Indische Palaographie von circa 350 a. Chr. – circa 1300 p. Chr. c46: Introduction
Indische Paläographie von circa 350 a. Chr. – circa 1300 p. Chr. c46
- Language
- German
Contents
- c46.2 — 4 parts
Introduction
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§ 1. The subject with which it is proposed to deal in the present work is that branch of Indian ethnography which is concerned with the social organisation of the population, or the dispersal of the latter into definite groups based upon considerations of race, tribe, blood or occupation. In the main, it takes the form of a descriptive survey of the return of castes and tribes obtained through the Census of 1901. The scope of the review, however, is limited to the population of India properly so called, and does not, therefore, include Burma or the outlying tracts of Balūchistān, Aden and the Andamans, by the omission of which the population dealt with is reduced from 294 to 283 millions.
c46.2.1
§ 2. It should be borne in mind from the outset, that but for the fact that this vast aggregate is spread over a continuous area between Cape Comorin and the Himālaya, and is politically under one rule, the population does not contain, as a whole, any of the essential elements of Nationality. Irrespective of racial differences, which, for reasons which will appear below, are to a great extent outside the Census inquiry, the Language, falling under no less than 147 heads, varies from Province to Province, each of the principal tongues having its dialects whose Shibboleth infallibly denotes the stranger a hundred miles or so from his native village. Society, again, is split up into almost innumerable self-contained divisions, under sacerdotal prohibition from intermarriage and domestic intercourse with each other. Religion, moreover, constitutes a well-defined distinction only in the case of creeds introduced from abroad, and the Faith returned under a single title, itself of foreign origin, by nearly three fourths of the population covers a vast and incoherent collection of beliefs and forms of worship, from the tribal animism of the primitive denizens of the forest to those involving the most refined metaphysical conceptions. Neither religion nor language, then will be here discussed more than cursorily, and solely in their bearings upon the ethnography of the country.
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Full information upon the philology and the main currents of religious belief of India will be found in special treatises upon those subjects in other volumes of this Encyclopaedia. Moreover, neither creed nor mother-tongue affords an adequate, or even an approximate indication of the great fundamental variety of race, a subject which also escapes the Census inquiry since the latter takes cognisance, perforce, of existing facts only, whilst race has been for centuries obscured by the operation of the two most prevalent forms of religious profession. The plastic and assimilative nature of Brāhmanism absorbs, whilst the uncompromising tendencies of Islam obliterate, distinctions of race equally with those of doctrine and ceremonial, and both have their effect in diminishing the popularity of the more restricted vernaculars. The veil of superficial uniformity which has thus been drawn over the actual elements from which Indian society has been formed can only be removed, and then but partially and on conjecture perhaps, by recourse to such ethnological evidence as may be gleaned from tradition and literature, with the aid, in certain directions, of anthropometrical investigation, so far as it has yet been carried. Purity of descent is no more a general characteristic of the population of India than it is of any other old civilisation in the Eastern Hemisphere in which geographical conformation admits of access from the North.
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In the Upper, or Continental, portion of India that purity is probably found in the upper classes of the Panjāb and Rājputāna. It exists, too, at the opposite end of the social ladder, amongst the Hill tribes of the Belt dividing the above portion of India from the Peninsula. South of that barrier, again, the population, except along parts of the West Coast, is comparatively homogeneous, and the main variations noticeable in it are not more marked than those which may reasonably be attributed to secular differences in habits and pursuits. The principal physical features of the country have to be taken into account in connection with its ethnography, as they have played a highly important part in determining the racial distribution of the population. To put it briefly, India can only be entered from the north by any considerable body of men by passes through the outlying ranges running southwards from the Himalaya in the western extension of that great system. In early times, no doubt, access was comparatively easy by routes debouching on the middle and lower Indus, over country which is now sandy desert, but which was once the abode of a considerable population. Similarly, on the eastern flank of the Himalaya, the trend of the lower ranges renders it possible for those accustomed to forest and mountain life to enter, though not in large bodies, the valley of the Brahmaputra or the eastern Gangetic Delta.
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Between the mountains and the next obstacle, the ranges of Central India, lie the vast alluvial plain of the Ganges and its tributaries and the open plains of the Five Rivers. The Central Belt, of considerable width in both hill and forest, though of insignificant height in comparison with the Himalaya, is yet sufficiently difficult to have proved an effective obstacle in the infancy of means of communication and of protective government. It also affords shelter to a considerable population of the wilder tribes, of old the guardians of the routes through their territory. As in the case of the Himālaya, however, the flank can be turned on both east and west, as the hills do not reach either coast, and the narrow strips intervening between the ranges and the sea consist of fertile and low-lying country, presenting little or no difficulty of passage on the East, at all events, to the great southern plains and the Dekkan plateau. These prominent natural features have now to be coordinated with the ethnology of India, so far as our knowledge of the latter extends.
