Along the North-East frontier British India marches with semi-independent States that have little or nothing in common with the rest of India.

Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim are Himalayan highlands inhabited chiefly by Mongolian Buddhists, who have far more affinity with Tibetans and Chinese than with their Indian neighbours to the south.

Assam is little more than an administrative dependency of Eastern Bengal, whilst Burma has been even more accurately described as a mere appendage of India, attached for purposes of administrative convenience to our Indian Empire, but otherwise as effectively divided from it by race, religion, customs, and tradition as by the waters of the Bay of Bengal and the dense jungles of the Patkai Mountains.
In none of these borderlands has Hinduism ever struck root, and in none of them, therefore, is Indian Nationalism, which is so largely bound up with Hinduism, likely to find a congenial soil.

But that Southern India where Hinduism is supreme should have remained hitherto so little affected by the political agitation which has swept across India further north from the Deccan to Bengal may at first sight cause some surprise.
Yet the explanation is not far to seek, if one bears in mind the profound differences which nature itself has imposed upon this vast sub-continent.

Southern India, which may be defined as including the whole of the Madras Presidency and the three native States of Mysore, Cochin, and Travancore, differs, indeed, almost immeasurably from Central and Northern India.