders, and the remainder are converts made to Islam in the course of the centuries of Mahommedan rule.
The census report of 1901 divided the population of India into seven distinct racial types: the Turko-Iranian type, represented by the Baluch, Brahui and Afghans of the Baluchistan Agency and the North-West Frontier Province; the Racial types. Indo-Aryan type, occupying the Punjab, Rajputana and Kashmir, and having as its characteristic members the Rajputs, Khatris and Jats ”

“ India owes her own peculiar civilisation to the gradual fusion of Aryan races of a higher type that began to flow down from Central Asia before the dawn of history upon the more primitive indigenous populations already in possession. ”

“ On the Gangetic plain Aryan and Dravidian eventually mingled to produce a high culture, and this center was later reinforced by contributions from the northeast, coming from China.
In India many types of social organizations flourished from time to time, from the semidemocratic systems of the Aryans to despotic and monarchial forms of government. But the most characteristic feature of society was the persistence of the great social castes that were instituted by the Aryans in an effort to perpetuate racial identity. ”

“ The transposition of the cultural center eastward must enter into the problem. Perhaps a larger and wealthier pre-Aryan population was encountered by the Aryans along the Ganges, contact and mixture with whom proved provocative of innovation. Or possibly the movement and development in the east began while the Vedas were still being composed along the Indus, and were ignored by them. ”

“ It is impossible, therefore, to avoid wondering whether the Aryans really found the rich plains of India a howling wilderness peopled by savages close in culture to the brutes, or whether, in parts of the vast continent at least, they found themselves pitted against another invading race, a Scythic race hailing from the north-east as the Aryan hails from north-west?
There is evidence even in the voice of the Rig-Veda for this. To begin with, there is the evidence of colour--colour which was hereafter to take form as caste. ”