Eight Lectures on India

by Halford John Mackinder

Muhammad, “The Praised,” was born in Mecca, about the year 570. He belonged to one of the ruling families of the tribe of Arabs who held Mecca and the surrounding country, but his father died before he was born, and his mother when he was only six months old. From his earliest youth Muhammad was addicted to solitude and musing. In his wanderings he visited Syria, and in a Nestorian convent there learned many of the Hebrew and Christian ideas which he subsequently incorporated into his teaching. In his twenty-fifth year he married Khadija, a widow of noble birth and considerable wealth. This marriage placed him in a position of independence, for he had previously been very poor.

When Muhammad was forty years old there came to him a Divine Call, bidding him teach his people to abandon their idols, to worship God, and to accept him as God’s Prophet. At first Muhammad met with the most bitter opposition, and in the year 622 A.D. he had to flee from Mecca to a city called Yathreb, which received him and made him its chief magistrate. Ever since that event this city has been called Medinat-un-Nabi, the City of the Prophet; or, shortly, Medina. The flight of Muhammad from Mecca is called the Hegira, and it is from this event that the Muhammadan calendar dates. In the year 630 A.D. Mecca was conquered, and shortly after this all Arabia submitted to the claims of the prophet.

After Muhammad’s death the Arabs set forth to conquer the world and to convert it to Islam. They subdued Egypt and Syria and the plain of the Euphrates. They marched to the gates of Constantinople, and through Northern Africa to the Strait of Gibraltar, and beyond Gibraltar through Spain into France, there to suffer a great defeat at the hands of the Christian Franks, which saved the remainder of Christendom. All this was accomplished in little more than a hundred years from the Hegira.

But the Musulmans did not wage war only against Christendom. Their armies advanced from the Euphrates up on to the Persian plateau and down into the lowlands of Turkestan in the heart of Asia, and over the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan, and then down into the plain of the River Indus. Already in the seventh century there had been Musulman incursions into India overseas, by way of Sind. In the eleventh century after Christ the Musulmans entered Gangetic India, and took Delhi. They founded there a Muhammadan realm, which presently extended through most of Northern India.

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The Mogul Empire at its greatest extent.| Five hundred years later a second Musulman invasion, more effective than the first, came into India by way of Delhi. The Moguls or Mongols of Central Asia had been converted to Islam, and in the time of our King Henry the Eighth they refounded the Musulman power at Delhi. For a hundred and fifty years, from the time of our Queen Elizabeth to that of our Queen Anne, the series of Mogul Emperors, from Humayun to Aurangzeb, ruled in splendid state practically the whole of India. This map shows the greatest spread of the Mogul Empire. Agra, a hundred miles down the Jumna from Delhi, became a subsidiary capital to Delhi, and in these two cities we have to-day the supreme examples of Muhammadan architectural art.

The Musulman, it must be remembered, came as an alien to India. He is no polytheist or pantheist, but a believer in the one God, and that a spiritual God, so that he holds it wrong to make any graven image, whether of man or of animal. Islam is the name which the followers of the prophet gave to their religion: it means primarily submission, and so peace, greeting, safety, and salvation, and in its ethical sense it signifies striving after righteousness. Islam is in its essence pure Theism coupled with some definite rules of conduct. Belief in a future life and accountability for human action in another existence are two of the principal doctrines of the Islamic creed. Every Musulman is his own priest, and, in theory at any rate, no divisions of race or colour are recognised among the followers of the Prophet. Musulmans are forbidden to take alcohol. The gospel of Islam is the Koran—The Book—in which are embodied the teachings and precepts of the Arabian Prophet. The Koran incorporates, as we have already seen, much that was drawn both from Hebrew and Christian teaching.

More than sixty millions of the Indian population hold the faith of Islam. They are scattered all over the land, usually in a minority, although that minority, as we have already learned, is frequently powerful, for it gives ruling chiefs to many districts which are dominantly Hindu. In two parts only of India are the Musulmans in a majority, namely, in the far east, beyond the mouths of the Ganges in the newly formed Province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, and in the Indus Basin from the neighbourhood of Delhi through the Punjab into Sind. For this reason, and also because of its physical character—lying low beneath the uplands of Afghanistan, and separated from the greater part of India by the breadth of the desert—we may think of the Indus Valley as being an ante-chamber to India proper. In this ante-chamber, and in the Delhi passage, between the desert and the mountains, for more than nine hundred years the Musulmans have predominated.

When the decay of the Mogul Empire began in the time of our Queen Anne, the chief local representatives of the Imperial Rule, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the Nawabs of Bengal and Oudh, assumed an independent position. It was with these new dynasties that the East India Company came into conflict in the days of General Clive, and thus we may regard the British Empire in India as having been built up from the fragments into which the Mogul Empire broke. In one region, however, the Western Deccan, the Hindus re-asserted themselves, and there was a rival bid for Empire, as we have already learned, on the part of the Marathas. It was the work of General Wellesley, afterwards Duke of Wellington, to defeat the Marathas. In the north also, in the Punjab, there was a recrudescence of the Hindu race, due to the new sect of the Sikhs, who set up a power with which at a later time the British Raj came into conflict. But this was not until after Delhi, the very seat of the Mogul throne, had been taken.

|Repeat Map No. 2.| |4.
Simla, Viceregal Lodge—distant view.| |5.
Simla, Bazaar and Town Hall.| We are now prepared for the fact shown in this map, that the tract northwestward of Delhi, in the gateway between the desert and the mountains, is sown over with battle fields—ancient battlefields near Delhi, where the incoming Musulmans overthrew the Indian resistance, and modern battlefields near the Sutlej, where advancing British power inflicted defeat upon the Sikhs after severe contests. It is by no accident that Simla, the residence during more than half the year of the British Viceroy, is placed on the Himalayan heights above this natural seat of Empire and of struggle for Empire.

In the Mutiny of 1857 the Sikhs of the Punjab, and of the still continuing Tributary States of Nabha and Patiala, mentioned in the last lecture, remained loyal to the British rule, although they had been conquered in the terrible battles on the Sutlej less than ten years before. In no small measure this was due to the extraordinary influence wielded over them by Sir John Lawrence, afterwards Lord Lawrence, the brother of that Sir Henry Lawrence who defended the Residency of Lucknow. As a result of the Sikh loyalty some of the British forces in the Punjab were free to march to the re-capture of Delhi. Thus the Indian Mutiny was overcome from two bases, on the one hand at Lucknow and Cawnpore by an army from the sea and Calcutta, and on the other hand at Delhi by an army advancing from the Punjab over the track beaten by so many conquerors in previous ages. Let us visit Delhi and see its defences, its mosques, the palaces of its Emperors, and the memorials of the Mutiny. Then we will go to Agra to see other splendid monuments of the Musulman dynasty. After that we will turn to Hardwar, at the point where the sacred Ganges bursts from its Himalayan valley on to the plain. Hardwar is a pilgrimage centre of the Hindus, second in sanctity only to Benares itself.