!/ 1 \ _<> 
 
 
 ■ a 1 > ,>^ 
 
 
 \^' ■■-!'- - \': «« -Af * ^i'p ^ 
 
 0°' 
 
 
 ■\\ 
 
 
 ' \ '^ ■' , X ■* ''*^ 
 
 0' 
 
 >'^c 
 
 
 ^# :i^^S4: '"^-^ 
 
 .^^%, 
 
 
 
 n\^- 
 
•^oo^ 
 
 > ,9^ 
 
 0^ , <-'' 
 
 ,0o^ 
 
 o 0^ 
 
 ".fc 
 
 
 •U. 
 
 % 
 
 "c^. 
 
 
 "^r, ,c\ 
 
 ':3^ 
 
 .^x 
 
 
 ■^ .^' 
 
 .\^^ 
 
 
 
 .x<\,^ 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
tL^^nO'^iA-ci^ ^^cu/i/x^ , 0,£i&^e^-ny ^a/et^'-fZ'yy. 
 
THE HISTORY OF 
 
 ARYAN RULE IN 
 INDIA 
 
 FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO 
 THE DEATH OF AKBAR 
 
 E. B. HAVELL 
 
 Author of "The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India" 
 
 " Indian Architecture : Its Psycholog-y Structure and 
 
 History " " Indian Painting and Sculpture " 
 
 " The Ideals of Indian Art " etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 
 PUBLrlSHHRS 
 
5'^ 
 
 -P^^ 
 
 
 PRINTED AT 
 THE COMPLETE PRESS 
 WEST NORWOOD 
 LONDON ENGLAND 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE Eastern Question is always with us, for the fate of 
 the British Empire is bound up with it ; and the kernel 
 of the Eastern Question lies in India, the country which 
 has contributed most to the wealth, prosperity, and power 
 of the Empire. But neglect of the study of Indian history, 
 or 'colossal ignorance' of it, has never been regarded as a dis- 
 qualification for the highest positions in the Government of 
 India. The Imperial ParHament takes it for granted that a 
 capable British Minister is as well quahfied for deahng with 
 the problems of Indian administration as he is for any other 
 office of State. 
 
 It is a significant fact that Indians generally prefer an 
 administrator who has not been through the mill of the Indian 
 Civil Service, from the idea that he will be likely to treat 
 high political questions in a more liberal and unbiased spirit. 
 And in this matter the Indian has intuitively understood the 
 secret of the astonishing success of British rule in the East. 
 Indian philosophy has always discriminated between two 
 kinds of knowledge — intuitional or divinely inspired wisdom, 
 and traditional, or that which is acquired by training and 
 experience ; and the former has always been held to be in 
 the highest plane. It is not the educational equipment or 
 administrative efficiency of the bureaucracy which makes the 
 vast majority of Indians accept British rule as the best possible 
 one, and brings Hindu and Musalman to rally round the flag of 
 the Empire at the most critical time of its existence. It is that 
 they recognise that the present Aryan rulers of India, in spite 
 of ' colossal ignorance ' and the mistakes which are the result 
 of it, are generally animated by that same love of justice and 
 fair-play, the same high principles of conduct and respect for 
 
 V 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 humanitarian laws, which guided the ancient Aryan statesmen 
 and lawgivers in their relations with the Indian masses. 
 
 Our Indo-Aryan brothers have perhaps more than most 
 Britons of that deep veneration for true knowledge which has 
 always been characteristic of the Aryan race. They recognise 
 in modern European scientific research, so far as it is disin- 
 terested and not prostituted for base purposes, the culmination 
 of the quest which their own divinely inspired rishis followed 
 for thousands of years, and they eagerly desire to have the 
 doors of this new temple of Sarasvati opened to them wider. 
 I^ord Macaulay, in spite of his contempt for Indo-Aryan 
 culture, is still regarded by them as a great statesman and 
 benefactor of India — and from their point of view rightly so, 
 for, though profoundly ignorant of Indo-Aryan history, his 
 intuitive genius showed him the path leading to an Indian 
 Renaissance, though he himself totally miscalculated the 
 direction it would take. 
 
 But neither Great Britain nor India can always expect 
 to be so well served or afford to regard ignorance of Indian 
 history as the best qualification for Anglo-Indian statesmen. 
 Not only the British nation but all Europe pays dearly for 
 lack of understanding of the Eastern Question. It is not 
 improbable that future historians in reviewing the causes of 
 Europe's present political bankruptcy will find the chiefest 
 in the fatal obsession of British statesmen that for the security 
 of our Empire in India it was necessary or expedient for Great 
 Britain to bolster up Turkish misrule in Asia and in Europe — 
 an idea deeply rooted in Anglo-Indian official traditions — and 
 in the misreading of Muhammadan history, which even now 
 makes Turks, Pathans, and Mongols the regenerators of 
 idolatrous Hindu India and the cultured inspirers of all that 
 is noble in Indian architecture. Deeper insight into the 
 psychology of Indian history would have added more power 
 and wisdom to the foreign policy of Great Britain and to the 
 cause of the Allies — ^which is the Aryan cause. 
 
 The course of the Great War has shown how groundless were 
 the fears that Indian Muhammadans, as a body, would desire 
 vi 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 to prolong the unlioly alliance between Islam and the powers 
 of evil which Turkish rulers, young and old, in Europe and in 
 Asia, have maintained for so many centuries. India herself 
 has been in the past one of the chief sufferers from this 
 alliance — as Muhammadan historians have clearly shown — 
 and Indian Muhammadans love their motherland too well 
 and respect Islam too much to become the tools of the 
 criminal conspiracy which plunged Europe into a mad war — a 
 conspiracy in which the purblind politicians of Young Turkey 
 believed they saw a great opportunity for themselves and 
 their country. 
 
 But neither British nor Turkish politicians can claim much 
 credit for clarity of vision with regard to the Eastern Question. 
 The Aryan spirit of British statesmen saved us from the folly 
 and crime of remaining passive onlookers in the great struggle ; 
 but had their predecessors understood Indian history better 
 the catastrophe might have been minimised or possibly averted. 
 The modern scientific method of Oriental research, inspired 
 by German thoroughness and German lack of psychological 
 insight, has since the days of Macaulay and Mountstuart 
 Elphinstone added greatly to the material for the history of 
 India, but has not done much for the better interpretation of it. 
 In one point, indeed, of vital importance for ourselves, it has 
 even led us further astray. Oriental scholars of the nineteenth 
 century, though they failed completely to understand the 
 predominance of Aryan inspiration in Indian art and to recog- 
 nise national art as a key to the true interpretation of history, 
 at least firmly grasped the essential truth that before the 
 Muhammadan invasions, if not afterwards, it was Aryan 
 culture which gave India its high place among the civilisations 
 of the world and inspired its greatest intellectual achievements. 
 But many modern writers of Oriental history proclaim as the 
 latest discovery of science that the early Aryan invaders of 
 India, who won the undying veneration of the people as mighty 
 seers and leaders of men, were only successful soldiers, versed 
 in the arts of chivalrous warfare, and that they borrowed their 
 finer culture from the Dravidians, and other civilised races 
 
 vii 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 they conquered. Almost they would persuade us that the 
 intellectual, high-souled Aryan is a myth, or reduce the his- 
 torical sum of Aryan achievements to the common factor that 
 might is right and military despotism the best of all possible 
 governments. 
 
 lyct us by all means construct history on a scientific basis ; 
 but the scientists should not forget that the master-builder 
 must be an artist as well as a mathematician. The historian 
 who totally misunderstands the ideas which inspire the mind 
 of a people may use his material with the utmost scientific 
 skill, but the result will hardly be anything but a complete 
 falsification of the most vital and informing historical truths. 
 And such a total misunderstanding of the Indian mind, as it 
 is expressed in the great monuments of Indian art, runs through- 
 out all the standard histories of India which are the text-books 
 for British statesmen and administrators. Is it not reasonable 
 to suppose that this explains why Indians prefer the ' colossal 
 ignorance ' of the British statesman to the imperfect learning 
 of the experts ? For though Indians themselves may not 
 always be better informed, it must be peculiarly humiliating 
 to them to be constantly told by their rulers that in political 
 science India has never at any period of her history attained 
 to the highest level of Europe ; that Freedom has never spread 
 her wings over their native land ; that they are heirs to untold 
 centuries of ' Oriental despotism ' and must wait patiently 
 until the highly cultured political fruits of the West can be 
 successfully grown in the virgin soil of India. 
 
 Whether unintentional or not, no greater spiritual injury 
 can be done to a people than to teach them to undervalue or 
 despise the achievements of their forefathers. To overvalue 
 them can hardly be a mistake. Not the least valuable of our 
 spiritual resources in the Great War has been the desire of 
 every man and woman to uphold the honour of their race, or 
 country, or province, or town, or school, or family, inspired 
 by the traditions, legendary or otherwise, of a glorious past. 
 And it cannot be to the advantage either of the British Empire 
 or of India that British statecraft in India should be based 
 viii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 upon historically false premises, and that India's present 
 Aryan rulers should misunderstand or ignore the political 
 ideals and methods by which the great men of our own race 
 made the people of India accept Aryan domination as the 
 greatest of divine blessings. The fact that Aryan principles 
 of polity had been to a great extent perverted or forgotten 
 when Great Britain assumed the sovereignty of India does not 
 absolve us from the obligation not only of studying carefully 
 the history of Aryan India, and of preserving with religious care 
 what remains of its monuments, but of following the example 
 of the greatest of Indian Muhammadan rulers, Akbar, in 
 making Indo- Aryan traditions the central pillar of the Empire. 
 In thus honouring our Aryan forerunners in India we shall 
 both honour ourselves and make the most direct and effective 
 appeal to Indian loyalty. 
 
 The average Briton understands Indian loyalty as the most 
 decisive proof of the complete success of British rule and the 
 attachment of Indians to the British Crown. The historian 
 who accepts that as a full and sufficient explanation is very 
 far from understanding the Indian mind and has a very limited 
 perception of the truths of Indian history. Indian loyalty is 
 not born of attachment to European political theories or to 
 any modern European form of government. It is a sentiment 
 which is deeply rooted in Indo- Aryan religion and in devotion 
 to the Aryan ideal. The idea of Vishnu the Preserver and 
 King of the Universe has its primitive roots in the ideal Aryan 
 temporal ruler and spiritual leader who protected his people 
 with his strong right arm, upheld the Aryan law of righteous- 
 ness, and maintained the liberties of the Aryan freeman. Bhakti, 
 or whole-souled devotion of man to God, which is one of the 
 leading motives of Indian religious thought, is the consecration 
 of the loyalty of the Aryan soldier towards his chieftain to 
 the ideals of spiritual life. lyoyalty is a sentiment which has 
 been nourished by every Indian religious teacher. Brahman 
 as well as Kshatriya. It has been the corner-stone of Indian 
 polity from the remotest antiquity. Krishna preached it 
 in the Bhagavad Git a. The heroes of the Rdmdyana and 
 
 ix 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Mahdhhdrata, whose lives and conduct are still the inspiration 
 of the Indian masses, were the living exemplars of it. The 
 Buddha built up his Sangha upon it. Akbar used it as the 
 foundation of his Din-Ilahi. 
 
 Even the Indian who has been sedulously taught in Anglo- 
 Indian schools and British universities to undervalue or 
 despise Indo-Aryan culture has the same subconscious feeling 
 of loyalty to the Aryan ideal, though he finds his inspiration 
 in the pages of English history instead of in the annals of Indian 
 national life. Indian loyalty to the British Empire and the 
 British Crown is therefore in its fullest content a feeling of 
 devoted attachment to those Aryan principles of conduct and 
 Aryan national ideals which Indians as well as Britons have 
 upheld both in peace and in war, in life and in death. Let us 
 therefore beware lest our own disloyalty to those principles 
 and ideals should inspire Indians with suspicion or distrust, 
 and let us not flatter ourselves that the magnificent demon- 
 stration of loyalty which the War has called forth from all 
 classes is an expression of complete satisfaction with things 
 as they are and of gratitude for the blessings of British rule. 
 If national art has any significance as an indication of the 
 springs of human action and as an index of human progress, 
 not even the most optimistic Anglo-Indian, looking at the 
 monuments of British rule in India, can maintain that we have 
 yet gone so far even as Alcbar went in restoring India to the 
 full height of her former Aryan civilisation. This we have 
 not yet done either on the material or spiritual plane, and 
 India, on the whole, still values spiritual more than worldly 
 gifts, though Europe would persuade her that she is lacking 
 in true insight. 
 
 The so-called progressive politician, who treats Indian 
 history as a book no longer read, tells us that we must look 
 forward and not backward ; that we can no longer build as 
 Akbar built ; that India can gain little or nothing by studying 
 her own past ; that East must be "West and forget that she 
 was East. Pretending to be a realist with a scientific political 
 programme based upon actualities, he is ignorant of the funda- 
 
 X 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 mental economic and social conditions by which a prudent 
 and far-seeing State policy must be governed and blind to the 
 things of everyday Indian life which pass before his own eyes. 
 The logic of history, ancient or modern, Indian or European, 
 is lost upon him. 
 
 But to the Briton who can divest himself of insular racial 
 prejudices and of the German habit of thinking, the study 
 of Indo-Aryan political science will have a deep significance, 
 though he may not take a special interest in Indian affairs. 
 For the ancient Aryan rulers of India were confronted by 
 political, economic, and social problems in many ways similar 
 to those with which modern British statesmen and social 
 reformers are struggling, and their solutions of them, according 
 to all the evidence of history, were much more satisfactory 
 to the people at large than any which modern Europe has 
 found. The freedom and general happiness attained by the 
 people of Great Britain with the help of Parliamentary in- 
 stitutions and the richest revenues of the world can hardly 
 be compared with that which Indians within the Aryan pale 
 enjoyed both before and after the fifth century a.d. — the time 
 which we regard as our Dark Ages, and theirs. The Indo- 
 Aryan constitution, built up by the highest intelligence of 
 the people upon the basis of the village communities, and not 
 wrung from unwilling war-lords and landlords by century-long 
 struggles and civil war, secured to the Indian peasant-proprietor 
 not only the ownership of the land, but very considerable 
 powers of self-government. The powers of the central Govern- 
 ment, though they might often be abused, were at least 
 delegated to it by the people themselves, and limited b}'' 
 unwritten laws which by common consent were given a 
 religious character. An interesting illustration of the strength 
 of such laws is given by Mr Sidney Webb in the preface to 
 Mr Matthai's valuable book on Village Government in British 
 India. Officially the Indo-Aryan political s^^stem has long 
 been regarded as dead. But, says Mr Webb, an able Collector 
 of long service in Central India, who was totally unaware of 
 any survival of that system in the villages over which he ruled, 
 
 xi 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 was led to make inquiries into the matter. ^ He then dis- 
 covered " in village after village a distinctly effective, if 
 somewhat shadowy, local organization, in one or other form 
 of panchayat, which was, in fact, now and then giving decisions 
 on matters of communal concern, adjudicating civil disputes, 
 and even condemning offenders to reparation and fine." This 
 form of local government, though it has no statutory warrant 
 and is not recognised by British tribunals, has gone on silently 
 functioning during centuries of ' Oriental despotism ' and 
 under British rule, " merely by common consent and with 
 the very real sanction of public opinion." When Indo- Aryan 
 law and order prevailed in India in the long centuries before 
 the Muhammadan invasions, the economic and political status 
 of the Indian peasant was certainly far higher than that of 
 the English peasant of the twentieth century, if the description 
 of the latter's condition given by Mr Maurice Hewlett may 
 be considered approximately true : " robbed, pauperised, 
 terrorised, mocked with a County Council of landlords, a 
 District Council of tenant-farmers, and a Parish Council without 
 powers." 2 
 
 The British factory-hand and dweller in city slums sings 
 when he goes to war because war is for him a release from 
 servitude and misery often far more degrading than the Indian 
 caste system at its worst. He does not sing in times of peace. 
 He is then chained down to a daily Ufe in which there is no joy 
 or freedom — ^the slavery of modern industrialism. He struggles 
 vainly to free himself from it by the organisation of trade 
 unions, and only adds to the political machine another form 
 of tyranny which often is a menace to the whole imperial 
 fabric. The co-operative trade and craft guilds of India 
 
 ^ A still more striking case illustrating the survival of Indo- Aryan institu- 
 tions, silently functioning unknown to the British authorities, is that of the 
 Indian master-builder, whose labours contributed so much to the making of 
 Indian history. His existence and work in the present day were both unknown 
 and unrecognised officially until the Government of India was led to make 
 the specific inquiries which resulted in the remarkable revelations published 
 in the Archaeological Survey's Report on Modern Indian Building, 1913. 
 
 2 I<etter to the Daily News, November 11, 1916. 
 
 xii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 helped the workman to enjoy Hfe, gave him self-respect and 
 fostered his technical skill, and at the same time served reli- 
 giously the interests of the State. The student of Indian 
 history may also be led to consider whether the Imperial 
 Parliament of Great Britain, constituted as it now is on more 
 or less empirical lines, is really more efficient as political 
 machinery than was the philosophic scheme of Indo-Aryan 
 polity, in which the common law of the land, formulated by the 
 chosen representatives of the people, had a religious as well 
 as a legal sanction, and represented the highest power of the 
 State to which even the king and his ministers must bow. 
 It will be a surprise to many readers to discover that the 
 Mother of the Western Parliaments had an Aryan relative 
 in India, showing a strong family likeness, before the sixth 
 century B.C., and that her descendants were a great power in 
 the State at the time of the Norman Conquest. 
 
 Perhaps the most conspicuous fault of historians of India 
 has been the inveterate habit of regarding Buddhism, Brah- 
 manism or Hinduism, and Muhammadanism as three entirely 
 independent camps, standing widely apart and representing 
 irreconcilable religious ideas. In dealing with the history of 
 Aryan rule in India it is neither necessary nor desirable to 
 enter deeply into questions of sectarian dogma or philosophical 
 disputes ; but it is of vital importance to show as accurately 
 as possible the relationship between different schools of 
 religious thought and their influence upon political ideas, for 
 there can be no true history of India which separates politics 
 from religion. Into this very wide field of historical research 
 I have endeavoured to bring forward the evidence of Indian 
 art to correct the errors of previous writers, whose misinter- 
 pretation of it has often led their readers hopelessly astray. 
 Even more important is it to understand the psychological 
 standpoint upon which Indo-Aryan political science is pivoted. 
 The great thinkers and social reformers of India, beginning 
 with the Buddha, grasped firmly one of the eternal verities, 
 generally ignored in Western politics, that ideas, good or evil, 
 are more potent than armaments — for the spirit survives when 
 
 xiii 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 
 the body is destroyed. It is therefore no less important for 
 the State to purge the body poUtic of evil thinking than it is 
 to stay an epidemic or provide efficient means of national 
 self-defence. For that reason the philosophical debating 
 halls, in which king and commoner met on terms of equality, 
 always played a more important part in Indo-Aryan politics 
 than councils of war, Acts of ParHament, or royal edicts ; and 
 for the same reason the political education of the Indian masses 
 in the Dark Ages of European history was probably far better 
 than that which obtains in most European countries in the 
 twentieth century. 
 
 The breakdown of Indo-Aryan constitutional government 
 under the stress of foreign aggression was more due to the 
 weakness of human nature than to the defects of the system 
 itself — just as the virtue of the British Parhament lies in the 
 character and ability of its members rather than in its pecuHar 
 constitution. Similar causes produce similar effects both in 
 India and in Europe. Indo-Aryan polity, instructed by the 
 Buddha and other great Aryan teachers of the mihtary caste, 
 was firmly based upon the principle that right is might, or, 
 as the Mahdbh'arata puts it, that " the heavens are centred 
 in the ethics of the State." But it reckoned without the Huns 
 and the sword of Islam as wielded by Turkish war-lords of 
 the eleventh and twelfth centuries, MahmQd of Ghazni and 
 'Ala-ud-din. Indo-Aryan statesmen did not find that the 
 illiteracy of the Indian masses prevented them from taking a 
 considerable part in the management of their own affairs, 
 for before the days of the printing press and modern journalism 
 there were in India other means of instructing the people and 
 a highly organised educational system which, judging by 
 results, was far more efficient than the present one. Until 
 British statesmen divest themselves of the fatal habit of 
 judging Indian things by Western standards they will never 
 see them in the right perspective. Indo-Aryan statesmen 
 were not afraid of allowing the masses, including women, to 
 vote, on account of their illiteracy — for the most learned and 
 most representative Indians were often illiterate in the European 
 xiv 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 sense : Akbar, one of the most brilliant, successful, and learned 
 statesmen of the sixteenth century, was one of them. British 
 rule has not yet profoimdly affected conditions which have 
 their root in times long before the beginnings of BngHsh 
 history. 
 
 It is not for the historian to offer a solution of modern 
 political questions, but to provide material for the study of 
 them. Having served an apprenticeship as a writer of Indian 
 history in the study and exegesis of Indian artistic records, 
 I now venture to use them to explain and amphfy the mass of 
 literary, epigraphical, and other archaeological material which 
 many writers, European as well as Indian, have collected and 
 made the basis of their historical studies. For chronological 
 data and statements of bare fact I can lay no claim to original 
 research, and must express full acknowledgment for the use 
 of the work of my predecessors in those directions. But the 
 treatment of the subject and interpretation of facts are for the 
 most part my own, and they often differ materially from those 
 of other writers, a difference which must be ascribed to my 
 different interpretation of the artistic record. As my inter- 
 pretation of Indian art has won the general assent of my fellow- 
 artists in Europe I cherish the hope that in the present work 
 I may succeed in throwing new light upon the subject of Aryan 
 rule in India. I have avoided as far as possible entering into 
 controversies on points of purely archaeological int .rest, though 
 it has been sometimes necessary to take a definite standpoint 
 when important historical issues are at stake. The question 
 of the age of the three most important works on Indo-Aryan 
 polity, the KauHliya-artha-S astra, the Code of Manu, and that 
 of Sukracharya, is one of them. It is generally agreed by 
 Oriental scholars that the first relates to the time of Chandra- 
 gupta Maurya and the second to the early centuries of the 
 Christian era, when Buddhist ethics had deeply influenced the 
 traditions of Brahmanism. The age of the Sukrd-nitisdra is 
 a much-debated question. Many Indians ascribe to it a very 
 great antiquity ; some European scholars take it to be a 
 comparatively modern one, i.e. of the twelfth or iQit[te^O-th 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 century a.d. Both may be right from their respective stand- 
 points, for all three of these codes undoubtedly contain a body 
 of traditional Aryan law and custom of very remote antiquity, 
 which can often be recognised in the traditions of modern 
 Indian life. On the other hand, Sukracharya contains references 
 to the use of explosives and military weapons which can hardly 
 be referred to the Mauryan epoch or earlier. I have therefore 
 taken the Sukrd-nitisdra as generally descriptive of Indo- 
 Aryan society in the early Middle Ages, but have not hesitated 
 to quote it as an authority on Indo- Aryan constitutional law 
 and custom in previous times, when it seems only to explain 
 or amplify parallel sections in Kautiliya's and Mann's codes. 
 Similarly I have sometimes assumed Mann's laws to have been 
 recognised in very early Aryan times, though the compilation 
 itself belongs to a later period. When the philological evidence 
 is obscure the historian is bound to rely on sruti rather than 
 smriti. For the history of the Muhammadan conquest I have 
 mostly used the material so abundantly provided by Muham- 
 madan historians, only checking their accounts with the artistic 
 evidence so as to remove the sectarian gloss which has falsified 
 the interpretation of historical facts in exactly the same way 
 as official German reports falsify the facts of modern history. 
 The great development of Islamic culture in India is thus 
 shown in its true aspect as a distinct branch of the Indo- Aryan 
 tree, and not, as Fergusson and his followers have made it, 
 a manifestation of inborn ' Turanian ' spirituality distinguishing 
 Muhammadan ' culture ' from Hindu ' barbarism/ 
 
 B, B, H, 
 
 XVI 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I : ARYAVARTA BEFORE THE 
 MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 lAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Aryans and Non- Aryans in Vedic India 3 
 
 The One in Many : The Aryans in Mesopotamia : Anglo-Saxons 
 and Indo-Aryans : The Matriarchal and Patriarchal 
 Systems : Aryan Village Organisation : Early Aryan 
 Religion. 
 
 II. The Epic Age 33 
 
 Political Development in the Epic Age : The Ramayana and 
 Mahabharata : The Surya-vamsa and the Chandra- vamsa. 
 
 III. The Buddha as a Statesman and Sociai. 
 
 Reformer 45 
 
 The Advent of Gautama Buddha : The Differentiation of his 
 Teaching from that of Brahmanism : The Organisation of 
 the Sangha : Parliamentary Institutions in Buddhist 
 India : The Buddha's Social and PoUtical Influence. 
 
 IV. The Buddhist and Jain Sanghas — Ai^exander's 
 
 Raid 57 
 
 Aryan Genius for Organisation : The Work of the Buddhist 
 Sangha before the Time of Asoka : Contact between 
 Hellenic and Indo- Aryan Civilisation : The Persian Empire 
 and Alexander's Raid into Northern India. 
 
 V. The Mauryan Empire 66 
 
 The Revolt in India and the Founding of the Mauryan Empire : 
 Chandragupta and his Policy as an Imperialist : The 
 Aryan Freeman : The Centralisation of the Village Com- 
 munities : The Co-operative System in Ancient India : 
 Roads and Waterways : Irrigation ; Department of Navi- 
 gation : Chandragupta' s Capital and Municipal Govern- 
 ment : Drink Tra£&c and GambUng : Department of 
 
 6 xvii 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Agriculture : Adtninistration of Justice : The Imperial 
 Council : Chandragupta's Daily Routine of Work : Court 
 I/ife : Imperial Revenue : The Army and Navy : Chandra- 
 gupta's Successor, Bindusara. 
 
 VI. ASOKA 89 
 
 Accession of Asoka : Buddhist and Jain Propaganda : Asoka's 
 Early Life and Military Conquests : His Conversion : The 
 Edicts : His Foreign Missions : General Assembly of the 
 Sangha at Pataliputra : Asoka's State Pilgrimages : 
 Progress of the Dharma in India and Beyond : Asoka as a 
 Democratic Leader : Brahmanical Influence upon Buddhist 
 Doctrine : Asoka as a Popular Educator : The Weakness 
 of Buddhism as a Social and Political Creed : The Develop- 
 ment of Buddhist Ritualism : Death and Canonisation of 
 Asoka as a Buddhist Saint : Asoka's Private Life. 
 
 VII. Maury AN Art 104 
 
 The Monuments of Asoka's Reign : The Two Phases of Asokan 
 Art : The King's Craftsmen and Aryan Artistic Traditions : 
 ' Persian Bell-shaped Capitals ' : The Sjrmbolism of the 
 I/otus Flower : Buddhist Hermitages and Chapter-houses : 
 The Popiilar Art of Bharhut and Sanchi : Indo-Aryan 
 Symbolism ; the Swastika, Stiipa, the Holy Mountain and 
 Tree : The Buddha worshipped as the Deity : The Stupa in 
 Asoka's Time : The Temple of Bodh-Gaya : The Sikhara : 
 Wooden and Stone Buildings in the Mauryan Epoch : The 
 Continuity and Vitality of Indian Art Traditions : The 
 Aniconic Symbolism of Asokan Sculpttire. 
 
 VIII. The Break-up of the Mauryan Empire and the 
 
 TuRKi Invasions 119 
 
 Asoka's Successor, Dasaratha : The Break-up of the Mauryan 
 Empire : The Sunga Dynasty : Pushyamitra revives the 
 Great Horse-sacrifice : Buddhism and Brahmanism : 
 Patanjali, the Sanskrit Grammarian, and the Revival of 
 Brahman Scholarship : The Alleged Persecution of 
 Buddhists by Pushyamitra : The End of the Sunga 
 Dynasty : The Kanva Dynasty : Invasions of India by 
 Turki Tribes : Menander and the Establishment of a Turki 
 Buddhist Dynasty in the North- West Provinces. 
 
 IX. The Aryanisation of Southern India — The 
 
 KusHAN Empire 127 
 
 The Shifting of Indo-Aryan Political Power Southwards : The 
 Practical Application of Vedic Philosophy to Indian Life : 
 Aryan Influence upon Early Dravidian Civilisation : The 
 Dynasties of Southern India : Trade of Southern India in 
 Early Times : The Rise of the Andhra Power : Popular 
 xviii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Buddhism and the Teaching of the Buddha : The Be- 
 ginnings of Gandharan Art : Yoga in Early Buddhist 
 Times : The Doctrine of Reincarnation : The Symbolism 
 of Aryan Village-planning : Hellenistic Influence in the 
 Kushan Empire : Mahayana Buddhism and the Spread of 
 Buddhist Propaganda in China : The Extent of the 
 Kushan Empire : Kanishka and Nagarjuna : Intercourse 
 between India and the Graeco-Roman World : Kanishka 
 summons a General Assembly of the Sangha : Kanishka' s 
 Wars and Death : His Successors : Development of 
 India's Maritime Trade and Colonies : Mahay anist and 
 Hinayanist Art. 
 
 X. The Gupta Empire 147 
 
 The Beginning of the Gupta Era and the Indo- Aryan Revival : 
 Chandragupta of the Gupta Line : The Buddhist Sangha 
 in the Fourth Century a.d. : Chandragupta's Conquests : 
 Aryan versus Turki Domination : Samudragupta and his 
 Campaigns : The Revival of Sanskrit beaming : The 
 Vaishnava Cult : Popular Education under the Gupta 
 Emperors : The Gupta Recensions of the Indo-Aryan 
 Epics. 
 
 XI. India in Gupta Times 159 
 
 The Code of Manu : The Influence of Buddhist Ethics upon 
 Indo-Aryan Social Life : The Theory of Kingship : Imperial 
 Taxation : The Ethics of Ritualistic Purity : The Relation- 
 ship of the Sexes : The Law of Karma : The Accession of 
 Vikramaditya : The Iron Pillar at Delhi : Vikramaditya's 
 Conquests : Fa-Hien's Observations on the Condition of 
 India : Indian Culture in Gupta Times : Religious 
 Tolerance : The Principles of Indo-Aryan Religion. 
 
 XII. The Huns in India — Gupta Art and Archi- 
 tecture 171 
 
 Kumaragupta : Indo-Aryan Imperialism, its Strength and 
 Weakness : Skandagupta and Buddhist Teaching : The 
 Hun Invasions : The Indo-Aryan Military Code : Skanda- 
 gupta's War Finance : His Death : Puragupta : Baladitya 
 and the Wars with the Huns : The Hun Ruler Toramana : 
 Mihiragula's Savagery rouses a General Revolt : Defeat of 
 the Huns by a Confederation of Indo-Aryan States : Effect 
 of the Hun Invasions upon Indo-Aryan Social and Political 
 Life : Gupta Architecture and the Derivation of the 
 Sikhara. 
 
 XIII. HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA '^ 187 
 
 Northern India after the Defeat of the Huns : The Rise of the 
 Chalukyan Power in the Dekhan : Pulakesin I : Harsha- 
 Vardhana of Thaneshar restores the Fortunes of Aryavarta 
 
 xix 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 and is opposed by Pulakesin II : Harsha's Court : Hiuen- 
 Tsang and his Indian Pilgrimage : His Observations on 
 the Character and Condition of the People and the Govern- 
 ment of the Country : PubUc Instruction : The Universities : 
 Nalanda : Hiuen-Tsang's Visit to the King of Kamarupa : 
 He attends Harsha's Court and instructs the Emperor and 
 his Sister in the Tenets of the Mahay ana School : Harsha's 
 Personal Character : He convokes a General Assembly of 
 the Sangha to listen to Hiuen-Tsang's Arguments : The 
 Great Festival of the Trimurti : Indian PoUtical Life in 
 the Seventh Century : The Hegira and the Influence of 
 Buddhism on Islam. 
 
 XIV. The Dekhan and Southern India from the 
 
 Seventh to the Eleventh Centuries 212 
 
 Pulakesin II, Ruler of the Dekhan : The Rise of Saivism in the 
 Dekhan and Southern India : The Parliament of Rehgions 
 and its Authority : The Historical Evidence of Temple 
 Architecture : Fergusson's Misleading Classifications : The 
 Early Saiva Revivalists : Sankaracharya and his Mission : 
 Local Self-government in Southern India : The Sukrd-niti- 
 sara on Caste and the Organisation of Village Life ; Craft- 
 guilds and Mercantile Corporations ; Imperial Taxat- in ; 
 The Jurisdiction of the King and his Officers ; Plan ling 
 of the Royal Capital ; the King's Ministers ; Parks 
 and Forests ; Administration of Justice ; the Ethics of 
 Sukracharya : The Dravidian and Aryan Ideals : South 
 Indian Inscriptions relating to Local Self-government : 
 The Chola System of Government : Brahmanical 
 ' Tyranny ' : The Chola Kings and the Aryanisation of the 
 South. 
 
 XV. The Artistic Record of Southern India from 
 
 THE Seventh to the Eleventh Centuries 242 
 
 XVI. Islam's First Footing in India — ^Northern 
 India from the Seventh to the Eleventh 
 Centuries 247 
 
 Harsha's Successor, Arjuna or Arunasa : Conflict with China 
 and Tibet : The Arab Invasion of the Eighth Century : 
 Effect upon Islam of Contact with Indo-Aryan Civilisa- 
 tion : The Political Degeneration of Aryavarta : The 
 Rajputs and Rajputana : Struggles with the Arabs : 
 Rajput Culture : The Gurjara Kingdom : Kashmir and its 
 Chronicles. 
 
 XX 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART II : THE MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST AND 
 THE INDO-ARYAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 CHAPTER FAGB 
 
 I. Mahmud of Ghazni 279 
 
 The Beginning of Turkish Domination in Islam : Mahmud of 
 Ghazni and his Raids into India : Death of Mahmiid : His 
 Character. 
 
 II. The Afghan and Turkish Sui^tans of Dei.hi 290 
 
 Fall of the Ghaznevide Empire : Revolt in India : The Afghan 
 Dynasty of Ghur : Shihab-ud-din's Invasion of India : 
 Defeat and Death of Prithivi-raja : Fall of Kanauj : Sack 
 of Benares : Bihar raided : Qutb-ud-din, Sultan of Delhi : 
 ' Saracenic ' Culture and Indo-Aryan Art : The Political 
 Ethics of Islam : Muhammadan Conquest of Gaur : 
 Altamsh : The Khilji Dynasty : 'Ala-ud-din and his 
 Kultur : Effect of his Policy upon Islam in India : Mubarik 
 Khan : The Tughlak Dynasty : Tughlak Shah : Muhammad 
 Tughlak and his Atrocities. 
 
 III. FiRuz Shah 315 
 
 Firuz Shah and his Rajput Mother : His Early Life and 
 Accession to the Tlurone of Delhi : His Administrative 
 Reforms : PubUc Works : Organisation of Slavery : The 
 Social Programme of Islam. 
 
 IV. The Psychological Effect of the Muhammadan 
 
 Conquest 324 
 
 The rapprochement between Hinduism and Islam : Development 
 of the Aryanisation of the South : The Aryanisation of 
 Islam and the Hindu Renaissance : Sunnis and Shiahs. 
 
 V. Break-up of the Delhi Empire 335 
 
 Musahnan Gaur and its Architecture : The Sultans of J aunpur : 
 Husain Shah and his Patronage of Hindu Learning : The 
 Ctdt of Satya-Pir : The J aunpur School of Islam : The 
 Kulbarga Dynasty : The Gujerat Dynasty and Wars with 
 the Rajputs of Mewar : The Portuguese in India : The 
 Afghan Dynasty of Malwa : The Faruki Dynasty of 
 Khandesh. 
 
 xxi 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 VI. Marco Polo 359 
 
 India in the Thirteenth Century as described by Marco Polo. 
 
 VII. The MoguIv Invasion 367 
 
 Timur, the Ancestor of the Great Moguls, and his Invasion of 
 India. 
 
 VIII. Thk Founding of the Mogui, Empire 378 
 
 Effects of the Mogul Invasion : The Sayyid Dynasty of Delhi : 
 The I^odi Dynasty : Babur's Conquest. 
 
 IX. The Turkish Dynasty of Bijapur 385 
 
 Yusuf 'Adil Shah and the War with Vijayanagar : Political 
 Influences in the Dekhan : Ismail 'Adil Shah I : The 
 Struggle for Mastery in the Dekhan : Ibrahim 'Adil Shah I : 
 Ibrahim dismisses Turkish and Mogul Officers : Friendly 
 Relations with Vijayanagar : Asad Khan : Wars with 
 Ahmadnagar : Death of Ibrahim. 
 
 X. FaIvI. of Vijayanagar 399 
 
 Ali 'Adil Shah renews the Alliance with Vijayanagar and 
 attacks Ahmadnagar : The Musahnan League for the 
 Destruction of Vijayanagar : The Battle of Talikota. 
 
 XI. Hindu India in the Muhammad an Period — 
 
 Chaitanya 407 
 
 Village Life : Chaitanya's Birthplace : His Boyhood : Enters a 
 Sanscrit Tol : Becomes the Head of a T61 : His Fame as 
 a Pandit : Philosophical Contests : Visit to Gaya and 
 Change in his Spiritual Outlook : His Mission ; Opposition 
 from the Brahman Aristocracy : Popularity with the 
 Masses : Influence upon Islam : Essence of his Teaching. 
 
 XII. Babur 420 
 
 Babur, his Character and Attitude towards Indian Life : 
 Establishes his Capital at Agra : Defeat of the Rajputs : 
 Administrative Measures and Public Works : Death. 
 
 XIII. HUMAYUN 428 
 
 Humayiin's Character : Fights with his Relatives for the 
 Throne : Sher Khan defeats Humayiin and forces him 
 to leave India. 
 
 xxii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIV. Sher Shah's Rkign and the Restoration op 
 
 THE Mogul Dynasty 437 
 
 Sher Shah's Administrative Policy : Revenue System : Treat- 
 ment of the Ryots : Military and Civil Organisation : His 
 Campaigns : Takes Chitor : His Tomb at Sahseram : Salim 
 Shah : Shaikh 'Alai and his Preaching : Muhammad 'Adil 
 Shah and the Break-up of the Delhi Empire : Return of 
 Humayiin and his Accidental Death. 
 
 XV. Akbar : The Protectorate of Bairam Khan 450 
 
 Accession of Akbar : Bairam Khan as Protector : Defeat and 
 Death of Hemu at Panipat : Struggles with the Afghans 
 of Bengal : Akbar assumes the Government : Bairam 
 Khan's Rebellion and Death. 
 
 XVI. Akbar as Ruler of Aryavarta 458 
 
 Akbar and the Associates of his Boyhood : The Insubordination 
 of his Generals : Murder of the Prime Minister by Adham 
 Khan : Akbar's Marriage with a Rajput Princess : Raja 
 Bihari Mall and Rajput Influence at Court : War with the 
 Rana of Mewar : Afghan Rebellion in Bengal : Attempt on 
 Akbar's Life : Akbar abolishes Taxes on Pilgrims : 
 RebeUion of Mirza Hakim : Siege and Capture of Chitor : 
 Founding of Fatehpur-Sikri : Faizi and Abul Fazl : Akbar's 
 Life at Fatehpur-Sikri. 
 
 XVII. Akbar as Ruler of Aryavarta {continued) 480 
 
 War with Gujerat : Revolt of the Mirzas : War with the Afghans 
 in Bengal : Todar Mall and his Financial Reforms : 
 Akbar's Land Revenue Policy : Raja Man Singh's Cam- 
 paign in Rajputana. 
 
 XVIII. Akbar as Spiritual IvEader of Islam 492 
 
 Akbar's Religious Studies and Views : The Debates in the 
 Ibadat-Khana : The Imperial Library : Psychical Re- 
 search : Akbar assumes the Spiritual Leadership of Islarn : 
 Administration of the Crown Domains : Renewed Dis- 
 turbances in Bengal and Gujerat. 
 
 XIX. The Din-Ilahi S" 
 
 The Dln-Ilahi and its Relationship to Indo-Aryan Religious 
 Orders : Proclamation of the Din-Ilahi : Changes in Court 
 Ceremonial and Ritual of Divine Service : Raja Todar Mall 
 becomes Diwan of the Empire : Akbar's Reply to the 
 Charge of Apostasy : Influence of the Din-Ilahi. 
 
 xxiii 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 HAPTER PAGE 
 
 XX. Akbae. as Chakra-vartin 520 
 
 Akbar removes his Capital to Lahore : Defence of the North- 
 west Frontier : A Mahdi Pretender : Death of Raja 
 Birbal : Conquest of Sind, Kathiawar, Katch, and Orissa : 
 Akbar Undisputed Master of the Ancient Aryavarta : His 
 Administrative Policy : Claims Sovereignty over the 
 Dekhan : Chand Bibi and the Defence of Ahmadnagar : 
 Akbar leaves Lahore and assumes Command in the 
 Dekhan : RebelUon of Prince Salim and Murder of Abul 
 Fazl : Akbar's Domestic Troubles and Death. 
 
 Index 539 
 
 MAPS 
 
 Ancient India 3 
 
 From Fergusson's History of Eastern and Indian Architecture, 
 by kind permission of Mr John Murray. 
 
 India under Muhammadan Rule 279 
 
 From Fergusson's History of Eastern and Indian Architecture , 
 by kind permission of Mr John Murray. 
 
 XXIV 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLATE PAGE 
 
 vi. Eastern Gateway of the Bharhut Stupa 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Belongs to about the third century B.C., and is one of the 
 numerous monuments erected by Asoka, either to contain 
 relics of the Buddha or to mark the sacred places hallowed 
 by his memory. The illustration shows one of the four 
 entrances to the pilgrims' procession path, which were 
 placed at the cardinal points, and part of the stone rail 
 enclosing it. The clustered pillar, surmounted by a lion, 
 represents an imperial standard, and is an example of the 
 fine craftsmanship of the Indo-Aryan masons under whose 
 dnection Asoka' s monuments were planned and executed. 
 They were State servants under the special protection of 
 the Crown. The fact that foreign craftsmen who showed 
 exceptional skiU were sometimes admitted into their ranks 
 accounts for the frequent traces of Hellenic craftsmanship 
 found in royal Indian monuments, but the inspiration of 
 the art is always essentially Indian. See Chapter VII. 
 Photo India Office. 
 
 4 2. Indo-Aryan Vii,i,age Pi,ans 26 
 
 A. Danddka, named after a Brahman's danda, or staff, and 
 
 intended for an asvdma, or hermitage. 
 
 B. Nandydvarta, or ' Abode of Bliss,' intended for a mixed 
 
 population including all the four varnas. 
 (Corrected from Ram Raz, essay on the Architectujre of the 
 Hindus.) 
 
 x,'3. The Buddha under the Bodhi Tree 48 
 
 From a colossal statue at Anuradhapura, Ceylon, attributed 
 by Dr Coomaraswamy to the second century a.d., but 
 probably a century or two later. It represents the 
 Buddha as he began to emerge from the state of profound 
 meditation. 
 
 /■ 4. Northern Gateway of the Sanchi Stupa 76 
 
 The stiipa, like that at Bharhut, is one of Asoka' s monuments, 
 but the elaborately carved gateways, reproducing ancient 
 Indian town or village gateways, were added by different 
 royal donors at later periods. See p. no. 
 
 XXV 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 PLATE _ PAGE 
 
 ^5. Capitai, of Asoka's Pii<i.ar at Sarnath 96 
 
 The pillar was erected by Asoka, reproducing an imperial 
 standard, to mark the spot in the Deer Park at Sarnath, 
 near Benares, where the Buddha preached his first 
 sermon. It is another fine example of the handicraft of 
 the Mauryan ' king's craftsmen.' The base of the capital 
 represents the lotus ' with turned-down petals ' (see 
 p. 106). Photo Archaeological Survey of India. 
 
 \6. Buddhist Shrines from the Bharhut Scui,p- 
 
 TURFS 110 
 
 A. The Bodhi Tree enclosed by a shrine, representing an 
 
 ancient Aryan village Council-house appropriated to the 
 teaching of the Law. See p. 109. 
 
 B. A village shrine of the third century B.C., showing the 
 
 prototype of the later Hindu temple, with its garbha- 
 griha, the ' Holy of Holies,' the antardla, a porch or 
 verandah for the priests, and the mandapam, the assembly 
 hall for the people. See pp. 116-117. 
 
 ,7. Buddhist Stupa from the Amaravati Scui^p- 
 
 TURES 112 
 
 The original marble slab is now in the Madras Museum. It 
 shows a complete stupa with its gateways and the rail 
 enclosing the pilgrims' procession path. The base of the 
 stiipa itself was elaborately carved with a series of the 
 reliefs by which the pilgrims were taught the principal 
 events in the Buddha's lives and the various stages 
 through which he passed before he obtained enlighten- 
 ment. Amaravati was a great seat of Buddhist learning 
 from the time of Asoka. The sculpture probably belongs 
 to the fifth or sixth century a.d. See p. 130. 
 
 -8. Interior of the Kari,e Chapter-house 132 
 
 Representing one of the assembly halls of the Buddhist 
 Sangha carved in the living rock. The comparatively 
 severe style of architectural sculpture shows it to belong 
 to the earlier Hinayana school, which inherited the 
 artistic traditions of the Vedic period. It is one of the 
 great Buddhist works of the Mauryan dynasty. 
 
 49. TempIvE of Bodh-Gaya, Restored 144 
 
 From the Annual Report of the Indian Archaeological Survey, 
 Eastern Circle, 1908-9, by kind permission of H.M. 
 Secretary of State for India in Council. 
 
 xxvi 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLATE 
 
 ,/i0. travei.i.brs or pn^grims i^istening to a vir.i,age 
 
 Kathak 154 
 
 From a nineteenth-century Indian painting. A group of 
 travellers or pilgrims are gathered round a fire in the 
 courtyard of a dharmasala, or rest-house, and listen 
 intently to a village story-teller. The painter, an Indian 
 Rembrandt, has tried to imitate the chiaroscuro of 
 European pictures, but has kept to traditional Indian 
 technique, using gold for the fire and its reflection on 
 the ground. Collection of the Government Art Gallery, 
 Calcutta. 
 
 vii. Stbi,E op Naram-Sin 180 
 
 See pp. 1 1 2-1 1 3, 1 81-182. In the Louvre. Photo Mansell. 
 
 12. Pai^ace of Sennacherib at Nineveh 182 
 
 Shown in Layard's Nineveh, 2nd Series, Plate XVI. From 
 the reproduction in the author's Ancient and Medieval 
 Architecture of India, by kind permission of Mr John 
 Murray. See pp. 113 and 182. 
 
 13. Vishnu Shrine, Barwar Sagar, Centrai, Pro- 
 
 vinces 184 
 
 A shrine with a typical Vishnu sikhara, characteristic of the 
 Gupta period, probably derived from the watch-tower of 
 an Aryan royal palace. Like the standards of Aryan 
 royalty it was crowned by Vishnu's blue lotus flower with 
 turned-down petals, a symbol of world-dominion. In 
 this case the mandapam, or assembly hall of the people, 
 has not been added to the front of the shrine, which 
 consists only of the garbha-griha, the deity's throne- 
 room, and the antarala, or porch for the attendant 
 priests. 
 
 1 14. ViSHVAKARMA ChAITYA HoUSE, ElLORA 186 
 
 Probably the Guildhall of the masons who carved the 
 monasteries and temples of EUora. 
 
 15. Trimurti Sculpture, Klephanta 204 
 
 (M. Victor Goloubeff's photo.) Probably of the later Gupta 
 period. It represents the Three Aspects of the One 
 Eternal — Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, 
 and Siva the Destroyer. In this sculpture, one of the 
 
 xxvii 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 PLATE PAGE 
 
 noblest of Indian classic masterpieces, the place of 
 Brahma, on the right, is taken by Parvati, Siva's sakti, 
 as the Creatrix. See pp. 184-185. For a full descrip- 
 tion of the Elephanta sculptures see the anthox' s Ancient 
 and Medieval Architecture of India and Ideals of Indian 
 Art (Murray). 
 
 4 16. vSivA Ti:mpi.k at Bad ami 216 
 
 A small but one of the most perfect examples of Indian temple 
 architecture, probably built by the royal craftsmen near 
 the time when Badami was capital of the Chalukyan 
 kingdom, or about the seventh century a.d. Photo 
 Archaeological Survey of India. 
 
 ^ij. Bronze Statuktte of AppARSWA^n 226 
 
 One of several statuettes of the Saiva revivalist, a predecessor 
 of Sankaracharya, now in the Colombo Museum. He 
 lived about the sixth century a.d., but the sculpture 
 belongs to the tenth or eleventh century, the great Chola 
 period. See p. 245. 
 
 i 18. Interior of a Modern Tempi^e Mandapam 232 
 
 A very good example of nineteenth-century Indian building 
 craft — -the assembty hall of the Diirga Temple at Benares, 
 popularly known as the Monkey Temple, because the 
 monkeys in the neighbourhood are fed by the priests 
 from the worshippers' offerings. The temple mandapam 
 was the assembly hall of the Indo- Aryan village com- 
 munity. 
 
 19. The Great Tempi^e, Tanjore 240 
 
 Built by the Chola emperor Rajaraja I about the beginning of 
 the eleventh century. View from north-east end of court 
 to right of the entrance. 
 
 A 20. Bronze Statuette of Nataraja 244 
 
 From the Tanjore temple. One of the masterpieces of the 
 Chola period. See p. 246. 
 
 421. Kandarya Mahadeva TEMPI.E, Khajuraho 264 
 
 Khajuraho, the ancient capital of the Chandela dynasty, in 
 Bundelkhand, is now deserted, but its splendid temples, 
 about thirty in number, still testif}' to the genius of the 
 Indian master-bviilder. Most of them were built about 
 the beginning of the eleventh century. The Kandarya 
 Mahadeva temple, thotigh dedicated to Siva, is an 
 xxviii 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLATE PAGE 
 
 elaboration of the Vishnu type of temple (Plate 13), 
 characteristic of the Gupta period and of North Indian 
 temple architecture generally. The contemporary temple 
 of Tanjore (Plate 19) shows the typical Siva temple, 
 derived from the ancient stupa, which is most cha- 
 racteristic of Southern India, where the Saiva cult is 
 predominant. To a Saiva worshipper there is no in- 
 consistency in placing a Siva image in a Vishnu shrine, 
 for Siva to him is Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva — the Three 
 in One. 
 
 22. SURYA Tl)MPI,B AT MARTAND 272 
 
 Built by Ivalitaditya in the eighth century a.d. The trefoil 
 arches are derived from the niche of a Buddhist shrine, 
 following the shape of the image with its aureole. 
 
 23. Interior of the Jami' Masjid, Ahmadabad 340 
 
 Built by Ahmad Shah of Gnjerat. It follows closely the design 
 of the Ranpur temple, built by Ahmad Shah's con- 
 temporary, the Rana Kumbha of Chitor. See pp. 341- 
 342. 
 
 24. Jain Tempi^es at Pai^itana, with so-cai,i,ed 
 
 Pathan Domes 342 
 
 See pp. 342-343. 
 
 25. Tower of Victory, Chitor 344 
 
 Built by the Rana Kumbha to celebrate his victory over 
 Mahmud Khilji of Malwa in 1440 (see p. 344) . The design 
 of these splendid Hindu towers was adapted to the 
 minarets of Indian mosques, as may be seen at Ahmada- 
 bad and elsewhere. 
 
 26. Baz Bahadur and Rupmati 354 
 
 The attachment of Baz Bahadur to the Hindu songstress was 
 a favourite subject with Indian painters. In this picture 
 the pair are seen riding by night among the hills of Raj- 
 putana, a torch-bearer in front lighting up the path. 
 From an eighteenth-century Indian painting in the 
 Calcutta Government Art Gallery. -\ 
 
 , 27. TiMUR Enthroned, attended by Tributary 
 
 Chieftains 37° 
 
 From a Persian manuscript of the sixteenth century in the 
 India Office Library (MS. 137, folio 71 verso), by kind 
 permission of H.M. Secretary of State for India in Council. 
 
 xxix 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 PLATE PAGE 
 
 The picture is entitled in the original " The Seating on 
 the Throne of the Ivord of the Conjunction after the 
 killing of the Amir Husain," and represents Timiir receiv- 
 ing the homage of tributaries after his accession. It is 
 no doubt the work of one of the Mogul court painters, 
 possibly of Babur's or Humayiin's time, but more 
 probably Akbar' s. 
 
 4 28, (i) Tomb of Ibrahim 'Adii. Shah II at Bijapur. 
 (2) Tomb of Muhammad 'Adii, Shah at 
 Bijapur 394 
 
 Two typical examples of Bijapiir architecture. The great 
 dome of Muhammad's tomb is larger than the Pantheon 
 at Rome, and is a triumph of the Indian master-builder's 
 engineering skill. By an ingenious arrangement of 
 pendentives, arranged in the form of a lotus, the huge 
 weight of the dome is balanced within the interior of the 
 building, in.stead of being thrown against heavy external 
 buttresses according to the more clumsy Roman system. 
 
 29. Thk ' BivBphant Stabi.es/ Vijayanagar 406 
 
 It is highly improbable that this building was originally 
 designed for elephant stables. It is much more likely to 
 have been the mosque built by Ramraj for his Muham- 
 madan bodyguard. Though the orientation is not strictly 
 orthodox, in other respects it closely resembles the design 
 of a mosque. 
 
 30. (i) Tomb of Shkr Shah at Sahseram. (2) Tomb 
 
 OF HUMAYUN AT DBI^HI 446 
 
 Tike most Muhammadan tombs, these two are extremely 
 characteristic of the men for whom they were built, the 
 massive grandeur of Sher Shah's monument showing a 
 marked contrast to the pompous but rather tawdry 
 elegance of Humayun's, designed in the Persian taste 
 affected by him. 
 
 v3i. Akbar entertained by his Foster-brother 458 
 
 From one of a series of pictures painted by Akbar' s orders to 
 illustrate the history of his reign, the Akbar-ndma. The 
 picture represents Akbar entertained by his foster- 
 brother, 'Azam Elhan, at Dipalpur, Panjab, in 1571. 
 The names of the artists, all Hindus, are inscribed upon 
 it : J agan (outline) , Sur Das (colour) , Madhu (por- 
 traits). From the original in the Indian Section of the 
 Victoria and Albert Museum, by kind permission of the 
 Director and Secretary. 
 XXX 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLATE PAGE 
 
 32. The Siege of Chitor 4^6 
 
 The destruction of a tower, caused by the explosion of a mine 
 during the vSiege by Akbar in 1567. From the Akbar- 
 ndma Series in the Indian Section of the Victoria and 
 Albert Museum, by kind permission of the Director and 
 Secretary. The picture is a double one and the reproduc- 
 tion shows one half of it. The artists' names are 
 Muskina (outline), Thura (colour). 
 
 J 33. (i) The J ami' Masjid, Fatehpur-Sikri. (2) The 
 
 Daftar Khana, Fatehpur-Sikri 47^ 
 
 Akbar's royal mosque and his Record Office. See pp. 470 and 
 4^6-4^7 . A full description of the buildings at Fatehpur- 
 Sikri is given in the author's Handbook to Agra and the Taj 
 (l^ongmans) . 
 
 XXXI 
 
CORRIGENDA 
 At pp. 1 1 6, 117, and 182 garbha-griha has been misprinted garbha-grihya. 
 
PART I 
 
 aryAvarta before the 
 muhammadan conquest 
 
^xsi "is? 
 
 Map of 
 
 ANCIENT INDIA 
 
 To illustrate Part I 
 
 Miles I 
 
 100 200 300 400 SOO* 
 
 tob 
 
Copyright, -fohn.Muri'av. Itorid^n 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS IN 
 VEDIC INDIA 
 
 INDIA, whether regarded from a physical or intellectual 
 standpoint, is herself the great exemplar of the doc- 
 trine of the One in Many which her philosophers 
 proclaimed to the world. Though singularly varied both in 
 climate and geographical character, there is one great force 
 which regulates the rainfall and helps to fertilise the soil — 
 the magnetic attraction of the tremendous mountain barriers 
 which separate her from the main continent of Asia and hold 
 up the onrush of the monsoon clouds. Always containing 
 amongst her population an immense variety of racial elements, 
 from the highest grade of civilisation to the lowest, there was 
 from the earliest recorded times one dominant race whose 
 religious theory and political institutions consolidated the 
 loosely cohering particles of the State and made Indian history. 
 From the time of Alexander's raid until the beginning of 
 British rule India was always politically a self-contained 
 state, in so far that no successful invader, once he had estab- 
 lished a dynasty there, ever dreamt of extending his conquests 
 further than her most northern boundaries, or beyond the 
 ocean which surrounds her eastern and western shores. And 
 in the domain of thought, though India has been more prolific 
 in schools of philosophy and religion than any other country 
 in the world, there runs through them all a vein of perception 
 or insight which differentiates them from the characteristic 
 bent of Western intellect and makes them distinctively Indian. 
 Religion in the West is the light given from above which 
 illuminates the path of life, but yet remains, for most men 
 and women, remote from life itself. In India philosophy and 
 
 3 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 religion have always been regarded as the essence of all sciences, 
 and the mainspring of all the forces which control life in every 
 aspect. 
 
 The Aryan people who gradually imposed their civilisation 
 upon the whole of India were closely related to that masterful 
 race which in the first or second millennium before Christ 
 began to dominate the shores and islands of the Mediterranean 
 and the Euxine, whose intellectual power gained a supremacy 
 in Europe not less than that won by their fellow-Aryans in 
 India. But so far as the scanty evidence of early Vedic 
 literature goes, the first Aryan invaders of India were pastoral 
 and agricultural rather than seafaring folk, and their entry 
 into India was chiefly through the north-western gateways 
 of the Himalayan mountain wall. There is, indeed, every 
 probability that some of the early Indo- Aryan settlements in 
 the Panjab came by sea, through the Persian Gulf and up • 
 the Indus — the route by which part of Alexander's expedi- 
 tion returned to Babylon ; for it is now known that Babylon ! 
 was ruled by an Aryan d^masty for about six hundred • 
 years, and there is no doubt that the great cities of Meso- 
 potamia were alwa^^s in close commercial intercourse with 
 India. 
 
 Modern archaeological research has thrown much light upon | 
 the history of the Aryans in Western Asia. In the second I 
 millennium B.C., or when the Aryans were pushing their way 
 into Northern India, the Mitannians, an Aryan people worship- 
 ping the nature-spirits of the Vedas, Surj^a, Varuna, and Indra, 
 had founded a powerful kingdom between the Tigris and 
 Euphrates, and the old Vedic tradition of the conflicts between 
 the Devas and the Asuras can perhaps be referred to the struggles 
 between the Aryan worshippers of Surya and the Seinites of | 
 Assyria, who became subject to the kings of Mitanni. About .:' 
 1746 B.C. the Kassites, another branch of the Arj^ans, made ■ 
 themselves masters of Babylon, and thus an Aryan dynasty 
 ruled over Babylonia for the following six hundred years. 
 During these centuries it is more than probable that the 
 Aryans of Mesopotamia assisted in the colonisation of the 
 
 4 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 Panjab, making use of the sea-route between India and the 
 Euphrates valley by which the Sumerians, the ancient Dravi- 
 dian inhabitants of the Sea-I^and to the south of Babylon, 
 must have come from India. A great impulse to Aryan 
 immigration into the Panjab by sea probably came about 
 1367 B.C., when after the death of King Dushratta — a name 
 familiar in ancient Indian literature by the story of the Rdmd- 
 yana — Mitanni was thrown into a state of anarchy, being 
 harried on the east by the Assyrians and on the west by the 
 Hittites, so that the only way of escape for the vanquished 
 Aryan warriors would have been down the river to the sea. 
 
 The theory that the Arj^ans, when first known to history, 
 were semi-barbaric tribes who borrowed their civilisation 
 from the more cultured races they conquered, both in India 
 and in Europe, seems to be formed upon a wrong judgment 
 of the archaeological evidence. The Vedas — the bedrock of 
 Indo-Ar^'-an civilisation — are not the literature of an uncultured 
 people, and they certainly are, on the whole, Aryan and not 
 borrowed from Dravidian or other sources. They represent 
 the culture of a race of warrior-poets and philosophers who 
 despised the arts of commerce and lived mostly by agriculture, 
 with one hand on the sword and the other on the plough. 
 They built no temples, but worshipped nature-spirits with 
 simple sacrificial rites which would leave little traces behind 
 them for archaeological explorers to analyse. The Aegean, 
 Babylonian, and Dravidian cultures which they added to 
 their own stock and re-inspired with their own genius were 
 essentially mercantile civilisations with a more limited spiritual 
 outlook than the Aryan, though in the nature of things they 
 would leave more material evidence of their existence for 
 posterity, for they were more concerned with the happiness 
 which lies in material possessions than in spiritual thoughts 
 and the endeavour to realise the high destiny of the human 
 race. 
 
 The Indo- Aryan classification of society into four categories — 
 intellectuals, militarists, merchants, and labourers — was not 
 merely a description of local conditions in Aryavarta but a 
 
 5 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 general one indicative of the four grades of culture which 
 are co-ordinated in the progress of civilisation. It was the 
 noblest characteristic of Indo-Aryan polity that it was always 
 based upon a just appreciation of the respective values of these 
 four powers governing the destiny of mankind. Though undue 
 preference might sometimes be given to Aryan intellect, racial 
 and social prejudices were never so strong that the great 
 thinkers of alien stock did not receive due honour. It was 
 only when Aryan civilisation was decadent that caste, as it is 
 now understood, became a hindrance to intellectual progress. 
 Neither the victories of brute force nor the seductions of 
 material prosperity are found dominating the pages of Indo- 
 Aryan history. The search for knowledge was a reUgious 
 quest which absorbed the highest energies of the Aryan State. 
 Those who contributed most to the happiness and progress of 
 mankind — the inspired religious teacher, the wisemen of every 
 class, and all who have loved and helped their fellow-beings — 
 were those whom India has honoured and cherished in her 
 memory. 
 
 It is a profound misunderstanding of history to maintain 
 that the Aryan genius was inartistic and that Aryan civilisation 
 was a borrowed one. The Aryans, as all poets and artists do, 
 borrowed their material where they could find it ; but it was 
 their own creative genius which gave the matter new and 
 higher forms and inspired it with deeper thoughts. And 
 because of their artistic genius and power of adapting them- 
 selves to their environment, Aryan civilisation in Greece, 
 Persia, and India, despite its common origin, had an indi- 
 viduality of its own — borrowed perhaps in the sense that a 
 plant borrows nutriment from the soil in which it grows. In 
 each case also the Aryan stock, on account of its adaptability 
 to its environment, was crossed with indigenous plants of a 
 lower order, and according to a natural law evolved a higher 
 state of culture from the union ; but it is not for the historian 
 to determine whether the Potter or the pot should be given 
 the greater credit for the result. 
 
 Aryan civilisation in India was not a reflex or a by-current 
 6 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 of that which had its origin in Southern Europe. It was 
 India herself who moulded it in her own image, directed its 
 endeavours and inspired its ideals. And the local environment 
 which gave Indo-Aryan thought its special character and 
 coloured its whole outlook upon life was the north-western 
 region of the Himalayas and the valleys of the great rivers 
 which have their sources there. That was, and is still, India's 
 holy land. However remote from it their migrations went, 
 the Aryans carried with them the legends of their Himalayan 
 home. The names of the Vedic nature-gods brought into 
 India by the first Aryan invaders — Surya, Agni, Mitra, Varuna, 
 and others — are vague memories of the past, but every Hindu 
 temple, ancient or modern, perpetuates the early Aryan 
 veneration for Siva, the blue-necked, snow-crowned moun- 
 tain ; for Parvati the Spring-maiden, Himalaya's fair daughter, 
 Siva's bride ; for Meru, Vishnu's sacred mountain, the pivot 
 of the universe ; and for I^akshmi, the breaking of day over 
 the Himalayan peaks. And not only are the Himalayan sacred 
 shrines still the cherished goal of the pilgrim and the centre 
 of popular Hindu worship, but even the intellectual Brahman 
 uses these names for symbols of cosmic forces and for the 
 concepts of his philosophy. 
 
 The description of the old English village communities in 
 Sleswick and Jutland given by a well-known historian, ^ and 
 the characteristics ascribed to the ancestors of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race, correspond closely with what is known of the 
 early Aryan settlements in India from their literary records 
 and from traditional evidence. The Indo-Aryan resembled 
 the Anglo-Saxon in his detestation of the restraints of city life 
 and his love for the independence which agriculture and the 
 organisation of village communities gave him. " Each little 
 farmer-commonwealth was girt in by its own border or ' mark,' 
 a belt of forest or waste or fen which parted it from its fellow 
 villages, a ring of common ground which none of its settlers 
 might take for his own, but which sometimes served as a 
 death-ground where criminals met their doom and was held 
 
 ^ J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, pp. 3-4. 
 
 7 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to be the special dwelling-place of the nixie and the will-o'-the- 
 wisp. . . . Inside this boundary the ' township,' as the village 
 was then called, from the ' tun ' or rough fence and trench that 
 served as its simple fortification, formed a ready-made fortress 
 in war, while in peace its entrenchments were serviceable in 
 the feuds of village with village or house with house. , . . The 
 holdings of the freemen clustered round a moot-hill or sacred 
 tree where the community met from time to time to order 
 its own industry and to frame its own laws. Here plough- 
 land and meadow-land were shared in due lot among the 
 villagers, and field and homestead passed from man to man. 
 Here strife of farmer with farmer was settled according to 
 the ' customs ' of the township as its ' elder men ' stated them, 
 and the wrong-doer was judged and his fine assessed by the 
 kinsfolk ; and here men were chosen to follow headman or 
 ealdorman to hundred court or war." ^ 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon ' ceorls ' corresponded with the Indo- 
 Ar^^an Kshatriyas, the fighting men of the clan, who in early 
 times took precedence over the priests, or Brahmans, and were 
 the spiritual leaders of the people. The name varna, or 
 colour, which was the Vedic word for social grade or caste, 
 seems to imply that the blood-bond which " gave both its 
 military and social form to Old English society " was also 
 the ruling principle in the early Indo-Aryan social system, 
 though afterwards the idea of ritualistic purity grew into and 
 eventually superseded it. 
 
 The parallel ceases abruptly when chronological coincidences 
 are sought for. Indo-Aryan civilisation is one of the oldest 
 in the world ; the Anglo-Saxon one of the most recent. When 
 Hengist and Horsa with their semi-civilised followers landed 
 on the Isle of Thanet in the fifth century a.d., the Indo-Aryan 
 tradition already went back for thousands of years; and the 
 first Aryan invaders were not less venerated by the Indian 
 people who came within the Aryan pale than were the 
 gods of the old Norse mythology by our Anglo-Saxon fore- 
 fathers. Indo-Aryan civilisation was a structure of venerable 
 
 ^ Green, he. cit. 
 
 8 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 antiquity before the corner-stones of the British Empire had 
 been well and truly laid. 
 
 There is another distinction, not less marked, between the 
 early period of Indo-Aryan history and that of the English 
 nation. The Jutes, Angles, and other Northern tribes which 
 helped to form the English stock won their footing on British 
 soil solely by their superior organisation and fighting qualities 
 and not by force of intellect. In civilisation they were often 
 on a far lower level than the people they overcame. But 
 the primitive religion of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors took 
 no root in Britain, and when the barbarian sword was sheathed 
 the culture of Athens and Rome began to assert its spiritual 
 supremacy over the whole of Western Europe ; and this 
 culture at that time derived its highest inspiration from Asia. 
 
 The Aryan conquest of India, on the other hand, was no 
 war of extermination, fierce and bitter though the struggle 
 may have been at the beginning. The pioneers of Indo-Aryan 
 civilisation, like their fellow-Aryans in Southern Europe, won 
 their way even more effectually by their superior intellectual 
 qualities than by their fighting strength. Though for many 
 centuries holding themselves proudly aloof from the non- 
 Aryan races and jealously guarding their spiritual inheritance 
 from profanation by the uninitiated, their laws, political 
 institutions, and religious ideas gradually became, for the vast 
 majority of the people, the warp and weft of Indian life, even 
 for the millions in whose veins no trace of Aryan blood can 
 now be found. 
 
 The student of Indian history must not, however, make 
 generalisations of this kind go too far. It is probable that 
 the Aryans were always numerically a very minute fraction of 
 the people of India ; and even among those who called them- 
 selves Aryan there were many of mixed blood. It was by 
 spiritual rather than physical ties that Aryans and non- Aryans 
 were gradually bound together into a political unity with an 
 abiding sense of nationality. In a very considerable propor- 
 tion the non-Aryans retained their vernacular languages and 
 their social customs. The Dravidians, and doubtless other 
 
 9 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 non-Aryans, had a settled village system before the Aryans 
 entered India which was not entirely superseded but rather 
 linked on to the Aryan system ; for it was a fixed principle 
 of Aryan government that the social customs and proprietary 
 laws of conquered people should always be respected. Thus 
 the primitive non-Aryan village system continued to exist 
 side by side with the Aryan, and long survived the break-up 
 of Aryan political organisation. But the fact that at the 
 present time possibly two-thirds of Indian villages belong to 
 a non-Aryan, or what is now known as the raiyatwdri revenue 
 system, does not show that Aryan civilisation never affected 
 more than one-third of the Indian population. It merely 
 indicates that when Aryan law and organisation relaxed their 
 hold upon Indian society its Dravidian or non-Aryan sub- 
 stratum was unable to resist the disintegrating power of alien 
 ideas introduced by the new Aryan rulers of India when they 
 were groping blindly in the darkness of India's unknown 
 history. 
 
 The historian who deals with a vast country like India must 
 inevitably indulge in generalisations which will seem mis- 
 leading if applied to particular provinces or to any one of the 
 numerous races which at one time or another came within the 
 Aryan pale. A true history of India must be a synthesis 
 rather than an analysis. It is therefore superfluous to attempt 
 to describe in detail the peculiarities of non-Aryan village 
 systems, but it is necessary to indicate briefly the broad 
 distinctions between them and the Aryan, The Aryan system 
 was a scientific organisation based upon sanitary laws and 
 inspired by high ethical and social ideals. It was a scheme of 
 communal village life, worked out by the practical philosophy 
 of one of the most highly gifted of the races of mankind, in 
 which each section of the communit}'- and each individual 
 member of it took their allotted shares of work for the common 
 weal, not under the compulsion of an autocrat or of a ruling 
 caste, but by a clear perception of mutual advantage and a 
 voluntary recognition of superior intellectual leadership. 
 
 The non-Aryan were empirical systems of a primitive agri- 
 10 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 cultural type, such as are found in many countries. These 
 primitive village communities were loosely knit together by 
 tribal customs and motives of self-interest, but they possessed 
 but little capacity for self -improvement so long as they remained 
 outside Aryan influence and guidance. The history of Aryan 
 village life is contained in Indo- Aryan sacred literature ; its 
 traditional organisation is preserved in the canonical books 
 of the Indian craftsman and in the planning of Indian temples 
 and towns. The Aryan village was the basis of Indo-Aryan 
 polity, and its history is the real history of India. The non- 
 Aryan village system has survived and served as the founda- 
 tions of the Anglo-Indian land revenue system, but before it 
 was developed imder Aryan inspiration it had no recorded 
 history, literature, or art, and its part in the evolution of 
 Indian civilisation had been almost a negligible factor. 
 
 Of all the non- Aryan races which inhabited India before 
 the Aryan immigration it has been assumed, with good reason, 
 that the most civilised were the Dravidians, and we can gather 
 from the study of primitive Dravidian sociology in aboriginal 
 Indian tribes of the present day what part Dravidian institu- 
 tions took in the formation of the Indo-Aryan village system. 
 The indigenous Dravidian system was in all probability the 
 foundation upon which the Indo-Aryan economic super- 
 structure was built. The Dravidian tribesmen were generally 
 nomad hunters living in the forest, and their social system 
 differed from the Aryan in being matriarchal instead of patri- 
 archal. The mothers and their children formed the nucleus 
 of a settled society ; the fathers were the hunters of a different 
 tribe whose occupation of supplying food for the common 
 meals kept them often away from the village. The men and 
 women of the same village had separate quarters. All the 
 tribal social customs, including marriage, were on a com- 
 munal basis — ^the children were the offspring of the intercourse 
 which took place when the young men and women of different 
 tribes met and danced together in the forest glades at the 
 festivals of the seasons. In the more settled communities 
 the Dravidian mothers added to the common food supplies 
 
 II 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 by collecting edible roots and forest produce which could 
 be found near the village, and began a regular sj^stem of 
 cultivation in the perfection of which they were helped, 
 according to tradition, by the friendly teaching of Aryan 
 rishis who had retired to the peaceful seclusion of the forest 
 for meditation. The agricultural lands of which the Dravidian 
 tribes thus became possessed were also communal property, 
 held in turns by different groups of cultivators according to 
 the redistribution made periodically at the village meetings. 
 
 The respective duties of the mothers and of the able-bodied 
 men in this ancient communal system were thus well defined. 
 The fathers had little concern with the affairs of their own 
 children — all the men and women of the same tribe were as 
 brothers and sisters. It is easy to understand how all the 
 inborn religious instincts of the people became centred in the 
 mother rather than in the father of the family, who did not 
 live in the village and often was unknown to the children. 
 They could never realise the conception of the Fatherhood of 
 God : the Earth-Mother who in times of distress would demand 
 a child-victim from her worshippers embodied all their ideas 
 of the divine. India was their mother, not their father. 
 
 The elder men of the village, past efficient work as hunters, 
 also had their share in the communal life. When the children 
 were old enough they took charge of their education, teaching 
 them all the lore of the forest, the habits of its wild denizens, 
 the use of the weapons of the chase, and the traditional laws 
 and customs of the tribe. The village grove where the children 
 were taught, and where the elders discussed the affairs of the 
 community, became the school, the parliament house, and the 
 temple of the tribe. 
 
 This Arcadian scheme of life, delightful in its primitive 
 simplicity and progressive up to a certain point, had one fatal 
 defect — that while it helped to bring all the inhabitants of a 
 village up to the tribal standard of efficiency, it also tended to 
 suppress any exceptional personal aptitudes and individual 
 efforts at improvement. It produced a kind of socialistic 
 despotism, not unknown in our own times, as tyrannical in 
 12 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 its own way as autocracy. Any member of the tribe possessed 
 of more than average abiUty who dared to question the 
 authority of tribal customs risked the punishment of immediate 
 death or the possibly worse penalty of being expelled from 
 the tribe. But rebels and reformers there were in those days 
 as in this, and those adventurous spirits who escaped the 
 anger of their fellow-tribesmen and the perils of the untracked 
 jungle would band themselves together as outlaws, preying 
 upon the more peaceful tribes and, when occasion offered, 
 carrying off their women to their hill-forts, where Durga, the 
 Inaccessible, the Terrible, was worshipped as the Mother with 
 bloody sacrifices. 
 
 It was amongst these bandit tribal offshoots, rather than 
 the original Dravidian stock with communal customs, that the 
 ideas of kingship, monogamous marriage, and individual owner- 
 ship of property developed. A successful leader would natu- 
 rally command more authority among them than he would 
 in the more conservative and less aggressive society. A wife 
 taken by force would remain the property of the captor, and 
 cultivated land or other spoil won in plundering raids would 
 be divided amongst the raiders. At the same time, the poten- 
 tialities of a higher development of culture were often greater 
 in this predatory state of society than they were in the other, 
 for it always attracted the more intelligent and enterprising 
 members of the village communities. In its lowest stage it 
 produced the ferocious forest bandits regarded by the Aryans 
 with horror and disgust as rdkshasas, or demons, and it 
 culminated in the powerful Dravidian kingdoms which the 
 Aryans gradually subdued by superior arms and superior 
 intellect. But in all grades of Dravidian civilisation the 
 primeval matriarchal principle remained as the basis of the 
 law of inheritance and the foundation of religious beliefs. 
 
 Such, no doubt, were some of the varied conditions of 
 Dravidian society when the first Aryan tribesmen, eating meat 
 and drinking an intoxicating liquor made from soma juice — 
 originally a fair-skinned hardy race of mountaineers — descended 
 into the plains of India, perhaps many centuries before they 
 
 13 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 succeeded in founding a dynasty in the Euphrates valley, but 
 not before they had developed a highly organised military 
 system and were well advanced in the science of agriculture. 
 They were cheerful, freedom-loving folk, full of the joy of life, 
 singing songs to the good spirits who guarded their homesteads 
 and cattle and aided them in winning the fruits of the earth — 
 songs which had a magic power to bless the daily toil in field 
 or workshop and gave them a kindly feeling towards their 
 neighbours, Aryan and non-Aryan, in times of peace. But 
 when, summoned to war by their chieftains or roused to defend 
 the homes and land they loved, they yoked their horses to 
 their fighting cars, strung their bows and took up sword and 
 spear, they were fierce and relentless enemies, going into battle 
 inflamed by heavy draughts of soma juice, led by their bards 
 shouting the tribal war-songs, and preferring death to dishonour 
 of the Aryan name. 
 
 Early Indo- Aryan society was, like that of the Homeric age 
 in Greece, a patriarchal system in which the father instead of 
 the mother was the head of the joint family, and the warrior, 
 instead of the hunter or bandit, was the leader of the tribe. 
 But war was not the only or chief occupation of the Aryan 
 tribesmen. Cattle-farming and agriculture were their principal 
 means of sustenance ; predatory warfare was incidental to 
 inevitable tribal quarrels, but not the sole end of existence. 
 
 The Aryans were a far more cultured race, but their organi- 
 sation resembled in some respects that of the Dravidian robber 
 tribes. The Aryan patriarchal joint-families were grouped 
 round the chieftain's hill-fort, which was the centre for mutual 
 defence, for the common tribal sacrifices, and the meeting- 
 place of the Sdbhd — the assembly of the householders. There 
 appears to have been no recognition of communal rights either 
 in agricultural land or in live stock, but only in the common 
 pastures to which the chief herdsman daily drove their cattle. 
 
 The first Aryan settlers were constantly being pushed further 
 south and east by the steady influx of others of the same 
 race, some of whom in the course of centuries brought the 
 experience of city life and of agriculture in the plains of 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 Mesopotamia, Aryan culture was thus gradually differen- 
 tiated from non-Aryan not only by greater proficiency in the 
 arts of peace and war, but also by the richness and variety 
 of its agricultural resources, for the Aryans brought the millets, 
 barley, wheat, and oil-seeds of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 
 to supplement the indigenous rice-crops of the non-Aryan 
 agriculturists in the plains of India. 
 
 As to when this Aryan immigration into India first began 
 and when it ceased authorities differ very widely. But whether 
 it commenced 5000 or 3000 years before Christ this much 
 is certain, that in the course of centuries a process of assimila- 
 tion went on by which eventually the Indo-Aryan village 
 system was evolved, having for its foundation the communal 
 principle of the primitive Dravidian foreign settlement and 
 for its superstructure the higher culture and organisation 
 created by Aryan genius and dominated by Aryan spiritual 
 ideals. The matriarchal system and the rudimentary culture 
 of the Dravidian village both retained places in the scheme of 
 Indo-Aryan civilisation. Dravidian kings were proud to claim 
 descent, on their mothers' side, from ancient Aryan dynasties. 
 Aryan forest hermits taught useful arts and higher spiritual 
 truths in Dravidian village schools, so that the cruel Earth- 
 Mother came to be the bride of the Aryan Sun-god and the 
 bringer of prosperity; while the dread Durga — the religious 
 cult of the brigand and outlaw — was transformed into the 
 beauteous wife of the Great Ascetic, Siva, the teacher of 
 spiritual wisdom and the destroyer of ignorance. Popular 
 legends of Krishna, the dark-skinned Indo-Aryan hero, guru 
 of the Pandavas, were interwoven with the folk-lore of Dravi- 
 dian village life, and he became the Protector of the people 
 from tyranny and wrong, the divine Cowherd who danced 
 with the village maidens at the spring festival and taught the 
 love of God for man. By such teaching the higher spiritual 
 intelligence of the Aryan with its great constructive genius 
 gradually welded together Dravidian civilisation with its own, 
 so that each contributed its best to the common stock and 
 both went hand in hand along the path of progress. 
 
 15 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 The great problem for Aryan thinkers, after their fighting 
 men had secured their position in India by the sword, was 
 to prevent their race, and with it the divine revelation of 
 which they believed themselves to be the heirs, from being 
 utterly submerged in the process of adaptation to their environ- 
 ment, which was the inevitable consequence of a permanent 
 occupation of the countr3^ This instinct of race preservation, 
 together with a profound conviction of divine guidance, formed 
 the basic principles of the code of laws and social customs 
 which became a part of the sacred literature of Hinduism. 
 The term Aryan, originall}^ a purely racial distinction con- 
 fined to the ' five peoples,' or five principal Aryan tribes, 
 came to mean all the people who were within the Aryan 
 pale and conformed to Aryan laws and institutions. The 
 five social grades, partly based upon race and partly upon 
 occupation, were ^,the four recognised varnas, known as the 
 ' pure classes ' — the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and 
 Sudras — and a fifth which included the offspring of inter- 
 marriages which were not recognised by Aryan law. The 
 Brahmans formed the priestly class ; the Kshatriyas were the 
 fighting men ; the Vaisyas the common people engaged in 
 occupations connected with the necessaries of life ; and the 
 Sudras the menial labourers, including the lower ranks of 
 handicraftsmen and tillers of the soil. Outside the Aryan 
 pale, and never admitted therein, were the wild aboriginal 
 tribes inhabiting the dense forests, who then, as now, held 
 themselves aloof from civilised hfe. 
 
 The idea of purity which made the social distinctions amongst 
 the Aryans themselves and between Aryans and non- Aryans 
 was probably in its origin identical with the blood-bond of 
 the Teutonic races. But with the gradual development of 
 the Vedic theory of sacrifice it came to be interpreted in 
 a spiritual rather than physical sense, and thus denoted 
 the barrier which separated those who could participate 
 in the benefits of Vedic ritual, either directly or by proxy, 
 from the ' impure,' whose mere presence would entirely 
 vitiate the efficacy of the sacrifice. 
 i6 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 But the rigidity and exclusiveness of tiie caste system, as 
 we now know it, were largely the product of medieval condi- 
 tions and did not exist either in the time of the Buddha or 
 for many centuries afterwards. Neither is it right to suppose 
 that the rigour of caste was imposed upon India by the craft 
 and subtlety of an unscrupulous priesthood only bent upon 
 self-aggrandisement. It was rather an inevitable consequence 
 of the peculiar conditions and circumstances which produced 
 Aryan civilisation in India. If it be assumed that a certain 
 race, few in numbers and surrounded by a vast population 
 of aliens, had by profound insight or by divine revelation 
 obtained a knowledge of the laws of life far above that of 
 their fellow-men, it would obviously be for the advantage of 
 the community at large that the purity of the race should 
 be maintained by strict marriage laws and that the utmost 
 care should be taken to hand down to posterity a tradition 
 so pregnant with human happiness. The Aryans believed 
 themselves to be in possession of this precious knowledge, 
 and lest it should be perverted or made a weapon in 
 the hands of unscrupulous adversaries, by common consent 
 it was guarded as a national palladium and entrusted to the 
 custody of a class specially selected and trained for the purpose. 
 Caste laws were laws of spiritual eugenics, designed to promote 
 the evolution of a higher race. It was also by a process of 
 natural selection, or survival of the fittest, that the Brahmans, 
 originally only attendants at the tribal sacrifices who chanted 
 the accompanying hymns and had charge of the sacred vessels, 
 gradually obtained precedence over the Kshatriyas, who in 
 Vedic times combined priestly functions with their military 
 profession and were the representatives of the purest Aryan 
 stock. For in the state of constant warfare which existed so 
 long as the Aryans and their non- Aryan allies were fighting 
 for supremacy in India, social and racial prejudices would 
 often be subordinated to considerations of national security, 
 and the blood of the Kshatriya aristocracy would tend to 
 become mixed by the admission into their ranks of non- Aryans 
 and men of mixed race who distinguished themselves as leaders 
 
 B 17 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 in war but were not competent to officiate in sacrificial 
 rites. 
 
 Tiie increasing complication of these rites and the supposed 
 dangers to the Aryan community which might arise from errors 
 in their performance also made it imperative that none but 
 highly trained experts should be allowed to take part in them. 
 And not only was the Brahman class by reason of its occupa- 
 tion less liable to mixture with non-Aryan blood, but the 
 intellectual training which alone entitled the Brahmans to 
 their especial privileges was intended to qualify them as 
 teachers and spiritual leaders of the people. The Brahman 
 at birth stood on the level of common humanity, even as a 
 Sudra. It was only at the ceremony of investiture with the 
 sacred thread and initiation into the state of Brahmacharin 
 or studentship, when his spiritual father, the Brahman guru, 
 whispered in his ear the mystic formula, the Gayatri, which 
 contained the essence of all the Vedas, that he was born to 
 Brahmanhood and was entitled to the exceptional privileges 
 of his class. "As an elephant made of wood, as an antelope 
 made of leather, such is an unlearned Brahman : those three 
 have nothing but names " {Manu, ii, 157). 
 
 However extravagant the claims of the Brahmans may 
 have become in later times, it must be admitted that the moral 
 standard prescribed in the rules of their order was a very 
 high one. " A Brahman should constantly shun worldly 
 honour as he would shun poison ; and rather constantly seek 
 disrespect as we would seek nectar " {Manu, ii, 162). He 
 was required to live abstemiously, to shun sensual excesses of 
 every kind, and to observe very strict rules of personal hygiene. 
 As a student, or Brahmacharin, in the first quarter of his life 
 he must learn to control his passions, to wait sedulously on 
 his preceptor, or guru, and beg for his daily food. As a house- 
 holder he must avoid all kinds of wealth that might impede 
 his constant study of the Vedas, speak the truth without needless 
 altercation, keep himself pure in mind and body, and live with 
 the least possible injury to all animated beings {Manu, iv). 
 In old age, provided that he had no relations dependent upon 
 18 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 him, he should renounce the worldly life entirely and retire 
 to a forest hermitage for meditation or become a wandering 
 mendicant {sannydsin) . The Brahman who neglected the rules 
 of his order or those who committed sin under the pretext of 
 austere devotion were, among their own class, to be despised 
 both in this life and the next {Manu, iv, 199). Those who 
 took to occupations other than those permitted by the rules 
 of their order lost their status as Brahmans and in the civil 
 courts were to be treated as Sudras {Manu, viii, 102). But, 
 lest such discriminations should lower the prestige of the 
 whole order, justice was not permitted to go further than 
 this, and Brahmans were to be honoured as such by the other 
 classes even though they descended to mean occupations, and 
 whether they were learned or ignorant {Manu, ix, 317-319). 
 
 The marriage laws, the strict rules of seclusion, and the 
 severe penalties for injuries caused to Brahmans by anyone 
 of the lower orders were, in the social conditions which obtained 
 in India, a necessary protection for those who were the especial 
 custodians of the honour and traditions of the Aryan race, and 
 who by the nature of their calling did not usually bear arms 
 for self-defence. It must be observed, however, that the 
 position given to Brahmans in the laws of Manu must not be 
 taken to represent that which they held in primitive Indo- 
 Aryan society, but rather that which they had earned for 
 themselves in the early centuries of the Christian era, when 
 this code was probably drawn up. Neither should it be 
 supposed that the laws were always strictly observed : they 
 represent rather a counsel of perfection given by Brahmans 
 for the government of a model Indo-Aryan state. 
 
 The Ramayana records the fact that some of the higher 
 ranks of craftsmen had a social status equal to that of Brahmans. 
 Included among them were those who were versed in the canons 
 of craft ritual, the Silpa-Sdstras, such as the craftsmen who 
 wrought the sacrificial posts at tribal religious ceremonies and 
 the master-builders who laid out the plans of the village 
 communities and designed public buildings and irrigation 
 works. But it was only when a craftsman was regarded as 
 
 19 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 officiating in sacred rites that he took the status of a Brahman 
 and was entitled to the privileges of the highest class. " The 
 hand of an artist employed in his art is always pure " {Manu, 
 V, 129), but those who built houses for gain were to be avoided 
 as offenders against Aryan law, contact with whom was pollu- 
 tion [Manu, iii, 163). 
 
 It has been assumed by Fergusson and other archaeological 
 writers, on very insufficient grounds, that the Aryans when 
 they entered India had not emerged from a primitive state of 
 culture, that they were little skilled in handicraft, and that 
 Indian architecture was largely a creation of the non-Aryan 
 races with whom they came in contact. If, as is more than 
 probable, some of the Aryan immigrants were an overflow from 
 the great cities of Mesopotamia and Persia, there is no reason 
 to suppose that they were unskilled in the arts of city life. 
 The building craft has always been closely associated with the 
 science of warfare, and the Aryan fighting clans would hardly 
 have prevailed in the long struggle against the warlike non- 
 Aryan races in India had they not been at least as well equipped 
 in the means of offence and defence as their adversaries. 
 Indeed every conquest of India has been a story of the superior 
 technical equipment of the invading armies. 
 
 The Kshatriyas, as well as the Vaisyas, were entitled to 
 the sacred thread and were initiated at the proper age as 
 members of the ' twice-born ' classes. Their special duties 
 were the protection of the whole community and the admini- 
 stration of justice, but they never renounced their claim to 
 be considered, equally with Brahmans, the spiritual leaders 
 of the people. As philosophers and poets they contributed a 
 great deal to Aryan sacred literature, especially to the earliest. 
 The Buddha was one of the great spiritual teachers who belonged 
 to the Kshatriya class and represented its religious ideals. 
 In warfare they were bound by rules of chivalry which always 
 distinguish civilisation from barbarism. It was held unworthy 
 of a Kshatriya to use arrows " mischievously barbed," or 
 poisoned darts blazing with fire, or concealed weapons. They 
 were forbidden to kill non-combatants, or an enemy when 
 20 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 sleeping, grievously wounded, or disarmed ; or one who was 
 naked, had broken weapons, or had lost his armour. As a 
 king, or chief of his tribe, either by election or hereditary right, 
 the duty of a Kshatriya was to consult his council of ministers 
 in all matters of importance and to rule in strict accordance 
 with Aryan common law. The rights of the people were to 
 be respected to such an extent that even a conquered nation 
 was to be ruled according to the laws declared in their books, 
 and not after the caprice of the conqueror {Manu, vii, 203). 
 Punishment for offences was to be awarded in an ascending 
 scale according to the social rank of the criminal. Thus, 
 according to the laws of Manu (viii, 336-338), the fine of a 
 Sudra for theft was to be eightfold ; that of a Vaisya sixteen- 
 fold ; that of a Kshatriya thirty -two-fold ; and that of a 
 Brahman sixty-four-fold. And where a man of lower rank 
 would be fined one pana a king was to be fined a thousand. 
 
 The Vaisya class, which included agriculturists, traders, 
 and handicraftsmen, was not bound by such strict rules of 
 morality as the two upper classes, since trafficking and usury 
 were satydnrita, or a mixture of truth and falsehood {Manu, 
 iv, 6). Yet this ancient code of Aryan ethics declares that 
 " of all pure things, purity in acquiring wealth is pronounced 
 the most excellent ; since he who gains wealth with clean 
 hands is truly pure, not he who is purified merely with earth 
 and water" {Manu, v, 106). If this principle were accepted 
 as the foundation of modern economic science we might 
 find in it the key to the solution of many vital industrial 
 problems. The position accorded to Vaisyas as one of the 
 ' twice-born ' classes seems to show that even in Vedic times 
 the trading community was an influential one among the 
 Aryans in India. There is evidence that commercial inter- 
 course both by land and sea existed between the Aryan colonies 
 in Northern India and the rich Dravidian kingdoms of the 
 South from very early times. Aryan merchants doubtless 
 also took part in the ancient trade between India and Egypt, 
 Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the great cities of Western Asia. 
 And no doubt it was owing to this constant intercourse with 
 
 21 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 foreign peoples that Aryan blood in the Vaisya class, in spite 
 of marriage laws, tended to become very mixed. 
 
 The Sudras, the lowest of the four classes recognised as 
 * pure,' or Aryan, occupied the position of serfs. They were 
 not permitted to wear the sacred thread, the symbol of a 
 second, or spiritual, birth, and their highest duty, sa5^s Manu, 
 was the service of Brahmans, with the expectation that if 
 faithfully performed it might win for them Brahmanhood in 
 the next birth. They were never permitted to study the 
 sacred scriptures or to perform the rites of the twice-born 
 classes on the ground that they could not by reason of their 
 calling attain to that degree of purity of mind and living 
 which were essential for the right use of the power gained 
 by divine knowledge. Yet, it was said, wisdom might be 
 learnt even from a Sudra, just as gold might be extracted from 
 impure substances or nectar from poison {Manu, ii, 238-239). 
 
 Outside the four varnas, but yet admitted within the Aryan 
 pale, was a fifth class called Sdmdnya, or Common, otherwise 
 Sutas, which was formed by irregular intermarriages between 
 the other classes or between Aryans and non-Aryans. This, 
 the original basis of the caste system, was constantly being 
 widened by the admission of non-Aryan people within the 
 pale, who though adopting the principles of Arj^an law and 
 religion, yet did not wholly abandon their own social customs 
 and popular deities. 
 
 The political organisation of the Aryan tribes was a demo- 
 cracy based upon the organisation of the village community, 
 a number of villages being generally federated for purposes 
 of mutual protection under the rule of a raja, or king, some- 
 times elected and sometimes hereditary, who though vested 
 with supreme authority was subject to Aryan common law 
 and tradition. The planning of the village and the religious 
 symbolism connected with it are recorded in the Silpa-Sastras, 
 and were reproduced in the enclosure of the Hindu temple 
 of medieval and modern times. The typical form, probably 
 derived from the fortified camp of the first Aryan invaders, 
 was a rectangular enclosure with the four sides facing the 
 22 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 four quarters, and divided into four wards by the two main 
 streets which crossed each other in the centre and were termi- 
 nated at each end by the four principal gates. There were 
 four subsidiary gates near the corners of the village enclosure, 
 so that the whole circumference of the walls or palisade was 
 divided into eight — ' the Eightfold Path.' The longest of the 
 two main streets, which ran east and west, was known as the 
 King's Street — Rdjapatha ; the shorter one was called Mahd- 
 kala or Vamana, signifying Broad Street or Short Street. 
 These two streets, wider than the rest and planted with trees, 
 were the two main lines of communication linking village 
 with village and forming the highways of commerce. They 
 were military and commercial routes maintained either at the 
 charge of the king's treasury or by the co-operation of groups 
 of villages and at their joint expense. The centre of the 
 village, at the intersection of the crossways, was the meeting- 
 place of the elders, and there, on a mound faced with stone 
 or brick which served as a platform, grew the Council Tree — 
 the Bodhi Tree or Tree of Wisdom — under the shade of which 
 the affairs of the village were discussed. In the larger villages 
 a more substantial Council House might be found in the form 
 of a pillared pavilion built of wood, brick, or stone, attached 
 to the shrine of the patron deity of the community, which was 
 open on all four sides to symbolise his guardianship of the 
 four quarters. This was the position assigned in the vSilpa- 
 Sastras to the temple of Brahma as Creator and Protector of 
 the Universe. To express his attributes of world-dominion 
 and his guardianship of the crossways he was popularly repre- 
 sented as having four heads, though Aryan religious teachers 
 discountenanced the ritualistic use of images. 
 
 Just as the aim of Vedic philosophy was to discover the 
 secret laws of the universe and to found thereon a religion of 
 everyday life, so the Indo-Aryan village was conceived as a 
 microcosm, the * five peoples ' of the Aryan community repre- 
 senting the five elements of the universe and each quarter of 
 the village symbolising a corresponding division of the macro- 
 cosm. The public celebration of the sacrificial rites to the 
 
 23 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 deities {devas) who presided over the different quarters of the 
 universe had its appointed place in the quarters of the village 
 dedicated to these deities, and thus each temple had its appro- 
 priate site fixed according to the aspect of the divine power 
 which was to be worshipped. The houses of the villagers — 
 which were the family property of the freemen, but could not 
 be alienated without the consent of the community — the 
 ''_£ublic bathing-places, parks or sacred groves, and public 
 orchards were grouped round these fixed points in various 
 ways, according to the nature of the site and the social rank 
 of the owners. The bazars occupied the blocks adjoining the 
 village enclosure, close to the main gates. 
 
 A wide path which intervened between the outer blocks and 
 the boundary walls, or fences, was known as the Mangala- 
 vlthi, the path of Blessing or Auspiciousness, as it was the path 
 by which the Kshatriya or Brahman householders circumambu- 
 lated the village in the immemorial rite of Pradakshind, reciting 
 mantrams to invoke the favours of the gods and to keep oft' 
 evil spirits. This path was dedicated to the War-god, Kartti- 
 keya, one of whose epithets is Mangala, on account of its use 
 in the military defence of the village. 
 
 A broad belt of land surrounding the village boundaries was 
 communal property cultivated by the villagers and the common 
 pasture-ground of their cattle, which were strictly guarded 
 from wild beasts and hostile raiders by the herdsmen and the 
 sentinels posted on the high towers or palisades over the 
 village gateways. Hence the latter were known as gopurams, 
 or * cattle-forts,' a name afterwards applied to the entrance 
 gateways of Hindu temple enclosures which repeated the 
 symbolism of the village plan. A general assembly of the 
 freemen met every year to elect the village council, consisting of 
 five members, who were presumed to represent the five social 
 elements of the community, and to administer the affairs of 
 the village according to Aryan law and custom. The elective 
 principle, however, though nominally it applied even to the 
 appointment of kings, was often superseded by the recognition 
 of a hereditary right of office, vested in certain families, and 
 
 24 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 only forfeited by some grave offence or neglect of duty. In 
 this case the general assembly of freemen tended to become 
 a consultative rather than an elective body, though its influence 
 was generally strong enough to maintain popular rights, even 
 in later times under the highly centralised government of 
 the Maury an and other imperial dynasties. 
 
 The sites of villages were carefully chosen according to 
 principles, ritualistic and sanitary, observed in the traditions 
 of the Indo-Aryan master-builder. They were generally on 
 the bank of a river, by the seashore or the side of a lake, so 
 that ample bathing facilities were easily accessible. Bathing 
 was regarded as a religious rite in itself, and a necessary pre- 
 liminary for sacrificial rites ; the Devas, ' the Shining Ones,' 
 who were the guardian spirits of the Aryan people, loved the 
 places which by nature or artifice were provided with water 
 and pleasant gardens. The soil of the proposed site was 
 examined to ascertain whether it was fit for cultivation and 
 whether good drinking water was procurable sufficiently near 
 the surface. When the site was determined and the blessing 
 of the gods had been invoked in the presence of the assembled 
 people, the ground was ploughed over. A new plough specially 
 made for the occasion was yoked to a pair of oxen, strong 
 and without blemish, with gold or silver rings on their horns 
 and hoofs, and the master-builder who directed the ceremonies 
 turned the first furrow. The oxen and plough were after- 
 wards presented to him as his perquisite, the people doing 
 him reverence as their guru. Then various kinds of sacrificial 
 grain were sown in the soil, and when the crops had grown 
 and come into flower the cattle of the community were turned 
 out to graze upon them. The site was then ready for the 
 building operations. The master-builder oriented the village 
 boundaries by means of the shadow of a gnomon, flxed the 
 position of the gateways, and laid out the two main streets in 
 the form of the cosmic cross. Then, squaring out the whole 
 area into the mystic figure called Paramdsdyika} he determined 
 
 1 The close connection of this geometrical system with Vedic sacrificial 
 lore and the position of the master-builder as a high priest, or sacrificial 
 
 25 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the auspicious sites for shrines, orchards, reservoirs, wells, 
 and blocks of houses, and the lay-out of the streets according 
 to the special needs of various social grades and the nature 
 of the ground. 
 
 The Silpa-Sastras give many different types of village plans, 
 such as a village adapted for a community v/hich was exclu- 
 sively Brahman, one which contained all five classes, and 
 others based upon the swastika and other symbolic figures. 
 For the purpose of co-operation and for mutual defence villages 
 combined in groups of ten, twenty, a hundred, and a thousand 
 or more, each group clustering round a fort or stronghold under 
 the command of a tribal chieftain who owed allegiance to 
 the overlord of the next largest group. In return for the 
 protection thus afforded, every village, through its headman, 
 paid a certain vali or tax into its chieftain's treasury, or in 
 lieu of this furnished him with a certain number of fighting 
 men, or with cattle or produce. The chieftain in his turn 
 had to pass on a similar proportion of his revenue to the head 
 of the group above him, who in the same way contributed to 
 the treasury of his overlord. The principle of combination 
 and co-operation was applied also to the upkeep of roads, 
 the construction of irrigation works, travellers' rest-houses, 
 public assembly halls, and the laying out of public parks, as 
 well as to agricultural work, trade, and handicraft. 
 
 It is usual to consider early Aryan religion as founded upon 
 the compilation of sacred hymns, ritualistic practices, and 
 philosophic ideas contained in the Vedas, but unless one 
 endeavours to relate these fragmentary records of Arj-an 
 poetry and religion to their natural context in Aryan daily life 
 
 expert, are indirect proofs of the great antiquity of the Indian science of 
 town-planning, for geometry as a science was an Indo-Aryan invention 
 and had its origin in the complicated system of Vedic sacrifices in which 
 it became necessary to resolve geometrical problems such as constructing a 
 circle equal in area to a square, or vice versa. The lay-out of the Indo- 
 Aryan village is treated in the Silpa-Sastras as the preparation of sacrificial 
 ground. I have therefore considered it justifiable to refer it historically to 
 the Vedic period and to connect it with the camp or fortified settlement of 
 the early Aryan invaders. There are distinct references to it in the Buddha's 
 teaching, as will be seen further on. 
 26 
 
N U 
 
 rii ^^H 
 
 /^ 
 
 PATH OF AUSPICIOUSNESS 
 
 "^^ 
 
 Wi 
 
 iTemple K 1 N G' S STREET 
 
 n~inc 
 D 
 
 D 
 
 C^"^ PATH OF AU 
 
 SPICIOUSNESS 
 
 ^/ 
 
 B 
 
 2. Indo- Aryan Vn;r,AGE Pi,ans 
 
 26 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 it is difficult, if not impossible, to view them in right perspec- 
 tive. It can hardly be doubted that the three aspects of 
 modern Hindu worship — that of the Ishta-devata, or the 
 divinity of the self, the Grihya-devata, or the divinity of the 
 household, and the Gramya-devata, the divinity of the village 
 community — correspond to the ancient tradition of Vedic 
 sacrifices, in which the head of the Aryan household had a 
 threefold religious duty to perform — towards his god, his 
 family, and his tribe. The Sandhyd, or daily ritual of the 
 Brahman, performed at sunrise, noon, and sunset, also belongs 
 to the immemorial traditions of Aryan religion, in which the 
 sun was worshipped as the symbol of the Unknown Power in 
 the universe, governing all other natural powers. This tradi- 
 tion, as we have seen, grew up with the organisation of the 
 Aryan village, in which the Mangalavithi, or path surrounding 
 the village, was consecrated for the performance of the rite 
 of Pradakshind, symbolising the path of the sun across the 
 heavens or the turning of the wheel of life and death. 
 
 The Kautiliya-artha-S dsfra, one of the oldest codes of Hindu 
 polity and sociology, gives the names of the four principal 
 gates of the Aryan town or village. The eastern gate, the 
 starting-point of the circumambulatory rite, was dedicated 
 to Brahma, the Creator, represented by the rising sun. The 
 southern gate, which symbolised the sun at noon, was dedi- 
 cated to Indra, the Vedic god who ruled the firmament of the 
 day. The western gate was dedicated to the setting sun, or 
 to Yama, the Ivord of Death, and the northern gate to Senapati, 
 or Karttikeya,^ the War-god. The Upanishads shaped this 
 primitive nature symbolism into definite philosophic concepts, 
 and Vishnu-Surya, ' the All-Pervading,' then took the place 
 of Indra at the zenith, Siva appropriated the attributes of 
 Yama and his position in the western sky, while the concept 
 of the cosmic Slumber, under the name of Vishnu-Narayana, 
 took the place of the War-god at the nadir. 
 
 ^ Kai-ttikeya was the War-lord as the offspring of Siva, the Destroyer, 
 He presided over the lunar mansions on account of his association with the 
 sunset. 
 
 27 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 It was upon this ancient symbolic rite of the Indo-Aryan 
 village — the rite of the Cosmic Cross or the Wheel of lyife — 
 that the Buddha based his doctrine of the Aryan Eightfold 
 Path — ^the new Way of Life which woiild release mankind from 
 suffering ; for, as we have seen, there were usually eight gates 
 in the village walls, one in the centre of each side, and one 
 smaller one at each corner. 
 
 The early Vedic symbols of natural powers — Surya, the 
 Sun ; Agni, the Fire-spirit ; Indra, the Wielder of the Thunder- 
 bolt, the Rain-producer, and the power which ruled the heavenly 
 dome by day ; and Varuna, the Concealer, the ruler of the night 
 sky — mostly belonged to the remote period of Aryan religion, 
 before the race appeared on Indian soil and before the philo- 
 sophic concepts of the Upanishads had been formulated. 
 Vishnu and Siva, in their early materialistic conception, were 
 both mountain deities, and seem to have come into Indo- 
 Aryan cosmogony when the Aryans had their home in the 
 Himalayan regions and when all the phenomena of tropical 
 nature had begun to shape their ideas. Vishnu, the fertile 
 mountain, gay with flowers and trees, upon which an Aryan 
 tribe would often build their chieftain's fort, was always 
 identified with the interests of the Kshatriyas and regarded 
 as their patron deity. Later he became the all-pervading 
 Spirit of lyife, moving spirally, like a serpent, around the 
 vertical arm of the cosmic cross, or the line joining the zenith 
 and nadir. Then his mountain was considered as the pivot 
 or axis of the cosmic forces, and his mystic tree which grew 
 thereon had the blue sky for its foliage and the sun and moon 
 and stars for fruits. In the night Vishnu (Narayana) slept 
 upon the cosmic waters guarded by the serpent of Eternity, 
 Sesha or Ananta (the Milky Way), and awoke at dawn to meet 
 his bride, Eakshmi, the bright goddess of the day, who brought 
 prosperity to mankind. 
 
 Siva, the Spirit of Death, the guardian of the western gate 
 of the village, or the gate of the setting sun, took concrete 
 form in the snow-clad mountain upon whose summit nature 
 seems to retire within herself, as if wrapt in meditation. But 
 28 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 just as the Himalayan mountain glacier is the fountain from 
 which pour the life-giving waters of the five rivers of the 
 Aryan holy land, so Siva as well as Vishnu had a dual aspect. 
 He was lord both of life and of death. Parvati, or Uma, the 
 fair daughter of Himalaya, and the symbol of spring, once a 
 year lured Siva from his profound meditation, caused his 
 snow-white mantle to melt partially away, and decked the 
 mountain slopes with bridal garlands. Siva was the horizontal 
 arm of the cosmic cross containing the sunrise and the sunset. 
 He was Creator and Destroyer. The circle which contained 
 both ends of the cross was the wheel of life and the serpent of 
 reincarnation. 
 
 Oriental scholars have long sought to discover by way of 
 philological research at what period of Indian history the two 
 great schools of modern Hinduism, the Saiva and Vaishnava, 
 had their starting-point, and, taking their stand upon philo- 
 logical data only, have drawn a hard-and-fast distinction 
 between the Hindu and Vedic religion because the names of 
 Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva do not come into prominence until 
 a late period of Sanskrit literature. But philology taken by 
 itself cannot show the relationship between the word and 
 the idea or give the symbol representing a religious concept 
 its proper place in the daily life of a people. Names are 
 constantly changing with the development of old ideas, though 
 all the powers of nature which suggest those ideas to the 
 human mind remain unchanged. 
 
 The tangle of terminology in which, to the Western mind, 
 Indian religious thought is involved may be unravelled by the 
 study of the symbolism contained in its ritual, which has 
 remained fixed in its association with the cosmic forces 
 worshipped by the ancient Aryans in spite of all terminological 
 changes. The symbol of the cosmic cross, the wheel of life, or 
 four-petalled lotus-flower shown overleaf, which is embodied 
 in the plan of the Indo-Aryan village and temple, contains 
 the four fundamental concepts upon which all Hindu religious 
 cults have been built from the remotest Vedic period down 
 to the present day, whether they represented the earliest 
 
 29 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Aryan nature-worship or the esoteric philosophy which grew 
 out of it. And just as Birth and Death, lyife and Eternity, 
 symbohsed by sunrise and sunset, noon and midnight, are 
 always immutable factors in the history of human thought, 
 so the historian may disregard the time when a particular 
 
 (NORTH) 
 
 ETERNITY 
 
 NARAYANA 
 
 f VARUNA 
 \SOMA<S-<;. 
 
 (WEST) 
 
 DEATH 
 
 SIVA 
 
 ( RUDRA 
 I YAMA &-C. 
 
 5AIVA 
 
 (O 
 
 "^■^^ 
 
 -1 
 
 "Vv 
 
 o 
 
 N. 
 
 o 
 
 ^\ 
 
 X 
 
 \ 
 
 u 
 
 \ 
 
 to 
 
 \ 
 
 
 SCHOOLS i 
 
 <: 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 < 
 
 / 
 
 zz 
 
 / 
 
 X 
 
 / 
 
 <o 
 
 / 
 
 ^•^ 
 
 ^'^ 
 
 ^_ 
 
 • 
 
 (EAST) 
 
 BIRTH 
 
 BRAHMA 
 
 USHAS ] 
 
 lakshmi i 
 parvatI 1 
 
 &-C. ) 
 
 (SOUTH) 
 
 LIFE 
 
 VISHNU 
 
 fSURYA 
 \lNDRA &<:. 
 
 vSanskrit name was attached to them in successive periods 
 if he gives to each its proper place in the symbolic plan 
 upon which all Indian philosophical concepts were based. 
 It will then become clear that there must always have been 
 Saiva and Vaishnava distinctions in Indo-Aryan religious 
 thought, whatever names may have been given to them, just 
 as there are optimists and pessimists in all ages and alwa3^s a 
 conflict in human nature between the will to live and the 
 higher spiritual instinct. 
 
 30 
 
ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS 
 
 Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva may be regarded as collective 
 names standing for all the symbols which Indo-Aryan religion 
 associated with Birth, Life, and Death in the abstract. Ndrd- 
 yana may be taken as a collective name for all the symbols of 
 the future life and eternity ; and as the jBirst three ultimately 
 merge into eternity, so according to Vedantic teaching they 
 represent the Three Aspects of the One Eternal. 
 
 It was not without reason that the Vedas were held to contain 
 the whole essence of Aryan religion, even after the names of 
 the older Vedic deities fell into disuse ; for though the concepts 
 of Vedic philosophy were expanded b^^ the later schools, and 
 though new names were given to the old symbols as they came 
 to bear a deeper and wider significance, the root-ideas are 
 to be found in the Upanishads and the Vedic religion was the 
 moving spirit of the organisation of the Aryan village com- 
 munities, which, in the words of vSir Charles Metcalfe, " contri- 
 buted more than any other cause to the preservation of the 
 people of India through all the revolutions and changes they 
 have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happi- 
 ness and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and 
 independence." ^ 
 
 To the philosopher Vishnu and Siva were concepts repre- 
 senting two different logical processes, the inductive and 
 deductive, and two different schools of thought. The former 
 was a scientific school which took its stand upon smriti — 
 reasoned knowledge and the law of cause and effect based 
 upon the facts of human experience ; the latter depended upon 
 insight or inspiration, known as sruti, or divine revelation, 
 of which the Vedas were said to be the highest expression. 
 The Kshatriya thinkers were men of action who generally 
 adhered to the Vaishnava school of thought, while the Brahman 
 philosophers mostly belonged to the Saiva school. It is hardly 
 necessary to say that there was always a wide gulf between 
 popular notions of religion and the profound speculations of 
 the Aryan philosopher. 
 
 1 Report of Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1832. See 
 Elphinstone's History of India, Book IIj chap. ii. 
 
 31 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Vishnu, popularly, was a deified hero, a great Kshatriya 
 teacher, reincarnated from time to time to instruct the Aryan 
 race and lead them to victory ; Siva was an ascetic whose 
 hermitage was fixed in some mountain cavern amidst Hima- 
 layan ice and snow, where through the third eye of spiritual 
 insight all the secrets of the universe were made known to 
 him. 
 
 Great as the achievements of the Aryan philosopher un- 
 doubtedly were in the field of abstract thought, they were 
 not more remarkable than the success of a small colony of 
 people, vastly outnumbered by the congeries of different races 
 which India has probably always contained, in welding together 
 these heterogeneous elements intellectually, socially, and 
 politically in the organisation of the village communities ; 
 so that though each political, social, and racial unit retained 
 its own individuality, India became a synthesis of people 
 with common traditions of polity and religion living together 
 within the Aryan pale. The result was not less remarkable 
 because several of the non-Ar^^an elements, especially the 
 Dravidian, made great intellectual contributions to the common 
 fund, and because the Aryan racial type never became very 
 widely distributed over the whole of India. Ethnographic 
 investigations show that the Indo-Aryan type described in 
 the Hindu epics — a tall, fair-complexioned, long-headed race, 
 with narrow, prominent noses, broad shoulders, long arms, 
 slim waists " like a lion," and thin legs like a deer — ^is now 
 (as it was in the earliest times) mostly confined to Kashmir, 
 the Panjab and Rajputana, and represented by the Khattris, 
 Jats, and Rajputs. 
 
 32 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE EPIC AGE 
 
 THERE is no record of any striking event like the landing 
 of Hengist and Horsa at Ebbsfleet, from wMch we 
 can date the beginning 'of Indian history. All that 
 can be gathered from philological evidence is that at some 
 remote period, reckoned from between 3000 and 1000 B.C. 
 or earlier, a number of Aryan tribes whose poets sang the 
 sacrificial hymns of the Rig-Veda, dedicated to the powers 
 of nature — ^the Sun, the Sky, the Rain-spirit, the Storm-wind, 
 Soma the Moon, the Fire-spirit — and to the Unknown God 
 who created all things, had estabUshed themselves in North- 
 western India, in the districts now contained by the Panjab 
 and Eastern Afghanistan, which they called Brahmavarta, 
 the Holy I^and or I^and of Prayer. They were divided into 
 clans, of which the Kshatriyas formed the aristocracy and 
 priesthood, the Brahmans being as yet merely assistants at 
 the tribal sacrifices. The lower orders, which, though more 
 or less mixed in race, were classed as Aryans, were engaged 
 in trade and agriculture. The organisation of the village 
 communities was already essentially complete. Each village 
 managed its own affairs through its council of elders, and the 
 assembly of the whole people elected its war-lord to lead 
 the tribe, or federation of tribes. Wars between the different 
 Aryan tribes as well as struggles with the non-Aryan ' bar- 
 barians,' the Dasyus or Dasas, were frequent, but as in the 
 former case it was a fixed principle that war should not be 
 made merely for acquisition of territory, and that a conquered 
 Aryan king should not be deposed but should become the 
 tributary of his conqueror, tribal quarrels probably did not 
 greatly disturb Aryan social order : these inter-tribal wars 
 
 c 33 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 were more of the nature of gladiatorial combats in which the 
 Kshatriya warriors exhibited their prowess. The chieftain 
 who had been the raja of five hundred villages might by his 
 victory become the maharaja of a thousand, and as such 
 exact tribute from the raja of the conquered group, but no 
 war-lord, however great, was above the common law of 
 the Aryan people, or could presume to curtail the liberties of 
 their freemen. " Never shall an Arya be subjected to slavery ' ' ^ 
 was the charter of the race even under the rule of the Mauryan 
 emperors. 
 
 This epoch of unknown antiquity in which the Vedic Aryans, 
 who called themselves the Panch-janah or ' the Five Peoples,' ^ 
 lived in the land of the Five Rivers, and had for their sacred 
 lore the Vedic hymns and ritual, and the philosophy of the 
 Upanishads, was followed by another one which may be 
 described as the Epic Age, since it was the period in which 
 the events recorded in the Mahdhhdrata and Rdmdyana 
 occurred, namely the Great War and the invasion of Southern 
 India by the Aryans. At the beginning of this epoch, or 
 somewhere between the first and second millenniums before 
 Christ, the Aryans had spread themselves over the Madhya- 
 desa, or ' Middle Country,' corresponding approximately to the 
 modern United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, and were pushing 
 themselves further east along the valley of the Ganges into 
 Vanga, or Bengal. Though Aryan culture afterwards diffused 
 itself over the whole of Southern India, the Vindhya Mountains, 
 which separate Northern India from the Dekhan, remained the 
 southern boundary of the land known as Aryavarta, or the 
 land of the Aryans, held to be crescent-shaped, like the moon 
 on Siva's brow. Hence Aryavarta was also known as the 
 I^and of the Moon (Indu), and every bend of a river or crescent- 
 shaped hill-scarp, bathed by a mountain torrent, was a symbol 
 of this holy land — a place propitious for the Vedic sacrifice and 
 fit for meditation or the hermit's cell. 
 
 1 Kautillya-artha-Sastra, Book III, chap. xiii. 
 
 * The name referred either to five prmcipal tribes, or perhaps to the five 
 classes of Aryans. 
 
THE EPIC AGE 
 
 The principal political development of this epoch was the 
 gradual consolidation of the small tribal confederations which 
 characterised the Vedic period into considerable states ruled 
 by hereditary dynasties. The explanation of the origin of 
 kingship given in the Mahabharata is the state of anarchy into 
 which Aryavarta had fallen owing to the absence of a strong 
 ruling hand to enforce social laws, and to the neglect of Aryan 
 tradition, which no doubt followed the frequent admission 
 of aliens to the privileges of freemen, as the Aryans gradually 
 spread themselves further over the country. But in Aryan 
 polity the divine right of kings was never recognised as a 
 personal attribute of the monarch, belonging to himself and 
 his family. He had no right except that which was conferred 
 upon him by Aryan law, and he could be fined or deposed by 
 the General Assembly of the freemen, or by the Council of 
 Ministers, if he neglected his duties as king or offended against 
 that law. The hereditary principle was recognised as a safe- 
 guard for the maintenance of Aryan tradition, the king's 
 family being regarded as the one amongst the others of the 
 ruling class which should be most expert in the duties of 
 kingship. Theoretically the king should be chosen from the 
 Kshatriya class, as being that which by birth and training was 
 best prepared for the responsibilities of royalty ; but the 
 rule was by no means a fixed one, and even a Sudra might in 
 time of war win his way to the throne by virtue of his military 
 prowess. The king's chief duty was the protection of the 
 State. He should " first subdue himself and then seek to 
 subdue his foes. How should a king who has not been able 
 to conquer his own self be able to conquer his foes ? " ^ "In 
 the happiness of his subjects lies his happiness : in their 
 welfare his welfare : whatever pleases himself he should not 
 consider as good." ^ In his coronation oath, which he was 
 to take "mentally, physically, and verbally," he swore to see 
 to the advantage of the State, " considering always as Cod 
 whatever is law and whatever is in accordance with ethics and 
 
 ^ Mahabharata, Raja dharmdnu gdsana Parva, Sect. I/XIX, 4. 
 * Kautiltya-ariha-Sdstra, " The Duties of a King," chap, xix. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 whatever is not opposed to policy. I will act according to 
 that and will never act arbitrarily." ^ 
 
 The so-called modern ideal of kingship is, in fact, as old 
 as Indian civilisation. According to Aryan law the king held 
 the same position in the macrocosm of the State as the grdmani 
 or headman of the village community did in his smaller sphere. 
 He was bound to consult his ministers, who, like the elders 
 of the village, were representative of all the five classes of 
 freemen, and were selected for their knowledge of Aryan tradi- 
 tion to advise the king in all important affairs of State, and to 
 assist him in the administration of Aryan law. 
 
 There is no detailed account of the exact constitution of 
 the king's council given in the epics, ^ but in the fully organised 
 Aryan state described in the oldest Aryan law-books the 
 ministers were generally ten in number — or eleven including 
 the crown prince. The first minister of the Crown was the 
 royal PuroMta or chaplain, whose qualifications were to be 
 equal to his high position. He was the king's chief spiritual 
 adviser, and should be competent " both to curse and bless." 
 Besides being learned in the Vedas and versed in Mantras and 
 sacred rites, a man of great strength of character and strict 
 morals, so that even the king should fear his anger and listen 
 to his correction, he was to be thoroughly versed in politics 
 and diplomacy, should know the science of archery in all its 
 branches, and be a master of military arms and tactics. The 
 Pratinidhi, ' the Deputy ' or viceroy, who came next in rank 
 and emoluments, was a kind of privy councillor who, if the 
 king failed to listen to good advice, should " go on explaining. "^ 
 The Pradhdna was the president of the council, who apportioned 
 to each member his special share of work. Next came the 
 Sachiva, or War Minister, the Mantri, or Foreign Minister, the 
 Pfddvivdka, or Chief Justice, the Pandit, the Sumantra, or 
 Finance Minister, the Amdtya, or Home Minister, and lastly, 
 
 1 Mahabharata, Santi Parva. 
 
 * In the Ramayana there were eight councillors — two Brahman spiritual 
 advisers and an executive council of six. 
 
 3 Sukra-nitisdra, translated by Benoy Kumar Sarkar, M.A., chap, ii, p. 
 178. 
 
 36 
 
THE EPIC AGE 
 
 the head of the poHce — ^the chief spy, who also fulfilled the 
 functions of an ambassador. 
 
 Such a highly organised form of administration did not 
 apparently exist in the times of the epics, but the principles 
 of polity which underlie it belong to the earliest traditions of 
 Aryan statecraft. The rights of the Aryan freemen were 
 always to be respected. The people, says Manu, are to be 
 protected from official underlings, who " are generally knaves, 
 and seize what belongs to other men " (vii, 123), and even in 
 conquered states the king should not interfere with popular 
 customs — ^the laws declared in their books were to be 
 established [Manu, vii, 203). 
 
 These are the theories of kingship laid down in the ancient 
 Hindu law-books. We may safely assume that theories did 
 not always coincide with practice, since human nature has 
 its failings in the East as in the West, and though these might 
 have been the principles usually accepted as Aryan by the 
 people of that race, there must have been times when the 
 stern necessities of war enforced the suspension of the ordinary 
 law and gave the king the powers of a dictator. But it must 
 not be supposed that the authority of the king and his ministers 
 entirely superseded that of the local assemblies and village 
 councils. This was not the case even in medieval times, 
 when the royal edicts continued to mention these democratic 
 institutions in terms of great deference. A distinction was 
 always drawn between imperial and local concerns. The 
 officers and servants of the king were to live outside the villages, 
 and no soldier of the king was to enter a village except on 
 royal business ; neither were villagers to have dealings with 
 the military [Sukrd-nitisdra, v, 180-182). 
 
