The Civilization of India

Asia is a continent in which republics were unusual in early ages. Here history reveals monarchies under despotic rulers, who were worshipped as though the subjects were mere slaves. India until late ages were under a very different form of government. In early Buddhist times, we find the land full of aristocratic republics. This was the same form of government to be found on other Cushite sites. Here in a more isolated clime, remote from outside influences, the old Cushite communal form of government has come on down to our times. Much can be gained from a study of this unique system. Out of it came the gentleness of the Hindu and it was the environment that nourished his exalted mental attainments. Again it is too lightly considered when we remember that this form of life produced artists and craftsmen who brought into existence lost arts and a skill and originality that we do not today attain. It is a common error to suppose that the tribes that the Aryan invaders found were savages. Ancient annals represented the Cushite Indi as wise and skillful. Heeren said that these writings represented the early Hindu as a commercial people, that their merchants could travel from one of the Nile flowing through Barabra (Ethiopia) and the mountains of the Moon.

Even the name Hindu is Ethiopian. Ancient records of authority made Hind and Sind sons of Cush. Philostratus. in Vit. Apollon (Lib. II), says, “The Indi is the wisest of mankind. The Ethiopians are a colony of them, and they inherit the wisdom of their fathers.” The separation of India from the parent Cushite stock was in ages long before the rise of the so-called Aryans in India. The older Greeks always associated the sacred waves of the Indian Sea with the wonderful Ethiopians. Ephorus stated that they occupied all the southern coasts of Asia and Africa. As in Chaldea, they brought to the aboriginal tribes of India the knowledge of metals to take the place of stone implements, they brought the knowledge of the arts. Their funeral remains all over India reveal the stone circles and upright massive menhirs of North Africa. They understood in those far distant ages how to make hard earthenware, iron weapons and ornaments of gold. Today in a state of the degenerated art, Sind is the only province where the potters craft is artistic. Before Megathenes, a Greek ambassador to the court of the non-Aryan Chandra Gupta, about 300 B. C., the Greeks mentioned as Indi only the Cushites of the areas between the Hindu Kush and Persia.

The name India means black, and Condor thinks that it was employed only to designate the home of the Asiatic Ethiopians. Let us look for a brief space at the land. India has often been described as almost a continent of itself, surrounded as it is by high mountain ranges to the north with the spurs stretching out to east and west, leaving only two natural passages down into the peninsula. India has a rich and varied climate and landscape. First, come the Himalayas with their colder atmosphere, then the vast, fertile, densely populated plains of northern India watered by the Indus, the great Ganges, and the Bramaputra. These have the greatest volume of any rivers of the world. South of the great northern plain is the elevated plateau of Decan. The Ganges has meant so much to the life and development of the country that it is a sacred river to the Hindu. Almost all the traffic of the country passes up and down this river. Southern India has a tropical climate. The Indian plains are sultry but Decan and the slopes of the Himalayas enjoy a temperate climate. There are two annual seasons the rainy and the dry.

Modern books deal with forest destruction in India and the wearing out of the land. These are the result of conquest and the crowding back of tribes upon the more waste areas. The great Indian rivers cause terrible disasters through floods that sweep off cattle, grain, stores and houses. The mighty currents undermine and carry away soil to build up monstrous deltas. Still, with all these disasters, India has an age old system of agriculture and we see everywhere the evidence of a people long skilled in agriculture. Northern India produces the plants of the temperate zone in profusion. Southern India abounds in tropical verdure. Two harvests are sometimes reaped in one year. Rice grows in the irrigated districts. Many think that cotton was first developed in India and that many other important plants found there their origin. We find indigo, jute, tobacco, sugar cane, cocoa, the date, and other palms. Among the tropical fruits are orange, lime, citron, melon, pineapple, fig, and other fruits. The dense growth of tropical woods affords some of the world’s most important plants. Here we find resins, gums, perfumes and varnishes with hundreds of other articles of commerce or luxury.

These wonderful and useful plains and fruits of India are not the result of the accident but are the fruit of the genius of some continuously agricultural race. These products were the foundation of the age-old art and commerce of the Indies, that in the days of Columbus made the route to India the world sought quest of western nations. Nearly every article that produces commerce abounds in India. All the shrubs and herbs needed for the healing of the nations may be found there and are used as native medicines. Rice and millet are the staple foods, though sweet potatoes, onions, barley, and garlic are much used. The vast forests are densely populated with wild animals and birds. The leopard, wolf, tiger, hyena, fox, and jackal abound, the lion is extinct. Snakes and reptiles cause innumerable death. The tiger is in every part of the country. One tiger in the course of three years killed one hundred and eight persons and another caused thirteen villages to be abandoned. There is a government price on the tiger’s head. The tamer animals are deer, sheep, goats, antelope, oxen, camels, mules, horses and many birds. With this rich flora and fauna, a distinctive ancient life developed and flowered as gorgeously in religion and art.

