When we turn to their literature we find nothing to encourage any hope that we may penetrate further back into their history than we have hitherto been able to do. Dr. Caldwell, the best and latest authority on the subject, ascribes the oldest work in the Tamil, or any southern language, to the 8th or 9th century of our era,[31] and that even then can hardly be called native, as it undoubtedly belongs to the Jains, who are as certainly a northern sect. According to the same authority, it was superseded by a Vaishnava literature about the 12th or 13th century, and that again made way for one of Saiva tendency about the latter date. There is no trace of any Buddhist literature in the south, and nothing, consequently, that would enable us to connect the history of the south with the tolerably well-ascertained chronology of Ceylon or Northern India, nor am I aware of the existence of any ancient Buddhist monuments in the south which would help us in this difficulty.[32]

Not having passed through Bactria, or having lived in contact with any people making or using coins, the Dravidians have none of their own, and consequently that source of information is not available. Whatever hoards of ancient coins have been found in the Madras Presidency have been of purely Roman origin, brought there for the purpose of trade, and buried to protect them from spoliation.

The inscriptions, which are literally innumerable all over the Presidency, are the one source from which we can hope that new light may be thrown on the history of the country, but none of those hitherto brought to light go further back than the 5th or 6th century, and it is not clear that earlier ones may be found.[33] It is, at all events, the most hopeful field that lies open to future explorers in these dark domains. There is nothing, however, that would lead us to expect to find any Tamil or native inscription in the country extending so far back as the age of Constantine. Those on the raths at Mahavellipore, or the caves at Badami, which may be as old as the age of Justinian, are in Sanscrit, and consequently look more like an evidence of the northern races pushing southward than of the southern races extending themselves northward, or being sufficiently advanced in civilisation to erect for themselves the monuments on which these inscriptions are found.

From a study of the architecture of the south we arrive at precisely the same conclusions as to the antiquity of Dravidian civilisation that Dr. Caldwell arrived at from a study of their literature. The only important Buddhist monument yet discovered in the Presidency is that at Amravati, on the Kistnah,[34] but that is avowedly a foreign intrusion. It was a colony or settlement formed by the northern Buddhists at or near their port of departure for Java and their eastern settlements. The rock-cut temples at Mahavellipore and Badami seem to be the works of northern Hindus advancing southward in the 5th or 6th century, and engraving the evidence of their religion on the imperishable rock. So far as is yet known, no indigenous native temple has been brought to light, built by any native king, or with inscriptions in any southern tongue, whose date can be carried further back than the 8th century. From that time forward their building activity was enormous. The style culminated in the 16th and 17th centuries, to perish in the 18th, under the influence of a foreign and unsympathetic invader. It is, however, by no means impossible that future investigation may enable us to fill up a portion at least of the gap that exists between the 5th and the 8th century. There may be buildings yet undescribed which are older than any we now know. But if they do carry us back to the 5th century, which is more than can reasonably be expected, they are still seven or eight centuries behind what we know for certainty to have existed in the north. There we have buildings and caves certainly, extending back to B.C. 250, and it seems by no means impossible that with sculptures, coins, and inscriptions, and written documents, we may some day be able to bridge over the gulf that exists between the death of Buddha and the accession of the Mauryas. In other words, the materials for history in the North of India carry us back with the same relative degree of certainty for more than a thousand years beyond what those found in the south enable us to trace of her history or her arts.

When the history of the south does acquire something like consistency it takes the form of a triarchy of small states. The eldest and most important, that of Mádura—so called after Muttra on the Jumna—was also the most civilised, and continued longest as a united and independent kingdom.

The Chola rose into power on the banks of the Cauvery, and to the northward of it, about the year 1000, though no doubt they existed as a small state about Conjeveram for some centuries before that time. The third, the Chera, were located in the southern Mysore country, and probably extending to the coast as early as the 4th or 5th century, and gradually worked their way northward, and became so powerful that there is reason for believing that during the dark ages of the north (750 to 950) their power extended to the Nerbudda, and it may be to them that we owe the Kylas and other excavations at Ellora, erected in the southern style about that time. They were, however, superseded, first by the Cholas, about A.D. 1000, and finally eclipsed by the Hoisala Bellalas, a century or so afterwards. These last became the paramount power in the south, till their capital—Hullabîd—was taken, and their dynasty destroyed by the Mahomedan, in the year 1310.

With the appearance of the Mahomedans on the scene the difficulties of Indian chronology disappear in the south, as well as in the north. From that time forward the history of India is found in such works as those written by Ferishta or Abul Fazl, and has been abstracted and condensed in numerous works in almost every European language. There are still, it must be confessed, slight discrepancies and difficulties about the sequence of some events in the history of the native principalities. These, however, are not of such importance as at all to affect, much less to invalidate, any reasoning that may be put forward regarding the history or affinities of any buildings, and this is the class of evidence which principally concerns what is written in the following pages.

Sculptures.

