Ancient Indian Historical Tradition c30.74

c30.74

According to tradition in chapter XXIV the Ailas or Aryans began at Allahabad, conquered and spread out north-west, west and south, and had by Yayāti’s time occupied precisely the region famed as Madhyadeśa. They possessed that Mid-land definitely and made it their own thoroughly, so that it was ‘their true pure home’, as Sir G. Grierson describes it linguistically.² They expanded afterwards into the Panjab and East Afghanistan, into West India and the north-west Dekhan, into East and South Bihar and into Bengal—precisely as he finds the Aryans did linguistically in those very regions, which he calls the ‘Outer Band’. ³ Also it has been pointed out that the Ayodhyā realm was non-Aila, was not subdued by the Ailas and was only influenced by them. This agrees exactly with his linguistic inference, that in Oudh ‘there is a mixture [of language] of the same nature, although here the Midland language has not established itself so firmly as it has in the west and south’. ⁴