CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London : FETTER LANE, E.C. C. F. CLAY, Manager Edinburgh : 100, PRINCES STREET Berlin : A. ASHER AND CO. Leipzig : F. A. BROCKHAUS New York : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombay and Calcutta : MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. All rights reserved Brāhmans ( Mirzapur district ) THE PEOPLES OF INDIA BY J. D. ANDERSON, M.A. Teacher of Bengali in the University of Cambridge, formerly of the Indian Civil Service Cambridge: at the University Press 1913 Cambridge : PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT

The writing of this little book has been delayed by the hope I once cherished of incorporating in it some of the results of the Indian Census of 1911. This desire was inevitable in the case of a retired Indian official, who, like most of his kind, has taken a small part in one or more of the decennial numberings of the Indian people. In this country, a Census affords material chiefly for the calculations and theories of the statistician, and the Registrar-General is not regarded as an expert in

It is necessary, once more, to remind the reader that the peninsula of India has an area and population roughly equal to the area and population of Europe without Russia. Everyone who has learnt geography at school is familiar with the great triangle, its base in the soaring Himalayan heights in the north, its apex jutting into the Indian Ocean, and marked by the satellite island of Ceylon. To the north, then, is the great mountain barrier, a tangled mass of snowy peaks, glaciers and snowfields,

Curiously enough, the systematic enquiry into the physical race-characteristics of the Indian peoples was due to a daring assertion by Mr Nesfield, of the Indian Educational Service, to the effect that, so far as physical signs go, there is practically only one Indian race and one Indian caste. This was a hasty but quite natural generalisation from experience of a part of India, the United Provinces, which is in the heart of the Aryan settlement in the Gangetic do-āb (the area between "two river

These are, as aforesaid, the languages of Southern India. Two of them survive further to the north in Chota Nagpore and the Sonthal Parganas, where they exist side by side with Mundā dialects. One curiously isolated Dravidian language is Brāhui, an extraordinary survival, far to the north-west, in the midst of the Iranian and Muhammadan languages of Baluchistan. The Sanskrit writers knew of two great southern languages which they named the Andhra-bhāshā and the Drāvida-bhāshā. The first correspo

We now return to the fascinating story of the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages over the north and west of the peninsula. In the tale, captured from the patient study of words and idioms, and finding only occasional support from legend, and practically none from history, since history had not yet begun to exist, we get a singularly moving and interesting picture of the social existence of vanished tribes of men. We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men whom we may

Finally, I must say a few words about the Indo-Chinese and Mon-Khmer languages. I spent most of my official life among people speaking these languages, and find, somewhat shamefacedly, that Sir G. A. Grierson makes me responsible for sundry vocabularies compiled in my distant youth. Naturally, I feel a personal interest in the people of the north-eastern border, and am tempted to enlarge on their qualities of speech and character. But I have left myself little space, and the Mongoloid races of t

(1) Animism. At the base of all the religions, perhaps at the base of all religions all over the world, lies a mass of primitive beliefs, not perhaps yet consciously classed by the holders of them as distinctly religious, which are called by the question-begging name of Animism. By this statement, I mean merely that many of the more ignorant and simple folk who profess and call themselves Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muhammadans, or Christians, are in fact at the animistic stage of intellectual evo

The standard authority on the modern languages of India is Sir G. A. Grierson's work on The Languages of India (Calcutta, 1903). It will, however, be superseded by the book which Sir G. A. Grierson is now writing on the basis of the further materials collected in his Linguistic Survey , and in the Census Reports of 1911. The eleven volumes hitherto published of the Survey itself give specimens of the Indian languages and skeleton grammars....

Professor Macdonell's History of Sanskrit Literature (Heinemann, 1905) contains a fascinating and readable account of the Hindu scriptures from the Vedic ages up to modern times. Professor Hopkins' Religions of India and India Old and New deal with both the literature and the actual working of Indian religions. Mr W. Crooke's Native Races of Northern India is a popular account of the Aryan region, and Mr Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India . Madras, Government Press. 1908. Though it i