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§ 3. The basic population of practically the whole country consists of a dark, short and broad-nosed race, with wavy, but not woolly, hair.
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In the present day it is represented by the wild tribes of the Central Belt, and in a higher state of culture by the population of the southern portions of the Peninsula. On philological grounds, the people south of the Belt are distinguished from those further north. The former, known as Dravidian, seem always to have kept to their present localities, except in a few cases where tribes have migrated into the Belt within historic times. The other race, to which the title of Kōl or Muṇḍā, is generally attached, is not known south of the forest Belt, in which it is at the present time concentrated under its distinctive tribal appellations. Formerly, however, it was spread over the whole of the great plains of Upper India, and, according to recent philological discoveries, it is akin, at least in language, to communities now settled on the borders of Assam, and far to the east of the Bay of Bengal. Some investigators, indeed, spread its former habitat over a still wider area. In the east and north-east of India, however, its identity has been obscured, if not obliterated, by the successive immigrations of people of Mongoloidic race from eastern Tibet and the head waters of the great Chinese rivers, whose main streams of migration have sought the sea by the valleys of the Irāwadi, Salwīn and Mekhong. In the Gangetic plain the type is traceable throughout the population, slightly, indeed, along the Jamnā, but more distinctly as the east is approached, and almost everywhere more prevalent as the social position is lower. This graduation is due to miscegenation between the Kōl, who, as far as ethnography is concerned, may be considered the autochthonous inhabitant of these tracts, and a taller and fairer race, which entered India by the passes of the North-west or the plains of Balūchistān. More than one such race are known to history, but in most cases their impact upon India was sharp but short; not, at any rate, of a character to leave a permanent impression upon the population. Such, for instance, was the connection of the Macedonians with the Panjāb. More durable though still in few cases amounting to settlement or colonisation, were the principalities set up from time to time in the North-west by scions of the race or races termed Scythian, of whom more will be said below. The only immigrating race of practical importance in connection with the present subject, is that of the Āryas, whose advent and progress are indirectly, and to a great extent conjecturally, revealed in the collection of their invocations handed down from perhaps as early as 3000 B C, in the Ṛgveda and the sacerdotal literature appended to it at later dates.
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§ 4. From these sources it appears that a number of cognate tribes of northern race and pastoral habits advanced across and along the Indus into the Panjāb, where they settled after dispossessing the dark tribes in occupation, relegating them to the position of helots in the service of the new communities. The Vedic Āryas seem to have lost touch in time with their original country across the snows, and to have developed their civilisation on lines peculiarly their own. Their progress eastwards from the Indus was that of expansion rather than of conquest, as the Kōl tribes seem after a time to have offered no serious resistance. The comparatively easy conditions of life in sub-tropical circumstances, and the immunity from attack in force from the west, which was secured by their mountain rampart, combined to soften the northern fibre of the race, and, in course of time, the supreme influence over the community was transferred from the chieftain to the priests, under whose auspices society was organised in a way that secured the absolute supremacy of their own order. The
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system thus established was so elastic in the matter of doctrine and worship, so simple in its demands upon traditional rites and customs, that without propaganda or formal conversion, it absorbed and continues to absorb into the pale of orthodoxy the religious and domestic observances of all the non-Āryan tribes with which it came into contact. As a necessary result, ethnical distinctions are thus obliterated by religious terminology, and, along with the tribal nomenclature, tribal languages have long tended to disappear from usage. This has been the case throughout the Gangetic valley, in Central India, and along the northern districts of the Western coast, in none of which tracts is creed or language an indication of racial origin. In the first named region, too, the physical characteristics of the masses denote clearly the admixture of Kōl with Āryan blood, a blend which, as above stated, grows more perceptible as the distance from the centres of Āryan settlement increases. The striking differences in this respect between the population of the Panjāb and northern Rājputāna and that east of the Jamnā appears to be due both to the stricter maintenance of the purity of the original northern stock, and also to the recruitment of that stock through the subsequent occupation of the first-mentioned tracts by communities from beyond the Himālaya. The most important of the latter are the various tribes known in ancient Indian literature by the probably generic title of S'aka, or Scythians, the greater portion of whom made their way south by way of Bactria. In more than one instance the dynasty establishing itself in India lasted so long and penetrated so far into the interior, that it is almost certain to have left a physical, as well as a political, impress upon the population. The case of the Yetha Hūnas, or White Huns, is one in point. After the usual vicissitudes north of the great ranges, they ruled in Central India for a considerable period, and, long before their overthrow, they seem to have been absorbed into the local chieftainry of Rājputāna and Mālvā. For several generations, too, a Pahlava, or Parthian, dynasty held sway on the lower Indus. The origin of most of these peoples was probably in the Mongoloid regions of north-east Asia, but recent investigators appear to consider that it is not improbable that at least one, and that an important dynasty in Northern India, was of Āryan race, driven southwards by the pressure on west-central Asia from the north-east. Whatever the actual race, the point relevant to the present question is that they were all northerners, and thus alien in blood and physique to the pre-Āryan inhabitants of India.
