Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/40

The Religion of the Veda
The river Ganges, so essential to a picture of India
in historical times, and even more bound up with
all Western poetic fancies about India, is scarcely
mentioned in the Rig-Veda. This same text is full
of allusions to the struggles of the fair-skinned
Aryas with the dark-skinned aborigines, the Dasyus.
The struggle is likely to have been bitter. The
spread of Aryan civilisation was gradual, and re-
sulted finally in the up-building of a people whose
civilisation was foreign and superior, but whose race
quality was determined a good deal by the over-
whelmingly large, native, dark-skinned, non-Aryan
population. At the beginning of our knowledge of
India we are face to face with an extensive poet-
ical literature, in set metres. This is crude on
the whole, even when compared with classical
Sanskrit literature of later times. Yet, it shows,
along with uncouth naïveté and semi-barbarous
turgidity, a good deal of beauty and elevation of
thought, and a degree of skill bordering on the
professional, in the handling of language and metre.
That this product was not created out of nothing on
Indian soil follows from the previously mentioned
close connection with the earliest product of Persian
literature, the Avesta.¹ Even the metric types of
Veda and Avesta are closely related.
1 See above, p. 13.
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