These people, speaking Indo-Chinese languages, surround India proper on the north and east in a crescent-shaped curve, mostly in the valleys of lofty and rugged mountains. From the eastern mountains projects into the midst of the modern province of Assam a range of hills, dividing the valley of the Brahmaputra from that of Sylhet, which is watered by the Surma. Readers of Sir W. W. Hunter's delightful little book on _The Thackerays in India_ will not need to be told where Sylhet is, or what sort of a place it is. This range of hills is inhabited by the Garos on the west, and the Nagas on the east, both Tibeto-Burman races. Between them, on one of the most beautiful plateaus in the world, are the Khāsis, once, as I have said elsewhere, regarded as being as isolated and unique as our European Basques, but now proved to be, linguistically at least, connected with the Mons in Burma, and many races and tribes in Further India and Australonesia. All these Indo-Chinese people seem to have come originally from north-western China, following the beds of great rivers in their travel; down the Chindwin, the Irrawaddy, and the Salween into Burma, down the Brahmaputra into Assam, and up the Brahmaputra into Tibet. There seem to have been at least three waves of migration. First, in prehistoric times, there was a Mon-Khmer invasion into Further India and Assam. Next, also at an unknown date, was a Tibeto-Burman invasion into the same regions and Tibet. Next the Tai branch of the Siamese-Chinese entered eastern Burma about the sixth century A.D. A fourth Tibeto-Burmese invasion, that of the Kachins, when in Lord Dufferin's time, the British annexed Upper Burma. I think I have now said enough to show how the languages of India are distributed. It only remains to give a brief and cursory account of the Indian Religions. This is a subject on which big books might be, and have been, written. But, even in so small a book on the Peoples of India it seems necessary to give some account of their religious divisions. [4] As in Europe, the modern Aryan languages differ from one another chiefly in survivals from the indigenous earlier speech which preceded each of them. CHAPTER III THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA