Chapter VI: Introduction (2)

In the beginning of the next century, after a short period of anarchy, we find a second Siladitya seated on the throne of Canouge as lord paramount in India, and, during a prosperous reign of thirty-eight to forty years, exercising supreme sway in that country. It was during his reign that the Chinese pilgrim, Hiouen Thsang visited India, and gave a much more full and graphic account of what he saw than his predecessor Fa Hian. Nothing can be more characteristic of the state of religious feeling, and the spirit of toleration then prevailing, than the fête given by this king at Allahabad in the year 643, at which the kings of Ballabhi and Kamarupa (Assam) were present. The king being himself a Buddhist, the first days were devoted to the distribution, among the followers of that religion, of the treasures accumulated during the previous five years, but then came the turn of the Brahmans, who were treated with equal honour and liberality; then followed the fête of the other sects, among whom the Jains appear conspicuous. All were feasted and fêted, and sent away laden with gifts and mementos of the magnificence and liberality of the great king.

Pleasant as this picture is to look upon, it is evident that such a state of affairs could hardly be stable, and it was in vain to expect that peace could long be maintained between a rising and ambitious sect, and one which was fast sinking into decay; apparently beneath the load of an overgrown priesthood. Accordingly we find that ten years after the death of Siladitya troubles supervened as prophesied,[21] and the curtain soon descends on the great drama of the history of northern India, not to be raised again for nearly three centuries. It is true, we can still follow the history of the Ballabhis for some little time longer, and it would be satisfactory if we could fix the date of their destruction with precision, as it was the event which in the Hindu mind is considered the closing act of the drama. If it was destroyed by a foreign enemy, it must have been by the Moslem, either before or during the time Mohammed Kasim, A.H. 712, 713. It was a flourishing city in 640, when visited by Hiouen Thsang, and from that time, till the death of Kasim, the Moslems were in such power on the Indus, and their historians tell us the events of these years in such detail, that no other foreigner could have crossed the river during that period. If it perished by some internal revolution of convulsion, which is more probable, it only shared the fate that overtook all northern India about this period. Strange to say, even the Moslems, then in the plenitude of their power during the Khalifat of Bagdad, retired from their Indian conquests, as if the seething cauldron were too hot for even them to exist within its limits.

The more southern dynasty of the Chalukyas of Kalyan seem to have retained their power down to about 750, and may, up to that time, have exercised a partial sway to the north of the Nerbudda, but after that we lose all sight of them; while, as a closing act in the great drama, the Raja Tarangini represents the King of Kashmir--Lalitaditya--as conquering India from north to south, and subjecting all the five kingdoms, into which it was nominally divided, to his imperious sway.

We need not stop now to inquire whether this was exactly what happened or not. It is sufficient for present purposes to know that about the middle of the 8th century a dark cloud settled over the north of India, and that during the next two centuries she was torn to pieces by internal troubles, which have left nothing but negative evidence of their existence. During that period no event took place of which we have any record; no dynasty rose to sufficient distinction to be quoted even in the lists of the bard; no illustrious name appears whose acts have been recorded; no buildings were erected of which we have a trace;[22] and but few inscriptions engraved. Dark night seems to have settled over the land, and whether we shall ever be able to penetrate into its mysteries seems more than doubtful.

When light again appears in the middle of the 10th century the scene is wonderfully changed. Buddhism had practically disappeared in the north and west at least, though it still lingered on in Bengal, and Jainism had supplanted it in most places; but the mass of the people had become followers of Vishnu or Siva. New dynasties had arisen which, though they try to trace their lineage back to the troublous times when Ballabhi fell, were new to Indian history. Old India had passed away, and the history of modern India was about to open. The old dynasties had become extinct, and the Rajput races were gaily stepping forward to assume their places--too soon, alas! to be engaged in a life or death struggle with the most implacable foe to their race and religion that India has ever known. It was a cruel Nemesis that their victories over the Buddhists should soon have been followed by the fatal siege at Somnath in 1024, and the fight on the banks of the Ghaghar in 1193, which practically laid India at the feet of the Moslem invader, and changed the whole course of her subsequent career. But, as hinted above, with the appearance of the Moslem on the scene, our chronological difficulties cease, and the subject need not therefore be further pursued in this introduction.

IMMIGRATIONS.

From the above brief sketch of ancient Indian history it may be gathered that it is doubtful whether we shall ever be able to clothe with solid flesh the skeleton of history which is all we possess anterior to the advent of Buddha. It is also possible that pious frauds may have so confused the sequence of events between his death and the rise of the Mauryas, that there will be great difficulty in restoring that period to anything like completeness. But for the thousand years that elapsed between “the revenge of Chanakya” and the fall of Ballabhi the materials are ample, and when sufficient industry is applied to their elucidation there is little doubt that the whole may be made clear and intelligible. It does not fall within the scope of this work to attempt such a task; but it is necessary to endeavour to make its outlines clear, as, without this being done, what follows will be utterly unintelligible; while, at the same time, one of the principal objects of this work is to point out how the architecture, which is one important branch of the evidence, may be brought to bear on the subject.