 The principal kingdoms mentioned in the Mahabharata and 
 Ramayana were that of the Panchalas, lying between the 
 Ganges and the Jumna, with Mathura, near the modern Agra, 
 and Kanyakubja (Kanauj) as its two chief cities ; Kosala, 
 which had its capital at Ajodhya, near Faizabad ; the smaller 
 kingdoms of Videha and Magadha — the capital of the latter 
 being Rajagriha — comprised in the present districts of North 
 
 37 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and South Bihar ; and the kingdom of Kasi, the modern 
 Benares. Besides these kingdoms there were numerous con- 
 federations of tribes in which regal authority was exercised 
 not by a single ruler but by a council of noble families, and 
 other states whose political organisation was purely repub- 
 lican, the General Assembly and its executive committees 
 controlling all the affairs of the community. But whether the 
 central authority was monarchical, an oligarchy, or republican, 
 the village was the political unit of the State, and the rights 
 of the soil were vested in the family of the freeman who cut 
 away the wood or who cleared and tilled it, the State receiving 
 its taxes as remuneration for the protection it afforded him, 
 but the freeman remaining owner of the land, as he continued 
 to be in Rajputana down to modern times. ^ 
 
 A natural consequence of the consolidation of the Aryan 
 tribal system into these larger states and kingdoms was the 
 gradual development of the village settlements into large 
 towns and cities planned on the same principles in which the 
 different wards, or village units, were grouped round the 
 royal palace and citadel. The royal capitals became industrial 
 and trading centres, the duties imposed upon merchandise 
 forming part of the State revenue. The Indus and other great 
 waterways upon which the early Aryan settlements were 
 placed were important trade routes linking together the 
 military roads maintained by the State, along which passed 
 the caravans laden with gold, precious stones, and spices from 
 Southern India which added to the magnificence and luxury 
 of the royal courts of Aryavarta as well as those of Western 
 Asia and Europe. And as the Brahmans gradually became 
 the custodians of Aryan traditions and culture, the asram, 
 or Brahman village, developed into the university town to 
 which Aryan youth of the twice-born classes went for instruc- 
 tion. But while the seaports, the halting-places for caravans, 
 and the centralisation of government, all tended to promote the 
 growth of city life, it always remained a characteristic of 
 Aryan culture that the greatness of the city — which was the 
 
 ^ Tod, Annals of Rajast'han, p. 492. 
 
 38 
 
THE EPIC AGE 
 
 product of the vitality of the village — and its political influence 
 never restricted the independence of the latter or narrowed its 
 outlook upon life. 
 
 The increasing influence of the Brahman aristocracy began 
 to have very important consequences, both politically and 
 socially. For not only did the Brahmans, as experts in sacri- 
 ficial lore, obtain the respect due to religious teachers, but 
 they also challenged the supremacy of the Kshatriyas, the 
 political and military leaders, on the ground that the strict 
 discipline of mind and body which was a fundamental principle 
 of Aryan philosophy was as indispensable for success in war 
 and poHtics as it was for the spiritual development of those 
 who sought divine truth. The Brahman university became 
 a school of arms and military tactics, diplomacy and political 
 science ; and just as Drona in the Mahabharata was the 
 Brahman instructor of the Pandava heroes in the use of the 
 bow and other weapons of war, so the Brahman diplomatist 
 and politician became the chief among the ministers who 
 formed the royal council. 
 
 It must be admitted that, theoretically at least, there was 
 much force in the Brahman contention. The attempt to enforce 
 ethical considerations in the conduct of State policy, which 
 was the justification of the position of the Purohita at the 
 right hand of the War-lord, was the ground upon which the 
 Christian Church in Europe asserted its claim for temporal 
 power and privileges. In both cases the success or failure 
 of the attempt depended almost as much upon the conscience 
 of the people as upon the integrity and sincerity of their rulers. 
 The Brahmans, however, as a class, never claimed for themselves 
 the prerogatives of the kingly office, but only special rights 
 as the king's philosopher and friend. The laws of Manu, a 
 code drawn up by and for the Brahmans, distinctly reserves 
 for Kshatriyas the power and position of sovereignty as defined 
 by Aryan tradition. Nevertheless the feeling of rivalry be- 
 tween the two sections of Aryan aristocracy became stronger 
 and stronger as their respective social positions and spheres of 
 influence became more clearly defined. The Kshatriyas were 
 
 39 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 as little disposed to submit to any curtailment of their political 
 and social privileges as they were to accept without reserve 
 Brahman leadership in philosophy and religion, and the schism 
 between Brahmanism and Buddhism can be traced to its 
 starting-point in the divergent intellectual outlook which 
 characterised the two schools of Aryan thinkers, Brahman and 
 Kshatriya. The former was conservative and took its stand 
 upon the Vedas as a divine revelation of which the Brahmans 
 were the sole interpreters ; the latter, more concerned with 
 the problems of social life and with the necessity of maintaining 
 harmony within the Aryan pale by a recognition of non- 
 Aryan ideas and customs, was broader in its views and always 
 sought to add to the store of Vedic wisdom by independent 
 research. 
 
 The main plot of the Mahabharata relates to the Great War, 
 in which many of the Aryan clans in Madhyadesa were the 
 combatants ; but the epic has also an ethical note as the 
 story of the triumph of Pandava chivalry and religious prin- 
 ciple over the craft and unscrupulousness of the Kauravas. 
 The leaders on the one side were five Kshatriya brothers, 
 Yudhisthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva, the sons 
 of King Pandu, and on the other their ten cousins, the Kauravas, 
 sons of King Pandu's brother Dhritarashtra, who was the chief 
 of the Bharata tribes at Hashtinapur. The Pandavas, together 
 with their common wife, Draupadi, were tricked into a peni- 
 tential exile by the cunning of the Kauravas, who hoped 
 thereby to supplant them in their royal rights. But with the 
 powerful aid of the Kshatriya hero Krishna, represented as an 
 inspired teacher and an incarnation of Vishnu, the Pandavas 
 placed themselves at the head of another confederation of 
 tribes and exterminated the Kauravas in a great battle on the 
 field of Kurukshetra, near the modern Delhi. Yudliisthira, 
 the eldest of the Pandavas, was then crowned as the hereditary 
 ruler of a great confederation, having its capital at Indraprastha, 
 in which the vanquished allies of the Kauravas were included. 
 The story of the Great War illustrates the process by which the 
 Aryan and non-Aryan tribes were gradually consolidated into 
 40 
 
THE EPIC AGE 
 
 kingdoms under a powerful central government. The sum- 
 mary of the philosophy of the Upanishads, given as a divine 
 revelation by the guru of the Pandavas, Krishna, forms a 
 religious nucleus interpreting the spiritual meaning of the 
 fateful struggle, and numerous legends with a moral or 
 religious purpose and monologues expounding the principles 
 of Aryan polity are interwoven with the main plot of the 
 epic. 
 
 The significance of the distinction between the Ramayana 
 and the Mahabharata, that the former records the history 
 of the Surya-vamsa, the race of Stirya, and the latter that of 
 the Chandra-vamsa, the race of Chandra, is worth considera- 
 tion. The conventional view is that of Indian court poets 
 and astrologers, that Rama had an imaginary pedigree going 
 back to the Sun-god, Surya, and that the Pandavas and 
 Kauravas were reputed to be descendants of Chandra, the 
 Moon. There may be real history behind this poetic fancy 
 if the symbolism is rightly understood. The expression 
 Surya-putra, 'the son of Surya,' or Chandra-putra, 'the son 
 of Chandra,' when applied to human beings, refers to their 
 spiritual and not their earthly father, or, in other words, to 
 their patron deity, or Ishta-devata ; just as the Gangd-putras — 
 an inferior class of Brahmans who now attend to the wants 
 of pilgrims at Benares — are not sons of Ganga in the literal 
 sense, but her servants or devotees. 
 
 The Surya-vamsa, Rama's family, were worshippers of 
 Surya, while the Pandavas and Kauravas were worshippers 
 of Chandra. Surya was the chief deity of the Aryans in Baby- 
 lonia in the second millennium before Christ,^ so we may 
 assume that the Aryan king of the Mitanni, Dushratta, who 
 ruled in Babylon at that time, was one of the Surya-vamsa. 
 It is not therefore surprising to find it recorded in the Rama- 
 yana that Dasharatha, of the royal house of Ajodhya, also 
 had Surya as his Ishta-devata. Vishnu-Surya was the patron 
 deity of the Kshatriyas, while Chandra- or Soma-worship 
 was a Brahmanical cult closely connected with that of Siva. 
 ^ Hall's Ancient History of the Near East, p. 201. 
 
 41 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 The distinction between the Surya-vamsa and Chandra-vamsa 
 of the Ramayana and Mahabharata was therefore analogous 
 to that which divides the two main groups of Hinduism, the 
 Vaishnava and Saiva, in the present day. 
 
 It is not without significance that in the Mahabharata, Siva 
 is put forward as the divine story-teller who records the history 
 of the Pandavas and Kauravas. The fact that Krishna, the 
 incarnation of Vishnu, is made their guru, or spiritual teacher, 
 suggests an attempt on the part of the pandits of a Vaishnava 
 court to unite the Surya-vamsa and Chandra-vamsa in a new 
 school representing a later development of Kshatriya doctrine ; 
 for the two schools were alwaj^s intermingling and constantly 
 borrowing from each other. 
 
 The Ramayana is probably older than the Mahabharata 
 as an epic, but the events recorded in it may have followed 
 those of the Great War. It is the first literary record of the 
 passing of the Aryans beyond the Vindhya Mountains, the 
 southern boundary of Aryavarta, and their penetration by 
 armed force into Southern India. According to the story the 
 leader of the expedition was Rama, a prince of Ajodhya, who, 
 like Krishna, is regarded as an incarnation of Vishnu. He, 
 and his devoted wife Sita, an ideal type of Indian womanhood, 
 were banished, like the Pandava brothers, by a court intrigue, 
 and went to a forest hermitage beyond the Vindhya Mountains 
 on the banks of the Godavari, accompanied by Rama's faithful 
 companion, his half-brother lyakshman. There, during the 
 absence of Rama on a hunting expedition, Sita was abducted 
 by the barbarian king of Ceylon, Ravana, described as a 
 magician of terrific strength and skill. Rama thereupon roused 
 the Aryan clans, and, gathering under his standard a great force 
 of semi-civilised but brave aboriginal tribes of the South, 
 he crossed over the straits which separate Ceylon from the 
 mainland, stormed the demon-king's stronghold, and, having 
 rescued Sita, came back in triumph to Ajodhya, where he 
 was crowned as king in his father's place. 
 
 It should be remembered that the two Indo-Aryan epics 
 belong to Kshatriya literature and record the prowess of the 
 42 
 
THE EPIC AGE 
 
 Aryan military class. We must not assume, from the absence 
 of any mention of it in Kshatriya records, that the early Aryan 
 settlements had no intercourse with the ancient Dravidian 
 kingdoms until Aryan civilisation was carried into the South 
 by force of arms. No doubt the Vaisyas, the Aryan * people,' 
 as distinguished from the nobles and priests, had commercial 
 relations with the traders of Southern India long before any 
 organised attempt was made to assert Aryan political supremacy 
 over the Dravidian kingdoms — ^the peaceful penetration of the 
 merchant, as usual, preceded, if it did not induce, the conquest 
 by military force. Though the Tamil people retained their 
 own language and many of their racial idiosyncrasies, they 
 were deeply indebted to Aryan civilisation. Aryan influence 
 must have been very great in the South long before the third 
 century B.C., when Asoka sent his younger brother, Mahendra, 
 to lead a band of Buddhist missionaries. The three oldest 
 Dravidian dynasties of which there is any record, the Pandya, 
 Kerala or Chera, and the Chola, all claimed descent from the 
 Aryan heroes of the Mahabharata, and the Pandya country, 
 like that of the first Aryan settlements in Northern India, 
 was divided into five tribal districts known as the ' five 
 Pandyas.' ^ 
 
 The small progress that has as yet been made in the study of 
 the early history of Indo- Aryan civilisation is in great measure 
 due to the fact that, beyond the literary record contained in 
 Vedic literature and the epics, hardly any evidence has yet been 
 discovered of the life and culture either of the cities mentioned 
 in the Mahabharata and Ramayana or those of the older 
 Dravidian kingdoms in the South. The history of Indian art, 
 so far as it is yet known, begins at the earliest only a few 
 centuries before Christ, and the long epoch before that time, 
 in which the foundations of Indian civilisation were laid, is 
 still a blank as regards the archaeological material which 
 contemporary civilisations in Egypt and Europe have so 
 amply furnished. One reason for this is that the actual sites 
 of these ancient cities are as yet unknown, for archaeological 
 1 Vincent Smith, Early History of India, p. 405. 
 
 43 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 research in India has onl}^ recently begun to penetrate beneath 
 the surface of the ground. Another is the fact that the tropical 
 climate of India is much more active than that of Europe 
 in obliterating the traces of civilised life, while the tracts of 
 desert sand in Rajputana and elsewhere which might, as in 
 Egypt, preserve the remains of buried cities for an indefinite 
 period, have not yet been explored. 
 
 44 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE BUDDHA AS A STATESMAN AND 
 SOCIAL REFORMER 
 
 E come now out of that misty period, the Vedic and 
 Epic ages, in which chronological points are vaguely 
 fixed by millenniums and centuries instead of by 
 years, to the sixth century before the Christian era, from which 
 time a more or less complete sequence of chronological data has 
 been collected by the labours of Oriental scholars and archaeo- 
 logists. From the Brahmanical point of view the advent of 
 the Buddha, about the year 563 B.C., was the starting-point 
 of the great heresy which obscured the divine light of Vedic 
 revelation, and hastened the fatal progress of Aryavarta along 
 the paths of unrighteousness, which will not be arrested 
 until at the end of the Kali age Vishnu's tenth avatar, 
 Kalkin, comes riding on a white horse, sword in hand, to 
 destroy iniquity and restore the divine rule of righteousness 
 and truth. 
 
 That Gautama Buddha disputed orthodox Brahmanical 
 theories of the universe as the leader of a new religious sect 
 was no new or startling event in Aryavarta. Aryan religion 
 was already a synthesis of ideas, not a single dogma of belief. 
 There was no subject more freely debated by Aryan thinkers 
 than the great problems of human existence ; provided that 
 his theory conformed to accepted laws of logic and stood the 
 test of debate, anyone could obtain a hearing in the public 
 disputations which took place under the village council tree, 
 in the temple porch, or in the palace of the king, so that new 
 sects and schools of . philosophy grew almost spontaneously 
 on Indian soil, though few survived the struggle for existence. 
 Nor was the Buddha philosophically an entirely original 
 
 45 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 thinker. With regard to theories of the First Cause and of the 
 human soul he was an agnostic of the Sankhya school and a 
 follower of Kapila, whose aphorisms were a part of Brahmanical 
 philosophic traditions before Gautama began to preach at 
 Sarnath, and whose memory was enshrined in the name of the 
 Buddha's birthplace — Kapilavastu. 
 
 In order to understand the cause of the rapid progress of 
 the Buddha's religious propaganda it is necessary to realise 
 the social conditions of the time, and the relations of the 
 Brahmanical priesthood to the rest of the community. Not 
 only had the Brahmans become an organised intellectual force 
 which asserted for itself the leading position in political affairs 
 hitherto held by the Kshatriyas, but in ministering to the 
 religious needs of the Indo-Aryan community at large they 
 had established a monopoly which lent itself to unscrupulous 
 exactions and to the encouragement of the grossest super- 
 stitions. The ancient Vedic idea of the divine power of speech 
 which had made Sarasvati, the goddess of learning, the sakti, 
 or active force, of Brahma the Creator, had developed into the 
 philosophical concept of the mantram as the human expression 
 of the etheric vibrations which permeate space and were the 
 first knowable cause of creation itself. So far as was humanly 
 possible the mantram, a Sanskrit formula composed of a certain 
 sequence of sounds and rhythm, was said to control these 
 etheric vibrations and produce effects, beneficial or the reverse, 
 to the persons or objects concerned. A mantram could bring 
 victory or defeat in wars, assure the prosperity of a state or 
 the destruction of its enemies ; it could be used to win votes 
 in the popular assembly or to silence the arguments of an 
 opponent, and either by itself or in conjunction with medicinal 
 prescriptions it could stop a cough or promote the growth 
 of hair. In short, the mantram embodied in itself the dynamic 
 principle of the universe ; there was no concern of daily life, 
 great or small, which could not be affected by it for better or 
 worse. 
 
 Now if the Brahman priesthood, as a class representing the 
 intellectuality of the Aryan race, had lived up to the high 
 
 46 
 
THE BUDDHA 
 
 ideal of purity and altruism set forth in the laws of Manu 
 and accepted as the guiding principle of Brahmanhood, or if 
 it had been possible to restrict the privileges of the order to 
 those who were fully qualified to exercise them, their exploita- 
 tion of the universal belief in the magical powers of the 
 mantram, whether that belief were justified or not, might 
 have been at the lowest reckoning harmless and at the highest 
 a strong incentive to the growth of moral and religious life 
 in the whole community, Bven modern medical science, which 
 has generally detached itself entirely from religious dogmas, 
 has begun to revert to psychological remedies for the ills of 
 the flesh, and the Sanskrit mantram as a form of prayer might 
 be as acceptable to God as any other if the spirit which dictated 
 it were truly religious. But the Brahmanical theory of the 
 mantram implied that it contained in itself a divine principle, 
 and the compelling power of the Deity Itself, though its use 
 by ignorant or ill-disposed persons would be ineffectual or 
 disastrous to themselves. The rule of life which the Brahman 
 was presumed to follow was designed to prevent the abuse 
 of the power of the mantram, but so long as Brahmanhood 
 depended in the first instance entirely upon the accident of birth 
 it would obviously fail in its purpose, and the influence exercised 
 by unscrupulous or ignorant priests was bound to encourage 
 superstition among the masses, and to become a hindrance 
 to civihsation as well as a source of exaction and cruelty. 
 
 Another instrument of tyranny and deception placed in the 
 hands of the Brahmans was the Aryan belief in the divine 
 power of sacrifice, which had come down from the earliest 
 Vedic times. In the course of many centuries the performance 
 of sacrificial rites had grown into a fine art, which the Brahman 
 experts were not slow to use for their personal advantage, 
 for the efficacy of the sacrifice was said to depend largely upon 
 the liberality of the indispensable dakshina, or reward, bestowed 
 upon the officiating priests and their servants. lyike the 
 mantram, the application of Vedic sacrificial ritual extended 
 to every concern of public and private life, great and small. 
 The purity and divine power of the Brahrnan was said to 
 
 47 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 be implicit in the fact that sacrificial rites were performed for 
 his benefit from the time of conception in his mother's womb 
 until his body was consigned to the bosom of holy Ganga or 
 consumed in the funeral pyre. And not only did public 
 sacrifices and the worship of tribal deities involve a vast 
 expenditure of State revenues, but the household rites for 
 which the services of Brahmans were generally necessary grew 
 more and more numerous and complicated. Some of the great 
 State ceremonies, such as the king's consecration and the 
 horse sacrifice performed to secure victory and the welfare 
 of the kingdom, absorbed the whole attention of the court 
 functionaries for over a year, required the attendance of 
 thousands of Brahmans and a corresponding bountiful dis- 
 tribution of largesse, besides inordinate feasting and wholesale 
 slaughter of animals. 
 
 The due fulfilment of domestic sacrificial rites was equally 
 onerous for the Aryan householder. Besides the ordinary 
 daily rites at which the householder himself presided there 
 were endless sacrificial ceremonies which required the attend- 
 ance of Brahman experts. There were sacrifices for obtaining 
 male offspring ; birth sacrifices which had to be repeated 
 every month ; sacrifices of feeding, naming, piercing the ears, 
 shaving the beard, and investiture with the sacred thread ; 
 and numerous others connected with ordinary daily events 
 or with marriage and death ceremonies. The indiscriminate 
 slaughter of animals and the free indulgence in the intoxicating 
 juice of the soma plant associated with Vedic ritual involved 
 the tacit recognition by the Aryan priesthood of many bloody 
 and obscene orgies of the uncivilised non- Aryan tribes, in which 
 human victims were frequently sacrificed. 
 
 Another superstition — ^though not by any means the exclu- 
 sive property of the Brahman class — ^which the Buddha came 
 to attack was the practice of tapas, or self-torture, by which 
 it was believed that both gods and men acquired spiritual 
 insight and command over the forces of nature. Sitting 
 between five fires, or upon an ant-heap in the forest, standing 
 upon one leg and holding an arm above the head until the 
 
3. The Buddha under the Bod hi Tree 
 
THE BUDDHA 
 
 muscles of it were atrophied, and a carefully graduated system 
 of starvation were among the means adopted for subduing 
 the physical senses, in the belief that if such conduct were 
 pushed to the furthest extreme of human endurance men 
 could become masters of the universe, and that even the gods 
 must submit to their will. 
 
 It is easy to understand that in such a condition of society 
 any new doctrine appealing to the deep religious instinct of 
 the people which removed the terror of the mantram and 
 the heavy burden of sacrificial ritual imposed by the Brahman 
 priesthood would be hailed as an inspired dispensation alike 
 by the ignorant masses from whom the Brahmans held aloof 
 and by all the better spirits of Aryan culture. And no one 
 could have been better qualified to make such an appeal than 
 the young Kshatriya prince Gautama, who had renounced 
 the dearest family ties, wealth, and a kingdom to discover 
 a better rule of life for the people of Aryavarta than that 
 which was propounded by the Brahman teachers of his 
 time. He had no doubt learnt from the Brahmans of his 
 father's court at Kapilavastu, the capital of the Sakyas — a 
 full-blooded Indo-Aryan clan settled in the Nepal Terai — all 
 that a Kshatriya prince should learn of Brahmanical lore. 
 He had gone further and sat at the feet of the most famous 
 Brahman sages to study philosophy. In the endeavour to 
 acquire a deeper insight into the mysteries of the universe 
 he had learnt the ritual of Yoga, and in the gloomy depths of 
 the Vindhya forests had practised the severest tapas prescribed 
 for ascetics who sought divine knowledge through mortification 
 of the flesh. 
 
 When, therefore, after long meditation under the Bodhi 
 Tree at Gaya, the conviction of a profound truth flashed upon 
 his mind and he started forth to preach the doctrine of the 
 Aryan Eightfold Path, he was a master of all the philosophical 
 theories current at his time. He was both able to meet the 
 Brahman logician with his own weapons and to speak from 
 personal experience of the religious observances to which all 
 devout Aryans had pinned their faith from time immemorial. 
 
 D 49 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 But if the young Kshatriya preacher had only stood forth in 
 the public debating halls as an accomplished dialectician to 
 confound the logic of the orthodox Brahman with incontro- 
 vertible arguments and to enforce the doctrines of Sankhya 
 and Yoga aphorisms with greater precision and clarity of 
 thought, or if he had merely disputed the divine authority 
 of the Vedas and the claims of the Brahmans to be the leading 
 exponents of Vedic tradition, it is hardly likely that he would 
 have stirred popular feeling profoundly, or that his teaching 
 would have been regarded as a new revelation for the Aryan 
 people. There were philosophers before the Buddha who 
 disputed the Vedic theory of the Universal Soul. Among the 
 ' Wanderers,' a fraternity of mendicant sophists open to all 
 classes within the Aryan pale, the greatest freedom of thought 
 prevailed, and in the public debating halls of Aryavarta 
 Brahmanical doctrines were controverted as freely as those 
 of the orthodox Christian churches are at popular resorts of 
 the present day in Europe. Brahmanism was an exclusive 
 cult, hedged round with the closest restrictions to prevent the 
 intrusion of the vulgar, though in special circumstances these 
 restrictions might be relaxed, as through royal influence or 
 in the stress of war-time. 
 
 The success of Gautama's mission must have been due 
 partly to his own magnetic personality and the deep human 
 feeling which inspired his teaching, and partly to the fact that 
 he opened wide the doors of Aryan religion and satisfied the 
 spiritual desires of the masses by offering them a religious law 
 easy to understand and accessible to all, free from elaborate 
 and costly ceremonial, raising the social status of the lower 
 orders, giving them their spiritual freedom and making the 
 life of the whole community healthier and happier. 
 
 Buddhism was much more a social than a religious revolution. 
 It was a new interpretation rather than an entire repudiation 
 of Vedic tradition. The sacrifice M^hich would make anyone 
 within the Aryan pale. Brahman or Sudra, free of the Sangha — 
 the brotherhood or congregation of believers — and potentially 
 an adept in the mystic powers of the universe, was not of 
 50 
 
THE BUDDHA 
 
 burnt offerings or of worldly goods, but the suppression of 
 the fires of evil thought and action, of lust, hatred, envy, 
 anger, and wrong thinking. The village of which every Aryan 
 might be a freeman was his own body : of this body the senses 
 were the gates, the conscience was the gatekeeper, and the 
 mind the headman.^ The Mangala-vithi, or Path of Blessing, 
 which encircled it was the Aryan Eightfold Path of Good 
 lyiving, and the mantram which was the key to the mysteries 
 of the cosmos was the supreme Aryan truth — ^the law of 
 Nirvana. 
 
 It was no new city which the Buddha desired to build, but 
 an ancient Aryan one which he would restore to prosperity and 
 healthy life. " As a man, brethren, wandering in the forest, 
 in the mountain jungle, might see an ancient path, an ancient 
 road, trodden by men of an earlier age ; and following it, might 
 discover an ancient township, an ancient palace, the habitation 
 of men of an earlier age, surrounded by park and grove and 
 lotus pool and walls, a delightful spot ; and that man were 
 to go back and announce to the king or his minister : ' Behold, 
 sir, and learn what I have seen ! ' And having told him he 
 were to invite the king to rebuild that city, and that city 
 were to become anon flourishing and populous and wealthy 
 once more : — Even so, brethren, have I seen an ancient Path, 
 an ancient Road, trodden by Buddhas of a bygone age . . . 
 the which having followed, I understand life, and its coming 
 to be and its passing away. And thus understanding, I have 
 declared the same to the fraternity and to the laity, so that 
 the holy life flourishes and is spread abroad once more, well 
 propagated among men." '^ 
 
 The Buddha's teaching must have been acceptable to 
 Kshatriya feeling, both because it was directly opposed to 
 the pretensions of the Brahman priesthood and because it 
 upheld Aryan institutions and traditions. The Sangha which 
 the Buddha founded was organised after the model of an 
 Aryan clan ; it was a select spiritual brotherhood within the 
 larger brotherhood of the secular Aryan community. There 
 
 1 Buddhism, Mrs Rhys Davids^ p. i8i. ^ Ihid., pp. 33-34- 
 
 Si 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 were four different grades of spiritual advancement within 
 the Buddhist Sangha, as there were four classes denoting 
 social status within the Aryan pale. And the Buddha was 
 careful to ordain that his Sangha should not be used as a 
 means of escaping secular obligations or of evading Aryan 
 laws. No one could enter it to avoid payment of debts, 
 neither were robbers, criminals who had been punished by 
 branding, persons in the royal service, or slaves admitted. 
 
 In the political unification of England, under Saxon rule, 
 the ecclesiastical synods founded by Theodore in the seventh 
 century a.d. were the first of all national gatherings for general 
 legislation, and the canons enacted by them led the way 
 to a national system of law. In England, the Parliament of 
 the Church established by a foreign missionary was the pro- 
 totype of the Parliament of the realm. ^ But the Buddha's 
 mission in India in the sixth century before Christ was in 
 no sense a propaganda of foreign ideas, and the administration 
 of the Buddhist Church — afterwards followed in many details 
 by the Church of Christ — was based entirely upon the ancient 
 political institutions of the Aryan village community which 
 formed the foundation of Indo-Aryan polity. Thus, the early 
 Buddhist records are historical documents which throw much 
 light upon the constitution and procedure of these ancient 
 popular Assemblies. 
 
 At the meetings of the Sangha all the members took their 
 seats according to seniority, their places being assigned to 
 them by an official called the Asana-prajinapaka — 'the Seat- 
 arranger.' The proceedings opened by the president repeating 
 the formula, " May the Honourable Sangha hear me ! If the 
 time seems fit to the Sangha, let the Sangha act. This is 
 the motion before the Sangha." After the motion had been 
 read the proposer of it explained its purport, and onl}^ those 
 who disapproved of it continued the debate. The president 
 put the question whether the motion should be accepted or 
 not. If there was no opposition after it had been put three times 
 it was declared carried ; otherwise it was put to the vote and a 
 
 ^ Green'vS SJiovt History of the English People, p. 32. 
 52 
 
THE BUDDHA 
 
 majority of tlie Sangha, including absentees, decided the ques- 
 tion. This was not, however, a system of government by majority 
 vote in the modern political sense. In the Buddhist Sangha, 
 as in the Aryan popular Assemblies, the unwritten traditional 
 law was above any act of the Sangha and was not determined 
 by a casual majority vote. No vote of the Sangha was valid 
 which was contrary to the Dharma, the Truth or lyaw as 
 revealed by the Buddha himself, which was the spiritual 
 coimterpart of the common law of the Aryan pale. The only 
 authority competent to adjudicate when the correct inter- 
 pretation of the Dharma was in dispute was the General 
 Assembly of the Sangha, the summoning of which was an 
 event as important in Indian life as a General Election in 
 Western politics. The proceedings of the most important 
 of these General Assemblies, e.g. the one held at Rajagriha 
 in 477 B.C., and another at Vaisali a century later, are recorded 
 in the Buddhist annals. At ordinary meetings of the Sangha 
 the teller of the votes, or arbitrator, who was elected for his 
 impartiality, virtue, and knowledge, was charged with the 
 duty of checking every decision of the majority, and of rejecting 
 it as illegal if it were contrary to the Dharma.^ The Indo- 
 Aryan political system was therefore a compromise between 
 arbitration and majority rule. 
 
 The Buddha's rare political insight revealed itself also in 
 the method of all his teaching. He was most careful to insist 
 that what he preached and the way his disciples should follow 
 was the ' Aryan ' way. All his metaphors were taken from 
 the life of the Aryan village community. He was not less 
 successful in appealing to the intellectuality of the Aryan 
 aristocracy than he was in touching their racial sentiment. 
 Even among the Brahmans there were many sincere believers 
 in the divine revelation of the Vedas who were, nevertheless, 
 dissatisfied with the methods of Brahmanical ritual, and could 
 not be blind to the charlatanism and superstition involved in 
 them. The accumulated experience of many generations had 
 
 ^ Chullavagga, iv, 14, 26. There were three ways of taking votes : the 
 secret method, the whispering method, and the open method. 
 
 53 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 brought the conviction to their minds that, however great 
 might have been the virtue of the mantram, and of mystical 
 rites as used b}' the Vedic rishis in an age of greater spiritual 
 purity, the practice of their own time brought no results 
 commensurate with the burdens imposed upon the State and 
 upon the routine of daily life. The doctrine of the law of 
 causation propounded by the Buddha offered to them a 
 middle path between pure atheism and a blind adherence to 
 a religion whose ritual had lost its efficacy ; while the exact 
 method of psychological analysis followed in the Buddhist 
 schools might be accepted as a return to that profound study 
 of natural causes and effects which had been the original 
 basis of the concepts of Vedic philosophy. 
 
 Even the bright nature-spirits — ' the Shining Ones ' ^ — to 
 whom the prayers and sacrifices of Vedic religion were addressed, 
 were not to be deposed from the position of veneration they 
 had always held in the minds of the Aryan people : the 
 Buddha's teaching only made them subject to the same 
 impersonal eternal order of things, expressed by the concept 
 of the Dharma or Norm, by which " all things animate and 
 inanimate, gods included, had their being." ^ 
 
 A clear illustration of the attitude of the early Buddhist 
 Church towards Brahmanism is given in one of its earliest 
 records, the Vindya Pitaka, or rules of discipline for the Sangha. 
 Here Brahma, the Creator, is made to appear as a suppliant 
 before the Buddha, imploring him to make his message known 
 to the world. ^ 
 
 While, therefore, the Buddha's propaganda naturally 
 aroused bitter hostility among the Brahmans, whose vested 
 interests were attacked, it was not really in conflict 
 with the fundamental principles of Vedic religion or with 
 the traditions of Aryan life. It was a reorganisation of 
 Aryan society upon a wider basis, and a re-adaptation of 
 religious thought to the spiritual needs of the times. The 
 Dharma of sacrifice and mantram, which had become ineffec- 
 
 * Devas. ^ Buddhism, Mrs Rhys Davids, p. 48. 
 
 8 Mahavagga, I, 5, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiii. 
 
 54 
 
THE BUDDHA 
 
 tive as practical politics for the Aryan people, was replaced 
 by the Dharma of right thought and right living. The reason 
 why the Buddha was denounced as a heretic, and from the 
 Brahmanical standpoint regarded as an avatar of Vishnu ^ 
 who came to rid the world of demons and wicked men by false 
 doctrines which should lure them to destruction, was because 
 his teaching, while outwardly conforming with the Vedic prin- 
 ciples, opposed an agnostic view of the First Cause to the 
 theory of a Universal Soul taught by the Upanishads, and 
 because he lowered the standard of ritualistic purity upon 
 which Brahman prestige depended, by breaking down the 
 social barriers set up by the Aryan aristocracy. 
 
 If, as a system of philosophy, the Buddha's teaching failed 
 to retain a permanent hold upon the Indian mind until its 
 concepts were enlarged and modified by Brahmanical ideas, 
 its influence upon Brahmanism in inducing greater clarity of 
 thought and a more scientific method of psychological analysis 
 was immense. An historical parallel might be found in the 
 influence which modern scientific investigations have had upon 
 the teaching of the Christian Church, for the Buddha substi- 
 tuted for the degenerate mysticism of contemporary Brahman- 
 ism a scientific system of psychological research which opened 
 the way to new religious inspirations in the same way as 
 modern criticism and science have given greater depth and 
 a better focus to religious thought in Europe. 
 
 And just as modern science has approached towards a 
 reconciliation with religious mysticism, so Buddhist and 
 Brahmanical thought eventually found a via media along which 
 they could go hand in hand. The Buddha's ethical teaching 
 had the profoundest influence upon Brahmanism both in its 
 ritualistic and spiritual aspects. Socially and politically 
 Buddhism had the same effect in making India a nation as 
 Christianity in the seventh century had in drawing together 
 the petty principalities of the Saxon heptarchy. In breaking 
 down the racial barriers of Aryavarta, and clearing the spiritual 
 
 ^ He was said to be the ninth avatar, the forerunner of Kalkin, who is 
 to restore the Ivaw of Righteousness. 
 
 55 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 atmosphere of superstition and priestly obscurantism, it bound 
 together in closer ties of sympathy the whole political organisa- 
 tion of the Aryan pale, and thus helped to lay the foundations 
 of the great empire of the Mauryan dynast5^ 
 
 In the Western sense of the term the Buddha was not a 
 religious teacher, but a divinely inspired interpreter of psycho- 
 logical laws, who showed the way by which mankind could 
 be emancipated from the ills of the flesh and learn to be in 
 harmony with themselves and with the universe. That, and 
 not the propagation of religious dogmas or philosophical 
 theories, has always been the true aim of Indo- Aryan religion. 
 Indian philosophy as theory may have no interest for modern 
 thinkers, but the vital part of it, its application to social and 
 political life, still has a pregnant message for the world. The 
 Buddha's prohibition of " the low arts of divination, spells, 
 omens, astrology, sacrifices to gods, witchcraft, and quackery," 
 relieved the Indian masses of a burden which had become a 
 grievous impediment to their spiritual progress. 
 
 56 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE BUDDHIST AND JAIN SANGHAS- 
 ALEXANDER'S RAID 
 
 M 
 
 ORB than two centuries elapsed after the death or 
 Pari-Nirvdna of the Buddha, at Kusinagara in 483 B.C., 
 before Asoka issued his imperial edicts which gave 
 State recognition to the teachings of the Sakya Prince through- 
 out the length and breadth of his vast dominions, and sent 
 missionaries far and wide to preach the doctrine of the Aryan 
 Eightfold Path to the world. Of the progress made by the 
 Sangha, or Order, during the long life of the Buddha himself, 
 and in the interval between his death and the accession of Asoka, 
 comparatively little is known. But the detailed rules of the 
 Order given in the Vindya Pitaka ^ are evidence that the 
 Buddha possessed the genius for organisation which has 
 always distinguished great Indo-Aryan leaders ; for the daily 
 life of the bhikkus in their monasteries was regulated with 
 an attention] to detail and thoroughness which would do 
 credit to a modern Prussian barrack, though the spirit 
 which moved ^the machine was the antipodes of Prussian 
 militarism. 
 
 No doubt the work of the Sangha was from the first of a 
 missionary character, and the wandering bhikkus, taught by 
 the Master or trained in the Buddhist schools, who went from 
 village to village and from court to court preaching the Good 
 Law under the Council Tree at the four crossways, in the 
 pilgrims' rest-houses, in the public debating halls, and in 
 royal palaces, must have made many converts both among the 
 lower classes and among the Kshatriya nobles, who were always 
 ready to listen to new philosophical theories, especially if 
 
 * See Sacred Books of the East, vols, xiii, xvii, and xx. 
 
 S7 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 opposed to orthodox Brahmanical teaching. But for over 
 two centuries the Buddhist Sangha was only one of many 
 similar religious organisations which represented dissent from 
 Vedic Brahmanism, though not influential enough to gain 
 popular support or to win many powerful patrons among the 
 Aryan aristocracy, either Brahman or Kshatriya. One of 
 the most important of these was the Sangha of the Jains, 
 or Nigranthas, founded by Mahavira, a contemporary of the 
 Buddha, although his tenets are said to have been expounded 
 by a succession of twenty-three earlier sages, the Tirthankaras 
 — some Brahman and some Kshatriya — whose history is entirely 
 legendary. 
 
 Mahavira himself was a Brahman, and he so far conformed 
 to orthodox Brahmanical tradition that he recognised the 
 practice of bodily mortification as a means of enlightenment ; 
 but, like Gautama, he denied the divine authority of the 
 Vedas, denounced the cruelty of animal sacrifices, and pro- 
 claimed a religion of universal love and brotherhood. Philo- 
 sophically Mahavira opposed to the monistic teaching of the 
 Upanishads and the Buddha's agnostic doctrines a theory of 
 the multiplicity of souls and of the permanence of matter. 
 The universe was said to be divided into two elements — life 
 and non-life. Every living being was said to be the centre 
 of innumerable minute divisions of matter, called Karmas, 
 possessing potential and kinetic energies, and surrounding and 
 concealing the true nature of the soul.^ Karmas were of two 
 qualities, progressive and retrogressive, and could be generated 
 by every embodied being through mind, speech, and action, 
 either by one's self or through other beings. This theory of 
 Karma differed from the Vedic one, which made sacrifice the 
 directing and compelling force of the universe, and from the 
 Buddhist one, in which Karma was entirely separate from 
 matter. Every Jiva, or living being, said Mahavira, possessed 
 a soul which by liberation from Karmas could attain to 
 godhead or perfect omniscience. The twenty-four Jinas, 
 or Conquerors of Self, worshipped by the Jains are those 
 
 ^ U. D. Barodia, History and Literature of Jainism, pp. 124-125. 
 58 
 
BUDDHIST AND JAIN SANGHAS 
 
 who are said to have attained to this absolute perfection of 
 soul. 
 
 The Jain, like the Buddhist 'Sangha, was a fraternity in 
 which the discipline of mind and body necessary for progress 
 towards Nirvana, or liberation of the Jiva from the effects of 
 Karma, was taught ; but the former organisation was made 
 to include the laity, who merely abstained from flesh-eating 
 and adapted the other ethical principles of Jainism to the 
 ordinary vocations of life, as well as those who renounced the 
 world and conformed to a more or less severe ascetic discipline. 
 The Buddhist Sangha, on the contrary, did not include the 
 laity, but was limited to those who were permitted to take 
 the vows of the Order. 
 
 The field of Mahavira's mission was also in Magadha — after- 
 wards known as Bihar, or ' the Land of Monasteries ' [vihdras] 
 — and in the neighbouring kingdoms of Videha and Anga. 
 At his death in 467 B.C. the Jain Sangha is said to have num- 
 bered over five hundred thousand members, and subsequently 
 the nine kings of the Nanda dynasty of Magadha (371-321 B.C.) 
 were patrons of the Order. The founder of the Mauryan 
 dynasty, Chandragupta, as well as his Brahman minister, 
 Chanakya, were also inclined towards Mahavira's doctrines, 
 and even Asoka is said to have been led towards Buddhism 
 by a previous study of Jain teaching. Jainism and Buddhism 
 have so much in common, that for many years European 
 scholars believed that the modern Jain religion was wholly 
 derived from Buddhism. They were both the outcome of the 
 revolt against the orthodox Brahman cult, as it was developed 
 in the land of the Five Rivers, which had its centre in Madhya- 
 desa in the sixth century B.C. The leaders of this revolt were 
 both of Aryan race. In some respects it was a Vedic reforma- 
 tion, or revival of the spirituality of the ancient Aryan faith, 
 but at the same time it coincided with the great expansion 
 of the Aryan pale which took place in the course of centuries : 
 the spiritual aspirations of the non- Aryan elements within the 
 pale lent much force to the movement, and helped considerably 
 to shape the thought which directed it. 
 
 59 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Before we proceed to sketch the progress of Indo-Aryan | 
 civilisation after the death of Gautama, it is necessary to 1 
 notice briefly the great pohtical events which led up to the 
 founding of the Mauryan dynasty in 321 B.C. The most 
 picturesque and romantic is the famous raid of Alexander 
 the Great into the Panjab, which took place five years bef ore 1 
 Chandragupta Maurya seized the throne of Magadha. It is| 
 usual to connect this great military achievement with the first 
 opening up of intercourse between India and Europe, though 
 such a view of it gives a very wrong impression of the mutual 
 relationship of East and West in one of the most eventful 
 epochs of the world's history. In the sixth and seventh 
 centuries before Christ, though the political boundaries of the 
 three great branches of the Aryan race — the Hellenic, Iranian, 
 and Indo-Aryan — ^were clearly defined, and though political 
 differences raised considerable barriers between them, there 
 was a community of ideas and a similarity of spiritual aspira- j 
 tions binding the three branches together which no political | 
 distinctions could obliterate. ] 
 
 While Mahavira and Gautama were propounding their 
 theories of the universe in the debating halls of Magadha, 
 Heracleitus of Ephesus was discoursing on elemental matter;^ 
 and the nature of the soul in the porticoes of Ionian temples. 
 About the same time Pythagoras of Samos preached the 
 doctrine of the One in Many, and founded a religious Sangha 
 in which strict abstinence from animal food was enforced.^ 
 The cities of Ionia, and not Athens and Sparta, were then; 
 the centre of Hellenic culture, and the antithesis implied ini 
 the modern use of the terms East and West had no applica- 
 tion to the international conditions of that period. Commer- ; 
 cial intercourse between the Greek cities of Asia Minor and ' 
 India, through the Euphrates valley, must have been con- j 
 siderable, and the lack of facilities of travel according to • 
 modern ideas probably was no greater impediment to the 
 enterprising Ionian than it was to European travellers in the; 
 days of Marco Polo. 
 
 1 H. B. Cotterill, Ancient Greece, p. 209 (Harrap). 
 60 
 
BUDDHIST AND JAIN SANGHAS 
 
 Along the main trade routes which stretched from Southern 
 ;ndia into Asia Minor, travelHng in those times was perhaps 
 10 more difficult and dangerous than it remained until the 
 ntroduction of railways. Pilgrims and merchants did not 
 ecognise the artificial boundaries set up by historians and the 
 bolitical rivalries of states, and if there is little circumstantial 
 lividence of the extent of their travels, it is because in this age 
 lardly anything was thought worthy of epigraphical record 
 except military expeditions, political laws, and the chronicles 
 )f kings. In the history of civilisation, however, the water- 
 shed of the mountainous region which stretches from the 
 [lorth-eastern corner of India into the heart of Asia Minor 
 and the valleys of the mighty rivers which flow from it formed 
 I continent by itself in which the three branches of the Aryan 
 race were, in the sixth century before Christ, in close contact 
 with each other. The differences between them arose from 
 political circumstances rather than intellectual antipathies, 
 jmd these political circumstances were largely governed by the 
 ttrength or weakness of the Aryan element in the population. 
 Where the Aryan element, racial or intellectual, predominated, 
 ;he political tendency was towards popular institutions and 
 constitutional government. Where it was weak the autocratic 
 3rinciple of government prevailed. 
 
 In 538 B.C., or about the time when the Prince Siddhartha 
 s said to have left his home and palace for the life of an ascetic 
 n search of spiritual wisdom, Cyrus the Great overthrew 
 Babylon and became the autocrat of an empire which comprised 
 ill the Aryan lands in Asia north of the Himalayas. Aryan 
 fulture had not penetrated very deeply into the mass of the 
 |)opulation of this vast empire, but the dominant power in it, 
 yhich was Persian, maintained the high spiritual ideals of 
 |:he Aryan race. 
 
 Zoroaster, who is beheved to have lived about this time, 
 ivas an Aryan thinker of the Vedic school who protested 
 igainst sacerdotal corruption and obscurantism, and some 
 vriters have suggested that the Persians under Cyrus, Cam- 
 Dyses, and Darius were inflamed with a desire for world-conquest 
 
 61 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 by the spiritual enthusiasm aroused by Zoroaster's teaching.^ 
 But in Persia the Magi, who corresponded to the Brahmans 
 in India, were poHtically a very powerful class : the Aryan 
 aristocracy held themselves proudly aloof from the non- 
 Aryan masses, and Zoroaster does not appear to have been — 
 like the Buddha and Mahavira — both a philosopher and social 
 reformer who could arouse a widespread religious fervour, 
 such as that which under Asoka broke down racial barriers 
 and made India a nation. The Magi successfully resisted 
 any encroachment upon their prerogatives, and the autocracy 
 centred in the great cities of Iran failed to consolidate the 
 loosely cohering racial elements of the empire, as Chanakya 
 and Chandragupta did through the Indo-Aryan system of 
 local self-government. There is little evidence to show how 
 far the Indo-Aryan system of administration prevailed in the 
 empire of the Achaemenidae. The ' royal road ' of 1500 miles 
 between Sardis and Susa, mentioned by Herodotus, is strikingly 
 suggestive of the Rajapatha and the four crossways of the 
 Indo-Aryan village ; but the popular assemblies, if they existed, 
 probably had very little political influence in such a highly 
 centralised system of government, though when Darius — a 
 scion of the royal house — succeeded to the throne in 521 B.C. 
 some form of election seems to have been observed. 
 
 The conflict of the free cities of Hellas with Darius of Persia 
 was, however, the assertion of Aryan political principles against 
 irresponsible autocracy rather than an opposition of intel- 
 lectual and spiritual ideals, or a struggle between Western 
 civilisation and Eastern barbarism, as it is usually represented. 
 Even Herodotus was constrained to admit the moral ^drtues 
 and magnanimity of the Persian character — their intense love 
 of truth and contempt for deceit and treacher}'^ — principles 
 which later Greek historians notice with surprise were respected 
 in Aryan society south of the Himalayas at least as much as 
 they were in Hellas. 
 
 After the death of Cjtus the Persian Empire was further 
 enlarged by the conquest of Egypt. Darius I added an Indian 
 
 ^ H. R. Hall, Ancient History of the Near East, p. 555. 
 62 
 
ALEXANDER'S RAID 
 
 province which paid the enormous annual tribute of 360 
 Euboic talents — 185 hundredweights — of gold-dust and sent 
 a contingent of archers to the imperial army. It was a natural 
 sequence, therefore, when about two centuries later the Mace- 
 donian autocracy had become supreme in Hellas, that Alex- 
 ander should seek to follow up the destruction of the Persian 
 empire by appropriating the wealth which India had accu- 
 mulated under the Indo-Aryan village system, though by that 
 time the provinces south of the Indus had thrown off the 
 suzerainty of Persia. The brilliant feat of arms by which 
 Alexander only partially achieved his purpose is only important 
 in Indian history as an incident leading up to the foundation 
 of the Mauryan Empire. Alexander's expedition did not lead 
 to the opening up of new highways between East and West — 
 rather the reverse. 
 
 Two years after Alexander left India the few provinces he 
 conquered had thrown off the Macedonian yoke, the Greek 
 garrisons he left behind were annihilated, and the consolidation 
 of the Indo-Aryan power under the Mauryan dynasty for a 
 long time prevented any further aggression from the north- 
 west. The raid itself could have left no impression upon 
 Indian civilisation. In the after-period, when Greece had lost 
 all political influence and the Hght of Hellenic inspiration 
 grew more and more dim, Indo-Aryan civilisation continued 
 to advance, and showed no signs of decadence a thousand 
 years later. The conditions which made Greek culture an 
 inspiration for her Roman conquerors had no counterpart in 
 India. The Indo-Aryans, unlike the Romans, had their classic 
 literature, their epics and philosophy, before Athens was built. 
 The classics of Greece in art and literature were part of the 
 spoils which the Romans won in war, but India did not conquer 
 Greece, and at the closest contact of Hellenic and Indo-Aryan 
 culture the latter had by far the greater vitality and creative 
 power. The points of resemblance between the two, which 
 have impressed Western writers so strongly, came from their 
 common ancestry and racial traditions. 
 
 The story of the raid must be briefly told. Alexander 
 
 63 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 arrived at the Indus in the beginning of 326 B.C., and, profiting 
 by the quarrels of the Indian tribes, crossed over without 
 opposition and entered the city of Taxila, or Taksha-sila, a 
 great centre of Brahmanical learning and the capital of a 
 principality then at war with its more powerful neighbours. 
 Here Alexander received the homage of the local raja and 
 obtained supplies and troops to assist his attack upon Poros 
 (Purusha), the head of an important federation of tribes in 
 the district between the Jhilam and Chenab rivers, who was 
 preparing to resist his further advance with a force of 30,000 
 footmen, 4000 horsemen marshalled by Kshatriya chieftains 
 mounted on 500 war-chariots, and many elephants. Alexander 
 by his strategy effected the difficult passage of the Hydaspes 
 (Jhilam) river in the face of Poros' army, and with a force of 
 about 17,000 men completely routed and nearly annihilated 
 the enemy on the other side in a pitched battle, in which the 
 desperate valour of Poros and his Kshatriya nobles was of 
 no avail against the superior tactics, mobility, and equipment 
 of the Macedonian cavalry. Poros was badly wounded and 
 taken prisoner, but Alexander, with fine diplomacy, respected 
 the Indo-Aryan tradition that a conquered king should not 
 be dispossessed of his ancestral rights, and after Poros had 
 acknowledged him as suzerain not only restored the kingdom 
 to his gallant foe but added a considerable territory to it. 
 
 Having thus made his communications secure and\eceived 
 the submission of several adjacent Indian states, Alexander 
 advanced as far as the Hyphasis (Bias) river, in the modern 
 Gurdaspur district, but at this point his exhausted European 
 soldiers refused to go further. He then retreated to one of the 
 fortified posts he had left on the banks of the Chenab, and 
 there his army was reinforced by twelve thousand fresh troops 
 sent from Europe. Having then made various administrative 
 arrangements with his Indian vassals, Alexander, with their 
 assistance, prepared a large fleet and, protected by a strong 
 army on the banks of the river, sailed down the Jhilam to 
 its confluence with the Chenab, and thence to the next con- 
 fluence with the Hydraotes or Ravi. Various confederations 
 
 64 
 
ALEXANDER'S RAID 
 
 of warlike tribes offered a desperate but ineffective resistance 
 to the passage of his forces, and in storming one of their strong- 
 holds Alexander was dangerously wounded by an arrow. On 
 his recovery he continued his victorious progress by land and 
 water until at last he reached the ocean through the delta 
 of the Indus. From thence he began to march his army 
 back to Susa, but the greater part of it, with most of the 
 rich spoils of the expedition, was lost on the way through 
 the terrible privations to which it was exposed in the deserts. 
 Nearchos, his admiral, was more successful in conducting his 
 fleet safely up the Persian Gulf to the Euphrates. The Indian 
 part of the campaign lasted about nineteen months. It was, 
 on the whole, a triumphant success from a military point of 
 view. Alexander added to his empire an Indian province 
 probably very much larger than that which had acknowledged 
 the suzerainty of Persia, but the conqueror, broken in health 
 by the difficulties of the campaign, died in Babylon within a 
 year after his return. 
 
 65 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 A YEAR after Alexander's departure from India the revolt 
 of tlie conquered provinces began, with the Brahman 
 university town as its centre. There a learned 
 Brahman of conspicuous ability, Chanakya by name, well 
 versed in Indo-Aryan polity — ^which included diplomacy and 
 military science — had for his companion or pupil a young 
 nobleman named Chandragupta, who was connected on his 
 father's side with the Nanda dynasty of Magadha, though his 
 mother is said to have been the daughter of the keeper of the 
 king's peacocks {Mayura-poshaka), and hence his family name 
 was Maurya.^ 
 
 Chandragupta, having been concerned in a conspiracy against 
 the king, had been obliged to fly from the court of Pataliputra, 
 and was at Taksha-sila at the time of the Macedonian occupa- 
 tion of the town. Possibly he suggested to Alexander the 
 attempted conquest of Magadha, which was prevented by the 
 mutiny of his European troops at the Hyphasis. King Poros, 
 Alexander's vassal, had been put to death by one of the Greek 
 satraps. This had aroused the fury of the Indo-Aryan popula- 
 tion. Philippos, the governor of one of the provinces, had 
 been murdered, and the general discontent only needed a leader 
 to throw it into open revolt. As soon as the news of Alexander's 
 death reached Taksha-sila, Chandragupta seized the oppor- 
 tunity to expel the hated Macedonians and revenge himself 
 against the Magadhan king. Aided by Chanakya, he roused 
 the clans of the Panjab, who fell upon and annihilated most 
 of Alexander's garrisons. He then marched at their head 
 
 1 U. D. Barodia, History and Literature of Jainism, p. 14. Mr Vincent SmitU 
 derives Maury a fron; his toother's n^me, Mnra, 
 
 66 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 against Pataliputra and overthrew the Magadhan king, 
 who was deposed, or, according to Greek accounts, put to 
 death. 
 
 Thus in 321 B.C. the dynasty of the Mauryas succeeded that 
 of the Nandas on the throne of Magadha. The lesson of 
 Alexander's raid was not lost upon Chandragupta and his 
 crafty Brahman counsellor, for they quickly followed up their 
 first successes by compelling or persuading all the smaller 
 states of Northern India to acknowledge the suzerainty of 
 Magadha, so that in a few years' time Chandragupta's empire 
 stretched from sea to sea and Aryavarta, instead of being torn 
 asunder by the dissensions and rivalries of numerous tribal 
 confederations, was united under a strong central government, 
 and could present an unbroken front to any foreign aggressor. 
 The political wisdom of this policy was justified seventeen 
 years after Chandragupta's accession, when Seleukos — one of 
 Alexander's generals, who had been most successful in the 
 general scramble for the fragments of the Macedonian empire 
 which had followed upon the death of his sovereign — sought to 
 add to his dominions the Indian provinces Alexander had 
 conquered. Seleukos crossed the Indus in 305 B.C., but 
 Chandragupta inflicted such a crushing defeat upon him that 
 I he was not only forced to retire hastily, but had to submit 
 ' to a humiliating bargain, by which he ceded to his Indian rival 
 I large districts west of the Indus, extending as far as the modern 
 i cities of Kabul and Herat, by way of dowry for a daughter 
 I sent to Chandragupta's zanana in exchange for a hundred 
 I elephants. An officer named Megasthenes was sent to repre- 
 sent Seleukos at Chandragupta's court, and his account of 
 India in the third century before Christ, preserved in a very 
 : fragmentary form in quotations by later writers, is extremely 
 interesting, and as reliable as such documents usually are in 
 the present day. Some glimpses of Chandragupta's personality 
 are given in popular legends, but materials for a detailed 
 biography are non-existent. His great minister, Chanakya, 
 however, is the reputed author of a treatise on Hindu polity 
 and political economy, the KauUUya-artha-Sa^tra, which gives 
 
 67 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 a better insight into Indo- Aryan civilization under the Mauryan 
 Empire than ordinary chronicles of royalty. 
 
 It must be observed that the Kautiliya-artha-Sdstra and 
 similar works of a later date are compendiums of the rules and 
 traditions governing the central administration of an Indo- 
 Aryan state, written for the guidance of the king and his 
 ministers. They do not, therefore, enter into a detailed 
 account of the self-government of the village communities, 
 or of the tribal confederations which maintained a republican 
 or oligarchical form of government. The organisation of the 
 Magadhan Empire, as described in the Kautiltya-artha-Sdstra, 
 must not be regarded as a new system of law or political 
 economy, devised by Chandragupta and his ministers, but as 
 a digest of traditional laws, revised to meet the conditions of 
 the times, and as a plan of co-ordination of the different political 
 systems of Aryavarta — all based upon the Indo-Aryan village 
 community — for the purpose of national defence. 
 
 Chandragupta's government, according to Greek writers, 
 was severe and even cruel. Passages in Kautiliya regarding 
 the punishment of criminals and the torture of prisoners to 
 elicit confession support this view, but the customs of the 
 time and the state of anarchy which would have followed 
 the break-up of the Macedonian administration must be taken 
 into account, Chandragupta, however, was no despot like 
 Darius of Persia. He had won his way to power with the 
 help of the republican tribes of the Panjab, and though the 
 safety of the realm demanded that their turbulence should be 
 checked, Kautiliya strongly upholds the principles of the ancient 
 Aryan constitution and the rights of the Aryan freeman. 
 He treats of the * duties ' of a king towards his subjects, not of 
 his divine prerogatives. " In their happiness lies his happi- 
 ness, in their welfare his welfare." No Aryan, even a Sudra, 
 must be sold into slavery permanently. Only in times of 
 family trouble, or to raise money for paying court fines or 
 State dues, was it lawful as a temporary expedient, but in 
 such cases it was incumbent upon the nearest relatives to 
 effect the release of the bondsman as soon as possible. It 
 68 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 was no crime for Mlechchhas (foreigners) to sell or mortgage 
 their children, but every Aryan of the ' Five Peoples ' was a 
 freeman and had the status of a Roman citizen unless he 
 offended against Aryan law. 
 
 Chandragupta's government was a firm and strong one, but 
 not one of military force alone. He had no dreams of world- 
 conquest. His policy, and that of his astute minister, was to 
 consolidate the strength of Aryavarta, not to create an auto- 
 cracy after the Persian model. It was a continuation and 
 extension of a process of political amalgamation which had 
 been going on for centuries before Alexander's raid gave it a 
 new impetus. The republican form of government which 
 obtained among many of the Aryan tribes was not suppressed, 
 though in Kautiliya it is regarded as a source of political 
 weakness. Neither were the traditional rights of the village 
 communities or their powers of local self-government altogether 
 ignored in the bureaucratic control set up by the Mauryan 
 imperial government for the purpose of removing the weakness 
 of Indo-Aryan polity, which had been revealed by the success 
 of Alexander's invasion. It need not be assumed that the 
 popular assemblies lost all their political influence because 
 Kautiliya makes no mention of them. They certainly con- 
 tinued to exercise considerable power in later times, and 
 Megasthenes noticed that in Southern India they checked the 
 power of kings, and that all Indians were regarded as freemen. 
 Chandragupta's will may have been law within his empire, 
 but he was none the less a constitutional monarch bound by 
 the common law of Aryavarta. The ordinances of Kautiliya 
 evidence a strict desire for justice between man and man. 
 Though Chanakya was himself a Brahman, he does not exalt 
 hi,s class to divine rank or exempt it from heavy punishment. 
 A Brahman was not to be tortured, but he could be heavily 
 fined and even his whole property might be confiscated, while 
 for the worst offences he could be condemned to work in the 
 mines — for him a particularly degrading form of punishment. 
 The attention given to hospitals and sanitation, the provision 
 made for famine and poor relief, and the careful regulation of 
 
 69 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 taxation are all evidences of the wise and liberal statesmanship 
 of Chandragupta's government. 
 
 The numerous regulations and ordinances detailed in the 
 Artha-Sdstra were not arbitrary enactments. They are a digest 
 of polity recognized by the traditions of Indo-Aryan govern- 
 ment, adapted to the special circumstances of the time by 
 Chandragupta and his Council — a system of government which, 
 in principle at least, is strikingly similar to that of the British 
 Raj. 
 
 Kautiliya declares that villages were first classified according 
 to their size into three classes, and then subdivided for revenue 
 purposes into five more. First were those which paid no 
 taxes — ^these would be religious and educational communities 
 and others specially exempted. The next were those which 
 furnished soldiers to the imperial army instead of paying 
 taxes. The third class were those which paid the customary 
 royal dues either in grain, cattle, gold, or raw materials ; the 
 fourth those which supplied free labour for public works, or, 
 in the case of artisans, manufactured goods ; and the fifth 
 were agricultural communities which furnished dairy produce 
 to the imperial establishments. 
 
 For the administration of the royal city numerous regula- 
 tions were made, but villages were apparently left to conduct 
 their own affairs according to Aryan law and custom. There 
 were, however, some significant restrictions. No ascetic 
 other than a vdnaprastha or forest recluse, no association other 
 than one of local origin, and no guilds except local co-operative 
 guilds were to be allowed in the villages of the kingdom (Book II, 
 chap, i, 48). The object of these regulations was, no doubt, 
 to put a check upon the political influence of religious or indus- 
 trial bodies which might become inimical to the interests of 
 the State. The ascetic was always a person of considerable 
 influence with the people : according to the old Hindu law- 
 books even the king was bound in matters of difficulty to seek 
 out an ascetic of high repute and act according to his advice. 
 The constitution of religious Sanghas might, therefore, become 
 a danger to the State if they were allowed to exist within the 
 70 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 boundaries of the secular pale. Their place was outside the 
 active life of the world, in the forest retreat, in the hermit's 
 cave, or in the holy places reserved for pilgrimages. The 
 industrial organisations, such as craft-guilds, were made 
 subject to a similar law in the interest of the whole commu- 
 nity. So long as they applied the co-operative principle, 
 which Kautiliya shows was well understood in ancient India, 
 solely for economic efficiency they were within their rights. 
 But they were not to be allowed to become a political power 
 which would usurp the functions of the king and his ministers, 
 or those of the popular assemblies and other local bodies 
 charged with the administration of local affairs. 
 
 There was a different grouping of villages made both for 
 economic purposes and for national defence. Among every 
 ten villages there was a central one, adequately fortified, which 
 served as a common market and a rallying-place in time of 
 war. A county or district containing two hundred villages 
 had also its central market and fort, called a kharvatika. A 
 larger district containing four hundred had a drona-mukha 
 as its centre ; while the chief provincial capital, around which 
 eight hundred villages were grouped, was strongly defended 
 by a fortress called a sthdniya. 
 
 Aryan India had always regarded the maintenance and 
 protection of the public highways as one of the duties for the 
 performance of which the king was responsible, and Kautiliya 
 shows the great importance which was attached to it from a 
 military and economic point of view. The two cross-roads 
 of the village — ^the Rajapatha and the Mahakala — as we have 
 already seen, were the two main lines of communication between 
 village and village ; the former, which ran east and west, 
 being the chief military road and the latter the chief commer- 
 cial route. The principal Rajapatha, or royal road, of Chandra- 
 gupta's empire was that which passed through Pataliputra and 
 continued right up to the north-western frontier. Along 
 these main routes trees were planted, wells were dug, and post- 
 houses, police-stations, and hostels for travellers were built at 
 regular intervals. Megasthenes mentions that pillars were 
 
 71 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 set up at every ten stadia (about i^ miles) to mark distances 
 and serve as signposts. Imperial and provincial officers looked 
 after their upkeep and proper repair, the towns and villages 
 through which they passed providing the labourers, who were 
 exempted from taxation. Fines were imposed upon those 
 who obstructed the traffic or damaged the roads. 
 
 Kautiliya details many different kinds of roads, classifying 
 them according to use and destination. In the towns and 
 forts there were roads for chariots paved with stones or planks 
 of palm-trees, roads for beasts of burden and for general traffic, 
 and roads leading to cremation-grounds. In the districts, 
 besides the main roads, cart- and cattle-tracks, and foot- 
 paths, there were roads leading to the central villages and 
 forts above mentioned, roads connecting the smaller villages, 
 roads leading to mines and to pastures, gardens, groves and 
 forests, and elephant preserves. Each road had a specified 
 width, varying from four feet for footpaths and cattle-tracks 
 to thirty-two feet, and twice that width for the royal roads and 
 main trade routes. Among the vehicles using these roads 
 six kinds of chariots are mentioned : the car of the god used 
 in temple processions and another used at public festivals, 
 the ordinary war-chariot and a special one used in foreign 
 expeditions, one used for military training, and the common 
 travelUng car. There were two different kinds of palanquins, 
 and several descriptions of bullock-carts. Merchandise was 
 carried by carts, camels, asses, and by human porters. 
 
 The regulation of water-borne traffic was the concern of a 
 separate department of the State. In the earliest times, 
 before agriculture had been greatly developed, and before the 
 village communities had been linked together by an organized 
 system of roads, the waterways must have been the easiest 
 means of passage through the dense forest and jungle, and the 
 chief line of communication between the principal Aryan 
 settlements. Tradition fixed the bank of a river at a curve 
 inclined towards east and west or at the confluence of two 
 rivers as the most auspicious site for an Aryan village settle- 
 ment. The holy rivers of Aryavarta must have been for the 
 72 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 early Indo-Aryans what tlie rivers of Mesopotamia were to 
 the Aryans of Iran, and have served the same purpose in 
 their struggles with the Dasyus as the Tigris or Euphrates in 
 the contest between the Aryan Kassites and Mitannians and 
 their hereditary foes, the Asuras (Assyrians). They were the 
 best military routes and the most important highways of 
 commerce. 
 
 No doubt the Aryans had inherited the science of irrigation 
 which they brought into India from their long tenure of the 
 Euphrates valley, and the construction and maintenance of 
 canals and reservoirs had been from very early times regarded 
 as public works for which the king was responsible. Thus the 
 name of one of Chandragupta's provincial governors, Pushya- 
 gupta, has been handed down to posterity on account of the 
 Lake Beautiful {Sudarsana) at Girnar, which he formed by 
 damming up a mountain stream with a great wall of masonry. 
 This irrigation work, as inscriptions testify, was enlarged and 
 kept in repair for eight hundred years by Pushyagupta's 
 successors under Asoka and later emperors of the Gupta 
 dynasty ; but in the troublous times which followed it fell 
 into ruin and became buried in the jungle. 
 
 Chandragupta's irrigation department was in charge of the 
 construction and maintenance of canals and reservoirs which 
 were too great to be undertaken by the effort of the village 
 communities separately : it inspected the sluices, measured 
 the lands which had to be irrigated, and regulated the supply 
 of water " so that every one had an equal supply of it " — a 
 duty which in the case of minor irrigation works belonged to 
 the village headman. Water was raised from the canals both 
 by bullocks and by windmills. Kautilij^a gives the rates 
 charged for the supply of water, varying from one-fifth to one- 
 third of the produce, according to the system employed — also 
 the fines which were imposed for neglect of the regulations. 
 He advises the observation of the relative rainfall in different 
 parts of the country and in different seasons, and the possi- 
 bility of forecasting the rainfall by the position of the sun 
 and planets and the different cloud-formations is mentioned. 
 
 73 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 The department of navigation was a separate one charged 
 ■with the duty of protecting travellers against river and sea 
 pirates, of providing and maintaining harbours, ferries and 
 bridges, and regulating all water traffic. Government vessels 
 were made available for the transport of merchandise by 
 sea and river ; the department was responsible for their 
 being properly equipped and manned, and in the event of a 
 vessel being lost or damaged owing to departmental neglect 
 the State was liable to make good the merchant's loss. Travel- 
 ling was encouraged officially, for passengers were taken in 
 the king's ships upon payment of passage-money. Government 
 vessels could also be hired for pearl and conch fishery. 
 
 There were both private and Government ferries, and a 
 considerable variety of them. Besides boats suitable for 
 crossing large rivers, and for the transport of criminals and 
 vehicles, there were, as at the present time in India, such 
 primitive arrangements as rafts of timber or bamboo tied 
 together, baskets covered by skin, gourds, and inflated leather 
 bags. Bridges were made solidly of wood, brick, and stone, 
 or were improvised by means of boats or by elephants. The 
 regulation of traffic was co-ordinated with the administration 
 of the criminal law, for the departmental officers, besides 
 destroying piratical craft, were authorised to arrest any 
 criminals or suspected persons, such as a man carrying off 
 another man's wife or daughter, thieves and smugglers, persons 
 in disguise and secret emissaries, those not provided with a 
 pass, or travellers who had no baggage. To facilitate the 
 suppression of brigandage and the maintenance of the peace 
 of the realm, and also to secure the safety of travellers, it was 
 ordained that no one should use the State ferries without 
 permission and at other than the appointed times, but excep- 
 tions were made in the case of fishermen, those who were 
 carrying perishable goods such as flowers and vegetables, 
 persons pursuing criminals, messengers, and others. In 
 monsoon times, when the rivers were in flood, and in crossing 
 dangerous rivers, all travellers were obliged to use the State 
 ferries. 
 
 74 
 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 Kautiliya mentions seagoing vessels, both for coastal traffic 
 and for longer voyages to Burma and China : oversea trade 
 was encouraged, both by facilities granted to well-known 
 foreign merchants, and by special rules for financing trade in 
 the Indian seaports. Both river- and sea-fishing were under 
 the control of the department; and fishing villages, in lieu 
 of the agricultural tax, had to pay royal dues at the usual 
 rate, i.e. one-sixth on the catch of fish. 
 
 Pataliputra, Chandragupta's capital, was planned on a 
 magnificent scale on the auspicious site formed by the con- 
 fluence of the Son with the Ganges. I^ike other Indo-Aryan 
 cities, it had a long river-front, extending for about nine miles, 
 with embankments of brick and harbours. The breadth of 
 the city was a mile and a half. Its massive timber walls 
 were defended by three successive brick-lined moats filled 
 with water, and by lofty towers built over the sixty-four gates, 
 as in modern temple gopurams, with several hundred smaller 
 ones between them. The royal palace, which occupied a 
 central position, and was placed in a fine wooded park laid out 
 with fountains and fish-ponds, was described by Megasthenes 
 as being more splendid than those of Susa and Ecbatana. Its 
 pillars were plated with gold and ornamented with designs of 
 birds and foliage in gold and silver, and it was magnificently 
 furnished with thrones and chairs of state, and great vessels of 
 gold, silver, and copper set with precious stones. Excavations 
 recently made on the site of Pataliputra have revealed what 
 are supposed to be the foundations of the palace, and an 
 arrangement of pillars similar to that of the Apadana at Perse- 
 polis, whence it has been somewhat hastily assumed that 
 Chandragupta sent for foreign builders to build him a palace 
 on the Persian model, just as in modern times Anglo-Indian 
 builders copy the plans of European buildings. Doubtless 
 the fame of Chandragupta would have attracted craftsmen of 
 all kinds from far and near, especially master-builders of 
 repute, who were always accustomed to seek employment 
 wherever it might be found when royal capitals were in the 
 making. But Indian history did not begin with Chandragupta 
 
 75 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and tlie Indo-Aryan building tradition was an ancient one 
 when Pataliputra was founded. The inference to be drawn 
 from the fact that an Indo-Aryan imperial palace resembled an 
 Iranian one in its general scheme is merely that Aryan culture 
 in India and Iran inherited the same traditions, not that 
 Chandragupta was of set purpose imitating the palace of 
 Darius. So great a champion of the Indo-Aryan cause and 
 the founder of the greatest Indo-Aryan dynasty known in 
 history would hardly be likely to celebrate the freedom of 
 Aryavarta from the Macedonian yoke by imposing on it the 
 intellectual domination of Persia, The Kautiliya-artha-Sdstra 
 shows that Chandragupta's statesmanship was wholly inspired 
 by Indo-Aryan tradition. 
 
 Megasthenes' description of Pataliputra may be supple- 
 mented by details given in Chanakya's summary of Indo- 
 Aryan polity. To the north of the royal palace was the temple 
 of the Ishta-devata of the imperial family, the tutelary deity 
 of the city, and in every other quarter shrines were built to 
 the guardian deities of the community residing in them. The 
 northern quarter was assigned to Brahmans and certain of 
 the higher craftsmen, such as the armourers, ironsmiths, and 
 workers in precious stones. In the north-west quarter were 
 bazars and hospitals : the latter were provided with stores of 
 medicines which were replenished at regular intervals from 
 the Government stores.^ In the eastern quarter of the city 
 lived the Kshatriya or fighting caste, and skilled workmen 
 whose occupation is not mentioned, together with merchants 
 who dealt in scents and garlands, grain and liquids. The 
 association of skilled craftsmen with Brahmans and Kshatriyas 
 is additional evidence that craftsmanship did not always hold 
 the inferior status in Indo-Aryan society which European 
 writers have assumed to be the case. It was only occupations 
 which were non- Aryan, or those which involved work offending 
 against Aryan ideas of ritualistic purity, which were relegated 
 to the Siidra or servile class. Kautiliya assigns the western 
 
 1 Medicinal plants were cultivated in the imperial domains between the 
 ordinary crops. 
 
 76 
 
4- Northern Gateway of the Sanchi Stupa 
 
 76 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 quarter of the city to Sudras, and with them were asso- 
 ciated spinners of wool and cotton, mat-makers, and leather- 
 workers. 
 
 In the corners of the city were the headquarters of craft- 
 guilds and co-operative societies. Other authorities on Indian 
 town-planning tell us that the four corners of a town or village, 
 away from the main routes of traffic, were the proper sites for 
 schools, and no doubt the same position was given to the 
 guild-halls on account of the educational purposes to which 
 they were devoted. Co-operation was a principle upon which 
 the whole organisation of Indo-Aryan society was based, so 
 that the mention of artisan co-operative societies is not sur- 
 prising. Another section of the Artha-Sdstra makes it a rule 
 that a citizen or villager who sent his servants and bullocks 
 to assist in co-operative work of any kind, in lieu of personal 
 service, should take his share in the expense but have no 
 claim to any of the profit. The organisation of these societies 
 was applied to agriculture as well as to trade, handicraft, and 
 fine arts such as music : each member contributed his share 
 of the capital and, provided the rules were observed, was 
 entitled to a corresponding share in the profits. As in the 
 Middle Ages in Europe, it often happened that the formidable 
 power acquired by these societies was not always used for the 
 public advantage and called for the interference of the State. 
 
 The four principal gates on the east, south, west, and north 
 were dedicated to Brahma the Creator, Indra the Sky-god, 
 Yama the I/ord of Death, and Senapati the War-god respec- 
 tively. Outside the city walls, at a distance of a hundred 
 bow-lengths from the moat, were rest-houses for pilgrims and 
 travellers, and sacred groves and shrines. Heretics — a term 
 applied at that time to Buddhists — and Chandalas, non-Aryan 
 tribes at the lowest stage of civilisation, were required to 
 live beyond the burial-grounds. It is significant that the 
 stupa, or funeral-mound, became the most sacred symbol of 
 Buddhism. 
 
 The administrative Council of the city was modelled upon 
 that of the village commutiities, and it may be assumed that, 
 
 77 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 like the latter, it was an elected body, though certain matters 
 were reserved for the control of imperial officials. It was 
 composed of thirty members, divided into six committees of 
 five. The first committee controlled the industries and handi- 
 crafts of the city. The second one was in charge of arrange- 
 ments for travellers and pilgrims visiting the city, providing 
 them with accommodation and, when necessary, with food 
 and medical attendance. Foreigners were kept under strict 
 supervision. The officials in charge of rest-houses were 
 instructed to question them and keep a register of information 
 regarding them, to watch over their movements and to see 
 that they were escorted when they left the country. When 
 they were sick, travellers were attended to medically, and in 
 the event of death they were buried and their property was 
 taken care of so that it might be handed over to the relatives 
 who were entitled to it. 
 
 The third committee was charged with the registration of 
 births and deaths, the statistics being considered necessary 
 for Government schemes of taxation and other purposes. The 
 fourth committee regulated the sales of produce, weights and 
 measures, and issued licences to merchants. The fifth per- 
 formed the same duties in regard to manufactures, and the 
 sixth collected tithes on all goods sold in the city. The city 
 Council also collectively administered general affairs, such as 
 finance, sanitation, water-supply, the provision and upkeep 
 of public buildings, fruit and flower gardens. The by-laws of 
 the city imposed fines upon persons defiling public roads or 
 reservoirs, or for allowing dead animals or human corpses 
 to pollute public places. Special routes were prescribed for 
 funeral processions, and no corpses were allowed to be buried 
 or cremated except in the public cemeteries and cremation- 
 grounds. In short, Pataliputra in the fourth century before 
 Christ seems to have been a thoroughly well-organised city, 
 and administered according to the best principles of social 
 science. 
 
 Pataliputra was mainly built of wood, because, as Megas- 
 thenes explained, cities on the banks of the great rivers were 
 
 78 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 not meant to be permanent, as the destruction caused by 
 floods and by changes of the river-beds was so great. The 
 houses were therefore built so that they could easily be removed 
 when a change of site became necessary. But from the nature 
 of the building material the risks of fire were as great as those 
 of water. In Pataliputra a well was provided for every ten 
 houses : no thatched houses were allowed in the city. Vessels 
 filled with water were kept in rows along the main streets 
 and public squares, and in front of the royal palace. Every 
 householder had to keep ladders, axes, hooks, ropes, baskets, 
 and leather bags, and in case of fire in a neighbour's house 
 was required to run to his help — ^the fine for neglecting to do 
 so being twelve panas. A fine of fifty-four panas was imposed 
 upon those who set fire to a house through carelessness, while 
 the penalty for arson was that the guilty person should be 
 thrown into the fire. 
 
 Among other affairs of civic life Kautillya provides for the 
 regulation of the drink traffic and gambling. Brahmans were 
 placed under severe penalties for indulging in liquor. Neither 
 taverns nor gambling-halls were allowed in villages, and those 
 in towns were limited in number and under strict supervision. 
 The former had to be decently furnished and provided with 
 scents, flowers, water, and " other comfortable things " accord- 
 ing to the season, so that the lure of the drink should not 
 be the only attraction. Inspectors, or ' spies,' stationed in 
 the taverns took note of the habitues and ascertained whether 
 they drank moderately or excessively. They also noted the 
 value of the jewellery and other valuables in possession of 
 customers who were intoxicated, for in the event of robbery 
 the tavern-keeper had not only to make good the loss, but was 
 liable to a fine of the same amount. 
 
 Excessive gambling was a vice to which Aryan nobles and 
 warriors had always been addicted. Chandragupta's Govern- 
 ment tried to regulate it by a system of licensed gambling- 
 halls and by forbidding gambling in the villages. The official 
 superintendents of gambling supplied the dice and saw that 
 the play was fair, Eive per cent, of the winnings was appro- 
 
 79 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 priated by the State, and fees were levied for licences, use of 
 dice, and hire of gambling-halls. 
 
 The interest of Chandragupta's Government in the pros- 
 perity of village life is evidenced by the minute attention given 
 by Kautiliya to cattle-breeding and the care of stock. Accord- 
 ing to Aryan tradition the land was the people's, but the raja, 
 like the headman of a village or group of villages, was entitled 
 to a certain proportion of the communal land as his share. 
 The Crown domains included elephant forests and mining- 
 ground, and agricultural land which was either leased out or 
 cultivated by hired labour. The agricultural department super- 
 intended the cultivation of these lands and collected the 
 revenue from them. There were expert officials in charge 
 of the imperial studs and herds of cattle and elephants, who 
 attended to their feeding, protected them from thieves and 
 wild animals, and rendered them veterinary aid. Kautiliya 
 lays down rules for the feeding of stock ; the milking of cows 
 and the standards of dairy produce ; the taming and training 
 of bulls and elephants ; the engagement of cowherds, either 
 on j&xed wages or on the principle of profit-sharing ; the 
 management of the imperial stables ; the prevention of cruelty 
 to animals and their protection from raiders and other dangers. 
 Private owners were entitled to the services of departmental 
 officials for the protection of their cattle on payment of a 
 tithe of the produce. 
 
 The administration of justice was carried out first by the 
 village headmen and the local panchayats, which decided 
 petty cases, and by two kinds of courts, inferior and superior, 
 composed of six judges, which held their sessions in the villages 
 and towns which formed the headquarters of different groups, 
 districts, or provinces. In each court there were three judges 
 learned in Indo-Aryan sacred literature and traditional law, 
 and three experts in local customs and practical affairs. The 
 inferior courts tried cases relating to contracts, recovery of 
 debts, assault and defamation, thefts, boundary disputes, 
 damage to crops, pastures, and public roads, domestic affairs, 
 craft-guilds and co-operative societies, and miscellaneous cases. 
 80 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 The higher courts dealt with the protection of craftsmen and 
 merchants. The craft-guilds had their own courts for main- 
 taining internal discipline, but craftsmen were considered to 
 be under the special protection of the king, and it was a capital 
 offence to maim one who was in the royal service so as to 
 impair his working efficiency. Other matters within the juris- 
 diction of these' higher courts were measures for dealing with 
 famine and other national calamities. Kautiliya enters into 
 details of the measures to be taken for famine protection. In 
 the jfirst place it was ordained that half the stores in the State 
 warehouses should always be kept in reserve for times of 
 famine. When famine occurred the State distributed relief 
 from this reserve, provided seed-grain for the next harvest, 
 and started public works to keep the people remuneratively 
 employed. The wealthy were called upon to subscribe for 
 the relief of the poor, and when possible the population of the 
 afflicted districts was removed to the banks of rivers, lakes, 
 or to the seashore, or to places where crops were abundant. 
 
 The maintenance of public morality and order, the trial 
 of persons arrested on suspicion of robbery, inquests into 
 cases of suspected murder and all cases in which capital 
 punishment, with or without torture, was the penalty, were 
 among those which were dealt with by the higher courts. 
 The sovereign and his ministers, assisted by learned Brahmans, 
 formed the final court of appeal. Punishment for offences 
 ranged from small fines to mutilation, torture, or death. The 
 lex talionis was often applied. Torture could be used to elicit 
 confession under certain circumstances, as in cases of robbery 
 when the accused could not give a satisfactory account of his 
 proceedings on the previous day. Capital crimes included 
 wilful damage to a sacred tree, evasion of royal taxes, and 
 intrusion upon the royal hunt. It is noteworthy that under 
 Chandragupta's rule Brahmans were not exempt from heavy 
 punishment.^ 
 
 The supreme control of the administration not only of 
 justice, but of all affairs of State, was vested in the King of 
 
 ^ See ante, p. 69. 
 
 F 81 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Kings, Chandragupta, and his Council, of which no doubt 
 Chanakya was the President, or Pradhdna. Bight seems to 
 have been the usual number of a royal council, but it varied 
 from time to time, and in Chandragupta's great empire it was 
 probably larger as the duties of the Council were onerous. 
 Individually each member, assisted by two under-secretaries, 
 was in charge of a State department. Collectively the Council 
 met to discuss departmental finances, foreign affairs, and all 
 other important matters, sometimes with, sometimes without 
 the presence of the sovereign. They appointed provincial 
 governors, departmental chiefs, and all the highest officers of 
 State. The Council generally initiated all important business, 
 the opinion of absent members being given in writing. The 
 resolutions of the Council were signed and sealed by each 
 member in order of precedence. Megasthenes testified to the 
 " high character and wisdom " of Chandragupta's councillors 
 and to the power they held in the State. Chandragupta's rule 
 was not the undiluted despotism of an absolute monarchy, 
 but a constitutional government formed after the ancient 
 Aryan tradition of empire, in which, theoretically at least, 
 the people's right was the only source of the divine right of 
 kings. This principle was asserted in the oath which every 
 Indo-Aryan king took at the religious ceremony in which he 
 received royal authority from the people's hands : " May I 
 be deprived of heaven, of life, and of offspring if I oppress 
 you." 1 
 
 According to the same tradition the king's duties and daily 
 routine of work were clearly defined. Bvery twenty-four hours 
 was to be divided into sixteen ndlikds, or periods of about 
 one and a half hours. The first nalika of the day was to be 
 given to the State finances and consideration of national defence. 
 In the second the king was to attend to the petitions and suits 
 of his subjects. The third was the time for bathing, dining, 
 and religious study. In the fourth he received payments for 
 the royal treasury and made official appointments. The fifth 
 
 * Aitareya Brahmana, vol. viii, 4.1. 15. See " Introduction to Hindu Polity," 
 by Kashiprasad Jayaswal, Modern Review, Calcutta, July 1913. 
 82 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 was devoted to Council business and to receiving the reports 
 of spies ; the sixth to relaxation and prayer ; the seventh 
 and eighth to military matters. In the first nalika of the 
 night he again received reports from officers of the secret 
 service ; the second was given to the evening bath, repast, and 
 study ; the third, fourth, and fifth were the hours for sleep. 
 In the sixth he arose, prepared himself for the coming day 
 by meditation, and was received by his bodyguard of female 
 archers. The seventh was given to the study of public affairs 
 and to issuing orders to his secret agents. In the eighth he 
 went into the private audience hall, where he received the 
 blessings of his guru and other Brahmans of the court and 
 met his councillors and the royal princes. Some religious 
 ceremonies were then performed, and after consultation with 
 the court astrologer, physician, and head cook, the day's work 
 began. In the reign of Chandragupta's grandson Asoka, we 
 learn that a water-clock at the great university of Nalanda 
 gave time for the whole of Magadha. 
 
 The function of the secret agents, who according to estab- 
 lished tradition were part of the machinery of government, 
 combined that of the modern journalist, inspecting official, 
 police detective, and military spy. They were to keep the 
 Government informed of the state of public opinion, to report 
 confidentially upon the working of departmental administra- 
 tions, to impose a check upon the arbitrary conduct of State 
 officials, to assist in the detection of crime, as well as to frustrate 
 seditious movements and to discover the designs of an enemy 
 country. " A king worthy of praise," says the Sukrd-nitisdra, 
 apropos of spies, " should always learn his own faults from his 
 subjects' point of view and get rid of them, but never punish 
 the people " (chap, i, p. 265). In principle, at least, the ancient 
 spy system had much to recommend it and stood on a far higher 
 moral plane than that of the present day, Greek accounts 
 which bear witness to Indian honesty and veracity declare 
 that Chandragupta was well served by his secret agents and 
 that their reports could always be considered trustworthy, 
 
 Greek writers also give some glimpses of the life of Chandra- 
 
 83 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 gupta, borrowed from Megasthenes' descriptions. The drastic 
 measures taken for the consolidation of the Empire must have 
 made the Mauryan dynasty many enemies, and for fear of 
 attempts against his life Chandragupta is said to have changed 
 his bedroom every night. The fact that he refrained from 
 sleeping in the daytime need not have been attributed to the 
 same cause, for it only proved that he observed the rules of 
 morality laid down in Brahmanical law-books. When the 
 Emperor rode abroad it was a capital offence to approach close 
 to the bodyguard of female archers which protected his person. 
 In the city he was sometimes carried in a palanquin of gold 
 festooned with pearls, but on his travels Chandragupta rode 
 either on horseback or on an elephant magnificently caparisoned. 
 When he sat in the public audience hall of the palace, clothed 
 * in purple and fine linen,' to hear the petitions and appeals of 
 his subjects, four attendants massaged his limbs with ebony 
 rollers. One of the most splendid of the court functions was 
 the celebration of the Emperor's birthday, when, according to 
 an ancient Aryan custom, his hair was washed in the presence 
 of the court, and the attendant princes and nobles of the 
 Empire brought rich presents to their sovereign. Displays 
 of arms of Kshatriya chivalry ; rhinoceros, elephant, ram, 
 and bull fights ; chariot-racing with horses and oxen yoked 
 together, and hunting, were the principal amusements of the 
 court. 
 
 Both Chandragupta and his minister Chanakya are said 
 to have favoured the followers of Mahavira,i who, though 
 unorthodox in the Brahmanical sense, did not make so wide 
 a breach in the Vedic tradition by disputing the existence of 
 the soul, a sin for which the Buddhists in Chandragupta's time 
 seem to have been classed as heretics and placed outside the 
 Aryan pale. But it does not follow that Chandragupta was 
 himself of the Jain persuasion because he bestowed imperial 
 bounty upon Mahavira's followers, for it was the recognised 
 duty of an Indo-Aryan monarch to be generous towards all 
 religious devotees, even the unorthodox, provided that their 
 ^ U. D. Barodia, History and Literature of Jainism. 
 
 84 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 doctrines did not subvert the whole foundation of Aryan 
 religion. 
 
 The imperial revenue was derived from many sources. 
 Besides the ordinary tax of one-sixth of the produce of com- 
 munal lands or of fisheries, which was the raja's due according 
 to the oldest Aryan tradition, there was the revenue from the 
 Crown domains ; from the working and leasing of mines, 
 pearl fisheries and salt manufacture, which were State mono- 
 polies ; the hire of Government ships and boats ; irrigation 
 assessments ; tolls on merchandise ; taxes on liquor and 
 gambling-houses ; fees for passports and for testing weights 
 and measures ; and fines imposed for various offences. 
 
 The system of collecting the land revenue followed the 
 organisation of the village communities previously described. 
 The headman, or gopa (lit. cowherd), of each of the smaller 
 groups of villages was responsible for keeping a register of 
 householders and their lands, which gave their occupations, 
 caste, income, and property in servants and live-stock, and 
 the amount of the tax payable, whether in money or kind, if 
 they were not exempt from taxation, or the State service for 
 which they were liable in lieu of taxes. The sthdnlka, or 
 mayor, of the district towns had under him a staff of revenue 
 officials who performed similar duties for the larger groups 
 of villages and townships ; while a higher officer acted in the 
 same way as revenue-collector for the fortified provincial 
 capitals, the State mines, gardens and forests, and for the 
 tolls on traffic. A Collector of Customs was posted at the 
 gates of fortified towns with an office staff to register the 
 merchants and their goods which passed through and to 
 examine passports. The markets were just inside the gates, 
 and the duties were levied only on the actual sales. Certain 
 kinds of goods, such as arms and armour, metals, vehicles, 
 grain, live-stock, and precious stones, were exempt from duty 
 and were therefore offered for sale outside the gates. No 
 duty was levied on articles intended for religious purposes or 
 for marriage festivals, or on presents for the king. Government 
 stores, and anything to be used for women in childbirth. 
 
 85 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Double duty was charged to a mercliant coming without a 
 pass, and eight times the amount if the pass was found to be 
 forged, while very heavy fines were imposed for smuggling. 
 
 The revenue received from these recognised sources was 
 not always sufficient for the State expenditure, and Chandra- 
 gupta and his ministers were sometimes driven to various 
 financial shifts to meet great emergencies — one of which, no 
 doubt, was the defence of the realm against Seleukos' invasion. 
 Thus it is said that special appeals were made for the people's 
 ' benevolences ' to replenish the State finances, that the rich 
 stores of gold in the temple treasuries were drawn upon, 
 and that eight hundred million debased silver coins were issued 
 from the imperial mint ; but though Kautiliya proposes various 
 extraordinary and irregular means of raising revenue, there is 
 no suggestion that such measures lay within the divine right of 
 kings, or were justified by any circumstances save the common 
 weal and grave dangers threatening the existence of the 
 State. 
 
 If Chandragupta's hand lay heavy upon his subjects, there 
 is no evidence except that of prejudiced Greek writers that his 
 government was deliberately oppressive. His justification lay 
 in his success in freeing Aryavarta from the Macedonian yoke, 
 an autocracy which would have been far less tender with the 
 rights of Aryan freemen. Popular legends represent him as 
 the Indian King Alfred who in the face of great difficulties 
 struggled successfully to free his country from the vicious 
 rule of the Nanda kings and from the yoke of the foreign 
 invader. Chanakya was ugly and deformed, but an accom- 
 plished scholar and a great statesman, who served his master 
 faithfully with the wisdom of a serpent, which prevailed over 
 all the wiles of his enemies and made the Magadhan Empire 
 the greatest and most glorious Aryavarta had ever known. 
 
 The organisation of Chandragupta's army followed the 
 Indo- Aryan tradition of warfare. After his succession to the 
 throne of Magadha it is said to have numbered six hundred 
 thousand infantry, swordsmen, and archers ; thirty thousand 
 cavalry; over eight thousand chariots drawn by two or four 
 86 
 
THE MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 horses and holding two warriors each; and nine thousand 
 elephants each seating three bowmen. Chandragupta had also 
 an effective navy, the details of which are not recorded, though 
 Kautiliya mentions ocean-going ships as well as vessels for 
 coast and river service. The administration of the army and 
 navy was, like that of the imperial capital, under a commission 
 of thirty members divided into six panchayats, or councils of 
 five. The first controlled the navy ; the second the army trans- 
 port and commissariat services; the third the infantry; the 
 fourth the cavalry ; the fifth the war-chariots ; and the sixth 
 the elephant force. 
 
 Chandragupta reigned twenty-four years and died in 296 B.C., 
 probably before the age of fifty. He left to his son Bindusara 
 a great and powerful empire which kept the foreign invader 
 at bay for a century after his death. Bindusara, while he was 
 Yuva-rdja, or Crown Prince, had no doubt been trained in the 
 art of war and, according to Aryan custom, taken a leading 
 part in the proceedings of the imperial Council — his place 
 being after that of the Purohita, the Royal Chaplain or highest 
 lyord Spiritual. He was thus well qualified to carry on his 
 father's poUcy, both in military and civil matters, and to 
 maintain the respect which the Mauryan dynasty had won 
 both at home and abroad. But so far as is known his reign 
 of twenty-five years was uneventful and he left no mark of a 
 strong personality upon the records of the time, unless the 
 extension of the Mauryan Empire in a southerly direction to 
 the latitude of Madras, so as to include the whole of the Dekhan, 
 is to be attributed to him, as Mr Vincent Smith believes. 
 
 Beyond this the only known events of his reign are the 
 despatch by Antiochos, Seleukos' son and successor, of a new 
 embassy, headed by Deimachos, to represent him at the court 
 of Pataliputra instead of the one of which Megasthenes was 
 the leader ; and of a similar one by the ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy 
 Philadelphus, of which Dionysios was the chief. The latter, 
 like Megasthenes, left written accounts of his impressions of 
 India. We need not infer that these diplomatic missions 
 marked the beginning of a close intercourse between India, 
 
 87 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Mesopotamia, and|Egypt, but only that tlie prestige of the 
 Mauryan dynasty was so great that the Western Powers thought 
 it worth while to recognise it. A sidelight is thrown on Bindu- 
 sara's personal interests by a letter he is said to have written 
 to Antiochos requesting that among the usual presents to be 
 brought by the Greek ambassador should be included figs 
 and raisin wine, adding confidentially that for a real Greek 
 philosopher he was willing to pay a high price. Antiochos 
 politely refused to make a bargain on the ground that his 
 philosophers were not for sale, but even so slight an incident 
 shows that there was both intellectual and commercial inter- 
 course between Bast and West at a time when Aryan interests 
 in both continents were similar. The fact is also worth noting 
 that Asoka's father had a philosophical bent of mind. 
 
 88 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ASOKA 
 
 IF the foundation of the Mauryan dynasty by Chandra- 
 gupta was the culminating-point of Aryan political 
 supremacy in India, the accession of his grandson, 
 Asoka, about 268 B.C., and his subsequent proclamations 
 of the Dharma of the Enlightened One as the law of the 
 land, must be taken to mark the final breaking down of the 
 racial barriers between Aryan and non- Aryan, and the beginning 
 of the history of India as distinguished from that of Aryavarta. 
 The process had doubtless been a gradual and continuous 
 one for many centuries before that time, but Asoka did for 
 Buddhism in the Bast what Constantine did for Christianity 
 in the West ; he gave a sect which, though already prosperous, 
 was subject to much contumely and opposition the prestige 
 of imperial patronage and used the whole organisation of 
 the State to propagate its doctrines. Of the success of the 
 Buddha's teaching and the fortunes of his followers in the 
 two and a quarter centuries which elapsed from the time of 
 the Pari-Nirvana in 483 B.C. until Asoka became a lay disciple 
 very little is known. But there is good reason to suppose 
 that in spite of the hostility of the Brahmans to the heretical 
 doctrines, the teaching of the Kshatriya Prince had obtained 
 powerful support from some of the ruling rajas. Ajatasatru, 
 King of Magadha, the founder of Pataliputra, was one of those 
 who had patronised the Buddhist Sangha and built a stupa 
 over relics of the saint. It is also possible that through royal 
 influence his philosophical system had found a recognised place 
 in the centres of Aryan learning, and that the wandering 
 bhikkus trained in the Buddhist schools to preach the Eight- 
 fold Path had won many adherents among the lower ranks of 
 
 89 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the village population. The success of Jain ascetics in opposing 
 the pretensions of orthodox Brahmanism would also have 
 reacted in favour of the Buddha's teaching. Thus though in 
 some localities the Buddhists may have been treated as heretics 
 and compelled to live outside the Aryan pale, in others the 
 Sangha had probably become a powerful political organisation 
 which even the Brahmans were compelled to respect. 
 
 Asoka in his father's lifetime had served as governor both 
 of the north-western province, of which Taksha-sila, Chanakya's 
 Alma Mater, was the capital, and of Western India, the capital 
 of which was Ujjain, another great centre of Aryan culture, 
 as renowned for its astronomical schools as Taksha-sila was 
 for its teaching of medicine. In his father's court and in 
 these famous universities he had doubtless learnt all the 
 accomplishments of a Kshatriya prince, which included at 
 least a superficial knowledge of some of the current systems 
 of Aryan philosophy. But as a young man his main pre- 
 occupation was the art of war, and it is supposed that his 
 succession was not a peaceful one and that his right to the 
 throne was disputed by an elder brother who may have been 
 passed over in his father's settlement of the Yuva-rdj. Accord- 
 ing to Aryan law the reigning monarch chose the fittest among 
 his nearest relatives or sons as the heir to the throne : the eldest 
 son had no prescriptive right by birth alone. 
 
 The ceremony of coronation, or royal consecration,^ by which 
 Asoka was formally confirmed as sovereign ruler of Aryavarta, 
 * beloved of the Devas/ was not celebrated until four years 
 after his accession. His famous edicts were dated from the 
 year of his consecration, as, according to Aryan law, the 
 monarch before that ceremony is performed is only, as it 
 were, on probation. These edicts, or proclamations inscribed 
 on magnificently wrought stone pillars representing the imperial 
 standards, or carved in the living rock, furm'sh the most reliable 
 data of the events of Asoka's reign. Thirty-four have been 
 discovered, some of them only recording the visits paid by 
 Asoka to the holy places of Buddhism, others dedicating 
 
 1 Abhisheka, lit. sprinkling over (with Ganges water). 
 90 
 
A S O K A 
 
 hermitages for the use of the Ajivikas, a certain sect related 
 to the Jains upon which imperial patronage was bestowed. 
 The rest are admonitions to the State officials and the members 
 of the Order, issued for the benefit of Asoka's subjects in the 
 outlying provinces of his dominions, setting forth the essence 
 of the Dharma as preached by the Buddha in words apparently 
 dictated by the Emperor himself. 
 
 From these contemporary records we learn that in the 
 ninth year of his reign (256 B.C.), or the thirteenth from the 
 date of his accession, Asoka entered upon the conquest of 
 Kalinga, the powerful kingdom of the east coast lying between 
 the rivers Mahanadi and the Godavari and Krishna. In this 
 successful campaign, which ended with Kalinga becoming 
 a new province of the Magadhan Empire, it is stated {Rock 
 Edict XIII) that one hundred thousand people were slain, one 
 hundred and fifty thousand carried away as prisoners, and that 
 vast numbers of non-combatants perished. Asoka expresses 
 his profound sorrow not only for the slaughter of fighting men 
 and the misery of prisoners of war, but for the Brahmans and 
 pious men of all sects and for householders within the Aryan 
 pale, " their friends, acquaintances, comrades, and relatives," 
 who had suifered all the cruel consequences of war — " violence, 
 slaughter, and separation from those whom they love. " " Even 
 upon the forest tribes," continues the proclamation, " His 
 Majesty has compassion and he seeks their conversion, inas- 
 much as the might even of His Majesty is based on repentance." ^ 
 The proclamation concludes with the declaration that in his 
 Majesty's opinion the only true conquest lies in the conquest of 
 self (by the Dharma) — a maxim which finds a parallel in Bhima's 
 recital of kingly virtues in the Mahabharata : "A king should 
 first subdue himself and then seek to subdue his foes. How 
 should a king who has not been able to conquer his own self 
 be able to conquer his foes ? " {Santi Parva, Sect. lyXIX, 4). 
 
 According to tradition the Buddhist monk who won the 
 Emperor as a lay disciple and afterwards induced him to 
 become one of the Order was Upagupta, mentioned in other 
 * For a full translation of the edict see Vincent Smith's Asoka, pp. 129-133. 
 
 91 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 inscriptions as having accompanied Asoka on his State pil- 
 grimages to the holy places of Buddhism. The successive 
 proclamations record the gradually increasing zeal of Asoka 
 for the propagation of the Buddhist faith. For two and a 
 half years he was content with being a lay disciple, but 
 in the eleventh year of his reign he entered upon the Aryan 
 Eightfold Path, or, in other words, was ordained as a member 
 of the Buddhist Sangha. In the inscription recording the 
 fact [Edict VIII) he lays out for himself the royal Path along 
 which a follower of the Sakya Prince should go — pilgrimages 
 devoted to works of piety ; reverence and liberality to ascetics 
 and Brahmans ; reverence to elders ; the welfare of the 
 country and people ; the proclamation of the Dharma and 
 the explanation of it. These State pilgrimages were ordered 
 to take the place of the royal hunting parties which had been 
 the traditional amusements of Aryan nobility. The slaughter 
 of animals for sacrifice was forbidden at Pataliputra, the 
 number of public festivals being restricted so that the order 
 might be the more easily enforced. To set a good example, 
 no animal food was served at the imperial court. 
 
 The duties of the central Government with regard to the 
 planting of avenues and fruit-gardens, the building of rest- 
 houses, the digging of wells along the public roads, the provision 
 of medical aid, and the cultivation and distribution of medi- 
 cinal plants were not only insisted upon, but animals are 
 specially mentioned as being entitled to these benefits as 
 much as human beings. To ensure that the appeals and 
 petitions of his subjects were promptly heard and that public 
 grievances were redressed without delay, Asoka gave orders 
 that there should be no fixed time for attending to such 
 business as heretofore, but that " at all times and in all places, 
 whether I am dining or in the ladies' apartments, in my 
 bedroom or in my closet, in my carriage or in the palace 
 gardens, the official reporters should keep me constantly 
 informed of the people's business, which business of the people 
 I am ready to dispose of at any place" [Rock Edict VI).^ And 
 
 * Vincent Smith's Asoka, p. 122. 
 92 
 
ASOKA 
 
 further, if any difficulty should arise in the bestowal of 
 the imperial bounty or in the execution of orders, through 
 disputes arising in the agency entrusted with them (the 
 Parishat), it was commanded that immediate report should 
 be made to the Emperor " at any hour and at any place," for, 
 says Asoka, "work I must for the commonweal." 
 
 Asoka also issued instructions for the guidance of the State 
 officials who supervised the administration of towns, districts, 
 and provinces. They were enjoined to regard all men as the 
 Emperor's children, whose happiness in this world and the 
 next was his chief desire. They were warned to be careful 
 in their conduct, for those who neglected their duty would 
 gain neither the favour of Heaven nor of the Emperor. They 
 were to prevent false imprisonment, the unjustifiable torture 
 of citizens, and any acts of violence. In their behaviour they 
 must avoid envy, harshness, impatience, idleness, and lack 
 of perseverance — faults which prevented them from being 
 useful State officials. And that these orders might be under- 
 stood by the people, Asoka gave directions that they should 
 be read regularly at public festivals and at the provincial 
 assemblies, which were to be held every three or five years 
 {Provincial Edict No. i, detached Edict). 
 
 To the people themselves Asoka addressed numerous edicts 
 calling on them to observe the precepts which the Departed 
 One had proclaimed as unalterable and true, and to join 
 in their sovereign ruler's efforts to establish the Dharma, 
 " because even the small man can, if he choose, by exertion 
 win for himself much heavenly bliss." This was the Dharma, 
 the Law of Good Living, by devotion to which every one 
 might gain peace of mind, joy in this life and in the life here- 
 after. The clergy were enjoined to read attentively the 
 Good Law and to meditate upon it, so that the laity, male and 
 female, might be persuaded to do the same. Parents should 
 be obeyed ; the teacher must be reverenced by the pupil ; 
 truth must be spoken ; no living thing should be sacrificed 
 or injured ; disputes should be avoided, personal indulgence 
 restricted ; but generosity to friends, acquaintances, relatives, 
 
 93 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Brahmans, and pious men were to be encouraged. Those who 
 were too poor to give lavishly could fulfil the Good Law by- 
 cultivating self-control, purity of thought, gratitude, and 
 fidelity. Charity must be practised, ceremonies had to be 
 performed, but there was no charity like the gift of the Dharma, 
 and the only ceremony that would bear good fruit was that 
 which included kind treatment of slaves and servants, respect 
 for teachers and for the sacredness of life, and liberality to 
 religious devotees and Brahmans. 
 
 " The ceremony of the Dharma is not temporal ; if it fails 
 to attain the desired end in this world, it surely begets eternal 
 merit in the other world." But a man must reverence all 
 sects and never think that he honours his own by disparaging 
 that of another man for trivial reasons. " All sects deserve 
 reverence for one reason or another. By thus acting a man 
 exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the 
 sects of other people " {Edict XII). " His Majesty cares not 
 so much for donations or external reverence as that there 
 should be a growth of the essence of the matter in all sects." 
 
 By a special edict issued in the twenty-seventh year of his 
 reign Asoka made regulations for the protection of birds and 
 animals and other living things. Some were scheduled as 
 exempt from slaughter, including parrots, adjutant birds, 
 Brahmani ducks, grey doves, village pigeons, geese, Brahmani 
 bulls, stags, rhinoceroses, squirrels, flying-foxes, lizards, tortoises, 
 prawns, and queen-ants ; also she-goats, ewes, and sows with 
 young or in milk and their young up to six months, and all 
 four-footed animals which were not eaten or otherwise used 
 by man. Forests were not to be burnt, not even chaff " con- 
 taining living things," and the living were not to be fed with 
 the living. On certain days fish were not to be caught or 
 sold, and no animals living in elephant preserves or fish- 
 ponds were to be destroyed. At other times the branding of 
 horses and oxen and the castration of cattle were forbidden. 
 
 Though Asoka was thus solicitous for the welfare of all 
 living beings, in the case of criminals he apparently did little 
 to relax the severity of Aryan law, but used its machinery to. 
 
 94 
 
ASOKA 
 
 the fullest extent for maintaining good conduct according to 
 the teaching of the Buddha. Capital punishment and the 
 torture of prisoners to elicit confession were not abolished. 
 He only endeavoured to secure the just administration of the 
 law, and in the case of criminals condemned to death ordered 
 a respite of three days, in which time their relatives could 
 endeavour to win their repentance, so that " even during their 
 imprisonment they may gain the next world." 
 
 But " in order to see that justice was done and to minister 
 to the spiritual and temporal needs of his subjects" Asoka 
 appointed special officers, censors or monitors of the Dharma, 
 whose duties were to prevent wrongful imprisonment or 
 punishment, to remove hindrances from the path of the faithful, 
 to help parents with large f amihes and others in distress through 
 misfortune or old age. They were entrusted with the dis- 
 tribution of the imperial bounty and with the supervision 
 of various charitable institutions. Their jurisdiction even 
 included the affairs of the Sangha and of all religious orders, 
 Brahman, Jain, and others. They were likewise charged with 
 the superintendence of the female establishments of members 
 of the imperial family residing at Pataliputra and some of the 
 provincial capitals. 
 
 Nor was Asoka's zeal for the advancement of the Dharma 
 limited by the boundaries of his great empire. The indepen- 
 dent tribes beyond his borders were also to be taught the 
 iGood I^aw. He dispatched medical missions to Ceylon and 
 ito the Chola, Pandya, Satiyaputra, and Keralaputra kingdoms 
 iof Southern India with remedies for man and beast, and used 
 his diplomatic connections with Antiochos of Syria, Ptolemy 
 Philadelphus of Egypt, and the kings of Macedonia, Epirus, 
 and Cyrene to spread the wisdom of the Enlightened One. 
 
 According to the Sinhalese tradition the most important 
 and successful of these missions was one headed by Mahendra, 
 one of Asoka's brothers, who had followed his example by 
 joining the Order. It seems to have begun work by estab- 
 ishing a monastic centre in Southern India, from whence 
 Mahendra is said to have passed into Ceylon and to have 
 
 95 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 quickly won as converts the king Tissa and the whole of his 
 court. 
 
 Mahendra, according to the same tradition, was afterwards 
 joined by his sister Sangliamitra, who brought with her a 
 branch of the sacred Bo Tree from Bodh-Gaya, and with the 
 help of the Princess Anula founded the first Buddhist nunnery 
 in the island, while Mahendra devoted himself to organising 
 the male members of the Sangha. Both these royal mis- 
 sionaries are believed to have spent the rest of their lives in 
 the island, and the great stupa at Mihintale is pointed out 
 as the memorial containing Mahendra's ashes. The legends 
 associating Asoka's brother and sister with the Ceylon mission 
 are interwoven with many miraculous incidents, and some 
 Oriental scholars regard them as entirely fictitious, but the 
 story of the Bo Tree is represented on the sculptures of Sanchi, 
 which are very close to Asoka's time, and there is no doubt 
 that the conversion of Ceylon to Buddhism was due to Asoka's 
 missionary efforts. 
 
 Tradition also is the sole authority for the statement that 
 Asoka in the eighteenth year of his reign summoned a General 
 Assembly or Council of the Sangha to Pataliputra for the 
 purpose of eradicating heresy, to clear up disputed points of 
 doctrine, and to enforce rules of discipline among members 
 of the fraternity. Several of the rock edicts prove that matters 
 of this kind did — as might be expected from such a zealous 
 and indefatigable member of the Sangha — receive his atten- 
 tion, and the fact that no references to the Council of Patali- 
 putra are made on the Asokan inscriptions so far discovered 
 in no way renders it improbable that the Emperor adopted 
 this traditional Indian method of dealing with such questions, 
 though the year of the Council's meeting is uncertain. 
 
 The course of the State pilgrimages which Asoka instituted, 
 in place of royal hunting-parties, and the holy places of Bud- | 
 dhism which he visited were marked by memorials in the 
 form of imperial standards {dhwaja-stamhhas), splendidly ■ 
 wrought in stone and inscribed with Asoka's edicts or inscrip- 
 tions recording the Emperor's visit. Many of these still exist 
 
 96 
 
5- Capita!, of Asoka's Pii,i,ar at Sarnath 96 
 
ASOKA 
 
 in a more or less perfect conditian. The picturesque tradi- 
 tional account of his grand tour states that on the advice 
 of his ministers Asoka sent for Upagupta to act as his guide. 
 The great abbot came from his forest retreat near Mathura, 
 travelling by boat down the Jumna and Ganges with eighteen 
 thousand members of the Order as companions. At Patali- 
 putra they joined the Emperor's suite, and with a splendid 
 military escort the imperial procession started for the lyUmbini 
 Garden. There, as Asoka's inscribed standard still records, 
 Upagupta pointed to the Buddha's birthplace, saying, " Here, 
 Great King, the Venerable One was born. Here was the first 
 memorial consecrated to the Enlightened One ; and here, 
 immediately after His birth, the Saint took seven steps upon 
 the ground." Asoka then did reverence to the holy place, 
 ordered an imperial standard to be set up there, distributed 
 largesse of gold, and made the village free of State taxes for 
 ever. Kapilavastu, the scene of the great Renunciation, was 
 the next place visited, then the Bodhi Tree at Gaya under 
 which the Sakya Prince attained Nirvana. There Asoka built 
 a shrine, probably similar to the one which now exists at the 
 place, and lavished alms upon the crowds of mendicants — a 
 hundred thousand gold pieces, so the story goes. Then the 
 great procession passed on to Sarnath, the Deer Park or sacred 
 grove in which the Buddha first proclaimed the Dharma, or 
 " turned the Wheel of the Law" ; and next to Sravasti, the 
 monastery where the Saint lived and taught. Then to Kusi- 
 nagara, where He passed away or reached the goal of Pari- 
 Nirv'^ana. 
 
 At Sravasti Asoka did reverence to the stupas of the Buddha's 
 disciples. At the stupa of Ananda, the most devoted and 
 beloved, he gave, it is said, largesse of a million pieces of 
 gold, but at that of Vakkula only a single copper coin, for 
 Vakkula had not striven greatly in the Eightfold Path nor 
 had he done much to help his fellow-creatures. 
 
 From time to time Asoka recorded with satisfaction the 
 progress which the Dharma was making, not only in his own 
 dominions but in foreign lands. The gods who at one time 
 
 G 97 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 were regarded as true gods had now, he wrote, become untrue 
 gods. " Owing to my instructions this yearning for and 
 devotion to the Dharma have grown up from day to day and 
 will continue to grow " [Pillar Edict I). Yet it is interesting 
 to note that, like the Buddha himself, he did not claim to be 
 preaching any new doctrine, but " the ancient standard of 
 good living which leads to length of days." " The kings who 
 had ruled the land before him had desired that men should 
 live according to the Dharma, but had failed to persuade them. 
 He himself, both by personal example and by State measures, 
 had induced men to obey the lyaw, and now the Dharma 
 was growing and was increased in strength by obedience to 
 father and mother, obedience to teachers, reverence to the 
 aged, and kindly treatment of Brahmans and ascetics, of the 
 poor and wretched, yea, even of slaves and servants " [Pillar 
 Edict VII).'^ There was greater piety among men, cruelty to 
 animate creatures had diminished, there was less slaughter of 
 living beings, while even in the lands outside the empire, 
 " where the Greek king named Antiochos dwells, and be- 
 yond that Antiochos, to where dwell the four kings named 
 Ptolemy, Antigonos, Magas, and Alexander [i.e. the kings of 
 Egypt, Macedonia, Bpirus, and Cyrene], and in the south 
 the kings of the Cholas and the Pandyas, and of Ceylon . . . 
 everywhere men follow the Dharma as proclaimed by His 
 Majesty " [Edict XIII).^ 
 
 There was probably less exaggeration in Asoka's summary of 
 his own life's work than is usually found in royal proclama- 
 tions. He was using the whole organisation of a great empire — 
 and a very perfect one — which in the hands of Chandragupta 
 and Chanakya had been so powerful as a political and economic 
 machine, not for oppression or extortion, but solely for the 
 education of the masses. And if he exercised his authority 
 in an autocratic manner hardly in consonance with Aryan 
 traditions of kingship, there is every probability that he had 
 behind him the enthusiastic support of the great majority of 
 his subjects. The times were ripe for a great democratic 
 * Vincent Smith, Asoka, p. 156. ^ JUd., p. 156. 
 
 98 
 
ASOKA 
 
 movement in religious ttiought. The Aryan pale included so 
 many of non-Aryan race that the monopoly in spiritual 
 leadership which the twice-born classes asserted could no 
 longer be maintained. Though the intellectual impulse came 
 from the great minds of the Aryan aristocracy in both cases. 
 Buddhism and Jainism were essentially democratic move- 
 ments, and Asoka in putting himself at the head of the one 
 and extending State patronage to the other made himself a 
 great popular leader, while he disarmed the hostility of the 
 Brahman priesthood by his tolerant attitude towards all 
 religious sects. 
 
 It is significant also of the subtle influence which Brah- 
 manical thought was already beginning to have upon Buddhist 
 doctrine — an influence which was destined to modify profoundly 
 its whole philosophical basis — ^that Asoka in his edicts con- 
 stantly refers to the bliss of the life hereafter as the reward 
 of good living — ^the goal to which the pious strive to reach is 
 ' heaven ' {swarga), not Nirvana. " His Majesty thinks nothing 
 of much importance save that which concerns the next world." 
 He often cites the Buddha, the Venerable One, as the authority 
 for his ethical precepts, but the interpretation of the Good 
 and Ancient I^aw is given as his own : "I have appointed 
 officers among the people to expound and extend my teaching." 
 In making the moral law the guiding principle of life — a law 
 transcending ethical rules which bound human society — 
 instead of the Brahman law of sacrifice, which was a non- 
 moral law, Asoka was reaffirming the Buddha's teaching and 
 also, in a sense, going back to the principles of the Vedic 
 seers who made the efficacy of the sacrifice contingent on the 
 moral virtues of the sacrificer. But in laying so much stress 
 upon the reward of virtue in the next world as the highest 
 incentive for human energy in this Asoka was unconsciously 
 shifting the Buddhist logical position towards that compromise 
 with Brahmanism which eventually made the Buddha the 
 Supreme Deity, the Creator Himself, ruling over the Devas 
 whose influence upon the destinies of mankind he himself had 
 denied. 
 
 99 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 But no doubt Asoka in his edicts intentionally popularised 
 the Buddha's teaching to make it more comprehensible to the 
 uneducated masses to whom they were addressed. He care- 
 fully avoided any metaphysical arguments which the learned 
 Brahman might try to controvert. The order for Brahman, 
 Sudra, and for those outside the Aryan pale was the same : 
 " Strive to do good to all creatures — that is sufficient for your 
 salvation in this world and the next." In thus making the 
 supreme power of the State identical with the moral law 
 Asoka' s reign was not only one of the greatest epochs of 
 Indian culture, but a conspicuous landmark in the history of 
 civilisation. And there is no reason to question Asoka's claim 
 that the effect of his missionary zeal was felt far beyond the 
 borders of his own dominions. Recent archaeological research 
 has discovered evidence of the presence of Asoka's missionaries 
 in Egypt, and as no religion can be explained or understood as 
 a disconnected fact in the process of man's spiritual develop- 
 ment, it is more than justifiable to conclude that the Buddhist 
 missions established by Asoka prepared the soil from which 
 both Christianity and Islam afterwards sprang. 
 
 In India itself Asoka's propaganda, apart from its effect 
 in breaking down racial barriers and making India a nation, 
 had the most far-reaching social and cultural influence. The 
 Kshatriya and Brahman aristocracy had been meat-eaters and 
 addicted to strong drink — ^the intoxicating soma juice which 
 represented the nectar of the gods. There is little to show 
 how far the habits of the ancient Aryans had been changed 
 in this respect by their Indian environment before Asoka's 
 time, but the powerful influence of a highly centralised govern- 
 ment during a period of thirty-eight years and the restriction 
 of the slaughter of animals must have done much to form the 
 tradition of vegetarian food and non-alcoholic drinking which 
 became the rtile of the upper classes in Hindu society. And 
 the predominance of Buddhist thought in the universities of 
 the land must have had an equal influence in substituting 
 scientific investigation of cause and effect for a blind acceptance 
 of scriptural authority. 
 
 100 
 
ASOKA 
 
 At the same time Buddhism as a social and political creed 
 contained within itself elements of weakness which after 
 Asoka's death led quickly to the break-up of the Mauryan 
 Empire. The pious inclination of an impressionable people to 
 imitate the example of the Great Renunciation had such an 
 injurious effect upon social order that penalties were imposed 
 upon any man leaving his wife and family without adequate 
 provision for their support, and the prestige of the Sangha 
 withdrew the best part of the manhood of Magadha — the 
 central province of the empire — into a monastic life, so that in 
 after times it was known as Vihdra, 'the I^and of Monasteries.' 
 Moreover, Buddhist scholastic teaching speedily became infected 
 with the same intellectual vice which it had set out to combat — 
 the reference of every rule of life to scriptural authority, in 
 thi« case to the word of the Blessed One. The members of the 
 Sangha were bound to the observance of a set of rules as 
 stringent and meticulous as those of the Brahmans. The 
 Vindya texts refer all the minutiae of personal hygiene and 
 the organisation of the work of the Sangha not, as the Buddha 
 himself would have done, to natural laws of sound health 
 and self-discipline, but solely to the command of the Blessed 
 One. If the floor of the monastery was to be swept and kept 
 clean it was only because the Buddha had so commanded. 
 The Blessed One Himself had prescribed that the Sangha's 
 permission should be asked for having new-coming bhikkus 
 shaved — so it must be done. The Buddha had shown how 
 the monasteries were to be built ; what kind of bowls were 
 to be used ; how they were to be carried ; where needles, 
 scissors, and thimbles were to be kept, etc. — and there was 
 no other way. 
 
 The Master's message to the world — ^that to worship Good 
 was to worship God, and that good living, the Dharma, led 
 to emancipation from all the ills which afflict mankind, as 
 effect follows cause and water quenches fire — ^was preached 
 assiduously by the Buddhist missionaries whom Asoka sent 
 north, south, east, and west ; but the standard of conduct 
 set up by the Sangha itself did not reach to the high ideal 
 
 lOI 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 of its founders and the obscurantism with which the Brahman 
 priesthood had darkened the teaching of the Vedic seers 
 entered into the monasteries and nunneries of Buddhism. 
 Already in Asoka's time it is evident that the immense stimulus 
 given to Buddhist propaganda by imperial patronage tended 
 towards the development of a ritual hardly less extravagant 
 than the Brahmanical sacrifices it superseded. The forms and 
 ceremonies of rehc-worship were substituted for those of the 
 sacrificial altar, and, in Asoka's words, " instead of the sound 
 of the war-drum the sound of the drum of the Dharma is 
 heard, while heavenly spectacles of processional cars, elephants, 
 illuminations and the like, are displayed to the people " {Rock 
 Edict IV). But the millennium had not arrived and human 
 nature was not changed by the affirmation of great spiritual 
 truths. The miracle which Asoka expected by his proclama- 
 tions of the Dharma did not come to pass ; and the spiritual 
 insight which he so earnestly desired to give to all his subjects 
 is less evident in early Buddhist records than extravagant 
 faith in the wonder-working powers of the bodily relics of the 
 Saints who taught the Good Law. 
 
 Asoka himself, according to Buddhist legends, did much 
 to encourage such superstition by the most lavish expenditure 
 on the building of stupas to contain such relics, but we may 
 take it that the monkish tradition often did as little justice to 
 Asoka's character as it did to the memory of the Enlightened 
 One by attributing to him all the meticulous regulations 
 prescribed for members of the Sangha. It may, however, be 
 accepted as true that towards the end of his reign Asoka, 
 in order to gain further progress along the Aryan Eightfold 
 Path, adopted the strict ascetic practice of the Order and 
 perhaps retired from active participation in State affairs. 
 He died 226 B.C., in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, having 
 attained to the spiritual rank of Arahat, or Saint, which is next 
 to that of Full Enlightenment or Buddhahood. And if sanity 
 of thought, uprightness of character, and love of humanity can 
 be reckoned among the highest qualifications of sainthood, even 
 the narrowest sectarian need not grudge him the honour. 
 102 
 
ASOKA 
 
 Various legends, more or less entitled to credence, throw side- 
 lights upon Asoka's private life and domestic relations. One 
 of his consorts, Karuvaki by name, followed his own religious 
 inclinations, and her charitable donations are mentioned in 
 one of the edicts. In his old age Asoka lost his favourite 
 wife, Asandhimitra, who had been his faithful companion for 
 many years. He then married a young and vain woman 
 called Tishyarakshita, who is said to have been so irritated by 
 Asoka's devotion to the Dharma that she attempted without 
 success to destroy the holy Tree at Bodh-Gaya by incantations 
 — a story which under the circumstances seems very true to 
 life. Other folk-lore traditions tell of the tragic end of the 
 young Empress. She is said to have been attracted by the 
 beautiful eyes of Asandhimitra's son, Kunala, and to have 
 conceived a violent passion for him ; but when the pious 
 youth rejected her advances with horror Tishyarakshita's love 
 turned to hate, and a base attempt against his life schemed 
 by her was so far successful that the young prince was blinded 
 by the Emperor's officials at Taksha-sila. Kunala, after many 
 sufferings, found his way to his father's presence, and Asoka 
 was so enraged by the discovery of the plot that he ordered 
 Tish^^arakshita to be burned alive and inflicted terrible punish- 
 ments upon all concerned in it. Kunala, so the story goes, 
 afterwards recovered his sight through a miracle performed by 
 a monk who lived at the holy shrine at Bodh-Gaya. 
 
 103 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 MAURYAN ART 
 
 WHETHER in accordance with Aryan royal tradition 
 a great monument was raised over Asoka's ashes 
 by his grandson and successor, like those which 
 were built at Sanchi to the memory of the Good Men he sent 
 to teach the Dharma in the Himalayan region,^ there is as 
 yet no evidence. But with the monuments of the Asokan 
 period begins almost the earliest artistic record of Aryan 
 civilisation in India yet discovered. With the exception of 
 a few coins, a few remains of stone fortifications, a few hermit- 
 ages carved in the living rock, and a few simple brick stupas, 
 or burial-mounds, archaeological research has so far failed to 
 reveal any important works of Indian artists and craftsmen, 
 either Aryan or Dravidian, which can be definitely assigned 
 to the pre-Mauryan period. The fact seems almost inexplicable 
 when one contrasts it with the wonderful record of early 
 Egyptian, Cretan, and Hellenic culture which has been brought 
 to light in recent years. Differences of climatic and geological 
 conditions and the use of different building materials account 
 for it to a certain extent. A good deal is explained by the 
 fact that archaeological research in India, having been until 
 recent years spasmodic and unscientific, has not yet pene- 
 trated below the accumulations which thirty or more centuries 
 have piled over the remains of early Indian civilisation. But, 
 as it stands now, Indian art when it first appears conspicuously 
 in the ^ Maury an epoch had already reached a high state of 
 technical development, though it has not yet assumed the 
 characteristic forms of expression which Indian mysticism 
 gave it in later times. 
 
 1 See Rhys Davids' Buddhist India, pp. 299-300. 
 104 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 The sculptured art of the Mauryan period, as might be 
 expected from the social conditions of the time, shows two 
 very distinct phases. The first phase is distinguished by 
 great nobility of design, a cultured form of expression, and 
 the finest technical accomplishment. To this class, which 
 doubtless represents the pure Aryan artistic tradition, belong 
 the magnificent stone pillars — ^the imperial standards — which 
 Asoka set up at various places for displaying his edicts. They 
 were also placed as symbols of the Spiritual King, the Lord 
 Buddha, at the gatewa3^s of holy shrines. They were derived 
 from the royal or tribal ensigns which at the ancient Vedic 
 sacrifices were set up to mark the sacrificial area, and were 
 no doubt the work of the Aryan royal craftsmen, who, according 
 to the Ramayana, held equal rank with the officiating priests, 
 and, as Kautiliya tells, lived in the Brahman and Kshatriya 
 quarters of the king's city. They were in State service, and, 
 like the Brahmans, their persons were specially protected 
 by the common law. At the same time they were forbidden 
 to work for private gain. These were the master-builders 
 who planned the Aryan settlements on the lines laid down by 
 their Silpa-Sastras, built temples and royal palaces and all 
 those public works which came within the scope of the central 
 Government's functions. 
 
 The artistic traditions of these royal craftsmen must have 
 been inherited from the days of Aryan supremacy in the 
 Euphrates valley, and it is not therefore surprising that there 
 should be a close affinity between their art and that discovered 
 in Aryan palaces in Persia ; but the theory that the Mauryan 
 emperors imported all their best craftsmen from Persia shows 
 the lack of insight into Indian thought upon which the common 
 misunderstanding of Indian history is based. The symbolism 
 of these royal craftsmen is thoroughly characteristic of Indo- 
 Aryan thought, and the few suggestions of Hellenic and Persian 
 influence are generally much more satisfactorily explained 
 by considering the common origins of Indo-Aryan and 
 Iranian art than by the assumption that the great Mauryan 
 emperors set out to reproduce the palaces of the rival 
 
 105 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Aryan dynasty which had exacted heavy tribute from Indo- 
 Aryan freemen. 
 
 The so-called ' Persian bell-shaped capital ' of these stately 
 Mauryan pillars is a symbolic motif which is universal in 
 Indian art. The label is misleading, for the capital represents 
 a flower and not a bell. It is the mystic world-lotus with 
 turned-down petals so often mentioned in Indian poetry and 
 literature. In this particular case it is the blue lotus of the 
 sky, Vishnu's flower, and the pillar, or imperial standard, 
 surmounted by a lion or other heraldic animal, has the same 
 significance of world-dominion as the State umbrella which 
 is part of the paraphernalia of Indian royalty — for the umbrella 
 also represents a lotus-flower with turned-down petals, as is 
 seen in the sculptured ' tee ' which surmounts the relic shrines 
 of ancient India. 
 
 This lotus symbolism is more characteristic of Indian art 
 than Persian. As an instance of archaeological misnomers it 
 is interesting to note that the so-called sacred lotus of Egypt 
 [Nelumbium speciosum) is not an Egyptian but an Indian 
 flower.^ It may have been imported into Egypt from Persia, 
 or more probably from India, for it is doubtful whether it is 
 indigenous in Persia. It certainly is so in India, where it is 
 always recognised as the Brahma lotus, the Creator's flower, 
 which unfolds at the first flush of morning light, when Ushas, 
 the Dawn Maiden, flings open the doors of the sky. The pink 
 petals of the flower are the robes of the Dawn Maiden, while 
 the pericarp is the rising sun, the throne of the Creator. It 
 is thus associated with the very earliest Vedic traditions of 
 India, and it is quite possible that the sculptors who used the 
 symbolism of the world-lotus in the palaces of Persepolis were 
 some of the Aryan royal craftsmen of India taken into the 
 service of the Great King. 
 
 Other works which may certainly be ascribed to these royal 
 craftsmen of India are the hermitages with finely polished 
 walls carved out of the hardest granitic rock in the Barabar 
 hills, near Gaya, by Asoka's command for the use of the 
 
 ^ The only Egyptian ' lotus ' are Nymphaea loins and Nymphaea cerulea, 
 1 06 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 Ajivika ascetics. The great chapter-houses and monasteries 
 of Karle, Kanheri, Nasik, and other places are works of the 
 same school of craftsmen in later times, which will be dealt 
 with in their proper sequence. 
 
 The second of the phases of Mauryan art is shown in the 
 profuse sculpture of the stupas of Bharhut and Sanchi, which 
 record current events or legends connected with the life of 
 the Buddha as told in the Jatakas, This is folk-art expressed 
 with the vigour and sincerity characteristic of its class in all 
 countries. It cannot be called primitive, for it often reaches 
 to a very high standard of technique which proves a tradition 
 of great antiquity, but though the same Aryan symbolism 
 runs through it all it is generally less cultured and refined 
 than the handiwork of the royal craftsmen who superintended 
 the design and construction of these Asokan relic shrines. 
 It is clearly the work of the lower grades of craftsmen, classed 
 as Vaisyas or Sudras, and being so, it is less pure in style : 
 it is expressive of the craftsman's own racial character in 
 combining many non-Aryan elements with the Aryan ideas 
 which dominate it. 
 
 These two phases of M^-uryan art, therefore, when rightly 
 understood throw a vivid light upon the social conditions of 
 the time and are a revelation of the effect of the Buddhist 
 propaganda in gradually welding together the diverse con- 
 stituents of Indian society in the time of Asoka — an effect 
 which can be seen still more clearly in later monuments. 
 
 Before going further into the history of Indian art it is 
 necessary to consider briefly the fundamental ideas which 
 underlie the architecture of all Indian religious sects, from the 
 most remote antiquity down to the present day. The Buddha 
 and Mahavira were not the first of Indian sages to propound 
 a rule of life for the people ; for the whole aim of Indian 
 philosophy was to discover a way of living, intended at first 
 for the chosen people, the Aryans, exclusively, but afterwards 
 for all who came within the Aryan pale, and later on for 
 humanity at large. Philosophical ideas always ranged between 
 two extremes. The extreme pessimists preached the vanity of 
 
 107 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 all things and tlie futility of human endeavour, and so found 
 the burial- or cremation-ground the most appropriate place 
 for meditation. Naturally the symbols of their religious faith 
 became the stupa or funeral-mound, the ashes of the sacrificial 
 fire, the snow-clad mountain-peak, the moon or the setting 
 sun, and the white water-lily which unfolds in the night. 
 Their way of life was to obtain true knowledge — jndna-marga — 
 nothing else was worth struggling for. This cult was most 
 typical of Brahmanical thought, though by no means confined 
 to one school. At the other extreme was the optimist and 
 man of action, rejoicing in the vigour of mind and body, who 
 found the way of wisdom in doing his daily round of work 
 without regard to the life hereafter. His was the karma- 
 marga, the way of work, and the symbols were the rising sun, 
 which aroused the world from sleep, and the lotus, which 
 unfolded at the first flush of dawn. 
 
 Between the two extremes was the man who sought the 
 mean — the middle way — both in action and in thought. His 
 symbols were the sun in mid-heaven, the blue lotus-flower, 
 which reflects the azure of the cloudless sky ; and the places 
 best for meditation he found under the shade of the spreading 
 tree, which turned his thoughts to the mysteries of life, or 
 on a pleasant hill-top, from whence he could survey the world 
 around. His was the hhakti-marga, the way of faith, inspired 
 by joy and content with this world and hope for the next. 
 
 These three direct ways of thought, connected by many 
 intersecting curves, were by no means sectarian but common 
 to all religious schools. Nor can they be said to be purely 
 Aryan or Indian, for they express psychological distinctions 
 which are universal. At the same time the symbolism which 
 belongs to them is more characteristic of Indian artistic thought 
 than of any other school, and forms the key to the understanding 
 of much that archaeologists have either misinterpreted or left 
 wholly unexplained. It must be understood, however, that 
 no indication of this classification and the nomenclature which 
 belongs to it will be found in Sanskrit literature until compara- 
 tively late times ; but ages before Indian philosophers analysed 
 lo8 
 
 1 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 and systematised their religious doctrine it is possible to trace 
 ttie gradual evolution of ideas by the study of artistic symbols 
 typical of the different schools. 
 
 The earliest symbols found in Aryan art are the swastika, 
 the stupa, the holy mountain which represents the pivot or 
 centre of the world, and the tree — all of which may be said to 
 belong to the first dawn of Aryan religion, though they were 
 not the exclusive property of the Aryan race. The swastika, 
 which was a sacrificial symbol indicating the direction of the 
 circumambtilatory rite [Pradakshind) of the altar, was contained 
 in the cross-roads of the Aryan village plan running east and 
 west, north and south — which, as we have already seen, were 
 terminated by the four principal gates dedicated to the four posi- 
 tions of the sun. The village itself was consecrated ground, 
 the altar of sacrifice being represented by the central platform 
 or enclosure built round the Council Tree of the village at the 
 meeting of the cross-roads, which was also the chosen site 
 for the worship of Brahma the Creator, the Protector of the 
 four quarters of the universe, if the village were a Brahman 
 one, or of Vishnu the Preserver, in the person of the tribal 
 chief or king, if the fighting class predominated in the village. 
 In royal capitals the king's fortress-palace, chapel, and council- 
 chamber took the place of the Council Tree of the elders and 
 the shrine of the tutelary deity of the community. 
 
 Thus the sculptures from the Bharhut stupa which show the 
 Bodhi Tree pushing its branches out of the dome of a Buddhist 
 shrine represent an ancient Aryan village council-house and 
 temple appropriated to the teaching of the I^aw, as propounded 
 by Sakya Muni, the Enlightened One. It is significant that 
 the Buddha, as the Supreme Deity, subsequently took the 
 place of Brahma in the Trinity of Buddha, Sangha, and Dharma, 
 which Mahayanist ritual substituted for the Three Aspects of 
 Brahmanism — Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. But by his own 
 caste-fellows, the Kshatriyas, and by the mass of the people 
 the Buddha was worshipped as Vishnu-Narayana, the Eternal 
 One. The Brahmanical concept of the Three Aspects was 
 based upon the three positions of the sun, at morning, noon, 
 
 109 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and evening, or the three times of daily prayer, represented 
 by the eastern, southern, and western gates of the Aryan village 
 plan. In Mahayanist sculpture the stupa, placed upon a 
 square base carved on each face with an image of the Buddha, 
 was substituted for the four-headed image of Brahma as the 
 guardian of the four cross-roads. 
 
 The stupa, though of course venerated as a memorial of the 
 dead by all sects, probably did not have a place within the 
 boundaries of the Aryan village until it was adopted as a 
 symbol of a religious cult, as it was by Buddhists, Jains, and 
 by Brahmans of the Saiva school. Its place was in the crema- 
 tion- or burial-ground, outside the village boundaries and in or 
 near a grove of trees sacred to the lyord of Death, to which 
 ascetics of various schools resorted. In Asoka's time, however, 
 the stupa had become a universal symbol. It was, like the 
 fortified Aryan village, enclosed by a fence or stockade, which 
 marked the procession-path of the worshippers and was entered 
 by four gates at the four cardinal points. These gateways at 
 Bharhut and Sanchi are stone reproductions of the massive 
 timber constructions which formed the approaches to the 
 fortified capital of an Aryan chieftain, or to his palace enclosure. 
 On either side of the gateways are the carved stone royal, or 
 tribal, standards, similar to those which marked off the sacri- 
 ficial area in ancient Vedic rites, though the symbolism is 
 adapted to the ideas of the Buddhist cosmogony. The stupa 
 itself, like the Aryan village plan, was a symbol of the cosmos, 
 the solid hemispherical dome representing the heavenly vault, 
 the mystic blue lotus with turned-down petals which forms 
 the heavenly vault. A reliquary in the form of a Vedic sacri- 
 ficial altar surmounted the dome ; but the precious relics for 
 which the stupa was built were often for greater safety placed 
 in a chamber built in the solid brickwork of the dome. The 
 umbrella which crowned the reliquary was a part of the insignia 
 of royalty which gradually, like the dome, acquired a m^^stic 
 significance and developed into the pyramidal * tee,' a series 
 of umbrellas symbolising the heavenly tree or succession of 
 spiritual spheres leading up to final release from the chain of 
 no 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 existences. This ancient funeral monument is thus revealed 
 in Asokan sculpture as the principal object of worship for 
 the members of the Buddhist Sangha leading an ascetic life 
 who collected in the assembly halls or chapter-houses of the 
 Order to listen to the words of the Blessed One. It was placed 
 in the apse at the end of the chapter-house, and was either 
 profusely sculptured or covered with a layer of fine white 
 plaster and painted in fresco. 
 
 The stupa was equally venerated by the Jains, who also 
 used it as a reliquary. But it is an error to regard it as a 
 sectarian symbol used only by Buddhists and Jains. As a 
 cenotaph or burial-mound — a memorial of the dead and symbol 
 of Yama the lyord of Death — it was venerated by all sects alike. 
 The Jains and Buddhists only used it to symbolise a definite 
 philosophical concept — that of Pari-Nirvana, or the merging 
 of the finite Bgo with the Infinite. In orthodox Brahman 
 philosophy it was a symbol of Vishnu-Narayana, Eternity. A 
 natural symbol analogous to the stupa was Siva's solitary 
 snow-capped hermitage. Mount Kailasa, upon the slopes of 
 which grew the arboreal emblem of eternity, the stately 
 Himalayan deodar, or tree of the Devas. 
 
 The antithesis to the stupa and to Siva's paradise in the 
 eternal snows was the holy Mount Meru, Vishnu's abode, 
 which his devotees regarded as the centre or pivot of the 
 universe. With this terrestrial paradise were associated all 
 kinds of trees which from their flowers, fruit, or foliage were 
 considered the special gifts of the I^ord of lyife, the Preserver, 
 lyong before Aryan thinkers attempted to unravel the mysteries 
 of life and death the high hill with fertile slopes had been 
 regarded as a holy place from being used as a natural altar 
 for tribal sacrifices and as a site for the stronghold of the 
 chieftain, who was the high priest of sacrifice. So in 
 Asoka's time Indra's or Vishnu's mountain had from asso- 
 ciations of remote antiquity become connected with the 
 Kshatriya schools of religious thought which sought the way 
 of hhakti, or devotion, while the Brahman ascetics who 
 followed the path of knowledge as the shortest way to 
 
 III 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 salvation found their most appropriate symbol in the stupa and 
 snow-clad mountain. 
 
 Architecturally the symbol of Vishnu's mountain first 
 appears in the great shrine of Bodh-Gaya, built close to 
 or over the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha reached 
 the zenith of spiritual consciousness, Nirvana — Vishnu-Surya, 
 the Preserver, the midday sun, having by that time taken the 
 place of Indra as the patron deity of Aryan royalty. The cur- 
 vilinear pyramid, called the sikhara, which surmounts the 
 shrine is in its architectonic conception a representation of 
 the holy Mount Meru, but symbolically it has the same signi- 
 fication as Asoka's carved pillars or imperial standards : it 
 stands for the mystic four-petalled lotus with turned-down 
 petals, the so-called amalaka or stone finial which crowns it 
 representing the fruit of the flower. In the pillar the amalaka 
 is the abacus of the ' bell-shaped ' capital. 
 
 The existing temple of Bodh-Gaya can hardly be dated 
 earlier than the first century before Christ, ^ but there is good 
 reason to believe that it reproduces the design of the original 
 temple which Asoka built on the same site. The motif of the 
 sikhara, which afterwards became so conspicuous in Indian 
 temple architecture, especially in the north, can be traced 
 back to a much earlier date, and was in all probability brought 
 by Aryan builders into India from Mesopotamia. It appears 
 in the famous stele of Naram-Sin, who ruled in the Euphrates 
 valley about 2700 B.C., which was discovered by M. de Morgan 
 in Susa. This remarkable sculpture records the victory of 
 Naram-Sin over Satuni, King of lyulabu. For the Indian 
 historian it is of absorbing interest because the sculptor uses 
 exactly the same motifs which are found in Indian architecture, 
 clothed with Aryan religious symbolism, three thousand years 
 later. Naram-Sin, the conspicuous figure in the upper part 
 of the stele, having stormed the hill-fortress of his adversary, 
 who lies prostrate outside of it stricken with an arrow, is 
 trampling on the bodies of the slain and hurling them down the 
 slope of the hill. The conical structure on the hill-top is 
 ^ See Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India, by the author (Murray). 
 112 
 
7- Buddhist Stupa from the Amaravat? Scui<ptures 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 strikingly suggestive of the Indian sikhara, not only on 
 account of its form but because the sculptor has placed 
 over it the midday sun, Vishnu's blue lotus-flower, which 
 Indian builders represented by its fruit, the amalaka, used as 
 the finial of the sikhara. The inference to be drawn from 
 this sculpture may be that the sikhara was originally only 
 a tribal watch-tower placed upon a hill, just as the toran, 
 or gateway of the stupa, represented the fortified post for the 
 sentinels who guarded the entrances of an Aryan settlement 
 or camp. 
 
 In one of the Nineveh sculptures, described by Layard i as 
 a representation of the palace of Sennacherib, both the sikhara 
 and the stupa appear side by side in a group of buildings placed 
 at the foot of a mountain upon the slopes of which the arboreal 
 emblems of life and death, the flowering tree and the cedar 
 or pine-tree, are planted. In this case, as in Naram-Sin's 
 stele, the sikharas are probably the watch-towers of the royal 
 citadel ; the domed structures represent royal tombs like the 
 sttipas or reliquaries of Aryan saints in India. Used symboli- 
 cally the sikhara and stupa often appear side by side in Indian 
 temple enclosures, but the significance of the juxtaposition 
 and the derivation of it have been entirely misunderstood 
 by Fergusson and other archaeological writers. 
 
 The significant point for the historian is that in the ideas 
 connected with the earliest monuments of Indian art, the 
 stupa and sikhara-temple, one can already recognise the lines 
 of cleavage which separate the two great sectarian groups 
 of modern Hinduism, the Saivas and Vaishnavas ; the former, 
 being the intellectual heirs of Brahman philosophy, based 
 upon jnana-marga, the path of knowledge, while the latter 
 incline to the teaching of the Kshatriya schools which followed 
 the bhakti-marga, the way of devotion and faith. 
 
 The reason why Buddhist art of the Mauryan period appro- 
 priated both" sets of symbols was that the learned members 
 of the Sangha, as exponents of the true Law, claimed greater 
 authority than the Brahmans in divine knowledge, and at 
 * Nineveh, 2nd Series, Pi. XVI. 
 
 H 113 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the same time the popular teaching of the Buddha as a 
 Kshatriya leader of thought won for him the personal devotion 
 of the masses, by whom he was regarded as the great lyiberator 
 and representative of Aryan ideals of kingship. The sentiment 
 of hero-worship was concentrated in the bhakti-cult ; this we 
 may take to explain the fact that while in the chapter-houses 
 of the Sangha the stupa was invariably the chief object of 
 veneration, the sacred sites of Buddhism, like Sarnath and 
 Bodh-Gaya, are found strewn with numbers of stone sikhara- 
 shrines in miniature, sometimes carved with images of Ganesha 
 or other household gods, but all expressing the same senti- 
 ment — ^the people's adoration for their great national hero, 
 the Sakya Prince. 
 
 When the Vishnu, or sikhara, temple — dedicated to any 
 sectarian worship, Buddhist, Jain, or Brahmanical — ^was not 
 in the centre of the Aryan village or town, as the shrine of its 
 tutelary deity, it had its appointed place at the western end 
 of the King's Road. In this position it had one entrance only, 
 facing the east. The eastern front of the sikhara was pierced 
 by a great window of lotus-leaf shape, ^ symbolising the rising 
 sun and placed so that the first flush of dawn might light up 
 the interior of the shrine, for Vishnu-Narayana, the sun at 
 its nadir, was awakened from sleep by his bride, I^akshmi, 
 to whom under the name of Ushas, the Dawn Maiden, so 
 many of the Vedic hymns are addressed. A similar * horse- 
 shoe ' or sun window — ^which is the most characteristic feature 
 of Asokan architecture, being used as the principal decorative 
 motif as well as for practical purposes — was always placed 
 over the main entrance of the assembly halls of the Sangha, so 
 as to throw a brilliant light from the rising or setting sun, 
 or from the moon, upon the altar or stupa-symbol at the 
 further end. It was a most effective device both from an 
 artistic and utilitarian point of view, for nothing could be 
 more impressive than the contrast of the shining altar and the 
 dim light of the interior of the hall ; at the same time it gave 
 perfect ventilation to the sacred edifice. The lotus-leaf or I 
 
 * Or, according to Western terminology, horseshoe-shape. 
 114 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 sun window of early Indo- Aryan architecture was the proto- 
 type of the rose window of Christian churches, where it was 
 similarly placed and served the same purpose of lighting up 
 the altar. The churches were also frequently oriented on 
 the same principle, i.e. so that the rays of the morning sun 
 would fall upon the altar on the day of the patron saint to 
 whom the church was dedicated. 
 
 The record of Indian art of the Mauryan period is almost 
 entirely confined to the solid brick-built stupas and to the 
 assembly halls and hermitages cut out of the living rock. 
 As many of the latter are evidently reproductions of wooden 
 architecture, it has been assumed that all early Indian archi- 
 tecture was wooden, like that of Burma at the present day. 
 That was probably true of Magadha, the central province of 
 the Mauryan Empire. Megasthenes tells us that Pataliputra 
 was built of wood because the city was in constant danger from 
 floods and the breaches of the banks of the river upon which 
 it was built. The Atharva Veda also gives evidence that 
 wood was preferred as building material on account of the 
 facility it gave for shifting the site of a house. A Brahman 
 to whom a house has been presented composes an invocation 
 to Indra to facilitate the removal of it : 
 
 " The Builder has drawn thee together, pressed thee together, 
 placed five knots upon thee. Skilfully as the priest who 
 butchers [the sacrificial animal] do we with Indra' s aid disjoint 
 thy limbs. 
 
 " From thy beams, thy bolts, thy frame and thy thatch, 
 from thy sides [O house] abounding in treasures, the fastenings 
 of the dovetailed joints of the reed [-covering] do we loosen 
 here from ' the mistress of dwelling.' " {Atharva Veda, ix, 3.) 
 
 Probably the Aryans at the time of their first entry into 
 India and for a long time afterwards found movable buildings, 
 which could be dismantled and put upon their bullock-carts 
 as they trekked from place to place, the most convenient for 
 their settlements. The great primeval forests made wood 
 plentiful, and the sites of villages were often changed in times 
 of drought or plague, or when they moved on to win more 
 
 IIS 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 territory from the non- Aryan tribes. In later times it became 
 a tradition that the site of a royal capital should be changed 
 at least once every thousand years, as the soil by that time 
 became unfit for human habitation. The fact that wood 
 was used for the railings which enclosed the place of sacrifice, 
 and for the carved posts to which the victims were bound, 
 would also give to wooden forms a sacramental meaning. 
 This is sufficient to explain the fact that the stone rails enclos- 
 ing the stupas of Sanchi and Bharhut are exact imitations of 
 wooden construction, for they were probably built by, or 
 under the supervision of, Magadhan royal craftsmen sent by 
 Asoka for that purpose. But it is going much too far to 
 assume that craft conditions similar to those of the Magadhan 
 province prevailed all over the Mauryan Empire and that 
 Indian builders of that time were being instructed in masonic 
 craft by foreigners. There were doubtless many localities, 
 as there are now, in which geological conditions made stone 
 the most accessible and plentiful building material : the 
 technical perfection of Indian stonework of the Asokan period 
 indicates a masonic tradition many centuries old. 
 
 The Bharhut and Sanchi sculptures bear witness to the 
 wonderful continuity and vitality of the Indian craft tradition 
 both in domestic and religious architecture. The village 
 dwellings sculptured there are of the same type as the Bengali 
 cottages of the present day, with roofs of bamboo and thatch 
 admirably designed to meet the heavy rainfall of the south- 
 west monsoon. The three-storied building described as ' the 
 Palace of the Gods ' at Bharhut finds almost a replica in a 
 wealthy merchant's mansion at Bikanir — not very remote from 
 Bharhut — built recently by a living Indian master-builder. 
 
 The shrine adjoining ' the Palace of the Gods ' devoted to 
 the worship of Buddhist emblems shows the traditional plan 
 of a Hindu temple, which may be here described. The garbJia- 
 grihya, or inner chamber containing the sacred image or symbols, 
 is generally square in plan, but sometimes octagonal, circular, 
 or shaped like a lotus-flower with extended petals. This is 
 roofed either by the sikhara — the Vishnu symbol — or by the 
 ii6 
 
MAURYAN ART 
 
 pyramidal tower described by Fergusson as ' Dravidian/ 
 which is a development of the stupa dome shown in the shrine 
 of ' the Palace of the Gods.' In front of the garbha-grihya is 
 the antamla, a porch or verandah for the priests or custodians 
 of the shrine, which is often connected with a pavilion or porch 
 for the shelter of the worshippers, known as the mandapam. 
 The latter is generally supported by four or more pillars and 
 is either flat-roofed or covered by a dome. The mandapam 
 was both the church and assembly-hall of the village or town. 
 All these features of a medieval and modern Hindu temple 
 plan are clearly indicated in the contemporary representation 
 of a Buddhist shrine of the third century before Christ. 
 
 Another striking characteristic of Mauryan art is that in 
 all the sculptured representations of Buddhist shrines and 
 of Buddhist worship the image of the Buddha never appears, 
 and the events of the Master's life from the time of the Great 
 Renunciation are told by aniconic symbols or hieroglyphs. 
 Thus the attainment of Nirvana is S37mbolised by a pipal tree 
 with a throne or altar in front upon which various sacred 
 emblems are placed for worship. A prayer- wheel — ' the Wheel 
 of the lyaw ' — stands for the proclamation of the Dharma at 
 Sarnath, and a stupa represents the Pari-Nirvana, or the 
 Buddha's death at Kusinagara. 
 
 The orthodox canons of the Buddhist faith in Asoka's time 
 did not allow the personality of the Buddha to be worshipped 
 in the assembly halls of the Sangha, though probably pictures 
 and images of the Master were to be found among the household 
 gods of the non- Aryan laity. This puritanical spirit was quite 
 in consonance with the esoteric teaching of the Vedas, which 
 had a profound influence upon Aryan artistic expression : 
 " The vulgar look for their gods in water ; men of wider 
 knowledge in celestial bodies ; the ignorant in wood, bricks, 
 or stones ; but the wisest men in the Universal Self." Aryan 
 religious symbolism not only rejected the graven image, but 
 for many centuries refrained from committing to writing the 
 esoteric doctrines of the Upanishads, from the feeling that the 
 revelation of divine mysteries was too holy for any materialistic 
 
 117 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 vehicles of thought. It could only be imparted by direct 
 intercourse of soul with sotil and only realised by profound 
 meditation. It was therefore handed down from one genera- 
 tion to another, from asram to asram and from guru to chela, 
 the most elaborate precautions being taken to ensure the 
 perfection of this traditional Aryan scholarship. When the 
 language of the Vedas ceased to be a living one, Sanskrit 
 grammar was perfected by Brahman scholars to ensure perfect 
 accuracy of expression, and a wonderful system of memorising 
 was established which extended to the counting of each syllable 
 of the sacred slokas, while the correct pronunciation and 
 intonation of the chants was religiously observed, for a mantram 
 lost its efficacy if a single syllable were incorrect in expression 
 or intonation. 
 
 The aniconic symbolism of Asokan sculpture reflects the 
 spirit of Vedic idealism, but at the same time the popular 
 aspects of Indo- Aryan religion are also represented. The Devas, 
 the nature-spirits, who from time immemorial had been regarded 
 as the patron deities of the Aryan community, stand guard 
 at the four gateways of the Bharhut stupa, and popular divinities 
 like the snake-gods and goddesses and other denizens of the 
 forest, lake, and river, carved with the intense realism of 
 popular art, join in the worship of the symbols of the faith. 
 We have therefore in these invaluable historical documents a 
 most significant illustration of the tolerant spirit of Buddhist 
 teaching in Asoka's time, as declared in the Emperor's own 
 words : " The growth of the essence of the matter assumes 
 various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech : to 
 wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect by dis- 
 paraging that of another man for trivial reasons. Depreciation 
 should be for adequate reasons only, because the sects of other 
 people deserve reverence for one reason or another " {Rock 
 Edict XII). ^ 
 
 ^ Vincent Smith, Asoka, p. 128. 
 
 118 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MAURYAN 
 EMPIRE AND THE TURK! INVASIONS 
 
 THE Mauryan dynasty did not survive many years after 
 the death of x\soka. He was succeeded by his 
 grandson Dasaratha, a name which recalls that of the 
 Aryan king of the Mitanni who eleven centuries earlier had 
 ruled in Mesopotamia. Even before Asoka's death events 
 occurred which foreshadowed coming danger to India from the 
 quarter whence troubles always came — the north-west fron- 
 tier. About 246 B.C. Diodotos, satrap of the Baktrian province 
 of the kingdom of Syria, threw off the overlordship of Babylon 
 and established an independent Hellenic kingdom on the Indian 
 border, which was soon to renew the menace Chandragupta 
 Maurya had removed. Dasaratha seems to have continued 
 his grandfather's zealous religious propaganda and relied upon 
 the virtue of the Buddha's teaching to protect his dominions 
 from foreign aggression. His reign lasted only about eight 
 years, and as none of his successors had the capacity of Chandra- 
 gupta and Asoka for holding the reins of empire, the numerous 
 states which had acknowledged the suzerainty of Magadha 
 one by one renounced the supreme authority of the King of 
 Kings at Pataliputra, and the Mauryan imperial dynasty 
 virtually came to an end when Brihadratha was assassinated 
 by his commander-in-chief, Pushyamitra, in 183 B.C., though 
 descendants of Asoka continued to be rajas of Magadha down 
 to the seventh century a.d. 
 
 Even before this tragedy the north-west provinces appear 
 to have been lost to the Magadhan Empire, and the dangers 
 threatening the State may have induced the Council of the 
 empire to put the strong man Pushyamitra on the throne of 
 
 119 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Magadha in the place of the weak successors of Asoka ; for, 
 though he is said to have imprisoned one of the ministers, an 
 Aryan royal dynasty could hardly have been superseded by 
 another without popular support and the consent of the 
 majority of the Council. It may have been a Brahman faction 
 which put an end to Mauryan supremacy, for when he had 
 established his right as King of Kings by repelling a double 
 invasion of Magadha — one by Menander, a relative of the Bak- 
 trian king, and another by the Raja of Kalinga — Pushy amitra 
 celebrated the event and his consecration as the founder of 
 the Sunga royal line by the performance of the famous Vedic 
 rite, the great horse sacrifice, which Asoka had suppressed. 
 
 This was the most elaborate of the ancient Aryan sacrifices, 
 and it could only be performed by kings for the welfare of the 
 State and as a symbol of universal dominion. Thousands of 
 Brahman priests assisted, and they were lavishly rewarded by 
 gifts from the royal treasury. After appropriate ceremonies 
 a young war-horse, chosen for its auspicious colour and marks, 
 was led towards the north-east and then released to wander 
 at its will, in company with a hundred old horses, for a year. 
 The troop was escorted by a guard of a hundred Kshatriya 
 youths, and the king's army followed to fight any hostile 
 forces which dared to stop the passage of the sacrificial animal. 
 The success of the sacrifice naturally depended upon the 
 victory of the challenging army. The rulers of the states 
 through whose territories the horse wandered (or was judiciously 
 guided), if they acknowledged the suzerainty of the royal 
 sacrificer or were defeated in battle, followed in his (the horse's) 
 train and assisted in his further progress. In the meantime 
 at the royal capital the king was officiating at various sacred 
 rites ; the court minstrels and story-tellers daily chanted and 
 recited his praises and tales of his ancestors' prowess ; offerings 
 were made to Savitri, the goddess of wisdom, and alms were 
 bestowed upon the attendant Brahmans. After a year's 
 victorious progress the horse, accompanied by the subject 
 rajas, was brought back in triumph. It was then yoked to a 
 golden car with three other horses and, after elaborate cere- 
 
 120 
 
B R E A K-U P OFMAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 monies, sacrificed with many otiier victims to Agni, the Fire- 
 spirit, representing the sun, and to Soma, the intoxicating 
 juice of the plant so called, which was the nectar of the gods 
 and deceased ancestors and specially associated with the moon 
 and the god of war.^ In this rite, as in the stories of the 
 Ramayana and Mahabharata, one can trace the distinctions 
 between the Surya cult and the Chandra or Soma cult which 
 divided the Aryan clans into ' Surya-putras ' and ' Chandra- 
 putras.' 2 
 
 Pushyamitra's great horse sacrifice was long remembered 
 in Northern India, and the traditions were embodied in 
 Kalidasa's play, Mdlavikdgnimitra, or the story of Malavika 
 and Agnimitra, written about the fifth century a.d. Here 
 it is said that a body of Yavana, or Greek, cavalry attempted 
 to seize the horse as it wandered on the south bank of the 
 river Sindhu in Raj put ana, but that after a fierce struggle 
 they were driven off by Pushyamitra's forces, led by his grand- 
 son Vasumitra, * the mighty bowman.' 
 
 The celebration of this great national Aryan festival by 
 Pushyamitra has been taken by Mr Vincent Smith and other 
 writers to indicate a reaction towards Brahmanism and the 
 beginning of the gradual extinction of the Buddhist religion 
 in India. ^ It is necessary to consider how far this is true 
 and to what extent Buddhism can be said to have been extin- 
 guished in the land of its birth. That Pushyamitra celebrated 
 his victory over his enemies by the revival of the great national 
 festival cannot by itself be taken to mean a decline in the 
 Buddhist religion. Nor is it likely that Pushyamitra's perse- 
 cution of the Buddhist monks — assuming that the tradition 
 to this effect is reliable — was anything but a stimulus to the 
 faith of the Buddha's followers. Buddhism as a religion 
 never became extinct in India, though as a community the 
 Sangha was dissolved and disestablished from the position it 
 held in the State. And if the Brahman representatives of 
 
 1 See Barnett's Antiquities of India, pp. 169-171. 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
 ^ Early History of India, 2nd edit., p. 190. 
 
 121 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Aryan intellectuality took a leading part in the making of 
 Buddhism a world-religion, Buddhist philosophy was equally 
 powerful in the influence it exercised over Brahmanical 
 thought ; so that neither Brahmanism nor Buddhism in 
 Pushyamitra's time could have been quite the same as it was 
 in the time of Asoka. 
 
 Brahman influence was never supreme in pre-Buddhist 
 times ; such influence as it had was won by force of intellect 
 alone. Although Asoka abolished certain Vedic sacrifices and 
 diverted much public and private patronage formerly bestowed 
 upon Brahmans as such to the Buddhist religious organisations, 
 there is no reason to suppose that the Brahman intellect 
 failed to adapt itself to the new position as readily as it has 
 to modern conditions. Brahman members of the Sangha 
 would change their names and lose their Brahmanhood, but 
 it is most unlikely that they lost either their social status or 
 their intellectual influence. The new Brahmanism which 
 sprang up after the extinction of the Mauryan dynasty was 
 not, therefore, a sectarian reaction, but the sequence of a 
 process of assimilation and adaptation which was charac- 
 teristic of Aryan intellectuality. 
 
 It is supposed that Patanjali, the great Sanskrit grammarian 
 and reputed author of the Yoga-sutras, lived in Pushyamitra's 
 reign and witnessed the celebration of the great horse sacrifice. 
 We may well believe that the revival of Brahman scholarship 
 at this time was in a measure due to the exact logical S3^stem 
 taught in the Buddhist schools. Just as Christian thought 
 in the present day has been led to a more precise statement 
 of its position and to a readjustment of its views by the search- 
 light of modern science, so Vedic Brahmanism was cleared 
 of many intellectual cobwebs by the scientific broom which 
 Buddhist logic applied to it, Buddhist philosophy, like 
 modern science, recognised no arguments which could not 
 be referred to the inexorable law of cause and effect implied 
 in its interpretation of Dharma. When the Brahmans found 
 that the sanctity of Vedic traditions no longer sufficed to 
 gain acceptance for their theories they fortified their position 
 
 122 
 
BREAK-UP OF MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 by applying the same logical system to the interpretation of 
 the Vedas, and by a searching investigation into the founda- 
 tions of their beliefs. Thus the intellectual stimulus given 
 by Buddhist teaching was the indirect cause of the rising 
 influence of Brahmanism in the second century before Christ. 
 
 Whatever truth there may be in the stories of the persecution 
 of the Buddhists by Pushyamitra — Buddhist chronicles allege 
 that he burnt their monasteries and killed many of the monks — 
 it is certain that it was not against Buddhism as a religion, 
 but against the Sangha as a political power, that such violent 
 means of suppression were directed. It would have been a 
 flagrant outrage upon the Indo- Aryan sense of royal justice 
 for a king to attempt to controvert any form of religious 
 argument except by the weapons of logic in the public debating 
 halls. Pushyamitra, who had been the instrument of the 
 punishment of the Mauryan dynasty for neglect of the duties 
 of Aryan kingship and had yet to make the inheritance of his 
 own line secure, would hardly have been so impolitic as to 
 start the persecution of a powerful religious community, 
 though he may have punished political and social offences 
 with the severity recognised by Indo-Aryan law even in 
 Asoka's time. If, therefore, there is any truth in the Buddhist 
 tradition, we may take it that some members of the Sangha 
 were concerned in conspiracies against the Sunga dynasty. 
 
 Pushyamitra ruled as the paramount sovereign of Northern 
 India for about five years after the repulse of the last Hellenic 
 invasion under Menander. In driving the foreign invader 
 from the sacred soil of Aryavarta he played the same role as 
 the great Mauryan emperors, though not with the same 
 success. His empire did not include the provinces beyond the 
 Indus, and probably not even the Panjab or the territory 
 south of the Narbada river, for the rise of the Andhra dynasty 
 deprived Magadha of most of its southern provinces. Neither 
 did he retain the suzerainty of Kalinga, the conquest of which 
 had caused Asoka such profound remorse, though he success- 
 fully repelled the invasion of Magadha from that quarter. 
 
 Pushyamitra was succeeded in 148 B.C. by his son, the 
 
 123 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Crown Prince Agnimitra. The Sunga dynasty counted ten 
 kings and lasted 112 years before it came to the same inglorious 
 end as the Maury an about 72 B.C. The last of the line were a 
 succession of weaklings whose only record is neglect of their 
 royal duties and debauchery ; so that it is not surprising that 
 the Magadhan Council of State took measures to restore 
 political stability by putting an end to the Sunga dynasty 
 in the same way as the Mauryan line had been extinguished. 
 The tenth king, Devabhuti, a dissolute creature, was disposed 
 of by what Western writers have stigmatised as a Brahman 
 plot. But the violent measures adopted were probably 
 approved by the ministerial Council and by public opinion 
 of the time as a necessary act of State policy. 
 
 Vasudeva, who took a leading part in the tragedy, suc- 
 ceeded Devabhuti as king, but his dynasty, known as the 
 Kanva, failed to revive the glories of the Magadhan Empire, 
 and in 27 B.C. the fourth of the line, Susarman, was slain in 
 an attack on Pataliputra by one of the Andhra kings. Magadha 
 then lost its position as the paramount Indo-Aryan state in 
 Northern India for more than three centuries, though as a 
 centre of Buddhist culture it continued to exercise the greatest 
 intellectual influence. 
 
 Even during Pushyamitra's reign Magadha was barely able 
 to resist the ever-increasing pressure of invasion from the 
 north-west. Menander — or Milinda, as he is called in the 
 Buddhist chronicles — was strongly established at Kabul, which 
 had been included in the Asokan Empire, and though he was 
 defeated in his attack on Pataliputra, he, or the petty Baktrian 
 princes who acknowledged his authority, kept firm hold of 
 the Indus valley, Sind, and Rajputana. It was not until 
 the latter part of his reign that Pushyamitra ventured to 
 celebrate the great horse sacrifice which asserted his right 
 to the diminished empire of the Mauryans. 
 
 It is interesting for archaeologists but unnecessary for the 
 understanding of Indian history to follow the chequered fortunes 
 of the numerous Parthian and Baktrian kings who alternately 
 fought with each other and struggled for the possession of the 
 124 
 
BREAK-UP OF MAURYAN EMPIRE 
 
 north-west provinces of India. After many years of indecisive 
 warfare the political situation in Western Asia was entirely 
 changed by the appearance of new and strange combatants 
 in the arena. Pushyamitra himself might not have succeeded 
 in resisting the advance of the Graeco-Baktrian power had 
 not Menander's attention been diverted by the necessity of 
 meeting another foe on his own north-eastern border. Abotit 
 170 B.C. the Sakas, a great tribe of Turki nomads, were pushed 
 out of their pastures to the north of the Upper Jaxartes by 
 others, called the Yueh-chi or Kushans, and began to trek 
 southwards. Thirty or forty years afterwards they overran 
 the Parthian and Baktrian kingdoms, and, with the Yueh-chi 
 and Parthian tribes following them, they began to pour over 
 the Indus and gradually established themselves in the Panjab, 
 Rajputana, and Kathiawar. 
 
 There were reasons apart from prospects of conquest and 
 plunder which had turned the stream of Turki migration 
 towards India — reasons which make a vast distinction between 
 this and the subsequent invasions of Tartar tribes when they 
 came under the spell of Islam many centuries later. Though 
 Brahman chronicles refer with horror and disgust to this dark 
 period of foreign invasion which followed the break-up of the 
 Mauryan Empire, it is necessary to understand that the 
 political and social conditions were totally different from those 
 which obtained in earlier or later invasions of India. Western 
 Asia was by that time to a very large extent Buddhist. 
 Menander was a pious follower of the Dharma whose sayings 
 were recorded in the Buddhist chronicles. The Sakas, the 
 Yueh-chi, and other Turki tribes may have been among those 
 to whom Asoka's missionaries had carried the message of the 
 Good L^aw. Certainly in Western Asia they came under 
 Buddhist influence, and the nearer they approached the Indus 
 valley the more they threw off their nomadic habits and 
 adapted themselves to the settled life of Indo- Aryan civilisa- 
 tion. Thus many of them must have entered India, not as 
 barbarous conquerors, bent only on rapine and plunder, but 
 as disciples of the Sakya Prince pressing forward to their 
 
 125 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 holy land, as the Crusaders fought their way to the birthplace 
 of the Prince of Peace at Bethlehem. 
 
 Taksha-sila and Mathura, whether under Baktrian, Scythian, 
 Parthian, or Turki rule, continued to be seats of Buddhist 
 learning to which students from Western Asia and from China 
 came in great numbers. And as the organisation of the 
 Buddhist Church was Indo- Aryan, based upon the democratic 
 tradition of the village community, the establishment of 
 Baktrian or Turki Buddhist dynasties on Indian soil did not 
 mean the break-up or a profound disturbance of Indo-Aryan 
 society, but only the admission of new racial elements into the 
 Indo-Aryan pale, and a contribution of new ideas to the Indian 
 religious synthesis. Buddhism did not, as Asoka hoped, 
 prevent war, but it profoundly affected the psychology of 
 Asia and made India what it has remained to the present day, 
 the most religious country in the world. 
 
 126 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE ARYANISATION OF SOUTHERN 
 INDIA— THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 THE ultimate political effect of the constant invasions 
 from the north-west and of the weakening of the 
 organisation of Mauryan rule was very much the 
 same as that of the Muhammadan invasions in later times — ^to 
 shift the centre of Indo-Aryan political power further south. 
 The Aryanisation of the Dekhan and Southern India had 
 begun long before the foundation of the Mauryan Empire, 
 though it was not until after Asoka's death that the South 
 Indian dynasties began to play an important part in the 
 politics of Northern India. According to tradition Agastya 
 was the first Aryan sage who, long before Asoka's mission, 
 penetrated the great forest barrier south of the Vindhya 
 mountain range and brought the wisdom of the Vedas to the 
 Dravidians of the South. 
 
 Whether Agastya was a real personage or a name for a 
 new epoch in Dravidian civilisation may be disputed, but 
 according to the Ramayana Rama visited his forest hermitage, 
 and a temple dedicated to his memory in the Tanjore district 
 still exists. The extent of the influence of Aryan culture 
 upon the South is indicated by the tradition that, besides being 
 the author of the first Tamil grammar and of works on Vedic 
 philosophy, he is said to have been a great craftsman and to 
 have brought the jungle under cultivation. Further, he is 
 believed to have compiled treatises on chemistry and medicine 
 and to have written the Silpa-Sastras which are still used by 
 the temple craftsmen of Southern India.^ Indeed, Vedic 
 
 ^ See Ancient India, by S. Krisknaswami Aiyangar, pp. 5, 8, and 30; and 
 0. C. Gangoly's South Indian Bronzes, pp. 2-6. 
 
 127 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 philosophy and religion can never be properly understood 
 nor their influence on Indian civilisation appreciated by the 
 methods of the Western philologist, for, though they certainly 
 express the soul of India, they represent the spiritual essence 
 of a great system of national education in all the practical 
 concerns of life, including agriculture, arts and crafts, science, 
 and political economy. It is significant that craftsmen are 
 always closely associated with religious propaganda in Buddhist 
 and Brahmanical history, as they are in that of Christianity. 
 The stapathi, or master-builder, is described in the Silpa-Sastras 
 as officiating at the religious ceremonies which preceded the 
 laying out of the Indo- Aryan town or village, and some of the 
 metal-workers and carpenters of Southern India still retain 
 as their caste distinction the name 'Acharya,' which denotes 
 a teacher of religion. 
 
 The beginning of the legendary epoch connected with the 
 name of Agastya has been referred to the eighth century B.C. 
 Whether the chronology is correct or not, this epoch marked 
 the opening up of Southern India to Aryan civilisation, which 
 gradually, as in the north, so completely absorbed the pre- 
 existing Dravidian traditions that though the Dravidian 
 languages remained the vehicle of thought, and though racial 
 characteristics were unaffected, Ar^^an ideas were the main- 
 spring of all progressive movements, social and political, 
 so that there remains nothing in South Indian literature or 
 artistic record, and no event in its political history, which 
 can be definitely referred to an earlier period. 
 
 The earliest dynasties of which there is any record claimed 
 descent from the Aryan heroes of the Mahabharata. The 
 prehistoric Dravidian deities were absorbed in the pantheon 
 of Brahmanical Hinduism. It is possible that the worship 
 of the female principle in Hindu ritual was derived from 
 Dravidian ideas of the Earth-Mother, but the earliest historical 
 records of South Indian religion are connected with Ar^^an 
 propaganda — Brahmanical, Jain, or Buddhist. Civilised Dravi- 
 dian society gradually adopted the religion, including the 
 social and political organisation, of the Aryan village commu- 
 128 
 
ARYANISATION OF S. INDIA 
 
 nities. Dravidian art and architecture were wholly impreg- 
 nated with Vedic idealism and the craftsmen referred all 
 their traditions to Aryan teachers. Throughout the Middle 
 Ages, and afterwards when Northern India was almost entirely 
 subject to the rule of Islam, the South remained the great 
 stronghold of the Indo- Aryan tradition in religious literature, 
 art, and polity. 
 
 Of the four dynasties mentioned as rulers of the South in 
 Asoka's edicts — ^the Chola, Pandya, Keralaputra, and Satiya- 
 putra — ^hardly anything is known historically until after the 
 decline of the Andhra power in the Dekhan, except that monas- 
 teries were built by them for the Buddhist missions which 
 Asoka sent. Megasthenes refers to the popular assemblies 
 of the South as restraining the power of the local kings, and 
 early Tamil records mention that builders from Magadha 
 assisted in the construction of Dravidian palaces — ^both of which 
 circumstances point to the adoption of Aryan traditions. 
 The most definite facts recorded of South Indian history 
 before the rise of the Andhra power are those of its commercial 
 relations with Europe and the north of India. Teak, which 
 must have come from the Malabar coast, has been found in 
 the ruins of the Chaldean city of Ur. Gold, pearls, ivory, rice, 
 pepper, peacocks, and apes are among the other natural 
 products of Southern India carried by Dravidian ships from 
 the seaports of the west coast which found their way to 
 Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and in later times to Rome. The 
 existence of this trade can be traced back with certainty to 
 the seventh or eighth century B.C., though it probably began 
 much earlier, as it is supposed from the striking resemblances 
 in ethnic type that the Sumerian founders of Babylonia were 
 of Dravidian stock. ^ 
 
 The traditional plan of the Aryan village communities gives 
 some indications of the existence of a similar trade by the 
 most important land routes. The Mahakala, the Broad Street 
 of the village, running north and south, was the way of the 
 caravans conveying the rich merchandise from Dravida to 
 1 Hall's History of the Near East, pp. 173-174. 
 
 I 129 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the capitals of the Aryan kings in the north. The Silpa- 
 Sastras appoint the south-east approach to the village as the 
 proper site for travellers' rest-houses which afforded the 
 necessary provision for man and beast ; and the door of the 
 temple of I^akshmi, the giver of prosperity, specially worshipped 
 by the Jain mercantile community, was also turned towards 
 the south. 
 
 Of the great extent of Dravidian commerce in the centuries 
 immediately before and after the Christian era — ^the period 
 we are now considering — ^there is abundant evidence in Tamil 
 literature, in the writings of Greek and Roman historians, 
 and in the quantities of Roman coins discovered in Southern 
 India. India was then in close contact with the Hellenic 
 world both by land and sea. Yavana, or Greek, merchants 
 thronged the bazars of the Dravidian seaports and royal 
 capitals to purchase pepper, precious stones (especially beryls), 
 and fine silk and cotton fabrics ; the stalwart Yavana soldiers, 
 or Asiatic Greeks, who may have come overland from the 
 Graeco-Baktrian kingdom or by way of sea, were in demand 
 for service in the bodyguards of the Dravidian kings. 
 
 The Andhra power, which was then paramount in the 
 South, and had begun to take a prominent part in North 
 Indian politics, had its centre on the eastern side of Dravida, 
 in the districts between the Godavari and Krishna rivers, the 
 capital city, called Sri Kakulam, being conveniently situated 
 for maritime trade near the mouth of the latter. In Asoka's 
 time the Andhra State had acknowledged the suzerainty of 
 Magadha, and the stupas of Amaravati, the sculptures of 
 which are among the most valuable of Indian historical records, 
 no doubt marked the site of one of the seats of Buddhist learning 
 which received the great Emperor's patronage, if it was not 
 among those which he himself established for the teaching 
 of the Law. 
 
 But after Asoka's death the Andhras threw off the authority 
 of Pataliputra, and soon after 220 B.C., under a king named 
 Krishna or Kanha, they had extended their rule right up the 
 Godavari river to the town of Nasik, near its source in the 
 130 
 
ARYANISATION OF S. INDIA 
 
 Western Ghats, so that their dominions practically stretched 
 across the Dekhan from sea to sea. The next one hears of 
 them is that about i68 B.C. a king of that line aided Kharavela, 
 the King of Kalinga, in the attack on Magadha which Pushya- 
 mitra repulsed ; and circa 27 B.C. an unknown Andhra king 
 slew Susarman, one of the Brahman successors of Pushyamitra's 
 family on the throne of Pataliputra, and thus ended the Kanva 
 dynasty. The mantle of Pushyamitra, as the defender of 
 Indo-Aryan civilisation from the barbarian intruders of the 
 north, then fell upon the Dravidian kings of the Dekhan 
 until the revival of Magadhan power under the Guptas. 
 
 Though the early kings of the Andhra line thus took a 
 prominent part in the break-up of the political organisation 
 which the Mauryan dynasty had created, they were not, 
 like Pushyamitra and his successors, patrons of Brahmanism, 
 but apparently continued after Asoka's death to support 
 the propaganda of Gautama's and Mahavira's teaching in 
 Southern India; for both the Buddhists and the Jains had 
 much influence there for some centuries after the beginning of 
 the Christian era. It was, however, the rise of the Kushan 
 power in the north-west which gave a renewed impetus to 
 Buddhist propaganda and completed the work of Asoka's 
 missionaries in Central Asia, while Christianity at the same 
 time began to build upon the foundations laid by them in 
 the west. 
 
 Buddhism in the century before Christ not only embraced 
 a far larger number of followers than it had done two centuries 
 earlier, but as a religious dogma had assumed a very different 
 character from that which it presents in the edicts of Asoka. 
 Asoka's interpretation of Gautama's message to the world 
 was certainly in an Indian sense religious, though it was 
 only a great humanitarian movement based upon the teaching 
 of profound psychological truths. But we must guard our- 
 selves from the error of assuming that even before Asoka's 
 time this was all that Buddhism meant for the masses of the 
 people who hailed the message as a revelation of divine truth, 
 or even for the zealous instructed bhikkus who went from 
 
 131 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 village to village to expound it at the meeting-place of the 
 four crossways, where the Bodhi Tree, or a mandapam, gave 
 shelter for the folk-assembly. The history of all world- religions 
 shows how numerous and divergent are the sects and popular 
 cults which spring from the parent stem, even in countries of 
 far less extent and population than India ; and the earliest 
 Buddhist chronicles give evidence that the Sangha represented 
 many different schools of thought and many opinions counted 
 as heretical in the Pali canons. 
 
 However acceptable a philosophy of ethics such as Asoka's 
 might have been to their intellectual leaders, it is certain 
 that it would not have satisfied the religious cravings of the 
 people if they themselves had not supplied the element of the 
 miraculous and superhuman by ascribing to the Buddha himself 
 all the attributes of divinity which he refused to claim, Bven 
 in pre-Buddhist times Indo- Aryan religion, like that of Hellas, 
 had always given a personal and anthropomorphic character 
 to the popular deities. The Vedic gods were presumed to 
 assist in person at the tribal sacrifices, taking their seats on 
 the places reserved for them, strewn with the sacred kusha 
 grass. Formerly, it was said, " men saw them when they 
 came to the feast ; now they still are present, though invisible." 
 Theological discussion in Vedic times mainly centred in the 
 question as to which of these gods was the greatest ; and 
 before the time of Buddha the idea had been evolved of One 
 Supreme Power as the Controller of the Universe, formulated 
 philosophically in the Upanishads and popularly represented 
 by the Creator Brahma, or Vishnu the Preserver, whose shrine 
 as the guardian deity of the whole Aryan community was 
 placed at the meeting of the village crossways. 
 
 Orthodox Brahmanical ritual did not permit an image of 
 the Supreme Deity to be worshipped ; neither did the orthodox 
 ritual of the Sangha when the Buddha took the place formerly 
 assigned to Brahma, or Vishnu-Narayana, An empty throne 
 with sacred footprints or other symbols carved or placed upon 
 it, as is shown in the Sanchi sculptures, served to fix the minds 
 of the faithful upon the presence of the Blessed One, but his 
 132 
 
THE KUSHAN^ EMPIRE 
 
 appearance could not be realised except by the eye of faith 
 and by the mystic power of meditation. 
 
 Thus it is that Indo- Aryan art before Buddhism had taken 
 root in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the north-west of India 
 shows so little trace of the worship of the Buddha as a divinity, 
 though it probably existed long before that time. The king's 
 craftsmen of the Mauryan period, representing as they did 
 orthodox views of art and religion, would not be permitted 
 to make a graven image of the Buddha to be set up in the 
 assembly halls of the Sangha, though Brahmanical deities 
 are carved on the capitals of the massive pillars of the Karle 
 Chapter-house, seated on Vedic altars as of old when they 
 came down to assist at the tribal sacrificial feasts. But the 
 craftsmen patronised by the Buddhist kings of Baktria followed 
 the Hellenic tradition, and were not bound by the restrictions 
 of the orthodox Indian schools, so that already in the first 
 century before Christ the monasteries and stupas of the country 
 known as Gandhara began to be covered with sculptures of 
 the Buddha, as the Deity worshipped alike by men and by the 
 gods whom he had displaced. 
 
 In the first efforts of these Hellenistic craftsmen to grasp 
 Indian ideas the Buddha's personality is given as that of an 
 Apollo, the Sun-god, either seated in the pose of an Indian 
 yogi or standing as a guru expounding the doctrine of the 
 Law. But the standpoint of archaeologists, following the 
 lead of German scholars, that Gandharan sculptors inspired 
 Indian craftsmen and created the Indian ideal of the divine 
 Buddha, gives a hopelessly distorted view of Indian history. 
 These Gandharan sculptures are the crude efforts of uncultured 
 Graeco-Roman craftsmen to realise the mystical conceptions 
 of the Buddha's personality suggested to them by their teachers, 
 the Indian Buddhist monks. The ideal itself had been very 
 distinctly formulated by Indian thought long before, though 
 the sculptor was forbidden by the orthodox canons of Indian 
 Buddhism to exhibit to the gaze of the vulgar the holy mysteries 
 revealed by spiritual insight. The real significance of these 
 sculptures is that they, together with contemporary Indian 
 
 133 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 works, show tlie process by which the philosophical teaching 
 of Buddhism was made into a popular religious formula and 
 adapted to the older traditions of Indo- Aryan divine worship. 
 It is a very similar process to that which is revealed in early 
 Christian art by another school of Hellenistic craftsmen, the 
 Byzantine. 
 
 One of the fundamental doctrines of Indo-Aryan faith, 
 accepted by all religious sects, was that of Yoga, which was 
 systematised by the Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali about 
 the second century before Christ, but was even then a theory 
 of great antiquity. Yoga in its literal sense of union was a 
 system of religious meditation which connoted the Vedic 
 doctrine of the Supreme Soul, for it was by means of Yoga 
 that the soul of man attained to blissful, ecstatic communion 
 with the Universal Spirit, and by Patanjali the word was used 
 in the strict sense of communion with God. The early Bud- 
 dhists accepted Yoga as a psychological exercise leading to 
 true spiritual insight — the perception of the I^aw — though 
 they rejected the Vedic implication of the Universal Spirit 
 as God and the First Cause. 
 
 But the idea of the personality of the Godhead was too 
 deeply rooted in the Indian mind to be explained away by 
 scholastic formularies. Every rule of the Buddhist Church 
 was referred to the authority of the Buddha himself — not to 
 a natural law scientifically explained — and to every relic of 
 his life on earth enshrined in the stupas raised to his memory 
 was ascribed miraculous powers which postulated his eternal 
 existence in another sphere as the Protector and Ruler of the 
 Sangha to whom the worship of the faithful was due. When, 
 therefore, the Hellenistic sculptors in the first century before 
 Christ began to represent the Buddha as the Deity they were 
 simply expressing an idea which had doubtless been a cardinal 
 belief of the Indian Buddhist Church for many generations. 
 
 The synthesis of Indian religious ideas which formed the 
 body of Buddhist doctrine contained two other cardinal 
 beliefs, common to all schools of thought and deeply rooted 
 in a remote antiquity. The first was the dogma of reincarna- 
 
 134 
 
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 tion, which in the earHest days of the Buddhist propaganda 
 had been explained to the people, by adaptations of the village 
 folk-lore, in the tales of the Jatakas — ^the previous births of 
 the Enlightened One — recounting the many deeds of self- 
 sacrifice in lower planes of existence by which the Bodhi- 
 sattva, or Buddha that was to be, prepared himself for the 
 final victory over the powers of evil in the great conflict under 
 the Bodhi Tree of Gay a. These Jatakas, as we have seen, 
 were favourite subjects with Indian sculptors of Asoka's time, 
 as no doubt they were with village story-tellers. Gradually 
 the world of Bodhisattvas was greatly enlarged by the trans- 
 formation into potential Buddhas of all the subordinate deities 
 borrowed from the Vedic pantheon, and from the innumerable 
 host of minor divinities which were the object of popular 
 worship. 
 
 It was to interpret these Indian ideas in terms of Hellenistic 
 culture that the schools of Graeco- Roman sculpture were formed 
 at Taksha-sila and Mathura about the beginning of the Christian 
 era under the patronage of the Buddhist dynasties of North- 
 western India. But Magadha, not Greece, was the spiritual 
 centre of the Buddhist world, and the Hellenistic craftsmen 
 in the service of the Baktrian and Kushan kings brought 
 no new inspiration to Indian art. They merely supplied a 
 local demand for images by adjusting the traditional divine 
 ideal of Hellas to the mystical conceptions of the Indian yogi. 
 
 An exactly similar process of assimilation and adaptation of 
 popular religious notions had been going on for many centuries 
 in the rival Brahmanical schools, ever since the philosophers 
 of the Upanishads had formulated the doctrine of the One 
 in Many. We can follow the process in the planning of the 
 Indian village, in the allocation of sites to the greater and 
 lesser divinities, and in their orientation. The ancient Aryan 
 worship of the One God, in its different ritualistic aspects 
 according to different positions of the sun, formed the symbolic 
 framework into which both the idealism of the Upanishads and 
 the primitive beliefs of the masses were fitted. The principal 
 places in each of the four quarters of the village were assigned 
 
 135 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to the four greater Aryan Devas, or nature-spirits, who were 
 worshipped as symbols of the four different aspects of the 
 Sun-god. The entrances to their shrines faced east, west, north, 
 or south, according to the quarter of the heavens in which the 
 Deva resided. The lesser Devas, including those of non- 
 Aryan derivation which from time to time were admitted into 
 the Aryan pantheon, were given subordinate sites in order of 
 precedence within or without the village boundaries, and the 
 orientation of their shrines as prescribed in the Silpa-Sastras 
 followed the intermediate points of the compass. In this 
 way Brahmanical ritual made room for the admission of an 
 infinite number of popular deities into its pantheistic scheme, 
 while the fundamental doctrine of the Unity of the Godhead 
 was symbolised by the shrine of the Supreme Deity with doors 
 on all four sides overlooking the whole universe. 
 
 Naturally every religious cult included in the Indo-Aryan 
 synthesis assigned to the special deity it worshipped the 
 position of the One Supreme, but the disputations of different 
 sects and different philosophic schools gradually resolved con- 
 clusions as to the nature of the Divine which made common 
 ground for the majority of them. One of these was the Three- 
 fold Aspect of the One, a theory which had its ritualistic 
 symbols in the Sandhyd — or worship of the sun in the morning, 
 noon, and evening — in the three Vedas, the three worlds, 
 and in the three Paths by which the Deity could be approached 
 — karma-marga, bhakti-marga, and jndna-marga, or the Path 
 of Service, the Path of Devotion, and the Path of Intuitive 
 Knowledge. 
 
 Philosophically the theory was expressed by the pair of 
 opposites, Birth and Death, or Creation and Destruction, linlced 
 together by the mean or norm, lyif e or Preservation ; and theo- 
 logically by the Three Aspects of the Supreme Ishvara, Brahma 
 the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer — 
 a concept which was further expanded into a Trinity of Spirit 
 {Purusha), Sat-Chit-Anandam, correlated with a Trinity of 
 Matter, Sattvam-Rajas-Tamas, known as the three gunas. 
 
 As the Buddhistic schools gradually elaborated a religious 
 136 
 
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 ritual adapted to their philosophic teaching, they took for their 
 Trinity the formula Buddha-Sangha-Dharma, called the Tri- 
 ratna, or the Three Jewels. The Tri-ratna, we may take it, 
 implied at first only a negation of Brahmanical theories of 
 the divine ; but when the Buddha himself began to be wor- 
 shipped as the Creator it followed as a matter of course that 
 the Dharma, the I^aw of the Cosmos, stood for the concept of 
 Eternal Bliss or the Eternal Spirit, while the Sangha, the 
 Community, represented the life of the universe. It was then 
 an easy transition from the abstract to the concrete to personify 
 the Dharma as a deity with all the attributes of the Brah- 
 manical Siva, and the Sangha as another with the attributes 
 of Vishnu, the Preserver. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that these subtle conver- 
 sions or adaptations of orthodox Buddhist doctrine, which 
 tended to .submerge the whole philosophy of Gautama in a 
 flood of Brahmanical symbolism, met with the approval of 
 all the leaders of the Sangha. There was always a strong party 
 of intellectuals who realised the danger and strove to keep 
 Buddhist ritual within the four corners of the Pali or Sanskrit 
 canons which were the depository of the early traditions of 
 the faith. Asoka himself, following the advice of the Great 
 Teacher, had summoned periodical General Assemblies of the 
 Sangha to discuss disputed points of doctrine and combat 
 heretical interpretations of the I^aw ; and so long as Patali- 
 putra retained its political supremacy the organisation of the 
 Sangha was strong enough to resist the intrusion of heterodox 
 Brahmanical theories. But the rise of Hellenistic influence 
 and the transference of Buddhist political power in the North 
 from Pataliputra to Taksha-sila combined to relax the discipline 
 of the Sangha, so that about the beginning of the Christian 
 era, when the Tartar or Kushan dynasty had carved out a 
 powerful kingdom in the north-west provinces of Asoka's 
 empire, a great schism appeared in the Buddhist Sangha. 
 
 The popular party, headed apparently by Brahman members 
 of the Sangha, detached itself from the primitive doctrines of 
 the faith and under the name of the Mahay ana, or Great Vehicle, 
 
 137 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 compiled a revised version of the Dharma in wliich the divinity 
 of the Buddha was accepted as an orthodox behef, and Patan- 
 jali's teaching of Yoga became incorporated in the Buddhist 
 canons. 
 
 As the name implied, the Mahayana doctrine admitted into 
 its theistic scheme a vast number of Bodhisattvas, archangels, 
 or saints, who were little more than the ancient popiilar 
 divinities thinly disguised under Buddhist symbolism and 
 nomenclature. The Mahayanist propaganda was also specially 
 identified with the bhakti-marga, the way of winning Nirvana 
 by the passionate devotion of self to the Buddhist ideal — a 
 devotion which manifested itself in pious gifts and works of 
 love rather than in the attainment of spiritual knowledge, 
 which was the shortest way to the goal. Mahayanist ritual 
 imposed no restriction upon the worship of images, so that 
 the representation of the Divine Buddha and the innumerable 
 host of Bodhisattvas gave unlimited scope for the art of the 
 sculptor and painter, who became the most active propagand- 
 ists of the Mahayana cult, in the same way as the royal 
 craftsmen of Magadha had helped in the earlier development 
 of Buddhist teaching — now known as the Hmaydna, or I^ittle 
 Vehicle. 
 
 From the first century before, and after the commencement 
 of, the Christian era the progress of Mahayana Buddhism 
 was identified with the growth of Kushan poHtical power in 
 the north-west of India. We have already seen how the 
 Turki tribes known as the Yueh-chi or Kushan had followed 
 up others of the same race, the Sakas, in overrunning the 
 Baktrian kingdom and putting an end to both Hellenistic and 
 Parthian domination in that quarter. About the middle of 
 the first century before Christ the Kushans had won supremacy 
 over all the mixed population of the Indian borderland, and 
 had established an empire which as a centre of Buddhist culture 
 brought law and order into that unsettled region, and formed 
 a half-way house between India and Rome on the one side 
 and India and China on the other. 
 
 Politically it was strong enough to protect India for the 
 138 
 
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 time being from adventurous raids either from the west or 
 the east ; at the same time it challenged the claims of the 
 Andhras for the suzerainty of Northern India. It is unfor- 
 tunate that the exact chronology of the Kushan dynasty is 
 still a matter of dispute, but there can be no doubt that the 
 new development of Buddhism which synchronised with the 
 foundation of the Kushan Empire and was centred in its sphere 
 of influence had the most far-reaching effect upon both Eastern 
 and Western religion. The Mongolian connections of the 
 Kushan people gave an immense impetus to Buddhist propa- 
 ganda in China, and at the same time the Hellenistic culture 
 of Western Asia imbibed the Buddhist idealism which so deeply 
 impressed the ritual and folk-lore of Christianity. 
 
 At the summit of its power the Kushan dynasty held under 
 its suzerainty Kashmir, the Panjab, and probably the whole 
 of Northern India as far east as Benares and as far south as 
 the Vindhya Mountains. To the north of the Himalayas it 
 wrested from Mongolian rule the provinces of Central Asia 
 now known as Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan. In Western 
 Asia its dominions extended to the borders of Parthia and 
 Persia, thus including Sogdiana, Baktriana and Ariana, or 
 Bukhara and Afghanistan. 
 
 When the Kushans had completed the conquest of North- 
 western India the centre of their political power naturally 
 shifted from Kabul to Purushapura, the modern Peshawar, 
 and Taksha-sila became the university capital of Mahayana 
 Buddhism. The two names which stand out most conspicu- 
 ously in the somewhat obscure records of the time are those 
 of Kanishka, the emperor who emulated Asoka's passionate 
 devotion to the Dharma, and the Brahman monk Nagarjuna, 
 whom Indian tradition recognises as the great exponent of 
 the Mahayana doctrine. Whether they were contemporary 
 or not, we may take it that they were teachers, rather than 
 originators, of the religious movements of their times. 
 
 There are definite chronological data which help to establish 
 the close intercourse betvv^een India and the Graeco- Roman 
 world at this eventful period. Dion Cassius says that Augustus 
 
 139 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 received many embassies from Indian kings sent to confirm 
 treaties of alliance, and bringing with them as presents tigers 
 and other animals which Romans saw for the first time. The 
 same author relates that an Indian named Zarmaros " burned 
 himself, after the manner of his country, on a funeral pile, in 
 presence of Augustus and the Athenians." ^ Strabo records 
 the same or a similar incident when Augustus, circa 24 B.C., 
 received at Samos an embassy from an Indian king, apparently 
 of one of the Pandyan dynasties of the South, observing that 
 in olden days another Indian sophist named Kalanos had 
 " exhibited a similar spectacle in presence of Alexander." ^ 
 
 It was the great development of trade between India and 
 the West, both by sea and land, in the palmy days of the 
 Roman Empire which was the direct cause of the frequent 
 diplomatic conversations between the courts of Indian kings 
 and Rome. The luxurious habits of cosmopolitan Rome 
 created an enormous demand for the perfumes, unguents, and 
 spices of the Bast, as well as for precious stones of Southern 
 India, particularly the much-prized beryl. Fantastic prices 
 were paid in Rome for the gorgeous silks, brocades, cloth of 
 gold, and fine muslins for which the weavers of India were 
 famous, and Pliny condemned the extravagance which yearly 
 drained the Roman Empire of a hundred million sesterces 
 (about one million sterling), paid for these luxuries. And 
 while the nobility of Rome lavished their wealth on Oriental 
 fashions, the wild beasts of India, such as the tiger, cheetah, 
 and elephant, brought as presents by Indian ambassadors, 
 assisted in the gladiatorial shows which amused the Roman 
 populace. 
 
 It would, however, be wrong to conclude that the mercantile 
 relations which helped to fill the royal treasuries of India with 
 Roman gold and to crowd the bazars of Indian commercial 
 cities with foreign traders had any deep or abiding influence 
 upon Indian culture or upon the religious movements of the 
 times. Mahayana Buddhism, though its propaganda owed 
 
 1 MacCrindle's Ancient India, vol. vi, p. 212, 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. vi, p. 10. 
 140 
 
 I 
 
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 so much to the influence of the Kushan kings, was intellectually 
 and spiritually Indian as much as the Buddha's original teach- 
 ing had been. Gandharan sculpture exhibits the influence of 
 India upon the artistic thought of Hellenism, analogous to 
 that which Oriental fashions exercised upon the contemporary 
 social life of the capital of the Roman Empire. 
 
 The spirit of bhakti which moved the people of the Indian 
 borderlands went over to the early Christian churches in 
 Western Asia, and in Byzantium, as in Gandhara, quickened 
 into a new life of fervent piety the dry bones of Graeco-Roman 
 art. It was only superficially and externally that the Maha- 
 yana school, centred in Taksha-sila, was related to Hellenistic 
 culture. Spiritually it derived from the same impulse which 
 caused the revolt of Buddhism against the Vedic theory of 
 sacrifice and, in later times, led to the revival of Brahmanism. 
 It was a popular protest against the teaching which made 
 religion the exclusive property of a learned clique, instead of 
 the common spiritual heritage of the people. Nagarjuna was 
 the lyuther of Buddhism, the apostle of the bhakti-marga, 
 who would find means of expression for the deep-seated religious 
 instincts of the masses through the way of devotion to the 
 Divine Teacher, rather than through the dry agnostic philo- 
 sophy of the Hinayana schools. The latter, having accom- 
 plished the Buddha's mission of freeing the people's soul, 
 fast bound by the chains of sacerdotal superstitions, was too 
 cold and austere to satisfy the passionate and emotional nature 
 of Southern races. 
 
 The name Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, by which the new 
 movement distinguished itself, seems to imply that there was 
 a certain exclusiveness, perhaps of racial feeling, in the admini- 
 stration of the early Buddhist Sangha — a feeling expressed 
 in the Pali canons by the frequent qualification of Buddhist 
 virtues by the term ' Aryan.' There is no ground for asserting 
 that Mahayana Buddhism was in its origin a non- Aryan cult, 
 but no doubt the influx of non-Aryans into Northern India 
 gave it much greater strength and helped to spread its teaching 
 over the greater part of Asia. Southern India then became 
 
 141 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the great stronghold of the Hinayana school, just as in later 
 times it became the last defence of Aryan India against the 
 devastating hosts of Islam. 
 
 The dynastic history of the Kushan Empire, under whose 
 aegis Mahayana Buddhism flourished, affords many parallels 
 with that of the Mauryan Empire — so much so that popular 
 Indian and Chinese legends seem often to confuse the per- 
 sonalities of Asoka and Kanishka, The period of its greatest 
 power in Northern India — or approximately from the middle 
 of the first century before Christ to the beginning of the third 
 century a.d. — nearly follows the fortunes of the Andhra 
 dynasty in the South. In Europe it includes the time from 
 the rise of Julius Caesar and the furthest extension of 
 the Roman Empire eastward under Trajan to the beginning 
 of its fall under his degenerate successors Caracalla and 
 Elagabalus. 
 
 Kadphises the First and Second were apparently the two 
 military leaders whose swords helped to accomplish what 
 Chandragupta and Bindusara had done for the Mauryan 
 dynasty, first by the overthrow of Baktrian and Parthian 
 rule in North-western India, next by checking the advance of 
 the powerful Chinese armies towards the west, and afterwards 
 by extending their conquest to the east of the Indus. Their 
 achievements, however, only live in the records afforded by 
 the copper, silver, and gold coins, mostly imitations of those 
 of the Roman Empire, which they struck to assist the increasing 
 trade between India and the West, which brought rich toll 
 to their treasuries. So far as is known they took no interest 
 in the great religious movements of the time. The coins of 
 Kadphises II seem to show that he adhered to the Brahmanical 
 school of which the worship of Siva was the chief cult. 
 
 Kanishka, according to Buddhist tradition, was also under 
 the influence of orthodox Brahmanism before he became an 
 enthusiastic patron of the Sangha. lyike Asoka, the first years 
 of his reign ^ were spent in extending the boundaries of his 
 
 ^ The year of Kanishka' s accession or coronation is dated by some scholars 
 58 B.C., and by others at various dates down to a.d. 278. 
 142 
 
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 empire by conquests through which he opened up closer 
 communication with China on the one side, and with the 
 Roman Empire on the other. It is said that Kanishka, when 
 he began to interest himself in Buddhist teaching, was confused 
 by the wide divergences between the doctrines of different 
 schools, and the chief event of his reign recorded in Buddhist 
 chronicles is a General Assembly of the Sangha convened by 
 the Kushan Emperor to settle the strife between the contending 
 sects. The meeting-place was Kundalavana, a monastery in 
 Kashmir, near which Kanishka frequently held his court. 
 It was attended by five hundred monks, who made an exhaus- 
 tive examination of authoritative Buddhist literature and 
 compiled elaborate commentaries thereon, including a work 
 called the Mahdvibhdshd, which was intended to form an 
 authorised version of Buddhist philosophical systems. The 
 canons of the faith, as stated by the delegates of the assembly, 
 were inscribed on copper plates and deposited in a great 
 stupa built by Kanishka's order, near Srinagar, the exact 
 site of which is at present unknown. The Mahdvibhdshd 
 still exists in a Chinese version, but the contents of it are not 
 yet known to Western scholars, so that the conclusions of 
 Kanishka's assembly are still a matter of conjecture. 
 
 Judging by the numerous coins of Kanishka's reign it 
 would appear probable that, though celebrated in Buddhist 
 tradition as a liberal patron of the Sangha, the Emperor, 
 like his great Mogul successor, Akbar, really imbibed the true 
 spirit of Indo-Aryan kingship and gave impartial encourage- 
 ment to all religious teaching, including that of Zarathushtra 
 and of various Brahmanical sects ; but as a matter of policy 
 and inclination he bestowed a larger share of State patronage 
 upon the Buddhist community, to which the majority of his 
 subjects probably belonged. Among the memorials of his 
 reign which existed for many centuries afterwards were a great 
 stupa, thirteen stories in height, and a splendid monastery 
 which he built near his winter capital, Purushapura. 
 
 It was no doubt owing to Kanishka's Turki descent that 
 Taksha-sila and other famous seats of Indian learning now 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 began to be the resort of crowds of students from the Far 
 East, who helped to spread the message of the Good lyaw 
 over the whole of the Chinese Empire and eventually, when 
 Brahmanism began to reassert its spiritual and political 
 supremacy in India, made it the seat of the Indian Patriarch 
 of Mahayanist Buddhism. If popular legends can be trusted, 
 Kanishka's devotion to the Dharma did not, as in Asoka's 
 case, lead him to give up a career of military conquest and to 
 strive for the goal of the Aryan Eightfold Path. According 
 to these legends Kanishka wearied all his subjects by his 
 continu.al aggressive campaigns and insatiable lust for world- 
 dominion, so that in the end the opportunity of the Emperor's 
 sudden illness was seized to smother him in bed with his own 
 quilt. This is one of the many recorded instances of the fate 
 which overtook Indian sovereigns who offended against the 
 traditions of Indo-Aryan constitutional government. 
 
 Kanishka is believed to have reigned between twenty-four 
 and thirty years. Of his three successors, Vasishka, Huvishka, 
 and Vasudeva, the first is a name known only from a few inscrip- 
 tions. Huvishka founded a new Kushan capital in Kashmir, 
 known as Hushkapura, inside the Baramula Pass, and estab- 
 lished Buddhist monasteries close by which flourished at the time 
 of Hiuen-Tsang's visit in the seventh century. There is some 
 ground for believing that Huvishka built a shrine in front of the 
 Bodhi Tree at Gay a to replace one erected by Asoka. The exist- 
 ing temple with its Vishnu sikhara may be Huvishka's work, or a 
 later reproduction of it. Vasudeva, according to some archaeo- 
 logists, reigned about a.d. 33 ; others put his reign a century 
 and a half later. Mr Vincent Smith, apparently overlooking the 
 difference in the dates of inscriptions, would identify Vasishka 
 with Vasudeva, as both names are synonyms of Vishnu, the 
 former with Turki and the latter with Sanskrit spelling. 
 
 Vasishka's inscriptions date from the twenty-fourth to the 
 twenty-eighth years of the Vikrama era,i while Vasudeva's 
 range from the seventy-fourth to the ninety-eighth years 
 of the same. 2 The adoption of one of Vishnu's synonyms 
 
 ^ Began 58 B.C. ^ Barnett's Antiquities of India, pp. 42-43. 
 
 144 
 
9. Tempi,e of Bodh-Gaya, Restored 
 
 144 
 
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE 
 
 as a royal title was very usual and meant nothing more than 
 the assertion of sovereignty over Aryavarta, for every monarch, 
 according to the Indo- Aryan tradition of government, became 
 Vishnu's vicegerent on earth by virtue of his consecration 
 as king, quite irrespective of his race or sectarian predilections. 
 It might therefore be expected that more than one of the 
 Kushan line followed this Indo- Aryan custom, and the fact of 
 their having done so would by no means prove that they were 
 not good Buddhists, for the Buddha as the Divine Protector 
 of the Sangha was Vishnu — regarded not as the ' god ' of a 
 Hindu sect but as a cosmic principle recognised by all schools 
 of Indian philosophy. The understanding of this fundamental 
 fact will obviate many misconceptions of Indian history. 
 
 The important fact which emerges from the fragmentary 
 historical data of the Kushan Empire is that both in religion 
 and in principles of government the Turki monarchs were, like 
 the greatest of the Mogul dynasty, thoroughly Aryanised, 
 and could not therefore have regarded themselves as despotic 
 and irresponsible rulers of a conquered people. And to this 
 cause the historian should not hesitate to ascribe the fact 
 that Kanishka's line maintained an unbroken supremacy in 
 Northern India for nearly three centuries. 
 
 While Indo- Aryan culture was thus spreading itself over the 
 highlands of Western and Central Asia it was also penetrating 
 into the southern regions of the continent by way of sea. The 
 development of India's maritime trade brought her into close 
 connection with Burma, Siam, Java, and Kambodia, and ac- 
 cording to local traditions the first century of the Christian 
 era saw the beginning of those great colonising enterprises 
 which subsequently built up the magnificent monuments of 
 Indo- Aryan civilisation which now remain in Prambanam and 
 Borobudur in Java, and near to the deserted capitals of the 
 kings of Kambodia. As in Southern India and Ceylon, it was 
 Brahmanical teaching which preceded and prepared the way 
 for the spread of Buddhistic doctrine. 
 
 That Mahayana Buddhism was a revolt against the austerity 
 of the earlier Buddhist schools is indicated by all the monu- 
 
 K 145 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 ments of the Kushan period in India. The sculptors of the 
 Gandharan monasteries revelled in a profuse elaboration of 
 statuary and ornament, and their influence was soon felt in 
 the architecture of the Hinayana schools, which gradually 
 lost the grave simplicity and restraint of its earlier style and 
 began to imitate the rich carving and elaborate symbolism 
 of the more popular cult. The principal artistic monuments 
 of the period now remaining, outside those of the Gandhara 
 school, are the temple of Bodh-Gaya, the later sculptures of 
 Amaravati, the Nasik monasteries and some of the college 
 halls and chapels which occupy the centre of Siva's bow at 
 Ajanta,^ and the great Assembly Hall at Kanheri, near 
 Bombay. There are besides numerous smaller rock-cut 
 assembly halls and monasteries in other parts of India. 
 Geographically, however, most of these were outside the 
 Kushan dominions, and the work of Indian craftsmen who 
 owe nothing to Hellenistic art traditions. They nearly all 
 come within the territory of the later Andhra kings, of whose 
 personality even less is known than of that of the contempo- 
 rary Kushan rulers. These artistic records prove that during 
 this period, though the Brahman intellect was slowly re- 
 shaping the doctrines of Buddhism, the wonderful organisation 
 of the Sangha which Asoka had built up maintained sufficient 
 political power both in Northern India and the Dekhan to 
 appropriate the lion's share of State patronage and prevent 
 the Brahmans outside the Sangha from asserting their priestly 
 authority. 
 
 1 See Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India, by the author, p. 143 
 (Murray, 1915). 
 
 146 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE GUPTA EMPIRE 
 
 ABOUT a century after the extinction of the Kushan 
 and Andhra dynasties the centre of political interest 
 » is again shifted to Pataliputra, and the great Gupta 
 era, characterised by Western writers as the period of Hindu 
 or Brahmanical revival, begins. The intervening century, 
 from about a.d. 220 to 320, is an obscure period of which 
 practically nothing is known except that the Kushan and 
 Andhra Empires collapsed and apparently broke up into a 
 number of smaller states ruled by rajas who were perhaps 
 contented with the happiness of their subjects and had no 
 ambition to live in history as mighty war-lords. In any case 
 their miUtary exploits were not considerable enough to leave 
 an impression upon Indian history. 
 
 It is well to consider at the outset how far the description 
 of the Gupta era as the beginning of a Brahmanical reaction 
 is an accurate analysis of the psychological and political 
 changes which then took place in India. The principal evi- 
 dence upon which Oriental scholars have relied is that of the 
 epigraphical records, which show that until the second or 
 third century a.d. practically all royal and private benevolences 
 were bestowed upon Jain and Buddhist institutions, and that 
 patronage of Brahmans, as such, and of Brahmanical deities 
 did not begin until after that time. It might therefore be 
 assumed that the effect of Asoka's propaganda was to reduce 
 Brahman influence to a very low ebb for many centuries, and 
 that it was not until the beginning of the Gupta era that the 
 Brahmans regained the position they had held as exponents 
 of Indo-Aryan culture. 
 
 But on the other hand the artistic records which explain 
 
 147 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and amplify the epigraphical evidence show very clearly that 
 this is a quite untrue reading of Indian history. Through- 
 out the whole of this period Brahman influence was steadily 
 growing, intellectually, socially, and politically. Even many 
 of the Buddha's disciples were Brahmans who changed their 
 names upon initiation as members of the Sangha, in the same 
 way as Christians dropped their pagan names upon baptism. 
 Already in Asoka's time the Brahmans had probably captured 
 the whole machinery of the Sangha as effectually as in modern 
 times they have controlled the inner working of British depart- 
 mental machinery. A similar situation obtained in the world 
 of religious thought represented by Brahmanism. Brahmanical 
 or Vedic sacrificial ritual was transformed or swept away, but 
 the ideas behind it remained as the nucleus of a new spiritual 
 growth. The Vedic gods were pressed into the service of the 
 Sangha and made subordinate to the divine Buddha, or under 
 other names joined the great assembly of Buddhist saints, 
 the Buddhas that were to be ; but the nature-powers they 
 represented were worshipped as before, and the philosophical 
 concepts connected with them were accepted as the basis of 
 Buddhistic systems. 
 
 And during all this time Brahmanism retained its indepen- 
 dent existence as a side channel of the great stream of popular 
 religion, and within its forest asrams the basic ideas which 
 formed the two great divisions of modern Hinduism were 
 slowly maturing. It was after the disinterested labours of 
 Brahman scholars in this period of seclusion had thoroughly 
 examined the foundations of Vedic religion, and after the 
 coarse materialism of Vedic ritual had been purged of its 
 grossness by Buddhist idealism, that the religion of the Vedas 
 reunited with the main current of Indo-Aryan beliefs, and the 
 Brahmans resumed their natural position as the interpreters 
 of Indo-Aryan religion, as distinguished from the dogmas of 
 the Buddhist and Jain orders. Buddliism, deprived of the 
 intellectual support of the Aryan aristocracy, then gradually 
 relapsed into the position it had held at the beginning. It 
 became one of the many sects of Hinduism instead of a syn- 
 148 
 
THE GUPTA EMPIRE 
 
 thesis of all of them, and finally in India attained the goal of 
 Pan-Nirvana by being merged in the ocean of Indian thought. 
 
 The movement which the Gupta era ushered in was, however, 
 more of a national revival, or a reassertion of Aryan intellectual 
 and political supremacy, than a religious one. It had its 
 centre of inspiration in a federation of the pure-blooded Aryan 
 clans, among them the Ivichchavi, whose nobility had been 
 known in the days of the Buddha as closely connected with 
 the kings of Magadha, and afterwards with the imperial 
 Maury an line, and with another dynasty in Nepal. It was a 
 raja of Pataliputra, bearing the proud name of Chandra- 
 gupta, and married to a lyichchavi princess, Kumara Devi, who 
 about A.D. 308 roused the Aryan clans, like his great pre- 
 decessor of the same name, to a holy war in defence of Arya- 
 varta. 
 
 There was, no doubt, good reason why such an appeal 
 should meet with an enthusiastic response from the Kshatriya 
 nobility, and why the military ardour which it evoked should 
 connote hostility to the Buddhist Sangha, especially to the 
 Mahayanist movement which had flourished so greatly under 
 the patronage of the neighbouring Kushan emperors. 
 
 Though the Kushans, as we have seen, had adopted at 
 least the external forms of Aryan religion and political institu- 
 tions, it was hardly likely that the Indo-Aryan aristocracy 
 had ever reconciled itself to the increase of Turki political 
 domination or to the intrusion of so many foreigners unfamiliar 
 with Indo-Aryan traditions into Indian society. Indian 
 Buddhism had always been bound up with the traditions of 
 Aryan social life and had never been entirely successful in 
 obliterating the pride of race which made ' Aryan ' virtue a 
 state of ethical perfection not to be reached in their present 
 life by men of alien blood. 
 
 Neither had the Sangha's organisation proved its efficiency 
 for carrying out the Buddha's programme for the regeneration 
 of human nature. Like all powerful religious organisations 
 endowed by the State it tended to create vested interests and 
 monopolies, the preservation of which became of more account 
 
 149 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 than the reaUsation of the moral and spiritual aims of the 
 Great Teacher, That religious organisations like the Sangha 
 had always been prone to meddle in political matters outside 
 their jurisdiction is shown by the law laid down in the Kautiliya- 
 artha-Sdstra forbidding the entry of any but local co-operative 
 guilds into the villages of the Mauryan Empire. It is easy 
 to understand that when this rule was relaxed in favour 
 of the Sangha by zealous Buddhist propagandists like Asoka 
 and Kanishka, innumerable ways would be found for tyrannis- 
 ing over those who did not belong to the Order. And while 
 Buddhist tyranny was not more easy to bear than that of the 
 Brahmans, the Buddhist monks were no less adept in fostering 
 popular superstitions for the benefit of themselves and their 
 Order than the priests of the Vedic sacrifices had been. 
 
 The cult of rehc worship developed a ritual as elaborate as 
 that of Vedic times, and popular belief in the miractilous was 
 exploited to promote lavish expenditure on the building of 
 stupas and monasteries for the safe custody of a supposititious 
 eyelash, tooth, or toe-nail of the Blessed One, or of the ashes 
 of a Buddliist saint. 
 
 Nor did the Good lyaw of love and self-control preached by 
 the Sangha bring any nearer the era of universal peace which 
 had been Asoka's dream. Buddhist monarchs went to war 
 for the possession of a precious relic as eagerly as the Kshatriya 
 kings of Vedic India followed the sacrificial horse sent out as 
 a challenge to their neighbours. It was only when a strong 
 central government like that of the Kushan and Andhra 
 dynasties existed that India enjoyed a period of prolonged 
 peace. And while the powerful and wealthy organisation of 
 the Sangha was of no avail for keeping the foreign invader 
 off the sacred soil of Aryavarta, a monastic life was held in so 
 high esteem and offered so many attractions to Kshatriya 
 youth that the fighting strength of Aryavarta was becoming 
 dangerously weakened, and the resources of the State needed 
 for national defence were absorbed by the thousands of 
 monasteries filled with the wearers of the yellow robe. 
 
 None would be more conscious of the political and social 
 150 
 
 I 
 
THE GUPTA EMPIRE 
 
 dangers which threatened Indo-Aryan supremacy in India 
 than the leaders of those Aryan clans which six and a half 
 centuries before had ans.vered Chandragupta Maurya's call 
 to arms. It was among these Aryan clans that the Maury an 
 Emperor's successor, the first of the Gupta Une, found strong 
 and steadfast allies. In accordance with Kshatriya tradition 
 his first effort was to put an end to the turmoil into which 
 Aryavarta had fallen through the break-up of the Kushan 
 and Andhra Empires by asserting the right of government 
 exercised by the Aryan fighting class from time immemorial. 
 It was a right which was necessarily maintained by the sword, 
 though founded upon the principles of justice and consideration 
 for the general good which were accepted by the whole Aryan 
 community and embodied in the codes of Indo-Aryan law and 
 tradition which every Kshatriya prince learned by heart and 
 was taught to regard as the canonical laws of his caste. A 
 war conducted on these principles could never be a brutal 
 war of spoliation or extermination. It was rather the uphold- 
 ing of the strong arm of universal law by Vishnu's vicegerent 
 on earth and the assertion of the principle that right is might. 
 
 About twelve years after his marriage with the lyichchavi 
 princess and the proclamation of this holy war, Chandragupta, 
 either by voluntary alliances or by force of arms, had won the 
 overlordship of a great part of the valley of the Ganges and 
 Jumna, including the ancient kingdom of Ajodhya, a name 
 enshrined in Aryan memory as the home of the Kshatriya hero 
 Rama and his beloved queen Sita, the ideal wife of Aryan 
 tradition. 
 
 In the beginning of a.d. 320 Chandragupta was crowned as 
 King of Kings, a date thereafter reckoned as the beginning of 
 the great Gupta era. To celebrate the event he struck coins 
 inscribed with his own name, that of his queen, Kumara Devi, 
 and of the lyichchavi clan of which he was the chief. 
 
 It is wholly misleading to describe the Gupta era as a Hindu 
 or Brahmanical reaction. It was rather an Aryan revival, 
 for it was the effort of the Aryan Kshatriyas, aided by the 
 Aryan Brahmans, to restore the political and spiritual supre- 
 
 151 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 macy of the Indo-Aryan race in Aryavarta. The Brahmans 
 were not opposing the Buddhism of which the Aryan prince 
 Siddhartha was the exponent, for they had been the foremost 
 in assimilating and adapting it to the fundamental doctrines 
 of orthodox Indo-Aryan religion. It was against the Sangha 
 of the fourth century a.d., under Turki, Parthian, and Scythian 
 leadership, with the superstitious corruptions and abuses which 
 it propagated, that the better sense of the Indo-Aryan intellect 
 revolted. From the religious standpoint it was a revival 
 analogous to that which the prince of the Aryan clan, Sakya 
 Muni, had himself inspired, for it was a reawakening of the 
 profound spiritual instinct of the Aryan race which found 
 expression in a great renaissance of Aryan poetry, drama, and 
 art, Chandragupta reigned about fifteen years after his con- 
 secration as King of Kings, when his mantle as the champion 
 of Aryan India fell upon his son Samudragupta, who as 
 Yuva-raja had attained high proficiency in all the culture of 
 an Aryan prince. 
 
 Very soon after his accession, circa a.d. 335, Samudragupta 
 appears to have opened the victorious campaign for the 
 suzerainty of Aryavarta which his court poet Harishena 
 celebrated in Sanskrit verses inscribed upon one of the imperial 
 standards of Asoka which now stands in the fort at Allahabad. 
 Aryavarta at that time was a term including all the lands 
 south of the Vindhya Mountains which were the scene of 
 Rama's exploits, as well as Hindustan, the Aryavarta of the 
 Mahabharata. The intention of Samudragupta's campaign 
 was thus to restore in his own person the supremacy of the 
 Maury an dynasty at the height of its glory under Asoka. 
 The feeling of racial antagonism which prompted Samudra- 
 gupta and his allies is shown in the different treatment accorded 
 to the rajas of the North — ^the Turki, Parthian, and other non- 
 Aryan dynasties which had established themselves under the 
 Kushan suzerainty — and the Indo-Aryan states in the North 
 and South whose government was either monarchical, oligarchic, 
 or republican. The former were " forcibly rooted out " and 
 t.heir territories annexed to Samudragupta's own raj ; but the 
 152 
 
THE GUPTA EMPIRE 
 
 latter having acknowledged Samudragupta's suzerainty and 
 paid the customary tribute remained in enjoyment of their 
 former self-elected or hereditary forms of government. 
 
 Samudragupta appears to have changed his capital from 
 Pataliputra to Ajodhya, and his southern campaign was 
 apparently the traditional Kshatriya military pilgrimage — 
 accompanied by the ritual of the sacrificial horse — ^to the 
 places hallowed in Aryan memory by Rama's and Sita's 
 wanderings in the forest, and by the victorious progress of 
 Rama's army marching to the rescue of his queen when she 
 was abducted by Dravidian pirates and carried off to their 
 stronghold in Ceylon. Marching along the eastern road 
 through Orissa, or Kalinga, Samudragupta first obtained the 
 submission of the king of that region and then entered the 
 districts between the Krishna and Godavari rivers, passing 
 the sacred hill of Chitrakuta and the country famed as the 
 scene of Rama's exile. Having forced his way further south 
 to Kanchi, or Conjeveram, and conquered the local kings 
 who opposed him, he crossed over the southern end of the 
 Indian continent and returned in triumph to his capital 
 through the western districts of the Dekhan. 
 
 There the Vedic rite of Asvamedha was completed in solemn 
 state by the sacrifice of the horse which had led Samudragupta's 
 victorious march, and by the lavish distribution of the rich 
 spoils he had won. One of the gold medals struck by Samudra- 
 gupta to celebrate the event, with a representation of the horse 
 and sacrificial altar, is in the British Museum, and the carved 
 stone horse with an inscription on it which now stands at 
 the entrance to the Lucknow Museum may be another memorial 
 of his triumph. 
 
 The Buddhist chronicles of Ceylon throw interesting light 
 upon the history of the Gupta era. They both explain why 
 Samudragupta refrained from any attempt to repeat Rama's 
 final exploit by the conquest of Ceylon, and prove that there 
 was no narrow sectarian feeling in the Aryan revival which 
 the Gupta era inaugurated. Ceylon at that time was practi- 
 cally a part of Aryan India. Its dynasty was of Indo-Aryan 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 not Dravidian descent, and Hinayana Buddhism, which 
 flourished there, was representative of the older Aryan culture 
 of Asoka's time. There was therefore no feeling of racial 
 or religious antagonism between Ceylon and the Aryans of 
 Northern India. At the beginning of Samudragupta's reign 
 Meghavarna, the reigning King of Ceylon, had despatched a 
 mission with costly presents which had established cordial 
 relations between the two rulers and had led to the fulfilment 
 of Meghavarna's desire to found a monastery near the Bodhi 
 Tree at Gaya for the benefit of Sinhalese students and pilgrims. 
 The toleration shown by Samudragupta and his Brahman 
 advisers in allowing a splendid Buddhist abbey, richly endowed, 
 to be given a place of honour in his territory proves that the 
 so-called Brahmanical reaction was not inspired by narrow 
 sectarian feelings. 
 
 Samudragupta by his conquests considerably enlarged the 
 empire of the Guptas and fulfilled his father's mission by 
 releasing Aryavarta from foreign domination and reasserting 
 the principle of Kshatriya or Indo- Aryan hegemony over the 
 whole of India ; though apparently he did not maintain more 
 than a nominal suzerainty as King of Kings over the Dekhan 
 and Southern India after his return from his great southern 
 campaign. The limits of the Kushan Empire were again 
 pushed back to the Indus, and the influence of Mongolian and 
 Hellenistic culture which Kanishka had introduced into India 
 was superseded by a great revival of Sanskrit learning under 
 the patronage of the Gupta emperors. 
 
 Sanskrit, the classical language of Brahman and Kshatriyan 
 culture, though it had long ceased to be a vernacular even 
 among the Indo- Aryan classes who called themselves ' pure,' 
 and though as an official literary language it had been super- 
 seded at many Buddhist courts and seats of learning by Pali 
 and local dialects, had always remained the vehicle by which 
 the religion and philosophy of the Vedas and the early tradi- 
 tions of Aryan culture had been handed down from one genera- 
 tion to another by Brahman gurus in their asrams and in the 
 courts of old-fashioned rajas who stood aloof from popular 
 
 154 
 
lO. TrAVEI,I<ERS or PII^GRIMS WSTENING to A VlI<I,AGE KaTHAK 
 
 154 
 
THE GUPTA EMPIRE 
 
 religious movements. Sanskrit, though it might be called the 
 Brahmanical language, was also that in which every pure- 
 blooded Aryan prince, even a disciple of Gautama, would be 
 instructed in the duties of his position. Sanskrit, therefore, 
 naturally was the official language of the Gupta imperial 
 court, instead of Pali, Greek, or Turki, and the linguistic 
 medium through which the Indo-Aryan revival found ex- 
 pression. 
 
 The Brahman guru emerged from the obscurity of his forest 
 hermitage and basking once more in the sunshine of imperial 
 favour became the leader of the new national movement in 
 the place of the Buddhist bhikku, whose influence had waned 
 through the frequent abuse of his authority and popular 
 dislike of the foreigner. The village kathaks no longer touched 
 popular sentiment by stories of the Buddha's self-sacrifice and 
 divine compassion, but found ready listeners to praises of the 
 mighty Kshatriya then seated on Rama's throne at Ajodhya, 
 who had revived the glorious traditions of the Aryan race. 
 The Indo-Aryan revival of the Gupta period was distinguished 
 from the Buddhist propaganda of Asoka's time by being based 
 upon aristocratic rather than democratic sentiment, and in 
 being a patriotic rather than a religious movement. 
 
 It is true that Brahman leaders took the opportunity to 
 propagate their religious teaching by giving the Bhagavad GUd, 
 ' The Song of the Blessed One,' a setting in the great Aryan 
 epic, the Mahabharata ; but this seems to show that it was 
 put forward as an appeal to the national feeling of Aryavarta 
 rather than as a new religious message. It was a call to 
 Kshatriya youth to fulfil their religious duties by warlike 
 deeds rather than by meditation in the seclusion of the monas- 
 tery. Krishna, the military leader and man of action, who 
 had delivered his people from the tyrant's yoke and destroyed 
 the demons who were ravaging the land — the Divine Cowherd, 
 beloved of the village folk — would point the way to mukti 
 for every one by simple devotion to duty, instead of Gautama, 
 the Sakya ascetic whose pietism would emasculate the manhood 
 of Aryavarta in the monastic cell. "He that performeth a 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 dutiful action independently of the fruit of action, he is an 
 ascetic, he is a yogi " {Bhagavad Git a, VI, i). 
 
 The revival of Brahmanism in the form of the Vishnu cult 
 was an inevitable psychological reaction after the many 
 centuries in which monasticism had been preached as the 
 only door by which the highest spiritual perfection could be 
 reached. The Gupta era was the beginning of an Indo-Aryan 
 renaissance. Yet it would be easy to exaggerate the direct 
 influence of the Gupta court upon the religious sentiment of 
 the people. None of the Guptas were zealous religious enthu- 
 siasts like Asoka. They were liberal patrons of Brahmanical 
 learning, but they did not lay hands upon the endowments 
 of the Buddhist Sangha or attempt to break up its powerful 
 organisation. Neither did they countenance any persecution 
 of the followers of Gautama. The capital of the Gupta 
 emperors became the centre of Brahmanical culture, but 
 the masses followed the religious traditions of their fore- 
 fathers, and Buddhist and Jain monasteries continued to 
 be public schools and universities for the greater part of 
 India. 
 
 The decline of Buddhism and its final disappearance from 
 India as a separate religious cult were the consequence of a 
 gradual process of intellectual absorption, rather than the 
 result of any outside pressure. The whole logical position of 
 Sakya Muni's philosophy was shifted and brought closely into 
 line with that of the Brahmanical schools directly the Buddha 
 himself was recognised as the absolute Good — or as a personal 
 God — and there is no doubt that this became the authorised 
 teaching of the Sangha very soon after his death. The develop- 
 ment of Mahayana teaching made the difference between 
 Buddhism and Brahmanism no greater than that which 
 separated one Brahmanical school from another, and though 
 the Sangha as an organisation remained in India until it was 
 finally broken up in the Muhammadan invasions, its intel- 
 lectual supremacy was already superseded in the beginning 
 of the Gupta era by the new schools of Kshatriya and Brahman 
 philosophy. 
 
 156 
 
THE GUPTA EMPIRE 
 
 In India militarism has always been the agent rather than 
 the originator of social and political revolutions, and it was 
 the Brahman intellect more than the Kshatriya sword which 
 led to the downfall of the Buddhist Sangha. With the en- 
 couragement of the Gupta emperors their Brahman statesmen 
 set to work to take popular education out of the hands of 
 Buddhist monks by compiling into one great religious and 
 moral code the traditions of Indo-Aryan history, as recorded 
 by the bards of the Aryan clans, the court poets and gurus, 
 and the teachers of Brahman asrams. This noble epic in 
 stately Sanskrit slokas, under the name of the Mahabharata, 
 the story of the Great War, containing the essence of Kshatriya 
 polity, philosophy, and religious doctrine, was an encyclopaedia 
 of hero-worship and a moral text-book which gave abundant 
 material for a system of popular education. The sddhu and 
 sannydsin carried it throughout the length and breadth of 
 India, as the bhikkus of the Sangha had formerly spread the 
 message of the Buddha. Both in the original Sanskrit text 
 and in vernacular translations it played the same part in 
 moulding Indian character and in forming the synthesis of 
 thought called ' Hinduism ' as the Old and New Testaments 
 have done in Christianity and the Quran in Islam. 
 
 The fact that the Mahabharata is the same in Bengal and 
 in Southern India, in the Panjab and throughout the Dekhan, 
 shows that it was carefully edited with a set purpose and is 
 not, as the superficial reader might imagine, a corpus of 
 Brahmanical literature strung together haphazard in different 
 periods of time. The purpose of the Mahabharata, as edited 
 by the Brahman scholars of the Gupta court, is well described 
 by a Western writer who had rare insight into the psychology 
 of Indian history : " The foreign reader, taking it up as 
 sympathetic reader merely and not as scholar, is at once 
 struck by two features ; in the first place, its unity in com- 
 plexity ; and, in the second, its constant effort to impress on 
 its hearers the idea of a single centralised India with an heroic 
 tradition of her own as formative and uniting impulse. It is 
 in good sooth a monarch's dream of an imperial race. The 
 
 157 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Gupta Emperor of Pataliputra who commissioned the last 
 recension of the great work was as conscious as Asoka before 
 him or Akbar after of making to his people the magic statement, 
 ' India is one.' " ^ 
 
 The recension of the Mahabharata is only one of the great 
 works attributed to the Brahman pandits of the Gupta court. 
 The Ramayana in its present form seems to be the ancient 
 legend of Rama's exploits retold by the poets who sang the 
 praises of Samudragupta's triumphal progress in the footsteps 
 of the Aryan hero. The Vishnu and some of the other Puranas 
 probably belong to the same period, while tradition also refers 
 to the Gupta age the classics of the Indian drama, Sakuntala 
 and other works of Kalidasa. 
 
 It is not certain whether Samudragupta in addition to his 
 military achievements took the lead in promoting this great 
 renaissance of Sanskrit literature. Indian romance and legend 
 refer it vaguely to Vikramaditya — ' the God-like Hero ' — a 
 title which was assumed by Samudragupta's son and successor, 
 Chandragupta II. But Harishena, who composed the inscrip- 
 tion on the Allahabad pillar, refers to Samudragupta's accom- 
 plishments as a poet and musician, and one of the gold coins 
 of his reign preserved in the British Museum shows the 
 Emperor seated on a throne playing the vina, or Indian lute ; 
 so it would not be rash to date the beginning of the Sanskrit 
 renaissance under the Guptas from the middle of the fourth 
 century a.d. 
 
 1 Footfalls of Indian History, by Sister Nivedita, p. i8o. 
 
 158 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 INDIA IN GUPTA TIMES 
 
 THE Code of Manu, though it was probably compiled 
 some centuries before this time and, like the Maha- 
 bharata, embodied Aryan traditions of much greater 
 antiquity, may be taken to represent the sociology and polity 
 of Aryavarta under the Gupta emperors. Though based upon 
 the traditions of Vedic India it describes a state of society in 
 many respects altered. Caste distinctions are strictly defined, 
 and the supremacy of the Brahmans as spiritual leaders of 
 the people is regarded as incontestable, though only by 
 reason of their higher purity and superior knowledge of Vedic 
 wisdom. 
 
 Of the three twice-born classes Brahmans only were absolutely 
 forbidden to marry Sudra women. There was no expiation 
 for a Brahman v/ho defiled himself by such an alliance. Brah- 
 mans, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas were advised to choose their 
 first wives from their own class, and a Sudra man must not 
 marry into a higher class. But with these exceptions there 
 was no absolute bar to intermarriage between the different 
 varnas, only it was regarded as an indication of a weak intellect 
 for any twice-born man to debase the purity of his family 
 stock by marriage with a Sudra woman. 
 
 The diet of Brahmans was to be strictly vegetarian, except 
 on special occasions on which sacrificial meat was allowed, and 
 certain vegetables, such as garlic, onions, leeks, and mushrooms, 
 w^ere forbidden. No mortal was more sinful than he who 
 desired " to increase his own flesh with the flesh of another 
 creature " not offered as a sacrifice to the gods or to his 
 ancestors (v, 52). Food was to be eaten reverently, after 
 
 159 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 ablution and prayer, and without excess. " Excessive eating 
 is prejudicial to health, to fame, and to bliss in Heaven : it 
 is injurious to virtue and odious among men" (ii, 57). The 
 fact that fruit trees were especially assigned to Brahmans as 
 their portion of the riches of the earth may be connected with 
 the planting of fruit gardens for the use of travellers and 
 pilgrims which belonged to the tradition of public works in 
 India ages before the Mogul times. There is no mention of 
 the soma plant, the intoxicating juice of which played so 
 important a part in Brahmanical ritual of Vedic times. Even 
 in Chandragupta Maurya's time soma plantations were provided 
 for Brahman communities by the State.^ The marked change 
 from the beef -eating and soma-drinking Brahman of Vedic 
 times shows the effect which Asoka's reforms had upon the 
 habits of Aryan society. 
 
 There are other indications of the deep impress which 
 Buddhist ethics had made upon Brahmanical laws. In the 
 epic period hunting and gambling were the chief relaxations 
 of Indo-Aryan kings, but Manu classes them among the four 
 most pernicious vices which a dutiful king must shun (vii, 50). 
 Kautiliya only provided for the proper regulation of gambling- 
 houses, but Manu insists that all gambling-houses should be 
 suppressed and that the king should punish anyone who in- 
 dulged in gambling either privately or publicly, even if only for 
 amusement. As Manu includes in his damnatory clauses not 
 only gamblers but public dancers and singers and all sellers 
 of spirituous liquors it must be assumed that his puritan code 
 sometimes reflected his own personal views rather than the 
 practical politics of the State. But Fa-Hien's observations 
 show that at least in the home provinces of the Gupta Empire, 
 Madhyadesa, the laws of Manu were strictly observed mth 
 regard to eating of animal food, drinking, and hunting ; for 
 he says that " the people of this country kill no living creature 
 nor do they drink intoxicating liquors ; and, with the exception 
 of the Chandalas they eat neither garlic nor onions. . . . 
 In this country they do not keep swine or fowls, they do not 
 
 ^ Kautiliya-artha-Sdstra, Book II, chap. ii. 
 160 
 
INDIA IN GUPTA TIMES 
 
 deal in living animals, nor are there shambles or wine shops 
 round their markets. . . . The Chandalas alone go hunting 
 and deal in flesh." ^ 
 
 In other respects the polity of Manu, which may be taken 
 to have been sound Aryan law in the Gupta period, does not 
 differ much from that of Kautiliya, which is typical of Mauryan 
 times. Kingship was a prerogative of the Kshatriya class 
 and was established for the maintenance of the whole system 
 of traditional laws, religious and civil, which governed Indo- 
 Aryan society. At the same time Manu recognises the possi- 
 bility of a Sudra becoming a king, for he advises Brahmans 
 to avoid any city governed by a Sudra or inhabited by a 
 majority of heretics or outcasts. 
 
 The explanation of the origin of monarchy given by Manu 
 is the same as that of the Mahabharata. It was instituted 
 after a period of universal anarchy for the purpose of re- 
 establishing Aryan laws and institutions. The king was the 
 personification of justice, and his authority within the limits 
 of Aryan law was absolute. " All classes would become 
 corrupt ; all barriers would be broken down ; there would be 
 total confusion among men if punishment were not inflicted, 
 or were inflicted unduly " (vii, 24). A king who inflicted just 
 legal punishments greatly increased virtue, pleasure, and wealth; 
 but punishment itself would destroy the king who was crafty, 
 voluptuous, and wrathful. 
 
 The king's council, as usual, was to consist of seven or eight 
 ministers chosen from those whose ancestors were servants of 
 kings, who were versed in the holy books, who were brave, 
 skilled in the use of weapons, and of noble lineage. The king 
 was bound to consult his councillors on questions of peace 
 and war, military, naval, and financial matters, on things 
 concerning the protection of the people, and on the proper use 
 of the royal revenues (vii, 54-56). He was to act " as a father 
 to his people," for the king who foolishly or rashly oppressed 
 his subjects would, sooner or later, together with his family, 
 be deprived of his kingdom and of life (vii, iii). We have 
 ^ Travels oj Fah-Hian, Seal's translation, p. 55. 
 
 L 161 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 already noticed several historical instances of the fulfilment 
 of this principle of Indo-Aryan law. 
 
 The organisation of the local administration likewise re- 
 sembled that of the Maury an period. Villages were grouped 
 in tens, twenties, hundreds, and thousands, each group under 
 the headship of a State official. The head of the smallest 
 group had for his perquisite the produce of two plough-lands, 
 or as much land as could be tilled by two ploughs each drawn 
 by six bullocks. The head of twenty villages received the 
 produce of ten plough-lands, the head of a hundred the 
 revenue of a village, and the head of a thousand the revenue 
 of a town. 
 
 A governor was appointed to check any abuse of authority 
 by these imperial officials. " Since the servants of the king 
 whom he has appointed guardians of districts are generally 
 knaves, who seize what belongs to other men, from such 
 knaves let him defend his people" (vii, 123). Manu only 
 refers in general terms to the principles of taxation recognised 
 by Aryan law. Taxes on merchandise were to be levied so 
 that the king and merchant should both receive their dues, 
 lyearned Brahmans were always to be exempt from taxes and 
 suitably provided for. Petty traffickers were to be lightly 
 taxed, and the lower classes of artisans and labourers might 
 give one day's work in a month in lieu of taxes. In time of 
 war or of urgent necessity a Kshatriya king might take up to 
 one-fourth of the crop as the price of protection of his realm, 
 provided that he did not falter in protecting his people with 
 his sword. Similarly the taxes demanded by the royal 
 treasury from the Vaisya class in times of prosperity must 
 not exceed one-twelfth of their crops and one-fiftieth of their 
 personal profits ; but in times of public necessity the medium 
 rate of one-sixth — or even one-fourth, the highest limit — 
 might be lawfully demanded. The highest permissible tax 
 on merchandise was one-twentieth of the profits. 
 
 Mann's regulations also throw light upon the ethics of 
 ritualistic purity which governed caste distinctions. Among 
 the persons to be avoided when oblations were offered to the 
 162 
 
INDIA IN GUPTA TIMES 
 
 gods or to ancestors, and as company at festivals, were physi- 
 cians — presumably because they were liable to be infected by 
 their patients — anyone suffering from phthisis, elephantiasis, 
 epilepsy, leprosy, or erysipelas ; a one-eyed man ; a feeder of 
 cattle ; a usurer ; a man who subsisted by the wealth of his 
 relatives ; a drunkard or swindler ; a mariner of the ocean ; 
 an oilman ; a suborner of perjury ; a gambling-house keeper ; 
 a priest who made money by image- worship ; an unlearned 
 Brahman ; or a craftsman who built houses for gain. In the 
 same category were dancers ; breeders of sporting dogs ; a 
 falconer ; a seducer of damsels ; a man delighting in mischief ; 
 a Brahman living as a Sudra ; the husband of a Sudra woman ; 
 a Sudra teacher ; and Brahmans who only sacrificed to the 
 inferior gods. 
 
 The views of the old Aryan law-giver on the relationship of 
 the sexes were that " a woman is never fit for independence " : 
 their fathers must protect them in childhood, their husbands 
 in their youth, and their sons in their old age. It was a 
 settled rule that women had no business with the sacred text 
 of the Vedas. It was a father's duty to find a husband for 
 his daughter as soon as possible after arrival at maturity ; 
 but if she remained unmarried for three years after that time 
 she was at liberty to choose for herself — only in this case she 
 was not to take with her the jewels she had received from her 
 father, mother, or brothers. 
 
 Married women must be honoured by their husbands and 
 male relations, and provided with suitable ornaments and 
 apparel ; for " a wife being gaily adorned her whole house 
 is adorned " (iii, 62). "A man might take a second wife if the 
 first should not bear children within eight years after marriage ; 
 or ten years after marriage if all his children had died ; or 
 after eleven years if he had no son. But a good and virtuous 
 wife must never be disgraced, though she might be superseded 
 by another with her own consent," 
 
 Manu concludes by a summary of the law of Karma and 
 transmigration by which every human being receives the 
 reward or punishment of his thoughts, words, and actions in 
 
 163 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 this life, or through rebirth in a higher or lower state. 
 He sums up by declaring that the highest aim of humanity 
 is to attain through Brahmanhood to the knowledge and 
 right worship of the One God, as taught by the Upa- 
 nishads. 
 
 Samudragupta's son, Chandragupta II, succeeded his father 
 about A.D. 380, and as above mentioned adopted the title 
 of Vikramaditya. The celebrated Iron Pillar now stand- 
 ing in the courtyard of Qutb-ud-din's mosque at Delhi is a 
 dhwaja-stambha, or imperial standard, similar to those of 
 Asoka, with the imperial symbol of Vishnu's blue lotus flower 
 at the top, which was set up by Vikramaditya to record his 
 campaigns in Bengal and the Panjab by which he either 
 suppressed an attempt to throw off his suzerainty or extended 
 the territory won by his father. The conquest of Malwa, 
 Gujerat, and the peninsula of Surashtra, or Kathiawar, where 
 a dynasty known as the Saka, of Turki origin, had ruled for 
 several centuries, restored Aryan political supremacy in 
 Western India, and extended Vikramaditya's suzerainty to 
 the Arabian Sea, The reigning king, Rudra-Sena, whom 
 Vikramaditya is said to have slain with his own hand, bore 
 an Aryan name, but is described as a dissolute creature un- 
 worthy of the traditions of Aryan kingship. By this conquest 
 Vikramaditya obtained possession of the Saka capital, Ujjain, 
 an historic city known as the headquarters of Asoka when he 
 was viceroy for his father, and as the birthplace of his brother 
 Mahendra, who headed the Buddhist mission to Ceylon. It 
 was also famous for its university and for its astronomical 
 observatory, 
 
 Chandragupta II is generally believed to have been the 
 Vikramaditya who was the patron of the great Sanskrit 
 dramatist Kalidasa, and if popular tradition may be trusted 
 Ujjain, after the fall of the Saka dynasty, became the 
 imperial capital where all the most renowned Sanskrit poets, 
 artists, and scholars of Ary^avarta added to the lustre of the 
 Gupta court. Probably the Gupta imperial family was one 
 of those, like the Mogul line, in which father, son, and grandson 
 164 
 
INDIA IN GUPTA TIMES 
 
 were men of high culture and equally zealous patrons of arts 
 and letters. 
 
 Among the most interesting records of the Gupta period 
 are the accounts written by the Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hien of 
 his travels in search of the authoritative version of the rules 
 of the Buddhist Order — ^the Vindya Pitaka. He spent six 
 years in the journey overland from his native province of 
 Chhang'an to the Indus, six years in India itself copying 
 Buddhist texts and collecting sacred relics and images, and 
 three years on his return journey to China by sea, including 
 a visit to Ceylon which lasted about two years. One can 
 learn nothing from his notes of the revival of Brahmanical 
 learning, of the splendour of the imperial court, or of the 
 achievements of Vikramaditya ; but occasionally he turns 
 aside from his pious quest to observe the conditions of the 
 people and the government of the country. The people of 
 Magadha, he declared, were happy and prosperous. The 
 account of the organisation of an imperial government given 
 by Kautiliya and others might perhaps justify the comment 
 of a European scholar that it depicted " a society choking 
 in the deadly grip of a grinding bureaucracy." ^ It is interest- 
 ing, therefore, to find an impartial observer of a Hindu admini- 
 stration formed on similar lines stating that the people were 
 singularly free from bureaucratic tyranny. " They have not 
 to register their households, or attend to any magistrates and 
 rules." The chief officers of the king had fixed incomes and 
 they were not tempted to extort money from the people. 
 But even where Buddhism was the State religion the prejudice 
 against the Chandalas, or the aboriginals outside the Aryan 
 pale, was just as strong as it was in states governed by Brah- 
 manical laws. If any one of them entered a town or market- 
 place he was obliged to strike a piece of wood so that the 
 ' pure ' might avoid contact with him. 
 