A glance at India today reveals a great difference from the old condition of opulence. The country has grown overpopulated. Many districts are so overcrowded that the natives can hardly secure land to cultivate. Life in the British Isles is very congested, the population being about 213 to a square mile, but in India, we find 271 to the square mile. In England, the people support themselves by working in the industries. India has very few large towns. Millions are struggling to live and support themselves on half an acre. If the rains fall short by only a few inches, there is the terrible scarcity of food and thousands die. This condition is due to the fact also that the old industrial system of the Hindu has been destroyed. Once they manufactured in their homes and thus kept themselves from want. During the centuries of misrule after the various conquests of India, the land became full of robbers and armed bands. Since the introduction of railroads by the English, the natives are slowly moving from the congested districts to the few remaining spare lands. In ancient days each rural family was rooted to the spot of its ancestry.

The first glimpses that we catch of the Hindu in historical times we find a people of varied ethnology. The popular theory emphasizes an Aryan invasion that took place in late ages, compared to the primitive times when the deeds of the Indian epics were, enacted. As late as the authoritative records of history, the most powerful kingdoms of India were ruled over by non-Aryan princes. These were the Indi of the ancient records. This ruling race had produced the culture that passed down, and just as across all the wide belt of the equator the civilization of the ancient Cushite was appropriated–here it was not destroyed. So intermixed are all the classes of the Hindu today that all Brahmin, and Sandra have identically the same form of a skull, the old formation of Ethiopia. This later Brahmic type which has only ruled India in the Christian Era is Turanian in the same sense that the races of western Europe may be so called. These Turanians entering India were inferior in culture to the Indi. Today after the continued conquest, we find great peoples using literary languages among the Dravidians who represent the primitive Cushite stock. Such are the Tamils, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kanarese. Authorities dispute the claim that the black Rajputs were the same race as the invading Turanians. The ancient books read without prejudice reveal a deadly contest between Brahmins and the Kshatriyas, the original royal stock.

The literature reveals that this hostility did not come to an end until the Brahmins gave up the hope of holding the sovereignty and took over the custody of the ancient books and the priesthood. We read in Buddhist India, p. 44, that it is a common error to suppose that the tribes with whom the so-called Aryans came in contact were savages. Some were, but there were also settled communities with a highly developed social organization, wealthy enough to excite the cupidity of invaders. These people were too much addicted to peace to be able to offer prolonged resistance, but they were strong enough to impose many of their ideas and institutions upon their conquerors. On page 59 we read, “It is now generally admitted that there are no pure Aryans in India, in spite of the theoretical restrictions on intermarriage. Aryan, Kolarin, and Dravidian could not at the time of the rise of Buddha be recognized. Long before the theory of caste had been brought into working order a fusion sufficient at least to obliterate completely the old landmarks had been accomplished.” In the ancient books of India, there is, no mention of caste. Long before the time of Alexander all the Hindu were a dark race.

Baldwin declares that Indo-Aryans were but a small proportion of the whole population of India. All over the country are masses, whose dialects reveal that they did not belong to the Indo-European group. Cushites entering India in primitive ages perhaps found aboriginal Malays. They did not exterminate them but conciliated, civilized and to some extent absorbed them. This was the Ethiopian custom over their wide domains. In the central provinces, an aboriginal Malay race forms a large proportion of the population, showing that the Cushites may have refused to intermix. The struggle represented as taking place between these Cushites and their conquerors might have been but a later emigration of their race as the Cassite invaders of Chaldea. We would think this from the identity of skull formation of all the racial divisions of India. The hill people of the Himalayas have always been fair, as we find Cushite people on all the continents where they were not exposed to the torrid rays of the sun. The Casdim or Cassites of ancient days occupied the highlands of southwestern Asia from the Caucasus to the highlands of India. Does it not seem more reasonable that this learned race as proved by the Chaldeans and Elamites sent the type into India that made her ruling class.

