South India

“ This does not, of course, mean that South India alone is the land of this play of cultures, for, in many places besides are evidences forthcoming in India to show that it had been the meeting ground of the cultures of Primitive Man Now, it has become a matter for speculation whether all these cultures are indegenous to India and radiated in different directions to all quarters of the globe, or India is only the central meeting ground and is halting place for the various cultures which had found their origin in various parts of the world. ”

“ Under present conditions India is her peril. The one thing that will transform India from a source of ever-increasing danger to a bulwark of strength, is to trust her as South Africa has been trusted. She is certainly as worthy of trust as South Africa was. Thus to trust her, and to lift her up to a responsible place in the Empire, will appeal to India’s pride as it has never been appealed to, will create in her an enthusiasm of loyalty equal to anything seen in any of the self-ruling colonies, will bind her to Great Britain with bands of steel. ”

“ Anthropological research does not stop here, but takes us back to Late-Tertiary and Quaternary times. On top of all this comes the contact of South India with Aryan culture, leading us down to the proto-historic age in India.
Thus, the panorama of history is ever widening before us and India is being brought in cultural relation with the various races and nations of the earth. ”

“ Coming from homes Hindu or Christian, conservative or liberal, from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the modern Indian city, or the far side of the jungle villages, one might find in their home histories, in their thoughts and ambitions and desires, a composite picture of the South Indian young womanhood of to-day. Countries as well as individuals pass through periods of adolescence, of stress and strain and the pains of growth, when the old is merging in the new. ”

“ Thus at least nine-tenths of the people of South India are, first of all, demonolaters, and secondly, but a long way behind, are Hindus. And yet a great many people in the West think of these people as the pure worshippers of the highest type of the Brahmanical faith! ”

“ The ancient kingdoms of the south, although rich and populous, inhabited by Dravidian nations not inferior in culture to their Aryan rivals in the north, were ordinarily so secluded from the rest of the civilized world, including Northern India, that their affairs remained hidden from the eyes of other nations, and, native annalists being lacking, their history, previous to the year 1000 of the Christian era, has almost wholly perished. ”

“ Its probable Indian representatives are known to-day as Dravidians—the brown-skinned people still dominating South Indian life, whose exact place in the family of races puzzles every anthropologist. It was then that civilization was first walking up and down the great river valleys of the Old World. ”

“ I look rather to facts and deeds. At the time of our worst reverses in South Africa I was in a very typical part of India where there were only two or three other Englishmen, and where I could be in touch with real Indian feeling in regard to these events. At home men were talking of the decay of the Empire, and were in the deepest depths of gloom. ”

“ But what of the roads on which the Doctor never passes? From Vellore's fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all the intermediate points of the compass. Every city of India forms such a nucleus for the country around. Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads. ”

“ Thus we find that the conquest of Southern India which was commenced at the close of the Epic Period went on through succeeding centuries; that by the sixth century, Bengal, Orissa, Gujarat, and the Deccan had been conquered and Aryanized; and that by the fifth century the Deccan as far south as the Krishna River was the seat of a powerful Hindu Empire. By the fourth century B. c. the whole of Southern India south of the Krishna River had been Hinduized, and three great Hindu kingdoms, those of the Cholas, the Cheras, and the Pandyas had been founded, stretching as far south as Cape Comorin ”

“ We may in any case certainly regard as the birthplace of the great majority of romances in both tongues that portion of South India which is also the source whence are derived the popular mysticism and the popular religious legends of the Mohammedan peoples of the E. Indian Archipelago.
Their Indian origin.The appearance of the déwas, raksasas and other denizens of the skies, the air, the forest and the sea are often portrayed in somewhat pagan fashion. ”

“ The people of Northern India are especially grateful to you of the South, as the great source to which most of the impulses that are working in India today can be traced. The great Bhâshyakâras, epoch-making Âchâryas, Shankara, Râmânuja, and Madhva were born in Southern India. ”

“ The chief modern divisions of the population, therefore, do not follow the lines of blood and language, but of religion and caste.
Of the four elements already enumerated the oldest are the wild tribes of central India, such as the Bhils and Gonds, who probably represent the original inhabitants of the country. These number some 11,000,000. Second come the Dravidians of the south, amounting to about 54,000,000. Thirdly come the Aryans, inhabiting mainly that portion of India north of the Nerbudda which is known as Hindustan proper. ”

“ The third is that India is divided off from the Continent of Asia by barriers even more stupendous than those which separate the Continent of Asia from the Continents of Europe and Africa, or the Continent of North America from that of South America. ”

“ The third region, or the triangular table-land in the south, has a character quite distinct from either of the other two divisions, and a population which is now working out a separate development of its own. Broadly speaking, the Himalayas are peopled by Mongoloid tribes; the great river plains of Hindustan are still the home of the Aryan race; the triangular table-land has formed an arena for a long struggle between that gifted race from the north and what is known as the Dravidian stock in the south. ”

“ There is one parallel, not indeed in political conditions, but in the qualities required for the shaping of the country. If we can show in South Africa that spirit of sleepless intelligence which has created British India, then there is nothing to fear. For, as I understand history, India was made by Englishmen who brought to the task three qualities above others. ”

“ But on the north-east, as on the north-west, India has again a land frontier. The Himalayan ranges at the north-eastern angle (in about 28° N., 97° E.) throw off spurs and chains to the south-east, which separate Eastern Bengal from Assam and Burma. Stretching south-eastwards from the delta of the Irrawaddy, a confused succession of little explored ranges separates the Burmese division of Tenasserim from the native kingdom of Siam. ”

“ In the south of India the foreign element is manifested less than in the north; so that it is the south of India which exhibits the original stock in its fullest form. Its chief characteristics are referable to three heads, physical form, creed, and language. In respect to the first, the southern Indian is darker than the northern—cæteris paribus, i. e. under similar external conditions; but not to the extent that a mountaineer of the Dekhan is blacker than a Bengali from the delta of the Ganges. Descent, too, or caste influences colour, and the purer the blood the lighter the skin. ”

“ The Telugus are certainly not richer as a class than the Tamils, and the explanation of these differences is perhaps to be found in the fact that the south is more religiously inclined than the north, and has more temples and their connected charities (religion and charity go hand in hand in India) , and so offers more temptation to follow begging as a profession. ”

“ The People. The people of India number, according to the census of 1901, 291,236,000—about one-fifth of the inhabitants of the globe. This population represents more races than are found in the whole of Europe. Besides many small tribes, it has eleven nations, the least of which numbers 2,250,000 souls. Of these nations seven are of Aryan, and four of Dravidian, extraction; and they differ in physique, temperament and language. Between the sturdy Aryan on the north and the degraded primitive people on the plains of the south there is a great gulf. ”

“ India is about 1,900 miles in extent from north to south, and 1,600 in breadth in latitude 25° north. The boundaries of this vast country, established by nature for the most part, are the Bay of Bengal (now called a sea in the southern portion) on the south-east, and the Arabian Sea on the south-west. On the north the Himalaya Mountains separate it from China, Thibet, and Turkestan ”

“ South-eastern Asia. India extends from the Indus eastward to the boundaries of China, being bounded on the south by the Indian Ocean, and on the north by the Himala ́yas, from whose snowy heights many great rivers descend to fertilize the plains. The richness of the soil fits it for the abode of a swarming population; and roads, temples, and other structures, dating from a very remote period, attest the skill and industry of the people. ”

“ In our times the process has been reversed, and we 2 seek for information with our backs to the South. We have worked our way northward, having entered India by the southern water gates, and as we have from time to time struggled rather to remain content within narrow borders than to push outward and forward, the drift to the north has been very slow, and there has never been, right from the very beginning, any strenuous haste in the expansion of commercial interests, or any spirit of crusade in the advance of Conquest. ”

“ The whole of India is watered by rivers, some of which empty themselves into the two largest, the Indus and the Ganges; others discharge themselves into the sea by their own mouths. But all of them have their sources in the Caucasus. At their commencement their course is towards the south; some of them continue to flow in the same direction, particularly those which unite with the Indus; others turn to the east, as the Ganges. ”

“ The South is a beautiful, a luxuriant region, where, ‘lapped in Elysium,’ you may dream your soul away; but the West is a magnificently vigorous land, whose clarion voice summons you to action. The South might be illustrated by a beautiful epicurienne, like India—the West only by a vigorous young Titan, like”——
251“Whom?”
“Mark Sutherland!” answered Rosalie, with her eyes sparkling with delight. ”

“ We know, too, that there is a vast tract of country in Central India, extending east and west from shore to shore, and north and south from Sadras to Ellora, which is covered with buildings of great beauty and interest, but which nobody cares to explore. ”

“ Indians of Greater and Lesser India is a regular mediæval term for the inhabitants of India proper and of south-western Asia, sometimes including Abyssinia. Another frequent division was threefold: India Prima, Secunda, Tertia, or Greater, Lesser, and Middle, as in Marco Polo, Bk. iii, chs. i, xxxviii-xxxix. Most commonly, Greater India means India west of Ganges; Lesser India corresponds to the classical India extra Gangem, or Assam, Burma, Siam, etc.; and Middle India stands for Abyssinia, and perhaps for some parts of the Arabian coast, as far as the Persian Gulf. ”

“ In the great subcontinent of South Asia live more than a sixth of the earth's population. Over the years we--and others--have invested very heavily in capital and food for the economic development of India and Pakistan. ”

“ Looking at the map of the world to see where brown races next appear, good authorities define one on the continent of India. There the hill-tribes present the type of the old dwellers in south and central India before the conquest by the Aryan Hindus, and its purest form appears in tribes hardly tilling the soil, but living a wild life in the jungle, while the great mass, more mixed in race with the Hindus, under whose influence they have [95] been for ages, now form the great Dravidian nations of the south, such as the Tamil and Telugu. Fig. ”

“ In other words, the materials for history in the North of India carry us back with the same relative degree of certainty for more than a thousand years beyond what those found in the south enable us to trace of her history or her arts.{32}
When the history of the south does acquire something like consistency it takes the form of a triarchy of small states. The eldest and most important, that of Mádura—so called after Muttra on the Jumna—was also the most civilised, and continued longest as a united and independent kingdom. ”

“ Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls. ”

“ The position of Indians in South Africa has for some years past received the most anxious consideration of the Government of India, and, as the Mahajana Sabha acknowledge, they are doing all that lies in their power to ensure fair treatment for Indians residing within the Union. ”

“ However, the moment they leave India, they are free from the healthy checks that keep them on the narrow path. In South Africa, they are without any religious instruction, though they need it badly. They are called upon to give evidence against their masters for the sake of a fellow brother. ”