The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c15.196

v1.c15.196

This type is regarded as ‘probably a blend of Dravidian and Mongoloid elements, with a strain of Indo-Āryan blood in the higher groups.’ The region in which it prevails lay beyond the geographical ken of the earlier literature. It comes into view first in the later literature (the epics and Purāṇas) when it was occupied by a number of peoples among whom the Vaṅgas (from whom Bengal has inherited its name) and the Kaliṅgas of Orissa were the chief. On the north-west it is separated from the Aryo-Dravidian area by what is now also the political dividing-line between Bihār and Bengal. In regard to this limit, as marking the extent of Indo-Āryan influence at an early date, ethnology and literature are fully in agreement. In the Atharvaveda the Magadhas of the Patna and Gayā Districts, and the Aṅgas of the Monghyr and Bhāgalpur Districts in Southern Bihār, are mentioned in a manner which indicates that they were among the most distant of known peoples (see *Vedic Index*, II, p. 116); while a legend in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa (I, 4, 1, 10 ff.) preserves the memory of the spread of Brāhmanism from the west into Videha, or Tirhut in Northern Bihār. The traces of Indo-Āryan descent, which have been observed in the higher social grades of Bengal and Orissa, must be due to colonisation at a later date.