No direct evidence, however, derived only from events that occurred in India itself, would suffice to make the phenomena of her history clear, without taking into account the successive migrations of tribes and peoples who, in all ages, so far as we know, poured across the Indus from the westward to occupy her fertile plains.

As mentioned above, the great master fact that explains almost all we know of the ancient history of India is our knowledge that two or three thousand years before the birth of Christ a Sanscrit-speaking nation migrated from the valleys of the Oxus and Jaxartes. They crossed the Indus in such numbers as to impress their civilisation and their language on the whole of the north of India, and this to such an extent as practically to obliterate, as far as history is concerned, the original inhabitants of the valley of the Ganges, whoever they may have been. At the time when this migration took place the power and civilisation of Central Asia were concentrated on the lower Euphrates, and the Babylonian empire never seems to have extended across the Carmanian desert to the eastward. The road, consequently, between Bactria and India was open, and nations might pass and re-pass between the two countries without fear of interruption from any other people.

If any of the ancient dynasties of Babylonia extended their power towards the East, it was along the coast of Gedrosia, and not in a north-easterly direction. It is, indeed, by no means improbable, as hinted above, that the origin of the Dravidians may be found among the Accadian or in some of the Turanian peoples who occupied southern Babylonia in ancient times, and who may, either by sea or land, have passed to the western shores of India. Till, however, further information is available, this is mere speculation, though probably in the direction in which truth may hereafter be found.

When the seat of power was moved northward to Nineveh, the Assyrians seem to have occupied the country eastward of the Caspian in sufficient force to prevent any further migration. At least, after that time--say B.C. 1000--we have no further trace of any Aryan tribe crossing the Indus going eastward, and it seems mainly to have been a consequence of this cutting off of the supply of fresh blood that the purity of their race in India was so far weakened as to admit of the Buddhist reform taking root, and being adopted to the extent it afterwards attained.

During the period of the Achemænian sway, the Persians certainly occupied the countries about the Oxus in sufficient strength to prevent any movement of the peoples. So essentially indeed had Bactria and Sogdiana become parts of the Persian empire, that Alexander was obliged to turn aside from his direct route to conquer them, as well as the rest of the kingdom of Darius, before advancing on India.

Whether it were founded for that purpose or not, the little Greek kingdom of Bactria was sufficiently powerful, while it lasted, to keep the barbarians in check; but when about the year 127-126 B.C., the Yuechi and other cognate tribes invaded Sogdiana, and finally about 120 B.C. conquered the whole of Bactria,[23] they opened a new chapter in the history of India, the effects of which are felt to the present day.

It is not yet quite clear how soon after the destruction of the Bactrian kingdom these Turanian tribes conquered Cabul, and occupied the country between that city and the Indus. Certain it is, however, that they were firmly seated on the banks of that river before the Christian Era, and under the great king Kanishka had become an Indian power of very considerable importance. The date of this king is, unfortunately, one of those small puzzles that still remain to be solved. Generally, it is supposed he reigned till about twenty to forty years after Christ.[24] Evidence, however, has lately been brought to light, which seems to prove that he was the founder of the Saka era, A.D. 79, and that his reign must be placed in the last quarter of the first century of our era, instead of in the earlier half.[25]

Be this as it may, it seems quite certain that the power of these Turuska kings spread over the whole Punjab, and extended as far at least as Muttra on the Jumna, in the first century of the Christian Era.

At the same time another horde, known to us only from the coins and inscriptions in which they call themselves Sahs or Sah kings, crossed the Indus lower down, and occupied the whole of the province of Gujerat. It is not quite clear whether the first of them, Nahapana, was only the Viceroy of one of these northern kings--probably of Kanishka himself--though he and his successors afterwards became independent, and founded a kingdom of their own. They seem to date their coins and inscriptions from the Saka era, A.D. 79, and the series extends from that date to A.D. 349, or at latest to 371.[26] It thus happens that though Gautamiputra, the Andra king (312-333), boasts of having humbled them,[27] they were only in fact finally disposed of by the rise of the Guptas.

No other foreign race, so far as we know, seems to have crossed the Lower Indus into India. But the whole external history of northern India, from the time of Kanishka to that of Ahmed Shah Durani (1761) is a narrative of a continuous succession of tribes of Scythian origin, pouring across the Upper Indus into India, each more Turanian than the one that preceded it, till the whole culminated in the Mogul conquest of India, in the 15th century, by a people as distinct in blood from the Aryans as any that exist.

