The most timid or untractable had probably preferred a wild independence in the thickets of hills and mountain-fastnesses to the yoke of more powerful intruders, or to incorporation with foreigners whom they could not expel. In the then imperfect state of navigation, the foreign colonists had perhaps poured in by land from the teeming plains of Hindustan Proper. From them Bengal must have derived its Hinduism and the Sanscrit literature. The present language is, in all likelihood, a commixture of the original wild dialect with the polished vocabulary of the Vedas and Purans. Indeed this province appears, on the emigration of new colonists, to have undergone similar mutations in men and language with its insular mistress of the west, where the Saxons and Normans amalgamated with the Aboriginal savages, though they were the means of driving a a wild free-spirited horde into inaccessible mountains and forests.
But whatever be the probable truth of these suppositions, it is almost undoubted that Bengal did not rise into importance so early as the other divisions of Hindustan.[1] Whether the Brahminical theology was in any shape known and acknowledged from the very commencement of its population or not, certain it is that the study of Brahminical learning was not long carried on here with any celebrity or success. The Nuddea school, now so famous for its cultivation of the Nyaya, or Logic, is confessedly of modern institution. What the state of learning, philosophy, and theology, was, in this province, during or previous to its connection with the Magadha empire, does not clearly appear. The contempt with which it is still spoken of in the other divisions of India, and the absence of any traditionary or monumental proofs of its pristine glory, is a presumptive evidence of its primitive insignificance. Under the Buddhist family of the Pals, Brahminism must naturally have been on the wane, and little as the Shasters had before been studied, they must have been less so at this period. This is evident from the miserable condition to which the priests had been reduced under the Hindu kings that succeeded the Buddhists. In the reign of Adisur, the founder of the Sen or the medical dynasty, the ranks of Brahminism had not only been sadly desolated, probably owing to the persecution of his Buddhist predecessors, but the few that had escaped this catastrophe were found deplorably ignorant in their sacerdotal duties. Brahminism, it must be remembered, requires its
- ↑ The long list of Bengal kings contained in the Ayeen Acbary cannot be entirely correct. How could so many names be traditionally remembered?—or if the compiler made use of any documentary guides, where are they now?