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§ 5. The connection of the Āryas with Dravidian India seems to have been of a different character from that established in the Gangetic region and the Panjāb. There does not appear to have been any colonisation, and little, if any, cross-breeding. It may be fairly conjectured that the open and fertile plains of the south-east afforded opportunities for civilisation upon local lines to an extent which, by the time the Āryas had spread to the means of access from the north, had placed the Dravidian communities in a much stronger position than the Kōl tribes of the Continental plains. From the Āryan additions to the vocabulary of the vernacular tongues and the special features of the Brāhmanism and the social system of the South it may be inferred that the influence of Āryan civilisation was there of a missionary, not political or military, character. The cloak of Brāhmanic orthodoxy was thrown over the local deities and ceremonial, and social divisions adopted the Brāhmanic organisation; but,
c46.8
beyond the introduction of a certain contingent of Brāhmans as teachers and advisers, no Āryan blood was infused into the population. Along the western coast, however, which is cut off from the Tamil country and the Dekkan by the Sahyādri range, tradition assigns a northern origin to several of the more important communities, and is confirmed by physical appearance and certain special customs.
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§ 6. It remains to mention the more modern accretions to the peoples of India received from foreign countries, but now permanently established in the land of their adoption.
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§ 7. Another community which, as regards the majority of its members, is the result of apostolic zeal rather than of immigration, is that of the Christians in India, of whom more than 91 per cent are native to the country and another 3 per cent of mixed European and native origin. The remainder are practically sojourners only, and comprise the European military and civil establishments, the mercantile communities of the larger cities, and the considerable staff of the railway systems. The conversion of certain localities, chiefly on the Malabar coast, is alleged to date from the first century of the Christian era; but until the arrival of the Portu-
c46.11
Of movements of this description which have had a racial significance, that which took place under the auspices of the followers of Muhammad first claims attention. It must be noted, however, that, on the whole, the extent to which it introduced fresh blood into the country is of far less importance than its religious and political influence. India contains, it is true, more Muslim than any other country in the world, and votaries of their faith are found in every part of it; but, except in the territories bordering upon the exclusively Muslim States of Afghānistān and Balūchistān, the community consists almost entirely of local converts from Brāhmanism, without any admixture of foreign blood. In Upper India, colonies of considerable importance were left by successive waves of invasion, especially in and round the cities founded or occupied by the conquering races. In the case of the Moghal dynasties, military and administrative centres were established far down the Ganges and on the western coast. The Arabs, too, have been in commercial intercourse with that coast from time immemorial, and have planted permanent settlements as far south as Malabar. The largest aggregates, however, of foreign Muslim are those recruited from the Indus frontier, and settled not far from that river. The conversion of Sindh and Kashmir has long been almost complete, and that of the eastern tracts of the great Delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra is in active progress, and already extends to more than half the population. With this exception, the proportion of Muslim diminishes, like that of the Āryan stock, southwards and eastwards from the Panjāb, and is very small amongst the Dravidians, and scarcely existent in the Central Belt of hills and forests. From the standpoint of ethnography it is not to be assumed that the results of conversion to Islām extend no further than the substitution of one dogma or ritual for another, as is the case, to a great extent, when a lower race is absorbed into Brāhmanism. The acceptance of the monotheistic creed entails, as a rule, material expansion of the matrimonial field and of the social horizon generally, with a wider range of diet also, all of which tend to differentiate, after a generation or two, the converted community from that to which it originally belonged, the modification extending to physical as well as to other attributes.
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guese, the propaganda was not extended far beyond the original settlements of the Nestorian Church. The Roman Catholic missionaries, under the political aegis of Goa, ranged over a large portion of Southern India, and, to this day, three fourths of the Christian population of India belongs to the Dravidian tracts, and more than half to the Church of Rome. The differentiation of the convert to this religion from his Brāhmanic fellows varies, usually according to the numbers and homogeneity of the local congregation. The breach with old custom is more marked where conversion is comparatively sporadic, and slighter in the case where Christianity has been hereditary for generations, or, if of comparatively recent acceptance, has been embraced by considerable numbers of more or less the same social position. This position, owing mainly to the restrictions of the caste system, is generally low, as the change is there not only less of a sacrifice to people who have no hope of rising, but may even bring with it some chances of ameliorating their lot.