Of the older races, it seems probable that the Yavanas must be distinguished from the Turanians. It will hardly now be contended that they were pure Greeks, though their name may be merely a mispronunciation of Ionian. The term seems to have been applied by Indian authors to any foreign race coming from the westward who did not belong to one of the acknowledged kingdoms known to them. As such it would apply to any western adventurers, who during the existence of the Bactrian kingdom sought to establish settlements in any part of India, and would also apply to the expatriated Bactrians themselves when driven from their homes by the Yuechi, 120 or 130 years B.C. It is only in this sense that we can explain their presence in Orissa before and about the Christian Era, but in the west the term may have been more loosely applied. The Cambojas seem to have been a people inhabiting the country between Candahar and Cabul, who, when the tide was setting eastward, joined the crowd, and sought settlements in the more fertile countries within the Indus.

The Sakas were well known to classical authors as the Sacæ, or Scythians. They pressed on with the rest, and became apparently most formidable during the first four centuries of the Christian Era. It was apparently their defeat by the great Vicramaditya in the battle at Korûr, on the banks of the Indus, A.D. 524 or 544, that raised the popularity of that monarch to its highest pitch, and induced the Hindus at a subsequent age to institute the era known by his name 600 years before his time, and another called by his other name, Sri Harsha, 1000 years before the date of the battle of Korûr.[28]

Another important horde were the Ephthalites, or White Huns, who came into India apparently in the 4th century, and one of whose kings, if we may trust Cosmas Indicopleustes, was the head of a powerful state in northern India, about the year 535. They, too, seem to have been conquered about the same time by the Hindus, and, as both the Sakas and Hunas were undoubtedly Buddhists, it may have been their destruction that first weakened the cause of that religion, and which led to its ultimate defeat a little more than a century afterwards.

During the dark ages, 750 to 950, we do not know of any horde passing the Indus. The Mahomedans were probably too strong on the frontier to admit of its being done, and after that age they--and they only--conducted the various invasions which completely changed the face and character of northern India. For seven centuries they were continued, with only occasional interruptions, and at last resulted in placing the Mahomedan power supreme, practically, over the whole of India, but only to fall to pieces like a house of cards, before the touch of Western civilisation. All this, however, is written, and written so distinctly, in so many books, that it need not be recapitulated here.

SOUTHERN INDIA.

If the records of the ancient history of northern India are unsatisfactory and untrustworthy, those of the southern part of the peninsula are at least ten times more so. The Dravidians have no ancient literature like that of the Vedas. They have no traditions which point to any seat of their race out of India, or of their having migrated from any country with whose inhabitants they can claim any kindred. So far as they know, they are indigenous and aboriginal. The utmost extent to which even their traditions extend is to claim for their leading race of kings--the Pandyas--a descent from Arjuna, one of the heroes of the ‘Mahabharata.’ He, it is said, when on his travels, married a princess of the land, and she gave birth to the eponymous hero of their race, and hence their name. It is true, indeed, that they produce long lists of kings, which they pretend stretch back till the times of the Pandus. These were examined by the late Professor Wilson in 1836, and he conjectured that they might extend back to the 5th or 6th century before our era.[29] But all that has since come to light has tended to show that even this may be an over-estimate of their antiquity. If, however, as Dr. Kern believes, the Choda, Pada, and Keralaputra of the second edict of Asoka do really represent the Cholas, Pandyas, Cheras, of modern times, this triarchy existed in the third century B.C.; but there are difficulties in the way of this identification which have not yet been removed. In fact, all we really do know is that, in classical times, there was a Regio Pandionis in the country afterwards known as the Pandyan kingdom of Madura, and it has been conjectured that the king who sent an embassy to Augustus in 27 B.C.[30] was not a Porus, which would indicate a northern race, but this very king of the south. Be this, however, as it may, we do know, by the frequent mention of this country by classical authors, that it was at least sufficiently civilised in the early centuries of our era to carry on a considerable amount of commerce with the western nations, and there is consequently no improbability that at least one powerful dynasty may then have been established in the south. If so, that dynasty was certainly the Pandyan. The Chola and the Chera became important states only at a much later date.

When we turn to their literature we find nothing to encourage any hope that we may penetrate further back into their history than we have hitherto been able to do. Dr. Caldwell, the best and latest authority on the subject, ascribes the oldest work in the Tamil, or any southern language, to the 8th or 9th century of our era,[31] and that even then can hardly be called native, as it undoubtedly belongs to the Jains, who are as certainly a northern sect. According to the same authority, it was superseded by a Vaishnava literature about the 12th or 13th century, and that again made way for one of Saiva tendency about the latter date. There is no trace of any Buddhist literature in the south, and nothing, consequently, that would enable us to connect the history of the south with the tolerably well-ascertained chronology of Ceylon or Northern India, nor am I aware of the existence of any ancient Buddhist monuments in the south which would help us in this difficulty.[32]

Not having passed through Bactria, or having lived in contact with any people making or using coins, the Dravidians have none of their own, and consequently that source of information is not available. Whatever hoards of ancient coins have been found in the Madras Presidency have been of purely Roman origin, brought there for the purpose of trade, and buried to protect them from spoliation.