In order to render the subject treated of in the following pages quite complete, it ought, no doubt, to be preceded by an introduction describing first the sculpture and then the mythology of the Hindus in so far as they are at present known to us. There are in fact few works connected with this subject more wanted at the present day than a good treatise on these subjects. When Major Moor published the ‘Hindu Pantheon’ in 1810, the subject was comparatively new, and the materials did not exist in this country for a full and satisfactory illustration of it in all its branches. When, in 1832, Coleman published his ‘Mythology of the Hindus,’ he was enabled from the more recent researches of Colebroke and Wilson, to improve the text considerably, but his illustrations are very inferior to those of his predecessor. Moor chose his from such bronzes or marbles as existed in our museums. Coleman’s were generally taken from modern drawings, or the tawdry plaster images made for the Durga puja of Bengali Babus. By the aid of photography any one now attempting the task would be able to select perfectly authentic examples from Hindu temples of the best age. If this were done judiciously, and the examples carefully engraved, it would not only afford a more satisfactory illustration of the mythology of the Hindus than has yet been given to the public, but it might also be made a history of the art of sculpture in India, in all the ages in which it is known to us. It is doubtful, however, whether such a work could be successfully carried through in this country at the present day. The photographs that exist of the various deities have generally been taken representing them only as they appear as ornaments of the temples, without special reference to their mythological character. They are sufficient to show what the sculptor intended, but not so detailed as to allow all their emblems or characteristics being distinctly perceived. To be satisfactory as illustrations of the mythology, it is indispensable that these points should all be made clear. At the same time it is to be feared that there is hardly any one in this country so familiar with all the details of emblems and symbols as to be able to give the exact meaning of all that is represented. It would require the assistance of some Pandit brought up in the faith, and who is familiar with the significance of all the emblems, to convey to others the true meaning of these innumerable carvings. In India it could easily be accomplished, and it is consequently hoped it may before long be attempted there.

From its very nature, it is evident that sculpture can hardly ever be so important as architecture as an illustration of the progress of the arts, or the affinities of nations. Tied down to the reproduction of the immutable human figure, sculpture hardly admits of the same variety, or the same development, as such an art as architecture, whose business it is to administer to all the varied wants of mankind and to express the multifarious aspirations of the human mind. Yet sculpture has a history, and one that can at times convey its meaning with considerable distinctness. No one, for instance, can take up such a book as that of Cicognara,[35] and follow the gradual development of the art as he describes it, from the first rude carvings of the Byzantine school, till it returned in the present day to the mechanical perfection of the old Greek art, though without its ennobling spirit, and not feel that he has before him a fairly distinct illustration of the progress of the human mind during that period. Sculpture in India may fairly claim to rank, in power of expression, with mediæval sculpture in Europe, and to tell its tale of rise and decay with equal distinctness; but it is also interesting as having that curious Indian peculiarity of being written in decay. The story that Cicognara tells is one of steady forward progress towards higher aims and better execution. The Indian story is that of backward decline, from the sculptures of the Bharhut and Amravati topes, to the illustrations of Coleman’s ‘Hindu Mythology.’

When Hindu sculpture first dawns upon us in the rails at Buddh Gaya, and Bharhut, B.C. 200 to 250, it is thoroughly original, absolutely without a trace of foreign influence, but quite capable of expressing its ideas, and of telling its story with a distinctness that never was surpassed, at least in India. Some animals, such as elephants, deer, and monkeys, are better represented there than in any sculptures known in any part of the world; so, too, are some trees, and the architectural details are cut with an elegance and precision which are very admirable. The human figures, too, though very different from our standard of beauty and grace, are truthful to nature, and, where grouped together, combine to express the action intended with singular felicity. For an honest purpose-like pre-Raphaelite kind of art, there is probably nothing much better to be found elsewhere.

The art certainly had declined when the gateways at Sanchi were executed in the first century of the Christian Era. They may then have gained a little in breadth of treatment, but it had certainly lost much in delicacy and precision. Its downward progress was then, however, arrested, apparently by the rise in the extreme north-west of India of a school of sculpture strongly impregnated with the traditions of classical art. It is not yet clear whether this arose from a school of art implanted in that land by the Bactrian Greeks, or whether it was maintained by direct intercourse with Rome and Byzantium during the early centuries of the Christian Era. Probably both causes acted simultaneously, and one day we may be able to discriminate what is due to each. For the present it is sufficient to know that a quasi-classical school of sculpture did exist in the Punjab, and to the west of the Indus during the first five centuries after Christ, and it can hardly have flourished there so long, without its presence being felt in India.

Its effects were certainly apparent at Amravati in the 4th and 5th centuries, where a school of sculpture was developed, partaking of the characteristics of both those of Central India and of the west. Though it may, in some respects, be inferior to either of the parent styles, the degree of perfection reached by the art of sculpture at Amravati may probably be considered as the culminating point attained by that art in India.

When we meet it again in the early Hindu temples, and later Buddhist caves, it has lost much of its higher æsthetic and phonetic qualities, and frequently resorts to such expedients as giving dignity to the principal personages by making them double the size of less important characters, and of distinguishing gods from men by giving them more heads and arms than mortal man can use or understand.

