History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s2.2

v1.c8.s2.2

Their settlement in India extends to such remote pre-historic times, that we cannot feel even sure that we should regard them as immigrants, or, at least, as either conquerors or colonists on a large scale, but rather as aboriginal in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Generally it is assumed that they entered India across the Lower Indus, leaving the cognate Brahui in Baluchistân as a mark of the road by which they came, and, as the affinities of their language seem to be with the Ugrians and Northern Turanian tongues, this view seems probable.¹ But they have certainly left no trace of their migrations anywhere between the Indus and the Narbadâ, and all the facts of their history, so far as they are known, would seem to lead to an opposite conclusion. The hypothesis that would represent what we know of their history most correctly would place their original seat in the extreme south, somewhere probably not far from Madurâ or Tanjor, and thence spreading fan-like towards the north, till they met the Aryans in the northern Dekhan. The question, again, is not of much importance for our present purposes, as we do not know to what degree of civilisation they had reached anterior to the Christian Era, or when they were first able to practise the arts of civilised life with such success as to bring them within the scope of a work devoted to the history of art.¹