The inscriptions, which are literally innumerable all over the Presidency, are the one source from which we can hope that new light may be thrown on the history of the country, but none of those hitherto brought to light go further back than the 5th or 6th century, and it is not clear that earlier ones may be found.[33] It is, at all events, the most hopeful field that lies open to future explorers in these dark domains. There is nothing, however, that would lead us to expect to find any Tamil or native inscription in the country extending so far back as the age of Constantine. Those on the raths at Mahavellipore, or the caves at Badami, which may be as old as the age of Justinian, are in Sanscrit, and consequently look more like an evidence of the northern races pushing southward than of the southern races extending themselves northward, or being sufficiently advanced in civilisation to erect for themselves the monuments on which these inscriptions are found.

From a study of the architecture of the south we arrive at precisely the same conclusions as to the antiquity of Dravidian civilisation that Dr. Caldwell arrived at from a study of their literature. The only important Buddhist monument yet discovered in the Presidency is that at Amravati, on the Kistnah,[34] but that is avowedly a foreign intrusion. It was a colony or settlement formed by the northern Buddhists at or near their port of departure for Java and their eastern settlements. The rock-cut temples at Mahavellipore and Badami seem to be the works of northern Hindus advancing southward in the 5th or 6th century, and engraving the evidence of their religion on the imperishable rock. So far as is yet known, no indigenous native temple has been brought to light, built by any native king, or with inscriptions in any southern tongue, whose date can be carried further back than the 8th century. From that time forward their building activity was enormous. The style culminated in the 16th and 17th centuries, to perish in the 18th, under the influence of a foreign and unsympathetic invader. It is, however, by no means impossible that future investigation may enable us to fill up a portion at least of the gap that exists between the 5th and the 8th century. There may be buildings yet undescribed which are older than any we now know. But if they do carry us back to the 5th century, which is more than can reasonably be expected, they are still seven or eight centuries behind what we know for certainty to have existed in the north. There we have buildings and caves certainly, extending back to B.C. 250, and it seems by no means impossible that with sculptures, coins, and inscriptions, and written documents, we may some day be able to bridge over the gulf that exists between the death of Buddha and the accession of the Mauryas. 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.

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.

The Chola rose into power on the banks of the Cauvery, and to the northward of it, about the year 1000, though no doubt they existed as a small state about Conjeveram for some centuries before that time. The third, the Chera, were located in the southern Mysore country, and probably extending to the coast as early as the 4th or 5th century, and gradually worked their way northward, and became so powerful that there is reason for believing that during the dark ages of the north (750 to 950) their power extended to the Nerbudda, and it may be to them that we owe the Kylas and other excavations at Ellora, erected in the southern style about that time. They were, however, superseded, first by the Cholas, about A.D. 1000, and finally eclipsed by the Hoisala Bellalas, a century or so afterwards. These last became the paramount power in the south, till their capital--Hullabîd--was taken, and their dynasty destroyed by the Mahomedan, in the year 1310.

With the appearance of the Mahomedans on the scene the difficulties of Indian chronology disappear in the south, as well as in the north. From that time forward the history of India is found in such works as those written by Ferishta or Abul Fazl, and has been abstracted and condensed in numerous works in almost every European language. There are still, it must be confessed, slight discrepancies and difficulties about the sequence of some events in the history of the native principalities. These, however, are not of such importance as at all to affect, much less to invalidate, any reasoning that may be put forward regarding the history or affinities of any buildings, and this is the class of evidence which principally concerns what is written in the following pages.

SCULPTURES.

In order to render the subject treated of in the following pages quite complete, it ought, no doubt, to be preceded by an introduction describing first the sculpture and then the mythology of the Hindus in so far as they are at present known to us. There are in fact few works connected with this subject more wanted at the present day than a good treatise on these subjects. When Major Moor published the ‘Hindu Pantheon’ in 1810, the subject was comparatively new, and the materials did not exist in this country for a full and satisfactory illustration of it in all its branches. When, in 1832, Coleman published his ‘Mythology of the Hindus,’ he was enabled from the more recent researches of Colebroke and Wilson, to improve the text considerably, but his illustrations are very inferior to those of his predecessor. Moor chose his from such bronzes or marbles as existed in our museums. Coleman’s were generally taken from modern drawings, or the tawdry plaster images made for the Durga puja of Bengali Babus. By the aid of photography any one now attempting the task would be able to select perfectly authentic examples from Hindu temples of the best age. If this were done judiciously, and the examples carefully engraved, it would not only afford a more satisfactory illustration of the mythology of the Hindus than has yet been given to the public, but it might also be made a history of the art of sculpture in India, in all the ages in which it is known to us. It is doubtful, however, whether such a work could be successfully carried through in this country at the present day. The photographs that exist of the various deities have generally been taken representing them only as they appear as ornaments of the temples, without special reference to their mythological character. They are sufficient to show what the sculptor intended, but not so detailed as to allow all their emblems or characteristics being distinctly perceived. To be satisfactory as illustrations of the mythology, it is indispensable that these points should all be made clear. At the same time it is to be feared that there is hardly any one in this country so familiar with all the details of emblems and symbols as to be able to give the exact meaning of all that is represented. It would require the assistance of some Pandit brought up in the faith, and who is familiar with the significance of all the emblems, to convey to others the true meaning of these innumerable carvings. In India it could easily be accomplished, and it is consequently hoped it may before long be attempted there.