 It must have been a time of exceptional prosperity if, as 
 Fa-Hien seems to imply, the State revenue was mainly derived 
 from the rents of the royal domains, the lessees of which were 
 ^ Dr Iv. D. Bamett, Antiquities oj India, p. 104. 
 
 i6s 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 free to give up possession when they liked. The administration 
 of justice was considerably milder than it was in the time of 
 Asoka, for offences were generally punished by fines, and the 
 death penalty was never inflicted. Only in cases of repeated 
 attempts to incite disorder or rebellion the right hand of the 
 culprit was cut off. 
 
 It is noticeable that in this time of Brahmanical revival 
 Fa-Hien makes no mention of any form of religious persecution, 
 or any attempt on the part of orthodox Hindu rulers to deprive 
 the Buddhist sects of their endowments and privileges. On the 
 contrary, Fa-Hien explains that as the records of these endow- 
 ments were no longer engraved on iron, but on sheets of copper, 
 they were preserved in good condition and handed down in 
 the State archives from one king to another, so that the Sangha 
 remained in undisputed possession of its proper revenues and 
 no one dared to deprive it of them. The Sangha was in a 
 flourishing condition, the followers of the Mahayana and 
 Hinayana cults living amicably together. The monks residing 
 in the Sangharamas had chambers, beds, coverlets, food, drink, 
 and clothes provided for them without stint or reserve. " Thus 
 it is in all places." ^ 
 
 Yet many of the most sacred places of Buddhism which in 
 the time of Asoka had a large population had fallen into deca^^ 
 Gaya was waste and desolate. At Kapilavastu there was no 
 government or people : wild elephants and Hons made it 
 difficult of access. Sravasti, which in the Buddha's time was 
 a great city, the capital of the kingdom of Kosala, had now 
 no more than two hundred families. But the Buddhist 
 monasteries at other places were rich and magnificent. They 
 had fine water-gardens, with luxurious groves and numberless 
 flowers of varied hues. At Mathura the followers of the lyaw 
 were numerous, and all the kings of the neighbouring countries 
 uncovered their heads when they paid their offerings to the 
 Sangharamas. The king himself would often come in state 
 and conduct the monks to his palace to provide them with 
 food, and when the repast had been spread before the guests 
 
 ^ Travels oj Fah-Hian, Beal's translatioiij p. 56. 
 166 
 
INDIA IN GUPTA TIMES 
 
 on the royal dais, he and his ministers of State would take 
 their stand on a carpet spread below — ^for this " was a nile 
 for the conduct of princes which had been handed down from 
 the time of the Blessed One." 
 
 Fa-Hien rarely alludes to the existence of orthodox Brahman- 
 ism, but in " mid-India," or the provinces which had Ajodhya 
 for their chief city, he mentions " ninety-six heretical sects, 
 all of whom admitted the reality of worldly phenomena." 
 However, he allowed them this merit, that they built dharma- 
 sdlas along the roads where travellers found shelter, food, and 
 drink, and were supplied with all necessaries. Even Buddhist 
 pilgrims were entertained at the public expense, though 
 separate provision was made for them. 
 
 At Pataliputra the people were " rich, prosperous, and 
 virtuous." The nobles and landowners of the country had 
 founded free hospitals within the city to which were admitted 
 all poor and helpless patients suffering from all kinds of 
 infirmities. " They are well taken care of," says Fa-Hien, 
 " and a doctor attends them, food and medicine being sup- 
 plied according to their wants. Thus they are made quite 
 comfortable, and when they are well they may go away." ^ 
 
 In Pataliputra there once lived a wise Brahman of profound 
 learning who did much to extend the influence of the I^aw of 
 Buddha. He belonged to the Mahayana school, but lived 
 apart from the world in pious seclusion. The king honoured 
 him as his guru, and for about fifty years the whole country 
 reverenced him and placed entire confidence in his advice. 
 When the king went to visit him he did not presume to sit 
 down in his presence, and if he should from a feeling of affec- 
 tion grasp his guru's hand the latter would immediately wash 
 himself from head to foot. This anecdote of Fa-Hien brings 
 the evidence of a keen and impartial observer to show how 
 little Buddhism had diminished the social and political influence 
 of Brahmans or broken down the restrictions of caste rules. 
 
 Both the Great and Little Vehicles flourished at Patahputra, 
 and if any sectarian rancour existed Fa-Hien did not observe 
 
 ^ ForHien's Travels, Giles' translation, chap, xxvii. 
 
 167 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 it. Once a year, he said, there was a great popular festival 
 in which all sects, including the Brahman students, joined. 
 It was inaugurated by a great procession of images placed 
 upon four-wheeled temple cars. The superstructure of the 
 cars, over twenty-two feet in height, was made of bambus 
 lashed together in five stages, covered with white linen and 
 painted with gaily coloured pictures. Upon them were placed 
 images of all the Devas, ornamented with gold, silver, and 
 lapis lazuli, under canopies of embroidered silk. At the four 
 corners of the cars there were shrines within which were placed 
 images of the Buddha in yogi attitude with a Bodhisattva 
 in attendance.^ Thus they were drawn into the city from the 
 neighbouring monasteries in a stately procession, accompanied 
 by singers and musicians, by priests offering flowers and swing- 
 ing censers, and great crowds of the lay brethren. At the 
 city gates the Brahman students came forward to salute the 
 images. There were all sorts of games and amusements for 
 the people, and in the evening the city was illuminated with 
 lamps. 
 
 In the centre of the city Fa-Hien noticed the ruins of Asoka's 
 palace : the walls, built of massive stones, the door- 
 ways and sculptured towers, were, he declared, " no human 
 work." After a pilgrimage to Gaya, Benares, and other places, 
 Fa-Hien returned to Pataliputra and spent three years in 
 studying Sanskrit and in copying a manuscript of the Vindya 
 Pitaka and other Buddhist texts which he had sought for in 
 vain in the earlier part of his travels. He gives the reason 
 that throughout the whole of Northern India the learned 
 masters of the I^aw trusted entirely to oral tradition handed 
 down from one generation of scholars to another, and no 
 written copies of the Master's precepts were to be found. 
 
 Now that it is so common to impose literary shibboleths as 
 final tests of culture and political capacity it is interesting to 
 observe that at a time when India had reached the zenith of 
 her creative power in arts and letters, a position at least as 
 
 1 The description suggests that the cars were miniature reproductions of 
 the great temple at Bodh-Gaya. 
 
 i68 
 
INDIA IN GUPTA TIMES 
 
 Mgli as that reached by any modern state, and had achieved 
 a system of self-government probably as perfect as the world 
 has yet known — if the highest standard of political ethics and 
 the general happiness of the community be accepted as criteria 
 — she found it not only unnecessary but undesirable to make 
 book-learning a test either of literary culture or of poUtical 
 capacity. In the Golden Age of Indian literature writing was 
 a mercantile accomplishment rather than an intellectual one : 
 the highest intellect of the land preferred an oral method of 
 education as more exact and more mentally efhcient than that 
 of text-books. But in days when machinery has become all- 
 powerful even our mentality must be machine-made, lest we 
 should go too slowly in the mad race for world-markets and 
 world-power. 
 
 It is significant that Magadha, and not the Kushan country, 
 was the centre in which Fa-Hien found the authoritative texts 
 and symbolic images of Mahayana Buddhism ; also that 
 Sanskrit, the literary language of the Brahman schools, was 
 used in Magadha for the written statement of the Buddhist 
 I^aw. This confirms what the true reading of Gandharan 
 sculpture also evidences, that the influence of Hellenistic art 
 upon Indian was purely technical in character and was in no 
 way the spiritual or intellectual force which shaped its ideals 
 p,nd ordered its forms of expression. Magadha and not Gandhara 
 was the spiritual centre of the Mahayana Buddhism to which 
 Kanishka gave imperial patronage. 
 
 Fa-Hien had not set out on his adventurous journey alone, 
 but one of his fellow-pilgrims died, and others returned to 
 China, so when he reached Pataliputra he had but one com- 
 panion, Tao-Ching. The latter was so deeply impressed by 
 the strict decorum and religious deportment of the monks of 
 Magadha — " even in the midst of worldly influences " — which 
 he contrasted with the lax discipline and ignorance of the 
 X-aw shown by the Buddhist priests of his own country, that 
 he resolved to remain in India until in some future existence 
 he should reach Nirvana. So Fa-Hien, desiring with his whole 
 heart to spread the true knowledge of the Good I^aw through- 
 
 169 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 out his native land, returned alone with a precious collection 
 of sacred texts and images. He spent two years at Tamlak, 
 then the principal port of Kalinga, but now thirty miles 
 inland, and about the same time in Ceylon. Then, embarking 
 on a great merchant ship manned by two hundred men, he 
 set out on his return journey to China by sea. He reached 
 Java after a perilous voyage of ninety days, and stayed in the 
 island five months. He then resumed his voyage in another 
 large merchant vessel, which he found very comfortable, with 
 a number of Hindu merchants from Java, described as Brah- 
 mans, as fellow-passengers. The ship was provisioned for 
 fifty days, but on account of stormy weather the voyage lasted 
 three months. 
 
 Fa-Hien here records the only occasion on which he was 
 exposed to any danger or subjected to any annoyance through 
 sectarian animosity. Provisions ran short, and he narrowly 
 escaped the fate of being landed on a desert island, for the 
 Brahmans attributed their misfortunes to Fa-Hien and the 
 heretical books and images he had brought on board. How- 
 ever, they refrained from molesting him for fear of the punish- 
 ment they might receive from the King of China, and Fa-Hien 
 at length reached his native land in safety with all his precious 
 cargo. 
 
 Fa-Hien's account of India makes us understand that it 
 was only when Buddhism was detached from its parent stem 
 and transplanted in foreign lands that it became a fixed 
 system of dogma which ceased to develop ethically and philo- 
 sophically. In India it was always a synthesis and alwa^'S 
 in process of evolution or disintegration. Buddhism grew out 
 of Brahmanism, or early Hinduism, and for a time contained 
 Hinduism within itself. I^ater Hinduism grew out of Bud- 
 dhism, and the latter, though disintegrated, continued to live 
 in India within the new synthesis of Hinduism. In India 
 religion is hardly a dogma, but a working hypothesis of human 
 conduct adapted to different stages of spiritual development 
 and different conditions of life. 
 
 170 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE HUNS IN INDIA— GUPTA ART 
 AND ARCHITECTURE 
 
 VIKRAMADITYA was succeeded in a.d. 413 by his son, 
 Kiimaragupta, in whose reign, which lasted over forty 
 years, the troubles of Ar3^avarta were renewed. It is 
 worth while to recall the fact that it was a fixed principle of 
 Indo-Aryan polity never to embark upon wars of foreign 
 aggression, i.e. outside the boundaries of Bharata-Varsha, or 
 Aryavarta in its widest sense. Even the great war-lords 
 Samudragupta and Vikramaditya, with the most powerful 
 armies and navies at their command,^ and with almost unlimited 
 opportunities at a time when the Roman Empire was tottering 
 to its fall, were content to limit their title of world-sovereignty 
 to the confines of Aryavarta and the people who came within 
 the Aryan pale. The great wealth of India's natural resources 
 and its geographical unity might seem to make the temptation 
 less than it would be under other conditions, but such condi- 
 tions, as a rule, only tend to inflame the lust for power of would- 
 be world-conquerors. 
 
 But though the wisdom of Indo-Aryan polity thus protected 
 the State from the consequences of aggressive foreign wars, the 
 love of independence which always inspired the Aryan people 
 and the very heterogeneous character of the racial elements of 
 which Aryavarta was formed were disintegrating forces always 
 threatening to weaken dangerously India's power of resistance 
 to attacks from outside. The imperial constitution of Arya- 
 varta, though nominally on a popular basis, was too little 
 representative of local interests to hold together long except 
 under rulers of unusual capacity and high character, or when 
 
 171 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the semi-independent states which were federated with it 
 forgot their mutual jealousies and rivalries in the face of a 
 great common danger. 
 
 Every interval of peace and prosperity under a strong central 
 government was quickly followed by internal dissensions which 
 sooner or later opened the door to the invader on the north- 
 west frontier, always ready for an opportunity to loot the 
 prosperous cities of the Indian plains. The prestige of Samu- 
 dragupta's and Vikramaditya's arms maintained peace in 
 Aryavarta for over thirty years of Kumaragupta's reign, but 
 towards the end of it the Gupta dynasty was seriously 
 threatened by the attempt of one of its vassal states to assert 
 its independence by force of arms. The details of the struggle 
 are only known by an inscription in which it is recorded that, 
 after a serious defeat inflicted on the imperial armies by a 
 confederation known as the Pushyamitra, the Crown Prince, 
 Skandagupta, retrieved the situation by the complete over- 
 throw of the enemy. 
 
 In 455 Kumaragupta died and was succeeded by Skanda- 
 gupta. Seeing how narrow was the difference which separated 
 Brahmanism from Buddhism at this time it is not surprising 
 to find that though the Guptas were known as devoted adherents 
 of the Vishnu cult, Skandagupta is claimed in the Buddhist 
 chronicles as a zealous disciple of Vasubandhu, a celebrated 
 Mahayanist teacher of that time, and as a liberal patron of the 
 Sangha. It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that 
 he therefore renounced the worship of Vishnu and ceased to 
 be a Hindu. It simply meant that he regarded the Buddha, 
 rather than Krishna, as the Divine Guru who showed him the 
 right way to worship Vishnu. Skandagupta could therefore 
 continue to show on his imperial coinage the S5^mbols of a 
 pious Hindu ruler without any inconsistency or offence to the 
 spirits of his illustrious ancestors. 
 
 The first duty which Skandagupta was called upon to 
 perform after his accession to his father's throne was to take 
 up arms in defence of Aryavarta against a foreign enemy — 
 the most powerful and relentless which had threatened its 
 172 
 
THE HUNS IN INDIA 
 
 security since the Turki invasions. The left wing of the vast 
 hordes of savage Huns which had started on their devastating 
 work westward turned aside to pour down into the Indus 
 valley through the passes of the north-western Himalayas. 
 The first onrush of the barbarians was successfully met. 
 Skandagupta inflicted a crushing defeat upon them, and bring- 
 ing the joyful news to his mother^ " just as Krishna when he 
 had slain his enemies hastened to his mother, Devaki," he 
 ordered his victory to be celebrated by sacrifices to the Devas 
 and by the usual permanent memorial, a Vishnu pillar, as a 
 thank-offering for the delivery of Aryavarta from her hateful 
 enemies. The pillar, with an inscription recording the event, 
 still stands at Bhitari in the Ghazipu.r district, not far from 
 Benares. 
 
 About twelve years later the Huns renewed their furious 
 onrush, and this time secured a strong footing in Gandhara, 
 the former centre of the Kushan Empire, where one of the 
 chieftains made himself execrated by the atrocities he com- 
 mitted upon the Buddhist monks and laymen. From 470 
 until his death about ten years later Skandagupta was engaged 
 in resisting successive incursions into India of these ferocious 
 exponents of the doctrine of ' frightfulness ' in war. The 
 Indo- Aryan military code fully recognised that war is war. 
 The Sukrd-nitisdra, after explaining the ethics of warfare as 
 recognised by Aryans, and forbidding the slaughter of old men, 
 women, and children, and even fighting men when wounded, 
 asleep, naked, or unarmed, ^ makes the reservation that these 
 rules applied only to wars conducted according to the laws of 
 morality. There was a method of warfare, the kutayudha, or 
 non-moral war, which was justified as having been used by 
 Rama, Krishna, and other Aryan heroes in exterminating 
 demons like Ravana and others who were outside humanitarian 
 laws. But, though it was admitted in India of the fifth century 
 A.D. that there was no method like this for extirpating a 
 powerful enemy, it was unthinkable that it should be employed 
 in wars between Aryan and Aryan. Tempora mutantur. 
 1 Chap. IV, Sect, vn, 724. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 There is only vague tradition to rely upon for the details of 
 Skandagupta's later wars with the Huns ; but the greater 
 part of North-western India seems to have been overrun by 
 the barbarians, who followed the same tactics of indiscrimi- 
 nate slaughter of non-combatants, destruction and plunder of 
 monasteries and religious monuments, as their fellow-tribesmen 
 in Europe. The imperial treasury found great difficulty in 
 financing Skandagupta's campaigns, and the usual method of 
 meeting such great emergencies was resorted to, i.e. the standard 
 of the gold coinage was reduced, for the later issues of Skanda- 
 gupta's suvarnas, or pieces of gold, show a decline in the 
 amount of pure gold from io8 to 73 grains.^ 
 I Apparently Skandagupta kept the Hunnish hordes at bay 
 until about 480, when he died and was succeeded by his half- 
 brother Puragupta, who in accordance with the traditions of 
 Aryan polity seems to have superseded the direct heirs to the 
 succession as being better qualified to undertake the responsi- 
 bilities of government in such troublous times. The fact that 
 the Gupta gold coinage in his reign was raised above the normal 
 standard of purity ^ is an indication that the empire was 
 recovering its internal prosperity ; but the Huns were still 
 devastating its north-western provinces, and continued to do 
 so throughout Puragupta's short reign of about five years. 
 
 The next of the line, Narasinhagupta Baladitya, who came 
 to the throne about 485, was distinguished alike by his piety 
 and his military achievements. He had for his spiritual 
 teacher Skandagupta's Buddhist preceptor, Vasubandhu, who 
 thereafter had an honoured place at the imperial court in 
 Ajodhya. Many Buddhist seats of learning, especially the 
 famous university at Nalanda, benefited by Baladitya's patron- 
 age. Nevertheless he exhibited the tolerant spirit of an Aryan 
 sovereign by allowing his sister to take for a husband a learned 
 Brahman, named Vasurata, who was known for his zeal in de- 
 fending orthodox Vedic teaching against Vasubandhu's attacks. 
 The philosophical disputations of the learned pandits of the 
 
 1 Vincent Smith, Early History oj India, 2nd edit., p. 291. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 291. 
 
THE HUNS IN INDIA 
 
 court seem for a time to have diverted Baladitya's attention 
 from the great dangers which threatened the security of his 
 empire. Wave after wave of marauding Huns continued to 
 pour through the passes of the north-west, and the imperial 
 armies failed to stem their advance into the Indus valley. 
 About 495 the rich province of Malwa was wrested from Bala- 
 ditya by a Hun chieftain named Toramana, who abandoned 
 the predatory habits of his race, adopted Indo-Aryan royal 
 titles, and exercised suzerainty over the local rajas in Central 
 India and the Panjab who formerly owed allegiance to the 
 Guptas. Other rajas in the Dekhan seized the opportunity 
 to assert their independence, so that the Gupta Empire was 
 gradually reduced to a shadow of its former greatness. 
 
 Toramana before he died had consolidated his power in the 
 frontier provinces almost as effectively as the Kushans. He 
 appears to have been a sagacious ruler. Perhaps the Turki 
 element in the population which had already become Aryanised 
 made it easier for the Huns to assimilate Indo-Aryan ideas 
 and traditions of government. But his son Mihiragula, who 
 succeeded him about 510, was an unmitigated savage whose 
 record for fiendish cruelty might stand with that of Nero and 
 Attila. The relentless slaughter and persecution of his Buddhist 
 subjects at length aroused all Aryavarta to combine in attack- 
 ing the tyrant, and a confederation headed by Baladitya and 
 Yasodharman, a raja of Central India, defeated the Hun army, 
 circa 528, in a pitched battle in which Mihiragula himself was 
 taken prisoner. He would have forfeited his life as a punish- 
 jment for his misdeeds had not the chivalrous Baladitya set 
 an example of Buddhist piety and respect for Aryan laws by 
 releasing him and allowing him to go into exile. His younger 
 brother was then placed upon the throne as his successor at 
 Sakala (Sialkot), the capital of the Hun dynasty. 
 I Mihiragula's brutal character was not bettered by Bala- 
 |iitya's magnanimity. He took shelter in Kashmir, where the 
 (|.aja protected him and gave him and his retinue a small 
 jippanage for their maintenance. But at the first opportunity 
 le made a treacherous attack upon his benefactor, seized the 
 
 175 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 kingdom for himself, and with the augmented strength which 
 success always brings to tyrants of criminal propensities next 
 invaded Gandhara. There he sought to recover his lost 
 prestige among his compatriots by a characteristic exhibi- 
 tion of Hunnish methods of warfare. The royal family was 
 exterminated, thousands of non-combatants were massacred ; 
 the splendid Buddhist monasteries and shrines were plundered 
 and laid in ruins. But within a year after this exploit Mihira- 
 gula died, and the speedy dechne of the Hun supremacy which 
 followed after his death illustrated the futility of ' frightfulness ' 
 as a means of gaining permanent control over the destinies of 
 nations. 
 
 But though the Huns ceased thereafter to have any import- 
 ance as an independent ruling race in India, the effect of a 
 century of Hun incursions — following those of the Sakas, 
 Kushans, and other Central Asian nomads in previous centuries, 
 partly warlike and partly peaceful in character — could not 
 fail to make a deep impression upon the sociology and polity 
 of Northern India. Even after the military strength of Arya- 
 varta had broken the Hun armies and arrested their further 
 advance, the principles of Aryan religion forbade the delibe- 
 rate wholesale extermination of a defeated enemy — even the 
 detested Mlechchhas. The more peaceful foreign immigrants 
 would settle down to agrictdtural pursuits and become recog- 
 nised as Sudras. Many detached bands of fighting men would, 
 as they did in similar circumstances in Europe, establish them- 
 selves in remote corners of the country and by the help of 
 forced local labour build themselves hill-fortresses strong 
 enough to stand a prolonged siege. Having thus established 
 their right of overlordship by force of arms the Hun or Turki 
 chieftains and their retainers would have no difficulty in secur- 
 ing brides of Indo-Aryan blood by the right of capture well 
 recognised by Aryan tradition. Their descendants were eventu- 
 ally admitted into the Aryan pale as members of the Kshatriya 
 caste, but naturally they would take rank from their maternal 
 ancestry rather than from their Hun or Turki relations. 
 
 There can be little doubt that the numerous ramifications 
 176 
 
THE HUNS IN INDIA 
 
 of the Rajput clans of the present day are the result of the 
 many foreign elements which were assimilated by Indo- Aryan 
 society from the fourth to the sixth centuries and in later 
 times. To the same cause may be attributed the greatly 
 increased strictness of caste regulations and the gradual weaken- 
 ing of Indo-Aryan political strength which became apparent 
 in succeeding centuries. The pure-blooded Rajputs who prided 
 themselves on their descent from the heroes of the Maha- 
 bharata kept themselves aloof from the foreign intruders, as 
 their ancestors had held themselves aloof from the non- Aryan 
 population in ancient times. Racial prejudice added to the 
 growing prestige of the Brahmans as being less tainted with 
 an admixture of impure Mlechchha blood. The same reason 
 made the Brahman aristocracy look askance at alliances with 
 Kshatriya women and tended to increase the penalties for all 
 breaches of caste custom. 
 
 This strong infusion of barbarian blood lowered the high 
 ethical standard of Indo-Aryan tradition and favoured the 
 growth of many of the vulgar superstitions which were never 
 countenanced by the great philosophers and spiritual teachers 
 of Aryavarta. It tended also to debase the free spirit of 
 Aryan political ideals, to weaken the authority of the popular 
 assemblies, and to increase the arbitrary power exercised by the 
 head of the State. ' Oriental despotism ' was of Tartar or 
 Mongolian creation : it was never recognised in Indo-Aryan 
 traditional laws. 
 
 The death of Baladitya about 530 may be taken as the end 
 of the political greatness of the Guptas, though his successors 
 continued to rule over Magadha, or the eastern provinces of 
 the empire, with Patahputra as their capital. The Gupta era 
 is well known as the Golden Age of Sanskrit literature, and 
 Orientalists are agreed in attributing to the Sanskrit revival 
 the extant recensions of the epics, the works of Kalidasa, and 
 other Indo-Aryan classics. Archaeologists are far less precise 
 in defining the characteristic expression of Gupta culture in 
 art and architecture. Fergusson and other authorities have 
 
 M 177 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 attempted to distinguish a Gupta style of architecture by a 
 detailed analysis of a few temples which by epigraphical or 
 other chronological evidence can be proved to belong to that 
 period ; but they are too few in number and insufficiently 
 important to determine the architectural characteristics of a 
 creative epoch which was doubtless not less productive in 
 architecture than it was in literature. 
 
 The Gupta period politically was an Indo-Aryan revival, 
 for the Guptas were undoubtedly the representatives of the 
 Aryan Kshatriya tradition and champions of the Aryan cause 
 against Aryavarta's adversaries of Turki, Hun, Dravidian, and 
 other alien descent. From the religious point of view it was 
 marked by a Vaishnava propaganda in which Krishna, the 
 Aryan hero of the Mahabharata, was put forward as the 
 exponent of Indo-Aryan teaching in opposition to the Buddhist 
 doctrines, chiefly Mahayanist, favoured by Aryavarta's alien 
 enemies. If Fergusson's conventional method of classification 
 be applied to Gupta buildings we should therefore be justified 
 in assuming that they would be characteristic of the spirit of 
 the age and would be rightly catalogued as belonging to an 
 ' Indo-Aryan style.' 
 
 But Fergusson's analysis of an ' Indo-Aryan style ' conflicts 
 entirely with this point of view. Its geographical limits corre- 
 sponded with the country described as Aryavarta, but he says, 
 " No style is so purely local, and, if the term may be used, so 
 aboriginal, as this." ^ And of its chief characteristic, the 
 curvilinear steeple of the temple, known as the sikhara, he 
 says : " Wherever a square tower-like temple exists with a 
 perpendicular base, but a curvilinear outline above, there we 
 may feel certain of the existence, past or present, of a people 
 of Dasyu extraction " — ^the Dasyus being the non- Aryan, 
 aboriginal races of India with whom the Aryans came into 
 conflict. " No one," says Fergusson, ** can accuse the pure 
 Aryans of introducing this form into India, or of building 
 temples at all, or of worshipping images of vSiva or Vishnu, 
 with which these temples are filled, and they consequently 
 
 ^ History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, vol. ii, p. 86. 
 
 178 
 
GUPTA ART AND ARCHITECTURE 
 
 have little title to confer their name on the style. The Aryans 
 had, however, become so impure in blood before these temples 
 were erected, and were so mixed up with the aboriginal tribes 
 whose superstitions had so influenced their religion and their 
 arts, that they accepted their temples with their gods." ^ 
 
 Fergusson himself, though convinced of its aboriginal Indian 
 or Dasyu origin, left the symbolism of the sikhara unexplained 
 and frankly confessed it to be a mystery to him. Other writers 
 have tried to prove its derivation from the stupa, but all 
 archaeologists have accepted Fergusson's dictum that it was 
 not introduced into India by the Aryans, and that the ' Indo- 
 Aryan style ' was a borrowed one. 
 
 It is most important for the understanding of the history of 
 Aryan India to clear up the mystery of the derivation of the 
 sikhara and its connection with early Aryan religion. No one 
 can remain long in India and become familiar with its monu- 
 ments without feeling that the innumerable temple spires of 
 Northern India, essentially the same in every place whether 
 the temple be Jain, Buddhist, Vaishnava, or Saiva, have much 
 to tell us of the foundation of Aryan religious beliefs. The 
 theory that the sikhara is derived from the stupa seems to be 
 untenable if only for the reason that at the most ancient sites 
 of Buddhism, such as Sarnath, the sikhara is found side by 
 side with the stupa, but quite as fully developed and as distinct 
 from the latter both in structure and symbolism as it is at 
 any later period. There are no transitional forms by which 
 one can trace the passing of the stupa into the sikhara. The 
 sikhara may be square, octagonal, or circular in its base, but 
 in the most ancient examples the amalaka, or the melon- 
 shaped finial, which is its most striking characteristic, is never 
 used on the stupa dome. It is quite clear that the sikhara 
 shrine as a symbol was meant to be the antithesis to or comple- 
 ment of the stupa. 
 
 The stupa is a reliquary or funeral monument — a symbol of 
 death. The sikhara shrine we may therefore assume to be 
 a symbol of life — or, using the terminology of modern Hinduism, 
 
 1 op. cit., Introduction, p. 14. 
 
 179 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the stupa is a Saiva symbol, the sikhara is a Vaishnava symbol. 
 Starting with this hypothesis, that the sikhara as a symbol 
 is connected with the Vaishnava cult, let us now endeavour 
 to trace it back to its place in early Aryan life. The Vaishnava 
 cult was undoubtedly Kshatriya in origin and closely connected 
 with primitive, hero-worship, or loyalty to the tribal traditions 
 in the person of its chieftain. According to the Silpa-Sastras 
 the Vishnu-temple's place in the Aryan village was on the 
 Rajapatha, the King's Road. It was the royal chapel, for 
 Vishnu was the patron deity of the Kshatriya caste, and the 
 amalaka which crowned it is the same as that which formed 
 the capital of the royal standard, or Vishnu pillar, on which 
 Asoka inscribed his edicts. It represents the fruit of the blue 
 lotus {Nymphaea cerulea), Vishnu's flower, conventionally 
 treated to indicate the partitions of the interior of the seed- 
 capsule, or the spokes of the wheel of life. The Indo- Aryan 
 king by his consecration as Vishnu's vicegerent on earth 
 probably took rank as a Kshatriya whatever his family vama, 
 or caste, might have been. 
 
 Now we find that other conspicuous features of Indian 
 architecture were originally associated with secular rather than 
 religious uses. The Amaravati sculptures show the torana, or 
 arched entrance of Buddhist stupas, in its original use as a 
 town or village gateway, and the name gopuram, or cow-fort, 
 of modern Hindu temples suggests its derivation from similar 
 brick or stone gateways used as watch-towers for the protec- 
 tion of the Aryan villagers' cattle. The usual method of 
 construction used for temple sikharas and their ornamentation 
 convey a similar suggestion of the original use of the spire as 
 a military watch-tower or fort. The interior of the spire is 
 usually built up in stories, as may be seen from a ruined 
 example at Khajuraho, and the decoration of the miniature 
 sikharas found at Sarnath ^ shows how each story was pierced 
 on all sides by sun-shaped loopholes out of which the royal 
 sentinels could watch the surrounding country and shoot 
 
 ^ See The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India, by the author, Fig. 41, 
 p. 97. 
 180 
 
II. Stei<e of Naram-Sin 
 
GUPTA ART AND ARCHITECTURE 
 
 arrows at tlie approaching enemy. The wooden or bambu 
 type of construction which was retained even when the material 
 was brick or stone indicates that in their original secular use 
 for the protection of the king's person the sikharas were often 
 improvised when the army was in camp, and in such cases 
 bambu would be universally used in India. The fact that the 
 name ratha, or warrior's chariot, is sometimes applied to a 
 temple vim ana, and literally interpreted by the carving of 
 stone wheels on the plinth of the mandapam, also suggests that 
 the king's car was often similarly furnished with a bambu 
 superstructure to distinguish it from the otliers, and to provide 
 platforms for archers of the royal body-guard. 
 
 That such an improvised fort or armoured car might have 
 been used b}^ the Dasyus who opposed the early Aryan invaders 
 of India is quite possible ; but as they have left no artistic 
 record which can be used as evidence it is impossible to prove 
 it. On the other hand, there are at least two important 
 artistic documents of great antiquity which support the theory 
 now put forward that the sikhara was used by the Aryans, 
 both symbolically and practically, long before the days of 
 Buddhism, and that it was not borrowed from the non- Aryan 
 races of India. It is true that they cannot be described as 
 Aryan documents, but both of them come from the Euphrates 
 valley, from the time and the places when and where the 
 Aryans, the devotees of Surya, were engaged in the struggle 
 with their ancient foes, the Asuras, and they are good evidence 
 of the original use of the sikhara as a royal fortress-tower. 
 
 The earliest of the two, dated by Mr H. R. Hall circa 
 2750 B.C., is the famous stele of the Semitic king Naram-Sin, 
 already described. ^ Whether the conical tower which is so 
 conspicuously shown in the stele is there used as a fort or 
 a temple is not clear, but it is significant that the symbolism 
 used is the same as that of the Indian sikhara ; only Vishnu, 
 the midday sun, instead of being represented by the blue lotus, 
 is sculptured realistically immediately over the summit of the 
 cone. The latter may have been formed by clay laid over a 
 ^ Supra, pp. 112-113. 
 
 181 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 wooden or basket-work frame, as similar structures are built 
 in the present day in the same locality, or it may have been 
 only a skin tent. But the characteristic form and the symbol- 
 ism make it extremely probable that here we have the proto- 
 type of the perfected Aryan sikhara, as shown in the miniature 
 examples found at Sarnath. 
 
 The other ancient illustration of the sikhara is figured in 
 I^ayard's Nineveh} and is there described as Sennacherib's 
 palace. Here among a group of buildings, some with flat 
 roofs and others with domes like that of a stupa, are two 
 sikharas, more structurally developed than in Naram-Sin's 
 stele, though still of a primitive type. One of them has a 
 square base, resembling the garbha-grihya or shrine of an Indian 
 temple, and both of them are crowned by a finial which suggests 
 the amalaka or a similar sun-symbol. On the summit of the 
 adjacent mountain another Vishnu symbol appears, the flower- 
 ing tree, contrasted with the cypress, the tree of eternity. It 
 is also significant that in both of these ancient examples 
 the sikhara is associated with a hill or mountain-top, the 
 natural site for a king's or tribal chieftain's fort, which was 
 always connected with the ritual and symbolism of the Vishnu 
 cult. 
 
 In early Vedic times the Kshatriyas, not the Brahmans, 
 were the spiritual leaders of the Aryan tribes, and the Aryan 
 village or township, built for defensive purposes, like the 
 medieval fortresses of Rajputana, would have for its centre 
 the Kshatriya chieftain's fort, crowned by a sikhara, outside 
 which the tribal altar was raised. The Vedic rites connected 
 with the worship of Surya, the patron deity of the Aryan 
 warrior, were celebrated by the Kshatriya chieftain, and his 
 fort with its tower and sun-shaped loopholes thus came to be 
 regarded as a sacred shrine, and the chieftain himself as a 
 delegate of the Sun-god, Surya. Hence the Ranas of Mewar, 
 the representatives of the most ancient royal line of Aryan 
 India, claim to be descendants, or sons, of Surya ; and for 
 the same reason the sun emblems, like the amalaka, were 
 
 1 Second Series, PI. XVI. 
 182 
 
12. Pai,ace of Sennacherib 
 AT Nineveh 
 
 182 
 
GUPTA ART AND ARCHITECTURE 
 
 placed upon the royal Aryan standards and upon the summit 
 of the king's tent or fort. 
 
 In later Vedic times Surya-worship merged into that of 
 Vishnu,! and assumed a profounder metaphysical aspect with 
 the gradual development of the philosophy of the Upanishads. 
 But the metaphysics of the cult of Vishnu always retained 
 the symbolism derived from the ancient ritualistic practice. 
 Vishnu is always represented with the regalia and arms of a 
 Kshatriya king. The Vaishnava theory of hhakti, or devotion 
 to God, grew out of hero-worship and the feeling of loyalty 
 to the chieftain of the tribe. The incarnations of Vishnu were 
 mostly metaphysical deductions drawn from the history of 
 ancient Aryan heroes. The Western student must, however, 
 be careful not to confuse the traditional ritualistic symbolism 
 with the metaphysical ideas connected with them ; or imagine 
 that the Vaishnava cult is to be fully explained as the apotheosis 
 of kingship combined with prehistoric mountain-worship. 
 
 If these conclusions are justified the fact that the sikhara 
 is the most characteristic feature of the temple architecture 
 of Aryavarta, the modern Hindustan, and that it began to 
 be prominent at the beginning of the Vaishnava propaganda 
 of the Gupta period need no longer be regarded as a mystery, 
 but as the natural sequence of its historical associations with 
 the ancient Aryan ritual of the Kshatriyas. It must also 
 follow that we must look for the characteristics of a Gupta 
 style of architecture among the more ancient of the sikhara- 
 crowned temples of Hindustan, like those of Bhuvanesvar, 
 and that the flat-roofed spireless temples which General Cun- 
 ningham and others have cited as typical examples of the 
 style must be placed in quite a different category. They are 
 in fact Siva temples, and therefore represent a cult chiefly 
 identified with Brahmanical caste-traditions, which did not 
 come into political prominence until after the Gupta period, 
 though like the Vishnu cult it had a history of great antiquity. 
 
 Apart from temple architecture the art of the Gupta period 
 
 ^ This is made clear by the most ancient images of Surya, which are practi- 
 cally identical with those of Vishnu, except for a slight variation of symbolism. 
 
 183 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 is illustrated by some of the earlier halls and chapels of the 
 splendid abbey of Ajanta, one of the great universities of the 
 time. The fragments of the wonderful frescoes still remaining 
 on the walls are not only masterpieces of painting, but, both 
 in their vivid imagination and in their realistic portrayal of 
 contemporary life, they give a striking impression of the 
 masterful creative impulses which were then stirring the mind 
 of India. In this respect they fully confirm the evidence of 
 contemporary Sanskrit literature and Fa-Hien's graphic descrip- 
 tion of Indian Ufe. 
 
 As records of the religious thought of the period they show 
 clearly that the Buddha then, and probably long before that 
 time, was not only recognised by Brahman theology as one 
 of the ten incarnations of Vishnu, but was actually worshipped 
 as such by the Buddhists themselves, though their iconic 
 symbolism and terminology were adapted to their own philo- 
 sophical tenets. In the noble fresco of the marriage of Prince 
 Siddhartha which decorates the front of the shrine in the 
 first monastic hall — one of a series which are within or very 
 near to the Gupta period — the Bodhisattva is represented 
 holding Vishnu's blue lotus flower, and the two divine lovers, 
 Siva and Parvati, watch the ceremony with benevolent interest 
 from the heights of Mount Kailasa. Mahay ana Buddhism is 
 here shown to be only one of the sectarian phases of the great 
 Vaishnava movement of which all the Gupta emperors from 
 Chandragupta to Baladitya were the zealous patrons. The 
 Saiva sculptures of Klephanta, which belong to the same 
 artistic school, though perhaps of a somewhat later period,^ 
 reveal another sectarian phase of the same movement. Here 
 the symbolism of the marriage of Siva and Parvati is a corollary 
 of that of the marriage of Vishnu with the goddess I^akshmi, 
 churned from the depths of the waters of life, and the majestic 
 head of Vishnu which forms the centre of the Trimurti sculpture 
 is the Brahmanical counterpart of the head of the Bodhi- 
 
 ^ Fergusson's estimate of the date of the great temple — the eighth or ninth 
 century — based only on evidence of ' style/ is in all probability several 
 centuries too late. 
 
 184 
 
13- Vishnu Shrine, Bar war Sagar, Centrai, Provinces 184 
 
GUPTA ART AND ARCHITECTURE 
 
 sattva in the Ajanta frescoes. The concept of the Three 
 Aspects of the One — Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva — represented 
 symboHcally from the Saiva point of view in the famous 
 sculpture of Blephanta, was one of the fundamental, cosmo- 
 logical ideas upon which Indian theism, both Buddhist and 
 Brahmanical, was based : its philosophical development was 
 infinitely older than its first artistic representation, just as 
 the Vedas were compiled ages before they were committed to 
 writing. 
 
 Thus the sculptors and painters of the Gupta age have left 
 to posterity a record of the synthesis of Indian thought corre- 
 sponding exactly to that of the Gupta recension of the Maha- 
 bharata, in which Krishna, as the incarnation of Vishnu, sums 
 up the essence of Aryan religion in the Song of the Blessed 
 One. The psychology of Indian history can never be under- 
 stood by treating Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism as 
 water-tight compartments wholly independent of each other, 
 as they are in the narrative of a zealous sectarian like Fa-Hien. 
 Neither is it possible in this way to understand the tolerance 
 shown by one sect towards another, nor how some of the Gupta 
 emperors, without outraging the traditions of the dynasty, 
 or the feelings of their subjects, could accept Buddhist teachers 
 as their gurus and continue to display Brahmanical symbols 
 in State ceremonial and official procedure. 
 
 Among the most interesting architectural monuments of the 
 Gupta period is the so-called Vishvakarma Chaitya House at 
 HUora, which may be assigned to the sixth century. Vishva- 
 karma was the Divine Architect, the Ishta-devata of the 
 master-builder, and it is probable that this was the chapel of 
 the guild of masons who resided at Bllora and for many genera- 
 tions devoted themselves to excavating all the wonderful 
 shrines and monasteries along the crescent-shaped rocky 
 precipice, which was sacred in the eyes of every Indian pilgrim, 
 both by reason of its formation and on account of the great 
 waterfall which flows over it. 
 
 If this were the masons' chapel of Bllora we have here a 
 specially significant record of the great co-operative guilds 
 
 185 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 which played so important a part in the social economy of 
 India. The members of these technical corporations recognised 
 no distinction of sect, so far as their business as craftsmen was 
 concerned, and the Vishvakarma Chaitya House was in all 
 probability the Guildhall of Ellora, not an ordinary chapter- 
 house or Chaitya Hall for Buddhist monks. Unless one realises 
 the non-sectarian character of Indian craft-traditions it is im- 
 possible to understand either the history of art in India or 
 its affinities with the art of Europe : how, for instance, the 
 traditions of the art of Gandhara, originally pagan, became 
 Buddhist under Kanishka, Christian under Constantine the 
 Great, and Hindu under Vikramaditya in India. 
 
 1 86 
 
14. ViSHVAKARMA ChAITYA HOUSE, El-r,ORA 
 
 i86 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 THOUGH the Gupta line did not become extinct until 
 the early part of the eighth century the history of 
 the dynasty ceases to have much interest after the 
 middle of the sixth. The political disorder which followed 
 the Hun invasions had led, as we have already seen, to the 
 detachment of the western and north-western provinces of 
 the Gupta Empire from the central power, some under the 
 rule of Hunnish kings, and some under rulers of Turki or 
 Indo- Aryan descent. The tendency of these disorders was to 
 shift the centre of Indo-Aryan supremacy again further south, 
 though for some centuries later the northern states were strong 
 enough to check the foreign invader. 
 
 Little is known of Yasodharman, the raja of Central India 
 with whose aid Baladitya had overthrown the savage despot 
 Mihiragula, except that his court poet in a panegyric inscribed 
 on two pillars of victory claimed for him an empire stretching 
 from the Brahmaputra to the Arabian Sea, and from the 
 Himalayas to Mahendragiri in Orissa. Court poems should 
 not be taken too literally, but we can well believe that Yaso- 
 dharman had much more energy and military capacity than the 
 philosophic Gupta emperor, and that he took the leading part 
 in the successful campaign against the Huns, for the clarion 
 call to the Kshatriya warrior in the Bhagavad Gita would not 
 appeal strongly to a man of Buddhist sympathies. 
 
 But Yasodharman's reign was apparently a short one, and 
 nothing is known of any other of his line. After the defeat 
 of the Huns, the rajas of Valabhi, the capital of the province 
 of Surashtra (Kathiawar), became independent and were 
 known as great patrons of Buddhist learning until about 770, 
 
 187 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 when the Arabs who had established themselves in Sind over- 
 threw the dynasty. About the middle of the sixth century 
 the Indo- Aryan states of the Dekhan, which had not taken a 
 leading position since the middle of the second century — ^when 
 the Andhra king distinguished himself by overthrowing the 
 Saka, Yavana, and Pahlavi tribes whose occupation of the 
 Kathiawar province preceded that of the Huns — began to 
 appropriate some of the departed glory of the Gupta Empire. 
 
 Pulakesin I, a Rajput chieftain who claimed descent from 
 the ancient Aryan dynasty of Ajodhya, about 550 founded the 
 Chalukyan Empire, which soon became powerful enough to 
 prevent any northern state from reasserting its suzerainty 
 over the kingdoms lying south of the Vindhya Mountains. 
 For the next fifty years Indian political history is only a dull 
 record of dynastic struggles which came to no decisive issue, 
 until about 606 another strong man, Harsha-Vardhana of 
 Thaneshar, a scion of the Gupta line, restored for a time the 
 fortunes of Aryavarta and once more brought peace and 
 security to the people of Northern India. The history of his 
 reign, which lasted forty years, is illuminated by the writings 
 of another adventurous Chinaman, Hiuen-Tsang, who like his 
 predecessor Fa-Hien undertook a pilgrimage to the I^and of the 
 Ivotus of the Good Law in order to bring back to his country 
 authentic records of the teaching of the Enlightened One. 
 
 Thaneshar, or Sthanesvara, then capital of a small Rajput 
 state, shared with Ajodhya the fame of being the most holy 
 ground of Aryavarta, for it was biiilt close to the famous 
 battlefield of the Mahabharata, Kurukshetra, upon which the 
 divine Krishna had taught the hero Arjuna the duties of an 
 Aryan warrior. The Raja Prabhakara-Vardhana, Harsha's 
 father, had taken an honourable part in the wars against the 
 Huns, and other Mlechchha states adjoining his own, and it 
 was in 604, while the Crown Prince Rajya-Vardliana, Harsha's 
 elder brother, was leading a large army to attack the Huns 
 on the north-west frontier, that the Raja died. Harsha, who 
 though only fifteen years old was in command of a reserve of 
 cavalry which followed the rgyal army, immediately returned 
 188 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 to the capital to act as regent in his brother's absence, and 
 Rajya-Vardhana, on the conclusion of a successful campaign 
 which justified his selection as Yuva-raja, returned a few 
 months afterwards and took his father's place on the throne 
 according to Aryan law. But immediately afterwards, mes- 
 sengers from Kanauj having brought the news that his brother- 
 in-law, the raja of that state, had been slain by the Raja of 
 Malwa — ^probably a Hun — and that his sister the Princess 
 Rajasri had been thrown into prison like a common felon, the 
 new Raja of Thaneshar once more put himself at the head of 
 his army and marched out to rescue his sister and avenge 
 her husband's death, leaving Harsha in military command 
 at the capital. The new campaign began with complete 
 success. The Malwa raja was defeated in battle, but unfortu- 
 nately the gallant Kshatriya king was inveigled into a trap 
 by one of the enemy's allies and treacherousl3^ murdered. At 
 the same time the Princess of Thaneshar escaped from her 
 prison and fled with a few attendants to a forest hermitage in 
 the Vindhya Mountains. 
 
 At this crisis Harsha was nominated by the State Council 
 as his brother's successor. It may be presumed that Rajya- 
 Vardhana's sons were for some reason unfitted to assume 
 royal responsibilities, for they had no prescriptive right to 
 the throne except as being the best qualified of the king's 
 nearest relatives. The interests of the State always over- 
 ruled family rights in this matter. According to the Sukrd- 
 nitisdra (ii, 29-31) the choice of an heir-presumptive to the 
 crown lay between the king's uncle, if younger than himself ; 
 a younger brother or son of his elder brother ; his own son — 
 or one treated as a son ; an adopted child or daughter ; or 
 a sister's son, according to their relative qualifications.^ 
 
 1 Mr Vincent Smith suggests {Early History of India, pp. 3 10-3 11) that the 
 State Council were acting unconstitutionally in setting aside the rights of 
 Rajya-Vardhana' s children, and that Harsha' s nomination was due to court 
 intrigues in which he himself was implicated. But under the circumstances 
 the Council acted in accordance with Aryan law. Rajya-Vardhana had him- 
 self acknowledged his brother's claim by leaving him in command at his 
 capital during his absence. 
 
 189 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 It could not be disputed that in an emergency like this a 
 military leader of acknowledged capacity was the best fitted 
 to assume the duties of kingship, and Harsha was not long in 
 proving his right, though his consecration as king was deferred 
 till some years later — not, as Mr Vincent Smith assumes, 
 because Harsha had been disloyal to his brother and did not 
 dare to assert his right to the crown before that time, but 
 because it was usual for an Aryan king-elect to justify his 
 nomination in the eyes of his subjects before the solemn rite 
 of consecration was performed. The new king's first act was 
 to set out on the difficult task of finding his sister's hiding- 
 place in the Vindhya Mountains. Guided by friendly aborigi- 
 nal tribes he at length threaded his way through primeval 
 forests to her retreat, just in time to prevent Rajasri and her 
 companions from throwing themselves in despair upon the 
 sacrificial fire as satis. That a devoted follower of the Buddha, 
 as Rajasri was, should contemplate this act as a religious duty 
 is further proof that the I^aw of the Sangha was an adjust- 
 ment rather than a revolution in ancient Aryan thought. 
 Hiuen-Tsang describes how later on he met the widowed 
 princess at Harsha's court. She was, he says, a lady of rare 
 intelligence, learned in the doctrines of the Hinayanist Sam- 
 mitiya school. But he succeeded in convincing both herself 
 and her brother of the " narrow and erroneous ideas " of the 
 Hinayana school, and henceforth they both became enthu- 
 siastic followers of the Greater Vehicle. 
 
 Harsha, like his sister, to whom he appears to have been 
 deeply attached, was a pious Buddhist ; but this did not 
 make him forget the tradition of kingship which from the 
 days of Chandragupta Maurya had made it every Kshatriya's 
 desire to unite India into one great Aryan empire, or under 
 one umbrella. It can hardly be doubted that this desire, 
 implicit in the dharma of a king whatever his religious beliefs 
 might be, was prompted by considerations of wise statesman- 
 ship and patriotic feeling and not merely by the lust of con- 
 quest. Harsha himself, according to Hiuen-Tsang, belonged 
 to the Vaisya caste by birth. Whether this was a mistake or 
 190 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 not there is good reason for believing that in those days 
 personal qualifications often overruled distinctions of birth, 
 and a Vaisya, or even a Sudra, became a Kshatriya by the 
 rite of consecration as king and was bound to regard the 
 Kshatriya's dharma as his own. 
 
 So immediately after his sister's safety had been secured 
 Harsha, with a force consisting of 5000 elephants, 20,000 
 cavalry, and 50,000 infantry, set out to punish the persecutor 
 of the Sangha, the wicked King of Gaur — his brother's murderer 
 — and to bring the ' Five Indies ' ^ under allegiance to himself. 
 The campaign, says Hiuen-Tsang, lasted six years, and in 
 that time apparently Harsha brought the greater part of 
 Northern India under his banner and had considerably aug- 
 mented his military resources. The details of the campaign 
 are not completely recorded, but M3.1wa and Gaur were subdued, 
 and before the end of his reign Harsha's rule was supreme in 
 Aryavarta from sea to sea, as far south as the Narbada river, 
 except over the kingdom of Gurjara, which included Rajputana, 
 Northern Gujerat, and part of the Panjab. The growing 
 strength of the southern states prevented him from repeating 
 the exploits of Samudragupta ; for the Chalukyan king, 
 Pulakesin II, about a.d. 620 successfully opposed his attempted 
 passage of the Narbada, and compelled him to give up all 
 hopes of conquest in the Dekhan or Southern India. 
 
 With the exception of a few minor campaigns the rest of 
 Harsha's reign was an unbroken peace. The court of Kanauj, 
 the city which Harsha made his capital instead of Thaneshar, 
 became famous for the philosophers, poets, dramatists, and 
 painters upon whom the liberal patronage of Harsha and the 
 Princess Rajasri was bestowed, Harsha himself had been 
 thoroughly trained in all the accomplishments of Indo-Aryan 
 royalty, and was equally skilful with the pen as with the 
 sword. He was a poet of no mean merit, and his songs, set 
 to music by himself, became popular throughout Aryavarta. 
 
 ^ The ' Five Indies' were Svarasta (the Panjab), Kanyakubja (Kanauj), 
 Gaur (Bengal), Mithila (Durbhanga), and Orissa. (D. C. Sen, History oj 
 Bengali Language and Literature, p. 385.) 
 
 191 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Three Sanskrit plays attributed to him, the Ndgdnda, the 
 Ratndvall, and the Priyddarsikd, are still extant and reckoned 
 among the best works the Indian drama has produced. He 
 also wrote a treatise on Sanskrit grammar, and was a keen 
 listener to the philosophical debates which always formed a 
 part of the distractions of Aryan aristocracy. Though his 
 patronage was principally bestowed upon Buddhists he did 
 not neglect the learned men of other sects, and a Brahman 
 court poet, Bana, was the author of an epic, the Harsha- 
 karita, describing Harsha's campaigns and the events of liis 
 reign. 
 
 But it is to the learned Chinese Master of the Ivaw, Hiuen- 
 Tsang, that we are indebted for the most impartial and vivid 
 account of India in the seventh century a.d. He was about 
 twenty-nine years of age and already known as a learned and 
 eloquent exponent of Mahayanist doctrine when in 629 he 
 set out on his pilgrimage to obtain further knowledge 
 and authentic texts in the famous monasteries of India, 
 especially with regard to the science of Yoga, which then 
 apparently was treated as heretical by the Hinayana schools, 
 though it formed one of the principal tenets of the Great 
 Vehicle. 
 
 India, says Hiuen-Tsang, was known as the I^and of the 
 Moon. He gives a mystical explanation of the term, likening 
 human existences since the sun of the Buddha set to a long 
 dark night illumined only by the light given by a succession 
 of wise and holy teachers. But India, or Aryavarta, before 
 the Buddha's time had been known as the land of King 
 Soma, the Moon, and so called on account of its supposed 
 resemblance in shape to the crescent moon, or ' digit ' of the 
 moon, a symbol long afterwards used for the standard of 
 Islam. The night was the time for meditation, and an imme- 
 morial Aryan tradition had fixed the crescent-shaped bend 
 of a river, or any similar land formation, as a holy place and 
 the most auspicious site for a hermitage or Brahman asram. 
 The cult of the night sky — ^Varuna or Vishnu-Narayana — and 
 of Chandra, or Soma, had been the Brahman counterpart of 
 192 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 the ancient sun-worship of the Kshatriyas represented by 
 Indra or Vishnu-Surya. 
 
 Sixteen years elapsed before Hiuen-Tsang returned to his 
 native land. A great part of that time was spent in the 
 monasteries at Nalanda and other places, but the pilgrim 
 gives vivid accounts of his adventures on the road and his 
 experiences as an honoured guest at various royal courts. He 
 also makes many observations on the character and condition 
 of the people, and the state of the different parts of India he 
 visited. The disorder created by the Hun invasions was 
 shown by the dangers to which travellers were exposed by 
 bands of outlaws. On one occasion the pilgrim and his com- 
 panions were seized by river pirates. His fine figure and 
 handsome face reminded them that the proper time for sacrifice 
 to their dread goddess Durga was at hand. Hiuen-Tsang was 
 led to an improvised altar by two of the bandits with drawn 
 swords, but his fearless mien so impressed his captors that 
 they granted his request for a few moments' respite that he 
 might pray to " enter into Nirvana with a peaceful and happy 
 mind." The pious Master of the I^aw then fixed his thoughts 
 upon the Tusita heavens and upon the Buddha that is to come, 
 imploring Maitreya to descend to earth to instruct and convert 
 his cruel captors and make them abandon their infamous 
 profession. In the midst of his devotions a furious sandstorm 
 arose which so terrified the brigands that when Hiuen-Tsang 
 opened his eyes he found them kneeling at his feet begging 
 forgiveness and instruction from one whose power over the 
 spirits of the air proved him to be a deity. They then threw 
 their weapons into the Ganges, restored the property they 
 had stolen from Hiuen-Tsang and his fellow-travellers, and 
 took leave of him vowing that thenceforth they would follow 
 the teaching of the Good I^aw. 
 
 The conditions varied greatly in different parts of the 
 country, but in the more settled districts, where a strong 
 central government existed, Hiuen-Tsang, like his predecessor 
 two centuries earlier, found good roads and free rest-houses 
 with food and medical attendance provided for needy travellers 
 
 N 193 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and pilgrims. In other matters Hiuen-Tsang confirmed Fa- 
 Hien's testimony with regard to the good government of the 
 country. Taxes were light, the royal revenues being chiefly 
 derived from the leasing of Crown lands. " Families are not 
 registered, and individuals are not subject to forced labour 
 contributions. Of the royal land there is a fourfold division : 
 one part is for the expenses of government and State worship ; 
 one for the endowment of great public servants ; one to reward 
 high intellectual eminence; and one for acquiring religious 
 merit by gifts to various sects. Taxation being light and 
 forced service being sparingly used, every one keeps to his 
 hereditary occupation and attends to his patrimony. The 
 king's tenants pay one-sixth of the produce as rent. Trades- 
 men go to and fro bartering their merchandise after paying 
 light duties at ferries and barrier stations." ^ 
 
 Among the numerous anecdotes with which the Chinese 
 pilgrim enlivens his memoirs is one which explains Indo- 
 Aryan constitutional law with regard to the levy of royal 
 taxes. Vikramaditya, King of Sravasti, he says, after he had 
 reduced the * Five Indies ' to submission was so lavish in the 
 distribution of largesse to the poor and needy that his treasurer 
 became alarmed and in a courtly way tried to bring home to 
 the King what the result of his extravagance would be. He 
 begged the King to double his largesse by distributing five 
 lakhs more of gold coins among the poor from all quarters. 
 Then the Treasury would be completely exhausted and new 
 taxes would have to be imposed. This, said he, would bring 
 to the King unbounded popularity, for he would have the 
 people's gratitude for his generosity ; but the ministers {who 
 would have the responsibility for imposing new taxes) would 
 bear the public insults and reproaches. The King paid no 
 heed to the Treasurer's polite remonstrance, but taking him 
 at his word gave an additional five lakhs to the poor. The 
 moral of the story came as usual at the end, when Vikra- 
 maditya lost his kingdom and was succeeded by another king 
 who " showed respect to men of eminence," ^ 
 
 ^ Walters' translation, vol. i, p. 176. ^ /jf^.^ vol. 1, pp. 211-212. 
 
 194 
 
 1 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 It is interesting to note that voluntary service and not 
 conscription was the method of recruitment for the imperial 
 forces. " Those who are employed in the Government service 
 are paid according to their work. They go abroad on military 
 service or they guard the palace ; summonses are issued 
 according to circumstances, and after proclamation of the 
 reward the enrolment is awaited." ^ This implies that men 
 of the Kshatriya caste were not bound to render military 
 service by reason of their birth, and though according to the 
 law books the functions of royalty were reserved for the 
 Kshatriyas it is questionable whether this implied more than 
 that any Aryan freeman might become ' Kshatriya ' by per- 
 forming the dharma of that class of society. Among the 
 kings mentioned by Hiuen-Tsang some were Brahmans, others 
 were Kshatriya, Vaisya, or Stidra. But a king certainly ranked 
 as Kshatriya by virtue of his consecration in the rite of Raja- 
 suya, when he was anointed by a representative of each of the 
 ' twice-born ' castes. There is no record of a king-elect being 
 refused consecration on account of his being a Sudra by birth. 
 
 Of the people of India Hiuen-Tsang speaks in terms of the 
 highest respect and without narrow sectarian prejudice. He 
 notices customs of Vaishnava and Saiva ascetics which are 
 foUowed in the present day : " Some wear peacocks' tails ; 
 some adorn themselves with a necklet of skulls ; some are 
 quite naked ; some cover their bodies with grass or boards ; 
 some pull out their hair and clip their moustaches ; some mat 
 their side-hair and make a top-knot coil. Their clothing is 
 not fixed and the colour varies." ^ 
 
 Occasionally he was shocked by the " rude, bad ways and 
 the low, vulgar speech " of the people, but generally they were 
 fond of learning, well instructed, and most kindly disposed 
 towards him. " They believed in the working of Karma and 
 paid respect to moral and intellectual eminence." ^ He did 
 not find all the virtues among his co-religionists : sometimes 
 the most thorough believers were bigoted, quarrelsome, 
 
 ^ Walters' translation, vol. i, p. 176. 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. i, p. 148. 3 iii^^^ yoi^ i^ p 201. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 vituperative, and of very shallow learning. Even among the 
 non-Buddhist population he found people with honest, sincere 
 ways, who applied themselves to learning and were fond of 
 religious merit, though they sought the joys of this life." ^ 
 Brahmans and Kshatriyas were " clean-handed and unosten- 
 tatious, pure and simple in life, and very frugal." ^ The 
 former kept their principles and lived continently, strictly 
 observing ceremonial purity : the latter were the race of 
 kings and had held sovereignty for many generations, and 
 their aims were benevolence and mercy. 
 
 Fa-Hien hardly stopped to observe anything which was not 
 Buddhist ; but the more open-minded Hiuen-Tsang gives 
 much information regarding the different religious sects. 
 Buddhism though it counted the great King Harsha among 
 its followers by no means enjoyed a monopoly either of temporal 
 or spiritual power. The King of Assam, one of Harsha's 
 principal vassals, was an orthodox Brahman. There were but 
 few Buddhists left in Gandhara, and its once flourishing towns 
 and villages were desolate. The Jains were influential in 
 Southern India. Pataliputra, Asoka's capital, was mostly in 
 ruins. Gaya had but few inhabitants. The great Bodhi Tree 
 there had been uprooted by the wicked King Sasanka, who 
 murdered Harsha's brother, but the Raja of Pataliputra, 
 Purnavarma, the last descendant of Asoka's line, had replanted 
 it and built a stone wall to protect it. 
 
 Hiuen-Tsang has much to say about educational matters, 
 both with regard to popular instruction and the higher learning 
 of the monasteries. Brahman and Buddhist teachers vied 
 with each other in devotion to their duties. The brethren of 
 the Sangha often met together to sharpen their wits in intel- 
 lectual contests and to promote the moral aims of their Order. 
 Those who most distinguished themselves by profound learn- 
 ing and dialectical skill were given precedence and special 
 privileges — ^the highest being the honours accorded to royalty, 
 or the grant of a richly caparisoned elephant and a large retinue 
 
 ^ Watters' translation, vol. i, p. 330. 
 2 Ibid., vol. i, p. 151. 
 196 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 of monks to attend on them. On the other hand, those who 
 only displayed their ignorance and broke the rules of the Order 
 might be ignominiously expelled from the monastery with 
 their faces daubed with red and white clay and their bodies 
 covered with dirt. I^earning, however, was not the monopoly 
 of the Buddhist monks or Brahmans. A man who delighted 
 in wisdom could study diligently at home and be a monk or 
 layman as he pleased.^ 
 
 There was an organised system of popular education. 
 Children began by learning the alphabet and the Siddhan, or 
 Siddhi-astu, a primer containing twelve chapters. At seven 
 years of age they passed on to the study of the ' Five Sdstras,' 
 or sciences, beginning with grammar. The second Sastra was 
 " the science of arts and crafts," the third medical science, 
 the fourth logic, and the fifth the principles of philosophy. 
 All these departments of knowledge formed a system of general 
 education for laymen of all sects. In theory, at least, Indian 
 educationists of the seventh century a.d. seem to have devised 
 a system of public instruction far superior to that of the 
 present day. 
 
 The method of teaching was oral. Hiuen-Tsang praises the 
 earnestness and diligence of the teachers. Brahman as well 
 as Buddhist. They began by explaining the general meaning 
 of the lesson ; then they carefully analysed the details, point 
 by point. They inspired their pupils to exert themselves, and 
 skilfully led them forward step by step. " They instruct the 
 inert and sharpen the dull." They took pains even with idle 
 shirkers, doggedly repeating instruction until their disciples 
 were fully qualified. This was not, however, generally achieved 
 before the latter were thirty years of age — ^then " their minds 
 were settled and they went into office : and the first thing 
 they do is to reward the kindness of their teachers." ^ Hiuen- 
 Tsang gives high praise to the wandering bhikkus or sadhus, 
 men deeply versed in antique wisdom and possessing the 
 culture accumulated by constant travel, who, though some- 
 
 1 Walters' translation, vol. i, p. 162. 
 ^ Ibid., vol. i, p. 160. 
 
 197 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 times belonging to wealthy families, were content to live a 
 life of poverty apart from the world unmoved by honour or 
 reproach. " For them there is honour in knowing truth and 
 no disgrace in being destitute." ^ Wandering continually from 
 place to place, no fatigue was too great when an opportunity 
 offered of gaining knowledge, or of using their own for helping 
 others. Those who were famed for their wisdom were treated 
 with the highest respect ; but not even the honours which 
 kings could bestow tempted them to forsake the path of know- 
 ledge. The influence of these pious men must have been felt 
 far beyond the borders of India, for they recognised no political 
 barriers nor any distinctions of race. 
 
 The great monasteries described by Hiuen-Tsang were 
 Buddhist, but they were real universities of learning and non- 
 sectarian so far that in some cases followers of the main 
 divisions — ^the Hinayana and Mahayana — dwelt together in 
 the same monastery. Some were famous for particular 
 sciences, like Taksha-sila for its school of medicine, and Ujjain 
 for astronomy. Nalanda, where Hiuen-Tsang stayed some 
 years, was the Oxford of Mahayana Buddhism ; the rival of 
 Benares, which was the stronghold of orthodox Brahmanical 
 learning. Nevertheless it was entirely eclectic in its teaching, 
 for the eighteen Hinayana sects were represented there, and 
 among the different recognised branches of learning were 
 included the Vedas, medicine, and mathematics. The resident 
 monks took precedence according to the range of their study 
 rather than their excellence in one particular branch. Among 
 the ten thousand within and without the walls, one thousand 
 were accounted proficient in ten works upon the Sutras 
 and Sastras ; five hundred had graduated in thirty ; ten 
 only, including Hiuen-Tsang himself, in fifty ; while the 
 venerable Abbot, Silabhadra, was reputed master of every 
 work which had any bearing upon the knowledge of the Right 
 I^aw. 
 
 The wandering bhikkus had carried reports of the Chinese 
 pilgrim's great learning from monastery to monastery through- 
 1 Walters' translation, vol. i, p. 162. 
 
 iq8 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 out Magadha, so that on approaching Nalanda lie was met by 
 a deputation sent by the Abbot, and was accompanied to the 
 gates of the monastery by an imposing escort carrying baimers 
 and State umbrellas and burning incense. He was garlanded 
 and ceremoniously invited to be a guest of the monastery, and 
 then conducted to the presence of the Abbot, the venerable 
 Silabhadra, "the Treasure of the Right I^aw," who received 
 him with the utmost kindness and assigned to him sumptuous 
 quarters and an ample supply of fruit and other provisions, 
 including a special kind of rice of very large grain and fine 
 flavour which was cultivated only in Magadha and reserved 
 exclusively for the cuisine of royalty and of monks of great 
 distinction who were accorded royal honours. 
 
 The monastery, says Hiuen-Tsang, had been originally a 
 mango orchard — no doubt with a garden mansion attached 
 to it — belonging to a rich landowner, which had been purchased 
 for a large sum by five hundred merchants who were disciples 
 of the Buddha, and presented to the Master. The Buddha 
 himself had hved there for three months preaching to his 
 merchant disciples, many of whom had thus obtained the 
 fruit of the Bodhi Tree. Five successive kings had added to 
 its buildings and endowments, so that now it was the largest 
 and richest of all the monasteries of India. The last of its 
 royal benefactors had enclosed all the different buildings by 
 a high wall. 
 
 Hiuen-Tsang, in flowery language, describes the high towers 
 " piercing the mists of the morning," from the windows of 
 which one could watch the glowing sunset and meditate on 
 the serene beauty of the moonlight. The numerous pillared 
 halls and pavilions were richly carved and painted, filled with 
 precious shrines and glowing with colour and brilliant jewelled 
 adornment. In the gardens the thick groves of mango trees 
 afforded a grateful shade, while the kanaka trees {Butea frondosa) 
 with their festoons of brilliant red flowers, the fountains and 
 serpentine canals of clear water filled with blue lotuses, were 
 more beautiful than he had seen anywhere. The monasteries 
 of India, he said, could be counted in thousands, but none 
 
 199 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 equalled Nalanda in the grandeur, ricliness, and loftiness of 
 its construction. 
 
 The discipline maintained by the monks was so admirable 
 that there was no record of any infringement of the rules in 
 the seven hundred years since the abbey had been founded : 
 the brethren of Nalanda were looked up to by all India both 
 for their conduct and learning. There the days were all too 
 short for study and discussion : " day and night they admon- 
 ished each other, juniors and seniors mutually helping to 
 perfection." The revenue of a hundred villages had been 
 assigned by the State for the endowment of the abbey, so that 
 the monks and their disciples were well provided with the 
 necessaries of life, and the instruction given was gratuitous. 
 Many foreign students came there, attracted by the fame of 
 the university and by the prestige they could win by using 
 its name in their own country, but the standard of learning 
 was so high that few succeeded in gaining admittance to the 
 advanced debating schools. 
 
 It was while Hiuen-Tsang was at Nalanda studying the 
 Yoga-sdstra and other works under the direction of the learned 
 Abbot that he was invited by Bhaskaravarma, or Kumara, 
 the King of Kamarupa (Assam and Eastern Bengal), one of 
 Harsha's most powerful allies, to pay a visit to his court. 
 This king was an orthodox Brahman, but, true to the tradi- 
 tions of his caste, he treated all learned men with respect, 
 and the colleges of his country, like Nalanda, attracted students 
 from many quarters, though Buddhism did not prosper there. 
 The monks of Nalanda implored Hiuen-Tsang to remain, but 
 after the Abbot had received several urgent letters from 
 Kumara he reluctantly gave his consent, and so the pilgrim 
 packed up his precious collection of manuscripts and images, 
 took leave of his beloved Alma Mater, and went. Kumara 
 had heard of Hiuen-Tsang's profound scholarship from a 
 Brahman who had presumed to challenge the Chinese doctor, 
 and had been compelled to acknowledge his inferiority in 
 debate. Hiuen-Tsang was received by the King and his 
 ministers with the highest honours and installed as a guest 
 
 200 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 in the royal palace, where he was entertained lavishly for a 
 month and overwhelmed with valuable presents. 
 
 In the meantime Harsha had received information that 
 Hiuen-Tsang, who had previously declined several invitations 
 to attend the imperial court, was now Kumara's guest, and 
 immediately sent a peremptory message to his vassal to 
 despatch the learned Chinese monk to Kanauj at once. Kumara 
 airily replied, " I would rather send my head than let your 
 Majesty have the Master of the Law," but when the imperial 
 messenger returned with a demand for the fulfilment of 
 Kumara's first offer he saw it was no joking matter and set 
 out to accompany Hiuen-Tsang in royal state to Kanauj 
 himself. Harsha was touring in his dominions and met the 
 procession on its way to his capital, and was not less lavish 
 than his vassal had been in the honours he bestowed upon 
 Hiuen-Tsang, only reproaching him gently for not having 
 come at his first invitation. " Master," said he, " your disciple 
 invited you to come before. Why did you not come ? " 
 " I journeyed to far countries," replied Hiuen-Tsang, " to 
 find the Law of the Buddha. I was stud3dng the Yoga-chdrya- 
 hhumi-Sdstra when your Majesty's order came, but I had not 
 finished hearing the explanation of it. That is why I did not 
 come immediately to pay my respects to your Majesty." 
 Harsha accepted the explanation as satisfactory, and then 
 proceeded to question Hiuen-Tsang on a subject which interested 
 both Kumara and himself deeply — ^the origin of a celebrated 
 Chinese song and dance known as " The Music of Ch'in- Wang's 
 Victory " and " The Dance of the Seven Virtues," composed 
 to celebrate the suppression of a formidable rebellion in 6ig,^ 
 and thereafter performed on great occasions at the Chinese 
 imperial court. 
 
 Hiuen-Tsang gives a pleasing account of Harsha's personal 
 character and his life as a sovereign ruler. He was indefatigable 
 in the discharge of his administrative duties, spending most 
 of the year in making tours of inspection throughout his 
 dominions, setting a good example to his ministers and to the 
 1 Watters' translation, vol. i, pp. 349-350. 
 
 201 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 kings who were his vassals, and showing favour only to those 
 who were as zealous as himself in good works. Like Asoka 
 he forbade the killing of animals for food, and built thousands 
 of stupas and monasteries besides travellers' rest-houses and 
 similar benevolent institutions. He was lavish in the distribu- 
 tion of alms to religious devotees of all sects. At the royal 
 lodges a thousand Buddhist monks and five hundred Brahmans 
 were fed every day. The chapter-houses and assembly halls 
 were furnished with supplies and decorated with sculpture and 
 painting. Over the affairs of the Sangha, as in other official 
 matters, he kept strict control. Besides the great Quinquennial 
 Assembly which was regularly held, the Sangha was called 
 together yearly for discussion and examination, for the reward 
 of moral and intellectual merit and the punishment of offenders 
 against the rules of discipUne. 
 
 In the early part of his reign Harsha, like his sister — ^who is 
 said to have assisted him in the administration of the empire — 
 inclined to the doctrines of the Little Vehicle ; but a treatise 
 which Hiuen-Tsang wrote and presented to the Emperor 
 convinced both of them of the superior merit of Mahayanist 
 teaching, and he immediately gave orders that a General 
 Assembly of the Order should be summoned to the capital, 
 Kanauj , so that the Master of the Law might argue the matter 
 with all the religious teachers of his realm. The Assembly 
 thus convoked was a great State function attended by the 
 Emperor and his whole court, and by eighteen tributary kings 
 who responded to the summons. There were two thousand 
 Brahman and Jain pandits, and four thousand representatives of 
 Hinayana and Mahayana teaching, including about a thousand 
 monks from the Nalanda monastery. Some of these great 
 church dignitaries were mounted on elephants, others were 
 carried in palanquins ; they were attended by a numerous 
 suite with banners, standards, and other ecclesiastical para- 
 phernalia. The multitude which thronged to listen to the 
 debate was immense. 
 
 An imposing pavilion covered with thatch was erected for 
 the learned members of the convocation, and a great image 
 
 202 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 of the Buddha, equal in stature to the Emperor, was placed 
 under a lofty thatched tower adjoining it. From the descrip- 
 tion we may infer that this temporary shrine was a royal 
 travelling lodge covered by a sikhara, like a Vishnu temple, 
 and that the convocation met in a great mandapam built in 
 front of it. The Emperor's camp was pitched at some distance 
 from the place of assembly. On the appointed day, early in 
 A.D. 644, a golden image of the Buddha, specially wrought for 
 the occasion, was placed in a jewelled shrine upon the back 
 of a gorgeously caparisoned elephant. The Emperor himself, 
 attired as the guardian Deva of the Kshatriya caste, Indra, 
 held one of the emblems of royalty — a yak-tail fly-flap — over 
 the image on the right hand, while his ally, the Brahman King 
 Kumara, personifying the Ishta-devata of his own caste, 
 Brahma, held a State umbrella over it on the other side. The 
 Master of the lyaw and the ministers of State, also mounted on 
 elephants, rode behind, and, joined by the splendid procession 
 of the tributary rajas, the stately pageant moved on to 
 the place of the assembly, Harsha and Kumara scattering 
 largesse of gold, pearls, and other precious substances along the 
 route. 
 
 At the gate of the grand pavilion Harsha and the rest of 
 the imperial procession dismoimted, and the sacred image 
 was placed upon a throne prepared for it with the usual 
 religious ceremonial, at which the Emperor assisted as high 
 priest. Then the distinguished members of the convocation 
 were conducted to their seats, and after refreshments had been 
 served and presents distributed Harsha invited Hiuen-Tsang 
 to take his seat as president and open the debate. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that the effect of his discourse 
 was entirely satisfactory to the adherents of the Mahayanist 
 school. Hiuen-Tsang's eloquence, supported by the Emperor's 
 presence, was overpowering. The learned Master of the I^aw, 
 anticipating lyUther, nailed his thesis to the gateway of the 
 pavilion as a challenge to his opponents with a postscript at 
 the foot of it — " If anyone here can find a single wrong argu- 
 ment and can refute it I will let him cut ofl my head " — a 
 
 203 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 formula which appears to have been a part of the tradition 
 of these pubHc disputations. No one ventured to take up the 
 challenge, and Hiuen-Tsang remained in possession of the 
 field until the evening, when Harsha returned to his camp 
 delighted. If the Chinese pilgrim and his biographer can be 
 trusted the same programme was repeated for eighteen days, 
 to the utter confusion of all heretics and the joy of the Maha- 
 yanists. But one account avers that the convocation was 
 brought to an abrupt conclusion by the pavilion being set on 
 fire by Hiuen-Tsang's opponents, and by an attempt on the 
 Emperor's life by an armed fanatic, in consequence of which 
 some of the conspirators were executed and five hundred 
 Brahmans were expelled from Harsha's dominions. 
 
 Whichever may be the true account, Harsha's esteem for 
 the Chinese Master was only increased by his conduct of the 
 Great Assembly. Hiuen-Tsang would not receive the marks 
 of imperial favour offered him lavishly in the form of money 
 and costly presents, but accepted an invitation to accompany 
 Harsha to a great national festival held every five years at 
 the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. The tradition of 
 the sacredness of the place, due to the crescent-shaped forma- 
 tion of the land where the two holy rivers united, went back 
 to the earliest Vedic times ; and the quinquennial distribution 
 of royal bounty which was a part of the religious ceremonial 
 probably had its origin in the ancient custom of the Dravidian 
 forest settlement by which the redistribution of the communal 
 lands took place every five years. 
 
 The vast sandy plain to the west of the confluence had been 
 known from time immemorial as ' the Place of Alms ' ; for 
 charity bestowed upon that spot had for the giver many 
 thousand times the merit of a similar act elsewhere. In this 
 hallowed place it had been Harsha's custom every five years 
 since his accession to distribute all the surplus of his treasury. 
 The ceremony to which Hiuen-Tsang was invited was the 
 sixth distribution. A great square space was marked off by 
 stakes joined with festoons of roses, as in a Vedic sacrifice, 
 and in the centre under a number of thatched sheds was piled 
 204 
 
15. Trimurti Scui,pture, Ei,:Ephanxa 
 
 204 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 a vast quantity of treasure, gold and silver work and jewellery 
 wrought by the royal craftsmen. Surrounding these were long 
 sheds filled with all kinds of costly fabrics, brocades, silks, 
 and fine cottons, besides heaps of gold and silver coin. Out- 
 side this quadrangle were a hundred pavilions ranged in long 
 lines for the distribution of food, each pavilion seating a 
 thousand persons. An imperial decree invited to the feast 
 religious devotees of all sects, and all the poor and needy 
 in the ' Five Indies.' 
 
 A few weeks after the conclusion of the convocation at 
 Kanauj, Harsha with the Princess Rajasri, with Hiuen-Tsang 
 and the kings of the eighteen tributary states in his train, 
 arrived at ' the Place of Alms,' where a great concourse of 
 Buddhist, Brahman, and Jain ascetics and poor laymen number- 
 ing half a million had assembled. The first three days of the 
 festival were devoted to the worship of the Three Aspects of 
 the One — the Trimurti. On the first day the rdjasic Aspect, 
 represented by the Buddha, whose image was installed in a 
 temporary shrine built upon the sands, was worshipped, the 
 religious rites being accompanied by music, the offering of 
 flowers, and the formal dedication of the most precious of the 
 costly presents from the imperial treasury. On the second 
 day, with similar rites, the sattvic Aspect of the Trimurti, 
 represented by Vishnu under the name of Aditya, received 
 adoration, and on the third day the tamasic Aspect, Siva, was 
 worshipped. 
 
 On the fourth day the distribution of the treasure thus 
 solemnly dedicated to the service of God began. About 
 10,000 Buddhist monks were fed, and each one received loo 
 pieces of gold, a pearl, a cotton garment, and gifts of flowers 
 and perfumes. The Brahmans were the next recipients of 
 Harsha's bounty, the distribution lasting twenty days. Twenty 
 days more were given to presenting gifts to Jain devotees and 
 those of other sects, while another month passed away before 
 all the destitute orphans and other poor laity had received 
 their gifts. By that time, says Hiuen-Tsang, all the surplus 
 of the imperial treasury accumulated in the last five years 
 
 205 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 had been exhausted. There only remained the horses and 
 elephants and the military accoutrements of the imperial forces 
 which were necessary for maintaining order in the State. 
 Harsha then began, in imitation of the Sakya Prince at the 
 hour of the Great Renunciation, to take off his imperial tiara, 
 necklet of pearls, jewelled earrings and bracelets, and to divest 
 himself of his magnificent brocaded vesture, to add them to 
 the treasure already distributed as alms. Then, begging from 
 the Princess Rajasri a common worn garment, such as an 
 ascetic might wear, he put it on and worshipped " the Buddhas 
 of the ten regions," rejoicing that his riches were no longer 
 hidden in a solid and impenetrable storehouse but scattered 
 broadcast on the " field of divine merit." 
 
 At the close of the great festival the eighteen kings purchased 
 the imperial regalia, vestments, and other costly presents from 
 the persons upon whom they had been bestowed, and oftered 
 them to Harsha as the tribute due to him ; but in a few days' 
 time the Kmperor had again distributed the most valuable in 
 alms. 
 
 When the time came for Hiuen-Tsang's departure both 
 Harsha and Kumara begged insistently that he should remain 
 in India, but finding that he could not be turned from his 
 purpose of spreading the knowledge of the Right Ivaw in his 
 native country they accompanied him along a part of the 
 road and then, having provided him with ample means for 
 the long journey, regretfully allowed him to proceed to the 
 frontier under the protection of a royal escort. Hiuen-Tsang 
 reached home in the early part of a.d. 645, with most of the 
 precious relics, images, and manuscripts he had collected, and 
 lived to translate seventy-four important Sanskrit works into 
 Chinese. He died in 664, nineteen years after his return from 
 India. 
 
 The record which he left of his travels, which must, of course, 
 be read with due allowance for the pilgrim's religious partisan- 
 ship and for the mistakes both of his biographer and of the 
 latter's transcribers, gives the impression of a remarkably 
 keen and close observer, and is one of the most trustworthy 
 206 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 iiistorical documents of the period. It is invaluable for the 
 light it throws upon Harsha's administration both in secular 
 and religious matters, and upon the psychology of Indian life 
 in the seventh century. One important historical fact comes 
 out clearly in his narrative — ^that the General Assembly of the 
 Sangha was not, as might be supposed, ' Buddhist ' in the 
 sectarian sense of modern writers, but a real Parliament of 
 reUgions representative of all important schools of thought, 
 Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanical. And the real authority 
 exercised by this Assembly in religious matters is shown by 
 the fact that Harsha in his zeal for propagating Mahayanist 
 doctrines did not attempt to use his power arbitrarily in the 
 manner of the ' Oriental despot,' but sent his chosen guru, 
 the Master of the Law, to argue the matter before the great 
 pandits of the ' Five Indies.' It was the decision of this 
 Assembly, after a long formal debate, which was ratified by 
 Harsha in an imperial decree. 
 
 Whether the Assembly was obsequious and did not dare to 
 lift up its voice against the Emperor's emissary, whether 
 Harsha tried to pack the Assembly and to prejudice its decision 
 by methods well known even in the most democratic states 
 of modern times, are irrelevant issues in deciding the principles 
 of Indo-Aryan government and the methods employed in 
 practising them. Another striking characteristic of Indian 
 political life is the extraordinary deference shown by military 
 rulers to the authorised exponents of national culture, the 
 professional pandits. Europeans are accustomed in modern 
 times to the spectacle of a coterie of State professors employed 
 in explaining and justifying every act of a dominant military 
 caste. But these modern professors of Kultur, however great 
 their personal intellectual influence may be, hold a strictly 
 subordinate position in the whole social system and never 
 dare to assert any authority beyond the narrow sphere allotted 
 to them by the State. In medieval times we have known 
 many dignitaries of the Church competing on the battlefield 
 for the control of the temporal arm and exercising the highest 
 authority by virtue of the spiritual terrors they could invoke ; 
 
 207 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 but there is no parallel in European history to the influence 
 exercised by Indian philosophers in every grade of society, 
 from the highest to the lowest, solely by reason of their superior 
 intellectual qualities and personal virtues. The acknowledged 
 champion in a great philosophical debate received, both before 
 and after death, public honours as great as the warrior could 
 win by a victorious campaign. There could be no better proof 
 that the ethics of the State in ancient India were not entirely 
 dictated by the sword, and that ' the humanities ' had at 
 least as high a place in national life as they hold in the civilisa- 
 tion of modern Europe. Neither in this matter is it necessary 
 to inquire whether the extravagant respect accorded to men 
 of learning tended to weaken the military strength of the 
 State, or whether the exaltation of the scholar above the man 
 of action confined economic progress to a very narrow groove. 
 No civilisation in the world's history can be said to have 
 achieved perfection, but the fact remains that, judged by 
 standards of culture, Indian civilisation in the seventh century 
 A.D. attained to a height which has not been exceeded by any 
 other in ancient or modern times. 
 
 Harsha's reign was also memorable for an epoch-making 
 event, usually considered as outside the range of Indian history, 
 the Hegira, which took place in 622. While that great religious 
 impulse which had its centre in Magadha was bringing pilgrims 
 from the Far East to study in the universities of India, an 
 Arab teacher in Western Asia, fired by similar zeal, was calling 
 on his fellow-tribesmen to join him in the worship of the One 
 God and in the propagation of the truth of which Muhammad 
 was the Prophet. Western criticism has been content to 
 regard the event as a separate episode in the religious history 
 of the world, and by divorcing it from its historical context to 
 misrepresent its true spiritual significance. 
 
 The process of the spiritual evolution of the human race 
 becomes totally inexplicable if all the great world-religions are 
 considered as mutually antagonistic and wholly autochthonous 
 in origin. If the position of each religion in the general 
 progress of mankind were estimated by its influence upon the 
 208 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 civilisation of different races, instead of by dogmatic values, 
 it would become obvious that every race, or racial group, must 
 strive to discover the particular spiritual formula best adapted 
 for the stage of evolution in which it finds itself, instead of 
 seeking to establish the absolute superiority of one set of 
 formulas over another. If Muhammad had been preaching 
 to the General Assembly of the Sangha at Kanauj, instead of 
 to the Arab tribes, the dogmas of Islam would certainly have 
 been stated differently. It was not the philosophy of Islam, 
 but its sociological programme, which won so many converts 
 for it in India. 
 
 Muhammad was a poet rather than a philosopher, and in 
 the poetic frenzy of the Quran there is no evidence that the 
 Prophet of Mecca drew direct inspiration from the deeply 
 reasoned psychology which formed the original basis of the 
 I^aw of Buddha. But in the seventh century a.d. the psycho- 
 logical influence of Buddhism, especially outside India, was 
 less dependent upon its philosophical teaching than upon the 
 depth of the religious fervour which the spirit of bhakti evoked. 
 The example of right living and right thinking which had 
 been set by generations of the Buddha's devout disciples had 
 been an inspiration to many religious teachers before Muham- 
 mad. The spiritual impulse of which India had been the 
 centre for over a thousand years was independent of dogmas 
 and philosophies. It was borne along the highways of com- 
 merce, by sea and land, to the furthest confines of Asia both 
 in the east and west. And though the echoes of the debating 
 halls of India may not have resounded upon the coasts of 
 Arabia so clearly as they did among the hills of the further 
 East, the doctrine of the Unity of the Godhead implicit in the 
 theory of the One in Many was probably as familiar to the 
 camel-drivers of Arabian caravans as it was to the students of 
 China long before the Prophet raised the banner of Islam. 
 
 Muhammad was an inspired teacher who skilfully adapted 
 his theological formulas to Arabian tribal traditions, in the 
 same way as the Buddha had established the Law upon the 
 traditions of the Indo-Ar^^an village community. If he was 
 
 o 209 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 not as familiar with Indian religious thought as he was with 
 the teaching of Christianity he certainly caught the spirit of 
 bhakti which was common to them both. The conflict between 
 Islam and Hinduism was chiefly on matters of ritual, like the 
 disputes in the Christian Church. On higher spiritual grounds 
 the Brahman pandit and the mulla easily found a modus 
 Vivendi, for India was a motherland to them both. 
 
 Hiuen-Tsang gives some indication of the western extension 
 of Buddhism in his time by the mention he makes of Hinayana 
 monasteries in Persia. Alberuni, the Arabian historian of the 
 eleventh century, states that " in former times Khurasan, 
 Persia, 'Irak [Mesopotamia], Mosul, and the country up to the 
 frontiers of Syria were Buddhistic." ^ 
 
 In the seventh century a.d. Japan was the furthest outpost 
 of Indo-Aryan religion in the Bast : it is more than probable 
 that Mecca, a town closely connected with Indo-Arabian 
 coasting trade, was one of its outposts in the West. The 
 iconoclastic rage which animated the Prophet and his disciples 
 indicates that the ritual of Hinayana Buddhism, ^ which doubt- 
 less retained more of its pristine simplicity and austerity in 
 its outlying mission fields than it did in India itself, appealed 
 more strongly to the Arab tribesmen than the exuberant 
 symbolism of the Mahayanist school. It was upon Maha- 
 yanists in particular that the fury of the onslaught of Islam 
 vented itself in India, though Arab historians in recording the 
 wholesale destruction of monasteries and temples which marked 
 the progress of the Musalman invaders were indifferent to 
 distinctions of sect. * Bauddha temples ' was a contemptuous 
 term applied to all Indian places of worsliip. 
 
 Already in Harsha's time the conquering Arabs had advanced 
 as near to India as Baluchistan, then part of the dominions of 
 
 ^ Alberuni's India, translated by E. G. Sachau, vol. i, p. 21. 
 
 • The Buddha forbade " imaginative drawings painted in figures of men 
 and women," but allowed the bhikkus to draw and paint " representations 
 of wreaths and creepers, and bone hooks and cupboards " (Chullavagga, vi, 
 3, 2) . (The latter category no doubt refers to the names of traditional patterns.) 
 Thus Muhammadan law was practically identical in this respect with that of 
 HinaySna Buddhism. 
 210 
 
HARSHA AND THE HEGIRA 
 
 the Buddhist Raja of Sind, Diwaji, who lost his life in opposing 
 them. In 646 Sahasi, Diwaji's grandson, met the same fate, 
 and early in the eighth century the Arabs had overrun Sind 
 and established themselves there permanently. But it was 
 not until two centuries later that the great Muhammadan 
 invasion which ended in the conquest of the greater part 
 of India began. The first Arab invasions were the attacks of 
 religious enthusiasts whose only philosophy was the sword : 
 in the subsequent invasions plunder and the lust of conquest 
 were the primary motives with the great majority of the 
 followers of Islam, as they had been with the Hellenic, Turki, 
 and Scythian marauders of former times. 
 
 The artistic history of Harsha's reign, so far as the north 
 of India is concerned, is a continuation of that of the Gupta 
 period. Vishnu's sikhara continued to be the characteristic 
 feature of temple architecture, whether the sectarian dedication 
 of it were Buddhist, Jain, or Brahmanical. The temple of 
 Parasuramesvar at Bhuvanesvar, which probably belongs 
 to the seventh century, may be taken as a typical building of 
 the period. The Duma Lena at Ellora, which is almost an 
 exact copy on a larger scale of the Elephanta temple, may 
 have been partly excavated in Harsha's time, though Ellora, 
 like Ajanta, was beyond the southern boundaries of Harsha's 
 dominions and came under Pulakesin's jurisdiction. The 
 noble sculptural facade of the adjoining Ramesvaram temple 
 is also typical seventh-century work. 
 
 211 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 FROM THE SEVENTH TO THE 
 
 ELEVENTH CENTURIES 
 
 HARSHA died in 648, a few years after the departure of 
 Hiuen-Tsang from Kanauj. His death was the signal 
 for fresh poHtical troubles in Northern India ; but 
 before continuing the dynastic history of the North it is neces- 
 sary to turn our attention to the Dekhan, where Pulakesin II, 
 Harsha's powerful rival, riiled from about 610. The Chalukyan 
 dynasty, of which Pulakesin was the fourth representative, 
 was said, as before stated, to be of Rajput, or Kshatriya, 
 descent, and the inhabitants of Maharashtra, the chief province 
 of Pulakesin's dominions, were, says Hiuen-Tsang, warlike 
 and proud-spirited, " grateful for favours and revengeful for 
 wrongs, self-sacrificing towards suppliants in distress and 
 sanguinary to death with any who treated them insultingly. 
 Their martial heroes who led the van of the army in battle 
 went into conflict intoxicated, and their war-elephants were 
 also made drunk before an engagement. Relying on the 
 strength of his heroes and elephants, the King treated neigh- 
 bouring cotmtries with contempt." ^ 
 
 Pulakesin's reign began and ended with wars, offensive and !ij 
 defensive. On his northern frontier he successfully opposed !' 
 Harsha's attacks ; on the south he was constantly struggling 
 with the Pallava King of Kanchi, Narasimhavarman ; and in 
 the east he held the Kalinga power in check. About 630 ,; 
 Pulakesin exercised suzerainty over the greater part of Southern 'i 
 India, including the Chola, Pandya, and Kerala kingdoms. He 
 
 1 Watters' translation, vol. ii, p. 239. 
 212 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 also entered into diplomatic relations with Kushrau II, King 
 of Persia — perhaps for the purpose of checking Harsha's ambi- 
 tions — an event which is supposed to be recorded in one of 
 the fresco paintings of the monastic hall at Ajanta now known 
 as Cave I, 
 
 But the main interest of the history of the seventh century 
 in the Dekhan and Southern India is centred in the rise of 
 Saivism, the school of philosophy which then began to domi- 
 nate the religious thought and architecture of the South as 
 Vaishnavism was taking the lead in the North. We have 
 already seen how Vaishnavism was essentially a Kshatriya 
 cult, a philosophical development of the idea of the king as 
 the protector and father of his people, and having its archi- 
 tectural symbol in the tower of the king's fortress palace 
 idealised into a temple of Vishnu, the Preserver of the Universe. 
 Saivism was the corresponding cult of the Brahman ascetic, 
 opposing to the Vaishnava ideal an austere and pessimistic 
 view of life which only regarded the vanity of human existence, 
 the impermanence and unreality of natural phenomena. It 
 is, however, as great a mistake to suppose that Saivism origi- 
 nated in the seventh century as to suppose that Vaishnavism 
 began in the fourth or fifth ; and a still greater error to accept 
 the dictum of archaeological writers that Saivism is a Dravidian 
 superstition assimilated and adapted by Brahmanism. It is 
 doubtless true that many gross superstitions fastened them- 
 selves upon the external forms of Saiva religion — such is the 
 case with all religions — but the esoteric ideas of Saivism are 
 as purely Aryan in their origin as those of Buddhism and 
 certainl3^ not less ancient. 
 
 Both Vaishnavism and Saivism have their root in the very 
 beginnings of Aryan religion. Buddhism in the sixth century 
 B.C. was a compromise accepted for a time by the great majority 
 of Aryan thinkers, Vaishnava and Saiva, though in its pessi- 
 mistic view of life and in its ritualistic symbolism early Bud- 
 dhism inclined more to the Saiva ideal. But even in early 
 Buddhism it is easy to distinguish the two ideals — ^the Buddha 
 as King and Protector and the Buddha as the Seer and Ascetic : 
 
 213 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the two types of miniature votive shrines strewn in hundreds 
 among the dSbris of Sarnath bring out the difference clearly. 
 The sikhara type is the offering of the pious layman, the 
 stupa type that of the monk or devotee. The distinction 
 became more marked within the Sangha itself when the Vaish- 
 nava, or Mahayana, section of the Order detached itself from 
 the Saiva, or Hinayana, about the beginning of the Christian 
 era. Up to this time the General Assembly or Parliament of 
 religions which regulated the spiritual affairs of Aryavarta 
 was entirely non-sectarian in the sense that it represented 
 all denominations except the small minority of extremists and 
 irreconcilables. There was no doubt a Kshatriya or Brahman 
 opposition, not influential enough to control the debates, 
 though sufficiently important to make its voice heard and to 
 shape the policy of the Assembly. But in course of time the 
 philosophical creed of this party became more defined, and 
 having been formulated in the Bhagavad Gita it was adopted 
 by the first Gupta emperors as the authorised Vaishnava 
 doctrine. The fourth century a.d. may therefore be taken as 
 the approximate period of the formation of the new Vaishnava 
 party with a clear constructive programme in opposition to 
 both Mahayana and Hinayana policy, though it was evidently 
 less widely separated from the former than from the latter. 
 From the fourth to the seventh centuries there is good evidence 
 that these three religious parties, the Vaishnava, Mahayana, 
 and Hinayana, alternately shared spiritual and temporal power 
 in the State — ^the two former having more influence in the 
 north of India and the latter in the south. But at the same 
 time a fourth group or party, representative of Brahman 
 opinion, was gradually being formed within the Hinayana 
 group, in sympathy with the ascetic ideals of the latter, but 
 with more pronounced theological views and a more comprehen- 
 sive philosophical programme. This party set up Siva as the 
 ideal of Brahman asceticism in the place of Sakya Muni, the 
 ideal of the Buddhist monastery, and taking the Upanishads 
 for a starting-point elaborated a new rationalistic theory of 
 the First Cause in opposition to the agnostic philosophy of 
 214 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 the Buddha upon which both the Hinayana and Mahayana 
 systems were based. 
 
 This new Saiva school, the especial cult of Brahmanism as 
 distinguished from Vaishnavism, which was the favourite cult 
 of Kshatriyas, was not without royal patrons even before the 
 seventh century, but until the appearance of its great exponent 
 Sankaracharya in the eighth or beginning of the ninth century 
 it lacked a powerful interpreter to argue its philosophical tenets 
 convincingly in the universities and pubhc debating halls of 
 the land, so that for a long time it remained an inconspicuous 
 minority in the Great Assembly, and none of the Kings of 
 Elings or Ivords Paramount of Aryavarta lent their powerful 
 influence in propagating its doctrines as they did to the rival 
 Vaishnava school. But it is quite possible, and indeed prob- 
 able, that Saivism in some form had been the dominant cult 
 in the asrams of Brahman ascetics during the whole period of 
 Buddhist political ascendancy. 
 
 The break-up of poUtical unity in Aryavarta which so often 
 followed the death of a strong ruler like Vikramaditya and 
 Harsha no doubt had its effect in promoting the growth of 
 independent parties in reUgious matters. In Indian history 
 poUtics cannot be detached from reHgion. In Europe, and 
 especially in England, the struggle to create a free political 
 constitution was so severe that religious controversies took a 
 subordinate place to the questions at issue between King and 
 Parliament. But in India political freedom had been built 
 upon the basis of the village republics from the earUest period 
 of her history, and no Buddhist or Hindu king attempted to 
 curtail the right to administer their own affairs which the 
 village republics enjoyed under the Aryan system of constitu- 
 tional government. There was no struggle for freedom of 
 conscience or for the pohtical rights of individuals because 
 both were estabUshed by the unwritten law of the land, 
 confirmed by every monarch in his coronation oath. 
 
 India's Magna Carta was contained in her constitutional 
 law, a digest of the Acts of the Sabha or tribal Parliament, 
 which were as sacred as the Vedas or the sayings of the Buddha. 
 
 215 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Religion took the foremost place in the political history of 
 India by a natural psychological process, because when the 
 preliminary steps in social evolution were passed — freedom of 
 conscience, and a sufficient measure of personal hberty to 
 ensure the contentment and material prosperity of the com- 
 munity — all impediments to the attainment of the highest 
 goal of intellectual effort — spiritual freedom — had been removed. 
 Political liberty was held to be safe in the keeping of the king 
 and his ministers : the Parliament of religions, whose functions 
 were to lay down the law of the universal life, by observing 
 which all men could live sanely and well, became invested 
 with an authority which not even the king could dispute. 
 But when every petty state had its own Great Assembly the 
 Lords Spiritual who came to regulate the religious instruction 
 of the people no longer spoke with the united voice of the 
 ' Five Indies ' because they were only representative of a few 
 local sects. The more the political unity of India was broken 
 up the more religious differences tended to become localised. 
 
 The architectural history of India shows how the rise of 
 the new Saiva sect in the seventh century synchronised with 
 the growth of the political power of the Dekhan and Southern 
 India. But Fergusson's architectural nomenclature is wholly 
 misleading, because he implies that ' Dravidian ' temples, which, 
 with few exceptions, follow Saiva symbolism in their structure, 
 are non-Aryan : whereas all the architectural traditions of 
 Southern India are as much Aryan as those of the North, and 
 Sankaracharya, the great apostle of the Saivas, took his stand 
 upon the Vedas, the fountain-head of all Aryan religious 
 teaching. 
 
 The structure and symbolism of Saiva temples, which are 
 by no means entirely confined to Dravida — ^the south of India 
 — are good evidence that the new Saiva sect grew out of or 
 was in close sympathy with the Hinayana school of Buddhism. 
 As in all Indian temples, Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanical, 
 the yogi's cell as a symbol of the divine Logos formed the 
 holy of holies, the shrine of the sacred image. In the north 
 of India, where Vaishnavism and Mahayana Buddhism held 
 2l6 
 

DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 the field, this is generally (in the temples which escaped the 
 iconoclastic fury of Islam) surmounted by Vishnu's symbol, 
 the royal sikhara. But in the South, which became the strong- 
 hold of Hinayana Buddhism after the break-up of the Mauryan 
 Empire, the common symbol of Buddhist monasticism and 
 Brahman ascetism, the domed stupa, covered the sacred shrine 
 instead of the sikhara. Fergusson's so-called ' Dravidian ' 
 temple is built up of a multiplication of these Saiva symbols, 
 while his ' Indo- Aryan ' temple is similarly constructed on the 
 basis of the Vishnu sikhara. But both Saiva and Vaishnava 
 symbols belong to Indo-Aryan religion and not to non-Aryan 
 or Dravidian superstitions. How the original symbol of 
 creation adopted by the Saivas, the four-head Brahma image 
 evolved from the stupa, became vulgarised into Siva's phallic 
 emblem, the lingam, is a technical point which has been 
 discussed elsewhere.^ 
 
 The tedious narrative of dynastic wars, both in the north 
 and south of India, which fills up the interval between the 
 death of Harsha and the great Muhammadan invasions throws 
 little light upon the greater problems of Indian history, beyond 
 the fact that these constant internal dissensions contributed 
 largely to the success of the Muhammadan armies when, their 
 progress westward having been stayed, the eyes of their war- 
 lords turned again towards India. The beautiful Saiva temples, 
 probably of the seventh century, which remain near Badami, 
 the ancient capital of the Chalukyan kingdom, show that the 
 new Saiva movement had made progress in Southern India 
 long before Sankaracharya came forward as the exponent of 
 its philosophy. The famous sculptures of Mamallapuram, 
 executed by the royal craftsmen of the Pallava dynasty about 
 the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century, 
 indicate that some of the kings of that line were patrons of 
 the Saiva cult, the Vaishnava names now given to these 
 sculptures by local tradition having been bestowed upon them 
 in later times, probably by the followers of Ramanuja. 
 
 The new Saiva propaganda in the beginning was of the nature 
 ^ See Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India, by the author, pp. 106-108. 
 
 217 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 of a general religious revival rather than a sectarian movement. 
 The Brahmans of the South, penetrated by the spirituality of 
 the Buddha's ethical doctrines, wished to set up a higher ideal 
 of spiritual life than those of contemporary Buddhism and 
 Jainism. The Saiva propagandists of the South were the 
 Brahman reformers of Hinayana Buddhism, as the Vaishnava 
 propagandists of the North had been in earlier times the 
 Brahman reformers of Mahayana Buddhism, The earhest of 
 these Saiva revivalists, Manikka-vacagar, a minister of one 
 of the Pandyan kings of Madura about the sixth century, 
 preached renunciation as the cure for the ills of the flesh no 
 less earnestly than Sakya Muni himself, and the burden of the 
 hymns in praise of Siva attributed to him is always the same 
 bhakti — perfect faith and devotion — which is the dominant 
 note of the Mahayana doctrine. It was only through his 
 philosophical contests with the Hinayana pandits of the South 
 that he became known as ' the Hammer of the Buddhists ' — 
 the vital point at issue between them being the authority and 
 spiritual significance of the Vedas. The successors of Manikka- 
 vacagar in the seventh and eighth centuries were saints and 
 poets rather than philosophers, their names being remembered 
 by the miracles they are said to have performed and by 
 devotional lyrics, like those of the early Buddhist bhikkus and 
 bhikkanis, rather than by learned theses. The resemblance 
 between the new movement and the early Buddhist propaganda 
 is accentuated by the fact that though the Brahmans were 
 the leaders of it and its chief philosophical exponents it was 
 by no means Brahmanical in a caste sense, for the majority 
 of its teachers were non-Brahmans. To this popular element 
 in it must be attributed — as in other phases of Indian religion — 
 the striking contrast between the lofty idealism of its esoteric 
 teaching and the naivete of its popular symbolism. 
 
 About the middle of the eighth century Vikramaditya II, 
 the last but one of Pulakesin's line, made his name more 
 illustrious by the Virupaksha temple of Pattadakal — a noble 
 Saiva shrine built under his patronage — ^than by his successful 
 wars with the Pandya, Chola, and Kerala kings. Krishna- 
 218 
 
 I 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 Raja I of the Raslitrakuta dynasty, which supplanted the 
 Badami kings as Ivords Paramount of the Dekhan about 754, 
 was one of the Brahman patrons of the Saiva movement. His 
 reign was memorable for the commencement of the Kailasa 
 temple at Ellora, a rock-cut marvel representing Siva's Hima- 
 layan paradise which reproduced with more elaboration and 
 on a grander scale the design of the Pattadakal temple.^ 
 
 When, therefore, Sankaracharya, a young Brahman sann- 
 yasin of the Nambudri class, born according to one account 
 in a village of the Malabar district, and according to another 
 at Chidambaram, came forward about the beginning of the 
 ninth century to challenge the pandits of Buddhism in the 
 philosophical arena, he did not come to propound any original 
 doctrines, or to found a new religious sect, but to maintain 
 against all comers the original position of Brahman orthodoxy 
 as laid down in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. He 
 was the delegate of the Brahman asrams of the South, sent 
 to confute the doctrines of the Mahayana school which had 
 been championed by Hiuen-Tsang on behalf of the learned 
 Nalanda professors a century and a half before. Sankara- 
 charya left no personal memoirs and found no biographer to 
 record the details of his mission with the exactitude of a China- 
 man, but, shorn of its miraculous incidents, the legendary 
 account of the young sannyasin's victorious progress and of 
 his reception at the royal courts reads like a chapter from the 
 life of the Chinese pilgrim. After studying under a famous 
 Brahman guru of Southern India, Govinda by name, and 
 taking the vow of a sannyasin, he first went to Benares, the 
 university of Brahman orthodoxy, where probably his two 
 most important works, the commentaries on the Upanishads 
 and the Bhagavad Gita, were written. Having won great 
 distinction in the debating hall, and received the customary 
 highest award of the university, he set out in state, as Hiuen- 
 Tsang had done before him, escorted by a great retinue of 
 disciples, to champion orthodox Brahman philosophy on his 
 university's behalf in all the public debating halls of India. 
 
 ^ For details see Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India, by the author. 
 
 219 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 His reception at the royal courts he visited was not less magnifi- 
 cent and deferential than that which Harsha had accorded to 
 Hiuen-Tsang. Nor was his triumph in the public assemblies 
 less complete than that which the learned Master of the I^aw 
 had won in the royal pavilion at Kanauj. The pandits of 
 Buddhism were no match for his great dialectical powers, and 
 Sankaracharya inflicted a final blow upon the prestige of both 
 the Hinayana and Mahayana schools by organising, with the 
 help of many of his royal patrons, an order of sannyasins open 
 to all castes after the model of the Buddhist Sangha for the 
 purpose of popularising Saiva teaching among the masses. 
 The chief guru of the Sringeri Math, the most famous of the 
 monasteries of Southern India founded by Sankaracharya, is 
 still regarded as the spiritual head of the Saiva cult. 
 
 Sankaracharya's mission was so successful in Southern India 
 that Buddhism, in its sectarian aspect, after the eighth century 
 disappeared from the mainland and only maintained itself in 
 Ceylon. The Vaishnavism of the Bhagavad Gita, to which 
 Sankaracharya was in no way opposed, in a similar way sup- 
 planted, or rather absorbed, the Buddhism of the Mahayana 
 schools in the North, which, however, continued to flourish in 
 the Far Bast, both in China and Japan. The wholesale destruc- 
 tion of monasteries and temples by the Muhammadan invaders 
 finally put an end to the organisation of the Buddhist Sangha 
 officially set on foot by Asoka. The ethics of Buddhism had 
 long before become the common property of all Hindus, and 
 Sankaracharya adopted its social principles by ignoring caste 
 distinctions in the monastic order he founded ; so that it was 
 more in a material than a spiritual sense that Buddhism became 
 extinct in India. When Sankaracharya had accomplished his 
 mission he retired to a Himalayan hermitage, and according 
 to tradition died at Kedarnath, one of the most venerated of 
 the Saiva tirths, in 828, at the early age of thirty-eight.^ 
 
 It is a matter of the highest historical importance to deter- 
 mine how much the ancient organisation of the village com- 
 munities and the Aryan political constitution of India were 
 
 ^ See Sri Sankaracharya, his Life and Times, by C. N. Krishnasami Aiyar. 
 220 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 affected by frequent dynastic changes, and by the constant 
 internal wars recorded from the death of Harsha until the 
 Muhammadan conquest of Northern India. The increasing 
 volume of epigraphical evidence collected by the Archaeo- 
 logical Survey of India tends to prove that, as in the time of 
 Megasthenes, the Kshatriya traditions of chivalrous warfare 
 protected the peaceful pursuits of the village communities 
 throughout the troublous times of the Middle Ages, and that 
 neither the quarrels of petty chieftains nor the rivalries of 
 powerful dynasties affected seriously the solid organisation of 
 village life which was the bed-rock of Hindu polity. A very 
 interesting Pandyan inscription of the ninth century records an 
 agreement entered into by local chieftains with the headman 
 of a village, or group of villages, by which the former solemnly 
 promised, when they and their retainers were fighting, to avoid 
 inflicting any injury upon villages or their property, and under- 
 took to pay compensation of loo panams for any cultivator 
 who was injured, and 500 panams for any village that was 
 destroyed.^ There are also many medieval inscriptions which 
 testify to the complete control exercised by village assembhes 
 in local affairs, and the great respect paid to them by the 
 supreme head of the State. 
 
 There is, moreover, a very important document, the Nitisdra 
 of Sukracharya, which gives similar evidence with regard to 
 Hindu political economy in the Middle Ages as the KautiUya- 
 artha-Sdstra does for the Mauryan period and the Code of Manu 
 for the early centuries of the Christian era. All three of these 
 works embody a common tradition which is of very much 
 earlier date than their respective texts, but each of them reflects 
 some special characteristics of contemporary conditions, and 
 therefore may be taken as good historical evidence for the 
 period to which the extant texts are usually assigned. Sukra- 
 charya describes his own treatise as an abridgment of earlier 
 works by the Vedic rishi Vasishtha and others, and refers 
 to Manu as an authority on the subject. The references 
 
 * See Report of the Assistant Archaeological Sttperintendent on the Progress 
 of Epigraphy in Southern India, 19 14-15. 
 
 221 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to cannons and gunpowder give some indication of the period 
 in which the author or compiler Uved. 
 
 The Sukrd-niti is more expHcit than the Code of Manu on 
 the subject of caste. In ancient times, says Sukracharya, 
 the castes were divided into four classes by Brahma according 
 to their occupations (iv, 3-21). " The man who is good by 
 birth becomes low by low associations, but the man who is 
 low by birth cannot become high by high associations " (iv, 
 27-28). Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Sudras, and Mlech- 
 chhas are separated, he declares, not by birth but by virtues 
 and by works. " Neither through colour nor through ancestors 
 can the spirit worthy of a Brahmana be generated." The 
 Brahman is he who practises the duties of Brahmanhood ; the 
 Kshatriya he who is strong and valiant and self-restrained in 
 his duty of protecting the State ; the Vaisya he who lives 
 by commerce, tends cattle, and cultivates lands; the Sudra 
 he who serves the twice-born, is bold yet peaceful and self- 
 controlled, drives the plough, and carries wood and fodder 
 for cattle ; Mlechchhas are those who neglect their duties, are 
 cruel and oppressive to others, excitable, envious, and foolish. 
 In making official appointments work, character, and merit 
 were to be regarded — neither caste nor family (ii, 111-112). 
 Only in marriages and in eating together the observation of 
 caste rules was compulsory. The reward of labour was also 
 to be regulated according to caste distinctions. " The wealth 
 that is stolen by the Brahman tends to well-being in the next 
 life ; the wealth that is given to the Sudra tends only to hell," 
 is one of Sukracharya's pungent aphorisms (ii, 811-812). 
 
 With regard to the organisation of town and village life the 
 Sukrd-niti agrees with the Kautiliya-artha-Sdstra. The detailed 
 planning of towns and villages is described. Wide roads (rdja- 
 margas) were to be constructed to connect town and village. 
 Bridges and ferries were to be provided for crossing rivers. 
 The roads were to be made with a convex surface, like the 
 back of a tortoise ; they should have drains on both sides, 
 and be repaired every year with stones or gravel by convict 
 labour at the cost of the royal treasury. A travellers' rest- 
 222 
 
 I 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 house was to be provided between every two villages ; it was 
 to be kept clean and in good order by the official in charge of 
 it, who was also to scrutinise all travellers, record their names 
 and permanent residence, take possession of their arms at 
 night, and have the rest-house carefully guarded. 
 
 The king's troops were not to be quartered upon villagers, 
 and his officers and servants were not to live in the villages 
 nor meddle in their affairs. No soldier was to enter a village 
 except with a royal permit, nor was he in any case to oppress 
 villagers. In order to avoid any dispute with the military, 
 villagers were advised to avoid dealings with soldiers. The 
 king himself should personally inspect the villages every year, 
 as well as the chief towns and districts, to ascertain whether 
 his subjects were contented and not suffering from oppressive 
 officials. " He should take the side not of his officers, but of 
 his subjects " (i, 754). An officer accused by one hundred 
 persons was to be dismissed. The village headman, as the 
 king's deputy, should be Hke a father and mother to the 
 people and protect them " from bandits, thieves, and officials " 
 (ii» 343-344)- " '^or who," says Sukracharya, " does not 
 get intoxicated by drinking the vanity of office ? " (ii, 
 227). ^ 
 
 While the rights of the village communities were thus 
 jealously safeguarded, the principle of self-government also 
 extended to craft-guilds, banking and mercantile corporations, 
 and reHgious organisations. The king's courts did not interfere 
 in their domestic affairs : all disputes between members were 
 settled according to custom and the traditions of each of these 
 bodies, because such disputes involved technical questions 
 upon which the king's officers could not properly adjudicate. 
 The organisations of dancers and thieves came under this 
 category. 
 
 In levying taxes upon the peasant cultivator the amount 
 of his profits should be taken into consideration. Successful 
 agriculture ought to yield a profit of double the expenditure, 
 including the State taxes (IV, ii, 224-226). The king should 
 levy taxes upon the peasant as a garland-maker gathers leaves 
 
 223 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and flowers from the trees in the forest, not like a charcoal- 
 burner. 
 
 The extent of the liberty of the subject is carefully defined. 
 The jurisdiction of the king's officers extended to the regulation 
 of gambling, drinking, hunting ; the use of arms ; the sale 
 and purchase of cattle, elephants, and other live-stock ; im- 
 movable property ; precious metals and jewellery ; intoxi- 
 cants and poisons ; the manufacture of wines and spirits ; 
 the preparation of deeds relating to sales, gifts, and loans ; and 
 to medical practice. Liquor houses were not allowed inside 
 villages, and no drinking of liquor was to be permitted any- 
 where in the daytime. In defining the limitations of monarchy 
 the Hindu lawgiver is much more explicit and outspoken than 
 the barons of England at Runnymede when they dictated 
 Magna Carta. The king must never act upon his own opinions 
 (ii, 5-6), but upon the opinions of the majority (i, 232-233). 
 " Public opinion is more powerful than the king, as the rope 
 made up of many fibres is strong enough to drag a lion " 
 (iv, 7, 838-839). The king's word alone was not valid authority 
 — " The king who commands without writing and the officer 
 who acts without written orders are both thieves." The 
 written order under the king's seal represented the real king. 
 " The king is not a king " (ii, 582-587). And it must be 
 remembered that Sukracharya's authority is not that of an 
 obscure pamphleteer airing his personal opinions, or of a village 
 Hampden risking his neck in defence of popular rights. Who- 
 ever the reputed author might have been he certainly was 
 regarded as an exponent of an ancient popular tradition which 
 every king was bound to respect, for these Nitisdras were the 
 text-books for the king's education. There are always kings 
 who forget their lessons or learn them badly ; but the theor}^ 
 that India has never enjoyed a constitution according to 
 modern ideas is an historical fiction which does not bear careful 
 examination. 
 
 Sukracharya's instructions for the planning of the king's 
 capital contain many interesting particulars. The site should 
 be chosen in a place that was well wooded, fertile, with good 
 224 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 supplies of water and food, and not too far from the hills. It 
 must have good roads, wells and reservoirs, public parks or 
 orchards, and well-constructed taverns, temples, and serais for 
 travellers. The royal fortress palace was a square block built 
 in the centre of the city, with the Council buildings surround- 
 ing it. Accommodation was to be provided for the royal 
 stables, storehouses, armoury and gymnasium, piiblic and 
 private entertainments, the king's study and sleeping apart- 
 ments, the court house, royal workshops, servants' quarters, 
 etc. 
 
 The Council House, consisting of three, five, or seven apart- 
 ments, was to be a beautiful building accessible by all routes, 
 painted and furnished with fountains and ventilating apparatus, 
 clocks, mirrors, and musical instruments. The ministers and 
 their staffs were to be provided with separate quarters adjoin- 
 ing it. Military cantonments were to be laid out on the north 
 and east of the palace, and the dwelling-houses of the city 
 were to be grouped round the latter in order of precedence 
 as indicated in the plans of the Silpa-Sastras previously 
 described. 
 
 The functions of the Council of State and its constitution 
 were practically the same as in the Mauryan period. The king 
 was not always present at the deliberations of the Council, 
 but when the resolutions of the Council had been put into 
 writing they were signed first by the Foreign Minister, the 
 Chief Justice, and the Pandit, next by the Amdtya or Home 
 Member, then by the Sumantra or Finance Member, and after- 
 wards successively by the President {Pradhdna), the lyCgal 
 Member {Pratinidhi, he who knows what can be done and what 
 cannot be done), the Crown Prince, the Purohiia or Royal 
 Chaplain, and finally by the king. 
 
 Among the executive officers were the Director-General of 
 Parks and Forests, who was to be an expert in horticulture 
 and arboriculture and to be acquainted with the medicinal 
 properties of products of the vegetable kingdom. The Chief 
 Ofiicer of Public Works was to be a master-builder, learned 
 in the Silpa-Sastras, who could construct palaces and their 
 
 p 225 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 defensive works, wells, reservoirs, and irrigation machinery — 
 " all very finely according to the rules of the Sastras." 
 
 In the administration of justice strict regard was to be paid 
 not only to the privileges of castes, villages, corporations, and 
 families, but to local customs. For example, Sukracharya 
 states that in Madhyadesa beef -eating and polyandry were 
 practised, and in the South Brahmans married their maternal 
 uncles' daughters ; but punishment was not to be inflicted 
 in such cases because the custom of the country permitted 
 these breaches of Aryan law. The ethical code of the Sukrd- 
 nitisdra is tinged with opportunism and does not always main- 
 tain the high ideals of Buddhism. Sukracharya advises that 
 the rules of chivalrous warfare should be observed as long as 
 one is powerful, but when the enemy is strong there is no 
 method so effective as the kutayudha, or warfare in which 
 morality is disregarded. He counsels moderation in virtue as 
 in vice. " Vices become virtues by change of circumstances. 
 Virtue is that which is approved of by the majority : vice is 
 that which is condemned by all. The theory of morals is 
 very intricate and is not easily understood " (v, 70-72). Hunt- 
 ing was to be considered a vice by the ordinary man, but for 
 the king it was permissible to hunt and kill wild beasts in 
 order to develop his courage, activity, and military skill. 
 When any members of the royal family were found to be of 
 very evil disposition the king should not hesitate to get rid 
 of them " by tigers, or by craft," lest the safety of the State 
 and of the people should be imperilled. Indian history shows 
 that when the king as well as his relations showed a " very 
 evil disposition " similar drastic measures were not infrequently 
 resorted to by the Council of State for putting an end to a 
 royal dynasty. 
 
 When allowances are made for differences in matters of 
 detail due to the maintenance of local customs, which Aryan 
 polity always carefully respected, the principles of government 
 laid down by these Indo-Aryan codes of law may be said to 
 have equal application to the history of the Dekhan and 
 Southern India as they have to that of the North. Aryan 
 226 
 
Z'W^^ 
 
 L,... 
 
 
 
 17. Bronze Statuette of Apparswami 
 
 226 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 religion made all India one body in politics, for disputes on 
 matters of doctrine or politics never caused a conflict between 
 Church and State in India, and the principles of Aryan religion 
 were always acknowledged to be the highest political laws. 
 " All forms of sacraments are combined in politics ; all the 
 heavens are centred in the ethics of the State." ^ 
 
 The Dravidian races of the south of India clung with the 
 tenacity of a convert to Aryan ideals of religion and polity, 
 although they clothed them with their own vernacular forms 
 of expression, and retained many of their own social habits 
 and customs. When the Aryan tradition in the north of 
 India began to lose some of its pristine spirituality, after the 
 many incursions of foreign racial elements, it was the Brahmans 
 of Southern India who restored the prestige of Vedic teaching 
 and waged war against many immoral and corrupt practices 
 of the Buddhist Sangha. And in the subsequent period, when 
 the Muhammadan invaders in the North were hacking up the 
 roots of Indo-Aryan culture and political organisation with 
 the svv^ord, the Aryan tradition continued to flourish under the 
 patronage of the kings of the South. In the temple records 
 of Southern India one still finds the most detailed statements 
 of the Indo-Aryan system of local self-government as it is 
 outhned in the codes of Kautiliya and Sukracharya. 
 
 From these records it is clear that Megasthenes was not 
 exaggerating when he stated that the popular Assemblies of 
 the South held the power of kings in check, though the ' Five 
 Great Assemblies ' to which he referred were different from 
 those of the local Assemblies administering village affairs. 
 The former constituted an imperial Parliament, the members 
 of it taking precedence after the king's ministers. The five 
 classes represented were, first, the village communities ; 
 secondly, the priests ; thirdly, the physicians ; fourthly, 
 astrologers ; and, fifthly, the king's executive officers. The 
 representatives of the first class safeguarded the rights and 
 privileges of the people ; those of the second class controlled 
 public rehgious ceremonies and the administration of temples ; 
 
 ^ Mahabharata, Santi Parva, I^XIII, 29. 
 
 227 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the physicians directed State sanitation ; the astrologers fixed 
 the auspicious times for pubHc ceremonies and foretold coming 
 events ; the king's officers supervised the collection and 
 expenditure of the revenue and the administration of justice.^ 
 
 So far as archaeological research has gone the period which 
 yields the most interesting records relating to the constitution 
 and powers of the village Assemblies is from the time of San- 
 karacharya down to a.d. iigo, though there is no reason to 
 doubt that such institutions existed in much earlier times and 
 were part and parcel of the Aryanisation of the South. These 
 inscriptions, mostly inscribed on the walls of the temple manda- 
 pams which formed the local council chambers and town 
 halls, show that the same system of village unions under the 
 control of a king's officer which existed in the days of Chandra- 
 gupta Maurya was maintained in Southern India in medieval 
 times. 
 
