Shortly after Harsha's death in A.D. 648, India, as is her wont as soon as the strong man's arm is paralysed, relapses once more into political chaos. Her history does not indeed ever again recede into the complete obscurity of earlier ages. We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by them, into their own religious and social system. The most notable feature of the post-Harsha period of Hindu history is the emergence of the Rajput states, whose rulers, though probably descendants of relatively recent invaders, not only became rapidly Hinduised, but secured relatively prompt admission to the rank of Kshatryas in the Hindu caste system, with pedigrees dated back to the Sun and Moon, which to the popular mind were well justified by their warlike prowess and splendid chivalry. I need only recall the name of Prithvi-Raja, the lord of Sambhar, Delhi, and Ajmer, whose epic fame rests not less on his abduction of the Kanauj princess who loved him than on his gallant losing fight against the Mahomedan invaders of India. But fierce clan jealousies and intense dynastic pride made the Rajputs incapable of uniting into a single paramount state, or even into an enduring confederacy fit to withstand the storm of which Harsha himself might have heard the distant rumblings. For it was during his reign that militant Islam first set foot in India, in a remote part of the peninsula. Just at the same time as the Arabs, in the first flush of victory, poured into Egypt, a small force crossed the Arabian Sea and entered Baluchistan, and a century later the whole of Sind passed into Arab hands. Another two centuries and the Mahomedan flood was pouring irresistibly into India, no longer across the Arabian Sea, but from Central Asia through the great northern passes, until in successive waves it submerged for a time almost the whole of India.

Now if we look back upon the fifteen centuries of Indian history, of which I have sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and sufficiently rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Of its marvellous tenacity and powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, contemporary and closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically quite unimportant sect. But indomitably powerful as a social amalgam, Hinduism failed to generate any politically constructive force that could endure much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding pantheon of gods and goddesses for the multitude, with its subtle and elastic philosophies for the elect, with the doctrine of infinite reincarnations for all, and, bound up with it, the iron law of caste.

The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life even by the Western-educated classes. It divides up Indian society into thousands of water-tight compartments within which the Hindu is born and lives and dies without any possibility of emerging from the one to which he has been predestined by his own deeds in his former lives. Each caste forms a group, of which the relations within its own circle, as well as with other groups, are governed by the most rigid laws—in no connection more rigid than in regard to marriage. These groups are of many different types; some are of the tribal type, some national, some sectarian, some have been formed by migration, some are based upon a common social function or occupation past or present, some on peculiarities of religious beliefs and superstitions. A distinguished French writer, M. Senart, has described a caste as a close corporation, in theory at any rate rigorously hereditary, equipped with a certain traditional and independent organisation, observing certain common usages, more particularly as to marriage, food, and questions of ceremonial pollution, and ruling its members by the sanction of certain penalties of which the most signal is the sentence of irrevocable exclusion or out-casting. The Census of 1901 was the first to attempt a thorough classification of Indian castes, and the number of the main castes enumerated in it is well over two thousand, each one divided up again into almost endless sub-castes. The keystone of the whole caste system is the supremacy of the quasi-sacerdotal caste of Brahmans—a caste which constitutes in some respects the proudest and closest aristocracy that the world has ever seen, since it is not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of divine origin. An Indian is either born a Brahman or he is not. No power on earth can make him a Brahman. Not all Brahmans were learned even in the old days of Hinduism, though it was to their monopoly of such learning as there then was that they owed their ascendancy over the warrior kings. Nor do all Brahmans minister in the temples. Strangely enough the minority who do are looked down upon by their own castemen. The majority pursue such worldly avocations, often quite humble, as are permissible for them under their caste laws. The Brahmans were wise enough, too, to temper the fundamental rigidity of the system with sufficient elasticity to absorb the new elements with which it came into contact, and in most cases gradually to reabsorb such elements as from time to time rebelled against it. The process by which new castes may be admitted into the pale of Hinduism, or the status of existing castes be from time to time readjusted to new conditions, has been admirably explained by Sir Alfred Lyall. But the process can be worked only under Brahmanical authority, and the supreme sanction for all caste laws rests solely with the Brahmans, whilst of all caste laws the most inexorable is the supremacy of the Brahman. Therein lies the secret of the great influence which, for good as well as for evil, he has always wielded over the masses. For though in theory there could be no escape from the bondage of caste, individuals, and even a whole group, would sometimes find ways and means of propitiating the Brahmans who ministered to their spiritual needs, and the miraculous intervention of a favouring god or the discovery of a long-lost but entirely mythical ancestor would secure their social uplift on to a higher rung of the caste-ladder.

Such a system, by creating and perpetuating arbitrary and yet almost impassable lines of social cleavage, must be fatal to the development of a robust body politic which can only be produced by the reasonable intermingling and healthy fusion of the different classes of the community. It was perhaps chief among the causes that left Hinduism with so little force of organised political cohesion that the Hindu states of ancient India, with their superior culture and civilisation, were sooner or later swept away by the devastating flood of Mahomedan conquest, whilst the social structure of Hinduism, just because it consisted of such an infinity of water-tight compartments each vital and self-sufficing, could be buffeted again and again and even almost submerged by the waves without ever breaking up.



