History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s17.6

v1.c8.s17.6

The tables of this census also afford us some information with regard to the distribution of races among the people, though it could not be expected that the ethnological survey should yet be able to organise a satisfactory census of the races, though the distribution of languages helps us somewhat. Here, however, it is to be borne in mind that, especially in northern India, many aboriginal or non-Aryan tribes have changed their language for one of the Sanskritic family spoken by their neighbours. Hence we must regard the Indo-Aryan group of languages as including a vast number of people of Turanian and mixed descent. The tables show that upwards of 221,000,000 speak Indo-Aryan tongues—including Baloch, Pashtu, Marâthi, Bengâli, etc.—that is about three-fourths of the entire population, whilst close on 60,000,000 or a fifth are Dravidians and Kolarians, Gonds, Brahuis, etc., which the census has grouped together as a Dravida-Munda group. Lastly, the Indo-Chinese and Malayan, including Tibetan, Burmese, etc., number 11,720,000, or about four per cent. of the whole.