 But the point which the Kautillya-artha-Sdstra does not 
 bring out is the great extent of the powers exercised by the 
 local Assemblies — the Sabhas and Maha-sabhas — and the 
 extreme respect paid to the ' great men ' of the village by the 
 officers of the king. Even when the king's intervention in the 
 affairs of the village union is invoked, the edict of the Assembl)^ 
 which settles a dispute is not issued in the king's name, but 
 in that of the ' great men,' to whom the royal envoy himself 
 respectfully applies the honorific form of address, " their 
 Majesties " [Tiruvadiyar). 
 
 These village Parliaments though responsible to the supreme 
 Government for the payment of the taxes due from village 
 lands had complete control over the collection of them, and 
 the lands not reserved as royal domains or dedicated to religious 
 purposes belonged ultimately to the Assembly, not to the 
 State. The distribution of village lands among the cultivators 
 was in their hands, both when fresh clearings were made and 
 when holdings were taken over by the Assembly in default 
 of payment of taxes. In disputed matters the king's authority, 
 as arbitrator, was sometimes invoked, when the king in person, 
 
 1 V. Kanakasabhai, The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago, p. 143. 
 228 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 or a royal envoy sent as his representative, would intervene. 
 Thus in one inscription of the tenth century we get an intimate 
 glimpse of the great Chola king, Sri Rajarajadeva, seated in 
 the college hall on the south of the painted chamber next to 
 the great Hippodrome Gate at Tanjore, adjudicating in a case 
 in which certain landholders had not paid the taxes for three 
 years. The judgment, drafted by the king's private secretary 
 and approved by one of the ministers, the Chief Secretary, was 
 to the effect that the lands might be sold by the village com- 
 munities to the exclusion of the defaulting occupiers. But it 
 is clear from the rule that the king's officers must live outside 
 the village ^ that the royal officials did not ordinarily interfere 
 with the administration of local affairs except when their 
 counsel was thus invited, though occasionally they called for 
 the village accounts and adjusted matters relating to temple 
 endowments when complaints were made by the temple 
 authorities. If a Sabha, or Assembly, of a single village or 
 of the smallest group of villages neglected its duties towards 
 its constituency, the Maha-sabha, or the Great Assembly, of 
 the next largest group could interfere and punish the offending 
 members by fines. The king, also, could fine or otherwise 
 punish the Sabha for maladministration. 
 
 The Assemblies conducted their business by means of a 
 number of committees in the same way as the affairs of Patali- 
 putra were conducted in the fourth century B.C. References 
 are frequently made to a Water Committee, which attended to 
 public wells, reservoirs, and irrigation works ; a Garden or 
 Park Committee, which looked after the public gardens where 
 flowers were cultivated to be used as offerings to the gods and 
 for garlands at public ceremonies, and also the public orchards 
 which provided fruit for Brahmans in the temple service, for 
 pilgrims, and for travellers. Another committee was concerned 
 with the administration of those temples whose endowments 
 and charities were not under the entire control of the Brahman 
 custodians. The Assembly often provided endowments for 
 temples or other religious institutions, free of all taxes, by 
 
 ^ Sukracharya, v, 179. 
 
 229 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 selling village lands and, after making provision for payment 
 of royal dues, devoting the proceeds to such purposes. Some- 
 times the Assembly not only transferred the whole revenues 
 of villages, including the labour contributed by artisans in 
 lieu of taxes, and similar contributions for public purposes, as 
 a pious gift to a temple, but ordered that the temple authorities 
 should take over judicial jurisdiction themselves and punish 
 any offences committed against the law by the villages. They 
 also received gifts of land or money for the purpose of construct- 
 ing and maintaining works of public utility, such as wells and 
 bathing tanks, or charitable institutions. 
 
 There were also committees charged with the administration 
 of general affairs, finance, and justice. In judicial matters 
 also these historical records supplement the statements of 
 Kautiliya and Sukracharj^a, for they show that the popular 
 Assemblies had similar powers to those of the royal courts of 
 justice in cases which came under their jurisdiction. The 
 Assembly not only imposed fines for breaches of communal 
 laws, but even had jurisdiction in cases in which the penalty 
 might be death. For the trial of such cases the Assembly was 
 sometimes convened by the Governor of the district, but it 
 also acted independently. 
 
 Among the most important of the inscriptions yet deciphered 
 are two found on the walls of a temple in the Madura district 
 laying down the rules for the election of members of the local 
 Assembly. The circumstances recorded in the inscriptions 
 show that an appeal had been made to the king by some of 
 the inhabitants of the Brahman village union, Uttarameru- 
 Catur-Vedimangalam, which consisted of twelve villages divided 
 into thirty wards. The ground of complaint was the mal- 
 administration of the affairs of the union. The communal 
 laws had been broken ; the officials of the Assembly had 
 embezzled public funds and had not rendered their accounts. 
 The Chola king, Parantaka I, who held court at Madura 
 thereupon (a.d. 918) sent an official to confer with the local 
 Assembly. The first inscription records an arrangement made 
 " so that the wicked men of our village may perish and the 
 230 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 rest prosper." The royal envoy, Tattanur-Muvendavelana, 
 having been a Sudra, it is not surprising that the Brahmans 
 of the village union remained dissatisfied. The following 
 year the King sent a Brahman of the court to act as 
 arbitrator. The final settlement passed by "the great men 
 sitting in the Assembly " and written out by the royal 
 arbitrator at their command is recorded in the second in- 
 scription. 
 
 The purport of the settlement is the framing of rules for the 
 election of the six committees of the Assembly and for the 
 appointment of the local accountant. The committees were 
 those for Annual Supervision ; the Garden or Park Com- 
 mittee ; the Tank or Water Committee ; a Committee for the 
 Supervision of Gold ; a Committee of General Affairs {Pancha- 
 vdra), and a Committee of Justice. The qualification for 
 members related to property, age, and education. As regards 
 property, the member nominated must own a quarter veli ^ 
 of tax-paying land, and also occupy and own a house together 
 with the land upon which it was built. The age limit was 
 fixed at above thirty-five and below seventy. This regulation 
 doubtless took into account the fact that the constituency was 
 a Brahman one, for a Brahman who followed the dharma of 
 his caste strictly would not have completed the period of 
 studentship much before thirty-five, and before seventy years 
 of age he should have ceased to be a householder and have 
 devoted himself to spiritual concerns. 
 
 The educational qualifications took into consideration the 
 ancient Aryan tradition that an unlearned Brahman had no 
 civil rights. The minimum standard fixed was knowledge of 
 the Mantra Brahmdna and capacity to teach it. In the case 
 of a Brahman who knew one Veda and one of the four Bhashyas 
 the value of the property qualification was reduced : he was 
 eligible if he possessed only one-eighth veli of tax-paying land. 
 These particular inscriptions give no indications whether women 
 were eligible, but that this was the case at least in some village 
 communities is evident from the mention in another South 
 
 ^ About I J acres. 
 
 231 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Indian inscription of a woman serving on the Committee of 
 Justice. 
 
 Among those quahfied as above only those who were virtuous 
 and well conversant with business, who had acquired their 
 wealth by honest means, whose minds were pure, and who had 
 not served on any of the committees for the last three years 
 were to be nominated. The list of disqualifications included 
 those who had formerly served on the committees but had not 
 rendered their accounts. A safeguard against nepotism was pro- 
 vided by a rule excluding from office the near relatives of any 
 member as specified in a long list of them. Next follows a list of 
 crimes and misdemeanours which would make any member of 
 the community ineligible — such as killing a Brahman, drinking 
 intoxicating liquors, and adultery with the wife of a guru. 
 
 The names of the nominees for each of the thirty wards 
 were to be inscribed on voting tickets by the electors, and 
 the tickets for each ward were tied together in packets with 
 the total number of votes marked outside. On the day of 
 election, fixed by the ' Gold Committee ' for the current 
 year, a general meeting of the Assembly was held in the 
 mandapam of the temple at which apparently all the ' pure 
 classes,' young and old, could be present. All the temple 
 priests were expected to attend in the antardla, the ante- 
 chamber in front of the shrine. The proceedings commenced 
 by one of the senior priests, acting as * arbitrator,' or returning 
 officer, holding up in full view of the Assembly a jar containing 
 the thirty packets of voting tickets. Then any young boy 
 standing near — " one who was ignorant of the matter " — 
 took at random one of the packets, and the tickets having 
 been untied were placed in another jar and shaken together. 
 From this jar the boy took one of the tickets and handed it 
 over to the arbitrator, who received it "in the palm of his 
 hand with the five fingers open " and read out the name 
 written upon it. The ticket was then passed round so as to 
 be seen and read by all the assembled priests. The person 
 thus chosen was declared duly elected. One nominee for each 
 ward was similarly chosen. 
 232 
 
i8. Interior of a Modern Tempi^e Mandapam 232 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 The edict of the Assembly goes on to declare that from the 
 members thus duly elected twelve of the oldest and most 
 learned, or those who had previously served on the Garden 
 or Water Committees, were to constitute the Committee of 
 Annual Supervision. Twelve of the rest should be taken for 
 the Garden Committee, and the remaining six for the Water 
 Committee. The term of office for each committee was one 
 year, but any member guilty of misconduct was to be removed 
 at once. The Committee of Justice for the current year were 
 to summon a meeting of electors to fill up vacancies which 
 might occur. Separate nominations were to be made for the 
 Panchavara Committee, whose functions were apparently 
 those of general supervision,^ and for the ' Gold Committee.' 
 Thirty nominees were to be chosen in the manner described, 
 and from these were to be eliminated the candidates of wards 
 which had been represented on the same committees in the 
 previous year. From the remainder six members were then 
 selected for the first committee, and the same number for the 
 second by an oral vote. 
 
 No regulations are made for the constitution of the Com- 
 mittee of Justice, nor is the method of its election described, 
 so we must conclude that the ordinary rules, whatever they 
 may have been, were followed in this case. It is reasonable 
 to assume that in general principle the rules prescribed in the 
 edict of the Assembly accorded with the ancient tradition of 
 popular self-government of which the Brahmans of Uttara- 
 mallur were the custodians, only they were made more strict 
 to meet the special circumstances of the case and to prevent 
 a recurrence of the irregularities which had made the interven- 
 tion of the King necessary. 
 
 The edict concludes with regulations for the office of village 
 accountant — an important person in the political economy of 
 the community. " Arbitrators, and those who have earned 
 their wealth by honest means, shall write the accounts of the 
 village." No accountant was to be reappointed to that office 
 until he had himself prepared his accounts and submitted them 
 ^ Or perhaps revenue collection. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 for audit to the ' Great Committee,' which must certify to 
 his honesty. 
 
 The method of organisation and the official administration 
 of the districts and provinces of the Chola kingdom were like- 
 wise according to Indo-Aryan principles of political economy. 
 The village community was the unit ; a certain number of 
 units combined to form a district {nddu) ; a federation of 
 nadus formed a division {kottam) ; and a federation of kottams 
 formed a province {mandalam) .'^ Each of these different 
 groups was in charge of a royal official, who with his assistants 
 acted as the intermediary between the local Assemblies and 
 the supreme Government, and exercised those functions which 
 came within imperial jurisdiction. The Governor of a province 
 was generally a prince of the royal house, as was the case in 
 the administration of the Mauryan and succeeding empires 
 of Northern India. 
 
 The principal source of Government revenue was the land- 
 tax, the normal rate of which according to immemorial tradi- 
 tion was one-sixth of the gross produce. For the assessment 
 of this tax a very careful survey of cultivated land was made, 
 of which a register was kept, so that every cultivator knew 
 the exact amount for which he was liable. ^ It was only in 
 defiance of public opinion and of traditional laws that the 
 king would venture to demand more from the cultivators 
 directly. But in times of great emergency and with the 
 consent of the popular Assemblies the rate could be raised. 
 The king, moreover, with the consent of his Council, which 
 was presumed to represent the people's interests, had the 
 power of increasing his revenue by levying various imposts and 
 tolls upon merchandise, especially luxuries, and a great number 
 of these are detailed in the inscriptions. That the cumulative 
 effect of these was sometimes oppressive may be gathered 
 from the fact that one Chola king earned the popular title of 
 Sunganda-virta-Chola — ' the Chola who abolished tolls.' 3 
 
 ^ Ancient India, by S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, pp. 173-174. 
 2 A summary of Rajaraja's inscriptions relating to land surveys is given 
 by Professor Krishnaswami Aiyangar in his Ancient India, pp. 175-176. 
 ' Ibid., p. 182. 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 No form of government, Eastern or Western, democratic, 
 autocratic, or bureaucratic, has yet been devised which cannot 
 be and is not made an instrument of oppression, but the 
 common belief of Europe that Indian monarchy was always 
 an irresponsible and arbitrary despotism is, so far as concerns 
 the pre-Muhammadan period, only one of the many false 
 conceptions of Indian history held by Europeans. Neither 
 ancient nor modern history in Europe can show a system of 
 local self-government more scientifically planned, nor one 
 which provided more effective safeguards against abuses, than 
 that which was worked out by Aryan philosophers as the social 
 and political basis of Indo-Aryan religion. The liberty of the 
 Englishman was wrung from unwilling rulers by bitter struggles 
 and by civil war. India's Aryan constitution was a free gift of 
 the intellectuals to the people ; it was designed, not in the interest 
 of one class, but to secure for all classes as full a measure of liberty 
 and of spiritual and material possessions as their respective 
 capacities and consideration for the common weal permitted. 
 
 Much has been written of Brahmanical tyranny. Authority 
 makes tyrants of all men. But intellectual tyranny is certainly 
 the mildest form of that disease and the least injurious to 
 humanity. The Brahmans were profound students of human 
 nature, and they recognised intuitively a psychical fact which 
 Europe is learning empirically by a slow and painful process, 
 that all men are not born equal, and that terrible disasters to 
 civilisation may occur by giving free access to the well of 
 knowledge for all men, whether they are spiritually fit for it 
 or not. If the restrictions imposed by Brahmans seem too 
 severe to Western minds, they may be taken as a proof of the 
 deep religious spirit in which the Indian people entered into 
 the acquisition of knowledge ; and certainly no people ever 
 honoured learning more or were more ardent in the pursuit 
 of it. Nor was the Brahman dispensation less liberal in bestow- 
 ing its intellectual treasures upon the people than the spiritual 
 hierarchy of Europe : the ' illiterate ' masses of India might 
 even now give lessons in culture to the scientific barbarians of 
 modern Europe. 
 
 235 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 The dynastic history of Southern India, so far as it is known, 
 does not give much insight into the personal character or 
 achievements of the Chola kings, nor do the frequent wars in 
 which they were engaged with their rivals, the Pandyas, 
 Pallavas, Cheras or Keralas, and Chalukyas, have the political 
 interest which belongs to those of the great imperial rulers of 
 the North. The Cholas were of an ancient lineage, as it is 
 mentioned in the Mahabharata, and their kingdom was 
 renowned in the early centuries of the Christian era for its 
 maritime trade, centred in a great port called Kaviripaddinam, 
 at the mouth of the Kaviri river, where there were settlements 
 of Yavana merchants (Asiatic Greeks) and many other foreign 
 traders,^ for the markets of Kaviripaddinam, besides local 
 products and manufactures such as fine cotton goods, received 
 great quantities of merchandise from the Ganges valley, from 
 Burma, Ceylon, and from the ports of the Red Sea. In the 
 warlike expeditions of the South Indian kings their navies 
 often played a considerable part, and no doubt the legend of 
 Ravana's ' magic car ' on which he transported the captive 
 Sita to Ceylon is the poetical version of some piratical raid up 
 the Godavari river in which the fair Aryan princess was seized 
 as a rich prize and carried off to Lanka, the pirate king's 
 stronghold. It is easy to understand that such an outrage 
 created as much uproar in the Aryan court of Ajodhya as the 
 abduction of Helen did in the palace of Menelaus. 
 
 The wars with Ceylon occupy a prominent place in Tamil 
 history. The first definite record of a Chola king's exploits 
 by the court poets of Southern India refers to a successful 
 naval expedition from Kaviripaddinam against Ceylon, in which 
 Karikala obtained 3000 craftsmen to assist in a great work he 
 was undertaking — ^the embankment of the Kaviri. By this 
 means, it is said, he was enabled to continue it for a hundred 
 miles. Probably the need of craftsmen for executing great 
 public works of this kind was often one of the motives for 
 plundering expeditions. Indo-Aryan masons were noted for 
 their skill, and even Mahmtid of Ghazni and Timiir in their 
 
 ^ See History of Indian Shipping, by Radhakumud Mookerji, p. 136. 
 236 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 insatiate thirst for blood observed the rule that the lives of 
 craftsmen should be spared in battle so that they might 
 contribute by their labour to the glory of the victors. Indian 
 craftsmen, especially the master-builders learned in the Silpa- 
 Sastras, have thus played a very important part in the diffusion 
 of Aryan culture. 
 
 Buddhism in Southern India, as in the North, favoured the 
 growth of a vernacular literature, and it is to the early centuries 
 of the Christian era, when Buddhism and Jainism were flourish- 
 ing in the South, that scholars generally assign the classical 
 works of Tamil literature, of which the Rural of Tiruvalluvar 
 is a typical masterpiece. At this period Madura, under the 
 patronage of the Pandya kings, took the corresponding place 
 to Taksha-sila or Pataliputra in the North. We have had 
 acquaintance already with the practice in Northern India of 
 referring philosophical theses to the General Assembly of 
 pandits for judgment. A remarkable institution connected 
 with the Pandyan capital was the Sangam, a body of critics 
 and poets which constituted a court for judging the merit of 
 poems or plays submitted to it.^ It apparently existed for a 
 considerable period, as forty-nine Pandyan kings are said to 
 have been its patrons. 
 
 But though the royal courts were thus the centres of literary 
 culture and great mercantile activity, and though the Dravidian 
 capitals vied in splendour with those of Aryavarta, there is 
 little evidence that civilisation had penetrated deeply among 
 the people of Southern India, as it had done in the North, 
 before the beginning of the great Saiva movement. Hiuen- 
 Tsang has not much to say in praise of Dravidian civilisation 
 until he comes to Kanchipura (Conjeveram), then the Pallava 
 capital, where he says the people " were courageous, thoroughly 
 trustworthy and public-spirited, and they esteemed great 
 learning." In other parts of the southern districts he describes 
 the inhabitants as " harsh and impetuous, of mixed religions, 
 indifferent to culture and only good at trade." ^ His observa- 
 
 ^ Ancient India, by Krishnaswami Aiyangar, chap. xiv. 
 2 Beal, On Yuan Chwang, vol. ii, pp. 226-228. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 tions carry the more weight because he frequently testifies to 
 the love of learning he found among those who were not followers 
 of the Law during his Northern pilgrimage. 
 
 The architectural record of the South also goes to prove 
 that Dravidian civilisation derived its main impulse from the 
 gradual extension southward of Indo-Aryan culture, for the 
 so-called ' Dravidian style ' of architecture is only Indo-Aryan 
 design adapted to the symbolism of the Saiva cult and shows 
 little direct inspiration of Dravidian ideas. The earhest 
 Aryanisation of the South gathered strength under the disasters 
 which overtook Aryan civilisation in the North, for they drove 
 Indo-Aryan royal craftsmen to take refuge in the courts of 
 the Southern kings and brought many other refugees to com- 
 plete the Aryan colonisation of Dravida. The records of the 
 admirable system of local self-government, based upon Indo- 
 Aryan traditions, which have been mentioned above synchro- 
 nise with the Chola hegemony of Southern India established 
 about the middle of the ninth century by Vijayalaya, though 
 no doubt a similar system, more or less developed, had existed 
 in the kingdoms of the Pandya, Pallava, and other dynasties 
 before that time. 
 
 Vijayalaya, profiting by the exhaustion of the Pandya and 
 Pallava powers resulting from their constant wars with the 
 Chalukyas and with each other, made the city of Tanjore 
 his capital and extended the Chola dominion down to Cape 
 Comorin. His two immediate successors inflicted further 
 defeats upon the Pallavas and pushed northward to the 
 territories of the Rashtrakutas — ^the dynasty which in the 
 middle of the eighth century had succeeded the Chalukyan 
 kings as lords of the Dekhan — and Parantaka I, who reigned 
 from 907 to 947, drove the Pandyas from their ancient capital, 
 Madura. He was holding court there in 918 when the Brah- 
 mans of Uttaramallur appealed for his intervention in the 
 affairs of their commune. Parantaka, like his predecessors, was 
 a patron of the Saiva cult, and signalised his victories by 
 re-plating with gold the great hall, or Kanaka Sahhd, of the 
 shrine of Chidambaram, one of the five great Saiva temples of 
 238 
 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 Southern India dedicated to the five lingams, or five cosmic 
 elements — earth, water, fire, air, and ether. ^ Chidambaram 
 is consecrated to the last of the five, dkasa, the cosmic ether, 
 which is appropriately symbolised in the Holy of Holies by an 
 empty shrine shrouded in utter darkness. As is usual in 
 Southern India, Siva is here imaged as Nataraja, the lyord of 
 the Dance, a symbol of the rhythmic vibration of ether by 
 which Ishvara sets the universe in motion and impels it to 
 destruction according to his will. The beautiful Nritya Sahhd, 
 the dancing hall of the temple, is devoted to the professional 
 nautch, an institution intended to popularise the esoteric 
 philosophy of Saivism, though it cannot be said to be inspired 
 by its highest ideal of living. 
 
 Parantaka's eldest son, Rajaditya, when he succeeded his 
 father rashly ventured to measure his strength with the Rash- 
 trakuta forces, but was killed at Takkolam in a hand-to-hand 
 fight with Krishna III, brother-in-law of Butuga II, the raja 
 of the territories comprised in the present Mysore state. This 
 catastrophe was followed by Krishna's entry into Kanchi and 
 the siege of Tanjore, and though the second of Parantaka's 
 sons did something to avert further disaster it was thirty-six 
 years before the military genius of Rajaraja I restored the 
 fortunes of the Chola dynasty. 
 
 This doughty warrior, who succeeded Parantaka II in 985, 
 was a contemporary of Sabuktagin, the founder of the Ghaz- 
 nevide dynasty, and of Mahmud : the contest for the supremacy 
 of the Dekhan and Southern India was fought while Northern 
 India was being ravaged by the Muhammadan raiders. Raja- 
 raja's first success was a naval action off the Malabar coast 
 in which the Chera fieet was destroyed. Then he forced to 
 acknowledge his suzerainty the districts contained in the 
 present Mysore state belonging to the Chalukyan raj. The 
 Telugu and Uriya countries right up to the Mahanadi river, 
 
 1 The other four temples are those at Kanchi (Conjeveram), which is dedi- 
 cated to the earth-lingam ; the J ambvikeshvaram temple near Trichinopoly, 
 where a perennial spring is worshipped as the water-lingam ; Tiruvannamalai,' 
 in South Arkot, to the fire-lingam ; and Kalahasti, North Arkot, to the air- 
 lingam. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 which formed the kingdom of Kalinga, were the next additions 
 to the Chola Empire. A struggle of four years ended about 
 1005 in the complete conquest of Ceylon, which remained subject 
 to the Chola power for seventy years afterwards. Rajaraja's 
 fleets seem to have swept the Arabian Sea and the Bay of 
 Bengal, for the records of his triumphs claim dominion over 
 " the twelve thousand ancient islands of the sea." He is also 
 said to have emulated Mahmud's exploits by invading the 
 northern part of the Chalukyan territories with a vast army 
 which chastised the hereditary enemies of the Cholas by indis- 
 criminate plunder and slaughter. His victories were com- 
 memorated by the building of the great Saiva temple at 
 Tanjore, one of the most splendid monuments of South Indian 
 architecture. I/ike all other Dravidian temples it follows 
 entirely Indo- Aryan building traditions. 
 
 Rajaraja's son, Rajendra (1013-1044), added to his father's 
 conquests both by sea and land. His greatest exploit was the 
 conquest of the southern districts of Burma, forming the 
 ancient kingdom of Prome, or Pegu. The inscriptions of the 
 thirteenth year of his reign record that the Chola fleet convoy- 
 ing his army, including war-elephants, across the Bay of 
 Bengal met and scattered the enemy's fleet and then assisted 
 in the capture of the capital Kadaram and the seaports of 
 Takkolam and Matama, or Martaban — a much greater naval 
 achievement than the transport of William of Normandy's 
 troops across the English Channel, which took place about 
 forty years afterwards. Rajendra's armies, besides overcoming 
 the resistance of several Sinhalese kings and defeating their, 
 ancient enemies, the Chalukyas — who were at this time repre- 
 sented by a new dynasty known as the Chalukyas of Kalyan — 
 penetrated to the Ganges valley, probably with the assistance 
 of the fleet, and forced Mahipala, King of Gaur, one of the 
 representatives of a dynasty which had ruled in Bengal since 
 the middle of the eighth century, to acknowledge Chola supre- 
 macy. The Chola Empire was thus one of the greatest known 
 since the days of the Guptas, extending as it did over the 
 greater part of Eastern India and the Dekhan, and the whole 
 240 
 
o 
 
J 
 
DEKHAN AND SOUTHERN INDIA 
 
 of Southern India, including Ceylon. Had the Cholas succeeded 
 in establishing a complete hegemony over India south of the 
 Vindhyas they might have created an effective barrier to the 
 advance of the Musalman armies southward ; but the cruelty 
 and disregard of the rights of non-combatants which seem to 
 have characterised the Chola wars did not contribute to the 
 internal strength of the empire, and the death of Rajendra I 
 was followed bj^ a revolt of some of the tributary states. This 
 gave Somesvara I, the Chalukyan king, an opportunity to 
 push forward to the Tungabhadra river, and in the great 
 battle of Koppam in a.d. 1053 Rajadhiraja, the then reigning 
 Chola emperor, was slain. The day was saved by the valour 
 of the Crown Prince, Rajendra, who turned defeat into victory 
 and was crowned emperor on the battlefield, but the Tunga- 
 bhadra remained the frontier between the two powers, and 
 neither Rajendra III nor his successors attained the full height 
 of Chola ambition by establishing a Tamil empire extending 
 over all Dravida, or India south of the Vindhyas. 
 
 241 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE ARTISTIC RECORD OF SOUTHERN 
 
 INDIA FROM THE SEVENTH TO 
 
 THE ELEVENTH CENTURIES 
 
 THE artistic record of Southern India from the seventh 
 to the tenth or eleventh centuries, which cover the 
 great Chola period, is fortunately more complete than 
 that of the Guptas ; partly because the iconoclastic rage of 
 Islam had satiated itself before the resistance of Hinduism in 
 the South was broken down, and partly because Islam itself 
 by that time had learnt to regard India as its adopted home- 
 land. It had taken the ensign of Hindustan, the crescent 
 moon, as its own, and had imbibed some of the ideas and the 
 tolerant spirit of Hindu philosophy. 
 
 The early architectural monuments of the Saiva revival, of 
 which the temples at Badami are typical, are all impressed 
 with the great intellectuality and refinement which distin- 
 guished Brahman culture before popular Hinduism obscured 
 the clarity of its thought with its own fantastic and turgid 
 imagery. These seventh-century temples, rivalHng the more 
 famous temples of Greece in their noble design and superb 
 craftsmanship, mark the time when Badami was the capital 
 of the Chalukyan kings ; for they, like the Cholas, were patrons 
 of Saivism. The last but one of their line, Vikramaditya II 
 [circa 733-747), built the splendid temple of Virupaksha at 
 Pattadakal, which must have been one of the great centres of 
 Brahmanical learning in the South. In the eighth century 
 every South Indian dynasty which played any considerable 
 part in the history of the times supported the Saiva movement. 
 The Pallavas at Conjeveram, before the Cholas made it their 
 242 
 
 i 
 
ARTISTIC RECORD OF THE SOUTH 
 
 capital, built the Kailasanatha temple. At Mamallapuram, 
 in the same century, their royal craftsmen sculptured some of 
 the famous Raths. The period of the Chola Empire beginning 
 in the middle of the tenth century with Parantaka I is celebrated 
 by the oldest part of the Chidambaram temple ; but the most 
 magnificent of the Chola monuments, the great temple at 
 Tanjore and the ruined temple and irrigation works at Gangai- 
 konda-Cholapuram, commemorate the triumphs of Rajaraja 
 and his son, Rajendra I, at the end of the tenth and beginning 
 of the eleventh centuries. Gangaikonda-Cholapuram was the 
 new capital built by Rajendra after his great career of conquest 
 was achieved ; the name having reference to his defeat of the 
 King of Gaur, who, it is said, brought Ganges water by way 
 of tribute to consecrate the mighty reservoir constructed to 
 irrigate the two adjoining districts. The embankment of it 
 was a wonderful piece of masonry sixteen miles long, provided 
 with the necessary sluices and channels for irrigation purposes. 
 It was these magnificent public works of the Indo-Aryan 
 tradition of kingship which in the eleventh century excited 
 the wonder of Arabian travellers like Alberuni, who was not 
 otherwise given to admiring things Indian. Alberuni's words 
 are : " Our people, when they see them, wonder at them, and 
 are unable to describe them, much less to construct anything 
 like them." ^ He might have added that it was hardly a 
 principle of Muslim government outside of India to concern 
 itself with beneficent public works of this kind, unless they 
 contributed to the comfort and pleasure of their divinely 
 appointed kings or to the enjoyment of the faithful — and even 
 then it was the labour and wealth of the ' infidels ' which provided 
 them. 
 
 The temple architecture of Southern India is especially 
 interesting because in its present form it preserves more com- 
 pletely than that of most other parts of India the fundamental 
 idea of Indo-Aryan temple-planning. The temple and its 
 enclosures were the abode of the Devas, and of the sons of the 
 Devas — ^their devotees — and the model which this spiritual 
 
 ^ Alberuni's India, E. C. Sachau's translation, vol. ii, p. 144. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Sangha took for its town-planning was that of the Aryan 
 village which sheltered the lay Sangha of the Indo-Aryan 
 community. Its four gates at the four cardinal points were 
 the ' gopurams,' the ' cattle-forts ' of the Aryan village fortress ; 
 only there was a spiritual interpretation of the word, for the 
 * cows ' which gave sustenance to this spiritual community 
 were the four Vedas. The corridors at Ramesvaram which 
 lead up from the gopurams to the holy shrine — ^the king's 
 palace at the four cross- ways — are the Rajapatha and Vamana- 
 patha of the Aryan town-plan ; those which form its Pradak- 
 shina path represent the Mangalavithi.^ The mandapam of 
 the shrine is the Council House ; the Halls of a Thousand 
 Columns reproduce in the symbolism of sculptured stone the 
 sacred groves and public orchards dedicated for the sustenance 
 of sadhu and sannyasin. The bathing-tanks likewise represent 
 those essentials of Aryan social life which the village republics 
 so carefully ordered and maintained. The temple bazars 
 along the outer walls occupy the sites appointed for them in 
 the Indo-Aryan town-plan. All these different features of 
 civic life were reproduced in temple-planning, though variations 
 in detail are found in every temple, as very few were completely 
 laid out from the beginning. Especially as regards their 
 enclosures they represent the growth of many centuries. But 
 the symbolism of Indian temple-building is always Indo- 
 Aryan in the South as well as in the North, based upon the 
 ideals given to India by her Aryan teachers. The temple was 
 not only the college and Parliament-house of the Indo-Aryan 
 community, in the last resort it was their citadel-fortress ; 
 and this circumstance may have contributed largely to the 
 wholesale destruction of temples and the massacre of monks and 
 priests by the Muhammadans in Northern India. 
 
 While the Buddhists have left very few traces of their 
 architecture in Southern India, except the traditions which 
 are embodied in the design of Saiva temples and monasteries, 
 their rivals the Jains, who enjoyed a not inconsiderable share 
 of royal patronage even in the time of the Saiva revival, have 
 
 ^ Supra, pp. 23-24. 
 244 
 

 20. Bronze Statuette of Nataraja' 
 
 244 
 
ARTISTIC RECORD OF THE SOUTH 
 
 preserved some fine memorials of their early history. At 
 Ellora, the Indra Sabha and the Jagannatha Sabha are nearly 
 contemporary with the great temple of Kailasa, and must have 
 been excavated under the patronage of the Chalukyan kings, 
 either those of the Badami or Rashtrakuta branch. In the 
 Pandyan territory there is the exquisite monolithic temple of 
 Kalugamalai, which is said to have been originally Jain. But 
 the most famous Jain temples of Western India are of later 
 date. Jain temple architecture, like the Buddhist and Brah- 
 manical, has two distinct architectonic symbols, the stupa 
 dome and the sikhara, according to the philosophic ideals to 
 which the shrine was originally dedicated. The ascetic ideal 
 was symbolised by the stupa dome, which crowned the tower 
 of the shrine ; the layman's ideals — the hhakti- and karma- 
 marga — were represented by the sikhara. A later develop- 
 ment, also common to all sects, based upon a philosophical 
 compromise — ^the via media — was symbolised by a combina- 
 tion of the two structural types. In this case the sikhara is 
 crowned by a stupa dome instead of by Vishnu's special symbol, 
 the amalaka, or fruit of the blue lotus flower. This composite 
 form was taken by Fergusson as the leading characteristic of 
 his ' Chalukyan style,' because it is mostly found in the 
 Chalukyan territory ; but this classification, like the ' Dravidian 
 style,' is a purely arbitrary one which diverts attention from 
 the vital principles of Indian architectural design, and should be 
 abandoned by those who wish to penetrate into its psychology. 
 The bronze sculpture of the great Chola period forms one 
 of the most important chapters of Indian art, and from an 
 historical point of view is invaluable for its unique impressions 
 of the ideals of the Saiva cult. The images and idealised 
 portraits of the Saiva revivalists preserved in the Madras and 
 Colombo Museums and in the temples of the five lingams in 
 Southern India reveal to us the passionate fervour of these 
 South Indian hhaktas : Apparswami with his hands joined in 
 prayer as he goes on his lifelong pilgrimage from shrine to 
 shrine to weed the temple courtyards ; ^ Sundaramurti, the 
 ^ See Ideals oj Indian Art, by the author, p. 114, PI. XIV. 
 
 245 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 youthful bridegroom, transfigured by the divine illumination 
 which claimed him as a servant of the Lord Siva ; Sambandha, 
 the inspired child, singing hymns in Siva's praise. 
 
 In the bronze images of Siva as Nataraja the Chola royal 
 craftsmen interpreted with consummate art the esoteric ideals 
 of Saivism, following the noble traditions of Elephanta and 
 Bllora, but giving full play to their own Dravidian fantasy 
 and unrivalled skill as metal-workers. The Nataraja of Raja- 
 raja's great temple at Tanjore ^ and two others from the 
 Tanjore district in the Madras Museum are the masterpieces 
 of the Chola period. In this great personification of the cosmic 
 rhythm, Siva, surrounded by a halo of fire in the form of the 
 setting sun, is dancing on the dwarf demon Tripura — ^the 
 world, the flesh, and the devil — holding the sacrificial fire and 
 beating the cosmic time with an hour-glass drum. The 
 beautiful Sanskrit si okas which the Brahman priest recites in 
 the service of the temple is the devotional interpretation of 
 the symbolism : 
 
 " O Lord of the Dance Who calls by beat of drum all who 
 are absorbed in worldly things, and dispels the fear of the 
 humble and comforts them with His Love divine : Who points 
 with His hand to His uplifted Lotus-foot as the refuge of 
 salvation : Who carries the fire of sacrifice and dances in the 
 Hall of the Universe : do Thou protect us ! " 
 
 ^ First published by Mr O. C. Gangoly in his valuable monograph on South 
 Indian bronzes (Indian Society of Oriental Art, 191 5). 
 
 246 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING IN INDIA- 
 NORTHERN INDIA FROM THE SEVENTH 
 TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURIES 
 
 B must now turn back to the history of India north of 
 the Vindhyas, which has been brought down to the 
 end of Harsha's reign. Harsha's death, about the 
 beginning of a.d. 648, brought his dynasty to an end and 
 broke up the empire he had created. Incidentally it led to the 
 interference of China in the political affairs of Northern India. 
 Since the days of Kanishka the spread of Buddhism in China 
 had been gradually bringing the Far East into closer touch 
 with India, chiefly by way of sea, which was the shorter and 
 probably the safer route and the principal way of trade. In 
 A.D, 526 Southern China became of more importance in the 
 hierarchy of Buddhism than India itself, owing to Bodhidharma, 
 who was the spiritual head of the Sangha at the time, and the 
 twenty-eighth successor of the Buddha, transferring his seat 
 to Canton. Whether this was one of the consequences of the 
 Hun invasions or of the waning influence of Buddhism in the 
 royal courts of India is not known ; but Bodhidharma was 
 received with high honour at the court of Nanking, and China 
 henceforth remained the seat of the Buddhist patriarchate, a 
 circumstance which led to the migration of numbers of Indian 
 Buddhists, both monks and laymen, to the Far Bast. 
 
 In the seventh century the Chinese empire which united 
 Northern and Southern China had reached the summit of its 
 power under the Tang dynasty, and though Hiuen-Tsang had 
 undertaken no diplomatic mission, Harsha's attachment to 
 him as a masterly exponent of Buddhist doctrine made the 
 
 247 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Indian Emperor wish to enter into friendly intercourse with 
 the former's powerful patron at the Chinese court. In 641 
 Harsha sent a complimentary mission headed by a Brahman 
 to the Tang Emperor Tai-Tsung, which returned shortl}^ before 
 Hiuen-Tsang left India accompanied by Chinese envoys bear- 
 ing a friendly acknowledgment from their imperial master. 
 The Chinese Emperor in 646 followed up this exchange of 
 courtesies by sending another mission, probably to announce 
 the safe return of Hiuen-Tsang with his precious collection of 
 Buddhist treasures ; but before this reached India Harsha 
 had died. 
 
 Apparently the extravagant favours shown to the Buddhist 
 Sangha by Harsha and his family had made him enemies in 
 the imperial Council, for one of the ministers, Arjuna or 
 Arunasa, succeeded in setting aside the claims of Harsha's 
 family and in putting himself upon the throne. A student of 
 Indo-Aryan history may venture to doubt whether the term 
 ' usurper ' which Mr Vincent Smith and other writers have 
 used in describing this event can be justly applied to Arunasa. 
 Indo-Aryan law did not vest the right of succession to the 
 throne in the family of the reigning monarch absolutely : it 
 was contingent on the approval of the State Council as repre- 
 senting — de jure if not de facto — ^the whole Aryan community. 
 It was no doubt the case that the power wielded by the Council 
 in this respect was often only nominal, for the king had the 
 right to choose and dismiss his own ministers, and in his own 
 lifetime could ensure that they were subservient to his will. 
 But we have already noticed several instances in which the 
 Council, at the king's death, exercised their traditional preroga- 
 tive, enabling them in the interest of the State to alter the line 
 of succession to the throne ; and though Buddhist writers 
 would naturally regard Arunasa as a ' usurper,' it is more 
 than probable that he was the lawful successor of Harsha as 
 the nominee of Harsha's ministers. 
 
 The incident of the firing of the pavilion at Kanauj, if it 
 were not an accident, shows that even in Harsha's lifetime 
 there had been some who had dared to protest against the 
 248 
 
 I 
 
ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING 
 
 Emperor's pronounced partiality for Buddhism. Kumara, 
 Harsha's most powerful vassal, did not share his suzerain's 
 religious sympathies. In the seventh century Buddhism, at 
 the height of its ascendancy in China, had lost to a great 
 extent its influence as a popular religion in India, both in the 
 North and in the South. It was therefore to be expected that 
 orthodox Brahmanism would seize the opportunity of Harsha's 
 death to reassert its political supremacy in Aryavarta. Of the 
 disorders which followed the deposition of Harsha's family no 
 detailed account is given. It may well be believed that they 
 and their partisans were not disposed of by the mere fiat of 
 the imperial Council, and the unrest which supervened was 
 aggravated by a drought which caused a severe famine. But 
 Arunasa, who had control of the imperial army, or the principal 
 part of it, might have overcome these difficulties if he had not 
 made the fatal blunder of allowing the Chinese envoys, who 
 reached Magadha soon after his accession, to be insulted and 
 maltreated. Their escort was massacred, but Wang-hiuen-tse, 
 the leader of the mission, together with his deputy, succeeded 
 in escaping to Nepal, which was then a dependency of the 
 kingdom of Tibet. 
 
 There they found not only friendly shelter but an army to 
 avenge the outrages inflicted on them. The King of Tibet, 
 Srong-Tsan-Gampo, was not only as ardent a Buddhist as 
 Harsha himself, but a devoted ally of the Chinese Emperor, 
 whose daughter, the Princess Wencheng, he had married. He 
 promptly sent Wang-hiuen-tse a thousand Tibetan cavalry to 
 join the army of seven thousand men which the Raja of Nepal 
 had placed at his disposal. With their aid Wang-hiuen-tse 
 soon overran Magadha and exacted terrible vengeance for the 
 insults inflicted on him. The chief town of the northern 
 province was captured after a short but bloody siege, and three 
 thousand of the garrison were beheaded as a punishment. In 
 subsequent battles Arunasa's armies were completely broken, 
 and he himself together with his entire family became Wang- 
 hiuen-tse's captives. Kumara, Harsha's ally, found it politic 
 to assist the Chinese general by sending him military equipment 
 
 249 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and large supplies of cattle ; and no doubt he profited by the 
 collapse of Harsha's empire to assert his independence in Assam 
 and Eastern Bengal. Wang-hiuen-tse, when his victorious 
 campaign was ended, returned to China to report the tragic 
 results of his mission to the Emperor^ taking the miserable 
 Arunasa with him. In 657 he visited India once more, but 
 this time as a peaceful Buddhist pilgrim to worship at the 
 shrines of the Blessed One, following the usual route of Chinese 
 pUgrims at that time, which was to enter India through Nepal 
 and return through Northern India by the passes of the Hindu 
 Kush. 
 
 The effect of the break-up of Harsha's empire in shifting 
 the dynamic centre of Indo-Aryan culture from Magadha to 
 Dravida, or India south of the Vindhyas, has already been 
 described. The further consequence of the political disintegra- 
 tion of Aryavarta was more disastrous, for it gave the Arabs 
 the opportunity they were seeking of setting a firm foot in 
 India. About 710 one of the armies of the Khalif Wahd, 
 under the command of a young Arab chieftain named Muham- 
 mad ibn Kasim, then only seventeen years old, invaded Sind, 
 and after defeating and killing the Brahman king Dahir, 
 conquered the whole of the Indus valley from the delta of the 
 river up to Multan. 
 
 The first Muhammadan conquerors of India, though inspired 
 by a fanatical hatred of the idolator, inherited some of the 
 chivalrous characteristics of the Arab race, for the Arabs 
 formed the civilising leaven in the uncultured world of Islam. 
 The early Arab historians were generous in praise of the people 
 of India. Thus Al Idrisi, who compiled a book of travel at 
 the end of the eleventh century, wrote that " Indians are 
 naturally inclined to justice and never depart from it in their 
 actions. Their good faith, honesty, and fidelity to their engage- 
 ments are well known, and they are so famous for these qualities 
 that people flock to their country from every side." ^ Muliam- 
 mad Kasim was relentless in severity towards the Kshatriya 
 warriors who opposed him, but when his victory was complete 
 
 1 Elliot's History of India, vol. i, p. 88. 
 250 
 
ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING 
 
 he found it expedient to employ the Brahmans in pacifying 
 the country by taking them into his confidence. He allowed 
 them to repair their temples and to follow their own religion 
 as before, placed the collection of revenue in their hands, and 
 employed them in continuing the traditional system of local 
 administration. ^ 
 
 The principles of Muhammadan rule, however, always showed 
 a sharp contrast to those of the Aryan lawgivers. The infidels 
 whose lives were spared were allowed to exist so that they 
 might contribute by their industry and skill to the sustenance 
 and comfort of the faithful. Sind contributed a large annual 
 tribute to the treasury of the Elhalif at Baghdad, raised by 
 special taxes imposed upon non-Musulmans. A strong economic 
 pressure was brought to bear upon the Hindu population to 
 persuade them to embrace Islam, for those who did so were 
 ipso facto relieved from payment of the capitation tax and 
 other special imposts, and acquired all the rights of a Musalman 
 citizen in the law-courts, where the Quran and not Aryan law 
 and custom decided disputes in all cases. This method of 
 proselytising was very effective among the lower castes of 
 Hindus, especially among those who suffered from the severity 
 of Brahmanical law with regard to the ' impure ' classes. 
 
 Though the Arabs were disposed to admire Indians for their 
 strict regard for justice, they had little feeling for it themselves 
 in their dealings with the ' infidels.' Muhammad Kasim had 
 received invaluable help in defeating the Brahman King of 
 Sind from certain tribes of Jats and Meds who were smarting 
 under the tyranny of their native rulers. But so far from 
 rewarding them for the services they had rendered to the 
 cause of Islam he reimposed upon them and their chiefs all the 
 disabilities from which they had suffered imder the Brahman 
 rule. Moreover, the Arab conquest let loose upon Sind a 
 motley horde of greedy adventurers who when a less firm hand 
 than that of Muhammad Kasim held the reins of government 
 maltreated and fleeced the Hindu inhabitants unmercifully. 
 It was not imtil the Musalman invaders had made India their 
 
 ^ Elliot's History of India, vol. i, pp. 182-191. 
 
 251 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 home and the Aryan traditions of India had been grafted upon 
 the wild Arab stem that Islam took its place, at least for a 
 time, as a civilising power in the world. 
 
 The Arab historians give conflicting accounts of the tragic 
 end of Muhammad Kasim. One states that he was recalled 
 and tortured to death by order of the Khalif Sulaiman. But 
 the majority declare that the two virgin daughters of the 
 Brahman king Dahir, who had been sent to Baghdad for the 
 Khalif Walid's harem, in revenge for their father's death 
 accused Muhammad Kasim of having violated them, whereupon 
 the furious Khalif wrote a letter in his own hand to his general 
 and commanded him that immediately on receipt of it he 
 should suffer himself to be sewn up in a raw cowhide and sent 
 thus to the capital. Implicit obedience to the commands of 
 the Khalif as Allah's representative on earth was the duty 
 of every Musalman ; so Muhammad Kasim without hesitation 
 ordered his people to sew him up in a hide. After two days 
 he delivered his soul to God, while his body was placed in a 
 chest and forwarded to the Khalif. When the corpse was 
 shown to the Brahman girls they taunted the Khalif for his 
 unreasonable cruelty, confessing that they had brought a false 
 charge against the young general to bring about his death, 
 because he had killed their father, destroyed their holy temples, 
 and reduced the daughters of the * twice-born ' to slavery. 
 The climax of the tragedy was that the IChalif ordered the 
 two girls to be immured alive ; or according to other accounts 
 they were tied to horses' tails and dragged round the city until 
 they were dead.^ 
 
 As the Khalifate of Baghdad grew more effete and corrupt, 
 after the extinction of the Abbasid dynasty, it ceased to exercise 
 any control over the province of Sind. From a political point 
 of view the Arab conquest of Sind was a comparatively insignifi- 
 cant event in the Muhammadan world, and it has been treated 
 as such by Anglo-Indian historians. But the importance of 
 the conquest for its effect upon the whole culture of Islam has 
 been little understood. For the first time the nomads of the 
 
 ^ Blphinstone's History of India, vol. i, p. 437. 
 252 
 
ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING 
 
 Arabian desert, with their more cultured brethren of the 
 Arabian Httoral, fired with the rehgious fervour of the Prophet 
 of Mekka, found themselves in the holy land of the Aryans in 
 close contact with Indo-Aryan civilisation, which from all 
 points of view, politically, economically, and intellectually, had 
 reached a far higher plane than their own. The Sultans of 
 Sind entered into friendly relations with the powerful Hindu 
 kings of the Rashtrakuta line, who permitted the Arabs not 
 only to establish mercantile settlements within their dominions 
 along the west coast, but to build mosques and live according 
 to the laws of Islam. 
 
 To the poetic imagination of the Arab tribesmen, India, with 
 its gorgeous temples and monasteries carved in the living rock, 
 its palace-fortresses and magnificent irrigation works of massive 
 masonry, must have seemed a land of wonders, of djinns and 
 great magicians. In all the arts of peace India then stood at 
 the pinnacle of her greatness. The Arab conquered with his 
 sword, but came to learn at the Mother's feet the wisdom which 
 had inspired his own great Prophet. The mullas of Islam, 
 disgusted though they might be with the outward forms of 
 popular Hindu ritual, soon learnt that the formula " There is 
 one God and Muhammad is His Prophet," which seemed to 
 them so great an inspiration, was no revelation to the Hindu 
 philosopher. The Arab chieftains might hate the Kshatriya 
 warrior and despise the Buddhist and Brahman monk, but 
 they were charmed by the skill of Indian musicians and the 
 cunning of the Hindu painter. Their young fighting men dis- 
 covered that the lotus-eyed maidens of the ' twice-born ' were 
 as fair as the houris of their desert dreams. The Indian crafts- 
 men were as indispensable to the Muslim city-builders as they 
 had been to the Indo-Aryan kings. The dome of the temple 
 mandapam, shorn of its exuberant symbolism, which was so 
 offensive to the unsophisticated mentality of the Arab — because 
 the things it spoke of were beyond the range of his philosophy — 
 became the dome of the Muslim mosque and tomb. The 
 simplified symbolism of Muslim ritual was all borrowed from 
 India. The pointed arch of the prayer carpet and mihrab — 
 
 253 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 afterwards the characteristic feature of Saracenic architecture — 
 was the symboHc arch of the Buddhist and Hindu shrine. The 
 ' horseshoe ' arch was the sun-window of Buddhist chaitya 
 halls and Hindu temples. The cathedral mosques of Mushm 
 royalty were oriented like the Vishnu temple, and their entrances 
 corresponded to the temple gopurams and the gates of the 
 Indo-Aryan village. The minars of the mosque were adapta- 
 tions of Indian Towers of Victory, which were an elaboration 
 of Indo-Aryan royal standards. Finally, under Turkish domi- 
 nation, the ensign of Islam became the crescent moon, Siva's 
 bow, which had been the symbol of India — ' the I^and of the 
 Moon ' — or of India's holy land, Aryavarta, ages before the 
 Prophet of Mekka was born. 
 
 In Sind the Arab sheikhs had their first practical lessons in 
 Indo-Aryan statecraft under the guidance of their Brahman 
 ofiicials. They learnt to adapt their own primitive patriarchal 
 polity to the complicated problems of a highly organised system 
 of government evolved by centuries of Aryan imperial rule. 
 Soon after the Arabs established themselves in the Indus valley 
 the victory of Charles Martel at the battle of Tours saved 
 Western Europe from Muslim rule, and the empire of Charle- 
 magne (a.d. 771-814) was the political counterpoise in the West 
 to the Khalifate of Baghdad under the Abbasid dynasty. It 
 was in Mesopotamia, especially in the glorious days of Hartin-al- 
 Raschid (a.d. 786-809), that the foundations of Saracenic culture 
 were laid. The court language, etiquette, and literary accom- 
 plishments were borrowed from the Iranian branch of Aryan 
 civilisation, in the centre of which the founders of the Abbasid 
 dynasty had been nurtured. But all the scientific elements 
 which formed Arabic scholarship and in later times made it 
 famous in Europe — philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and 
 medicine — were in the eighth century borrowed directly from 
 India. Through the Arab occupation of the Indus and Euphrates 
 valleys Islam was enabled to tap the inexliaustible resources of 
 India, spiritual and material, and to become the agents for 
 their distribution over the whole of Europe — a relationship 
 which continued to exist long after the outlying territories of 
 254 
 
ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING 
 
 Islam in Europe had asserted their independence of the 
 Khalifate of Baghdad. 
 
 Every student of the history of Arab civilisation must 
 recognise the great impetus which it gave to European learn- 
 ing ; but Musalman historians are prone to ignore the debt 
 of the Arabs to Indo- Aryan culture, and thus to form an exag- 
 gerated opinion of the creative work of Islam in. India. The 
 knowledge of chemistry, medicine and pharmacy, mathematics 
 and astronomy which the Arabs disseminated in Europe was 
 almost wholly derived from Indian sources. Their sudden 
 intellectual awakening and great devotion to learning can 
 hardly be attributed to the influence of the teaching of Islam, 
 which made the Quran the depository of all knowledge neces- 
 sary for the spiritual and intellectual sustenance of the faithful. 
 It was not in the Western schools of the Dark Ages that they 
 could have caught the enthusiasm of the scholar. The great 
 universities of North-western India, which were famous 
 throughout Asia for the very sciences in which the Arabs 
 afterwards excelled, had all the traditions of scholarship and 
 the subtle intellectual atmosphere which stimulate the mental 
 activity of the student. And in the early days of the Arab 
 conquests, before Islam could boast of any universities of its 
 own, these were the schools to which high-born Arab youth in 
 Persia and India would go in quest of knowledge. 
 
 In the early days of the Arab occupation of Sind, while it 
 still formed part of the Khalifate, Indian pandits brought to 
 the court of Manstir at Baghdad the celebrated works of 
 Brahmagupta, the Brahmdsiddhdnta and Khandakhddyaka, 
 which were translated by Muslim scholars and formed the 
 basis of Arabic astronomical knowledge.^ In the palmy days 
 of the great Harun the influence of Indian scholarship was 
 supreme at the Baghdad court. The most trusted friends and 
 advisers of the Khalif, belonging to the Barmak family, were 
 said to be descendants of the abbot of a Buddhist monastery 
 in Balkh, whence the riiling dynasty itself had come. Through 
 their influence Hindu physicians were brought to Baghdad to 
 ^ Alberuni's India, Sachau's translation, p. xxxi. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 organise hospitals and medical schools. Hindu scholars helped 
 to translate into Arabic many of the principal Sanskrit works 
 on philosophy, logic, mathematics, medical science, and other 
 subjects.^ The high-born youth of Arabia began to join the 
 crowd of students which gathered from all parts of Asia in the 
 great universities of India. Taksha-sila, the university specially 
 noted for its medical schools, would have been the most acces- 
 sible to the students of Baghdad through the Arab command 
 of the sea and river communications. 
 
 Although after the glory of the Abbasid Khalifs was eclipsed 
 Arabic scholars turned to the Hellenic branch of Aryan learn- 
 ing for further inspiration, it was India and not Greece that 
 taught Islam in the impressionable years of its youth, formed 
 its philosophy and esoteric religious ideals, and inspired its 
 most characteristic expression in literature, art, and architec- 
 ture. The political relationship between Baghdad and India 
 ended when Sind became independent of the Khalifate, and 
 Arabian scholars ceased to occupy themselves with the transla- 
 tion of Indian writings when Hellenic thought began to attract 
 them ; but intercourse between India and Mesopotamia, which 
 had existed even before Aryan kings ruled in Babylon, was 
 not broken off by political changes. By the time the Arab 
 dynasties which first made Islam a civilising influence had 
 fallen, China, the fellow-student of Arabia in the universities 
 of India, began to assist in the development of Muslim culture 
 in Asia, until the conquest of Hindustan by the Musalman 
 armies brought Islam to its Motherland and enabled it to 
 progress further in the paths of peace under the most liberal . 
 of the Muhammadan sovereigns of India. 
 
 It must, however, be recognised that the Arabs in Europe 
 soon made themselves independent of Indian teaching and 
 developed schools of their own which gave a new impetus to 
 scientific research. The follower of Islam, though he might 
 draw upon Indian sources of knowledge, would on conscientious 
 grounds refuse to recognise the religious basis upon which all 
 Hindu teaching was formulated ; and as he had no scientific 
 
 ^ Alberuni's India, Sachau's translation, pp. xxxi-xsxii. 
 256 
 
ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING 
 
 Sastras of his own he would naturally seek to create them by 
 methods of original research. Through this secularisation of 
 Hindu religious knowledge the Arabs laid the foundation of 
 Western experimental science, which has often appropriated to 
 itself the credit of discoveries which really belong to Buddhist 
 and Hindu India. But a distinction must always be drawn 
 between Arab, or Saracenic, culture and that of Muhammadan 
 India, for they always remained apart. The Arabs never won 
 for themselves a permanent political footing in India, nor did 
 the Western school of Islam ever take any strong hold upon 
 the mentality or religious feeling of the Indian Musalman 
 before English teachers with little or no knowledge of Indian 
 history undertook the direction of education in India. Fortu- 
 nately for the British Raj, Indian Musalmans in remaining true 
 to their Indian Mother have proved true to themselves. 
 
 The Arab governors of Sind after Muhammad Kasim were 
 not successful in enlarging the boundaries of the province, 
 though they were at constant war with their Hindu neighbours 
 on the east and north. The Abbasid Khalifs made no organised 
 attempt to pursue the conquest of India begun by Walid's 
 general. On the other hand, they maintained very friendly 
 intercourse with the Rashtrakilta dynasty which ruled over 
 the greater part of Western India. It was left to the Turki 
 dynasties of Ghazni to carry out the systematic policy of 
 plunder and massacre which gradually broke the economic 
 strength of the Northern Hindu states and opened the way to 
 the final subjugation of India by the Muhammadans. 
 
 But the victorious progress of Islam in India is not to be 
 accounted for by external reasons. It was mainly due to the 
 political degeneration of Aryavarta which set in after th© 
 death of Harsha. While the south of India was being con- 
 solidated under the Chola rule, the north was split up into a 
 number of independent states, the mutual jealousies of which 
 bUnded them to the dangers which threatened all from the 
 constantly increasing strength of the enemy at their gates. 
 The social programme of the Prophet, which, like the law of 
 the Buddha, gave every true believer an equal spiritual status 
 
 R 257 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 within the community of Islam, had precisely the same political 
 effect in the Islamic world as Asoka's propaganda had in Arya- 
 varta — it made Islam a political and social synthesis and gave 
 it an imperial mission. The peculiarly favourable geographical 
 formation of India confined the political empire of Aryavarta 
 to the boundaries of India itself, but the dominions of the 
 Khalifate lacked the physical demarcations which the Hima- 
 layas and the encircling ocean gave to the conquests of the 
 Aryans in India, and thus the war-lords of Islam were con- 
 stantly occupied with schemes of world-conquest. A united 
 Aryavarta offered an impenetrable front to the foreign invader. 
 Disunion opened the gateways of the Himalayas and exposed 
 the whole coast-line of Aryavarta to attack. 
 
 Islam reached the zenith of its political strength at the 
 critical period when the conflict between Buddhist philosophy 
 and that of orthodox Brahmanism was a potent cause of 
 political dissensions in Northern India. We have already 
 noticed the effect of these dissensions as a contributory cause 
 of the break-up of Harsha's empire. Islam had the immense 
 advantage that, however much the faithful might quarrel over 
 the distribution of the spoils of conquest, the dogmas of their 
 spiritual faith were so simple and clearly stated that they gave 
 little cause for disputes disturbing greatly the peace of the 
 Musalman world or dividing it against itself, though a hundred 
 sects might wrangle over minor points of ritual. 
 
 And, however fanatical the Muhammadan might be in his 
 religious beliefs, he was rarely inspired by that intense desire 
 to penetrate into the secrets of the Universe which made the 
 Hindu so willing to give up all worldly attachments and seek 
 communion with the Infinite in the seclusion of the monasterj'^ 
 or in the peace of the forest asram. Islam, like the Law of 
 Buddha, was a rule of life sufficient for the happiness of average 
 humanity, content to take the world as it is and leave philo- 
 sophers to wrangle over the cause of all things. 
 
 It was this passionate absorption in her spiritual quest of 
 which Islam itself was but a faint reflection, which was at 
 once the source of India's greatness and of her weakness. 
 258 
 
ISLAM'S FIRST FOOTING 
 
 Buddhism especially, by its huge monastic organisation, helped 
 to emasculate the manhood of India. The conquest of Sind 
 by the Arabs was made easy by the fact that thousands of the 
 male population had adopted the yellow robe for the sake of 
 the easy life of the monastery. They were not like the monks 
 of Nalanda and other great seats of Buddhist learning, for 
 they were accounted as idle, dissolute fellows who had no 
 regard for their own reputation or for the rules of their Order. 
 The monastic system continued to absorb a large proportion 
 of the flower of Indian manhood even after the development 
 of Brahman philosophy added Buddhism to the Hindu syn- 
 thesis, for every great Hindu temple which was built meant 
 the dedication of public or private funds for the maintenance 
 of priests, temple-servants, Brahman students and their gurus, 
 sadhus and sannyasins. And it was the period from the 
 seventh century to the time of Mahmud of Ghazni which was 
 the most prolific in religious building — a time when Hindu 
 monarchs vied with each other in the magnificence and number 
 of their temples, when sacred hills were converted into cities 
 of the gods, and when hundreds of thousands of skilled artisans 
 were diverted from ordinary industrial pursuits to the pious 
 labour of elaborating the embellishment of the temple service 
 in stone, bronze, precious metals, and costly fabrics. This 
 was an occupation which Western political economists regard 
 as extravagantly wasteful and unprofitable when they compare 
 it with the modern ' progressive ' system which condemns 
 millions of men, women, and children to the intellectual and 
 moral degradation of factory labour, and employs the highest 
 intelligence of the nation in the invention and manufacture of 
 engines of destruction. The medieval system, however un- 
 scientific and wasteful it might have been, was abundantly 
 productive. The amazing accumulation of wealth stored in 
 Indian temple treasuries more than anything else excited the 
 cupidity of the Muhammadan invaders and made their pious 
 predatory raids highly profitable undertakings. 
 
 Brahmanical social science did indeed provide some checks 
 against the flagrant abuses of monasticism which the demo- 
 
 259 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 cratic principles of Buddhism tended to encourage. The merit 
 of the much-abused caste system was that it formed an auto- 
 matic process of selection of the fittest for every vocation in 
 life ; and so long as the barriers of caste were as easy to 
 overcome as they were in pre-Muhammadan times it may be 
 questioned whether the examination system or any other 
 artificial selective method has proved itself superior from the 
 point of view of eugenics, or economics, or of spiritual progress. 
 Though the high ethical ideals of Buddhism had won for India 
 the respect of the whole Eastern world, the weakness of its 
 political and social economy was the chief cause of the success 
 of the Muhammadan arms. Buddhism had fatally impaired 
 the efficiency of the Kshatriya caste in the special work of 
 national defence which Brahman sociology had assigned to it. 
 For several centuries, indeed, the Rajput states which main- 
 tained their traditional organisation and martial ardour kept 
 their own territories inviolate ; but the political disorganisa- 
 tion of Northern India after the death of Harsha left so many 
 weak spots in India's armour that the plateau of Rajputana 
 gradually became like a great hill-fortress invested on all sides 
 by the armies of Islam. So long as Aryavarta was united 
 under a Chakra-vartin, or xmiversal monarch, as in the time 
 of the Maury as and Guptas, and to some extent imder Harsha, 
 the chieftains of the Rajput communities owned allegiance to 
 the central power, contributed their share of military service 
 to the imperial armies, and merged their political individu- 
 ality in the empire. But the gradual disintegration of the 
 empire by the Muhammadan invasions instinctively impelled 
 the fighting Kshatriyas scattered over the plains to rally round 
 their hereditary chieftains in the hill-fortresses of Rajputana 
 and Central India, the natural home of the Kshatriya, hallowed 
 by the most sacred associations of their Aryan ancestors. 
 
 The claims to Aryan ancestry of some of these fighting clans 
 might be difficult to prove to the satisfaction of the ethnologist, 
 and doubtless many of the foreign invaders of India had been 
 admitted within the Aryan pale. But they were all united 
 in devotion to Aryan traditions, and only Aryan honour and 
 260 
 
THE RAJPUTS 
 
 acknowledged claims to descent from Aryan heroes gave prece- 
 dence in their order of nobility. Many of these fighting clans 
 were Aryanised in the same way as the Dravidian dynasties 
 had been in much earlier times, through their Aryan wives 
 won in war with the Indo- Aryan tribes — ^the rdkshasa form of 
 marriage, or by right of capture, being one of those recognised 
 by Hindu law as appropriate for Kshatriyas. Thus the claims 
 to Aryan ancestry of some modern Rajput tribes may not be 
 so illusory as they are reckoned by scientific investigators. 
 
 However that may be, the Rajputs who were Aryans only 
 by right of valour became as proud of the name as the full- 
 blooded Kshatriya, and as willing to lay down their lives 
 in defence of their beloved Aryavarta ; though the mutual 
 jealousies of different tribes gave rise to constant internecine 
 warfare, which was always fatal to their power of resistance 
 to a well-organised attack from beyond the frontier. 
 
 In the three and a half centuries which intervened between 
 the death of Harsha and the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni 
 there were a number of more or less important Rajput states, 
 with a chain of great hill-fortresses as points d'appui, which 
 kept up the ancient patriarchal traditions of Aryan culture in 
 the form peculiar to the Kshatriya communities, such as 
 survive to some extent in modern Rajputana. In the history 
 of these miniature Aryavartas one does not hear so much of 
 the ancient popular Assemblies which the Buddha took for the 
 model of his Sangha, and which continued to have so much 
 political influence in Southern India throughout medieval 
 times. But the self-governing village communities under the 
 protection of the Kshatriya fighting men continued to form 
 the foundation of the body politic so long as the Rajput states 
 remained independent and kept alive their Aryan traditions. 
 The Sudra cultivators were the proprietors of the soil, their 
 rights being maintained by an immemorial tradition which the 
 common law of Aryavarta made inviolable. "In accordance 
 with this principle," says Tod in tho^ Annals of Rajast'han,^ " is 
 the ancient adage, not of Mewar only but all Rajputana — 
 
 1 Vol. i, p. 494. 
 
 261 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Bhog ra dhanni Raj ho : bhom ra dhanni ma cho — ' The Govern- 
 ment is owner of the rent, but I am the master of the land.' " 
 Each commune with its guilds of craftsmen and industrial 
 co-operative societies was "an imperium in imperio, a little 
 republic, maintaining its municipal legislation independent of 
 the monarchy, on which it relies for general support, and to 
 which it pays the bhog, or tax in kind, as the price of this 
 protection." ^ The sovereign could dispossess the fighting 
 chiefs who owed allegiance to him as the head of their clan 
 of the estates they held in fief from the Crown ; he was the 
 landlord of the Khalisa demesne — the Crown lands which were 
 leased to cultivators — and the proprietor of mines, marble 
 quarries, and reserved forests. But over the lands of the 
 peasant freeholders neither the sovereign nor the chief had any 
 proprietary rights, except such as the peasant himself or the 
 commune was willing to confer. Thus a chieftain, or Thakur, 
 says Tod, when inducted into a perpetual fief by the Rana, 
 would try to insure himself against the loss of it by obtaining 
 from the ryot or the commune a few acres of freehold land, 
 with the knowledge that if through his sovereign's displeasure 
 he should forfeit his seigniorial estates and cease to be a Thakur, 
 his rights as a Bhumia, or owner, could never be set aside. ^ 
 The vState could call for the military service of these Bhumias, 
 the yeomen of Rajasthan, but their land [hhum) was exempt 
 from the jurih (measuring rod) , it was never assessed, and they 
 only paid a quit-rent, in most cases triennial, and a war-tax — ■ 
 the khur-lakur. 
 
 The supreme ruler of these Rajput states had doubtless 
 many means of oppression and exaction, but he was far from 
 being an irresponsible despot like a Muhammadan Khalif or 
 Sultan. The petty chieftain was as jealous as his overlord of 
 his own rights and those of his retainers ; and the assembly 
 of the chieftains which was summoned to advise upon important 
 State affairs was a real check upon the abuse of sovereign 
 power. There was a well-regulated distribution of political 
 and civil rights throughout the different grades of society, 
 
 ^ Tod's Annals of Rajast'han, vol. i, p. 495. ^ Ibid., p. 496. 
 
 262 
 
THE RAJPUTS 
 
 from the highest to the lowest, kept in balance and adjusted 
 from time to time, not by formal Acts of Parliament, but by 
 the highly developed culture and religious sense of the people, 
 which made the common law of the land — ^the Dharma — as 
 sacred as the Vedas and binding upon the monarch as well 
 as the meanest peasant. It is this culture and religion which, 
 in spite of Western ' education,' make the Rajput of to-day 
 as loyal to the British Raj as he was to his Mogul overlord 
 when the wise statesmanship of Akbar won the alliance of the 
 chiefs of Rajputana. 
 
 The Annals of Rajast'han contain references to the struggles 
 with the Arabs in which the famous citadel of Chitor became 
 the chief rallying-point of the Rajput clans, as it was during 
 the subsequent attacks of the Turks under Mahmud and those 
 of the Moguls under Babur and his successors. Here, it is 
 said, the son of Dahir found a refuge after his father's kingdom 
 was lost. It is interesting to note that the Hindu chroniclers 
 in referring to their Arab enemies of this time always apphed 
 to them the name of the ancient foes of the Aryans in Meso- 
 potamia, the ' Asuras,' ^ thus definitely associating the Arabs 
 with their Semitic ancestors, the Assyrians. In other respects 
 the conditions of Aryavarta brought back the ancient heroic 
 times. The fighting ground upon which the Rajput chieftains 
 were struggling with the Arab invaders was the scene of the 
 great Aryan epic, the Mahabharata. Close to Indraprastha, 
 the Delhi of that time, was the field of Kurukshetra, where the 
 Pandavas and Kauravas met in deadly conflict. Panchala, one 
 of the great Rajput states which took part in the struggle, was 
 known in Aryan legends as the kingdom over which, when the 
 Great War was ended, the Brahman who taught the Pandavas 
 the use of divine weapons, the wise Drona, ruled. Malwa, under 
 its ancient name of Avanti, or the kingdom of Ujjain, had been 
 also one of the earliest centres of Aryan culture, its university 
 having been famous even in the time of the Buddha. 
 
 The epic times were also recalled by the constant quarrels 
 between themselves, or with their neighbours in the Dekhan, 
 ^ Tod's Annals of Rajast'han, vol. i, p. 247. 
 
 263 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 which occupied the attention of these different Indo-Aryan 
 states when they were not forced to repel the attacks of the 
 Arab armies. But the epigraphical record in which the student 
 can find the somewhat dreary details of this internecine strife — 
 so far as archaeological research has gone — should not make 
 the historian overlook the fact that the centuries immediately 
 before the Muhammadan conquest of India were as rich in 
 art and literature and in splendid works of public utility as 
 the palmy days of the Great Moguls, for in spite of the ravages 
 of Turk and Mongol much remains to testify to it even in the 
 present day. In the eighth century the court of Yasovarman, 
 Raja of Kanauj, was distinguished for its dramatists, among 
 them Bhavabhuti, author of Mdlatimddhava and other famous 
 Sanskrit plays. Rajasekhara, noted as the author of the drama 
 Karpura-manjun, was a minister of Mahendrapala, one of 
 Yasovarman's successors at the end of the ninth century. 
 The Paramara dynasty of Malwa, founded in the ninth century, 
 well maintained the ancient fame of the Ujjain court for 
 literary and artistic culture. The poems of Munja, the seventh 
 raja (974-995), have been handed down to the present day ; 
 he was renowned for his scholarship and literary gifts as well 
 as for his skill at arms. His nephew Bhoja (1018-1060), who 
 was contemporary with Mahmud of Ghazni, revived the 
 glorious memories of the Gupta dynasty by his own accomplish- 
 ments and those of his court poets, master-builders, artists, 
 and scientists. " His fame," says Mr Vincent Smith, " as 
 an enlightened patron of learning and a skilled author remains 
 undimmed, and his name has become proverbial as that of 
 the model king according to the Hindu standard. Works on 
 astronomy, architecture, the art of poetry, and other subjects 
 are attributed to him, , , , A mosque at Dhara now occupies 
 the site of Bhoja's Sanskrit college, which seems to have been 
 held in a temple dedicated appropriately to Sarasvati, the 
 goddess of learning." ^ 
 
 The narrow sectarian will regard the extraordinary develop- 
 ment of temple-building in this period only as evidence of 
 
 ^ Early History of India, 2nd edit., p. 365. 
 264 
 
21. Kandarya Mahadeva Temple, Khajuraho 
 
 264 
 
THE RAJPUTS 
 
 profound superstition and moral depravity, in ignorance of the 
 fact that in a religious system founded not merely upon dogmas 
 but upon a science of social life the temple combined the 
 service of God with various works of public utility, instruction, 
 and recreation. Many of the great temples, like those at 
 Khajuraho,^ with which the Chandela and other dynasties 
 adorned their capitals, served not only as schools for secular 
 as well as religious instruction : the series of halls with their 
 splendid domes and sculptured pillars which formed the 
 approaches of the sacred shrine were the assembly hall, theatre, 
 and music-hall of the people. The economic needs of the 
 community were not less sumptuously provided for by the 
 rulers of these Rajput states. All over the country they 
 administered are ruins of the great irrigation works by which 
 they both assisted agriculture and added to the amenities of 
 popular life, in which the Rajput monarch took a much larger 
 share than was usually the case in other aristocratic systems 
 of government. Bhoja of Malwa added to his fame as a patron 
 of arts and letters by the great artificial lake of Bholpur, 250 
 square miles in extent, created by throwing embankments of 
 solid masonry across the watershed of a circle of hills. The 
 name of the Muhammadan king in the fifteenth century who 
 upheld the glory of Islam by destroying it has not been recorded. 
 The rajas of the Chandel dynasties and many others of the 
 warrior chieftains who came into prominence at this time 
 were equally active in temple-building as in promoting these 
 great irrigation works, and some of these still remain to fertilise 
 and beautify the valleys between the hill-forts of Malwa, 
 Rajputana, and Central India. 
 
 Before Mahmud of Ghazni broke through the defences of 
 Hindustan by his successive raids, the Rajput chieftains pre- 
 sented a much more solid front to the invader than they did 
 in later times. Most of the territory now known as Rajputana, 
 together with some of the districts of the Panjab and the 
 present United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, acknowledged 
 the suzerainty of a powerful Rajput, King Nagabhata, who in 
 ^ See Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India, by the author, pp. 208-212. 
 
 265 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 8 10 had conquered Kanauj and made it his capital. Kanauj 
 after the death of Harsha remained the bone of contention 
 for all the princes of Aryavarta who aspired to be a Chakra- 
 vartin or universal monarch. At the close of the eighth century 
 it had been more than once attacked by the kings of Kashmir : 
 at the beginning of the ninth Dharmapala, King of Bengal, 
 had dethroned its then ruler and made the Kanauj state 
 tributary to him. The capture of the city by Nagabhata 
 marked him out as the premier chief of Rajasthan. 
 
 Nagabhata was the head of the Gurjaras, one of the fighting 
 clans of foreign descent which had been admitted into the 
 Aryan pale in the troublous times of the Hun invasions and 
 had formed themselves into a Rajput state, having its capital 
 at Bhinmal, or Srimal, not far from Mount Abu. One of 
 Nagabhata's predecessors, Vatsaraja, had distinguished himself 
 by defeating Gopala, the King of Bengal, who apparently 
 attempted to lay hands on the former provinces of Harsha's 
 empire. The kingdom of Kanauj, or Panchala, under its 
 Gurjara ruler formed a barrier against hostile incursions into 
 the Gangetic plain which none of the Arab rulers of Sind were 
 able to penetrate. Muhammad Kasim was on the point of 
 making the attempt when he received the fatal letter from the 
 IChalif which ended his brilliant career as a general. The 
 Gurjara kingdom maintained its supremacy over the Rajput 
 clans for over a century, and perhaps might have continued 
 to hold the Muslims at bay if it had not been weakened by its 
 wars with the Rashtrakuta kings, one of whom, Indra III, 
 captured Kanauj in a.d. 916, though he did not succeed in 
 retaining possession of it. 
 
 The eastern boundary of the Gurjara kingdom was con- 
 terminous with that of Gaur, or Bengal, which under the 
 Pala dynasty continued the zealous patronage of Buddhism 
 which the Sangha had enjoyed in the days of Harsha. The 
 ancient Magadha country, now known as Bihar, ' the Ivand of 
 Monasteries,' remained its home province, with Pataliputra as 
 its capital. Except for the Nepalese and Tibetan invasion 
 previously recorded nothing definite is known of the history of 
 266 
 
GAUR, OR BENGAL 
 
 Bengal and Bihar for nearly a century after Harsha's death. 
 About A.D. 730, however, Gopala, the first of the Pala dynasty — 
 so called from the suffix signifying ' Protector ' or ' Defender ' 
 which terminated the names of these kings — began to revive 
 the glory of Magadha, but was checked in the attempt to 
 recover its western provinces by Vatsaraja, the Rajput chief 
 of Gurjara. Foiled in his ambition to bring the ' Five Indies ' 
 under his banner, Gopala, like Harsha, sought to win undying 
 glory in "the field of religious merit " by devoting the rich 
 resources of his kingdom to the building and endowment of 
 larger and more splendid monasteries and temples for the 
 members of the Order. His successor, Dharmapala, ' the 
 Defender of the Faith,' came to the throne towards the end 
 of the eighth century, and is said to have reigned for sixty- 
 four years. He renewed Gopala's attempt to extend his 
 dominions westward, and so far succeeded that about a.d. 800 
 he defeated and deposed Indrayudha, the King of Kanauj, 
 but Nagabhata's capture of the city soon afterwards put an 
 end to Dharmapala's plans of conquest in that direction, while 
 it was equally effective in protecting the rich monasteries and 
 temples of Bihar from any attack from the Arab marauders. 
 Bengal was thus secured from the onslaughts of Islam until 
 the end of the twelfth century, for although Mahmud of Ghazni 
 sacked the city in 1018 he did not venture to push further 
 east. All the Pala kings remained faithful to Buddhism, and 
 continued to reign in Bengal until Qutb-ud-din's armies under 
 Muhammad ibn Bakhtiyar captured Nudiah and laid waste 
 Bihar. But about 1060 one of the local rajas of the Sena 
 family ceased to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Pala kings, 
 and by setting up an independent raj in the eastern part of 
 Bengal accelerated the process of disintegration which brought 
 Aryavarta to ruin. 
 
 Among the different independent states which make up the 
 political history of the period after the death of Harsha down 
 to the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni, Kashmir holds a con- 
 spicuous if not a distinguished place. The peculiar situation 
 of the valley of Kashmir, enclosed by a circle of Himalayan 
 
 267 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 mountains, and only accessible in a few places by long and 
 difficult passes, gives its inhabitants a character of their 0"«ti 
 different from those of the outside world, which few of them 
 ever entered or knew except by listening to travellers' tales. 
 The detached life they led would make their history a study 
 by itself, and in the twelfth century a.d. Kashmir found an 
 historian in a learned Brahman, Kalhana, the son of the 
 Kashmir King Harsha's minister, Canpaka. But into the 
 psychological causes which led to the total disregard of the 
 first principle of Aryan self-government, self-control, the dis- 
 solute life of most of its kings and the tyranny of the feudal 
 landowners, Kalhana does not enter. Perhaps they may be 
 found in the indolence and ignorance of the Brahman and 
 Buddhist intellectuals, by which they gradually lost the political 
 and social influence they enjoyed in Aryavarta, in the Turkish 
 and Tibetan connections of some of the later rtding dynasties, 
 and in the grape vine of the valley of Kashmir, the garden 
 city of the Himalayas. 
 
 In very early times Kashmir had been occupied by Aryan 
 tribes, and for many centuries their rulers joined in the strenuous 
 life of Aryavarta. It formed a part of the empire of Asoka, 
 who is said to have built the ancient city of Srinagar, near the 
 present capital. According to Kalhana, he also built not only 
 many stupas in honour of the Blessed One, but renewed the 
 outer wall of the ancient Saiva shrine of Vijayeshvara. Having 
 regard to the intimate connection between Saiva and Buddhist 
 symbolism there would be no inconsistency in a pious Buddhist 
 worshipping at a Saiva shrine. Nor would the history of the 
 life of the Buddha make it improbable that he was himself a 
 Saiva devotee, who by the inspiration of genius made the 
 philosophy of asceticism applicable to everj^day worldly life. 
 
 The complete Aryanisation of Kashmir is attributed by 
 Kalhana to a son of Asoka, Jalauka, who drove out the bar- 
 barian oppressors, and introduced Aryan settlers and an Aryan 
 system of government. The early part of the Kashmir 
 chronicle is embellished with much legendary tradition, making 
 Jalauka and other Kashmirian rulers mighty conquerors who 
 268 
 
KASHMIR 
 
 ruled over all Aryavarta. Kashmir was also a province of the 
 Kushan Empire, and Buddhism flourished greatly there under 
 Kanishka and Huvishka. The former is said to have held 
 there the third General Assembly of the Sangha which was 
 summoned to settle disputed points of doctrine and ritual, 
 and Kalhana makes Nagarjiina, the apostle of the Mahayana 
 doctrine, " the sole lord of the land " at that time.^ Kashmir 
 also came under the sway of the Hun tyrant Mihiragtda, 
 " the terrible enemy of mankind [who] had no pity for children, 
 no compassion for women, no respect for the aged." ^ In his 
 time the valley was overrun by hordes of barbarians, and the 
 people knew the approach of the Hun armies by the vultures 
 and crows which flew ahead of them. Evil-minded as the 
 tyrant was, says Kalhana, he yet sought to win religious merit 
 by building Saiva shrines and endowing Brahman monasteries, 
 which the lowest of the ' twice-born,' as vile as their protector, 
 did not disdain to accept. 
 
 In the seventh century the Kashmir rulers did not, appa- 
 rently, acknowledge Harsha of Thaneshar's suzerainty, though 
 one of them was forced to surrender a precious relic, a tooth 
 of the Buddha, which the Emperor coveted. At the time of 
 Hiuen-Tsang's visit Buddhism was on the decline, but the 
 King of Kashmir was powerful enough to exact tribute from 
 the kingdom of Taksha-sila and other states lying at the foot 
 of his own mountain walls. The decadence of Kashmir, 
 politically and socially, seems to have begun with its more or 
 less complete isolation from the rest of Aryavarta. Kalhana's 
 chronicles bring out clearly an important principle of Indo- 
 Aryan poHty, the power vested in the ministerial Council for 
 checking the arbitrary conduct of the monarch, and for alter- 
 ing the line of succession when the interests of the State 
 demanded it. Thus Yudhisthira I was expelled from his 
 kingdom for misconduct, and Kalhana pathetically describes 
 the fallen King's departure from his capital, the distress of 
 the citizens at seeing the sorry plight of his delicately nurtured 
 
 ^ Rajatarangini, i, 173 (Stein's translation). 
 2 Ibid., i, 293. 
 
 269 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Queen, and the misfortunes which overtook the royal party 
 on their march to the frontier : " Marching on the lovely 
 mountain paths, and seeking when tired the shade of the trees, 
 he forgot by dint of his [daily] halting and marching his truly 
 great misfortune. But when roused by the shouts of the low 
 [hill-] folk, which reached his ear from afar, he appeared to 
 sink back, as it were, into depths along with the waters of the 
 mountain torrents. When his wives, whose figures were as 
 delicate as the beautiful young shoots of the lotus-stalks, had 
 passed through the forest regions, strongly scented with the 
 fragrance of the various shrubs and herbs, and through the 
 slippery [beds of the] mountain-streams with their rocks beaten 
 by the tossing water, they bent their bodies over their laps 
 and swooned from fatigue. When the King's wives, after 
 casting a long glance at the distant land from the height of 
 the mountain-boundary, threw all at once handfuls of flowers 
 as a farewell offering, even the swarms of birds nesting in the 
 mountain ravines cried plaintively in their excitement, and 
 buried their beaks in their plumage spread out on the ground." ^ 
 
 Similarly, in the history of the new dynasty brought in from 
 abroad to fill the vacant throne, Kalhana records that an able 
 and much ill-treated minister, Sandhimati, who had resisted 
 the arbitrary conduct of the king, " consented to the prayer 
 of the citizens to rule the country " when the throne again 
 became vacant {Raj., ii, ii6). Again, when the Gonanda 
 dynasty became extinct it was by the election of the ministerial 
 Council, as representing the voice of the people, that a prince 
 of the Karkota line was consecrated " with sacred water poured 
 out from golden jars " (ii, 528). The traditional authority of 
 the Supreme Council of State made one of the fundamental 
 differences between Indo-Aryan polity and that of Islam, in 
 which the sovereign ruled by divine right — derived from his 
 descent from the Prophet, or bestowed upon him by the Khalif 
 as the Prophet's representative, or won by the Prophet's own 
 weapon, the sword. 
 
 With the Karkota line the chronicles of Kashmir begin to 
 
 1 Rdjatarangini, i, 369-371 (Stein's translation). 
 270 
 
KASHMIR 
 
 rest on a firmer chronological foundation. After narrating the 
 pious benefactions and love affairs of the first of the dynasty 
 Kalhana sings the prowess of I/alitadit^^a Muktapida, a great 
 warrior, who about a.d. 740, or twenty-eight years after the 
 Arab conquest of Sind, defeated Yasovarman, King of Kanauj . 
 He also conducted many victorious campaigns against the 
 Tibetans and Dards, and against the Turks, who had established 
 a kingdom to the north of Sind on the upper waters of the Indus 
 and in the Kabul valley. lyalitaditya seems to have had some 
 family connections with the Turks of this region, for his 
 minister, Cankuna, who filled his treasury with gold by his 
 magical power, came from there, and Shahiya Turks, among 
 others, were appointed by the King to the five high offices of 
 State created to control the eighteen administrators of the 
 ancient Aryan regime instituted by Asoka's son. In his 
 conduct towards his conquered foes, and in his political 
 testament bequeathed to his successors, I^alitaditya certainly 
 seemed to be inspired by Turkish rather than Indo-Aryan 
 principles : " Those who dwell there in the mountains difficult 
 of access should be punished, even if they give no offence ; 
 because sheltered by their fastnesses they are difficult to break 
 up if they have once accumulated wealth. Every care should 
 be taken that there should not be left with the villages more 
 food-supply than required for the year's consumption, or more 
 oxen than wanted for the tillage of their fields ; because, if 
 they keep more wealth, they would become in a single year 
 very formidable Damaras and strong enough to neglect the 
 commands of the King " (iv, 346-348). Evidently here is the 
 secret of Cankuna's magical power in filling the King's treasury 
 , with gold. 
 
 However, lyalitaditya, when not intoxicated, seems to have 
 been a wise and liberal ruler of his own people : both he 
 and his Prime Minister were active in promoting beneficent 
 public works of a religious and economic character. He dis- 
 tributed the water of the Vitasta to various villages by con- 
 , structing a series of water-wheels. Cankuna's wife constructed 
 a well " the water of which was as pure as nectar and gave 
 
 271 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 health to the ailing " {Raj., iv, 212) ; and the ruins of the 
 famous temple of Martand still remain as a record of the great 
 days of lyalitaditya. 
 
 After a reign of thirty-six years he was followed by Kuvalaya- 
 pida, who soon found the cares of State too heavy for him and 
 took refuge in a forest hermitage. Then followed a succession 
 of dissolute and avaricious sovereigns who disgraced the tradi- 
 tions of their line and brought disorder into the country, 
 redeemed partly by Jayapida, who at the close of the eighth 
 century revived Sanskrit learning by attracting famous scholars 
 and poets to his court. But towards the close of his reign he 
 became the tool of unscrupulous court officials, began to fleece 
 his subjects unmercifully, and to victimise the Brahmans who 
 dared to reprove him. Finally one of the 'twice-born,' Ittila, 
 brought down the wrath of heaven upon the reckless monarch, 
 and he died miserably, like Herod, eaten of worms. 
 
 The character of lyalitapida, Jayapida's son and successor, 
 is summed up by the Brahman historian of Kashmir in un- 
 qualified terms. He was " the slave of his passions and did 
 not attend to his regal duties ; the kingdom became the prey 
 of courtesans and was defiled by immorality. He squandered 
 the riches which his father, condemned to hell, had accumulated 
 by wicked deeds, on buffoons, and the parasites who got a 
 foothold in the royal palace initiated him into the arts of 
 whoredom " {Raj., iv, 661-663). The climax was reached when 
 Brihaspati, his son by a low-caste concubine, succeeded him. 
 The government was seized by Brihaspati's maternal uncles, 
 and " these low-born persons who knew no restraint in their 
 actions " conspired together to put their nephew to death. 
 They then put a puppet of the Karkota line upon the throne, ! 
 and won popularity for themselves by patronage of religious 
 foundations and a lavish distribution of their ill-gotten wealth, 
 until the kingdom was torn to pieces by the quarrels of their Ij 
 several factions. In the chaos which ensued the feeble remnant 
 of the Karkota line was almost exterminated, while the descen- 
 dants of Brihaspati's low-caste relatives increased their prestige. 
 Thereupon a wise minister, Shura, one of the class of Damaras, 
 272 
 
KASHMIR 
 
 or feudal landlords, took the part of Avantivarman, a grandson 
 of the eldest of Brihaspati's uncles, Utpala, and declared him 
 a fit person to rule the kingdom. 
 
 Avantivarman (a.d. 855-883) fully justified the minister's 
 choice, for, after seating himself firmly on the throne with 
 Shura's help, he restored peace and prosperity to Kashmir, 
 causing learning, " whose flow had been interrupted, to descend 
 again upon this land." The extant works of the scholars of 
 his court occupy a prominent position in the Sanskrit literature 
 of old Kashmir. 1 But Avantivarman's renown as a benefactor 
 of Kashmir rests chiefly on the great engineering and irrigation 
 works which he promoted through the skill of his able public 
 works minister, Suyya, who no doubt was one of the master- 
 builders versied in the Silpa-Sastras whose achievements in 
 works of this kind had done so much for the material prosperity 
 of India. Kashmir, says Kalhana, had been but little produc- 
 tive before this time on account of the devastating floods from 
 the overflowing of the Mahapadma I^ake. King lyalitaditya 
 had done something to improve matters, but under the mis- 
 government of his successors the country had reverted to its 
 former condition, and by the constant flooding of the land the 
 price of one khdri of rice had risen to ten hundred and fifty 
 dmndras in times of famine, and two hundred in times of great 
 abundance. Suyya, who by his religious merit, says Kalhana, 
 achieved in a single birth the holy work which Vishnu accom- 
 plished in four incarnations — ^the raising of the earth from the 
 water — ^by the granting of land to worthy Brahmans, the build- 
 ing of stone embankments to hold up the water, and the sub- 
 jugation of the water-demon Kaliya, reduced the price of one 
 khari to thirty-six dinnaras [Raj., v, 144-146). 
 
 The methods by which this great work was achieved are 
 summarised by Sir M. A. Stein as follows : " The systematic 
 regulation of the course of the Vitasta, down to the rock- 
 bound gorge where it leaves the valley, largely 1 educed the 
 extent of the water-locked tracts along the banks of the river 
 and the damage to the crops caused by floods. The construction 
 
 ^ Stein's Introduction to Rajatarangini, p. 98. 
 
 s 273 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 of new beds for the river at points threatened by inundation- 
 breaches was among the measures designed to effect the 
 same object. The change thus made in the confluence of the 
 Vitasta and its most important tributary, the Sindhu, can still 
 be clearly traced, thanks to Kalhana's accurate topographical 
 data. It shows alike the large scale and the systematic 
 technical basis of Suj^a's regulation. The result of the latter 
 was a great increase of land available for cultivation, and 
 increased protection against disastrous floods, which in Kashmir 
 have ever been the main causes of famine." (Introduct., p. 98.) 
 
 Several terrible famines are recorded in Kalhana's chronicle : 
 one of uncertain date, but before the beginning of the Karkota 
 dynasty, in which the ripening autumn crops were ruined by 
 a heavy fall of snow. In this case the king, Timjina, and his 
 pious queen were unremitting in their efforts to succour their 
 afflicted subjects. But in a.d. 917-918, when the crops were 
 destroyed by floods, both the ministers and the soldiers 
 (Tantrins) enriched themselves at the expense of the famine- 
 stricken people, and the land became " like one great burial- 
 ground." Again in 1099, when a similar calamity occurred, the 
 profligate Harsha, so far from relieving the people's misery, 
 " tormented them through the kdyasthas " ^ {Raj., vii, 1226). 
 
 From the time of Avantivarman's death until the beginning 
 of Mahmud of Ghazni's invasions in the eleventh century, page 
 after page of the chronicles of Kashmir record only the bestiality 
 and savagery of the low-born adventurers who misgoverned 
 the country. There is, however, one interesting incident worth 
 noticing which occurred about a.d. 939, when the commander- 
 in-chief, Kamala-Vardhana, was in a position to seize the 
 throne by force of arms. He hesitated to use the auspicious 
 moment from a desire to obtain religious sanction for his 
 claims beforehand and to win the intellectuals to his side by 
 constitutional means. He called the Brahmans together and 
 canvassed them in his desire for election to the throne. " Make 
 a countryman of yours, strong and full-grown, king," said he 
 {Raj., V, 458). Kalhana ridicules Kamala-Vardhana's na'iveU 
 
 ^ Revenue-collectors. 
 274 
 
KASHMIR 
 
 and ignorance of politics, and the contempt he pours upon the 
 incompetence and vacillation of his caste-fellows in those days 
 may have been deserved. But to the historian the interest 
 lies, firstly, in the fact that in spite of the corruption and 
 violence of the times an appeal was made to the traditional 
 law of kingship instead of to force of arms ; and, secondly, 
 in the unexpected result of the Assembly's vote, which was 
 that Kamala-Vardhana's claims were set aside in favour of 
 a Brahman candidate, Yashaskara, who was duly consecrated 
 as king by the ancient Vedic rite of abhisheka and reigned for 
 forty-seven years afterwards. 
 
 The choice, moreover, proved to be a happy one for the 
 country, Yashaskara, says Kalhana, " made the Krita Yuga 
 come back again." He purified the administration so that 
 " the officials who had plundered everything found no other 
 occupation but to look after agriculture. . . . The Brahmans, 
 devoted to their studies, did not carry arms. The Brahman 
 gurus did not drink spirits as they sang their chants : the 
 ascetics did not get children, wives, and crops. . . . Astrologer, 
 doctor, councillor, teacher, minister, Purohita, ambassador, 
 judge, clerk — none of them was then without learning " {Raj., v, 
 8-13). But though generally a wise ruler he was not altogether 
 free from the vices of his predecessors, and allowed himself to 
 come under the control of a courtesan, lyalla, and by the close 
 of his reign Kashmir was again plunged into disorder. 
 
 275 
 
PART II 
 
 THE MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST AND 
 THE INDO-ARYAN RENAISSANCE 
 
an- 
 
 Map of 
 
 INDIA 
 
 Under Mu HAM MADAN Rule 
 
 To illustrate Part H 
 
 Miles 
 
 y, London. 
 
CapsirriqHt tJt'lni Murroy, London,. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 MAHMUD OF GHAZNI 
 
 THE preceding chapters have brought the history of 
 Aryan rule in India down to the end of the tenth 
 century, which saw Mahmud upon the throne of Ghazni 
 and the beginning of Turkish domination in Islam. The glory 
 of the Abbasid Khalifs had departed, for although the court of 
 Baghdad kept up as much pomp and ceremony as in the days 
 of Harun-al-Raschid, the Khalif was a tool in the hands of 
 his Turkish bodyguard, and the richest provinces of the empire 
 no longer acknowledged his political supremacy. The power 
 of the sword, by which the Prophet sought to win converts to 
 his teaching, was turned against Islam itself ; for though in 
 matters of doctrine the Musalman might bow to the ruling of 
 the Khalif, in the distribution of worldly goods, which his own 
 good sword might win, he claimed the freedom of the true 
 believer : the turbulent tribes of Central Asia, which Buddhism 
 had hardly tamed, were enthusiastic converts to a creed which 
 gave them unlimited scope for their predatory instincts. 
 
 In the first centuries after the death of Muhammad there 
 had not been wanting in Islam the strong and resolute leader- 
 ship necessary to control the forces let loose by the subversion 
 of the existing social order, and probably the stern patriarchal 
 discipline imposed by the Arab rulers upon their followers was 
 a more effective civilising influence for many converts to the 
 Faith than the idealism of the Christian and Buddhist doctrine 
 imperfectly taught and learnt. But when the control of a 
 master-mind was wanting the inherent weakness of the social 
 theories of Islam became apparent, and in the general scramble 
 for political power the most unscrupulous and daring adventurer 
 had the better chance of the prize. The history of Islam at 
 
 279 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 this period, as it is written by its own historians, is solely 
 occupied with the varied fortunes of these bold adventurers 
 — many of them men of strong character and great ability — 
 and of the dynasties they founded. 
 
 The overpowering energy and enthusiasm with which Islam 
 prosecuted its campaigns undoubtedly had a regenerating effect 
 upon some of the old and effete civilisations it sought to uproot, 
 and won it sympathy from many to whom its dogmatic teaching 
 made no appeal. The Arab conquest had revived the national 
 spirit of Persia, and the Persian converts from Zoroastrianism 
 not only rivalled the Arabs in martial ardour, but contributed 
 a rich store of their old Iranian culture to the treasury of Islam. 
 Under the influence of Indian and Persian scholars the primitive 
 philosophy of the Quran had been expanded into the mystical 
 interpretations of the Sufi school, by which the poetry of Islam 
 became a lyrical version of the Vedanta. After the fall of the 
 Ommayad dynasty the Persians became the intellectual leaders 
 of Islam in Asia, with the Arabs and Turks as their disciples. 
 
 Before Mahmud of Ghazni came upon the scene, three semi- 
 independent Persian dynasties — ^the Tahirid, Saffarid, and 
 Samanid, had ruled over some of the richest provinces of 
 Central Asia, owing only a nominal allegiance to the Khalifate 
 of Baghdad. Under the dynasty of the Samanids — so called 
 from a Persian nobleman, Saman, a convert from Zoroastrianism, 
 whose descendants had established themselves as rulers in 
 Transoxiania — Alptagin, a Turkish slave, had been promoted 
 to the governorship of Khurasan by Abdul Mahk I (a.d. 954- 
 961). On the death of the latter there was a dispute regarding 
 the succession, and Alptagin, having supported the losing side, 
 thought it safer for himself and his retainers to leave Eiiurasan. 
 They accordingly made a raid toward the south and captured 
 the stronghold of Ghazni, where he was able to defy the armies 
 which Mansur, Abdul Malik's son and successor, sent against 
 him. Sabuktagin, another Turkish slave, serving in Alptagin's 
 body-guard, who through his ability had become commander- 
 in-chief, succeeded to the throne of Ghazni in 975, and quickly 
 added Kandahar to his dominions. He then began to harry 
 280 
 
MAHMUD OF GHAZNI 
 
 the 'infidels ' of India and replenisli his treasury by raids across 
 the border. These incursions brought him into conflict with 
 Jaipal, Raja of Lahore, who rashly marched up the Kabul 
 valley to attack the brigands in their lair ; but his troops were 
 badly equipped for mountain warfare, and suffering from the 
 inclement climate were defeated by the hardy Turkish and 
 other Central Asian horsemen. In this campaign Sabuktagin's 
 son Mahmud, then only a boy of ten, is said by his biographer 
 to have given "signal proofs of his valour and conduct."^ 
 
 Mahmnd, though Sabuktagin's eldest son, did not obtain 
 his father's throne without a struggle, for his claims were 
 disputed by a younger brother, Ismail, on the ground of his 
 illegitimate birth — ^Mahmud's mother having been a slave — 
 a quarrel which has its humorous side, considering the ante- 
 cedents of the father. The dispute having been settled in 
 Mahmud's favour by the usual argument, Ismail was confined 
 in a fortress until his death, and Mahmud ruled in Ghazni. 
 Mahmud was then nearly thirty years of age, with a strong and 
 well-made figure ; but his face was badly marked with the 
 smallpox, and he is said to have complained that " nature had 
 been so unkind to him that his appearance was positively 
 forbidding." ^ 
 
 According to the standards of their time, Muhammadans 
 are no doubt justified in declaring that Mahmud " was en- 
 dowed with all the qualities of a great prince and reflected 
 lustre upon the faith." ^ He was a brilliant commander in the 
 field, and as a dashing cavalry leader had no equal. According 
 to Ferishta, his administration was so just that among his 
 own turbulent subjects " the wolf and the lamb drank together 
 at the same brook." But in Ghaznevide society ideas of 
 justice did not comprehend much more than a fair distribution 
 of the spoils of war among the spoilers ; and as Mahmud always 
 had an unfailing supply of the indispensable material the tears 
 of his subjects at his death were doubtless not unfeigned. 
 Ferishta admits, however, that he had his weak points. First 
 
 1 Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. i6. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 33. » Ibid., p. 32. 
 
 281 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 in his conduct towards Firdausi, in cheating him of part of his 
 promised reward ; and secondly in his exactions from his 
 subjects in the latter part of his reign.^ Nor does the story 
 his biographer tells of his treatment of a citizen of Nyshapur 
 speak much for the great Sultan's sense of justice. Hearing 
 that this worthy person was immensely rich, Mahmud sum- 
 moned him to his presence and charged him with being an 
 idolater and an apostate from the faith. The citizen replied that 
 he was neither an idolater nor an apostate, but he was possessed 
 of much wealth. The Sultan might take his money, but he 
 should not rob him of his good name also. Mahmud agreed to 
 this proposition, and having fleeced him of all his property 
 gave him a certificate under the ro^^-al seal of the purity of 
 his religious tenets ! ^ On the other hand, when his ruling 
 passion was not touched, Ferishta gives us to understand that 
 Mahmud was a man of his word and would deal even-handed 
 justice even when his own near relatives were the transgressors. 
 It must also be said that Mahmud's avarice was not the sordid 
 greed of a miser. Like other great war-lords he had a strongly 
 developed ' will to power,' and money, won by fair means or 
 foul, was the way to power. 
 
 Like Babur he was fond of laying out pleasure-gardens in 
 the Persian and Indian fashion, and had such catholic tastes 
 that he admired immensely the Hindu temples of Mathura, f 
 and, to the disgust of his devout followers, refrained from 
 destroying them completely — probably, as Ferishta says, 
 because the labour of doing so would have been excessive, 
 and because he had richer spoil in view. After his return 
 from this expedition, laden with immense booty from the 
 plundered temples, he followed the usual custom of employing 
 the Indian craftsmen who were among his prisoners in making 
 his own capital vie in splendour with the great cities of India 
 he had despoiled. Thus the Great Mosque of Ghazni, known 
 by the name of 'the Celestial Bride,' was built of marble and 
 granite, furnished with rich carpets and with lamps and 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 33. 
 2 Ibid., p. 85. 
 282 
 
MAHMUD OF GHAZNI 
 
 candelabra of gold and silver. Near it Mahmud founded a 
 university, and with the zeal of the modern opulent curio- 
 hunter furnished it with " a vast collection of curious books 
 in various languages," and established " a museum of natural 
 curiosities," probably a zoological collection such as the Great 
 Moguls were fond of, 
 
 " When," says Ferishta, " the nobility of Ghazni perceived 
 the taste of their king evince itself in architecture, they also 
 endeavoured to vie with each other in the magnificence of 
 their private palaces, as well as in public buildings which they 
 raised for the embellishment of the city. Thus, in a short 
 time, the capital was ornamented with mosques, porches, 
 fountains, reservoirs, aqueducts, and cisterns, beyond any 
 city in the East." Fergusson, the historian of Indian archi- 
 tecture, with a singular lack of critical judgment, classifies the 
 buildings made for Mahmud and his parvenu nobles as Pathan, 
 and much exuberant rhetoric has been lavished on the artistic 
 genius of the ' Pathan builders.' On the same principle, the 
 Shah-ndma, the great epic of Mahmud's court poet, Firdausi, 
 might be called * Pathan literature.' It may be conceded that 
 Mahmud, Hke many of the meanest of his subjects, was apt in 
 the improvisation of a Persian verse, and could argue theo- 
 logical points with his mullas as ably as the ' Defender of the 
 Faith ' in our own Tudor times. But there is no warrant for 
 giving either Mahmud, or any of his promiscuous soldiery, 
 credit for higher artistic or literary culture than other Turks, 
 Tartars, or Pathans of his time possessed. 
 
 Mahmud exploited the culture of India and Persia as sys- 
 tematically and zealously as he plundered the temples of the 
 ' infidels ' ; but he had no constructive genius as a statesman 
 nor profound religious convictions. He would have sacked 
 Baghdad with as little compunction as he plundered Somnath, if 
 the undertaking had seemed as profitable and as easy, for he 
 did not hesitate to threaten the Khalif with death when the 
 latter refused to give him Samarkand.^ Like every other 
 successful Turki adventurer of obscure origin, he was anxious, 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 53. 
 
 283 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 for the prestige of liis dynasty, to pose as a descendant of 
 ancient Persian kings, and his court poets, as was their 
 duty, supplied him with a pedigree and extolled his victories 
 over the idolater, while they sang the glorious deeds of the 
 Achaemenian line. The inconsistency of associating the feats 
 of the ' Asylum of Islam ' with those of the infidel fire- 
 worshippers did not trouble M9,hmud's conscience until he was 
 called upon to redeem his promise to pay for the great epic of 
 his Poet Laureate. 
 
 In like manner Persian and Indian builders embellished 
 Mahmud's capital with " mosques, porches, fountains, reservoirs, 
 aqueducts, and cisterns," so that the faithful might be bene- 
 fited by the creative genius of the twin offspring of the ancient 
 Aryan stock ; but the innate savagery of the Turk was not 
 subdued, either then or in later times, by the thin veneer of 
 culture which it borrowed from these and other sources. 
 
 Madmud made in all seventeen plundering raids into India, 
 the first in looi, when he defeated and took prisoner Jaipal, 
 the Raja of lyahore, whom he had met before in battle when 
 he was serving under his father, Sabuktagin. The rich spoil 
 gathered in this expedition encouraged Mahmud to repeat the 
 adventure in the following year, with such success that the 
 looting of the idolaters' temples became thereafter almost an 
 annual State function and the main source of Mahmud's 
 revenue. The accounts of these expeditions are derived almost 
 entirely from Muhammadan sources, and we need not believe 
 that they were all of the nature of triumphal progresses, though 
 their main object, that of loot, was comparatively easy to attain 
 with the large force of well-mounted cavalry which Mahmud 
 skilfully led. The Sultan of Ghazni had the advantage of 
 ' inner lines ' and could direct his attack at unexpected points, 
 before the numerous Hindu states opposed to him had time to 
 settle their own differences and organise an effective defence. 
 In the pitched battles he fought Mahmud repeated the tactics 
 of Alexander the Great, and by a skilful use of his cavalry 
 and archers made the unwieldy war-elephants of the Indians 
 a potent weapon in his own^^hands. 
 284 
 
MAHMUD OF GHAZNI 
 
 The whole series of marauding expeditions was, moreover, 
 organised with great military foresight. Having made his 
 capital secure by the conquest of the Hindu kingdoms in the 
 upper valley of the Indus, Mahmud turned his arms against 
 the Arabs in the northern part of Sind, which was then divided 
 into two provinces with their respective capitals at Multan 
 and Mansura. The Amirs of Sind were independent of the 
 Khalifate of Baghdad. Multan had, it is said, paid tribute to 
 Sabuktagin, but had subsequently renounced the suzerainty 
 of Ghazni : Mahmud, by suddenly appearing before the city 
 in loio, not only forced the Amir, Abul Fath Daud, to pay a 
 heavy contribution to the Ghazni treasury, but secured an 
 invaluable base for his subsequent expeditions. Thus, though 
 Mahmud always preferred the hills of Afghanistan to the 
 plains of India for his headquarters, he was in a position four 
 years later to venture an attack upon Thaneshar, which 
 promised rich booty, for it was held in the same veneration 
 by the idolaters as Mecca by the faithful. ^ 
 
 The news of the approach of the Musalman army roused all 
 the neighbouring Hindu states to combine for the defence of 
 the sacred city, but before they had time to do so Mahmud 
 had swooped down upon its temples, plundered them of their 
 gold and silver images and the vast wealth of their treasuries, 
 and returned to Ghazni with 200,000 captives to fill the harems 
 of the faithful and furnish forced labour for the Sultan's public 
 works. Mahmud'scapital thereafter, says Ferishta, " appeared 
 like an Indian city, no soldier of the camp being without 
 wealth, or without many slaves." It was after this successful 
 foray that Mahmud sent a letter to the Khalif , Al Kadir Billa- 
 Abassy, requesting that his governors should surrender to him 
 that part of Khurasan which still remained subject to Baghdad. 
 Finding the Khalif complacent he followed it up with a peremp- 
 tory demand for the cession of Samarkand, supplementing this 
 with a threat that in case of refusal he would march to Baghdad, 
 put the IChalif to death and bring his ashes to Ghazni. This 
 was too much, even for the weak successor of Harun-al-Raschid, 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 50. 
 
 285 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and the laconic but spirited reply which he sent had the 
 effect of " preventing Mahmud from again urging the 
 request." 
 
 Possibly the disastrous issue of his campaign in 1015, when 
 he tried to penetrate into the valley of Kashmir, sobered the 
 royal freebooter for a time. He failed in his attempt to storm 
 the fortress of Lohara, and on its homeward march his army, 
 being misled by guides, fell into extensive morasses and many 
 of his troops perished. But three years later he collected an 
 army of 100,000 Turki and Afghan horsemen, and 20,000 foot, 
 and set out with still richer loot in view — ^Mathura, the sacred 
 city of Krishna, and proud Kanauj, which "raised its head to 
 the skies and which in strength and beauty might boast of 
 being unrivalled." This daring project involved a three 
 months' march from Ghazni, and there were seven formidable 
 rivers to be crossed, but Mahmtid's skilful strategy was equal 
 to the occasion. He had prepared for the expedition carefulty 
 by sending spies to survey the country,^ and he found efficient 
 guides among the Indians serving in his army. In order to 
 conceal his real objective he marched along the foot of the 
 Himalayas until the Jumna was reached, and crossing it 
 captured the fort of Baran, the modern Bulandshahr. Then 
 pushing rapidly southward he appeared before the gates of 
 Mathura, and having forced his way into the city with very 
 little difficulty he gave it over to plunder, rapine, and 
 massacre. 
 
 A vast quantity of gold, silver, and priceless gems was found 
 in the temple treasuries, besides numbers of gold and silver 
 images, which were broken up for the sake of the precious 
 metal. The magnificence of the buildings, constructed of fine 
 masonry and riveted with iron, excited Mahmtid's admiration, 
 especially the principal temple in the middle of the city, re- 
 garding which he wrote to the governor of Ghazni : " If any 
 should wish to construct a building equal to this, he would not 
 be able to do it without expending an hundred thousand 
 thousand red dinars, and it would occupy two hundred years, 
 
 ^ Tdnkh Yamml, Elliot's History of India, vol. ii, p. 41. 
 286 
 
MAHMUD OF GHAZNI 
 
 even though the most experienced and able workmen were 
 employed." ^ 
 
 Mahmud did not tarry at Mathura, but after giving orders for 
 the temples to be burned with naphtha and fire, he pushed on 
 with a picked force to Kanauj. The Raja Rajya-pala re- 
 treated across the Ganges on his approach, and the great city 
 with its ancient temples shared the fate of Mathura, the in- 
 habitants who did not escape being massacred or taken to 
 Ghazni to be sold as slaves. The account of the rest of the 
 expedition is somewhat difficult to follow ; but after capturing 
 several hill-forts and penetrating into Bundelkhand, where he 
 defeated and killed a great Rajput chieftain, Chandra-pal, 
 Mahmud returned in triumph to his capital with spoil in gold, 
 silver, and gems beyond the dreams of avarice, and so many slaves 
 that Ghazni became a market for merchants from distant cities 
 and " the countries of Mawarau-n nahr [Turkistan], 'Irak, and 
 Khurasan were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the 
 rich and the poor were commingled in one common slavery." ^ 
 
 The crowning exploit of Mahmud's career was the plunder 
 of the great Saiva temple of Somnath, on the seashore at the 
 extreme south of the Surashtra (Kathiawar) peninsula. The 
 coast-line there is crescent-shaped, like Siva's bow, and the 
 temple, facing the setting sun, was dedicated to Soma, the 
 ancient Vedic deity representing Siva as the Moon-I^ord. 
 The name Surashtra also connected the city with ancient Vedic 
 ritual. The considerations which prompted Mahmud to this 
 adventure were probably two : first, that the field for profit- 
 able looting in other directions had been well exploited, and 
 second, that an attack in that quarter would be the least 
 expected by the infidels. No doubt he had obtained from his 
 Indian spies accurate information of the fabulous wealth 
 deposited in the temple, and the difficulties and dangers of the 
 route only roused the adventurous spirit of his faithful followers. 
 
 So, invoking the aid of the Almighty, as all good bandits do, 
 he set out in the autumn of 1025 with 30,000 horse. The route 
 
 ^ Tdrikh Yammi, Elliot's History of India, vol. ii, p. 44. 
 ^ Ibid., p. 50. 
 
 287 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 lay through the Musalman province of Sind, which was to a 
 large extent under Mahmud's control. At Multan he collected 
 30,000 camels with water and provisions for crossing the desert 
 which lay between him and the fertile province of Surashtra. 
 He met with very little opposition until he reached Dabalwarah, 
 two days' march from Somnath. " The people of this place 
 stayed resolutely in it, believing that Somnath would utter his 
 prohibition and drive back the invaders ; but Mahmud took 
 the place, slew the men, plundered their property, and marched 
 on to Somnath." ^ 
 
 The great temple, enclosed by a strong fortress, was built 
 upon the seashore, and washed by the waves at every recurring 
 tide, so that the ocean itself joined in worship at the shrine of 
 the Moon-Iyord, Siva. A thousand Brahmans performed the 
 daily service of this temple, and the daughters of the royal 
 houses of India, it is said, danced the dance of the cosmic 
 rh5rthm in front of Siva's shrine to the time-beat of the waves. 
 When Mahmud's army approached, the Hindu defenders hurled 
 defiance at the Musalmans, telling them that Mahadeva would 
 destroy them to the last man. But after a desperate assault 
 lasting two days, Mahmud's troops carried the outer defences 
 and drove the Hindus through the city to the entrance of the 
 great temple. A dreadful slaughter ensued. " Band after 
 band of the defenders entered the temple to Somnath, and with 
 their hands clasped round their necks wept and passionately 
 entreated him. Then again they issued forth to fight until 
 they were slain and but few were left alive. These took 
 to the sea in boats to make their escape, but the Musalmans 
 overtook them, and some were killed and some were drowned." ^ 
 Over fifty thousand Hindus perished in tne assault and sub- 
 sequent massacre. Mahmud, it is said, obtained so much loot 
 that no other king possessed anything equal to it. Somnath was 
 endowed with the revenue of more than ten thousand villages, 
 and its treasury contained the pious offerings of centuries. 
 The chains of the temple bells were of gold, weighing 200 mans. 
 
 * Kamilu-t Tawdrzkh of Ibn Asir, Elliot's History of India, vol. ii, p. 470. 
 2 Ibid., pp. 470-471. 
 288 
 
MAHMUD OF GHAZNI 
 
 There were canopies for the temple processions set with pearls 
 and precious stones, and exquisitely jewelled lamps for lighting 
 the shrine which contained the lingam, Siva's symbol, also set 
 with gems of immense value. All of this, exceeding in value 
 two millions of dinars, was carried off to Ghazni, and to com- 
 plete the humiliation of the infidel the great stone lingam was 
 also removed to serve as a doorstep for the mosque of ' the 
 Celestial Bride.' 
 
 On his return march Mahmud encountered a Rajput chieftain, 
 who ineffectually tried to bar his passage, and met with serious 
 difficulties in recrossing the desert owing to the treachery of 
 a guide. According to one account he reduced to submission 
 the lower province of Sind, with its capital Mansura, the ruler 
 of which was an apostate from Islam. He then returned to 
 Ghazni through Multan, 
 
 Mahmud did not long survive this grand coup. He died in 
 1030 at the age of sixty-three, after a reign of thirty-five years, 
 and was buried, says Ferishta, with great pomp and solemnity 
 at Ghazni, At his death the Panjab, Sind, and jjarts of the 
 adjoining provinces acknowledged his suzerainty. Though he 
 did not effect any permanent conquests in India, he opened the 
 gates wide for his co-religionists. The almost invariable success 
 of his arms added immensely to his prestige and brought Islam 
 many adherents among the uncultured warlike clans of the 
 north-west provinces of India, to whom fighting was a religion 
 and victory in the field the highest proof of divine inspiration. 
 Mahmud was no bigot, and in his eyes the sinfulness of idolatry 
 only called for the chastisement of the sword when it was 
 accompanied by much portable property. In politics he was 
 a realist of the modern type — the Khalif was no more to him 
 than a Hindu raja, and he was as successful in turning the 
 mutual jealousies of Hindu states to his advantage as he was 
 in plundering their temples and in squeezing the wealth of his 
 own Musalman subjects. 
 
 289 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE AFGHAN AND TURKISH 
 SULTANS OF DELHI 
 
 FOR about a century and a half after Mahmnd's death 
 there was a pause in the triumphant progress of Islam in 
 India. In 1033 famine followed by a devastating plague 
 raged all over Mesopotamia, Persia, and parts of India, where, 
 says Ferishta, whole districts were entirely depopulated. The 
 Ghaznevide Empire was soon brought into chaos by the usual 
 disputes for the succession by the rival candidates, which, 
 according to the recognised law of Islam, were settled on the 
 principle that " dominion belongs to the longest sword." ^ 
 Fresh hordes of Turks from Central Asia profited by the oppor- 
 tunity to claim their place in the sun. The Hindus in the 
 Panjab also rose in revolt, and in 1043 the Raja of Delhi, in 
 alliance with other Rajput princes, recaptured Hanzi, Thane- 
 shar, and Nagarkot, which were garrisoned by Musalmans. 
 They failed, however, in an attack upon Lahore, and most of 
 the rest of Mahmud's Indian feudatories remained firm in 
 allegiance to the Ghaznevide Sultans, who from time to time 
 made Lahore their capital, but were too much occupied in 
 holding their Turkish enemies at bay to attempt to enlarge 
 their Indian possessions. 
 
 The end of Ghazni and its dynasty was a fitting climax 
 to the record of bloodshed, inhumanity, a d self-indulgence 
 which made its history. About the middle of the twelfth 
 century the Afghans made themselves an independent princi- 
 pality at Ghtir, a mountain fortress between Ghazni and Herat. 
 In 1 152 their chieftain, 'Ala-ud-din Hasan, incensed at the 
 torture and execution of his brother by the Sultan B air am, 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 98. 
 290 
 
THE SULTANS OF DELHI 
 
 advanced against Ghazni, and after a furious battle captured 
 the city and gave it up to " flame, slaughter, and devastation." 
 " The massacre which followed," says Ferishta, " continued for 
 a space of seven days, in which pity seemed to have fled from 
 the earth and the fiery spirits of demons to actuate men." 
 'Ala-ud-din, insatiable of revenge, carried away a number of 
 the Sultan's adherents in chains to his native city, where they 
 were slaughtered and the earth mixed with their blood was 
 plastered on the walls. The Sultan himself died soon after- 
 wards at Lahore, where he had taken refuge with the remnants 
 of his army, but in 1186 Muhammad Ghuii, or Shihab-ud-din, 
 'Ala-ud-din's cousin, captured the city, so that the last remnant 
 of the Ghaznevide Empire, which included Kabul as well as 
 the Panjab and part of Sind, passed into the possession of the 
 Ghuri line. 
 
 The first of the Afghan Sultans, Shihab-ud-din Muhammad 
 ibn Sam — ^to give him his full title — in accordance with court 
 etiquette was provided with a pedigree going back to some 
 apocryphal Persian kings. He acted for several years as com- 
 mander-in-chief for his brother Ghiyas-ud-din, 'Ala-ud-din's 
 successor, and in that capacity conducted his first Indian 
 campaign. In 1191 he met with a disastrous defeat near 
 Thaneshar from Prithivi-raja, the Raja of Delhi, and only 
 escaped capture through the courage of a faithful servant who 
 carried him off the field fainting from his wounds. The Afghan 
 retired to his native stronghold, Ghur, in a furious mood, and 
 visited with his wrath some of his officers who returned with 
 the remnants of his army by putting them in prison, having 
 first compelled them to walk round the city with horses' nose- 
 bags tied round their necks munching corn. Then as soon as 
 he had recovered from his wounds he mustered a new army of 
 120,000 chosen Turki and Afghan horsemen and marched into 
 India, determined to recover his lost honour from the infidels 
 or die in the attempt. 
 
 Prithivi-raja, who, with his brother-in-law Samarsi, Raja of 
 Chitor, and other great Rajput princes, prepared to meet the 
 barbarian with equal resolution, was of the purest Rajput 
 
 291 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 blood, being the chieftain of the Chauhan or Sessodia clansmen, 
 who claimed descent from Rama and the Suryavamsa of 
 Ajodhya. B}^ virtue of his military prowess and noble lineage 
 Prithivi-raja was recognised as the premier Rajput of Rajasthan. 
 Ajmir for a long time had been the Chauhan capital, but in the 
 middle of the twelfth century one of Prithivi-raja's ancestors 
 had captured Delhi, one of the several cities which had risen 
 and fallen, in successive ages, near the scene of the historic 
 struggle between the Kauravas and Pandavas. There had been 
 a long-standing feud between the Gahawar clan, whose chief- 
 tains then ruled at Kanauj, and the Chauhans of Delhi, accen- 
 tuated by the elopement of Prithivi-raja with a Gahawar 
 princess. This romantic incident,^ which was quite in accord- 
 ance with Kshatriya marriage traditions, was used by the 
 Delhi court poet, Chand Bardai, to explain the disasters which 
 overtook the Rajput arms, for Prithivi-raja's attachment to 
 his bride is said to have caused a fatal delay in the preparations 
 for meeting Shihab-ud-din's attack. The Raja of Kanauj, 
 who lowered the standard of Rajput chivalry by employing 
 Turki horsemen in his army,^ is also said to have intrigued 
 with the common enem3^ There is no inherent improbability 
 in the former statement, for in earlier times Hindu kings often 
 had a bodyguard of Yavanas, or Asiatic Greeks, and, on the 
 other hand, success in war brought many Hindu recruits to 
 the armies of Islam. Ferishta states that a considerable 
 body of Hindu cavalry, under the command of a Rajput 
 
 ^ Jaichand, the Raja of Kanauj, had chosen one of the numerous suitors for 
 his daughter's hand, but as a formality had arranged the traditional Kshatriya 
 ceremony of Swayamvara, the bride's own choice. Prithivi-raja, in spite of 
 the deadly feud which existed between the two hoiises, received an invitation 
 like the rest of the Rajput princes, but on account of the intentional arrogance 
 of his letter Jaichand did not dream that the Chauhan would appear. In 
 derision he put up a statue of him as the doorkeeper of the tournament. The 
 princess, who was secretly in love with Pritliivi-raja, passed by all the throng 
 of princes and threw the bridal garland over the neck of the statue. At the 
 same moment the Chauhan Raja with a few chosen retainers dashed into the 
 arena, and in the confusion which ensued carried off the bride under the eyes 
 of the infuriated father, in spite of the desperate efforts of the Kanauj warriors 
 to prevent them. 
 
