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Title: India, Old and New

Author: Sir Valentine Chirol

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  INDIA
  OLD AND NEW


  BY
  SIR VALENTINE CHIROL

  AUTHOR OF "INDIAN UNREST," "THE EGYPTIAN PROBLEM," ETC.


     "We shall in time so far improve the character of our
     Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect
     themselves."--Minute by Sir Thomas Munro, Governor
     of Madras, Dec. 31, 1824.


  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
  1921




FOREWORD


It is little more than ten years since I wrote my _Indian Unrest_. But
they have been years that may well count for decades in the history of
the world, and not least in the history of India. Much has happened in
India to confirm many of the views which I then expressed. Much has
happened also to lead me to modify others, and to recognise more clearly
to-day the shortcomings of a system of government, in many ways
unrivalled, but subject to the inevitable limitations of alien rule.

At a very early stage of the Great War the Prime Minister warned the
British people that, after the splendid demonstration India was already
giving of her loyalty to the cause for which the whole Empire was then
in arms, our relations with her would have henceforth to be approached
from "a new angle of vision." The phrase he used acquired a deeper
meaning still as the war developed from year to year into a
life-and-death struggle not merely between nations but between ideals,
and India claimed for herself the benefit of the ideals for which she
too fought and helped the British Commonwealth to victory. When victory
was assured, could India's claim be denied after she had been called in,
with all the members of the British Commonwealth, to the War Councils of
the Empire in the hour of need, and again been associated with them in
the making of peace? The British people have answered that question as
all the best traditions of British governance in India, and all the
principles for which they had fought and endured through four and a half
years of frightful war, bade them answer it.

The answer finally took shape in the great constitutional experiment of
which I witnessed the inauguration during my visit to India this winter.
It promises to rally as seldom before in active support of the British
connection those classes that British rule brought within the orbit of
Western civilisation by the introduction of English education, just
about a century ago. It has not disarmed all the reactionary elements
which, even when disguised in a modern garb, draw their inspiration from
an ancient civilisation, remote indeed from, though not in its better
aspects irreconcilable with, our own. A century is but a short moment of
time in the long span of Indian history, and the antagonism between two
different types of civilisation cannot be easily or swiftly lived down.
It would be folly to underrate forces of resistance which are by no
means altogether ignoble, and in this volume I have studied their origin
and their vitality because they underlie the strange "Non-co-operation"
movement which has consciously or unconsciously arrayed every form of
racial and religious and economic and political discontent, not merely
against British rule, but against the progressive forces which contact
with Western civilisation has slowly brought into existence under
British rule in India itself. These forces have been stirred to new
endeavour by the goal now definitely placed within their reach. That we
were bound to set that goal and no other before them I have tried to
show by reviewing the consistent evolution of British policy in India
for the last 150 years, keeping, imperfectly sometimes, but in the main
surely, abreast of our own national and political evolution at home and
throughout the Empire. Once placed in its proper perspective, this great
experiment, though fraught with many dangers and difficulties, is one of
which the ultimate issue can be looked forward to hopefully as the not
unworthy sequel to the long series of bold and on the whole wonderfully
successful experiments that make up the unique story of British rule in
India.

I have to express my thanks to the proprietors of _The Times_ for
allowing me to use some of the letters which I wrote for that paper
whilst I was in India last winter, and also to the Royal Society of Arts
for permission to reproduce the main portions of a lecture delivered by
me last year on Hinduism as the first of the Memorial Lectures
instituted in honour of the late Sir George Birdwood, to whom I owe as
much for the deeper understanding which he gave me of old India as I do
to the late Mr. G.K. Gokhale for the clearer insight I gained from him
into the spirit of new India whilst we were colleagues from 1912 to 1915
on the Royal Commission on Indian Public Services.

                                                      VALENTINE CHIROL.

34 CARLYLE SQUARE, CHELSEA,
_August 24, 1921._




CONTENTS

                                                                 PAGE
  CHAPTER I
  THE CLASH OF TWO CIVILISATIONS                                    1


  CHAPTER II
  THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM                                   15



  CHAPTER III
  MAHOMEDAN DOMINATION                                             46


  CHAPTER IV
  BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY                        66


  CHAPTER V
  THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER                                 84


  CHAPTER VI
  THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST                                  111


  CHAPTER VII
  THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS                                        125


  CHAPTER VIII
  THROUGH THE GREAT WAR TO THE GREAT INDIAN REFORM BILL      139


  CHAPTER IX
  THE EMERGENCE OF MR. GANDHI                                     165


  CHAPTER X
  SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE ELECTIONS                                    193


  CHAPTER XI
  CROSS CURRENTS IN SOUTHERN INDIA                                214


  CHAPTER XII
  THE BIRTH OF AN INDIAN PARLIAMENT                               227


  CHAPTER XIII
  ECONOMIC FACTORS                                                246


  CHAPTER XIV
  SHOALS AND ROCKS AHEAD                                          268


  CHAPTER XV
  THE INCLINED PLANE OF GANDHIISM                                 286


  CHAPTER XVI
  THE INDIAN PROBLEM A WORLD PROBLEM                              299


  INDEX                                                           311




CHAPTER I

THE CLASH OF TWO CIVILISATIONS


On February 9, 1921, three hundred and twenty-one years after Queen
Elizabeth granted to her trusty "Merchant-venturers" of London the
charter out of which the East India Company and the British Empire of
India were to grow up, His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught
inaugurated at Delhi, in the King-Emperor's name, the new representative
institutions that are to lead India onward towards complete
self-government as an equal partner in the British Commonwealth of
Nations. To bring home to every Indian the full significance of the
occasion, the King-Emperor did not shrink from using in his Royal
Message an Indian word which not long ago was held to bear no other than
a seditious construction. His Majesty gave it a new and finer meaning.
"For years--it may be for generations--patriotic and loyal Indians have
dreamed of _Swaraj_ for their motherland. To-day you have the beginnings
of _Swaraj_ within my Empire, and the widest scope and ample opportunity
for progress to the liberty which my other Dominions enjoy."

It was a bold pronouncement inaugurating another, some say the boldest,
of all the many bold adventures which make up the marvellous history of
British rule in India. The simplicity, rare in the East, of the ceremony
itself enhanced its significance. It was not held, like the opening of
the Chamber of Princes, in the splendid Hall of Public Audience in the
old Fort where the Moghul Emperors once sat on the Peacock Throne, nor
were there the flash of jewels and blaze of colour that faced the Duke
when he addressed the feudatory chiefs who still rule their states on
ancient lines beyond the limits of direct British administration. The
members of the new Indian Legislatures, most of them in sober European
attire, though many of them retained their own distinctive head-dress,
were assembled within the white and unadorned walls of the temporary
building in which they will continue to sit until the statelier home to
be built for them in new Delhi is ready to receive them. But Delhi
itself with all its age-long memories was around one to provide the
historic setting for an historic scene, and Delhi still stands under the
sign of the Kutub Minar, the splendid minaret--a landmark for miles and
miles around--which dominates the vast graveyard of fallen dynasties at
its feet and the whole of the great plain beyond where the fate of
India, and not of India alone, has so often been decided.

On that plain were fought out, in prehistoric times, the fierce
conflicts of ancient Aryan races, Pandavas and Kauravas, around which
the poetic genius of India has woven the wonderful epos of the
Mahabharata. Only a couple of miles south of the modern city, the walls
of the Purana Kilat, the fortress built by Humayun, cover the site but
have not obliterated the ancient name of Indraprasthra, or Indrapat, the
city founded by the Pandavas themselves, when Yudhisthira celebrated
their final victory by performing on the banks of the Jumna, in token of
the Pandava claim to Empire, the _Asvamedha_, or great Horse Sacrifice,
originated by Brahma himself. There too, on a mound beyond Indrapat,
stands the granite shaft of one of Asoka's pillars, on which, with a
fine faith that the world has never yet justified, the great Buddhist
Apostle-Emperor of India inscribed over 2000 years ago his edicts
prohibiting the taking of life. At the very foot of the Kutub Minar the
famous Iron Pillar commemorates the victories of the "Sun of Power," the
Hindu Emperor of the Gupta dynasty with whose name, under the more
popular form of Raja Bikram, Indian legend associates the vague memories
of a golden age of Hindu civilisation in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Pillar was brought there by one of the Rajput princes who founded in
the middle of the eleventh century the first city really known to
history as Delhi. There Prithvi Raja reigned, who still lives in Indian
minstrelsy as the embodiment of Hindu chivalry, equally gallant and
daring in love and in war--the last to make a stand in northern India
against the successive waves of Mahomedan conquest which Central Asia
had begun to pour in upon India in 1001, with the first of Mahmud
Ghazni's seventeen raids. In the next century an Afghan wave swept down
on the top of the original Turki wave, and Kutub-ed-Din, having
proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi in 1206, built the great Mosque of
_Kuwwet-el-Islam_, "The Power of Islam," and the lofty minaret, still
known by his name, from which for six centuries the Moslem call to
prayer went forth to proclaim Mahomedan domination over India.

With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped
in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The
annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently
to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was
shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the wild spaces
of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again like a
devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed the
long line of Moghul Emperors who first under Baber and then under Akbar
won the Empire of Hindustan at the gates of Delhi, and for a time
succeeded in bringing almost the whole of India under their sway. But
their splendid marble halls in the great Fort of Delhi recall not only
the magnificence of the Moghul Empire, but its slow and sure decay,
until it became a suitor for the protection of the British power, which,
at first a mere trading power that had once sued humbly enough for its
protection, had risen to be the greatest military and political power
in India. It was at Delhi at the beginning of the nineteenth century
that Lord Lake rescued a Moghul Emperor from the hands of Mahratta
jailers, and it was at Delhi again that in 1857 the last semblance of
Moghul rulership disappeared out of history in the tempest of the
Mutiny. It was on the plain of Delhi that the assumption by Queen
Victoria of the imperial title was solemnly proclaimed in 1878, and,
with still greater pomp, King Edward's accession in 1903. There again in
1911 King George, the first of his line to visit his Indian Empire as
King-Emperor, received in person the fealty of princes and peoples and
restored Delhi to her former pride of place as its imperial capital.

Where else in the world can such a procession of the ages pass before
one's eyes, from the great "Horse Sacrifice" of the Pandavas at the dawn
of history to the inauguration by a British prince in the King-Emperor's
name of modern political institutions conceived in the democratic spirit
of British freedom?

Yet at the very time when an Indian-elected assembly, representing as
far as possible all creeds and classes and communities, and above all
the Western-educated classes who are the intellectual offspring of
British rule, were gathered together to hear delivered to them in
English--the one language in which, as a result of British rule, and by
no means the least valuable, Indians from all parts of a vast polyglot
country are able to hold converse--the Royal message throwing open to
the people of India the road to _Swaraj_ within the British Empire, the
imperial city of Delhi went into mourning as a sign of angry protest,
and the vast majority of its citizens, mostly, it must be remembered,
Mahomedans, very strictly observed a complete boycott of the Royal visit
in accordance with Mr. Gandhi's "Non-co-operation" campaign, and went
out in immense crowds to greet the strange Hindu saint and leader who
had come to preach to them his own very different message--a message of
revolt, not indeed by violence but by "soul force," against the
soulless civilisation of the West.

