Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/69

INTRODUCTION. 39 connected with the whole literature. It would be a legitimate part of the duty of the Archaeological Surveys to collect materials on a systematic plan for this object ; and the production of illustra- tions has now become so easy and inexpensive that photographs from original materials of a satisfactory class might readily be published to supply this most pressing desideratum. The details of the emblems and symbols of the numerous divinities of the pantheon could also be collected, along with the delinea- tions, by those familiar with such symbols. All this could easily be accomplished, and it is consequently hoped it may before long be attempted. 1 Much of the confusion of ideas that prevails on this subject no doubt arises from the exaggerated importance it has 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 migra- tions of races in the remote ages of antiquity, and established 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 peoples 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 many generations ; but with the beginning of the political Kaliyug 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. 2 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 1 Numerous excellent illustrations exist among the materials already accumulated by the Archseological Surveys in Southern and Western India and in the Calcutta Museum but, at present, there seems little prospect of their publication. ? For the mythology of the Vedas, see Professor A. A. Macdonell's ' Vedic Mythology ' in the ' Grundriss der indo- arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde,' in Bd. iii. A useful general handbook is Dowson's ' Dictionary of Hindu Mythology, '