ART. IV. KASHMIR AND THE COUNTRIES A Gazetteer of the Countries adjacent to India on the North West, including Sinde, Afghanistan, Beloochis- tan, the Punjab, and the Neighbouring States: By ART. V.-THE ALGEBRA OF THE HINDUS. 1. Lilawati, or a treatise on Arithmetic and Geometry by Bhascara Acharja. Translated from the original Sanscrit, by John Taylor, M.D., of the Honorable East India Company's Bombay Medical Establish- 2. Algebra, with Arithmetic and Mensuration from the Sanscrit of Brahmagupta and Bhascara. Translat- 3. History of Algebra in all Nations, by Charles Hutton, 4. Lectures on the Principles of Demonstrative Mathema- tics, by the Rev. Philip Kelland, A.M., F.R.S.S., L. and E., Professor of Mathematics in the Univer- sity of Edinburgh. Late Fellow and Tutor of Queen's College, Cambridge. Edinburgh, 1843, . ib ART. VI.-SIR P. FRANCIS. Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, between the year 1744, and the period of his decease in 1797. Edited by Charles William, Earl Fitz- THE CALCUTTA REVIEW. VOL. II.-No. III. [SECOND EDITION.] ART. I.-1. Genealogical account of the Kulins, by Dhrubánanda Misra, Sanscrit, unpublished. 2. Kula-sára-sindhu, by Raghunandan Tarkabágish, Sanscrit, unpublished. 3. Mukhuti-kula-varnaná, Sanscrit, unpublished. 4. A Historical Fragment, Sanscrit verse, unpublished. 5. Sankarmálá, by Bhriguráma, Sanscrit, unpublished. 6. Kankálir Abhishámpa, or the malediction of Kankáli, by Rúm Chunder Turkálankár.-Ratnakar Press, Calcutta. HEREDITARY distinctions of tribes and classes appear to have prevailed in India from very remote times. The Hindus, with their usual fondness for all Brahminical ordinances, pretend that their four-fold division of castes was coeval with the creation. The pretension, ridiculous and futile as it is, proves however the antiquity of the institution; and as the classification corresponds to a considerable extent with the Egyptian mode of distributing offices and occupations, it is probable that an early intercourse existed between these two nations, especially since voyages by sea were not of yore forbidden to the Hindus. There is no extravagance in the supposition, that the route which the Berenice, the Sesostris, the Cleopatra, the Victoria, the Akbar, &c., are now taking every month with the overland mails from and to Bombay, had centuries past been marked by Hindu vessels trading on the Red Sea, and that these merchantmen had imported or exported many of the existing laws of castes and tribes. Among the Hindus, as among the Egyptians, the priests occupied the first rank in society, and naturally commanded the veneration due to the guardians of religion and learning. The warriors and the merchants, who were entrusted with the preservation of the country and the supply of the comforts and necessities of life, enjoyed the second and third places in the VOL. II. A commonwealth, while the Sudras, or slaves, destined for the service of the others, filled the fourth and last grade. The first three orders were distinguished by the appellation of the twiceborn, and were invested with the sacred cord as the badge of their regeneration; the last were doomed to occupy the same position in India, that was allotted to the slaves in the Grecian republics. Disparities of rank and station are inseparable from human society, and the Hindu legislators in causing this quadruple division, acted upon the principle that was observed by statesmen all over the world. The satraps of the Magian and Sabian countries, the free-born citizens of the Grecian states, the priests and warriors of Egypt, the patricians and plebeians of Rome, and the peers, grandees, segniors, ameers, &c., in other quarters, are evidences of conventional distinctions maintained by all nations. Some have every-where endeavoured to rise above others. Even the most democratical states have not been free from aristocratic distinctions and influences. The vast majority of the human species has always submitted to the authority of the few, that have exalted themselves above the common level; and these have invariably improved every opportunity of self-aggrandisement. It was not Nimrod alone, though he was the first on record, that began to be mighty on the earth. Many have since followed the " mighty-hunter's" example by struggling for superiority over their brethren. These distinctions have, however, proved in India sad engines of corruption and human degradation. They have been considered, not as mere civil enactments intended for the well-being of society and so capable of alteration and improvement, according to the mutations of times and circumstances, but as an integral portion of the Brahminical theology itself, alledged to have been ordained by God from the very beginning of the world, and therefore superior to modification and change. The different tribes are religiously enjoined to keep separate from one another, and to abstain on peril of their souls from intruding into each other's professions. In their anxiety to place their own dignity upon the firmest footing, the Hindu legislators did not stop to consider or deplore the magnitude of the evils they were preparing for their country, or the hardness of the yoke they were imposing on millions of their species. The noblest families might deteriorate, and the meanest tribe might ameliorate itself, in process of time. Hereditary priests, warriors, mechanics and menial labourers might, by the vicissitudes of life, be all incapacitated in the course of a few centuries for