In no other city in India would such an alliance between Hindus and
Mahomedans have seemed only a few years ago more unthinkable. For
nowhere else have we such a vision as in Delhi of the ruthlessness as
well as of the splendour of Mahomedan domination in India. Nowhere can
one measure as in Delhi the greatness of its fall, and its fall had
begun before it ever came into conflict with the rising British power.
It had been shaken to its foundations by the far more ancient power of
Hinduism, which Islam had subdued but never destroyed. In the
seventeenth century Shivaji, the hero still to-day of the Hindu revival
of which Mr. Gandhi is the latest apostle, led out for the first time
his Mahrattas in open rebellion against Delhi and started the continuous
process of disintegration from which the Moghul Emperors were driven to
purchase their only possible respite under British protection. Since
India finally passed not under Mahratta, but under British rule,
Hinduism has never again been subjected to the oppression which the
fierce monotheism of Islam itself taught all her Mahomedan rulers, with
the one noble exception of Akbar, to inflict upon an "idolatrous" race.
British rule introduced into India not only a new reign of law and order
but the principles of equal tolerance and justice for all which had
struck root in our own civilisation. Nevertheless, at the very moment at
which we were attempting to extend a wide and generous application of
those principles to the domain of political rights and liberties, we
were being confronted with unexpected forces of resistance which, even
in Mahomedan Delhi, drew their chief inspiration from Hinduism.

But, it might be argued, Delhi, though restored to the primacy it had
lost under British rule as the capital city of India, has continued to
live on the memories of the past and has been scarcely touched by the
breath of modern civilisation. For the full effect of close contact
with the West, ought one not to look to the great cities that have
grown up under British rule--to Calcutta, for instance, the seat until a
few years ago of British Government in India, itself a creation of the
British, and if not to-day a more prosperous centre of European
enterprise than Bombay, a larger and more populous city, in which the
Hindus are in an overwhelming majority? But in the life even of Calcutta
features are not lacking to remind one how persistent are the forces of
resistance to the whole spirit of the West which Mr. Gandhi mustered in
Delhi to protest against the purpose of the Duke of Connaught's mission.
Had not a great part of Calcutta itself also observed the _Hartal_
proclaimed by Mr. Gandhi during the Prince's visit?

On the surface it seems difficult in Calcutta to get even an occasional
glimpse of the old India upon which we have superimposed a new India
with results that are still in the making. In Bombay, though it proudly
calls itself "the Western Gate of India" the glow of Hindu funeral
pyres, divided only by a long wall from the fashionable drive which
sweeps along Back Bay from the city, still called the Fort, to Malabar
Hill, serves to remind one any evening that he is in an oriental world
still largely governed as ever by the doctrine of successive rebirths,
the dead being merely reborn to fresh life, in some new form according
to each one's merits or demerits, out of the flames that consume the
body. On Malabar Hill itself, in the very heart of the favourite
residential quarter whence the Europeans are being rapidly elbowed out
by Indian merchant princes, the finest site of all still encloses the
Towers of Silence on which, contrary to the Hindu usage of cremation,
the Parsees, holding fire too sacred to be subjected to contact with
mortal corruption, expose their dead to be devoured by vultures.
Calcutta has no such conspicuous landmarks of the East to disturb the
illusion produced by most of one's surroundings that this is a city
which, if not actually European, differs only from the European type in
the complexion and dress of its oriental population and the
architectural compromises imposed on European buildings by a tropical
climate. The Marquess of Wellesley built Government House over a hundred
years ago on the model of Kedleston, and it is still the stateliest
official residence in British India. Fort William with Olive's ramparts
and fosses is still almost untouched, and with an ever-expanding
Walhalla of bronze or marble Governors and Viceroys and
Commanders-in-Chief, and at the farther end the white marble walls and
domes of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hall--the one noble monument we
have built in India--at last nearing completion, the broad expanse of
Calcutta's incomparable Maidan is, even more than our London parks, the
green playfield and the vital lung of the whole city. Along and behind
Chowringhee there are still a few of the old-time mansions of
Thackeray's "nabobs," with their deep, pillared verandahs standing well
off from the road, each within its discreet "compound," but they are all
rapidly making room for "eligible residences," more opulent perhaps but
more closely packed, or for huge blocks of residential flats, even less
adapted to the climate. The great business quarter round Dalhousie
Square has been steadily rebuilt on a scale of massive magnificence
scarcely surpassed in the city of London, and many of the shops compare
with those of our West End. The river, too, all along the Garden Reach
and far below is often almost as crowded as the Pool of London, with
ocean-going steamers waiting to load or unload their cargoes as well as
with lumbering native sailing ships and the ferries that ply ceaselessly
between the different quarters of the city on both banks of the Hugli.
The continuous roar of traffic in the busy streets, the crowded
tram-cars, the motors and taxis jostling the ancient bullock-carts, the
surging crowds in the semi-Europeanised native quarters, even the pall
of smoke that tells of many modern industrial activities are not quite
so characteristic of new India as, when I was last there, the
sandwich-men with boards inviting a vote for this or that candidate in
the elections to the new Indian Councils.

In all the strenuous life and immense wealth of this great city, to
which European enterprise first gave and still gives the chief impulse,
Indians are taking an increasing share. The Bengalees themselves still
hold very much aloof from modern developments of trade and industry, but
they were the first to appreciate the value of Western education, and
the Calcutta University with all its shortcomings has maintained the
high position which Lord Dalhousie foreshadowed for it nearly seventy
years ago. In art and literature the modern Bengalee has often known how
to borrow from the West without sacrificing either his own originality
or the traditions of his race or the spirit of his creed. Some of the
finest Bengalee brains have taken for choice to the legal profession and
have abundantly justified themselves both as judges in the highest court
of the province and as barristers and pleaders. In every branch of the
public services open to Indians and in all the liberal professions, as
well as in the civic and political life of their country, the Bengalees
have played a leading part, not restricted even to their own province,
and in the very distinguished person of Lord Sinha, Bengal has just
provided for the first time an Indian to represent the King-Emperor as
governor of a province--the neighbouring province of Behar and Orissa.
Nor have the women of Bengal been left behind as in so many other parts
of India. In Calcutta many highly educated ladies have won such complete
release from the ancient restraints imposed upon their sex that they
preside to-day over refined and cultured homes from which the subtle
atmosphere of the East does not exclude the ease and freedom of Western
habits of mind and body.

Yet these are still exceptions, and even in such a progressive city as
Calcutta and even amongst the highest classes the social and domestic
life of the majority of Hindus is still largely governed by the laws of
Hinduism, and not least with regard to marriage and the seclusion of
women. I was once allowed to attend a sort of "scripture lesson" for
little high-caste Hindu girls, organised by a benevolent old Brahman
lady, who has devoted herself to the cause of infant education on
orthodox lines. None of these 40 or 50 little girls had of course
reached the age, usually ten, at which they would be cut off from all
contact with the other sex except in marriage. They had bright and happy
faces, and as it was a Hindu festival most of them were decked out in
all their finery with gold and silver bangles on their dainty arms and
ankles, sometimes with jewelled nose-rings as well as ear-rings. They
went through an elaborate and picturesque ritual with great earnestness
and reverence and carefully followed the injunctions of the Brahman, a
cultured and Western-educated gentleman who presided over the ceremony.
It was an attractive scene, and would have been entirely pleasant but
for the painful contrast afforded by some eight or ten poor little mites
with shaven heads and drab-coloured dresses, almost ragged and quite
unadorned. They were infant widows, condemned according to the laws of
Hinduism by the premature death of their husbands to whom they had been
wedded, but whom they had never known, to lifelong widowhood, and
therefore in most cases to lifelong contempt and drudgery. For they were
debarred henceforth from fulfilling the supreme function of Hindu
womanhood, _i.e._ securing the continuity of family rites from father to
son by bearing children in legitimate wedlock, itself terribly
circumscribed by the narrow limits within which inter-marriage is
permissible even between different septs of the same caste. Happily
those I saw were probably still too young to realise the full
significance of the unkind fate that already differentiated them so
markedly from their more fortunate caste-sisters.

Nor has one to go so very far from the heart of Calcutta to be reminded
that the "premier city" of modern India derives its name from Kali, the
most sinister of Indian goddesses. She was the tutelary deity of
Kali-Kata, one of the three villages to which Job Charnock removed the
first British settlement in Bengal when he abandoned Hugli in 1690, and
her shrine has grown in wealth and fame with the growth of Calcutta.
Kali-Kata is to-day only a suburb of the modern city, but in entering it
one passes into another world--the world of popular Hinduism. In its
narrow streets every shop is stocked with the paraphernalia that Hindus
require for their devotions, for everything centres in Kali-Kata round
the popular shrine sacred to Kali, the black goddess of destruction,
with a protruding blood-red tongue, who wears a necklace of human skulls
and a belt of human hands and tongues, and, holding in one of her many
hands a severed human head, tramples under foot the dead bodies of her
victims. From the _ghats_, or long flights of steps, that descend to the
muddy waters of a narrow creek which claims a more or less remote
connection with the sacred Ganges, crowds of pious Hindus go through
their ablutions in accordance with a long and complicated ritual, whilst
high-caste ladies perform them in mid-stream out of covered boats and
behind curtains deftly drawn to protect their _purdah_. Past an ancient
banyan tree, from whose branches streamers of coloured stuffs depend
with other votive offerings from grateful mothers who have not prayed
for male offspring in vain, past the minor shrines of many favourite
deities, a road lined with closely packed beggars and ascetics,
thrusting forth their sores and their shrivelled limbs in the hope of a
few coppers, leads up to the place of sacrifice in front of the temple.
The pavement is still red with the blood of goats immolated to the Great
Goddess, and her devotees who may have just missed the spectacle can at
least embrace the posts to which the victims were tied. On an open
pillared platform facing the holy of holies some of the high-caste
worshippers await in prayer and meditation the moment when its ponderous
bronze doors are from time to time thrown open. One old Brahman lady of
singularly refined appearance presses her fingers alternately on her
right and her left nostril, whilst she expels through the other, keeping
her lips all the time tightly closed, the unhallowed air which may have
contaminated her lungs on her way to the temple. Another worshipper lies
full length with his face pressed to the ground in motionless adoration.
Between them flit about laughing, bright-eyed little girls, the
"daughters" of the temple, still unconscious of the life of temple
prostitution to which they have been dedicated from their birth. The
court-yard all around is packed with a surging, howling mob of pilgrims,
many of them from a great distance, fighting for a vantage point from
which they may get a glimpse of the Great Goddess in her inner
sanctuary, even if they cannot hope to penetrate into it.

At last, after much clanging of bells and fierce altercations between
the Brahman priests and the faithful as to payment of necessary fees,
the bronze doors roll back, and in the dim religious twilight one
catches a glint of gold and precious stones, the head-dress of Kali,
whose terrific image barely emerges from the depth of the inner
sanctuary in which it stands, accessible only to its serving Brahmans.
They alone, though strangely enough temple Brahmans as a class enjoy
little credit with their fellow-castemen, can approach the idol and wash
and dress and feed it with offerings. Whilst the doors are open the
frenzy and the noise increases, as the mob of worshippers struggle for a
front place and bawl out their special supplications at the top of their
voices. Then when they are closed again there is a general unravelling
of the tangled knots of perspiring humanity, and those who have achieved
the supreme purpose of their pilgrimage gradually disperse to make room
for another crowd, one stream succeeding another the whole day long on
special festivals, but on ordinary days mostly between sunrise and noon.
At the back of the shrine, as I came away, some privileged worshippers
were waiting to drink a few drops of the foul water which trickles out
of a small conduit through the wall from the holy of holies. It is the
water in which the feet of the idol--and those of the serving
Brahmans--have been washed!

It was in this same temple of Kali that only some fifteen years ago,
during the violent agitation provoked by the Partition of Bengal, vast
crowds used to assemble and take by the name of the Great Goddess the
vow of _Swadeshi_ as the first step to _Swaraj_, and Bengalee youths,
maddened by an inflammatory propaganda, learned to graft on to ancient
forms of worship the very modern cult of the bomb. To this same temple
resorted only the other day Mr. Gandhi's followers to seek the blessing
of the Great Goddess for the more harmless forms of protest by which he
exhorted the inhabitants of Calcutta to bring home to the Duke of
Connaught during his stay in Calcutta their indignant rejection of the
boon which he had been sent out by the King-Emperor to confer on the
people of India.

Must we then be driven to the conclusion that there is a gulf never to
be bridged between India's ancient civilisation and the modern
civilisation which we have brought to her out of the West? In that case
the great constitutional adventure on which we have just embarked would
be, unlike all our other great adventures in India, foredoomed to
failure, and those Englishmen would be right who shudder at its rashness
and reiterate with added conviction, since the school of Indian thought
for which Mr. Gandhi stands seems to bear them out, that "East is East
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The whole history of
the British connection with India surely excludes such a conclusion of
failure and despair. It teaches us, not, as such Englishmen contend,
that India was won and has been held and must be retained by the sword
alone, but that British rule was established and has been maintained
with and by the co-operation of Indians and British, and that in seeking
to-day to associate Indians more closely than ever before with the
government and administration of the country, we are merely persevering
in the same path which, though at times hesitatingly and reluctantly,
the British rulers of India have trodden for generations past, always
keeping step with the successive stages of our own national and
political evolution. The Indian extremists misread equally the whole
history of British rule who see in it nothing but a long nightmare of
hateful oppression to be finally overcome, according to Mr. Gandhi's
preaching, by "Non-co-operation" and the immortal "soul force" of India,
rescued at last from the paralysing snares of an alien civilisation. Not
for the first time has the cry of "Back to the Vedas" been raised by
Indians who, standing in the old ways, watch with hostility and alarm
the impact on their ancient but static civilisation of the more dynamic
civilisation of the West with which we for the first time brought India
into contact. It would be folly to underrate the resistance which the
reactionary elements in Hinduism are still capable of putting forth. I
have shown how it can still be seen operating in extreme forms, and not
upon Hindus alone, in the two pictures which I have drawn from Delhi and
Calcutta. It meets one in a lesser degree at almost every turn all over
India. But it would be just as foolish to underrate the progressive
forces which show now as ever in the history of Hinduism, that it is
also capable of combining with a singular rigidity of structure and with
many forms repugnant to all our own beliefs a breadth and elasticity of
thought by no means inferior to that of the West.

To those who hoped for a more rapid and widespread fusion of Indian and
Western ideals, some of the phenomena which have marked the latter-day
revival of Hinduism and the shape it has recently assumed in Mr.
Gandhi's "Non-co-operation" campaign, may have brought grave
disappointment. But the inrush of Western influences was assuredly bound
to provoke a strong reaction. For let us not forget that to the abiding
power of Hinduism India owes the one great element of stability that
enabled her, long before we appeared in India, to weather so many
tremendous storms without altogether losing the sense of a great
underlying unity stronger and more enduring than all the manifold lines
of cleavage which have tended from times immemorial to divide her.
Hinduism has not only responded for some forty centuries to the social
and religious aspirations of a large and highly endowed portion of the
human race, almost wholly shut off until modern times from any intimate
contact with our own Western world, but it has been the one great force
that has preserved the continuity of Indian life. It withstood six
centuries of Mahomedan domination. Could it be expected to yield without
a struggle to the new forces, however superior we may consider them and
however overwhelming they may ultimately prove, which British rule has
imported into India during a period of transition more momentous than
any other through which she has ever passed, but still very brief when
compared with all those other periods of Indian history which modern
research has only recently rescued from the legendary obscurity of still
earlier ages?

We are witnessing to-day a new phase of this great struggle, the clash
of conflicting elements in two great civilisations. A constitution has
been inaugurated at Delhi to bring India into permanent and equal
partnership with a commonwealth of free nations which is the greatest
political achievement of Western civilisation, and the latest prophet of
Hinduism, applying to it the language of the West, has banned it
forthwith as a thing of Satan, the offspring of a Satanic government and
of a Satanic civilisation. His appeal to India is intended to strike
many and various chords, but it is essentially an appeal to the ancient
forces of Hinduism which gave India a great civilisation long before
Europe, and least of all Britain, had emerged from the savagery of
primitive man. Englishmen find it difficult to understand the strength
of that appeal, perhaps because they do not realise how deep and vital
are the roots of the civilisation to which it appeals.




CHAPTER II

THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM


India's civilisation, intimately bound up from its birth with the great
social and religious system which we call Hinduism, is as unique as it
is ancient. Its growth and its tenacity are largely due to the
geographical position of a great and populous sub-continent, on its land
side exposed only to incursions from the north through mountainous and
desolate regions, everywhere difficult of access and in some parts
impenetrable, and shut in on the other two sides of a roughly isosceles
triangle by broad expanses of sea which cut it off from all direct
intercourse with the West until, towards the close of the Middle Ages,
European navigators opened up new ocean highways to the East. India owes
her own peculiar civilisation to the gradual fusion of Aryan races of a
higher type that began to flow down from Central Asia before the dawn of
history upon the more primitive indigenous populations already in
possession. Its early history has only now begun to emerge from the
twilight of myths and legends, and cannot even now be traced with any
assurance of accuracy nearly as far back as that of other parts of the
world which preceded or gave birth to our own much more recent
civilisation. The pyramids of Ghizeh and Sakkara and the monumental
temples of Thebes bore ample witness to the greatness of Egyptian
civilisation long before the interpretation of her hieroglyphics enabled
us to determine its antiquity, and the discovery of its abundant art
treasures revealed the high degree of culture to which it reached.
Excavations in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates have yielded an
almost equally valuable harvest in regard to Babylonian and Assyrian
civilisation, and Cnossus has told us its scarcely less wonderful story.
Yet the long line of Pharaohs was coming to an end and Egypt was losing
the national independence which she has never once recovered; Nineveh
had fallen and Jerusalem was destroyed; Greece and even Rome had already
started on their great creative careers before any approximately correct
date can be assigned to the stages through which Indian civilisation had
passed. India only becomes historical with the establishment of the
Sasunaga dynasty in the Gangetic kingdom of Magadha, which centred in
what is now Behar, about the year 600 B.C.

As to the state of India before that date, no sort of material evidence
has survived, or at any rate has yet been brought to light--no
monuments, no inscriptions, very little pottery even, in fact very few
traces of the handicraft of man; nor any contemporary records of
undoubted authenticity. Fortunately the darkness which would have been
otherwise Cimmerian is illuminated, though with a partial and often
uncertain light, by the wonderful body of sacred literature which has
been handed down to our own times in the Vedas and Brahmanas and
Upanishads. To none of these books, which have, for the most part,
reached us in various recensions often showing considerable
discrepancies and obviously later interpolations, is it possible to
ascribe any definite date. But in them we undoubtedly possess a genuine
key to the religious thought and social conceptions, and even
inferentially to the political institutions of the Aryan Hindus through
the many centuries that rolled by between their first southward
migrations into the Indian peninsula and their actual emergence into
history. The Vedic writings constitute the most ancient documents
available to illustrate the growth of religious beliefs founded on pure
Nature-worship, which translated themselves into a polytheistic and
pantheistic idea of the universe and, in spite of many subsequent
transformations, are found to contain all the germs of modern Hinduism
as we know it to-day--and, indeed, of all the religious thought of
India. In the Vedic hymns Nature itself is divine, and their pantheon
consists of the deified forces of Nature, worshipped now as Agni, the
god of Fire; Soma, the god and the elixir of life; Indra, the god of
heaven and the national god of the Aryans; and again, under more
abstract forms, such as Prajapati, the lord of creation, Asura, the
great spirit, Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer; and sometimes, again,
gathered together into the transcendent majesty of one all-absorbing
divinity, such as Varuna, whose pre-eminence almost verges on
monotheism. But the general impression left on the Western mind is of a
fantastic kaleidoscope, in which hundreds and even thousands of deities,
male and female, are constantly waxing and waning and changing places,
and proceeding from, and merging their identity in, others through an
infinite series of processes, partly material and partly metaphysical,
but ever more and more subject to the inspiration and the purpose of the
Brahman, alone versed in the knowledge of the gods, and alone competent
to propitiate them by sacrificial rites of increasing intricacy, and by
prayers of a rigid formalism that gradually assume the shape of mere
incantations.

This is the great change to which the Brahmanas bear witness. They show
no marked departure from the theology of the Vedas, though many of the
old gods continue to be dethroned either to disappear altogether, or to
reappear in new shapes, like Varuna, who turns into a god of night to be
worshipped no longer for his beneficence, but to be placated for his
cruelty; whilst, on the other hand, Prajapati is raised to the highest
throne, with Sun, Air, and Fire in close attendance. What the Brahmanas
do show is that the Brahman has acquired the overwhelming authority of a
sacerdotal status, not vested merely in the learning of a theologian,
but in some special attribute of his blood, and therefore transmissible
only from father to son. The Brahman was doubtless helped to this
fateful pre-eminence by the modifications which the popular tongue had
undergone in the course of time, and as the result more especially of
migration from the Punjab to the Gangetic plains. The language of the
Vedic hymns had ceased to be understood by the masses, and its
interpretation became the monopoly of learned families; and this
monopoly, like all others, was used by those who enjoyed it for their
own aggrandisement. The language that had passed out of common usage
acquired an added sanctity. It became a sacred language, and sacred
became the Brahman, who alone possessed the key to it, who alone could
recite its sacred texts and perform the rites which they prescribed, and
select the prayers which could best meet every distinct and separate
emergency in the life of man.

In the Brahmanas we can follow the growth of a luxuriant theology for
the use of the masses which, in so far as it was polytheistic, tended to
the infinite multiplication of gods and goddesses and godlings of all
types, and in so far as it was pantheistic invested not only men, but
beasts and insects and rivers and fountains and trees and stones with
some living particle of the divine essence pervading all things; and we
can follow there also the erection on the basis of that theology, of a
formidable ritual of which the exclusive exercise and the material
benefits were the appanage of the Brahman. But we have to turn to a
later collection of writings known as the Upanishads for our knowledge
of the more abstract speculations out of which Hindu thinkers, not
always of the Brahmanical caste, were concurrently evolving the esoteric
systems of philosophy that have exercised an immense and abiding
influence on the spiritual life of India. There is the same difficulty
in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of the later
ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological evolution
with which they coincided. Only some of the earliest ones are held by
many competent authorities to be, in the shape in which they have
reached us, anterior to the time when India first becomes, in any real
sense, historical; but there is no reason to doubt that they represent
the progressive evolution into different forms of very ancient germs
already present in the Vedas themselves. They abound in the same
extravagant eclecticism, leading often to the same confusions and
contradictions that Hindu theology presents. The Sankhya Darshana, or
system, recognising only a primary material cause from which none but
finite beings can proceed, regards the universe and all that exists in
it and life itself as a finite illusion of which the end is
non-existence, and its philosophic conceptions are atheistic rather than
pantheistic. In opposition to it the Vedantic system of mystic
pantheism, whilst also seeing in this finite world a mere world of
illusion, holds that rescue from it will come to each individual soul
after a more or less prolonged series of rebirths, determined for better
or for worse by its own spirituality according to the law of Karma, not
in non-existence, but in its fusion with God, whose identity with the
soul of man is merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of
Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in
the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has
detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is
himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which
teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity,
mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable
mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the
means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and man. The
materialism of the Sankhya and the idealism of the Vedanta combine to
provoke the reaction of yet another system, the Mimansa, which stands
for the eternal and divine revelation of the Vedas, codifies, so to say,
their theology into liturgical laws, admits of no speculation or
esoteric interpretation, and seems to subordinate the gods themselves
to the forms of worship that consecrate their existence.

