Note 25 — Chapter III

2. And he goes on to say25: “Such a theory as the above is not compatible with the modern doctrine which divides the population of India into Aryan and Aboriginal. It presupposes an unbroken continuity in the national life from one stage of culture to another, analogous to what has taken place in every country in the world whose inhabitants have emerged from the savage state. It assumes, therefore, as its necessary basis, the unity of the Indian race. While it does not deny that a race of ‘white-complexioned foreigners,’ who called themselves by the name of Arya, invaded the Indus Valley viâ Kâbul and Kashmîr some four thousand years ago, and imposed their language and religion on the indigenous races by whom they found themselves surrounded, it nevertheless maintains that the blood imported by this foreign race became gradually absorbed into the indigenous, the less yielding to the greater, so that almost all traces of the conquering races eventually disappeared, just as the Lombard became absorbed into the Italian, the Frank into the Gaul, the Roman (of Roumania) into the Slav, the Greek (of Alexandria) into the Egyptian, the Norman into the Frenchman, the Moor (of Spain) into the Spaniard, and as the Norwegians, Germans, etc., are at the day becoming absorbed into Englishmen in North America, or as the Portuguese (of India) have already become absorbed into Indians. I hold that for the last three thousand years at least no real difference of blood between Aryan and Aboriginal (except perhaps in a few isolated tracts, such as Râjputâna, where special causes may have occurred to prevent the complete amalgamation of race) has existed; and the physiological resemblance observable between the various classes of the population, from the highest to the lowest, is an irrefragable proof that no clearly-defined racial distinction has survived, a kind of evidence which ought to carry much greater weight than that of language, on which so many fanciful theories of Ethnology have been lately founded. Language is no test of race; and the question of caste is not one of race at all, but of culture. Nothing has tended to complicate the subject of caste so much as this intrusion of a philological theory, which within its own province is one of the most interesting discoveries of modern times, into a field of enquiry with which it has no connection. The ‘Aryan brother’ is, indeed, a much more mythical being than Râma or Krishna, or any other of the popular heroes of Indian tradition whom writers of the Aryan school have vainly striven to attenuate into Solar myths. The amalgamation of the two races (the Aryan and the Indian) had been completed in the Panjab (as we may gather from the “Institutes” of Manu) before the Hindu, who is the result of this amalgamation, began to extend his influence into the Ganges Valley, where by slow and sure degrees he disseminated among the indigenous races those social and religious maxims which have been spreading wider and wider ever since throughout the continent of India, absorbing one after another, and to some extent civilising, every indigenous race with whom they are brought into contact, raising the choice spirits of the various tribes into the rank of Brâhman, Chhatri, and leaving the rest to rise or fall into the social scale according to their capacities and opportunities.”