ous civilization and progress dawned on her, she was unprepared to meet it. Her religion, laws, customs and language shrivelled up at once, and slunk into holes and corners, and the statues of her gods which had loomed grand and terrible in the twilight of Brahminism, looked poor, feeble scarecrows in the full blaze of el Islam. The conquerors were but little disposed to adopt the language of the conquered race, but even had they been so, that language afforded them no materials in which to clothe their ideas. Necessity stept in to aid inclination, and the result was a language full of imported words.

"But," it may be urged, "no one objects to a certain number of Arabic and Persian words; many of them are necessary, some even indispensable, to the people: all we object to is the indiscriminate introduction of words which are not necessary, and for which the early Mahomedan invaders are not responsible." I might answer this, by asking the Hindi school to tell me how they know at what date any given word first made its appearance in India? On what grounds do they assert that the simpler and shorter Arabic words were introduced first, and the longer and more complicated ones later? There exists no regular Urdu literature by which we can, as in English, mark the exact epoch of the introduction of a word. And this brings me to my second argument, that, namely, derived from the constitution of native society, during all the years in which the Urdu language has been growing, up to the present time.

The conquerors were essentially one nation, though composed of very mixed elements. If they had adopted the language of the conquered, in a few generations they would have become scarcely intelligible to one another. In the present day an inhabitant of the Punjab just manages to make himself intelligible to a man of Patna by virtue of those few words which are now common to all Indian dialects, namely those of Persian origin, and the Hindi verbs and particles which have, thanks to the Mahomedans, become familiar all over the country. At the time of the first invasions hond was not used over a wider area than bhá, pás than bhíre, uská than okerá or waká. As the country was split up into a number of petty kingdoms, so was the language into a mass of dialects. Hindi was not one but many, and so it is to this day. The service which the Mahomedans rendered to India, consisted in their taking one of these many dialects

and making it the vehicle of their Persian and Arabic, and thus distributing it all over India. The Hindustani or Urdu language is therefore, from one point of view, not Persian grafted on Indian, but Indian inserted into Persian. The movement began from above and was imitated by the lower classes.

At an early period of the invasion, large tracts of country were converted to the Muslim faith. All the Punjab west of the Chinab, and a great deal east of that river; all the chief towns in the valley of the Ganges, and many villages in all parts of the country were largely converted; and the conversion went on for centuries, and has not yet ceased. To all these converts Arabic became a sacred tongue, and as such lay and lies as near the hearts of this section of the people as Hindi. Speak to a Mahomedan rustic in Hindi, he understands you and talks to you in the same; but speak to him in Urdu, and he will press into his service every word he knows of Arabic and Persian, to show you that though, through accident of birth, he can only speak a few words of those honored and sacred tongues, he is yet not quite without knowledge of them. The rustic father sends his son to school to the village pedagogue, to learn what? not Hindi, but Arabic and Persian. And then we are told that these languages do not lie near the hearts of the people! Why, I believe if the votes of the whole Mahomedan population could be taken, an overwhelming majority of them would prefer to abandon Hindustani altogether and make Persian the language of the land.

Among the higher classes in towns, who form the most intelligent and cultivated portion of the population, there can be no question whether Urdu or Hindi is most popular. It is in the towns that we find the stronghold of the Musulman, and consequently of Arabicized Urdu. But on what grounds we are asked to set aside the townspeople and all the Mahomedan rural population, together with all cultivated Hindus who try to talk as much Urdu as possible, I do not see. Native society has been for five centuries so thoroughly leavened with the language of the Mogul invader, and the invader has so thoroughly made himself at home in India, and has so successfully maintained the claim of his composite dialect to express the progress and intelligence of the country, that all classes aspire to use it as a sign of good breeding and cultivation.

The language, to quote Dr. Fallon once more," in which men buy and sell and transact business" is not Hindi; it is Urdu. If man and ser and chitánk are Hindi, kímat and nirakh, mál, saudá, and saudagar, jins, rakm, bazár, and dukán are Persian. If hát is Hindi, ganj is Persian. Sarak, bail, and gáṛi are Hindi, but pul, saráí and manzil are Persian. And so it runs through all the scenes of common Indian life; you hear everywhere simple Persian words as frequently as Hindi in the mouths of all classes of the people. I appeal to the experience of all who know well the rural districts of this country for confirmation of this assertion.

