Hiuen-Tsang, who spent fifteen years in India during Harsha's reign, searching for the relics of early Buddhism in a land from which it was steadily disappearing, has given us a wonderful picture of a religious state-pageant which makes Prayaga, at the triple confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna with the sacred but invisible river, Saraswati, near to the modern city of Allahabad, stand out as another striking landmark in Indian history. Hindus attach great holiness to rivers and their confluence, and this Triveni, or triple confluence, had been specially consecrated by Brahma, who chose that spot for the first Asvamedha. "From ancient times," says the Chinese chronicler, "the kings used to go there to distribute alms, and hence it was known as the Place of Almsgiving. According to tradition more merit is gained by giving one piece of money there than one hundred thousand elsewhere." So King Harsha having invited all alike, whether "followers of the law or heretics, the ascetics and the poor, the orphans and the helpless," the kings of eighteen subordinate kingdoms assembled there with their people to the number of 500,000, and found immense refectories laid out for their refreshment, and long rows of warehouses to receive silk and cotton garments and gold and silver coins for distribution to them. "The first day a statue of Buddha was placed in the shrine erected on the Place of Almsgiving, and there was a distribution of the most precious things and of the garments of greatest value, whilst exquisite viands were served and flowers scattered to the sound of harmonious music. Then all retired to their resting-places. On the second day a statue of the Sun-god was placed in the shrine, and on the third day the statue of Shiva," and the distribution of gifts continued on those days and day after day for a period of over two months, ten thousand Brahmans receiving the lion's share, until, having exhausted all his wealth, even to the jewels and garments he was wearing, King Harsha borrowed a coarse and much-worn garment, and having "adored the Buddhas of the ten countries," he gave vent to his pious delight, exclaiming: "Whilst I was amassing all this wealth I was always afraid lest I should find no safe and secret place to stow it away. Now that I have deposited it by alms-giving in the Field of Happiness I know that it is for ever in safety. I pray that in my future lives I may amass in like manner great treasures and give them away in alms so as to obtain the ten divine faculties in all their plenitude."
Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India, behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the picture left to us is singularly complete. The first day is a sort of farewell tribute to the waning glory of Buddha, and the second to the ancient majesty of the Vedic gods; but they only prepare the way for the culminating worship, on the third day, of the terrific figure of Shiva, who had already been raised to one of the highest, if not the highest, throne in the Hindu pantheon, which he still retains—Shiva, the master of life and death, whose favourite emblem is the phallus, and from whose third eye bursts forth the flame which is one day to consume the world. Around Harsha, and devouring his gifts until, at the end of two months, they are wholly exhausted, are the Brahmans, "born above the world, assigned to guard the treasury of duties, civil and religious," through whom alone the wrath of angry gods can be appeased and present and future life be made safe in the descending hierarchy of caste.
Shortly after Harsha's death in A.D. 648, India, as is her wont as soon as the strong man's arm is paralysed, relapses once more into political chaos. Her history does not indeed ever again recede into the complete obscurity of earlier ages. We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by them, into their own religious and social system. The most notable feature of the post-Harsha period of Hindu history is the emergence of the Rajput states, whose rulers, though probably descendants of relatively recent invaders, not only became rapidly Hinduised, but secured relatively prompt admission to the rank of Kshatryas in the Hindu caste system, with pedigrees dated back to the Sun and Moon, which to the popular mind were well justified by their warlike prowess and splendid chivalry. I need only recall the name of Prithvi-Raja, the lord of Sambhar, Delhi, and Ajmer, whose epic fame rests not less on his abduction of the Kanauj princess who loved him than on his gallant losing fight against the Mahomedan invaders of India. But fierce clan jealousies and intense dynastic pride made the Rajputs incapable of uniting into a single paramount state, or even into an enduring confederacy fit to withstand the storm of which Harsha himself might have heard the distant rumblings. For it was during his reign that militant Islam first set foot in India, in a remote part of the peninsula. Just at the same time as the Arabs, in the first flush of victory, poured into Egypt, a small force crossed the Arabian Sea and entered Baluchistan, and a century later the whole of Sind passed into Arab hands. Another two centuries and the Mahomedan flood was pouring irresistibly into India, no longer across the Arabian Sea, but from Central Asia through the great northern passes, until in successive waves it submerged for a time almost the whole of India.