All this is developed, it must be confessed, with considerable vigour and richness of effect in the temples of Orissa and the Mysore, down to the 13th or 14th century. After that, in the north it was checked by the presence of the Moslems; but, in the south, some of the most remarkable groups and statues—and they are very remarkable—were executed after this time, and continued to be executed, in considerable perfection down to the middle of the last century.

As we shall see in the sequel, the art of architecture continues to be practised with considerable success in parts of India remote from European influence; so much so, that it requires a practised eye to discriminate between what is new and what is old. But the moment any figures are introduced, especially if in action, the illusion vanishes. No mistake is then possible, for the veriest novice can see how painfully low the art of sculpture has fallen. Were it not for this, some of the modern temples in Gujerat and Central India are worthy to rank with those of past centuries; but their paintings and their sculptured decorations excite only feelings of dismay, and lead one to despair of true art being ever again revived in the East.

To those who are familiar with the principles on which these arts are practised, the cause of this difference is obvious enough. Architecture being a technic art, its forms may be handed down traditionally, and its principles practised almost mechanically. The higher phonetic arts, however, of sculpture and painting admit of no such mechanical treatment. They require individual excellence, and a higher class of intellectual power of expression, to ensure their successful development. Architecture, may, consequently, linger on amidst much political decay; but, like literature, the phonetic arts can only be successfully cultivated where a higher moral and intellectual standard prevails than, it is feared, is at present to be found in India.

Mythology.

Whenever any one will seriously undertake to write the history of sculpture in India, he will find the materials abundant and the sequence by no means difficult to follow; but, with regard to mythology, the case is different. It cannot, however, be said that the materials are not abundant for this branch of the inquiry also; but they are of a much less tangible or satisfactory nature, and have become so entangled, that it is extremely difficult to obtain any clear ideas regarding them; and it is to be feared they must remain so, until those who investigate the subject will condescend to study the architecture and the sculpture of the country as well as its books. The latter contain a good deal, but they do not contain all the information available on the subject, and they require to be steadied and confirmed by what is built or carved, which alone can give precision and substance to what is written.

Much of the confusion of ideas that prevails on this subject no doubt arises from the exaggerated importance it has of late years been the fashion to ascribe to the Vedas, as explaining everything connected with the mythology of the Hindus. It would, indeed, be impossible to over-estimate the value of these writings from a philological or ethnological point of view. Their discovery and elaboration have revolutionised our ideas as to the migrations of races in the remote ages of antiquity, and establish the affiliation of the Aryan races on a basis that seems absolutely unassailable; but it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the Aryans are a race of strangers in India, distinct from the Indian people themselves. They may, as hinted above, have come into India some three thousand years before Christ, and may have retained their purity of blood and faith for two thousand years; but with the beginning of the political Kali Yug—or, to speak more correctly, at the time of the events detailed in the ‘Mahabharata,’ say 1200 years B.C.—they had lost much of both; while every successive wave of immigration that has crossed the Indus during the last three thousand years has impaired the purity of their race. From this cause, and from their admixture with the aborigines, it may probably be with confidence asserted that there is not now five per cent.—perhaps not one—of pure Aryan blood in the present population of India, nor, consequently, does the religion of the Vedas constitute one-twentieth part of the present religion of the people.

Though this may be absolutely so, it must not be overlooked that there are few things more remarkable, as bearing on this subject, than the extraordinary intellectual superiority of the Aryans over the Dasyus, or whatever we may call the people they found in India when they entered it. This superiority was sufficient to enable them to subdue the country, though they were probably infinitely inferior in numbers to the conquered people, and to retain them in subjection through long ages of time. Even now, when their purity of blood has become so diluted that they are almost lost among the people, their intellect, as embalmed in their writings, has left its impress on every corner of the land, and is still appealed to as a revelation of the will of God to man.

With the Vedas, however, we have very little to do in the present work. The worship they foreshadow is of a class too purely intellectual to require the assistance of the stonemason and the carver to give it expression. The worship of the Aryans was addressed to the sun and moon. The firmament and all its hosts; the rain-bearing cloud; the sun-ushering dawn; all that was beautiful in the heavens above or beneficent on earth, was sung by them in hymns of elevated praise, and addressed in terms of awe or endearment as fear or hope prevailed in the bosom of the worshipper.[36] Had this gone on for some time longer than it did, the objects worshipped by the Aryans in India might have become gods, like those of Greece and Rome, endowed with all the feelings and all the failings of humanity. In India it was otherwise; the deities were dethroned, but never were degraded. There is no trace in Vedic times, so far as at present known, of Indra or Varuna, of Agni or Ushas, being represented in wood or stone, or of their requiring houses or temples to shelter them. It is true indeed that the terms of endearment in which they are addressed are frequently such as mortals use in speaking of each other; but how otherwise can man express his feeling of love or fear, or address his supplication to the being whose assistance he implores?

The great beauty of the Veda is, that it stops short before the powers of nature are dwarfed into human forms, and when every man stood independently by himself and sought through the intervention of all that was great or glorious on the earth, or in the skies, to approach the great spirit that is beyond and above all created things.

