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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 85
India
India.
| 1. | The Mountain System of the Himalaya in the north, which contains in its western portion the State of Kashmir. |
| 2. | A large plain south of the Himalaya, through which the Ganges, with its tributary the Jumna, flows, and which includes Lower Bengal (Assam) and the North-West Provinces. |
| 3. | Another plain, through a portior of which the Indus, with its five tributaries, flows, and which includes the Punjab and the Western Rajputana States. |
| 4. | A northern table-land, between the Aravali Hills and the river Nerbudda, which includes Central India and the Eastern Rajputana States. |
| 5. | A table-land called the Deccan, supported, as it were, on the Eastern and Western Ghats, and which includes the Central Provinces, Hyderabad, Mysore, and Coorg, and a portion of the Bombay Presidency. |
| 6. | The Carnatic, or low country, extending from Cape Comorin to the river Kistna, and which includes a portion of the Madras Presidency. |
Some idea of the size of Hindoostan.—From the line of the Himalaya southwards to its extreme cape on the Indian Ocean, India occupies a space more than fifteen times as large as our Island of Britain, and a journey across it, from north to south, or from east to west, would require half a year, if one travelled ten miles a day. The Himalaya are as distant from Cape Comorin as Iceland is from Spain.
Some idea of the Population of India.—If Her Majesty's Indian subjects had filed before her at the rate of fifteen persons each minute, for twelve hours each day, from the first day of her reign, the whole of them would only have passed in this year of her Jubilee.
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Thus, it will be easily understood that in Hindoostan there must be great variety of Race, of Climate, of Productions, and of occupation for the people.
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.