Now if we look back upon the fifteen centuries of Indian history, of which I have sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and sufficiently rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Of its marvellous tenacity and powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, contemporary and closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically quite unimportant sect. But indomitably powerful as a social amalgam, Hinduism failed to generate any politically constructive force that could endure much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding pantheon of gods and goddesses for the multitude, with its subtle and elastic philosophies for the elect, with the doctrine of infinite reincarnations for all, and, bound up with it, the iron law of caste.
The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life even by the Western-educated classes. It divides up Indian society into thousands of water-tight compartments within which the Hindu is born and lives and dies without any possibility of emerging from the one to which he has been predestined by his own deeds in his former lives. Each caste forms a group, of which the relations within its own circle, as well as with other groups, are governed by the most rigid laws—in no connection more rigid than in regard to marriage. These groups are of many different types; some are of the tribal type, some national, some sectarian, some have been formed by migration, some are based upon a common social function or occupation past or present, some on peculiarities of religious beliefs and superstitions. A distinguished French writer, M. Senart, has described a caste as a close corporation, in theory at any rate rigorously hereditary, equipped with a certain traditional and independent organisation, observing certain common usages, more particularly as to marriage, food, and questions of ceremonial pollution, and ruling its members by the sanction of certain penalties of which the most signal is the sentence of irrevocable exclusion or out-casting. The Census of 1901 was the first to attempt a thorough classification of Indian castes, and the number of the main castes enumerated in it is well over two thousand, each one divided up again into almost endless sub-castes. The keystone of the whole caste system is the supremacy of the quasi-sacerdotal caste of Brahmans—a caste which constitutes in some respects the proudest and closest aristocracy that the world has ever seen, since it is not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of divine origin. An Indian is either born a Brahman or he is not. No power on earth can make him a Brahman. Not all Brahmans were learned even in the old days of Hinduism, though it was to their monopoly of such learning as there then was that they owed their ascendancy over the warrior kings. Nor do all Brahmans minister in the temples. Strangely enough the minority who do are looked down upon by their own castemen. The majority pursue such worldly avocations, often quite humble, as are permissible for them under their caste laws. The Brahmans were wise enough, too, to temper the fundamental rigidity of the system with sufficient elasticity to absorb the new elements with which it came into contact, and in most cases gradually to reabsorb such elements as from time to time rebelled against it. The process by which new castes may be admitted into the pale of Hinduism, or the status of existing castes be from time to time readjusted to new conditions, has been admirably explained by Sir Alfred Lyall. But the process can be worked only under Brahmanical authority, and the supreme sanction for all caste laws rests solely with the Brahmans, whilst of all caste laws the most inexorable is the supremacy of the Brahman. Therein lies the secret of the great influence which, for good as well as for evil, he has always wielded over the masses. For though in theory there could be no escape from the bondage of caste, individuals, and even a whole group, would sometimes find ways and means of propitiating the Brahmans who ministered to their spiritual needs, and the miraculous intervention of a favouring god or the discovery of a long-lost but entirely mythical ancestor would secure their social uplift on to a higher rung of the caste-ladder.
Such a system, by creating and perpetuating arbitrary and yet almost impassable lines of social cleavage, must be fatal to the development of a robust body politic which can only be produced by the reasonable intermingling and healthy fusion of the different classes of the community. It was perhaps chief among the causes that left Hinduism with so little force of organised political cohesion that the Hindu states of ancient India, with their superior culture and civilisation, were sooner or later swept away by the devastating flood of Mahomedan conquest, whilst the social structure of Hinduism, just because it consisted of such an infinity of water-tight compartments each vital and self-sufficing, could be buffeted again and again and even almost submerged by the waves without ever breaking up.
CHAPTER III
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.