History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v1.c8.5

v1.c8.5

That the Indian people in their higher and many lower strata also, are Aryan by race, nobody can now deny although mixture to a certain extent with the Dravidians, the original inhabitants of the land, has taken place. The prevailing type, however, was then and is still Aryan. Measurements of the head and the nose taken at the census of 1901 have indubitably proved that the people of the Panjab and Rajputana are unmistakably Aryan and those of the United Provinces and the Bombay Presidency are mixed Aryans and Dravidians. The prominence and length of the nose of the people of India is remarked even by Hiuen Tsang. "They have long noses and large eyes". (page 151). Bāṇa too refers to the same peculiarity when he makes the poetical remark on Skanda Gupta's nose that it was as long as the pedigree of his master's family.* The people of India were then thus unmistakably Aryan and it is therefore strange to observe that European scholars are still labouring under the old bias of tracing the origin of the Kshatriyas of India to Scythic and Hunic peoples. This purity of race was greatly preserved in India in the higher castes as well as the lower owing to restrictions imposed on marriage by inveterate custom and legal precept. Hiuen Tsang himself remarks that Indians marry within the caste, and there are several classes within the four castes according to their degree of purity. Although outside races like the Śakas and the Hūṇas came to India these were always treated as separate classes of Kshatriyas and they rarely married with the old Kshatriyas. This fact coupled with the paucity of the foreigners accounts for the still distinctly preserved Aryan type in the peoples of the Panjab and Rajputana though these parts had especially been the scenes of the inroads of foreign peoples.