“Does the passage in Manu refer to firearms or not?” asks Dr. Oppert. “In our opinion it certainly alludes to them” (p. 70). We need not recur to the mistranslation of Manu already noticed.
The two poems on which Dr. Oppert relies for further evidence are the Nitiprakásika of Vaisampayana, and the Sukraniti of Sukra. According to the former, the Hindu deities, Sita, Indra, Krishna, &c., were authors of “books on polity.” Brahma’s contribution to literature consisted of 10,000,000 double verses (p. 36). The constitution of an army was as follows (p. 5):—
| Foot | 2,187,000,000 |
| Horse | 21,870,000 |
| Elephants | 218,700 |
| Chariots | 21,870 |
The “arms in use” of one species were forty-four in number; of another species, fifty-five. Rabelais has only succeeded in cataloguing forty-six arms in the introduction to the third book of “Pantagruel.” Lest the ninety-nine arms in use might fail to ensure success, a spell (of thirty-two syllables) is given (p. 10) which would bring certain victory to him who repeated it 32,000 times. Both of these veracious works, however, undoubtedly mention cannon and muskets, and a recipe for gunpowder is given in the Sukraniti.[236]
Dr. Oppert makes no critical examination of the texts of these poems to ascertain whether they contain the interpolations to be found in most Oriental works. Of their age he only says that “no Chinese work ... can, with respect to antiquity, be compared with the Sukraniti” (p. 45). As the reader will find in the following chapter, this implies a considerable age.
It is hard to believe that gunpowder was known to a people whose language contained no word for saltpetre;[237] that cannon were used by men whose books make no allusion to gunpowder, with the exception just mentioned. “It is peculiar,” says Dr. Oppert, “that powder should not have been mentioned in Sanskrit works” (p. 63). The same peculiarity is observable in Anglo-Saxon works, and is probably due to the same cause. But the fatal objection to the existence of this very early explosive is the admitted fact that after a time it was discarded and forgotten. Writers who lightly tell us so are apparently unconscious of the greatness of the demand they make upon our credulity. They ask us, in effect, to accept the astonishing proposition, that a nation voluntarily surrendered, without any assignable cause, an incalculable “advantage” in the “struggle for existence”—the eager, continuous, and unending preparation for self-defence which is, in Mr. Bagehot’s words, “the most showy fact” in human history. It is infinitely more probable that the passages in the two poems which mention gunpowder and cannon were interpolated by the scribes of after-ages than that the Hindus wantonly broke the first and strongest law of human nature, the law of self-defence. There can be no reasonable doubt that the recipe for gunpowder in the Sukraniti is an interpolation. The proportions are given in the first place as 5:1:1, and then it is added, “if the powder is to be used for a gun,” let them be 4:1:1, or 6:1:1.[238] And why not 5:1:1 also? This recipe was not written by a gunner: it is the handiwork of some charlatan of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, who imagined that, by making a certain mystery about the proportions 5:1:1, he should give a semblance of great antiquity to the recipe. But he blundered badly about the proportions. The proportions 4:1:1 were only reached by the Swedes about the middle of the sixteenth[239] century, and approached by the English about the middle of the seventeenth,[240] and powder of such strength would have blown weak, early bombards to pieces. Other sound reasons are given by competent critics for rejecting from first to last the allusions to firearms contained in the two poems. A critic in Nature points out that a work which mentions the Hunas (Huns or Europeans) cannot be of the age apparently assigned by Dr. Oppert to the Nitiprakásika.[241] “Oppert,” says Sir R. Burton, “shows no reason why the allusions to, and descriptions of, gunpowder and firearms should not be held modern interpolations into these absurd compositions.”[242] Mr. W. F. Sinclair concludes from the strong resemblance between the firearms described and those which we know were imported into India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, either that the MSS. date no further back than the sixteenth century, or that the allusions to firearms were interpolated at that period.[243] “One is naturally led to suspect,” says Professor Ray, “that the lines (of the Sukraniti) relating to gunpowder ... are interpolations.” The suspicion is further enhanced when it is borne in mind that in the “Polity of Kamandaki,” an ancient work of undoubted authenticity, “there occurs no reference whatever to firearms, nor is there any in the Agnipurana, in which the subject of training in the use of arms and armour takes up four chapters.... The more rational conclusion would be that the Sukraniti is a patchwork, in which portions of chap. iv. were added some time after the introduction of gunpowder in Indian warfare during the Moslem period.”[244] “The last chapter is apparently spurious,” says Rajendralala Mitra, “as it describes guns as they existed a hundred years ago.”[245] Finally, Herr von Romocki utterly rejects Dr. Oppert’s theory.[246]
The military history of India confirms the conclusions of the writers who have been quoted: not a fact is to be found there which lends any support to the theory of early gunpowder in India.
The employment of gunpowder in Europe revolutionised the art of war and affected, more or less, almost every human institution. “The military art,” says Gibbon, “has been changed by the invention of gunpowder.... Mathematics, chymistry, mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the science of war.”[247] Gunpowder, says A. Comte, “en emprimant à l’art de la guerre un caractère de plus en plus scientifique, a directement tendu à intéresser tous les pouvoirs à l’actif dévellopement continu de la philosophie naturelle.”[248] We may reasonably assume that the discovery of so tremendous an agent as gunpowder would have produced in India some few effects, at least, similar in their general features to the effects it produced in Europe. To mention one or two details: Sanskrit would have coined a word for saltpetre, which it did not possess; the use of the bow would have been curtailed; a lasting mark would have been put on fortifications; and some few specimens of the early firearms might have survived. Not a trace of these or similar changes is to be found; not a vestige of early firearms has remained. General Cunningham thought that the state of the ruins of certain ancient Kashmir temples proves the use of an explosive in their destruction,[249] but more prolonged observation shows that their condition is chiefly the effect of natural agencies. “The fingers of Time, and moderate movements of the earth, have been making openings in some of the other old Hindu buildings in Kashmir,” such as the little temple of Payach and the splendid temple of Martand; “and from their appearance it may be believed that these same agencies, together with undermining work applied for wilful destruction, could do what has been done.”[250] The plentiful supply of saltpetre to be found in the valley of the Ganges has been brought forward as a proof that the ancient Hindus must have had gunpowder, but the fact proves nothing. How many centuries did coal lie within reach of man’s hand, in England and elsewhere, before it was discovered and made use of? The attractive property of the magnet was known to Plato in the fifth century B.C., and Lucretius in the first century B.C. devotes a long passage of his poem to it (vi. 909-1089); yet its property of pointing north and south when free to move horizontally is first distinctly mentioned (in Europe) in the twelfth century A.D.[251]
Early Indian gunpowder is a fiction.