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BUDDHIST INDIA
tent and much later in time than is usually supposed. Our No. 2, Vedic, is largely subject to Dravidian influence, both in phonetics and in vocabulary. The Aryan vernaculars throughout, and all the literary forms of speech, -- Pāli, Sanskrit, and Prakrit,- are charged with it in a degree no less than that in which the descent and the blood-relationships of the many peoples of India are charged with non-Aryan elements — and that is saying a great deal.
The fact that south of the Godāvari we find the reverse state of things — Dravidian dialects charged with Aryan elements — shows that the Aryan settlements there were late, and not very important in regard to nuinbers. And it took a long time, in spite of a fair sprinkling of brahmin colonists, for the brahmin influence, now so supreme, to reach its supremacy in those parts. The mass of the more wealthy classes, and the inore cultured people, in the south, were Buddhists and Jain before they were Hindu in faith. As late as the fifth and sixth centuries we have Pāli books written in Kāñcipura and Tañjūr; and as Buddhism declined Jainism became predominant. It was only after the rise of brahmin influence in Northern India in the fourth and fifth centuries, and after it had become well established there, that it became the chief factor also in the south. But when once it had reached that stage, it developed so strongly as to react with great results on the north, where the final victory was actually won during the period from Kumārila to Sankara (700 to 830 A.D.), both of them born in the
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