 * Tod, Annals of Rajast'han, vol. i, p. 256. 
 292 
 
PRITHIVI-RAJA 
 
 chieftain, Siwand Rai, served in the armies of MahmUd of 
 Ghazni.i 
 
 Though internal dissensions no doubt contributed to the final 
 catastrophe, the immediate causes of the defeat of the Hindu 
 forces were the resourcefulness of the Turkish leaders in counter- 
 ing the traditional tactics of Rajput warfare and the irresistible 
 dash of the hardy Central Asian horsemen. When Shihab- 
 ud-din had reached Peshawar he was prevailed upon to order 
 the release of the officers he had imprisoned and to make amends 
 for the indignities he had inflicted on them by presenting them 
 with robes of honour and reinstating them in the army. Then, 
 following Mahmud's usual practice, he spent some time at 
 Multan in organising his forces, and finally advanced throt^h 
 the Panjab towards Delhi. Prithivi-raja, joined by a number 
 of Rajput princes, met the Musalman army near Thaneshar 
 in the field where he had previously been victorious, but after 
 a desperate conflict lasting from sunrise to sunset Shihab-ud- 
 din broke the Hindu ranks by a furious charge of his Turki 
 horsemen, and the flower of Rajput chivalry perished in a vain 
 attempt to retrieve the fortunes of the day. Prithivi-raja 
 himself was taken prisoner and put to death. Ajmir, the 
 Chauhan Raja's ancestral city, fell into Shihab-ud-din's hands 
 and suffered the usual fate of pillage and massacre. Delhi 
 resisted longer, but was captured the next year (1193) by 
 Qutb-ud-din, one of Shihab-ud-din's lieutenants, formerly a 
 slave, who was installed in Ajmir as governor. 
 
 A year later Shihab-ud-din followed up his victories by the 
 capture of Kanauj, after a pitched battle in which the Raja 
 Jaichand was killed by an arrow shot by Qutb-ud-din, who 
 was an expert bowman. With the destruction of this famous 
 fortress-city the way to the lower Ganges valley lay open. 
 Benares was next plundered and burnt, and its thousand 
 temples defiled and ruined by the ruthless barbarians in the 
 name of the One True God. At the same time a body of 
 horsemen sent by Qutb-ud-din, under the command of Muham- 
 mad ibn Bakhtiyar, sacked and burnt the monasteries of 
 1 Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 94. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Bihar, massacred the monks, and drove the raja, Lakhsman 
 Sen, from his capital at Nudiah. 
 
 Shihab-ud-din after the capture of Kanauj returned to 
 Ghazni laden with spoil, where on his brother's death he was 
 crowned as Sultan. He was assassinated in 1206, and from 
 that time Qutb-ud-din, who was one of the Turkish slaves to 
 whom the lav/ of Islam gave unlimited opportunities as war- 
 lords, ruled as an independent sovereign at Delhi. He and 
 his successors gradually extended their power over the plains 
 of Aryavarta, though the Rajput chieftains in their hill-fortresses 
 continued heroically to defend themselves against overwhelming 
 odds. Chitor held out until 1303, when 'Ala-ud-din threw all 
 the strength of his empire against it. Then after a long siege, 
 when further resistance was hopeless, all the Rajput women 
 to save their honour threw themselves into a colossal fimeral 
 pyre lighted within the subterranean vaults of the palace, 
 while the warriors clad in saffron robes of sacrifice rushed 
 sword in hand against the serried ranks of the besiegers. The 
 few who cut their way through found a refuge in the fastnesses 
 of the Aravali hills. But Chitor did not remain permanently 
 in the hands of the Musalman until it was captured by Akbar 
 in 1568, and the Rajputs kept up a resistance until the 
 last days of the Mogul Empire, though Akbar succeeded in 
 winning some of the chieftains to his side. The part the 
 latter played in the building up of that empire will be told 
 later on. 
 
 The noble monuments such as the Qutb Minar and the old 
 mosques at Delhi, the tomb of Altamsh and his mosque at 
 Ajmir, known as the Arhai-din-ka Jhompra, when taken from 
 their historical context and placed in a compartment by 
 themselves as examples of the ' old Pathan style,' according 
 to Fergusson's arbitrary classification, give a totally false im- 
 pression of the character and culture of these Turkish or Pathan 
 rulers and of the history of their times. Fergusson in his 
 admiration for these monuments shut his eyes to the fact that 
 they actually and positively represent a new link in the chain 
 of Indo-Aryan culture which stretches from the remotest 
 294 
 
'PATHAN' ARCHITECTURE 
 
 antiquity down to our own times, and only fortuitously and 
 incidentally are related to the initiative of the Turkish f reedmen 
 for whose glorification they were designed and built by Hindu 
 craftsmen. These Turkish or Pathan monarchs were no better 
 and no worse than might be expected of men who, in a time 
 when the doctrine of ' frightfulness ' in war was preached and 
 practised with such conspicuous success, rose by their own 
 energy, determination, and courage from the lowest estate to 
 the highest, and without any traditions of culture behind them 
 were set to rule over great empires. 
 
 It is to their credit that they did not attempt to root out 
 utterly the culture of the higlil3^ civilised Indo-Aryan races 
 whom they ruled with a rod of iron. They used it to increase 
 their own comfort and glory in much the same way as the 
 parvenu millionaire of modern times surrounds himself with all 
 the luxury and artistic treasures which money can provide. 
 Naturally, by compelling Hindu craftsmen to conform to the 
 law and ritual of Islam, they forced the traditions of Indo- 
 Aryan art into new channels and thus unconsciously gave them 
 a new impetus. But the personal note which they, and the 
 ferocious rough-riders of Central Asia who formed their nobility, 
 gave to Indian art was limited to one idea — ^they insisted that 
 their buildings should be the biggest things on earth. This 
 so-called ' Pathan ' art was saved from the vulgarity of the 
 modern plutocrat by the fact that the Turkish or Tartar tyrants 
 had at their command an unlimited supply of the finest^artistry 
 of the world, at a time when its creative power was fully 
 developed and had not been reduced to a mechanical formula 
 by modern machinery and archaeological pedantry. The 
 admiration which these great works justly excite should not 
 prevent us from seeing that both in spirit and in substance 
 their art is purely Indian and neither Turkish nor Pathan, and 
 that their craftsmen were brothers of those who in the same 
 epoch built the palaces of Chitor and the magnificent Towers 
 of Victory with which the Ranas of Mewar commemorated 
 the triumphs of Rajput chivalry.^ 
 
 1 Of the two Towers of Victory now existing at Chitor, the earliest belongs 
 
 295 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 The archaeological method of writing history starts with the 
 premiss that the Indian master-builders who created these 
 noble monuments were so dull-witted and pedantic that they 
 needed the inspiration of Turks, Pathans, or Persians or Arabs 
 to put a stone at an angle instead of horizontally when technical 
 conditions made it expedient to do so. The pointed arches 
 built in this fashion and ornamented with texts from the Quran 
 instead of idolatrous Hindu symbols are therefore taken as 
 incontestable evidence of the architectural genius of Islam. 
 The proselytising swordsmen of the Prophet would have scorned 
 to claim the merit which modern dilettanti thrust upon them. 
 Their interests were in the battlefield, in the chase, and in an 
 adventurous open-air life. The glory of Islam demanded that 
 its militant apostles should appropriate to themselves all the 
 symbols of earthly power and the comforts which it brought 
 them. But they left the arts of peace — except that of the 
 scribe, which was necessary for the right interpretation of the 
 law of Islam — ^to the infidel. Saracenic culture was therefore 
 purely literary. No Turk or Tartar or Mongol once enlisted 
 under the banner of Islam would deign to plough the field or 
 glorify God by the peaceful labour of his hands. The way 
 to riches and to Paradise lay in spoiling the infidel and 
 dying on the battlefield. Saracenic craftsmanship was the 
 culture of the races which were forced under the Musalman 
 yoke. Such terms as Saracenic or Pathan applied to Indo- 
 Muhammadan architecture are historically unscientific because 
 of the implication that the creative impulse came from out- 
 side India ; whereas, except for some of the decorative 
 motives where the influence of the foreign Musalman scribe 
 and painter can be seen, Indo-Muhammadan architecture 
 is purely Indian. Hindu builders joined the ranks of the 
 ' true believer ' to escape the poll-tax and the social stigma 
 from which they suffered as Hindus ; but their foreign 
 rulers left them to work out their own ideas of planning and 
 
 to the eleventh or twelfth century, and the later one, which may rank as 
 one of the finest towers in the world, to the reign of Kumbha Rana, 1428- 
 1468. 
 
 296 
 
TURKS AND PATHANS 
 
 of structure, provided they did not offend against the law of 
 Islam. 1 
 
 It would be outside the scope of this work to give a complete 
 account of the successive conquests of the early Musalman 
 dynasties and of their provincial governors, who were always 
 fighting for their own hand, and one after another set themselves 
 up as independent rulers in Aryavarta. So long as these 
 Turkish or Pathan Sultans and their deputies revelled in an 
 adventurous open-air life which involved strenuous physical 
 exercise and some mental exertion, their despotic rule was 
 characterised by a certain primitive sense of honour and justice 
 which is extravagantly extolled by Muhammadan writers. 
 But though some of these slave kings had qualities which made 
 them admirable tribal chieftains, none had the culture or the 
 moral stamina to qualify them as rulers of a highly civilised 
 race with a religion different from their own. Many of them 
 were despots of the worst type, who relapsed into hopeless 
 debauchery and cruelty. The system which put political power 
 into the hands of the slaves who formed the imperial body- 
 guard left the succession to the throne always insecure, made 
 the court a hotbed of intrigue, and favoured the grossest 
 corruption and tyranny in the administration. Some of the 
 Sultans won a vicarious fame as patrons of great poets, Persian 
 or Indian, but these dilettanti monarchs very rarely had great 
 intellectual gifts of their own such as distinguished the highly 
 cultured Aryan dynasties of India. 
 
 The Turk as a shepherd in his native pastures had a reputa- 
 tion for stupidity of which he was extremely sensitive when 
 conversion to Islam made him a military aristocrat and an 
 irresponsible ruler. Some tried to remove the reproach by 
 establishing a fictitious Persian pedigree and by bestowing 
 patronage upon Persian or Indian poets, but, except in the eyes 
 of their own courtiers, the Turki sovereigns of India were neither 
 statesmen, scholars, nor artists. The Pathans, who claimed 
 
 1 The evolution of Indo-Muhammadan architecture is explained more fidly 
 in the author's Indian Architecture : its Psychology, Structure, and History 
 (Murray, 1913). 
 
 297 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Jewish ancestry, lacked the essential quality of a ruling race — 
 capacity for self-government. They despised handicrafts and 
 any occupation except agriculture and warfare. Fergusson's 
 comment on the screen of Qutb-ud-din's mosque at Delhi, that 
 " the Afghan conquerors had a tolerably distinct idea that 
 pointed arches were the true form for architectural openings," 
 is hopelessly wide of the mark, whether applied to Turks or 
 Pathans. 
 
 In the administration of their vast Indian territories these 
 early Muhammadan Siiltans found it expedient to utilise for 
 the benefit of Islam the ancient Indo-Aryan administrative 
 machinery, though the ethical and religious principles upon 
 which it was based were entirely foreign to their minds. Even 
 under the best conditions the application of Indo-Aryan 
 methods of government by Turkish or Pathan rulers led to 
 grave abuses. The village communities, deprived of their 
 traditional rights as owners of the soil, were at the mercy of 
 the Sultan's Musalman officials, or of low Brahman agents 
 appointed to collect the imperial revenue, who were not always 
 above the temptation of extorting money from their own 
 people, while they would naturally regard it as a pious duty to 
 deceive their Mlechchha employers. 
 
 The assessment of taxes due to the imperial treasury, which 
 formerly had been regulated by traditional law and custom, 
 was now fixed arbitrarily by the caprice of a despotic ruler and 
 his unscrupulous officers, for whom infidels only existed that 
 they might minister to the needs of the faithful. The crowds 
 of foreign adventurers who thronged the imperial and pro- 
 vincial capitals were supported solely by grants of land or 
 allowances from the imperial treasury, while they contributed 
 nothing by their industry or science to the general welfare of 
 the State. The endowment of learning and piety which under 
 Hindu rule had been bestowed impartially upon all recognised 
 religious sects, either at the free will of the popular assemblies 
 or from the sovereign's personal estate, was now limited to 
 the propagation of the teachinj^- of Islam at the expense of the 
 whole community, while all forms of religious belief outside 
 298 
 
DELHI AND GAUR 
 
 Islamic dogma were penalised by heavy exactions and limitless 
 means of oppression. 
 
 The chief events in the history of the Muhammadan conquest 
 of Northern India by Qutb-ud-din and his immediate succes- 
 sors may be briefly summarised. Qutb-ud-din's victories and 
 Muhammad ibn Bakhtiyar's occupation of Bihar and Bengal 
 practically made two Musalman kingdoms, one having its 
 capital at Delhi and the other at Lakhnauti or Gaur, though the 
 province of Gaur generally acknowledged the suzerainty of the 
 Delhi Sultan. Ibn Bakhtiyar attempted to add Tibet and 
 KamarQpa, the modern province of Assam, to his conquests, but 
 meeting with stronger opposition than he expected he turned 
 back, only to find his retreat cut off by the Raja of KamarHpa's 
 troops. His force was nearly annihilated, and he himself 
 narrowly escaped with his life. Defeat to these fire-eating 
 swashbucklers was worse than a crime. He died of grief 
 shortly afterwards, and none of his successors ever attempted 
 to repeat his hazardous enterprise. 
 
 Altamsh, Qutb-ud-din's son-in-law and successor, in 1231 
 captured the fortress of Gwalior, and soon afterwards the capital 
 of Malwa, the famous city of Ujjain, destroying a great 
 temple, dedicated to Mahakali, which rivalled Sonmath in 
 magnificence. In 13 10 the whole province fell into Musalman 
 hands, and was ruled by governors appointed from Delhi until 
 the beginning of the fifteenth century, when it became an 
 independent Musalman state with its capital at Mandu. 
 Altamsh's son and successor, Rukn-ud-din, was a debauchee, 
 and soon made way for his capable sister, the Sultana Razia 
 Begam, who had frequently acted as regent in her father's 
 lifetime, and possessed many of the qualities of a good Musal- 
 man, including that of reading the Quran with correct pro- 
 nunciation.^ She, however, offended the Turki faction at her 
 court by her intimacy with an Abyssinian slave whom she 
 made commander-in-chief, and after a short reign she was put 
 to death by her brother Bairam in 1239. 
 
 At the close of the thirteenth century Qutb-ud-din's dynasty 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. ii, p. 217. 
 
 299 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 was brought to an end by the weakness and debauchery of 
 Kai-Kubad M'uizz-ud-din. One of his generals, Jalal-ud-din, 
 the leader of the Khilji clan, having disposed of his dying 
 master, seized the throne in 1288, but after a reign of seven 
 years was himself treacherously murdered by his nephew 
 'Ala-ud-din, the second of the Khilji dynasty. The Khiljis 
 were Turks, like their predecessors, but of a different tribe. 
 'Ala-ud-din' s chief exploit was a daring raid which he undertook 
 on his own responsibility during his uncle's reign. Up to this 
 time the Musalman conquests had been confined to Aryavarta, 
 or Hindustan proper — the land lying north of the Vindhya 
 range. The Indo- Aryan kingdoms of the Dekhan and Southern 
 India had been fully occupied with their own quarrels, and, 
 being accustomed for many centuries to consider themselves 
 as having no part in the political affairs of Northern India, 
 had looked on unconcerned while the armies of Islam plundered 
 and ravaged the holy places of Aryavarta. 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, young and adventurous, longed to explore the 
 country as yet unkonwn to the Musalman marauders, which 
 promised richer spoil than he had yet obtained from the 
 impoverished infidels near at hand. Jalal-ud-din was fond of 
 his impetuous nephew and had made him governor of the 
 province of Oudh. The position by no means satisfied 'Ala-ud- 
 din's thirst for adventure, so having heard of a flourishing city 
 named Deoghur (the modern Daulatabad), then the capital of 
 Maharashtra, lying seven hundred miles to the south, he left 
 his headquarters at Karra with a body of eight thousand horse 
 and, spreading abroad the rumour that he had quarrelled with 
 the Sultan of Delhi and was about to take service with a raja 
 in the south, he marched through Bundelkhand unopposed, 
 drawing supplies from the prosperous Hindu villages through 
 which he passed. He then pushed on through Malwa, using 
 alternately the Delhi Sultan's prestige and the plausible tale 
 of his quarrel with him to secure support from the Musalman 
 authorities and to disarm the suspicion of the Hindu, When 
 at last, having crossed the Vindhyas and the Narbada river, 
 'Ala-ud-din appeared before Deoghur, the Raja Ram Deva 
 300 
 
'ALA-UD-DIN 
 
 was totally unprepared to meet his attack, for no Musalman 
 army had yet penetrated so far. The city was plundered of 
 all its wealth, and the Raja, who had retired to his adjoining 
 hill-fortress, was glad to save himself from a dangerous position 
 by a heavy payment of gold and jewels and the promise of a 
 yearly tribute to the Sultan. 
 
 When 'Ala-ud-din got safely back to Karra after a year's 
 absence, with numerous elephants and an immense booty, 
 there was great rejoicing at the Delhi court at the prospect 
 of a splendid contribution to the imperial treasury, for "the 
 guileless heart of the Sultan " relied on the fidelity of his nephew. 
 He was soon undeceived, for 'Ala-ud-din had not the least 
 intention of parting with his plunder. When the unsuspecting 
 Sultan came to take over the spoil, he was cut down by followers 
 of 'Ala-ud-din while the latter was pretending to do him homage. 
 The imperial canopy was immediately brought and raised over 
 the chief assassin's head, and 'Ala-ud-din's succession to the 
 throne of Delhi was made secure by the murder of Jalal-ud- 
 din's two sons and some of his partisans, and by the lavish 
 distribution of largesse from the imperial treasury.^ 
 
 The atrocities which 'Ala-ud-din perpetrated as Sultan even 
 surpassed his villainous conduct as a subject. Yet he was 
 altogether a very interesting historical figure, and in his reign 
 of twenty years there are many parallels with the events of 
 our own time. His ideals were those of a Prussian war-lord. 
 " I do not know whether this is lawful or unlawful," he an- 
 swered to the arguments of the learned doctors of Islam ; 
 " whatever I think to be for the good of the State, or suitable 
 for the emergency, that I decree." ^ This new religion and 
 KuUur, upon which he invoked the blessings of God and of 
 His Prophet in proper form, he would bring all men to adopt 
 by his sword and by the mighty war-machine which he con- 
 trived. All statesmanship was summed up in the efficiency of 
 the war-machine, and in the subordination of all other human 
 interests to its perfection. His methods of promoting it were 
 
 ^ Tdnkh-i Firoz Shdhi, Elliot's History oj India, vol. iii, p. 151. 
 2 Ibid., p. 188. 
 
 301 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 drastic and thoroughly scientific. The whole of his subjects, 
 Musalman as well as Hindu, were to be disciplined into implicit 
 obedience as a means of promoting perfect discipUne in the 
 army. The first steps were to bring back under imperial 
 control all proprietary rights, free gifts, and religious endow- 
 ments granted by his predecessors. All pensions, grants of 
 land, and endowments in the country were appropriated — 
 " the people were pressed and amerced, money was exacted 
 from them on every kind of pretence." ^ No one could stir 
 without the Sultan's knowledge, and " whatever happened in 
 the houses of nobles, great men, and ofiicials was commtmicated 
 to the Sultan by his reporters. Nor were the reports neglected, for 
 explanations of them were demanded. The system of reporting 
 went to such a length that nobles dared not speak aloud even 
 in the largest palaces, and if they had anything to say they 
 communicated by signs." ^ 
 
 The Sultan next, in consultation with the learned professors 
 of his court, devised rules and regulations " for grinding down 
 the Hindus and for depriving them of that wealth and property 
 which fosters disaffection and rebellion." ^ Sharaf Kai, " an 
 accomplished scribe and a most honest and intelligent man, 
 who had no rival either in capacity or integrity," was the 
 Sultan's chief agent in enforcing the regulations, which were 
 so effective that " one revenue officer would string twenty 
 khuts, mukaddins, or chaudharis together by the neck and 
 enforce payment by blows. "^ 
 
 'Ala-ud-din had a short way with those who failed to follow 
 the principles of his Kultur implicitly. Being informed that 
 some of the chiefs of the ' New Musalmans * or Moguls he had 
 enlisted in his army were disaffected and plotting revolt, he 
 determined that " the whole of that race settled in his territories 
 should be exterminated " and that " not one of the stock 
 should be left alive upon the face of the earth." Between 
 20,000 and 30,000 of them were accordingly massacred, " of 
 
 ^ Tdrlkh-i Firoz Shdhi, Elliot, vol. iii, p. 179. 
 2 Ibid., pp. 179-180. 
 
 8 Ibid., p. 182. * Ibid., p. 183. 
 
 302 
 
'ALA-UD-DIN 
 
 whom probably only a few had any knowledge [of the intended 
 revolt]." 1 " After these punishments," adds the Musalman 
 historian, " breaches of the peace were never heard of in the 
 city." 
 
 'Ala-nd-din, with a self-denial rare in a despot of his type, 
 even put a check upon his own vices. Finding that his drinking 
 habits impaired his efficiency as a war-lord, he gave up wine- 
 parties entirely, prohibited wine-drinking and wine-selling, 
 and the use of beer and intoxicating drugs. He ordered that 
 the china and glass vessels of his banqueting-hall should be 
 broken : " Jars and casks of wine were brought out of the royal 
 cellars and emptied at the Badaun Gate in such abundance 
 that mud and mire were produced as in the rainy season." ^ 
 Holes for the incarceration of wine-bibbers were dug outside 
 the gate, and the severity of the punishment was such that 
 many of them died. " The terrors of these holes deterred 
 many from drinking." He gave minute attention to the 
 organisation and equipment of his army ; he attended carefully 
 to the upkeep of his lines of communication, establishing posts 
 along the roads with relays of horses, from whence regular 
 reports of the progress of the army were sent to headquarters. 
 To prevent false news being circulated among the troops or 
 in the city, reports of the Sultan's health were constantly 
 circulated by the same agency.^ 
 
 But the most remarkable of his achievements were the 
 economic measures by which he provided for a large increase 
 of the effective strength of the army when a formidable in- 
 vasion of Moguls threatened his capital. As the resources of 
 the imperial treasury would not provide for the necessary 
 augmentation without reducing the current rates of pay, he 
 was advised by his counsellors that the only alternative was 
 to devise regulations and tariffs so that the price of grain and 
 other provisions might be brought down to a lower level. In 
 that way, they observed, a large army might be maintained at 
 a comparatively small expense. 
 
 ^ Tdnkh-i Firoz Shahi, EJlliot, vol. iii, p. 206. 
 ^ Ibid., p. i8o. * Ihid., p. 203. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 'Ala-ud-din's organising capacity was equal to the occasion. 
 He first appointed a wise and practical man, Malik Kabul 
 Ulugh Khan, as chief controller of the markets, gave him a 
 high remuneration and a strong military escort, and placed 
 under him an expert staff of officials assisted by intelligent 
 spies. Then the Sultan replenished the State granaries by 
 ordering that the tribute from a fixed number of villages 
 should be paid in kind.^ " By these means so much royal grain 
 came to Delhi that there never was a time when there were not 
 two or three royal granaries full of grain in the city. When 
 there was a deficiency of rain, or when for any reason the cara- 
 vans did not arrive and grain became scarce in the markets, 
 then the royal stores were opened and the corn was sold at the 
 tariff price, according to the wants of the people." ^ 
 
 The Malik's first proceeding was to arrest all the principal 
 grain-dealers and carriers, forcing them to give security for 
 each other, and detaining them until they had agreed upon a 
 common mode of action, i.e., a low fixed tariff. Then they 
 with their families, beasts of burden, and cattle were given 
 fixed locations in the villages along the banks of the Jumna 
 and placed under the supervision of overseers whose orders 
 they were compelled to obey. The provincial revenue officers 
 and their assistants were instructed that the ryots should be 
 compelled to sell their standing corn to the grain-dealers at 
 the standard price, but they were allowed to earn the grain- 
 carriers' profit by bringing their corn to the market and selling 
 it at the tariff rate. Stringent regulations were made to 
 prevent either merchants or ryots from concealing or holding 
 back their grain. The Sultan himself kept a firm grip upon 
 the whole organisation. He received daily reports of the market 
 rate and transactions from three different sources, and any 
 deviations from the rules were severely punished. 
 
 The success of the scheme was " the wonder of the age." 
 Even in years when the rains were deficient there was 
 
 ^ This had been the usual custom before the Muhaminadan invasions, but 
 evidently the Musalman had insisted on the taxes being paid in coin. 
 2 Tarlkh-i Firoz Shdhi, ^Elliot, vol. iii, p. 193. 
 
'ALA-U^D-DIN 
 
 no scarcity of corn in Delhi, and no rise in the price. " Once 
 or twice when the rains were deficient a market-overseer 
 reported that the price had risen half a jital, and he received 
 twenty blows with the stick. When the rains failed, a quantity 
 of corn, sufficient for the daily supply of each quarter of the 
 city, was consigned to the dealers every day from the market, 
 and half a man used to be allowed to the ordinary purchasers 
 in the markets. Thus the gentry and traders, who had no 
 villages or lands, used to get grain from the markets. If in 
 such a season any poor reduced person went to the market 
 and did not get assistance, the overseer received his punish- 
 ment whenever the fact found its way to the King's ears." ^ 
 
 Similar arrangements were made for maintaining a maximum 
 price for clothing, fruit, vegetables, and other provisions, 
 slaves, horses, and cattle. It should be observed that the 
 regulation of prices and famine-preventive measures had been 
 a recognised branch of traditional Hindu polity, though the 
 principles on which they were based were different. 'Ala-ud- 
 din's methods of punishment for dealers who gave short weight 
 were characteristic. The official inspector took from the 
 offender's shop the quantity which was deficient and then cut 
 off from the latter's haunches an equal weight of flesh. The 
 ' Kultural ' effect was that the traders were kept honest and 
 " gave such good weight that purchasers often got somewhat 
 in excess." 
 
 The virtue of 'Ala-ud-din's KuUur was proved by the fact 
 that through these economic measures he raised the strength 
 oi his cavalry to 475,000 ; his military organisation was made 
 thoroughly efficient, and the arms of Islam everjrwhere tri- 
 imphed both over the Hindus and the Moguls. He emulated 
 ;he barbarity of the latter by bringing thousands of them as 
 prisoners to Delhi, where they were cast under the feet of 
 • tlephants, and suitable reprisals were taken against the bar- 
 )arians by piling up their heads in pyramids and building 
 hem into towers. ^ 
 
 ^ Tdrikh-i Firoz Shdhi, Elliot, vol. iii, p. 195. 
 2 Ibid., p. 197. 
 
 u 305 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Early in his reign 'Ala-ud-din set about the conquests by 
 which he hoped to become a second Alexander.^ In 1297 
 he sent an expedition to reconquer Gujerat, which had been 
 tributary to Qutb-ud-din, but had recovered its independence. 
 This being successfully accomplished he laid siege to the hill- 
 fortress of Rantambhor, as a preUminary to the conquest of 
 Rajputana. The place was stoutly defended for a whole year 
 by Hamir Deva, a descendant of the Raja Prithivi-raja of Delhi, 
 assisted by some Mogul troops who had taken refuge there, 
 but it was finally carried by assault and the whole garrison 
 put to the sword. Chitor, which had been recovered by 
 the Rajputs, again fell after a siege of many months, and 
 again the Rajput women saved their honour by throwing 
 themselves into the sacrificial fire, while a devoted band of 
 warriors cut their way through the besiegers and rallied in 
 their native fastnesses. The Rana himself was made prisoner, 
 but escaped in the following year. 'Ala-ud-din contented 
 himself with handing over Chitor to a representative of the 
 Rana of Mewar's family, who remained as a tributary to Delhi 
 for some years, until he was driven out by Hamir. The famous 
 Rajput stronghold thereafter kept the banner of the Surya- 
 vamsa proudly flying in the midst of its Musalman enemies, ,j 
 until it was taken by Akbar and his Rajput allies. i 
 
 In the meantime 'Ala-ud-din had proved the efficiency of his | 
 war-machine, not only by repelling several formidable invasions '■. 
 of the Mogul hordes, which were then overrunning Kurope and ! 
 Asia, and by suppressing dangerous conspiracies among his j 
 own followers, but by carrying on a successful campaign in 
 the Dekhan imder the command of his general Mahk Kafur. 
 The latter was a Hindu slave taken in the conquest of Gujerat, 
 who had embraced Islam, and being attached to the imperial 
 bodyguard had speedily risen to a high position at the court, 
 much to the disgust of 'Ala-ud-din's Turki and Afghan retainers. 
 Malik Kafur marched to Deoghur, the scene of 'Ala-ud-din's 
 early exploits, and forced the Raja Ram Deva to do homage to 
 
 ^ According to Ferishta the title of ' Alexander the Second ' was struck upon | 
 the coins of the Empire. i 
 
 306 ' 
 
'ALA-UD-DIN 
 
 the Stiltan ; then, using that place as a base, he eventually 
 swept through the Dekhan and Southern India. In the 
 course of several campaigns he captured Warangal, then the 
 capital of the Telinga country, Madura, the ancient capital of 
 the Pandyas, and Halebid, where the powerful rajas of the 
 Hoysala Ballala line then ruled over the territory now com- 
 prised in the Mysore state, and part of the Kanarese country. 
 The spoils gathered from these rich southern kingdoms were 
 prodigious. When Malik Kafur returned to Delhi in 1311 
 with the Hoysala raja as his captive, he brought back, it is 
 said, 612 elephants, 96,000 mans of gold, several boxes of 
 priceless jewels and pearls, and 20,000 horses. The oldest 
 inhabitant declared that so much gold and so many elephants 
 had never before been brought to Delhi, and the hearts of the 
 faithful were made glad by the lavish gifts distributed by the 
 Sultan. 1 
 
 Before his death in 1316 'Ala-ud-din was suzerain not only 
 of the Musalman kingdom of Gaur, but of the greater part of 
 Hindu India. Though in his own person he represented the 
 uncompromising barbarity of the Turkish despot, his policy 
 and conduct assisted to some extent the process of evolution 
 by which the typical Indian Muslim came to regard India as 
 his spiritual home, and to make Islam in India the highest 
 expression of a great world-religion. The process had already 
 begun when the doctors of Islam under Harun-al-Raschid 
 began to expand the primitive doctrine of Islam by the study 
 of Indian religious thought. It was continued when the Arabs 
 gained a firm footing in Aryavarta, and again when Mahmud 
 of Ghazni filled the harems of the Musalman world with Indian 
 women and sent thousands of Indian craftsmen forth to make 
 ^ their religion serve the material as well as the spiritual needs 
 of Islam in Western Asia. The Indian craftsman was always 
 a religious teacher, and the foundations of his belief were not 
 shaken when he took a Muslim name and invoked the Deity 
 IS Allah instead of Ishvara. The final conquest of Hindustan 
 wrought the baser elements of Islam into close contact with 
 
 ^ Tdnkh-i Fnoz Shdhi, Elliot, vol. iii, p. 204. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Indian civilisation. But even while India lay prostrate and 
 bleeding under the oppressor's foot, the Indian ideal was 
 slowly permeating the social and spiritual life of the Muhamma- 
 dan conquerors, and Islam was adjusting its dogmas to the 
 Indian religious synthesis. 
 
 Indian women were prized above all others in the Muslim 
 slave-market on account of their beauty and graceful manners.^ 
 'Ala-ud-din himself was captivated by a Rajput princess, 
 Kaula Devi, the wife of the Raja of Gujerat, " who for beauty, 
 wit, and accomplishments was the flower of India. "^ He took 
 her into his harem, and his attachment to her gave a touch of 
 romance to the annals of his reign. Kaula Devi had two 
 daughters by her Hindu husband, one of whom had died ; 
 the surviving one, Dewal Devi, remained in the house of her 
 exiled father after her mother had been captured by 'Ala-ud- 
 din's general and taken into the imperial harem. Kaula Devi's 
 chief desire, when the news reached her at Delhi that her 
 daughter was alive, was to obtain possession of her. 'Ala- 
 ud-din gave orders, through the governor of Gujerat, that the 
 young princess must be sent to Delhi forthwith. The governor 
 at first tried to persuade the Raja, Karan Rai, to surrender 
 his daughter by promises and threats ; but failing in these 
 marched his army against him. The Raja was defeated and 
 obliged to fly. Dewal Devi had been sent off previously with 
 an escort to be wedded to the Raja of Deoghur ; but the bridal 
 party was intercepted by a party of Musalman horsemen in 
 the neighbourhood of Ellora, and Dewal Devi was thus restored 
 to her mother at Delhi. Soon afterwards the Sultan's eldest 
 son, Khizr Khan, fell violently in love with her, and 'Ala-ud-din 
 would have consented to the match but for the opposition of 
 Khizr Khan's Afghan mother, who wished him to marry the 
 daughter of her brother. Alp Khan, governor of Gujerat. 
 Eventually, after many romantic adventures, which were sung 
 by the court poet. Amir Khusru, a compromise was made and 
 Dewal Devi became Khizr Khan's second wife. 
 
 1 Extract from Travels of Shahab-ud-din Abul Abbas Ahmad, Elliot, vol. iii, 
 p. 581, 2 Eerishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 329. 
 
 308 
 
DEATH OF 'ALA-UD-DIN 
 
 'Ala-ud-din had many wives, and the impartiaHty with which 
 he chose them made his court a hot-bed of intrigues between 
 the Rajput, Turki, and Afghan factions. Towards the end of 
 his reign, when his health was impaired by intemperance, he 
 was no longer able to keep a firm grip on the reins of govern- 
 ment. Revolts broke out in Gujerat and in the Dekhan, the 
 Rajputs recovered Chitor, and 'Ala-ud-din's death was the 
 signal for the usual murderous scramble for power, in which 
 his Indian general, Malik Kafur, the conqueror of the Dekhan, 
 took the leading part. He succeeded in putting out the eyes 
 of 'Ala-ud-din's two eldest sons, and would have done the same 
 with the third, Mubarik Khan, if assassins had not put a stop 
 to his crimes. 
 
 Mubarik Khan, the last of the Khilji line, then ascended the 
 throne of Delhi in 1317, and immediately gave way to unbridled 
 excesses. " He became infamous," says Ferishta, " for every 
 vice that can disgrace human nature, and condescended so far 
 as to dress himself often like a common actress and go with 
 the public women to dance at the houses of the nobility." The 
 next upstart who was enabled by the social philosophy of 
 Islam to hack his way to a throne was a Hindu pariah who 
 found favour with Mubarik and then murdered him. He 
 rallied round him the lowest rabble of Delhi, both Musalman 
 and Hindu, and for five months the city was a pandemonium. 
 When at last the contending factions had settled with each 
 other the Khilji line was found to be exterminated, and in 132 1 
 Ghiyas-ud-din, the first of the Tughlak dynasty, became Sultan 
 under the name of Tughlak Shah. 
 
 The new Sultan was of Turkish or Tartar race on his 
 father's side, but his mother was an Indian J at. Finding the 
 political atmosphere of Delhi unhealthy, he built himself a 
 citadel about four miles away to the east — ^the grim fortress 
 to which he gave the name of Tughlakabad. With equal 
 prudence he strengthened the defences of the north-west 
 frontier to keep back the Mogul hordes, always waiting for an 
 opportunity to swoop down into the Indus valley and spoil 
 the spoilers of Hindustan. The rest of his five years' reign 
 
 309 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 he was occupied in suppressing revolts of his Hindu tributaries 
 in the Dekhan and Maharashtra, and in bringing Gaur back to 
 its allegiance to the Delhi Sultanate. 
 
 Tughlak Shah met with his death by the collapse of a wooden 
 pavilion which had been raised for his reception on his return 
 from a successful expedition to Tirhut. The mystery of the 
 ' accident ' was never cleared up, but as this was one of the 
 methods of getting rid of an enemy recognised by Indian 
 diplomacy, there is good reason to suspect foul play. Muham- 
 mad Tughlak, his eldest son, enjoyed the unusual luxury of a 
 peaceful accession. " On this occasion the streets of the city 
 [of Delhi] were strewed with flowers ; the houses adorned ; 
 drums beaten ; and every demonstration of joy was exhibited. 
 The new monarch ordered some elephants laden with gold and 
 silver to precede and follow the procession, from which money 
 was scattered among the populace." ^ 
 
 Muhammad had all the accomplishments of the Turkish 
 dilettante which in later times distinguished the Great Moguls, 
 but he was hopelessly incapable as a statesman and ruler of 
 men. He excelled in Persian and Arabic calligraphy. He had 
 studied Greek philosophy, and resumed the traditions of Indo- 
 Aryan courts by debating metaphysical problems with the 
 learned doctors of Islam and by bestowing a liberal patronage 
 upon men of letters. He took interest in astronomy, mathe- 
 matics, and the physical sciences. He established hospitals 
 and almshouses for widows and orphans. Ferishta also states 
 that he sometimes went so far as to attend on sick persons 
 whose symptoms excited his curiosity, but in such legends of 
 court life a liberal allowance must be made for courtly fantasy. 
 He observed all the outward professions of a good Musalman, 
 was regular in his daily prayers, and abstained from drunken- 
 ness and other vices condemned by the Prophet. 
 
 His conscience was not satisfied by purging the court of the 
 shameless debauchery which had disgraced the name of Islam. 
 He sought to repair the errors of his predecessors, who for 
 several centuries had totally ignored the temporal supremacy 
 
 * Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 409. 
 310 
 
MUHAMMAD TUGHLAK 
 
 of the Khalif. To secure the pontifical blessing he sent an 
 embassy with rich presents to Egypt and caused the Khalif 's 
 name to be struck on the imperial coinage and to be substituted 
 for his own in public worship in the mosques. When his 
 ambassador returned from Egypt with the Khalif's envoy 
 bearing the letter which confirmed his own authority as vSultan, 
 Muhammad advanced in person with all humility to receive it, 
 put the letter on his head, and opened it with great solemnity 
 and respect.^ A grand festival was ordered in the envoy's 
 honour, and Muhammad gave orders that every Sultan's name 
 which had not received the Khalif's confirmation should be 
 omitted in the reading of the Khutha in the mosques. 
 
 In striking contrast to his religious professions was Muham- 
 mad's conduct as a ruler. " He was," says his biographer 
 and co-religionist, " wholly devoid of mercy or consideration 
 for his people. So little did he hesitate to spill the blood of 
 God's creatures, that when anjrthing occurred which excited 
 him to proceed to that horrid extremity, one might have 
 supposed his object was to exterminate the human species 
 altogether." He suffered from megalomania to such an extent 
 that his actions often laid him open to the suspicion of mental 
 derangement — as when he ordered one of his own teeth to be 
 buried with much ceremony, and caused a magnificent monu- 
 ment to be raised over it. 2 He surpassed 'Ala-ud-din in the 
 grandeur of his schemes of world-conquest, but totally lacked 
 the great Khilji Sultan's military genius and capacity for 
 organisation. Disregarding the remonstrances of his military 
 advisers, he launched an army of 100,000 men on a wild project 
 of conquering China, and put to death the few who returned 
 to tell the tale of their disasters. On the other hand, when an 
 army of Moguls under Timtir Shin Khan invaded the Panjab 
 and threatened Delhi, he could only meet the situation by the 
 feeble device of buying off the enemy with large presents of 
 
 ^ Ferishta, vol. i, p. 426. 
 
 ^ Ferishta, however, does not observe that this proceeding might have 
 been in derision of the Buddhist practice of building stupas over the bodily 
 relics of their Master. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 gold and jewels. His ruthless cruelty and senseless exactions 
 roused both his own provincial governors and his Hindu 
 feudatories to rebellion : he revenged himself by having his 
 own nephew flayed alive, and by organising man-hunts on a 
 large scale by which whole districts were depopiilated. 
 
 Among the grandiose schemes of Muhammad's disordered 
 brain was the removal of his capital from Delhi to Deoghur. 
 Though the distance between the two places is considerable, 
 such a resolve would not have been inconsistent with Indian 
 monarchical traditions had not the Sultan also resolved to 
 celebrate the event by ordering that the whole population of 
 Delhi, men, women, and children, with all their movable pro- 
 perty, should accompany him. The poor were to be provided 
 with money and food for the journey, and even trees were to 
 be planted along the roads to give a fictitious splendour to the 
 grand procession, but not a cat or a dog was to be left in Delhi. 
 No one dared to disobey, but many died on the road, and of 
 those who reached Deoghur many were exposed to terrible 
 privations from lack of means of subsistence. Muhammad 
 tried to appease the discontent of his soldiers by laying out 
 the new capital, which he called Daulatabad, on a magnificent 
 scale ; but two years afterwards he was constrained to return 
 to Delhi, and again his unfortunate subjects were made the 
 victims of his caprice. The effect of this was noticed by Ibn 
 Batuta, the traveller, who visited India and took service for 
 a time under Muhammad Tughlak at Delhi. The city was the 
 greatest and most magnificent in the world, he said, but it 
 had the fewest inhabitants.^ 
 
 When the imperial treasury had been exhausted by his 
 boundless extravagance another brilliant idea entered the head 
 of this hare-brained autocrat. He had heard that in China 
 there was a paper currency, the notes used instead of coin 
 being stamped with the Emperor's seal and made payable at 
 the imperial treasury. Muhammad Tughlak thought it a better 
 plan to issue copper coins as counters and by an imperial decree 
 to make them pass at the value of gold and silver. This was 
 
 1 Elliot's History of India, vol. iii, p. 585. 
 312 
 
MUHAMMAD TUGHLAK 
 
 an opportunity of which the Hindu metal-workers promptly 
 took advantage. Every village became an open mint, and the 
 whole population joined in the game of defrauding the imperial 
 treasury. For a time the Sultan's credit was good enough 
 and the golden days of Aryavarta seemed to have returned. 
 The people gladly paid their tribute in copper instead of gold, 
 and they bought all the necessaries and luxuries they desired 
 in the same coin. But the prudent merchants bought in 
 copper and sold in gold. The Sultan's tokens were not accepted 
 in countries in which his decrees did not run. Soon the whole 
 external trade of Hindustan came to a standstill. When at 
 last " the copper tankas had become more worthless than clods," 
 the Sultan in a rage repealed his edict and proclaimed that 
 the treasury would exchange gold coins for his copper ones. 
 
 The effect of this decree may be imagined. " Thousands of 
 men from various quarters who possessed thousands of these 
 copper coins and caring nothing for them . . . now brought them 
 to the treasury and received in exchange gold tankas and silver 
 tankas. ... So many of these copper tankas were brought to 
 the treasury that heaps of them rose up in Tughlakabad like 
 mountains." ^ Muhammad was obliged to close his treasur^^ 
 The sharp-witted merchants had made fortunes, but thou- 
 sands were ruined, and the Sultan vented his wrath upon 
 his unfortunate subjects by devising fresh means of pitiless 
 extortion. 
 
 Hindustan was reduced to the same plight as Armenia in the 
 worst days of Turkish misrule. The ryots in the fertile tract 
 between the Ganges and the Jumna set fire to their houses 
 in despair and retired to the forests with their families and 
 cattle, eking out a precarious existence by brigandage. Whole 
 provinces were desolated by famine, populous towns were 
 deserted. Thousands sought refuge in Bengal (Gaur), which 
 had thrown off its allegiance, or placed themselves beyond the 
 reach of the Delhi tyrant in other provinces. Even the Sultan's 
 household at times was inconvenienced by the general distress, 
 so that Muhammad's heart " seemed for once to be softened 
 
 ^ Tdnkh-i Flroz Shdhi, Elliot, vol. iii, pp. 240-241. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 by the miseries of his subjects." He directed that large sums 
 should be distributed for the encouragement of husbandry 
 and commerce. The recipients of his bounty, however, were 
 so distressed that they spent the money on the purchase of the 
 necessaries of life, and many of them were severely punished 
 on that account. 
 
 Towards the end of his reign, following the usual practice of 
 his predecessors, he drove the best of his Musalman officers 
 to revolt by conferring high rank upon men of the meanest 
 birth and vilest character, who were only too willing to be 
 made instruments of his wickedness. Some of the feudatory 
 Hindu princes joined in the revolt. Muhammad Tughlak 
 escaped the fate which overtook so many other of the Delhi 
 Sultans by dying of a fever in 1350 after a reign of twenty-five 
 years. 
 
 3H 
 
CHAPTER III 
 FIRUZ SHAH 
 
 FIRUZ SHAH, Muhammad Ttighlak's nephew and suc- 
 cessor, is perhaps not unduly praised in Muhammadan 
 chronicles as a wise and humane ruler, according to 
 the ethics of Islam. His reign is a welcome break in the long 
 chain of tyranny, cruelty, and debauch which makes up the 
 gloomy annals of the Turki dynasties. His Musalman bio- 
 graphers naturally attribute his virtues as a man and as a 
 ruler to his devotion to the teaching of Islam, and do not 
 attempt to penetrate deeper into the psychology of Indo- 
 Muhammadan history. But one of them, Shams-i-Siraj 'Alif, 
 who was a contemporary of Firuz Shah, and in high favour at 
 his court, gives us a clue left unnoticed by Anglo-Indian writers 
 who have followed Fergusson's lead in treating Islamic culture 
 in India as a foreign importation. 
 
 Firuz Shah's mother was a Rajputni, one of the beautiful 
 and accomplished daughters of the Rana Mall Bhatti. His 
 father, Sipah Salar Rajab, was a younger brother of the first 
 Tughlak Stdtan, Ghiyas-ud-din, who acted as Governor of 
 Dipalpur during the reign of 'Ala-ud-din. Every young Turki 
 noble in those days, by fair means or foul, filled his harem 
 with high-born Indian women, and the Governor of Dipalpur 
 when he was seeking a suitable match for his brother heard 
 the praises of Bibi Naila, Rana Mali's beautiful daughter. He 
 accordingly sent "intelligent and acute" messengers to the 
 father with a proposal of marriage on his brother's behalf. 
 The Rajput chief indignantly rejected the offer, with language 
 which was "unseemly and improper." The Governor, after 
 debating long upon the next course to take, proceeded to Rana 
 Mall's villages and demanded immediate payment in cash of 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the whole year's taxes. "The mukaddins and chaudharis 
 were subjected to coercion and payment in full was insisted 
 upon." 
 
 In the days of 'Ala-ud-din, observes the Musalman historian, 
 the protests of Hindu landowners were unavailing and no one 
 dared to make any outcry. The exact methods of coercion 
 adopted by the Governor's agents are not partictilarised, but 
 in the course of two or three days, we are told, the Hindus 
 " were reduced to extremities and suffered much hardship." 
 
 Reports of the people's distress soon reached the ears of 
 the Rana's aged mother. Knowing well the object of the 
 Governor's proceedings, she went to her son's house at the 
 time of evening prayer, " weeping and tearing her hair, and 
 spoke most feelingly upon the matter." Bibi Naila happened 
 to be in the courtyard and anxiously inquired the cause of 
 her grandmother's grief. " I am weeping for you, Naila," 
 replied the venerable lady, " for it is on your account that 
 Tughlak Shah oppresses the people of this land." The high- 
 spirited girl dried her grandmother's tears. " If my surrender," 
 she exclaimed, " will deliver our people from such misery, send 
 me to him at once : only say that the Moguls have carried off 
 one of your daughters." The proud Rana was moved by his 
 heroic daughter's self-sacrifice, and at last gave his assent to 
 the marriage. Messengers were sent to the Governor to 
 announce the fact. Bibi Naila was brought to Dipalpur, and 
 as the bride of Sipah Salar became known by the name of the 
 Sultana Bibi KadbanH.^ 
 
 We hear nothing of the life of the devoted Rajput lady in 
 the seclusion of the harem, except that she was left a widow 
 seven years after the birth of her only child, Firuz Shah, and 
 that Tughlak Shah was kind to his brother's wife and treated 
 the child as his own. Tughlak Shah became Sultan when 
 Firuz was a youth, and the latter accompanied his uncle 
 during four and a half years of his reign on his State 
 tours. Muhammad Shah, it is said, was exceedingly kind and 
 generous to him, and instructed him in affairs of State. For 
 
 ^ Tdrikh-i Ftroz Shdhi, Elliot, vol. iii, pp. 272-273. 
 316 
 
FIRUZ SHAH 
 
 some years before he came to the throne he served as a 
 provincial governor. Firuz Shah's courtly historian, quietly 
 ignoring the black record of Muhammad Shah's reign, attri- 
 butes his capacity as a ruler to the training he received from 
 his two uncles, but reveals the whole truth by the glimpse he 
 gives us of the Sultana Bibi Kadbanti's early life. The blood 
 of Indo-Aryan royalty ran in the veins of Firuz Shah, and it 
 was at his Rajput mother's knee that he learnt the lesson of 
 noblesse oblige and the great traditions of Aryan polity which 
 guided him in after-life. 
 
 Firuz Shah's uncles, nevertheless, took good care that in 
 his religious instruction he should be brought up according to 
 the strictest canons of Islam and with an inveterate intolerance 
 of the popular forms of Hindu ritual. He was as zealous an 
 iconoclast as Mahmud of Ghazni, and like a good Sunni forbade 
 the painting of portraits in the royal palaces. He reimposed 
 the jizya, or poll-tax, upon Brahmans, who had been exempt 
 from it in former reigns, declaring that they were " the very 
 keys of the chamber of idolatry " and ought to be taxed first. 
 An old Brahman, charged with idol-worship and with the 
 perversion of Muhammadan women, having refused to accept 
 Islam, was burned alive in front of the Sultan's palace, together 
 with the wooden tablets " covered with paintings of demons 
 and other objects " which were the damning proof of his heresy. 
 
 Firuz Shah apparently constituted himself a Grand Inquisi- 
 tor both of Musalmans and Hindus. He burned the books 
 of the Shiahs, suppressed the propaganda they were making, 
 and put to death a Musalman fanatic who claimed divine 
 inspiration as a prophet and " led people astray with mystic 
 practices." He was equally severe with Hindus of the Sakta 
 sect, who worshipped the creative principle with obscene 
 rites. He forbade the persecution of Hinduism in general, 
 but " destroyed their idol temples and instead thereof built 
 mosques." 
 
 Though Firuz Shah seems to have been a pious and zealous 
 Musalman it is not quite clear whether he acted thus entirely 
 from conscientious motives. Probably he tried to placate the 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 fanatical Sunni faction at court by giving them a fiee hand 
 in rehgious matters. Certain incidents of his reign warrant 
 the belief that he lacked strength of character and often allowed 
 his better judgment to be overruled by the learned doctors 
 of the law and the powerful nobles whose support secured his 
 succession to the throne. He was by no means of a cruel 
 disposition like so many of his predecessors ; neither was he 
 an ascetic or a lugubrious saint. Every Friday after public 
 prayers at the mosque there were great entertainments in the 
 palace at which musicians, story-tellers, and athletes to the 
 number of three thousand took part. He was an enthusiastic 
 big-game hunter and an epicure in his choice of wines. " Some 
 were yellow as saffron, some red as the rose, some were white ; 
 and the taste of all was like sweet milk." 
 
 An amusing anecdote told by his eulogistic biographer is a 
 revelation of his character and like one of those delightful 
 miniature pictures with which the court painters recorded the 
 intimate life of the Great Moguls. The Sultan was marching 
 with a brave and well-appointed army to bring Gaur back to 
 its allegiance. The strictest discipline was to be observed 
 among all ranks, such were the Sultan's orders. But one 
 morning after prayers the Great King felt thirsty and called 
 for a glass of his favourite wine. While he was "moistening 
 his throat," the Khan-i-'Azam, Tatar Khan, a distinguished 
 general and an austere and pious M^salman, came to the 
 imperial tent to demand an audience on important business. 
 The Sultan was greatly annoyed at the interruption, and sent 
 his son, Fath Khan, to put him oft" with some excuse. But 
 Tatar Khan insisted, and the Sultan, having hastily pushed 
 the wine flask and cups under the couch and thrown a sheet 
 over it, sat down on a coverlet to receive him. Immediately'' 
 the general came into the imperial presence he sniffed the 
 aroma of the wine, and his keen eye caught sight of the cups 
 hidden under the couch. He was so troubled by the sight that 
 his lips failed to utter the usual salutation. The Sultan spoke 
 not a word, neither did he. At length Tatar Khan began to 
 sermonise the shamefaced Sultan, reminding him that they 
 318 
 
FIRUZ SHAH 
 
 were marcliing against the enemy, and " the time was one for 
 repentance, abasement, and prayer." Firnz Shah tried to 
 dissimulate, asked what the general meant and whether any- 
 thing untoward had happened. The Khan-i-'Azam replied 
 sternly that " he perceived certain articles under the bed." 
 " Yes, I like to take a little now and then," said the Sultan 
 apologetically. But Tatar Khan was not to be put off with 
 such feeble excuses, and after lecturing the humiliated monarch 
 severely took an oath from him that he would drink no more 
 wine while the IChan remained with the army. " Tatar Khan 
 gave thanks to God and went away." 
 
 The Sultan kept his oath, but the Khan-i-'Azam did not 
 remain long with the army. After the latter had left the tent 
 Firuz Shah " sat brooding over the matter and thought the 
 Khan had spoken to him in a disrespectful and unkind manner." 
 He was magnanimous enough not to take severe notice of the 
 old general's uncourtly behaviour ; but a few days afterwards 
 the Khan-i-'Azam was despatched to a remote district " to 
 restore order and quiet." ^ 
 
 Firuz Shah's administrative reforms entitle him to a high 
 place among the great rulers of India. During his long reign 
 Hindustan recovered a great measure of its former prosperity 
 and contentment. In secular matters he was guided by the 
 high ideals of a royal race which his Rajput mother had taught 
 him. The intolerable oppression of the ryots ceased. No 
 demand in excess of the regular Government dues was allowed 
 to be made. Agriculture revived, and while prices were lower 
 than they had been in the days of 'Ala-ud-din, the homes of 
 the ryots " were replete with grain, property, horses, and furni- 
 ture," and every one had plenty of gold and silver. ^ Shams-i- 
 Siraj 'Alif contrasts this state of prosperity with their condi- 
 tion under former Muhammadan sovereigns : " Several writers 
 told the author of this work that it was the practice to leave 
 the raiyat one cow and take away all the rest." 
 
 Firuz Shah's edicts, though not free from sectarian bias, 
 
 1 Tdnkh-i Firoz Shahi, EJUiot, vol. iii, pp. 306-307. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 290. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 breathed the humanitarian spirit of Asoka's. " In the reigns 
 of former kings," he declared, " the blood of many Musalmans 
 has been shed, and many varieties of torture employed. . . . 
 The Great and Merciful God made me, His servant, hope and 
 seek for His mercy by devoting myself to prevent the unlawful 
 killing of Musalmans and the infliction of any kind of torture 
 upon them or upon any men." His religious feeling and high 
 sense of justice were also shown in his desire to make amends, 
 as far as possible, for the misdeeds of his predecessors. He 
 gave orders that the heirs of all persons who had been put to 
 death or mutilated in the last reign should be compensated 
 from the imperial treasury, so that " they might be reconciled 
 to the late Sultan " and sign declarations of their satisfaction. 
 These documents were then put into a chest and deposited at 
 the head of Muhammad's tomb, " in the hope that God in 
 His great clemency would show mercy to my late friend and 
 patron." In the same pious spirit he restored to their rightful 
 owners all village lands and patrimonies that had been wrong- 
 fully taken from them in former reigns. 
 
 lyike Akbar, Firuz vShah took a special interest in planning 
 new cities, building palaces and mosques, as well as schools, 
 hospitals, public rest-houses, and other charitable institutions, 
 and in laying out gardens. Among other cities he built a new 
 capital at Firuzabad, five kos distant from Delhi, in which 
 there were eight public mosques each with a courtyard large 
 enough for 10,000 worshippers. During the forty years of his 
 reign, says his biographer, every kos on the road from Delhi 
 to Firuzabad was crowded with carriages, palanquins, mules, 
 and horses, besides foot-passengers swarming " like ants or 
 locusts." Firuz Shah also founded Jaunpur, naming it in 
 honour of his friend and patron, Muhammad vShah, one of 
 whose names was Jaunan. It afterwards became the capital 
 of the Sharki Sultans and a great seat of Muhammadan learn- 
 ing, rivalling the fame of its ancient Hindu neighbour, Benares. 
 Fathabad, or Futtehabad, named after his son, Fath Khan, 
 and HissSr Firuza were also planned under the Siiltan's orders, 
 and amply provided, according to the Hindu tradition, with 
 320 
 
FIRUZ SHAH 
 
 public fruit-gardens, wells, and reservoirs. One of his irriga- 
 tion works was a great canal from the head-waters of the 
 Jumna, Hansi, and Hissar, which, however, fell into disuse 
 after his death. It has been restored and extended by the 
 British Government, and now irrigates a large tract of land 
 in the Panjab. Firuz Shah is said to have laid out in the 
 neighbourhood of Delhi alone no less than 1200 gardens 
 planted with black and white grapes, some of which were 
 leased for private cultivation, and some bestowed as endow- 
 ments upon religious institutions. 
 
 Among his other administrative activities Firuz Shah paid 
 great attention to the organisation of the institution of slavery ; 
 partly, it would seem, to prevent the inhuman massacre of 
 prisoners of war, partly to increase the supply of skilled 
 artisans in Musalman cities, and partly to bring more infidels 
 within the Muslim pale. No doubt the Muhammadan invasions 
 and the tinsettled condition of Hindustan in the previous 
 reigns had driven great numbers of Hindu craftsmen to avoid 
 forced labour under Musalman masters by emigration. Firuz 
 Shah gave orders to his officers and feudatories that as many 
 prisoners as possible should be taken in war-time, and that 
 the best should be sent for the service of the court. " Those 
 chiefs who brought many slaves received the highest favour, 
 and those that brought few received proportionately little 
 consideration." The effect was that numbers far in excess of 
 the Sultan's requirements were sent to Delhi, but the situation 
 was met by distributing them over the different provinces. 
 Some were employed in the Sultan's body-guard and personal 
 service, or in the army. Some were sent to study the Quran 
 and the law of Islam at Mecca, or at the numerous Muslim 
 colleges in India ; others were apprenticed to tradesmen and 
 taught handicrafts. In this way " 12,000 slaves became 
 artisans of various kinds." 
 
 The Sultan took great interest in the welfare of his prose- 
 lytes, gave them fixed allowances in money or in kind, and 
 created a separate department for administering their affairs. 
 He showed the same consideration for Hindus who in order 
 
 X 321 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to escape the poll-tax, or for other reasons, voluntarily came 
 to the mosques and professed the Muslim faith. The amirs 
 and maliks, following the Sultan's good example, treated 
 their slaves like children, " providing them with food and 
 raiment, lodging them and training them, and taking every 
 care of their wants." On their yearly visits to court they 
 took their slaves with them and gave reports upon their merits 
 and utilities, which Firuz Shah received with great interest. 
 Unfortunately this happy state of things did not last long. 
 After the Sultan's death, adds the court historian, " the heads 
 of his favoured servants were cut off without mercy, and were 
 made into heaps in front of the darbar." ^ 
 
 In spite of Firuz Shah's brilliant record, his reign was another 
 illustration of the inherent weakness of Muhammadan polity. 
 The power of a military caste had made the mere recital of 
 the Musalman faith a social and political mantram as potent 
 as any of those by which Brahman philosophers claimed to 
 be able to control the forces of the universe. Nominally based 
 upon the principle of universal brotherhood, the social pro- 
 gramme of Islam became more tyrannous in its working than 
 the caste system ; for it exalted the rights of the individual 
 above the rights of the community, through seeking to gain 
 converts by compulsion and by material inducements rather 
 than by an appeal to conscience or intellect. Hindu polity 
 gave the monarch divine right as the representative of Vishnu, 
 the Preserver and I^ord of life — a right which had been earned 
 by the merit of former lives — ^but even the lowest of his subjects 
 might by a similar process of spiritual evolution rise to king- 
 ship. _ \ 
 
 The difference between the Hindu and Muhammadan 
 systems is well illustrated in their different methods of build- 
 ing construction. In the former the weight of personal 
 responsibility was evenly distributed from the top to the 
 bottom of the political fabric, right down to the foundation 
 of it in the village community. In the latter the stability of 
 the structure depended upon the soundness of the keystones 
 
 ^ Tdnkh-i Firoz Shahl, Elliot, vol. iii, p. 342. 
 322 
 
FIRUZ SHAH 
 
 of the arches — if one failed the house might soon become unfit 
 for human habitation. Islam produced many men of com- 
 manding ability and fine character, but never a great dynasty, 
 giving to the State a long succession of happy and prosperous 
 years. Under Hindu rule the prosperity of the State, as a 
 whole, was to a large extent independent of the personal 
 character of the ruling monarch ; the strength of its founda- 
 tions, broad based upon its village life, was proved by the 
 rapidity with which it recovered from the effects of centuries 
 of devastation and tyranny. Firuz Shah in a comparatively 
 short time effaced the miserable record of his predecessor's 
 misdeeds, but in his declining years his strength failed, and 
 even before his death in 1388, at the age of ninety, the system 
 of good government reconstructed by him began to fall to 
 pieces. In a few years after his death Hindustan was again 
 in a state of chaos ; the defences of the north-west frontier 
 broke down, and the Mogul hordes under Timur poured in an 
 overwhelming flood over the unhappy country. 
 
 323 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT OF THE 
 MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 EFORE continuing the chronicle of the Mtihammadan 
 dynasties of India it will be well to consider the 
 psychological aspect of the events of the period of 
 four centuries from the time of Mahmud of Ghazni to the 
 invasions of Timur. The materials for the study of this 
 question are not to be found in the writings of Muhammadan 
 historians. Brahmanical books for the most part pass over 
 the M^ammadan invasions in silence. But India from the 
 third century B.C. has an unbroken chain of psychological 
 evidence, invaluable for historical research, by which the 
 biased and distorted statements of Musalman historians can 
 be checked. An impartial and sound judgment of this 
 material is of vital importance for the understanding of Indian 
 history. 
 
 A pious Hindu might easily be led to regard the long period 
 of bloodshed and destruction which followed the Muhammadan 
 invasions as an unmitigated disaster to his motherland and to 
 the great civilisation of which Aryavarta was the centre. But 
 the true Hindu philosopher would not have failed to discern 
 the will of Providence even in the blind rage of the Musalman 
 fanatic : he was too devoted a student of natural laws not to 
 understand that behind the apparent ruin of his cause lay a 
 new impulse for the progress of the human race. Brahman 
 culture in the field it had created for itself had reached its 
 apex : its creative energy was on the wane. Endless reitera- 
 tion and hair-splitting dialectics would not carry it to greater 
 heights or widen the circle of its activity. On the contrary'', 
 mere mechanical processes of thought would tend to diminish 
 
 324 
 
EFFECT OF MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 the deductive power by which Hindu science had won its 
 greatest triumphs. The metaphysical researches in which 
 Hinduism was engaged were too abstruse for the comprehension 
 of the masses : the elaborate symbolic ritual which served as 
 a spiritual kindergarten for the latter was overgrown with 
 superstition and chicanery, demoralising for both the teacher 
 and the pupil. The sword of Islam was the Creator's pruning- 
 knife which removed the decaying branches and cut back the 
 unfruitful growth of the tree of knowledge He had planted 
 in Aryavarta. 
 
 The organisation of Buddhism, which, as a sectarian group, 
 had lost its intellectual influence in India before Islam gained 
 a footing in the Indus valley, was entirely broken up as the 
 storm of the Muhammadan invasions spread over Hindustan. 
 The Hindu aristocracy, representative of the higher Brahmanical 
 culture which survived, either left their desecrated shrines and 
 avoided the polluting touch of the barbarians by emigration, 
 or, if circumstances compelled them to remain, began to seek 
 a modus vivendi with the temporal power which supplanted 
 their own. The first effect of the Muhammadan invasions 
 and the break-up of many ancient seats of Brahmanical learn- 
 ing was therefore a great impetus to Aryan culture in the 
 Dekhan and Southern India — a rush of learned Brahmans and 
 skilled Hindu craftsmen to the friendly shelter of the Chola 
 and Rashtrakuta courts or those of their tributaries. This 
 migration may have influenced, if it did not originate, the 
 religious movement of which Ramanuja, the Vaishnava 
 reformer, was the leader at the end of the eleventh and begin- 
 ning of the twelfth centuries. The north of India, since the 
 Vaishnava revival under the Gupta emperors, had leaned for 
 the most part toward this school of philosophic teaching, or 
 its counterpart in Buddhistic doctrine, the Mahayana school. 
 The South remained firmly attached to its early Brahmanical 
 teachers — who in the ninth century, as we have already seen, 
 found a new exponent in Sankaracharya — or to their Buddhist 
 rivals of the Hinayana school. Sankaracharya had defeated 
 the Jains in Southern India and completed the overthrow of 
 
 325 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Buddhism by popularising the Adwaita philosophy of the 
 Vedanta — the theory of the ' One without a second/ which 
 was the Brahmanical statement of Muhammad's formula, 
 " There is no God but Allah." 
 
 Ramanuja, who opposed to Sankaracharya's teaching a 
 qualified form of monism, according to tradition was born at 
 Kanchi ; but Southern Vaishnavism, says Sister Nivedita, 
 " is the Vaishnavism of the Gupta Empire. It was the Vaish- 
 navism that was spread far and wide with the story of the 
 Mahabharata." ^ Vaishnavism in Southern India, from a 
 sectarian point of view, always remained an exotic : a fact 
 which is emphasised in its temple architecture, for the famous 
 shrines at Srirangam and Con j ever am have not the charac- 
 teristic architectonic symbol of Vaishnavism — ^the sikhara, 
 Vishnu's holy mountain, or the mystic blue lotus with turned- 
 down petals — they are only Saiva temples, or symbols of the 
 Great Yogi's hermitage at Kailasa, in which Vishnu images 
 are enshrined. We need not, however, take this as a proof 
 that Ramanuja's teaching had no permanent effect upon 
 South Indian religious thought, but rather as an indication 
 of the many points at which different lines of Indian thought 
 intersected each other. 
 
 The development of the Aryanisation of the South was by 
 no means the most important result of the impact of Islam 
 upon Hindu civilisation. Of far greater consequence was its 
 effect upon Islam itself. For just as in the days of Asoka the 
 intellectual aristocracy of Aryavarta began to make the teach- 
 ing of the Buddha its own by formulating its metaphysical 
 theories and giving them a Vedic interpretation, so the Brah- 
 mans of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries began to 
 shape the metaphysics of Islam, to guide its statecraft and 
 to reconcile racial and social antipathies by bringing it into 
 the Hindu synthesis. It was into this effort that the 
 finer spirits of Hinduism put their greatest strength and 
 achieved the greatest results. In the service of Islam they 
 healed the gaping wounds of their beloved motherland and 
 
 1 Footfalls of Indian History, p. 208. 
 326 
 
EFFECT OF MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 won back by spiritual weapons what they had lost on the 
 battlefield. 
 
 We have already seen how Islam, directly or indirectly, had 
 been gathering spiritual nourishment from India, partly by 
 intellectual intercourse and partly by racial assimilation, even 
 before Muhammadan sovereignty was finally established on 
 Indian soil. It is not, however, easy to demonstrate by 
 concrete illustrations the subtle effect of such spiritual and 
 physical intercourse upon the early development of Islam. 
 In its early stages a new religion, when it is gathering to itself 
 material from many sources, does not leave behind many 
 traces of the process of its spiritual growth for historians to 
 analyse. But the material for the study of the impact of 
 Hinduism upon Islam, and vice versa, after the Muhammadan 
 conquest is abundant, especially from the fourteenth century 
 onward, when independent dynasties, mostly of Indian descent, 
 began to set themselves up in the more distant provinces of 
 the Delhi Empire. From that time the craftsmen of these 
 Indo-Muhammadan courts began to revive the finest traditions 
 of Hindu culture in their wonderful mosques, palaces, public 
 gardens, wells, bathing-places, and irrigation works, conse- 
 crated, as of old, to the service of the One God whom Brahmans 
 worshipped as Ishvara, or Narain, Muhammadans as Allah. 
 In the heroic spirit of that noble Rajput lady, the mother of 
 Firuz Shah, India surrendered her body to the Muhammadan 
 conqueror that from her womb a new Islam might be born, 
 and through her self-sacrifice the sufferings of Aryavarta might 
 be mitigated. This new Islamic culture, which began when 
 Mahmud of Ghazni made the royal craftsmen of Mathura and 
 Kanauj build for him the mosque of ' the Celestial Bride,' is in 
 ever3rthing but name a Hindu Renaissance, Ahmadabad, the 
 capital of Muhammadan Gujerat, was created by the royal 
 craftsmen of Rajputana ; the Gaur of the Musalman Sultans 
 was a new lyakhnauti ; Benares was the mother of Jaunpur ; 
 Dhar the mother of Mandu ; the royal craftsmen of the 
 Vijayanagar rajas built the capital of the Muhammadan 
 dynasty of Bijapur. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Each of these Muhammadan royal cities developed distinc- 
 tive types of building derived from the local characteristics 
 of the parent Hindu cities. There was an interchange of 
 ideas between different parts of Muhammadan India, Gaur, 
 for instance, was in touch with the west coast through her 
 maritime connections. Persia was a province of Aryan India, 
 and there had been a constant interchange of ideas between 
 Ariana and Aryavarta for thousands of years. The ' Sara- 
 cenic ' architecture of Persia was founded upon the old Bud- 
 dhist biiilding traditions which India had given to Western 
 Asia : the pointed arch and the half-domed porches and 
 windows of Persian mosques were an adaptation of the niched 
 shrines in which Buddhist images were placed. The mullas, 
 having satisfied their conscience by destroying the hated 
 images, converted Buddhist temples into mosques and adopted 
 the empty niches as a symbol of the true faith, so that gradually 
 the niche with the pointed arch became an essential feature 
 in the structure of new Muhammadan buildings. 
 
 The same thing happened in India. The mullas dictated 
 their ritualistic requirements to the Hindu master-builders. 
 The latter shaped them into architectural form according to 
 the traditions of the Hindu Silpa-Sastras, and thus created 
 every type of Indo-Muhammadan architecture. The so-called 
 Saracenic architecture of India was in no sense a foreign 
 importation, as Western writers have made it, but a new 
 development of Indo- Aryan culture. To say this is not to 
 depreciate its superlative aesthetic merits, but to give it its 
 true place in Indian history. 
 
 Naturally if the Western critic, plunging headlong into the 
 study of Indo-Aryan culture, takes the perfected type of an 
 Indian mosque or tomb, as it was developed in the seventeenth 
 century, and compares it with a Hindu temple of the tenth 
 century, he will find it impossible to realise that the one 
 could be evolved from the other, or that the Muliammadan 
 conquerors of India did not inspire Indian craftsmen with 
 foreign ideas, or bring in ' Saracenic ' builders to instruct 
 them in the traditions of the West. He will assuredly agree 
 328 
 
 1 
 
EFFECT OF MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 with Fergusson that in some unexplored corner of Central 
 Asia there will be found eventually the key to the mystery. 
 But if the study of Indo-Muhammadan building is co-ordinated 
 with the political and religious history of the period and care- 
 fully followed step by step from the beginning, it will not be 
 necessary to fall back upon such a vague dilettante hypothesis. 
 
 Islam did not alter Indian aesthetic principles or add to 
 them, but was the unconscious instrument of giving Indian 
 art a new impulse, Indian master-builders had concentrated 
 for many centuries upon the idea of the manifoldness of the 
 Deity ; they had gone as far as it was possible to go in that 
 direction. Islam gave them an introspective bent of mind, 
 and they began to concentrate on the idea of the Unity of the 
 Godhead. The effect of this change of mood can be seen in 
 the gradual development of an Indo-Muhammadan or new 
 Indo-Aryan building tradition inspired by Indian ideals, not 
 by the rank materialism of the Musalman conqueror. It was 
 as if the philosophy of the Vedanta which permeated the 
 esoteric thought of India gradually became embodied in the 
 stone and marble of Indian mosques and tombs and crystallised 
 in the ritualistic forms of the Muhammadan faith. But this 
 aesthetic ideal was no new inspiration to Indian art : it ran 
 through the whole tradition of Indian sculpture and painting 
 from the beginning of the Christian era to the time of the 
 Muhammadan conquest. The exquisite refinement of contour 
 which Indo-Muhammadan tomb-builders achieved, and their 
 comparative reticence in surface decoration, had their counter- 
 parts and prototypes in the marvellous profiles and massive 
 generalisations with which the Indian painter realised his 
 ideal of the divine Buddha at Ajanta ; the inspiration of the 
 Trimurti of Elephanta and of the bronze Nataraja of the 
 Tan j ore temple is evident in the tombs of the Pathan kings 
 and in the dome of the Taj Mahall. 
 
 Nor is it surprising that the great political and social up- 
 heaval caused by the Muhammadan conquest should create 
 a revolution in the technical traditions of Indian art. Paint- 
 ing and sculpture were specialised branches of Hindu temple 
 
 329 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 architecture ; but when the higher ranks of Hindu painters 
 and sculptors — ^those who painted or sculptured the sacred 
 images — shared the common fate of Indian craftsmen and 
 became Muhammadan slaves, such specialisation would to a 
 great extent cease ; for neither figure-painting nor sculpture 
 was allowed by the strict law of Islam. The painters and 
 sculptors would for the most part become builders and designers 
 of buildings, and thus Indo-Muhammadan building traditions 
 formed a new synthesis of Hindu art. Neither is it surprising 
 that imder these political and social conditions the new syn- 
 thesis should absorb the vital impulse of Indo-Aryan culture, 
 or that Indo-Muhammadan building should exhibit an intense 
 energy and vitality while the older Indo-Aryan tradition 
 which survived in Southern India became more and more 
 decadent and relapsed into the morbid growth of the temples 
 of Halebid. The victors in the political field soon controlled 
 the richest resources of the economic and intellectual wealth 
 of India ; the older Hinduism was rapidly disintegrating while 
 Islam was gaining strength at its expense. The more conserva- 
 tive of Brahman thinkers who refused to ally themselves with 
 their new rulers might devote themselves to the conservation 
 of their ancient traditions, but it is evident from the artistic 
 record of later Hinduism that while they succeeded in maintain- 
 ing outward forms and ritualistic practices they failed to 
 preserve the creative vigour which Hinduism showed before 
 the Muhammadan conquest. 
 
 It is very significant that during this process of development 
 Islam in India was in a state of almost complete isolation, 
 spiritually and intellectually, from the rest of the Miihammadan 
 world. 
 
 From the twelfth century onward the M^ihammadans of 
 India, to whatever sect or race they might belong, though 
 they professed a nominal spiritual allegiance to the Khalifate, 
 were virtually subject to the authority of their own rulers in 
 spiritual as well as in temporal matters ; and with very few 
 exceptions these rulers entirely ignored the direct representa- 
 tives of the Prophet in Mesopotamia or Egypt. The Sultan 
 
 I 
 
EFFECT OF MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 of Delhi might defer to the judgment of the 'Ulamas on 
 questions of doctrine or Muhammadan law, but as soon as 
 Islam began to adapt itself to its Indian environment a strong 
 Indian party was formed at court whose interpretation of the 
 true faith would have seemed rank heresy to the orthodox 
 doctors of Baghdad or Cairo. With very few exceptions the 
 prayers in Indian mosques were said in the name of the reign- 
 ing Sultan, instead of in the name of the Khalif. The name 
 of the latter did not, as a rule, appear on any Indian coinage. 
 Firuz Shah created a precedent by acknowledging the temporal 
 authority of the Khalif and by sending some of his proselytes 
 to Mekka, but his personal influence could not divert the main 
 current of Muhammadan thought in India, which continued 
 to receive numerous tributaries from the ancient sources of 
 Indo-Aryan culture as its territorial conquests gradually 
 extended further and further. It was more especially in the 
 provincial centres that the tendency of Indian Muhammadanism 
 to differentiate itself from the Western forms of the faith 
 began to manifest itself. 
 
 In studying the relationship between Islam and Hinduism 
 we must not neglect to take into account the fundamental 
 differences of thought and doctrine which separated the two 
 main sectarian groups of Islam — differences which had their 
 original starting-point soon after the death of the Prophet. 
 In the conventional sectarian sense the differences between 
 Sunnis and Shiahs are centred in the dispute regarding the 
 succession to the Khalifate. The Sunnis maintain the validity 
 of the election of the first four Khalifs, the four friends of 
 Muhammad : the Shiahs denounce the latter as usurpers and 
 assert the claims of Ali, who married Fatima, the daughter of 
 the Prophet, and was the father of the Shiah martyrs, Hasan 
 and Husain. But the psychological differences between the 
 two sects went much deeper. The Sunnis were originally the 
 orthodox disciples of Muhammad, taking their stand upon the 
 text of the Quran and the body of canonical doctrine {Sunna) 
 which contained its recognised commentaries, and regarding 
 with horror the least attempt to bring an external light to 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 bear upon the exegesis of the Prophet's revelations. The 
 nucleus of the Sunni sect, first formed by Arabs only, gradually 
 attracted to itself Turks, Afghans, and people of other races 
 who at the time of the Hegira were in a primitive stage of 
 religious culture. In the ardour of their new-found faith they 
 were intolerant of any views but those of their own religious 
 teachers. The Prophet's denunciation of idolatry made them 
 furious iconoclasts. His promise of Paradise to the soldiers 
 of Islam who died for the cause was sufficient justification 
 for indiscriminate slaughter of the infidels. They banned any 
 paintings of animate beings as idolatrous. 
 
 The Shiahs, the dissenting sect, though originally of the 
 same race as the Sunnis, rallied to their side the converts which 
 Islam gained by compulsion or persuasion from the older and 
 more highly developed religious systems of Asia, and absorbed 
 into their own teaching a great deal of the mysticism of Aryan 
 and Indo- Aryan religion ; so that the dividing line between 
 a follower of Zoroaster and a Persian Shiah, or between an 
 orthodox Hindu and an Indian Shiah, was more a question of 
 ritual than of esoteric religious doctrine. The Shiah was a 
 philosopher, the Sunni a dogmatist. The Sufism of Persian 
 Musalmans was a development of Shiah philosophy. The 
 Sunnis had no desire to go beyond a literal interpretation of 
 the law, 
 
 Persian Musalmans were mostly Shiahs ; likewise Hindus 
 of the higher castes when they embraced Islam. The Turki 
 and Afghan conquerors of India were nominally Sunnis, but 
 were generally only bigoted in their attachment to fighting 
 and plunder. In religion they were opportunists. But the 
 racial distinctions between Sunni and Shiah were always 
 subject to modification by educational influences, Firuz Shah 
 was a strict Sunni in spite of his Rajput mother, because his 
 religious education was in the hands of Sunni teachers. The 
 language and literature of the Sunnis were Arabic, and all 
 Muhammadans whose religious teaching was confined to the 
 Arabic schools would in ordinary circumstances be Sunni. 
 Thus the Abyssinian Musalman was a Sunni. The Mogul 
 
EFFECT OF MUHAMMADAN CONQUEST 
 
 who adopted Persian culture was generally a Shiah. The 
 fact that the court language of Musalman India was Persian 
 partly accounted for the leanings of Muhammadan India 
 towards the Shiah sect, though the sympathies of cultured 
 Hindus would naturally tend in that direction. 
 
 The typical Sunni of the cultured classes, like Firuz Shah, 
 was often deeply religious and had a high sense of duty towards 
 his fellow-Muslims ; but his ideas of humanity and justice 
 towards ' infidels ' were as limited as those of the most intolerant 
 Brahman towards the ' impure.' He was uncompromising in 
 his attitude towards Hinduism in general, both in its esoteric 
 and popular aspects. The internal differences of Islam helped 
 to shape the course of political events in India, though perhaps 
 the Western historian is generally inclined to exaggerate their 
 importance. The Sunni faction in the Muslim courts, recruited 
 by a constant influx of foreign muUas and military adventurers 
 — Arabs, Abyssinians, Turks, and others — helped to keep alive 
 the fierce sectarian and racial rancour of the first Muhammadan 
 invasions. The Sunnis referred contemptuously to Indian 
 Shiahs and to the Mogul mercenaries of the same sect as 
 ' foreigners ' and ' new Musalmans,' implying thereby that 
 they were heathen and heretics. But the record of the 
 struggles between the numerous Musalman kingdoms into 
 which Hindustan and the Dekhan were split up in the four- 
 teenth and fifteenth centuries does not warrant the assumption 
 that religious fanaticism was the principal motive of the 
 disputes. Talboys Wheeler is hardly justified in describing 
 the process of dismemberment which the Delhi Empire under- 
 went in the time of Muhammad Tughlak and afterwards as 
 " the Shiah revolt." Sunni fought with Shiah to obtain 
 political mastery and to gather the spoils of war — not to assert 
 the superiority of his own religious formula. The bigoted 
 Sunni Sultan was as ready as his more tolerant Shiah rival to 
 accept the help of the idolatrous Hindu raja when it was 
 useful to him in crushing a Musalman opponent. He was only 
 more unscrupulous in his conduct towards his Hindu allies 
 when the victory was won, as the rajas of the Dekhan learned 
 
 333 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 from many bitter experiences. It was the hopeless mis- 
 government of the Delhi Sultans and the fundamental difference 
 between the political ideals of Islam and Aryavarta which 
 provoked the revolt of the Dekhan and drove the Hindu 
 rajas into the Shiah camp. 
 
 334 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 HE province of Gaur, which included all Bihar and 
 Bengal from Allahabad eastward, was one of the 
 first to break away from the Delhi Empire. Twelve 
 years before the death of Muhammad Tughlak, or in 1338, 
 Malik Fakhr-ud-din, an officer in the provincial army, assas- 
 sinated the Governor and proclaimed himself Srdtan ; but 
 after a short reign was supplanted by a fellow-officer, 'Ala-ud- 
 din, who was assassinated a few months aftervi^ards. The 
 kingdom was then for a time split up into two parts, each 
 with an independent ruler. Firuz Shah made an ineffectual 
 attempt to recover the province. In 1345 Shams-ud-din 
 Ilyas, who seems to have been a naval officer, assassinated his 
 master and founded the Purbiya dynasty of Bengal. In 1392 
 a Hindu zamindar. Raja Kans, seized the throne, and his son, 
 having embraced Islam, ruled for seventeen years under the 
 name of Jalal-ud-din. 
 
 Ferishta's account of the latter's conversion is very significant 
 of the state of religious feeling amongst the ruling classes of 
 Gaur at that time. After the death of Raja Kans, who though 
 a Hindu appears to have been accepted as their ruler without 
 demur by the Muhammadan officers of the army as soon as 
 he had proved himself the better soldier, his son, Jitmal, 
 called together all the officers of State and expressed a desire 
 to become a Musalman, adding that if they would not acknow- 
 ledge him as their sovereign on those terms he was prepared 
 to hand over the throne to his brother. His officers declared 
 that they were disposed to accept him as their king without 
 any reference to the religion he might choose to adopt. " So 
 that several learned men among the Mahomedans of that 
 
 335 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 country were summoned to witness Raja Jeetmul renounce 
 the Hindoo religion and profess that of the Moslems. He was 
 at the same time entitled Julal-ood-Deen ; and after ascending 
 the throne, he ruled with such justice that he became entitled 
 to the appellation of the Nowsherwan of the age. He reigned 
 with great splendour for a period of seventeen years." ^ The 
 army of Gaur at that time contained a large proportion of 
 Hindus. Ferishta mentions that one of the Purbiya Sultans 
 enlisted 5000 Hindu footmen as his body-guard. ^ 
 
 The rest of the history of the Muhammadan dynasties of 
 Gaur until the time of Sher Shah (1539-1545) has little interest ; 
 but the architecture of the capital is good evidence that Muham- 
 madan culture in Gaur, as in other parts of India, was a graft 
 upon the old Hindu stock and not an exotic transplanted from 
 Arabia to Indian soil. The temples of Hindu Lakhnauti were 
 destroyed so effectually by the first Sunni iconoclasts that 
 hardly anything but their foundations can now be traced. 
 Yet in all essential characteristics they grew up again in the 
 mosques of Muhammadan Gaur. Except in the Arabic in- 
 scriptions carved upon the walls, the mosques bear not the 
 faintest trace of inspiration other than Indo- Aryan. The 
 domes and arches are Indian Buddhist, not ' Saracenic' The 
 arch with radiating voussoirs, which Fergusson assumes to be 
 a foreign importation and makes the basis of his arbitrary 
 classification of ' styles,' does not appear in the earlier build- 
 ings : its spontaneous development from the traditional forms 
 of Magadhan temple architecture can be traced step by step 
 in successive buildings as the local craftsmen became accus- 
 tomed to the symbolism of the Muslim mihrdh and adapted 
 it to the new structural conditions created by Muslim ritual. 
 There could not be a worse method of writing history than to 
 ignore the inner moving spirit of artistic modes of expression 
 and determine their traditional character by a technical pro- 
 cess such as the construction of arches. 
 
 The technical character of the buildings of Gaur was deter- 
 mined by the fact that Bengal is a brick-making coimtr}'', and 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iv, p. 337. ^ Ibid., p. 340. 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 if we would trace the origin of the building processes of the 
 Magadha country we must first look to the ancient home of 
 the Aryan city-builders, for the lower valley of the Ganges 
 was in all probability in communication with Mesopotamia 
 when Aryan kings ruled in Babylon in the second millennium 
 before Christ. The position of Gaur made it a naval port as 
 well as a land fortress, and we learn from Ferishta that the 
 Muhammadans of Bengal were in communication with those 
 of the west coast in Malwa and Gujerat. Further evidence of 
 this fact is afforded by indications of Bengali craftsmanship 
 in Muhammadan brick buildings of those provinces. 
 
 Between Delhi and the city of Gaur was another province — 
 one of the five which belonged to the ancient Gaur kingdom — 
 stretching along the Ganges from Kanauj to Bihar, with its 
 capital at Jaunpur. At the end of the fourteenth century this 
 also became independent of the Delhi Sultans, and remained 
 so, tmder the Sharki or ' Eastern ' dynasty, for about a cen- 
 tury. During this time Jaunpur became a great centre of 
 Muhammadan ciilture. The extent to which the latter was 
 indebted to its Indian environment is evidenced by the noble 
 mosques and other buildings with which the capital was 
 adorned by Indian master-builders, Hindu and Musalman, 
 under the patronage of the Sharki Sultans, The finest of the 
 mosques, the Jami' Masjid, was completed in the reign of 
 Husain Shah (1452-1478), whose memory is still cherished in 
 Bengal for his efforts to reconcile the religious differences of 
 the Hindu and Musalman communities. He was a great 
 patron of vernacular literature as well as of vernacular art. 
 By his orders one of the Hindu courtiers, Maladhar Vasu, 
 . made what is said to be the first translation of the Bhagavata 
 i from Sanskrit into Bengali.^ Apparently Brahman influence 
 up to this time had prevented the sacred text being popularised 
 in the vulgar tongue, from the same motives which made the 
 , Christian hierarchy oppose the translations of the Bible. He 
 .jalso ordered a translation of the Mahabharata to be made.^ 
 
 i ^ Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature, p. 222. 
 ' 2 i})i(i_^ p. 202. 
 
 Y 337 
 
 ^ 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 it must not, however, be understood that the Indian masses 
 up to this time had been denied direct access to their own 
 sacred texts. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the 
 Puranas were familiar to every Indian villager, and the great 
 religious revivals of which Sankaracharya, Ramanuja, Chai- 
 tanya, and other Brahmans were the leaders were continually 
 breaking down the caste barriers which prevented Sudras and 
 others from entering the Sanskrit Tdls, in which special 
 religious instruction was given. The knowledge of Sanskrit 
 was thus widely diffused among all classes of Hindus. Husain 
 Shah's intention was to render the masterpieces of Indo- Aryan 
 literature accessible to himself and to his co-religionists who 
 were ignorant of the classical languages of India. According 
 to tradition Husain Shah was also the originator of a religious 
 cult which sought to unite Musalmans and Hindus in divine 
 worship by using a common name for the Deity compounded 
 of a Sanskrit word, Satya, and an Arabic word, Pir.^ Satya- 
 Narayana, a synonym of Vishnu, had been worshipped in 
 Bengal from time immemorial. Pir was the Arabic equivalent 
 for the Hindu conception of the Supreme Spirit. The religious i 
 literature of Bengal has preserved, says Mr Dinesh Chandra 
 Sen, several poems dedicated to the worship of Satya-Pir. 
 The Muhammadan colleges of Jaunpur may therefore be said , 
 to have assisted in preparing the way for the great Vaishnava ■ 
 revival in the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Chai- 
 tanya's ecstatic fervour roused even pious Musalmans to join 
 the crowds which went through the villages of Bengal chanting 
 the praises of Krishna. 
 
 It is also significant that Jaunpur was one of the centres of 
 the Mahdawi movement in the middle of the same century. | 
 The Shaikh 'Alai was a Bengali Musalman.^ Akbar's chief i 
 counsellor in religious matters, Shaikh Mubarak, had attached ' 
 himself in his early days to an Afghan Musalman preacher 
 of the Jaunpur school, Miyan Abdulla. Husain Shah was 
 
 ^ Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature, 
 
 P- 797- 
 
 ^ Blochmann, Am-i-Akbart, Introduction, p. v. 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI ^EMPIRE 
 
 Akbar's forerunner, and the latter's religious brotherhood, the 
 Din-Ilahi, was an organised effort to develop the teaching of 
 Islam on the lines of the Jaunpur school. 
 
 Another of the provinces of the Delhi Empire to set up an 
 independent Muhammadan dynasty in the stormy days of 
 Muhammad Tughlak was that of Kulbarga, in the Dekhan. 
 The founder, Hasan Gangu Bahmani (Brahmani), was the 
 servant of Gangu, a Brahman astrologer who enjoyed high 
 favour at the Delhi court. He had risen to the chief command 
 of the army of the Dekhan when the general revolt of Hindus 
 and Musalmans caused by Muhammad Tughlak's tyranny 
 gave him an opportunity of making a kingdom for himself. 
 Having defeated the imperial forces with the aid of the Raja 
 of Telingana, he assumed sovereignty as the first Muhammadan 
 king of the Dekhan at Kulbarga in 1347, ^^'^ 'took the name of 
 Bahmani, it is said, in gratitude to his former patron, who 
 became his Finance Minister. This, observes Ferishta, was the 
 first time that a Brahman had accepted office in the service of 
 a Muhammadan sovereign. Before that time Brahmans had 
 held aloof from public affairs and passed their lives in the 
 duties of religion and in the study of the Vedas, never accept- 
 ing an official position, though as physicians, astronomers, 
 philosophers, and historians they had sometimes associated 
 themselves with the ruling powers. After Gangu's time the 
 Brahmans of the Dekhan controlled the finances of the Musal- 
 man kings. ^ The former statement, though not exactly correct, 
 may be accepted as another indication of the gradual reconcilia- 
 tion of Hinduism with the ruling powers which had its beginning 
 in the fourteenth century. 
 
 The Bahmani kingdom was coterminous with M^aharashtra, 
 or the Mahratta country. It extended from Berar on the 
 north to the Krishna river on the south ; on the west it was 
 bounded by the Ghats. The Hindu state Telingana, or the 
 Telugu country, barred its access to the east coast. South of 
 the Krishna river the remnant of the Hindu kingdoms formed 
 a strong coalition under the Rajas of Vijayanagar, which for 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. ii, p. 292. 
 
 339 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 a long time held the Musalman at bay. The royal mosque at 
 Kulbarga, the capital, is a fine example of the creative genius 
 of the Hindu craftsman ; it marks an important stage in the 
 evolutionary process of M^hammadan architecture in the 
 Dekhan, which reached its culmination i.: the magnificent 
 tombs, mosques, and palaces of Bijapur. The covered court- 
 yard of the Kulbarga mosque is an adaptation of the traditional 
 Indo-Aryan plan of the hundred- or thousand-pillared halls 
 used for public assemblies or royal audiences. 
 
 The dynastic history of the Dekhan from the time of the 
 founding of the Bahmani dynasty until its extinction in 1525 
 is mainly a record of local wars between Musalman rivals or 
 Hindu states, often marked by great ferocity and by indis- 
 criminate slaughter of non-combatants, but not more interest- 
 ing historically than those which occurred when Hindu rajas 
 were the only combatants and settled their disputes according 
 to more chivalrous rules of warfare. Kulbarga remained the 
 chief Muhammadan capital until 1422, when the Bahmani 
 court was removed to Bidar, about sixty miles to the north- 
 east. At the end of the fifteenth century the centre of Muham- 
 madan power in the Dekhan shifted to Bijapur under the 
 Turkish dynasty of the 'Adil Shahis. 
 
 An offshoot of the Bahmani kingdom was that of Ahmad- 
 nagar, founded in 1490 by Ahmad Nizam Shah, the son of a 
 Brahman convert whose father having been taken prisoner 
 by the army of Ahmad Shah Bahmani had won for himself a 
 high position at the court of Kulbarga. The Ahmadnagar or 
 Nizam Shahi dynasty lasted till 1595. 
 
 Gujerat, Malwa, and Khandesh were the three Musalman 
 states lying to the south and south-east of Rajputana which, 
 from the end of the fourteenth century, had separate dynasties 
 independent of the Sultanate of Delhi. The founder of the 
 Gujerati dynasty, Muzaft'ar Shah, was the son of a Rajput 
 who having been taken prisoner saved his life by accepting 
 the Muslim faith. There was consequently an undying feud 
 between the Gujerati rulers and all the Rajput princes who 
 had not bowed their necks to the Musalman yoke. The two 
 
 340 
 
23. Interior of the J ami' Masjid, Ahmad abad 
 
 340 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 MtLhammadan dynasties of Malwa and Gujerat at first kept 
 up very friendly relations, but when Hushang Ghuri, the 
 second of the Malwa line, was suspected of having poisoned 
 his father, Muzaffar Shah marched against him, took Hushang's 
 capital, Dhar, and made him a prisoner. Muzaffar found it 
 politic to reinstate him on the throne, but from that time 
 there were frequent hostilities between the two states, though 
 occasionally they combined against their comm_on enemy, the 
 Rana of Chitor. 
 
 Muzaffar Shah's capital was the ancient Hindu city Anhil- 
 war, but his grandson and successor, Ahmad Shah, moved to 
 Karnavati, which was then renamed Ahmadabad. Ahmad 
 (1412-1443), the most distinguished of his line, was a doughty 
 warrior. He upheld the military prestige of his Kshatriya 
 ancestry both in contests with the Hindu princes of his own 
 race, the Rajas of Idar, Jhalawar, and others, and with his 
 namesake Ahmad Shah Bahmani of Kulbarga. But for the 
 greater part of his long reign he was occupied with a series of 
 campaigns against his grandfather's adversary. Sultan Hushang 
 of Malwa, who sought to avenge his former defeat by combin- 
 ing with Ahmad Shah's Rajput enemies and with the rival 
 Muhammadan state, Khandesh. 
 
 Ahmad Shah, however, is more entitled to be remembered 
 as a great Rajput city-builder than as a Musalman sultan. 
 The splendid city he laid out according to the ancient Indo- 
 Aryan tradition was divided into 360 mahallas, or wards. The 
 plan was based upon the village unit, each mahalla being self- 
 contained and enclosed by walls. The principal streets, the 
 Rajamargas and Mahakalas, were wide enough to admit ten 
 carriages abreast, and the houses were generally substantially 
 built of bricks and had tiled roofs. The royal mosque, the 
 J ami' Masjid, one of the most beautiful in India, was an adapta- 
 tion to Muhammadan ritual of the contemporary Rajput 
 temple. It resembles very closely, both in structure and in 
 ornamentation, the Jaina temple of Ranpur, which the Rana 
 of Chitor, Kumbha, Ahmad's most formidable antagonist, 
 was building about the same time. Fergusson, not generally 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 enthusiastic over Hindu art, finds more poetry in the temple 
 than in the mosque, though he guards himself by adding, 
 " There is a sobriety about the plan of the mosque which may, 
 after all, be in better taste." ^ 
 
 It is noticeable how in the Ranpur temple the Hindu 
 builders seem to have tried to avoid offence to Musalman 
 susceptibilities by omitting the usual sciilptured ornamenta- 
 tion on the exterior of the domes. Perhaps many of them 
 had been previously employed in building mosques and had 
 adopted the Musalman rule of leaving the exterior of the 
 domes without carving of any kind, just as Hindu temple- 
 builders of the present day often take suggestions from the 
 * Gothic ' and ' Classic ' buildings of the Public Works Depart- 
 ment.^ But many Jaina and Hindu teachers both before and 
 after the Muhammadan invasions had condemned the ritualistic 
 use of images as contrary to the true spirit of Vedic philosophy. 
 Probably it was with the object of reconciling Indo- Aryan 
 religion with Islam that Jaidev in the thirteenth century and 
 Ramanand in the fourteenth were as emphatic as the muUas 
 in denouncing idolatry. Chaitanya's mission would not have 
 been so indulgently regarded by Muhammadan officials if he 
 had not avoided giving offence on this point. Kabir, the Hindu 
 weaver, was so strong in his protest against image-worship 
 that Muhammadans disputed with Hindus for the honour of 
 performing his funeral rites. Nanak, the first guru of the 
 Sikhs, taught the vanity of image-worship ; the tenth guru, 
 Govind Singh, absolutely prohibited it. 
 
 Thus, although Hinduism as a whole clung tenaciously to 
 its ancient tradition of popular symbolism, the Hindu master- 
 builders, who were the interpreters of the Sastras of temple 
 craftsmanship, were not uninfluenced by Islamic doctrine, and 
 in the districts where Muhammadanism was strong the manda- 
 pam of a temple built after the fourteenth century can hardly 
 be distinguished from the porch of a mosque. On the sacred 
 
 ^ Indian Architecture, 2nd edit., vol. ii, p. 232. 
 
 3 It must be said to the credit of the Indian master-builders that their 
 adaptations are generally more Gothic and Classic in spirit than the originals. 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 hill of Palitana most of the domes of Jaina temples are what 
 archaeologists describe as ' Pathan,' though they have not 
 the remotest connection with Pathan craftsmanship. They 
 are only Hindu domes with a plain instead of a sculptured 
 exterior, illustrating the process by which the Hindu captives 
 of Musalman sovereigns from the time of Mahmud of Ghazni 
 adapted Indo-Aryan building traditions to the ritual of Islam 
 and created what is misnamed ' Pathan ' architecture. 
 
 The territory comprised in the Musalman kingdom of 
 Gujerat is particularly rich in remains of Indo-Aryan civilisa- 
 tion, both before and after Muhammadan times. The Muham- 
 madans, as in other provinces, destroyed the temples, only to 
 rebuild them as mosques. Under the independent Musalman 
 dynasty the traditions of Rajput polity, which had been 
 suppressed so long as Gujerat was a province of the Delhi 
 Empire, were revived. Ahmad Shah followed the Indo-Aryan 
 practice of establishing his soldiers upon the land instead of 
 paying them wages as mercenaries. Outside the chief towns 
 Hinduism continued to flourish, and the Musalman land- 
 system did not disturb to a great extent the old relationship 
 between the freehold ryotwari and the ruling power. 
 
 Under Alimad Shah's successors Gujerat rose to be one of 
 the most powerful of the Musalman kingdoms of Hindustan. 
 Mahmud Begarah (1459-1511) reduced two of the strongest 
 Rajput hill-fortresses, Girnar or Junaghar, and Champanir, 
 which had held out for several centuries. The Musalman 
 victor, stung perhaps by taunts reminding him of his Rajput 
 ancestor's apostasy, was inflexible towards the two Hindu 
 rajas when they fell into his hands. They were given the 
 choice of accepting Islam or death. Girnar preferred to live ; 
 Champanir and his minister, who were both wounded in the 
 last desperate rush, after the dread sacrifice of Rajput royalty 
 had been performed, suffered death. 
 
 The Ranas of Chitor, with the flower of Rajput chivalry, 
 which rallied under their banner, still kept up the struggle^ of 
 centuries, and were at constant war with Gujerat or with 
 Malwa, or with both, swooping down from the hills of Mewar 
 
 343 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 when occasion offered and returning to the shelter of their 
 ancestral strongholds, sometimes laden with the spoils of 
 victory, sometimes with the avenging Musalman in hot pursuit. 
 In 1418 Kumbha Rana defeated the combined armies of 
 Gujerat and Malwa, In 1440 Mahmud Khilji of Malwa made 
 a desperate assault upon the Chitor citadel, but was driven 
 back by Kumbha Rana, who built the magnificent Jaya 
 stambha, 122 feet high, to celebrate his victory. This long 
 period of hostility was, however, broken in the sixteenth 
 century when Ratan Singh of Chitor and Bahadur Shah of 
 Gujerat joined in assisting the Rajputs of Malwa to put an 
 end to the impossible rule of the Afghan Sultan Mahmud. 
 
 In the middle of the fifteenth century Gujerat and Malwa 
 played the most important part in the politics of Hindustan, 
 for the Sultanate of Delhi shrank into a second-rate Muham- 
 madan power after the sack of the city by Timur. In 1509 
 Sikandar Lodi of Delhi sent an embassy with rich presents to 
 Ahmadabad to congratulate Mahmud Shah Begarah on his 
 victories over the infidel — ^the first occasion on which the Delhi 
 Sultanate had recognised the independence of Gujerat. The 
 fame of the Rajput Sultan even reached to the court of Persia, 
 and in 15 11 Shah Ismail sent a Turkish officer on a (:ompli- 
 mentary mission to Ahmadabad ; but Mahmud died before the 
 envoy could obtain an audience.^ 
 
 The long reign of Mahmud Shah Begarah is also memorable 
 for the appearance of the Portuguese upon Indian soil — ^the 
 first Europeans who had gained a footing there since the days 
 of Alexander the Great. In 1498 the three ships of Vasco da 
 Gama, after a perilous voyage round the Cape, arrived off the 
 coast of Malabar, and Don Vasco and his officers, bearing a 
 letter from King Bmanuel of Portugal, were received first by 
 the Brahman ministers of the Zamorin of Calicut in the mauda- 
 pam of the temple, and afterwards by the Zamorin himself at 
 his palace. But the not unnatural suspicions aroused by the 
 appearance of the mysterious foreigners and the high-handed 
 action of the Portuguese in seizing some fishermen as hostages 
 1 Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iv, p. 77. 
 
 344 
 
25. Tower of Victory, Chitor 
 
 344 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 led to hostilities, and Vasco da Gama was compelled to 
 return to Lisbon with the loss of two-thirds of his crews, only 
 bringing his Indian captives to bear witness to his great 
 discovery. 
 
 A second and larger expedition under Alvarez Cabral suc- 
 ceeded in obtaining the Zamorin's permission to establish a 
 factory at Calicut, but this was burnt down by an exasperated 
 mob when the Portuguese appropriated the cargo of a Musal- 
 man merchant ship. Cabral by way of reprisals bombarded 
 Calicut and burnt the Indian shipping lying in the harbour. 
 He then opened negotiations with some of the neighbouring 
 Hindu princes through a Brahman yogi, and with their aid 
 obtained the merchandise he wanted. The yogi, it is said, 
 afterwards became a Christian. 
 
 The subsequent conduct of the Portuguese seems to have 
 justified their association in the minds of the inhabitants of 
 Malabar with the native pirates who at that time were the 
 terror of the Indian seas. Vasco da Gama returned in 1502 
 with a well-armed fleet, and promptly began to imitate the 
 military and naval code of the pagan by burning and sinking 
 every Musalman ship, armed or unarmed, he met — sparing 
 neither women nor children except a few who were rescued 
 to be baptized as Christians. The Raja of Cochin, impressed 
 by the Portuguese defiance of the Musalman power, allowed 
 them to build a fort and factory at Cochin, and acknowledged 
 himself as a vassal of King Emanuel. This brought upon the 
 Raja an attack from the Zamorin of Calicut and his allies, 
 which was, however, unsuccessful. From that time the Portu- 
 guese began to be firmly established in their Indian possessions 
 under the famous viceroy Alfonso da Albuquerque, who seized 
 Goa and drove out a colony of traders planted there by the 
 Sultan of Bijapur. The Portuguese territory was protected 
 on the land side by the almost impassable forests and mountains 
 of the Western Ghats, and thus was admirably adapted for 
 colonisation by a strong naval power. 
 
 Naturally the Musalman authorities at Gujerat were not 
 pleased with the proceedings of the European intruders and 
 
 345 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 did their best to support their co-rehgionists. The Mamluk 
 Sultan of Egypt, whose commerce with India was interrupted 
 by the Portuguese rovers, fitted out a great fleet in the Red 
 Sea and sent a message to the Sultan of Gujerat requesting 
 his co-operation in exterminating the infidel who " had usurped 
 the dominion of the ocean." Mahmud Begarah, whose sea- 
 ports were threatened by the Portuguese, ordered his admiral 
 to act in concert with the Egyptian Sultan's fleet. In the 
 first engagement, off the port of Choul, south of Bombay, the 
 Portuguese flag-ship was sunk, and, according to the Musalman 
 historian, " three or four thousand Portuguese infidels were 
 at the same time sent to the infernal regions." The Viceroy 
 of Goa thereupon sailed with the rest of his ships to Diu and 
 took his revenge upon the pagans by practically annihilating 
 the Egyptian or Turkish fleet. The Gujerati Sultans after 
 this demonstration of the naval strength of Portugal thought 
 it politic to make terms with the enemies of Islam. 
 
 Bahadur Shah lost most of his territory in a war with the 
 Moguls, and in return for some assistance rendered by the 
 Portuguese in recovering it he allowed the latter to build a 
 fort upon the island of Diu. Subsequently, however, he was 
 so annoyed by the depredations of the Portuguese armed 
 merchantmen that he sent an embassy to Constantinople 
 to ask for the assistance of a Turkish fleet in expelling the 
 Europeans, but before the fleet arrived he was killed by the 
 Portuguese in an affray in the harbour of Diu. In a subse- 
 quent siege the fort was heroically defended by the Portuguese 
 against the Turkish forces. The Turks only succeeded in 
 alienating their Indian allies by their brutal behaviour and 
 were compelled to withdraw. Dynastic troubles and a suc- 
 cession of incompetent rulers in the sixteenth century reduced 
 Gujerat to a state of anarchy. In 1572 Muzaffar Shah III 
 abdicated, and his Sultanate was added to the empire of the 
 Moguls. 
 
 We must now go back to the early history of the two other 
 independent Musalman states which pla3^ed a more or less 
 prominent part in the events of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 centuries, Malwa and Kliandesh. The Malwa dynasty was 
 Afghan by race and Sunni in religious dogma, the founder, 
 Dilawar Shah, claiming relationship with the Ghuri dynasty 
 of Delhi and with the Sultan Shahab-ud-din of Damascus. 
 Racial antagonism would therefore account for the frequent 
 quarrels with the Rajput dynasty of Gujerat, without regard 
 to the sectarian differences between the two Musalman houses. 
 Malwa was one of the earliest and most important centres of 
 Indo- Aryan culture, its great university at Ujjain being already 
 famous in the days of the Buddha. The province was con- 
 quered by Ghiyas-ud-din early in the fourteenth century. It 
 was ruled from Delhi by provincial governors until 1401, when 
 Dilawar Ghuri seized the opportunity of the overthrow of the 
 Delhi Sultans by Timur to declare his independence. 
 
 The first seat of the Musalman government was Dhar, the 
 ancient Hindu capital. But Hushang Shah, the second Sultan 
 (1405-1432), after his defeat by Muzaffar Shah of Gujerat 
 removed his court to Mandu, a noble plateau about thirty 
 miles in circumference separated from the surrounding plains 
 by deep ravines and high cliffs, easily made impregnable by 
 artificial defences. It was, like Chitor, one of those natural 
 fortresses characteristic of that part of India, extremely diffi- 
 cult of access for an enemy, but surrounded by fertile plains 
 which seemed designed by the Creator for the development of 
 the Aryan patriarchal ideal and the cult of Vishnu — ^the 
 Protector of the Aryan people — ^where the herdsmen could 
 graze their cattle and the ryots till their lands around the 
 citadel — ^the sacred hill — ^while the Kshatriya warriors kept 
 watch and ward from the fortress walls and gopurams. The 
 extent of the plateau and the broken country at the foot of 
 it made the complete investment of the fortress impossible 
 except for a very large army. There was a plentiful supply 
 both of water and forage within the fortress walls. 
 
 Malwa, besides its sacred hill, had also — like every Indo- 
 Aryan state — its sacred river, the Narbada, along whose banks 
 Vedic rishis had meditated in their rock-cut hermitages, 
 succeeded by many generations of pious Hindus, Jains, and 
 
 347 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Buddhists. Here also Muhammadan pus, infected by the 
 same religious spirit, took up their solitary abode, holding 
 communion with the Deity Who regards not forms and cere- 
 monies. At Mandu Hushang's Indian master-builders built 
 him a splendid fort and palace, a J ami' Masjid, dharmasalas 
 and reservoirs, and a royal city such as their forefathers had 
 built for many successive Indo-Arj'-an dynasties, only adapting 
 themselves to the puritanical sentiment of the Sunni sect by 
 the strictest reticence in decorative detail, so that, in archaeo- 
 logical parlance, the style of the buildings is said to be ' Pathan.' ^ 
 Hushang directly after the death of Muzaffar Shah of Gujerat 
 took advantage of dynastic disputes in that country to lay 
 waste the territory of his Musalman neighbour and thus 
 revenge himself for his former defeat. Ahmad Shah, as soon 
 as he had seciired himself on the throne of Ahmadabad, took 
 up the challenge, and henceforth there was war to the knife 
 between the Afghan and Rajput rulers, the Sunni Sultan 
 sometimes supporting Ahmad's Hindu opponents, but leaving 
 theni to their fate when it seemed politic to do so, and some- 
 times playing from his own hand. In 1422 Ahmad Shah 
 invaded Malwa and laid siege to Mandu, investing it closely 
 on the northern side, but not being able to surround it com- 
 pletely owing to the difficult character of the hilly country. 
 Hushang accordingly took an opportunity to slip unperceived 
 through one of the southern gates, and in the disguise of 
 a merchant set out with a picked body of horsemen to pro- 
 cure the war-elephants which he greatly needed from the 
 Raja of Jajnagar, in the Orissa country, famous for its elephant 
 forests, and more than a month's journey from Mandu. To 
 barter for the elephants he took with him some fine horses to 
 suit the Raja's fancy and a quantity of valuable silk and cotton 
 goods. When the pretended merchants arrived an altercation 
 took place between them and the Raja's servants, and in a 
 
 1 Fergusson classifies pre-Muhammadan architectvire according to sectarian 
 distinctions — ' Buddliist,' ' Jain/ and ' Hindu.' To be consistent Indo- 
 Muhammadan buildings should be classified as ' Sunni ' and ' Shiak ' instead 
 of ' Pathan/ ' Mogul/ etc. 
 
 3+8 
 
 1 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 sudden thunderstorm which came on when the Raja arrived 
 the fine brocades and musHns were trampled upon and spoilt 
 by the royal elephants. Hushang and his followers without 
 hesitation sprang upon their horses, attacked the Raja's escort 
 and made the Raja a prisoner. The Malwa Sultan then 
 disclosed his identity, and the Raja was glad to purchase his 
 release with seventy-five elephants, though Hushang insisted 
 that he should accompany him as a hostage to the borders 
 of his dominions, and the unhappy Raja was forced to part 
 with a few more of his finest elephants before he got rid of his 
 unwelcome visitor. 
 
 On his return to Malwa after this exploit Hushang found 
 that his capital was still holding out, but to insure against the 
 risk of its falling before he could come to its relief he persuaded 
 the Raja of Kehrla to join forces with him. The Sultan then 
 seized the person of the Raja and took possession of his fort. 
 After this second successful ruse he marched to Mandu and 
 entered triumphantly by the southern gate while Ahmad Shah's 
 forces were occupied on the northern side, the besiegers being 
 ignorant of the Malwa Sultan's return until it was announced 
 from the fortress walls by the blare of war-horns and the 
 beating of drums. 
 
 Ahmad Shah thereupon raised the siege of Mandu in disgust 
 and marched southward toward Sarangpur through Ujjain ; 
 but the adroit Afghan, taking a more direct route, arrived 
 before him. Then to throw Ahmad off his guard Hushang 
 wrote him a submissive note proposing that they should both 
 desist from shedding Musalman blood and enter into negotia- 
 tions for a lasting peace. Ahmad Shah fell into the trap. 
 While the Malwa envoy was still in the Gujerati camp, Hushang 
 made a sudden night attack upon it. The Malwa troops sur- 
 rounded the royal pavilion, and Ahmad owed his life to the 
 gallant defence of his Rajput body-guard, under the command 
 of the Raja of Dankula, which enabled him to escape under 
 cover of darkness and re-form his scattered army. At day- 
 break Ahmad Shah with a picked body of Gujeratis fell upon 
 the Malwa army while it was counting its spoil, and Sultan 
 
 349 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Hushang was not only completely defeated, but lost a good 
 number of the elephants he had stolen from Jajnagar and a 
 considerable amount of treasure. 
 
 During his thirty years' reign Sultan Hushang was perpetually 
 at war, but though he gained some temporary successes by cun- 
 ning and treachery he was not able to overcome any of his power- 
 ful neighbours. When he was not engaged with his Gujerati rival 
 he was fighting sometimes with the Dekhani Muhammadans under 
 Ahmad Shah Bahmani, sometimes with those of Jaunpur under 
 Ibrahim Shah Sharki, and sometimes with the Delhi Sultan. 
 He died in 1432, and was buried at Hushangabad, a city he 
 founded on the Narbada river ; but subsequentlj'- his body 
 was conveyed to Mandu and reinterred there in the stone 
 vault of a splendid mausoleum, from the sides of which, pious 
 Musalmans declared, water miraculously oozed in the dry 
 season only, as if the very rocks were lamenting the death of 
 the doughty warrior who upheld the cause of Islam. In 1435 
 the Ghuri dynasty of Malwa became extinct and the succession 
 passed over to another Afghan dynasty, the Khilji, also con- 
 nected with the Delhi Sultanate. The first Sultan, Mahmud 
 Khilji (1436-1452), was famed as a patron of learning and 
 founded several colleges in different parts of his kingdom for 
 the study of philosophy and religion. ^ He continued the war 
 against Gujerat, and once unsuccessfully besieged Delhi ; but 
 he was chiefly occupied with campaigns against the Rana of 
 Chitor and the Bahmani Sultans of the Dekhan. 
 
 It is clear from the promiscuous character of these local 
 wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that religious 
 principles were seldom at stake. It was war for war's sake. 
 Religious controversy made as good a pretext as any other 
 for making war, but Shiah fought against Shiah and Sunni 
 against Sunni. Hindus fought on one side or the other, 
 according to circumstances. When Musalman war-lords were 
 tired of fighting each other they joined in falling on the 
 idolatrous Hindu; but outside the ranks of the fighting men 
 Hindus and Musalmans for the most part lived peacefully 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iv, p. 197. 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 together and learned to reconcile their religious differences. 
 Racial animosities and political disputes were the principal 
 causes of dissensions among the masses. 
 
 In the beginning of the sixteenth century the Hindu Rajputs 
 for a time regained possession of Mandu. The last Sultan of 
 Malwa, Mahmud II (1510-1530), was under deep obligations 
 to Medni Rai, an able Rajput chieftain, who had rendered 
 invaluable assistance in securing his succession to the throne 
 when many of the Muhammadan nobles had espoused the 
 cause of his elder brother. As Mahmud's chief minister Medni 
 Rai seems to have acted loyally and with conspicuous courage 
 in a position of extreme difficulty. Mahmud, a brave soldier 
 but a capricious and incompetent ruler, left the administration 
 in his hands. Medni as a Hindu and Rajput was hated by 
 the Arab, Persian, and Abyssinian officials of the Mandu court, 
 who were at the same time poisoning the mind of the Sultan 
 and plotting against his life. Medni's drastic measures in 
 getting rid of them and replacing them by Rajputs whom he 
 could trust infuriated the foreign Musalmans. At last they 
 raised the standard of revolt and sent a petition to Sikandar 
 Ivodi, the Delhi Sultan, stating that the idolaters had become 
 virtually masters of the country and were defiling the mosques, 
 while the Sultan Mahmud was a puppet in their hands and 
 refused to hsten to his Muhammadan officers and subjects. 
 It was expected, they said, that Medni Rai would soon depose 
 the Sultan and place his own son upon the throne. They 
 therefore begged the Delhi Sultan to send an army to which 
 the faithful might rally, so that Sahib Khan, the brother of 
 Mahmud, might be proclaimed Sultan of Malwa. 
 
 Sikandar I^odi was persuaded to send an army of 12,000 
 horsemen to assist the rebels, and Muzaffar Shah of Gujerat 
 also invaded Malwa. In this dangerous situation Medni Rai 
 proved himself equally skilful in war and in diplomacy. 
 Accompanied by the {Sultan he marched against the Gujeratis 
 and defeated them, forcing Muzaffar Shah to return to Ahmad- 
 abad. At the same time he succeeded in promoting dissensions 
 between the Malwa rebels and the Delhi Sultan's general, so 
 
 351 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 that Sikandar lyodi recalled his army. Sultan Mahmud there- 
 upon fell upon the rebel forces and dispersed them. Sahib 
 Khan and his chief supporters made overtures for peace, which 
 Mahmud, doubtless advised by Medni Rai, thought fit to 
 accept, ceding to his brother several forts and giving him a 
 substantial grant for his maintenance. 
 
 The Sultan's confidence in his minister after these events 
 was naturally increased ; but Medni Rai's difficulties were by 
 no means lessened, for the Musalman officials' opportunities 
 of squeezing the infidel grew smaller and smaller under the 
 Rajput chieftain's strong administration. The friction between 
 the Rajputs and the malcontent Musalmans led to frequent 
 disturbances, and finally Ghalib Khan, a former governor of 
 Mandu, took the opportunity when Mahmud was out hunting 
 to shut the gates of the fortress and refuse admission to the 
 royal party. The Sultan proceeded to invest the citadel, and 
 with the aid of the loyal Rajputs Ghalib Khan was seized and 
 executed. After this Medni Rai, says Ferishta, made a clean 
 sweep of all Muhammadan officials, so that the whole of the 
 offices of government were filled by Rajputs. 
 
 At last the Sultan, though he had no reason to trust his 
 intriguing Musalman courtiers, began to suspect the motives 
 of his too powerful minister, and resolved to disband all his 
 Rajput soldiers, to the number of 40,000. Not daring to meet 
 Medni Rai face to face with such a proposal, he sent, according 
 to the Indian custom when a servant is discharged for no 
 fault, a basket with 40,000 packets of pan, directing Medni 
 Rai to distribute them among his Rajput soldiers and disband 
 them. This clumsy proceeding deeply wounded the proud 
 Rajputs, who had several times proved their steadfast loyalty 
 to their sovereign on the field of battle, and caused the greatest 
 excitement among them. They sent a deputation to Medni 
 Rai, their hereditary chief, proposing to remove the ungrateful 
 Sultan and place his own son on the throne. The minister 
 refused to listen to such a proposal, giving the very good reason 
 that it would bring the united armies of Gujerat, Khandesh, 
 and the Dekhan to the rescue of Sultan Mahmud. He pacified 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 his angry followers and advised them to appeal to the 
 Sultan and beg him to reconsider his intention of discharging 
 them. 
 
 Mahmud, yielding at Medni Rai's intervention, agreed to 
 cancel his orders, on condition that all the court appointments 
 should in future be filled by Muhammadans, that discharged 
 Musalman officials should be reinstated, that no Muhammadan 
 women should be retained in Rajput zananas, and that no 
 Hindu should hold any civil office at court. Medni Rai 
 remained Prime Minister, but the insult the Rajput officers 
 had received continued to rankle, and the relations between 
 them and the Sultan began to be strained. At last Mahmud 
 determined to get rid of Medni Rai and another of the Rajput 
 chiefs, Salivahan, by assassination. The Musalman body- 
 guard waylaid them ; Salivahan was killed, but Medni Rai 
 escaped to his house covered with wounds. 
 
 All the Rajputs in Mandu flew to arms, and attacked the 
 Sultan in his palace ; but Mahmud with his body-guard fought 
 with desperate courage and kept them at bay. They then 
 withdrew to Medni Rai's house and begged him to put himself 
 at their head. Medni refused, ordered his followers to retire 
 to their quarters, and sent word to the Sultan that he was 
 ready for the good of the State to lay down his life, if his 
 Majesty thought that he should do so, and requested the 
 Sultan's orders. Mahmud, foiled in his treacherous scheme, 
 received Medni Rai into favour again, but the situation had 
 become impossible for both sides, and it was not long before 
 the shifty Sultan, accompanied only by his Master of the 
 Horse, his favourite mistress, and a few followers, slipped out 
 of Mandu by night and fled to Ahmadabad, relying on the 
 assistance of the Gujerat Stdtan, Muzaffar Shah. The latter 
 received the fugitives hospitably, and marched his army to 
 attack the Rajputs at M^ndu. In the meantime Medni Rai, 
 leaving garrisons at Mandu and other Malwa fortresses, had 
 gone to Chitor to invoke the aid of the Rana Sanga. Muzaffar 
 Shah laid siege to Mandu, and in 15 19 the hitherto impregnable 
 fortress was taken by assault, the Rajputs resisting to the 
 
 z 353 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 last, and sacrificing their women and children, according to 
 their tradition, rather than allow them to become slaves of 
 the Musalmans. 
 
 Muzaffar Shah, having reinstated Mahmud on his throne, 
 returned to Ahmadabad, leaving his army to continue the 
 contest with Mahmtid's Rajput adversaries. Medni Rai at 
 last returned with a great army led by Rana Sanga. Mahmud, 
 against the advice of Asaf Khan, the Gujerat general, imme- 
 diately gave battle, and headed a furious charge of the Gujerati 
 cavalry against nearly 50,000 Rajput horse. The result was 
 that the Gujerat army was almost annihilated. Asaf Khan's 
 son and thirty other officers of rank were slain, and Mahmud, 
 fighting like a lion until none of his body-guard were left, was 
 severely wounded and taken prisoner. The Rana, with extra- 
 ordinary magnanimity, ordered his wounds to be attended 
 to, and when he had recovered sent him back to Mandu 
 with an escort of a thousand Rajput horse. Thus for the 
 second time a Muhammadan Sultan was placed on his throne 
 by the chivalry of a Rajput warrior. 
 