Had the Aryans ever been a numerical majority in India, and consequently able to preserve their blood and caste in tolerable purity, the religion of India never could have sunk so low as it did, though it might have fallen below the standard of the Veda. What really destroyed it was, that each succeeding immigration of less pure Aryan or Turanian races rendered their numerical majority relatively less and less, while their inevitable influence so educated the subject races as to render their moral majority even less important. These processes went on steadily and uninterruptedly till, in the time of Buddha, the native religions rose fairly to an equality with that of the Aryans, and afterwards for a while eclipsed it. The Vedas were only ultimately saved from absolute annihilation in India, by being embedded in the Vaishnava and Saiva superstitions, where their inanimate forms may still be recognised, but painfully degraded from their primitive elevation.

When we turn from the Vedas, and try to investigate the origin of those religions that first opposed and finally absorbed the Vedas in their abominations, we find our means of information painfully scanty and unsatisfactory. As will appear in the sequel, all that was written in India that is worth reading was written by the Aryans; all that was built was built by the Turanians, who wrote practically nothing. But the known buildings extend back only to the 3rd century B.C., while the books are ten centuries earlier, or possibly even more than that, while, as might be expected, it is only accidentally and in the most contemptuous terms that the proud Aryans even allude to the abject Dasyus or their religion. What, therefore, we practically know of them is little more than inferences drawn from results, and from what we now see passing in India.

Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming every day more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native or at least of Turanian religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Yaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by Sakya Muni before his death in 543 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of faith, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, according to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas—according to the more usual accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and when he died, the father and mother’s name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi-tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but there seems no reason for doubting that they may have been real personages, and their dates extend back to a very remote antiquity.[37]

The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty-four Tirthankars, including Mahavira the last. Their places of birth and death are equally recorded, all are in northern India, and though little else is known of them, they too may have existed. The series ends with Mahavira, who was the contemporary—some say the preceptor—of Sakya Muni.

The Vaishnava series is shorter, consisting of only nine Avatars, but it too, closes at the same time, Buddha himself being the ninth and last. Its fifth Avatur takes us back to Rama, who, if our chronology is correct, may have lived B.C. 2000; the fourth,—Narasinha, or man lion—points to the time the Aryans entered India. The three first deal with creation and events anterior to man’s appearance on earth. In this respect the Vaishnava list differs from the other two. They only record the existence of men who attained greatness by the practice of virtue, and immortality by teaching the ways of God to man. The Vaishnavas brought God to earth, to mix and interfere in mundane affairs in a manner that neither the Aryan nor the Buddhist ever dreamt of, and so degraded the purer religion of India into the monstrous system of idolatry that now prevails in that country.

No attempt, so far as I know, has been made to explain the origin of the Saiva religion, or even to ascertain whether it was a purely local superstition, or whether it was imported from abroad. The earliest authentic written allusion to it seems to be that of the Indian ambassador to Bardasanes (A.D. 218, 222), who described a cave in the north of India which contained an image of a god, half-man, half-woman.[38] This is beyond doubt the Ardhanari form of Siva, so familiar afterwards at Elephanta and in every part of India. The earliest engraved representations of this god seem to be those on the coins of Kadphises (B.C. 80 to 100[39]), where the figure with the trident and the Bull certainly prefigure the principal personage in this religion. Curiously enough, however, he or she is always accompanied by the Buddhist trisul emblem, as if the king, or his subjects at least, simultaneously professed both religions. Besides all this, it seems now tolerably well ascertained, that the practice of endowing gods with an infinity of limbs took an earlier, certainly a greater development in Thibet and the trans-Himalayan countries than in India, and that the wildest Tantric forms of Durga are more common and more developed in Nepal and Thibet than they are even in India Proper. If this is so, it seems pretty clear, as the evidence now stands, that Saivism is a northern superstition introduced into India by the Yuechi or some of the northern hordes who migrated into India, either immediately before the Christian Era, or in the early centuries succeeding it.

It does not seem at first to have made much progress in the valley of the Ganges, where the ground was preoccupied by the Vaishnava group, but to have been generally adopted in Rajputana, especially among the Jats, who were almost certainly the descendants of the White Huns or Ephthalites, and it seems also to have been early carried south by the Brahmans, when they undertook to instruct the Dravidians in the religion of the Puranas. That of the Vedas never seems to have been known in the south, and it was not till after the Vedas had been superseded by the new system, that the Brahmanical religion was introduced among the southern people. It is also, it is to be feared, only too true that no attempt has yet been made to ascertain what the religion of the Dravidians was before the northern Brahmans induced them to adopt either the Jaina or the Vaishnava or Saiva forms of faith. It is possible that among the Pandu Kolis, and other forms of ‘Rude Stone Monuments’ that are found everywhere in the south, we may find the fossil remains of the old Dravidian faith before they adopted that of the Hindus. These monuments, however, have not been examined with anything like the care requisite for the solution of a problem like this, and till it is done we must rest content with our ignorance.[40]

