CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Nixon Griffis Cornell University Library DS 413.L74 3 1924 022 898 096 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022898096 INDIA AND ITS PROBLEMS INDIA AND ITS PROBLEMS BY WILLIAM SAMUEL LILLY OP THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTER-AT-LAW FORMERLY OP THE INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE HONORARY PELLOW OF PETERHOUSE, CAMBRIDGE LONDON SANDS & CO. 12 BURLEIGH STREET, STRAND 1902 E.M, To Sir ALEXANDER JOHN ARBUTHNOT, K.C.S.I. Dear Sir Alexander, In dedicating this book to you, with your kind permission, I desire to acknowledge a great debt of gratitude, accumulated through many years. When I went out to India, you held the important oiEce of Chief Secretary to the Government of Madras, and it was my good fortune to be brought by common friends under your direct notice. Your encouraging kindness greatly assisted me during my brief Indian career, and was especially manifested when I acted as Under Secretary to the Madras Government in the Departments of which you then had immediate charge as a Member of CouncU. Ill -health compelled me to leave a country in which I was absorbingly interested, and a service to which I was deeply attached. You remained to administer, for a time, the Government of Madras, and then to give the Empire the benefit of your extensive experience and sound statesmanship as a Member of the Viceregal Council. But while our paths in life thus diverged, our friendship continued unbroken and undimmed. My last VIU obligation to it is for many most valuable suggestions with which your perusal, undertaken at my request, of the proof sheets of this book, has led you to favour me. Of course I do not claim the sanction of your high authority for any of the opinions expressed in it upon controverted topics. But I rejoice to know that you think it likely to promote my object in writing it : the diffusion of accurate knowledge regarding the country for which you have laboured so long and so faithfully. I am. Dear Sir Alexander, Very truly yours, W. S. LILLY. Athen^um Club, November i, igoi. SUMMARY PART I.— PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS CHAPTER I THE HIMALAYAS PAGE Vastness and variety of India . . . 3 Object of the present volume ..... Four separate and well-defined regions of India : the Himalayas, Hindustan, the Deccan, and Burmah The Himalayas, not a mere range of mountains, but a mountain ous country ....... 6 Comparison between the Himalayas and the Alps . 7 Vegetable and animal products of the Himalayas The Himalayas a rampart for the Indian Empire against invaders from Asia ..... And a vast reservoir for Hindustan The three great rivers of Hindustan issue from them CHAPTER II HINDUSTAN By Hindustan is meant the country lying to the north of the Vindhyan range : the wide plains watered by the Himalayan rivers and the region round them . . 13 This country divided into five provinces, besides the recently created frontier province : — First, the Punjab, the country of the five rivers : a vast alluvial plain, specially fertile in the Eastern portions . . 14 Second, Sind, for political purposes included in the Bombay Presidency: an almost rainless district . . 14 iz a2 X SUMMARY Third, Rajputana, the country of the Rajputs : fertile where "™ watered by the drainage of the Vindhyan range, and possessing much undeveloped mineral wealth . . 14 Fourth, The North- West Provinces and Oudh, occupying well-nigh the whole of the basins of the Ganges and the Jumna : a vast expanse of monotonous verdure . 1 5 Fifth, Bengal, consisting chiefly of the two wide alluvial valleys of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra . . 15 Sixth, Assam, including the higher valleys of the Brahmaputra, and those of the Barak or Surma, together with the mountainous watershed intervening between those two rivers .....•• '5 Products of Hindustan . . . . . • 1 5 CHAPTER III THE DECCAN By the Deccan is meant the triangular peninsula which has the Vindhya Mountains as its base and Cape Comorin as its apex ........ 18 But the Vindhya Mountains must not be dissociated from the Aravalli range, the southern slopes of which are drained by the Nerbudda, or from the Satpur hills in which the Tapti rises ....... 18 And as the tableland, constituting the Deccan, has the Vindhya Mountains for its base, so is it supported on either side by the Eastern and Western Ghats, which give the key to the configuration of the peninsula . . .19 Chief districts of this division of India : — First, Central India, made up of the nine Political Agencies, among which are included the dominions of Scindia and Holkar, a territory for the most part fertile and well wooded ...... 20 Second, the country of the Guicowar : an open fertile tract . 21 Third : the Central Provinces, a country of highlands and valleys, of plateaus and plains, only one-third of the whole area of which is under cultivation . . 21 Fourth : the Nizam's country, considerably elevated, and generally fertile ...... 22 Fifth : the Bombay Presidency, divided by the Nerbudda into two portions : the northern a low plain of alluvial origin, the southern a level coast strip rising into an upland country ..... 22 25 SUMMARY XI Sixth : the Madras Presidency, watered by the Godavery, the '*oe Kistna, and the Cauvery, and presenting three natural divisions : the long and broad east coast, the shorter and narrower west coast, and the central tableland which, however, goes considerably beyond the limits of Madras ..... 22 Products of Southern India .... 23 CHAPTER IV BURMAH Burmah, a country of hills, forests, streams, and abundant rain- fall : through its centre flows the Irawadi . . .24 Four natural divisions of Burmah : — First, the central valley : watered by the Irawadi and the Chindwin ....... Second : the province of Arakan, divided from it by the Yoma range, and running down to the Bay of Bengal : watered by the Kuladan . . . . .25 Third : the mountainous country of the Shans, east of the Irawadi, running up to the Chinese frontier : watered by the Salween . . . . . .26 Fourth : the province of Tenasserim, a long, isolated, southern coast strip : watered by the Salween, the Attaran, and the Tavoy ..... 26 Products of Burmah . . . . 26 The Andaman and Nicobar Islands may be regarded as the emerging summits of a submarine range of hills, linking the Arakan Yoma to the central hill range of Sumatra . 27 PART II.— RACES, LANGUAGES, AND LITERATURE CHAPTER V RACES The Aborigines of India, probably Kolarians . 31 Mongolian and Dravidian invaders . . 32 Aryan invaders, who drive the Mongolians into the Himalayas and beyond the Ganges, and the Dravidians into the Deccan ....... 32 Scythian and Mohammedan invaders ... 33 Present racial constituents of the population of India 34 xu SUMMARY CHAPTER VI LANGUAGES Sanskrit nearest to the language of the ancient Aryans The Prakrit dialects The modern Aryan languages of India The Dravidian languages . The Kolarian dialects The Tibeto-Burman languages 36 37 38 39 39 39 CHAPTER VII LITERATURE The non-Aryan languages of India contain little of high literary value .... And the modern Aryan tongues nothing . The only Indian literature of much real intrinsic merit, the Sanskrit The Vedic Hymns The Brahmanas . The Puranas The Tantras The Ramayana . The Mahabharata The Raghu-vansa and the Kumarasambhava The Sanskrit drama The Upanishads .... 41 42 nsic merit, the 42 42 44 44 45 45 45 49 49 49 PART III.— HISTORY CHAPTER VIII HINDU INDIA Scantiness of the materials for a knowledge of Hindu India Historic value of the Mahabharata (1426 B.C.), and the Rama- yana (about 1000 B.C.) And of the Laws of Manu (about 500 B.C.) India in the time of Sakya-Muni (about 550 B.C.) Alexander's invasion (327 B.C.) The account of Megasthenes (300 B.C.) . Asoka (260-223 B.C.) .... 55 56 57 57 58 59 59 SUMMARY XUl Kanishka (a.d. io) . Buddhist India ....... The accounts of Fa Hian (400), Sung Yun (518), and Hiouen- Tshang (639-645) ..... The disappearance of Buddhism from India PAOB 61 61 62 64 CHAPTER IX expeditions into India (looi of Ghazni MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS The thousand years of Buddhist supremacy in India, followed by a thousand years of Mohammedan invasion and conquest .... First incursion of the Moslems into India (604) Arab invasion of Sind with a regular army under Mohammed Kasim(7i4). His conquests and tragic fate Mohammed of Ghazni's seventeen 1030) The Somnath legend Merits and defects of Mohammed Mohammed Ghori (1157-1206) Kutab-ud-din (1206-1210) . Ala-ud-din (1295-1316) Mohammed Tughlak (1325-135 1) Firuz (1351-1388) . Tamerlane's invasion (1398) Baber, the sixth in descent from him, invades India in 1526, and winning the first battle of Panipat, founds the Moghul Empire ...... The Hindu monarchies of the Deccan . . . . In 1556 Akbar, Saber's grandson, then aged thirteen, wins the second battle of Panipat over the Afghans, who had dethroned his father Humayon . . . . And succeeds as Emperor next year upon Humayon's death (1556-1605) .... The affair of Beiram Akbar's victories, administration, and character Jehanghir (1605-1627) Shah Jehan (1628-1658) . Aurungzebe (1658-1707) The later Moghuls .... The third Battle of Panipat (1761), and the dissolution of the Moghul Empire ...... 65 66 66 66 68 69 70 73 73 74 74 76 76 77 79 79 79 81 89 92 93 96 97 XIV SUMMARY CHAPTER X THE ENGLISH CONQUEST Difficulty of realising in how short a time the British Empire in India has grown up . The East India Company .... The beginnings of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta Struggles with the Portuguese and Dutch in the seventeenth century .... And with the French in the eighteenth century Clive (1751-1767) . Warren Hastings (1774-1785) Lord Comwallis (1786- 1793) Lord Wellesley (1798-1805) Arthur Wellesley's work in India . Lord Hastings (1814-1823) Lord William Bentinck (1828-1835) Lord Auckland (1836- 1842) Lord EUenborough (1842- 1844) . Lord Hardinge (1844-1848) Lord Dalhousie (1848-1856) Lord Canning (1856-1862) Lord Elgin (1862- 1863) . Sir John Lawrence (1864- 1 869) . Lord Mayo (1869-1872) Lord Northbrook (1872- 1876) Lord Lytton (1876- 1880) . Lord Ripon (1880- 1884) . Lord Dufferin (1884-1 98 99 100 100 Id 104 105 106 X06 108 109 109 109 109 no 112 114 114 114 114 114 114 115 PART IV.— RELIGIONS CHAPTER XI HINDUISM 119 Difficulty of accurately defining Hinduism The Rig- Veda, the work of transcendent authority on the beliefs and practices which constitute it . . . .120 The Vedic religion the first phase of the polytheistic idea of the universe still dominating the minds of the great majority of the people of India . . . .120 SUMMARY XV The gods of the Vedas personifications of physical forces and ""aos phenomena : no mention in those books of the features of modem Hinduism most repugnant to the European mind ........ 121 The Vedic reUgion passes into Brahminism — how we have no means of determining — as its naturalism is metaphysi- cally construed and sacerdotally developed in the Brahmanas ....... 121 In casie we have the explanation of this second phase of the Indo-Aryan religion . . . . .122 But while the Brahmins were building up a stupendous system of rites, they were busy with the philosophic speculations enshrined in the U'panishads . . . .122 Buddhism, a development of and a reaction against Brahminism, though Sakya-Muni was no conscious revolutionist . 124 Within two or three centuries after the Buddha's death (B.C. 543) it becomes the fashionable religion of India, but practically disappears by the tenth century of our era . 125 During those thousand years a great transformation takes place in the Brahminical religion : the Vedas give place to the Puranas, and the worship of Siva becomes general . 125 Siva ... . . . . 126 Vishnu . . . . . 127 Brahma .... 128 Characteristics of modem Hinduism 129 Not an ethical religion .... . 130 But a mass of superstitions . . 131 Benares ..... i3S Resources of the religious sentiment . . . -137 CHAPTER XII OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS Buddhism perhaps the most interesting to us of all the religions of the East . Some account of it . Jainism possibly a survival of it Mohammedanism . Sikhism The religion of the Parsis . 139 139 144 145 149 151 XVI SUMMARY CHAPTER XIII CHRISTIANITY Widespread desire in England and the United States for the conversion of India to Christianity. How far is that desire likely to be gratified ? . . . . Christianity in India in primitive and medieval times . Catholic missions in India in the sixteenth century Present position of the Catholic Church in India Protestant missionaries first appear in India in the eighteenth century ....... Insignificant results as yet achieved by them Causes of their ill success ...... Small prospect that Protestantism, in any of its varieties, will make substantial progress in India : the outlook for Catholicism not much more hopeful Testimony of the Ahh6 Dubois ..... Other testimony ....... Sir Alexander Arbuthnot's opinion of the value of the labour of the missionaries ...... 154 IS4 iSS 157 159 160 161 162 162 163 169 PART v.— INDIA OF TO-DAY CHAPTER XIV THE BRITISH RAJ The blessing of peace bestowed on India by the British Government ...... Three-eighths of the country under the immediate sway of native rulers .... Some account of them The provinces directly under British rule How governed .... The Legislative Councils . Indian districts and their administration . The judicial system 174 174 174 176 176 177 177 179 SUMMARY XVll Causes which mar the administration of justice in India Indian finance The land-tax Systems of land tenure Other taxes Material progress of India under British rule Excess of exports over imports Indefensible charges on the Indian revenues Blemishes on British rule . i8i 182 183 IBs 187 187 188 189 190 CHAPTER XV CASTE Differing opinions on the merits and demerits of caste . . 194 Origin of the present fourfold system .... 195 How the exclusiveness of castes is maintained . . 199 Position of the Brahmins at the apex of Hindu civilisation 200 Vast number of extra castes and sub-castes . . .201 Caste rules and regulations . ... 201 The vast majority of the Hindus tenaciously cling to caste . 204 But the exigencies of modern life war against its strict obser- vance .... . 204 Prospects of the caste system . . . 205 CHAPTER XVI THE HINDU AT HOME The people of India a dense population of husbandmen . 206 Great antiquity of the social, economical, and religious institu- tions of an Indian village ..... 206 Importance of the barber . 207 Of the astrologer . 207 Of the purohit 207 Of the guru . 208 Thekharta. .... 210 A shradha .... . . 211 Hindu houses ... 214 XVni SUMMARY CHAPTER XVII WOMAN IN INDIA A chief test of a social order, and a sure index to its character, page afforded by the position which it assigns to woman . 218 The place of woman in modern civilisation unquestionably due to Christianity . . . . .218 In India the one faith whose ethos has most in common with the Christian — Buddhism — the most favourable to woman 221 Though Mohammed's reform did something for woman, her condition in Islam one of semi-slavery . . .221 The position of woman in modem Hinduism indicates how vastly that system has degenerated from the ancient Vedic religion, where husband and wife were joint rulers of the Aryan household . ... 223 Servile state of Hindu wives ..... 223 The lot of Hindu widows harder still . . . 225 Marriage among the Hindus ..... 225 Only in the rarest of cases are Hindu wives companions to their husbands ...... 230 A Hindu gentleman desiring a companion of the other sex usually seeks her among dancing girls . . .231 Some account of those women ..... 232 CHAPTER XVIII SELF-GOVERNMENT IN INDIA Desire, in certain quarters, to confer on India the blessing of self-government ...... 238 What has been done to carry out that desire . . 239 Unsatisfactory results thereof ... 2^0 Those results foreseen by Sir Henry Maine and other wise persons . •• ... 240 The pretence at representative government in India a fraud . 240 And a folly ........ 241 Indian " Congresses "....., 242 The Anglicised Hindu ...... 24% The complaint as to the practical exclusion of the natives of India from the Covenanted Civil Service examined . 245 The large effacement under British rule of the native leaders of Indian society unquestionably an evil . . . 248 True principle as to the employment of natives of India in the public service ...... j^g SUMMARY XIX CHAPTER XIX THE FINE ARTS IN INDIA Indian music ....... Indian painting ....... Indian architecture ...... Neglect of the magnificent edifices of India by the British Government ...... Architectural performances of the Department of Public Works The life of the Hindu people penetrated by the artistic spirit . Indian artisans ....... The trade guilds of India ...... British machinery and Indian art . 253 254 254 256 258 258 260 263 264 CHAPTER XX THE FRONTIER QUESTION Instability of the policy of the Government of India regarding the Frontier Question History of that policy .... The North-West fi-ontier the recognised road for the invaders of India for well-nigh three thousand years . The advance of Russia towards that frontier Her object .... " Russophobia " ... The crucial point ..... A grave mistake ..... The eventual re-opening of the Afghan Question 268 268 270 270 270 271 271 273 273 CHAPTER XXI THE CONDITION OF INDIA Indian debt to British enterprise and British capital, in respect of— {a) Irrigation works ...... {b) Metalled roads and railways .... {c) Mining, manufacturing, and planting industries . {d) Great cities ....... 274 280 280 282 XX SUMMARY PAGE These things undoubtedly tokens of prosperity . . . 284 But of whose prosperity ? Of the prosperity of the people of India ? The test of a prosperous country is, that the great mass of the inhabitants should be able to procure, with moderate toil, what is necessary for living human lives . 284 But for miUions of the Indian peasantry the difficulty is not to live human lives — lives up to the level of their low standard of comfort — but to live at all . . .285 Common misconception regarding the riches of India . . 286 Famine in India chronic ...... 286 Causes of the poverty of the population of India . . 288 Suggested remedies . . . . . .291 The chief errors which have marred British rule in India due to want of insight ...... 306 APPENDIX A Proclamation creating a new Frontier Province . . .311 APPENDIX B Balance-sheet of the Indian Empire, 1899-igoo . . . 313 Index ........ 315 PART I PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS CHAPTER I THE HIMALAYAS The late Sir Henry Maine thought it not easy to "overrate the ignorance of India which prevails in England on elementary points." My own ex- perience leads me to think likewise. Two of the most patent facts about India are its vastness and its variety. Yet nothing is more common than to hear from people who are called "educated," or "well informed," such a remark as this: "Ah! you have been in India : I wonder whether you met my cousin A. or my friend B. there ! " The man to whom the question is addressed may be, say, a Madras Civil Servant, or an employe of the Mysore Government ; the friend, or cousin, a soldier doing duty with his regiment on the north-west frontier, or an engineer in the Central Provinces ; and the suggested meeting is as likely as one between a Russian official and a Manchester trader, a German colonel and a barber of Seville. That great triangular space on the world's map, stretching from the Himalayas to the ocean, which constitutes the Indian Empire — a length of about 1900 miles, which is also its greatest breadth — 3 4 THE HIMALAYAS equals in area and population the whole of Europe except Russia, and is ,/ar less homo- geneous than Europe, socially, politically, and religiously. "It is a continent rather than a country." It is inhabited by one-fifth of the human race. It comprises peoples and nations in well-nigh every state of civilisation, from the abject savagery of certain Vindhyan hill tribes, some of whom, only a few years ago, still used flint points for their arrows, to the most com- plex commercial communities, and the most arti- ficial social organisations. It includes languages, and religions, and jurisprudence of the most diverse kinds. "It presents every variety of climate, from the dry and singularly bracing cold of the snowy slopes of the Himalaya, to the humid tropical heat of the Concan and of the Coromandel coast. It possesses every variety of scenery from peaks of ice to reefs of coral ; from treeless, burning plains to thick, tangled jungle, and almost impenetrable forests." Its products include almost everything needed for the service of man. Twelve thousand different kinds of animals are found in it. How huge a subject our Indian Empire is, may, perhaps, be inferred from the fact that the Statistical Survey of it executed, or rather edited, for the Government by the late Sir William Hunter, extends to 128 volumes, aggre- gating 60,000 pages. What I propose to do in this little treatise is to put before the general reader such a bird's-eye view of it as may, at all events, convey to him some correct concep- THE ORDER OR METHOD 5 tion of its outlines, and may perhaps lead him to refer to more ample sources of information. I shall endeavour to construct my work on the plan which Lord Bacon recommends for the compilation of a book of " Institutions " of the Law. " Principally," he says, " it ought to have two properties : the one a perspicuous and clear order or method ; and the other an universal latitude or comprehension, that the student may have a little prenotion of everything." And here I will state what my " order or method " is. In Part I. I shall speak of the Physical Characteristics of India. In Part II. I shall give a succinct account of its Races, Languages, and Literature. Part III. will con- tain a brief summary of its History. Part IV. will deal with its Religions. Part V. will pre- sent some principal aspects of the India of To- day, and will discuss a few of the more important problems now confronting us there, the solution of which will vastly influence the India of To- morrow. First, then, as to the Physical Characteristics of India, the theme of this Part. India consists of four separate and well-defined regions : the Himalayas in the north ; the Great River Plains, which stretch southwards from their base, and which constitute Hindustan in the proper sense of the word ; the three-sided Tableland which 6 THE HIMALAYAS slopes upwards again from the River Plains, and which, with the narrow belts of coast between it and the sea, makes up the southern half of India — that vast tract of country known as the Deccan, with the Vindhya Mountains on the north, and on the east and west with the two chains of Ghats running down on either side till they meet in a point near Cape Comorin ; and, lastly, Burmah, consisting of the valley and delta of the Irawadi, together with the Yoma ranges, a coast strip in the Bay of Bengal, and a wild hill region stretching on the east and south-east of the Irawadi towards the Chinese and Siamese frontiers. I have spoken of the Himalayas — and would the reader please notice that such, not Himalayas, is their name — as a division of India. It is just possible that he has been accustomed to regard them as a single mountain range. I myself was brought up so to think of them. They are really a mountainous country extending some fifteen hundred miles in length, and some two hundred in breadth. I speak of the Himalayas proper. But in truth the Hindu Kush may rightly be regarded as merely a continuation of them : and if we take this view, we must hold them to extend from the Equator — by their branches into the Malayan Peninsula — to 45 degrees of North latitude, and over ']■>, degrees of longitude. Hence the phrase by which the Arabs designate them, "the stony girdle of the earth," is amply warranted. But, as Mr Andrew Wilson points out in his fascinating book, The Abode of Snow, there is even more meaning THE ABODE OF SNOW 7 than this, and even more propriety than the Arabs themselves understand, in their phrase, because this great central range can easily be traced from the mountains of Formosa in the China Sea to the Pyrenees, where they sink into the Mediter- ranean. We are, however, here concerned only with what are called the Western Himalayas, a series of nearly parallel ranges, lying from south-east to north-west, and enclosed by the Indus, the Brahma- putra, and the great Northern Plain of India, where they terminate abruptly in a precipitous ridge from six to seven thousand feet above the country below. If the reader will refer to the map, he will see that this is "a very simple and intelligible boundary, for the two rivers rise close together in, or in the near neighbourhood of, Lake Manasa- , rowar : in the first part of their course they flow close behind the great ranges of the Himalayas, and they cut through the mountains at points where there is some reason for considering that new ranges commence." The word Himalaya is a Sanskrit compound, meaning the Abode of Snow. The Himalayan line of perpetual snow is, of course, much higher than the Alpine. It is, in fact, twice as high : eighteen thousand feet instead of nine thousand. And here it may not be amiss to insert Mr Andrew Wilson's masterly comparison between the great Asiatic range, which can be known only to few of my readers, and the European mountains which are, doubtless, known to many of them. 8 THE HIMALAYAS " The Himalayas as a whole are not so richly apparelled as the Alps. In Kashmir and some parts of the Sutlej valley, and of the valleys on the Indian Front, they are rich in the most glorious vegetation, and present, in that respect, a more picturesque appearance than any parts of Switzerland can boast of; but one may travel among the great ranges of the Asiatic mountains for weeks, and even months, through the most sterile scenes, without coming on any of these regions of beauty. There is not here the same close union of beauty and grandeur, loveliness and sublimity, which is everywhere to be found over the Alps. There is a terrible want of level ground and of green meadows enclosed by trees. Except in Kashmir, and about the east of Ladak, there are no lakes. We miss much those Swiss and Italian expanses of deep blue water, in which white towns and villages, snowy peaks and dark mountains are so beautifully mirrored. There is also a great want of perennial waterfalls of great height and beauty, such as the Staubbach ; though in summer, during the heat of the day, the Himalaya, in several places, present long, graceful streaks of dust-foam. " The striking contrasts and the more wonderful scenes are not crowded together as they are in Switzerland. Both eye and mind are apt to be wearied among the Himalaya by the unbroken repetition of similar scenes during continuous and arduous travel, extending over days and weeks together ; and one sorely misses Goethe's Eckschen, or the beautiful little corners of nature which satisfy the eye and mind alike. The picture is not sufficiently filled up in its detail, and the continuous repetition of the vast outlines is apt to become oppressive. The very immensity of the Himalaya prevents us from often beholding at a glance, as among the Alps, the wonderful contrast of green meadows, darker pines, green splintered glaciers, dark precipitous cliffs, blue distant hills, white slopes of snow, and glittering icy summits. There are points in the Sutlej valley and ill Kashmir where something like this is presented, and in a more overpowering manner than anywhere in Europe ; but months of difficult travel separates these two regions, and their beauty cannot be said to characterise the Himalaya generally. But what, even in Switzerland, would be great mountains, are here dwarfed IMMENSE HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS 9 into insignificant hills ; and it requires some time for the eye to understand the immense Himalayan heights and depths. Some great rock at the foot of some great precipice, which is pointed out as our camping place for the night, looks at first as if it were only a few hundred feet off, but after hours of arduous ascent, it seems almost as far off as ever. " The human element of the Western mountains is greatly wanting in those of the East ; for though here and there a monastery like Ki, or a village like Dankar, may stand out picturesquely on the top of a hill, yet, for the most part, the dingy-coloured, flat-roofed Himalayan hamlets are not easily distinguishable from the rocks amid which they stand. The scattered chalets and sen-huts of Switzer- land are wholly wanting, and the European traveller misses the sometimes bright and comely faces of the peasantry of the Alps. I need scarcely say, also, that the more wonderful scenes of the Abode of Snow are far from being easily acces- sible, even when we are in the heart of the great mountains. And it can hardly be said that the cloudland of the Hima- laya is so varied and gorgeous as that of the mountains of Europe, though the sky is of a deeper, more sword-like blue, and the heavens are much more brilliant at night. " But when all these admissions in favour of Switzerland are made, the Himalaya still remain unsurpassed, and even unapproached, as regards all the wilder and grander features of mountain scenery. There is nothing in the Alps which can afford even a faint idea of the savage desolation and appalling sublimity of many of the Himalayan scenes. No- where, also, have the faces of the mountains been so scarred and riven by the nightly action of frost, and the mid-day floods from melting snow. In almost every valley we see places where whole peaks or sides of great mountains have very recently come shattering down ; and the thoughtful traveller must feel that no power or knowledge he possesses can secure him against such a catastrophe, or prevent his bones being buried, so that there would be little likelihood of their release until the solid earth dissolves : and, though rare, there are sudden passages from these scenes of grandeur and savage desolation to almost tropical luxuriance and more than tropical beauty of organic nature. Such changes are lO THE HIMALAYAS startling and delightful, as in the passage from Dras into the upper Sind Valley of Kashmir, while there is nothing finer in the world of vegetation than the great cedars, pines, and sycamores of many of the lower valleys." I may here note that it was from the Hima- layas that Sir Joseph Hooker introduced into England half a century ago the beautiful species of rhododendron from which have sprung the various hybrid sorts that in some parts of these islands decorate our gardens and our shrub- beries. But in its native home it grows into a great tree, whole forests of which are found throughout the length of the mountains. From them, too, the orchid originally came to us. In return we have given them the potato, which is largely cultivated by the hill tribes, who also raise crops of barley, oats, millet, and various small grains. "The characteristic animals of the Hima- layas include the yak-cow, musk-deer, many kinds of wild sheep and goat, bear, ounce, and fox : the eagle, pheasants of beautiful varieties, partridge, and other birds." Such are the Himalayas ; the most extensive of all mountain ranges, and the highest, culmina- ting as they do in the 29,002 feet of Mount Everest, the loftiest measured peak in the world. And though for the most part they are beyond our frontier — -the feudatory kingdom of Kashmir, with an area of 80,900 square miles, is the most important state in them subject to the British Raj — they rightly claim the notice they have here received. With the offshoots which at their east- ern and western extremities stretch southwards, A VAST RESERVOIR II they form a rampart for the Indian Empire against invaders from Asia. They serve it, on this side, "in the office of a wall." But they also serve as a vast reservoir for Hindustan. I need hardly observe that the great source of the earth's water supply is the sea, whence vapour is raised by solar heat, and is carried and distributed over the land in snow, rain, and dew. And so long as the sun runs his course, the quantity of vapour thus sucked into the atmosphere will ever be the same. Throughout the summer a vast amount is exhaled from the Indian Ocean. This is gathered into clouds which are carried northward, with amazing rapidity, by the monsoon in the month of June. And such of the moisture as does not descend, in the shape of rain, upon the parched plains, and the lower ranges of the Hima- layas, is precipitated in the crystallised form of snowflakes upon the inner heights of those moun- tains. The drainage of the northern slopes of the Himalayas is collected by two great rivers : the Indus and the Brahmaputra, which, as I have already observed, rise not very far from each other in the neighbourhood of Lake Manasarowar. The Indus runs for 800 miles through the Himalayas before it enters British territory, first westwards and then southwards. It bursts through the mountains near Iskardo in North-West Kashmir by a gorge 14,000 feet deep, and then flows through the Punjab, finally falling into the Indian Ocean after a course of 1800 miles. On • the other hand, the Brahmaputra, whose course is 12 THE HIMALAYAS of about the same length, runs in an easterly direction through the Himalayas for nearly a thousand miles, entering British territory at Saduya, in the Assam Valley, whence it descends to the plain of Eastern Bengal to join, at Goal- anda, the third great river of Hindustan — the Ganges. A great river, indeed ; in some respects the greatest of Indian streams, sacred in the highest degree to the Hindus, whose worship of it is, at all events, intelligible, if we reflect upon its claims to their gratitude. It issues from an ice cave at the foot of a Himalayan snow-bed, and with its most considerable tributary, the Jumna, which joins it at Allahabad, collects for looo miles the drainage from the lower slopes of the Himalayas, to water the earth and bless it, and make it very plenteous, in a large portion of northern India. After a course of 1500 miles, it merges into the sea through the Bengal Delta, the largest in the world. CHAPTER II HINDUSTAN A CHAIN of mountains called the Vindhya runs across the peninsula of India from east to west. It extends between the twenty-third and twenty- fifth parallels of latitude, from the desert north- west of Guzarat to the Ganges. The country south of this chain — a triangle of which it forms the base and Cape Comorin the apex — I designate, in accordance with a popular usage, the Deccan. By Hindustan I mean not only the country lying to the north of it, but the wide plains watered by the Himalayan rivers, and the regions around them : the provinces known as the Punjab, Sind, Rajputana, Oudh and the North- West Provinces, Bengal and Assam. I shall now touch briefly on the physical characteristics of these lands. The most striking feature of the Punjab is in- dicated by its name. It is the country of the five rivers {punj db) : the country watered by the con- fluent streams of the Sutlej, the Beas, the Ravi, the Chenab, and the Jhelum, But the administrative province of the Punjab at present extends beyond 1 4 HINDUSTAN that region. It comprises the whole of British India north of Sind and Rajputana, and west of the river Jumna, with the exception of the three small strips of Baluchistan subject to British rule, as well as several Himalayan ranges, on one of which the sanatorium of Simla is situated.* Its area is 106,632 miles. Speaking generally, the Punjab may be described as a vast plain of alluvial formation, fertile where neither sand nor the saline effervescence known as reh is present, but especially fertile in the eastern portion where the great cities of Delhi, Amritsar, and Lahore are situated. Its five rivers flow into the Indus, which enters the province at Amb, and which, after receiving them, flows into the Arabian Sea through Sind. The area of that province, which for political purposes is included in the Bombay Presidency, is 48,014 square miles, and its average rainfall is less than ten inches. Sometimes, indeed, no rain falls in it for two or three years. Hence "the Indus is to Sind what the Nile is to Egypt." The State forests lying along its banks extend to 375.329 acres. On the east of Sind, separated from it by a great desert, is Rajputana, the country of the Rajputs. It extends to 132,461 square miles, and consists of twenty autonomous native states and the British province of Ajmere - Merwara. The Aravalli Mountains — the only hills in Rajputana of much account — intersect it in a line running nearly north-east and north-west. Its more fertile * While this work was passing through the press, a new frontier province was formed. See Appendix A. FERTILE RIVER PLAINS 15 portions are those which are watered by the drainage of the Vindhya range. Its mineral wealth is considerable, but is little developed, and its quarries yield admirable building stone. The North-West Provinces and Oudh occupy, roughly speaking, the whole of the basins of the Ganges and the Jumna. This is the region to which the Mohammedan chroniclers gave the name of Hindustan. It is highly cultivated ; a vast expanse of monotonous verdure, thanks to the Ganges, with a score of tributary rivers, and to the Jumna, which has almost as many affluents. The extreme edges of the basin, on the north and the south, are skirted by mountainous country. Its area is 111,229 square miles. The area of the province of Bengal is 193,198 square miles. "It consists chiefly of two broad river valleys. The western of them, the Ganges, brings down the wealth and accumulated waters of Northern India. The eastern valley is the route by which the Brahmaputra ends its tortuous course of 1800 miles. These valleys are luxuriant alluvial plains diversified by spurs and peaks thrown out by the great mountain systems which wall them on the north, east, and south-west." Higher valleys of the Brahmaputra, and those of the Barak or Surma, together with the mountain- ous watershed intervening between these two rivers, form the chief part of the province of Assam, of which the area is 46,341 square miles. As I have intimated, the river plains of Hin- dustan are extremely fertile. They yield two 1 6 HINDUSTAN crops each year and sometimes three. Wheat is produced chiefly in the North-West Provinces and Oudh. But it is also grown largely in the Punjab and in the western parts of Bengal. Rice, of course, is very largely cultivated in the great river basins. It is what is called "a wet crop," requiring from 36 to 41 inches of water for its full development. With regard to the other natural products of Hindustan, it must suffice here to quote a portion of the picturesque sum- mary given in the Imperial Gazetteer. "Sugar-cane, oil-seeds, flax, mustard, sesamum, palmachristi, cotton, tobacco, indigo, safflower and other dyes, ginger, coriander, capsicum, cummin, and precious spices, are grown both in the North- western or Upper Provinces and in the moister valleys and delta of Lower Bengal. A whole pharmacopoeia of native medicines, from the well- known aloe and castor-oil, to obscure but valuable febrifuges, is derived from shrubs, herbs, and roots. Resins, gums, varnishes, indiarubber, perfume-oils, and a hundred articles of commerce or luxury, are obtained from the fields and the forests. Vege- tables, both indigenous and imported from Europe, largely enter into the food of the people. The melon and huge yellow pumpkin spread themselves over the thatched roofs ; fields of potato, brinjal, and yams are attached to the homesteads. The tea-plant is reared on the hilly ranges that skirt the plains both in the North-West and in Assam ; the opium poppy about half-way down the Ganges, around Benares, and in Behar ; the silkworm mul- berry still farther down in Lower Bengal ; while VEGETABLE PRODUCTS 1 7 the jute fibre is essentially a crop of the delta, and would exhaust any soil not fertilised by river floods. Even the jungles yield the costly lac and the tasar silk cocoons. The mahua, also a gift of the jungle, produces the fleshy flowers which fornr a staple article of food among the hill tribes, and when distilled supply a cheap spirit. The sal, sissu, tun, and many other indigenous trees yield excellent timber. Flowering creepers, of gigantic size and gorgeous colours, festoon the jungle ; while each tank * bears its own beautiful crop of the lotus and water-lily. Nearly every vegetable product which feeds and clothes a people, or enables it to trade with foreign countries, abounds." *The following explanation, which I take from Mr B. H. Baden-Powell's admirable work, The Land Systems of British India, may not be superfluous for some of my readers. "A 'tank' does not mean a rectangular masonry-lined reservoir — that sort of tank is no doubt common, but mostly for bathing or in connection with a sacred place or temple. The irrigation tank is, in fact, a suitable soil-depression, stor- ing up the rain and drainage water, and varying in size from a pond filling the upper part of a small valley, to a vast lake covering hundreds of acres. The tank is closed in by an embankment of earth or masonry, or both. . . . An escape is afforded in case the water threatens to overtop the embank- ment. In some cases the tank represents a lake which is never dry : in others, the whole of the water is run off, or dries up early in the season, and the bed, enriched with slime, and moistened by the previous soaking of the water, is ploughed up and cultivated.'' CHAPTER III THE DECCAN By the Deccan, as was stated in the last Chapter, we mean the triangular peninsula which has the Vindhya Mountains as its base, and Cape Comorin as its apex. It includes the Governments of Madras and Bombay, the Central Provinces, Berar, and the territories of various feudatory princes, of whom the most considerable are the Maharajah of Mysore, the Nizam, Scindia, Holkar, and the Guicowar. I have spoken of the Vindhya Mountains — their greatest height is less than 5000 feet — as forming the southern Hmit of Hindustan. But we must not disassociate them from two other sets of hills. The Aravalli, of which the southern slopes are drained by the Nerbudda, are connected by lower ranges with the western extremity of the Vindhyas. The Satpur, a parallel chain of no great height, are separated from them by the valley through which that river flows. It is in the Satpur Hills that the Tapti rises. This river and the Nerbudda flow in almost parallel lines till they join the sea in the Gulf of Cambay. The reader who really MOUNTAINS AND STREAMS I9 desires to understand India must diligently study her mountains and her streams. He will perceive that one very important physical characteristic of the region now engaging our attention is the hill system which traverses the country south of the Nerbudda. He will observe, too, that as the tableland constituting the Deccan has the Vindhya Mountains for its base, so it is supported on either side by the long ranges known as the Eastern and Western Ghats, which give the key to the configu- ration of the peninsula. Both follow its form as they run towards the south. And between them and the sea is a low strip of land forming a sort of belt, narrow on the Western side and broader on the Eastern. From the Western Ghats issue the three great rivers of the Madras Presidency, the Godavery, the Kistna, and the Cauvery, which flow eastward across the central plain of the Deccan into the Indian Ocean. The Western Ghats, which run parallel to the sea for some five hundred miles, maintain a much higher level than the Eastern, and sometimes rise to over eight thousand feet. But the highest peak in Southern India is found in the Anamully Hills — a spur of the Eastern Ghats : its altitude is 8850 feet. The Eastern Ghats are joined to the Western range by the Neilgherries, or Blue Mountains, in whose spacious, undulating plateau, 7000 feet up, and "sweet half English air," are the sanatoria of Ootacamund and Conoor. And here it may not be amiss to insert a few words of Mr Andrew Wilson's, pointing out a remarkable parallelism between the Western Ghats and the Himalayas, 20 THE DECCAN which will serve to make the contour of both ranges more easily intelligible. " Both are immense bounding walls, the one to the elevated plains of the Deccan, and the other to the still more elevated tableland of Central Asia. Carrying out this parallel, the Narbada (Nerbudda) will be found to occupy very much the same position as the Indus, the Sutlej as the Tapti, and the Godaveri as the Brahmaputra. All have their rise high up on their respective tablelands ; some branches of the Godaveri rise close to the sources of the Narbada, just as the Indus and the Brahmaputra have their origin somewhere about Lake Manasarowar, and yet the former rivers fall into the sea on opposite sides of the Indian Peninsula, just as the two latter do. So, in like manner, the Tapti has its origin near that of the Narbada, as the Sutlej rises close to the Indus ; and if we can trust the Sind tradition, which represents the upper part of the Arabian Sea as having once been dry land, there may have been a time within the human era when the Tapti flowed into the Narbada, as the Sutlej does into the Indus some way above the sea. There is no mountain group in the highlands of Central India where the three southern rivers rise quite so close together as do the three northern rivers from the lofty and inaccessible Tibetan Kailas, but still there is a great similarity in their relative positions." So much in general as to the more striking physical characteristics of the Deccan. I will now add a very few words regarding the several pro- vinces which are included in it. First, then, as to Central India, which the reader must not con- found — as, if unversed in the subject, he is apt to do — with the Central Provinces. Central India is the name applied to a congeries of native states covering an area of 75,079 square miles, which are under the direct supervision of nine Political MAHAL RACHTRA 21 Agents, all of them being subordinate to the Agent to the Governor-General for that territory. It includes a great part of what was known as Mahal Rachtra, "the Great Kingdom," the country of the Mahrattas, bordered on one side by the Vindhya Mountains, and on the other by the Western Ghats ; a land for the most part fertile and well culti- vated. Eighty - two states are included in the Central Indian Agency, some of them being very small. The most considerable are the dominions of two princes of the Mahratta race, whose names are specially familiar to English readers : Scindia, the most powerful native sovereign of Hindustan, whose country — Gwalior — extends to 29,067 square miles ; and Holkar, who rules over 8402 square miles, and at whose capital of Indore the Agent to the Governor-General resides. Another great Mahratta prince is the Guicowar, whose state, Baroda, is subject to the political control of the Government of Bombay. It is an open fertile tract, and covers an area of 8570 square miles. The Central Provinces lie to the south of Central India, and extend to 113,279 square miles. It is a country of highlands and valleys, of plateaus and plains, and presents grand alternations of picturesque scenery, fertile in places — in the Ner- budda valleys, for example, which have been de- scribed as "green from end to end with wheat" in the cold season — but in large part sterile and waste : only one-third of its whole area is under cultivation. Once its heights were clothed with magnificent forests. But these have largely dis- appeared before the axe of the charcoal-burner, 22 THE DECCAN and the fires of the dhya cultivator, whose method in husbandry is to clear a portion of the jungle, to set fire to the logs and brushwood when dried by the sun, and to scatter among the ashes after the first rainfall a handful of grain. Hyderabad, the Nizam's country, has an area of 80,000 square miles. It is a tract of considerable elevation, averaging 1250 feet above the level of the sea, and presenting much variety of surface and feature. It is generally fertile ; but its most productive part is the province of Berar, directly administered by the British Government, to whom it was assigned for the support of the Hyderabad con- tingent. Berar is a broad valley running east and west, and lying south of the Satpur range ; its 17,700 square miles include many rich cotton-fields. The area of the Bombay Presidency is 197,876 square miles, and the country is of a broken character. It may be roughly divided into two portions, the Nerbudda forming the boundary line. The northern portion is for the most part a low plain of alluvial origin ; the southern a level coast strip, rising into an upland country. The Madras Presidency, of which the area is 149,092 square miles, presents three natural divisions : the long and broad east coast, the shorter and narrower west coast, and the central tableland. But this central tableland goes beyond the limits of Madras. It includes a consider- able portion of the Bombay Presidency, Berar, the Nizam's country, and Mysore. Indeed, Mysore, with its area of 27,936 square miles, may be regarded geographically as a portion of Madras. FORESTS 23 The whole of Southern India, there is reason to believe, was once buried under forests. Their remains are still extensive. The various moun- tain regions are all more or less wooded. The forests of the Madras Presidency alone cover 5000 square miles and yield noble timber. " In the valleys and upon the elevated plains of the central plateau," we are told in the Imperial Gazetteer of India, "tillage has driven back the jungle to the hilly recesses, and fields of wheat and many kinds of smaller grain or millets, tobacco, cotton, sugar- cane, and pulses, spread over the open country. The black soil of Southern India, formed from the detritus of the trap mountains, is proverbial for its fertility ; while the level strip between the Western Ghats and the sea rivals even Lower Bengal in its fruit-bearing palms, rice harvests, and rich succession of crops. The deltas of the rivers which issue from the Eastern Ghats are celebrated as rice-bearing tracts. But the interior of the central tableland of the Southern Peninsula is subject to droughts. The cultivators here contend against the calamities of nature by various systems of irrigation — by means of which they store the rain brought during a few months by the monsoon, and husband it for use throughout the whole year." But of this I shall have to speak in a subsequent Chapter. CHAPTER IV BURMAH The fourth division of the Indian Empire, as we are considering it, is Burmah : a country of hills, forests, streams, and abundant rainfall, covering 170,000 square miles. Through the centre of it flows the Irawadi, the greatest of all its rivers. " The source of the Irawadi," Mr Blandford tells us, in his India, Burmah, and Ceylon,. " is still un- known, and has been the subject of much dis- cussion among geographers. The main stream probably comes from Tibet, breaking through the Eastern Himalaya, where it is known as the Lu-tse-Kyang, or Lu River, and it enters Upper Burmah under the name of the Kewhom, or Meh Kha, but this is known from native report only, in lat. 26°, where it unites with a smaller river, the Mali Kha, that comes from the north, and rises in the mountains that close the eastern end of the Assam Valley. A little below lat. 25°, where it receives the Mogoung River from the west, the Irawadi is a fine river, half a mile broad and from two to three fathoms deep, flowing at FOUR NATURAL DIVISIONS 25 the rate of two miles an hour. Below this it enters the first defile, where at one place it is con- tracted by rocks to 70 yards in the dry season, and this defile continues to five miles above Bhamo. A second occurs below Bhamo, a third 40 miles above Mandalay, and a fourth between Thyetmyo and Prome. It receives several affluents from the east, the largest of which, the Shiveli, comes from Yunan, and is navigable in the rainy season ; but its greatest tributary is the Chindwin, which joins it from the north-west, 58 miles below Mandalay. It enters its delta at Myanoung and gives off branches, one of which forms the Bassein River, a large navigable stream that enters the sea near Cape Negrais, and another communicates with the Rangoon River at the eastern extremity of the delta. The length of the Irawadi from the Kewhom in lat. 26° to the sea is 850 miles, all of which is navigable to boats. Steamers ascend it 700 miles to Bhamo, which is the starting place of the trade route to China." Burmah groups itself naturally into four divi- sions. First, there is the central valley watered by the Irawadi and its most important tributary the Chindwin. Second, the province of Arakan, to the west of this valley, divided from it by the lofty Yoma range, the highest peak of which is the Blue Mountain (7100 feet), and running down to the Bay of Bengal. The greatest breadth of this strip of coast is 170 miles. The largest river is the Kuladan, which rises in the Yoma mountains and receives the drainage of their western half. 26 BURMAH Third, the mountainous country east of the Irawadi, inhabited by the Shans, and other tribes in a low state of civihsation, which runs up to the frontier provinces of the Chinese Empire. The chief river watering this country is the Salween, which forms the boundary between Burmah and Siam. Fourth, the province of Tenasserim, a long, isolated southern coast strip, through which the Salween flows, passing Moulmein and empty- ing itself into the Gulf of Martaban. The other chief rivers of this province are the one which bears its name, the Attaran, which joins the Salween not far from the sea, and the Tavoy ; and all three run in longitudinal valleys, parallel with the coast and the Yoma Mountains. " The central valley and the two coast strips," writes Sir William Hunter, " are extremely fertile. The outskirts of the hilly tracts are rich in teak and other valuable trees, and forest produce. A thousand creeks indent the sea-board ; and the whole of the level country, on the coast and in the lower Irawadi valley, forms one vast rice-field. The rivers float down cheaply the teak, bamboos, and timbers from the north. Tobacco, of an excellent quality, supplies the cigars which all Burmese (men, women, and children) smoke, and affords an industrial product of increasing value. Arakan and Pegu, the two provinces of the coast, and also the Irawadi valley, contain mineral-oil springs. Tenasserim is rich in tin-mines, and contains iron-ores equal to the finest Swedish ; besides gold and copper in smaller quantities, and a very pure limestone. Rice and timber form the THE ANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ISLANDS 27 Staple exports of Burmah ; and rice is also the universal food of the people." A word should here be added regarding the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which, as Mr Blandford observes, " may be regarded as the emerging summits of a submarine range of hills, linking the Arakan Yoma to the central hill range of Sumatra." There are four of the Andaman group and eighteen of the Nicobar, and their whole area is 3285 square miles. They are administered by a Superintendent, who, for certain purposes, ranks as a Chief Commissioner, and the main Andaman island is used as a penal settlement for Indian convicts. PART II RACES, LANGUAGES, AND LITERATURE CHAPTER V RACES From the Physical Characteristics of India I pass on to speak of the Races which dwell in it. The transition is a natural one, for the geo- graphical configuration of the country has largely determined the habitats of its population. Who its aborigines were we cannot say with absolute certainty. Probably they were Kolarians, whose chief seat was south of the Ganges in its lower course ; men of the same stock as the Nigritians of the Indian Ocean, and represented now by some of what we call the wild tribes of India; by the Santals about Bhagalpur ; the Karias and Mehtos of Singbhum and Chutia Nagpur ; the Mundas, Larkas, and other Kols of Sing- bhum ; the Mal-Parahias or Tuangs of Orissa ; the Kurkus about the sources of Nerbudda, in the very heart of the Satpur range ; the Bheels of Malwa and Kandesh ; the Kulis of Guzarat ; the Mhairs of Rajputana ; and others elsewhere : numbering altogether about 4,000,000. The first invaders of India seem to have been Mongolian and Dravidian tribes, who have n 32 RACES left but faint oral traditions, and, of course, no written histories. Their descent upon the country took place in the dim antiquity of prehistoric times ; doubtless long before the date assigned by Hebrew chronologists to the Creation. The Mongolians came into the plains of Bengal, it is conjectured, through the north-eastern passes of the Himalayas, from Central Asia, where they dwelt side by side with the forefathers of the Chinese. The Dravidians * appear to have found their way into the Punjab through the North- West Provinces of the same mountains, and to have established themselves at first along the southern coast of the Indus. But both Mongolians and Dravidians were destined to give place to a mightier race. According to Hindu chronologists, who, indeed, are of no more authority than Hebrew, the Aryans entered India just three thousand years before Christ. It is from this date that they reckon their present era : the Kali Yuga or Black Age. The Aryan invaders settled in the Punjab and remained there, apparently, for 1500 years. Then, about the time of the exodus of Israel from Egypt, they began to move towards the valley of the Ganges. In another thousand years they reached the delta of that great stream. As the Aryans advanced eastward from the * I follow the usually received account of the Dravidians : but another view is taken, and is supported by weighty arguments, in the vast Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency^ due to the indefatigable labour of Dr Charles Maclean. ARVANS AND NON-ARYANS 33 Sind-Saga-Doab to the Sunderbunds, they drove the Mongolian race into the Himalayas and beyond the Ganges, where they are still repre- sented by the Thibeto-Burman tribes of Ladak and Baltistan, Garwal, Nepaul, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Assam, and of the maritime countries of Arakan, Pegu, and Tenasserim : some 4,000,000 people in all. The southern advance of the conquerors towards Saurashtra on the west and Orissa on the east, pressed the Dravidians into the Vindhyan fastnesses. There, side by side with the Kolarian tribes, some of them still dwell and are known as Gonds in the Central Provinces, as Konds in the highlands of Ganjam and Orissa. But the great bulk of them descended into the Deccan, then thickly wooded, and were fruitful and multiplied, and replenished the earth and subdued it. Southern India is still mainly Dravidian : the portion of it between the Goda- veri and Cape Comorin, we may say, is almost exclusively so. Hindustan is mainly Aryan. And the hill tribes of the North-West frontier, who probably number about a million, are no doubt for the most part descendants of Aryan stragglers, left there and reduced to primitive savagery by the conditions of so inaccessible and unproductive a situation. I have said that Hindustan is mainly Aryan. But sections of its population are due to subsequent invasions. Between the years 100 B.C. and 500 a.d. various tribes of Central Asia, called for want of a more exact name Scythians, made many inroads into India ; and their descendants still form a c 34 RACES considerable element in tHe population of the frontier provinces. About the year looo a.d. began the series of Mohammedan invasions which lasted till the middle of the sixteenth century of our era. "They represent in Indian history the overflow of the nomad tribes of Central Asia to the south-east, as the Huns, Turks, and various Tartan tribes disclose, in early European annals, the westward movements from the same great breeding ground of nations." These, then, are the chief constituents of the population of India. First, the wild tribes com- posed, according to the niost probable conjectures, of the various elements above enumerated, whose numbers may roughly be estimated at 10,000,000, or, perhaps, 11,000,000. Secondly, the Dravidians of the Deccan — Tamils, Telugus, Canarese, and others, amounting to about 54,000,000. Thirdly, the Aryans, who are found chiefly in the country which I have called Hindustan. But of these only the Brahmins and the Rajputs — they number some 20,000,000 — are of pure Aryan blood. Pure, or relatively pure ; for in truth it is only in the north of India, and especially in Kashmir and the Punjab, that we find the unmodified Aryan : as we descend the Gangetic valley, the lips, the nose, the cheek-bones, the dark complexion, more and more betray foreign ingredients, until in Bengal and Orissa the traces of the nobler race are almost undiscernible. The remaining 135,000,000 Hindus represent the fusion of Aryan and non- Aryan elements. And, fourthly, the Moham- medans, dwelling chiefly in Bengal, the North- West THE BRITISH ELEMENT 35 Provinces, the Punjab, and Hyderabad, who number about 60,000,000. They are by no means a homo- geneous race. Half of their number are the descend- ants of the converts made to Islam from Hinduism for many centuries, whether by might, persuasion, or compulsion. The other half are Tartars, Afghans, or Persians — Arabs, so-called ; the descendants of successive hordes of Moslem invaders. The 9,000,000 of Burmese, as we may roughly reckon them, are of Indo-Chinese race — with perhaps the exception of the Mon or Takings of Pegu and Arakan, who are believed to be the posterity of Dravidian immigrants. The Parsis, though numerically inconsiderable — they amount only to some 90,000 souls — occupy in wealth and influence a foremost position in the population. They are the descendants of refugees from Persia who fled from their country on the fall of the Sassanian dynasty in the seventh century of our era, and established themselves on the coast of Daman in Western India. Fifty thousand of them dwell in Bombay. But " there is not an advanced port of the Empire in Arabia, or the Somali coast of Africa, in Baluchistan, or even in the far-off Shan States of Burmah, which is not occupied by some of them." The British element in the population of India is not numerically much larger than the Parsi. It may be roughly stated at 135,000. There is about the same number of Eurasians, the descend- ants of European fathers and native mothers ; there are some 12,000 Jews, and perhaps as many Chinese. CHAPTER VI LANGUAGES Professor Sayce, in his most interesting Intro- duction to the Science of Language, tells us that the tongues at present spoken in the world fall into about a hundred families. One of the chief of these is the Aryan or Indo - European : the family of which the languages of Hindustan, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany, and Slavonia are members : " daughters of the same mother, and heirs of the same wealth of words and flections." Of these, Sanskrit is, in some respects, the most interesting and important from a merely philo- logical point of view, for it is no doubt the nearest to the language of the ancient Aryans. I speak thus advisedly. It is most probable that at the time of the dispersion of the Aryans from their original home — wherever that may have been — their speech was already divided into dialects .of which Sanskrit was merely one. " At the head of the Indian group of dialects," writes Professor Sayce, " stands Sanskrit, the classical language of Hindustan and its Sacred Books, which, though long since extinct, is still spoken by the Brahmans SANSKRIT 37 as Latin was in the Middle Ages. We must distinguish, however, between Vedic Sanskrit and classical Sanskrit, the older Sanskrit of the Veda differing in many respects from the later Sanskrit of the Hindu epics Both Vedic and Post- Vedic Sanskrit were poor in vowels, possessing only a, i, and u, long and short, with the diph- thongs e, at, 0, and au, and the Unguals ;' and /; on the other hand, they were rich in consonants, among which the ' cerebral ' or linguo-dental t and d are usually supposed to have been borrowed from the Dravidian tongues. The euphonic laws are strict and delicate, the final sounds of a word being affected by the initial sounds of the word following according to precise and well-observed rules. The syntax is comparatively simple, com- position taking its place, especially in the later period of the language. The grammatical forms, however, are very full and clear, and it is to them that Sanskrit mainly owes the high position that it has occupied in the comparative study of , Aryan speech. It has often preserved archaic forms that have been obscured else- where, though it must not be forgotten that this is by no means invariably the case ; Greek and Latin, for instance, are sometimes more primitive than the old language of India. The declension is especially complete, preserving the dual as well as a locative and an instrumental. Other cases, however, which must have been once possessed by the parent-speech, have either dis- appeared or left faint traces behind them." So much as to Sanskrit. The Prakrit dialects 38 LANGUAGES followed upon it just as the Romanic dialects of Europe followed upon Latin. One of them, the Pali of Maghada or Behar in North Eastern India — now, for many centuries, a dead language — was traAsported by Buddhist missionaries to Ceylon in the year 244 B.C., and became the holy language of the Southern Buddhist Church, the most authoritative Sacred Books of which are written in it. " The modern Aryan languages of India," continues Professor Sayce, "have de- veloped out of the other Prakrits, and in their present form are considered not to go back further than the tenth century. Bengali and Assamese retain many features of Sanskrit ; Sindhi and Gujerati in the north-west, Nepali and Kashmiri in the north, Hindi in the centre, and Marathi in the south, are all more or less changed from the primitive type. Hindi is merely the modern form of Hindui, a language which was much culti- vated during the Middle Ages of recent Hindu literature, while Hindustani or Urdu, the language of the 'camp,' is Hindi mixed with Arabic and Persian — in fact, a lingua franca which grew up at the time of the Mohammedan invasion in the eleventh century." We may say, then, speaking generally, that the languages of Hindustan are Aryan. The languages of the Deccan belong to another family, the Dravidian. This is an agglutinative family, whereas the Aryan is inflectional, a difference lucidly explained by Professor Max Muller in his Lectures on the Science of Language : "The chief distinction between an inflectional and an aggluti- THE DbAVlDtAN TONGUES 39 nate language," he writes, "consists in the fact that agglutinative languages preserve the con- sciousness of their roots, and therefore do not allow them to be affected by phonetic corruption ; and though they have lost the consciousness of the original meaning of the terminations, they feel distinctly the difference between the significa- tive roots and the modifying elements. Not so in the inflectional languages. There the various elements which enter into the composition of words may become so welded together, and suffer so much from phonetic corruption, that none but the educated would be aware of an original distinction between root and termination, and none but the comparative grammarian able to discover the seams that separate the component parts." The Dra- vidian languages are usually reckoned as twelve in number. Six — Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese, Malaya- lam, Tulu, and Kudagu — are all highly developed tongues. Tamil is peculiarly rich in grammatical forms ; and Telugu has been called, not without reason, "the Italian of India." Six less refined and developed varieties of Dravidian are Toda, Kota, Khond, Gond, Uraon, and RajmuhaH, spoken by more or less barbarous tribes, and quite distinct from one another. The tribes descended from the aborigines speak some ten different dialects of Kolarian, which is a distinct linguistic family. Finally, to complete this rough enumeration of the languages of India, there is the Tibeto-Burman family, which is neither inflexional nor agglutina- tive, but isolating. And here, for the benefit of the reader not versed in philological studies, a 40 LANGUAGES word of explanation may be necessary. I will take it from Professor Sayce : "In the isolating languages, the separate terms or ideas which make up the sentence are not subordinated to each other and fused into a single whole, but every word remains a separate and distinct sentence. The Chinaman has to say, ' thyan — hi — leri tsyari — sari-. — lei ' — literally," '' heaven — air — cold begin — rise — come ' — if he wants to state that ' the weather began to be cold ' ; and the Bur- man's way of expressing ' we are going ' is by saying ' na do dhwa kra dhdn • — 'I multitude go multitude which.' In cases such as these, the ideas are each set down independently, instead of being subordinated one to another, and the words which embody them are accordingly contrasted with each other like so many independent sen- tences." Of the Tibeto-Burqian family Professor Sayce reckons seven groups speaking some seventy different tongues or dialects. The most import- ant of these is Burmese. CHAPTER VII LITERATURE What has been said of the languages of India may serve, incidentally, to impress upon the reader the much needed lesson of the vastness of the country and the complexity of its civilisation. Let us now proceed to consider its literature. I do not think there is much of very high value in any of its non-Aryan tongues. Certainly there is not in the Tibeto-Burman. Nor, in my judgment, is there in the Dravidian languages, with three principal varieties of which — Tamil, Telugu, and Canarese — I have some acquaintance. Tamil, indeed, possesses many books ; but they are chiefly borrowed from the Sanskrit. The most pretentious original work in it is the Tiraga Chintamami, which a high authority, the Rev. Dr Pope, somewhat hyperboHcally characterises as being " at once the Iliad and Odyssey of the Tamil language." The Kural of Tiruvallular — a collection of verses compiled in the tenth century of our era by a Pariah, whose sister, Auvaiyar, has also, left some admirable stanzas — certainly exhibits, in places, considerable poetical power. 