History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v1.c23.19

v1.c23.19

This people belonged to the first race of Aryan invaders or the solar race according to our view. The second race of Aryan invaders the lunar race people came subsequently through Gilgit into the valley of the Ganges like a wedge in the Indo-Aryan land then extending from Gāndhāra to Ayodhyā along the foot of the Himālāyas, a tract which has a milder climate than the parts west-wards. The new invaders could not expand either in the Panjab or in Oudh and hence spread southwards along the banks of the Jumna as far as the Vindhya range of mountains i.e. from Jubbulpore and Ujjain in the south to Allahabad and Ghazipur in the north. In this tract, however, the aboriginal population was denser and stronger and it remained practically the cultivator of the soil except in Kurukshetra, the tract where the lunar Indo-Aryans first settled. The condition of this southern tract, therefore, differed from that of the Panjab as the people consisted of two layers of population, the lower Dravidian and the higher Aryan. While the warriors and preists and traders were Aryan the cultivators and the artisans and labourers were Dravidian. The Aryans in this tract intermarried to a larger extent with the lower Dravidian population and hence grew up that mixture of Aryan and Dravidian races which characterises the population of the present United and Central provinces (as noted by Sir H. Risley.)