In the north we have been somewhat more fortunate, and enough is now known to make it clear that, so soon as the inquirers can consent to put aside personal jealousies, and apply themselves earnestly to the task, we may know enough to make the general outline at least tolerably clear. When I first published my work on ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ seven years ago, no one suspected, at least no one had hinted in type, that such a form of religion existed in Bengal. Since that time, however, so much has been written on the subject, and proof on proof has accumulated with such rapidity, that few will now be bold enough to deny that Trees were worshipped in India in the earliest times, and that a Naga people did exist, especially in the north-west, who had a strange veneration for snakes. It may be too bold a generalisation to assert, at present, that no people became Buddhists who had not previously been serpent worshippers, but it certainly is nearer the truth than at first sight appears. It is, at all events, quite certain that underlying Buddhism we everywhere find evidence of a stratum of Tree and Serpent Worship. Sometimes it may be repressed and obscured, but at others it crops up again, and, to a certain extent, the worship of the Tree and the Serpent, at some times and in certain places, almost supersedes that of the founder of the religion himself.

The five, or seven, or one thousand-headed Naga is everywhere present in the temples of the Jains, and pervades the whole religion of the Vaishnavas. In the great act of creation the Naga performs the principal part in the churning of the ocean, and in almost every representation of Vishnu he appears either as supporting and watching over him, or as performing some subsidiary part in the scene. It is, in fact, the Naga that binds together and gives unity to this great group of religions, and it is the presence of the Tree and Serpent worship underlying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vishnuism that seems to prove almost incontestably that there existed a people in the north of India, whether we call them Dasyus, Nishadhas, or by any other name, who were Tree and Serpent worshippers, before they adopted any of the Hindu forms of faith. Nothing can be more antagonistic to the thoughts and feelings of any Aryan race than such forms of worship, and nothing more completely ante-Vedic than its rites. It seems also to have no connection with Saivism.[41] Nor is there any trace of it found among the Dravidians. There appears, in fact, no solution of the riddle possible, but to assume that it was an aboriginal superstition in the north of India, and it was the conversion of the people to whom it belonged that gave rise to that triarchy of religions that have succeeded each other in the north during the last two thousand years.

This solution of the difficulty has the further advantage that it steps in at once clearly to explain what philology is only dimly guessing at, though its whole tendency now seems in the same direction. If this view of the mythology be correct, it seems certain that there existed in the north of India, before the arrival of the Aryans, a people whose affinities were all with the Thibetans, Burmese, Siamese, and other trans-Himalayan populations, and who certainly were not Dravidians, though they may have been intimately connected with one division at least of the inhabitants of Ceylon.

Both the pre-Aryan races of India belonged, of course, to the Turanian group; but my present impression is, as hinted above, that the Dravidians belong to that branch of the great primordial family of mankind that was developed in Mesopotamia and the countries to the westward of the Caspian. The Dasyus, on the contrary, have all their affinities with those to the eastward of that sea, and the two might consequently be called the Western and the Eastern, or the Scythian and Mongolian Turanians. Such a distinction would certainly represent our present knowledge of the subject better than considering the whole as one family, which is too often the case at the present day.

These, however, are speculations which hardly admit of proof in the present state of our knowledge, and would consequently be quite out of place here, were it not that some such theory seems indispensable to explain the phenomena of the architectural history of India. That of the north is so essentially different from that of the south that they cannot possibly belong to the same people. Neither of them certainly are Aryan; and unless we admit that the two divisions of the country were occupied by people essentially different in blood, though still belonging to the building races of mankind, we cannot possibly understand how they always practised, and to the present employ, styles so essentially different. Until these various ethnographical and mythological problems are understood and appreciated, the styles of architecture in India seem a chaos without purpose or meaning. Once, however, they are grasped and applied, their history assumes a dignity and importance far greater than is due to any merely æsthetic merits they may possess. Even that, however, is in many respects remarkable, and, when combined with the scientific value of the styles, seem to render them as worthy of study as those of any other people with whose arts we are acquainted.

Statistics.

It would add very much to the clearness of what follows if it were possible to compile any statistical tables which would represent with anything like precision the mode in which the people of India are distributed, either as regards their religious beliefs or their ethnographical relations. The late census of 1871-72 has afforded a mass of new material for this purpose, but the information is distributed through five folio volumes, in such a manner as to make it extremely difficult to abstract what is wanted so as to render it intelligible to the general reader. Even, however, if this were done, the result would hardly, for several reasons, be satisfactory. In the first place, the census is a first attempt, and the difficulty of collecting and arranging such a mass of new materials was a task of the extremest difficulty. The fault of any shortcomings, however, lay more with the enumerated than with the enumerators. Few natives know anything of ethnography, or can give a distinct answer with regard to their race or descent; and even with regard to religion their notions are equally hazy. Take for instance the table, page 93 of the Bombay Report. The compilers there divide the Hindus of that Presidency into three classes:—

The mixed class they proceed to define as “all who simply worship some god or goddess, without knowing anything of theology”—a description that probably applies with equal truth to two-thirds of the Hindu population of the other presidencies. The upper and educated classes do know now what sect they belong to, and the sects are so distinctly marked as to admit of no doubt; but even that was not so clear in former days.

