Abstract
Aboriginal Races of India B. S. GUHA in a racial analysis of the aboriginal peoples of India (Science and Culture, 4, 17, June, 1939) points out that of the inhabitants of all India, 22½ millions, in round numbers, are still in a primitive state, living by hunting, fishing and on forest produce, and forming 6½ per cent of the entire population, but that if to these are added the fifty millions and more of the so-called “exterior castes”, who are mostly detribalized primitive folk in process of entering the Hindu social system, the proportion becomes twice or even thrico this figure. Regionally these tribes are grouped into three separate zones. (1) A northern and north-eastern division of about three million people, scattered over a very large area of the sub-Himalayan region and the mountainous territory of Assam and north-eastern India, and merging into those of Burma and Yunnan. (2) A central division occupying small hills and plateaux traversing the entire breadth of the country from the Gulf of Cambay to the Orissan coasts, and comprising the Bhil, Gond, Kol, Oraon, Munda-Santal, etc. (3) the southern division, the smallest, containing little more than a hundred thousand people, spread over the hills of southern India, especially the extreme south-western strip. There is a rough parallel between the geographical distribution and the linguistic affinities of these peoples. Among the northern and north-eastern group the languages are of the Tibeto-Chinese family, with certain small exceptions. In the central division the languages spoken belong chiefly to the Munda branch of the Austric family, though certain peoples have adopted Aryan and Dravidian tongues. The southern group now speak entirely Dravidian languages in corrupt forms; and in the absence of a linguistic survey there is no means of knowing whether any traces of their original languages, Austric or other, survive. The same parallelism, however, does not exist in physical features, which show strains of Negrito, Proto-Australoid, a brachycephalic element with two subdivisions, ono being more primitive than the other, and fourthly a medium-statured dolichocephalic element chiefly distributed in the Assam hills and mixed no doubt with short-statured Palae-Mongols.
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Research Items. Nature 144, 293–295 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144293a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144293a0