DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16243#0038
4
PEOPLE OF INDIA
of racial distinctions which conquest brings in its train.
Isolated hill ranges and lofty plateaux, guarded by fever-
haunted forests and offering no prospect of profit or plunder,
furnish an abiding refuge for tribes which are compact enough
to emigrate en masse. Lastly, a coast line almost devoid of
sheltering harbours, while it may invite a daring invader, fails
to foster the maritime skill and enterprise which alone can
repulse his landing.
For the internal factors—the races which lived and struggled
, „ within the environment roughly sketched
Internal Factors. , , , .
above—we must depend to a great extent
upon speculative data. Living organisms are more complex
and less stable than their material surroundings. The hills
may not be everlasting, as poets have imagined, but they out-
live countless generations of men, and the changes that time
works in their structure do impress on them some record,
however imperfect, of processes which it has taken ages to
complete. Man alone passes and leaves nothing behind. India
in particular is conspicuous for the absence of the pre-historic
evidence of which ethnologists in Europe have made such
admirable use. There are no cave deposits, no sepulchral
mounds or barrows, no kitchen middens, no lake dwellings,
no ancient fortified towns such as modern research is now
unearthing in Greece,* and no sculptured bones or weapons
portraying the vicissitudes of the life of primitive man. The
climate and the insects have obliterated all perishable vestiges
of the past, and what nature may have spared a people devoid
of the historic sense has made no effort to preserve. To fill
the blank we are thrown back mainly on conjecture. Yet in
India conjecture starts from a more solid basis than in the
progressive countries of the Western world. For here we have
before our eyes a society in many respects still primitive,
which preserves, like a palimpsest manuscript, survivals of
immemorial antiquity. In a land where all things always are
the same we are justified in concluding that what is happening
now must have happened, very much in the same way, through-
out the earlier stages of human society in India. Observation
of the present is our best guide to the reconstruction of
the past.
* In an instinctive paper recently published Professor Kabbadias, Director of Antiquities
in Greece, shows that in pre-historic times fortified towns occupied the place taken in other
countries by pile-dwellings, Man, Deer., 1904, No. 112.
PEOPLE OF INDIA
of racial distinctions which conquest brings in its train.
Isolated hill ranges and lofty plateaux, guarded by fever-
haunted forests and offering no prospect of profit or plunder,
furnish an abiding refuge for tribes which are compact enough
to emigrate en masse. Lastly, a coast line almost devoid of
sheltering harbours, while it may invite a daring invader, fails
to foster the maritime skill and enterprise which alone can
repulse his landing.
For the internal factors—the races which lived and struggled
, „ within the environment roughly sketched
Internal Factors. , , , .
above—we must depend to a great extent
upon speculative data. Living organisms are more complex
and less stable than their material surroundings. The hills
may not be everlasting, as poets have imagined, but they out-
live countless generations of men, and the changes that time
works in their structure do impress on them some record,
however imperfect, of processes which it has taken ages to
complete. Man alone passes and leaves nothing behind. India
in particular is conspicuous for the absence of the pre-historic
evidence of which ethnologists in Europe have made such
admirable use. There are no cave deposits, no sepulchral
mounds or barrows, no kitchen middens, no lake dwellings,
no ancient fortified towns such as modern research is now
unearthing in Greece,* and no sculptured bones or weapons
portraying the vicissitudes of the life of primitive man. The
climate and the insects have obliterated all perishable vestiges
of the past, and what nature may have spared a people devoid
of the historic sense has made no effort to preserve. To fill
the blank we are thrown back mainly on conjecture. Yet in
India conjecture starts from a more solid basis than in the
progressive countries of the Western world. For here we have
before our eyes a society in many respects still primitive,
which preserves, like a palimpsest manuscript, survivals of
immemorial antiquity. In a land where all things always are
the same we are justified in concluding that what is happening
now must have happened, very much in the same way, through-
out the earlier stages of human society in India. Observation
of the present is our best guide to the reconstruction of
the past.
* In an instinctive paper recently published Professor Kabbadias, Director of Antiquities
in Greece, shows that in pre-historic times fortified towns occupied the place taken in other
countries by pile-dwellings, Man, Deer., 1904, No. 112.