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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 85
A few Words about the People of India
A few Words about the People of India.
It is generally believed that in very early times India was inhabited by a race of the same stock as that to which the Chinese belong, viz., the Mongols, and that about 1,600 years B.C. a colony of the Aryan race, the same race from which we are descended, came down from the high plateau of the north into the plains of Northern India. This colony, having conquered the Mongols, settled on the great plains of the Indus and Ganges, driving the Mongols to the table-land of the Deccan and to the Carnatic, over which some centuries later they spread.
Broadly speaking, there are two distinct races in India.
| 1. | —The Aryan of the North, whose language is related to the Sanscrit.—To these belong the Bengali and Assamese in the north-east, the Hindus proper of the plains of the Ganges, the vigorous Rajput tribes of the North-West Provinces, the dark forbidding Jats, the Sikhs of the Punjab (the best cavalry in Asia), the Mahrattas northwest of the Deccan. |
| 2. | The Dravidian of the South, the principal groups of which are the Tamil and the Telugu speaking groups. |
Between these two are such native tribes as the Bheels and the Gonds, the Todas, the Badagas.
Specially compare the different races in the Ethnological groups, as to size, character, dress, and notice how superior the representatives of the Aryan stock are to the purely native tribes.