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§ 8. At the very opposite pole to the Muslim and Christians in regard to recruitment by propaganda of their religion, stand the small but well defined body of Parsis. The original settlers of this race were driven out of Īrān by the Muslim in the 7th century, and the bulk of their descendants are still to be found in and round the tract upon which they first landed, on the coast north of Bombay. The opening of the latter by the British as the commercial emporium of western India, induced many families of Parsis to migrate thither, and from this centre they have spread all over the country to such an extent that, though their aggregate numbers is only just over 93 000, there is scarcely a large town in India in which a few families of Parsi traders are not resident. From their arrival in the country the Parsis made a point of keeping their race and ritual unsullied by intercourse with their neighbours, and to this particularism is due to some extent, their very slow rate of increase. It is remarkable, however, that with this strict maintenance of their customs and ritual, and their abstinence from intermarriage with Indians, the Parsis have long lost all hold of their original language, Pahlavī, except in their liturgy, and universally make use of Gujarātī as their mother-tongue.
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§ 9. In addition to the Christians, Parsis and Arabs, the west coast of India has also afforded refuge to successive small bodies of Israelites, of which the more ancient, at all events, hold the tradition that like the Parsis, they were driven by persecution from their fatherland. Like the sons of Īrān, again, they have kept up their religion and customs and lost their mother-tongue. The earliest colony is that of Cochin, on the Malabar coast, which dates from the Christian era, if not from an earlier period. It consists of two sections, the White, which has kept its breed pure, and gets its brides occasionally from Syria and Baghdād, and the Black, which is suspected of intermarriage with Indians or of the incorporation of local converts in days of yore, and is therefore socially avoided by the others. The total number of both communities does not exceed 1300, and is not increasing. Another Jewish settlement of apparently distinct origin from those further south, is that of the Beni-Israel, on the mainland near Bombay. The members thereof possess the physical characteristics of their race, and keep up their religious observances, though they have adopted the dress and language of their Marāṭhā neighbours. Unlike their compatriots in general, they are engaged chiefly in cultivation, and have taken to a considerable extent also to military service in the
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British Indian army. They have the same tradition as those of Cochin as to their exile from their country under persecution, but seem to have a laxer grip of their past than the latter, and no inclination for alliances with those of their race beyond the seas. In numbers they greatly surpass their fellow exiles. The largest community of Jews in India is the comparatively recent commercial settlement in Bombay and to a less extent in Calcutta, of traders from Baghdād, who, whilst permanently settled in their place of business, keep in close touch with their old home.
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§ 10. The above sketch of the ethnological aspect of the subject will serve to indicate this fact of primary relevance, that, north of the Dravidian country, the demarcation of race is only ascertainable in the case of the communities under tribal constitution, such as the Kōl of the Central Belt, the Mongoloid tribes of the North-east, and the Muslim immigrants of the North-west. The undoubted racial difference between the fair people of Rājputāna and the Panjāb and the masses further east is obscured, for the purposes of ethnography, by the superstructure of Brāhmanism under which it now lies buried. This survey would be incomplete, however, without some exposition of the distribution of creed and language, even though it be restricted to mere numbers. First, then, in regard to Mothertongue, it will be seen from Table I given on the next page, that no more than about one person in a thousand returns any language not peculiar to India or its immediate vicinity, and that one, is probably a European sojourner. Nine in a thousand speak a frontier dialect, mainly Pashtū, Balūchī, Tibetan or one of the almost innumerable languages of the hill-tracts between India and Burma. The languages distinguishable as restricted respectively to special tribes are returned by some 6¹/₄ millions; and, on the whole, 96 per cent speak Indo-Āryan languages or Dravidian, other than those of the hill-tribes. Appended to this volume is a Table showing the territorial distribution of each of the principal tongues, from which a conception may be formed of the great linguistic diversity of the country.
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§ 11. It will be inferred from what has been stated above, that the diversity of religion is by no means equal to that of language, so far as nomenclature is in question. In Table II on the next page, the numbers of those professing the main forms of belief are given, along with their relative proportion to the total population.