CHAPTER III

MAHOMEDAN DOMINATION

Of all the great religions that have shaped and are still shaping the destinies of the human race, Islam alone was borne forth into the world on a great wave of forceful conquest. Out of the sun-scorched deserts of Arabia, with the Koran in the one hand and the sword in the other, the followers of Mahomed swept eastward to the confines of China, northward through Asia Minor into Eastern Europe, and westward through Africa into Spain, and even into the heart of medieval France. But it was not till the beginning of the eleventh century that the Mahomedan flood began to roll down into India from the north with the overwhelming momentum of fierce fanaticism and primitive cupidity behind it—at first mere short but furious irruptions, like the seventeen raids of Mahmud of Ghazni between 1001 and 1026, then a more settled tide of conquest, now and again checked for a time by dissensions amongst the conquerors quite as much as by some brilliant rally of Hindu religious and patriotic fervour, but sweeping on again with a fresh impetus until the flood had spread itself over the whole of the vast peninsula, except the extreme south. For three centuries one wave of invasion followed another, one dynasty of conquerors displaced another, but whether under Turki or Afghan rulers, under Slave kings or under the house of Tughluk, there was seldom a pause in the consolidation of Mahomedan power, seldom a break in the long-drawn tale of plunder and carnage, cruelty and lust, unfolded in the annals of the earlier Mahomedan dynasties that ruled at Delhi. One notable victory Prithvi Raja, the forlorn hope of Hindu chivalry, won at Thanesvar in 1192 over the Afghan hordes that had already driven the last of the Ghaznis from Lahore and were sweeping down upon Delhi, but in the following year the gallant young Rajput was crushingly defeated, captured, and done to death by a ruthless foe. Then Delhi fell, and Kutub-ed-Din, in turn the favourite slave, the trusted lieutenant and the deputed viceroy of the Afghan conqueror, growing tired of serving an absent master, within a few years threw off his allegiance. In 1206 he proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi. That the Slave Dynasty which he founded was in one respect at least not unworthy of empire, in spite of the stigma attaching to its worse than servile origin, the Kutub Minar and the splendid mosque of which it forms part are there to show. The great minaret, which was begun by Kutub-ed-Din himself, upon whose name it has conferred an enduring lustre not otherwise deserved, is beyond comparison the loftiest and the noblest from which the Musulman call to prayer has ever gone forth, nor is the mosque which it overlooks unworthy to have been called Kuwwet-el-Islam, the Might of Islam. To make room for it the Hindu temples, erected by the Rajput builders of the Red Fort, were torn down, and the half-effaced figures on the columns of the mosque, and many other conventional designs peculiar to Hindu architecture, betray clearly the origin of the materials used in its construction. But the general conception, and especially the grand lines of the screen of arches on the western side, are essentially and admirably Mahomedan. On a slighter scale, but profusely decorated and of exquisite workmanship, is the tomb of Altamsh, Kutub-ed-Din's successor, and like him originally a mere favourite slave.

It had been well for these Slave kings had no other record survived of them than those which they have left in stone and marble. Great builders and mighty warriors they were in the cause of Allah and his Prophet, but their depravity was only exceeded by their cruelty. The story of the whole dynasty is a long-drawn tale of horrors until the wretched Kaikobad, having turned Delhi for a short three years into a house of ill-fame, was dragged out of his bed and flung into the Jumna, his infant child murdered, and the house of Khilji set up where the Slave kings had reigned. It was the second of these Khilji princes, Ala-ud-Din, who built, alongside of Kutub-ed-Din's mosque, the Alai Darwazah, the monumental gateway which is not only an exceptionally beautiful specimen of external polychromatic decoration, but, to quote Fergusson, "displays the Pathan style at its period of greatest perfection, when the Hindu masons had learned to fit their exquisite style of ornamentation to the forms of their foreign masters." Yet the atrocities of his twenty years' reign, which was one of almost unbroken conquest and plunder, wellnigh surpass those of the Slave kings. He had seized the throne by murdering his old uncle in the act of clasping his hand, and his own death was, it is said, hastened by poison administered to him by his favourite eunuch and trusted lieutenant, Kāfur, who had ministered to his most ignoble passions. To the Khiljis succeeded the Tughluks, and the white marble dome of Tughluk Shah's tomb still stands out conspicuous beyond the broken line of grim grey walls which were once Tughlukabad. The Khiljis had been overthrown, but the curse of a Mahomedan saint, Sidi Dervish, whose fame has endured to the present day, still rested upon the Delhi in which they had dwelt. So Mahomed Tughluk built unto himself a new and stronger city, but he did nothing else to avert the curse. Indeed, he invented a form of man-hunt which for sheer devilish cruelty has been only once matched in the West by the cani del duca when the crazy Gian Maria ruled in Milan. Well may his milder successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital. Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and lavish charities. The record he kept of them is not without a certain naive pathos:

Under the guidance of the Almighty, I arranged that the heirs of those persons who had been slain in the reign of my late Lord and Patron, Sultan Mahomed Shah, and those who had been deprived of a limb, nose, eye, hand, or foot, should be reconciled to the late Sultan and appeased by gifts, so that they executed deeds declaring their satisfaction, duly attested by witnesses. These deeds were put into a chest, which was placed at the head of the late Sultan's grave in the hope that God in his great mercy would show his clemency to my late friend and patron and make those persons feel reconciled to him.

The curse fell upon Delhi in the reign of the next Tughluk, Sultan Mahmud. Timur, with his Mongolian horsemen, swooped down through the northern passes upon Delhi, slaying Mahomedans and Hindus alike and plundering and burning on all sides as he came. Opposite to the famous ridge, where four and a half centuries later England was to nail her flag to the mast, he forded the Jumna, having previously slain all captives with his army to the number of 100,000. Mahmud's army, with its 125 elephants, could not withstand the shock. Timur entered Delhi, which for five whole days was given over to slaughter and pillage. Then, having celebrated his victory by a great carouse, he proceeded to the marble mosque which Firuz Tughluk's piety had erected in atonement of his grim predecessor's sins, and solemnly offered up a "sincere and humble tribute of praise" to God. Within a year he disappeared in the same whirl-wind of destruction through the northern passes into his native wilds of Central Asia, leaving desolation and chaos behind him.

From so terrific a blow Delhi was slow to recover. A group of picturesque domes marks the resting-place of some of the Seyyid and Lodi kings who in turn ruled or misruled the shrunken dominions which still owned allegiance to Delhi. The achievement of a centralised Mahomedan empire was delayed for nearly two centuries. But the aggressive vitality of Islam had not been arrested, and out of the anarchy which followed Timur's meteoric raid Mahomedan soldiers of fortune built up for themselves independent kingdoms and principalities and founded dynasties which each had their own brief moment of power and magnificence. In all these states, which spread right across Middle India from the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Bengal, Islam remained the dominant power; but, even whilst trampling upon Hinduism, it did not escape altogether the inevitable results of increasing contact with an older and more refined civilisation. Amidst rapine and bloodshed and the constant clash of arms, it was a period of intense artistic activity which, as usual in the countries conquered by Islam, expressed itself chiefly in terms of stone and marble, and though Hinduism never triumphed as classical paganism, for instance, triumphed for a time in Papal Rome, the steady and all-pervading revival of its influence can be traced from capital to capital, wherever these Mahomedan podestas established their seat of government during that Indian Cinque Cento, which corresponds in time with, and recalls in many ways, though at best distantly, the Italian Cinque Cento, with its strange blend of refined luxury and cruelty, of high artistic achievement and moral depravity.

To the present day almost all those cities—some of them now mere cities of the dead, such as Golconda and Gaur and Mandu, some, such as Bijapur and Bidar and Ahmednagar and Ahmedabad, still living and even flourishing—bear witness to the genius of their makers. From motives of political expediency, the Mahomedan rulers of those days, whether Bahmanis or Ahmed Shahis or Adil Shahis or whatever else they were called, were fain to reckon with their Hindu subjects. Wholesale conversions to the creed of the conquerors, whether spontaneous or compulsory, introduced new elements into the ruling race itself; for converted Hindus, even when they rose to high positions of trust, retained many of their own customs and traditions. Differences of religion ceased to be a complete bar to matrimonial and other alliances between Mahomedans and Hindus. Even in war Mahomedan mercenaries took service with Hindu chiefs, and Hindus under Mahomedan captains. There was thus, if not a fusion, a gradual mingling of the Mahomedan and Hindu populations which, in spite of many fierce conflicts, tended to promote a new modus vivendi between them. It was a period of transition from the era of mere ruthless conquest, which Timur's tempestuous irruption brought practically to a close, to the era of constructive statesmanship, which it was reserved to Akbar, the greatest of the Moghul Emperors, to inaugurate.

Each of these early Mahomedan states has a story and a character of its own, and each goes to illustrate the subtle ascendancy which the Hindu mind achieved over the conquering Mahomedan. I can only select a few typical examples. None is in its way more striking than Mandu, over whose desolation the jungle now spreads its kindly mantle. Within two years of Timur's raid into India the Afghan governors of Malwa proclaimed themselves independent, and Hushang Ghuri, from whom the new dynasty took its name, proceeded to build himself a new capital. The grey grim walls of Mandu still crown a lofty outpost of the Vindhya hills, some seventy miles south-east of Indore, the natural scarp falling away as steeply on the one side to the fertile plateau of Malwa as on the other to the broad valley of the sacred Nerbudda. The place had no Hindu associations, and in the stately palaces and mosques erected by Hushang and his immediate successors early in the fifteenth century scarcely a trace of Hindu influence can be detected, though some of them still stand almost intact amidst the luxuriant vegetation which has now swallowed up the less substantial remains of what was once a populous and wealthy city. The Ghuris came from Afghanistan, and the great mosque of Hushang Ghuri—in spite of inscriptions which say in one place that it has been modelled on the mosque of the Kaaba at Mecca, and in another place on the great mosque at Damascus—is perhaps the finest example of pure Pathan architecture in India, and one of the half-dozen noblest shrines devoted to Mahomedan worship in the whole world; a mighty structure of red sandstone and white marble, stern and simple, and as perfect in the proportions of its long avenues of pointed arches as in the breadth of its spacious design. Behind it, under a great dome of white marble, Hushang himself sleeps. Unique in its way, too, is the lofty hall of the Hindola Mahal, with its steeply sloping buttresses—a hall which has not been inaptly compared to the great dining-hall of some Oxford or Cambridge College—and alongside of it, the more delicate beauty, perhaps already suggestive of Hindu collaboration, of the Jahaz Mahal, another palace with hanging balconies and latticed windows of carved stone overlooking on either side an artificial lake covered with pink lotus blossoms. Mandu was at first an essentially Mahomedan city, and under Mahmud Khilji, who wrested the throne from Hushang's effete successor, its fame as a centre of Islamic learning attracted embassies even from Egypt and Bokhara. But its greatness was short-lived. Mahmud's son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for many years his father's right hand, both in council and in the field. But no sooner did he come to the throne in 1469 than he discharged all the affairs of the state on to his own son and retired into the seraglio, where 15,000 women formed his court and provided him even with a bodyguard. Five hundred beautiful young Turki women, armed with bows and arrows, stood, we are told, on his right hand, and, on his left, five hundred Abyssinian girls. Profligate succeeded profligate, and the degeneracy of his Mahomedan rulers was the Hindu's opportunity. The power passed into the hands of Hindu officers, who were even suffered to take unto themselves mistresses from among the Mahomedan women of the court. The end came, after many vicissitudes, with Baz Bahadur, chiefly known for his passionate devotion to the fair Hindu, Rup Mati, for whom he built on the very crest of the hill, so that from her windows she might worship the waters of the sacred Nerbudda, the only palace now surviving in Mandu which bears a definite impress of Hinduism. Baz Bahadur surrendered to the Emperor Akbar in 1562.

At Ahmedabad, on the other hand, the Ahmed Shahi Sultans of Gujerat found themselves in presence of an advanced form of Hindu civilisation as soon as they entered into possession of the kingdom which they snatched from the general conflagration. Whether Ahmedabad, which is still the modern capital of Gujerat and ranks only second to its neighbour, Bombay, as a centre of the Indian cotton industry, occupies or not the exact site of the ancient Karnāvati, Gujerat was a stronghold of Indian culture long before the Mahomedan invasions. Architecture especially had reached a very high standard of development in the hands of what is usually known as the Jaina school. This is a misnomer, for the school was in reality the product of a period rather than a sect, though Jainism probably never enjoyed anywhere, or at any time, such political ascendancy as in Gujerat under its Rashtrakuta and Solanki rulers from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and seldom has there been such an outburst of architectural activity as amongst the Jains of that period. To the present day the salats or builders, mostly Jains, have in their keeping, jealously locked away in iron-bound chests in their temples, many ancient treatises on civil and religious architecture, of which only a few abstracts have hitherto been published in Gujerati, but, as may be seen at Ahmedabad, in the great Jaina temple of Hathi Singh, built in the middle of the last century at a cost of one million sterling, they have preserved something of the ancient traditions of their craft.

Firishta described Ahmedabad as, in his day, "the handsomest city in Hindustan and perhaps in the world," and very few Indian cities contain so many beautiful buildings as those with which Ahmedabad was endowed in the course of a few decades by its Ahmed Shahi rulers. No one can fail to admire the wealth of ornamentation and the exquisite workmanship lavished upon them, though they are not by any means the noblest monuments of Mahomedan architecture in India. In fact—and herein lies their peculiar interest—they are Hindu rather than Mahomedan in spirit. For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in earlier times for their Hindu rajas. By the mere force of a civilisation in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them, many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture. To obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant, they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat. Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan purposes has passed. It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy. The earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu temple with a Mahomedan facade, and the figures of animals and of idols can still be traced on the interior pillars. The octagonal tomb of Ganj Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan character. Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat. It was completed in 1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in the domain at least of architecture.

In Bijapur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu art—perhaps because the great days of Bijapur came after it had taken its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern India to perish by the sword of Islam. Having laid low the Hindu "City of Victory," the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan "City of Victory" eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed. The Gol Kumbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed space in the world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St. Peter's dominates the Roman Campagna. To such heights Hindu architecture can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which rests on symmetrical groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like the same bold span or the same lofty elevation. Have we not there a symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture? Even if the Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture. The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except under compulsion.

To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan condottieri possessed. A new power more equal to the task was already storming at the northern gates of India. On a mound thirty-five miles north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous battles that decide the fate of nations. It is Panipat. There, on April 21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the last of the Lodis. Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar horsemen; but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for empire. He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his statesmanship as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries. Though it was at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there to-day. But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his son Humayun's mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous feature in the plain of Delhi. Endowed with many brilliant and amiable qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father or his son. Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it, when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi caused his death at the early age of forty-eight. But would he have been able to retain it? He had by no means crushed the forces of rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule, and which were still holding the field under the leadership of the brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu. Delhi itself was lost within a few months of Humayun's death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty years after his grandfather's brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan. He too fought and won, and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to mould and to fashion at the promptings of his genius.

Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed—the blood of Timur flowed in his veins—and men of other races and of other creeds. They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. What was the reason? Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and perished? Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge in the family. He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force, but he never used force alone. He subdued the Rajput states, but he won the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East. He created a homogeneous system of civil administration which our own still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively slight modifications to the present day.

Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could be no security for the future against the revival of the old and deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred books to be translated into Persian—the cultured language of his court—so that he could study them for himself; and he invited Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the greatest of the Moghul Emperors—the contemporary of our own great Queen Elizabeth—presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over against it, in the beautiful "Golden House," dwelt his Rajput consort, Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and illustrious Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation, untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the "Gate of Victory," the lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the spacious mosque quadrangle: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world is a bridge. Pass over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'"

It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them, he foresaw that his life's work would assuredly some day be wrecked. Did he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as noble a mind as his not proof against the overweening hubris to which a despotic genius has so often succumbed? One momentous evening, in the Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran, which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, "There is no God but God, and Mahomed is his prophet," proclaimed indeed in the same words the unity of God, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent of God. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only borrowed its prayers chiefly from the Parsees and its ritual from the Hindus, but practically abolished all Mahomedan observances. The orthodox Mahomedans naturally held up their hands in horror, and many preferred honourable exile to conformity. But the awe which Akbar inspired, and perhaps the acknowledged elevation of his motives, generally compelled at least outward acceptance during his lifetime. His Mahomedan subjects had, moreover, to admit that his desire to conciliate Hinduism did not blind him to its most perverse features. Whilst he abolished the capitation tax on Hindus and the tax upon Hindu pilgrims, he forbade infant marriages and, short of absolute prohibition, did all he could to discountenance the self-immolation of Hindu widows. To the Brahmans especially his condemnation, both implied and explicit, of the caste system was a constant stone of offence.

Great as was his genius and admirable as were many of his institutions, Akbar, to use a homely phrase, fell between two stools to the ground. He himself ceased to be a Mahomedan without becoming a Hindu, whilst the great bulk at least of his subjects still remained at bottom Mahomedans and Hindus as before. Neither community was ripe for an eclectic creed based only upon sweet reasonableness and lofty ethical conceptions. His son and successor, Jehanghir, at once reverted to Mahomedan orthodoxy, but the reaction only became militant when Aurungzeb succeeded Shah Jehan. The profound incompatibility between Islam and Hinduism reasserted itself in him with a bitterness which the growing menace of the rising power of the Hindu Mahrattas probably helped to intensify. The reimposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus destroyed the last vestige of the great work of conciliation to which Akbar had vainly applied all his brilliant energies. Like Fatehpur Sikri itself, which for lack of water he had been compelled to abandon within fifteen years of its construction, it was a magnificent failure, and it was perhaps bound in his time to be a failure.

Aurungzeb was the first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth of the new Mahratta power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous Peacock Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern passes. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army. The Mahrattas endured a crushing defeat, which, together with treachery within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.

For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the Portuguese—Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British—the British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection, and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, "If a paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here"; and when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had passed into the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the noblest of Akbar's dreams.

But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off, but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same process of adaptation, assimilation, and absorption, which had been going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry between the cults of Shiva and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by Shivaite and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most popular of Hindu gods, and the divine love, of which he was at first the personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their origin from the ancient ideas of sexual dualism immanent in some of the Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of the great gods into the Sakti worship of the female principle, often with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the altars of the Mahamatri, the great goddesses personified in Kali and Durga. The worship of the gods assumed a more terrific and orgiastic character. Sati was more frequently practised. Many of the most splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples—amongst others that of Jaganath at Puri—were founded during that period. The custom, in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism reasserted itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against Mahomedan domination.

The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority of woman by her close confinement—of which there are few traces in earlier times—within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a precautionary measure for her protection against the lust of the Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the women of India, even in the classes in which the men of India have been drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate conservatism clings to social traditions and religious superstitions of which their male belongings have already been taught to recognise the evils. In this respect Mahomedan domination has helped to strengthen the forces of resistance inherent to Hinduism.

On the other hand, Mahomedan domination has left behind it a deep line of religious cleavage, deepest in the north, which was the seat of Mahomedan power, but extending to almost every part of India. Sixty-six millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans, and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by the supreme force of religion. We have a pale reflection of that sort of antagonism at our own doors in the bitterness between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster. All over India, Mahomedans and Hindus alike remember the centuries of Mahomedan domination, the latter with the bitterness bred of the long oppression that struck down their gods and mutilated their shrines, the former with the unquenched pride and unquenchable hope of a fierce faith which will yet, they believe, make the whole world subject to Allah, the one God, and Mahomed, his one Prophet.



CHAPTER IV

BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as conquerors. For trade meant co-operation. There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few precarious settlements on the far-flung shores of a then almost unknown continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an embassy to court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement, until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of almost constant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force, its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's forces, formed only a tithe numerically of the victorious armies that fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comradeship between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day, with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulership of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring, wherever circumstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.

In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British Government and the British people to control the methods by which British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers, they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to influence also the attitude of the British people towards the alien races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth. But whilst our competitors never got much beyond that stage, and for the most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which the development of their own national institutions had imbued their rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their Indian possessions.

So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple. The three "Presidents" who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters assumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking abundant tithe of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend financial and military assistance in order to rescue the East India Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The grant of the Diwani to the Company by the titular Emperor of Delhi gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable advances in order to replenish them, and the splendour of the fortunes amassed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home, combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live issues of British party politics.

There was much that was squalid and grossly unjust in the rancorous campaigns conducted first against Clive and then against Warren Hastings. But behind all the personal jealousies and the greed of factions there was a strong and healthy public instinct that the responsibilities assumed by the East India Company were greater than a trading association could safely be left to discharge uncontrolled, and that the State could not divest itself of the duties imposed upon it by the acquisition of vast and populous possessions. It would be idle to pretend that the British people already entertained any definite conception of a tutelary relationship towards the peoples of India, or were animated by purely philanthropic solicitude for the moral welfare of India. But the passionate oratory of Fox and Burke and their fervid denunciation of oppression and wrongdoing in India awoke responsive echoes far beyond the walls of Westminster. In 1762, when France had claimed, in the course of the peace negotiations which led to the Treaty of Paris, the restitution of the possessions she had lost to the East India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of "any right of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property of a body corporate." Only eleven years later, the House of Commons passed resolutions to the effect that "all acquisitions made under the influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of right belong to the State," and the Commons had the country behind them. From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian affairs.

A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which Parliament, asserting the right of "eminent dominion over every British subject in every country," gradually established its authority over Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually preserved until the Crown assumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the extension of British dominion in India. The first of these legislative measures was Lord North's Regulating Act, which was passed in 1773, just eight years after the East India Company had acquired for the first time the right of revenue and civil administration over vast territories in Bengal and in the Madras "Northern Circars," and thereby taken over the duties of government in respect of a great native population, absolutely alien in race, in religion, and in customs. Lord North's Act did not attack directly the problem of Indian government, but it sought to facilitate its solution by the East India Company itself by reforming its constitution at home, where the jealousies and intrigues of rival factions in the Board of Directors had often reached the dimensions of a public scandal, and by centralising the Company's authority in India, where, as the result of recent developments which had now established the centre of British gravity in Bengal, the post of Governor-General was created for the Bengal Presidency and invested with powers of control over the other Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, which had hitherto enjoyed a status of practical equality. At the same time an attempt was made to strengthen control from home by enjoining upon the Governor-General to keep the Board of Directors in London fully informed and to abide by its instructions, whilst a check was placed upon the executive authority in Bengal by the creation of a Supreme Court in Calcutta from which the present High Court is descended.

The defect of this legislation—a defect inherent to the situation in India itself—was the dualism it created by endeavouring to enforce Parliamentary restraints upon a Company which derived its title to government over the greater part of its possessions from the irresponsible despotism of the Moghul emperors. The Company was thus made to serve two masters, and at the same time it remained essentially a great trading corporation whose commercial and fiscal interests were always liable to conflict, and sometimes did conflict, with its duties towards both masters. The total collapse of the Moghul Empire removed before long one of the ambiguities of this situation, but the other endured in a greater or less degree until the East India Company itself disappeared, though every subsequent measure of Indian legislation at home tended to bring the Indian executive more and more fully under the control of the home Government.

Eleven years later Pitt's famous Government of India Act of 1784 marked a very important step forward. Another great war had been brought to an end by the Peace of Versailles in 1783, and whilst at its close we had lost the greater part of our North American Colonies, the genius of Warren Hastings had saved and consolidated British power in India. It was easy to criticise, and if we are to judge in accordance with modern standards, it is doubtless right to condemn some of the devices to which he resorted in the course of the long struggle he was often left to wage with little or no help, and sometimes in the face of active obstruction from those who, at home and in India, should have been the first to support him. Whatever his errors may have been, they were more than atoned for by the cruel persecution to which he was subjected whilst England was harvesting the fruits of his energy and courage. Pitt's Act was in fact the solemn consecration of all his greatest achievements, whilst it brought India into closer and more direct relationship with the Crown. Not the least of the difficulties with which Hastings, the only Governor-General appointed by the East India Company, was confronted arose from frequent opposition in his own Council, where he was merely primus inter pares. Pitt took care to provide against the recurrence of similar trouble in the future. But having strengthened the Governor-General's position, he took away the right of appointing him from the Company and transferred it to the Crown. Nor was that all. The Company itself was placed under the effective control of the Crown by the establishment in London of a Board of Control, of which the President was ultimately to develop into the Secretary of State for India, over the Courts of Directors and Proprietors. In substance, if not in form, India was already becoming a Dependency of the British Crown.

Nor was Pitt's Act concerned only with the relations of the Company to the Crown. Its numerous and very drastic provisions for the prevention and punishment of the corruption and oppression which had become rampant amongst the Company's servants after the grant of the Diwani testified to the determination of Parliament, whilst acquiescing in the extension of the British dominion, to uphold and enforce at the same time in the governance of Indian peoples the principle of justice for all to which the British people had gradually fought their way. A strong impetus was thus given to the great reforms already initiated by Clive himself, and still more drastically by Warren Hastings, which, within the framework as far as possible of the old indigenous system of judicial and civil administration, built up on solid foundations of integrity and efficiency a capacious and elastic structure easily extended to the vast territories that were still to pass under British rule. But then no more than at any later period could the machinery of government have worked smoothly, or even at all, without the co-operation of the Indians themselves, who were recruited in large numbers into the Company's service. Respect for their traditional customs and beliefs, and encouragement, of which Warren Hastings was the first to recognise the importance, to Indian education, though still only on the old lines with which Indians were already familiar, secured the growing loyalty of their co-operation. Then, as now, it was nowhere more effective than in the judicial administration, and side by side with new tribunals, which conformed with Western jurisprudence, the old ones, purified and reorganised, continued to dispense justice in accordance mainly with Hindu and Mahomedan and Indian customary law. With the consolidation of the British Paramount Power Indians learnt to identify it with their ancient conception of the State, and the Company's service came to enjoy the popularity and prestige which had always attached to the service of the State under their indigenous rulers and even under Mahomedan domination.

The renewal of the Company's Charter, which took place at intervals of twenty years, dating from Lord North's Act of 1773, afforded a convenient opportunity for the revision, when required, both of its relations to the Crown and of its methods of government in India. The abrogation of its trading monopoly in 1813 was mainly a concession to opposition at home, quickened by the loss of the European markets which had been closed against Great Britain by Napoleon's continental system, and for the renewal of its Charter the Company had to surrender its trading monopoly. It was the first step towards the abrogation of all its trading privileges twenty years later, when the Company, finally delivered from the temptations which beset a commercial corporation, became for the first time a purely governing body, free to devote its entire energies to the discharge of the immense responsibilities that had devolved upon it. This was, however, only one, though not the least significant of the momentous changes that accompanied the renewal of the Charter in 1833.

The trend of events in Europe after the peace in 1815 had tended to accentuate the profound divergency of views between Great Britain and the leading continental Powers in regard to fundamental principles of government, which, dating back to the seventeenth century, had been arrested at the close of the eighteenth by the exigencies of common action against the excesses of the French Revolution and the inordinate ambition of Napoleon. Under the auspices of the Holy Alliance, the continent of Europe was drifting into blind reaction. The British people, on the contrary, were entering upon a further stage of democratic evolution at home, and, under the influence of new liberal and humanitarian doctrines, their sympathies were going out abroad to every down-trodden nationality that was struggling, whether in Greece or in South America, to throw off the yoke of oppressive despotisms. Their growing sense of responsibility towards alien races which they themselves held in subjection was manifested most conspicuously in the generous movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our West Indian Colonies. It could not fail to be extended also to India. Under Lord Hastings British dominion had again rapidly expanded between 1813 and 1823, when he left it firmly established from the extreme south to the Sutlej in the north. Then ten years of internal and external peace had followed in which the educational labours, chiefly in Bengal, of a generation of great missionaries began not only to meet with unexpected reward in India itself, but also to stir the public mind at home to new aspects of a mission which came to be regarded as providential, and to the moral duties which it imposed upon us in return for the material advantages to be derived from political dominion. Some of our great administrators in India were themselves beginning to look forward to a time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India capable of self-government—not yet, of course, on the lines now contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is to be their final result on the character of the people?" The following passage in that remarkable document may be commended to our faint-hearted doubters of to-day:

Liberal treatment has always been found the most effectual way of elevating the character of any people, and we may be sure that it will produce a similar effect on that of the people of India. The change will no doubt be slow, but that is the very reason why no time should be lost in commencing the work. We should not be discouraged by difficulties, nor, because little progress may be made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has been among the nations of Europe and through what a long course of barbarous ages they had to pass before they attained their present state. When we compare other countries with England, we usually speak of England as she now is. We scarcely ever think of going back beyond the Reformation, and we are apt to regard every foreign nation as ignorant and uncivilised, whose state of government does not in some degree approximate to our own, even should it be higher than our own was at no distant date.

We should look upon India not as a temporary possession but as one to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in some after age be effected in India there is no cause to despair. Such a change was at one time in Britain itself at least as hopeless as it is here. When we reflect how much the character of nations has always been influenced by that of governments, and that some, once the most cultivated, have sunk into barbarism, while others, formerly the rudest, have attained the highest point of civilisation, we shall see no reason to doubt that if we pursue steadily the proper measures, we shall in time so far improve the character of our Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect themselves.

It was a splendid vision for a great British administrator to have entertained nearly one hundred years ago, though, with no self-governing Dominions in those days to point a better way, the only possibility that could occur to Munro's mind in the event of its fulfilment was an amicable but complete severance of our connection with India; and it is well to be reminded of the faith that was already in him and not a few other experienced and broad-minded Englishmen in India as well as at home, now that many of us are inclined to contemplate only with scepticism and apprehension an approach to its fulfilment on the new lines which the evolution of the British Empire and of democratic government throughout all its component parts, neither of which could then be foreseen, have in the meantime suggested.

Indians were at that time already employed in large numbers in the Company's services, but only in subordinate posts, for which in most cases their educational backwardness alone fitted them, and only as an act of grace on the part of their British rulers. Parliament had recognised the right of the Indian people to expect from us the benefits of good and honest government—perhaps as a duty which we owed to ourselves as much as to them—but it had not yet risen to a recognition of their right to any active share in the government of their country.

One of the first questions to come before the new Parliament elected after the great Reform Bill was that of the renewal of the Company's charter in 1833. The Parliamentary Committee appointed to inquire and report on the subject struck a new note when it laid distinct stress on the Indian point of view. It admitted frankly that "Indians were alive to the grievance of being excluded from a larger share in the executive government," and proceeded to state that in its opinion ample evidence had been given to show "that such exclusion is not warranted on the score of their own incapacity for business or the want of application or trustworthiness." Accordingly, when the Charter was renewed, Parliament laid it down that "no native of the said Indian territories, nor any natural British-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the Company." This was the first substantial promise given to India that British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however beneficent, of alien rulers. It invited the co-operation of the subject race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission. It heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without which the promise would have been empty.

The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to provide out of the Company's funds for the maintenance of indigenous educational institutions, and it had been definitely provided in the renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education. But long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education. The champions of English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff, a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of English as essential to the spread of Western education. One of the immediate objects in view—and incidentally as a measure of economy—was undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the administrative and judicial services of the Company. But if Macaulay was quite wrong in imagining that Western education would assimilate Indians to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means blind to the larger implications of the new departure he was advocating. Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our efforts should be directed. "It may be," he declared, "that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come, I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history."

Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was to be the diffusion of Western education. "The great object of the British Government," he declared, "ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone."

India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to the new call. Not only were the new Government schools as well as the older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning, but the rapid assimilation of Western ideas amongst the upper classes, especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit of the West. Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the barbarous custom of Sati, i.e. the self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Government, however, rightly felt that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and beliefs into harmony with Western standards. Nor was there any lack of Indians to give their countrymen that lead—amongst them several high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost. They were resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superstitious and idolatrous impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure kernel of Hindu philosophy. The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any personal God. British administrators watched and fostered the moral and intellectual progress of India with increasing confidence in the results of Western education, and none with more conviction than Lord Dalhousie, a high-minded and dour Scotsman, who was the last Governor-General to serve out his time under the East India Company. Other aspects of his policy may have been less wise. The extension of British rule to the Punjab became inevitable after a Sikh rising compelled him to complete what his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, had begun, and break once and for all the aggressive power of the Sikh Confederacy; but the rigorous application to the native States of the doctrine of lapse or escheat whenever the ruler died without a recognised heir, and the forcible annexation of the kingdom of Oudh as a penalty incurred by the sins, however gross, of the reigning dynasty have been often condemned as grave errors of judgment. They were not, in any case, errors that can be ascribed to the lust of mere dominion. Dalhousie was convinced that Indian progress would always be hampered by the continuance of native administration under such rulers as the kings of Oudh. If he was bent on extending the area of British dominion, it was in order to extend the area within which Britain was to be free to discharge her civilising mission without let or hindrance, and not least by the furtherance of education. If he took a legitimate pride in the introduction into India under his auspices of the two great discoveries of applied science which were just beginning to revolutionise the Western world, viz. railways and telegraphs, together with unified postage, it was because he regarded them as powerful instruments of education. The impulse given by him to public instruction even in the new provinces recently brought under British control prepared the way for the great educational measures of 1854 which marked a tremendous stride forward on the road upon which Macaulay's Minute had started India just two decades before. It was to Dalhousie that Sir Charles Wood addressed his memorable despatch which contained, as the Governor-General frankly acknowledged, "a scheme of education for all India far wider and more comprehensive than the local or Supreme Governments could have ventured to suggest." Its main features were the establishment of a department of Public Instruction in every province to emphasise the importance attached by Government to the educational purpose of British rule; the creation of Universities in each of the three Presidency cities, and of Government colleges of a higher grade, and training colleges for teachers, and the bestowal of grants-in-aid on private educational institutions. The claims of vernacular education were not forgotten, nor the vital importance of promoting female education, by which "a far greater proportional impulse is imported to the educational and moral tone of the people than by the education of men." The despatch mapped out a really national system of education worthy of the faith which the British generation of that day had in the establishment of an intellectual and spiritual communion between India and the West. The initial steps immediately taken by Dalhousie to carry the provisions of that despatch into execution are enumerated in the masterly Report drawn up by him on his way home in 1856, reviewing every aspect of his administration during his eight years' tenure of office—an administration which virtually closed, and not unworthily, perhaps the noblest period of British rule in India, when men of the intellectual and moral elevation of Bentinck and Munro and Metcalfe and Elphinstone and Thomason, and Dalhousie himself, humbly but firmly believed that in trying to found "British greatness on Indian happiness" they were carrying out the mission which it had pleased Providence to entrust to the British people. Dalhousie's parting hope and prayer, when he left India, broken in health but not in spirit, after eight years of intensely strenuous service, was that "in all time to come these reports from the Presidencies and provinces under our rule may form in each successive year a happy record of peace, prosperity, and progress." His immediate successor, Lord Canning, was moved to utter some strangely prophetic words before he left England: "I wish for a peaceful term of office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin." Within less than a year the cloud arose and burst, and he had to face the outbreak of the Mutiny and see all the foundations of co-operation between Indians and British rudely shaken, which a broad and liberal policy of "peace, prosperity, and progress" seemed to have so well and truly laid.



CHAPTER V

THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER

Many different causes, much more clearly apprehended to-day than at the time, contributed to provoke the great storm which burst over India in 1857. On the surface it was a military and mainly Mahomedan insurrection, but it was far more than that. It was a violent upheaval not so much against the political supremacy of Britain as against the whole new order of things which she was importing into India. The greased cartridges would not have sufficed to provoke such an explosion, nor would even Mahomedans, let alone Hindus, have rallied round a phantom King of Delhi in mere revenge for the annexation of Oudh or the enforcement of the doctrine of lapse. The cry of "Islam in danger" was quick to stir the Mahomedans, but the brains that engineered and directed the Mutiny were Hindu, and the Mutiny itself was the counter-revolution arraying in battle against the intellectual and moral as well as against the material and military forces of Western civilisation that was slowly but steadily revolutionising India, all the grievances and all the fears, all the racial and religious antagonism and bitterness aroused by the disintegration under its impact of ancient social and religious systems. Western education was to yield other fruits later on, but before the Mutiny it was rapidly familiarising the mind of India with Western ideals which imperilled not only the worship of the old gods but also the worship of the Brahman as their mouthpiece and "the guardian of the treasury of civil and religious duties." Modern schools and colleges threatened to undermine his ascendancy just as Western competition had by more dubious methods undermined Indian domestic industries. No man's caste was said to be safe against the hidden defilement of all the strange inventions imported from beyond the seas. Prophecy, vague but persuasive, hinted that British rule, which dated in the Indian mind from the battle of Plassey in 1757, was doomed not to outlive its centenary. All the vested interests connected with the old order of things in the religious as well as in the political domain felt the ground swaying under their feet, and the peril with which they were confronted came not only from their alien rulers but from their own countrymen, often of their own caste and race, who had fallen into the snares and pitfalls of an alien civilisation. The spirit of fierce reaction that lay behind the Mutiny stands nowhere more frankly revealed than in the History of the War of Independence of 1857, written by Vinayak Savarkar, one of the most brilliant apostles of a later school of revolt, who, as a pious Hindu, concludes his version of the Cawnpore massacre with the prayer that "Mother Ganges, who drank that day of the blood of Europeans, may drink her fill of it again."

The revolt failed except in one respect. It failed as a military movement. It had appealed to the sword and it perished by the sword. But it is well to remember that the struggle, which was severe, would have been, to say the least, far more severe and protracted had not a large part of the Indian army remained staunch to the Raj, and had not Indian troops stood, as they had stood throughout all our previous fighting in India, shoulder to shoulder with British troops on the ridge at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow. It failed equally as a political movement, for it never spread beyond a relatively narrow area in Upper and Central India. The vast majority of the Indian people and princes never even wavered. British rule passed through a trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities. The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company then still was. The Company had long ceased to be a mere trading corporation. Transformed into a great agency of government and administration, it had risen not unworthily to its immense responsibilities. But the time had come for the final step. The Company disappeared and the Crown assumed full and sole responsibility for the government and administration of India. The change was in effect more formal than real. The Governor-General came to be known as the Viceroy, and the Secretary of State in Council took the place of the old President of the Board of Control. But the system remained as before one of paternal despotism in India, to be tempered still by the control of Parliament at home.

Only in one respect had the reactionary forces at the back of the Mutiny scored some success. The Proclamation issued by Queen Victoria on her assumption of "the government of the territories in India heretofore administered in trust for us by the Honourable East India Company," was a solemn and earnest renewal of all the pledges already given to the princes and people of India. It emphasised the determination of the Crown to abstain from all interference with their religious belief or worship. It reiterated the assurance that "as far as may be," her subjects "of whatever race or creed" would be freely and impartially admitted to offices in the service of the Crown, "the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge," and that, "generally in framing and administering the law, due regard be paid to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India." It promised the wide exercise of her royal clemency to all offenders save those actually guilty of murder during the recent outbreak. It closed with a fine expression of her confidence and affection towards her Indian subjects. "In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward." But no Proclamation, however generous and sincere, could undo the moral harm done by the Mutiny. The horrors which accompanied the rising and the sternness of the repression left terrible memories behind them on both sides, and this legacy of racial hatred acted as a blight on the growth of the spirit of mutual understanding and co-operation between Indians and Englishmen in India which two generations of broad-minded Englishmen and progressive Indians had sedulously and successfully cultivated.