The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c29.194

c29.194

In this place I desire to draw attention to the fact, long suspected and now established by good evidence, that the foreign immigrants into Rājputāna and the upper Gangetic provinces were not utterly destroyed in the course of their wars with the native powers. Many, of course, perished, but many more survived, and were merged in the general population, of which no inconsiderable part is now formed by their descendants. The foreigners, like their forerunners the Śakas and Yüe-chi, universally yielded to the wonderful assimilative power of Hinduism, and rapidly became Hinduized. Clans or families which succeeded in winning chieftainship were admitted readily into the frame of Hindu polity as Kshatriyas or Rājpūts, and there is no doubt that the Parihārs and many other famous Rājpūt clans of the north were developed out of the barbarian hordes which poured into India during the fifth and sixth centuries. The rank and file of the strangers became Gūjars and other castes, ranking lower than the Rājpūts in the scale of precedence. Farther to the south, various indigenous, or ‘aboriginal’, tribes and clans underwent the same process of Hinduized social promotion, in virtue of which Gonds, Bhars, Kharwārs, and so forth emerged as Chandēls, Rāthōrs, Gaharwārs, and other well-known Rājpūt clans, duly equipped with pedigrees reaching back to the sun and moon. The process will be discussed further and illustrated in some detail when I come to deal with the mediaeval dynasties of the north.