Again, poor Huns! We do not need such legend to know that they were utterly barbarian; that they rode like the devil, fought with bone-tipped javelins, clothed themselves in skins, and ate herbs and half-raw meat which they had first made tender by using it as their saddle! It is a sufficiently black indictment, and, though it applies only to the rolling swarm of savages which, on leaving that hive of humanity, the wide Siberian Steppe, turned westward, we have no reason to suppose that the swarm which turned eastward differed much from the type. It is true they are called the White Huns, but that is most likely because among the dark races of Hindustan, the yellow Mongolian complexion showed fair.
India had been overrun many times before, but it needs small consideration to see that this invasion must have been the worst, must have brought with it a perfect horror of havoc. Far more so than the Hun invasion in Europe. There the ultimate savage met, for the most part, with Goths and Visigoths. In India they stood between a Brahman and his salvation, between culture and comfort. For India was in these days far more civilised than Europe; its people were refined, bound hand and foot by ritual, curiously conventional in custom.
The long ages which had passed since the Vedic times had made religion more complex, had multiplied ceremonial to such an extent that the performance of the simplest duty was hedged about by the danger of fateful commissions, and still more fateful omissions. The revival of Hinduism during the paling days of the Gûpta empire had vastly increased the power of the Brahman. In brief, Purânic Hinduism--that is, religion based on the Purânas, as distinct from the Vedas--with all its hair-splitting, its overlay of ritual by ritual, was at its zenith. From birth to death a man--even the meanest man--was in the grip of innumerable petty commandments.
The very gods he worshipped had changed. The elemental deities of the Rig-Veda--the Winds, the Fire, the Sun, the Dawn--behind which lay ever (half recognised, wholly mysterious) the Unconditioned, the Absolute, were lost; crowded out, as it were, by the three hundred and thirty millions of Purânic godlings, which rumour says had replaced the thirty-and-three of the Vedas. And beset by an Athanasian furore for faith, the Purânas had defined the undefinable. The doctrine of a Trinity seems about this era of the world's history to have been more than usually in the air, and we find it here, hard and fast, crystallised unchangeably.
Brahma the Creator, Siva the destroying Spirit, Vishn or Krishn the Saviour, the Man-God, kind to the weaknesses of humanity. The three hundred and thirty millions of little gods were contained in the Three; they were emanations, attributes, as such imaged and worshipped. A great change this from the singing of a hymn to Agni the Fire-God, as the victim's flesh shrivelled in the flame, and the cooling of the ashes with a libation of soma juice.
And the worshipping of images brought with it a veneration for temples, a reverence for a paid priesthood, with its inevitable corollary of cult and custom and ceremonial. This complexity of religion naturally showed itself in the character of the people. As Mr Dutt writes:--
"Pompous celebrations and gorgeous decorations arrested the imagination and fostered the superstitions of the populace; poetry, arts, architecture, sculpture, and music lent their aid, and within a few centuries the nation's wealth was lavished on these gorgeous edifices and ceremonials which were the outward manifestations of the people's unlimited devotion and faith. Pilgrimages, which were rare or unknown in very ancient times, were organised on a stupendous scale; gifts in land and money poured in for the support of temples, and religion gradually transformed itself to a blind veneration of images and their custodians. The great towns of India were crowded with temples, and new gods and new idols found sanctuaries in stone edifices and in the hearts of ignorant worshippers."
Add to this the testimony of the literature of the period. The dramas of Kâlidâsa, beautiful as they are, concern themselves entirely with Love. The very descriptions of nature have reference to it, as when we read:--
"The oleander bud
Shows like the painted fingers of the fair,
Red tinted on the tip and edged with ebony."