 Medni Rai and other Rajput chiefs retired to their ancestral 
 domains, leaving the incorrigible Sultan to his own devices. 
 Mahmud repaid Rana Sanga's generosit^^ by wantonly attack- 
 ing his son, Ratan Singh, as soon as Babur's great victory 
 over the Rajputs in 1527 gave him an opportunity. But his 
 crowning act of folly was to alienate the sympathy of his 
 Musalman allies in Gujerat. This occurred in 1525, when 
 Bahadur Shah, the son of Muzaffar Shah, succeeded to the 
 throne of Ahmadabad. Mahmud then lent his aid to the 
 intrigues of a younger brother who had fled to Mandu for 
 protection. Bahadur Shah thereupon marched into Malwa. 
 Mahmud was soon forced to surrender, and was confined in the 
 fortress of Champanir, but being suspected of further intrigues 
 was soon afterwards put to death. Malwa was then annexed 
 to the kingdom of Gujerat. Medni Rai died while bravely 
 defending his ancestral fortress, Chanderi, against the assaults 
 of the Moguls under Humayun. 
 The great fortress of Mandu lives in Indian memory not so 
 
 354 
 
26. Baz Bahadur and Rupmati 
 
 354 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 much for the events of the stormy period above narrated, but 
 for a romantic episode later on in the sixteenth century when 
 Baz Bahadur, son of an Afghan governor appointed by Sher 
 Shah Sur, had himself crowned as Sultan and for a time kept 
 up a show of sovereignty. Baz Bahadur was extremely fond 
 of music, and enamoured of a beautiful Hindu songstress, 
 Rupmati, described by Muhammadan writers as the most 
 lovely of India's womanhood ever seen. Her heau cavalier 
 was, however, more successful in love than in war ; for having 
 led his army to the siege of the fortress of Garrah he was caught 
 in an ambuscade prepared by the followers of the Rani Durga,- 
 vati, the Hindu princess who ruled the country. His army 
 was practically annihilated, though he himself succeeded in 
 escaping alone to Sarangpur. The quondam Sultan then gave 
 up military adventures and solaced himself by passing his time 
 among the hills of Malwa in the company of the fair musician, 
 so that the loves of Baz Bahadur and Rupmati were sung by 
 the local bards and became a favourite subject with Indian 
 painters. One of the palaces at Mandu, with a beautiful 
 prospect over the Narbada valley, and a pavilion higher up 
 the hill, are named by tradition after the two lovers. 
 
 In 1559 Akbar, hearing of the disordered state of the country, 
 sent a Mogul army into Malwa. Baz Bahadur collected a 
 small army and gallantly defended the remnant of his territory, 
 but was defeated and compelled to take to the hills. The 
 beautiful Rupmati fell into the hands of the Mogul general, 
 who would have forced her into his harem ; but faithful to 
 her old lover she took poison and died rather than ^deld to 
 his threats and importunities. Baz Bahadur, tired of guerrilla 
 warfare and a precarious life in the forests and hills, at length 
 made submission to Akbar a,nd was given a command of two 
 thousand horse. With the conquest of Gujerat Malwa was 
 absorbed in the Mogul Empire, and Mandu ceased to play any 
 considerable part in Indian political history. 
 
 The history of Khandesh, a small Musalman kingdom in 
 the extreme north of the Dekhan, formed by the lower part of 
 the valley of the Tapti river and the districts of Berar, was 
 
 355 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 associated with that of Gujerat and Malwa. Like Malwa the 
 country was rich in monuments of Indo-Aryan civilisation 
 and full of the memories of the long centuries before Muham- 
 madan times. The record of the Arab, or Faruki, dynasty of 
 Khandesh is chiefly interesting for the glimpse it gives of 
 provincial Hfe in a typical Indo-Aryan state. At the close of 
 the fourteenth century Khandesh was a province of the Delhi 
 Empire, administered by two brothers, Malik Nasir Khan and 
 Malik Iftikar, of the Faruki family, which claimed descent from 
 the Klialif Omar. The former was the more energetic, and by 
 unscrupulous diplomacy soon succeeded in ousting his brother 
 from his possessions and in making himself independent by 
 the aid of the neighbouring Muhammadan rulers who had 
 already thrown off their allegiance to the Delhi v^ultanate. 
 
 His first exploit as Governor had been to make himself master 
 of the fort of Asirgarh, the hereditary castle of a Hindu chief- 
 tain, Asa Ahir, in whose family it had remained for seven 
 hundred years. Nasir Khan was on very friendly terms with 
 Asa Ahir, who had been one of the first of the local chieftains 
 to submit to the Musalman military authorities, and was 
 universally respected for his charitable disposition and piety. 
 Shortly before Nasir Khan's assumption of ofiice a great famine 
 had raged in Khandesh, and Asa Ahir had saved many lives 
 by gratuitously distributing corn from his granaries and by 
 employing many labourers in rebuilding the ancestral fort 
 which gave protection to his own flocks and herds and the 
 farms and homesteads of his retainers from the bands of robbers 
 which infested the neighbouring forests. He was a wealthy 
 man, possessed of five thousand buffaloes, five thousand cows, 
 twenty thousand sheep, and a thousand mares. 
 
 Asa Ahir's fort was strong, his influence in the neighbour- 
 hood was great, and he had two thousand well-armed yeomen 
 devotedly attached to his service. Nasir Khan coveted his 
 neighbour's possessions, but hesitated to attack Asa Ahir 
 openly ; though he might have fabricated an excuse for doing 
 so, in spite of the obligations owed to him — for Nasir had 
 accepted many rich presents from the chieftain when he 
 
 I 
 
BREAK-UP OF THE DELHI EMPIRE 
 
 succeeded to the charge of the district. So Nasir Khan 
 prepared a cunning trap^for the imsuspecting Hindu. He 
 wrote a friendly letter to Asa saying that two neighbouring 
 rajas had assembled large forces, and that he had suspicions 
 of their intentions. The chief fort of the district, that of 
 Talnir, was occupied by his own brother, Malik Iftikar. The 
 other one was too near to the said rajas' territories to be a 
 safe retreat. He therefore begged Asa to take his (Nasir 
 Khan's) family under the protection of liis roof, while he 
 himself prepared to resist the rajas' impending attack. 
 
 Asa gladly agreed to the proposal ; he gave orders that 
 suitable apartments should be prepared for the reception of 
 the Governor's family, and that every respect should be paid 
 to them. The next day several dhulis came up the hill with 
 the first arrivals of the expected guests — some Muhammadan 
 ladies, who were installed in the apartments prepared for them 
 and visited by Asa's wife and daughter. The day afterwards 
 it was announced to the chieftain of Asirgarh that two hundred 
 dhulis, bearing the Governor's wife, mother, and the rest of 
 the household, were approaching the castle. Asa ordered the 
 gates to be thrown open, and accompanied by his sons he rode 
 out to escort the party to their residence. But immediately 
 after they had joined the procession the occupants of the 
 dhulis, who were some of Nasir Khan's armed retainers, sprang 
 out and, after cutting down Asa Ahir and his sons, attacked 
 and put to flight the chieftain's men-at-arms before they had 
 time to recover from the panic which the murderous assault 
 had caused. 
 
 Nasir Khan as soon as he heard of the complete success of 
 his dastardly plot proceeded to Asirgarh and began to strengthen 
 the fortifications ; but acting on the advice of the Shaikh 
 Zein-ud-din of Daulatabad, his family's spiritual adviser, who 
 came to congratulate him on " his success against the infidels," ^ 
 he did not establish a permanent residence there, but chose 
 a site for a new town, unstained by foul murder, on the western 
 bank of the Tapti. History does not record whether it was 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iv, p. 290. 
 
 357 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 only superstition which prompted the Shaikh to give this 
 advice, or whether the holy man was shocked when he heard 
 the whole story of the outrage. But even Nasir Khan seems 
 to have felt some qualms of conscience, or fear of the vengeance 
 of Asa Ahir's spirit, for neither he nor his descendants made 
 use of the money and jewels taken from Asirgarh. The 
 property, it is said, fell intact into the hands of Akbar two 
 centuries afterwards, when he took possession of Khandesh.^ 
 
 Nasir Khan was as ready to use a Hindu raja as a tool 
 against a Musalman enemy as he was to compass his destruc- 
 tion by foul means. He supported the Raja of Jalwara against 
 the Sultan of Gujerat by persuading Ahmad Shah Bahmani, 
 his father-in-law, to send an army into the Gujerat territory. 
 When this expedition ended disastrously he sought the assist- 
 ance of the Sultans of Malwa and Gujerat in stirring up trouble 
 in his father-in-law's dominions. Finally this typical war- 
 lord of the realistic school was ignominiously defeated by 
 'Ala-ud-din, his son-in-law, commanding the army of the 
 Dekhan, and died a few days afterwards. His reign lasted 
 forty years. 
 
 The rest of the history of the Khandesh dynasty has no 
 special interest. The Faruki Khans were generally tributary 
 to the Sultans of Gujerat, with whom they were connected by 
 marriage. Thej^ took part in the struggle with the Moguls, 
 and the Khandesh dynasty survived the conquest of Gujerat 
 by Akbar's armies. The last of the Khans, Bahadur Khan, 
 was besieged in Asirgarh by Akbar, and held out until a pesti- 
 lence among the garrison made further resistance futile. In 
 1599 Asa Ahir's fortress with all its treasures came into the 
 possession of the Great Mogul, and Nasir Khan's descendant 
 was conveyed as a State prisoner to Gwalior. 
 
 ^ The Musalman historian omits to mention, however, that it was a tradi- 
 tion with Indian kings not to use the treasure handed down to them by their 
 predecessors, but to treat it as a reserve for times of great emergency. 
 
 358 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MARCO POLO 
 
 THK detailed accounts of Muhammadan writers, who 
 are the principal authorities for the political history 
 of India in the period we are reviewing, are supple- 
 mented by the observations of various European travellers 
 regarding the internal state of the country and the manners 
 and customs of the people. Apart from their information as to 
 the economic state of the country, none of them have quite 
 the same value as the illuminating memoirs of the Chinese 
 pilgrims of the fifth and seventh centuries, though they are 
 interesting as wholly detached criticism of foreign onlookers. 
 
 Marco Polo, who visited India in the latter part of the thir- 
 teenth century, describes the pearl fishery in, or adjoining, the 
 Gulf of Manaar, practised then by the same methods as now. 
 He is struck by the popular superstitions of the divers in using 
 magic spells to exorcise the shark-demon infesting these waters, 
 and notes the great revenue which the king drew from royalties 
 on the proceeds of the fishery. 
 
 He then describes the province of Maabar, or the Coromandel 
 coast districts, including what then remained of the Chola 
 kingdom and the Raja of Telingana's territory. His European 
 sense of propriety was shocked by the aversion of the inhabi- 
 tants of a tropical country to superfluous clothing — even the 
 king went as bare as the rest, though he had a magnificent 
 necklace of 104 ^ large pearls and rubies, a priceless heirloom 
 upon which he told his daily prayers, while the jewellery he 
 wore besides was worth more than a city's ransom ! It is 
 clear, therefore, that they had the means of dressing themselves 
 more decently. 
 
 ^ Probably, as Sir Henry Yule suggests, an error for 108, which is the 
 mystic number of a Vaishnava rosary. 
 
 359 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 The king in that part of Southern India had about five 
 hundred wives and many children. His person was guarded 
 by a number of nobles or " trusty lieges/' who when their 
 sovereign died were bound by oath to accompany him to the 
 other world by throwing themselves on the funeral pyre — a 
 custom which Sir H. Yule observes was not peculiar to India. 
 Marco Polo says nothing of the practice of sati by the king's 
 wives, but he mentions that many women, when their husbands 
 died, burned themselves along with the body, and won great 
 praise for doing so. 
 
 The people were almost exclusively vegetarians : only Mu- 
 hammadans and outcasts followed the butcher's trade. They 
 mostly abstained from alcohol, and were careful to avoid 
 contamination from the common use of drinking vessels. With 
 regard to their own persons they were extremely cleanly, 
 though Marco Polo thought it odd that they rubbed the mud 
 floors and walls of their houses all over with cow-dung to keep 
 them clean and free from vermin. The custom of sitting on 
 the ground instead of on chairs was explained to him as the 
 Indian way of doing reverence to Mother Earth. Every 
 child's horoscope was taken at birth, and in after-life every 
 action was influenced by a firm belief in astrology, " sorcery, 
 magic, and geomancy, and suchlike diabolical arts." In this 
 respect India did not differ much from Europe of the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 The people of Maabar, says Marco Polo, were born traders. 
 Parents when their boys were thirteen years of age sent them 
 out to earn their living as traders, giving them a small sum — 
 twenty or thirty groats — ^to start with. The juvenile capitalists 
 went about all day buying and selling, bringing home the 
 food they earned for their mothers to cook, but not eating a 
 scrap at their fathers' expense. At the time of the pearl 
 fishery they ran to the beach, while the big merchants sheltered 
 themselves in their houses from the hot sun, and bought from 
 the fishermen a few pearls — five or six, according to their 
 means. Then they brought the pearls to the merchants and 
 sold them again at a profit — after the usual haggling. So 
 360 
 
MARCO POLO 
 
 they were trained " to be very dexterous and keen traders." ^ 
 Evidently the Vaisyas of Southern India had a very practical 
 system of commercial education, and as they had a great 
 reputation for honesty and truthfulness it cannot be said that 
 either East or West has advanced much in that direction since 
 that time, 
 
 Marco Polo gives further particulars of the trading com- 
 munity of Southern India, and shows that in the thirteenth 
 century the country still maintained its ancient reputation 
 as one of the chief marts of Asia, He repeats fabulous stories 
 of the famous diamond mines of Golconda and the methods 
 by which the stones were collected. There were vast accumula- 
 tions of wealth in the royal treasuries, for when the king died 
 none of his successors touched the wealth he had stored up, 
 but handed it on to their children. In the Telugu country 
 were made the finest muslins and other costly fabrics : "In 
 sooth they look like tissue of spider's web ! There is no king 
 nor queen in the world but might be glad to wear them. The 
 people have also the largest sheep in the world, and great 
 abundance of all the necessaries of life," ^ On the Malabar 
 coast there was, as there had been from time immemorial, a 
 great trade in pepper, ginger, and other spices, as well as dye- 
 stuffs, such as indigo and Brazil wood. Merchants came from 
 Southern China, Arabia, and the Levant to obtain cargoes of 
 these commodities. 
 
 In Maabar a great part of the king's revenue went in the 
 purchase of horses for military purposes, for the climate was 
 unsuitable for horse-breeding and they were consequently all 
 imported from Arabia and Persia by sea. Incidentally this 
 observation throws light upon the great part which the horse 
 played in Indian political history. From the time the Aryans 
 entered the country the horse of the Kshatriya fighting men 
 and the splendidly equipped war-car of their chieftains gave 
 the Aryans an incontestable superiority over the Dravidians 
 and other races in the long struggle for supremacy. But in 
 
 1 Yule's Travels oj Marco Polo, vol. ii, p. 344. 
 
 2 Ibid,, p. 361. 
 
 361 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 India — especially in the south — ^the Aryan war-horse gradually 
 deteriorated, and the elephant did not prove an efficient substi- 
 tute for it ; so that when the Central Asian tribes — expert 
 bowmen mounted on their sturdy mares — poured down into 
 the Indian plains the Indo- Aryan cavalry was outclassed and 
 their armies were at the same disadvantage as their ancient 
 antagonists had been. The Musalman war-lords monopolised 
 the best horse-breeding grounds of Asia. The South Indian 
 kings in the thirteenth century knew by experience the reasons 
 for the enemy's superiority, and tried to make good their 
 military deficiencies by a large importation of horses, but did 
 not succeed in redressing the balance by this method. 
 
 Marco Polo had much to say of Indian merchants in Gujerat 
 — ^those of the Vaisya caste who wore the sacred thread. He 
 praised them as being the best and most truthful in the world. 
 A foreign merchant could safely entrust his goods to them for 
 sale, and they would " sell them in the most loyal manner, 
 seeking zealously the profit of the foreigner and asking no 
 commission except what he pleases to bestow." ^ But they 
 were as superstitious as the rest of the people and regulated 
 all their actions by the observation of signs and omens. No 
 business could be done except on the day and hour they found 
 propitious for it. They had a short and easy way of collecting 
 debts which were overdue. The creditor when he met his 
 debtor had only to draw a circle round him unawares, and the 
 latter would not dare to pass outside of it without the creditor's 
 leave for fear of the penalty of the law.^ Marco Polo witnessed 
 an incident in which a raja who owed a foreign merchant a 
 certain sum of money was thus compelled to satisfy the claim. 
 
 The Venetian traveller says nothing of the great struggle 
 then going on between the Musalman and Hindu powers : 
 all the countries he visited were under Hindu rule, and the 
 invasion of the Dekhan by 'Ala-ud-din's armies did not begin 
 until a few years afterwards. The western seas were infested 
 
 1 Yule's Marco Polo, vol. ii, p. 363. 
 
 * Or, as Sir Henry Yule explains, for fear of the wrath of the deity invoked 
 by the creditor when he drew the magic circle. 
 362 
 
 I 
 
MARCO POLO 
 
 with pirates, but Marco Polo does not speak of any difficvilties 
 in travelling by land. In Southern India there were five 
 kings, brothers born of one father and mother, who were only 
 restrained from continually fighting with each other by their 
 widowed mother's influence. When she died, he said, they 
 would most assuredly fall out and destroy one another. But 
 one of them, at least, who ruled in the extreme south, admini- 
 stered his kingdom well and showed great favour to merchants 
 and foreigners. Telingana had been ruled for forty years by 
 a queen, " a lady of much discretion," who for the great love 
 she bore her husband who reigned before her would not re- 
 marry. And during those forty years " she had administered 
 her realm as well as ever her husband did, or better ; and as 
 she was a lover of justice, of equity and of peace, she was more 
 beloved by those of her kingdom than ever I^ady or lyord of 
 theirs before." ^ Sir H. Yule identifies the queen to whom 
 this fine tribute is paid with Rudramana Devi, the widow of 
 Rudra Deva, the Raja of Worangal, who had extended his 
 kingdom to the east coast and up to the frontier of Orissa. 
 
 As a good Venetian citizen Marco Polo naturally writes 
 with disgust and horror of the Eastern vikings who lived by 
 the plunder of peaceful traders. But these Indian pirates 
 seem to have set an example of magnanimity and discretion 
 to others of the same profession in Europe, for instead of 
 murdering men, women, and children, it was their custom to 
 release the merchants they plundered, saying, " Go along with 
 you and get more gain, and that mayhap will fall to us also ! " 
 Their scientific method of forcing their captives to surrender 
 valuable pearls or precious stones they swallowed by administer- 
 ing a mixture of tamarind and sea-water, if unpleasant, was 
 not inhuman. The Raja of Tana provided his army with 
 horses by legalising the system of piracy on the understanding 
 that all horses captured should be considered as State property. 
 Military necessity, as in modern times, was held to justify the 
 State's condonation of piracy ; though Marco Polo thought 
 the practice " naughty and unworthy of a king." The urgent 
 ^ Yule's Marco Polo, vol. ii, p. 360. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 demand for horses for military purposes is evidenced by Marco 
 Polo's statement that no ship ever went to India from the 
 West without horses in addition to its other cargo. 
 
 Piracy was, however, kept within bounds by the maritime 
 law of India and not allowed to encroach upon the fundamental 
 rights of humanity. At the recognised ports of trade merchants 
 were safe from the depredations of sea-rovers : only if their 
 ships were driven out of their course by wind or weather and 
 went ashore, or if they took refuge in an unknown harbour, 
 they had to beware, for the seafaring population of the 
 coast districts would regard them as lawful spoil — the gods 
 they worshipped had sent them these riches, and they were 
 the rightful owners." The merchants doubtless covered the 
 risk by the prices they charged to their usual customers. The 
 ethics of piracy sank to a much lower plane when, in Muham- 
 madan times, sectarian and racial animosities were mixed up 
 with them. 
 
 Marco Polo's observations on Indian religious practices were 
 as superficial as those of the majority of Europeans. He 
 ascribed popular superstitions common to all humanity to the 
 particular forms of religious ritual adopted by Indians, and 
 was unable to understand the symbolism which gave their 
 image- worship its real spiritual significance. At the same time 
 he was probably right in his judgment that some forms of 
 Indian priestcraft were even more pernicious in their effect 
 than similar perversions in Europe ; though, like other Western 
 onlookers, he was unable to understand the deep religious 
 feeling which animated the Indian masses. 
 
 He describes the Brahmans of Gujerat as being devoted to 
 their idols, and so strict that they would rather die than do 
 what their I^aw pronounced to be a sin. They were very long- 
 lived, owing, he said, to the use of a medicine compounded of 
 sulphur and mercury. Some yogis went stark naked because, 
 as they said, they had come naked into the world and desired 
 nothing that was of this world. " Moreover," they declared, 
 " we have no sin of the flesh to be conscious of, and therefore 
 we are not ashamed of our nakedness, any more than you 
 364 
 
 I 
 
MARCO POLO 
 
 are to siiow your hand or your face. You who are conscious 
 of the sins of the flesh do well to have shame and to cover 
 your nakedness," - A similar line of argument explains why 
 chaste women of the Malabar districts even at the present day 
 often wear a minimum of clothing, or go without any, while 
 prostitutes are particular in covering their persons. 
 
 There is a reminiscence of the temptation of the Buddha 
 by Mara and his daughters in the rule observed by some of 
 the monastic orders of Gujerat. Before a novice took the 
 vow of the Order the monks sent for the nautch-girls from the 
 neighbouring temple to dance before him and try his continence 
 with their blandishments. " If he remains indifferent they 
 retain him, but if he shows any emotion they expel him from 
 their society. For they say they will have no man of loose 
 desires among them." ^ Marco Polo also noticed the customs 
 which the orthodox Jain community of Gujerat maintains to 
 the present day. " They would not kill an animal on any 
 account, not even a fly, or a flea, or a louse, or anything in 
 fact that has life ; for they say these have all souls, and it 
 would be sin to do so." ^ For the same reason they ate no 
 vegetables in a green state and spread their food only on dried 
 leaves. 
 
 The Portuguese who entered into Indian politics two centuries 
 after Marco Polo's visit were, as before stated, the first European 
 nation to come into close contact with India since the time of 
 Alexander ; but their interests were purely mercenary, and 
 their daring but unscrupulous enterprises only assisted the 
 disintegration of Aryan India which the Muhammadan invasions 
 began. It was not until the middle of the sixteenth century 
 that the intellectuals of Portugal under the zealous leadership 
 of St Francis Xavier began to follow up the noble-spirited 
 work of the pioneers of Aryan civilisation in India, but their 
 pious endeavours were ultimately frustrated by the corruption 
 and demoralisation of the governing classes in Goa. The 
 Vaisyas of the West, who had already begun to play a great 
 
 ^ Yule's Marco Polo, vol. ii, p. 366. 
 8 Ibid., p. 366. 8 Ibid., p. 366. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 part in European politics, eventually gained the supreme 
 control of all political relations between Europe and India, 
 wliich they maintain to a great extent even in the present 
 day. Indo-Aryan polity never showed greater wisdom than 
 in making both military and commercial interests subject to 
 the control of the highest intellectual forces of the State. 
 
 366 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MOGUL INVASION 
 
 E must now resume the political history of the central 
 Muhammadan power in Northern India, which was 
 broken off in a previous chapter with the death of 
 Sultan Firuz Shah of Delhi at the venerable age of ninety. The 
 state of tranquillity and comparative prosperity to which he had 
 restored his dominions began to deteriorate when the infirmities 
 of old age made him incapable of controlling the government, 
 and his relatives began the usual contest for the succession, 
 in which the Hindu rajas generally decided the issue between 
 the different Musalman factions by the support they gave to 
 one party or another. Firuz Shah's successor, a dissolute 
 grandson, Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlak II, was murdered after five 
 months. Another grandson, Abubekr, shortly afterwards was 
 deposed by the legitimate claimant to the throne, Nasir-ud-din, 
 a son of Firuz Shah. This Sultan died in 1394 after a reign of 
 six and a half years. His son reigned forty-five days, and 
 finally Mahmud Tughlak, another son of Nasir-ud-din, and a 
 minor, was placed on the throne after violent disputes among 
 the nobles, who assumed the control of the government during 
 the minority of the Sultan. 
 
 It was in the midst of the disorders which followed these 
 dynastic disputes that the governors of the different provinces 
 of the Delhi Empire established themselves as independent 
 rulers and Muhammadan India became as divided against 
 itself as Aryavarta had been at the time of the invasion of 
 Mahmud of Ghazni. The Mogul power in Central Asia, on the 
 other hand, had been thoroughly organised and consolidated 
 since the beginning of the thirteenth century by a succession 
 of able war-lords who had been watching closely the course of 
 
 367 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 political events in India, and from time to time trying the 
 strength of their armies against the Muhammadan conquerors of 
 the country. Throughout the same period the Moguls had been 
 gradually acquiring a foothold in India in the service of Muham- 
 madan sultans, who were glad to enlist these well-mounted 
 bowmen in their armies as converts to the cause of Islam. By 
 the end of the fourteenth century the Moguls, both in India 
 and in Central Asia, had settled their somewhat dubious 
 religious standing by openly professing the Muslim faith, and 
 their great war-lord, Timur or Tamerlane, posed as the champion 
 of Islam by right of birth, for he claimed descent from the 
 Khalif Ali ibn Abu Talib. In reality Timur was a Turk, but for 
 political reasons his court genealogists gave him a pedigree 
 which made him a pure Mongol and a descendant of Chinghiz 
 Khan. 
 
 In 1398 Timur, thirsting for an opportunity to distinguish 
 himself as a ghdzi, or slayer of infidels, found the time ripe for 
 another invasion of India, conveniently ignoring the fact that 
 the greater part of Hindustan was then under Musalman rule. 
 He first sought an omen from the Quran, and found it in the 
 verse : " O Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers 
 and treat them with severity." Then, calling a council of war 
 at Samarkand, he put it to his generals and other counsellors 
 whether he should invade Hindustan or China, at the same 
 time suggesting to them that the Divine decree made it in- 
 cumbent upon him to choose the former alternative. 
 
 Some of his generals demurred, pointing out the great strength 
 of the ' four defences ' of India. Others declared that as 
 Stiltan Mahmud had conquered Hindustan {sic) with 30,000 
 horse, the Great Sultan Timur, who had 100,000 valiant Tartars 
 waiting at his stirrup, was certain of the favour of Almighty 
 God if he gave orders for the expedition. One of the nobles 
 pleased TimGr greatly by pointing out that the conqueror of 
 India became the Lord Paramount of the earth. Another one 
 drew attention to the prospect of rich booty. " The whole 
 country of India," he said, " is full of gold and jewels, and in 
 it are seventeen mines of gold and silver, diamond and ruby 
 368 
 
THE MOGUL INVASION 
 
 and emerald and tin and iron and steel [sic] and copper and 
 quicksilver, etc., and of the plants which grow there are those 
 fit for making wearing apparel, and aromatic plants, and the 
 sugar-cane, and it is a country which is always green and verdant, 
 and the whole aspect of the country is pleasant and delightful. 
 Now, since the inhabitants are chiefly polytheists and infidels 
 and idolaters and worshippers of the sun, by the order of God 
 and His Prophet it is right for us to conquer them." ^ 
 
 Then the probable revenue of India was discussed. The 
 financial experts estimated it at six arbs or 600 krors of miskals 
 of silver. Some of the nobles protested against any project 
 for the permanent conquest of India, for "if we establish 
 ourselves permanently therein our race will degenerate and 
 our children will become like the natives of those regions, and 
 in a few generations their strength and valour will diminish." 
 Timur, seeing that these words made a deep impression upon 
 the council, declared that his sole object was to lead an ex- 
 pedition against the infidels so that they (the Moguls) might 
 convert to the true faith the people of that country, destroy 
 their temples and idols, and win the reward which God be- 
 stowed upon ghdzls and mujdhids. The great war-lord's 
 protestation did not seem to satisfy the council entirely, so 
 Timur called in the doctors of Islam and appealed to them for 
 their opinion. They unhesitatingly declared that it was the 
 duty of the Sultan of Islam and all the people of the true faith 
 " to exert their utmost endeavour for the suppression of the 
 enemies of their faith." This apostolic pronouncement brought 
 the waverers round to Timur's views ; all the nobles declared 
 for a holy war in Hindustan, and " throwing themselves on 
 their knees they repeated the Chapter of Victory." ^ 
 
 The great war council then dissolved. Some doubts have 
 been thrown upon the authenticity of Timur's memoirs in 
 which this account is given, but whether the words are Timur's 
 or not, the main statements have a genuine ring and may be 
 accepted as substantially correct. Timur immediately began 
 to mobilise his army. The wily Turk, in fact, some time before 
 
 ^ Maljuzat-i Tlmuvi, IRlliot, vol. iii, pp. 396-397. ^ Ibid., p. 397. 
 
 2 A 369 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 had instructed his grandson, Pir Muhammad, who was Governor 
 of Kabul, to watch the pohtical situation in India and seek 
 for a suitable casus belli — never a matter of great difficulty for 
 war-lords, ancient or modern ; but as the Sultan of Delhi was 
 an orthodox Musalman, as Timur himself professed to be, 
 there were conscientious scruples which had to be satisfied. 
 The distracted state of Hindustan during the minority of 
 Mahmud Tughlak gave Timur's dutiful grandson the exact 
 opportunity he wanted. One of Mahmud's guardians, Sarang 
 Khan, had established himself at Multan as an independent 
 ruler. Pir Muhammad, as Timur's deputy, wrote a letter to 
 Sarang Khan to the effect that the Great Sultan, his master, 
 whose fame as a world-conqueror had doubtless reached the 
 ears of the Governor of Multan, had ordered that " if the rulers 
 of Hindustan come before me with tribute I will not interfere 
 with their lives, property, or kingdoms ; but if they are negli- 
 gent in proffering obedience and submission, I will put forth 
 my strength for the conquest of the kingdoms of India." ^ 
 
 Sarang Khan received Pir Muhammad's envoy courteously, 
 but sent him back with the answer that if Timur desired to 
 take that kingdom with its rich revenue he must do it by 
 force of arms. Pir Muhammad immediately proceeded to cross 
 the Indus by a bridge of boats, captured the fortress of Utch, 
 and then laid siege to Multan, but found it too strong to take 
 by assault, so he wrote to his grandfather for instructions. 
 Timur, putting his foot in the stirrup at a lucky moment — for 
 in these matters the orthodox Musalman was as superstitious 
 as the idolater — left Samarkand in the spring of 1398, crossed ,! 
 the passes of the Hindu Kush, and marched via Kabul to Dinkot | 
 on the Indus, which he reached in the third week of September, j 
 In two days his engineers had constructed a bridge of boats, 
 and Timur, having crossed over without opposition, proceeded' 
 through desert country to the Jhilam river. Here the Moguls 
 took some time to capture a strong position on an island 
 defended by a detachment of the Delhi armj^ under the com- 
 mand of Shahab-ud-din. Having made sure of his com-;' 
 * Malfuzat-i Tlmurl, Elliot, vol. iii, pp. 398-399. 
 
THE MOGUL INVASION 
 
 mtinications with the thoroughness upon which Timlir prided 
 himself by a general massacre of the inhabitants of the island, 
 the Moguls marched southward along the Chenab river to its 
 confluence with the Ravi, near which the town and fortress of 
 Tulamba were situated. Here Timur gazed with admiration 
 upon the conflict of the rushing waters where the two great 
 rivers met, for there was in his character, as in that of his 
 descendants, that combination of childlike delight in the 
 beauties of nature and unmitigated ferocity which distinguishes 
 the primitive savage. Then with the keen eye of a soldier 
 he looked at the fortress on the other side and decided 
 that a bridge must be built for his army to cross the river. 
 The local zamindars and chiefs represented that it was impossible 
 to build a bridge over such a strong and turbulent flood, for 
 previous Mogul war-lords had failed in the attempt. Neverthe- 
 less in six days the engineers of Timur's army had achieved the 
 impossible, partly by driving piles into the river-bed and partly 
 by collecting a great number of boats and connecting them 
 with chains and rope-cables. When Timur and his troops had 
 crossed in safety they marched forward and encamped on 
 the plain close to the fortress. The chief Muhammadans of 
 Tulamba then came out and made their submission, and Timur, 
 having " filled their hearts with joy and triumph by presents 
 of costly dresses of honour and Arab horses," fixed the ransom 
 of the people of the town at two lacs of rupees, exempting the 
 Sayyids, the descendants of the Prophet, and the 'Ulamas, 
 the synod of Islamic law and doctrine. Owing, however, to 
 the scarcity of provisions, the rapacious Mogul soldiery were 
 not to be restrained from plundering the town, and in the 
 tumult which ensued the inhabitants were slaughtered without 
 mercy. Timur easily found an excuse for ravaging the sur- 
 rounding country and for butchering some thousands more. 
 He then satisfied his faithful followers' greed by distributing 
 the spoils among them. 
 
 In the meantime his grandson, Pir Muhammad, had suc- 
 ceeded in taking Multan ; but in the rainy season which 
 followed most of his horses died and he was in his turn besieged 
 
 371 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 by the neighbouring zamindars and chieftains. But on the 
 approach of Timur's army the siege was raised and Pir Muham- 
 mad hastened to join his grandfather. Timur, who without 
 wasting time in reducing the fort of Tulamba had attacked and 
 dispersed a small force of tribesmen who opposed him, and 
 captured large stores of grain in the flourishing villages of the 
 district, was now encamped on the banks of the Bias river. 
 He manifested his warm approval of his grandson's conduct, 
 and furnished him with 30,000 horses to make up for the losses 
 his army had suffered. Timur then pushed on towards Multan 
 and encamped in the vicinity of the city for four days, while 
 Pir Muhammad entertained him at a sumptuous banquet and 
 presented him with magnificent gifts, including tiaras, price- 
 less jewels, splendidly embroidered cloths, Arab horses, with 
 housings set with gold and precious stones, and gold and silver 
 vessels in such quantities that the scribes of the Sultan's 
 retinue took two days to make an inventory of them. All 
 these treasures Timur distributed among the amirs and others 
 of his retinue. 
 
 Proceeding rapidly towards Delhi, Timur was detained for 
 some time by the siege of Bhatnir, a Rajput stronghold in the 
 defence of which Muhammadans and Hindus fought side by 
 side and perished together in the jauhdr which terminated 
 the struggle. The Moguls were so exasperated by the losses 
 they suffered that they slaughtered every one left in the town 
 and fortress, and, after piling up a ghastly pyramid of 10,000 
 heads, set fire to the houses and razed the fortress to the ground. 
 The next town on the line of the Mogul march, called Samana, 
 shared the same fate, only the women and children were spared 
 to become the slaves of the true believers. On approaching 
 the vicinity of Delhi several detachments of the Mogul horse 
 which had been sent out to plunder and slaughter the infidels 
 rejoined the main body, and Timur found himself seriously 
 encumbered by a vast number of prisoners in addition to other 
 booty. Besides women and children there were, no doubt, a 
 great number of Hindu craftsmen, who were always regarded as 
 too useful as slaves of the faithful to be sent to perdition 
 
THE MOGUL INVASION 
 
 prematurely. The amirs represented to Timtlr that the 
 prisoners might become a source of danger in the decisive 
 battle now impending, if they were left in the rear with the 
 baggage. Moreover, these infidels had shown unmistakable 
 signs of joy on the previous day when the enemy had made 
 an attack. It was against all the rules of war to set them free, 
 and it was too great a military risk to detach a sufficiently 
 strong force to guard them. 
 
 Timur agreed that military necessity is above all laws, human 
 and divine, and gave orders that every man who had infidel 
 prisoners over the age of fifteen should put them to death. 
 The order was promptly obeyed, and Timur noted with satis- 
 faction that 100,000 impious idolaters were on that day slain. 
 And so zealous were the faithful in fulfilling their duty that 
 even non-combatants joined in the massacre. " Maulana 
 Nasir-ud-din 'Umar, a counsellor and man of learning, who in 
 all his life had never killed a sparrow, now in execution of my 
 order slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus who were 
 his captives." ^ Another Muhammadan historian translated 
 by Elliot 2 would lead one to suppose that the women were 
 spared, but Timur in his memoirs is made to say that " after 
 the whole of the vile idolaters had been sent to hell, I gave 
 orders that one out of every ten should be told off to guard 
 the property and cattle and horses." 
 
 Up to this time Sultan Mahmud's generals had made no 
 serious attempt to oppose the Mogul host. A body of 
 5000 cavalry had been sent out from Delhi to reconnoitre ; 
 but after an unsuccessful encounter had revealed the great 
 streng-th of the enemy it was thought better to await an attack 
 under the walls of the fortress. Though the Moguls had a 
 great numerical superiority, rumours of the terrific strength 
 and size of Indian war-elephants had caused some alarm in 
 their ranks, and before the Jumna was crossed the court 
 astrologers counselled delay, as the stars were not altogether 
 propitious. Timur, however, after reviewing the military 
 
 1 Mal}uzdt-i Ttmiln, Elliot, vol. iii, p. 436, 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 497. 
 
 373 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 situation, was of a different opinion, and knowing as well as 
 modern war-lords how to use religious fanaticism in the strategy 
 of war he turned to the Quran for a fdl, or omen, in the sacred 
 text. A verse in the chapter of the Bee satisfied himself and 
 his retinue and discomfited the astrologers, so the Mogul army 
 crossed the Jumna and entrenched on the other side, near 
 Firuzabad. Always full of resource, Timur had provided his 
 infantry with a contrivance of spiked iron, ordering them to 
 throw them on the ground in front of the elephants. 
 
 The next day, early in January 1399, the decisive battle 
 took place. Mahmud of Delhi and his general Mallu Elhan 
 marched out with 10,000 horsemen, 40,000 infantry, and 125 
 war-elephants covered with armour, carrying in their howdahs 
 crossbowmen and disc-throwers. Grenade-throwers and rocket- 
 men marched by the elephants' sides. The vanguard un- 
 fortunately fell into a Mogul ambush and was quickly routed, 
 while the well-mounted Central Asian bowmen met the charge 
 of Mahmud's centre with showers of arrows, which brought 
 the elephant-drivers to the ground, and then attacked the 
 elephants resolutely, hacking at their trunks with their swords. 
 Mahmud's soldiers also fought valiantly, but they were badly led 
 and in horsemanship were no match for their agile opponents. 
 The maddened elephants turned tail and threw their ranks into 
 confusion, and finally the whole army took to flight. Sultan 
 Mahmud and Mallu Khan escaped with difficulty and shut 
 themselves up in the fortress. Timur received the congratula- 
 tions of the imperial princes with tears in his eyes, and casting 
 himself upon the ground he poured out thanks to Almighty God 
 Who had shown such signal favour to His faithful worshippers 
 by this great and glorious victory. 
 
 Soon afterwards the Mogul army entered Delhi in triumph, 
 the Sultan having fled to avoid falling into the hands of the 
 enemy. Timur's first days in Delhi were spent in court 
 ceremonials and festivities. He had all the State elephants, 
 120 in number, and several rhinoceroses paraded before him, 
 and amused himself vastly by watching the tricks they per- 
 formed. To advertise his triumph he ordered that some of 
 
 374 
 
THE MOGUL INVASION 
 
 them should be sent to the principal towns of his empire, 
 Samarkand, Tabriz, Shiraz, Herat, Sharwan, and Azurbaijan. 
 Timur's name was proclaimed in all the mosques of the city 
 as Sultan of Hindustan, and at a great State function he be- 
 stowed honours and lavished presents upon the members of his 
 family, the amirs, and other high officers who had distinguished 
 themselves in the campaign. While these festivities were 
 going on Timur's revenue officials had been busy collecting a 
 heavy fine which had been imposed upon the city, and the 
 Turkish and Mogul soldiery were amusing themselves in their 
 own way at the expense of the infidels. A great crowd of 
 Hindus from the suburbs had poured into the city with their 
 goods and chattels to escape the marauders outside, and these 
 were considered fair game for Timur's soldiery. Timur takes 
 some pains to explain the events which followed, but students 
 of modern history will find such explanation superfluous. 
 When he issued orders that these Hindu refugees should be 
 arrested there was some resistance to the military, and " the 
 savage Turks [Timur's countrymen] fell to killing and plun- 
 dering. The Hindus set fire to their houses with their own 
 hands, burned their wives and children in them, and rushed 
 into the fight and were killed." ^ For a day and a night 15,000 
 Turks were engaged in slaying, plundering, and destroying. 
 Then the rest of the Mogul army joined in, and for two days 
 more the massacre and plunder continued. Each man took 
 from twenty to a hundred infidels as slaves, and the other booty 
 was immense. The gold and silver ornaments of the Hindu 
 women were taken in such quantities as to exceed all account. 
 Only the quarter where the Sayyids, the 'Ulamas, and other 
 Musalmans resided was spared. 
 
 When the slaughter was over Timur heard that some Hindus 
 had taken refuge in the mosque of Old Delhi and were prepared 
 to defend themselves. Such an outrage was not to be excused. 
 He immediately gave orders that the house of God should be 
 cleared of idolaters and unbelievers. This was at once done, 
 and Old Delhi was then given up to rapine and massacre. 
 ^ Malfu?at-i Ttmun, Elliot, vol. iii, p. 446. 
 
 375 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 It was, Timiir piously observed, the will of God. It had been 
 his earnest wish that no evil should befall his new subjects ; 
 but God had willed it otherwise and inspired them with a 
 spirit of resistance to military orders. Timur's memoirs in 
 almost every line might be read as modern European history. 
 
 Besides drawing a striking portrait of himself, Timur also 
 throws light upon the methods by which he and his descendants 
 have won the credit of being the great architects of India, as 
 the creators of the * Mogul style." When the massacre was 
 over and the captives had been counted, he ordered that all 
 the artisans and skilled mechanics who were masters of their 
 respective crafts should be picked out from among the prisoners 
 and set aside. Accordingly some thousands of craftsmen were 
 selected to await the Sultan's commands. The master-builders 
 and masons were retained for the imperial service, for Timur, 
 following the example of Mahmud of Ghazni, had resolved to 
 build a great mosque in his capital, Samarkand, which should 
 be without a rival in the world. The rest of the craftsmen 
 were distributed among the imperial princes, the amirs, and 
 others holding official positions in different parts of Western 
 Asia. So the * Mogul style ' and the ' Pathan style ' were 
 both the product of Indo-Aryan culture by adaptation to a 
 new environment and new technical conditions. Both are 
 directly related to the temples and palaces of Hindu India, 
 to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Sakuntala, and other 
 creations of Hindu genius. They are only Mogul and Pathan 
 in the same sense as St Sophia of Constantinople is Turkish. 
 The Turks plundered the intellectual riches of Asia, but never 
 increased them by the fruit of their own intellect. lyike the 
 Dravidians they civilised themselves by mixture with Aryan 
 blood and by adopting Aryan culture ; but the Turk of sang 
 pur has remained a savage to the present day — though like 
 many other savages he may have charming qualities, exhibited 
 at their best when he is not on the war-path. 
 
 Timur remained in Delhi only fifteen days, and then, having 
 appointed an Indian Muhammadan, Khizr Khan, as liis viceroy 
 — no doubt because none of his sons or nobles cared to under- 
 
THE MOGUL INVASION 
 
 take the ungrateful task — ^he took his departure, ostensibly 
 to fulfil his duty of waging war against the infidels of Hindu- 
 stan. The real reason was that famine and pestilence began 
 to appear in the countryside devastated by the Mogul army, 
 which made his situation precarious ; while his followers, 
 glutted with plunder and bloodshed, were anxious to return 
 to their homes before the hot season set in. Pir Muhammad's 
 losses at Multan warned Timur against the risks to which his 
 precious horses were liable in the Indian plains. Moreover, 
 Timur himself was sixty-three years old and suffered from 
 rheumatism. So, after gathering more plunder by following 
 the Ganges up to Hardwar, and by a raid into Kashmir, he 
 returned to Samarkand via I^ahore and Kabul. 
 
 He died in 1405, about five years after his return, and was 
 buried in a splendid mausoleum built by his captive craftsmen. 
 The long inscription on the ' world-conqueror's ' tomb makes 
 not the slightest allusion to his achievements as a war-lord, but 
 is most careful to give his full pedigree, tracing his descent 
 first from Chinghiz Khan and then from the amir Bodzontschar. 
 The latter had no father, according to the Mogul genealogists, 
 but was the youngest of three sons miraculously conceived by 
 Alongoa, the widow of a Mongohan prince. It follows, there- 
 fore, so runs the inscription, that Timur was descended from 
 the Khalif Ali ibn Abu Talib. " Alongoa's glorious sons 
 have often confirmed this statement concerning him." The 
 pedigree is as fictitious as the history of Western writers which 
 makes Turks, Afghans, and Moguls the greatest artists and 
 architects of India. 
 
 377 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FOUNDING OF THE MOGUL 
 EMPIRE 
 
 FOR two months after the Mogul army had left it famine 
 and pestilence raged around Delhi, and the stricken 
 city had no rulers and hardly any inhabitants. 
 Timur's viceroy, Khizr Khan, retired to Multan. Mahmud 
 Tughlak had taken refuge in Gujerat and had no inclination 
 to reassert his right to the sovereignty of Delhi. The two 
 first competitors of the old regime who came forward were 
 Nasrat Shah, a grandson of Firuz Shah, and Ekbal Khan, a 
 brother of the former Governor of Multan, Sarang, who had 
 taken the principal part in the government during Mahmud's 
 minority and now acted ostensibly on behalf of his former 
 sovereign. Ekbal having proved himself the stronger in the 
 field invited Mahmud to return to Delhi. 
 
 The latter was glad to leave his somewhat ignominious 
 position as a refugee in Gujerat, but soon found his situation 
 in his former capital under Ekbal's protection equally intoler- 
 able. So when Ekbal marched against Ibrahim Shah of 
 Jaunpur in the hope of recovering that province, Mahmud, 
 who accompanied him, went over to the Shark! camp, naively 
 expecting that the Shah would receive him with open arms 
 and acknowledge him as his lawful sovereign. Ibrahim refused 
 to receive him, and Mahmud retired in disgust to Kanauj, 
 then a part of the Jaunpur territory. Here he was permitted 
 to remain for a time without interference either from Ekbal 
 or Ibrahim. But about two years afterwards Ekbal unsuccess- 
 fully besieged the place, and then turned his arms against 
 Khizr Khan, who hitherto had remained passive at Multan. 
 In the battle which ensued Ekbal was killed. Mahmtid was 
 378 
 
FOUNDING OF THE MOGUL EMPIRE 
 
 then invited by the officers in command at Delhi to resume 
 his throne. This was in 1405, the year of Timur's death. 
 Before Mahmud's death in 1412 he was twice besieged in his 
 capital by Khizr Khan, and had disgusted all his partisans 
 by his incapacity and pusillanimity. Thus ingloriously ended 
 the Turki slave dynasty which had ruled at Delhi for nearly 
 a century. 
 
 In 1414, fifteen months after Mahmud's death, Khizr Khan 
 had established himself again at Delhi, nominally as the Mogul 
 viceroy, for the terror of Timur's invasion had not passed 
 away. He claimed to be a Sayyid, or descendant of the 
 Prophet, and was much respected on that account and as a 
 just and benevolent ruler. But the Sayyid dynasty which he 
 founded played an inconspicuous part in the pohtics of Northern 
 India during the thirty-six years it lasted. The Delhi Sultanate 
 had lost its prestige and had been shorn of its fairest provinces. 
 At times it was reduced to the districts in the immediate 
 neighbourhood of the city, and besides resisting further incur- 
 sions of Moguls it had to maintain itself both against Hindu 
 enemies and against the attacks of the numerous independent 
 Musalman kingdoms of Hindustan — Gujerat, Malwa, Jaunpur, 
 Gaur, and others. By the middle of the fifteenth century the 
 Panjab had come into the possession of the Afghans under a 
 powerful chieftain, Behlol Lodi, in whose favour Sa3ryid Muham- 
 mad abdicated in 1450. Delhi in this way recovered the 
 Panjab, and Behlol Lodi increased his dominions, with the 
 help of some 20,000 Mogul mercenaries, by the conquest of 
 Jaunpur, after a war lasting twenty-six years, which ended in 
 Husain Shah, the last of the Sharki line, being forced to take 
 refuge at Gaur. 
 
 Sikandar, the second of the lyodi line (1488-1517), did some- 
 thing to restore the prestige of the Delhi Sultanate by capable 
 administration and successful warfare. He was distinguished 
 as a zealous Musalman and a just ruler, except in religious 
 matters, for he supported the bigoted Afghan Sunnis in reviv- 
 ing the bitter feuds between Musalman and Hindu. We have 
 already noticed the general tendency among Indian Muham- 
 
 379 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 madans of the fifteenth century towards a better understanding 
 with their Hindu neighbours in religious questions — a move- 
 ment strongly supported by Husain Shah and other Musalman 
 rulers, and encouraged by Hindu teachers such as Kabir, 
 Chaitan5^a, and Ramanand. Sikandar I^odi set his face against 
 any compromise with the infidel, A Brahman named Budhan, 
 probably a follower of Kabir, who had aroused much discussion 
 by maintaining that " the religions both of the Muslims and 
 Hindus, if acted on with sincerity, were equally acceptable to 
 God," was summoned to appear at the Sultan's court and 
 defend his thesis before an inquisition of the 'Ulamas. After 
 hearing the infidel's arguments the learned men all agreed that 
 unless he renounced his errors and embraced the Muhammadan 
 faith he should be put to death. The Sultan confirmed the 
 decision, and Budhan was accordingly executed as he refused 
 to accept life on such terms. Before dissolving the court the 
 Sultan showed his satisfaction with the result by bestowing 
 suitable presents upon the judges.^ Budhan seems, however, 
 to have found some influential official supporters ; among them 
 Ahmad Khan, son of the Afghan Governor of lyucknow, and 
 one of the I^odi clan. He was dismissed from office and 
 imprisoned. The Jesuit priests of Goa soon afterwards followed 
 Sikandar I^odi's example by setting up an Inquisition, with 
 all its accompanying horrors, among the native Christian com- 
 munity, the effect being a general stampede of Indians from 
 the Portuguese colony, and a decided set-back to the cause of 
 Christianity. 
 
 Sikandar I^odi not only made a point of destroying Hindu 
 temples, but in the city of Mathura he had mosques and 
 Muhammadan bazars built opposite to the bathing ghats, and 
 ordered that no Hindus should be allowed to bathe there. 
 This arbitrary proceeding evoked a protest from a pious 
 Musalman, who addressed the Sultan in the public audience 
 hall and declared that it was unlawful for a king to interfere 
 with the religion of his subjects and prevent them from bathing 
 at the places to which they had been accustomed to resort for 
 
 * Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 577. 
 380 
 
FOUNDING OF THE MOGUL EMPIRE 
 
 ages. " Wretch," cried the Sultan, drawing his sword, " do 
 you maintain the truth of the Hindu rehgion ? " " By no 
 means," rephed the brave man ; "I speak according to the law. 
 Kings should not persecute their subjects on any account." 
 This answer, says Ferishta, pacified the Sultan, leaving his 
 readers to infer that the rebuke was not unavailing. 
 
 Apart from his narrow religious views Sikandar lyodi seems 
 to have been an estimable monarch with a high sense of justice. 
 He gave encouragement to learning, especially among the 
 officers of his army, so that most of them were well-educated 
 men, and " the profession of arms assumed a new character." ^ 
 His Hindu subjects also, says his biographer, began to learn 
 Persian and to study Muhammadan literature. He died in 
 1517, after a reign of twenty-eight years, and was buried at 
 Sikandra, the place named after him, near Agra, afterwards 
 the resting-place of Akbar. 
 
 The reign of Ibrahim lyOdi, his son and successor, is only 
 distinguished for the opportunity it gave to the Moguls under 
 Babur to effect the permanent conquest of Hindustan. He 
 gave mortal offence to all the chiefs of the I^odi clan by with- 
 drawing the privilege granted them in the two previous reigns 
 of sitting in the presence of the Sultan, instead of standing 
 with their hands crossed before them. In consequence they 
 conspired to place his brother, Jalal Khan, on the throne of 
 Jaunpur, leaving Ibrahim only Delhi and a few of the surround- 
 ing districts. The plot failed, and Jalal Khan was eventually 
 seized and put to death ; but the disaffection of the I^odi 
 chieftains was kept alive by Ibrahim's treacherous and arbi- 
 trary conduct, and finally Daulat Khan lyodi, the Governor of 
 Lahore, rebelled and sent an invitation to Babur, who had by 
 that time won the kingdom of Kabul, to reassert his right to 
 the sovereignty of Delhi derived from his grandfather, Timur. 
 
 Babur, who had already made several attempts to invade 
 
 India, was nothing loth, but knowing the Afghan character 
 
 and having good reason to suspect a trick, he first determined 
 
 to make his communications secure by a conquest of the 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. i, p. 587. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Panjab. In this enterprise he succeeded completely, though 
 Daulat Khan's shiftiness more than justified Babur's cautious 
 attitude. Babur then sent 'Ala-ud-din, Ibrahim's uncle, who 
 had escaped from prison and taken refuge in the Mogul camp, 
 with an army to attack Delhi, while he himself remained in 
 Kabul to keep his unruly Afghan subjects in order. 'Ala-ud- 
 din was completely defeated under the walls of Delhi and 
 retreated to the Panjab. Then Babur determined to take the 
 business in hand himself. In December 1525 he crossed the 
 Indus with a strong force of artillery, but only 10,000 picked 
 horsemen. 
 
 Daulat Khan, who now sided with the Sultan of Delhi, had 
 collected an army of 40,000 men to oppose the Moguls, but 
 on Babur's approach he shut himself up in the fortress of 
 Milwat and surrendered after a few days' siege. Babur, whose 
 genius showed itself as much in his shrewd diplomacy as in 
 his brilliant success in war, overlooked the chieftain's double- 
 dealing and conciliated the Afghans by restraining the maraud- 
 ing propensities of his Mogul troops, thus saving Daulat Khan's 
 household from molestation, and a fine library collected by 
 his son from destruction. As Babur marched towards Delhi 
 the dissensions among Ibrahim lyodi's Afghan followers con- 
 tinued, one of the chieftains coming out to join the Mogul 
 army with 3000 horse, but when the two armies faced each 
 other on the historic field of Panipat, in April 1526, Ibrahim 
 could still muster nearly ten times Babur's little army of about 
 12,000 horse. Babur, however, had the superiority in artillery, 
 and by long experience in war he had made his military machine 
 the most perfect in Asia, Ibrahim was young and inexpe- 
 rienced, and had made the fatal mistake of despising his enemy. 
 " He was," says Babur, " negligent in all his movements ; he 
 marched without order, retired or halted without plan, and 
 engaged in battle without foresight," 
 
 Babur, on the other hand, neglected no precautions which 
 his military experience and skill suggested. For six days 
 before the battle he was engaged in organising his artillery 
 and strengthening his position by linking the guns together 
 382 
 
FOUNDING OF THE MOGUL EMPIRE 
 
 with leather ropes made of raw hides, " according to the 
 practice of the Turkish armies in Asia Minor," He entrenched 
 himself so strongly that one of his officers suggested that the 
 enemy would never dream of attacking him there. " You 
 judge of him," rephed Babur, " by the khans and sultans of 
 the Uzbeks. . . . But you must not judge of our present 
 enemies by those who were then opposed to us. They have 
 not the ability to discriminate when it is proper to advance 
 and when to retreat." Babur's intuition was correct. Ibra- 
 him's great host came on impetuously in a solid phalanx with 
 the intention of carrying the Mogul position by sheer weight 
 of numbers. Babur marshalled his horsemen in two lines, 
 composed of four divisions with a few light troops thrown out 
 in advance and with strong reserves in the rear of each, and 
 having carefully instructed his generals took up his position 
 in the centre of the first line. 
 
 Ibrahim began the battle by a great charge of cavalry, which 
 was met by Babur's artillery and archers so steadily that it 
 failed to break the first Mogul line. When the Afghans began 
 to retreat they found themselves surrounded, for Babur at 
 the critical moment had ordered his reserves to wheel round 
 the enemy's flanks and fall upon them in the rear — a manoeuvre 
 which succeeded perfectly. In the hand-to-hand melee which 
 ensued Ibrahim and 5000 of his body-guard were slain, and 
 the rest of the Delhi army completely routed with a loss 
 estimated at 12,000 to 50,000 men. Babur immediately 
 followed up his decisive victory by sending a strong cavalry 
 force under the command of his son Humayun to occupy 
 Agra, while he himself pushed on to Delhi, which he entered 
 on April 22, 1526, two days after the battle. The Khutba, 
 or prayer for the sovereign ruler, was at once read in Babur's 
 : name at the Great Mosque ; but after inspecting the city and 
 ! visiting the tombs of Muhammadan saints and heroes he 
 joined Humayun before Agra, which was defended by the 
 Rajput troops of the Raja of Gwalior, who had shared the 
 fate of Ibrahim on the field of Panipat. The Rajputs, however, 
 in a few days made terms with Babur, and in gratitude for 
 
 383 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the protection afforded to them the Raja's family presented 
 to Humayun, as a peshkesh, or token of homage, a quantity of 
 the State jewels, including a great diamond weighing eight 
 miskals, or about 280 carats, which had formerly been in the 
 possession of the Sultan 'Ala-ud-din of Malwa. This stone is 
 generally believed to have been the celebrated Koh-i-Nur. 
 
 Thus Babur, as he writes with pride in his memoirs, with 
 an army hardly a tithe of the forces which Mahmud of Ghazni 
 and Muhammad Ghuri had commanded, obtained a permanent 
 foothold in the heart of Hindustan and laid the foundation 
 of the Mogul Empire in India. His success, however, was 
 as much due to the weakness and hesitation of his opponents, 
 caused by pohtical dissensions in the camp of the Afghan 
 ruler, as to his military genius. The events which followed 
 the great victory of Panipat will be dealt with in a subsequent 
 chapter. 
 
 384 
 
 II 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 THE TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 WHIIvB two great Musalman dynasties were thus strug- 
 gling for power in Northern India, another one in 
 the southern part of the Dekhan, which had kept 
 itself almost entirely aloof from the politics of Hindustan, 
 continued the holy war against the infidels, who since the days 
 of 'Ala-ud-din had set up a strong barrier against the further 
 progress of the arms of Islam southward. About thirty-five 
 years before Babur crossed the Indus a Turkish dynasty was 
 established at Bijaptir by Yusuf 'Adil Khan, an officer in the 
 service of the Bahmani Sultan MahmUd Shah II, The latter 
 was a weak and dissolute creature in the hands of Georgians, 
 Circassians, Kalmuks, Turks, and Moguls, who formed his 
 body-guard. The quarrels of these truculent swashbucklers 
 and the weakness of their master soon ended the Bahmani 
 dynasty, and its territories were split up into a number of 
 minor Musalman principalities, of which the Bijapiir state was 
 one. The latter, under the 'Adil Shahi dynasty, quickly aggran- 
 dised itself, partly at the expense of its Muhammadan rivals, 
 but chiefly by its final victory over the Vijayanagar dynasty, 
 which at the beginning of Yusuf 'Adil Shah's reign had main- 
 'tained for two centuries Hindu power in Southern India. 
 
 The war with Vijayanagar was a continuation of a struggle, 
 ilmost unexampled in its ferocity, which the Bahmani Sultans 
 lad commenced. About the year 1371, Muhammad Shah 
 Bahmani I in a drunken revel at court had presented a band 
 )f musicians with a draft upon the treasury of Vijayanagar, 
 .ealed with his own seal, which he ordered to be despatched 
 orthwith to the Raja for payment. The latter on receipt of 
 he insulting document had the messenger seated on an ass 
 
 2B 385 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and sent back to Kulbarga, after having been subjected to the 
 derision and contumely of the populace of Vijayanagar. He 
 then marched his army into the Bahmani Sultan's territory, 
 captured the fortress of Mudkal, and put the whole garrison 
 to the sword, except one man who escaped to bring the news 
 to Muhammad. The latter in a fit of fury ordered him to be 
 executed for having dared to survive the death of his comrades. 
 He then set out with 9000 chosen horse to wreak vengeance 
 on the Raja, having taken a solemn oath not to sheathe the 
 sword until the blood of the ' martyrs ' had been avenged b^^ 
 the slaughter of 100,000 infidels. So rapid was his march 
 that the Vijayanagar army was taken by surprise and broke 
 up, leaving the camp with its thousands of followers in the 
 hands of the enemy. Muhammad's vow was partly fulfilled 
 by the indiscriminate massacre of 70,000 men, women, and 
 children. Soon afterwards the Sultan, having received reinforce- 
 ments from Daulatabad, crossed the Tungabhadra river and 
 invaded Vijayanagar territory. A desperate battle took place 
 with great losses on both sides, but the day was won by the 
 Musalmans when the Vijayanagar elephants turned on their 
 own lines and the Hindu commander-in-chief fell mortally 
 wounded. The Raja, Krishna Rai, was compelled to seek 
 safety in flight, and the massacre of the unbelievers was 
 renewed with relentless savagery under the Sultan's eyes. 
 
 The end of the campaign was that the Raja was compelled by 
 his own subjects to sue for peace in order to put an end to the 
 horrid bloodshed. Muhammad Shah, though the death toll 
 required for the fulfilment of his vow had been far exceeded, 
 refused to listen to any overtures until the bill for the musicians 
 drawn up in his drunken carouse had been paid. Krishna's 
 ambassadors immediately paid the money, and Muhammad 
 Shah gave thanks to God that his orders had been obe^-ed ! 
 Seeing that the Sultan was in a good humour the ambassadors 
 then ventured to make an appeal in the name of humanit5^ 
 No religion, they said, required that the innocent should sufifer 
 for the crimes of the guilty, more especially helpless women 
 and children. If their master, the Raja, had been in fault, 
 386 
 
TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 his helpless subjects were not accessory to his errors. The 
 Sultan replied with the stock phrase of such murderous war- 
 lords—that he had no power to alter God's decrees. The 
 ambassadors represented that as God had bestowed upon the 
 Sultan the government of the Dekhan it was probable that 
 his successors and the Rajas of Vijayanagar would long remain 
 neighbours, and that it was reasonable to avoid unnecessary 
 cruelty in war. They therefore proposed that a treaty should 
 be made between the two powers binding them not to slaughter 
 helpless and unarmed inhabitants in future battles. 
 
 " Muhammad Shah," says Ferishta, " struck with the good 
 sense of this proposal, took an oath that he would not here- 
 after put to death a single enemy after a victory, and would 
 bind his successors to observe the same hne of conduct." 
 '' From that time to this," he adds, " it has been the general 
 custom in the Dekhan to spare the lives of prisoners in war, 
 and not to shed the blood of an enemy's unarmed subjects." ^ 
 Incidentally Ferishta mentions that this was the first campaign 
 in the Dekhan in which artillery was used both by the Hindu 
 and the Musalman armies. The Sukrd-nitisdra, however, which 
 is certainly older than the fourteenth century, refers to the 
 use of cannon and gunpowder. 
 
 Muhammad Shah's son, Mujahid Shah Bahmani, renewed 
 the war with Krishna Rai on account of boundary disputes, 
 and Vijayanagar seems to have paid tribute to Kulbarga for 
 some time afterwards, until Deva Raja in 1398 felt himself 
 strong enough to attack Firuz Shah Bahmani. The war con- 
 tinued for many years. Sometimes Vijayanagar was invaded 
 by the Muhammadan troops and Deva Raja was glad to 
 make peace by gratifying Firuz Shah's cosmopolitan taste in 
 matrimony. In his harem, it is said, there were Arabians, 
 Circassians, Georgians, Turks, Russians, and other Europeans, 
 Chinese, Afghans, and Indians from Bengal, Gujerat, Telingana, 
 and Maharashtra, and each lady fancied herself the most 
 beloved.^ At other times the Hindus overran the Dekhan 
 
 1 Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. ii, p. 319. 
 * Ibid., p. 369. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and nearly succeeded in breaking the Mtihammadan power 
 there. 
 
 Similar conditions prevailed throughout the greater part of 
 the fifteenth century, until the Bahmani kingdom fell to pieces 
 through the bestiality and licentiousness of its rulers, though 
 the Muhammadan soldiery, probably on account of their better 
 equipment, generally maintained a superiority over the Hindus 
 in fighting capacity. The Vijayanagar Rajas recognised the 
 fact by enlisting a number of Musalman cavalry and archers 
 in their armies, and by endeavouring to bind them to loyal 
 service by a scrupulous respect for their religious feelings and 
 by rewarding them, according to Hindu custom, with grants 
 of land. They lived in a separate quarter of Vijayanagar. 
 The Raja's master-builders built them a splendid mosque in 
 which they could practise their own religious rites undisturbed, 
 and the Quran was brought into the royal court when the 
 Muhammadan officers came to swear fealty to the Raja. The 
 Bijapur Sultans, equally impartial in the choice of military 
 weapons, enlisted large numbers of Hindu cavalry from the 
 Maharashtra country into their armies. In this respect the 
 contest between Bijapur and Vijayanagar was a revival of the 
 ancient feud between the Chola and Rashtraktita dynasties. 
 
 The conventional reading of the history of the Dekhan in 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has always made political 
 events circle round a contest of religious dogmas. Though the 
 differences between Hindu and Musalman and between Sunni 
 and Shiah acted as a fulcrum in the dynastic wars of the 
 Dekhan and Southern India, and to a considerable extent 
 determined the brutal character of the warfare, they had 
 hardly more influence as the originating cause of war than 
 sectarian disputes had in the wars between Pandava and 
 Chola, or Chola and Rashtrakuta. Dynastic ambitions and 
 racial animosities, then as now, were infinitely more active 
 forces both in creating the war-machines of the rival powers 
 and in setting them in motion. The Bijapur dynasty was a 
 foreign one, boasting of its connection with the Ottoman 
 Sultans of Constantinople. It was equally jealous of the 
 388 
 
TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 Bahmani Sultans of Arab descent at Kulbarga and Bidar, of 
 the Sliahs of Ahmadnagar, who were of Brahman ancestry, 
 and of the Hindu Rajas of Vijayanagar. When the Bijapur 
 Sultans tried to crush their Musalman rivals at Ahmadnagar 
 they invited the aid of the infidel Raja of Vijayanagar. When 
 the latter's war-machine became too powerful the Sunni and 
 Shiah war-lords joined in smashing it. The quarrels between 
 Sunni and Shiah were of a domestic character : they served to 
 distinguish the chief factions at court, but had little influence 
 on foreign politics. 
 
 Yusuf 'Adil Shah (1490— 15 lo), the first Sultan of Bijapur, 
 was too much occupied with the intrigues at the court of 
 Kulbarga, by which he had established his independence, to 
 enter seriously into the contest with Vijayanagar, though he 
 successfully opposed an incursion which Turima, the minister 
 who acted as regent during the minority of the Raja, made 
 into his territory. He married the sister of a Mahratta chief- 
 tain, and was zealous in promoting the tenets of the Shiah 
 sect, thus giving a double offence to his Turkish and Abys- 
 sinian officers, who were Sunnis and jealous of the favour shown 
 to Indian Musalmans. But though he openly proclaimed his 
 attachment to Shiah doctrines by altering the service at the 
 royal mosque, he forbade the customary abuse of the Sunni 
 faith to which Shiahs were addicted, and encouraged Christians 
 and Miihammadans of both sects to live at peace with each 
 other. " Holy teachers and pious recluses," says Ferishta, 
 " were equally astonished at this well-regulated moderation, 
 and attributed it to an almost miraculous ability in the wise 
 king." 1 It was in his reign that the Portuguese established 
 themselves at Goa. 
 
 Of Yusuf 'Adil Shah's character and accomplishments his 
 biographer writes : " He also was eminent for his learning, his 
 hberality, and his valour. He wrote elegantly and was a 
 good judge of poetical composition, and even sometimes wrote 
 verses himself. His taste and skill in music were superior to 
 those of most of the masters of his time, whom he encouraged 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. ui, p. 29. 
 
 389 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 by munificent rewards to attend his court : he himself per- 
 formed to admiration on two or three instruments, and in 
 his gay moments would sing improvisatore compositions." ^ 
 Ferishta's history of the Bijapur dynasty is particularly valu- 
 able, as he lived at the Bijapur court in the reign of Ibrahim 
 'Adil Shah II (1579-1626), and writes with a sincerity not 
 often found in court historians. 
 
 Ismail 'Adil Shah I, born of a Mahratta mother, succeeded 
 to the Sultanate of Bijapur in 15 10, but as he was a minor 
 the administration was placed in the hands of Kumal Khan, 
 a nobleman of the Bahmani court who had espoused the cause 
 of his father and had become Yusuf 's Prime Minister. Kumal 
 Khan first made himself popular with the foreign faction at 
 court by restoring the Sunni service in the royal mosque, and 
 then, having enlisted a large number of Mahratta horsemen, 
 began to intrigue with the officers to secure the throne for 
 himself. Ismail's mother, Babaji Khanam, knowing his 
 treasonable designs, for she and the young Sultan were virtually 
 prisoners in their own palace, took into her confidence the 
 Sultan's foster-father, Yusuf Turk, who had been grievously 
 insulted b^^ the regent and readily agreed to risk his life in 
 getting rid of him. Kumal Khan had posted his own guards 
 in the city and taken up his abode in the fort, close to the royal 
 palace, waiting for the day which the conspirators believed 
 to be propitious for carrying out the plot. In the meantime 
 he feigned sickness and remained in his room. 
 
 Babaji Khanam also pretended. Assuming deep anxiety 
 for the regent's health, she called an old female attendant 
 whom she knew to be Kumal Khan's spy, and giving her money 
 for a ' wave-offering ' for the regent's recovery sent her to make 
 inquiries. Then, as if an afterthought had struck her, she 
 called the old lady back and begged her to take Yusuf Turk 
 with her and prevail upon the regent, as a personal favour 
 to the Sultan, to grant her old retainer leave to go on a pilgrim- 
 age to Mekka, Kumal Khan received the message in good faith 
 and admitted Yusuf Turk to his presence, but while he stretched 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iii, p. 30. 
 
TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 out his hand to give the latter the customary pan he was 
 stabbed to the heart by a dagger which Ytisuf had concealed 
 under his coat. The assassin was immediately cut down 
 by the regent's guards, who also killed Babaji Khanam's 
 messenger, thinking she was an accomplice in the murder. 
 
 Now the mother of Kumal Khan, not less resourceful than 
 the Sultana, came forward to play her part in the tragedy. 
 She prevented the regent's attendants from raising a clamour, 
 and to make believe that the regent was still alive had the 
 corpse propped up with cushions on a masnad in the balcony 
 of the palace overlooking the courtyard. Then she sent her 
 grandson, Safdar Khan, with the regent's body-guard to 
 surround the royal apartments, to seize Ismail and his mother, 
 and to proclaim Kumal Khan as Sultan. Babaji Khanam, 
 supposing that Yusuf Turk had failed in his attempt, was at 
 first inclined to despair, but on the advice of Yusuf 's sister, 
 Dilshad Agha, she determined on a desperate resistance. The 
 palace gates were shut, and the Turkish guards in the outer 
 courtyard of the seraglio obeyed the summons to rally round 
 their royal master. The young Sultan came out, accompanied 
 by the two ladies, with bows and arrows in their hands and 
 clad as men-at-arms, to take part in the defence. 
 
 When Safdar Khan with his rebel guards hammered at the 
 palace gates he was met with a shower of arrows from the 
 walls. Dilshad Agha, who had previously despatched a mes- 
 senger to rouse all the Sultan's partisans in the city, was the 
 leading spirit of the defence. With a veil over her face she 
 fought as valiantly as her fellow-countrymen, encouraging 
 them with animating speeches and promises of reward. But 
 the little garrison was greatly outnumbered and many fell 
 under the musket-balls of the rebels. At last reinforcements 
 began to arrive from the city and were helped over the walls by 
 Dilshad Agha at a spot left unguarded by the besiegers. Safdar 
 Klhan perceiving this secured all the approaches to the palace, 
 brought cannon to batter down the walls, and made a desperate 
 assault with five hundred men. But as he was on the point 
 of breaking into the courtyard he was pierced in the eye by 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 an arrow, and Ismail broke his back with a heavy stone as he 
 lay concealed under the terrace wall. The rebels seeing their 
 leader killed rushed to the house of Kumal Khan, but finding 
 to their dismay that he also was dead they opened the gates 
 of the citadel and fled precipitately. 
 
 Ismail's first care when all danger was over was to bury 
 with full honours the body of Yusuf Turk. A fine mausoleum 
 with a mosque attached was built over his remains, and so 
 long as he lived the Sultan showed his gratitude by going once 
 a month to pray over his foster-father's tomb. He rewarded 
 Yusuf's relative, Klhusru Turk, with the title of Asad Khan, 
 and conferred upon him the district of Belgaum as a jdgir. 
 Asad Khan afterwards became commander-in-chief and Ismail's 
 most trusted counsellor. The Sultan's confidence was well 
 placed, for Asad Khan's loyalty and military skill brought his 
 rash and impetuous master out of many dangerous situations. 
 Perhaps in consideration of the gallantry of his own women- 
 folk Ismail was equally generous to the late regent's mother. 
 He allowed her and her family to leave his dominions in safety, 
 and gave her a large sum of money for her maintenance. 
 
 For a long time after Ismail remained suspicious of Kumal 
 Khan's Mahratta allies and only enlisted Turks and Moguls in 
 his body-guard. Though he was himself an adherent of Shiah 
 doctrines he was guided in this matter by political rather 
 than religious motives. He recognised that the Simni faction 
 was a danger to his dynasty. He would not allow any Abys- 
 sinian or Indian-born soldiers in his army, but eventually 
 relaxed the rule in favour of the children of foreigners bom 
 in India, Rajputs and Afghans. The constitution of the 
 Bijapur army, says Ferishta, remained on this basis until the 
 time of Ibrahim 'Adil Shah II. 
 
 While Ismail was thus struggling for his throne, Turima, the 
 minister who had now subverted the ancient dynasty of Vija- 
 yanagar, took advantage of the situation at Bijapur to invade 
 Ismail's territory and lay siege to Mudkal and Raichor. Ismail 
 was unable, for the time being, to prevent these fortresses 
 from being taken, for he was too much occupied in watching 
 392 
 
TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 the proceedings of his Musalman rivals in the Dekhan, espe- 
 cially the Amir Berid, who was now practically master of 
 Kulbarga and had had a secret understanding with Kumal Khan 
 in the latter's attempt to overthrow the Bijapur dynasty. 
 During the time Babur was engaged in the conquest of Hindu- 
 stan Bijapur was thus the centre of the struggle for mastery 
 in the Dekhan, the chief combatants being Ismail 'Adil Shah 
 and his loyal minister, Asad Khan ; Amir Berid, who shared 
 with the Qutb Shahi dynasty of Golconda the dismembered 
 territories of the Bahmani Sultans ; and Turima and his son, 
 who ruled at Vijayanagar, A fourth, who played an oppor- 
 tunist game, was Burhan Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar : at 
 different times he joined Amir Berid in attacking the Bijapur 
 Sultan ; allied himself with the latter and married his sister 
 Miriam ; fought with his brother-in-law on some domestic 
 quarrel, and later on obtained assistance from him in repelling 
 an invasion of the Gujeratis. It is noticeable that the brutality 
 and viciousness which characterised the struggles of the two 
 preceding centuries were generally conspicuous by their absence. 
 Religious animosities seemed to have greatly diminished. We 
 find a Brahman minister serving at the Musalman court of 
 Ahmadnagar, and even acting as the confidential adviser of 
 the Amir Berid, a professed champion of the Sunni sect.^ 
 
 A touch of humour lights up the gloomy history of Musalman 
 warfare in the description of Asad Khan's penetrating into Amir 
 Berid's tent in the dead of night and carrjdng off the crafty 
 old fox fast asleep in his camp cot, after a drunken revel ; 
 then sarcastically reproaching the " reverend old man," when 
 he awoke with horrid dreams of djinns and black magic, for 
 his intemperance and consohng him with promises of kind 
 treatment. Nor did Ismail find it necessary to exact ven- 
 geance for Amir Berid's ingratitude and double-dealing after 
 his release. 
 
 By the end of Ismail's reign Bijapur had become the chief 
 power in the Dekhan. Mtidkal and Raichor had been recovered 
 from the Hindus, though the armies of Vijayanagar still barred 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iii, pp. 57, 220. 
 
 393 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the way further south. Ismail had the reputation of being most 
 humane in the administration of justice, averse from listening 
 to slander, and fond of the company of learned men and poets. 
 " He was adept in the arts of painting, varnishing, making 
 arrows, and embroidering saddle-cloths. In music and poetry 
 he excelled most of his age." ^ I/ike Firtlz Shah of Delhi he 
 probably inherited many of his fine personal qualities from his 
 Indian mother, but he was well served by his foreign relatives 
 and partisans. 
 
 Ismail's eldest son, Mallu 'Adil Shah, a thoroughly vicious 
 youth, reigned only six months, and was then deposed at the 
 instigation of his strong-minded grandmother, Babaji Khanam, 
 in favour of Ismail's youngest son, Ibrahim. Asad Khan 
 remained in power, but serious differences soon arose between 
 the young Sultan and his father's trusted minister. Ibrahim 
 began by making many sweeping changes in the court and 
 in the administration of his kingdom. His first act was to 
 dismiss most of the Turkish and Mogul officers and men from 
 the royal body-guard and replace them by Abyssinians and 
 Dekhani soldiers, both Hindu and Musalman. Many of the 
 Musalman foreigners thus discharged enlisted in the body- 
 guard of Ramraj, the Raja of Vijayanagar. Ibrahim would 
 have none of the Persian fashions which Ismail had introduced 
 at court. He restored the Sunni form of service in the royal 
 mosque and ordered that the revenue accounts should be kept 
 in Mahratti instead of Persian. In consequence of the latter 
 change the Brahman accountants began to acquire considerable 
 influence in the government of Bijapur — another indication 
 that Islam in India was adapting itself to its environment, for 
 the orthodox Sunnis had hitherto been known as the most 
 violent opponents of the Brahmans. Even the veteran Asad 
 Khan was ordered to dismiss his foreign retainers and to follow 
 the Sunni ceremonies. He obeyed the first order, but refused 
 to comply with the second, and Ibrahim was wise enough not 
 to insist upon this demand. 
 
 The relations between Bijapur and Vijayanagar had so much 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Briggs' translation, vol. iii, p. 72. 
 
 394 
 
Tomb of Ibrahim 'Adii, Shah II at Bijapur 
 
 Tomb of Muhammad 'Adil Shah at Bijapur 
 
 394 
 
TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 improved that a year after his accession Ibrahim was invited 
 to intervene in the internal affairs of the Hindu state, thrown 
 into disorder by disputes regarding the succession to the 
 throne. The rival claimants were Ramraj, the son of Turima, 
 and Bhoj Tirumal Rai, a representative of the former dynasty. 
 The latter appealed to Ibrahim for assistance, in return for 
 which he promised to acknowledge himself tributary to Bijapur 
 and to pay a handsome sum for the expenses of the expedi- 
 tionary force. Ibrahim, on the advice of Asad Khan, accepted 
 the offer, and on arriving at Vijayanagar with his army was 
 lavishly entertained by Tirumal Rai. This betrayal of the 
 interests of the State naturally strengthened the cause of 
 Ramraj and made all the most powerful Hindu rajas rally 
 round his standard. Tirumal Rai committed suicide, and 
 Ibrahim, shortly after his return from Vijayanagar, found 
 himself involved in a war with Ramraj. This, however, was 
 not of long duration, and after an indecisive battle the two 
 belligerents came to terms. 
 
 The drastic changes which Ibrahim had made at his court 
 encouraged the intriguers to stir up ill-blood between the 
 Sultan and his faithful minister, with so much success that 
 Asad Khan fearing for his life thought it prudent to retire to 
 his Belgaum estates. The strained relations between the 
 Sultan and his most able general soon became the common 
 talk of the Dekhan, and Amir Berid, now ruling at Bidar, and 
 Burhan Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar, Ibrahim's uncle, joined 
 forces and marched to lay siege to Bijapur, partly with a view 
 of wiping off old scores, and partly to win back certain districts 
 round Sholapur which had been disputed territory for many 
 years. On the way they passed through the jagir of Asad 
 Khan, who thought it politic to make a pretence of joining 
 hands with them, but secretly despatched a trusted messenger 
 to Ismail Shah of Berar, another of Ibrahim's uncles by mar- 
 riage, asking him to come to his sovereign's aid. As soon 
 as the Berar army moved to attack Kulbarga Asad Khan 
 joined it and Bijapur was relieved. This signal proof of Asad 
 Khan's loyalty brought about a reconciliation between him and 
 
 395 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Ibrahim, and peace between Bijapur and its northern rivals 
 was hastened by the sudden death of Amir Berid. Foiled in 
 his plans by this turn of events, the Shah of Ahmadnagar now 
 formed an alliance with the Raja of Vijayanagar and the Shah 
 of Golconda. Ibrahim was now attacked from the north, 
 south, and east. In this predicament he again sought counsel 
 with Asad Khan, and acting on his advice succeeded in 
 breaking up the confederacy by ceding the disputed Sholapur 
 districts to Burhan Nizam Shah and making some concessions 
 to the Raja of Vijayanagar. Asad Khan then marched against 
 the Shah of Golconda, and after punishing him severely 
 returned in triumph to BijapGr. 
 
 The Ahmadnagar Shah, however, encouraged by his partial 
 success, soon renewed hostilities and attempted to seize the 
 former capital of the Bahmani Sultans, Kulbarga, which was 
 now a part of the Bijapur possessions ; but Ibrahim with Asad 
 Khan's assistance inflicted a severe defeat upon him, capturing 
 250 elephants and 170 cannon, besides Burhan Nizam Shah's 
 camp equipage and royal insignia. Elated by this victory, 
 Ibrahim began to create new enemies at home by his tyrannical 
 conduct towards his own subjects, and so disgusted both his 
 Musalman officers and the Brahman civilians that a conspiracy 
 was formed to dethrone him in favour of his brother, Abdulla. 
 The plot was discovered and Abdulla fled to Goa, where he 
 was well received by the Portuguese. Ibrahim vented his 
 rage upon the Brahman police officials, several of whom were 
 put to death with excruciating tortures in the great square of 
 Bijapur. His inveterate suspicions of Asad Khan revived, 
 and again the old general retired in disgust to his Belgaum 
 jagir. 
 
 In the meantime Burhan Nizam Shah had been busy in 
 aggravating his nephew's troubles by laying waste the Bijapur 
 territories and inflicting several defeats upon Ibrahim's armies, 
 while the Portuguese, whose trade with Southern India was 
 menaced by the hostility of Bijapur, did their best to add fuel 
 to the fire. Abdulla from his safe retreat at Goa entered into 
 negotiations with Burhan Nizam Shah to obtain the latter's 
 
TURKISH DYNASTY OF BIJAPUR 
 
 assistance in dethroning his brother. The Portuguese promised 
 their help provided that Ibrahim's chief support, Asad Khan, 
 could be won over. The Shah of Ahmadnagar accordingly- 
 sent one of his most trusted Brahman advisers to open negotia- 
 tions with Asad Khan ; but the steadfast loyalty of the old 
 chieftain was not to be shaken. Indignant at the reflection 
 upon his honour, he ordered the Brahman, if he valued his 
 life, to get out of his sight and quit Belgaum with the least 
 possible delay, lest his anger should get the better of his respect 
 for the laws of civilised nations which safeguarded the persons 
 of royal envoys. Burhan Nizam Shah, in spite of this rebuff, 
 proceeded with his plans, and the Portuguese, finding that 
 most of the nobles of Bijapur were in sympathy with Prince 
 Abdulla, openly espoused his cause. 
 
 At this crisis Asad Khan became seriously ill, and Burhan 
 Nizam Shah, in expectation of his death, instead of marching 
 straight to Bijapur, where the discontented nobles were pre- 
 pared to proclaim Prince Abdulla as Sultan, turned aside to 
 take possession of Asad Khan's fortress and valuable estates. 
 The delay was fatal to the success of the campaign. The 
 Brahman envoy who was sent again with the object of seducing 
 Asad Khan's retainers by bribes was seized and put to death. 
 Ibrahim marched his army to the relief of Belgaum, and though 
 Asad IChan died before the Sultan arrived, the Portuguese 
 thought it prudent to return to Goa, and the other confederates 
 retreated also. Burhan Nizam Shah now fell back upon the 
 assistance of the Raja of Vijayanagar, and a new plan of 
 campaign was made by which Ahmadnagar was first to attack 
 the son of the late Amir Berid of Bidar, who had allied himself 
 with Ibrahim. This plan was successful in drawing the 
 Bijapur army into the field, and in a great battle near Kallian 
 Ibrahim's forces were routed and the Sultan himself, surprised 
 while taking his bath, narrowly escaped being taken prisoner. 
 Ramraj then recaptured the fortress of Mudkal and Raichor. 
 His Muhammadan ally retook Sholapur. 
 
 The fate of the Bijapur dynasty was again hanging in the 
 balance, when Burhan Nizam Shah died. Ibrahim succeeded 
 
 397 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 in patching up a peace with his son and successor, Husain 
 Nizam Shah, who was Burhan's son by his favourite wife, a 
 dancing-girl called Amina. At the same time Ibrahim made, 
 as before, a temporary accommodation with the Raja of 
 Vijayanagar, who having no reason to love his Musalman 
 alhes was strictly opportunist in his policy. Ibrahim's next 
 move was to attempt to recover the much-prized districts of 
 Sholapur by playing with conspirators at the Ahmadnagar 
 court who wished to supplant Husain by his half-brother, Ali, 
 son of the late Shah of Ahmadnagar by the Princess Miriam 
 of Bijapur. He succeeded in bringing over to his camp a 
 powerful ally in the person of Burhan Nizam Shah's late 
 commander-in-chief, Ain-ul-Mulk, but Ibrahim's suspicions 
 and violent character soon made an enemy of him, and after 
 being defeated both by Husain Nizam Shah and by the rebel 
 general, the Sultan of Bijapur was again besieged in his capital 
 and compelled to appeal to his Hindu neighbours for help. 
 Ramraj responded to the call and put the besieging army to 
 flight. Ibrahim soon afterwards ended his days in a prolonged 
 fit of rage, during which he caused several of the court physi- 
 cians to be executed and others to be trodden under the feet 
 of elephants. The rest of the medical profession of Bijapur 
 fled precipitately from the city to escape similar treatment. 
 
 398 
 
CHAPTER X 
 FALL OF VIJAYANAGAR 
 
 AIvI 'ADIIv SHAH, Ibrahim's son, ascended the throne 
 of Bijapur in 1557, an operation performed with less 
 difficulty than was usual in Muhammadan courts of 
 the period, as he had carefully prepared for the event of his 
 father's death, and the partisans of the Shi ah sect to which 
 he belonged rallied round his standard immediately it was 
 raised. The Khutba, or prayer for the Sultan, was read in 
 the mosques according to the Shiah formula as in the days 
 of his grandfather, Ismail ' Adil Shah, and forty persons followed 
 in the new Sultan's train wherever he appeared abroad to utter 
 curses against the Sahiba,^ a custom calculated to arouse the 
 fanatical spirit of the two chief Muhammadan sects. 
 
 Ali 'Adil Shah's next step was to strengthen his somewhat 
 precarious position by sending ambassadors to negotiate both 
 with his father's ally, the Raja of Vijayanagar, and with the 
 inveterate enemy of Bijapur, the Shah of Ahmadnagar. Ramraj 
 responded in the most friendly spirit, while Husain Nizam Shah, 
 viewing the overtures merely as an attempt to recover the 
 territory which Ibrahim had lost, treated the envoys with 
 marked coldness. Ali 'Adil Shah accordingly began to cultivate 
 assiduously the friendship of his powerful Hindu neighbour. 
 On the death of Ramraj 's son and heir, he went with an escort 
 of only one hundred horse to express his condolences in person. 
 The Raja received the Sultan with the greatest respect, and 
 the Rani, touched by Ali 'Adil Shah's professions of sympathy, 
 adopted him as her son. After staying three days as an 
 honoured guest the Sultan took his leave. Ramraj did not, 
 
 1 The first three KJialifs, who were the means of excluding Ali from the 
 succession, 
 
 399 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 however, observe Musalman court etiquette by conducting his 
 guest outside the city walls — a fact remembered by Ali 'Adil 
 Shah when he afterwards wanted an excuse for attacking the 
 infidel. 
 
 Having secured the support of the Vijayanagar armies, Ali 
 'Adil Shah now sent Husain Nizam Shah a peremptory demand 
 for the restoration of the forts and districts which had been 
 wrested from Bijapur in the late Sultan's reign. The ulti- 
 matum was rejected, and Ramraj joined Ali 'Adil Shah in 
 overrunning the territories of Ahmadnagar right up to Daulata- 
 bad, Musalman historians, as an excuse for Ali 'Adil Shah's 
 later treachery, declare that the Vijayanagar troops on this 
 occasion perpetrated frightful excesses against the Muham- 
 madan population. If the charge were true, the Hindus might 
 with good reason have appealed to the established traditions 
 of Musalman warfare as their justification ; but modem history 
 furnishes so many instances of unfounded charges of a like 
 character being brought forward as the excuse for broken 
 faith and reckless inhumanity that some degree of scepticism 
 on this point would be judicious. 
 
 Husain Nizam Shah bought peace by the cession of the fort 
 of Kallian, but immediately the enemy had retired he persuaded 
 his neighbour, Ibrahim Qutb Shah of Golconda, to join with 
 him in trying to recapture it. Ali 'Adil Shah again obtained 
 assistance from Ramraj, and persuaded Ali Berid Shah of 
 Bidar to join him also. The Golconda Shah thereupon changed 
 sides, and Husain Nizam Shah was again besieged by the 
 allied Hindu and Musalman armies. But when the monsoon 
 rains began to hamper the besiegers the inevitable jealousies 
 and intrigues engendered by such a combination of forces had 
 their effect upon the policy of the allies. The Musalman 
 chieftains were disgusted by the preponderating influence of 
 Ramraj in the affairs of the Dekhan, and doubtless the caste 
 prejudices of the Hindus caused dissensions in the camp, for 
 complaints were made of their overweening arrogance. Ramraj, 
 moreover, in return for his services, expected certain readjust- 
 ments of frontiers at the expense of BijapHr and Golconda, 
 400 
 
FALL OF VIJAYANAGAR 
 
 which the Musalman monarchs pretended to regard as an 
 insolent encroachment on the rights of Islam. 
 
 Ramraj withdrew his army to Vijayanagar, and Ali 'Adil 
 Shah summoned a council to consider measures for the protec- 
 tion of the faithful against the oppression of the infidel. It 
 was agreed that it was meritorious and highly politic to destroy 
 the power of the common enemy of all the Musalman monarchs 
 of the Dekhan ; but the great economic resources of Southern 
 India enabled Ramraj to maintain armies of such strength 
 that none of the Musalman kingdoms could hope to contend 
 against him singly. It was necessary to form a Pan-Islamic 
 league, so that the strength of the united armies of the Dekhan 
 could be brought into the field. Ali Adil Shah then sounded 
 Ibrahim Qutb Shah as to the possibility of such a league, and 
 the Golconda Shah, delighted with the proposal, sent an envoy 
 to Ahmadnagar. Husain Nizam Shah was naturally pleased 
 with the prospect of breaking up the powerful confederacy 
 against himself and promptly agreed to a treaty of eternal 
 friendship with BijapGr. The terms of the treaty were that 
 his daughter, Chand Bibi, should be given in marriage to Ali 
 Adil Shah, with the fortress of vSholapur as dowry — an arrange- 
 ment which settled the chronic disputes between Ahmadnagar 
 and Bijapur ; secondly, that Ali 'Adil Shah's sister, Hadia 
 Sultana, should marry Husain's eldest son. Prince Mutarza ; 
 and, thirdly, that all the new allies should march against 
 Ramraj at the earliest possible moment. 
 
 As soon as the diplomatists had brought the negotiations 
 to this highly satisfactory conclusion, Ali 'Adil Shah immediately 
 made his preparations for war and broke with his old ally by 
 Isending an envoy with a demand for the restoration of Mudkal, 
 jRaichor, and other forts which had formerly belonged to 
 Bijapur. Ramraj 's indignant refusal was, of course, the casus 
 belli which diplomatic etiquette required. The allies marshalled 
 their armies on the plains outside Bijapur in December 1564, 
 and shortly afterwards the great decisive battle was fought 
 near Talikota, on the banks of the Krishna. Ramraj, then 
 seventy years of age, showed conspicuous courage ; at one 
 
 2C 401 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 time it seemed as if the Hindus liad won the day, for Ali 'Adil 
 Shah and his confederate of Golconda prepared to retreat. 
 But at the crisis of the battle Ramraj was surrounded and 
 taken prisoner. He was brought before Husain Nizam Shah, 
 who immediately ordered his head to be cut off and exhibited 
 on a long spear in front of the enemy. The Hindus were panic- 
 stricken at the death of their Raja and fled in disorder. The 
 usual massacre of the infidel followed. One hundred thousand, 
 says Ferishta, were slain during the battle and in the pursuit 
 afterwards. The same authority explains that the disaster to 
 the Vijayanagar army was due to an unruly elephant, but a 
 European traveller, Caesar Frederick, who visited Vijayanagar 
 two years after the battle, was told that it was caused by the 
 treachery of the Raja's Muhammadan officers, which under 
 all the circumstances seems more probable, for it is unlikely 
 that Ali 'Adil Shah and his confederates neglected obvious 
 measures for tampering with the loyalty of Ramraj 's Musalman 
 body-guard. 
 
 The sack of Vijayanagar which followed the battle of Talikota 
 revived the glorious memories of Mahmud of Ghazni. It was 
 one of the most populous and richest cities of Asia. Paez, the 
 Portuguese traveller, who visited it early in the sixteenth 
 century, describes it as being " as large as Rome and very 
 beautiful to the sight." It was a garden city, laid out accord- 
 ing to the old Indian traditions with spacious parks and 
 orchards. There were, he said, " many groves of trees within 
 it and many conduits of water which flow into the midst of it, 
 and in places there are lakes ; and the King has close to his 
 palace a palm-grove and other rich-bearing fruit-trees." Below 
 the quarter set apart for the Raja's Muhammadan bod^^-guard 
 there was a little river, and on this side there were many 
 orchards and gardens with many fruit-trees, for the most part 
 mangoes and areca-palms and jack-trees, but also many lime- 
 and orange-trees, growing so closely to one another that the 
 quarter looked like a thick forest. He noticed also the cultiva- 
 tion of white grapes. Paez was greatly impressed by the 
 density of the population — no troops, horse or foot, he said, 
 402 
 
FALL OF VIJAYANAGAR 
 
 could force their way through them, so great was the throng 
 of people and elephants. " It was the best provided city in 
 the world ; stocked with provisions of every kind." There 
 were broad and beautiful streets full of fine houses in which 
 the wealthy merchants and principal craftsmen lived — for it 
 was the chief trading and industrial centre of Southern India. 
 The palace of the Raja enclosed a space " greater than all the 
 castle of Lisbon," and besides the bustling activity of the bazars 
 Paez observed a vast crowd, which he estimated at fifteen to 
 twenty thousand men, engaged in extending or repairing the 
 great irrigation works which supplied the whole city with water. 
 Paez was an observer, it should be noted, acquainted with the 
 great cities of Italy in the palmy days of the Renaissance. 
 
 The victors, besides plundering the city, razing the chief 
 buildings to the ground, and committing, as Ferishta states, 
 " every species of excess," perpetuated the memory of their ^ 
 triumph in the grossest manner by preserving the head of 
 their great antagonist as a trophy and exhibiting it publicly, 
 covered with oil and red pigment, on the anniversary day of 
 the battle — a barbarous custom piously observed by the 
 Muhammadans of Ahmadnagar for over two and a half centuries 
 after the famous battle. The empire of Vijayanagar never 
 recovered the blow inflicted on it at Talikota. Neither did the 
 Pan-Islamic league of the Dekhan long survive the death of the 
 Ahmadnagar Sultan, Husain Nizam Shah, which followed soon 
 afterwards. When Ali 'Adil Shah attempted to follow up his 
 triumph by acquiring more of the Vijayanagar territories, 
 Venkatadri, the late Raja's brother, obtained the assistance 
 of the Ahmadnagar army in defeating the Bijapur Sultan's 
 ambitions — a fact which shows clearly that religious differences 
 had very little to do either with the conflict between Vijayana- 
 gar and the Muhammadan rulers of the Dekhan, or with the 
 disputes between the different Musalman dynasties,^ though 
 
 ^ Talboys Wheeler summarises the whole history of the period under the 
 title of " The Shiah Revolt in the Dekhan," making this ' revolt' the anti- 
 thesis of the Sunni conquest of the Panjab and Hindustan, a sectarian view 
 which totally misrepresents the dominant political factors in the struggle 
 between Islam and Hindmsm. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 religion was often used as the most convenient peg for hanging 
 them on. It is most significant that in this ' holy war ' of the 
 Muhammadan rulers of the Dekhan the Hindu cavalry of 
 Maharashtra continued to serve the Sultan of Bijapur. 
 
 The constant appeals of Miihammadan writers to the sanction 
 of the Almighty for the acts of the political leaders of Islam 
 tend to confuse the real differences of thought and of tempera- 
 ment which, after three centuries of close contact, continued 
 to bring Hindus and Musalmans into deadly conflict with each 
 other. In both communities there were men of the highest 
 religious ideals, but the facts disclosed by Muhammadan his- 
 torians show that the differences between them were socio- 
 logical and political rather than religious. Islam was an 
 individualistic cult, and especially a protest against the 
 restraints which an older and more developed civilisation — 
 in the interest of the whole community — ^placed upon indi- 
 vidual liberty. In theory, at least, all men within the fold 
 of Islam were equal. The reward of the faithful was an 
 unbounded enjoyment of the present life and Paradise here- 
 after, and a part of this reward was the right to rule over all 
 who were not of the fold, so that they too might increase 
 the happiness and wealth of the elect. The rules of conduct 
 which regulated Musalman society did not necessarily apply 
 to the treatment of non-Musalmans. Such rights as the 
 latter, individually or collectively, might possess were of the 
 nature of benevolences contingent upon their good behaviour 
 and the will of God, represented by the sword of Islam. 
 
 The Musalman political code was a sanctification of the 
 doctrine that might is right. The Sultan's slave was a divinely 
 appointed ruler, provided that he could wield the sword better 
 than his master and produce a pedigree proving his descent 
 from the Prophet. Pedigrees of this kind were as easily fur- 
 nished as the family portraits of the modern nouveaux riches ; 
 and the divine authority which put no limit to the ambitions 
 of a successful general made a virtue of conspiracy against the 
 throne and multiplied petty autocracies indefinitely. The 
 Hindu political system, built upon the bedrock of the free 
 404 
 
 I 
 
HINDU & MUHAMMADAN POLITICS 
 
 village community, was essentially an imperial democracy. 
 Whether it was a great empire or a petty kingdom it never 
 lost the democratic character which belonged to it. The 
 Muhammadan system, based upon a fiction of social freedom, 
 gave a slave leave to rule the world, but took away from the 
 community its liberty and right of self-government. These 
 were the vital points at issue between Hindu and Muhammadan 
 states. On both sides religious principles were involved, but not 
 those upon which Brahmans and mullas disputed. It needed 
 a statesman of Akbar's genius to reconcile the differences. 
 
 The sovereign in both the Hindu and Muhammadan political 
 systems was the representative of divine justice, but in the 
 opinion of most Muhammadan writers of the period a liberal 
 and fair distribution of the spoils of war among the elect 
 covered a multitude of moral failings. The stain upon Mahmud 
 of Ghazni's character was not that he massacred tens of 
 thousands of non-combatants, but that he kept too much of 
 the spoil for himself. The grave offence of the Raja of Vija- 
 yanagar was not that he was an infidel, but that being such he 
 was more wealthy and powerful than any Muhammadan ruler 
 in the Dekhan. He was also a high-caste Hindu whose social 
 etiquette was a standing offence to the feelings of the Musalman 
 freeman, however much he might try to avoid hurting them. 
 
 The quarrels between the different Musalman rulers had as 
 little to do with sectarian differences of the mullas. The Turk 
 hated the Mogul, the Afghan the Turk, the Abyssinian the 
 Arab, and the native-born Musalman all the foreign mercenaries 
 who had no root in the soil but boasted of their martial deeds 
 and claimed the lion's share of the booty. The great problem 
 of Mvisalman statecraft in the Dekhan was to reconcile the 
 conflicting interests of the different military factions, rather 
 than to steer straight between Sunni and Shiah sectarians. 
 
 The effect of the Musalman poHtical creed upon Hindu social 
 life was twofold : it increased the rigour of the caste system 
 and aroused a revolt against it. The alluring prospect which 
 it held out to the lower strata of Hindu society was as tempting 
 as it was to the Bedouins of the desert and the nomads of 
 
 405 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Central Asia, who could enjoy to the full the pleasures of city- 
 life, but had not the industry and ability to build cities for 
 themselves. Islam gave the nomad a divine command to 
 force the infidels to build for them and fight for them, made 
 the Sudra a freeman and potentially a lord of Brahmans. 
 lyike the Renaissance of Europe it stirred up the intellectual 
 waters, produced many strong men and some men of striking 
 originality and genius. Like the Renaissance, also, it was 
 essentially a city cult ; it made the nomad leave his tents 
 and the Sudra abandon his village. It developed a type of 
 humanity full of joie de vivre, eager to hunt and fight and keen 
 for adventure of every kind, a man of epicurean tastes and 
 many dilettante accomplishments. But it left the heart of 
 India unchanged. Islam built its splendid mosques and tombs 
 in the city, but the village temple remained. 
 
 Ali 'Adil Shah, with his treasury filled to overflowing with 
 the immense wealth of Vijayanagar, set his captive Hindu 
 craftsmen to work, according to the usual practice of Muham- 
 madan conquerors, in building a great mosque to celebrate his 
 triumph and in making his capital vie in splendour with the 
 finest of Indian cities. A comparison of Ali 'Adil Shah's mosque 
 with the mosque built by Ramraj for his Musalman mercenaries 
 (now known as ' the Elephant Stables ') shows clearly the origin 
 of the great school of architecture subsequently developed at 
 Bijapur. Its distinctively Indian character was due to the 
 fact that Bijapur was further removed from Persian influences 
 than the great Muhammadan centres of Northern India. After 
 the fall of the Bijapur dynasty the royal craftsmen of Southern 
 India assisted in the creation of the Taj Mahall at Agra.^ 
 
 Before Ali 'Adil Shah died a shameful death in 1580 all the 
 old quarrels of the Musalman states of the Dekhan were revived. 
 But the Mogul dynasty of Hindustan had by that time become 
 the dominant political power in India, and Akbar had already 
 begun to rebuild a great empire upon the ancient Indo-Aryan 
 foundation. 
 
 ^ A detailed analysis of Bijapur architecture is given in the author's Indian 
 Architecture (Murray). 
 406 
 
w 
 i-r 
 
 K 
 W 
 
I 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 HINDU INDIA IN THE MUHAMMADAN 
 PERIOD— CHAITANYA 
 
 IT would give a very imperfect impression of Indian life 
 in early Muhammadan times if it were assumed that 
 the somewhat sordid record of Muhammadan dynasties 
 contained all that is most important to remember in the 
 history of the period and absorbed the greater part of the 
 intellectual activities of the people. In truth the real India, 
 though deeply affected politically and economically by the 
 impact of Islam, continued to live its own life in the villages, 
 and outside the city walls the vast majority of the Indian 
 population paid unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but 
 were spiritually unaffected by the presence of the foreign 
 conquerors. True, a devastating army might ravage whole 
 districts, burn the villages, and bring death, or worse, in its 
 train ; but these were temporary visitations like plague, earth- 
 quake, or famine. The brutal soldiery were not quartered 
 upon the villagers — ^they came and went like a cyclone. There 
 was no costly furniture or elaborate upholstery to be replaced : 
 the mud and thatch cottages were quickly rebuilt. The 
 Mother's loving care would soon efface the marks of the 
 Destroyer's wrath. The old religion of the Aryan village had 
 a recuperative power stronger than all the armies of Islam. 
 The Musalman zamindars or governors might squeeze the 
 industrious peasantry, but they lived apart from them and 
 rarely interfered with their daily life. There was always 
 safety in numbers, and for his own peace and comfort even the 
 most uncompromising Musalman put a limit to his exactions. 
 So when the storm blew over, the Hindu villagers who then, 
 as now, formed the vast majority of the Indian population 
 
 407 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 returned to their usual life. The victories of the Musalman 
 warriors, which formed the theme of the court poet and his- 
 torian, were unnoticed in the records of the village handed 
 down in song and story from one generation to another. The 
 village kathaks still sang the praises of Rama and Krishna 
 and of the heroes of the Mahabharata, of Vikramaditya and 
 Prithivi-raja ; and though the gossip of the Sultan's court 
 might often circulate among the crowd of listeners gathered 
 under the pipal-tree or in the temple mandapam, yet the 
 devoted loves of Satyavana and Savitri, of Nala and Damayanti, 
 the constancy of King Shivi and the trials of Prahlada, told 
 and retold to countless generations of villagers, never lost 
 their interest. Foreign jargon, borrowed from the language 
 of the court, crept into the vernaculars ; but these importations 
 were all related to camp and city life — the language of the 
 countryside remained unaltered.^ 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that Islam in India 
 appropriated all the civic culture which had been developed 
 during the man^^ previous centuries of Indo-Aryan rule. In 
 the deeper sense India was never conquered. Islam seized 
 her political capitals, controlled her military forces, and appro- 
 priated her revenues, but India retained what she cherished 
 most, her intellectual empire, and her soul was never subdued. 
 Her great university cities lost to a great extent their political 
 influence ; some changed their sites, as they had often done 
 before ; others, like Benares, Kanchi, and Nudiah, were less 
 populous and wealthy, but remained as the historic seats of 
 Hindu learning. M^ahayana Buddhism removed its intellectual 
 centre to Southern China. Nalanda and Taksha-sila crumbled 
 into dust ; but Hindu pandits in the Sanskrit Tols continued 
 the pious work of the Buddhist monks, and throughout the 
 Muhammadan period these centres of intellectual India pro- 
 duced a succession of great teachers to hand on the torch of 
 Indo-Aryan wisdom to posterity. 
 
 ^ D. C. Sen, History oj Bengali Language and Literature, pp. 382-383. The 
 statement quoted relates only to village life in Bengal, but it is undoubtedly 
 applicable to the greater part of India. 
 408 
 
CHAITANYA 
 
 And, excluding the small minority of the military classes 
 attached to the soil who took service under the foreign con- 
 querors and adopted their religion, the spiritual life of the 
 village was totally unaffected by the change of rulers, except 
 that the employment of Brahmans as the agents of Muham- 
 madan revenue administration placed in their hands more 
 power over the village communities and certainly tended to 
 lower the high ideals of the Brahmanical order, even though 
 the good sense of the people could easily discriminate between 
 the excisemen and their spiritual teachers. In educational 
 matters the Muhammadan rulers with few exceptions left the 
 infidels to their own heretical devices — ^the schools they estab- 
 lished were only for true believers. But the court language, 
 Persian, was taught to Hindu children in some of their own 
 village schools for the same reason as English is now taught, 
 because it was the medium of communication between the 
 people and the ruling powers, and because it opened the door 
 to official employment. 
 
 Every Hindu village had its own schoolmaster, whose income 
 was derived either from the lands assigned for the upkeep of 
 the temple or from a fixed share in the village harvest. Gene- 
 rally the schoolmaster was also the village priest and Brahman ; 
 and as every Hindu teacher would regard all knowledge as 
 religious, so the elementary instruction in reading, writing, and 
 arithmetic, and perhaps Sanskrit grammar and poetry, given 
 in the village schools was invariably of a religious character, 
 though the higher spiritual truths were reserved for the Sanskrit 
 Tols, which took up the work of higher education when the 
 Buddhist monasteries were broken up. The village schools 
 were open to all Hindus within the Aryan pale, i.e. those of 
 the four ' pure ' castes. Every great wave of religious feeling 
 which passed over India helped to break down the obstacles 
 which Brahman prejudices placed in the way of the higher 
 education of the masses; for it was not only the Buddha 
 who taught higher Aryan truths to Sudras : Sankaracharya, 
 Ramanuja, and all the great Vaishnava teachers did the 
 same, under conditions intended to provide against the 
 
 409 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 prostitution of spiritual and intellectual power for immoral 
 purposes. 
 
 It is in the history of one of these great movements, that 
 of which Chaitanya was the leader, that we get a glimpse of 
 the inner life of Hindu India during the Muhammadan period. 
 Chaitanya, the great Vaishnava apostle of Bengal, was born 
 at Navadwipa, or Nudiah, in i486, about the time when 
 Sikandar lyodi, the Sultan of Delhi, was bitterly persecuting 
 his Hindu subjects, after his father, Behlol Khan, had driven 
 the wise and tolerant Sultan Husain Shah from the throne of 
 Jaunpur. Nudiah in the twelfth century had some political 
 importance as the capital of the last Hindu raja of the Sena 
 dynasty, Rai lyakhsmaniya ; in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries it was still famous as an educational centre, especially 
 for its school of logic, known as the Navya Nyaya System. 
 In spite of political changes Nudiah remained a flourishing 
 city, for its Sanskrit Tols drew Hindu students from all parts 
 of India, and to have been a scholar of Nudiah was in itself 
 a mark of distinction in the highest Hindu society.^ It covered 
 an area of sixteen square miles and was divided into sixteen 
 wards. Here Hinduism continued to follow its own civic life 
 and to pay its devotions to Sarasvati, the Goddess of Ivcarn- 
 ing, in its accustomed manner, regardless of the Musalman 
 conqueror. 
 
 Chaitanya's father, Jagannath Mishra, was a Brahman who 
 had come to NGdiah from Sylhet to complete his education, 
 had married the daughter of a well-known pandit, and had 
 settled down to the life of a Hindu householder in the shelter 
 which a university city afforded even in those troublous times. 
 He had ten children, eight daughters, who all died in infancy, 
 and two sons, the elder named Vishvarupa, and the younger 
 Vishvambara, afterwards known as Chaitanya. Vishvarupa 
 was to have been married when he was sixteen years of age, 
 but the religious atmosphere of Nudiah had infected the lad's 
 mind, and the night before the marriage was to have been 
 celebrated he disappeared. lyike the Buddha he had taken 
 
 ^ D. C. Sen, Hisioyy of Bengali Language and Literature, p. 410. 
 410 
 
CHAITANYA 
 
 the vow of asceticism, and with the pilgrim's staff and begging- 
 bowl in hand had set out on the sannyasin's spiritual quest. 
 UnUke the Buddha he never returned to his grief -stricken 
 home, and Vishvambara, affectionately called Nimai, because 
 he was born in a shed under a nimba tree,^ remained the 
 sole solace of his parents. Nimai was then five years old, the 
 age when he should have gone to school, but owing to the 
 objections of his mother, Shachi Devi, who was haunted by 
 the fear that her darling child would follow his brother's 
 example, he was kept at home. 
 
 Nimai soon became the terror of pious and learned Brahmans, 
 and outraged all the sedate and orderly social traditions of the 
 quarter by his boyish pranks. He joined with other boys in 
 robbing orchards and in other petty pilfering ; he teased little 
 girls ; and even dared to disturb elderly Brahmans at their 
 devotions by running away with their ritualistic symbols, or 
 by hiding their clothing when they were bathing. He grieved 
 his Brahman parents by a total disregard of caste prejudices, 
 never avoiding unclean refuse or other things which were 
 pollution to the twice-born. When reproved he would say : 
 " You do not send me to school, so how can I know what is 
 clean or unclean ? In my eyes nothing is pure or impure — 
 all things are alike to me " — an answer which only added to 
 his parents' sorrow, for it revealed the mind of the true sann- 
 yasin, placed above the restrictions of caste rules. These and 
 similar wise sayings, presaging his coming mission, were 
 treasured up in his parents' hearts and remembered in after 
 years. 
 
 At last Jagannath's neighbours insisted that he should fulfil 
 his duty as a Brahman by sending the boy to school, and 
 Nimai at six years of age was placed in one of the Sanskrit 
 Tols under a pandit named Ganga Das and entered upon the 
 first stage of a Brahman's life, that of a Brahmacharin, 
 
 It must be observed that throughout the whole story of 
 
 ^ See Mr D. C. Sen in his Histoty of Bengali Language and Literature, p. 415. 
 According to Professor J adunath Sarkar the signification of the name is ' short- 
 lived,' and it was given to him to avert the evil eye. 
 
 411 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Chaitanya's life there is a vein of the miraculous, for no ordinarj^ 
 child woiild begin what is in reality college life at that age. 
 But Nimai was of extraordinary precocity, and in a very short 
 time was engaged in disputes with men of learning upon the 
 intricacies of Sanskrit grammar and logic, though he still 
 retained all the vivacity of boyhood and delighted in poking 
 fun at the grave and reverend dons of Nudiah. When he was 
 twenty, or at an age when many Brahman youths would be 
 seeking entrance into a Tol for the completion of their educa- 
 tion, Nimai had acquired so great a reputation that he estab- 
 lished a Tol of his own on the banks of the Bhagirathi, the 
 branch of the Ganges which flows by Nudiah, and many pupils 
 gathered round him, for he was famed for his wit and the 
 brilliancy of his dialectics. 
 
 Up to this time Nimai's intellect had not developed the cha- 
 racteristic bent which distinguished his teaching as a Vaish- 
 nava reformer. The scholars of Nudiah at that time were 
 known for their highly intellectual accomplishments rather 
 than for depth of religious fervour. An atmosphere of scepti- 
 cism, created by the agnostic teaching of Buddhism, pervaded 
 the Tols of Nudiah, and Nimai had imbibed all the intellectual 
 pride of his Alma Mater. The chief interest of Nudiah societ}^ 
 was in passages of arms between famous philosophical experts 
 armed with their favourite weapons of logic — an interest shared 
 by all educated Hindus at that time. " No extraordinan- 
 marriage function could in those days be regarded as complete 
 without its battle of the pundits. Invitations were sent out 
 to members of rival schools to come and join their forces under 
 the presidency and direction of such and such a Brahman. 
 The contest would take place in the presence of the whole polite 
 world, who, though they could not have waged it themselves, 
 had quite sufficient knowledge of the language and matter 
 under dispute to be keen and interested critics of skill. Put 
 thus upon their mettle, the combatants would wrestle, and at 
 the end of days or hours, as the case might be, the victor was 
 declared. Sometimes the whole of the money grant about' 
 to be made by the father of the bride would be assigned by 
 412 
 
CHAITANYA 
 
 him to the chief of the pundits. This would be for a signal 
 and crushing victory. More often it would be a proportion 
 of three-quarters, five-eighths, or even fifteen-sixteenths. . . . 
 As in the tournaments of European chivalry the appearance 
 of the unknown knight might at any moment occur, so here 
 also one never knew whether some stranger of genius might 
 not upset the best-calculated chances. The savant must be 
 prepared to defend his own pre-eminence against all comers, 
 and against every conceivable method, new or old." ^ 
 
 In the greater contests, where the reputation of a famous 
 university or of a well-known school of philosophy was at 
 stake, the names of the victors and their literary works would 
 be piously handed down to posterity, while no one except 
 court poets and historians thought it worth while to perpetuate 
 the memory of the contemporary war-lords and their tale of 
 bloodshed and desolation. Thus it is that India has so 
 little to tell of that side of her national history which forms 
 the main theme of Western historians. 
 
 Several of the incidents recorded of Chaitanya's university 
 life relate to intellectual bouts in which he defeated famous 
 scholars of his day, representing Benares and other great seats 
 of learning, who came to Nudiah to win from her chosen 
 champions the customary ' letters of victory,' by which the 
 vanquished acknowledged the superior skill of their antagonists 
 in logic, grammar, rhetoric, and similar subjects. Such proofs 
 of intellectual ability and profound scholarship were regarded 
 as indispensable qualifications for any teacher of Hindu 
 religion. 
 
 Nimai, having established his fame as a pandit by over- 
 throwing Keshava Kashmiri — an intellectual knight-errant who 
 after winning many contests in other parts of India had come 
 to Nudiah as the champion of all India — married and settled 
 down as a householder, the second stage of a Brahman's life. 
 His father died about the same time, and on his return from 
 a successful tour through Eastern Bengal, in which he added 
 to his scholastic reputation, he found that his wife had died 
 
 ^ Sister Nivedita, Footfalls of Indian History, pp. 237-238. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 from snake-bite. To console his mother's grief he married 
 again, but soon started off, with his mother's reluctant consent, 
 on a pilgrimage to Gaya to make the customary Pinda offerings 
 so that his father's spirit might gain an easy passage to heaven. 
 
 This visit to Gaya vas the turning-point of his life. Here 
 he came under the influence of a venerable Vaishnava guru, 
 Ishvara Puri, and adopted his teaching of the bhakti cult 
 associated with the name of Krishna and the doctrine of the 
 Bhagavad Gita. Falling into a profound trance before the 
 image of Krishna at the great temple which marked the site 
 of the Buddha's enlightenment, he saw, like Arjuna, a vision 
 of Krishna as Lord of the Universe. When he returned to 
 consciousness on the banks of the Bhagirathi — for his com- 
 panions had meanwhile carried him back to his Tol at Nudiah — 
 his whole spiritual outlook was changed. No longer the proud 
 Brahman pandit conscious of his intellectual superiority whose 
 chief delight was to confound an opponent by argument, he 
 would spend hours only chanting the praises of Krishna and 
 speaking of divine love. Love was the divine power which 
 upheld the universe, caused the sun and moon to shine, kept 
 the stars in their courses, and made the earth bring forth its 
 fruits in due season. For man's happiness and spiritual 
 wisdom love was all-sufficient. Even the outcaste was superior 
 to the most learned Brahman if he were pious and had the 
 love of God. But only when man and woman appear the 
 same, and sex loses all its charm, could that love divine be 
 realised. " Be like a tree," he said. " The tree gives shade 
 even to him who cuts its boughs. It asks no water of anyone, 
 though it be withering for want of it. Rain and storm and 
 the burning rays of the sun it suffers, yet continues to give 
 sweet-scented flowers and delicious fruits. Patiently serve 
 others, even as a tree, and let this be your motto." ^ 
 
 To enforce the moral of his teaching by example he would 
 go down to the river and help the old and infirm to carry their 
 burdens or wash their clothes, regardless of the rules of his 
 caste ; and when anyone out of respect for his Brahmanhood 
 
 ^ D. C. Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature, p. 429. 
 414 
 
CHAITANYA 
 
 hesitated to accept his services he would say : " Do not, I 
 pray you, prevent me. When I serve you I see God : these 
 Httle deeds are hoHness for me." ^ 
 
 The change which took place in Nimai's spiritual attitude 
 is illustrated by an incident which occurred on one of his 
 pilgrimages. He joined a crowd collected round a Brahman 
 in a temple who with tears pouring down his face was reciting 
 the Gita with intense rapture, heedless of the ridicule and 
 laughter which greeted the numerous mistakes of intonation 
 and grammar which he was making. Nimai in his pandit 
 days would likewise have scoffed at the Brahman's ignorance, 
 but now he was deeply touched. " Tell me, sir," he said, 
 " what deep meaning do you find in these words to inspire 
 you to such rapture ? " The Brahman replied : " Sir, I am 
 very ignorant and do not know the meaning of the words. 
 But my heart is full of joy when I see Krishna, dark ^ and 
 beautiful, sitting in Arjuna's chariot teaching divine truth. 
 I can never cease reading the Gita, because I always behold 
 Him when I am reading the book." Chaitanya, as he was then 
 called, embraced the Brahman and said : " You only are truly 
 worthy to read the Gita, as you have understood the essence 
 of its meaning." ^ 
 
 His pride in his dialectical powers completely disappeared, 
 and his teaching now centred upon the concept of the barren- 
 ness of abstract philosophy. Often he would decline to enter 
 into controversy on religious subjects and expressed his willing- 
 ness to acknowledge his opponent's superiority in argument 
 by the formal ' letter of victory,' taking his stand upon the 
 issue that " the love of God passeth all understanding." Instead 
 of the ritual of orthodox Brahmanism with all its comphcated 
 symbolism he organised Sdn-kirtana * parties of singers and 
 
 ^ D. C. Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature, p. 429. 
 
 2 The idea of Krishna's dark complexion had nothing to do with the racial 
 question. As the Universal Lord, Krishna was connected with the Vedic 
 concept of Eternity or the Cosmic Slumber — Narayana — and with Vishnu- 
 Surya, the midday sun. His colour symbol was therefore either black, like 
 the moonless night, or azure blue, like the sky at noon. See diagram, p. 30, 
 
 ^ Jadunath Sarkar, Chaitanya s Pilgrimages and Teachings, p. 88. 
 
 * Chanting God's name. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 dancers which, headed by himself and his chief disciple, Nit- 
 yananda, assembled in the mandapams of temples or court- 
 yards of houses and went in procession through the streets 
 chanting the praise of God and His love for mankind. 
 
 The Brahman aristocracy of Nudiah were unmoved by the 
 emotional fervour of the young reformer's religious teaching, 
 but were greatly perturbed by the excitement it caused and 
 by the crowds of all classes, especially of the lower castes, 
 which followed Nimai in the processions. Nimai's open defi- 
 ance of caste rules disgusted them, and the excited crowds of 
 singers and dancers outraged their sense of academic propriety. 
 Finding that Nimai remained indifferent to their protests and 
 threats of spiritual pains and penalties, they appealed at last 
 to the civil power, the Muhammadan Qazi, to enforce respect 
 for the ancient traditions of Nudiah by prohibiting Nimai's 
 noisy demonstrations. The Qazi complied with their request 
 and issued an order forbidding any more San-kirtana proces- 
 sions. On the evening of the same day Nimai went to the 
 court-house with a great crowd of followers and started the 
 San-kirtana service at the Qazi's own door. The worthy 
 magistrate came out in a rage to demand an explanation of 
 this defiance of his orders, but, seeing the young Brahman 
 standing in the midst of the crowd with his face lit up with 
 divine ecstasy, he was so moved that he cancelled the prohibi- 
 tion and sent the people away with his blessing. 
 