* * * * *

From its very nature, it is evident that sculpture can hardly ever be so important as architecture as an illustration of the progress of the arts, or the affinities of nations. Tied down to the reproduction of the immutable human figure, sculpture hardly admits of the same variety, or the same development, as such an art as architecture, whose business it is to administer to all the varied wants of mankind and to express the multifarious aspirations of the human mind. Yet sculpture has a history, and one that can at times convey its meaning with considerable distinctness. No one, for instance, can take up such a book as that of Cicognara,[35] and follow the gradual development of the art as he describes it, from the first rude carvings of the Byzantine school, till it returned in the present day to the mechanical perfection of the old Greek art, though without its ennobling spirit, and not feel that he has before him a fairly distinct illustration of the progress of the human mind during that period. Sculpture in India may fairly claim to rank, in power of expression, with mediæval sculpture in Europe, and to tell its tale of rise and decay with equal distinctness; but it is also interesting as having that curious Indian peculiarity of being written in decay. The story that Cicognara tells is one of steady forward progress towards higher aims and better execution. The Indian story is that of backward decline, from the sculptures of the Bharhut and Amravati topes, to the illustrations of Coleman’s ‘Hindu Mythology.’

When Hindu sculpture first dawns upon us in the rails at Buddh Gaya, and Bharhut, B.C. 200 to 250, it is thoroughly original, absolutely without a trace of foreign influence, but quite capable of expressing its ideas, and of telling its story with a distinctness that never was surpassed, at least in India. Some animals, such as elephants, deer, and monkeys, are better represented there than in any sculptures known in any part of the world; so, too, are some trees, and the architectural details are cut with an elegance and precision which are very admirable. The human figures, too, though very different from our standard of beauty and grace, are truthful to nature, and, where grouped together, combine to express the action intended with singular felicity. For an honest purpose-like pre-Raphaelite kind of art, there is probably nothing much better to be found elsewhere.

The art certainly had declined when the gateways at Sanchi were executed in the first century of the Christian Era. They may then have gained a little in breadth of treatment, but it had certainly lost much in delicacy and precision. Its downward progress was then, however, arrested, apparently by the rise in the extreme north-west of India of a school of sculpture strongly impregnated with the traditions of classical art. It is not yet clear whether this arose from a school of art implanted in that land by the Bactrian Greeks, or whether it was maintained by direct intercourse with Rome and Byzantium during the early centuries of the Christian Era. Probably both causes acted simultaneously, and one day we may be able to discriminate what is due to each. For the present it is sufficient to know that a quasi-classical school of sculpture did exist in the Punjab, and to the west of the Indus during the first five centuries after Christ, and it can hardly have flourished there so long, without its presence being felt in India.

Its effects were certainly apparent at Amravati in the 4th and 5th centuries, where a school of sculpture was developed, partaking of the characteristics of both those of Central India and of the west. Though it may, in some respects, be inferior to either of the parent styles, the degree of perfection reached by the art of sculpture at Amravati may probably be considered as the culminating point attained by that art in India.

When we meet it again in the early Hindu temples, and later Buddhist caves, it has lost much of its higher æsthetic and phonetic qualities, and frequently resorts to such expedients as giving dignity to the principal personages by making them double the size of less important characters, and of distinguishing gods from men by giving them more heads and arms than mortal man can use or understand.

All this is developed, it must be confessed, with considerable vigour and richness of effect in the temples of Orissa and the Mysore, down to the 13th or 14th century. After that, in the north it was checked by the presence of the Moslems; but, in the south, some of the most remarkable groups and statues--and they are very remarkable--were executed after this time, and continued to be executed, in considerable perfection down to the middle of the last century.

As we shall see in the sequel, the art of architecture continues to be practised with considerable success in parts of India remote from European influence; so much so, that it requires a practised eye to discriminate between what is new and what is old. But the moment any figures are introduced, especially if in action, the illusion vanishes. No mistake is then possible, for the veriest novice can see how painfully low the art of sculpture has fallen. Were it not for this, some of the modern temples in Gujerat and Central India are worthy to rank with those of past centuries; but their paintings and their sculptured decorations excite only feelings of dismay, and lead one to despair of true art being ever again revived in the East.