Of all the doctrines that these early speculations evolved, none has had
a more enduring influence on Hinduism than that of the long and indeed
infinite succession of rebirths through which man is doomed to pass
before he reaches the ultimate goal either of non-existence or of
absorption into the divine essence. For none has done more to fortify
the patriarchal principle which from the earliest times governed the
tribal family, and to establish the Hindu conception of the family as it
prevails to the present day. With that curious inconsequence which
frequently characterises Hindu thought, even when it professes to be
ruled by the sternest logic, the belief that every rebirth is
irrevocably determined by the law of Karma, _i.e._ in accordance with
the sum total of man's deeds, good and bad, in earlier existences, is
held to be compatible with the belief that the felicity of the dead can
only be assured by elaborate rites of worship and sacrifice, which a son
alone, or a son's son, can take over from his father and properly
perform. The ancient _patria potestas_ of tribal institutions has been
thus prolonged beyond the funeral pyre, and the ancient reverence for
the dead which originally found expression in an instinctive worship of
the ancestors has been translated into a ceremonial cult of the
ancestral manes, which constitutes the primary duty and function of
every new head of the family. Hence the Hindu joint family system which
keeps the whole property of the family as well as the governance of all
its members under the sole control of the head of the family. Hence also
the necessity of early marriage, lest death should overtake the Hindu
before he has begotten the son upon whose survival the performance of
the rites essential, not only to his own future felicity, but to that of
all his ancestors depends, and, as an alternative, to mitigate the awful
consequences of the default of heirs male of his own body, the
introduction of adoption under conditions that secure to the adopted
son precisely the same position as a real son would have enjoyed. Hence
again the inferiority of woman, whom early marriage tended to place in
complete subjection to man. Her chief value was that of a potential
breeder of sons. In any case, moreover, she passed on her marriage
entirely out of her own family into that of her husband, and terribly
hard was her lot if she were left a widow before having presented her
husband with a son. Even if she were left an infant widow of an infant
husband and their marriage could not possibly have been consummated, she
was doomed to an austere and humiliating life of perpetual widowhood,
whilst, on the other hand, if she died, her widowed husband was enjoined
to marry again at once unless she had left him a son. To explain away
this cruel injustice, her fate was supposed to be due to her own Karma,
and to be merely the retribution that had overtaken her for sins
committed in a former existence, which condemned her to be born a woman
and to die a childless wife, or worse still, to survive as a childless
widow. The misfortune of the widowed husband who was left without a son
should logically have been imputed in the same way to his own Karma, but
it was not. All through life, and in death itself, man was exalted and
woman occupied a much lower plane, though in practice this hardship was
mitigated for the women who bore sons by the reverence paid to them in
their homes, where their force of character and their virtues often gave
them a great and recognised ascendancy. However hard the laws that
governed the Hindu family might press on individual members, the family
itself remained a living organism, united by sacred ties--indeed more
than a mere living organism, for the actually living organism was one
with that part of it which had already passed away and that which was
still awaiting rebirth. It is undoubtedly in the often dignified and
beautiful relations which bind the Hindu family together that Hinduism
is seen at its best, and Hindu literature delights in describing and
exalting them.

Traditional usages, or Smriti, were ultimately embodied in codes of law,
of which the most famous is that of Manu; and though disfigured by many
social servitudes repugnant to the Western mind, they represent a lofty
standard of morality based upon a conception of duty, or Dharma,
narrowly circumscribed, but solid and practical. Though these codes of
law, and notably that of Manu in the form in which we possess them, are
of uncertain but probably much later date, they afford us, in
conjunction with the vast body of earlier religious and philosophic
literature, and with a certain amount of scientific literature dealing
with astronomy and astrology, with mathematics and specially with
geometry, and with grammar and prosody, sufficient materials for
appraising, with a fair measure of accuracy, the stage of progress which
the Aryan Hindus had reached in the sixth century B.C. When the world
was young, and they revelled in their recent conquest of a fair portion
in it, they delighted to worship the bright gods who had helped them to
possess it, and worship and war were the ties that kept their loose
tribal organisation together. Out of the primitive conditions of nomadic
and pastoral life, under the leadership of tribal elders who were both
priests and warriors, they gradually passed, after many vicissitudes of
peace and war, into more settled forms of agricultural life and
developed into distinct and separate polities of varying vitality, but
still united by the bond of common religious and social institutions in
the face of the indigenous populations whom they drove before them, or
reduced into subjection and slowly assimilated as they moved down
towards and into the Gangetic plain. As the conditions of life grew more
complex, with increasing prosperity and probably longer intervals of
peace, differentiation between classes and professions grew more marked.
There was time and leisure for thinking as well as for fighting, for
contemplation as well as for action. The "bright" gods that Nature had
conceived for the early Aryans were fashioned and refashioned by
speculations already laden with the gloom of melancholy and awesomeness
that pervades India. Caste, it may be inferred from the Sanskrit word
_Varna_, which means colour, originally discriminated only between the
Aryan conquerors of relatively fair complexion and the darker aborigines
they had subdued. It was extended to connote the various stratifications
into which Hindu society was settling, and in the stringent rules which
governed the constitution of each caste, and the relations between the
different castes, the old exclusiveness of tribal customs was
perpetuated and intensified.

To the supremacy which the Brahman, as the expounder of the scriptures
and of the laws deduced from them, and the ordained dispenser of divine
favour, through prayer and sacrifice, was able to arrogate to his own
caste, the code of Manu, above all others, bears emphatic witness:

     The very birth of Brahmans is a constant incarnation of Dharma....
     When a Brahman springs to light he is born above the world, the
     chief of all creatures, assigned to guard the treasury of duties,
     religious and civil. Whatever exists in the world is all in effect,
     though not in form, the wealth of the Brahman, since the Brahman is
     entitled to it all by his primogeniture and eminence of birth.

Every offence committed by a Brahman involves a relatively slight
penalty; every offence committed against him the direst punishment. Next
to the Brahman, but far beneath him, is the Kshatrya and beneath him
again the Vaishya. The Shudras are the fourth caste that exists chiefly
to serve the three twice-born castes, and above all the Brahman. As Sir
William Jones observes in the preface to the translation which he was
the first to make a little more than a century ago of these
extraordinarily full and detailed ordinances, they represent a system of
combined despotism and priestcraft, both indeed limited by law, but
artfully conspiring to give mutual support with mutual checks. But
though they abound with minute and childish formalities, though they
prescribe ceremonies often ridiculous, though the punishments they
enact are partial and fanciful, for some crimes dreadfully cruel, for
others reprehensibly slight, though the very morals they lay down, rigid
enough on the whole, are in one or two instances, as in the case of
light oaths and of pious perjury, dangerously relaxed, one must,
nevertheless, admit that, subject to those grave limitations, a spirit
of sublime devotion, of benevolence to mankind, and of amiable
tenderness to all sentient creatures pervades the whole work, and the
style of it has a certain austere majesty that sounds like the language
of legislation and extorts a respectful awe. Above all it is well to
remember that the ordinances of Manu still constitute to-day the
framework of Hindu society, and Brahman judges of the Indian High
Courts, who administer our own very different codes, still cling to them
in private life and quote them in political controversies as the
repositories of inspired wisdom.

It is on this background of tangled religious beliefs and abstruse
philosophic speculations and very precise and elaborate laws framed to
safeguard the twofold authority of priests and kings, but of the latter
always in subordination to the former, that we see men and cities and
organised states assume for the first time historic substance towards
the sixth century B.C. From that date onwards we are on firmer ground.
For though even in much later times the Hindus never produced historians
in the strict sense of the term, we are able to call in aid the valuable
testimony not only of a few indigenous chroniclers but also of Greek and
Chinese and Arab writers and travellers, as well as the authoritative
evidence supplied by epigraphy and numismatics; and though for many
centuries still very infrequently, the precious remains of ancient
monuments. But the original background is never effaced, for the whole
religious and social system, the whole philosophic outlook upon the
world of which I have sought to outline the long and laborious evolution
through prehistoric ages, remained fundamentally immune against change
until the advent of the British to India subjected them to the solvent
of Western civilisation.

One of the most striking peculiarities of Hinduism is that its origin
cannot be associated with any single great teacher or prophet, however
legendary. Still less can it be identified with the personal inspiration
of a Moses or a Christ, of a Confucius or a Mahomed. Only when we reach
the firmer ground of historic times does any commanding personality
emerge to leave a definite and abiding impress upon successive ages. The
first and the greatest is Buddha, and we can still trace to-day his
footsteps in the places where he actually stood and delivered his
message to the world. It was at Buddh Gaya that, after fleeing from the
pomp and luxury of his father's royal palace, he sat and meditated under
the Bo-tree on the vanity and misery of human life, but it was at
Rajagriha, "the King's House," that he first began to preach. Rajagriha,
about 40 miles S.S.E. of the modern Patna, was then the capital of one
of the many small kingdoms that had grown up in the broad valley of the
Ganges. It was already an ancient city of some fame, for the Mahabharata
mentions all the five hills which, as the first Chinese pilgrim,
Fa-Hien, puts it, "encompass it with a girdle like the walls of a town."
It was itself a walled city, and some of the walls, as we can still see
them to-day, represent most probably the earliest structure raised in
India by human hands that has survived down to our own times. They were
no jerry-builders then. Strengthened at sundry points by great square
bastions, the walls of Rajagriha measure in places over seventeen feet
in width and eleven or twelve feet in height, and they are faced with
undressed stones three to five feet in length, without mortar or cement,
but carefully fitted and banded together with a core of smaller blocks
not less carefully laid and packed. They merely supplemented and
completed the natural line of defences provided by the outer girdle of
hills, rising to 1200 feet, which shut off Rajagriha from the plain of
Bihar. On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India
when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I
looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for
some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it
just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom we owe most of our knowledge
of Rajagriha described it--"a solitary peak rising to a great height on
which vultures make their abode." Many had been the revolutions of the
wheel of time since Hiuen-Tsang had watched the circling of the vultures
round the sacred peak some twelve and a half centuries before me, and as
Buddha himself, another twelve and a half centuries earlier, must have
watched them when he miraculously stretched forth his hand through a
great rock to rescue his beloved disciple Ananda from the clutch of the
demon Mara, who had taken on the shape of a vulture. The swoop of those
great birds seemed to invest the whole scene with a new and living
reality. Across the intervening centuries I could follow King Bimbisara,
who reigned in those days at Rajagriha, proceeding along the causeway of
rough, undressed stones, which can be traced to-day to the foot of the
mountain and up its rocky flanks, after his men had "levelled the valley
and spanned the precipices, and with the stones had made a staircase
about ten paces wide," so that he should himself be carried up to wait
in his own royal person on the Lord Buddha. There, marked to the present
day by the remains of two large _stupas_, was the place where the king
alighted from his litter to go forward on foot, and farther up again the
spot where he dismissed his followers and went on alone to invite the
Buddha to come down and dwell in his capital.

That must have been about 500 B.C., and Buddha spent thereafter a
considerable portion of his time in the bamboo garden which King
Bimbisara presented to him on the outskirts of Rajagriha. There, and in
his annual wanderings through the country, he delivered to the poor and
to the rich, to the Brahman and to the sinner, to princes and peasants,
to women as well as to men, his message of spiritual and social
deliverance from the thraldom of the flesh and from the tyranny of
caste.

With the actual doctrines of Buddhism I do not propose to deal. There is
nothing in them that could not be reconciled with those of the Vedanta,
and they are especially closely akin to the Sankhya system. But the
driving force of Buddhism, as also of Jainism, which grew up at the same
time as Buddhism under the inspiration of another great reformer,
Mahavira, who is said to have been a cousin of King Bimbisara, was a
spirit of revolt against Brahmanical Hinduism, and a new sense of social
solidarity which appealed to all classes and castes, and to women as
well as to men. The Vedanta reserved the study of the scriptures to men
of the three "twice-born" castes, and placed it under the supreme
authority of the Brahmans. Both Buddha and Mahavira recognised no such
restrictions, though they did not refuse reverence to the Brahman as a
man of special learning. The religious orders which they founded were
open to all, and these orders included nuns as well as monks. This was
the rock on which they split with Hinduism. This was the social
revolution that, in spite of the religious and philosophical elasticity
of Hinduism, made Buddhists and Jains unpardonable heretics in the eyes
of the Brahmans, and produced a conflict which was to last for
centuries.

