History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s3: Dasyus.
History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s3
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Dasyus.
v1.c8.s3.1
In addition to these two great distinct and opposite nationalities, there exists in India a third, which, in pre-Buddhist times, was as numerous, perhaps even more so, than either the Aryans or the Dravidians, but of whose history we know even less than we do of the two others. Ethnologists have not agreed on a name by which to call them. I have suggested Dasyus,² a slave people, as that is the name by which the Aryans designated them when they found them there on their first entrance into India, and subjected them to their sway.³ Possibly they were partly of Mongol-Tibetan origin, and partly they may have been a mixed race allied to the Dravidians, and now represented by Gonds, Santâls, Bhîls, etc.
v1.c8.s3.2
² 'Tree and Serpent Worship,' pp. 244-247.
v1.c8.s3.3
³ 'Dasyu' probably meant 'provincial,' 'aboriginal,' and was used much as 'Gentiles,' 'Pagans,' 'Barbarians,' in early times. They are also termed Yâdvas, of which we may have a survival in the 'Jats.'
v1.c8.s3.4
The Dasyus, however, were not mere barbarians; for they had towns, and traces of at least a partial civilisation; they had leaders or chiefs possessed of strong fortified retreats, and they possessed treasures of gold and rich jewels.⁴ Whoever they were they seem to have been a people of less intellectual capacity, less muscular, and less united than their invaders. When the Aryans first entered India they seem to have found them occupying the whole valley of the Ganges — the whole country in fact between the Vindhya and the Himâlaya Mountains. At present they are only found in anything like purity in the mountain ranges that bound that great plain. There they are known as Bhîls, Gonds, Kandhs, Mundas, Orâons, Hos, Kols, Santâls, Nâgas, and other mountain and forest tribes. But they certainly form the lowest underlying stratum of the population over the whole of the Gangetic plain. So far as their affinities have been ascertained, they are with the trans-Himâlayan population, and it either is that they entered India through the passes of that great mountain range, or it might be more correct to say that the Tibetans are a fragment of a great population that occupied both the northern and southern slope of that great chain of hills at some very remote pre-historic time.
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⁴ Vivian de Saint Martin's 'Étude sur la Géographie et les populations primitives du Nord-ouest de l'Inde, d'après les Hymnes védiques.'
v1.c8.s3.6
Whoever they were, they were the people who, in remote times, were apparently the worshippers of Trees and Serpents;¹ but what interests us more in them, and makes the enquiry into their history more desirable, is that it was where the people were largely of this aboriginal stock that Buddhism seems to have been most readily adopted, and it is largely among allied races that it is still adhered to. In Ceylon, Tibet, Burma, Siam, and China—wherever a people allied to the Mongol or Tibetan family exists, there Buddhism flourished and still prevails. But in India a revival of Brahmanism abolished it.
v1.c8.s3.7
¹ See ‘Indian Antiquary,’ vol. iv. pp. 5f.
v1.c8.s3.8
Architecturally, there is no difficulty in defining the limits of the Dasyu province: wherever a square tower-like temple exists with a perpendicular base, but a curvilinear outline above, such as that shown in the woodcut (No. 1), there we may feel certain of the existence, past or present, of a people of Dasyu extraction. No one can accuse the pure Aryans of introducing this form into India, or of building temples at all, or of worshipping images of Siva or Vishnu, with which these temples are filled, and they consequently have little title to confer their name on the style. The Aryans had, however, become so impure in blood before these temples were erected, and were so mixed up with the aboriginal tribes whose superstitions had so influenced their religion and their arts that they accepted their temples with their gods. Be this as it may, one thing seems tolerably clear, that the regions occupied by the Aryans in India were conterminous with those of the Dasyus, or, in other words, that the Aryans conquered the whole of the aboriginal or native tribes who occupied the plains of northern India, and ruled over them to such an extent as materially to influence their religion and their arts, and also very materially to modify even their language. So much so, indeed, that after some four thousand years of domination we should not be surprised if we have some difficulty in recovering traces of the original population, and could probably not do so, if some fragments of the people had not sought refuge in the hills on the north and south of the great Gangetic plain, and there have remained fossilised, or at least sufficiently permanent for purposes of investigation.
v1.c8.s3.9
1. Hindû Temple, at Bahulârâ, near Bânkurâ.