5000 years ago we have shown there was no branch of the Aryan race that could have produced the Rig-Veda. 5000 years ago no Japhethic nation possessed blacksmiths, chariots, and the civilization that the Rig-Veda reveals. It seems to be the story of the passage to the southwest of Hindu colonists from the mountains of Hindu-Kush (Cush) down into the plains of India. Note the name of the region from which they came. In the beginning, these invaders took Dravidian wives because most probably they were primarily of the same stock. 3000 to 4500 B. C. the father is represented with the ancient Cushite traits in all their glory. He was the priest of the family. He conducted human sacrifice, for which the horse sacrifice was substituted in later ages. There was no burning of widows and woman enjoyed a high position. The Rig-Veda represents these people at this far distant age as blacksmiths, barbers, coppersmiths, goldsmiths, carpenters, and husbandmen. They fought from chariots as did all Cushite nations. They settled down as husbandmen to till the fields. Unlike the modern Hindu, they ate beef. They adored gods identical with those of Egypt, Chaldea and Ethiopia. Who were these people who 4500 B. C. possessed towns and built ships? Semites and Turanians had no such arts.

When the Hebrews left Egypt they did not understand the art of welding iron. Persians in late ages used Egyptians as their carpenters. The historic Greek and Roman at this early age had not emerged from caves and use of rude stone tools. Let us glance at the Goths as they appeared on the plains of western Europe as late as the Christian Era and see if we find the race traits that the Rig-Veda reveals. They possessed no knowledge of metals. They scorned images and temples, therefore they had no priests. The name of not a single Gothic deity has come down to us. They showed not the faintest glimmer of the mentality and austerity of life of the Buddhist. They were coarse and gluttonous. They loved the strong drink and would lay for days in the drunken stupor in the ashes of their hearths. They appropriated the gods of the long headed race of western Europe, Odin and Thor. They knew nothing of agriculture being a nomadic race fitted for conquest. They had no communal interests as the people of India, they were extreme individualists. They battered down the grand structures of antiquity, they did not create them and smashed the art treasures of ages. Even in the Middle Ages they had developed none of the traits of the gentle Hindu and regarded not the rights of others unless compelled to do so by the sword.

Beside this picture let us line the Hindu priest. His is a type that early was devoted to the ceremony. His whole life was mapped out for stages of discipline. When he had reared a family and gained a practical knowledge of the world, he retired into the forest as a recluse, using nature’s wild foods. Here he practiced religious duties with increased devotion. Next, he entered upon an ascetic and rigorous self-denial, wandering as a religious mendicant, wholly withdrawn from joy or pain, wholly absorbed in final absorption into the deity. He ate nothing but what was given him unasked, remained not more than one day in a village. Throughout his life, he took no wine, curbed desire, shut out tumults of war, his duty was to pray and not to fight, to study-and practice self-restraint. The Brahmin represents a race in India that holds supremacy not by force of arms but by the vigor of hereditary culture and temperance. Dynasties have fallen, religions have spread themselves over the land and disappeared, but since the dawn of history, the Brahmin has calmly ruled.

As late as the Græco-Bactrian and Scythian inroads 327 B. C. to 544 A. D. we find the fairest districts of northern India still in possession of Cushites. In almost every part of Oudh and the northwestern provinces are to be found ruins ascribed to this race, which reigned at different periods from the fifth to the eleventh centuries A. D. The early invaders found as the Vedas describe, these people in possession of wealth, having cattle, cities, and forts. The literature represents them as making alliances with the native Cushite princes, this would have been impossible if they had not been of the same race. The Nubians (Cushites) of old Ethiopia will not intermarry with Arabs or Egyptians. Some superficial interpretations of the Vedas attempt to make out the Dravidian Cushites as disturbers of sacrifices, lawless, without gods, and without rites. This would not describe Cushites anywhere in the world. For at no stage of their development do they seem to be without sacrifice, law and religion, which rites they gave to the ancient world. That section of the Vedas describes Cushites finding the aborigines of the country without these rites, which they naturally at first opposed.

To those who read the Rig-Veda intelligently and without the confusing glasses of prejudice, these mutilated and interpolated writings are but a description of the familiar traits and customs of Cushite Ethiopians. The Brahmins were probably a much later and intermixed branch of the inhabitants of Hindu-Kush. That they were intermixed we can tell by their cruelty. Full blooded Cushites are very gentle. The fact that the Brahmins altered the Sanskrit writings to such great extent is proof itself that they were not the original authors of these works. They took over and appropriated much from Buddhism that would appeal to the masses when they found it otherwise impossible for them to sit in the saddle of the priesthood. An ancient treatise tells us of the early Cushite element, that they adorned their dead with gifts, with raiment, and ornaments, imagining thereby that they shall attain the world to come. Their ornaments were bronze, copper, and gold. One non-Aryan chief described this race as of fearful swiftness, unyielding in battle, in color like a dark blue cloud. This old type is represented today by the compact masses at the south. These Dravidians constitute forty-six millions of southern Indians today. They represent the unmixed Cushite type. All the rest of the blood of India is heavily mixed with this strain.

These Dravidians that the untruthful book seeks to represent today as despised outcasts when they are still a very important division of the Hindu population, entered India in primitive times by the northwest passage. They were a part of that advancing wave of the Old Race that swept eastward and westward, peopling primitive Arabia, Egypt, and Chaldea. The rich merchants of the ancient Indian commerce had been Dravidians. One of their greatest kingdoms was Pandya so noted in the Sanskrit writings. The Nandas in Behar of whom the great Chandra Gupta sprang and his greater grandson Asoka, were non-Aryan. These were of the supposed-to-be degraded Sudra. The Takshak and Naga nations who figure so largely in Sanskrit traditions are words purely African. Koch or Kush (Cush) form the masses of Bengal and Behar. By virtue of their descent from the old dominant race, they retain their name of Kshatriya and call themselves Rajbansis a term exactly corresponding to Rajput. The rajas of Kuch Behar claim a divine descent. The name Rajput means of royal descent. It was the title of the old conquering class of the ancient Cushites. There was an alliance between them and the Brahmins. We find distinguished bodies of the Kshattriyan so-called caste received into the Brahmin caste and for the same reason sections of aboriginal races manufactured into Brahmins.

In the Hindu Puranas, the Dravidian kingdom of Pandya was given two dynasties. The first had seventy-three kings, the second forty-three kings. The last king of the second dynasty was overthrown 1324 A. D. by the Mohammedans. No other Dravidian kingdom can boast so continuous a succession as the kings of Madura. The chronicles enumerate fifty Chara kings and fifty-six Chola kings as well as many minor dynasties. Dr. Deiche and Isaac Taylor thought the Hindu alphabet derived from the south Arabian and adopted a thousand years later by the Brahmins. The early history of the Dravidians is yet to be deciphered from moldering palm leaves and more trustworthy inscriptions on copper and stone. Like the Minoan script of Crete and the Merotic of Ethiopia, this is a third of the Ethiopic stem the has not been interpreted. In the territory of the Dravidians, we find extensive ruins of ancient temples, fortifications, tanks, bridges and vast remains.

The Dravidians in ethnic type are Ethiopian and are the race of India from which her civilization originated. Megathenes said that the natives of India and Ethiopia were not much different in complexion or feature. Dravidians are short like the race of the Mediterranean called Iberians and the Chaldeans. Their complexions are black or very dark. Their hair is plentiful and crispy. Their heads are elongated with the nose very broad. They occupy the oldest geological formation of India. They are descendants of that race of black men with short woolly hair that were the primitive inhabitants of ancient Media, Susiana and Persia, mentioned repeatedly in the Iranian legends, and whose faces look out at us from the sculptures of Babylon and Nineveh Dravidian is spoken by forty-six millions of India, not including the numerous uncultivated hill tribes and retired communities. A form of speech similar to it is spoken in Baluchistan, which originally was Cushite. In all the political changes that come to India, the communal type of life to which these natives cling never changes.

In ancient times India was ruled by Rajas, who were assisted by a council of elders. Sometimes the Raja was influenced by a queen mother or dowager. In Cushite races, lineage was traced through the mother. The succession of the Rajah was traced in the same way. This was changed upon the ascendency of the Brahmins. Turanians trace lineage from the father’s side. Some authors have sought to prove that the metronymic system or inheritance through the female line is evidence of promiscuity at the beginning of human life. In savage life men and women pair in mating, also among anthropoid apes proving that this instinct is as old as the human species. The spirit of the Cushite was to honor and exalt woman, therefore lineage was thus traced. Nephews, when born of sisters, were treated as sons and inherited the property to the exclusion of sons. Devalle described the queen of Ilaza as a black Ethiopian. He said she ruled like a woman of judgment. Marco Polo described the inhabitants of India as black and adorned with massive gold bracelets and strings of rare and precious gems. They had temples and priests. Vasco de Gama while circumnavigating the globe found the inhabitants black.