Though King Bimbisara welcomed the Buddha to his capital, and Buddhism
made rapid headway amongst the masses, he does not appear to have
himself embraced the new religion, and it is not till after Alexander
the Great's expedition had for the first time brought an European
conqueror on to Indian soil, and a new dynasty had transferred the seat
of government to Pataliputra, the modern Patna, on the Ganges, that
perhaps the greatest of Indian rulers, the Emperor Asoka, who reigned
from 272 to _circa_ 232 B.C., made Buddhism the state religion of his
Empire. Tradition has it, that when Buddha on his last wanderings
passed by the fort which King Ajatasatni was building at Pataliputra, he
prophesied for it a great and glorious future. It had already fulfilled
that prophecy when the Greek Ambassador, Megasthenes, visited it in 303
B.C. A few remains only are being laboriously rescued from the waters of
the Ganges, under which Pataliputra is for the most part buried. But at
that time it spread for ten miles along the river front; five hundred
and seventy towers crowned its walls, which were pierced by sixty-four
gates, and the total circumference of the city was twenty-four miles.
The palace rivalled those of the Kings of Persia, and a striking
topographical similarity has been lately traced between the artificial
features of the lay-out of Pataliputra and the natural features of
Persepolis, King Darius's capital in Southern Persia.

Pataliputra became the capital of India under Chandragupta Maurya, who,
soldier of fortune and usurper that he was, transformed the small
kingdom of Magadha into a mighty empire. Known to Greek historians as
Sandrokottos, young Chandragupta had been in Alexander's camp on the
Indus, and had even, it is said, offered his services to the Macedonian
king. In the confusion which followed Alexander's death, he had raised
an army with which he fell on the Macedonian frontier garrisons, and
then, flushed with victory, turned upon the King of Magadha, whom he
dethroned. After eighteen years of constant fighting he had extended his
frontiers to the Hindu Kush in the north, and nearly down to the
latitude of Madras in the south. He had, at the same time, established a
remarkable system of both civil and military administration by which he
was able to consolidate his vast conquests. His war office was
scientifically divided into six boards for maintaining and supplying his
huge fighting force of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, 9000 elephants,
and 8000 war chariots, besides fully equipped transport and commissariat
services. No less scientific was the system of civil government as
illustrated by the municipal institutions of Pataliputra. There, again,
there were six boards dealing respectively with trade, industries,
wages, local taxation, the control of foreign residents and visitors,
and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, with vital statistics. Equally
admirable was the solicitude displayed for agriculture, then, as now,
the greatest of Indian industries, and for its handmaid, irrigation. The
people themselves, if we may believe Megasthenes, were a model people
well worthy of a model government, though if he does not exaggerate, one
is driven to wonder at the necessity for such fearful penalties as were
inflicted for the most trivial breaches of the law. But behind
Chandragupta the power of the Brahman was still clearly entrenched, for
his chief minister was a Brahman, Chanakya, who had followed his
fortunes from their first adventurous beginnings.

The stately fabric which Chandragupta built up during his own
twenty-five years' reign, _circa_ 322-297 B.C., endured during the reign
of his son Bendusara, of whom scarcely anything is known, and at the end
of another twenty-five years passed on, undiminished, to his great
successor, Asoka, whose unique experiment would have been scarcely
possible had he not succeeded to an empire already firmly consolidated
at home and abroad. When he came to the throne, about 272 B.C., Asoka
had served his apprenticeship in the art of government as viceroy, first
in the north at Taxila, and then in the west at Ujjain. He had been
brought up by Brahmans in the manner befitting his rank. Buddhist
tradition would have us believe that until his conversion he was a
monster of cruelty; but there is scarcely enough to warrant that
indictment in the fact that he began his reign with a war of aggression,
for which he afterwards expressed the deepest remorse. It was, indeed,
from that moment that he determined to be henceforth a prince of peace;
but it is quite as probable that his determination inclined him more and
more to turn his ear to Buddhist teaching as that Buddhist teaching
prompted his determination.

No monarch has ever recorded the laws which he gave to his people in
such imperishable shape. They are to be seen to the present day cut into
granite pillars or chiselled into the face of the living rock in almost
every part of what was then the Empire of the Mauryas, from the Peshawar
district in the north to Mysore and the Madras Presidency in the south,
from the Kathiawar Peninsula in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the
east. The pillars are often at the same time monuments of artistic
design and workmanship, as, above all, the Garnath pillar near Benares
with its magnificent capital of the well-known Persepolitan type and its
four lions supporting the stone Wheel of the Law, first promulgated on
that spot. Many more of Asoka's monuments may yet be discovered, but the
eleven pillar edicts and the fourteen rock edicts, not to speak of minor
inscriptions already brought to light and deciphered, constitute a body
of laws which well deserve to have been made thus imperishable. For no
temporal sovereign has ever legislated so fully and exclusively and with
such evident conviction for the spiritual advancement and moral
elevation of his people. Scarcely less important is the autobiographical
value of these inscriptions, which enable one to follow stage by stage
the evolution of the Apostle-Emperor's soul. Within a year of the
conquest of the Kalinjas, for which he afterwards publicly recorded his
remorse, Asoka became a lay disciple of the Buddhist law, and two and a
half years later studied as a Buddhist monk. In 257 B.C., the thirteenth
year of his reign, he began to preach his series of sermons in
stone--sermons that were at the same time laws given to his Empire. His
profession of faith was as lofty as it was simple:

     The gods who were regarded as true all over India have been shown
     to be untrue. For the fruit of exertion is not to be attained by a
     great man only, because even by the small man who chooses to exert
     himself immense heavenly bliss may be won.... Father and mother
     must be hearkened to. Similarly, respect for living creatures must
     be firmly established. Truth must be spoken. These are the virtues
     of the law of piety which must be practised.... In it are included
     proper treatment of slaves and servants, honour to teachers,
     gentleness towards living creatures, and liberality towards
     ascetics and Brahmans.... All men are my children, and just as I
     desire for my children that they may enjoy every kind of prosperity
     and happiness in both this world and the next, so I desire the same
     for all men.

These principles are applied in all the instructions to his officials.
He commends to their special care the primitive jungle folk and the
untamed people of the borderlands. He bestows much thought on the
alleviation of human suffering, and his injunctions in restriction of
the slaughter and maiming of animals and the preservation of life are
minute and precise. It is in this connection that the influence of
Buddhism on Hinduism has been most permanent, for whilst the primitive
Aryan Hindus were beef-eaters, their descendants carried the vegetarian
doctrines of Buddhism to the extreme length of condemning cow-killing as
the most awful of crimes, next to the killing of a Brahman.

Determined to preserve the unity and discipline of his own church,
Asoka's large tolerance sees some good in all creeds. He wishes every
man to have the reading of his own scriptures, and whilst reserving his
most lavish gifts for Buddhist shrines and monasteries, he does not deny
his benefactions to Brahmans and ascetics of other sects. Nor is he
content merely to preach and issue orders. His monastic vows, though
they lead him to forswear the amusements and even the field sports which
had been his youthful pastimes, do not involve the severance of all
worldly ties. He is the indefatigable and supreme head of the Church; he
visits in solemn pilgrimage all the holy places hallowed by the memory
of Buddha, and endows shrines and monasteries and convents with princely
munificence; he convenes at Pataliputra a great Buddhist council for
combating heresy. But he remains the indefatigable and supreme head of
the State. "I am never fully satisfied with my efforts and my despatch
of business. Work I must for the welfare of all, and the root of the
matter is in effort." He controls a highly trained bureaucracy not
unlike that of British India to-day, and his system of government is
wonderfully effective so long as it is informed by his untiring energy
and singular loftiness of purpose.

With Asoka Buddhism attained to a supremacy in India which may well be
compared with that of Christianity in Europe under Constantine; and it
is only by measuring the height to which Buddhism had then risen that we
can realise the enduring power of Hinduism, as we see it through
successive centuries slowly but irresistibly recovering all the ground
it had lost until Buddhism at last disappears almost entirely off the
face of India, whereas it continued to spread, though often in very
debased forms, over the greater part of Eastern Asia, and still
maintains its hold there over more than a third of the total population
of the globe.

As with most of the great rulers and conquerors that India has from time
to time thrown up, Asoka's life-work fell to pieces almost as soon as he
had passed away. Not only did the temporal empire which he built up
disintegrate rapidly in the hands of his feeble successors, but Buddhism
itself was dethroned within fifty years with the last of his dynasty,
slain by the usurper Pushyamitra Sunga, who, after consecrating himself
to the Hindu gods with the rites of _Rajasuya_, celebrated his advent to
Paramount Power by reviving the ancient ceremony of _Asvamedha_, the
Sacrifice of the Horse--one of the most characteristic of Brahmanical
rites.

It was not till after another great conquering inflow from Central Asia
in the first century of our era that Kanishka, the greatest of a new
dynasty which had set itself up at Purushpura, situated close to the
modern Peshawar, shed a transient gleam of glory over the decline of
Buddhism and even restored it to the position of a state religion. But
it was a Buddhism already far removed from the purity of Asoka's reign.
The most striking feature of this short-lived revival is the artistic
inspiration which it derived from Hellenistic sources, of which the
museums of Peshawar and Lahore contain so many remarkable illustrations.
The theory, at one time very widely entertained, that Alexander's brief
incursion into India left any permanent mark on Indian civilisation is
now entirely discarded by the best authorities. No Indian author makes
even the faintest allusion to him, nor is there any trace of Hellenic
influence in the evolution of Indian society, or in the elaborate
institutions with which India was endowed by the Mauryan dynasty that
followed immediately on the disruption of Alexander's empire. But the
Kushans, or Yueh Chis, during the various stages of their slow migration
down into Northern India, came into long and close contact with the
Indo-Bactrian and Indo-Parthian kingdoms that sprang up after Alexander.
The populations were never Hellenised, but their rulers were to some
extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation. They spoke
Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn
subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the
conquerors something of their own Greek veneer. In the second century of
our era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain,
where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its
cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra
a famous Buddhist saint, who converted him to Buddhism. But as these
Indo-Scythian kings had not been long enough in India to secure
admission to the social aristocracy of Hinduism by that slow process of
naturalisation to which so many ruling families have owed their Kshatrya
pedigrees, Kanishka, having himself no claim to caste, may well have
preferred for reasons of state to favour Buddhism as a creed
fundamentally opposed to caste distinctions. Whatever the motives of his
conversion, we have it on the authority of Hiuen-Tsang that he
ultimately did great things for Buddhism, and the magnificent _stupa_,
which he erected outside his capital, five-and-twenty stories high and
crowned with a cupola of diamonds, was still 150 feet high and measured
a quarter of a mile in circumference when the Chinese pilgrim visited
Purushpura five centuries later. To the present day there are traces
outside the northern gate of Peshawar of a great Buddhist monastery,
also built by Kanishka, which remained a seat of Buddhist learning until
it was destroyed by Mahomedan invaders; and it was only a mile from
Peshawar that the American Sanskritist, Dr. Spooner, discovered ten
years ago the casket containing some of Buddha's bones, which is one of
the most perfect specimens of Graeco-Buddhist art. The Buddhist statues
and bas-reliefs of that period are Greek rather than Indian in their
treatment of sacred history, and even the head of Gautama himself might
sometimes be taken for that of a young Greek god.