To those who are familiar with the principles on which these arts are practised, the cause of this difference is obvious enough. Architecture being a technic art, its forms may be handed down traditionally, and its principles practised almost mechanically. The higher phonetic arts, however, of sculpture and painting admit of no such mechanical treatment. They require individual excellence, and a higher class of intellectual power of expression, to ensure their successful development. Architecture, may, consequently, linger on amidst much political decay; but, like literature, the phonetic arts can only be successfully cultivated where a higher moral and intellectual standard prevails than, it is feared, is at present to be found in India.

MYTHOLOGY.

Whenever any one will seriously undertake to write the history of sculpture in India, he will find the materials abundant and the sequence by no means difficult to follow; but, with regard to mythology, the case is different. It cannot, however, be said that the materials are not abundant for this branch of the inquiry also; but they are of a much less tangible or satisfactory nature, and have become so entangled, that it is extremely difficult to obtain any clear ideas regarding them; and it is to be feared they must remain so, until those who investigate the subject will condescend to study the architecture and the sculpture of the country as well as its books. The latter contain a good deal, but they do not contain all the information available on the subject, and they require to be steadied and confirmed by what is built or carved, which alone can give precision and substance to what is written.

Much of the confusion of ideas that prevails on this subject no doubt arises from the exaggerated importance it has of late years been the fashion to ascribe to the Vedas, as explaining everything connected with the mythology of the Hindus. It would, indeed, be impossible to over-estimate the value of these writings from a philological or ethnological point of view. Their discovery and elaboration have revolutionised our ideas as to the migrations of races in the remote ages of antiquity, and establish the affiliation of the Aryan races on a basis that seems absolutely unassailable; but it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the Aryans are a race of strangers in India, distinct from the Indian people themselves. They may, as hinted above, have come into India some three thousand years before Christ, and may have retained their purity of blood and faith for two thousand years; but with the beginning of the political Kali Yug--or, to speak more correctly, at the time of the events detailed in the ‘Mahabharata,’ say 1200 years B.C.--they had lost much of both; while every successive wave of immigration that has crossed the Indus during the last three thousand years has impaired the purity of their race. From this cause, and from their admixture with the aborigines, it may probably be with confidence asserted that there is not now five per cent.--perhaps not one--of pure Aryan blood in the present population of India, nor, consequently, does the religion of the Vedas constitute one-twentieth part of the present religion of the people.

Though this may be absolutely so, it must not be overlooked that there are few things more remarkable, as bearing on this subject, than the extraordinary intellectual superiority of the Aryans over the Dasyus, or whatever we may call the people they found in India when they entered it. This superiority was sufficient to enable them to subdue the country, though they were probably infinitely inferior in numbers to the conquered people, and to retain them in subjection through long ages of time. Even now, when their purity of blood has become so diluted that they are almost lost among the people, their intellect, as embalmed in their writings, has left its impress on every corner of the land, and is still appealed to as a revelation of the will of God to man.

With the Vedas, however, we have very little to do in the present work. The worship they foreshadow is of a class too purely intellectual to require the assistance of the stonemason and the carver to give it expression. The worship of the Aryans was addressed to the sun and moon. The firmament and all its hosts; the rain-bearing cloud; the sun-ushering dawn; all that was beautiful in the heavens above or beneficent on earth, was sung by them in hymns of elevated praise, and addressed in terms of awe or endearment as fear or hope prevailed in the bosom of the worshipper.[36] Had this gone on for some time longer than it did, the objects worshipped by the Aryans in India might have become gods, like those of Greece and Rome, endowed with all the feelings and all the failings of humanity. In India it was otherwise; the deities were dethroned, but never were degraded. There is no trace in Vedic times, so far as at present known, of Indra or Varuna, of Agni or Ushas, being represented in wood or stone, or of their requiring houses or temples to shelter them. It is true indeed that the terms of endearment in which they are addressed are frequently such as mortals use in speaking of each other; but how otherwise can man express his feeling of love or fear, or address his supplication to the being whose assistance he implores?

The great beauty of the Veda is, that it stops short before the powers of nature are dwarfed into human forms, and when every man stood independently by himself and sought through the intervention of all that was great or glorious on the earth, or in the skies, to approach the great spirit that is beyond and above all created things.

Had the Aryans ever been a numerical majority in India, and consequently able to preserve their blood and caste in tolerable purity, the religion of India never could have sunk so low as it did, though it might have fallen below the standard of the Veda. What really destroyed it was, that each succeeding immigration of less pure Aryan or Turanian races rendered their numerical majority relatively less and less, while their inevitable influence so educated the subject races as to render their moral majority even less important. These processes went on steadily and uninterruptedly till, in the time of Buddha, the native religions rose fairly to an equality with that of the Aryans, and afterwards for a while eclipsed it. The Vedas were only ultimately saved from absolute annihilation in India, by being embedded in the Vaishnava and Saiva superstitions, where their inanimate forms may still be recognised, but painfully degraded from their primitive elevation.

