episode of the monkey princes), and seems to have grown up in Eastern India, with an Austric background; but later it was re-edited as a national poem within the gorgeous framework of the composite and highly complex Hindu civilization of 2,000 years ago. The Mahābhārata story, on the other hand, which developed in the Midland (present-day Western United Provinces and Eastern Punjab), would appear to embody a good deal of the legends, traditions, and history of the Aryans as well as of the mixed Aryan-non-Aryan peoples, and was created consciously as the national poem of a new Hindu nation of mixed origin welded into one people under Brƒhma–a guidance. Viewed in this light, the pre-Vedic antiquity of a number of heroic tales and legends and dynastic "histories" as being really pre-Aryan, possibly Dravidian, can be properly understood, as cases of rendering in the Aryans' language of pre-Aryan material....

The speakers of the Austric, Dravidian and Indo-European Aryan tongues, racially Proto-Australoids, Mediterraneans, Nordics, Alpines, and Dinarics, made up the Indian people and built up the civilization of India. After this civilization had taken its definite colour and its special orientation, by the middle of the first millennium B.C., another new racial and culture-language element came into India-the Mongoloid Sino-Tibetan speakers-the Kirātas; but they touched only the fringe of India in the North-east, and their influence was but local, and not of much significance. According to a Tibetan tradition of very doubtful value, the Tibetans first settled in Tibet during the time of the Buddha. But it was over a thousand years after that, in the seventh century A.D., that they came in active contact with India-an India which was already far advanced in her composite Aryan-non-Aryan culture. The various Sino-Tibetan tribes were in a very primitive and backward condition, and they did not have much to give to the Indians, of Austric-Dravidian-Aryan affinities and origin. There is a Mongoloid stratum in the Himālayas and in the tracts immediately to the South, in Assam, in North and East Bengal; and in the evolution of Aryan languages like Gorkhali or Nepāli, Bengali and Assamese, some Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) influence has been suggested. The Sino-Tibetan peoples, at least those among them who could benefit by their contact with Indian culture, thoroughly imbibed it and, like the Newārs of Nepāl valley, became fully Indianized. It is only where they are remote from the Aryan-speaking Indians that they are able to maintain their separate identity a little; but their absorption into an Aryan-speaking Indian body-politic is inevitable, whether in Nepāl or in Bengal or in Assam. But in the process of their becoming completely Indianized, they are sure to make at