their respective occupations, and yet be adapted for other duties; and if the country could not reap the benefit of their services in those departments, for which time and circumstances, though not their birth, had prepared them, the nation must be reduced to a stagnant state of semi-barbarism, and of imbecility both at home and abroad. And is not this sufficiently evidenced in the present degradation of this vast and magnificent empire? Has not the sad experience of hundreds of years imprinted, as with an iron pen, on the minds of all who have eyes to see, understandings to judge, yea, or even hearts to feel, the strongest conviction that this religious division into castes has, by detaching tribe from tribe and forcing important professions upon unwilling and perhaps unsuitable individuals, proved the real cause of India's internal misery and external humiliation? What other nation under the sun has continued under foreign dominion for centuries and centuries without ever exhibiting the least impatience, or making the smallest effort for liberty and independence? Before we can properly introduce the subject prescribed for this article to the notice of our readers, a few preliminary observations on the ancient annals of Bengal will not be misplaced. Although at present a most important division of Hindustan, containing the metropolis of British India and the seat of her Supreme Council, and peculiarly adapted by position and soil for commerce and trade, Bengal does not seem to have enjoyed much consequence in this vast empire, before foreigners were attracted thither for mercantile purposes. The silence of the old Hindu writers would incline to the belief that it is for the most part alluvial land, and that originally the lower provinces were, in a great measure, comprehended in the unfathomed recesses of the deep ;-that the present metropolitical residence of the British viceroy in the East, was, at one time, the bed of the mighty ocean!-Forests and marshes probably occupied the soil as the sea abandoned it, and human habitations were subsequently formed, where tigers had once prowled and fishes disported. Who the original inhabitants were, or when they settled, can at this distant age only be a question of conjecture. That the existing occupiers of the soil are all descended from the Aborigines, we are not willing to believe. That these are all colonists and emigrants we are also loath to admit. That the wild hill tribes on the frontiers are the only relics of the first inhabitants cannot be proved to any body's satisfaction. The truth seems to lie between these varying propositions. The savage clans dwelling in the recesses of jungles and hills, are proper representatives of the people in their pristine condition. But of these, large numbers may have been humanized by amalgamation with more civilized emigrants. The most timid or untractable had probably preferred a wild independence in the thickets of hills and mountain-fastnesses to the yoke of more powerful intruders, or to incorporation with foreigners whom they could not expel. In the then imperfect state of navigation, the foreign colonists had perhaps poured in by land from the teeming plains of Hindustan Proper. From them Bengal must have derived its Hinduism and the Sanscrit literature. The present language is in all likelihood a commixture of the original wild dialect with the polished vocabulary of the Vedas and Purans. Indeed this province appears, on the emigration of new colonists, to have undergone similar mutations in men and language with its insular mistress of the west, where the Saxons and Normans amalgamated with the Aboriginal savages, though they were the means of driving many a wild free-spirited horde into inaccessible mountains and forests. But whatever be the probable truth of these suppositions, it is almost undoubted that Bengal did not rise into importance so early as the other divisions of Hindustan.* Whether the Brahminical theology was in any shape known and acknowledged from the very commencement of its population or not, certain it is that the study of Brahminical learning was not long carried on here with any celebrity or success. The Nuddea school, now so famous for its cultivation of the Nyaya, or Logic, is confessedly of modern institution. What the state of learning philosophy and theology was in this province, during or previous to its connection with the Magadha empire, does not clearly appear. The contempt with which it is still spoken of in the other divisions of India, and the absence of any traditionary or monumental proofs of its pristine glory, is a presumptive evidence of its primitive insignificance. Under the Buddhist family of the Pals, Brahminism must naturally have been on the wane, and little as the Shasters had before been studied, they must have been less so at this period. This is evident from the miserable. condition to which the priests had been reduced under the Hindu kings that succeeded the Buddhists. In the reign of Adisur, the founder of the Sen or the medical dynasty, the ranks of Brahminism had not only been sadly desolated, probably owing to the persecution of his Buddhist predecessors, but the few that had escaped this catastrophe, were found deplorably ignorant in their sacerdotal duties. Brahminism, it *The long list of Bengal kings, contained in the Ayeen Acbary, cannot be entirely correct. How could so many names be traditionally remembered-or if the compiler made use of any documentary guides, where are they now? |