When we turn from the Vedas, and try to investigate the origin of those religions that first opposed and finally absorbed the Vedas in their abominations, we find our means of information painfully scanty and unsatisfactory. As will appear in the sequel, all that was written in India that is worth reading was written by the Aryans; all that was built was built by the Turanians, who wrote practically nothing. But the known buildings extend back only to the 3rd century B.C., while the books are ten centuries earlier, or possibly even more than that, while, as might be expected, it is only accidentally and in the most contemptuous terms that the proud Aryans even allude to the abject Dasyus or their religion. What, therefore, we practically know of them is little more than inferences drawn from results, and from what we now see passing in India.

Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming every day more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native or at least of Turanian religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Yaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by Sakya Muni before his death in 543 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of faith, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, according to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas--according to the more usual accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and when he died, the father and mother’s name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi-tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but there seems no reason for doubting that they may have been real personages, and their dates extend back to a very remote antiquity.[37]

The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty-four Tirthankars, including Mahavira the last. Their places of birth and death are equally recorded, all are in northern India, and though little else is known of them, they too may have existed. The series ends with Mahavira, who was the contemporary--some say the preceptor--of Sakya Muni.

The Vaishnava series is shorter, consisting of only nine Avatars, but it too, closes at the same time, Buddha himself being the ninth and last. Its fifth Avatur takes us back to Rama, who, if our chronology is correct, may have lived B.C. 2000; the fourth,--Narasinha, or man lion--points to the time the Aryans entered India. The three first deal with creation and events anterior to man’s appearance on earth. In this respect the Vaishnava list differs from the other two. They only record the existence of men who attained greatness by the practice of virtue, and immortality by teaching the ways of God to man. The Vaishnavas brought God to earth, to mix and interfere in mundane affairs in a manner that neither the Aryan nor the Buddhist ever dreamt of, and so degraded the purer religion of India into the monstrous system of idolatry that now prevails in that country.

No attempt, so far as I know, has been made to explain the origin of the Saiva religion, or even to ascertain whether it was a purely local superstition, or whether it was imported from abroad. The earliest authentic written allusion to it seems to be that of the Indian ambassador to Bardasanes (A.D. 218, 222), who described a cave in the north of India which contained an image of a god, half-man, half-woman.[38] This is beyond doubt the Ardhanari form of Siva, so familiar afterwards at Elephanta and in every part of India. The earliest engraved representations of this god seem to be those on the coins of Kadphises (B.C. 80 to 100[39]), where the figure with the trident and the Bull certainly prefigure the principal personage in this religion. Curiously enough, however, he or she is always accompanied by the Buddhist trisul emblem, as if the king, or his subjects at least, simultaneously professed both religions. Besides all this, it seems now tolerably well ascertained, that the practice of endowing gods with an infinity of limbs took an earlier, certainly a greater development in Thibet and the trans-Himalayan countries than in India, and that the wildest Tantric forms of Durga are more common and more developed in Nepal and Thibet than they are even in India Proper. If this is so, it seems pretty clear, as the evidence now stands, that Saivism is a northern superstition introduced into India by the Yuechi or some of the northern hordes who migrated into India, either immediately before the Christian Era, or in the early centuries succeeding it.

It does not seem at first to have made much progress in the valley of the Ganges, where the ground was preoccupied by the Vaishnava group, but to have been generally adopted in Rajputana, especially among the Jats, who were almost certainly the descendants of the White Huns or Ephthalites, and it seems also to have been early carried south by the Brahmans, when they undertook to instruct the Dravidians in the religion of the Puranas. That of the Vedas never seems to have been known in the south, and it was not till after the Vedas had been superseded by the new system, that the Brahmanical religion was introduced among the southern people. It is also, it is to be feared, only too true that no attempt has yet been made to ascertain what the religion of the Dravidians was before the northern Brahmans induced them to adopt either the Jaina or the Vaishnava or Saiva forms of faith. It is possible that among the Pandu Kolis, and other forms of ‘Rude Stone Monuments’ that are found everywhere in the south, we may find the fossil remains of the old Dravidian faith before they adopted that of the Hindus. These monuments, however, have not been examined with anything like the care requisite for the solution of a problem like this, and till it is done we must rest content with our ignorance.[40]

In the north we have been somewhat more fortunate, and enough is now known to make it clear that, so soon as the inquirers can consent to put aside personal jealousies, and apply themselves earnestly to the task, we may know enough to make the general outline at least tolerably clear. When I first published my work on ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ seven years ago, no one suspected, at least no one had hinted in type, that such a form of religion existed in Bengal. Since that time, however, so much has been written on the subject, and proof on proof has accumulated with such rapidity, that few will now be bold enough to deny that Trees were worshipped in India in the earliest times, and that a Naga people did exist, especially in the north-west, who had a strange veneration for snakes. It may be too bold a generalisation to assert, at present, that no people became Buddhists who had not previously been serpent worshippers, but it certainly is nearer the truth than at first sight appears. It is, at all events, quite certain that underlying Buddhism we everywhere find evidence of a stratum of Tree and Serpent Worship. Sometimes it may be repressed and obscured, but at others it crops up again, and, to a certain extent, the worship of the Tree and the Serpent, at some times and in certain places, almost supersedes that of the founder of the religion himself.