42 UTfifeATURE Barth, in his very learned work on The Religions of India, characterises it as " instinct with the purest and most elevated religious emotion." In the eighteenth century of our era, the Italian Jesuit Beschi composed an immense epic poem in classical Tamil, the Tembavani, on Biblical sub- jects. It is considered by some competent judges to have won him " a conspicuous rank among Dravidian poets." Many years have elapsed since I looked into the work, but I remember it appeared to me tasteless and frigid. The modern Aryan tongues, so far as I am aware, contain no writings of any considerable merit. The only Indian literature of much real intrinsic value is the Sanskrit. And the most notable things in it are the Vedic Hymns, the two great national epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Upanishads. Of the Vedas the oldest is the Rig-Veda, pre- eminently called The Veda. "It is," writes Pro- fessor Sayce, " a collection of hymns and poems of various dates, some of which go back to the earliest days of the Aryan invasion of north- western India ; the whole collection, however, may be roughly ascribed to at least the fou'rteenth or fifteenth century B.C. In course of time it came to assume a sacred character, and the theory of inspiration invented to support this goes much beyond the most extreme theory of verbal inspira- tion ever held in the Jewish or the Christian Church. The Rig-Veda was divided into ten mandalas, or books, each mandala being assigned to some old family ; and out of these were formed THE VEDAS 43 three new Vedas — the Yajur, the Sama, and the Atharva. The Yajur and the Sama may be des- cribed as prayer-books compiled from the Rig for the use of the choristers and the ministers of the priests, and contain Httle besides what is found in the earliest and most sacred Veda The Atharvana may be described as a collection of poems mixed up with popular sayings, medical advice, magical formulee, and the like." In the Rig- Veda we have poems — sometimes very striking — on Nature : hymns to the Sun, the Rain, the Clouds, the Fire, the Sky, the Earth, the Wind, the Storm, the Dawn. But there is no subjective thought, no personal emotion. I shall have to speak in a later Chapter of the Vedic religious teaching. Here, by way of specimen of the poetry of our far-off Aryan ancestors, I will quote Max Miiller's rendering of the 129th hymn of the tenth book of the Rig- Veda. " Nor Aught nor Naught existed ; yon bright sky Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched above. What covered all ? what sheltered ? what concealed ? Was it the water's fathomless abyss ? There was not death — yet was there naught immortal, There was no confine betwixt day and night ; The only One breathed breathless by itself, Other than It there nothing since has been : Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled In gloom profound — an ocean without light— The germ that still lay covered in the husk Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat. Then first came love upon it, the new spring Of mind — yea, poets in their hearts discerned, Pondering, this bond between created things And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth 44 LITERATURE Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven ? Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose — Nature below, and power and will above — Who knows the secret ? who proclaimed it here Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang ? The gods themselves came later into being — Who knows from whence this great creation sprang — He, from whom all this great creation came, Whether His will created or was mute. The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven, He knows it — or perchance even He knows not." As time went on, commentaries on the Vedas were produced and received the name of Brah- manas. They soon came to be regarded as little inferior in sacredness to the Vedas themselves. In truth they are, for the most part, incorrect and inept explanations of Vedic texts, the meaning of which had grown obscure. Herr Eggeling, the accomplished author of the translation of the Satta- patha-Brahmana in the Sacred Books of the East, remarks : " For wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterised by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning, these works are perhaps not equalled anywhere." Most intelligent readers of his bulky volumes will, I think, agree in this judgment. I should here remark that the Puranas — there are eighteen of them and eighteen supplements — are ancient legendary histories written when the Vedic religion had become antiquated, some by the votaries of Vishnu, and some by the votaries of Siva — I shall have to speak of these deities in a subsequent Chapter — for the purpose of exalting the one or the other to- the highest position. The THE TWO GREAT SANSKRIT EPICS 45 Tantras were composed to stimulate devotion to the female counterpart of Siva. Next let us glance at the two great Sanskrit epics. The Ramayana, which consists of 24,000 stanzas, and is arranged in seven books, describes the history of Rama, the seventh incar- nation of Vishnu. The name of Rama is a household word throughout all India. Hindu mothers delight to tell their children of his ex- ploits. He is for the poet who sings of him " the finished type of submission to duty, nobility of moral character, and chivalric generosity " ; and there are passages in the work which attain to a high order of inspiration. Further, as Barth observes, there are in it " accents of an ardent charity, of a compassion and tenderness, and a humility, at once sweet and plaintive, which ever and anon suggest the action of Christian in- fluences, and which in any case contrast singu- larly with the pride and want of feeling — fruits of the spirit of caste — with which Hindu literature is replete." The other great Sanskrit epic is the Maha- bharata. It is the longest epic in the world, extending as it does to 222,000 lines. It is, strictly speaking, rather a collection of epic poetry than an epic : and by far the most noteworthy portion of it is the Bhagavat-Gita — "The Lay of the Divine One" — a work which may justly be considered the high-water mark of Sanskrit poetry. William von Humboldt celebrates it as "the most beautiful, perhaps the only true, philosophical song which exists in any known tongue." Warren 46 LITERATURE Hastings noted in it "a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost unequalled." Schlegel closes his Latin version of it with an invocation of the unknown author, "whose oracular soul is, as it were, wafted aloft into divine and eternal truth with a certain ineffable delight." It is in the form of a metrical dialogue in which Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, explains to Arjuna the supre'rne secret of religion and philosophy. Very noble are the portions of the poem in which Krishna reveals himself as the manifestation of that Great Universal Spirit with whom Arjuna is one. It is worth while to cite them in Sir Monier Williams's excellent translation. " Whate'er thou dost perform, whate'er thou eatest, Whate'er thou givest to the poor, whate'er Thou ofFerest in sacrifice, whate'er Thou doest as an act of holy penance. Do all as if to me, O Arjuna. I am the ancient Sage, without beginning, I am the Ruler and the All-sustainer, I am incomprehensible in form, More subtle and minute than subtlest atoms ; I am the cause of the whole universe. Through me it is created and dissolved ; On me all things within it hang suspended. Like pearls upon a string. I am the light. In sun and moon, far, far beyond the darkness ; I am the brilliancy in flame, the radiance In all that's radiant, and the light of lights. The sound in ether, fragrance in the earth. The seed eternal of existing things. The life in all, the father, mother, husband. Forefather, and sustainer of the world. Its friend and lord. 1 am its way and refuge, Its habitation and receptacle, THE bhagavat-g!ta 47 I am its witness. I am Victory And Energy ; I watch the universe With eyes and face in all directions turned. I dwell, as Wisdom, in the heart of all. I am the Goodness of the good, I am Beginning, Middle, End, eternal Time, The Birth, the Death of all. I am the symbol A Among the characters. I have created all Out of one portion of myself. E'en those Who are of low and unpretending birth. May find the path to highest happiness If they depend on me ; how much more those Who are by rank and penance holy Brahmans And saintly soldier-princes like thyself.'' Then be not sorrowful ; from all thy sins I will deliver thee. Think thou on me. Have faith in me, adore and worship me, And join thyself in meditation to me ; Thus shalt thou come to me, O Arjuna ; Thus shalt thou rise to my supreme abode, Where neither sun nor moon hath need to shine. For know that all the lustre they possess is mine." Arjuna, filled with awe at this revelation, thus addresses the Incarnate Deity : — " Most mighty Lord supreme, this revelation Of thy mysterious essence and thy oneness With the eternal Spirit, clears away The mists of my illusions. Show me then Thy form celestial, most divine of men, If haply I may dare to look upon it." To this Krishna replies : — " Thou can'st not bear to gaze upon my shape With these thy human eyes, O son of Pandu, But now I gift thee with celestial vision ; Behold me in a hundred thousand forms. In phases, colours, fashions infinite." 48 LITERATURE Then follows the description of Krishna's transfiguration : — " Thus having said, the mighty Lord of all Displayed to Arjuna his form supreme, Endowed with countless mouths and countless eyes. With countless faces turned to every quarter, With countless marvellous appearances, With ornaments, and wreaths, and robes divine, With heavenly fragrance and celestial weapons ; It was as if the firmament were filled All in an instant with a thousand suns, Blazing with dazzling lustre, so beheld he The glories of the universe collected In the one person of the God of gods." The likeness between these portions of the Bhagavat-GUa — there are many more such — and the Sacred Scriptures of Christianity must strike even the most superficial reader. Hence some scholars — conspicuous among them is Dr Lorinser — have been led to believe that the Sanskrit poet directly borrowed from the New Testament, copies of which, he thinks, found their way to India about the third century, the period, as he judges, of the GUds composition. On the other hand, there are those who assert that the Christian Evangelists were indebted to the Krishna legend : an assertion for which, however, there is no evidence. If, indeed, the Glta is rightly assigned to the third century of our era, its author may have known something of Christianity, which certainly existed in India at that period. But, in truth, the date of the Glta cannot be fixed. Mr K. T. Telang, a learned Hindu to whom we owe the translation of it given in the THE MAHABHARATA AND THE RAMAYANA 49 Sacred Books of the East, refers it to the fourth century B.C., and gives many arguments, some of which are plausible enough, in support of his theory. What is certain is — to quote the words of a learned American author — that the work, "though not without its imperfections, like the rest, is one of the grand immortal forms in religious literature : an eternal word of the Spirit in man." The Mahabkarata and the Ramayana are of great value as pictures of ancient Indian life and civilisation. In Sanskrit poetry they occupy a place by themselves. There are, however, two later epics, the Raghu-vansa and the Kumara- santbhava which, though of far inferior inspira- tion, contain passages marked by much beauty of poetic diction and much elevation of thought. They are ascribed to Kalidasa, who lived — as seems most probable — in the sixth century before Christ, and who is considered the father of the Sanskrit drama. The most famous of his plays is Sakuntala, The Lost Ring, which Sir William Jones translated, and which Goethe warmly eulogised in some well-known verses. It remains to speak of the Upanishads — the term Upanishad means mystic teaching — of which there are some one hundred and seventy. Only a few of them, however, such as the Prasna, Mundaka, and Mandukya Upanishads belong to the period — the later period — of Vedic literature. They present the earliest and simplest form of the Vedanta philosophy which is accounted — as the name implies — " the end of the Veda " ; its D 50 LITERATURE ultimate aim and consummation ; an idealistic monism deriving the universe from an eternal conscious spiritual principle which it calls Atman — self. I shall have to speak in a later Chapter of the influence of the Upanishads in the develop- ment of Hinduism. Their importance to readers specially interested in Oriental metaphysics has been admirably pointed out by Mr Gough in his well- known work upon them. " They are an index to the intellectual peculiarities of the Indian character. The thoughts they express are the ideas that prevail throughout all subsequent Indian literature, much of which will be fully comprehensible to those who carry with them a knowledge of these ideas to its perusal. A study of the Upanishads is the starting-point in any intelligent study of Indian philosophy." To enter upon an exposition of the various schools — they reckon six principal ones — of that philosophy, would take me beyond the scope of the present work The practical outcome of them all is in the Vedanta, which for the last thousand years has dominated — and which still dominates, consciously or unconsciously — the Hindu mind. It may be thus briefly summed up. Being, absolute, pure, void, unconscious, is the Ultimate Reality. The veil of Maya hides It from us. The whole universe is "a fleeting show for man's illusion given." It seems, and is not. Humanity, Society, Civilisation, are mere delusions. Man is "a wandering shadow in a world of dreams." He is an unreal actor on the semblance of a stage, as his soul transmigrates through an innumerable THE VEDANTA 51 series of bodies. And the way of deliverance from this web of illusion is entire detachment from the world and the things of the world, through a pro- cess of purificatory virtues which may be the work of many successive lives : the renouncement of family, of home ; meditation, abstraction ; the denial of desire. Thus does the sage lose all sense of individual personality, and return to the con- dition of simple soul. This is the summum bonum, the only real good — this loss of separate identity by absorption into the unconscious Absolute, the fontal Self. It is no great wonder that a people penetrated by these doctrines and beliefs should be unprogressive. It is no great wonder that such a people should have no history, no national polity, no science.* * By way of appendix to this Chapter, I should like to call attention to the great value of the translations from the Sanskrit which iind place in the forty-nine volunies of the Sacred Books of the East. Those volumes are a vast monument of the learning and zeal of my lamented friend. Professor Max Miiller, and of the wisdom and liberality of the University of Oxford which enabled his great design to be carried out. PART III HISTORY CHAPTER VIII HINDU INDIA Let me now proceed to indicate, in the briefest outline, and as if by a few strokes of a pencil, some of the more salient features of the history of India. I shall touch, first, on the course of events up to the middle of the seventh century of our era, when the long series of Mohammedan invasions began. That is the subject of this present Chapter. Of the two next Chapters, the one will deal with the period of Mohammedan domination, and the other with the British conquest. Our materials for a knowledge of Hindu India are of the scantiest. It is not too much to say that there are no Hindu historians. To the Hindu mind, essentially idealistic, filled with a profound conviction of the illusiveness of life and the unreality of phenomena, the procession and succession of events, the rise and fall of dynasties, the fate of empires, seemed a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. Our knowledge of India, till the chroni- clers of Islam wrote of it, is derived from the evidence of language and material monuments, from legends beneath which facts may be traced 56 HINDU INDIA in dim and uncertain outline, and from casual mention by writers of other countries. The most ancient Indian legends aire those collected in the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, of which some account was given in the last Chapter. The wars which are their themes, are probably historical events. That celebrated in the Mahabharata was a contest be- tween the dynasties of Pandu and Kuru for the territory of Hastinapiir, apparently a place on the Ganges to the north-east of Delhi. General Cun- ningham, by the help of certain astronomical data, places its date in 1426 B.C. The Ramayana, which relates the invasion of Ceylon by the Hindu prince, Rama, is a few centuries later. It is not necessary here to relate the main story of either of these epics, or to speak of the various episodes inter- woven in them. Their historic value lies in what they disclose to us of the condition of the Indian Aryans at the time when they were written. It is clear that at the period to which the Mahabhai^ata refers, there were many reigning houses — states or principalities — in the country. Half a dozen, at least, are mentioned as belonging to the Gangetic district ; among them the kingdom of Magada, afterwards to become so famous. And chiefs from widely distant parts, the banks of the Indus and the Deccan, are among the allies on either side. Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana repre- sent a state of society possessing many of the features of the Homeric age : a society of primitive structure and simple arrangements ; of athletic habits and warlike tastes ; a society, too, of archaic THE LAWS OF MANU 57 sexual relations : Draupadi, the heroine of the Mahabharata, is the wife in common of five brothers. There is no trace in these ancient poems of the preponderating influence afterwards enjoyed by the Brahmins, or of the system of caste upon which that influence rests. During the periods to which both relate, the Brahmins appear to have been little more than animal sacrificers at religious rites. How and when they acquired their subsequent power, we cannot conjecture. They were certainly in possession of it when Buddhism comes upon the scene of Indian history in the sixth century before the Christian era. The Laws of Manu, though probably not reduced to their present shape until two centuries later, present an accurate picture of Indo-Aryan society as it then existed ; the four- fold caste — I shall dwell upon it in a subsequent Chapter — the sacrosanct character of the Brahmins, the paternal despotism of the petty princes or Rajahs who bore rule, the village system which has come down to this day unchanged in its essential features. Such was the world into which Sakya Muni, afterwards known as Gotama Buddha, was born ; himself the son of a Rajah who ruled over Kapila-vastu, a small principality situated on the southern slope of the Himalayas. Of him and his mission I shall have to speak when dealing with the religions of India. Here I will merely observe that Budd'hism was essentially a reaction against Brah- minism. It was not that Gotama laboured directly for the abolition of caste ; or that he even, in terms, condemned it. He recognised it, just as he recognised the multitudinous Hindu deities. 58 HINDU INDIA But he emptied it, as he emptied them, of real significance. His teaching — to quote Koppen's admirable words — " put spiritual brotherhood in place of hereditary priesthood ; personal merit in place of distinctions of birth ; human intelligence in place of authoritative Vedas ; the self-perfected sage in place of the gods of the old mythology ; morality in place of ritualism ; a popular doctrine of righteous- ness in place of scholasticism ; a monastic rule in place of isolated anchorite life ; and a cosmopolitan spirit in place of old national exclusiveness." It is to the Greeks that we owe the most trustworthy glimpses of India in the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era. Shortly after the death of Gotama Buddha in b.c. 543 — if indeed that is the right date — Darius Hystaspes is said by some authorities to have invaded the Punjab, and to have formed part of it into a satrapy. Two hundred years subsequently, Alex- ander the Great, on conquering the Persian Empire, resolved, as is alleged, to emulate that exploit ; and it is to his followers that we owe the first fairly accurate accounts of India and its inhabitants. Starting from Bactria — the modern Balkh — he crossed the Hindu Kush and descended to Kabul. Thence he made his way through the Khyber Pass, and fought that famous action against Porus on the Jhelum, or Hydaspes, which is familiar to every schoolboy. It would be foreign frorfi my present purpose to speak of the various episodes of Alexander's Punjab campaign. Shortly after his death, Eudemus, his lieutenant and representa- tive at Taxila, on the Indus, was driven out of the ASOKA 59 country by the Hindu prince, Chandragupta, known to the Greeks as Sandrokottos, who then captured the city erf Patna, and soon after acquired the kingdom of Magada. This monarch formed an alliance with Seleukos, the Greek sovereign of Persia and Bactria, whose daughter he married, and received at his court a Greek ambassador named Megasthenes. Nearly all that we know of the con- dition of Hindustan at this time is due to the account written by Megasthenes (300 B.C.). His experi- ence seems to have been chiefly gained at Magada ; but he has left us a detailed account of ancient Patna — Pali-bothra— with its wooden walls, its busy streets, its elephants, chariots, and horsemen. He was told that in all India there were 118 indepen- dent governments ; and he relates that the army of Sandrokottos numbered 400,000 men. He men- tions castes, gives an account of the administration of justice, and furnishes some curious particulars as to taxation. The grandson of Chandragupta, Asoka, plays a great part in ancient Hindu history. He began his career as monarch by massacring all his brethren, and then greatly extended his dominions by force of arms. He is said to have reigned over Hindustan, the Punjab, and Afghanistan. Four years after his accession, he openly took under his patronage the religion of Gotama, which may be said to have then entered upon a new career. He is often called the Constantine of Buddhism, and there is unquestionably a close and curious parallel- ism between the two monarchs. Each was, pro- bably, much influenced by political considerations 6o HINDU INDIA in declaring himself in favour of the new faith. Each was, as probably, influenced by similar motives in postponing his formal admission into the Church till the last years of his life. But of the two, Asoka appears to be by far the higher character. "The Wrathful," was the title given him in early life, and he unquestionably deserved it. But in his later days, when his heart had been touched and changed by the holy doctrine of the Buddha, men called him "The Just." And the monuments of his legislation, cut in the rock at his command, which are with us to this day, witness to a spotless purity of motive, a noble zeal for justice and mercy, a genuine liberality of mind, an enlightened toleration of spirit, which entitle him to rank high among the rulers of mankind His inscriptions tell us: "The King, beloved of the gods, honours every form of religious faith, but considers no gift or honour so much as the increase of the substance of religion ; whereof this is the root — to reverence one's own faith, and never to revile that of others. Whoever acts differently, injures his own religion, while he wrongs another's. The texts of all forms of reli- gion shall be followed, under my protection. Duty is in respect and service. Alms and pious demon- strations are of no worth compared with the loving- kindness of religion. The festival that bears great fruits is the festival of duty. The King's purpose is to increase the mercy, charity, truth, kindness, and piety of all mankind. There is no gift like the gift of virtue. Good is liberality ; good it is to harm no living creature ; good to abstain from KANISHKA 6 1 slander ; good is the care of one's parents, kindness to relatives, children, friends, slaves. That these good things may increase, the King and his descen- dants shall maintain the law. Ministers of morals shall everywhere aid the charitable and good. I will always hear my people's voice. I distribute my wealth for the good of all mankind, for which I am ever labouring." With the conversion of Asoka (257 B.C.) began the alliance between Buddhism and the State in India, which lasted for nearly a thousand years. We should perhaps err in calling Buddhism the estab- lished religion of any part of the country. But for long it certainly seems to have been, in many regions, the most favoured. We read of a prince called Kanishka, who begun to reign in the year 10 of our era, and who was a very zealous Buddhist. " His dominions extended from Kabul to the Hindu Kush and Bolor Mountains, over Yarkand and Khokan ; through Kashmir, Ladak, and the Central Himalayas ; down over the plains of the Upper Ganges and Jumna as far as Agra ; over Rajputana, Guzarat, and Sind, and through the whole of the Punjab — a magnificent empire unequalled in extent from the time of Asoka to that of the Moghuls." Under the fostering care of this and like-minded princes, stately monasteries arose throughout the land, in which crowds of monks spent their lives in teaching the law of Buddha, and in developing those metaphysical speculations which have so irresistible an attrac- tion for the Hindu mind. Missionaries went to and fro ; and from Kashmir to Cape Comorin the 62 HINDU INDIA gospel of Gotama had free course and was glori- fied. A son of Asoka is said to* have evangelised Ceylon. And gradually the doctrine of the Buddha penetrated to regions much further from its original home : to Thibet and China, to all Eastern Asia from Korea to Siam. For glimpses of it in the land of its origin, during the early centuries of our era, we are indebted to the accounts of pious Chinese pilgrims who camte thither in search of relics and sacred texts. Interesting in the highest degree are these records of the geography, history, manners, and religion of the people of India in those far-off times. And we may entirely agree with their translator, Mr Beal : " Never did disciples more ardently desire to gaze on the sacred vestiges of their religion : never did men endure greater sufferings by desert, mountain, and sea, than these simple Buddhist priests." Fa Hian, the earliest of them, wrote at the begin- ning of the fifth century of our era. It took him five years to arrive at mid- India. He resided there for six years, and it was three more before he returned to China from Ceylon — after a perilous voyage ot which he gives a most graphic account — with the sacred books and images collected by him. Fa Hian relates that throughout his travels he found the religion of the Buddha everywhere flourishing, with kings for its nursing fathers and queens for its nursing mothers. And between it and Brah- minism there seems to have been no open enmity. Sung Yun visited India a century later, but did not penetrate further than Peshawar. He speaks of the country east of the Indus as Buddhist. Of S!LADITYA 63 far more importance was the pilgrimage of Hiouen- Tshang. This most illustrious traveller was born in the year 603 of our era, at Ch'in Liu, in the province of Honan, and at the age of twenty received full Buddhist orders as a Bhikshu or priest. In a.d. 629 he left China on his perilous pilgrimage, returning in a.d. 648 with precious relics and statues of the Buddha, and with Buddhist literature, which formed a load for twenty-two horses. He found India divided into more than a hundred states, of which he has left us as exact an account as he could : geographical, social, political, historical, and religious. St Hilaire calls him one of those "elect souls in history, few of whom have been able to carry disinterestedness so far towards the limit where nothing is known but the plain idea of goodness." It would appear that the most powerful monarch in India at that time was Siladitya, the king of the country which Hiouen-Tshang calls Kie-jo-kio-she-kwo (Kanya- kubja). The remains of its capital, Kanauj, may still be seen on the banks of the Ganges. Hiouen- Tshang received a cordial welcome from Siladitya, a zealous Buddhist, well read in the Sacred Books, whose virtues he celebrates in glowing terms. Of the capital city and its inhabitants he gives the following pleasant account : "It has a dry ditch round it, with strong and lofty towers facing one another. The flowers and woods, the lakes and ponds, bright and pure, and shining like mirrors, are seen on every side. Valuable merchandise is collected here in great quantities. The people are well off and contented : the houses are rich and 64 HINDU INDIA well formed. Flowers and fruits abound in every place, and the land is sown and reaped in due season. The climate is agreeable and soft : the manners of the people are honest and sincere. They are noble and gracious in appearance. For clothing they use ornamented and bright shining fabrics. They apply themselves much to learning, and are renowned for the clearness of their argu- ments. The believers in Buddha and the heretics are about equal in number. There are some hundred Buddhist temples with 10,000 priests. There are 200 Hindu temples with several thou- sand followers." Slladitya is stated to have reigned over Hindustan and the Punjab, and to have exercised suzerainty over many princes beyond those regions. So much as to Hiouen-Tshang and his travels. The general impression which he leaves on the mind is, that though he found Buddhism still a considerable power, it had fallen below the position which it held in Fa Hian's day. This is the last glimpse we get of Buddhism in India. Four centuries afterwards, it is gone, and its original birthplace knows it no more. Its dis- appearance is one of the most curious phenomena in history, and is quite unexplained. There is a tradition of sanguinary and exterminating persecu- tions by the Brahmins. But the tradition rests upon no evidence. Mr Rhys Davis thinks, " In the eighth and ninth centuries Buddhism became so corrupt that it no longer attracted the people, and when it lost the favour of the kings, it had no power to stand against the opposition of the priests." CHAPTER IX MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS A THOUSAND years Is the period commonly and roughly assigned by historians to Buddhist supre- macy in India. The next thousand years are the millennium of Mohammedan invasion and conquest. The Hindus, speaking generally, have never been a warlike people. In most ages, foreign victors have made a prey of them. Thus, in the epoch at which we have just glanced, invaders, dubiously described as Scythians, swept in, horde after horde, through the north-west passes, and occupied portions of the Punjab, and of the valley of the Ganges. It was in driving back these foreigners that Vikramaditya won his prominent place among Indian heroes. He is described as King of Ujjain, but what his achieve- ments really were, or what was their date, we do not know. Of this great prince " Only a fading verbal memory, An empty name in writ, is left behind." We also read of a people called Guptas — the Hindu name for them was Mlechhas or barbarians 64 T, 66 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS — who made a home for themselves in the North- West Provinces. But when they came, or who they were, we are ignorant. The favourite con- jecture seems to be that they were immigrants from the old Grseco-Bactrian Empire who had become half Hinduised. Anyhow, they would seem to have made common cause with the Hindu princes, and to have fought side by side with them in the great battle of Korur, in which the Indo-Scythians were completely overthrown. But the date of this conflict, esteemed " one of the decisive battles of the world," is matter of con- jecture. It has been shifted forwards and back- wards from 78 to 544 A.D. The truth is, Elphinstone well remarks, that we must be content with guesses until the arrival of the Mussulmans at length puts us in posses- sion of a regular succession of events with their dates. In the year 604 of our era — and 44 of the Hijra— the Moslems first appeared in India. It was a mere incursion. Not until a century afterwards did the Arabs seriously invade Sind with a regular army under the command of Mohammed Kasim. The success which attended that expedition led the youthful general — he was only twenty — to plan a march upon Kanauj. But he was baffled by what Elphinstone calls "a sudden reverse," which shall be related in the well-chosen words borrowed by that writer from the Mohammedan historians. " Among the numerous female captives in Sind were two daughters of Raja Dahir, who, from their rank and their personal charms, were thought worthy KASIM AND HIS CONQUESTS 67 of being presented to the Commander of the Faithful (Walid, the sixth cahf of the house of Ommeia). They were, accordingly, sent to the court, and introduced into the harem. When the eldest was brought into the presence of the calif, whose curiosity had been stimulated by reports of her attractions, she burst into a flood of tears, and exclaimed that she was now unworthy of his notice, having been dishonoured by Casim before she was sent out of her own country. The calif was moved by her beauty, and enraged at the insult offered to him by his servant ; and, giving way to the first impulse of his resentment, he sent orders that Casim should be sewn up in a raw hide, and sent in that condition to Damascus. When his orders were executed, he produced the body to the princess, who was overjoyed at the sight, and exultingly declared to the astonished calif that Casim was innocent, but that she had now revenged the death of her father and the ruin of her family." This characteristic catastrophe checked the advance of the Mohammedan arms in India for a time. But Kasim's conquests remained in the hands of his successor for thirty - six years when, upon the downfall of the house of Ommeia, they were reoccupied by the Rajputs. The next Moslem invaders of India were not Arabs, but Tartars, whom we may, with sufficient accuracy for our present purpose, call Turks. After the breaking-up of the empire of the Caliphs, which may be dated from the middle of the ninth century, there arose, among other independent 68 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS Moslem governments, that of Ghazni, which, under a ruler named Sebektegin, became a considerable power. Sebektegin was a slave, whom Alptegin, the ruler of Ghazni, himself originally of servile condition, had bought from a merchant of Turke- stan, and who displayed such skill in the arts both of peace and war, that he rose to high offices of power and trust. It is related of him that "one day in hunting, while yet a private horseman, he succeeded in riding down a fawn ; but when he was carrying off his prize in triumph, he observed the dam following his horse, and showing such evident marks of distress, that he was touched with compassion, and at last released his captive, pleasing himself with the gratitude of the mother, which often turned back to gaze at him as she went off to the forest with her fawn. That night the Prophet appeared to him in a dream, told him that God had given him a kingdom as a reward for his humanity, and enjoined him not to forget his feelings of mercy when he came to the exercise of power." He appears to have ruled his own people well. But he slaughtered and plundered the Hindus who dwelt on the northern bank of the Indus, and established a garrison at Peshawar. He was succeeded by his son, Mohammed of Ghazni, who assumed the title of Sultan. This prince made seventeen expeditions into India be- tween looi and 1020 a.d. Of these, thirteen were directed to the subjugation of the Western Punjab ; one was an unsuccessful incursion into Kashmir ; the remaining three were " short but furious raids " against Kanauj, Gwalior, and Somnath respectively. MOHAMMED OF GHAZNI 69 It is by the Somnath campaign that Mohammed of Ghazni is chiefly remembered. One of the few fragments of Indian history, so called, that have found currency in Europe, is the story of his breaking in pieces the idol of the great Somnath temple with his mace, after declining the ransom offered for it by its priests, to find the reward of his iconoclastic zeal in the treasure of jewels which poured to the ground from its interior. But, as modern writers have pointed out, the legend is a fond thing vainly invented, the idol of Somnath being merely a rude block of stone, one of the twelve lingams, or phallic emblems, erected in various parts of India. Another exploit of this Sultan Mohammed connected with his Somnath expedition, more or less popularly known in this country, is his carrying back the gates of the temple with him to Ghazni. It was these gates which Lord Ellenborough in 1842 proposed to send back to the place whence they came, after the storming of that town, as a memorial of " Somnath Revenged," announcing his intention to the native rulers and people of India in a pro- clamation, the bombastic language of which excited general wonder and dissatisfaction. As a matter of fact, the gates, which appear not to have been the ancient ones, but a modern forgery, got no further than Agra, and are still warehoused in the magazine there. But although the legend about the jewel- bellied image of Somnath is a clumsy forgery, no doubt Mohammed of Ghazni amply merited his title of Image-breaker by the destruction of 70 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS the idol of that temple and of many others. The one lasting result of his Indian campaigns was the conversion of the Punjab into an outlying province of Ghazni. "He never set up as a resident sovereign in India. His expeditions beyond the Punjab were the adventures of a religious knight errant, with the plunder of a temple or the demolition of an idol as their object, rather than serious efforts at conquest." Mussulman historians extol Mohammed of Ghazni as one of the greatest sovereigns of any age. He appears, certainly, to have been among the greatest of his own. His military skill was un- questionably of a high order. And his administra- tion of his kingdom displayed much talent for government. Notwithstanding the bloodshed and misery which he carried far and wide, he does not seem to have been wantonly cruel. Many anecdotes are current about him which illustrate his sense of kingly duty. One of the shortest, and not the least striking, is the following : — " Soon after his conquest of the Persian province of Irak, a caravan was cut off in the desert to the east of that district, and the mother of one of the merchants, who was killed, went to Ghazni to complain. Mohammed urged the impossibility of keeping order in so remote a part of his terri- tories, when the woman boldly replied, ' Why, then, do you take countries which you cannot govern, and for the protection of which you must answer at the Day of Judgment ? ' Struck with the reproach, he made the woman a liberal present and took effectual measures for the protection of A SENSE OF KINGLV DUTY 7I the caravans." Another story about him illustrates his severity to military license. One day a peasant threw himself at the monarch's feet complaining that an officer of the army had forcibly entered into his house, more than once, to gratify a criminal passion for his wife. The king directed the peasant to say nothing, but to come to him directly the next time the officer made his appearance there. This the man did. Mohammed took his sword in silence, and wrapped himself round in a loose mantle, and the two went to the house. There they found the guilty couple asleep, and the king, first extinguishing the lamp, cut off the head of the adulterer with a single blow. He then ordered lights to be brought, and on looking at the dead man's face, burst into an exclamation of thanks- giving, and called for water, of which he drank a deep draught. Perceiving the astonishment of the peasant, he told him that he had suspected his own nephew to be the criminal ; that he had ex- tinguished the light lest his justice should give way to affection ; that he now saw the offender was a stranger, and having vowed neither to eat nor drink until he had given redress, he was nearly exhausted with thirst. The great stain upon this prince's character seems to have been insatiable avarice. The love of gain, not of glory, was the chief motive of his wars. On the other hand, it is claimed for him that "if he was rapacious in acquiring wealth, he was unrivalled in the judgment and grandeur with which he knew how to expend it." The mosque called The Celestial Bride, which he 72 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS built at Ghazni, was the wonder of the East. His court was splendid. He founded a university at his capital, and spent a large sum on its maintenance. He was illustrious for his munificence to learned men, and gained especial renown for his patronage of Ferdousi. It was at his request that the poet composed the great epic, Shahnameh — a labour of thirty years. But the reward which Mohammed offered upon its completion was judged by Ferdousi altogether inadequate. He rejected it, and with- drew in indignation to his native city of Tus, where he composed a bitter satire against the too parsi- monious prince. Mohammed, however, took no offence, but sent the bard a lavish present. It arrived too late. As the messenger, who bore it, entered by one door of Ferdousi's house, the poet's body was being carried out to burial by another. His daughter, the chronicler adds, at first rejected the gift, but subsequently accepted it, and devoted it to procuring a supply of water to Ferdoufei's native city. The memory of Mohammed's avarice lived after him, and inspired one of the most strik- ing stories in Sadi's Gulistan. A certain person, that poet relates, saw the monarch, then long dead, in a dream. He was a mere skeleton, save the eyes, which were entire. And those organs of covetousness, as Orientals account them, gazed eagerly from their sockets, insatiable and inde- structible, like the passion which had animated them. So much may suffice regarding Mohammed of Ghazni ; on the whole, perhaps, the best type of those Mohammedan conquerors from whom India MOHAMMED GHORI 73 suffered so much in the Middle Ages. He died in 1030 A.D. His dynasty lasted till 1186, when the Ghorl family conquered Ghazni. The most famous prince of this house was Mohammed Ghori, who reigned from 1156 to 1205 a.d., and laid the real foundation of the subsequent Mohammedan empire of India. His six Indian campaigns were not merely incursions for the sake of booty, of which, however, he amassed an immense amount. He annexed the districts which he occupied — they extended from the delta of the Indus to the delta of the Gansfes — and provided means for their administration. At this period the ruling families of Northern India were all Rajputs who, when defeated by the Moslem invaders, quitted their homes rather than submit, and established themselves in the country border- ing on the eastern desert of the Indus, in which they have remained unto this day, and which is called after them Rajputana. When Mohammed Ghorl died — as a matter of fact, he was murdered by a party of Gakkars, a mountain tribe with whom he had had trouble — his Indian viceroy, Kutab-ud-din, proclaimed himself King of India, and founded a line of rulers which lasted for nearly a century, and which is known as the Slave dynasty, from the fact that he started in life as a Turki slave. He was a valiant and able ruler, and the celebrated minaret at Delhi, known as the Kiitab Minar, still exists as a memorial of him. It was in 1288 that the last Sultan of the Afghan Slave dynasty — or rather dynasties, for there were several of them — was assassinated, and till 74 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS 1320 the house of Khiljl reigned at Delhi. The most famous prince of this line was Ala-ud-din. The great work of the twenty years of his reign was to found the Mohammedan sway in Southern India. But before starting on his great expedition to the Deccan, he had to meet five Moghul inroads from the north. It should be noted that by this time there was a large Mohammedan population in Northern India, consisting of Moghul invaders, who, having failed in attempts at conquests, had taken service with the kings of Delhi ; of Afghans who had followed the Ghorite sovereigns, and of Turkis who had been brought in by the Ghaznite princes. To these should be added the converts to Islam made from time to time whether by persuasion or compulsion, but chiefly by the latter means. The Khiljl dynasty disappeared in 1321, and was succeeded in the Delhi kingdom by the house of Tughlak, founded by a Turki slave. The second of the race, Mohammed (1325-1351), was one of the most extraordinary characters that ever reigned. He is described as the most eloquent and accomplished prince of his age, an admirable Arabic and Persian scholar, well versed in mathematics and the physical sciences as they were then cultivated, in Greek philosophy, and in medicine ; a great builder of hospitals and almshouses, and a patron of learning, "Yet," proceeds the historian, "all these splendid talents and accomplishments were given him in vain ; they were accompanied by a perversion of judgment which, after every allow- ance for the intoxication of absolute power, leaves MOHAMMED TUGHLAK 75 US in doubt whether he was not affected by some degree of insanity." He assembled a vast army for the conquest of Persia, "which, after it had consumed his treasures, dispersed for want of pay, and carried pillage and ruin to every quarter." He sent another army of 100,000 men through the Himalayan passes to conquer China ; a disastrous expedition in which the troops perished almost to a man. To relieve his insolvency he introduced into his dominions a forced currency of copper tokens, the natural result being vastly to increase his financial embarrassment. When the husbandmen, beggared by his exactions, abandoned the culti- vation of their fields, and fled to the woods, he would order a man hunt. His army surrounded an extensive tract of country, and then gradually closing up towards the centre, slaughtered all the human beings within it, as though they were wild beasts. It is reported of him that, on one occasion, he commanded a general massacre of the inhabitants of the great city of Kanauj, who had in some way offended him. He compelled the whole population of his capital Delhi to remove to Deoghiri, in the Deccan, a journey of some seven hundred miles, through dense jungles, over high mountains and across great rivers, accomplished with infinite distress and prodigious loss of life, and entirely infructuous, for the plan failed. But the fort of Deoghiri, which still remains, is a token of the stupendous scale of his undertakings. " The rock round the hill is cut perfectly smooth and perpen- dicular for 180 feet — the only entrance being through a winding passage in the heart of ^6 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS the rock. The whole is surrounded by a broad, deep ditch, cut also in the solid rock." The net result of his reign was the dislocation of his empire, more extensive in the early part of it than the dominion of any Mohammedan prince who had preceded him. Bengal revolted under a Mussulman officer who became its Sultan. The Hindu Rajah of Karnata asserted his independence, and founded a new dynasty at Vijayanagar which soon flourished in great power. The Hindu Rajah of Telingana established himself at Warangol. The Moham- medan army of the Deccan broke into mutiny and set up a Sultan of its own. Of the subsequent princes of the Tughlak dynasty the most notable was Firuz (i 351-1388) distinguished for the number and excellence of his public works, which are stated to have com- prised 50 dams across rivers to promote irriga- tion, 40 mosques, 30 colleges, 100 caravanserais, 30 reservoirs for irrigation, 100 hospitals, 100 public baths, and 150 bridges. The most con- siderable of his undertakings remaining to us is the great Jumna canal, a part of which has been restored by the British Government. Ten years after this monarch's death, Tamerlane descended on India through the Afghan passes, with his Tartar hosts, and, defeating the Tughlak king Mahmud, under the walls of Delhi, took that city and gave it up to five days of massacre and plunder by his troops. He departed on the last day of the year, carrying off a vast amount of booty, and many men and women of all ranks who had been reduced to slavery. On the day of his departure THE DECCAN MONARCHIES ']'] he is said to have " offered up to the Divine Majesty a sincere and humble tribute of grateful praise in the noble mosque of polished marble erected on the banks of the Jumna by Firuz." He formed no permanent government in India. The Tughlak dynasty continued to rule in Delhi till 1 41 2, when it came to an end. The Sayyid dynasty took its place and continued till 1450, when it was succeeded by the Afghan house of Lodi which endured to the year 1526. It was in that year that Baber, the sixth in descent from Tamer- lane, invaded India, and winning the first battle of Panipat, founded the famous Moghul Empire. Before I proceed to speak briefly of this last and greatest of the Moslem dynasties of India, I should note that during the period at which we have just cursorily glanced, Mohammedan rule never ex- tended over the whole of that country. In the Deccan — which word, it will be remembered, I use to denote all India south of theVindhya Mountains — there were a large number of petty Rajahs, more or less independent. There were also, from very ancient times, three considerable Hindu monarchies, the Chera, the Chola, and the Pandya ; and the last mentioned of these, of which the capital was at Madura, endured until the eighteenth century. We possess no trustworthy evidence regarding these old Hindu states, beyond what is supplied by their inscriptions and architec- tural remains. But of the great monarchy of Vijayanagar we have several accounts by Western visitors. It existed from 1335 to 1565, and in the time of its highest prosperity its dominion extended •/8 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS from sea to sea, including well-nigh all the terri- tory now known as the Madras Presidency. The greatest of its monarchs appears to have been Krishna Raya, a contemporary of our Henry VIII., by whom were constructed most of the large annicuts still existing which cross the Tungabudra: On the south bank of that river stood its capital, from which it took its name : a magnificent city, indeed, among the colossal ruins of which I have often wandered, trying to reconstruct in imagina- tion its palaces and aqueducts, its amphitheatres and bazaars. An Italian traveller who visited it at the beginning of the sixteenth century, describes its buildings as far surpassing in splendour any- thing which he had beheld in Europe : and, . certainly, if they were on a like scale with its still existing temples — as no doubt they were — we may well credit the assertion. He tells us that it was twenty-four miles in circumference, enclosing several hills, and speaks with much admiration of the cool channels flowing through its streets, and the groves and gardens covering its suburbs. It fell in 1565 before a combination of the five Mohammedan princes of the Deccan, who over- threw its king in the sanguinary battle of Talikot. And great was the fall of it. With it seemed to fall all independent Dravidian life. The five Mohammedan princes who united to overthrow the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar were the " Sultans " — so they styled themselves — of Bijapur, Golconda, Berar, Ahmednagar, and Ahmedabad. Their kingdoms had been formed out of the territories of the Brahmini dynasty founded THE MOGHULS 79 by Hussain Ganga, one of the generals of Muhammed Tughlak, who successfully rebelled against his master, and who began to reign as an independent Moslem monarch in the Deccan in the year 1347. The date of the extinction of his dynasty is usually given as 1526. But long before that, as a matter of fact, the five Mohammedan principalities mentioned above had arisen in the Deccan, and had become practically autonomous. Let us return to Baber, who, as will be remem- bered, estabHshed himself at Delhi in the year 1526, and whose account of his eventful career in his Memoirs is one of the most fascinating autobiogra- phies ever written. Strangely pathetic was his death. His son Humayon being grievously sick, and given over by the physicians, the magnanimous monarch solemnly offered up his own life in substitution for the dying prince's, who forthwith began to recover. But Baber's vital force gradually declined, until, in a few months, he passed away at the age of fifty (1530). The greatest of his line was undoubtedly the famous Akbar, his grandson, who comes upon the stage of history in 1556. It was in that year that this boy of thirteen, by the aid of his general, Beiram, won the decisive victory at Panipat — the second important battle of that name — over the Afghans, who had dispossessed his father, Humayon, of the throne of Delhi. The next year Humayon died and he suc- ceeded as Emperor. His reign lasted till 1605, and was therefore almost contemporaneous with that of our Queen Elizabeth. At first he was, naturally, much under the tutelage of Beiram, the ablest of his father's warriors and councillors. And his 8o MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS relations with this strong and masterful adviser curiously resembled those which existed between the present German Emperor and Prince von Bismarck, Beiram being the real author of the renewed greatness of the House of Tamerlane. He it was whose clear intellect, iron will, and unswerving steadiness of purpose, had reared again the Moghul throne at Delhi. But he had the defects of his qualities. Harsh, dictatorial, ^ overbearing, he brooked no opposition, and those who ventured upon any, he put to death or sent into banishment. Akbar endured this thraldom for four years, and then found it intolerable. He was now seventeen. "He took occasion, when on a hunting party, to make an unexpected visit to Delhi on the plea of a sudden illness of his mother. He was no sooner beyond the sphere of the minister's influence, than he issued a pro- clamation announcing that he had taken the government into his own hands, and forbidding obedience to orders issued by any other than his authority." This fell upon Beiram like a thunder- bolt. For a brief time he meditated upon various schemes for recovering his power. But as none of them seemed promising, he set out for Nagiir, announcing his intention of going on a pilgrimage to Mecca. While he lingered over his prepara- tions for it, an imperial messenger arrived, bring- ing him a formal dismissal from his office, and a command to proceed on his pilgrimage without delay. He protested his submission to his master's will, and surrendered his standards, kettledrums, and other insignia of authority. But instead of AKBAR AND BEIRAM 8 1 embarking for Mecca, he raised an insurrection in the Punjab. Akbar proceeded against him in person. He was defeated by a detachment of the imperial troops, and threw himself upon his master's mercy. The Emperor sent nobles of high rank to meet him and to bring him to the royal tent. On his arrival there, he prostrated himself at the sovereign's feet, and moved, whether by the reproach written on Akbar's face, or by recollections of their former relations, or by the , realisation of his departed greatness, the strong man wept aloud. Akbar's own hands raised him up and seated him next to the imperial throne. He was invested with a dress of dignity, assured that his disloyalty should be forgotten, and offered his choice of high office at court, of one of the prin- cipal governments of the empire, or of an honour- able dismissal upon his pilgrimage. His proud soul elected to proceed to Mecca, feeling, no doubt, that his occupation in public affairs was gone. But at Guzarat, when about to embark upon that pious expedition, he was cut off by the knife of an Afghan assassin, whose father he had killed, years before, in battle. I have told this of Beiram at length, because it well illustrates the magnanimity which was one of the strongest features of Akbar's character, and which perhaps won for this great prince as many victories as his sword. A great prince, indeed ; one of the greatest that ever swayed the rod of empire ; great as a warrior ; greater as an adminis- trator ; greatest as a man. It would take me far beyond my present limits to sketch, even in outline, 82 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS the conquests of his long reign. I can only remind my readers, touching upon a few salient points, how, before he was twenty-five, he had brought into subjection his turbulent military aristocracy, crushing his adversaries by his vigour, or attaching them to him by his clemency ; how next he subdued the Rajput princes — all save the Rana of Chitur (or Udaipur) — and turned them into loyal feuda- tories ; how, subsequently, he recovered Bengal and Behar, and reduced Kabul, which had revolted under his brother, Mirza Hakim, binding that turbulent prince to him by a generous pardon and a restored trust ; how he added Kashmir to his dominions — this was in 1586 — and conquered Sind in the north-west, and Kandesh in the south. The net result was that he ruled over territories extend- ing from the heart of Afghanistan, to Orissa and Sind, and across all India, north of the Vindhyas, and divided them into the thirteen provinces of Bengal, Behar, Berar, Khandesh, Ahmadnagar, Allahabad, Oudh, Agra, Malwa, Guzarat, Ajmere, Delhi, Lahore, Multan, and Kabul — a term which embraced Kash- mir, Swat, Bajaur, and Kandahar. As Elphin- stone well writes, it was his " noble design to form the inhabitants of that vast territory " — some 150,000,000 of them — "without distinction of race or religion, into one community." Hence, one of his chief cares was to put an end to the religious disabilities pressing upon Hindus under previous Mussulman rulers. Quite early in his reign he abolished the jizia or capitation duty on infidels, an oppressive and irritating badge of Moslem supremacy. He abolished also the taxes akbar's rule 83 on Hindu pilgrimages, giving as his reason that " although the impost fell upon a vain superstition, yet as all modes of worship were designed for One Great Being, it was wrong to throw an obstacle in the path of the devout, or to cut them off from their own way of intercourse with their Maker." On the other hand, like the strong ruler he was, he forbade certain Hindu practices which were obviously opposed to public policy and to the general welfare, such as trials by ordeal, child marriages, and the enforced perpetuity of widow- hood. He carried, however, his respect for indi- vidual freedom so far as to permit sutti, if it was altogether voluntary. Upon one occasion, having heard that the widow of the Rajah of Jodhpurs son was pressed by her father-in-law to the funeral pile, he rode post-haste to the spot, and prevented the intended sacrifice. He himself married into two Rajput princely houses, and one of his Hindu wives — the daughter of the Rajah of Jeypur — is said to have been his favourite queen. Hindus were largely employed by him in the public service, and were advanced to the highest and most responsible offices. His famous finance minister. Rajah Todar Mall — also distinguished as a military commander — the principal author of the land revenue settlement which, in some of its chief features, endures to this day, was a Hindu. So was Rajah Man Singh, one of his most trusted and distinguished generals, who ruled the province of Bengal from 1589 to 1604. In fact, we may say that in Akbar's reign was realised the august conception of civil and religious liberty worthily 84 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS enshrined by Milton in words written after that monarch had passed away. "The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty. As for spiritual, who can be at rest, who can enjoy anything in this world with content- ment, who hath not liberty to serve God } The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advancements of every person, accord- ing to his merit." It is worth while to remember that while Akbar was carrying out this enlightened policy in his Indian Empire, Queen Elizabeth was racking and hanging her Catholic subjects in Eng- land, and King Philip the Second was burning holo- causts of Protestant victims in the fires of the Inquisition throughout Spain and the Low Coun- tries. Even the measure of toleration granted in France by the Edict of Nantes (1598), fell far below the ideal of religious equality realised by the greatest of the Moghuls. As might have been expected, Akbar's tolera- tion in matters of religion was most unacceptable to the more rigid of his Mohammedan subjects. In Islam, I need hardly observe, there is no priest- hood. The place of a sacerdotal order is filled by the Doctors of the Law — the very source and fount of which is the Qu'ran. Akbar was obliged, in the interests of the public peace, to adopt stringent measures for keeping the more fanatical of these sages in order. It is not unusual for persecutors who are withheld from persecuting, to complain that they themselves are persecuted. Such com- plaints were made against Akbar by the Moham- medan Scribes and Pharisees. They must be " THE DIVINE FAITH " 85 largely discounted. Certain it is, indeed, that he effectively broke down their power, and banished the more refractory of them to distant regions of Central Asia. They, in return, accused him of apostatising from Mohammedanism, and of founding a new religion of his own under the name of The Divine Faith. But it is undeniable that through- out his life he conformed to the creed of Islam, and that he died in the free and open profession of it. Unquestionably, however, he held it in a very different spirit from that which animated, and still animates, the vast majority of its adherents. As unquestionably he displayed an intelligent interest in other creeds. The disputations held in his palace every Friday, when Christians, Brahmins, Buddhists, and Parsis expounded their views with as much freedom as Moslems, witness to the open- ness and candour of his mind. He had much sympathy with the religion of Zoroaster. For Christianity he professed the utmost respect, and he manifested it by inviting Catholic priests to Agra and allowing them to build a church there. It is said, too, that one of the best loved of his wives was a Christian. The so-called sect founded by him does not appear to have really been more than a coterie of friends who held the Deism, of a Pan- theistic type, which he regarded as the root of the matter, and which is the doctrine of the great Mohammedan mystics. We may fitly take leave of the subject of Akbar's religion in the well- weighed words of Elphinstone. " He excelled all his predecessors in his conception of the Divine Nature," and "the general freedom which he 86 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS allowed to private judgment was a much more generous effort in a powerful monarch than in a recluse reformer." In Akbar we have, I think, the well-nigh perfect type of an Indian ruler ; and in his policy the true norm of Indian administration. I must not omit to notice how admirably Nature had equipped him for the great task committed to his hands. Strongly built, and handsome in person, he excelled in all manly exercises and feats of physical strength and skill. It is related of him that he would spring upon the backs of elephants who had killed their keepers and compel them to do his bidding. " He sometimes underwent fatigue for the mere pleasure of the exercise, as when he rode from Ajmere to Agra (220 miles) in two successive days, and in many similar journeys on horseback, besides walks on foot of twenty or thirty miles a day. His history is filled with instances of romantic courage, and he seems to have been stimulated by a sort of instinc- tive love of danger, as often as by any rational motive." He was extremely sober and abstemious in his personal habits, and was satisfied with very little sleep. Under the massive strength of his character there ran a deep vein of tenderness. One of the most touching episodes in his life is his grief when Rajah Bir Balu, to whom he was deeply attached, was slain during a campaign against the Afghans. He mourned for him like David for Jonathan, and was for long inconsolable. He greatly delighted in the society of learned ' men. Among his most intimate and cherished friends were the two brothers, Feizi and Abdul Fazl. Both akbar's character Sy were persons of much culture, and to Feizi belongs the distinction of being the first Mussulman pro- foundly versed in Hindu literature. To Abdul Fazl we owe the Akbarnameh, a detailed account of Akbar's home and history. Both were employed by him in weighty diplomatic affairs. Abdul Fazl also obtained high military rank, and, for some time, held the office of Prime Minister. His great influence with Akbar earned for him the hatred of Selim, the Emperor's eldest son, and successor under the title of Jehanghir ; and he was cut off in an ambuscade instigated — though Akbar never knew it — by that prince. Akbar was deeply affected by the intelligence of his death, and for two days could neither eat nor sleep. Some years before he had sustained the loss of the other of the two illustrious brothers, and the narrative of his behaviour upon that occasion well illustrates the strong sensibility of his nature. It was midnight when tidings reached him that Feizi was in the last extremity, and caused him to hasten to the chamber of the dying man, who was already nearly in- sensible. Akbar raised his head and, addressing him by the endearing epithet "Shekhji," said, " Why don't you speak ? I have brought Ali the physician to you." But Feizi's speech was now decayed, and no answer came. Akbar threw his turban on the ground in a passion of grief, and burst into lamentation. But the thought of the dying man's brother brought back his self-control, and he went off to sympathise, and condole with, Abdul Fazl. I spoke just now of Akbar's revenue system 88 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS which conferred upon India the boon of simple and just taxation in the place of the arbitrary and capricious demands made by former rulers upon the cultivators of the soil. The principal features of it were that the land was accurately measured and marked out, that the money equi- valent of the share of the state was determined on fixed and rational principles, and that the fees formerly levied by the officers of the Government — a vast source of extortion and vexation — were abolished. In the Ain-y-Akbari, or Regulations of Akbar, which forms the third volume of the Akbarnameh, there is a precise account of it. To that work also — made accessible to the English reader through several translations — we owe a minute and most interesting account of the estab- lishment and regulation of all the branches of Akbar's service, "from the Mint and the Treasury down to the fruit, perfumery, and flower offices, the kitchen and the kennel," the whole — I am quoting from Elphinstone — presenting "an aston- ishing picture of magnificence and good order." Akbar's life, in the midst of the splendour of his court, was as simple as dignified. European travellers who visited him describe him as affable and majestic, merciful and severe ; loved and feared of his own, terrible to his enemies. He lies buried at Agra, where so many magnificent structures were reared by him, in a mausoleum which is no unworthy sepulchre of so great a prince. " It is a sort of pyramid," writes Bishop Heber, " surrounded externally with cloisters, galleries, and domes, diminishing gradually on JEHANGHIR 89 ascending it, till it ends a square platform of white marble, surrounded by the most elaborate lattice work of the same material, carved with a delicacy and beauty which do full justice to the material, and to the graceful forms of the Arabic characters which form its chief ornament." There arose no king like unto Akbar among the Moghuls who came after him. His son Selim, who had embittered his last days by spasmodic attempts at rebellion, succeeded him, and took the pompous title — I am not aware for what reason^ — - of Jehanghir, " Conqueror of the World," by which name he is generally known. This " Conqueror of the World " appears to have been, upon the whole, not a bad ruler, according to the Eastern standard of rule. He was equitable and tolerant to his Hindu subjects, as became the son of a Rajput princess. But the old Tartar ferocity, of which we find no trace in Akbar, was strongly marked in him. Rebellious children are the great curse of Oriental dynasties, partly owing to the absence of the settled rule of succession now usually prevailing in the kingdoms of the West through the custom of primogeniture. Kushru, Jehanghlr's eldest son, who had endeavoured to supplant him even in Akbar's lifetime, broke into open revolt against him soon after his accession. The revolt was quelled within a month, and Kushru was brought in chains to his father at Lahore. In order to intimidate the young prince, Jehanghir ordered seven hundred of his principal accomplices to be impaled in a row, and caused him to be conducted along the line on an elephant, 90 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS while a mace-bearer, mocking the agonies of the sufferers, called upon him to receive the salutations of his friends. In the sixth year of his reign Jehanghir married Nur Jehan, whose romantic history, and striking personality, merit a few passing words. This very beautiful and accomplished woman was the daughter of a Persian nobleman who, reduced to poverty in his own country, emigrated to India to seek his fortune. Nur Jehan was born on the journey, just as the caravan reached Kandahar. And as the father had no means of supporting the baby, or even of paying for her journey, she was exposed by the road over which the travellers were to proceed next morning. A principal merchant of the caravan, struck with the child's beauty, had compassion on her, and announced his intention of providing for her. He further provided for the immediate needs of her relatives, and, subsequently, introduced her father and eldest brother to Akbar. After fulfilling some subordinate offices in that monarch's service, they were advanced to higher ones, upon their merits becoming manifest to his judging eye. When NiJr Jehan grew into girlhood she often accompanied her mother to the harem of Akbar, where she was seen by Jehanghir, who became violently enamoured of her. This coming to the ears of Akbar, he thought it advisable to remove the damsel from the prince's sight, and caused her to be married to a young Persian of good family named Shir Afghan Khan, who had recently entered his service, and to whom he gave a jaghir nUr jehan 91 in Bengal. In a few years Jehanghlr succeeded to the throne, and, shortly after that event, he determined to gratify his passion for the fair Persian, whom he had by no means forgotten, and directed his foster brother, the Viceroy of Bengal, to negotiate the matter with her husband. But in the course of an interview at which this was attempted. Shir Afghan Khan, so far from proving complaisant, entirely lost his temper, and stabbed the Viceroy to death, himself being immediately despatched, in return, by the viceregal attendants. Nur Jehan, shocked at this tragedy, for several years rejected all Jehanghir's overtures ; but in the event yielded to his importunities, and their marriage was celebrated with great pomp. Her influence over him was unbounded, and she was treated with a consideration never before shown to the consort of a Mohammedan sovereign. Her name appeared on the coinage beside the Emperor's, and he took no important step in the government of his dominions without consulting her. She was a woman of great natural capacity, and was usually a wise and prudent counsellor. Her power was, upon the whole, exerted for good. She repressed Jehanghir's caprice and tyranny, and induced him to be more sparing in the use of wine, to which a^ a young man he had been immoderately addicted. Her personal devotion to him was unquestionable, and upon one occasion she hazarded her life to deliver him from captivity to a rebellious general by whom he had been captured. At the end of his reign she was much mixed up in intrigues having for their object to oust 92 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS from the succession Shah Jehan, a son of Jehanghir who had married her niece, in favour of another and younger son, Sheriar, who had married her daughter by her first husband. But these intrigues failed, after causing a great deal of bloodshed, and on Jehanghir's sudden death of an asthma in 1627, Shah Jehan succeeded, and after slaying Sheriar, his only surviving brother, was firmly established upon the throne. Nur Jehan's influence expired with her husband, to whose cherished memory she devoted the remaining nineteen years of her life. She was treated with the greatest respect by the new monarch, and was allowed a pension of ;^2 50,000 a lyear. Shah Jehan had proved him- self a general of much ability during his father's lifetime. Among other achievements he had suc- ceeded in bringing to an honourable termination the conflict with the Rana of Udaipur, the greatest of the Rajput chiefs, and following the wise policy of Akbar, had assured to the vanquished prince a high position among the military paladins of the Empire. Shah Jehan's wars, chiefly with the potentates of the Deccan, need not detain us here. His civil administration of his dominions seems entitled to high praise. The historian, Khafi Khan, declares that for the good order and arrangement of his territory and finances, and the good administra- tion of every department of the state, no prince ever reigned in India that could be compared with Shah Jehan. And Elphinstone allows that after all deductions are made for fraudulent exaction by the collectors of revenue, and corruption SHAH JEHAN 93 in the ministers of justice, and for acts of extor- tion by custom house officers, and for arbitrary deeds by governors of provinces, "there will still remain enough to convince us that the state of India under Shah Jehan was one of great ease and prosperity." But Shah Jehan's fame rests chiefly upon the splendour of his court and of the structures which he erected. He was the most magnificent of the Moghuls, and kept his state upon that wonderful peacock throne — a blaze of diamonds and precious stones — which is estimated to have cost six and a half millions sterling, and is reckoned among the wonders of the world. He rebuilt Delhi on a regular plan, and adorned it with edifices of unrivalled magnificence, among which may be specially mentioned the palace — now the fort — the Great Mosque, a work of extraordinary elegance and grandeur, and the Taj Mahal, "a dream in marble, designed by Titans and executed by jewellers " : it is the mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal — the niece of Niir Mahal — whom he passionately loved, and whom he lost after fourteen years of marriage, within twelve months of his accession to the throne. Here I should note that his sons did unto him as he had done unto his father — and more also. His reign closed with a fratricidal war between four of them, resulting in his captivity to Aurungzebe — the third — in which he languished for the last eight years of his life. Aurungzebe's most pressing care after his usurpation was to get rid of his three brothers. In the first year of his sovereignty he put to 94 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS death Dara. In the second he completely broke the power of Shuja, who fled into Arakan and there perished miserably. In the third Murad was slain in prison. Thus began Aurungzebe's reign of forty-nine years (1658- 1707) under the title of Alamghlr, "the Conqueror of the Uni- verse." As a matter of fact, the portion of the universe which he conquered consisted of the Mo- hammedan kingdoms of Southern India. Three of these, Bedar, Ahmadnagar, and Ellichpur, had submitted to him before he attained the empire. It was not till 1680 that he annexed Bijapur. In the next year Golconda was subdued by his troops. His court was magnificent. His adminis- tration, at all events during the' earlier part of his reign, was careful and exact. He was un- questionably an able, valiant, and accomplished prince. Mussulman historians regard him as the greatest of the Moghul rulers, greater even than Akbar. In this they are wrong. He was certainly a more zealous Mohammedan. But the intoler- ance bred of his zeal is the secret of his failure as a ruler. He was a crowned and sceptred bigot. While extending his dominions, and carry- ing his empire to wider limits than any of his predecessors, he undermined the foundations of his rule. He reimposed the insulting poll tax (jizia) on non- Mussulmans throughout his territories. He sought to exclude all except Mussulmans from the public service. He desecrated shrines and destroyed sacred images of the Hindus. He prohibited many of their religious festivals. The dream of his life was the conversion of India to AURUNGZEBE 95 the faith of Islam. The effect of his proselytizing measures was to create disaffection and alarm throughout the country. His character and career present a curious similarity to the char- acter and career of Louis XIV. of France, whose reign was almost contemporaneous with his. To the men of their own time, both seemed magnifi- cent and illustrious. In Dryden's play of which Aurungzebe is the hero, he is presented as an ideal of magnanimity, and some of the noblest verses the poet ever wrote are put into his mouth. To Boileau, Louis XIV. was the em- bodiment of all kingly qualities: "Tout brille en lui, tout est roi," he declares. Far other is the judgment of history on "the Conqueror of the Universe" and the "Grand Monarque." In each it finds the same unscrupulousness, arrogance, and cruelty ; in each it detects theological fana- ticism usurping the place of pure religion and undefiled. It shows us how each, in the pleni- tude of his despotic egotism, by attempting to force his creed upon dissentient subjects, brought abopt the disruption of his realm and the ruin of his house. The palm of wickedness must be, indeed, conceded to the Most Christian King. The ravage of Rajputana was as atrocious an act as the ravage of the Palatinate. But there is nothing in the exploits of the sixth Moghul to equal in turpitude the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Dragonnades. Aurungzebe's reign of half a century came to an end in 170,7. He was then eighty-nine years old, " none of his senses," writes the historian Khafi 96 MOHAMMEDAN MASTERS Khan, " being impaired, except his hearing, and that in so small a degree that others could not perceive it." His last days were embittered by the not unnatural fear of such treatment from his sons as his father had experienced from him. It is related that not long before his end, upon Prince Azim seeking permission to visit him at Ahmed- nagar, where he was then encamped, on the ground of illness and desire for change of air, he observed " that is precisely the pretext I used to Shah Jehan." There is no need for entering here upon the history of his successors to the imperial throne, the last of whom, Mohammed Bahadur Shah, died forty years ago in captivity at Rangoon. They reaped the heritage of trouble which he had sown. It was in Aurungzebe's time that the Mahrattas came forward under Sivaji as a new Hindu power in Western and Central India : indeed, the last twenty years of his life were employed in waging an unsuccessful war against them. Immediately after his death, they began to close in upon the empire. They were aided in their work of destruction by the Rajputs, who in 1 7 1 5 became practically independent ; and by the Sikhs, a body of peaceful religionists, founded towards the end of the fifteenth century by Nanak Shah, who were converted in 1 710-17 16 by a bitter persecution into an armed nationality. In 1729, the Persian, Nadir Shah, swooped down upon India, sacked and plundered Delhi, and retired with a booty valued at 32,000,000 sterling — Shah Jehan's peacock • throne being among the THE CLOSE OF THE MOGHUL EMPIRE 97 Spoils. Then followed a tempest of invasion by the Afghans, resisted successfully by the Mahrattas until their decisive overthrow at the third battle of Panipat (1761), in which 200,000 of them are said to have perished. The victorious Ahmed Shah returned home without attempting to profit by his success. But, as Elphinstone observes, this third battle of Panipat really marks the close of the Moghul Empire. " Its territory is broken into separate states ; the capital is deserted ; the claimant to the name of Emperor is an exile and a dependant, while a new race of conquerors has already commenced its career, which may unite the empire under better auspices than before." CHAPTER X THE ENGLISH CONQUEST It is difficult for us to realise in how short a time the British Empire in India has grown up. A century ago it comprised only Bengal, Behar in Eastern Hindustan, a small territory round Bombay, and a somewhat larger round Madras. Two Indian princes — the Nawab Vizier of Oude and the Nawab of the Carnatic — were the protected allies of the English. Three others — the Nizam, Scindia, and Tippu — were their dreaded foes. Now, the whole country owns the sovereignty of the King- Emperor : and five-eighths of it are under his direct rule. It has been remarked by. De Toque- ville that the conquest and government of India are really the achievements which give England her place in the opinion of the world. No doubt this is so. It is equally beyond doubt that our greatness in India was forced upon us. Our Indian Empire was acquired, not by the deliberate design, but against the will of the people of England. I shall proceed in this Chapter to sketch in outline what Sir Henry Maine has well called " that wonderful succession of events which has brought the youngest THE EAST INDIA COMPANY 99 civilisation in the world to instruct and correct the oldest, which has re-united those wings of the Indo- European race — separated in the infancy of time to work out their strangely different missions." Thomas Stephens, the Jesuit, is the first Englishman known to have visited India in modern times. The date of his visit is 1578. His letters to his father, giving an account of it, stimulated the spirit of curiosity and adventure among us, and four years afterwards, three English merchants, whose names are worth remembering — Newberry, Fitch, and Leeds — made their way to the country overland. The Portuguese, who were already there, threw them into prison, first at Ormuzd, and then at Goa. Newberry, in the event, settled down as a shopkeeper at the last-mentioned place : Leeds entered into the service of Akbar : and Fitch, after long wanderings, found his way back to England. In 1600, "the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies " were incor- pofated by Royal Charter with a capital of ;^7o,ooo. They prospered exceedingly, their profits seldom falling below lOo per cent, and in 1612-13 their capital was raised to ;^40o,ooo. Other rival Com- panies were started from time to time, the most formidable being " The General Society trading to the East Indies," incorporated in 1698 with a capital of ;^2,ooo,ooo. In 1708 this "English" Company was amalgamated with the original " London " Company, under the style of " The United Company of Merchants of England trad- ing to the East Indies." That is "The East India Company," which has lasted till our time. lOO THE ENGLISH CONQUEST It is not necessary here to chronicle the conflict of English traders in India with Portuguese and Dutch during the seventeenth century. We may, however, note that the three great English cities of India then had their origin. Madras was founded in 1638, and was the first English territorial pos- session in that country. It was created an indepen- dent Presidency in 1653. The island of Bombay, which formed part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, came into our possession in 1665, and was made the seat of the Western Presidency twenty years afterwards. The beginnings of Cal- cutta must be referred to the year 1686. It was originally subordinate to Madras, and was not made an independent Presidency till 17 16. The eventual struggle for the possession of India was not between the English and the Portu- guese, or between the English and the Dutch, but between the English and the French, and took place in the eighteenth century. In 1674 the French founded their settlement of Pondicherry, some hundred miles lower than Madras on the Coromandel coast. And there, for seventy years, they peaceably pursued their commercial operations, although differences with the Madras Government arose, from time to time, and led to angry corre- spondence. But in 1743 war broke out between England and France. And in 1746 a French fleet, under La Bourdonnais, captured Madras. The English Government removed to Fort David, a similar settlement only twelve miles from Pondi- cherry. In 1748 a fleet arrived from England under Admiral Boscawen, and siege was laid to THE STRUGGLE WITH THE FRENCH lOI Pondicherry. It was then that CHve, a civiHan who had obtained an ensign's commission, first won military distinction. The siege of Pondicherry was unsuccessful, and was raised in three months. Shortly afterwards, hostilities between France and England were brought to a close by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and Madras was restored to the British. But Dupleix, the Governor of Pondicherry, nourished the dream of a French Empire in India ; and during the next fourteen years he laboured with all his might to realise it. He was no soldier. Battles, he said, confused his genius. But he was a consummate politician : and the story of his intrigues with the native potentates, through whom he sought to compass his designs, would fill a vast volume. In the wars which they produced, the English and the French were ranged on different sides. At first, the plans of Dupleix, ably seconded by his half-native wife, were crowned with success. In the early part of 1751 the ascendency of France was established throughout Southern India. Suddenly the situation was changed by the daunt- less courage and admirable strategy of Clive. His capture and defence of Arcot, in 1751, were the beginning of an unbroken series of English triumphs, finally crowned by the victory of Eyre Coote at Wandiwash in 1760 over Count Lally, General Bussy, and the whole French army, and by the capture of Pondicherry in 1761. Dupleix, who had been recalled to France in 1754, died ten years afterwards, ruined and broken hearted. Lally was judicially murdered in 1766. And in 102 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 1769 the French East India Company ceased to exist. Meanwhile Clive, promoted in 1755 to be Governor of Fort St David, had been called to Calcutta by the tragedy of the Black Hole — " that great crime, memorable for its singular atrocity, memorable for the tremendous retribution by which it was followed." On 23rd June 1757, the Battle of Plassy was fought and won. It is the date of the beginning of our Indian Empire. In 1758 Clive was appointed by the Court of Directors the first Governor of Bengal. His work during the next two years was the permanent establishment of British influence in the North Circars and at the Court of Hyderabad. In 1760 he returned to England, and was raised to the Irish peerage. He remained at home for five years, living in great splendour upon his income of ;^40,ooo a year — a very large one in that age — cultivating Parlia- mentary interest, and defending himself against a party among the Directors of the East India Com- pany who were jealous of his greatness. During those five years, affairs in Bengal were grossly mis- managed by the officials who held power there. Lord Macaulay goes so far as to say that their misgovernment was carried to a point such as seems hardly compatible with the very existence of society. " A succession of revolutions : a dis- organised administration : the natives pillaged, yet the Company not enriched : every fleet bringing back fortunate adventurers who were able to purchase manors and to build stately dwellings, yet bringing back also alarming accounts of the CLIVE 103 financial prospects of the Government : war on the frontier, disaffection in the army : the national character disgraced by excesses resembling those of Verres and Pizarro : such was the spectacle which dismayed those who were conversant with Indian affairs. The general cry was that Clive, and Clive alone, could save the empire which he had founded." Clive responded to the cry, after assuring his position with the Directors of the East India Company, and in May 1765 once more reached Calcutta and assumed office as Governor. He remained in India only a year and a half. But during that short time he accomplished two great works. He reorganised the Company's service, prohibiting that private trade which had been the source of frightful oppression and corruption, and establishing a liberal scale of official salaries. And he procured from the Moghul Emperor the grant of the Dewani or fiscal administration of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, which constituted the EngHsh the legal rulers of the country. He left India in 1767, for the last time, broken in health, and a poorer man than when he had returned to it. Of the "causes which embittered the remainder of his life and hurried him to an untimely grave," it is not necessary to speak here. But whatever blots are found on his career. Lord Macaulay's verdict upon him is certainly well warranted : " His name stands high in the roll of conquerors ; but it is found in a better list ; in the list of those who have done and suffered much for mankind." To Lord Clive must be given the first place among the founders of the Indian Empire. The 104 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST second belongs to one even greater — Warren Hast- ings. It is from his appointment as Governor- General, in 1774 — he was the first to fill that office — that we must date the foundation of the existing system of Indian Government. His name, like Clive's, has become a household word among us through the brilliant essays of Lord Macaulay. But certain it is that, in several important particu- lars, Macaulay was beti;ayed into injustice towards him by too implicit reliance upon traditions which have only more recently been discredited. It has been conclusively shown by the late Sir James Stephen that the charge of contriving the judicial murder, or something very like it, of Nuncomar, is untenable. And Sir John Strachey has given good reasons for thinking that the Rohilla war was by no means so flagitious an undertaking as it had for a century been believed to be. It is undeniable that whatever faults may stain Warren Hastings' long administration of the Indian Government — it lasted from 1774 to 1785 — his services to the State were of the highest order. And the verdict of posterity ratifies the verdict by which the House of Lords, after a seven years' trial, acquit- ted him of the charges urged by the majestic eloquence of Burke. Here again we may quote Lord Macaulay with full assent : " Those who look on his character without favour or male- volence, will pronounce that, in the two great elements of all social virtue, in respect for the rights of others, and in sympathy for the suffer- ings of others, he was deficient. His principles were somewhat lax. His heart was somewhat WARREN HASTINGS IO5 hard. But though we cannot with truth describe him either as a righteous or as a merciful ruler, we cannot regard without admiration the ampli- tude and fertility of his intellect, his rare talents for command, for administration, and for contro- versy, his dauntless courage, his honourable poverty, his fervent zeal for the interests of the State, his noble equanimity, tried by both extremes of fortune, and never disturbed by either." Warren Hastings was succeeded as Governor- General by Lord Cornwallis, whose first term of office lasted from 1786 to 1793, and who established on durable foundations the system of British ad- ministration which his predecessor had initiated. He is best known by his least successful achieve- ment — of which I shall have to speak in a sub- sequent Chapter — the Permanent Settlement of Bengal. In 1790-92, he commanded in person the British army in the second Mysore war — the first had been waged under Warren Hastings in 1780-84 — in which the Nizam of the Deccan and the Mahratta Confederacy co-operated as allies of the British. It resulted in the sub- mission of the Mysore ruler, the redoubtable Tippu Sultan, who was deprived of half his dominions and made to pay a fine of two millions sterling. With the exception of the disastrous Permanent Settlement of Bengal, carried out under the stringent orders of the Court of Directors, Lord Cornwallis's administrative measures were wisely conceived and admirably executed. It has been observed by a well-informed writer, " The Corn- Io6 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST wallis Code, whether for revenue, police, criminal and civil justice, or other functions, defined and set bounds to authority, created procedure, by a regular system of appeal guarded against the mis- carriage of justice, and founded the civil service of India as it exists to this day." Lord Mornington — created Marquis Wellesley in 1799 — ruled India from 1798 to 1805 : and un- questionably was one of her greatest rulers. As Clive must be regarded as the founder of the terri- torial system of the British Empire, and Warren Hastings as the founder of its administrative system, so Lord Wellesley was the founder of its political system. The friend and confidant of Pitt, his policy was shaped by the imperial spirit of that great statesman. On arriving in India he found French influence dominant at the courts of the principal Mohammedan prince, the Nizam, and the great Mahratta potentate Scindia, while the ruler of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, had openly sought the aid of Napoleon Bonaparte, then in Egypt, against the English, and had declared himself "a citizen of the French Republic." Lord Wellesley resolved to crush this curious citizen of the French Republic, and having induced the Nizam to receive and pay for a British force, and to discard his French officers, he sent into Mysore two British armies, to whose assistance his brother Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, brought a considerable body of the Nizam's troops. Tippu perished at the siege of Seringapatam (1799) : a youth who represented the ancient Hindu dynasty was proclaimed Maharajah of Mysore, and Arthur ARTHUR WELLESLEY lOj Wellesley was entrusted with the settlement and administration of that country. Lord Wellesley 's next great achievement was to break up the Mahratta Confederacy in Southern India which aimed at, and very nearly achieved, supreme power there. It was Arthur Wellesley who gave the death blow to it at the battle of Assaye (1803). There is no exaggeration in saying that he was the saviour of our rule in India. The course he pursued in that famous fight was daring in the extreme. But it was the truest wisdom : a retreat would almost certainly have been fatal to him. The battle of Assaye is second in importance only to the battle of Plassy. It was followed, as a natural consequence, by the paralysis of French influence and French intrigue. It was supplemented by Lord Lake's great victories of Delhi and Laswari. And England became indisputably the dominant power in the East. Here we may note that the Duke of Wellington gave to our rule in India not merely military strength, but moral force. He did much to raise the tone of official life there, and to purify the public service. To corruption, in all its forms and disguises, he was the unflinching foe. And the prudence of his policy towards the native chiefs is as remarkable as his military skill. Like Akbar he knew how successfully to conciliate the foes he had subdued. His, too, was a sword "that only con- quers men to conquer peace." Lord Wellesley left India in August 1805. He had found the Moghul Empire in complete dissolution. He had raised the British Empire on its ruins. He had brought the North-West Io8 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST Provinces under British rule. He had acquired the greater part of the territory in South-Eastern India, now constituting the Madras Presidency. And in South-Western India he had reduced the Mahratta ruler, the Peshwa, to vassalage, thus preparing the way for the destruction of that Prince's power in the fourth Mahratta war {1818), when the dominions of the vanquished potentate were annexed by Lord Hastings. They now form a portion of the Bombay Presidency. It was in 18 13 that the Marquis of Hastings — he was then Lord Moira — came to India as Governor-General. After the departure of Lord Wellesley, Lord Cornwallis was again nominated to the office, but died within a few months of his arrival. Next Sir George Barlow officiated in it for two years, when he was sent to the subordinate Government of Madras, upon the appointment of Lord Minto, whose rule of six years (1807-13), was marked by no incident which need be mentioned in this brief sketch. The most important event of the Marquis of Hastings' long Governor-General- ship (18 14-1823), was the fourth and last Mahratta war which has been already mentioned. But his reign was also memorable for the Nepaul war (18 14-15), in which General Ochterlony achieved the brilliant march to Khatmandu, and dictated there the peace which assured to us the hill stations of Naini Tal, Massuri, and Simla, and for the suppression (1815) of the Pindari bands of mar- auders who desolated Central India. Then came Lord Amherst (1823-28), and the first war with Burmah, which resulted in the cession to us of a "the benevolent bentinck 109 portion of that country. The next Governor- General was Lord William Bentinck, who twenty years before had been Governor of Madras : " the benevolent Bentinck " who — to quote Macaulay's inscription on his statue at Calcutta — "never forgot that the end of government is the welfare of the governed ; who abolished cruel rites : who effaced humiliating distinctions : who allowed liberty to the expression of public opinion : whose constant study it was to elevate the intellectual and moral character of the nation committed to his charge." His reign lasted from 1828 to 1835. And it was in 1833 that Macaulay was appointed legal member of his Council, being the first to hold that office. Lord Auckland's Governor - Generalship — it lasted from 1836 to 1842 — was made memorable by our intervention for the first time in the affairs of Afghanistan. For two years the country was occupied by British troops. Then came the murder of Sir William Macnaughten, the Political Officer, and the destruction of our army in its attempt to make its way back to India through the passes. In 1842 Lord Ellenborough succeeded Lord Auck- land as Governor-General, and two British armies, under Generals Pollock and Nott respectively, made their way to Kabul, which they sacked, blowing up the great bazaar with gunpowder. In 1843 Lord Ellenborough annexed Sind. In 1844 he was recalled, and was succeeded by Sir Henry Hardinge, subsequently advanced to the peerage as Lord Hardinge. Lord Hardinge held office as Governor- General for four years. The chief event of his reign was no THE ENGLISH CONQUEST the first Sikh war. As was stated in a previous Chapter, the Sikhs were a sect founded by Nanak Guru out of Hindus, Mohammedans, and others in the fifteenth century. At first gentle reH- gionists, the savage persecution of the Moghul Emperors in the early eighteenth century con- verted them into valiant warriors. About the beginning of the nineteenth century one of them, Runjeet Singh, established himself as their personal ruler, making Lahore his capital, and extending his conquests south to Multan, west to Peshawar, and north to Kashmir. Up to his death in 1839, he was faithful to an alliance into which he had entered with the British. But when he had passed away, troubles arose, issuing in the invasion in 1845 of our territories by a Sikh army of 60,000 men with 150 guns. They were opposed by Sir Hugh Gough, afterwards raised to the peerage as Lord Gough, who in three weeks fought four pitched battles with them, at the last of which, Sobraon, they were decisively overthrown. Peace was then concluded, Dhuleep Singh, the infant son of Runjeet, being recognised as Maharajah, a portion of Sikh territory being annexed by the British, and the Rajput, Golab Singh, a Sikh general, being constituted Maharajah of Kashmir for a payment of a million in hard cash towards the expenses of the war, one of the most disgrace- ful transactions that stain our rule in India. In 1848 Lord Dalhousie went out as Governor- General, at the comparatively early age of thirty-six. He held the office for eight memorable years, leaving the impress of his vast energy, iron will, LORD DALHOUSIE 1 1 I and intense devotion to duty, upon every branch of the administration. The second Sikh war broke out before he had been in the country six months. It ended within a year in the decisive victory of Guzarat. Lord Dalhousie determined upon the annexation of the whole of the Punjab as the only way of ending its chronic misgovernment. And the event has justified his policy. The country soon became tranquil, and has steadily advanced in prosperity. And the Sikhs are among the most loyal and contented subjects of the British Crown. Dhuleep Singh received for his relinquishment of the sovereignty a grant of ;^58,ooo a year, and lived as an English gentleman upon an estate in Norfolk. In 1852 the second war with Burmah broke out. It resulted in the annexation of a further portion of that country. In 1856 the king- dom of Oudh, long a prey to anarchy and oppres- sion, was annexed, the ex-king being allowed a pension of ;^ 120,000 a year, upon which he settled down in a suburb of Calcutta. Further accretions of territory took place during Lord Dalhousie's reign by the lapse to the British Government of the states of Sattara, Jhansi, and Nagpur, upon the death of their respective Rajahs without heirs male. But Lord Dalhousie's long term of office was distinguished not merely by the extension of British territory, but also by his indefatigable exertions to promote the moral and material well- being of the people over whom he ruled. He was the real founder of the Indian Universities. He set on foot vast and most beneficent schemes of public works. Under him the railway system of 112 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST India was begun. He introduced into the country the half - anna post. The admirably successful system of administration in the Punjab and in Burmah was initiated by him. He went home to die — his constitution, never strong, quite broken down by his labours and anxieties. Lord Dalhousie's friend, Lord Canning, the illustrious son of the illustrious George Canning, was the next Governor-General. In little more than a year from his assumption of office, the Indian Mutiny broke out. It would almost seem as if some presage of a great calamity must have arisen in his mind when, on the eve of his departure from England, he said, at a farewell banquet given by the Court of Directors : " I wish for a peaceful term of office : but I cannot forget that in our Indian Empire that greatest of all blessings depends upon a greater variety of chances, and a more precarious tenure, than in any other quarter of the globe. We must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man's hand ; but growing bigger and bigger, may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin." It would be difficult to depict more accurately than in these prophetic words the course of the Indian Mutiny. The affair of the greased cartridges, which seemed to the official mind a mere bagatelle, was, as a matter of fact, the occasion of a commotion which shook the British Raj to its foundations. In May 1857 the sepoys at Meerut rose on their officers, and began the work of massacre. It was not until the middle of the year 1858 that Sir Hugh Rose, LORD CANNING II3 afterwards Lord Strathnairn, finally suppressed the insurrection in Central India. There is no need to touch here even upon the outlines of the tragedy which filled that space of time. The massacre at Cawnpore, the siege and storming of Delhi, the defence and relief of Lucknow, the heroic deeds associated with the names of Havelock, Lawrence, Outram, and Colin Campbell, are fresh in all memories. But it is well to turn the mind's eye to Lord Canning, unmoved throughout that season of stress and storm ; realising the ideal of the "just man, firm of purpose," depicted by the Roman poet ; declining to swerve one hair's breadth from the course of justice in obedience to the " rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness " which, as he wrote to the Queen in September 1857, was "abroad, even among those who ought to set a better example." "As long as I have breath in my body," he protested to Lord Granville, a short time afterwards, " I will pursue no other policy than that I have been following : justice, and that as stern and inflexible as law and might can make it, I will deal out : but I will never allow an angry or undiscriminating act or word to proceed from the Government of India as long as I am responsible for it." The suppression of the Mutiny was followed by the extinction of the East India Company as a ruling body. In 1858 an Act for the better government of India transferred the administration of that country to the Crown, acting through a Principal Secretary of State. Shortly after the passing of this measure, a great Durbar was H 114 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST held at Allahabad, at which Lord Canning — who had now become Viceroy — published the Royal Proclamation, announcing that the Queen had assumed the Government of India, and declaring the policy of justice and religious toleration which would be pursued by herself and her successors. In March 1862 Lord Canning went home in a moribund state, and was succeeded by Lord Elgin, who died in November of the following year. Then came the five years' Viceroyalty of Sir John Lawrence — afterwards raised to the peerage — whose wise and firm administration had saved the Punjab during the Mutiny. The next Viceroy was Lord Mayo, whose short term of office — he was cut off by the hand of an assassin in 1872 — was marked by a great development of public works. His successor. Lord Northbrook, held the Viceroyalty for four years, and was followed in 1876 by Lord Lytton, who in 1877 held a great Durbar at Delhi, when the Queen was proclaimed Empress of India, and who in 1880 made way for the Marquis of Ripon. The first year of the new Viceroy's rule was marked by the conclusion of the war with Afghanistan, occasioned by the murder of Sir Louis Cavagnari. The remaining three were years of peace, devoted chiefly to legislative measures recommended by the name of Liberal. Of these measures the most notable was the so-called Ilbert Bill, which pro- posed to extend the jurisdiction of the rural criminal courts over European British subjects, irrespective of the race or nationality of the pre- siding magistrate. This project was vehemently opposed, not only in India but also in England, LORD RIPON 115 and was ultimately amended by its restriction to the Courts of District Magistrates and Sessions Judges. Whatever view we may take of some portions of Lord Ripon's policy, there can be no question as to his high character, rectitude of purpose, and unswerving loyalty to his sense of duty. Few English rulers have so largely won the confidence and affection of the native population. When he retired in 1884, he was succeeded by the Marquis of Dufferin, who in the next year was driven by the hostile attitude of the Burmese king to annex the country over which that monarch ruled : thereby completing the conquest of the territories which form the Indian Empire. PART IV RELIGIONS CHAPTER XI HINDUISM I NOW come to speak of the religions of India. The broad lines of demarcation are between Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Three-fifths of the people of India profess Hinduism. But, as we shall presently see, it would be difficult to give any accurate definition of Hinduism : to say what it is, where it begins, and where it ends. There is not the same difficulty about Mohammedanism, which is the religion of some 60,000,000 of the inhabitants of the Indian Empire ; or about the Buddhism of the Southern Church, which is the religion of the 9,000,000 who dwell in Burmah. These are definite and homo- geneous creeds. There are 2,500,000 of Christians, of various kinds. The Sikhs, Jains, and Parsis, however considerable from other points of view, are numerically a mere handful. In this part of my work I shall speak first of Hinduism, devoting to it the present Chapter. The next will deal with the other non-Christian religions of India. Then will follow one on Christianity. The Rig- Veda is confessedly the work of trans- 119 1 20 HINDUISM cendent authority on the beliefs and practices which make up Hinduism. All other Indian Sacred Books are subordinate to it. The name sruti, or revelation, is uniquely applied to it. Less holy writings are called smriti, or tradition. The Vedic religion is the first phase of that poly- theistic idea of the universe which, after the transformations, and developments, and corrup- tions of three thousand years, still subsists in India, and dominates the minds of the great majority of her people. Let us consider it a little. The gods of the Vedas are personifications — there is no better word available — of physical forces and phenomena. The religious beliefs enshrined therein are founded on that nature worship which was originally common to all the branches of the Indo-European family. The Light, the Sun, the Dawn, the Wind, the Fire, are celebrated in the Vedic hymns with vivid and picturesque imagery, as manifestations of Divinity. In the god Varuna — the name is the same as the Greek word for Heaven, Oiz/oavo? — the attributes of power and majesty found in the other objects of worship are combined. But Varuna appears to be merely the chief of many deities — primus inter pares — who keep watch over the universe. To say that there is absolutely no moral element in this old Vedic religion would be incorrect. Sin is recognised as evil, righteousness as good. But if we proceed to inquire what constitutes sin, and what righteous- ness, we find little trace of those ethical conceptions which lie at the root of modern European life. THE VEDIC RELIGION 121 "The Vedic minstrels," writes Barth, "feel the weight of other duties besides those of multiplying offerings to the gods, and the punctilious observ- ance of religious ritual ; but we must admit that the observance of these is with them a matter of capital importance, and that their religion is pre- eminently ritualistic : the pious man is, by distinc- tion, he who makes the soma* flow in abundance, and whose hands are always full of butter ; while the reprobate man is one penurious towards the gods, the worship of whom is the first duty." Of the features of modern Hinduism most repug- nant to the European mind there is no mention in the Vedas ; the atrocities of Siva and Kali ; the licentiousness of Krishna ; the grotesque adven- tures of Vishnu ; child marriage, sutti, and per- petual widowhood. So much as to the religion of the I ndo- Aryans up to, say, B.C. 1200; the religion treasured up in those Vedic hymns which, as Weber remarks, "they had brought with them from their ancient homes on the banks of the Indus, and which they had there used for invoking prosperity on themselves and their flocks, in their adoration of the dawn, in celebration of the struggle between the god who wields the lightning and the powers of darkness, and in rendering thanks to the heavenly beings for preservation in battle." How this Vedic religion passed into Brahminism we have no means of determining. But it did so pass, as its naturalism was metaphysically construed and sacerdotally * The fermented drinkable juice of a plant so named, offered in libation to the gods. 122 HINDUISM developed in the Brahmanas. The Vedic deities became gradually more and more shadowy in the popular mind. The rites performed by the priestly caste — the Brahmins — assumed an ever greater and greater importance. In the word caste, indeed, we have the key to the explanation of this second phase of the Indo-Aryan religion. The fourfold division of the people into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Sudras is, no doubt, foreshadowed even in the Rig-Veda; the priesthood appears there as con- stituting a distinct profession and as hereditary. But in this second period, the caste distinctions are, so to speak, stereotyped ; they assume the rigidity which finds expression in xhe-Laws of Manu. The Brahmin alone knows the rites of religion with their hidden and mystic meaning ; and his supre- macy is established. In this period, which may be roughly considered to extend from looo to 500 B.C., sacrifices hold a great place ; and, as Barth remarks, "among the victims, which consist of all imaginable kinds of domestic and wild animals, there is one which recurs with ominous frequency, viz., man." But while the Brahmins were thus building up a stupendous system of rites, they were busy with the philosophic speculations which are enshrined in the Upanishads. These sacred books are meta- physical treatises, largely pantheistic in tone, largely mystical, largely allegorical. The origin and destiny of things, the nature of deity, the con- stitution of the soul, the genesis of mental error, of moral evil, are their main themes. But, to quote Barth again, "these singular books are still more THE UPANISHADS I 23 practical than speculative. They address them- selves more to man as man, than to man as thinker. Their aim is not so much to expound systems, as to unfold the way of salvation. They are pre- eminently exhortations to the spiritual life, per- plexed and confused, indeed, but delivered at times with a pathos which is both lofty and affecting. It seems as if the whole religious life of the period, which we miss so much in the ritualistic literature, had become concentrated in these writings. [They regard] the separated condition of the soul, which is the cause of mental error, as also the cause of moral error. Ignorant of its true nature, the soul attaches itself to objects unworthy of it. Every act which it performs to gratify this attachment, en- tangles it deeper in the perishable world ; and, as it is in itself imperishable, it is condemned to a perpetual series of changes. Once dragged into the samsara, into the vortex of life, it passes from one existence into another without respite and without rest. This is the twofold doctrine of the karman, i.e., the act by which the soul determines its own destiny, and of the punarbhava, i.e., the successive rebirths which it undergoes. This doctrine, which is henceforth the fundamental hypothesis common to all the sects and religions of India, is found formulated in the Upanishads for the first time." Unquestionably, this doctrine had sunk deeply into the popular mind, when Sakya Muni began to preach and to teach, and to lay the foundations of the religion which, numerically considered, is still the most prevailing of the world's creeds. I 124 HINDUISM shall have to speak of it, particularly, in the next Chapter. Here I would remark that though the spiritual greatness of its founder has impressed a distinct character on Buddhism, it is as truly both a development of and a reaction against Brahmin- ism, as Christianity is a development of and a re- action against Judaism. Its underlying doctrine is essentially that doctrine of the Upanishads at which we have just glanced. On the other hand, it may be called, with entire accuracy, "a protest against the tyranny of Brahminism and caste." We must remember, however, that the protest was rather implicit than explicit. The Buddha was no conscious revolutionist. He does not ap- pear to have controverted the cosmogony or the theology of the Brahmins. His teaching seems to have been purely ethical ; its substance that exist- ence, in any form, must necessarily be evil ; and that the only way to get rid of evil is to get rid of the desire of existence. The Buddha was born, and lived, and died a Hindu. "His whole teach- ing," Mr Rhys Davids emphatically observes, " was Brahminism ; he probably deemed himself to be the most correct exponent of the spirit as distinct from the letter of the ancient faith ; and it can only be claimed for him that he was the greatest, the wisest, and the best of the Hindus." But in declaring that his law was " a law of grace for all" in receiving all who came to him without distinction of birth or status, in opening to all his kingdom of righteousness wherein reigned "uni- versal brotherhood and spiritual equality," he un- doubtedly struck a fatal blow to the system of caste SIVA 125 which is the corner-stone of Brahminism. In the long run, Buddhism and Brahminism were found incompatible. The death of the Buddha occurred, probably, in B.C. 543. And within two or three centuries his doctrine became the fashionable religion in India. How it lost its hold upon the people we do not know. But we do know that by the tenth century of our era it had practically disappeared. During those thousand years a great transformation had taken place in the Brahminical religion. It had overcome Buddhism by new combinations of belief, philosophy, and epic legend, of which the Baghavat-Glta is the chief literary symbol. The religion of the Vedas had practically disappeared ; it had given place to the religion of the Puranas. The worship of Siva had arisen, and in the eighth century of our era it was widely and successfully propagated by Sankaracharya — a great name in Hindu theology. His work it was to mould the Vedantic philosophy into final form, and to base thereon a popular religion. He died at the age of thirty-two, after having preached his doctrines throughout India ; and is to this day venerated as an incarnation of Siva. Personally, he was a Deist, holding the visible world to be the creation of an omnipotent deity — the sole and supreme God. But among the masses his religion became a religion of fear and of the coarsest idolatry. It is recorded that one of his latest utterances was, " Oh Lord, pardon my three sins ; I have in contemplation clothed in form Thee, who art formless ; I have, in praise, described Thee, who 126 HINDUISM art ineffable ; and in visiting shrines I have ignored Thy omnipresence." It is claimed by the votaries of Sankara that all the chief sects of modern Hinduism were founded by his disciples. There are, besides the Sivites — of whom there are thirteen varieties — the Vishnavites, worshippers of Vishnu ; the Sauras, worshippers of Surya, the Sun ; and the Gana- patras, worshippers of Ganesa, the lord of the demons ; to whom we may perhaps add the Saktists, worshippers of the Sakti or female energy of Siva, as they seem to constitute a distinct body. What is the genesis of Siva himself cannot with certainty be determined. Some learned men regard him as a modification of Rudra, the storm god of Vedas. Others consider that " the recognition of his godhead is a survival of some ancient form of demon worship." Certain it is that the religion of the lower Indo-Aryan races is a religion of demon worship, and that to them Siva, the Destroyer, specially appealed. But Siva is not only the Destroyer. He is also the Reproducer — " I bring to life, I bring to death." To the more highly educated Hindus, he is the symbol of death merely as a change of life. It is as regarding him in this deeper significance that the ordinary Brahmin is a votary of his, with the lingam. as his expressive emblem. I may here remark that phallic worship, like tree worship, was probably borrowed by Hindu- ism — one of the most receptive of religions — from the aboriginal tribes. The procreative and pro- ductive energies of nature were among the first facts to impress with wonder and awe the mind of VISHNU 127 primitive man, awaking to speculation on the origin of things. The mystery of sex is unquestionably one of the greatest mysteries. And the early religious conceptions which were associated with the lingam, and the yoni, must be distinguished from the morbid prurience and lascivious mystic- ism into which they naturally degenerated. This by the way. Next in popularity to the worship of Siva, which is still the most prevailing element in the religion of the Hindus, comes the worship of Vishnu, the deity chiefly honoured by the trading classes. Vishnu is specially known as the Preserver, and is, at all events, so far as his name goes, a Vedic deity. In the Rig- Veda he is spoken of as a form of the sun or penetrating solar ray. In practice he is regarded by the numerous sects of his votaries as the Supreme Deity, just as the Sivite sects attribute that pre- eminence to Siva. He is worshipped for the most part in his Avatars or Incarnations, of which they reckon ten, the most notable being those in which he was made man, first as Rama and then as Krishna — the favourite deity of the Hindu women, who adore him as Bala Gopala, the Infant Cowherd. It may here be noted that the Vishnavite sects are marked by perpendicular white lines shaped like a trident, from the roots of the hair to the eyebrow ; while the Sivite sects employ three horizontal lines drawn across the forehead. It must not be supposed that Sivism and Vishnavism are opposed, or incompatible creeds. They merely represent different aspects of Hindu theology, and their professors dwell together in unity. It may 128 HINDUISM be added that Siva and Vishnu are, in practice, chiefly adored in the persons of their consorts, the wife of Vishnu being Lakshmi, while Siva's consort is the goddess called Kali, Durga, Jagad- hatu, or Mahl. It was out of devotion to the female energies of Nature, as represented by these consorts of Siva and Vishnu, that the Tantras were composed ; the latest of the religious writings of the Hindus, and the most grossly licentious. Although it may be said, generally, that all Hindus are worshippers either of Siva, Vishnu, or of their female energies, there is another prin- cipal god and person of what is popularly called the Hindu Trinity, namely, Brahma, the Creator. In the general mind, however, he holds an in- significant place. He is regarded, apparently, as functus officio, and there seems to be only one shrine of importance throughout the whole of India specially sacred to him. It is at Pushkara, near Ajmere. " The worship which was once his due," writes Sir Monier Williams, "was trans- ferred to the Brahmins, regarded as his peculiar offspring, and, as it were, his mouthpieces ; while his consort, SarasvatI, once a river goddess, was regarded as the goddess of speech and learning, and inventress of the Sanskrit language and letters." But, besides these three principal deities, there are innumerable minor ones, or semi - divine beings — 30,000,000 of them are reckoned, and for the most part they are infamous conceptions — who are the objects of worship. Hinduism is the most tolerant of religions. The educated Brahmin regards popular legends as merely broken lights THE MOST TOLERANT OF RELIGIONS 1 29 of the Supreme Reality. The uneducated Hindu is ready to worship anything. Mr Wilkins, in his Modern Hinduism, relates: "An old Brahmin pundit and priest, with whom I frequently con- versed on these subjects, told me that in his own daily worship he first made an offering to his own chosen deity, Vishnu, and that when this was done, he threw a handful of rice for the other deities to scramble for it ; it was his hope, he explained, that by thus recognising the existence and authority of them, though he had no clear notion in his mind about any of them, he would keep them in good humour towards himself" The truth is that modern Hinduism is as complicated, as irregular, as multiform as the roof of a pagoda. We have seen that it is a develop- ment of Brahminism, just as Brahminism was a development of Vedism. But it no more resembles its original than the rank vegetation of an Indian forest represents the original germs or seeds. Sects, rites, doctrines, are innumerable. Articles of faith, fundamental dogmas, great lines of thought there are none. Theism, Pantheism, Polytheism, Fetichism, Nature Worship, Demon Worship, Ancestor Worship, Animal Worship — all are there, dissolved, so to speak, in an element of Pantheistic philosophy. The Brahmin seek- ing absorption in deity, the fakir earning the paradise of Siva by years of self-torture, the recluse honouring Vishnu by works of mercy, the Saktist revelling in sexual impurity, the Gond, the Pariah, on his knees before a shape- less stone — all are equally orthodox. Each of I 130 HINDUISM the huge army of deities is so various in his form and qualities, that he may be realised in another. Siva, the Lord of Death, is, as we have seen, the Lord of Life also ; he is the Destroyer, but he is the Producer too. More, he is a great ascetic and the model of ascetics. But he is a great voluptuary, and is honoured by debauch. His five faces, six arms, three eyes, and thousand appellations express the variety of his attributes. Vishnu, again, the Preserver, the Force which upholds the universe — rerum tenax vigor, as the Latin poet sings — is known in his incarnations, and especially in the form of Rama and of Krishna. But the worship and legends of these two deities have become almost indefinitely varied and multi- plied. The beliefs which have grown round the trunk of Vishnavism — if I may so speak — are countless. It has associated elements of Buddhism, of Mohammedanism, nay, of Christianity. For, surely, there is something more than an analogy between Christianity and Krishna worship ; while the Lutheran and the Krishnaite doctrines of the all-sufficiency of faith are most curiously alike in their essential antinomianism. It is significant that learned Brahmins have been quite willing to regard Christ himself as an incarnation of Vishnu for the benefit of the Western world. And here I should note that when we speak of Hinduism as a religion, the word has a much more restricted sense than that which it bears when we apply it to Buddhism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity. In all those creeds there is an ethical element. In modern Hinduism there is VANUS DEORUM TIMOR I3I none. In this faith there is an absolute divorce between religion and morality. In it murder may assume the character of a religious duty — as, for example, among the Thugs. So may theft. There were sects — like the Thugs they have been sup- pressed by the strong arm of the British Govern- ment — who honoured Siva by larceny. The pro- miscuous intercourse of the sexes is a chief incident of the religious festivities of the Saktists. Dancing girls are among the endowed ministers of temple worship ; and commerce with them is regarded as meritorious, as an act of devotion to the idol whose brides they are. Modesty, as we under- stand it, the Hindus know not. Their religion does not limit a married man to exterior decency, to say nothing of conjugal fidelity. Things which, in the language of the Apostle, it is shame even to speak of, are done by them not in secret but openly. All daily reverence the lingam and the yoni. The native conception of the relation of the sexes is merely animal. Love in the sense which it bears in the Western world — as hallowed by Christianity and disciplined by chivalry — is unknown in Hindu life. Children are married, and are immediately separated until they arrive at maturity. Then they are brought together, but the wife is merely her husband's first servant. The widow is an outcast and object of loathing, the very sight of her is an ill omen. But I shall have to speak of this later on. In fact the religion of the ordinary Hindu is superstition, as Cicero defines it : vanus deorunt tvhtor. Vain fear of unseen powers, and the desire 132 HINDUISM of propitiating them, rule his life. This is the foundation upon which the power of the Brahmins rests. The world, a well-known text declares, is under the power of the gods ; the gods are under the power of the mantras * ; the mantras are under the power of the Brahmins ; therefore the gods are under the power of the Brahmins. One of the most curious of Hindu superstitions is connected with shaving — an essential preliminary of every religious rite. It is summed up in the text : " Sins as huge as Mount Meru or Mandara, Sins of various kinds, These all adhere to the hair of the head ; For these sins do I undergo this shaving." And, as it is forbidden by religion that a man should shave himself, the barber is a person of much importance. He is a regular officer of the Hindu village ; and an endowment in land is set apart for him. It is his right to shave the people of the village, and, unless my memory is at fault, the Courts have upheld that right by injunction. Religion also prescribes that a man must be shaved fasting. Another matter of great importance in Hinduism is the sacred thread. Manu orders, " In the eighth year from the conception of a Brahmin, in the eleventh from that of a Kshatriya, and in the twelfth from that of a Vaishya, let the father invest the child with the tokens of his class : " that is the sacred thread, the frontal mark, and the sacred top-knot. The marks on the forehead * Mantras are religious formulas used by the Brahmins. THE RELIGIOUS MENDICANTS 1 33 have already been described, and the top-knot needs nO description. The sacred thread, a cord or skein over the left shoulder, hanging down under the right arm like a sash, is the outward visible sign of the three twice-born classes. Sudras have no right to assume it, though some do. It is not, in fact, put on by the father, but by the guru, or spiritual director of the family, who, at the same time, teaches the child a mantra, a short Sanskrit text, or the name of some deity, which must be kept a profound secret, and repeated one hundred and eight times a day. A rosary is often used to help the recitation. Very conspicuous persons in modern Hinduism are the religious mendicants. There are some five millions of them, of various kinds, described by a learned Hindu gentleman, Mr Jogendra Nath Bhat- tacharya, in his valuable book on Hindu Castes and Sects, as "sleek in body and pestilential in morals." This authority proceeds : " When a mendicant has acquired a character for sanctity by any one of the usual processes, he has only to give out that he has found an idol by miracle, with injunctions to erect a temple to it. The necessary funds for the purpose being never supplied miraculously to the devotee, he invites subscriptions from the pious ; and when the temple is built, a part of it naturally becomes his dwelling house. With the further contributions made by the visitors to the shrine, he is enabled to live in comfort. When a shrine is in the struggling stage, the high priest generally leads a pure life, and spends a large part of his income in feeding the poor pilgrims. But the high priests 134 HikDUISM of the temples\ that have a well-established char- acter for sanctity, are usually just the kind of men that they ought not to be. There are thus five stages in the careers of the successful monks and nuns. First the beggar, then the charlatan, then the temple-promoter, then the princely high priest, and last of all the debauchee. The theme is one to which justice could be done only by the genius of a Shakespeare." Of course these pungent remarks of this extremely well-informed Hindu gentleman must be accepted with reservation. All religious mendi- cants in India are not of that type. There is much fanatical asceticism which is perfectly sincere. Some devotees have given proof of their sincerity by causing themselves to be buried alive. Others have practised; and still practise, the most horrible self-torture. " In our days cruel mortifications are becoming rare. Yet there are still Akacamukhiris and Urdhvatalines, who pose themselves in im- movable attitudes, their fates and their arms raised to heaven, till the sinews shrink and the posture assumed often stiffens into rigidity ; as well as Nagas, Paramahanavas, Avadhutas, and others, who, in spite of English interdicts, expose them- selves to the inclemency of the weather in a state of absolute nudity." Enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate how in modern Hinduism only the faintest traces are discernible of the Vedic beliefs whence it has sprung. Assuredly we must account it a religion in the last stage of decadence and decay. "It is true," to quote the words of Professor Max Muller A LIVING DEATH OF RELIGION 1 35 in his Westminster Abbey Lecture, "there are milHons of children, women, and men in India who fall down before the stone image of Vishnu, with his four arms, riding on a creature, half bird, half man, or sleeping on the serpent, who worship Siva, a monster with three eyes, riding naked on a bull, with a necklace of skulls for his ornament. There are human beings who still believe in a god of war, Kartikeya, with six faces, riding on a peacock, and holding bow and arrow in his hands ; and who invoke a god of success, Ganesa, with four hands and an elephant's head, sitting on a rat. Nay, it is true that in the broad day- light of the nineteenth century, the figure of the goddess Kali is carried through the streets of her own city, Calcutta, her wild, dishevelled hair reaching to her feet, with a necklace of human heads, her tongue protruded from her mouth, her girdle stained with blood. All this is true ; but ask any Hindu who can read, and write, and think, whether these are the gods he believes in, and he will smile at your credulity. How long this living death of national religion in India may last, no one can tell." The dictum, " Segnius irritant animum demissa per aures Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus," is as true as it is hackneyed. Anyone who wants to realise what modern Hinduism is would do well, should opportunity offer, to visit Benares, its centre, its very heart — Benares, the sacred city on the sacred Ganges : more hallowed by 1 ^6 HINDUISM the countless votaries who flock thither, than Jeru- salem by the ancient Hebrew, than Mecca by the Moslem, or Rome by the Catholic, of our own day. So holy is it that death on its soil is the gate of life, the abundant entrance to the Paradise of Siva : and this to every one : to the Mussulman, the Christian, the eater of beef, the slayer of the cow, no less than to the thrice born, learned in the Vedas, or the fakir, slowly self-immolated by years of penance. This marvellous city was already famous when Rome was a mere collection of shepherds' tents, when Mecca was an unwalled village, nay, long before Joshua smote Adoni- Zedec, King of "Jebusi, which is Jerusalem," with his four confederate chieftains, and slew them and hanged them on five trees. Wonderful, indeed, is the spectacle which Benares presents with its 25,000 Brahmins; its 2000 temples and innumer- able shrines ; its 500,000 idols, of all varieties of hideousness and obscenity ; its streets full of pil- grims jostled by sacred cows who feed peaceably on their offerings, and by gambolling and gibber- ing apes ; its clear air darkened by the columns of smoke from the funeral piles which are turning the devout dead into ashes to be mingled with its sacred stream, in whose lustral waters thousands of the devout living are seeking to wash all their sins away. ' There is, however, another consideration which must not be lost sight of, when we survey the gloomy and repulsive, the absurd and obscene features of modern Hinduism. And I do not know who has better expressed it than Barth, MIRA BAI 137 in words which may serve to conclude this Chapter : — " It would be to display great ignorance indeed of the immense resources of the religious sentiment, to presume that the effect of such things as these must be necessarily and universally demoralising. The common people have a certain safeguard in the very grossness of their superstition, and among the higher ranks there are many souls that are at once mystically inclined and pure-hearted, who know how to extract the honey of pure love from this strange mixture of obscenities. That is a touching legend, for instance, of that young queen of Udayapura, a contemporary of Akbar (in the end of the sixteenth century), Mira Bai, who renounced her throne and her husband rather than abjure Krishna, and who, when close pressed by her persecutors, went and threw herself at the feet of the image of her god, exclaiming, ' I have abandoned my love, my wealth, my kingdom, my husband. Mira, thy servant, comes to thee, her refuge ; oh, take her wholly to thyself ! If thou knowest me to be free from every stain, accept me. Except thee, no other will have compassion on me ; pity me, therefore. Lord of Mira, her well-beloved, accept her, and grant that she be no more parted from thee for ever ! ' Upon this the image opened, and Mira Bai disappeared in its sides." CHAPTER XII OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS In this Chapter, I shall glance, briefly,, at the principal non-Christian creeds, other than Hindu- ism, which are professed in the Indian Empire. These are Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedanism, the religion of the Sikhs, and the religion of the Parsis. I shall not think it necessary to dwell upon the various forms of Fetichism found among the less civilised tribes, such as the Bheels, who adore stones covered with red lead and oil ; or to speak of the recently formed Deistical sects, which do not number more than eight or ten thousand adherents between them, and which certainly have not the promise of the future. Of all the religions of the East, Buddhism is perhaps the most interesting to us in the Western world. Through "the mists of fabling time," the great figure of its founder shines, clear and distinct upon us, in this far-off twentieth century, and wins the homage of the best men of the most various schools of thought. Philosophers like Schopenhauer, and physicists like Huxley, have been content to sit at his feet and to learn of him ; THE BUDDHA 139 Catholic and Anglican prelates, Wesleyan and Baptist missionaries, consent to the judgment of the French rationalist, that "with the sole excep- tion of the Christ, there is no more touching figure than his among the founders of religions," so entirely is he "without spot and blemish," "the finished model of the heroism, the self-renunciation, the love, the sweetness which he commands." It is difiicult, indeed, to understand how any one can rise from the perusal of the works, made acces- sible to^ us by recent scholarship, in which is con- tained the genuine record of his life and teaching, without the profoundest veneration for his moral and spiritual greatness. It is no wonder that for twenty-five centuries, his personality and his reli- gion have afforded more widely than any other, stay in life and hope in death, to " troublous and distressed mortality " : it is no wonder that 450,000,000 of the human race still turn to him with the disinterestedness of pure affection, as the highest and noblest ideal of which they have knowledge. Of these, 9,000,000 dwell in the Burmese province of the Indian Empire. What the faith of the Buddha really is to them, has been of late told us, in the fascinating pages of Mr Fielding's work, The Soul of a People. I must content myself with thus indicating a docu- ment where the actual working of Buddhism, as a living religion, may be fully seen. Such space as I have to give to it here, must be devoted to a succinct account of its tenets, which I shall borrow from my work, Ancient Religion and Modern Thought, for two reasons ; the first being. 140 OTHER NON -CHRISTIAN CREEDS that I do not know how to put the matter more clearly and concisely ; and the second, that Mr Rhys Davids, probably the greatest living authority on Buddhism, was good enough to characterise it as correct and complete. " The foundation of the gospel of the Buddha is the illusoriness of the world, the subjection of all that is to the great law of mutability, the misery inseparable from the condition of man so long as he remains in 'the whirlpool of existence.' In the account which is given of the workings of his mind in the first watch of the great night which he spent under the bo-tree, he is represented as going through the chain of ' the Twelve Causes and Effects,' and tracing back all the evil that is in the world to ignorance, the prime illusion, the fundamental error of those who cling to individual existence. And in his sermon to the seventy Brahmins he declares, ' to know as truth that which is true, this is perfect rectitude^ and shall bring true profit.' And then he goes on to point out as the primary truth — ' Everywhere in the world there is death, there is no rest in either of the three worlds. The gods, indeed, enjoy a period of bliss, but their happiness must also end, and they must also die. To consider this as the condition of all states of being, that there is nothing born but must die, and therefore to desire to escape birth and death, this is to exercise oneself in religious truth.' For death is in itself no deliverance from the burden of being. To die is merely to pass from one state of existence to another. So long as tanha — thirst, passion, desire — remains, the source KARMA 141 of being remains. To root out ' tanha ' is the only way of escaping ' the yawning gulf of continual birth and death.' It is this which is expressed in the Four Truths, thought out by the Buddha, in that great night after he had followed the Twelve Causes and Effects — the Four Noble Truths, as they are called, regarding Suffering, the Cause of Suffering, the Cessation of Suffering, and the Path which leads to the Cessation of Suffering, which may be reckoned great fundamental doctrines of the Buddhist Church. " But there are two other tenets of no less importance. In common with almost all Oriental thinkers, the Buddha believed in Transmigration — a hypothesis in support of which a certain amount of evidence may be adduced, and which, as Mr Rhys Davids observes, ' is incapable of disproof, while it affords an explanation, quite complete, to those who can believe in it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution of happiness or woe.' The doctrine of Karma, which plays so great a part in Buddhism, and which is the main source of its moral excellence, is the complement of the doctrine of Transmigration, and the link which connects it with the ' Four Noble Truths.' It is the teaching of the Buddha that there is no such thing as what is commonly called a soul. The real man is the net result of his merits and demerits, and that net result is called Karma. A god, a man, a beast, a bird, or a fish — for there is no essential difference between all living beings — is what he does, what he has done, not only during his present existence. 142 OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS but very far more, among his countless previous existences in various forms. His actual condition is the result of the deeds done in his former births, and upon his present deeds, plus the past, will depend his destiny in future existences, divine, human, or animal. And the character of his acts depends upon his intention. ' All that we are,' the Teacher insists, ' depends upon what we have thought.' " Thus life in all its grades, from the highest to the lowest, is, in the strictest sense, a time of proba- tion. ' Two things in this world are immutably fixed,' the Buddha is reported to have said upon another occasion, ' that good actions bring happi- ness, and that bad actions bring misery.' In the pregnant Buddhist phrase, ' we pass away, accord- ing to our deeds,' to be reborn in heaven, or in hell, or upon the earth, as man or animal, according to our Karma. To say that a man's works follow him when he dies, that what he has sown here he shall reap there, falls far short of this tremen- dous doctrine. His works are himself, he is what he has sown. All else drops from him at death. His body decays and falls into nothingness, and not only his material properties (Rupa) but his sensations (Vedana), his abstract ideas (Sanna), his mental and moral predispositions (Sanikhara), and his thought or reason (Vznnana) — all these constituent elements of his being pass away. But his Karma remains, unless he has attained to the supreme state of Arahat — the crown of Buddhist saintship — when Karma is extinguished and Nir- vana is attained." THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS 1 43 Such is Karma — a great mystery, which the limited intellect of ordinary man can but contem- plate, as it were, " through a glass darkly " : only the perfectly enlightened mind of a Buddha can fully fathom it. As I observed, it is closely connected with the Four Noble Truths. The cause of demerit is tanka, which appears to present some analogy to concupiscence, as Catholic theologians define it : "a certain motion and power of the mind whereby men are driven to desire pleasant things that they do not possess.',' That is the cause of sin, of sorrow, and of suffering. To root out this thirst is the only way to obtain salvation, release from the evil which is of the essence of existence, and, as the fourth of the Noble Truths teaches, " the means of obtaining the individual annihilation of desire " is supplied by the eight-fold Path of Holiness. Abolition of self, living for others, is the substance of the Buddhist plan of salvation. Scrupulously avoiding all wicked actions, reverently performing all virtuous ones, purifying our intentions from all selfish ends — this is the doctrine of all the Buddhas. Thus does man conquer himself; and, "having conquered himself, there will be no further ground for birth." And so the Chinese poet, commenting upon the Prati- vzoksha : " The heart, scrupulously avoiding all idle dissipation, Diligently applying itself to the holy Law of Buddha, Letting go all lust and consequent disappointment, Fixed and unchangeable, enters on Nirvana.^' This is the blissful state which results from the extinction of desire : this is the highest con- 144 OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS quest of self; it is the fulness "of deep and liquid rest forgetful of all ill." Those who have attained to this "peace which passeth understanding" even the gods envy, we are told. "Their old Karma is being exhausted; no new Karma is being produced; their hearts are free from the longing after future life ; the cause of their existence being destroyed, and no new yearnings springing up within them, they, the wise, are extinguished like this lamp." Buddhism proper, as we saw in the last Chapter, has disappeared from the land of its birth. It survives there only in the form of Jainism-;-if. indeed we are correct in regarding Jainism as a survival of it. That is a point on which scholars differ, and which is not likely to be conclusively settled. What is certain is that Jainism came into notice when Buddhism had disappeared from India, and that the affinities between the two systems are very striking. The chief difference between them is, that the Jains observe caste. The Jina, or Conquering Saint, is in the Jain system what the Buddha is in the Buddhist. He is the Perfect One who has subdued all worldly desires ; who has completely effected that liberation (moksha) — the highest end and aim of intelligent beings — by means of right intuition, right knowledge, and right conduct. And the chief canons . of this right conduct are : Do harm to no living thing ; Do not lie ; Do not steal ; Be temperate, sober, and chaste ; Desire nothing inordinately. All which certainly sounds like an echo of the teaching of the Buddha, Jainism now numbers about a million and a half adherents in India, among whom are some of the MOHAMMED 145 wealthiest and most cultivated natives of that country. Several fine Jain temples have recently been built in Calcutta. From Buddha, the gentle Aryan sage, to Mohammed, the fierce Semitic warrior, is a vast descent. Still, only inveterate prejudice can blind us to the real spiritual greatness of the Founder of Islam. Our ancestors identified him with the devil : " The prince of darkness is a gentleman, Modo he's called, and Mahu." We have come to think otherwise of Mahu or Mohammed. For a full estimate of his career and teaching, I may be permitted to refer the reader to a Chapter in my work, The Claims of Christianity. In this place I will merely quote a sentence from Mr Freeman, which, I believe, expresses correctly the judgment formed of him by most candid and competent scholars. " I cannot conceal my con- viction that, in a certain sense, his belief in his own mission was well founded. Surely a good and sincere man, full of confidence in his Creator, who works an immense reform, both in faith and practice, is, truly, a direct instrument in the hands of God, and may be said to have a commission from Him." The doctrine of Mohammed has been summed up epigrammatically and correctly by Deutsch : " Judaism as adapted to Arabia." Its essence is a severe and lofty Theism. The Divine Unity, making, upholding, governing, perfecting all things, is the rock on which Mohammed builds : his shield K 146 OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS and hiding place. The consciousness of dependence upon the Absolute and Eternal is the keynote of Islam. It is all briefly comprehended in the two words, " Allah akbar." Religion meant for Mo- hammed self-chosen submission to the will of a Moral Governor of the Universe. The sovereignty of God and the free volition of man are the postu- lates of his system. It was the unquestioning belief in this living and life-giving Theism taught by him — a belief summed up in the formula, " There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God " — that sharpened the swords of the earlier Moslems and gave them victory in the battle. It is the same faith which in our own day makes the Moslem preachers the most successful of prosely- tizers ; potent to expel from many dark places of the earth barbarous and impure idolatries, and to train millions of converts to better things by its doctrines of righteousness, temperance, and judg- ment to come. " It must be confessed," writes a distinguished Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Isaac Taylor, " that over a large portion of the world, Islam, as a missionary religion, is more successful than Christianity. It is eminently adapted to be a civilising and elevating religion for barbarous tribes. When it is embraced by a negro tribe, paganism, devil worship, fetichism, cannibalism, human sacrifices, infanticide, witchcraft, at once disappear. Hospitality becomes a religious duty ; drunkenness becomes rare ; gambling is forbidden ; immodest dances and the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes cease : female chastity is regarded as a virtue ; polygamy and slavery are regulated, and THE INDIAN MUSSULMANS I47 their evils are restrained. All the more civilised tribes of negroes, the Mandingoes, Foulahs, Jolofs, and Houssas are Moslems, while in Lagos the hold of Christianity is feeble, and in Sierra Leone Christianity is actually receding before Islam. How little have we to show for the vast sums of money and all the precious lives lavished upon Africa ! Christian converts are reckoned by thou- sands ; Moslem converts by millions." In India there are nearly sixty millions of Moslems. His Most Gracious Majesty, the Emperor of that country, has more Mohammedan subjects than any other ruler ; and in some respects they may be truly described as the backbone of the population. Islam, of course, has not escaped the influence of its environment in India. It has adopted various superstitious practices. It has, to some extent, declined from the sternly ascetic standard laid down in the Quran. But Indian Mussulmans manifest a manliness, a self- respect, a devotion to duty, very attractive to Englishmen. And, as a rule, they make far more trustworthy officials than the supple and quick- witted Bengalis, who easily outstrip them in the examinations which are the portal to the public service. Their practical exclusion from their fair share of appointments under Government is unques- tionably a public evil, and is justly resented by them as a wrong. " They feel themselves superior," Mr Spenser Wilkinson well remarks in The Great Alternative, "both as believers in one invisible God, and as men of warlike race and character, to the classes who enter at the examination door." 148 OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS And they are superior. Their creed and wor- ship give them a very real superiority over the idolatrous races by which they are surrounded. It is an interesting question how far this superiority is likely to influence the future of religion in India. Western civilisation is undermining Hinduism — this is beyond doubt. And what is to take its place? Christianity? Of that, as we shall see in the next Chapter, there seems small prospect. There are careful and compete'nt observers who consider the faith of Mohammed far more likely to spread in India, as the foul deities of the Hindu Pantheon fall into discredit. Thus Sir Alfred Lyall writes in his Asiatic Studies : " The Mohammedan faith has still at least a dignity, and a courageous, unreasoning certitude which in Western Chris- tianity have been perceptibly melted down and attenuated, by the disease of casuistry, and by long exposure to the searching light of European rationalism : .whereas the clear, unwavering formula of Islam carries one plain line straight up toward heaven, like a tall obelisk pointing direct to the sky, without shadow of turning. It thus possesses a strong attraction for Hindus, who are seeking an escape from the labyrinth of sensual Polytheism, but who yet require something more concrete and definite than is offered by their indigenous speculations about Deism or Pantheism : while the vigour and earnestness of the message announced so unflinchingly by Mahomed, conquer the hearts of simple folk, and warm the imagination of devout truth-seekers." Mr Talboys Wheeler, in his History of India, goes further : " The people of India," he writes, " are drifting slowly but surely towards the religion of Islam, rather than towards Christianity. Few impartial observers will deny this fact." THE SIKHS 149 There have indeed been times in the past history of India when a fusion of Hinduism and Mohammedanism seemed probable. Ramamander, Kabir, Chaitayana, the great medieval mission- aries, appealed to the adherents of both creeds alike. The Sikh religion is, in fact, the result of such a fusion. It now numbers 10,000,000 of adherents, of whom eleven twelfths dwell in the Punjab. Nanak, its founder, a Hindu, who died at Kirtipore, on the banks of the Ravi, in the year 1539, described himself as a successor of Mohammed, though one of his first sermons is said to have been on the thesis : " There are neither Hindus nor Mohammedans." Undoubtedly, he derived from the Prophet of Islam the strict monotheism which is the foundation of his teach- ing. The Adi-Granth, the Sikh Bible, describes God as " One, sole, self-existing, the meaning and the cause of all, who has seen numberless creeds and names come and go." It insists upon the brotherhood of men, does not recognise caste, and inculcates pure and simple ethics. This Adi- Granth — fundamental book, the term means — was not published till the time of Nanak's fifth suc- cessor, Guru Arjun (1584- 1606), and the tongue in which it is written is now obsolete. It consists of the poetical pieces left by Nanak and the Gurus who succeeded him, including compositions by Arjun himself, arid of selections from the writings of certain Hindu teachers, " Since the publication of the Granth" writes Barth, "there cannot, in a dogmatic reference, be any longer much question of the profound influence 150 OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS of Islam on the thinking of the founders of this religion. But from first to last, both as regards the form and the foundation of its ideas, this book breathes the mystic pantheism of the Vedanta, reinforced by the doctrines of chakti, of grace, and of absolute devotion to the guru. It is especially distinguished from the sectarian literature in general, by the importance which it attaches to moral precepts, by the simplicity and spiritualistic character of a worship stripped of every vestige of idolatry, and especially by its moderation in regard to mythology, although we find in it a considerable number of the personifications of Hinduism, and even detect at times in it a sort of return to the Hindu divinities. But it would be difficult to eliminate from all this what is due to Mussulman influence. . . . The worship of the Sikhs is simple and pure. With the exception of Amritsar, which is the religious centre of the nation, and a few sanctuaries in places consecrated by the life or the death of gurus and martyrs, they have no holy places. Their temples are houses of prayer. Here they recite pieces and sing hymns extracted from the Granth ; and the congregation separates after each believer has received a piece of the karah prasad, ' the effectual offering,' a kind of pastry ware consecrated in the name of the guru. As tolerant as they were formerly fanatical, they do not object to admit to their religious services strangers, whom they allow even to participate in their communion. It is true that under this tolerance there lies concealed no little lukewarmness, and that, in the opinion of THE PARSIS 151 the best judge in this matter, Dr Trumpp, the translator of the Adi Granth, ' Sikhism ' is a religion which is on the wane." It remains to speak of the religion of the Parsis, which is of extreme interest as a survival of one of the world's greatest creeds, though professed by only some 100,000 people. They are the descendants of those Zoroastrian exiles, who, in the seventh Christian century, after the destruction of the Sassanid dominion, sought a refuge in India from the proselytizing violence of the conquering Mussulmans. And, during all that tract of years, they have kept the monotheistic faith of their fathers, and the monogamous structure of the family, although borrowing, as was natural, some Hindu and some Mohammedan customs. The Zoroastrian religion exhibits, in the judgment of Geiger, "a purity and sublimity of religious thought such as no nation of antiquity in the East, with the single exception of the Israelites, has been able to attain to ; embracing conceptions approximating closely to a pure monotheism, repre- senting the Deity as free from human adjuncts, and working out the spiritual part of theology with exactness and precision." Its Sacred Books were sealed to the Western world, until towards late in the last century, Anquetil Duperron, a young Frenchman, without money, without friends, and but modestly equipped with scholarship, conceived the design of penetrating their secrets, and of un- veiling their mysteries. There are few more romantic stories than his in the history of scholar- ship. And though his translation of the Zend 152 OTHER NON-CHRISTIAN CREEDS Avesta, published in 1771, is often wide of the sense of the original — which is not wonderful, seeing that he possessed neither grammar nor dictionary of its language — he laid securely the foundation upon which many illustrious scholars have since built. " The importance," writes Pro- fessor Darmestetter, "of the Avesta and of the creed of that scanty people the Parsis, in the eyes of the historian and the theologist, is that they present to us the last reflex of the ideas which prevailed in India during the five centuries pre- ceding, and the seven following the birth of Christ : a period which gave to the world the Gospels, the Talmud, and the Quran: . . . enabling us to go back to the very heart of that most momentous period in the history of religious thought which saw the blending of the Aryan with the Semitic, and thus opened the second stage of Aryan thought." Zoroaster himself is of course a somewhat shadowy person to us, though there can be no question as to his historic reality. As little can there be that in the venerable document known as The Five Gathas, we possess a record of his actual teaching. Dr Haug inclines to consider him a contemporary of Moses. Pliny places him several thousand years earlier. Bunsen writes, " Zoroaster the Prophet cannot have lived later than B.C. 3000 (250 years before Abraham there- fore), but 6000 or 5000 years before Plato may very likely be more correct, according to the state- ment of Aristotle and Eudoxus." What is certain is, that he was the preacher of Monotheism to ZOROASTER 1 53 his people — the antique Aryans who were the ancestors ahke of Iranians and Indians. And it is probable that his reform produced the schism between the worshippers of the Vedic Gods and the worshippers of Ormuzd. Most curious is it to reflect how, after long centuries, the remnant of the posterity of those who had followed his reform, were driven to accept the hospitality of the descend- ants of those who had rejected it. Of course the importance of the religion of the Parsis is historical. They have never sought to make proselytes in the country of their exile : nor is their creed likely to exercise any influence upon the future of religion in India. In number — as we have seen — they are a quite insignificant element of the population of the country. But socially they are far from in- significant : their intelligence, industry, and integrity have given them a position of much importance in the second greatest of Indian cities — Bombay. CHAPTER XIII CHRISTIANITY There is a considerable body of excellent people in the world — chiefly in England and in the United States of America^whose thoughts turn to India as " the most interesting country in the mission field." They ardently desire its conversion to Christianity, and especially to some form — they do not, as a rule, greatly care what — of that variety of Protestantism which is known as Evangelical. Let us endeavour to see in this Chapter how far their desire seems likely to be gratified. Christianity is no stranger in India. The tra- dition* that one "Thomas" introduced it there is very ancient. But whether this Thomas was — to quote Gibbon — "an Apostle, a Manichsean, or an Armenian merchant," has been much disputed among the learned. Certain it is, however, that Indian Christianity, so far as we can follow it back in history, presents traces of a special cultus of *That very considerable authority, Dr Burnell, writes in The Indian Antiquary (vol. iv., p. 182): "The Manichaean mission to India in the third century a.d., is the only historical fact that we know of in relation to Christian missions in India, before we get as low as the sixth century." 151 NESTORIANS AND JACOBITES 1 55 St Thomas the Apostle. Certain it is also that Christian communities existed in India — on the Malabar coast — in the fifth century : and that they then became Nestorian. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century brought these heretical Christians into communion with Rome — the Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Diamper in 1599 setting the seal to the work. And the Inquisition, established at Goa in 1560, carefully watched over it, displaying, indeed, an amount of fiery zeal which astonished the Western world. But when, in 1663, the capture of Cochin by the Dutch overthrew the Portuguese power on the seaboard of Western India, the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch sent a Bishop to Malabar, who received the adhesion of a consider- able number of the Christians dwelling in that region ; the speculative differences between the Jacobites, who deny the two natures in Christ, and the Nestorians, who assert not only two natures but two persons, appearing to them of less account than independence of Rome. That independence they have since maintained, and at the present day they number about 300,000. Side by side with these Jacobite Christians, are the Catholics of the Syrian rite in communion with the Holy See, who number some 200,000. Another body of Indian Christians, who also are spiritual subjects of the Pope, is composed of the descendants of the converts made in the sixteenth century by Catholic missionaries. The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the bold navigators of Portugal had rendered India accessible, though the voyage occupied twelve 156 CHRISTIANITY months. And the Franciscans were the first to take advantage of this great change in order to spread the Christian faith. A small company of their friars arrived in the Deccan in 1500, and within a few months one of them, Father Peter of Covilhao, sealed his testimony with his blood. His brethren continued his work for forty years with a fair measure of success. Then — in 1542 — St Francis Xavier landed at Goa and began his abundant labours. " Besides doing much to re- form the life of the Portuguese settlers them- selves," observes a recent writer, "he completed the conversion of the Paravas on the fishery coast, founded the Christianity of Ceylon, and converted thousands in the native states of Travancore and Cochin. To this day the lands where he laboured are the most Christian districts in India. His favourite disciples, the poor Parava fishermen, have never lost the faith they received from him, and numbers of them, during the last terrible famine in Southern India, refused to pur- chase food and life by even a day of simulated apostacy." He may be regarded as the pioneer of the Jesuit missionaries, whose heroic self-denial, quenchless zeal, and indefatigable activity in spread- ing Christianity, have never been surpassed. Two of the greatest names among them are those of Robert de Nobile, the founder of , the Madura mission, and Beschi, who, as we have seen in a previous Chapter, attained high distinction as a Tamil poet, and who was honoured by the people with the title of Viramamuni, "the heroic devotee." It has ever been the laudable endeavour of the CATHOLIC MISSIONS 157 Jesuits, as far as their religion allows, to become all things to all men ; and so in India, they were led to recognise and respect many native customs and prejudices, more or less questionable ; especially those connected with caste. This, Sir William Hunter opines, " is the secret of the wide and permanent success of the Catholic missions." Any- how, it was the source of the chief troubles of the Jesuit missionaries — troubles involving disputes which greatly divided them among themselves, and which had to be referred, in the event, for the decision of the Pope. The persecution of the Society of Jesus by the Portuguese Government in 1759, and its suppression fourteen years after- wards by Clement XIV., struck a heavy blow at Catholicism in India. Then came the persecu- tion of Christians by Tippu Sahib in the countries subject to him. In one year (1784) he is said to have compelled some 30,000 Catholics of Canara to embrace Mohammedanism, forcibly circumcising them, and deporting them to the country above the Ghats. But in 18 14 the Society of Jesus was re-established, and began anew its missions in India ; and various other Catholic agencies have been labouring during the present century for the evangelisation of that country. The number of Catholics throughout the Indian Empire is now close upon 2,000,000, to whom must be added 300,000 for the French and Portuguese settlements. It is worthy of note that more than one half of the Catholic clergy, including several Bishops, are natives. " The Roman Catholics in India," writes Sir 158 CHRISTIANITY William Hunter, "steadily increase; and, as in former times, the increase is chiefly in the South. . . . The Roman Catholics work in India with slender pecuniary resources. The priests of the Propaganda deny themselves the comforts con- sidered necessaries for Europeans in India. They live the frugal and abstemious life of 'the natives ; and their influence reaches deep into the life of the communities among whom they dwell." It should here be noted that great trouble and inconvenience have been caused to Catholics in India by what is known as the Padroado ; the right of patronage over bishoprics and beneficies in the East, granted by the Popes to the Portuguese crown, and issuing in a general jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa. The condition on which this right was granted was that the Portuguese sovereigns should provide the necessary funds for the maintenance of the Catholic clergy in India. And it might have been supposed that when the decadence of the Portuguese power rendered the fulfilment of this condition no longer possible, the right of patronage would be held to have lapsed. But that was not the view taken by the Portuguese. And when Gregory XVI., in 1838, limited the Goanese juris- diction to the possessions of Portugal, the Indo- Portuguese clergy broke into open schism. At last, in 1886, Leo XIII. concluded a new Con- cordat with Portugal which restricted the Padroado to the ecclesiastical province of Goa, raising the Archbishop of that see to the dignity of Patriarch, but reserved to the King of Portugal a voice in the selection of the Bishops of Bombay, Trichi- PROTESTANT MISSIONS I 59 nopoly, and Mangalore — dioceses within the Indian Empire — an arrangement causing much discontent to the British CathoHcs resident there. While erecting Goa into a Patriarchate, Leo XIII. created seven Archbishoprics — Agra, Bombay, Verapoli, Calcutta, Madras, Pondicherry, and Colombo — be- sides raising all the existing Indian Vicariates Apostolic, and the Prefecture Apostolic of Bengal, to the rank of Episcopal sees. This may seem a very liberal hierarchical provision indeed, for some two millions of Catholics. But doubtless the Pope had in consideration the future as much as the present. The first Protestant missionaries came to India at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and appear to have been Danish Lutherans. At all events they were under the patronage of the King of Denmark, though they were but coldly received by the local Danish authorities in India. Funds from Denmark failed them in a few years ; and they were then taken into the pay of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, English Pro- testant missionaries not being at that time forth- coming. It was the same Society that in 1750 sent out the famous Schwartz, also a Lutheran, who became the founder of the Protestant Tinne- velli missions. Towards the end of the century, the Baptist missionaries, Carey, Marshman, and Ward made their appearance. They busied them- selves much, as their Lutheran predecessors had done, with translations of the Bible into the Indian vernaculars. In 1814 the first Protestant Bishopric in India was established at Calcutta. In 18 14 the l6o CHRISTIANITY Church Missionary Society sent out a few clergy, and in 1820 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which had been at work in the country for some years, appointed Dr Mill Principal of Bishop's College, . Calcutta. At the present time there are some thirty-five Protestant sects labouring for the conversion of India to their various forms of Christianity. It is not easy to give with accuracy the number of their adherents, as some of them include among their converts inchoate proselytes : persons under instruction and not as yet baptized. For these, assuredly, credit cannot fairly be taken, as, however promising their dispositions, they are not formally Christian. Making due deduction for them, the number of native Protestant Christians in India is probably not much over half a million. It does not seem a very great result for long years of aspiration and effort — more especially when the quality of the converts is considered. But is there any reason to believe that, as Sir Monier Williams affirms in his interesting work on Hindu- ism, " Christianity is spreading its boundaries more widely, and striking its foundations more deeply ? " — that — as he somewhat oddly expresses it — " the good time will arrive when every tongue of every native of India, from Cape Comorin to the Himalaya mountains, shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.''" It seems to me, I own, that there are no tokens of a consummation so devoudy to be wished ; but rather that the wish is father to the thought. The success of the Protestant mission- aries is infinitesimal. And I look in vain for any AN INARTICULATE DESIRE l6l promise of a more abundant harvest. Indeed, Sir Monier Williams elsewhere observes, " The desire of India for Christ is not articulate.'' But in the absence of articulation, what evidence is there that such a desire exists ? The Protestant missionaries without exception — at least I never, while in India, heard of an exception — lead quite respectable lives, and sometimes even display earnest religious- ness and much zeal. But certain it is, that they do not appeal to the popular imagination as did the great Hindu ascetics, who forsook all to follow an ideal. Nor are their arguments, whether on behalf of their own religion, or against the religion of others, largely found persuasive or convincing. The uneducated Hindus are not touched by their preaching. The educated despise it. The Chris- tian heaven depicted by them presents no attrac- tion to their hearers. The conception of happiness cherished by the multitude is purely sensuous. Higher minds look forward to what is called ntakti: absorption in deity. Some half a million of youth — including 75,000 girls — attend their schools. But the proportion of their pupils who join their sects is exceedingly small. The vast majority of young Hindus educated by the missionaries, are just as anti-Christian as are those educated in the Government Colleges. Mr Kerr, the author of a well-known and justly esteemed work on Domestic Life in India, tells us, that upon one occasion an extremely interesting and highly cultured Brahmin young man was asked by a missionary, whether now that he had read Paley's Evidences he did not feel 4rawn to Christianity? The youth's reverence L 1 62 CHRISTIANITY for truth would not allow him to say with his lips what he did not believe in his heart. He hung down his head, made no reply, and, after some silence, "looked up with rather a sly smile." There seems to rne, I confess, small prospect that Protestantism, in any or all of its varieties, will make substantial progress in India. And I am not much more hopeful for Catholicism. My own observations and inquiries, while in that country, brought me to the conclusion expressed by the Abbe Dubois, after three decades of most unsparing and self-denying, and not altogether unfruitful missionary labour : " Let the Chris- tian religion be presented to these people under every possible light, . . . the time of conver- sion has passed away, and under existing cir- cumstances there remains no human possibility of bringing it back." I must refer my readers to the Abbe's own Letters on the State of Christianity in India, for the grounds upon which he arrived at a conclusion so distasteful to himself The chief of them is the utter alienation of the Hindu mind from the fundamental positions of Christianity. In one extremely curious and significant passage he re- marks : " Should the intercourse between indi- viduals of both nations, by becoming more intimate and more friendly, produce a change in the religions and usages of the country, it will not be to turn Christians that they will forsake their own religion, but rather (what in my opinion is a thousand times worse than idolatry) to become mere atheists ; and if they renounce their present CONVERTS 163 customs, it will not be to embrace those of Euro- peans, but rather to become what are now called Pariahs." It should be observed that, although the Abbe completely despaired of the higher castes ever becoming Christians, he thought that a certain number of converts might be made among the lower castes and the out-castes. Of his own labours he remarks, " For my part, I cannot boast of my successes in this sacred career during the period that I have laboured to promote the interests of the Christian religion. The restraints and privations under which I have lived, by conforming myself to the usages of the country, embracing, in many respects, the prejudices of the natives, living like them, and becoming all but a Hindu myself — in short, by being made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some — all these have proved of no avail to me to make proselytes. During the long period I have lived in India in the capacity of a missionary, I have made, with the assistance of a native missionary, in all between two and three hundred converts of both sexes. Of this number two-thirds were Pariahs or beggars ; and the rest were com- posed of Siidras, vagrants, and out-castes of several tribes, who, being without resources, turned Christians, in order to form connections, chiefly for the purpose of marriage, or with some other interested views." It may be of advantage to compare with these extracts from the Abbe Dubois, the following passage in Mr Baines' General Report on the Census of 1891 : — 164 CHRISTIANITY " The greatest development [of Christianity] is found where the Brahmanic caste system is in force in its fullest vigour, in the south and vsrest of the Peninsula and amongst the Hill Tribes of Bengal. In such localities it is naturally attractive to a class of the population whose position is hereditarily and permanently degraded by their own religion ; as Islam has proved in Eastern Bengal, and amongst the lowest class of the inhabitants of the Punjab. We have seen that in the early days of Portuguese missionary enterprise it was found necessary to continue the breach that Brahmanic custom had placed between certain grades of society and those above them ; but, in later times, and in foreign missions of the Reformed Church, the tendency has been to absorb all caste distinctions into the general communion of the Christianity of that form. The new faith has thus affected the lower classes more directly than the upper, who have more to lose socially, and less to gain." . . . In this connection, the following observations in Mr V. H. Narasimmiyengar's Mysore Census Report (1891) may be worth considering: — " Roman Catholicism is able to prevail among the Hindus more rapidly and easily, by reason of its pplicy of tolerating among its converts the customs of castes and social observances, which constitute so material a part of the Indian social fabric. In the course of the investigations engendered by the census, several Roman Christian communities have been met with, which continue undisturbed in the rites and usages which have guided them in their pre-conversion existence. They still pay worship to the Kalasam at marriages and festivals, call in the Brahmin astrologer and purohita, use the Hindu religious marks, and conform to various other amenities, which have the advantage of minimising friction in their daily intercourse with their Hindu fellows and brethren." And here I will put before my readers a letter addressed to me some years ago by a highly culti- vated and highly placed Hindu gentleman, now AN OUTSIDE VIEW 1 65 no more, whose character was on a level with his intellect and his position. His views may be of special interest to those who are professionally engaged in the diffusion of Christianity in India : — " You have asked me to set down in writing some of the thoughts which I have expressed, from time to time, in conversation, regarding the chances of Christianity in India. I do so with much diffidence, the source of which is not any doubt in my own mind on the subject, but my fear to give oflFence by speaking too plainly. I am quite sure that many educated European gentlemen would agree with me. Indeed, I think most whom I have met would. For I have observed that very few of them are Christians of the missionary type. But they usually wrap up their meaning and trim their phrases, so as not to hurt the religious prepossessions and prejudices among which they have grown up. I am confident you know me well enough to be sure that I should be very sorry to say anything that would distress or annoy you. But I am also confident that you wish me to be entirely candid. And as what I am writing is intended for your eye alone — though you are quite at liberty to make any use of it you see fit, but without mentioning my name — I shall set down my thoughts just as they come to me, trusting to your often experienced kindness to pardon my crudity of expression. "The chances of Christianity in India! Well, I suppose it will be universally admitted to have little chance among Moslems, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, and Buddhists. I should say its chances are best among the wild tribes who inhabit the Vindhyan ranges. In these there is the raw material of a good many converts, though they could hardly become Christians of the British type. I fancy, however, that what you specially wish from me is my opinion as to the chances of Christianity among the educated portion of the Hindus properly so called — my own co-religionists. Let me put it in this way. The missionaries come to me and say : ' You ought to be a Christian.' I reply, ' Why ? What should I gain by it ? What I should lose is clear enough.' They rejoin, ' Whatever you might lose, your gain would vastly preponderate. You l66 CHRISTIANITY would gain the true religion : the one and only true religion.' To that 1 demur. Christianity ' the one and only true religion ! ' Well, in the first place, I might object that the thirty or forty sects of you had better first agree among your- selves as to what Christianity is, before you ask us to embrace it. But let that pass. What is certain is that Christianity, in all its forms, is losing its hold in Europe, a fact which is perfectly well known to the educated Hindu, and is not, prima facie, a recommendation of that religion to him. The tone of the great masters of modern European literature, from Goethe till now, is alien from Christianity, if not opposed to it. There is hardly an exception. At the last census in France, out of a population of some 35,000,000, 7,500,000 returned themselves as ' of no religious belief.' Is the Christian faith more prevailing in Italy or in Germany ? In England it probably is, among certain classes — especially the Lower Middle. But I remember Emerson, in his English Traits, tells us, 'The Church 'at this moment is very much to be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a Bishop meets an educated gentleman and reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him.' But you are offended at our supersti- tions. Is the religion of Spanish peasants, Neapolitan lazzaroni, or British Salvationists a bit more rational ? Has not Cardinal Newman told us that a popular religion is ever a corrupt religion ? And then the grossness of our popular cult offends you. You are shocked, for example, at the worship paid to the lingam and the yoni. But is not this the real worship — though cryptic — of multitudes in England ? The popular literature of that country, so largely erotic, seems to suggest that it is. In France the worship is less veiled. Contemporary French fiction and poetry are, for the most part, paeans in honour of the things represented by those symbols. I speak specially of England and France, because those are the European countries with whose languages and literature I am personally familiar. But if I may trust what reaches me by hearsay, it is not very different in other parts of the Western world. Though indeed I do find that you Europeans, on the whole, are, in this matter, upon a lower plane than we are. Our phallic worship is of the reproductive powers of Nature. Yours is of mere sensual gratification. Your Aphrodite is, THE WORK OF THE BIBLE SOCIETIES 1 67 as Swinburne sings, the goddess ' of barren delights and unclean.' " You must remember, my dear missionaries, that we look at Christianity as you do at Hinduism, from the outside. Things which use has made familiar to you, excite our wonder ; just as things which use has made familiar to us, excite yours. Bear with me, then, if I say that I think you and your Bible Societies have rendered a very doubtful service to the cause you have at heart, by the translations of your Sacred Books into our vernaculars, which you have disseminated broadcast in this country. To the man of the people, these writings, if he chances to be able to read them, are simply unintelligible. To the educated, they are amazing ! The beauty and pathos and sublimity of some parts of them are unquestionable. There are in the Psalms things as fine as anything in our own religious literature. But side by side with these strains of inspiration, are found savagery and imprecations certainly not breathing the wisdom that comes down from above. Your Bible is the most unequal book I ever saw ; as might, indeed, be expected from its extremely composite character. Heights, and depths, and shallows — all are there. There is the most unqualified fetichism — Moses reminds me of an Obi man among the negroes. But you turn the page, and you come upon such flashes of divine intelligence as might shine out of the depths of eternity. I am thinking, just now, chiefly of the Old Testament. But if I am to speak of the New, I confess freely the charm of the Gospels, and the high ethical tone, and elevated religious sentiment, of much in the Epistles. The figure of the Author of Christianity is certainly one of the noblest — perhaps the noblest — in the annals of humanity. I will go so far as Mill, and allow that we ' must place the Prophet of Nazareth in the very front rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast ; probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth ; nay, possibly, what he supposed himself to be — not God, for he never made the smallest pretension to that character, and would, probably, have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as it seemed to the men who con- demned him but — a man charged with a special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and 1 68 CHRISTIANITY virtue.' I do not wonder that the virtue which went out from him drew the Western world after him. But what is any candid mind, viewing the matter, Hke myself, from the outside, to make of the theology into which St Paul converted his religion ? No, my dear missionaries, the educated Hindu knows too much of what history and criticism have done for your Sacred Books, while you were busy translating them, to take them at your valuation. If you knew as much, I feel persuaded you would agree with me that the claims made for the Bible by orthodox Protestantism, and I suppose I must say orthodox Catholicism too — for Catholics appear to be in the same boat — are quite as untenable as the claims made by orthodox Hindu theologians for the Vedas, or by orthodox mullahs for the Qu'rdn. To which I would add, that the claim made for Christianity as the one religion seems not a whit more tenable. That has been well put by a very learned clergyman — the Rev. Mark Pattison — in words imprinted on my memory : ' Reflection on the history and condition of humanity, taken as a whole, gradually convinced me that this theory of the relation of all living beings to the Supreme Being was too narrow and inadequate. It makes an equal Providence, the Father of all, care only for a mere handful of the species, leaving the rest (such is the theory) to the chances of eternal misery. If God interferes at all to procure the happiness of mankind, it must be on a far more comprehensive scale than by providing for them a church of which far the majority of them will never hear.' Religions are the accidents of time and place : some better ; some worse ; all imperfect ; ' broken lights.' An absolute religion is a contradiction in terms. Religion is essentially relative. I think a wise Hindu, or a wise Mohammedan, or a wise Buddhist, would do well to make the best of the religion in which he is born. That is what I try to do." The sincere and candid soul who w^rote thus, perhaps knows more about these matters now. " The shadow cloak'd from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds," has summoned him beyond the veil. But his AN INDIAN statesman's VIEW 1 69 words will not have been written in vain, if they help Christian missionaries to realise the difficulties which their message or rather messages, for their teaching is multiform, present to the cultivated Hindu, and arouse them to the need of an ampler apologetic, a diviner dialectic. And here I gladly insert a note with which my old and valued friend, Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, has favoured me, pointing out some admirable aspects of their work, too frequently overlooked by unsympathetic eyes. " Remarks are often made upon the comparatively small success which has attended the efforts of Christian missionaries, and especially of Protestant missionaries, to convert to the Christian faith the Hindu and Mohammedan inhabitants of India. It is said, and is truly said, that hitherto their converts are chiefly natives of the lower castes, such as the Pariahs, the Shanars, and the like, and that the conversion of the higher classes, and especially of the better educated, is an event so remote as to justify us in regarding as futile the efforts which they have made during the century which has just closed, and are still making with undiminished zeal. Expression is given to this view in the striking letter from a Hindu gentle- man which Mr Lilly is publishing in his forthcoming book on India ; and the sentiments expressed in that letter are, I am aware, held by many Englishmen, and not exclusively by those who, for one reason or another, are hostile to missionary effort. " It is impossible to say how far the views to which I have referred will be justified as time goes on. The conversion to Christianity of the nations of Europe was the work of several centuries, and it may be that the conversion of the various peoples who inhabit the vast Indian continent will be a matter of even greater difficulty ; but however this may be, I cannot help thinking it a mistake to regard missionary enterprise in India as a waste of labour. On the contrary, I am convinced that looking at the question merely from a political point of view, the existence of our Christian Missions is an important 1^0 CHRISTIANITY factor in maintaining the prestige of the British Government in that land. I write from some practical observation of the work of the various missionary bodies, which, although dating back a good many years, is, I believe, fully applicable to the present state of things. I served in India for a period which covered from first to last some thirty-eight years, and during a part of that time my public duties as Director of Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency brought me into frequent contact with mission work. While thus employed I was greatly impressed by the admirable manner in which the work was done. I could not help feeling that the example of self- denying zeal which was afforded by many of the English missionaries, toiling, not for profit, not to gratify any ambitious aims, but with the single object of disseminating the faith which they believed to be the true faith, and of thereby pro- moting the spiritual and moral progress of the people among whom they worked, was a spectacle which could not fail to redound to the credit of the English nation and to raise the prestige of the British name. For instance, the presence in an Indian district of such a man as the late Bishop Caldwellj who for many years carried on the Edeyenkoody Mission in Tinnevelly, combining as he did 'devotion to his work with learning, judgment, and knowledge of the natives which were not surpassed by any Englishman throughout the land, was an example which could not fail to impress the native mind and to exercise a beneficial influence over numbers besides the actual converts to Christianity. I am persuaded that this aspect of missionary work is too little regarded by those who denounce it, and that if it be only on account of its value from a secular point of view, that work is deserving of liberal, nay, of enthusiastic support. With the other far more important aspects of the question I cannot attempt to deal in this brief note." PART V INDIA OF TO-DAY CHAPTER XIV THE BRITISH RAJ Until the paramount power of England was established, the whole of India never acknowledged a single ruler. For well-nigh a thousand years prior to its final conquest by the British, it was a perpetual battle-field, as we have seen in former Chapters. The reader will remember that, eventu- ally, the struggle lay between us and the Mahrattas, represented chiefly by Scindia, the Guicowar and Holkar. The eventual triumph of British arms restored to India such unbroken peace as she had not known since the days immediately before the invasion of Alexander. And it has unquestionably been the constant endeavour of British admini- strators to enable the country fully to realise the blessing of peace. The words which that extremely well informed and acute observer, the Abb6 Dubois, wrote a century ago have since received abundant confirmation : — " The justice and prudence which the present rulers display in endeavouring to make the people of India less unhappy than they have been hitherto ; the anxiety they manifest in increasing their material comfort ; above all, the inviolable 173 174 THE BRITISH RAJ respect which they constantly show for the customs and religious beliefs of the country ; and lastly, the protection they afford to the weak as well as to the strong, to the Brahmin as to the Pariah, to the Christian, to the Mahomedan, and to the Pagan : all these have contributed more to the consolidation of their power than even their victories and conquests." Three-eighths of the country have been left under the immediate sway of native rulers of different grades, and possessing various degrees of independence ; but all utterly unconnected with one another, their only bond being the suzerainty of the Emperor, the one independent sovereign. There are about eight hundred feudatory states in India, some of them very tiny. Foremost among them must be reckoned the seventeen principalities ruled by Rajputs, who represent the purest Hindu blood : the Rana of Udaipur, indeed, claims descent from Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, who is generally worshipped as an incarnation of Vishnu. The government of these Rajput states is of a patriarchal character, the land being par- celled out between the sovereign and his subjects, who, as members of the same clan, are accounted his kinsmen. The Maharajah of Kashmir is also a Rajput, descended from Gholab Singh, to whom, by a most disreputable transaction, that lovely country was sold on the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The most considerable Mohammedan prince in India is the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose dominions comprise an area of 82,698 square miles. His importance is indicated by the fact that he is NATIVE RULERS 175 entitled to a salute of twenty-one guns, an honour conferred upon only two other native feudatories, the Maharajah of Mysore and the Guicowar of Baroda. At the more important of the courts of native princes, the British Government is repre- sented by a Resident, whose duty it is to watch over the administration, and, by timely and authori- tative counsels, to prevent mis-government and oppression. The whole of Rajputana is super- vised by a Political Officer residing at Abu, who is styled Agent to the Governor-General. Similarly, the native states of Central India constitute an Agency, the Agent being placed at Indore. One of the most important reforms carried out in the feudatory principalities of late years is the conver- sion of their military forces into Imperial Service Troops. The effect of this measure, Colonel Durand well observes in The Making of a Frontier, has been that "small, compact bodies of well-trained, disciplined, and regularly paid troops were substituted for an armed rabble in all native states. The duty of the great chiefs to share in the defence of the Empire was emphasised ; the readiness of the Supreme Government to give their troops a place of honour, and its open and avowed trust in the loyalty of the great martial races, were proclaimed to the world. It was a great scheme, giving to the fighting races, and to their hereditary leaders, a chance of wearing the sword, of resuming the honourable profession of arms, the only one for many races and castes in which a man of good blood can engage. The plan has worked splendidly. The Imperial Service 176 THE BRITISH RAJ Troops now represent -a force of some 20,000 men, the pick of the population of the Native States." So much may suffice as to the territories under native rule. The rest of the Indian Empire — five-eighths of the whole — is directly under British administration. This vast region is divided into thirteen * provinces : Madras, Bombay, Bengal, the North - Western Provinces and Oudh, the Punjab, Burmah, the Central Provinces, Assam, Ajmere, the Berars, Coorg, Baluchistan, and the Andamans. They vary much in extent, the area of Coorg being only 1583 miles, while 171,430 square miles are comprised in Burmah. They vary also in the method of their rule. Madras and Bombay are each administered by a Governor appointed by the Crown, who is assisted by a Council composed of two eminent members of the Covenanted Civil Service. Bengal, the North-West Provinces, the Punjab, and Burmah are under Lieutenant- Governors, Oudh t and the Central Provinces and Assam are under Chief Commissioners, nominated by the Viceroy. Baluchistan is administered by the Agent to the Governor-General as Commissioner. The Andamans are under a Superintendent and Chief Commissioner. The Resident at Mysore is Commissioner of Coorg. Berar is administered by a Commissioner who is subordinate to the Resident at Hyderabad. And Ajmere is under a Commis- sioner who is subject to the Governor-General's * Fourteen. See Appendix A. t The Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces is also Chief Commissioner of Oudh. THE VICEROY 1/7 Agent for Rajputana. The authority exercised by the Viceroy over the Lieutenant-Governors, and other rulers of provinces appointed by him, is direct and effective. The Governors of Madras and Bombay he "superintends and controls," in the words of the Act of Parliament (3 & 4 Will. IV., c. 85), "in all points relating to the civil and military administration " of their provinces, and can compel them to obey "his orders and instructions in all cases whatsoever." He also controls finance, and consequently public works throughout India : he supervises the army, he directs internal and external diplomacy. He is assisted by a Council of six, composed of the Commander-in-Chief in India, a legal member, a financial member, a military member, and two distinguished and ex- perienced civil servants. He holds office for a term of five years, and is himself subject to the control of the Secretary of State for India, who, again, is assisted by a Council. Laws are made for all India by the Legislative Council of the Viceroy, and for various parts of it by the Legislative Councils of Local Governments. In these assemblies there are members who are supposed to bear a representative character, as they are appointed on the recommendation of certain local bodies. The various provinces of India are divided into districts : the district is the territorial unit ; the unit of administration. Of these districts there are 250. At the head of each is a Collector- Magistrate, or Deputy-Commissioner, who, as a rule, is taken from the Indian Civil Service, M 1 78 THE BRITISH Rlj appointments to which are obtained by open competition at examinations held in London. This official, who receives a salary ranging from ;^I200 to ;i^20oo a year, fills a position of great importance, involving many and diverse responsi- bilities and anxieties. The tract of country which he rules is sometimes very extensive : one of the districts in the Madras Presidency with which I am personally acquainted is larger than Denmark. " Upon his energy and personal character," writes Sir WiUiam Hunter, "depends ultimately the efficiency of our Indian Government. His own special duties are so numerous and so various as to bewilder the outsider ; and the work of his sub- ordinates, European and native, largely depends upon the stimulus of his personal example. His position has been compared to that of the French prdfet, but such a comparison is unjust in many ways to the Indian District officer. He is not a mere subordinate of a central bureau, who takes his colour from his chief, and represents the political parties or the permanent officialism of the capital. The Indian Collector is a strongly individualised worker in every department of rural well-being, with a large measure of local independence and of individual initiative. As the name of the Collector- Magistrate implies, his main functions are two- fold. He is a fiscal officer, charged with the collection of the revenue from the land and other sources ; he is also a revenue and criminal judge, both of first instance and in appeal. But his title by no means exhausts his multifarious duties. He does in his smaller local sphere all that the Home THE OFFICIAL HIERARCHY 1 79 Secretary superintends in England, and a great deal more ; for he is the representative of a paternal and not of a constitutional government. Police, gaols, education, municipalities, roads, sanitation, dispensaries, the local taxation, and the imperial revenues of his district are to him matters of daily concern. He is expected to make himself acquainted with every phase of the social life of the natives, and with each natural aspect of the country. He should be a lawyer, an accountant, a surveyor, and a ready writer of State papers. He ought also to possess no mean knowledge of agri- culture, political economy, and engineering." In most parts of India there is an officer called a Com- missioner who has under his supervision several districts. But in Madras this functionary does not exist. Instead of Commissioners, there is in that Presidency a Board of Revenue, to which all the District Collectors are directly subordinate. The Collector-Magistrate, or Deputy Commis- sioner, is assisted in his duties by a vast number of subordinates. First come those Assistant Collectors, or Commissioners and Magistrates, who, like him, belong to the Covenanted Civil Service of India. Next in the official hierarchy are Deputy Collectors and Magistrates, who are sometimes Europeans or Eurasians, but more commonly natives. And then Tahsildars, or as they are called in Bombay, Mamlatdars, who are also Subordinate Magistrates, whether of the First or Second Class, and who are almost always natives. Besides these administrative magistrates, there l8o THE BRITISH RAJ are also in each district purely judicial function- aries, of whom the Chief is the Judge — District and Sessions or District Judge is his full title — and he is ordinarily taken from the Covenanted Civil Service. In civil causes he has unlimited jurisdiction, as he has also in criminal — except over European British subjects — but capital sentences passed by him must not be carried out without the confirmation of the High Court to which he is subordinate, and to which an appeal from his decisions lies. There are four High Courts in India, namely, of Bengal, Madras, Bombay, and the North - West Provinces, be- sides the Chief Courts of the Punjab and Lower Burmah, which exercise the powers of a High Court. In the smaller provinces those powers are exercised by a Judicial Commissioner. Of the Judges of the High Courts, at least one-third, including the Chief Justice, must be barristers of not less than five years' standing. Another third are taken from the Covenanted Civil Service, and some from the local bars, which are largely composed of Hindu and Mohammedan advocates. Besides their appellate jurisdiction, the High Courts of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay have an original jurisdiction also in the cities in which they are located ; and European British subjects can be tried only by a High Court for grave offences. Not very far short of 3,000,000 suits are brought annually before the civil courts in India ; and close upon 2,000,000 people are arraigned before the criminal tribunals. The system of criminal law prevailing in the Indian Empire is CORRUPTION l8l largely based upon the English, and is embodied in the Indian Penal Code, the work chiefly of Lord Macaulay. The law of contracts and torts also is substantially English, as is the law of evidence. The law of marriage and inheritance is determined by the customs, usages, and Sacred Books of the various classes of the community. The public peace is kept by a large number of police — some 150,000 altogether — who, like the constables in England, are usually armed only with a truncheon. No one can deny that this system of civil and criminal administration is vastly superior to any- thing which India ever possessed under former rulers. Its defects arise chiefly from causes ex- traneous to it. The unblemished integrity and unswerving devotion to duty of the officials, whether English or Indian, who occupy the higher posts, no one will call in question. The character of the subordinate officials is not always so entirely above suspicion, and the course of justice is too often perverted by a lamentable characteristic of the Oriental mind. " Great is the rectitude of the English, greater is the power of a lie," is a pro- verbial saying throughout India. Of course, false evidence is to be found in all countries. But in few regions, perhaps, is oral testimony of so little value as in India. Nay, Mr Rudyard Kipling goes so far as to assert that there "you can buy a murder charge, including the corpse all complete, for fifty rupees." This may be one of his humorous exaggerations. But he is strictly accurate in asserting that, "when a native begins perjury, he perjures himself thoroughly ; he does not boggle 1 82 THE BRITISH RAJ over details." Perhaps the least satisfactory of the Government departments is the Police. A recent writer observes, " It is difficult to imagine how a department can be more corrupt." This, too, may be an over-statement. But, taken on the whole, the rank and file of the Indian police are probably not of higher integrity and character than those of New York. Next, a few words must be said regarding the finances of the Indian Empire. The currency is a silver one, and hitherto the accounts of the Govern- ment of India have been so rendered as to show the revenue and expenditure under each head in tens of rupees, for which the symbol Rx is used. It has come down to us from the days when ten rupees were equivalent to one pound sterling. One hundred thousand rupees are called a lac, and a hundred lacs make a crore. So that a crore of rupees represented a million of money. Unfortunately, the exchange value of the rupee has, of late years, been greatly depreciated — it has now sunk to sixteen pence — whence financial difficulties and problems too far-reaching and intricate to be discussed here. One result of them was the appoint- ment of a Royal Commission, which has recom- mended a gold currency for India. Sovereigns have now become a legal tender in that country, and are at present interchangeable with rupees at the rate of one sovereign for fifteen rupees, and the accounts of the Government of India are now drawn up so as to show the total revenue and expenditure under each head in pounds. The gross revenue in 1 899- 1 900 was ;