These exotic influences may indeed have acted as a further solvent upon
Buddhism. But in any case, its local and temporary revival as a dominant
state religion under Kanishka, whose empire did not long outlive him,
failed to arrest its steady resorption into Hinduism. On the one hand,
Buddhism itself was losing much of its original purity. The miraculous
legends with which the life of Buddha was gradually invested, the almost
idolatrous worship paid to him, the belief that he himself was but the
last of many incarnations in which the Buddha had already revealed
himself from the very beginning of creation--all these later accretions
represent, no doubt, the reaction upon Buddhism of its Hinduistic
surroundings. But they doubtless helped also to stimulate the growth of
the more definite forms of anthropomorphism which characterised the
development of Hinduism when the ancient ritual and the more impersonal
gods of the Vedas and of the Brahmanas gave way to the cult of such very
personal gods as Shiva and Vishnu, with their feminine counterparts,
Kali and Lakshmi, and ultimately to the evolution of still more popular
deities, some, like Skanda and the elephant-headed Ganesh, closely
connected with Shiva; others like Krishna and Rama, _av[=a]taras_ or
incarnations--and in many ways extremely human incarnations--of Vishnu.
At the same time, the Aryan Hindus, as they went on subduing the
numerous aboriginal races of India, constantly facilitated their
assimilation by the more or less direct adoption of their primitive
deities and religious customs. The two great epics, the Mahabharata,
with its wonderful episode, the Baghavat-Ghita, which is the apotheosis
of Krishna, and the Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama, show the
infusion into Hinduism of a distinctly national spirit in direct
opposition to the almost cosmopolitan catholicity of Buddhism,
sufficiently elastic to adapt itself even to the political aspirations
of non-Hindu conquerors as well as of non-Hindu races beyond the borders
of Hindustan, in Nepal and in Ceylon, in Burma and in Tibet, in China
and in Japan. The conflict between Buddhist and Hindu theology might not
have been irreconcilable, for Hinduism, as we know, was quite ready to
admit Buddha himself into the privileged circle of its own gods as one
of the incarnations of Vishnu. What was irreconcilable was the conflict
between a social system based on Brahmanical supremacy and one that
denied it--especially after Hinduism had acquired a new sense of Indian
patriotism which only reached fuller development in our own times when
it was quickened by contact with European nationalism.

Hindus themselves prefer, however, to-day to identify Indian nationalism
with the period when from another long interval of darkness, which
followed the downfall of the Kushan kingdom, Indian history emerges into
the splendour of what has been called "the golden age of Hinduism" in
the fourth and fifth centuries of our era under the great Gupta dynasty,
who ruled at Ujjain. Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or
more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as
Ozen[=i] to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as
Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves.
When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was,
for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere
ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the
sacrificial fire, which consumed her--the prototype of all pious Hindu
widows who perform _Sati_--in the presence of gods and Brahmans. Shiva,
maddened with grief, gathered up the bones of his unfortunate consort
and danced about with them in a world-shaking frenzy. Her scattered
bones fell to earth, and wherever they fell the spot became sacred and a
temple sprang up in her honour. One of her elbows fell on the banks of
the Sipra at Ujjain, and few shrines enjoy greater or more widespread
fame than the great temple of Maha-Kal, consecrated to her worship and
that of Shiva. Its wealth was fabulous when it was looted and destroyed
by Altamsh and his Pathan Mahomedans in 1235. The present buildings are
for the most part barely 200 years old, and remarkable chiefly for the
insistency with which the _lingam_ and the bull, the favourite symbols
of Shiva, repeat themselves in shrine after shrine. But it attracts
immense numbers of pilgrims, especially in every twelfth year, when they
flock in hundreds of thousands to Ujjain and camp as near as possible to
the river. The peculiarity of the Ujjain festival is that, in memory of
the form which Shiva took on when he wooed Uma, it attracts a veritable
army of Sanyasis, or mendicants, sometimes as many as fifty thousand,
from all parts of India. Seldom, except at the great Jaganath festivals
at Puri, is a larger congregation seen of weird and almost inhuman
figures; some clothed solely with their long unkempt hair, some with
their bodies smeared all over with white ashes, and the symbol of their
favourite deity painted conspicuously on their foreheads; some
displaying ugly sores or withered limbs as evidence of lifelong
mortification of the flesh; some moving as if in a dream and entirely
lost to the world's realities; some with frenzied eyes shouting and
brandishing their instruments of self-torture; some with a repulsive
leer and heavy sensuous jowls affecting a certain coquetry in the
ritualistic adornment of their well-fed bodies.

Chandragupta I., the founder of the great dynasty which Hindus extol
above all others, was only a petty chieftain by birth, but he was
fortunate enough to wed a lady of high lineage, who could trace a
connection with the ancient Maurya house of Magadha, and, thanks to this
alliance and to his own prowess, he was able at his death to bequeath
real kingship to his son, Samadragupta, who, during a fifty years'
reign, A.D. 326-375, again welded almost the whole of India north of the
Nerbudda river into one empire, and once even spoiled Southern India
right down to Cape Comorin. His victories are recorded--with an irony
perhaps not wholly accidental--beneath the Asokan inscription on the
Allahabad pillar. Of his zeal for Hinduism we have a convincing proof in
gold coins of his reign that preserve on the obverse in the figure of
the sacrificial horse a record of the _Asvamedha_, which he again
revived. Strange to say, however, his fame has never been so popular as
that of his son, Chandragupta II., Vikramadytia, the Sun of Power, who
reigned in turn for nearly forty years, and has lived in Hindu legend as
the Raja Bikram, to whom India owes her golden age. It was his court at
Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of
Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet
and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain.
The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy. As has so
often happened, and is still happening in India to-day in the struggle
between Urdu and Hindi, the battle of religious and political supremacy
was largely one of languages. During the centuries of Brahmanical
depression that preceded the Gupta dynasty, the more vulgar tongue
spoken of the people prevailed. Under the Guptas, Sanskrit, which was
the language of the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took
possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well
as of theology. Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was
adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical
code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa's plays,
and in many other works of which only fragments have survived.
Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and
to the greater glory of Brahmanism. Local tradition is doubtless quite
wrong in assigning to Raja Bikram the noble gateway which is the only
monument of Hindu architecture at its best that Ujjain has to show
to-day. But to that period may, perhaps, be traced the graceful, if
highly ornate, style of architecture, of which the Bhuvaneshwar temples,
several centuries more recent, are the earliest examples that can be at
all accurately dated. To the credit of Brahmanism be it said that in its
hour of triumph it remained at least negatively tolerant, as all purely
Indian creeds generally have been. Fa-Hien, who visited India during the
reign of Vikramadytia, though dismayed at the desolation which had
already overtaken many of the sacred places of Buddhism, pays a generous
tribute to the tolerance and statesmanship of that great sovereign. The
country seems, indeed, to have enjoyed real prosperity under a paternal
and almost model administration.

Yet the Gupta dynasty endured only a little longer than had that of the
Mauryas. Its downfall was hastened by the long reign of terror which
India went through during the invasion of the White Huns. Europe had
undergone a like ordeal nearly a century earlier, for when the Huns
began to move out of the steppes of Eastern Asia they poured forth in
two separate streams, one of which swept into Eastern Europe, whilst the
other flowed more slowly towards Persia and India. What Attila had been
to Europe, Mihiragula was to India, and though the domination of the
Huns did not long outlive him, the anarchy they left behind them
continued for another century, until "the land of Kuru," the cradle and
battle-field of so many legendary heroes, produced another heroic
figure, who, as King Harsha, filled for more than forty years (606-648)
the stage of Indian history with his exploits. He had inherited the
blood of the Gupta emperors from his mother, though his father was only
a small Raja of Thanesvar, to the north of Delhi. The tragic
circumstances in which he succeeded him made a man of him at the early
age of fourteen. By the time he was twenty he was "master of the five
Indias"--_i.e._ of nearly the whole of Northern India from Kathiawar to
the delta of the Ganges, and henceforth he proved himself as great in
peace as in war. In his case the knowledge we owe to Chinese sources is
supplemented by the valuable record left by the Brahman Bana, who lived
at his court and wrote the Harsha-Charita. Taxation, we are told, was
lightened, and the assessment of land revenue was equitable and
moderate. Security for life and property was enforced under severe but
effective penalties. Education received impartial encouragement whether
conducted by Brahmans or by Buddhist monks, and both as a patron of
literature, which he himself cultivated by composing dramas, and as a
philanthropic ruler King Harsha bestowed his favours with a fairly equal
hand on Hinduism and on Buddhism alike. For Buddhism still lingered in
the land, and Harsha, who was a mystic and a dreamer as well as a man of
action, certainly inclined during his later years towards Buddhism, or,
at least, included it in his own eclectic creed.

Hiuen-Tsang, who spent fifteen years in India during Harsha's reign,
searching for the relics of early Buddhism in a land from which it was
steadily disappearing, has given us a wonderful picture of a religious
state-pageant which makes Prayaga, at the triple confluence of the
Ganges and the Jumna with the sacred but invisible river, Saraswati,
near to the modern city of Allahabad, stand out as another striking
landmark in Indian history. Hindus attach great holiness to rivers and
their confluence, and this Triveni, or triple confluence, had been
specially consecrated by Brahma, who chose that spot for the first
_Asvamedha_. "From ancient times," says the Chinese chronicler, "the
kings used to go there to distribute alms, and hence it was known as the
Place of Almsgiving. According to tradition more merit is gained by
giving one piece of money there than one hundred thousand elsewhere." So
King Harsha having invited all alike, whether "followers of the law or
heretics, the ascetics and the poor, the orphans and the helpless," the
kings of eighteen subordinate kingdoms assembled there with their people
to the number of 500,000, and found immense refectories laid out for
their refreshment, and long rows of warehouses to receive silk and
cotton garments and gold and silver coins for distribution to them. "The
first day a statue of Buddha was placed in the shrine erected on the
Place of Almsgiving, and there was a distribution of the most precious
things and of the garments of greatest value, whilst exquisite viands
were served and flowers scattered to the sound of harmonious music. Then
all retired to their resting-places. On the second day a statue of the
Sun-god was placed in the shrine, and on the third day the statue of
Shiva," and the distribution of gifts continued on those days and day
after day for a period of over two months, ten thousand Brahmans
receiving the lion's share, until, having exhausted all his wealth, even
to the jewels and garments he was wearing, King Harsha borrowed a coarse
and much-worn garment, and having "adored the Buddhas of the ten
countries," he gave vent to his pious delight, exclaiming: "Whilst I was
amassing all this wealth I was always afraid lest I should find no safe
and secret place to stow it away. Now that I have deposited it by
alms-giving in the Field of Happiness I know that it is for ever in
safety. I pray that in my future lives I may amass in like manner great
treasures and give them away in alms so as to obtain the ten divine
faculties in all their plenitude."

Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the
days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in
bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India,
behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be
paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates
represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this
extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the
picture left to us is singularly complete. The first day is a sort of
farewell tribute to the waning glory of Buddha, and the second to the
ancient majesty of the Vedic gods; but they only prepare the way for the
culminating worship, on the third day, of the terrific figure of Shiva,
who had already been raised to one of the highest, if not the highest,
throne in the Hindu pantheon, which he still retains--Shiva, the master
of life and death, whose favourite emblem is the phallus, and from whose
third eye bursts forth the flame which is one day to consume the world.
Around Harsha, and devouring his gifts until, at the end of two months,
they are wholly exhausted, are the Brahmans, "born above the world,
assigned to guard the treasury of duties, civil and religious," through
whom alone the wrath of angry gods can be appeased and present and
future life be made safe in the descending hierarchy of caste.

