The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02

by Unknown

From the years of their immigration into the district of the Indus, which must have occurred in the third millennium before our era, until the fifteenth century, the Aryans lived in the Land of the Five Rivers as far as the sacred Saraswati. Divided into many tribes, they led a settled pastoral and agricultural life under the leadership of elders, chiefs, and kings, worshipping the sun-god Indra and the other powers of nature with songs and sacrifices, and hardening themselves by battle and tribal feuds. In the oldest portions of the Vedas are still preserved some of the songs and invocations sung at the festivals of the gods or at the sacrificial feasts of the dead.

In their gradual expansion towards the south, they may have reached the mouth of the Indus by the fourteenth or thirteenth century, and on the southern seacoast they may have made commercial alliances with the Babylonians and Phœnicians. Diodorus’ account, taken from the Greek historian Ctesias, of the journey of Queen Semiramis to the Indus, and her battle with the “Lord of the Earth” (Stabrobates-Sthavarapatis) seems, in spite of its fabulous exaggeration, to rest upon historical tradition, which, combined with the report that Semiramis founded the city of Kophen on the river Kabul tends to prove, that at this time the country on the right bank of the Upper Indus was subject and paid tribute to the Assyrians.[21]

A second stage of evolution is connected with the conquest of the land of the Ganges, beginning about the fourteenth century before our era, when an heroic period commenced full of warlike deeds, the traces of which are retained in the oldest legends of the national epic, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and in the names of some tribal princes and ruling families. We should have more accurate information about this period of heroic activity had not the heroic poems later undergone complete transformation under the hands of the Brahmans, but even in their present form they still retain a core of historical truth although more concealed and veiled than among other peoples. The farther the Aryans went to the east, the more the forsaken home on the Indus and its tributaries was regarded as the sacred mother country where the Aryan race was unmixed with foreign elements and where the sacred Sanskrit language maintained its original purity. But the patriarchal institutions and the old nature-religion were in the course of time so eliminated from the memory of the race that the remaining tribes, which had not kept pace with the evolution of the people of the Ganges, or had clung to the old forms, were excluded from the religious communion and the legal system of the worshippers of Brahma as impure and of low degree. Some of these tribes on the Upper Indus were under Persian dominion and marched as far as the plains of Eleusis in the army of Xerxes.

The national strength of the Indians seems to have been shattered by these centuries of long-continued struggles, first against the aboriginal population, and then after their subjugation or expulsion, among the Aryan races themselves, the first settlers seeking to defend the territory they had gained against later immigrants. Therefore it was not difficult for the priests, when arms were at last laid down, to repress the warlike portion of the population, which had been supreme in the heroic period, but had lost its best forces and its most capable leaders in the bloody battles, especially as the enervating climate and the fertility of their new abode on the Ganges and Jumna were more conducive to religious contemplation and peaceful courses than to martial excitement and military life.

These circumstances combined with the more passive and vegetative nature of the people, were favourable to the efforts of the Brahmans to subjugate the whole external and internal life of the nation to priestly dominion. They supplanted the old nature-religion by the pantheistic emanation doctrine of Brahma as the soul of the world, and gave the heroic Indra and his crowds of gods a subordinate place as guardians of the world. They restricted the free development of national power by a strict exclusive order of caste, in which they took the foremost place; and they repressed all natural activity by endless ceremonial and ritualistic laws, by sacrifices and purifications. They cast a gloom over life on earth and suppressed all pleasure in life and joyous impulse by the terrifying doctrine of rebirth and hell punishment. They taught a gloomy asceticism full of expiations and penances, the mortification of the flesh and all sensual pleasure by absorption in an imaginary Divine Being as the surest way to free the soul from the bonds of the body and to restore it to its heavenly home from this miserable earthly life.

Moreover the Brahmans not only obtained dominion over the domain of religion, and endowed it with its peculiar spiritualistic character, but they tried to gain power over and regulate with their precepts the state and law, and civil life in all its manifestations. With this end in view, they put into effect a code of law, ostensibly coming from Manu, which was to have authority in all Indian states and which by dint of severe punishments, and a strict royal despotism, based upon the power of officials and police, kept the people in a state of obedient submission.

The Brahmans were more anxious for the Indians to lead a uniform existence according to the precepts of the law, than for the separate kingdoms to unite into a political whole, and form a power with strong external relations. Therefore the Indian nation was never united by a common alliance, but just as the different castes existed side by side, but separated and without any common interest, so the Indian country was broken up into a lot of smaller or greater states without any external connection. They never formed a federal state, nor even a confederation of states. Separated and asunder, and not seldom in hostile relations, the different kingdoms were as distinct as the castes, and the kingdoms themselves consisted in turn of a lot of disunited villages and city communities only loosely connected together for convenience of taxation and supervision.

These political and social divisions and disruptions were not calculated to turn the attention of the Indian race to political life, so it recoiled from the wretched régime in which gloomy tyranny suppressed all joy in life, and watched over every spiritual activity and sought its happiness and salvation in the realm of faith and fantasy, in the world of imagination and dreams. It submerged itself in the divine, it filled heaven and earth with spirits and higher beings of every kind, and in the fascinating world of legends and stories of saints, of fables of miracles, and myths of penitents, it forgot the real world with its oppression of castes, its despotism of princes and officials, and its blood-sucking system of taxation. Thus did the Indians on the Ganges withdraw more than any other race from real practical life, for the “realm of fantasy was their fatherland, and heaven was their home.”

This was the line taken by Indian culture until the sixth century before our era, and it spread over a great part of the peninsula of the Deccan more by the Brahmanical missions and colonisation, than by force of arms. Then Buddhism developed out of Brahmanism and became a mighty ferment for the whole of eastern Asia. Moreover, the new doctrine was not without its influence on the Brahmanic religious system. The perception that the people were so much attached to the doctrine of Buddha because it cherished the belief that a god had appeared in human form on earth, led the Brahmans to the development of the doctrine of incarnations. They divided the creator Brahma, who always remained an incomprehensible idea to the popular mind, into three forms, and taught that the most popular and beneficent form of this triune deity, Vishnu, the vivifying, supporting spirit of nature, appeared from time to time on earth in human form, to restore order to the disturbed arrangement of the world and to lead back erring humanity to the right road. Rama and Krishna, the heroes of the national epics, were represented as such incarnations of Vishnu and the songs of the heroes were reconstructed according to this idea. Therefore, the profound speech of Bhagavad-gita was incorporated in the Mahabharata, in which the attempt to reconcile the faith of the Buddhists with the doctrine of Brahma is evident.