History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s16.4

v1.c8.s16.4

Much of the confusion of ideas that prevails on this subject no doubt arises from the exaggerated importance it has been the fashion to ascribe to the Vedas, as explaining everything connected with the mythology of the Hindûs. 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 established 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 peoples 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 many generations ; but with the beginning of the political Kaliyug—or, to speak more correctly, at the time of the events detailed in the Mahâbhârata, 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.²