Shortly after Harsha's death in A.D. 648, India, as is her wont as soon
as the strong man's arm is paralysed, relapses once more into political
chaos. Her history does not indeed ever again recede into the complete
obscurity of earlier ages. We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and
dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu
Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and
absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by
them, into their own religious and social system. The most notable
feature of the post-Harsha period of Hindu history is the emergence of
the Rajput states, whose rulers, though probably descendants of
relatively recent invaders, not only became rapidly Hinduised, but
secured relatively prompt admission to the rank of Kshatryas in the
Hindu caste system, with pedigrees dated back to the Sun and Moon, which
to the popular mind were well justified by their warlike prowess and
splendid chivalry. I need only recall the name of Prithvi-Raja, the lord
of Sambhar, Delhi, and Ajmer, whose epic fame rests not less on his
abduction of the Kanauj princess who loved him than on his gallant
losing fight against the Mahomedan invaders of India. But fierce clan
jealousies and intense dynastic pride made the Rajputs incapable of
uniting into a single paramount state, or even into an enduring
confederacy fit to withstand the storm of which Harsha himself might
have heard the distant rumblings. For it was during his reign that
militant Islam first set foot in India, in a remote part of the
peninsula. Just at the same time as the Arabs, in the first flush of
victory, poured into Egypt, a small force crossed the Arabian Sea and
entered Baluchistan, and a century later the whole of Sind passed into
Arab hands. Another two centuries and the Mahomedan flood was pouring
irresistibly into India, no longer across the Arabian Sea, but from
Central Asia through the great northern passes, until in successive
waves it submerged for a time almost the whole of India.

Now if we look back upon the fifteen centuries of Indian history, of
which I have sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the
Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the
twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent
form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other
hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital
social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in
prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of
a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic
to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and sufficiently
rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Of its marvellous tenacity
and powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the
elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous
uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed
under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the
Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, contemporary and
closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and
perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease
of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically quite
unimportant sect. But indomitably powerful as a social amalgam, Hinduism
failed to generate any politically constructive force that could endure
much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The
Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the
centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for
mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all
in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and
climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at
strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone
always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding pantheon of gods and
goddesses for the multitude, with its subtle and elastic philosophies
for the elect, with the doctrine of infinite reincarnations for all,
and, bound up with it, the iron law of caste.

The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to
the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its
essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life
even by the Western-educated classes. It divides up Indian society into
thousands of water-tight compartments within which the Hindu is born and
lives and dies without any possibility of emerging from the one to which
he has been predestined by his own deeds in his former lives. Each caste
forms a group, of which the relations within its own circle, as well as
with other groups, are governed by the most rigid laws--in no
connection more rigid than in regard to marriage. These groups are of
many different types; some are of the tribal type, some national, some
sectarian, some have been formed by migration, some are based upon a
common social function or occupation past or present, some on
peculiarities of religious beliefs and superstitions. A distinguished
French writer, M. Senart, has described a caste as a close corporation,
in theory at any rate rigorously hereditary, equipped with a certain
traditional and independent organisation, observing certain common
usages, more particularly as to marriage, food, and questions of
ceremonial pollution, and ruling its members by the sanction of certain
penalties of which the most signal is the sentence of irrevocable
exclusion or out-casting. The Census of 1901 was the first to attempt a
thorough classification of Indian castes, and the number of the main
castes enumerated in it is well over two thousand, each one divided up
again into almost endless sub-castes. The keystone of the whole caste
system is the supremacy of the _quasi_-sacerdotal caste of Brahmans--a
caste which constitutes in some respects the proudest and closest
aristocracy that the world has ever seen, since it is not merely an
aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of
divine origin. An Indian is either born a Brahman or he is not. No power
on earth can make him a Brahman. Not all Brahmans were learned even in
the old days of Hinduism, though it was to their monopoly of such
learning as there then was that they owed their ascendancy over the
warrior kings. Nor do all Brahmans minister in the temples. Strangely
enough the minority who do are looked down upon by their own castemen.
The majority pursue such worldly avocations, often quite humble, as are
permissible for them under their caste laws. The Brahmans were wise
enough, too, to temper the fundamental rigidity of the system with
sufficient elasticity to absorb the new elements with which it came into
contact, and in most cases gradually to reabsorb such elements as from
time to time rebelled against it. The process by which new castes may be
admitted into the pale of Hinduism, or the status of existing castes be
from time to time readjusted to new conditions, has been admirably
explained by Sir Alfred Lyall. But the process can be worked only under
Brahmanical authority, and the supreme sanction for all caste laws rests
solely with the Brahmans, whilst of all caste laws the most inexorable
is the supremacy of the Brahman. Therein lies the secret of the great
influence which, for good as well as for evil, he has always wielded
over the masses. For though in theory there could be no escape from the
bondage of caste, individuals, and even a whole group, would sometimes
find ways and means of propitiating the Brahmans who ministered to their
spiritual needs, and the miraculous intervention of a favouring god or
the discovery of a long-lost but entirely mythical ancestor would secure
their social uplift on to a higher rung of the caste-ladder.

Such a system, by creating and perpetuating arbitrary and yet almost
impassable lines of social cleavage, must be fatal to the development of
a robust body politic which can only be produced by the reasonable
intermingling and healthy fusion of the different classes of the
community. It was perhaps chief among the causes that left Hinduism with
so little force of organised political cohesion that the Hindu states of
ancient India, with their superior culture and civilisation, were sooner
or later swept away by the devastating flood of Mahomedan conquest,
whilst the social structure of Hinduism, just because it consisted of
such an infinity of water-tight compartments each vital and
self-sufficing, could be buffeted again and again and even almost
submerged by the waves without ever breaking up.




CHAPTER III

MAHOMEDAN DOMINATION


Of all the great religions that have shaped and are still shaping the
destinies of the human race, Islam alone was borne forth into the world
on a great wave of forceful conquest. Out of the sun-scorched deserts of
Arabia, with the Koran in the one hand and the sword in the other, the
followers of Mahomed swept eastward to the confines of China, northward
through Asia Minor into Eastern Europe, and westward through Africa into
Spain, and even into the heart of medieval France. But it was not till
the beginning of the eleventh century that the Mahomedan flood began to
roll down into India from the north with the overwhelming momentum of
fierce fanaticism and primitive cupidity behind it--at first mere short
but furious irruptions, like the seventeen raids of Mahmud of Ghazni
between 1001 and 1026, then a more settled tide of conquest, now and
again checked for a time by dissensions amongst the conquerors quite as
much as by some brilliant rally of Hindu religious and patriotic
fervour, but sweeping on again with a fresh impetus until the flood had
spread itself over the whole of the vast peninsula, except the extreme
south. For three centuries one wave of invasion followed another, one
dynasty of conquerors displaced another, but whether under Turki or
Afghan rulers, under Slave kings or under the house of Tughluk, there
was seldom a pause in the consolidation of Mahomedan power, seldom a
break in the long-drawn tale of plunder and carnage, cruelty and lust,
unfolded in the annals of the earlier Mahomedan dynasties that ruled at
Delhi. One notable victory Prithvi Raja, the forlorn hope of Hindu
chivalry, won at Thanesvar in 1192 over the Afghan hordes that had
already driven the last of the Ghaznis from Lahore and were sweeping
down upon Delhi, but in the following year the gallant young Rajput was
crushingly defeated, captured, and done to death by a ruthless foe. Then
Delhi fell, and Kutub-ed-Din, in turn the favourite slave, the trusted
lieutenant and the deputed viceroy of the Afghan conqueror, growing
tired of serving an absent master, within a few years threw off his
allegiance. In 1206 he proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi. That the
Slave Dynasty which he founded was in one respect at least not unworthy
of empire, in spite of the stigma attaching to its worse than servile
origin, the Kutub Minar and the splendid mosque of which it forms part
are there to show. The great minaret, which was begun by Kutub-ed-Din
himself, upon whose name it has conferred an enduring lustre not
otherwise deserved, is beyond comparison the loftiest and the noblest
from which the Musulman call to prayer has ever gone forth, nor
is the mosque which it overlooks unworthy to have been called
_Kuwwet-el-Islam_, the Might of Islam. To make room for it the Hindu
temples, erected by the Rajput builders of the Red Fort, were torn down,
and the half-effaced figures on the columns of the mosque, and many
other conventional designs peculiar to Hindu architecture, betray
clearly the origin of the materials used in its construction. But the
general conception, and especially the grand lines of the screen of
arches on the western side, are essentially and admirably Mahomedan. On
a slighter scale, but profusely decorated and of exquisite workmanship,
is the tomb of Altamsh, Kutub-ed-Din's successor, and like him
originally a mere favourite slave.

It had been well for these Slave kings had no other record survived of
them than those which they have left in stone and marble. Great
builders and mighty warriors they were in the cause of Allah and his
Prophet, but their depravity was only exceeded by their cruelty. The
story of the whole dynasty is a long-drawn tale of horrors until the
wretched Kaikobad, having turned Delhi for a short three years into a
house of ill-fame, was dragged out of his bed and flung into the Jumna,
his infant child murdered, and the house of Khilji set up where the
Slave kings had reigned. It was the second of these Khilji princes,
Ala-ud-Din, who built, alongside of Kutub-ed-Din's mosque, the Alai
Darwazah, the monumental gateway which is not only an exceptionally
beautiful specimen of external polychromatic decoration, but, to quote
Fergusson, "displays the Pathan style at its period of greatest
perfection, when the Hindu masons had learned to fit their exquisite
style of ornamentation to the forms of their foreign masters." Yet the
atrocities of his twenty years' reign, which was one of almost unbroken
conquest and plunder, wellnigh surpass those of the Slave kings. He had
seized the throne by murdering his old uncle in the act of clasping his
hand, and his own death was, it is said, hastened by poison administered
to him by his favourite eunuch and trusted lieutenant, K[=a]fur, who had
ministered to his most ignoble passions. To the Khiljis succeeded the
Tughluks, and the white marble dome of Tughluk Shah's tomb still stands
out conspicuous beyond the broken line of grim grey walls which were
once Tughlukabad. The Khiljis had been overthrown, but the curse of a
Mahomedan saint, Sidi Dervish, whose fame has endured to the present
day, still rested upon the Delhi in which they had dwelt. So Mahomed
Tughluk built unto himself a new and stronger city, but he did nothing
else to avert the curse. Indeed, he invented a form of man-hunt which
for sheer devilish cruelty has been only once matched in the West by the
_cani del duca_ when the crazy Gian Maria ruled in Milan. Well may his
milder successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital.
Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and
lavish charities. The record he kept of them is not without a certain
naïve pathos:

     Under the guidance of the Almighty, I arranged that the heirs of
     those persons who had been slain in the reign of my late Lord and
     Patron, Sultan Mahomed Shah, and those who had been deprived of a
     limb, nose, eye, hand, or foot, should be reconciled to the late
     Sultan and appeased by gifts, so that they executed deeds declaring
     their satisfaction, duly attested by witnesses. These deeds were
     put into a chest, which was placed at the head of the late Sultan's
     grave in the hope that God in his great mercy would show his
     clemency to my late friend and patron and make those persons feel
     reconciled to him.

The curse fell upon Delhi in the reign of the next Tughluk, Sultan
Mahmud. Timur, with his Mongolian horsemen, swooped down through the
northern passes upon Delhi, slaying Mahomedans and Hindus alike and
plundering and burning on all sides as he came. Opposite to the famous
ridge, where four and a half centuries later England was to nail her
flag to the mast, he forded the Jumna, having previously slain all
captives with his army to the number of 100,000. Mahmud's army, with its
125 elephants, could not withstand the shock. Timur entered Delhi, which
for five whole days was given over to slaughter and pillage. Then,
having celebrated his victory by a great carouse, he proceeded to the
marble mosque which Firuz Tughluk's piety had erected in atonement of
his grim predecessor's sins, and solemnly offered up a "sincere and
humble tribute of praise" to God. Within a year he disappeared in the
same whirl-wind of destruction through the northern passes into his
native wilds of Central Asia, leaving desolation and chaos behind him.