We may then safely state that to the higher classes throughout the country, to the Mahomedan rustic, to the townsmen in all districts, Urdu is as familiar and as well known; nay, more familiar, than pure unadulterated Hindi. It remains only to discuss the question as regards the Hindu peasant. And it is in this connection that the want of uniformity between the various Hindi dialects requires to be brought out in a stronger light. Hindi is not one, but many. If we follow the advice of our purists, and try to talk and write only pure Hindi, we abandon the possibility of retaining one universally intelligible language and fall back into a chaos of a dozen or more different dialects. In advocating the use of Hindi in preference to Arabicized Urdu, Dr. Fallon's school mean by Hindi those portions of Urdu which are of Indian origin; they mean the dialect which uses wuh, yih, iská, uská; which says honá, hotá, huá, karná, kiyá ; that dialect which has been incorporated into Urdu: the Hindi, in short, of Delhi and Muttra. But ten miles from Delhi itself I have heard wáká for uská, yáká for iská. If we are to reject such forms as these and use only the Delhi Hindi, we are quite as far from reaching the heads and hearts of the mass of the population as ever. The great Bhojpuri dialect, for instance, is spoken throghout eastern Oudh, Gorackpur, Benares, Shahábád, Sarun and Tirhút, and is more unlike the Delhi Hindi than Dutch is unlike English. I would ask a Delhi or upper Doab rustic to interpret the following from the evidence given in court in a dacoity case by a peasant of Champáran. "Okerá dwáre gárdhá sunilin, sagare log dháwalan, tún dúi sau jana jamilan, ghare samágelan, sagará dhan, chípá, loța, dhán, cháwal sathi lút lelan, dheri toralan, phin niksalan, áru mushál bhig delan, te bhágalan, t'hom a' P'shádwa chahet gelin, t'ekho chor pakaráil gel.”

This is pretty simple, especially when written down clearly on paper, but when heard from the mouth of the witness, mumbled and half pronounced and spoken with the rapidity of a steam-engine, it is not so easily caught. It means: "We heard a noise at his house. Every one ran [there] There two hundred men were collected. They entered the house. They looted all the property, platters, lotás, rice [of three sorts]; dhán, [unhusked]; cháwul, [husked]; sathi [a species of Bhadai rice]. They broke the granary; then they came out, threw away their torches and fled. Then I and Parshád pursued, and one thief was caught."

Does Dr. Fallon wish us to fall back on this dialect, for instance, with the certainty that by using it we render ourselves unintelligible to one-half of India? or are we to use some other dialect, unintelligible to this half? Or again is each Englishman to use the dialect of the district where he finds himself, and have to learn a new dialect at each change of station?

If in reply I am told that the language meant by Hindi is the dialect of hai and huá, kartá and kiyá; and not that of bha and bháil, karat and karalan,* nor that of che and child; nor that of húndá and hoya; nor that of cho, chá and chi ;§ and that a certain amount of necessary Persian words is allowable, I would ask where are we to draw the line in Hindi between what is classical and what is provincial, and in Urdu between what Arabic words are allowable and what are not?

Remarks on some ancient Hindu Ruins in the Garhwál Bhátur.—By Lieutenant AYRTON PULLAN, Assistant Surveyor, Great Trigonometrical Survey.

[Received 6th June, 1867.]

While engaged in surveying a portion of the dense forest that skirts the foot of the Himalayas between Garhwal and Rohilcund, I discovered a very remarkable temple and a number of carved slabs scattered through the jungle. These ruins have hitherto escaped notice, owing to the dense jungle in which they lie hidden. The

* Bhojpuri.
+ Tirhút.
§ Rajputana and Harrowti.

Panjabi.

admirable preservation in which the temple still is, and the beauty of the carving on it, and the surrounding fragments, have induced me to make sketches of the most remarkable portions. I send herewith zincographs from my sketches, trusting that with the following brief account, they may prove interesting to the Asiatic Society.

In January last, while in the Chandipáhár Seváliks and near the site of an ancient but now ruined village called Mandhal, almost six miles east of Hurdwar, I found among the grass the carved figure of & Bull; following up my discovery I came upon a small temple of exquisite carving and design, the figures on the frieze in fine altorelievo and the whole arrangement of the façade perfect.

Round the temple, which was eight feet in height and six or eight feet square, were scattered a number of carved slabs, a group of wrestlers, Ganesh with his elephant head, and some gods under canopies so very Buddhist, as to remind me of "Sákya Thubhá" on the drawings of the monks of Zauskar and Ladakh.

The temple itself stands on a platform or "chabutará," twenty feet square, and at each side is a trench or drain which was probably intended to carry off the water, and leave the flat square dry for worshippers. Beautifully executed heads terminate the trench at the four corners : on the south a woman's head and bust, at the west a lion, at the north a ram; the east corner is broken and defaced. These heads in form and execution brought to my mind most vividly "the Gargoyles" on the gothic Cathedrals of Europe.

Scattered about were two or three large capitals and shafts of pillars, evidently belonging to a building of far larger dimensions than the small one now standing. The frieze and doorway faces the south; the northern door is much plainer, but I would draw attention to one of the pillars shewing a stag under a tree which is identical with the stag and tree on a silver coin found by me two years ago near Betrut in the Saharanpur district, and attributed to the Mahárájá Amojdha; the coin is now in the possession of Bábu Rajendralála Mitra of Calcutta. Inside the temple lies a square carved slab, cracked by a fall, bearing a fine three-headed deity. This three-headed god occurs on most of the slabs throughout the Terai, and is conspicuous on the lingam found near Lál Dháng. * These zincographs may be seen in the Library of the Asiatic Society. ED.