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, Kāfur, 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 Karnāvati, 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 of Hindu widows. To the Brahmans especially his condemnation, both implied and explicit, of the caste system was a constant stone of offence.
Great as was his genius and admirable as were many of his institutions, Akbar, to use a homely phrase, fell between two stools to the ground. He himself ceased to be a Mahomedan without becoming a Hindu, whilst the great bulk at least of his subjects still remained at bottom Mahomedans and Hindus as before. Neither community was ripe for an eclectic creed based only upon sweet reasonableness and lofty ethical conceptions. His son and successor, Jehanghir, at once reverted to Mahomedan orthodoxy, but the reaction only became militant when Aurungzeb succeeded Shah Jehan. The profound incompatibility between Islam and Hinduism reasserted itself in him with a bitterness which the growing menace of the rising power of the Hindu Mahrattas probably helped to intensify. The reimposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus destroyed the last vestige of the great work of conciliation to which Akbar had vainly applied all his brilliant energies. Like Fatehpur Sikri itself, which for lack of water he had been compelled to abandon within fifteen years of its construction, it was a magnificent failure, and it was perhaps bound in his time to be a failure.
Aurungzeb was the first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth of the new Mahratta power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous Peacock Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern passes. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army. The Mahrattas endured a crushing defeat, which, together with treachery within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.
For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the Portuguese—Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British—the British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection, and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, "If a paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here"; and when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had passed into the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the noblest of Akbar's dreams.
But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off, but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same process of adaptation, assimilation, and absorption, which had been going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry between the cults of Shiva and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by Shivaite and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most popular of Hindu gods, and the divine love, of which he was at first the personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their origin from the ancient ideas of sexual dualism immanent in some of the Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of the great gods into the Sakti worship of the female principle, often with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the altars of the Mahamatri, the great goddesses personified in Kali and Durga. The worship of the gods assumed a more terrific and orgiastic character. Sati was more frequently practised. Many of the most splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples—amongst others that of Jaganath at Puri—were founded during that period. The custom, in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism reasserted itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against Mahomedan domination.
The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority of woman by her close confinement—of which there are few traces in earlier times—within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a precautionary measure for her protection against the lust of the Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the women of India, even in the classes in which the men of India have been drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate conservatism clings to social traditions and religious superstitions of which their male belongings have already been taught to recognise the evils. In this respect Mahomedan domination has helped to strengthen the forces of resistance inherent to Hinduism.
On the other hand, Mahomedan domination has left behind it a deep line of religious cleavage, deepest in the north, which was the seat of Mahomedan power, but extending to almost every part of India. Sixty-six millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans, and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by the supreme force of religion. We have a pale reflection of that sort of antagonism at our own doors in the bitterness between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster. All over India, Mahomedans and Hindus alike remember the centuries of Mahomedan domination, the latter with the bitterness bred of the long oppression that struck down their gods and mutilated their shrines, the former with the unquenched pride and unquenchable hope of a fierce faith which will yet, they believe, make the whole world subject to Allah, the one God, and Mahomed, his one Prophet.