The great defect, however, of the census is, that it does not include the population of the Native States, estimated at 46,245,000, or one-fifth of the whole population of India; and, though it may be fair to assume that the proportions of races and their beliefs are the same as those of the adjacent states under British rule, this is only an assumption, and as such must vitiate any attempt at precision in statements regarding the whole of India.

Notwithstanding these difficulties or defects, it may be useful to state here that the population of the whole of India—exclusive, of course, of British Burmah—was ascertained by the late census to amount to 235,000,000 of souls. Of these, about 7-10ths—or, more nearly, 15-20ths—or 175,000,000, belonged to the various branches of the Hindu religion; more than 1-5th or 4-20ths or 50,000,000, professed the Mahomedan faith; and the remaining 1-20th was made up principally of the uncivilised hill tribes, and various minor sects which cannot correctly be classified with the followers of Siva and Vishnu. In this last group of 11,000,000 are the Jains and the Christians, who, though so influential from their wealth or intellect, form numerically but a very small fraction of the entire population.

The tables of the census, unfortunately, afford us very little information that is satisfactory with regard to the distribution of races among the people. From the new edition of Caldwell’s ‘Dravidian Grammar,’ we learn that upwards of 45,000,000 are Dravidian or speak Tamil, or languages allied to that dialect.[42] This may be somewhat of an over-estimate, but, taking it as it stands, it accounts for only 1-5th of the population; and what are we to say regarding the other 4-5ths, or 190,000,000 of souls? Four or five millions may be put on one side as Koles, Bhîls, Sontals, Nagas, &c.—hill tribes of various classes, whose affinities are not yet by any means settled, but whose ethnic relations are of very minor importance compared with those of the 185,000,000 remaining.

As the census leaves us very much in the dark on this subject, supposing we assume that one-half, or 90,000,000 more or less, of the inhabitants of northern India are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the country—Dasyus, Nishadhas, or whatever we may call them. Let us further divide the remaining 90,000,000 into three parts, and assume that one-third are lineal descendants of the Aryans who entered India before the time of Buddha; one-third the descendants of Yavanas, Sakas, Hunas, and other Scythian tribes who crossed the Indus between the Christian Era and the time of the Mahomedan invasion; and that the remainder are the Moslem races, or their descendants, who have entered India during the last 800 years. Such a scheme may nearly represent the facts of the case; but it seems almost certainly to exaggerate the importance of the foreign immigrant element. Taking, for instance, the last, about which we know most, it seems hardly probable that since the time of Mahmood of Guzni any such number of tribes professing the Mahomedan religion could have entered India so as to be able to procreate a population of 30,000,000 of souls, even supposing they had brought their women with them—which they certainly did not, except in the most exceptional cases. Two or three millions of warriors may have crossed the Indus in that time and settled in India, and, marrying the females of the country, may have had a numerous progeny; but thirty millions is a vast population by direct descent, especially as we know how many of the Moslems of India were recruited from slaves purchased and brought up in the faith of their masters. In Bengal especially, where they are most numerous, they are Bengalis pure and simple, many, perhaps most, of whom have adopted that faith quite recently from motives it is not difficult to understand or explain. Though there may consequently be 50,000,000 of Mussulmans in India at the present day, we may feel quite certain that not one-half of this number are immigrants or the descendants of emigrants who entered India during the last eight centuries.

The same is probably true of the Turanian races, who entered India in the first ten centuries after our era. It is most improbable that they were sufficiently numerous to be the progenitors of thirty millions of people, and, if they were so, the mothers, in nine cases out of ten, were most probably natives of India.

Of the Aryans we know less; but, if so great a number as thirty millions can trace anything like a direct descent from them at the present day, the amount of pure Aryan blood in their veins must be infinitesimally small. But, though their blood may be diluted, the influence of their intellect remains so powerfully impressed on every institution of the country that, had they perished altogether, their previous presence is still an element of the utmost importance in the ethnic relations of the land.

Another census may enable us to speak with more precision with regard to these various divisions of the mass of the people of Hindustan, but meanwhile the element that seems to be most important, though the least investigated hitherto, is the extent of the aboriginal race. It has hitherto been so overlooked, that putting it at ninety millions may seem to many an exaggeration. Its intellectual inferiority has kept it in the background, but its presence everywhere seems to me the only means of explaining most of the phenomena we meet continually, especially those connected with the history of the architecture of the country. Except on some such hypothesis as that just shadowed forth, I do not know how we are to account for the presence of certain local forms of buildings we find in the north, or to explain the persistence with which they were adhered to.

When from these purely ethnographic speculations we turn to ask how far religion and race coincide, we are left with still less information of a reliable character. As a rule, the Dravidians are Saiva, and Saiva in the exact proportion of the purity of their blood. In other words, in the extreme south of India they are immensely in the majority. In Tanjore, 7 to 1 of the followers of Vishnu; in Mádura, 5 to 1; in Trichinopoly, 4 to 1; and Salem, and generally in the south, 2 to 1;[43] but as we proceed northward they become equal, and in some of the northern districts of the Madras Presidency the proportions are reversed.

