1867.] Proceedings of tlie Asiatic Society. 37 



of the Brahminic Rishis, barbarians of the lowest type, and our poets 

 confounded them with monkeys and satyrs — or wild men of the woods — 

 who were not to be included in the pale of humanity. Some of the 

 epithets used in the Vedas to indicate the aborigines are remarkable. 

 The Rig Veda describes them as Mridhravdch or " of imperfect 

 speech." Elsewhere they are said to be Andsa or " mouthless" or 

 " speechless." Some Rishis condemned them as " priestless and hymn- 

 less, fit only to be slain." In short, if any faith is to be put in the 

 Vedic narratives regarding the social condition of the people of India 

 in primitive times, we must accept the bulk of the aborigines to have 

 been in a state of society in which leaves and bark supplied the place 

 of clothing, the shade of trees served for boudoirs, and hollows and 

 caverns occupied the place of bedrooms. And all this at a time when 

 the Brahmins had lofty houses, fine clothing, gold ornaments, horses 

 and cars, iron implements, divers arts, poets, astronomers and musi- 

 cians, in short, everything indicating a tolerably advanced state of 

 civilization. Admitting that they had not come to the art of writing, 

 was it likely that their naked neighbours should have come to it ? If 

 we trace the growth and history of the Arian colonization in India, we 

 are led to the conclusion that the Arians continued steadily to advance, 

 and the Dravidians to recede and decay. The Arians gradually became 

 the masters of the finest provinces, and the Dravidians partly betook 

 themselves to jungles and mountain fastnesses, partly got incorporated 

 with the intrusive population, and partly submitted to them as bond 

 slaves, living out of the bounds of their cities and owning no property. 

 This degradation, physical and moral, was not a state of things which 

 would help the Dravidians to take the start of the Arians, and devise 

 the means of recording literary composition, which the latter should 

 fail to achieve. It may be said that the Arians reviled the aborigines 

 from a lofty sense of their own superiority, and called them asiknis 

 or " blackies," very much in the same spirit in which the roughs 

 among their own conquerors call them " niggers" in the present day, 

 and that they were not the repositories of everything that is vile, as 

 they are described to have been. But it is the very gist of the 

 present enquiry to ascertain the relation of the two races in the 

 scale of civilization, and it would be begging the question to say that 

 the Dravidians originated the art of writing, and the Arians borrowed 



