History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s3.4

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.