In Bengal, and wherever Buddhism once prevailed, the Vaishnava sects are, as might be expected, the most numerous. Indeed if it were not that so much of the present Hindu religion is an importation into the south, and was taught to the Dravidians by Brahmans from the north, it would be difficult to understand how the Vaishnava religion ever took root there, where Buddhism itself only existed to a slight extent, and where it, too, was an importation. If, however, it is correct to assume that Saivism had its origin to the northward of the Himalayas, among the Tartar tribes of these regions, there is no difficulty in understanding its presence in Bengal to the extent to which it is found to prevail there. But, on the other hand, nothing can be more natural than that an aboriginal Naga people, who worshipped trees and serpents, should become Buddhists, as Buddhism was originally understood, and, being Buddhists, should slide downwards into the corruptions of the present Vaishnava form of faith, which is avowedly that most fashionable and most prevalent in the north of India.

One of the most startling facts brought out by the last census, is the discovery that nearly one-third of the population of Eastern Bengal are Mahomedan—20,500,000 out of 66,000,000—while in the north-west provinces the Mahomedans are less than 1-6th—4,000,000 among 25,000,000; and in Oude little more than 1-10th. It thus looks more like a matter of feeling than of race; it seems that as the inhabitants of Bengal were Buddhists, and clung to that faith long after it had been abolished in other parts of India, they came in contact with the Moslem religion before they had adopted the modern form of Vishnuism, and naturally preferred a faith which acknowledged no caste, and freed them from the exactions and tyranny of a dominant priesthood. The Mahomedan religion is in fact much more like Buddhism than are any of the modern Hindu forms, and when this non-Aryan casteless population came in contact with it, before they had adopted the new faith, and were free to choose, after the mysterious evaporation of their old beliefs, they naturally adopted the religion most resembling that in which they had been brought up. It is only in this way that it seems possible to account for the predominance of the Moslem faith in Lower Bengal and in the Punjab, where the followers of the Prophet outnumber the Hindus, in the proportion of 3 to 2, or as 9,000,000 to 6,000,000.

Where Buddhism had prevailed the choice seemed to lie between Vishnu or Mahomet. Where Saivism crept in was apparently among those races who were Turanians, or had affinities with the Tartar races, who immigrated from the north between the Christian era, and the age of the Mahomedan conquest.

To most people these may appear as rash generalisations, and at the present stage of the inquiry would be so in reality, if no further proof could be afforded. After reading the following pages, I trust most of them at least will be found to rest on the firm basis of a fair induction from the facts brought forward. It might, consequently, have appeared more logical to defer these statements to the end of the work, instead of placing them at the beginning. Unless, however, they are read and mastered first, a great deal that is stated in the following pages will be unintelligible, and the scope and purpose of the work can be neither understood nor appreciated.

BOOK I.

BUDDHIST ARCHITECTURE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION AND CLASSIFICATION.

It is not, of course, meant to insinuate that the people of India had no architecture before that date; on the contrary it can be proved that they possessed palaces and halls of assembly, perhaps even temples, of great magnificence and splendour, long anterior to Asoka’s accession; but, like the buildings of the Burmese at the present day, they were all in wood. Stone, in those days, seems to have been employed only for the foundations of buildings, or in engineering works, such as city walls and gates, or bridges or embankments; all else, as will appear from the sequel, were framed in carpentry. Much as we may now regret this, as all these buildings have consequently perished, it is not so clear, as it may at first appear, that the Indians were wrong in this, inasmuch as, in all respects, except durability, wood is a better building material than stone. It is far more easily cut and carved, larger spaces can be covered with fewer and less cumbrous points of support than is possible with stone, and colour and gilding are much more easily applied to wood than to stone. For the same outlay twice the space can be covered, and more than twice the splendour obtained by the use of the more perishable material, the one great defect being that it is ephemeral. It fails also in producing that impression of durability which is so essential to architectural effect; while, at the same time, the facility with which it can be carved and adorned tends to produce a barbaric splendour far less satisfactory than the more sober forms necessitated by the employment of the less tractable material.

Be this as it may, it will, if I mistake not, become quite clear when we examine the earliest “rock-cut temples” that, whether from ignorance or from choice, the Indians employed wood, and that only in the construction of their ornamental buildings, before Asoka’s time.[44] From this the inference seems inevitable that it was in consequence of India being brought into contact with the western world, first by Alexander’s raid, and then by the establishment of the Bactrian kingdom in its immediate proximity, that led to this change. We do not yet know precisely how early the Bactrian kingdom extended to the Indus, but we feel its influence on the coinage, on the sculpture, and generally on the arts of India, from a very early date, and it seems as if before long we shall be able to fix with precision not only the dates, but the forms in which the arts of the Western world exerted their influence on those of the East. This, however, will be made clearer in the sequel. In the meanwhile it may be sufficient to state here that we know absolutely nothing of the temples or architecture of the various peoples or religions who occupied India before the rise of Buddhism,[45] and it is only by inference that we know anything of that of the Buddhists before the age of Asoka. From that time forward, however, all is clear and intelligible; we have a sufficient number of examples whose dates and forms are known to enable us to write a perfectly consecutive history of the Buddhist style during the 1000 years it was practised in India, and thence to trace its various developments in the extra Indian countries to which it was carried, and where it is still practised at the present day.[46]

