1850.] Brdhminical Conquerors of India. 19 



defining this region (II. SI. 22) as the tract proper to civilized men, 

 proceeds with a remarkable expression, which I never remember to 

 have seen quoted with any reference to its force, to declare what 

 country is holy, (II. SI. 23). "That land, on which the black ante- 

 lope naturally grazes, is held fit for the performance of sacrifices ; but 

 the land of the Mlechhas, or those who speak barbarously, differs widely 

 from it."* 



Now as the grazing ground of this antelope is confined to wide and 

 open plains, and the land of the Mlechhas is put forward in contradis- 

 tinction to it, the natural inference is, that the Hindus were as yet 

 masters of no more than the open country, proving them by this 

 evidence to have been a race of emigrant conquerors, imperfectly 

 established in the land. The region whence they came, and the period 

 at which they first appeared on the confines of India, are the subjects 

 of enquiry which next suggest themselves, and chronologers going on 

 the base of the ascertained date of the great war, and with the aid of 

 the Rajatarangini, or annals of Cashmere, the only Indian history of 

 any chronological authority, assign in the one case, 2256 before Christ, 

 as the date about which the first Hindu colonies appeared on the 

 confines of India, and in the other 2666 B. C. as the year of the 

 commencement of the history of Cashmere, in which the first brahmi- 

 nical settlement appears to have been formed : Col. Tod, and Professor 

 Wilson are severally the authors of these views. So much is certain, 

 that Manu himself points to a northern origin (II. SI. 17» 18), and 

 that the great war itself was, as Mr. Prichard observes, (Vol. IV. p. 

 105,) an invasive movement southwards, "the first invasion of the 

 Dekkhan by the sovereigns of northern Hindustan," indicatory of its 

 being no more than a sequel of similar aggressions whereby the new 

 sovereigns of northern India, had established themselves in the posses- 

 sions they then held. In the case of a people, so marked as the 

 Hindus by rigid adherence to ancestral habits, one may read their 

 doubtful history inferentially ; we know what was their onward progress 

 of conquest after the age of the Mahabharat, and knowing them to be 

 strangers in the land they then occupied, may come to an easy conclu- 

 sion as to the similarly aggressive progress by which they got there. 



* For a notice of the Indian aboriginal races, see Prichard's Physical Hist. Vol. 

 IV. 



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