The five, or seven, or one thousand-headed Naga is everywhere present in the temples of the Jains, and pervades the whole religion of the Vaishnavas. In the great act of creation the Naga performs the principal part in the churning of the ocean, and in almost every representation of Vishnu he appears either as supporting and watching over him, or as performing some subsidiary part in the scene. It is, in fact, the Naga that binds together and gives unity to this great group of religions, and it is the presence of the Tree and Serpent worship underlying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vishnuism that seems to prove almost incontestably that there existed a people in the north of India, whether we call them Dasyus, Nishadhas, or by any other name, who were Tree and Serpent worshippers, before they adopted any of the Hindu forms of faith. Nothing can be more antagonistic to the thoughts and feelings of any Aryan race than such forms of worship, and nothing more completely ante-Vedic than its rites. It seems also to have no connection with Saivism.[41] Nor is there any trace of it found among the Dravidians. There appears, in fact, no solution of the riddle possible, but to assume that it was an aboriginal superstition in the north of India, and it was the conversion of the people to whom it belonged that gave rise to that triarchy of religions that have succeeded each other in the north during the last two thousand years.

This solution of the difficulty has the further advantage that it steps in at once clearly to explain what philology is only dimly guessing at, though its whole tendency now seems in the same direction. If this view of the mythology be correct, it seems certain that there existed in the north of India, before the arrival of the Aryans, a people whose affinities were all with the Thibetans, Burmese, Siamese, and other trans-Himalayan populations, and who certainly were not Dravidians, though they may have been intimately connected with one division at least of the inhabitants of Ceylon.

Both the pre-Aryan races of India belonged, of course, to the Turanian group; but my present impression is, as hinted above, that the Dravidians belong to that branch of the great primordial family of mankind that was developed in Mesopotamia and the countries to the westward of the Caspian. The Dasyus, on the contrary, have all their affinities with those to the eastward of that sea, and the two might consequently be called the Western and the Eastern, or the Scythian and Mongolian Turanians. Such a distinction would certainly represent our present knowledge of the subject better than considering the whole as one family, which is too often the case at the present day.

These, however, are speculations which hardly admit of proof in the present state of our knowledge, and would consequently be quite out of place here, were it not that some such theory seems indispensable to explain the phenomena of the architectural history of India. That of the north is so essentially different from that of the south that they cannot possibly belong to the same people. Neither of them certainly are Aryan; and unless we admit that the two divisions of the country were occupied by people essentially different in blood, though still belonging to the building races of mankind, we cannot possibly understand how they always practised, and to the present employ, styles so essentially different. Until these various ethnographical and mythological problems are understood and appreciated, the styles of architecture in India seem a chaos without purpose or meaning. Once, however, they are grasped and applied, their history assumes a dignity and importance far greater than is due to any merely æsthetic merits they may possess. Even that, however, is in many respects remarkable, and, when combined with the scientific value of the styles, seem to render them as worthy of study as those of any other people with whose arts we are acquainted.

STATISTICS.

It would add very much to the clearness of what follows if it were possible to compile any statistical tables which would represent with anything like precision the mode in which the people of India are distributed, either as regards their religious beliefs or their ethnographical relations. The late census of 1871-72 has afforded a mass of new material for this purpose, but the information is distributed through five folio volumes, in such a manner as to make it extremely difficult to abstract what is wanted so as to render it intelligible to the general reader. Even, however, if this were done, the result would hardly, for several reasons, be satisfactory. In the first place, the census is a first attempt, and the difficulty of collecting and arranging such a mass of new materials was a task of the extremest difficulty. The fault of any shortcomings, however, lay more with the enumerated than with the enumerators. Few natives know anything of ethnography, or can give a distinct answer with regard to their race or descent; and even with regard to religion their notions are equally hazy. Take for instance the table, page 93 of the Bombay Report. The compilers there divide the Hindus of that Presidency into three classes:--

3,465,349 Saivas. 1,419,233 Vaishnavas. 8,029,989 Mixed. ---------- 12,914,571

The mixed class they proceed to define as “all who simply worship some god or goddess, without knowing anything of theology”--a description that probably applies with equal truth to two-thirds of the Hindu population of the other presidencies. The upper and educated classes do know now what sect they belong to, and the sects are so distinctly marked as to admit of no doubt; but even that was not so clear in former days.

The great defect, however, of the census is, that it does not include the population of the Native States, estimated at 46,245,000, or one-fifth of the whole population of India; and, though it may be fair to assume that the proportions of races and their beliefs are the same as those of the adjacent states under British rule, this is only an assumption, and as such must vitiate any attempt at precision in statements regarding the whole of India.