Poplations. —The regions thus defined are occupied by races of Negroid, Mongoloid, Aryan, Turanian, and Semitic descent, and this article is restricted the ethnic relations of the populations.
It is generally accepted that a great part of the inhabitants of Hindustan and the Peninsula are of Scythic, Mongoloid, or Turanian race, and were the earlier occupants of the country. This con clusion has been come to from their linguistic and physical affinities. Some of them seem to have been pastoral tribes from the north and north-west, who were subsequently pushed aside or pressed farther on by races in possession of a higher civilisation and a knowledge of agriculture. The successive arrivals have been supposed by Dr. Caldwell to have been—first and earliest, the Kol, Santal, Bhil, etc., who, he supposes, may have entered British India from the north-east. After them, but from the north-west, came the Dravidian races, who now occupy the south of the Peninsula, into which they voluntarily migrated or were driven by the pressure of subsequent hordes. Then there came Scythian or non-Aryan immigrants, also from the north - west, whose language afterwards united with the Sanskrit to form the Prakrit dialect of Northern India ; and lastly came the Aryans.
From time immemorial the region between the Euphrates and the Indus has been held by suc cessive Turanian, Iranian, and Semitic conquerors. In historic times Scythic tribes have invaded India,—Getse, Takshak, Saks;, Su, Yu-chi, Naga, Gbakar, Jat, Asi, Kathi, Rajpali, Hun, and Kamari. They seem to have brought with them a worship, out of which ultimately was formed the Buddhist religion as promulgated by Sakya Muni. These Indo-Scythic tribes also brought with them their northern custom of using tribal designations, taken from the names of animals,— Varaha, the hog • Numri or Lumri, the fox ; Takshak, the snake ; Langaha, the wolf ; Cutch waha, the tortoise ; Aswa or Asi, the horse ; Sisodya, from Sisoo, the hare, ete.,—and several of them still hold large possessions in the western parts of Central India, Sind, and Baluchistan. Some of them even carried their names into Europe. • Asi was the term by which the Getw, Yeut, or Jat were known when they invaded Scandinavia and founded Yeutland or Jatland ; and the Asi and other nomades who took Bactria from the Greeks, Mr. Prinsep considers to have been Scythians of Azes, who overpowered the Greek dynasties in Sogdiana. and Northern Bactria, between 140 and 130 B.C. And Asia seems to have been so called in ancient times from this great Asi race, whose name is said by Remusat to have been applied by the Chinese almost pro miscuously to the nations between the Jaxartes and Oxus, as far south as Slamareand. In one of
his quotations it is applied, to the people of Khokand, and in another to the people of Bokhara. Kanishka, B.C. 40, formed a powerful Scythic dynasty in the N.W. But Vikrarnaditya, king of Ujjain, B.C. 57, stemmed o;' Scythic inva sion, and in A.D. 78 Salivahana c 'Iced another inroad ; yet during the next seven f Rturies the Sah, the Gupta, and Valabhi establis c dynasties in Northern and Western Indies.
The Dravidian race preceded the U1 dian, Tibetan, and Aryan, and their language mailed 'everywhere to the southward of the ryas.
Their route seems to have been from the north-west, where, Chevalier Bunsen says, the two great nations once centred, the one in the Altai and the pasture land towards the Himalaya, the other having its centre in the Ural mountains, and now appear in Asia as the subdued or primary element, as the sub dued substratum of Iranian civilisation ; and the aboriginal languages of India which attained their full development in the Dekhan dialects belong to that stock. Also Dr. W. W. Hunter's philological investigations permit the conclusion that the fragmentary peoples still to be seen in India, who have preserved their ethnical identity in sequestered wilds, or have merged as helots or low castes into the lowland Hindus, form the ddbris of a widely spread primitive race ; and from the northern shores of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, traces have been exhumed by him of ethnical evolutions, and the ebb and flow of human speech far more ancient, and on a grander scale, than the pre-historic migrations of the Indo-Germanic stock. Successive Turanian and Irano-Semitic races have iu turn influenced all the great outlying southern provinces in Africa, India, and Ultra India ; but from the formation of the language, the older intrusive people, the Scythico-Semitic and pastoral, found India less Scythic and more African than it became under their influence. And the land routes from the north-east, north, and north west were not the only highways to the East Indies. Mr. Logan is of opinion that several of the races now dwelling in the south and east of Asia, in British India, Ultra-India, and Indonesia, reached their present localities by sea. Certainly, amongst all the foreign influences acting on the south of India proper, of which the presence can be clearly traced, two are of the widest extent. The first is entirely African and Indo-African in its character. It embraced the whole Indian Archipelago, Australia, and Papuanesia, and the races to which it must be referred appear to have prevailed along the shores and islands of the Indian Ocean from Africa to Polynesia, their limits being those of the monsoons.