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It must be understood that the term „Tribal Animism“ refers to the religion returned under the tribal name by those who adhere to none of the wider creeds. Again, the title „Hindūism“ is only recognised by the community to whom it is applied as denoting a distinction between them and the foreigner. The word was first used by the Muslim invaders for all Indian creeds in which the uncompromising Unitarianism of the follower of the Prophet detected signs of the worship of idols. It is here taken in its conventional sense of „the collection of rites, worships, beliefs, traditions and mythologies that are sanctioned by the sacred books and ordinances of the Brāhmans, and are propagated by Brāhmanic teaching“ (Lyall). In practice, this amounts to the application of the title to any Brāhmanic community that has not returned one of the more specific denominations which can legitimately be included under the general name. Consequently, the great mass of the people come under it. The prevalence of the different professions of faith in the principal territorial divisions of India is shown in a Table appended to this volume.
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I.
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| Linguistic Class | No. of Languages returned | Population Total | Population Per 100,000 | Population returning Languages native to Indian Frontiers | Population returning Languages native to India | Population returning Languages native to Foreign Countries |
| I. Kōl-Khervārī | 10 | 3,179,273 | 1,124 | — | 3,179,273 | — |
| II. Dravidian . . | 14 | 56,315,740 | 19,911 | 47,943 | 56,267,797 | — |
| III. Āryo-Dravidian | * | 344,143 | 122 | — | 344,143 | — |
| IV. Indo-Āryan . | 20 | 219,352,079 | 77,556 | 54,425 | 219,297,654 | — |
| V. Īrānian. . . | 6 | 1,388,223 | 491 | 1,369,133 | — | 19,090 |
| VI. Tibeto-Burman | 62 | 1,804,776 | 638 | 960,585 | 844,191 | — |
| VII. Mōn . . . | 2 | 177,854 | 63 | 27 | 177,827 | — |
| VIII. Tai . . . | 6 | 3,366 | 1 | 3,366 | — | — |
| IX. Mongolian . | 4 | 3,566 | 1 | — | — | 3,566 |
| X. Malay . . | 1 | 26 | — | — | — | 26 |
| XI. Semitic . . | 3 | 19,726 | 7 | — | — | 19,726 |
| XII. Hamitic . | † | 185 | — | — | — | 185 |
| XIII. European. | 23 | 243,109 | 86 | — | — | 243,109 |
| Total returned | 151 | 282,832,066 | 100,000 | 2,435,479 | 280,110,885 | 285,702 |
| *Not returned* . . | — | 158,997 | — | — | — | — |
| Population . . | — | 282,991,063 | — | — | — | — |
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¹ * Gipsy dialects, undistinguishable.
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² † Returned in generic terms, as Abyssinian, Negro etc.
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II.
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| Religion | Population | Proportion to 100,000 |
| **I. Religions native to India** . . . . | 218,797,808 | 77,316 |
| A. Tribal Animism . . . . | 8,176,560 | 2,890 |
| B. Offshoots of Brāhmanism. | | |
| (1) Hindūism. . . . . | 206,715,341 | 73,046 |
| (2) Brāhma and Ārya Samāj . | 96,054 | 34 |
| (3) Sikhism . . . . . | 2,185,330 | 772 |
| (4) Jainism . . . . . | 1,333,820 | 471 |
| (5) Buddhism . . . . | 290,703 | 103 |
| **II. Religions of Foreign Origin** . . . | 64,193,255 | 22,684 |
| C. Mazdaism . . . . . . | 93,449 | 33 |
| D. Judaism . . . . . . | 14,436 | 5 |
| E. Islām . . . . . . | 61,315,475 | 21,667 |
| F. Christianity . . . . . | 2,767,235 | 978 |
| G. Others . . . . . . | 2,660 | 1 |
| **Total** . . . | 282,991,063 | 100,000 |
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§ 12. One of the most interesting ethnographical questions entering into the Census inquiry is that of the rate at which Brāhmanism is in name, at least, absorbing the Animistic tribal population. Unfortunately, this cannot be fully solved from the returns, owing to the different interpretations given to the instructions for recording tribal creeds and languages. The enumerators, or those who instructed them, adopted somewhat arbitrary standards of orthodoxy and philology, and what was set down as tribal in one tract appeared under the more general title in another, just across a political frontier. Speaking generally, the tendency seems to have been to return the tribal terms wherever the community in question is in predominant occupation of a continuous and well-defined region, and is thus in comparative isolation from the civilisation of the plains. Where, on the other hand, the tribe is interlaced with the Brāhmanical peasantry, the distinction was less noticed, and probably the line is in reality less discernible. It may be interesting, in spite of the above drawbacks, to learn what the conditions are as set forth at the Census, so a further Table, in which the proportion in which each tribe returned the tribal religion and language is given in the Appendix.
Linked texts (1)
- Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit