Thus it happened that the state of the Aryans in the divided condition in which they found themselves, and the limitations to which the Brahmans had condemned their powers of will, in spite of the protected position of their country and the numbers of the population, had not the power to resist the attacks of Islam, and to prevent the erection of a lasting alien empire on their soil, which finally subjugated the lands of the Indus and the Ganges, and even the Deccan to a large extent, almost indeed the whole of India, while it transplanted to the soil numerous hordes of a foreign population. Precisely these districts which had given the impulse to the development of the Indian nature, became in the end the centre of this foreign dominion, while regions of the Deccan peopled mainly by non-Arian races, who had been won over at a comparatively late period by colonisation, made the most stubborn resistance. The empire of the Great Mogul in the Deccan was able only for a brief period to pass the Krishna to the south.
Though the Indians were not powerful enough to resist the arms of Islam they did resist its mania for conversion. Heavily as this pressed upon them from time to time, the habit of asceticism, the hope of escaping from the fetters of the soul with the death of the body, enabled them to withstand the fiercest tyranny. Even now the most cowardly Bengalee can die with the most dauntless courage. Thus the Indians were able to maintain their religion, the results of their history and civilisation, their whole intellectual possessions, against their Moslem masters. It is true that all advance was at an end, that the limits were fixed irrevocably, and could not be overstepped; but the mobility of the Indian spirit within these was not suppressed. Indian poetry could develop into artistic lyrics, into the drama, and didactic works; the formal subtlety of the nation laboured with effect in grammar, algebra, and logic. Even if the services of philosophy were mainly extensions, developments, and variations of the old ideas, though theology maintained her supremacy, and put and discussed anew the old questions, by such activity and such labours, the intellectual life of the Indians was preserved from sterility; they have placed the Indians in possession of a considerable literature of the second growth, and maintained unbroken their peculiar civilisation.
The Pharaohs engraved the memorials of their reigns on artificial mountains of stone, in order to preserve their deeds to the most remote future; their subjects chiselled, painted, and wrote the remembrance of their lives in their tombs, in order that no incident that had befallen the dead might be forgotten. The Indians have not written their history, because at a very early period they began to dedicate their lives to the future world, and convinced themselves that the state was nothing and religion everything. If among the Egyptians the name of a man was to live for ever, and his body was to rest to all eternity in its rocky grave, the Indians were tormented with exactly the opposite desire: they wished to attain the end of the individual as quickly as possible, to blot out existence without any return, and destroy the remains of it as completely and rapidly as possible. The Egyptians became painters, builders, masons, and sculptors; the Indians were philosophers, ascetics, interpreters of dreams, mendicants, and poets. The history of the Indians has passed into the acts of gods and saints; it is lost in the chaos in which heaven and earth are confounded. Only at home in heaven, in poetry, in philosophy, and imaginary systems, the Indians had no ethical world on this side the grave, and therefore no achievements of their princes, statesmen, or nations were worth the trouble of recording.
Religion has dominated the life of the Indians more thoroughly than that of almost any other nation. This result would not have been attained by the Brahmans, who never rose to an organised hierarchy, and were always limited to the advantages of their order, the influence of worship and doctrine, had not the feeling and heart of the people met them half way. The victory of Brahman over Indra decided the fate of the Indians. All attempts, even the most vigorous, to abandon Brahman merely led to modifications of the leading idea; they did not remove it. This pantheistic theory weakened the resolution of the Indians in the region of politics and action; the consequences so severely and zealously drawn from it have checked the ethical productiveness of the Indian spirit and prevented its advance.
The foundations of the Brahmanic system remain unmoved to this day. In worship the Brahmans are tolerant. Every one is free to choose his protecting deity; he may invoke Vishnu or Çiva, or any other god; he may or may not go a pilgrimage to the Ganges, to Hurdwar, Jagannatha, and other holy places; he may practise asceticism or omit it. In their philosophy and schools they are also tolerant; one man may follow this system, another that, provided that the world-soul is still retained. But in the question of purification and the social question of caste they are intolerant. The fixed scheme of the chief castes, to which the Dvija is linked by investiture with the holy girdle, together with the lower castes, the close castes of occupation within the main and subordinate castes, and their numberless gradations, still remains. Even now the castes which Manu's law destined to be servants observe this command both towards natives of higher caste and foreigners. This unnatural system is retained because in the eyes of the Indians it is neither unrighteous nor unjust, but is rather the expression of divine justice; birth in a higher or lower caste is the recompense for merit or sin in earlier existences. Moreover, with the exception of the lowest classes, the Pariahs and Chandalas, every man has an advantage over some other class, and would lose by expulsion from his birthright as well as by the suppression of the whole system. In India expulsion from the caste means the surrender of all the relations of life; the loss of social existence, of family, of the nearest connections; it implies a fall to the lowest level, that of the expelled casteless man. No man has any dealings with the expelled person; even his nearest relatives would be denied if they gave him a draught of water. So careful are the Indians of purity. The lowest Bengalee at the present day does not hesitate, courteously but decidedly, to request the officer of the ruling nation who visits his hut to leave it, that it may not be defiled.
In their national life the Indians have exhibited down to our days their long-practised and often-tried courage of patience. As the old system of religion and morals has bidden defiance to centuries, so do we find in the Indians that tenacity which long and severe oppression is wont to create in originally vigorous natures, that power of resistance which bends but does not break, united with a cunning and love of intrigue by which the oppressed revenges himself on the oppressor, against whom force avails nothing. With this they have retained a costly possession, that inclination towards the highest intellectual attainments which runs through their whole history. This treasure is still vigorous in the hearts of the best Indians, and appears the more certainly to promise a brighter future, as the government which now controls the nation has come to an earnest though late resolution to rule with the help of the Indians for the good of the people, while the intellectual force and cultivation of their western tribesmen are disclosing themselves ever more clearly to the eager activity of eminent Hindus.
FOOTNOTES:
[818] Polyb. 11, 34. Supra, 452.
[819] Wilson, "Vishnu-Purana," p. 470, 471.
[820] Strabo, p. 516.