If our ethnography is not at fault, it would be in vain to look for any earlier architecture of any importance in India before Asoka’s time. The Aryans, who were the dominant people before the rise of Buddhism, were essentially a non-artistic race. They wrote books and expressed their ideas in words like their congeners all the world over, but they nowhere seem successfully to have cultivated the æsthetic arts, or to have sought for immortality through the splendour or durability of their buildings. That was always the aspiration of the less intellectual Turanian races, and we owe it to this circumstance that we are enabled to write with such certainty the history of their rise and fall as evidenced in their architectural productions.

There is no à priori improbability that the Dravidian races of the south of India, or the indigenous races of the north, may not have erected temples or other buildings at a very early date, but if so, all that can be said is that all trace of them is lost. When we first meet the Buddhist style it is in its infancy—a wooden style painfully struggling into lithic forms—and we have no reason to suppose that the other styles were then more advanced. When, however, we first meet them, some six or seven centuries afterwards, they are so complete in all their details, and so truly lithic in their forms, that they have hitherto baffled all attempts to trace them back to their original types, either in the wood or brick work, from which they may have been derived. So completely, indeed, have all the earlier examples been obliterated, that it is now doubtful whether the missing links can ever be replaced. Still, as one single example of a Hindu temple dating before the Christian Era might solve the difficulty, we ought not to despair of such being found, while the central provinces of India remain so utterly unexplored as they now are. Where, under ordinary circumstances, we ought to look for them, would be among the ruins of the ancient cities which once crowded the valley of the Ganges; but there the ruthless Moslem or the careless Hindu have thoroughly obliterated all traces of any that may ever have existed. In the remote valleys of the Himalaya, or of Central India, there may, however, exist remains which will render the origin and progress of Hindu architecture as clear and as certain as that of the Buddhist; but till these are discovered, it is with the architecture of the Buddhist that our history naturally begins. Besides this, however, from the happy accident of the Buddhists very early adopting the mode of excavating their temples in the living rock, their remains are imperishably preserved to us, while it is only too probable that those of the Hindu, being in less durable forms, may have disappeared. The former, therefore, are easily classified and dated, while the origin of the latter, for the present, seems lost in the mist of the early ages of Indian arts. Meanwhile, the knowledge that the architectural history of India commences B.C. 250, and that all the monuments now known to us are Buddhist for at least five or six centuries after that time, are cardinal facts that cannot be too strongly insisted upon by those who wish to clear away a great deal of what has hitherto tended to render the subject obscure and unintelligible.

Classification.

For convenience of description it will probably be found expedient to classify the various objects of Buddhist art under the five following groups, though of course it is at times impossible to separate them entirely from one another, and sometimes two or more of them must be taken together as parts of one monument.

1st. Stambhas, or Lâts.—These pillars are common to all the styles of Indian architecture. With the Buddhists they were employed to bear inscriptions on their shafts, with emblems or animals on their capitals. With the Jains they were generally Deepdans, or lamp-bearing pillars; with the Vaishnavas they as generally bore statues of Garuda or Hunaman; with the Saiva they were flag-staffs; but, whatever their destination, they were always among the most original, and frequently the most elegant, productions of Indian art.

2nd. Stupas, or Topes.—These, again, may be divided into two classes, according to their destination: first, the true Stupas or towers erected to commemorate some event or mark some sacred spot dear to the followers of the religion of Buddha: secondly, Dagobas, or monuments containing relics of Buddha, or of some Buddhist saint.[47] If it were possible, these two ought always to be kept separate, but no external signs have yet been discovered by which they can be distinguished from one another, and till this is so, they must be considered, architecturally at least, as one.

3rd. Rails.—These have recently been discovered to be one of the most important features of Buddhist architecture. Generally they are found surrounding Topes, but they are also represented as enclosing sacred trees, temples, and pillars, and other objects. It may be objected that treating them separately is like describing the peristyle of a Greek temple apart from the cella. The Buddhist rail, however, in early ages at least, is never attached to the tope, and is used for so many other, and such various purposes, that it will certainly tend to the clearness of what follows if they are treated separately.

4th. Chaityas,[48] or Assembly Halls.—These in Buddhist art correspond in every respect with the churches of the Christian religion. Their plans, the position of the altar or relic casket, the aisles, and other peculiarities are the same in both, and their uses are identical, in so far as the ritual forms of the one religion resemble those of the other.

5th. Viharas, or Monasteries.—Like the Chaityas, these resemble very closely the corresponding institutions among Christians. In the earlier ages they accompanied, but were detached from, the Chaityas or churches. In later times they were furnished with chapels and altars in which the service could be performed independently of the Chaitya halls, which may or may not be found in their proximity.