From so terrific a blow Delhi was slow to recover. A group of
picturesque domes marks the resting-place of some of the Seyyid and Lodi
kings who in turn ruled or misruled the shrunken dominions which still
owned allegiance to Delhi. The achievement of a centralised Mahomedan
empire was delayed for nearly two centuries. But the aggressive vitality
of Islam had not been arrested, and out of the anarchy which followed
Timur's meteoric raid Mahomedan soldiers of fortune built up for
themselves independent kingdoms and principalities and founded dynasties
which each had their own brief moment of power and magnificence. In all
these states, which spread right across Middle India from the Arabian
Sea to the Gulf of Bengal, Islam remained the dominant power; but, even
whilst trampling upon Hinduism, it did not escape altogether the
inevitable results of increasing contact with an older and more refined
civilisation. Amidst rapine and bloodshed and the constant clash of
arms, it was a period of intense artistic activity which, as usual in
the countries conquered by Islam, expressed itself chiefly in terms of
stone and marble, and though Hinduism never triumphed as classical
paganism, for instance, triumphed for a time in Papal Rome, the steady
and all-pervading revival of its influence can be traced from capital to
capital, wherever these Mahomedan _podestas_ established their seat of
government during that Indian _Cinque Cento_, which corresponds in time
with, and recalls in many ways, though at best distantly, the Italian
_Cinque Cento_, with its strange blend of refined luxury and cruelty, of
high artistic achievement and moral depravity.

To the present day almost all those cities--some of them now mere cities
of the dead, such as Golconda and Gaur and Mandu, some, such as Bijapur
and Bidar and Ahmednagar and Ahmedabad, still living and even
flourishing--bear witness to the genius of their makers. From motives of
political expediency, the Mahomedan rulers of those days, whether
Bahmanis or Ahmed Shahis or Adil Shahis or whatever else they were
called, were fain to reckon with their Hindu subjects. Wholesale
conversions to the creed of the conquerors, whether spontaneous or
compulsory, introduced new elements into the ruling race itself; for
converted Hindus, even when they rose to high positions of trust,
retained many of their own customs and traditions. Differences of
religion ceased to be a complete bar to matrimonial and other alliances
between Mahomedans and Hindus. Even in war Mahomedan mercenaries took
service with Hindu chiefs, and Hindus under Mahomedan captains. There
was thus, if not a fusion, a gradual mingling of the Mahomedan and Hindu
populations which, in spite of many fierce conflicts, tended to promote
a new _modus vivendi_ between them. It was a period of transition from
the era of mere ruthless conquest, which Timur's tempestuous irruption
brought practically to a close, to the era of constructive
statesmanship, which it was reserved to Akbar, the greatest of the
Moghul Emperors, to inaugurate.

Each of these early Mahomedan states has a story and a character of its
own, and each goes to illustrate the subtle ascendancy which the Hindu
mind achieved over the conquering Mahomedan. I can only select a few
typical examples. None is in its way more striking than Mandu, over
whose desolation the jungle now spreads its kindly mantle. Within two
years of Timur's raid into India the Afghan governors of Malwa
proclaimed themselves independent, and Hushang Ghuri, from whom the new
dynasty took its name, proceeded to build himself a new capital. The
grey grim walls of Mandu still crown a lofty outpost of the Vindhya
hills, some seventy miles south-east of Indore, the natural scarp
falling away as steeply on the one side to the fertile plateau of Malwa
as on the other to the broad valley of the sacred Nerbudda. The place
had no Hindu associations, and in the stately palaces and mosques
erected by Hushang and his immediate successors early in the fifteenth
century scarcely a trace of Hindu influence can be detected, though some
of them still stand almost intact amidst the luxuriant vegetation which
has now swallowed up the less substantial remains of what was once a
populous and wealthy city. The Ghuris came from Afghanistan, and the
great mosque of Hushang Ghuri--in spite of inscriptions which say in
one place that it has been modelled on the mosque of the Kaaba at Mecca,
and in another place on the great mosque at Damascus--is perhaps the
finest example of pure Pathan architecture in India, and one of the
half-dozen noblest shrines devoted to Mahomedan worship in the whole
world; a mighty structure of red sandstone and white marble, stern and
simple, and as perfect in the proportions of its long avenues of pointed
arches as in the breadth of its spacious design. Behind it, under a
great dome of white marble, Hushang himself sleeps. Unique in its way,
too, is the lofty hall of the Hindola Mahal, with its steeply sloping
buttresses--a hall which has not been inaptly compared to the great
dining-hall of some Oxford or Cambridge College--and alongside of it,
the more delicate beauty, perhaps already suggestive of Hindu
collaboration, of the Jahaz Mahal, another palace with hanging balconies
and latticed windows of carved stone overlooking on either side an
artificial lake covered with pink lotus blossoms. Mandu was at first an
essentially Mahomedan city, and under Mahmud Khilji, who wrested the
throne from Hushang's effete successor, its fame as a centre of Islamic
learning attracted embassies even from Egypt and Bokhara. But its
greatness was short-lived. Mahmud's son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for
many years his father's right hand, both in council and in the field.
But no sooner did he come to the throne in 1469 than he discharged all
the affairs of the state on to his own son and retired into the
seraglio, where 15,000 women formed his court and provided him even with
a bodyguard. Five hundred beautiful young Turki women, armed with bows
and arrows, stood, we are told, on his right hand, and, on his left,
five hundred Abyssinian girls. Profligate succeeded profligate, and the
degeneracy of his Mahomedan rulers was the Hindu's opportunity. The
power passed into the hands of Hindu officers, who were even suffered to
take unto themselves mistresses from among the Mahomedan women of the
court. The end came, after many vicissitudes, with Baz Bahadur, chiefly
known for his passionate devotion to the fair Hindu, Rup Mati, for whom
he built on the very crest of the hill, so that from her windows she
might worship the waters of the sacred Nerbudda, the only palace now
surviving in Mandu which bears a definite impress of Hinduism. Baz
Bahadur surrendered to the Emperor Akbar in 1562.

At Ahmedabad, on the other hand, the Ahmed Shahi Sultans of Gujerat
found themselves in presence of an advanced form of Hindu civilisation
as soon as they entered into possession of the kingdom which they
snatched from the general conflagration. Whether Ahmedabad, which is
still the modern capital of Gujerat and ranks only second to its
neighbour, Bombay, as a centre of the Indian cotton industry, occupies
or not the exact site of the ancient Karn[=a]vati, Gujerat was a
stronghold of Indian culture long before the Mahomedan invasions.
Architecture especially had reached a very high standard of development
in the hands of what is usually known as the Jaina school. This is a
misnomer, for the school was in reality the product of a period rather
than a sect, though Jainism probably never enjoyed anywhere, or at any
time, such political ascendancy as in Gujerat under its Rashtrakuta and
Solanki rulers from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and seldom has
there been such an outburst of architectural activity as amongst the
Jains of that period. To the present day the _salats_ or builders,
mostly Jains, have in their keeping, jealously locked away in iron-bound
chests in their temples, many ancient treatises on civil and religious
architecture, of which only a few abstracts have hitherto been published
in Gujerati, but, as may be seen at Ahmedabad, in the great Jaina temple
of Hathi Singh, built in the middle of the last century at a cost of one
million sterling, they have preserved something of the ancient
traditions of their craft.

Firishta described Ahmedabad as, in his day, "the handsomest city in
Hindustan and perhaps in the world," and very few Indian cities contain
so many beautiful buildings as those with which Ahmedabad was endowed in
the course of a few decades by its Ahmed Shahi rulers. No one can fail
to admire the wealth of ornamentation and the exquisite workmanship
lavished upon them, though they are not by any means the noblest
monuments of Mahomedan architecture in India. In fact--and herein lies
their peculiar interest--they are Hindu rather than Mahomedan in spirit.
For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as
ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in
earlier times for their Hindu rajas. By the mere force of a civilisation
in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders
imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them,
many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture. To
obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the
Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant,
they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining
them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the
capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was
permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat.
Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed
through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan
purposes has passed. It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy. The
earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu
temple with a Mahomedan façade, and the figures of animals and of idols
can still be traced on the interior pillars. The octagonal tomb of Ganj
Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at
Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all
the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built
on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan
character. Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and
tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the
most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat. It was completed in
1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi
dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one
century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in
the domain at least of architecture.

In Bijapur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which
I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake
itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu
art--perhaps because the great days of Bijapur came after it had taken
its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern
India to perish by the sword of Islam. Having laid low the Hindu "City
of Victory," the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan "City of
Victory" eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed. The
Gol Kumbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in
which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an
almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed space in the
world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St.
Peter's dominates the Roman Campagna. To such heights Hindu architecture
can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the
Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed
circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which
rests on symmetrical groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like
the same bold span or the same lofty elevation. Have we not there a
symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan
conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture? Even if the
Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the
most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture.
The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except
under compulsion.

To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that
divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus
required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan
_condottieri_ possessed. A new power more equal to the task was already
storming at the northern gates of India. On a mound thirty-five miles
north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a
small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous
battles that decide the fate of nations. It is Panipat. There, on April
21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the
last of the Lodis. Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way
down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar horsemen;
but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for
empire. He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his
remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his
statesmanship as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations
upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric
of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries. Though it was
at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed
himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there
to-day. But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his
son Humayun's mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark
green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous
feature in the plain of Delhi. Endowed with many brilliant and amiable
qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father
or his son. Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated
but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it,
when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi
caused his death at the early age of forty-eight. But would he have
been able to retain it? He had by no means crushed the forces of
rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule,
and which were still holding the field under the leadership of the
brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu. Delhi itself was lost within a few
months of Humayun's death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty
years after his grandfather's brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had
in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan. He too fought and won,
and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to
mould and to fashion at the promptings of his genius.

Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was
already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He
showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the
reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors
before him in India, men of his own race and creed--the blood of Timur
flowed in his veins--and men of other races and of other creeds. They
too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had
passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. What was the reason?
Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and
that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities
their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and
perished? Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a
better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by
dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal
service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on
terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by
breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge
in the family. He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force,
but he never used force alone. He subdued the Rajput states, but he won
the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among
their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan
kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East.
He created a homogeneous system of civil administration which our own
still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which
was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively
slight modifications to the present day.

Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area
of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social
fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious
exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu
caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could
be no security for the future against the revival of the old and
deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself
learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred
books to be translated into Persian--the cultured language of his
court--so that he could study them for himself; and he invited
Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of
different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his
presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted
palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his
characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles
distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly
perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with
exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the
greatest of the Moghul Emperors--the contemporary of our own great Queen
Elizabeth--presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his
long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief
offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council
Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural
skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu
than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who
was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over
against it, in the beautiful "Golden House," dwelt his Rajput consort,
Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he
forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in
Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as
upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and illustrious
Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to
Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation,
untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious
evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the
memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed
the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the
great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar
himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all
denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired
Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than
in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the "Gate of Victory," the
lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the
spacious mosque quadrangle: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world
is a bridge. Pass over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but
an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'"

It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests
in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the
religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound
denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them,
he foresaw that his life's work would assuredly some day be wrecked. Did
he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had
already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as noble a
mind as his not proof against the overweening _hubris_ to which a
despotic genius has so often succumbed? One momentous evening, in the
Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and
confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the
domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran,
which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating
it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He
promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new
profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, "There
is no God but God, and Mahomed is his prophet," proclaimed indeed in the
same words the unity of God, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent
of God. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only borrowed its
prayers chiefly from the Parsees and its ritual from the Hindus, but
practically abolished all Mahomedan observances. The orthodox Mahomedans
naturally held up their hands in horror, and many preferred honourable
exile to conformity. But the awe which Akbar inspired, and perhaps the
acknowledged elevation of his motives, generally compelled at least
outward acceptance during his lifetime. His Mahomedan subjects had,
moreover, to admit that his desire to conciliate Hinduism did not blind
him to its most perverse features. Whilst he abolished the capitation
tax on Hindus and the tax upon Hindu pilgrims, he forbade infant
marriages and, short of absolute prohibition, did all he could to
discountenance the self-immolation o