The men of Hindustan on the Ganges are the tallest, fairest, and most warlike and manly of the natives of Hindustan proper ; they wear the turban, and a dress resembling that of the Mahomedans ; their houses are tiled, and built in compact villages in open tracts ; their food is unleavened wheaten bread.
Food.—Along the lowlands of the southern Peninsula, as in similar districts of Further India and China, rice is the favourite article of food with all whose means afford it ; but the multi tudes use it only as an occasional meal, and subsist on the pulses and millets and wheat. They are skilled cultivators of the soil, and by irrigation channels, canals, and tanks of every size, have supplemented the natural rains, producing largely for domestic use and for export, cinchona, cotton, coffee, hemps, indigo, jute, lac, opium, salt, silk, saltpetre, tea, and wheat; and, since the arrival of the British, coal has been largely worked, and tea and coffee have become great industries. Their domestic animals are the oxen and buffalo horned cattle, with camels, horses, asses, mules, goats, and sheep, and they have domesticated the elephant and the yak, and have trained the various hawks used in falconry ; they are brave and skilful fishers, and the sea could supply millions with food if the salt laws could be framed to permit its use for curing. Much loss of human life and domestic animals is caused by crocodiles, snakes, leopard, panther, bear, and tiger. Hindustan yields alum, gold, silver, iron, lead, precious stones, in which, as also in the copper and brass wares, they are skilled workers, and in much of their art they continue unrivalled. The raw materials for glass making are abundant, and they produce beauti fully-tinted bangles for the wrist. Their weavers supply the whole labouring community with the useful cotton and woollen cloths ; though Europe and America have been sending to Hindustan the cotton fabrics now used by the well-to-do classes, the strong cottons of the labouring classes are still holding their own. The British have introduced spinning mills, they are weaving by steam-power. In the finest muslins, they still sur pass all other nations ; and in their silks, silk and cotton fabrics, carpets, mushru, kimkhab, and shawls are producing articles the admiration of the world.
Languages.—There are two learned languages, Sanskrit and Pali, in which the religious books of the Hindus and the Buddhists are written. The Buddhist Scriptures of Tibet, Mongolia, Pegu, Ava, Siam, Kambogia, Cochin-China, and Ceylon, are all in the Pali, and the Vedas of the Hindus are iu a form of the Sanskrit tongue. The Koran and the Hadis are religious books of the Mahomed ans. Though the Koran has been translated into most languages, it is still retained in the Arabic by most of the people of that religion, but neither Arabic, Sanskrit, nor Pali are vernacular, and are understood only by the very learned. Throughout Northern Hindustan, the Hindi is the language of the people, but it has numerous dialects, designated by the names of the districts in which they are spoken, Panjabi, Multani, etc. One of these, the Brij -Basha or Brij -Bhaka, is the form spoken near Mathura, and takes its name from Brij, the tract about Mathura and Brinda ban, where, in the Hindu mythologies, Krishna sported with the Gopin. The Rangari or Rangri dialect is bounded by the Indus on the west, Bundelkhand on the east, the Satpura Hills on the south, and Jeypore, Jodhpur, and Jeysulmir on the north. A language of mixed origin is in use amongst the Mahomedans of India, and em ployed by all races as the ordinary lingua franca in their intercourse with the people of the country. It was first reduced to writing and grammar by Dr. John B. Gilchrist of the Bengal Medical De partment. It is called Hindustani, also Urdu, and is essentially Hindi, with large admixtures of words of Sanskrit origin or of Persian and Arabic, according as the speakers or writers are Hindu or Mahomedan. At present the Hindustani or Urdu, the Panjabi, and the Persian are written and printed in the same character ; but the Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Canarese, Chinese, Gujerati, Hindi, Mahrati, Malealam, Malay, Siamese, Singhalese, Tamil, and Telugu are all distinct tongues, each written and printed in a separate character. In the south of India, the Arabic numerals as used in Europe have been generally introduced into Government accounts. This was on the recommendation of Sir Erskine Perry ; ar it has been supposed possible to use the llomr and Italian character for the other tongues.