 Chaitanya's relations with the Muhammadan officials in 
 Bengal seem to have been on the whole friendly, and not a 
 few Musalmans were among his followers. The Chaitdnya- 
 charit-amrita, a work written half a century after his death, 
 tells the story of the conversion of a Muhammadan governor 
 in Bengal who having heard of the extraordinary power of the 
 Brahman monk came privately to see him, gave him an escort 
 of soldiers to protect him from river pirates, and accompanied 
 him through the province he administered with as much devo- 
 tion as any of Chaitanya's Hindu followers.^ At another time 
 
 ^ Chaitdnya-charit-amrita, translated by Professor Jadiinath Sarkar, pp. 
 193-195- 
 416 
 
CHAITANYA 
 
 Chaitanya enrolled ten Pathan troopers among his disciples 
 after convincing one of them by arguments based upon the 
 Muslim scripture,^ He seems to have had more difficulty in 
 overcoming the scepticism and intellectual pride of his fellow- 
 Brahmans. It was their opposition which finally induced him 
 to give up his Tol at Nudiah and to start on a pilgrimage to 
 Brindaban, the scene of Krishna's early life, after having taken 
 the sannyasin's vow of asceticism and adopted the name of 
 Krishna-Chaitanya, by which he was thereafter known. 
 
 So at the age of twenty-four years — a few years before 
 Martin Luther began his attack upon the abuses of the Church 
 of Rome — ^he set out on his great pilgrimage chanting the 
 verse, " I too shall cross the terrible and dark ocean of life 
 by devotion to the Supreme Being, as the sages did of yore, 
 by service at the Lotus-feet of Mukunda," and accompanied by 
 a devoted band of disciples. His mother hearing of his depar- 
 ture went after him, and seeing him with the shaven head of 
 a sannyasin was distracted with grief, for she feared that 
 Nimai, like her other son, would be lost to her for ever. But 
 Chaitanya, with the utmost tenderness, clasped his mother's 
 feet and consoled her by promising to live wherever she might 
 bid him and obey her wishes always, as he had done before. 
 It was afterwards agreed between them that Chaitanya should 
 make Puri his headquarters, so that his mother could easily 
 get news of him and sometimes see him at Nudiah. 
 
 The rest of his life Chaitanya spent in preaching the cult of 
 bhakti according to the Vaishnava school of thought, and in 
 devotion at the Jagannath temple at Puri. Everywhere he 
 went his passionate outpouring of spirit kindled a great flame 
 of religious fervour among the common folk, to whom the 
 doctrine of Eternal Love always makes a stronger appeal than 
 any other intellectual argument. During his lifetime his suc- 
 cess as a religious teacher was probably as great as that of 
 the Blessed One of Bodh-Gaya at whose temple he won en- 
 lightenment. He travelled throughout the greater part of 
 India, and was everywhere regarded by his followers as an 
 
 ^ Chaitdnya-charit-amriia, Sarkar's translation, p. 226. 
 
 2D 417 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 incarnation of Vishnu and worshipped as the Deit}'-, as probably 
 had been the case with Sakya Muni, in spite of the agnostic 
 tone of his teaching. Numerous miracles are attributed to 
 him. He often fell into a state of hypnotic trance, as in the 
 yogin's samddhi. Like Muhammad he was subject to fits 
 of epilepsy, which were regarded as special manifestations of 
 divine inspiration. 
 
 Chaitanya took special delight in the beauties of nature, and 
 was intensely moved by the sight of a glorious sunset, of a 
 noble river, or of a grove of asoka trees in full flush of flower. 
 His power over wild beasts and all the denizens of the forest 
 is said to have been marvellous. Elephants and tigers 
 would join with the wild deer, who were drawn to his side by 
 the sound of his sweet voice singing songs of divine love, and 
 at the Master's command would trumpet or roar forth the name 
 of Krishna, roll on the ground, and dance together with joy ; 
 while the peacocks strutted proudly and joined their shrill 
 notes to the songs of the other forest birds. Even the trees 
 and creepers bowed themselves down to listen to his voice, 
 and all things animate and inanimate united in the universal 
 paean of love and praise. Chaitanya's mission called forth 
 from the suffering masses a new outburst of that joie de vivre, 
 so clearly manifested in the art of Sanchi and Ajanta, which 
 the Buddha's mission had evoked ; only Chaitanya found no 
 Asoka to establish his teaching upon an imperial footing by 
 accepting it as the mainspring of State policy. Nevertheless 
 there can be no doubt that his influence was felt by Akbar 
 and his Muhammadan spiritual advisers when, fifty years 
 after Chaitanya's death, they endeavoured to unite Islam and 
 Hinduism in the cult of the Din-Ilahi, which made devotion 
 to the State a bond of spiritual fellowship. 
 
 Though this note of gladness rang through all Chaitanya's 
 teaching and was its especial characteristic, he himself, like 
 all great Indian teachers, lived an ascetic life and sternly 
 reproved any form of self-indulgence on the part of those who 
 wished to become partners in his lifework. Like the Saiva 
 bhaktas of Southern India his whole missionary life was cou- 
 418 
 
CHAITANYA 
 
 secrated to works of charity and self-denial. The lowest menial 
 work, if performed in the service of God, was to him as jojrful 
 as any other. Nor did he in the intensity of his emotional 
 temperament ignore the hygienic principles which were the 
 bedrock of ancient Aryan religious teaching in India. As if 
 to enforce the lesson that cleanliness is next to godliness, he 
 himself with the most scrupulous care swept the roads and 
 cleansed the temple at Puri, so that it was made " clean, cool, 
 and pure, like his own mind." ^ But his bodily strength was 
 worn out prematurely by the ardour of his religious zeal. 
 He passed away in 1533, at the age of forty-seven, leaving his 
 work to be carried on by the order of Vaishnava monks, or 
 Goswamis, which he founded. 
 
 ^ Chaitdnya-chant-amnta, Sarkar's translation, p. 139. 
 
 419 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 bAbur 
 
 IT was about seven years before Chaitanya's death that 
 Babur won the great battle of Panipat which made him 
 practically master of Hindustan. His engaging person- 
 ality, artistic temperament, and romantic career make him 
 one of the most attractive figures in the history of Islam. He 
 had all the energy and determination of his savage ancestor, 
 Timur, and at the same time was a much more chivalrous 
 fighter. A vein of sincere religious feeling runs through his 
 delightful autobiography, in marked contrast to the canting 
 hypocrisy of Timur's memoirs. It would be an interesting 
 biological and psychological study, if sufficient data could be 
 obtained to trace the whole sequence of racial intermarriages 
 in distinguished Turki and Mongol families, to show the effect 
 of the Mendelian law in producing exceptionally fine types of 
 humanity through the crossing of a wild and highly cultivated 
 stock. Such an investigation might throw much light upon 
 the laws of eugenics in their international relationship. The 
 great spiritual and intellectual development which took place 
 in comparatively few generations in men of Turki and Mongol 
 race after their conversion to Islam was more due to the 
 eugenic instinct which prompted them to prefer Iranian and 
 Indo- Aryan wives to their own women-folk, and to the influence 
 of the highly cultured peoples they conquered, than to the 
 civilising effect of the religion they professed to follow. Neither 
 Turks nor Mongols of pure blood contributed much to the 
 spiritual growth of Islam. 
 
 Babur's mother was a Mongol, a descendant of Chingliiz 
 Khan, and he inherited many of the savage instincts of the 
 untamed Tartar, as his name, ' The Tiger,* would seem to 
 420 
 
BABUR 
 
 suggest. His character was very typical of the individnaHstic 
 tendencies of Islamic culture. Towards his friends and in all 
 his personal relationships with his subjects he was generous, 
 chivalrous, and open-hearted. He could enjoy to the full all 
 the delights which good company and beautiful surroundings 
 could offer. But his sympathy with friends and acquaintances 
 and his communings with nature never went from the little 
 circle of his objective perceptions into the great world beyond. 
 He had no sympathy for humanity at large. He did not 
 exult in bloodshed as his savage ancestors did, yet he felt no 
 compunction in continuing the barbarous traditions of Tartar 
 warfare as part of the business of the war-lord ; he notes down 
 the wholesale butchery of prisoners in front of his royal pavilion 
 and the building up of pyramids of human heads with the 
 same faithfulness as he describes his joyful wine-parties, the 
 delights of his pleasure-gardens, and his minute observations 
 of topography and natural history. 
 
 There is not the slightest sense of personal responsibility 
 towards the millions of human beings committed to his charge 
 in his graphic and careful descriptions of the climate, boundaries, 
 population, and natural resources of Hindustan. He goes 
 round his newly won empire like a landlord taking stock of the 
 latest addition to his estate. At the same time he is perfectly 
 frank and makes no pretensions. " The chief excellency of 
 Hindustan," he says, " is that it is a large country and has 
 abundance of gold and silver." He does not disguise his 
 feelings of disappointment both with the land and its people. 
 The country and towns were ugly ; its gardens had no walls. 
 The people were not good fellows for a wine-party, they were 
 unsociable and stupid ; they had no genius for mechanical 
 invention ; knew nothing about architecture and pleasure- 
 gardens ; they had " no good horses, no good flesh, no grapes 
 or musk-melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good 
 food or bread in their bazars, no baths or colleges,' no candles, 
 no torches, not a candlestick." " In the rainy season you 
 cannot shoot, even with the bow of our country, and it becomes 
 quite useless." Babur grumbles wholeheartedly at the cursed 
 
 421 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 country in which he was forced to hve, Hke the British subaltern 
 fresh from Europe. 
 
 The special circumstances of his early life no doubt helped 
 to develop the finer side of Babur's character. He escaped 
 the usual atmosphere of sycophancy, adulation, and self- 
 indulgence which surrounded the court of a Turkish or Mogul 
 autocrat by being left fatherless at the age of twelve, and 
 compelled to hold his birthright only with the help of his own 
 native wit and with the advice of a remarkably clever and 
 courageous grandmother. For many years he was, in the 
 words of Ferishta, " like a king on a chess-board, moved from 
 place to place, and buffeted about like pebbles on the sea- 
 shore." The thrilling adventures of his boyhood, described 
 so vividly in his memoirs, gave him a taste for an active, open- 
 air life. The resourcefulness, courage, and cheerfulness he 
 showed in the desperate situations in which he was often placed 
 won for him many devoted adherents, whose steadfast loyalty 
 was of invaluable service in his dealings with his shifty " Mogul 
 rascals " and difficult Afghan subjects. By education Babur 
 was more Persian than Tartar, though he professed the Sunni 
 instead of the Shiah doctrine to which the great majority of 
 Persian Musalmans adhered. Like most Persians he was a 
 great lover of flowers and of the grape-vine ; but his drinking 
 bouts under the spreading plane-trees or in his garden pavilions, 
 where he watched with delight the red and yellow arghwan 
 bursting into flower, or the pomegranates hanging red upon 
 the trees, were never vulgar debauches, but rather an irrepres- 
 sible overflow of his bright, sunny nature. In the face of 
 difficulty or danger he always kept his lower self under strict 
 control. 
 
 We left Babur in a previous chapter at Agra, after the battle 
 of Panipat. But for his resolute character he would hardly 
 have been permitted to enjoy the fruits of that great victory. 
 His Afghan foes, though beaten, were by no means reconciled 
 to the idea of Mogul rule. Many of their chieftains still held 
 out in different provincial strongholds and refused to recog- 
 nise Babur's authorit3^ One of those who had joined Babur 
 422 
 
BABUR 
 
 deserted with all his followers and raided the country round 
 Agra, so that it was difficult for the Moguls to obtain forage 
 and provisions. The Mogul troops and their horses were also 
 suffering from the unaccustomed heat, and several of Babur's 
 chief officers urged him to return to Kabul. Babur himself 
 was by no means pleased with the first sight of his new kingdom. 
 He had already been prospecting to find a site for " an elegant 
 and regularly planned pleasure-ground," like those he had 
 laid out at Kabul, with their water-courses, cypresses and 
 flowering trees, beds of roses and narcissus, and the platform — 
 ' the Mount of Felicity ' — in the centre. But the ravages of 
 continual invasions had made the country round Agra a desert, 
 and he found it " so ugly and detestable " that he was " quite 
 reptdsed and disgusted." 
 
 Nothing, however, would persuade him to listen to the 
 proposal of leaving India as Tim.ur had done, and giving up 
 his hardly won kingdom. He told his officers that " a kingdom 
 which had cost him so much pains in taking should not be 
 wrested from him except by death," and issued a proclamation 
 to his troops stating his determination to remain in India, 
 and at the same time giving leave to those of his followers 
 who preferred safet^^^ to glory to return to Kabul. He would 
 only keep in his service soldiers whose valour would reflect 
 honour upon themselves, their Padshah, and their country. 
 " This order," says Ferishta, " had the desired effect : all 
 murmurs ceased, and the officers, one and all, swore never to 
 forsake him." Only one, Khwaja Kullan, whose reputation 
 was already well established, accepted the permission to retire 
 from the army on grounds of ill-health, and was appointed 
 Governor of Kabul and Ghazni as a reward for his services. 
 
 The proclamation also had the effect of bringing over to 
 Babur's side several of Ibrahim lyodi's high officers, who being 
 assured of Babur's intention to remain and rule as the Sultan 
 of Delhi, hastened to place themselves on the winning side. 
 Having thus secured his position for the time being, Babur 
 decided to make Agra his capital instead of Delhi, which he 
 found unsuitable for his water-gardens, baths, and airy pavilions, 
 
 423 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 by which he sought to overcome what he called the " three 
 inconveniences of Hindustan " — the heat, the strong winds, 
 and the dust. There was, however, another adversary, more 
 formidable than the Afghan, to dispose of. Babur had not 
 been long settled at Agra before he received intelligence that 
 the RanaSanga of Chitor, at the head of a confederation of 
 Rajput chieftains — ^including Medni Rai, the Raja of Chanderi, 
 who had played so conspicuous a part in the history of Malwa — 
 was preparing to resist the Mogul invader, and, in order to 
 secure the help of the Afghans, had put forward Mahmud, 
 son of Sikandar I^odi, as the rightful heir to the throne of 
 Delhi. Placing little confidence in the loyalty of the Indian 
 chieftains who had joined him, Babur despatched them to 
 maintain order in different parts of the provinces, and marched 
 with his small but well-tried army, mostly of Mogul horse and 
 artillery, to meet the enemy. Unfortunately his advance 
 guard fell in with an Afghan force near Biana and was repulsed 
 with considerable loss. This defeat caused consternation in 
 the Mogul ranks, and was followed by the desertion of some 
 of his men. To add to the trouble an astrologer in Babur's 
 retinue had observed that the planet Mars was to be seen 
 every evening in the west, and predicted that to march in 
 that direction would mean certain defeat. 
 
 Babur began to be troubled in his mind, and recalled an oft- 
 expressed resolve to make peace with the Almighty b}^ giving 
 up his intemperate habits. " Having sent for the gold and 
 silver goblets and cups with all the other utensils used for 
 drinking parties, I directed them to be broken, and renounced 
 the use of wine, purifying my mind. The fragments of the 
 goblets and other utensils of gold and silver I directed to be 
 divided among darweshes and the poor." He also gave orders 
 that no more wine should be sold in the camp. Then he called 
 a council of war. Most of his ofiicers advised that the arm}- 
 should retreat to the Panjab, after leaving a strong garrison 
 at Agra. He listened attentively to their proposals and then 
 put the question : " What will all the Muhammadan kings of 
 the world say of a monarch whom the fear of death obliged to 
 424 
 
BABUR 
 
 abandon such a kingdom ? " It would be far better, he 
 said, to face the prospect of martyrdom and fight to the last 
 man. " For as it is certain that the soul must quit the body, 
 it is fitting that it should do so with honour ; for the whole 
 aim of a man's life should be that when he dies he should 
 leave his name untarnished." Babur's appeal to the military 
 conscience of his officers was again successful. With one 
 voice they shouted approval of the Padshah's words, and each 
 took an oath on the Quran that he would die in battle rather 
 than turn his face from the enemy. 
 
 In the great battle which ensued, near Fatehpur-Sikri, 
 Babur adopted similar tactics to those he had used so success- 
 fully at Panipat. His well-organised artillery played havoc 
 in the Rajput ranks, and at the critical moment he led his 
 body-guard in a desperate charge which broke their centre 
 and won a decisive victory. Many of the Rajput chieftains, 
 including several of their Musalman allies, fell on the field of 
 battle, and the Rana, severely wounded, only escaped with great 
 difficulty to one of his hill-fortresses in Malwa, where he died 
 the same year. Babur proceeded to invest Chanderi, Medni 
 Rai's ancestral stronghold. After a brave defence the garrison 
 was reduced to the traditional forlorn hope, accompanied by 
 its terrible sacrifice of women and children, in which the 
 gallant Raja and several thousands of his retainers perished. 
 These events took place in 1527. Two years afterwards Babur 
 defeated the Afghans in Bengal near Buxar. 
 
 He lived only a year after this final victory, his vigorous 
 constitution having been undermined by repeated attacks of 
 malarial fever. From the time when, as a boy of twelve, he 
 came into his little kingdom of Ferghana he had reigned in 
 all thirty-seven years, but as the Padshah or sovereign ruler 
 of Hindustan he reigned less than five. His administration 
 during this short period was characterised by the same energy, 
 decision, and promptitude as he always displayed on the 
 field of battle. He laid out his capital at Agra as a splendid 
 garden-city, with palaces, baths, tanks, wells, and water- 
 courses, planting the orchards and flower-gardens which he 
 
 425 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 made " in every corner of Agra " with fruit-trees and rare 
 plants collected from all parts of his empire, planting roses 
 and narcissus regularly and " in beds corresponding to each 
 other," and making the water in the irrigation channels gurgle 
 over carved stone water-shoots, as if to remind him of his 
 dearly loved mountain-streams in Ferghana. He restored the 
 great trunk road which from the days of Chandragupta Maur>^a 
 had connected the imperial capitals of Hindustan with the 
 north-west frontier, building guard-houses and post-stations 
 at regular intervals, and establishing an express letter mail 
 between Agra and Kabul. He made a tour throughout his 
 Indian dominions, taking stock of the inhabitants, the beasts, 
 birds, fruit, and flowering trees ; sending at one time an 
 oleander of rare colour, at another a fruit-tree which was new 
 to him, to his gardens at Agra, ordering the reparation of 
 mosques and other buildings, having the distances from his 
 capital measured, and everywhere following the Indo-Aryan 
 tradition of a personal as distinguished from a bureaucratic 
 administration which eventually reconciled India to Mogul 
 rule — ^for it appealed to that deep religious feeling of the 
 Indian masses which makes a just and wise ruler God's vice- 
 gerent on earth, a feeling which no bureaucratic machine, 
 however perfect it may be, can ever evoke. 
 
 The chronicles of the Mogul dynasty from the time of Babur 
 down to Aurangzib's accession are entirely free from the narrow 
 sectarian rancour which characterised so many of the previous 
 Muhammadan rulers of India. There is no mention in Babur's 
 memoirs of the destruction of Hindu temples or of the wholesale 
 massacre of the ' infidels ' on account of their religion — ^though 
 he often put prisoners to death in accordance with Mogul 
 methods of * frightfulness ' in war. Babur, though no bigot, 
 showed his sincere piety both in his life and in the manner 
 of his death, which took place in the last da^^s of 1530, at the 
 age of forty-nine. His eldest son, Humayun, to whom he was 
 deeply attached, was seized with malarial fever while staying 
 at his country estate at Sambhal. Babur had him brought to 
 Agra by boat so that the court physicians might attend him, 
 426 
 
BABUR 
 
 but the latter pronounced the case hopeless. Babur himself 
 was in ill-health at the time, and he was greatly agitated at 
 the prospect of losing his dearly beloved son and heir. In his 
 grief he turned to his courtiers for advice. One of them 
 observed that in such circumstances the Almighty sometimes 
 deigned to accept the thing most valued by one friend in 
 exchange for the life of another. Babur at once clung to the 
 idea, and declared that as of all things his own life was dearest 
 to Humayun, so Humayun's life was dearest to him. He 
 would offer his own life as a sacrifice to save his son. 
 
 The courtiers urged that so great a sacrifice was uncalled 
 for — the Padshah should give up instead the great Gwalior 
 diamond taken at Agra, said to be the most valuable on earth. 
 But Babur was too sincere to put faith in courtly compromises 
 in his dealings with God. Just because his life was more 
 precious than any diamond the sacrifice must be made. He 
 began solemnly to walk round Humayun's couch, as if it were 
 an altar, and then retired to his apartment to finish his devo- 
 tions alone. Soon afterwards he was heard to exclaim : "I 
 have borne it away ; I have borne it away ! " He was seized 
 with an acute attack of the malaria to which he had been 
 subject since he had lived in India, and as he grew worse 
 Humayun revived. So the first of the Great Moguls gradually 
 sank and passed away, commending his son to the protection 
 of the comrades who had shared his struggles and his victories, 
 and imploring Humayun with his dying breath to be as kind 
 to his own brothers as his father had been to him, and avoid 
 the fratricidal strife which had brought so many former 
 dynasties to ruin. He was buried at Kabul, his former capital, 
 in the pleasure-garden which, in accordance with Mongol 
 custom, he had chosen for his own tomb — " the sweetest spot 
 in the neighbourhood." 
 
 427 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 HUMAYUN 
 
 HUMAYUN was only twenty-two years of age when he 
 began to reign, but he had had considerable experience 
 both in war as one of Babur's principal lieutenants, 
 and in civil administration under his father's guidance. He 
 was, says Ferishta, " a prince as remarkable for his wit as for 
 the urbanity of his manners ; and for the most part disposed 
 to spend his time in social intercourse and pleasure. He 
 devoted himself, however, to the sciences of astronomy and 
 geography, and not only wrote dissertations on the nature of 
 the elements, but had terrestrial and celestial globes constructed 
 for his use." lyike Babur his education and tastes were entirely 
 Persian, though he was far from being an orthodox Musalman — 
 the creed of Islam was held lightly by most of Timtir's descen- 
 dants. 
 
 But while Timur and Babur were strong individualists and 
 men of action, never allowing themselves to be turned from 
 any set purpose, either by the preaching of a muUa or the 
 prognostications of a soothsayer, Humayun was an amiable 
 but weak dilettante who sought the advice of the court astro- 
 logers in all affairs of State. His palace was designed accord- 
 ing to astrological rules, with seven halls of audience dedicated 
 to the sun, moon, and five planets, each hall being decorated 
 with appropriate symbolic paintings. He gave audience and 
 transacted business in one of these halls alternately throughout 
 the week, according to the planet of the da3^ Even the court 
 attendants wore on their uniforms an emblem corresponding 
 to the dominant planetary influence, so that the Padshah 
 might always be reminded of the occiilt power behind his 
 own. 
 428 
 
HUMAYUN 
 
 In spite of these precautions the stars in their courses fought 
 against Humayun. He fulfilled his father's dying injunctions 
 to treat his brothers well by bestowing on them the governor- 
 ship of different provinces ; but this did not prevent them 
 from seizing the first opportunity for trying to push him off 
 the throne. The individualistic principles of Islam, while 
 they gave a stimulus to new creative effort by breaking up 
 ancient civilisations, did not promote political stability, within 
 or without the Muhammadan pale ; for every man who wielded 
 the sword of Islam was tempted to test its strength and to 
 use it for his own ends, regardless of family ties or social 
 obligations. And for those who stood nearest to the throne 
 the temptation was always strongest. Humayun had therefore 
 to maintain his right of succession not only against his intriguing 
 brothers, but against a distant relative, Muhammad Zaman 
 Mirza, who first tried to get rid of him by assassination, 
 and, having failed, fled to Gujerat, where he was aided by 
 Bahadur Shah in raising a mixed army of Mogul, Afghan, and 
 Rajput mercenaries. 
 
 Another claimant to the throne of Delhi shortly afterwards 
 appeared in the person of 'Ala-ud-din, the brother of the late 
 Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, who also found Gujerat a convenient 
 recruiting ground, and Bahadur Shah's treasury useful for 
 supplying the sinews of war. 'Ala-ud-din was first in the field 
 with an army of 40,000 men, which he sent under the command 
 of his son, Tatar Khan, to attack Humayun at Agra ; but before 
 it reached the neighbourhood of the city the greater part of it 
 had deserted, and the imperial army, led by one of Babur's 
 time-sendng brothers, fell upon the remainder and nearly 
 annihilated it — Tatar Khan and three hundred of his officers 
 being amongst the slain. 
 
 Humayun had now to deal with Bahadur Shah himself, a 
 more formidable adversary, for Gujerat was then one of the 
 most powerful states of Northern India, its army being particu- 
 larly strong in artillery. Apparently from a chivalrous feeling 
 towards a fellow-Musalman, Humayun looked on while Bahadur 
 Shah was engaged in battering down the defences of Chitor, 
 
 429 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 but then marched against him. Bahadur Shah, imitating 
 Babur's tactics at Panipat, entrenched himself strongly, 
 expecting that Humayun would repeat Ibrahim Lodi's blunder 
 by hurhng his army against his batteries. In this he under- 
 estimated Humayun's military capacity, for instead of falling 
 into the trap prepared for him the latter sent strong bodies 
 of cavalry to scour the country in the rear of Bahadur's camp 
 and cut off his supplies. In the course of two months the 
 Gujerat army was reduced to a state of famine, and the Sultan 
 after blowing up his guns left it to its fate and escaped by 
 night with a few followers to the fortress of Mandu. Humayun 
 after dispersing the remnants of the Gujerat forces proceeded 
 to attack Mandu, and Bahadur Shah was eventually compelled 
 to hide himself in the island of Diu, one of the remotest corners 
 of his dominions, while the Mogul army overran the greater 
 part of Gujerat and Malwa, which Bahadur Shah had conquered 
 and annexed some years before. HumayHn, who was not 
 lacking in personal courage, distinguished himself at the siege 
 of ChamparJr by leading a party of three hundred men in 
 scaling the walls of the fortress by night, with the help of 
 steel spikes fixed in the scarp of the rock. He then forced 
 his way sword in hand through the defenders' ranks and opened 
 one of the gates for the entrance of his troops. 
 
 So far all seemed to go well with the Mogul dynasty. But 
 while he was prosecuting this successful campaign Humayun 
 received news of a still more formidable rival threatening the 
 security of his throne. This was Sher Khan Stir, an Afghan 
 chieftain of great ability and strength of character, who had 
 taken service under Babur, but only with a view to finding 
 the auspicious moment for driving the detested Moguls out 
 of India. Previous to entering the Mogul service he had 
 taken a prominent part in the politics of Bihar, where the 
 Afghans had established themselves for many generations, and 
 where his family estate, or jagir, was situated. Family 
 quarrels over the possession of the estate had thrown him 
 alternately from the Afghan to the Mogul side. Babur had 
 restored to him his jagir, of which he had been deprived by 
 
 430 
 
HUMAYUN 
 
 one of the Afghan rulers of Jaunpur ; but as soon as Mahmnd, 
 one of Sikandar Lodi's sons who fought with the Rana Sanga 
 against Babur, had obtained possession of Bihar after the 
 disastrous battle near Agra, Sher Khan joined him. His great 
 ambition would not permit Sher Klian to remain loyal to any 
 master, Afghan or Mogul. He quarrelled with Mahmud, and, 
 it is said, brought about his defeat by withdrawing his men 
 in the battle which restored Babur's supremacy in Bihar. 
 
 Early in the reign of Humayun, Sher Khan had played his 
 game so well that though nominally owing allegiance to the 
 Mogul Emperor he had obtained possession of the strong 
 fortress of Chunar, near Benares, commanding the main 
 entrance to the plains of Bengal through the Ganges valle}^ 
 and was practically master of Bihar. Humayun made the 
 mistake of allowing his scheming vassal to retain possession 
 of this important stronghold, and Sher Khan, as soon as the 
 Emperor was fully occupied in Gujerat, threw off the mask 
 and proceeded with consummate strategy to develop his 
 plans for driving the Mogul interlopers from Hindustan. He 
 had the advantage of being Indian by birth, and thus was 
 regarded by many Hindus as well as by Indian Muhammadans 
 as their natural leader. Humayun, as soon as he realised 
 Sher Khan's intentions, left Gujerat in charge of his brother 
 Mirza Askari, and marched with a large army to attack Chunar, 
 which Sher Khan left with a strong garrison while he himself 
 was strengthening his position by the conquest of Bengal. 
 The siege of Chunar, in which Humayun was assisted by a 
 Turkish artillery officer, Rumi Khan, formerly in the service 
 of the Sultan of Gujerat, lasted several months, but at last 
 the Afghan garrison surrendered. In the meantime Sher 
 Klian had sacked Gaur, and thus provided himself with means 
 for the more arduous campaign against Humayun, but as he 
 was not yet prepared to meet the imperial Mogul army he 
 evacuated Gaur as soon as Chunar had fallen, and inveigled 
 Humayun into a perilous advance into Bengal at the height 
 of the monsoon floods by leaving the road open for him. 
 
 Humayun fooHshly pushed on, but had no sooner taken 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 possession of Gaur than he found his communications cut off 
 by floods. He was thus compelled to remain at Gaur for 
 several months, during which time he lost many of his men 
 by sickness and desertion, and his brother Mirza Hindal, 
 whom he had left with part of the imperial army in Bihar, 
 went off to Agra to work up a rebellion, hoping first to secure 
 the throne for himself and then to finish off the Afghan. Sher 
 Khan, while Humayun and his brother were thus occupied, 
 had obtained possession of the fortress of Rohtas by a similar 
 trick to that by which Nasir Khan had taken the stronghold 
 of Asa Ahir several centuries before, and watching his oppor- 
 tunity placed his small but well-organised forces between 
 Humayun and Agra. He then retook Chunar and Benares, 
 and feeling sure that Humayun could not now escape him 
 laid siege to Jaunpur. When the state of the roads permitted, 
 the remnants of the imperial army set out on its return march 
 and Sher Khan commenced to stalk his quarry. Humayun was 
 intercepted near Buxar, and both armies remained there 
 watching each other for two months, the Moguls tr>dng to 
 bridge the Ganges, and the Afghans waiting for an opportunity 
 to attack, while Sher Khan tried to throw Huma^oin off his 
 guard by making a pretence of negotiating. 
 
 At last Sher Khan by a night march and skilful strategy 
 seized all the river craft and surprised the Mogul camp, with 
 the result that the greater part of the demoralised army was 
 cut to pieces or drowned in the river. HumayHn bj' the 
 persuasion of some of his officers was induced to leave the 
 field when all was lost, and tried to cross the Ganges on horse- 
 back ; but the exhausted animal was drowned, and the 
 Emperor would certainly have shared the same fate had not 
 a water-carrier in mid-stream helped him over on liis inflated 
 goat's skin. Humayun's arrival at Agra after the disaster 
 put an end for the time being to Mirza Hindal's schemes. His 
 other brother, Mirza Kamran, came from Kabul "with reinforce- 
 ments, and in face of the danger which threatened the Mogul 
 dynasty the three cried truce and agreed to put their rivalries 
 aside for a more convenient season. In the meantime Sher 
 
HUMAYUN 
 
 Khan was taking advantage of his victory by consoHdating 
 his position in Bengal and preparing for the decisive blow 
 which would break completely the Mogul power in Hindustan, 
 for as yet the imperial forces greatly outnumbered his own. 
 He had everything to gain by suspending his stroke, for the 
 Mogul court was a hot-bed of intrigues, and after a few months 
 Mirza Kamran again quarrelled with his brother and went off 
 to I^ahore with most of his retainers. About nine months 
 after his victory at Buxar, Sher Khan, who had now adopted 
 the title of Shah, with about 50,000 men advanced to Kanauj, 
 while Humayun marched from Agra to meet him with an 
 army of twice that number. Again the two armies faced 
 each other for a considerable time, the Afghans having the 
 advantage of position, and the Moguls losing heavily by 
 desertions. Sher Shah waited until Humayun was forced by 
 the breaking of the monsoon to move his camp, and then 
 attacked. The Mogul army was so completely routed that 
 the road to Agra lay open, and the Afghans were soon again 
 in possession of the capital of Hindustan. 
 
 The battle of Kanauj took place in 1540. Humayun fled 
 from the field on an elephant and again narrowly escaped 
 drowning while crossing the Ganges. His adventures for the 
 next three years, until he found refuge at the court of the 
 Shah of Persia, would form an excellent plot for an historical 
 novel. After hurriedly collecting as much as possible of 
 jewels and other valuables from the imperial treasury at Agra, 
 he fled to I^ahore, accompanied by his brothers, Hindal and 
 Askari, hoping to get assistance from Kamran. But the latter, 
 as soon as he realised the situation, opened negotiations with 
 Sher Shah, who allowed him to remain unmolested at Kabul 
 in return for the cession of the Panjab. Mirza Hindal retired 
 to Kandahar, so Humayun, who had been joined by some of 
 the Mogul officers who had escaped from Kanauj, was left to 
 his own resources. The cheerful spirit which was his best 
 characteristic did not, however, desert him. At a musical 
 party given at Mirza Hindal' s house he fell deeply in love with 
 a beautiful young Persian girl, named Hamida, and married 
 
 2E 433 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 her in spite of his brother's remonstrances. He also succeeded 
 in collecting a small army, and accompanied by his bride, 
 Banu Begam, as she was called, he marched southward into 
 Sind, hoping to get assistance from the Muhammadan governor 
 of that province in recovering possession of Gujerat. In this 
 he was disappointed, for after a year and a half of unsuccessful 
 campaigning and fruitless negotiations his Mogul troops had 
 nearly all deserted and he was constrained to apply for protec- 
 tion to the most powerful Rajput ruler in that neighbourhood, 
 the Maharaja Maldeo of Marwar, 
 
 After terrible sufferings in the desert he succeeded in forcing 
 his way to the vicinity of Jodhpur, only to find that there was 
 nothing to be hoped for in that quarter, for Maldeo was 
 preparing to seize him and hand him over to Sher Shah. So 
 with the few followers who still remained faithful to him 
 Humayun turned to fly towards Amarkot, a fortress on the 
 outskirts of the Sind desert, where he hoped for a better 
 reception from another Rajput prince, the Rana Prasad. 
 Pressing on by night through the waterless desert with Maldeo's 
 troopers in pursuit, Humayun and the young Begam, who had 
 shared all his misfortunes, were in a pitiful plight. Many of 
 his retinue died of thirst or went mad. After some days they 
 were overtaken and surrounded by a body of Rajput horse 
 under the command of the Crown Prince of Marwar, who, 
 however, contented himself with upbraiding Humayun for 
 violating Hindu territory and Hindu laws, and then supplied 
 him with water and allowed him to continue his march. In ij 
 spite of this unexpected help from the enemy the Moguls 
 suffered great privations before they reached Amarkot. For 
 three days they were without water, and when at last they 
 came to one of the deep wells of the desert country several of j 
 the party, maddened by thirst, threw themselves into it in 
 their eagerness to reach the first skinful as it was drawn to J 
 the surface. The next day they reached a small stream which i 
 showed that they were approaching the edge of the desert, j 
 In spite of the loss of several camels, which died from over-| 
 drinking, HumayGn and the Begam with the miserable rem- 
 
 434 
 
HUMAYUN 
 
 nant of their retinue at last straggled into Amarkot. Their 
 hopes of assistance from the Rana were not disappointed. 
 He not only showed them the kindest hospitality, but offered 
 Humayun the assistance of his armed forces in another attempt 
 to obtain possession of Sind. It was in this haven of refuge, 
 under the protection of a Hindu raja, that Banu Begam gave 
 birth to a son, Prince Akbar, known to posterity as the greatest 
 of the Great Moguls. Humayun, accompanied by the Rana 
 and his army, had already started on his second expedition 
 to Sind when he received the news. He indented on the 
 saddle-bags of his retinue — ^which now did duty for the imperial 
 Mogul treasury — ^for the customary presents to his friends, 
 and found only a bag of musk. This was brought on a china 
 plate and distributed among them with the pious wish that 
 his son's fame might be spread abroad throughout the world 
 like the fragrance of that perfume. 
 
 At the beginning all went well with the expedition. The 
 Rana was joined by several other Rajput chieftains, and a 
 few Mogul troopers rallied to Humayun's standard, so that 
 the whole force mustered 15,000 cavalry. But Humayun's 
 tactless conduct and disregard of Hindu susceptibilities offended 
 his Rajput friends, and before the army came into touch with 
 the Muhammadan forces in Sind the Rana had withdrawn his 
 troops in disgust and returned to Amarkot. Humayun was 
 now left to settle matters with Husain Arghun, the ruler of 
 Sind. After some fighting an arrangement was made by which 
 Humayun was allowed to retire unmolested on condition that 
 he went to Kandahar, where his brother Mirza Askari was 
 governor on behalf of Kamran. At this juncture he found 
 an invaluable recruit in Bairam Khan, a Turkoman noble — 
 
 ; one of Babur's generals and a most capable officer — who after 
 the disaster of Kanauj had escaped to Gujerat, and now suc- 
 
 , ceeded in rejoining his sovereign. He remained by Humayun's 
 side throughout all his subsequent difficulties and dangers, and 
 did much to restore the fortunes of the Mogul dynasty. 
 
 Humayiin's brothers, on the other hand, proved to be as 
 treacherous as ever. Before he reached Kandahar he was 
 
 435 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 warned by a friendly messenger from the city that the Mirza, 
 at the instigation of Husain Arghun, was on his way to seize 
 him and hold him as a prisoner so that he and Kamran might 
 be in a position to bargain with Sher Shah. Humayun, accom- 
 panied by the Begam and Bairam Khan, had hardly time to 
 mount and gallop away, leaving the infant prince to his uncle's 
 compassion, before the Mirza and his troopers dashed into the 
 camp. Askari, failing in his main object, carried ofE his 
 nephew to Kandahar, and Humayun, with only forty-two 
 followers, succeeded in reaching the Persian province of Seistan, 
 where he was received with all honour by the governor on 
 behalf of the Shah Tahmasp and supplied with every requisite 
 for a dignified appearance at the Persian court. HumayHn 
 was not at the end of his troubles, but he was safe from his 
 crafty enemy, Sher Shah, and from the machinations of his 
 nearest relatives. 
 
 436 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 SHER SHAH'S REIGN AND THE RESTORA- 
 TION OF THE MOGUL DYNASTY 
 
 DURING the three years which had elapsed since his 
 great victory over the Moguls at Kanauj in 1540 
 Sher Shah had been fully occupied in extending his 
 conquests and in restoring order in his new dominions. In 
 this task he proved his high qualities both as a military leader 
 and as an administrator. The former Mogul provinces had 
 relapsed into a state of complete anarchy. The roads were 
 insecure for mercantile traffic, and the cultivators upon whose 
 industry the revenues of the State depended were at the 
 mercy of the disbanded Mogul soldiery and of other marauders. 
 Sher Shah was a rigid disciplinarian : he punished with equal 
 severity his own Afghan soldiers and Mogul or other outlaws 
 when caught plundering the villagers. He showed no mercy 
 either to zamindars or ryots when they failed to pay the 
 governmental dues. 
 
 Born in India, he had acquired an intimate knowledge of 
 village life and a practical experience of administrative work 
 while he was in charge of his father's estates at Sahseram, 
 and as an astute estate manager had realised that the interests 
 of the landlord were bound up with the well-being of his 
 tenants. He was a well-read man, and following the tradi- 
 tions of previous Afghan rulers in Bengal had doubtless made 
 himself acquainted with the principles of Hindu as well as 
 Muhammadan polity. He was, however, far from being the 
 vicegerent of Vishnu, the Preserver, after the Hindu ideal of 
 government, though his Muhammadan biographer extols the 
 justice of his dealings with the ryots and asserts that before 
 his time the settlement of land revenue was left to the caprice 
 
 437 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 of Government officials. Like many modern writers, Abbas 
 Khan, the author of the Tdnkh-i Sher Shdhi,'^ assumes that 
 Indian history began with the Muhammadan conquest. Sher 
 Shah was a strict Sunni who dealt with Hindu ryots in the 
 same spirit as a prudent farmer treats his horses and cattle — 
 they were to be protected from injury and maltreatment so 
 that they might contribute the more to their owner's strength 
 and wealth ; for Sher Shah acted entirely on the principle 
 L'Etat, c'est moi. 
 
 His government was a military despotism and his administra- 
 tive methods thorough in the modern Prussian sense. The 
 whole country was effectively garrisoned so that no one dared 
 to dispute his authority or disturb the regular collection of 
 the imperial revenue. Of the people of Kanauj it is said by 
 his biographer, " no man kept in his house a sword, an arrow, 
 a bow, or a gun, nay, any iron article whatever except the imple- 
 ments of husbandry and cooking utensils ; and if he [the 
 Governor] ordered the headmen of any village to attend him, 
 they obeyed his order, and dared not for one moment to absent 
 themselves. The fear and dread of him was so thoroughly 
 instilled into the turbulent people of those parts that accord- 
 ing to the measurement they paid their revenue to the 
 treasurers." ^ He was as severe with the zamindars, the 
 fiscal agents of Muhammadan India, as he was with the rj^ots. 
 When the headmen and cultivators of the province of Sambhal 
 fled from the oppression of the Musalman officials he sent 
 Masnad Ali Isa Khan, " a lion in valour and gallantry," 
 with orders to enlist five thousand new cavalry for restoring 
 order in the province. The new governor " so humbled and 
 overcame by the sword the contumacious zamindars of those 
 parts that they did not rebel even when he ordered them 
 to cut down their jungles, which they had cherished like 
 children, but cut them with their own hands, though draw- 
 ing deep sighs of affliction ; and they reformed and repented 
 them of their thieving and highway robberies, and they paid 
 
 1 Translated in vol. iv of Elliot's History oj India. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 416. 
 
SHER SHAH'S REIGN 
 
 in at the city their revenue according to the measurements." ^ 
 So Sher Shah, it is said, had no more anxiety regarding the 
 province of Sambhal. 
 
 Sher Shah's system of revenue-collection is described by 
 the same writer as follows : " There was appointed in every 
 pargana one armr, one God-fearing shikkddr, one treasurer, 
 one kdrkun to write Hindi and one to write Persian ; and he 
 ordered his governors to measure the land every harvest, to 
 collect the revenue according to the measurement, and in 
 proportion to the produce, giving one share to the cultivator, 
 and half a share to the mukaddam [headman] ; and fixing the 
 assessment with regard to the kind of grain, in order that 
 the mukaddams and chaudhans and ' dmils should not oppress 
 the cultivators, who are the support of the prosperity of the 
 kingdom. Before his time it was not the custom to measure 
 the land, but there was a kdnungo in every pargana, from whom 
 was ascertained the present, past, and probable future state 
 of the pargana. In every sarkdr he appointed a chief shikkddr 
 and a chief munsif, that they might watch the conduct both 
 of the ' dmils and the people ; that the ' dmils should not oppress 
 or injure the people, or embezzle the King's revenue ; and if 
 any quarrel arose among the King's 'dmils regarding the boun- 
 daries of the parganas, they were to settle it, that no con- 
 fusion might find its way amongst the King's affairs." How 
 little the prosperity and happiness of his Hindu subjects 
 counted in Sher Shah's land poHcy may be judged from the 
 next sentence. " If the people, from any lawlessness or 
 rebellious spirit, created a disturbance regarding the collection 
 of the revenue, they were so to eradicate and destroy them 
 with punishment and chastisement that their wickedness and 
 rebellion should not spread to others." ^ 
 
 Sher Shah was, however, scrupulously careful to protect 
 the crops of industrious ryots from unnecessary injury. When 
 on the march he stationed guards to prevent any of his soldiery 
 trespassing on cultivated ground, and if any man disobeyed 
 
 ^ Tdrikh-i Sher Shdht, EUiot, vol. iv, pp. 415-416. 
 2 Ibid., pp. 413-414. 
 
 439 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 orders by plucking the corn he would himself cut off the ears 
 of the offender and have him paraded through the camp with 
 the corn hung round his neck. Neither would he allow the 
 r3^ots to be plundered or carried off as slaves when he entered 
 an enemy's country, for, said he, " the cultivators are blame- 
 less, they submit to those in power ; and if I oppress them 
 they will abandon their villages, and the country will be 
 ruined and deserted, and it will be a long time before it again 
 becomes prosperous." ^ He was also generous in rewarding 
 the faithful service of his officials, especially his own countrj^- 
 men. His reflections on this subject are characteristic of 
 his administrative principles. " I have examined," he said, 
 " and accurately ascertained that there is no such income and 
 advantage in other employments as in the government of a 
 district. Therefore I send my good old loyal experienced 
 servants to take charge of districts, that the salaries, profits, 
 and advantages may accrue to them in preference to others ; 
 and after two years I change them, and send other servants 
 like to them, that they also may prosper, and that under my 
 rule all my old servants may enjoy these profits and advan- 
 tages, and that the gate of comfort and ease may be opened 
 to them." 2 And to every pious fellow-countryman who came 
 to the imperial court Sher Shah gave presents " exceeding 
 his expectations," and he would say : " This is your share 
 of the kingdom of Hind which has fallen into my hands ; this 
 is assigned to you, come every year to receive it." Nor did 
 he forget the men of his own clan — the tribe and family of 
 Sur who dwelt in the land of Sur. He sent them an annual 
 stipend, and during his reign " no Afghan whether in Hind 
 or in Roh was in want, but all became men of substance." 
 No M^onder his pious biographer invokes blessings on his 
 head ! 
 
 At the same time Sher Shah was impartial in exacting from 
 all his subjects implicit obedience to his orders. No one dared 
 to dispute his authority, or act in opposition to his administra- 
 
 ^ Tdrikh-i Sher Shdhl, Elliot, vol. iv, p. 422. 
 2 Ibid., p. 414. 
 440 
 
SHER SHAH'S REIGN 
 
 tive measures. " If a son of his own, or a brother, or any of 
 his relatives or kin, or any chief or minister, did a thing dis- 
 pleasing to Sher Shah, and it got to his knowledge, he would 
 order him to be bound and put to death." ^ Sher Shah was 
 a good estate manager. Following the ancient Hindu tradi- 
 tions, he paid special attention to the upkeep of roads and to 
 the security and comfort of passengers on the king's highway. 
 He built many serais, with fruit gardens and separate provision 
 for Hindus and Musalmans. Many of the roads were planted 
 with avenues of fruit and shade-giving trees. In every serai 
 two horses were kept to provide a regular postal service, so 
 that every day news might be conveyed to the imperial court 
 from the most distant parts of Hindustan. The headmen of 
 villages were made personally responsible for the detection 
 of cases of highway robbery. If they failed to point out the 
 thieves they were compelled to make good the traveller's 
 loss ; " for," so the wise chronicler of the times reflects, " it 
 has been generally ascertained that theft and highway rob- 
 beries can only take place by the connivance of these headmen. 
 . . . Mukaddams and cultivators are alike thieves, and they 
 bear to each other the intimate relations of kinsmen ; hence 
 either the mukaddams are implicated in thefts and highway 
 robberies, or can ascertain who perpetrated them." ^ In cases 
 of murder, when the perpetrators were not discovered Sher 
 Shah's methods were equally thorough. The headman of the 
 village within whose limits the murder had occurred was 
 arrested and kept in prison until he disclosed the whereabouts 
 of the criminals — in default he was to be put to death. 
 
 Sher Shah showed brilliant capacity as an organiser, both 
 in military and civil affairs. By dint of indefatigable industry 
 and personal attention to the smallest details of administration 
 he restored law and order throughout Hindustan in the short 
 space of five years. And no doubt the long-suffering, law- 
 abiding ryot was grateful to the iron-handed Afghan for an 
 interval of comparative peace, and for protection against 
 indiscriminate plunder, though he might sometimes sigh for 
 ^ Tdrtkh-i Sher ShdM, Elliot, vol, iv, p. 428. * Ibid., p. 420. 
 
 441 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the golden days when even Sfldras were Aryan freemen, and 
 the laws of the village Assemblies were respected even by the 
 King of Kings and Supreme Ivord of the Five Indies. 
 
 While he was thus putting his house in order Sher Shah 
 was also energetically organising his military forces and 
 conducting several campaigns. He established fortified posts 
 in many parts of his dominions where danger threatened from 
 invasion, or where he wished to overawe an unfriendly popula- 
 tion. The principal of these was the great fortress of Rohtas, 
 on the Jhilam river, named after the stronghold in Bihar, and 
 designed to strengthen his hold upon the Panjab. After 
 frustrating the attempts of Humayun to retrieve the disaster 
 of Kanauj, Sher Shah was obhged to display his military 
 strength in Bengal in order to suppress an ambitious viceroy 
 who, following his own example, aspired to be an independent 
 ruler. When his recalcitrant subject had been put in chains, 
 he partitioned Bengal into a number of provinces and dis- 
 tributed the command of them among chieftains of different 
 clans whose mutual jealousies were a guarantee against similar 
 attempts. 
 
 Two years after his accession Sher Shah added Malwa to 
 his dominions. In 1542 he laid siege to Raisin, a Rajput 
 stronghold which surrendered after a siege of six months, 
 when the walls had been battered and breached in many 
 places by his artillery. The Rajputs, trusting to his solemn 
 promise that their lives would be spared, came out of the 
 fortress, but while they were encamped in the neighbour- 
 hood Sher Shah repented of his promise and gave orders for 
 a wholesale massacre. The Raja Puran Mall, when he was 
 told that the Afghans had surrounded his camp, first killed 
 his beloved wife, Ratnavali — " who sang Hindi melodies very 
 sweetly " — and then called upon his retainers to sacrifice 
 their own wives and families. " While the Hindus," sa5^s 
 the Musalman historian, " were employed in putting their 
 women and families to death, the Afghans on all sides 
 commenced the slaughter of the Hindus. Puran Mall 
 and his companions, like hogs at bay, failed not to exhibit 
 442 
 
SHER SHAH'S REIGN 
 
 valour and gallantry, but in the twinkling of an eye all were 
 slain." 1 
 
 Such of their wives and families as were not slain were 
 taken prisoners. One daughter of Puran Mall and three sons 
 of his elder brother were taken alive ; the rest were all killed. 
 Sher Shah gave the daughter of the Raja to some itinerant 
 minstrels, " that they might make her dance in the bazars." 
 The boys were castrated, " so that the race of the oppressor 
 might not increase." 
 
 The excuse given for Sher Shah's treachery and fiendish 
 cruelty on this occasion was that some Muhammadan widows 
 had complained of the Raja's conduct, and that the 
 'Ulamas, when consulted in the matter, had decided that the 
 sovereign's promises and oaths under these circumstances were 
 not binding. 
 
 After this exploit Sher Shah's mind was " quite at ease 
 concerning the kingdom of Hind." But, persuaded by his 
 Sunni nobles and chieftains, who urged that he should not 
 sheathe the sword until Islam in India was purged of the 
 Shiah heresy, he determined to strike at the root of the evil 
 by breaking the power of the Hindu, then represented by the 
 Maharaja of Marwar, Maldeo. So in 1543 he collected all 
 the forces of his empire, and invaded the latter's territory. 
 Many of the Rajput chiefs rallied to the Maharaja's standard, 
 and Sher Shah made little progress until by means of forged 
 letters dropped by his spies in the Rajput camp he managed 
 to arouse the Maharaja's suspicions regarding the loyalty of 
 some of his chieftains. Two of the latter, named Jaya Chandel 
 and Goha, in order to wipe off the imputation upon their 
 honour withdrew their retainers, numbering about 12,000 men, 
 and rashly attacked the whole imperial army, which out- 
 numbered them by more than six to one. For once Sher Shah's 
 cunning calculations were entirely upset. The Afghan camp 
 was quite unprepared for the sudden onslaught of the Rajput 
 cavalry and was at first thrown into confusion. When at 
 last the Afghans rallied and the Rajputs were forced to retire, 
 1 Tdrikh-i Sher ShdM, EUiot, vol. iv, p. 403. 
 
 443 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 even Slier Shah acknowledged the courage of the infidel, and, 
 alluding to the barrenness of the soil of Marwar, declared that 
 he " had nearly given the kingdom of Delhi for a handful of 
 millet." 
 
 Soon after this the Maharaja was compelled to retire to the 
 fortress of Siwana, on the borders of Gujerat, and Sher Shah 
 took possession of Chitor. In 1545 the imperial army laid 
 siege to Kalanjar, which was stoutly defended by the Raja 
 Kirat Singh. In consequence of Sher Shah's treachery at 
 Raisin, the Rajputs refused to come to terms. While Sher 
 Shah was directing his batteries, which had been placed upon 
 high earthworks, so as to command the interior of the fortress, 
 an enemy shell exploded a magazine close to where the 
 Emperor was standing. Sher Shah was carried to his tent 
 mortally wounded, but continued to give orders to his officers 
 for the final assault by which the fortress was won. The 
 brave defenders were put to the sword, except the Raja, who 
 with a few of his retainers fought his way through, but was 
 taken prisoner the next day and put to death to celebrate the 
 accession of the new ruler of Hindustan. Sher Shah died 
 giving thanks to God for the victory. He was buried at 
 Sahseram, on his family estate, in a stately mausoleum, one 
 of the finest monuments of the Muhammadan period in India, 
 which in its stern grandeur is eloquent of one of the strcug 
 men of Islam, a typical Musalman war-lord. 
 
 These great royal tombs, the Muhammadan counterpart 
 of the Indo- Aryan stupa, all bear the stamp of the men whose 
 fame they celebrate. They were built in one of the pleasure- 
 gardens where their royal owners passed their hours of recrea- 
 tion, a terrestrial paradise which death consecrated as hoh^ 
 ground. And though forbidden by his creed to make for 
 himself a graven image the Musalman monarch took so much 
 interest in the planning of his last resting-place that uncon- 
 sciously he gave it the impress of his own character, and the 
 builders formed it after his own image with as much care as 
 the court painters drew his portrait. Thus the mausoleum 
 together with the personal memoirs, the chronicles of the 
 444 
 
SHER SHAH'S REIGN 
 
 court historian, and the portraits of the court miniature painter 
 help to provide material for the study of the cult of indi- 
 vidualism which made Muhammadan history. But from the 
 artistic standpoint the Indo-Muhammadan tomb belongs to 
 Indian tradition as much as the stupa, the royal tomb of the 
 Aryan kings. Its symbolism is precisely the same as that of 
 the stupa, and the monuments of Indo-Aryan and Indo- 
 Muhammadan kings were both the creations of the royal 
 craftsmen of India. 
 
 If Sher Shah had transmitted his own strength of character 
 to his grandchildren Humayun would hardly have found the 
 opportunity for recovering his lost kingdom, and the history 
 of the Mogul dynasty in India would have ended with the 
 battle of Kanauj in 1540. But the Muhammadan cult of 
 individualism was absolutely inconsistent with the hereditary 
 principle of monarchy, and the efforts of Musalman monarchs 
 to reconcile their personal and dynastic interests with the 
 political ideals of Islam only led to chronic unrest and in- 
 variably ended in dismal failure. Sher Shah had appointed 
 his eldest son, 'Adil Khan, as his heir, but he was a weakling 
 and was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother, Jalal Khan. 
 Muhammadan politicians never recognised any dynastic rights 
 unless they were maintained by force of arms. When one of 
 Sher Shah's generals urged the claims of 'Adil Khan as the 
 rightful heir he was answered by the other grandees : " What 
 advice is this ? No one obtains a kingdom by inheritance ; 
 it belongs to whoever can gain it by the sword." ^ 
 
 Jalal Khan, who assumed the name of Salim Shah, inherited 
 some of Sher Shah's capacity, and after some disturbances 
 caused by 'Adil Khan's faction seated himself firmly on his 
 father's throne by the usual method of exterminating many 
 of his nearest relatives and those of the nobles whom he dis- 
 trusted. During his reign, which lasted eight years, Humayun 
 remained under the protection of the Persian court and did 
 not venture to cross swords with the Afghan ' usurpers,' as 
 the Mogul chroniclers chose to regard the representatives of 
 
 ^ Tdrikh-i Dandt, Elliot, vol. iv, p. 487. 
 
 445 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the line of Stir. So Salim Shah's reign was for the most part 
 free from serious pohtical commotion, except for some disturb- 
 ances caused by a Muslim revivalist named Shaikh 'Alai, who 
 preached a form of socialism based upon the Quran and posed 
 as the expected Mahdi who at the close of the Muhammadan 
 millennium was to appear as the herald of the Day of Judgment. 
 He gained many converts by his eloquence, and his enthusiastic 
 followers took upon themselves to turn the sword of Islam 
 against all who contravened their chosen s^^stem of social 
 ethics. The court mullas, however, did not accept this pro- 
 ceeding as good Muhammadan logic, and were shocked at the 
 Shaikh's lack of respect for royalty, so they condemned him 
 to death as a heretic. Salim Shah was magnanimous enough 
 to commute the sentence to banishment to a remote part of 
 his dominions. The Shaikh nevertheless persisted in his 
 seditious propaganda, and at last died when the punishment 
 of the lash was being inflicted upon him. His followers 
 gradually dispersed, so this interesting socialistic experiment, 
 like many others, ended in failure. The Mahdawi movement, 
 however, continued to agitate the mind of Islam for a long 
 time afterwards. 
 
 Salim Shah died in 1553, and was followed by his brother- 
 in-law, Muhammad Khan, who murdered Salim's eldest son, 
 a boy of twelve, and thus cleared the way for his own succession 
 to the throne. Under the title of Muhammad 'Adil Shah, or 
 'Adili Shah, he soon won for himself the nickname of Andli — 
 ' the Fool ' — for he immediately began to dissipate the resources 
 of his treasury in senseless prodigality, and in a very short 
 time the whole of the political machinery so carefully built 
 up by Sher Shah, upon which his own power and prosperity 
 depended, was completely disorganised. The Delhi Empire 
 soon ceased to exist : it was again split up into five separate 
 kingdoms at war with each other. Hemu, a Hindu shop- 
 keeper who had pushed his way to the front as 'Adil Shah's 
 commander-in-chief, was the strongest and most capable of 
 the competitors for power, but the prospect of a revival of 
 Hindu supremacy was naturally distasteful to most Muham- 
 446 
 
 
Tomb of Sher Shah at Sahseram 
 
 30. 
 
 Tomb op Humayun ax Dei,hi 
 
 446 
 
HUMAYUN'S RETURN 
 
 madans ; so while the different Afghan factions were contend- 
 ing with each other messengers were sent from Delhi and 
 Agra inviting the exiled Mogul monarch in Persia to return 
 and take possession of his throne. 
 
 Though Humayun's life as a political refugee at the Persian 
 court had been far from pleasant, when he received the message 
 he was in a dejected state of mind and hardly disposed to 
 undertake new adventures. Shah Tahmasp, who was an 
 enthusiastic propagandist of Sufi doctrines, had accorded him 
 ceremonial honour and lavish hospitality, but had lost no 
 opportunity of reminding Humayun of his dependent position, 
 and had exacted the most humiliating terms as the price of 
 his assistance in recovering his throne. Though Humaytin 
 had been brought up as a Sunni he had been compelled by the 
 Shah to sign a profession of the Shiah faith and to promise 
 to propagate its doctrines in India and to give territorial 
 compensation to Persia. With the aid of Persian troops he 
 had taken Kabul and Kandahar from his brother Kamran, 
 and had recovered possession of his son, Prince Akbar. But 
 his hold upon the Afghans was most precarious. Repeated 
 acts of treachery had at last driven him to put out Kamran's 
 eyes. Mirza Hindal had been killed while fighting on Huma- 
 yun's side. He had been reconciled again to Mirza Askari, 
 but immediately after a great feast held to celebrate the 
 event Humayun had thrown him into prison. He even dis- 
 trusted his staunchest adherent and right-hand man, Bairam 
 Klhan, who had stood loyally by his side during all the 
 time of his exile from India and by his tact and diplomacy 
 had smoothed the way in the difficult negotiations with the 
 Shah. 
 
 In this mood Humayun fell back upon an old method of 
 divination to settle his fate. He sent three horsemen out in 
 different directions to take the names of the first three persons 
 they might meet. The first returned and reported that he 
 had met a traveller whose name was Daulat (' empire ') ; the 
 second declared that his man called himself Murad (' the object 
 of desire ') ; the third that he had met a villager whose name 
 
 447 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 was Saadiit (' good luck ').i Humayun's spirits revived at this 
 most auspicious augury. Though he had only 15,000 horse 
 under his command, he set out from Kabul at the beginning 
 of 1555 to recover possession of the Panjab. At Peshawar 
 he was joined by Bairam Khan with a body of Mogul veterans, 
 and by the old general's skilful strategy HumayHn defeated 
 the Afghan forces which opposed his advance, occupied Lahore, 
 and re-entered Delhi in triumph fifteen years after his defeat 
 at Kanauj. 
 
 The Afghan dynasty was overthrown, but Humayun did 
 not live to recover all his former dominions. Six months 
 afterwards he died from the effects of falling down a staircase 
 in his palace at Delhi. Humayun was a wine-bibber, like 
 Babur, and indulged in opium. It is not improbable that the 
 accident was primarily due to this cause, though Ferishta 
 gives it a pious touch. Humayun, he says, was descending 
 the stairs when the muazzin, or crier of the royal chapel, 
 announced the hour of prayer. The Padshah, according to 
 custom, stood still, and having repeated the creed sat down 
 on the second step until the crier had finished. As he rose 
 and tried to support himself on the staff he held in his hand 
 it slipped on the polished steps and he fell headlong over the 
 parapet. He was taken up unconscious, and though he soon 
 recovered his senses the injuries he had received proved fatal 
 four days afterwards. 
 
 Humayun died at the beginning of 1556, in the forty-ninth 
 year of his age. Including the years of exile, he had reigned 
 twenty-five years. His shallowness and defects of character 
 were covered by the saving grace of cheerfulness. Like most 
 of the Great Moguls, he was for his intimate friends a prince 
 of good fellows. He was never wanting in personal courage, 
 but the restoration of the Mogul dynasty was more due to the 
 steadfast loyalty of his comrades and to the weakness of 
 Sher Shah's descendants than to his own military capacity. 
 The contrast between Sher Shah and HumayHn could not be 
 better illustrated than it is in the two great monuments which 
 
 ^ Ferishta, Btiggs' translation, vol. ii, pp. 172-173. 
 448 
 
 I 
 
HUMAYUN'S DEATH 
 
 perpetuate their memory. Humayun's mausoleum at Delhi 
 portrays in its polished elegance the facile charmeur and rather 
 superficial dilettante of the Persian school, whose best title 
 to fame is that he was the father of Akbar ; Sher Shah's at 
 Sahseram the stern, strong man, egotist and empire-builder, 
 who trampled all his enemies underfoot and ruled Hindustan 
 with a rod of iron. 
 
 2F 449 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 AKBAR : THE PROTECTORATE OF 
 BAIRAM KHAN 
 
 AT the time of Humayun's death Bairam Khan was 
 occupied in completing the conquest of the Panjab 
 on behalf of his sovereign, who was represented by 
 the young Prince Akbar, then only thirteen years old. If 
 he had so willed it the Khan could have found plenty of prece- 
 dents, reckoned sound by Muhammadan opinion of the time, 
 for using the opportunity to get rid of his youthful commander- 
 in-chief and for making a bid for supreme power for himself. 
 It says much for the loyalty of his character that he was proof 
 against the temptation, and immediately joined with the other 
 officers in proclaiming Akbar as Padshah of Hindustan, though 
 he himself, by Akbar's wish, retained the position given him 
 by Huma3^un as the Prince's guardian, and during Akbar's 
 minority exercised full power of sovereignty under the title of 
 Khan Baba, or Protector. 
 
 Akbar had been reared in the camp from the day of his 
 birth. At five years of age, when Humaytin was besieging Kabul, 
 he had been exposed to the shot from his father's cannon by 
 his vindictive uncle Kamran. His playfellows had been the 
 tough old campaigners to whom warfare was the breath of 
 life, and by the time he had entered his teens he was an expert 
 in the management of elephants, horses, and camels, and skilled 
 in the use of arms. Nevertheless it was well for the Mogul 
 dynasty that he had such a powerful supporter by his side 
 in this critical time, for Humayun had by no means disposed 
 of all his adversaries before he died. Hindustan was not only 
 distracted by the struggles of the numerous competitors for 
 the throne of Delhi. Soon after Akbar's accession a great 
 450 
 
AKBAR: THE PROTECTORATE 
 
 famine occurred, followed by an epidemic of plague which 
 devastated most of the cities of Northern India. The news of 
 Humayun's death had inspired the Governor of Kabul to 
 revolt, and Hemu, 'Adili Shah's commander-in-chief, now prac- 
 tically master in Bengal, was still in the field and already 
 advancing from Chunar towards Agra with an army of thirty 
 thousand men, gathering strength on his march from the 
 numerous enemies of the Mogul cause. Hemu, as a Hindu, 
 was popular|with the Indian masses, and none of the predatory 
 racesrsettled|in India liked the appearance of more competitors 
 in the field they regarded as their own. 
 
 Before Bairam could come to the rescue Agra had fallen. 
 HemG energetically followed up this first success by laying 
 siege to Delhi, where the main body of the Mogul army was 
 concentrated. The Governor, Tardi Beg Khan, without waiting 
 for reinforcements, sallied out to attack the enemy, but was 
 defeated and fled to Sirkind. The city surrendered, and Hemu, 
 assuming the title of Vikramaditya, was proclaimed sovereign 
 ruler of Hindustan. In spite of his position as the avowed 
 champion of Hinduism Hemu had secured the alliance of a 
 number of Afghan chieftains, and with an army now augmented 
 to over one hundred thousand men was preparing to push on 
 to Lahore with the intention of annihilating Bairam's forces 
 and the last hope of the Mogul dynasty. The Moguls, including 
 the remnants of the garrison of Agra and Delhi, did not muster 
 many more than twenty thousand men, and almost all of 
 Akbar's officers, alarmed at the reports of Hemu's triumphant 
 progress, were in favour of a retreat to Kabul. But Bairam 
 Khan, supported by Akbar, resolutely opposed such a feeble 
 step, which would have been fatal to the prospects of the house 
 of Timur. Pour encourager les autres he gave orders for the 
 arrest and summary execution of the late Governor of Delhi, 
 Tardi Beg, on a charge of misconduct in the face of the enemy, 
 and then marched out rapidly to meet Hemu. Fortune favoured 
 the resolute Turkish general, for a large body of cavalry which 
 he sent out to reconnoitre surprised an Afghan force in charge 
 of Hemu's artillery and captured the whole of it. This was 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 disastrous for the Hindu cause. The two main forces met 
 on the historic field of Panipat. Hemu endeavoured to make 
 up for the loss of his guns by a furious charge of elephants, 
 and almost broke the Mogul centre, but in the crisis of the 
 battle he was shot in the eye by an arrow and fell back in his 
 howdah insensible. His body-guard began to waver at the 
 sight of his fall, and before he recovered his army was routed 
 by a charge of the Mogul cavalry. Hemu himself was taken 
 prisoner and brought to Akbar's tent in a pitiable plight, 
 Bairam Khan was anxious that his royal protege should win 
 for himself the title of Ghazi, or ' Champion of the Faith,' by 
 slaying the infidel on the spot, but the more chivalrous Akbar 
 had scruples against killing a wounded prisoner and merely 
 touched Hemu's head with his sword, whereupon Bairam drew 
 his own weapon and cut down his brave opponent, leaving his 
 attendants to finish off the business. 
 
 Hemu's death and the rout of his army, which took place ten 
 months after Akbar's accession, gave the Moguls possession of 
 Delhi and Agra and disposed of the Padshah's most formidable 
 rival ; but the Afghans in the Panjab and in Bengal still re- 
 fused to acknowledge his supremacy. A nephew of Sher Shah, 
 Sikandar Stir, fought Akbar's army in the Panjab for eight 
 months longer before he surrendered on condition of being 
 allowed to retire to Bengal, where Muhammad 'Adili Shah still 
 exercised a nominal sovereignty. By the successful conclusion 
 of the Panjab campaign Bairam Khan's work was accomplished 
 and Babur's grandson was firmly seated on the throne of Dellii. 
 But Akbar, now growing into manhood and active both in 
 mind and body, soon began to find the tutelage of his faithful 
 but rather domineering guardian growing more and more 
 irksome. Bairam Khan's attachment to the house of Timur 
 was a family tradition of several generations. He had been 
 a close friend of Akbar's father long before Akbar was born, 
 and his loyalty towards Humayun's son was above suspicion. I 
 Akbar, however, was as strong-willed as his Protector, more i 
 liberal in his views, and of far greater mental capacity ; and 
 as the young Padshah became conscious of his own strength 1 
 452 
 
AKBAR: THE PROTECTORATE 
 
 he resented more and more Bairam's fatherly control and his 
 somewhat high-handed proceedings. The Protector was a 
 politician of Sher Shah's type, a strict discipUnarian, and very 
 jealous of Akbar's youthful friendships and of any favours 
 which the Padshah might bestow upon others without consulting 
 him. 
 
 Bairam's many enemies at court — among whom must be 
 reckoned one of Akbar's nurses, Maham Anaga, to whom the 
 Padshah was much attached — were not slow to use every 
 occasion for fomenting the feehng of irritation on both sides, 
 and a trifling incident at last brought about a serious quarrel 
 between Akbar and the Protector. Akbar, who was of strong 
 physique and fond of all manly sports, was amusing himself 
 with an elephant fight when two of the animals got out of 
 control, broke out of the enclosure, and stampeded Bairam's 
 camp close by — one of them running over the ropes of the 
 regent's tents and putting his life in danger. The Khan, in 
 spite of Akbar's protestations that the affair was purely acci- 
 dental, chose to feel insulted and ordered the mahout of the 
 offending elephant, one of Akbar's personal servants, to instant 
 execution. For some time there was a feeling of coldness 
 between the Protector and the Padshah, but the latter soothed 
 Bairam's ruffled feelings by giving him in marriage a niece of 
 Humayun's, Sulima Sultana Begam, according to an arrange- 
 ment made in his father's lifetime. A reconciliation took place, 
 but not long afterwards Bairam Khan, much to Akbar's disgust, 
 put to death one of the grandees of the court on account of 
 some real or imaginary offence and proceeded to take vengeance 
 on one of the Padshah's intimate friends, formerly one of his 
 own proteges. 
 
 This was a mulla named Pir Muhammad, half soldier and 
 half scholar, who had been appointed by the Protector as 
 Akbar's tutor and had acquired considerable influence over 
 his royal pupil's mind. He was, however, a man of unscru- 
 pulous character, and, having wormed himself into the Padshah's 
 favour, had grown insolent both towards the other courtiers 
 and towards his former patron. At length he grossly offended 
 
 453 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the Protector when the latter paid a visit to his house, by making 
 him wait at the entrance. This so enraged the Khan that 
 without consulting Akbar he put the mulla in prison and 
 appointed another tutor in his place. Akbar was furious, but 
 did not take any decided step to free himself from the Protec- 
 tor's control until the whole court was suffering from Bairam's 
 irritable temper. Then Akbar, after consulting with Maham 
 Anaga and some of his intimate friends, took the opportunity 
 of a hunting party, when the Protector's vigilant eye was not 
 watching him, to ride off to Delhi, ostensibly to pay a visit 
 to his mother, who was ill. A few days after his arrival he 
 issued a proclamation announcing that he had taken the 
 supreme government into his own hands and requiring all his 
 subjects in future to obey no orders from the court except those 
 issued in his own name and under the imperial seal. 
 
 Bairam Khan, realising that he had gone too far, sent two 
 confidential messengers to Delhi with assurances of his unabated 
 loyalty towards the Throne ; but Akbar, determined to show 
 that he was now master, took the suggestion of some of his 
 courtiers and, instead of admitting them to an audience, 
 ordered them to be seized and imprisoned. Bairam Khan's 
 pride was deeply wounded by this unexpected treatment, and 
 still more by the inevitable effect upon his prestige at court. 
 In the first outburst of his wrath he meditated an attempt to 
 reassert his authority over the Padshah's person by force, but, 
 thinking better of such flagrant disloyalty, he withdrew from 
 Agra with the intention of annexing one or other of the provinces 
 which as yet did not acknowledge the suzerainty of Akbar 
 and making a little kingdom for himself. He first tried Malwa, 
 but his former friends in that quarter upon whose assistance 
 he relied turned their backs upon him. Then, thinking he 
 would try to drive the Afghans from Bengal and estabhsh 
 himself there, he turned in that direction, but before he had 
 gone far he gave up the plan as hopeless. Thwarted in all 
 his ambitions, the disappointed Klian took the resolution to 
 make a pilgrimage to Mekka, the last refuge of the pious 
 Musalman, and set out for the seaport in Gujerat from whence 
 
 454 
 
AKBAR: THE PROTECTORATE 
 
 he should embark. On the way another idea occurred to him — 
 to try his fortunes in the Pan jab, the province which he had 
 conquered for Humayun, and where, although it was now a 
 part of Akbar's dominions, he might expect to find better 
 support from those who owed their positions to his patronage. 
 He consequently halted at Nagaur, in Rajputana, and began 
 to collect an army for that purpose. 
 
 Akbar, as soon as he heard of the recalcitrant Khan's inten- 
 tions, sent a peremptory order formally dismissing him from 
 office and directing him to proceed at once on his pilgrimage : 
 " It being our intention henceforth to govern our people by 
 our own judgment, let our well-wisher withdraw from all 
 worldly concerns and, retiring to Mekka, far removed from 
 the toils of public life, spend the rest of his days in prayer." 
 Bairam Khan submitted, not with goodwill but because, like 
 the English King's great Chancellor thirty years before this 
 time, he saw the downfall of all his hopes and ambitions. Most 
 of his retainers, seeing that Akbar's star was in the ascen- 
 dant, were deserting the fallen Protector. " Of all those who 
 abandoned him at this time, most had been his associates and 
 attendants for many years, and owed everything to his favour ; 
 but all obligations were in a moment forgotten ; and on the 
 occasion of leaving him they even carried with them most of 
 his camels and camp equipage." ^ Bairam replied to the 
 Padshah's message by returning all his insignia of ofiice — 
 his banners, drums, and elephants — and, having completed 
 the preparations for his departure, dismissed the rest of his 
 retainers except a faithful few who refused to leave their old 
 master. Then he moved towards the coast, but with an 
 unsettled mind, still brooding over his grievances. 
 
 Akbar, who was now in the Panjab and on the alert, bestowed 
 the insignia returned by Bairam upon his foster-father, Atgah 
 Khan, and ordered Pir Muhammad to follow Bairam to the 
 coast and see him embark for Mekka. Pir Muhammad himself 
 had been under orders from the Protector to undertake the 
 pilgrimage, and was actually on his way when he received 
 
 ^ FerisMa, Briggs' translation, vol. ii, p. 200. 
 
 455 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 news of Bairam's fall, and instantly hastened back to court. 
 Akbar was pleased at his tutor's return and conferred upon 
 him the title of Khan. Bairam, irritated beyond measure 
 by the favours bestowed upon his former dependents and 
 avowed enemies, collected an army and marched into the 
 Panjab, but was again disappointed in his expectations of help 
 from his friends. He was defeated by the imperial army under 
 the command of Atgah Khan, and soon found himself hunted 
 out of the plains into the hills. As soon as Akbar assumed 
 command of the army in person Bairam was constrained to 
 throw himself upon the Padshah's mercy. Akbar not only 
 despatched a messenger assuring him of forgiveness, but 
 endeavoured to mitigate the humiliation of his position by 
 sending a deputation of the grandees of the court to conduct 
 him to the imperial presence with every mark of distinction. 
 When he arrived at lyahore, where Akbar was holding his court, 
 Bairam Khan, himself little disposed to tenderness towards 
 those who had offended him, was touched at Akbar's gracious 
 reception and threw himself in tears at his sovereign's feet. 
 Akbar instantly raised him up and made him take his former 
 place on his right hand at the head of the grandees of the empire. 
 Then he invested him with a splendid robe of honour, and, 
 addressing the ex-Protector in dignified words, offered him 
 three alternatives. If he preferred a military command he 
 might have the governorship of one of the imperial provinces. 
 If he chose to remain at court, he should be treated with the 
 highest honour as the benefactor of the imperial house. But 
 if he felt more disposed to seek retirement in a religious life, 
 he should be escorted on his pilgrimage to Mekkaina " manner 
 suitable to his rank." Bairam replied humbly that, having once 
 lost his sovereign's confidence, he could not wish to continue 
 to serve him. " The clemency of the Padshah is enough, and 
 his forgiveness is more than a reward for my former services. 
 I<et me, therefore, turn my thoughts from this world to another 
 and be permitted to proceed to the Holy Shrine." Akbar 
 approved of his decision, assigned to him a liberal pension and 
 a suitable escort, and then returned to Agra. 
 456 
 
AKBAR: THE PROTECTORATE 
 
 Whether Bairam Khan's intentions were sincere or not — 
 and one can hardly imagine that the tough old campaigner 
 would have found consolation in the role of a religious devotee — 
 he never reached Mekka. He set out for the third time on 
 his penitential pilgrimage ; but on his way, after spending a 
 pleasant evening with his friends on one of the lakes of Rajpu- 
 tana, near Alwar, he was waylaid by a party of Afghans, one 
 of whom, while pretending to salute him, drew his dagger and 
 stabbed him to the heart. The motive of the crime was said 
 to be that the Khan had killed the Afghan's father in battle 
 many years before, but there appears to have been a woman 
 in the case who had attached herself to Bairam' s suite and 
 was the cause of the trouble. Akbar took Bairam's widow 
 and her boy of four years under his protection. The former 
 eventually entered the Padshah's seraglio. Bairam's son had 
 a very distinguished career in the imperial army, and was 
 father-in-law to Akbar 's son. Prince Daniyal. 
 
 457 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 AKBAR AS RULER OF ARYAVARTA 
 
 THE death of the fighting Khan was the close of the 
 first chapter of Akbar's reign. The young Padshah 
 had proved both his strength of mind and generosity 
 of temperament in the duel with his former guardian, but this 
 did not deter other truculent generals in the Mogul army from 
 defying his authority and asserting the divine right conferred 
 by the sword of Islam. And Humayun's unfortunate reign 
 was a warning to Akbar of the dangers which threatened him 
 from other quarters ; for the Moguls were still regarded as 
 foreigners in India, and neither Hindus nor Muhammadans were 
 willing to recognize them as their rulers except under compul- 
 sion. It required both military genius and the highest states- 
 manship to establish the Mogul dynasty upon a stable founda- 
 tion, and Akbar soon showed that he was not lacking in either. 
 His exceptional physical strength and prowess both as a fighter 
 and big-game hunter gave him a great reputation among his 
 soldiers. Trained to arms on the battlefield from earl}^ boyhood, 
 he had already shown that in strategic capacity and practical 
 knowledge of war he was inferior to none of his generals. He 
 inherited his father's and grandfather's personal charm and 
 knew how to win both the affection of his subjects and the 
 respect of his enemies. Above all, he had a high sense of 
 honour and justice and was singularly free from sectarian 
 prejudices. lyike the ideal Hindu sovereign, he made himself 
 accessible to all, was most conscientious in the conduct of State 
 affairs, respected all religious sects, and, like Asoka, never 
 thought that he honoured his own " by disparaging that of 
 another man for trivial reasons." 
 
 Nevertheless it needed all of Akbar's great gifts and his 
 458 
 
31. Akbar enxertainejd by his Poster- brother 
 
 458 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 most strenuous exertions during a long reign to overcome the 
 difficulties which former Musalman governments had bequeathed 
 to him, to exact a willing obedience to his rule from the great 
 majority of his subjects, and to weld into a political synthesis 
 the many different racial elements which had been contending 
 for empire in India since the beginning of the Muhammadan 
 invasions. Akbar, like Husain Shah before him, devoted 
 himself to the study of Hindu philosophy, and even made a 
 bold attempt to bridge over the gulf between the two great 
 religious parties of his empire. But he was neither a religious 
 enthusiast of Asoka's type nor a secularist in politics. He 
 held rather to the political ideal of the Mahabharata — " the 
 Heavens are centred in the ethics of the State." 
 
 It was in 1560 that Akbar took into his own hands the 
 reins of government, though he remained for two years longer 
 under the influence of Maham Anaga and other associates of 
 his boyhood. The territories in which he was undisputed ruler 
 b}^ that time included, roughly, the Panjab and the present 
 United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, besides the fortresses of 
 Ajmir and Gwalior in Rajputana. The Afghans in Bengal, 
 under the leadership of a son of 'Adili Shah, Sher Shah II, now 
 made an attempt to recover Delhi, but were decisively defeated 
 by the Mogul army under the command of Khan Zaman-i- 
 Shaibani, one of Humayun's best generals. The Khan, how- 
 ever, after his victory showed an insubordinate disposition by 
 neglecting to send to Agra the elephants captured from the 
 enemy, which were a part of the Padshah's share of the spoils. 
 Akbar consequently was compelled to march towards Jaunpur 
 to bring his refractory general to order. As soon as Khan 
 Zaman heard of the Padshah's approach he thought better of 
 his disloyal intentions and advanced to pay his respects to his 
 sovereign, bringing not only the elephants but the rest of the 
 booty, as well as other propitiatory offerings. Khan Zaman 
 , had played a distinguished part in the battle of Panipat and 
 had rendered great services to the house of Timur previously. 
 Akbar, therefore, passed over his general's offence with a 
 gentle reprimand, returned him everything except that which 
 
 459 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 belonged of right to the Crown, and shortly afterwards con- 
 firmed him in the governorship of Jaunpur, where he had 
 already amassed a great fortune. 
 
 Very soon afterwards Akbar was called upon to deal with a 
 similar case of insubordination. Another general, Adham Khan 
 Atka, the son of Maham Anaga, had been appointed to the 
 command of an army sent by Akbar for the conquest of Malwa, 
 an undertaking which promised to be easy, for Baz Bahadur, 
 the Afghan ruler, was wholly absorbed by his passion for his 
 lovely Hindu mistress, Rupmati. Though informed of the 
 approach of the Mogtil army, Baz Bahadur made no attempt to 
 oppose it until it had arrived within twenty miles of Sarangpur. 
 Then he was roused from his love dreams, and marched out, 
 accompanied by Rupmati, His troops were routed at the 
 first onset of the Moguls. Baz Bahadur saved himself by 
 flight, but the fair poetess became Adham Khan's prize. Her 
 tragic end has been already told. The Mogul general, elated 
 by his victory, made a lavish distribution of the spoil to 
 enhance his popularity with his soldiers, but appropriated to 
 himself the royal ensigns and a great part of the treasure which 
 should have been sent to Agra. Akbar lost no time in marching 
 into Malwa at the head of the imperial army before his general 
 had time to proceed to open rebellion. Adham KJian obtained 
 pardon by prompt submission, but was superseded in his 
 command by Pir Muhammad. The latter continued the 
 campaign successfully for a time, until his barbarous treat- 
 ment of the inhabitants of Malwa, both Hindu and Mvisalman, 
 strengthened the cause of Baz Bahadur so much that the latter 
 was enabled, with the help of the ruler of Khandesh, to chase 
 the Moguls out of his dominions. Pir Muhammad was drowned 
 while his defeated army was crossing the Narbada. To 
 retrieve these disasters Akbar sent another army under the 
 command of one of his Uzbek generals, Abdulla Khan, who 
 at last captured Mandu and again compelled Baz Bahadur to 
 take to the hills. The campaign ended, as before stated, in 
 Baz Bahadur's submission. Akbar subsequently gave him a 
 command in the imperial army. 
 460 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 In spite of Akbar's tact and firmness the unruly spirit of 
 his officers still continued to manifest itself. Abdulla Khan 
 quickly followed the example of his predecessor in the governor- 
 ship of Malwa by an attempt at rebellion, which Akbar frus- 
 trated by marching against him and compelling him after 
 some fighting to take refuge in Gujerat. Shortly afterwards a 
 tragedy which occurred in the precincts of the imperial palace 
 at Agra gave fresh proof of the ungovernable temper of the 
 Padshah's retainers. Adham Khan, whom Akbar had kept at 
 court after his misconduct as a general, was jealous of the 
 promotion of another of the companions of Akbar's boyhood, 
 an old Afghan general named Muhammad Atgah Khan, who 
 had assisted in suppressing Bairam Khan's revolt and had lately 
 been appointed Vakil, or Prime Minister. He accordingly 
 entered into a conspiracy with several other courtiers to get 
 rid of him. One night when Atgah Khan was sitting with 
 other grandees of the court — some of whom were in the plot — 
 in the Diwan-i-Khas, Adham Khan appeared with a few of 
 his retainers. All excepting the Vakil, who was reading the 
 Quran, rose to greet him. Adham Khan, pretending to be 
 mortally offended, took out his dagger and stabbed the minister 
 to the heart. He then went, dagger in hand, towards the 
 Padshah's private apartments, adjoining the audience chamber. 
 Akbar, who had been roused from sleep by the noise, looked 
 out and saw the body of Atgah Khan weltering in blood on the 
 floor. Seizing his sword, he went after the assassin, who turned 
 and fled up a staircase, but was seized by the palace attendants. 
 Akbar's first impulse was to avenge his minister's death with 
 his own sword, but Adham Khan, presuming on his intimacy 
 with the Padshah, caught hold of his arms and begged him 
 to inquire into the cause of the quarrel. Akbar shook him 
 off in disgust and ordered the attendants to throw him down 
 from the terraced roof of the palace. Adham Khan's mother, 
 Maham Anaga, died of grief on hearing of the punishment of 
 her son, and Akbar had them both buried in a tomb he built 
 for them at Delhi. 
 
 This tragic event, which took place in 1561, helped to open 
 
 461 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the Padshah's eyes to the evil influence of his intimates in the 
 imperial household. His marriage with a Rajput princess 
 in the previous year had brought a better atmosphere into 
 the inner circles of the court and served to turn his mind 
 from the allurements of sport and adventure into more 
 intellectual channels. It also had important poUtical conse- 
 quences, in bringing him into closer touch with the Hindu 
 aristocracy and enlisting their sympathy with the Mogul cause. 
 In 1560 Akbar had gone to Ajmir on one of his periodical 
 visits to the shrine of a Muslim saint. Shortly afterwards a 
 Rajput of the royal family of Amber, Raja Bihari Mall, gave 
 him his daughter in marriage, Akbar celebrating the occasion 
 by enrolling the Raja and his son, Bhagwan Das, among the 
 nobles of his court. 
 
 Raja Bihari Mall had been known to Akbar from the first 
 year of his reign. A slight incident which had occurred when 
 he was presented at court had given the Padshah a favourable 
 impression of the Rajputs. Akbar was still a boy, and in a 
 boyish spirit of adventure had mounted an untrained elephant, 
 which became restive when the Raja's retinue appeared. 
 Akbar's own attendants made way for the unruly animal, but 
 the Rajputs remained immovable by the side of their chieftain. 
 The Raja became Akbar's fast friend, and after his daughter's 
 marriage was made a grandee of the empire, with the command 
 of five thousand horse. His son, Raja Bhagwan Das, and the 
 latter 's nephew. Raja Man Singh, also joined the imperial 
 service. This was the beginning of the devoted attachment 
 of the Rajputs to the Mogul dynasty. Akbar showed his 
 appreciation of their loyalty by giving them some of the highest 
 commands in his army, and they proved themselves wholly 
 worthy of his confidence. The Raja Bhagwan Das once saved 
 Akbar's life in battle, and was given the title of Amir-al-Umara, 
 or Chief Grandee of the Empire. Raja Man Singh was even- 
 tually raised to the command of seven thousand horse — a 
 distinction which Akbar only conferred upon his third son, 
 Prince Daniyal, and subsequently on two Musalman generals. 
 Akbar was a much-married man. According to Mogul 
 462 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 tradition, if the Padsliali fell in love with a married woman 
 her husband was bound to set her free immediately by giving 
 her a divorce. Akbar occasionally exercised this sovereign 
 right over his Musalman subjects, and several Hindu princes 
 ratified political alliances by giving him a daughter in marriage. 
 The imperial harem was consequently extensive. The whole 
 establishment, says Abul Fazl, numbered over five thousand 
 women, each with a separate apartment. The daughter of 
 Raja Bihari Mall was known by her Muhammadan name, 
 Mariam Zamani. She and her brother always had great 
 influence at court. Mariam was the mother of Akbar's son and 
 heir. Prince Salim, afterwards known as Jahangir. Her palace 
 at Fatehpur-Sikri,^ adjoining the Great Mosque built by Akbar, 
 was planned according to the royal palaces of Rajputana and 
 contained a Hindu chapel — a striking proof of Akbar's broad- 
 minded tolerance in religious matters, for it was an open 
 defiance not only of the traditions of the house of Timtir, 
 but of ail orthodox Musalman opinion, to permit the practice 
 of infidel superstitions in the precincts of the imperial palace. 
 Akbar, however, did not allow personal sympathies to stand 
 in the way of his poHtical plans. While he was laying the 
 foundations of his great scheme for reconcihng the religious 
 differences which divided Hindu from Musalman his armies 
 were actively engaged in the attempt to break down the 
 political independence of those Hindu states in Rajputana 
 which had survived the repeated attacks of other Musalman 
 conquerors. Before leaving Ajmir with his Rajput bride he 
 had made arrangements with the Governor — his brother-in-law, 
 Mirza Sharif-ud-din Husain — ^for the siege of the fortress of 
 Mirtha, in the territory of Udai Singh, Rana of Mewar, This 
 operation occupied the Mogxil army during the greater part 
 of 1561. The place was stoutly defended by two Rajput 
 chieftains, the Rajas Jai Mall and Devi Das, but after a long 
 siege the systematic mining operations of the Mogul engineers 
 
 ^ Now known as Jodh Bai's palace, possibly after Jahangir's Rajput wife, 
 the daughter of the Raja of Jodhpur. See Handbook to Agra and the Taj, 
 by the author. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 made breaches in the walls, and the garrison was reduced to a 
 state of famine. Jai Mall accepted the terms offered by the 
 Mogul general — to surrender their money and effects and to 
 march out with their horses and arms. The other chieftain 
 refused, and after the usual jauhdr made a desperate effort 
 with five hundred of his followers to cut his way through the 
 besiegers. Half of that number succeeded, carrying off the 
 head of their chieftain so that the funeral rites might be duly 
 performed. 
 
 Mirtha fell in the early part of 1562. Akbar was compelled 
 to postpone further operations on account of the continued 
 insubordination of his generals. Sharif -ud-din, soon after 
 his success in Rajputana, joined other malcontents and went 
 into revolt. The army which Akbar sent against him suffered 
 a heavy defeat, but eventually the rebel general was driven 
 to take refuge in Gujerat, where he continued to intrigue 
 against his sovereign. The Uzbek officers in Bengal, instigated 
 by Abdulla Khan and by Khan Zaman, whose previous 
 offence had been overlooked by Akbar, then stirred up the 
 hostility of the Afghans to Mogul rule. It took Akbar more 
 than two years to reduce these turbulent Musalman subjects 
 to order. In the interval a part of the imperial forces in 
 Rajputana was engaged in the conquest of the principality 
 of Garrah, in Central India, where the wealth and fame of the 
 Rani Durgavati had excited the cupidity of the neighbouring 
 Mogul governor, Asaf Khan. The Rani, who, as before 
 mentioned,^ had put to flight Baz Bahadur's army, marched 
 out at the head of her troops to oppose the invaders, but in 
 the battle which followed Asaf Khan won a decisive victory, 
 after Durgavati had been disabled by an arrow in her eye 
 and had stabbed herself with a dagger rather than become a 
 prisoner of the Musalman. The rich spoils captured by Asaf 
 Khan included a number of gold and silver images and a 
 hundred jars of gold coins. As usual, the Mogul general was 
 loth to part with his booty, and Akbar was compelled to resort 
 to compulsion to obtain the dues of the imperial treasury. 
 
 1 Supra, p. 355. 
 464 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 It was to be expected that among the motley horde of enemies 
 gathered round Akbar there would be some who would not 
 shrink from using every means, fair or foul, to get rid of him. 
 At the time of Sharif-ud-din's revolt, while Akbar was riding 
 through the suburbs of Delhi, a horseman who had been in 
 the general's service joined the imperial retinue unobserved, 
 and, while pretending to aim at a bird in the sky, suddenly 
 lowered his weapon and shot the Emperor in the shoulder. The 
 wound, fortunately, was not dangerous for a man of Akbar's 
 robust constitution, and when the arrow had been extracted and 
 justice had been done the Padshah proceeded on his journey. 
 The criminal, who had been seized, was put to death imme- 
 diately, Akbar refusing to allow him to be tortured in order 
 to extract the names of his accomplices, on the ground that 
 evidence of that kind was worthless and more likely to incrimi- 
 nate the innocent than the guilt3^ Perhaps the Padshah did 
 not Uke his brother-in-law to be implicated in the dastardly 
 deed ; in any case the outrage only added to the discomfiture 
 of Akbar's enemies and served to enhance his prestige among 
 all right-thinking Musalmans.^ 
 
 In 1563 Akbar increased his popularity with his Hindu 
 subjects, many of whom were now his most loyal adherents, 
 by abolishing all taxes on pilgrims. Some years afterwards 
 he also abolished the oppressive jizy a, or poll-tax on unbelievers, 
 which from the days of the Prophet had been a sacrosanct 
 institution in Muhammadan finance. From 1564 to 1567 Akbar 
 was chiefly occupied in quelling the revolt of his Uzbek officers 
 led by Khan Zaman and Asaf Khan. He effected his purpose 
 partly by consummate diplomacy and partly by military 
 strategy. Though fully conscious how little reliance was to 
 be placed upon his shifty antagonists' professions of submission, 
 his policy was, whenever possible, to placate them by generous 
 treatment and at the same time to inspire them with respect 
 for his power and indomitable will, rather than add to the 
 number of his enemies by a studied exhibition of ' f rightfulness.' 
 
 ^ Badaimi gives a slightly different account of the incident and connects 
 |it with Akbar's exercise of his royal prerogative with regard to matrimony. 
 
 2 G 465 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 But in the last resort Akbar did not hesitate to inflict con- 
 dign punishment upon the irreconcilables, according to the 
 barbarous methods of the period. 
 
 After the imperial forces had suffered several reverses the 
 revolt in Bengal was finally crushed by Akbar's taking command 
 in person. With his usual vigour and determination he crossed 
 the Ganges at nightfall, in spite of monsoon floods, and next 
 morning at sunrise attacked the rebel army with a picked body 
 of two thousand cavalry and elephants. The Uzbeks, beUeving 
 themselves secure with the Ganges between them and the 
 Mogul army, neglected all precautions, so that the sound of the 
 Padshah's war-drums was the first intimation they received 
 of his approach. Nevertheless it was only by desperate 
 fighting, in the course of which the arch-rebel Khan Zaman 
 and several of his associates were killed, that Akbar succeeded 
 in gaining a complete victory. Five of the rebel leaders who 
 were taken prisoners suffered the punishment of traitors by 
 being trodden to death by elephants. But Asaf Khan had 
 previously obtained Akbar's pardon by submission and had 
 regained the Padshah's favour by taking an energetic part 
 in suppressing the rebellion. 
 
 While these events were in progress Akbar's relatives — some 
 of them living at Kabul and some under Akbar's protection in 
 India — were, according to an old family tradition, stirring up 
 more trouble for him. Kabul was nominally a part of Akbar's 
 dominions, but it had never acknowledged his authority and 
 continued to be a city of refuge for an unscrupulous gang of 
 intriguers. Their manoeuvres, however, did not give Akbar 
 much anxiety, except for an ineffectual attempt on the part 
 of his brother, Mirza Hakim, to obtain possession of the Panjab. 
 By the end of 1566 Akbar had broken most of his Mogul rivals 
 and had commenced to strengthen his capital, with the aid of 
 an army of skilled Indian masons, by building the present fort of 
 Agra, on the site of an older one constructed by Salim Shah, with 
 its great walls seventy feet in height and imposing gateways. 
 
 He now felt himself free to renew the campaign in Rajputana 
 which had been broken off by Abdulla Khan Uzbek's revolt 
 466 
 
32. The Siege of Chitor 
 
 466 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 and by other disturbances in the army. The time was favour- 
 able for the Mogul arms. The son and successor of the great 
 Rana Sanga, Udai Singh, who was now the premier prince 
 of Rajputana, lacked his father's energy and military skill. 
 The miUtary resources of the Rajputs had been greatly reduced 
 in the struggle of centuries against the Musalman. Akbar had 
 won over several of the most influential chieftains to his side 
 and had gathered together a powerful and well-disciplined 
 army, which in artillery and engineering equipment was 
 immensely superior to the forces the Rajputs could bring into 
 the field. The Rana, on Akbar's approach, retired to the 
 inaccessible hilly country which separated his territories from 
 Gujerat, leaving a force of eight thousand Rajputs under the 
 command of Raja Jai Mall, the defender of Mirtha, a brave 
 and capable soldier, in charge of the stronghold of Chitor. 
 Akbar in October 1567 proceeded to invest the fortress, em- 
 ploying five thousand skilled craftsmen in the engineering 
 operations by which the walls were to be undermined. 
 
 The famous citadel, built upon a lofty spur of rock jutting 
 out into the plains of Mewar, was a place of great natural 
 strength. The garrison was provisioned for a long siege, and 
 perennial springs within the walls gave an inexhaustible supply 
 of water. But Akbar had under his command the best military 
 engineers of the period, and though the Rajputs had the 
 advantage of position and defended themselves with the courage 
 of despair, they were unable to prevent the besiegers from 
 gradually pushing their trenches nearer and nearer to the walls. 
 Ferishta describes the scientific manner in which the siege was 
 conducted : " The approaches were made by sahat, a descrip- 
 tion of defence for the besiegers peculiar to India. The 
 sahats are constructed in the following manner : The zigzags, 
 commencing at gunshot distance from the fort, consist of a 
 double wall, and by means of blinds or stuffed gabions covered 
 with leather the besiegers continue their approaches till they 
 arrive near to the walls of the place to be attacked. The miners 
 then proceed to sink their shafts and carry on their galleries 
 underground for the construction of the mines, in which 
 
 467 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 having placed the powder and blown up the works, the storming 
 party rushes from the sabat, or superior galleries, and assaults 
 the place." ^ Neither the material employed nor the method 
 of its use was an invention of the Mogul engineers ; both had 
 been used in Indian warfare for at least a century previously. 
 " On the present occasion," continues Ferishta, " two sabats, 
 or superior galleries, having been constructed, two mines were 
 carried under bastions at different spots, and they were both 
 fired at the same time. It happened that one of them exploded 
 before the other, and a practicable breach was formed. Two 
 thousand men, prepared to storm, advanced immediately, 
 under the supposition that both mines had been sprung, and the 
 parties divided in order to enter both breaches at once. One 
 of the mines, however, exploded only just as one of the parties 
 got close over it, when five hundred men were killed, besides 
 a number of the enemy who were crowded on the bastion. "^ 
 Both attacks consequently failed. The besiegers, who had 
 lost fifteen officers and a considerable number of men, were 
 disheartened by the disaster. But Akbar ordered other mines 
 to be prepared and the siege was continued with renewed 
 energy. At length, in February 1568, everything was ready 
 for the final assault. One night, as Akbar was giving his 
 orders, a flash of torchHght upon the fortress walls revealed 
 the figure of Raja Jai Mall directing the repair of the damage 
 caused by the besiegers' mines. Snatching a matchlock from 
 one of his attendants, Akbar fired at the Rajput general and 
 shot him through the head. A cry of despair arose from the 
 doomed citadel as the Rajputs bore the body of their gallant 
 chieftain away. Akbar instantly prepared to take advantage 
 of his success by ordering his troops to advance to the breaches, 
 which, to their astonishment, they found undefended. At the 
 first streak of dawn the besiegers clambered into the fortress 
 almost unopposed, for most of the defenders had spent the 
 last night of the siege in performing the funeral rites of their 
 chieftain, his wives and many of the Rajput women sacrificing 
 themselves in a vast pyre lighted in the basement of the palace. 
 
 I' [^ Briggs' translation, vol. ii, pp. 229-230. - Ibid., pp. 230-231. 
 
 468 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 The fighting men had now retired within their temple walls 
 to prepare for the forlorn hope of the Kshatriya warrior. 
 Akbar, wishing to spare the lives of the brave Rajputs, 
 summoned them to surrender, but as they refused to accept 
 quarter he mounted his elephant and gave orders for the 
 temples to be stormed. Many thousands of Rajputs fell in 
 this last assault. Some cut their way through, and a con- 
 siderable body saved themselves and their families by a clever 
 ruse. They made a pretence of binding their own women and 
 children as prisoners, and, seizing a favourable opportunity, 
 marched quietly through the cordon of besiegers as if they 
 were a detachment of Akbar's Rajput allies conducting their 
 captives to the rear. 
 
 Probably they were inspired to make this attempt to save 
 their families from sacrifice by the knowledge that Akbar 
 some years previously had issued an order forbidding the usual 
 Musalman practice of making slaves of prisoners of war ; 
 otherwise the Rajputs would hardly have run the risk of their 
 falling into the hands of the Moguls. Akbar subsequently 
 forbade the Rajput practice of forcing their widows to immolate 
 themselves on the funeral-pile of their husbands, and personally 
 interfered to save the daughter-in-law of the Raja of Jodhpur 
 when the latter was about to compel her to become a sati. 
 
 Several other Rajput chieftains after the fall of Chitor made 
 their submission to Akbar, but the Rana remained secure in 
 his mountain fortresses and the royal line of Mewar steadfastly 
 refused to follow the example of other Hindu princes by giving 
 a daughter of the Suryavamsa to the Great Mogul. Akbar 
 returned in triumph to Agra, carrying with him as a trophy, 
 instead of a bride, a pair of wooden gates taken from the 
 fortress, which he set up in the zanana of his own palace. 
 The next year he took two other Rajput fortresses, Rantambhor 
 and Kalanjar. He also won another Rajput wife, the daughter 
 of a chieftain of Bikanir. About a year after the capture of 
 Chitor, Mariam Zamani presented Akbar with a son and heir. 
 Akbar had been anxious regarding the succession to the throne, 
 as her twin children, born previously, had died in infancy. 
 
 469 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 When passing by vSikri, a village near Agra, he had consulted 
 a famous Musalman hermit, the Shaikh Salim Chishti, on the 
 matter. Acting on the latter's advice, Akbar made the place 
 his headquarters, and nine months afterwards Mariam gave 
 birth to a son, who was named Salim in honour of the holy 
 man in whose house he was born. The next year another son, 
 Murad, was born in the same auspicious place. So Akbar 
 determined to make Sikri a permanent place of residence, and 
 commenced to build the now deserted city, called by the 
 name of Fatehpur, 'the City of Victory,' after his successful 
 campaign in Gujerat, 
 
 Fatehpur-Sikri was Akbar's capital for seventeen years, 
 and it continues to be a splendid monument of his genius as a 
 statesman and of the most eventful years of his reign. Here 
 the Padshah, when still a young man, gathered round him 
 the ablest and most learned men of his time, who were his 
 advisers and collaborators in reorganising the system of 
 government and in carrying out his great schemes of political, 
 social, and religious reform. The city itself even as it now 
 stands, a fragment of its former self and without the charm 
 which the splendid lake and the fine gardens must have given 
 it, reveals to us a great deal of the mind of the greatest of the 
 Great Moguls, It was planned by the royal city-builders of 
 Rajputana in Akbar's service on traditional Hindu lines, 
 modified according to the Padshah's own ideas. The Grand 
 Mosque, the Jami' Masjid, towering high over the centre of 
 the city, was built in honour of the holy man, the Shaihk 
 Salim, whose tomb of white marble, fantastically carved, 
 glitters in the centre of the vast quadrangle. The mosque 
 was finished in 1571, the magnificent triumphal gateway, the 
 Buland Darwaza, being added some years afterwards to 
 commemorate Akbar's conquest of the Dekhan, According to 
 an inscription over the central arch, the mosque was intended 
 to be a replica of the Grand Mosque at Mekka, but obviously it 
 represents the Indian builders' conception of the holy shrine 
 of Islam, for, like all Indian mosques, it is an adaptation of 
 the Indo-Aryan building tradition to Muhammadan ritual, 
 470 
 
The J ami Masjid, FaTEhpur-Sikri 
 
 33- 
 
 The Daftar Khana, Patehpur-Sikri 
 
 470 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 Under the shadow of the Jami' Masjid lived the two famous 
 brothers Faizi and Abul Fazl, Akbar's most intimate Musalman 
 friends and counsellors. Their father, the Shaikh Mubarak, 
 was of Arab descent and reputed to be the most learned man 
 in Islam. He had taken a prominent part in the discussion 
 of a question which had been agitating the mind of Islam for 
 a long time — the expected appearance of a new Prophet, or 
 Mahdi, who at the end of the millennium of the Muhammadan 
 era was to restore the pristine purity of the faith and prepare 
 the way for the Day of Judgment. There had been many 
 popular preachers who in the state of psychical exaltation 
 induced by the discussion had come forward as the promised 
 Mahdi, and Mubarak in his youth had attached himself to 
 one of them, the Shaikh 'Alai, who, as before mentioned, 
 had been condemned as a heretic by the 'Ulamas of Islam 
 (SaHm) Shah's court. After the death of Shaikh 'Alai, Mubarak 
 had established a school of divinity at Agra, but had incurred 
 the enmit^^ of the Sunni 'Ulamas by his unorthodox teaching 
 and had fled from the city to save his life. In the first years 
 of his reign Akbar, though little disposed to religious intolerance 
 himself, had not interfered to prevent the 'Ulamas of Agra and 
 Delhi, who were strict Sunnis, from persecuting those who 
 showed Shiah tendencies, and Shaikh Mubarak suffered much 
 from the machinations of his enemies at court. Faizi was the 
 Shaikh's eldest son. lyike his father, he was deeply versed in 
 Arabic learning, and before he was twenty-one had made a 
 reputation both as a poet and physician. In 1568, when Akbar 
 was besieging Chitor, he received a summons to appear at 
 court, and the young Emperor and the poet soon became fast 
 friends. The Shaikh and his family were now safe from 
 further persecution. 
 
 In the meantime Abul Fazl, Faizi's younger brother, under 
 his father's instruction was throwing himself into the study of 
 philosophy and reUgion with intense ardour, and found such 
 delight "in passing nights in lonely spots with true seekers 
 after the truth" that he had half resolved to spend his life 
 as a wanderer, like the bhikku or sannyasin, holding converse 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 with the sages of Mongolia or the hermits of Lebanon, " with 
 the lamas of Tibet, with the Padris of Portugal," or sitting 
 at the feet of the Parsis and the learned of the Zend-Avesta. 
 But a few years after the foundation of Akbar's new capital 
 Abul Fazl, at the age of seventeen, was likewise summoned to 
 court, and his whole outlook upon life was altered. He found 
 in Akbar not only the gracious sovereign and protector of his 
 kinsfolk, but a kindred spirit. The Padshah, when his active 
 mind was not occupied with practical affairs of State, was 
 deeply concerned with spiritual matters, and woiild often pass 
 the morning alone in meditation, " sitting on a large flat stone 
 of an old building which lay near the palace in a lonely spot, 
 with his head bent over his chest and gathering the bliss of the 
 early hours." When he arrived at his twentieth year Akbar 
 confessed that his soul was filled with exceeding sorrow from the 
 consciousness that he " lacked spiritual provision for the journey 
 of life." " Although I am the master of so vast a kingdom 
 and all the appliances of government are in my hands, yet 
 since true greatness consists in doing the will of God, m}^ mind 
 is not at ease in this diversity of sects and creeds ; and apart 
 from this outward pomp of circumstance, with what satis- 
 faction in my despondency can I undertake the sway of 
 empire ? I await the coming of some discreet man of principle 
 who will resolve the difiiculties of my conscience." ^ 
 
 Akbar detested the narrow sectarianism of the court 'Ulamas 
 to whom he had to refer on questions of Muhammadan law 
 and doctrine, but was to a great extent in their hands, for, 
 owing perhaps to the vicissitudes of his boyhood, he could 
 neither read nor write. As an ' illiterate,' he would have been 
 disqualified in modern times for the humblest office of State, 
 yet, as he himself observed in one of his pithy sayings, " the 
 prophets were all illiterate." He was already highly educated 
 in an Indian sense and the foremost statesman of his age. 
 He had been taught by the traditional Indian oral method, 
 and with the help of Faizi's and Abul Fazl's book-learning was 
 
 ' Am-i-Akban ("The Sayings of His Majesty"), Jarrett's translation, 
 vol. iii, p. 386. 
 
 472 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 now in a position to meet the 'Ulamas on their own ground. 
 The imperial library at Fatehpur, in charge of the two brothers, 
 was filled with all the best Sanskrit, Hindu, Persian, Greek, 
 Kashmirian, and Arabic literature, either in originals or in 
 translations made by experts under Akbar's orders. " Among 
 books of renown," says Abul Fazl, " there are few that are 
 not read in His Majesty's assembly hall ; and there are 
 no historical facts of the past ages, or curiosities of science, 
 or interevSting points of philosophy, with which His Majesty, a 
 leader of impartial sages, is unacquainted." ^ Faizi continued 
 to devote himself to literary pursuits. Akbar appointed him 
 tutor to the imperial princes and made him his Persian Poet 
 I^aureate. Abul Fazl, soon after his presentation at court, 
 became one of the leaders of the philosophical discussions which, 
 as in the days of the Indo- Aryan monarchs, began to form one 
 of the chief distractions of the Fatehpur court. He quickly 
 rose to be one of the principal grandees of the empire, and 
 eventually became Akbar's Vazlr, or Finance Minister. 
 
 Akbar himself from the time of the founding of Fatehpur 
 seems to have openly adopted Indo- Aryan political and social 
 ideals, so far as they were compatible with those of absolute 
 monarchy. His throne, raised upon a Vishnu pillar in the 
 Diwan-i-Klhas, and approached by the four-went ways of the 
 cosmic cross, was the traditional Hindu symbol of universal 
 dominion. Though he honoured Musalman saints, like the 
 Shaikh Salim, and observed all the forms of Muslim ritual, 
 he allowed absolute freedom of conscience to men of other 
 creeds, and must have given grave offence to many of the true 
 believers by permitting his Rajput Sultanas to perform their 
 infidel rites within a stone's-throw of the J ami' Masjid. The 
 small pavilion known as the Yogi's Seat, close to the Diwan-i- 
 Khas, is said to have been built for one of the Hindu ascetics 
 with whom Akbar was fond of conversing on metaphysical 
 problems. The Jesuit Fathers from Goa were among those to 
 whom Akbar listened with great attention. He allowed them 
 to build a chapel at Agra, and once, it is said, came there alone, 
 ^ Am-i-Akbari, Blochmann's translation, vol. i, p. 103. 
 
 473 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 removed his turban, and offered prayers, first kneeling in the 
 Christian manner, then prostrating himself according to 
 Musalman custom, and finally according to the form of Hindu 
 ritual. It is also stated that he granted permission for the 
 funeral of one of the Christian community to pass through 
 the streets of Fatehpur with all the ceremonies of the Catholic 
 faith, and that it was attended by many of the Muhammadan 
 and Hindu inhabitants. 
 
 Akbar's thirst for knowledge was insatiable. He had all 
 the works which his librarians translated into Persian read to 
 him, and gave personal interviews to learned men of all denomi- 
 nations and sects — Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Brahmans, 
 Zoroastrians, and Musalmans. " Night and day," says Badauni, 
 " people did nothing but inquire and investigate : profound 
 points of science, the subtleties of revelation, the curiosities 
 of history, the wonders of nature, of which large volumes could 
 only give a summary abstract, were ever spoken of." Badauni 
 was a learned muUa of the strictly orthodox party whom 
 Akbar appointed as one of his court imams, or chaplains, on 
 account of his beautiful voice. His history of Akbar's reign, 
 written in secret and only brought to light many years after- 
 wards, is all the more valuable as he was a bitter enemy of 
 Abul Fazl and a very severe critic of his sovereign. Akbar 
 enjoyed freedom of speech and dehghted in the discomfiture 
 of the narrow and pedantic divines who represented the 
 Sunni faction at court. vSoon after Abul Fazl's arrival at 
 court Akbar built an Ihddat-Khdna, or Debating Hall, and 
 every Thursday evening the Muhammadan courtiers and 
 'Ulamas met, under the presidency of the Padshah, to discuss 
 questions of Islamic law and doctrine. Philosophical debates, 
 as we have seen, had always been the chief intellectual recreation 
 at a Hindu court, but this was an innovation in Mogul court 
 life not very pleasing to the old-fashioned mullas. In meeting 
 the arguments of the younger generation of Islamic scholars, 
 represented by Faizi and Abul Fazl, they often lost their tempers 
 and "a horrid noise and confusion ensued." Once Akbar 
 turned to Badauni and ordered him to rejoort any 'Ulama who 
 
 474 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 misbehaved or spoke nonsense, so that he (the Emperor) might 
 make him leave the hall. Badauni said in an undertone to 
 his neighbour, Asaf Khan, " If I were to carry out that order 
 most of the 'Ulamas would have to leave," when the Padshah 
 turned to him and asked what he had said. Akbar laughed 
 heartily when he was told, and repeated Badauni's remark to 
 the courtiers near the throne as a capital joke. 
 
 In the throne room and public audience-hall, where Hindu 
 and Musalman courtiers met on terms of perfect equality, 
 religious questions were often discussed with a freedom very 
 unusual in a Muslim court. Birbal, the Brahman Poet lyaureate 
 and one of Akbar 's favourites, would amuse the court with his 
 witticisms at the expense of the 'Ulamas, who hated him with 
 an intense bitterness, which often led to violent scenes in 
 spite of the Padshah's presence. One of the rajas once set 
 the whole court laughing by a sarcastic remark made when 
 the subject of Hindu veneration for the cow was mentioned. 
 " Allah Himself," said he, " showed great respect for cows, 
 for the cow is mentioned in the first chapter of the Quran." ^ 
 
 The two Rajput Sultanas and other Hindu members of the 
 imperial harem influenced Akbar's habits and induced him to 
 shave his beard, and to give up eating beef, garlic, and onions — 
 because, so it was whispered at court, " these things are incon- 
 venient in kissing." He gave grave offence to many Musalman 
 courtiers by insisting that they too should shave off their 
 beards. But Akbar was as resolute in putting down Hindu 
 practices which offended him as in braving the hostility of 
 orthodox Musalmans by adopting those which he liked. He 
 not only prohibited the burning of Hindu widows against 
 their will and prevented the rajas from evading the prohibition ; 
 he also forbade the marriage of boys before the age of sixteen 
 and of girls before fourteen, and interfered with the Hindu 
 law forbidding the re-marriage of widows. In the first part 
 of his reign, however, Akbar always seemed anxious to defer 
 to orthodox Musalman opinion and to reconcile his public and 
 
 1 Surat-ul-baqarah ("Sura of the Heifer"), Badauni, Ivowe's translation, 
 vol. ii, p. 215. 
 
 475 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 private actions with Islamic tradition. Thus at one of the 
 Thursday evening meetings he broached the subject of plural 
 marriages and appointed a Qazi to decide whether the Padshah 
 could lawfully take more than the usual number of free- 
 born wives, as he himself had done. A Uvely discussion 
 followed. The 'Ulamas were unanimous that four was the 
 limit fixed by the Prophet, but there was a great difference 
 of opinion as to the legal aspect of Akbar's case. One of 
 Akbar's intimates, his foster-brother, Mirza 'Aziz Kokah, had 
 an explanation of the inner meaning of the rule. It enabled 
 the good Musalman to enjoy the highest connubial bliss by 
 having a Persian wife to talk to, a Khurasani wife to do his 
 housework, a Hindu wife to be a mother for his children, and 
 a Turki wife to whip as a warning to the other three. The 
 Qazi settled the matter to Akbar's satisfaction, for he was 
 careful to appoint one who could be relied upon to give a 
 favourable verdict. The mullas of the court generally suc- 
 ceeded in finding warrant for the Padshah's unconventional 
 proceedings in some rare Arabic manuscript opportunely 
 brought to light. One such document — " an old worm-eaten 
 MS. in queer characters " — was produced to prove that the 
 coming Mahdi was to have many wives and would shave his 
 beard. Akbar's maturer judgment on the subject of marriage 
 is recorded by Abul Fazl in one of "His Majesty's wise sayings " : 
 " To seek more than one wife is to work one's own undoing. 
 In case she were barren or bore no son, it might then be expe- 
 dient. Had I been wise earlier, I should have taken no woman 
 from my own kingdom into my seraglio, for my subjects are 
 to me in the place of children." ^ This was doubtless a reflec- 
 tion of his intense grief for the misconduct of his thiee sons, 
 Salim, Murad, and Daniyal. 
 
 Among the interesting buildings still existing at Fatehpur- 
 Sikri are several of the public offices in which Akbar and his 
 ministers administered the affairs of the empire. The Daftar- 
 Khana, or Record Office, was where Abul Fazl sat when he 
 acted as Finance Minister and directed the staff of officials 
 
 ^ Am-i-Akbart, Jarrett's translation, vol. iii, p. 398. 
 476 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 busily engaged in drawing up innumerable reports and arranging 
 the State records in the pigeon-holes recessed in the massive 
 stone walls of the building. It was connected by a corridor 
 with Akbar's private apartments, so that the minister could 
 quickly run over for the Padshah's orders and lay before him 
 the daily reports of State business. Akbar from the time he 
 became Emperor de facto as well as de jure exercised a close 
 supervision over the smallest details of government. The 
 Am-i-Akhan, written by Abul Fazl himself, details the duties 
 of his staff. They had first to act as court journalists — to 
 record the orders and doings of the Emperor, what he ate and 
 drank, when he slept and when he rose from bed, when 
 he marched and when he halted ; his acts as the spiritual 
 guide of the nation ; the vows made to him and his daily and 
 monthly spiritual exercises ; what he said and which books were 
 read out to him. This official gazette and court journal also 
 noted the arrival and departure of courtiers and gave a list of 
 official appointments ; a diary of current events ; a schedule 
 of births, marriages, and deaths, including fatalities in the 
 imperial stables ; the police news, or a record of capital punish- 
 ments inflicted and reprieves granted by the Padshah ; a 
 ' sports column ' recording the imperial hunting parties, the 
 animal fights and the bettings thereon, the games of chess 
 and cards, polo, chaupar, and nard ; ^ a meteorological report, 
 or record of " extraordinary phenomena," and harvest reports. 
 The financial news gave the increase and decrease of imperial 
 taxation, a notice of contracts, sales, and mone}^ transfers, 
 receipts of tribute, grants of rent-free land, and payments on 
 account of the army. 
 
 This voluminous report, when it had been corrected by one 
 of Akbar's private secretaries, was laid before the Emperor 
 for his approval. A copy of it was then made, signed by 
 three officials, and handed over to writers, who made a 
 
 ^ In the northern half of the great palace quadrangle is a pachisi board, 
 cut in the pavement, similar to the one in the Samman Burj in the Agra 
 palace. Here Akbar and the ladies of the court amused themselves by 
 playing the game with slave-girls as living pieces. 
 
 477 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 precis of its contents, which was kept for record after being 
 signed and sealed by different ministers. Among other duties 
 of the record-keepers was the preparation of papers for Akbar's 
 signature, the receipt of departmental reports and the filing 
 of the Padshah's minutes thereon, and the reporting of the 
 proceedings of the philosophical meetings. Akbar's object, 
 says his faithful biographer, was " that every duty be properly 
 performed ; that there be no undue increase or decrease in 
 any department ; that dishonest people be removed, and trust- 
 worthy people be held in esteem ; and that active servants may 
 work without fear, and negligent and forgetful men be held 
 in check." ^ 
 
 On the east side of the Fatehpur palace and of easy access 
 from the throne room, or Diwan-i-Khas, was Akbar's DiM^an- 
 i-am, or Hall of Public Audience, where he frequently appeared 
 to transact public business, to receive the reports of officers, 
 to inspect the works of the court painters and craftsmen, to 
 hold a durbar, or to administer justice. The Padshah generally 
 showed himself to his people twice daily — first after performing 
 his morning devotions and afterwards in the Diwan-i-am. 
 Though he was particular in matters of court ceremonial and 
 etiquette, in his judicial capacity he was studiously simple 
 both in dress and demeanour, taking much pains to make himself 
 accessible to the meanest of his subjects by seating himself, 
 or standing, below the gaddi or judgment seat, and giving 
 personal attention to every case. 
 
 Akbar's intellectual interests were by no means wholly 
 confined to literature, philosophy, and religion. He gave close 
 attention to the work of the court builders and the painters 
 who decorated the palaces of Agra and Fatehpur, illustrated 
 profusely the books of the imperial library, and recorded the 
 history of the reign ; also to the weavers of fine carpets, brocades, 
 and other textiles, the goldsmiths, jewellers, and other skilled 
 craftsmen employed in the imperial workshops, which numbered 
 nearly a hundred. Akbar took a special interest in the ordnance 
 factory, where many pieces of artillery and special kinds of 
 
 ' Am-i-Akhan, Blochmann's translation, vol. i, p. 259. 
 478 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 matchlocks were made after the Padshah's own instructions. 
 He also devoted himself to improvements in horse-, cattle-, 
 and elephant-breeding. Akbar was a strict economist, both 
 in official and private affairs, regulating the expenses of his 
 court and household with as much exactitude as those of his 
 army. He fixed the prices of food and building material and 
 the wages of labourers, and collected statistics for the purpose of 
 checking extravagance and corruption in every department 
 of the State. At the beginning of his reign, finding that the 
 whole revenue administration was hopelessly corrupt, he 
 appointed his chief eunuch, Itimad Khan, to reorganize it. 
 A systematic inquiry was set on foot to ascertain the production 
 of different kinds of land and to assess the taxes thereon. 
 A proper system of accounts was introduced and regulations 
 were made to prevent the ryots from being plundered. This 
 work was afterwards continued by the Raja Todar Mall, who 
 was appointed Vakil of the empire in 1583. 
 
 Fatehpur-Sikri has memorials of Faizi, Abul Fazl, and Raja 
 Birbal, but none of Todar Mall, unless the Mint and Treasury 
 buildings may be connected with his name. Many of the 
 ministers and grandees of the empire were only temporary 
 residents at Fatehpur, occupying garden-houses on the shores 
 of the great lake, now dried up, where the court tournaments 
 took place and Akbar amused himself with polo, deer-hunting, 
 and hawking. His prowess as a big-game hunter is still remem- 
 bered in Indian folk-lore, and Abul Fazl gives many instances, 
 but he generally combined State business with recreation, 
 using his hunting parties as occasions for making himself 
 acquainted with the conditions of the people or for inspecting 
 the army. In his youth Akbar was passionately fond of all 
 kinds of sport, but later on he revolted against the indiscrimi- 
 nate slaughter of animals and reckoned an inordinate passion 
 for the chase among the four besetting sins which royalty should 
 avoid— the other three being gambling, wine, and women. 
 
 479 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 AKBAR AS RULER OF ARYAVARTA 
 
 {continued) 
 
 THE seventeen years during which Akbar resided mostly 
 at Fatehpur were the most important of his reign. 
 They were those in which most of his great administra- 
 tive reforms were begun, and his ideas of a State religion took 
 shape in the proclamation of the Dm-Ildhi, or Divine Faith, 
 from the pulpit of the Jami' Masjid. In the same time he 
 also brought to a successful conclusion two of his great cam- 
 paigns, ending in the annexation of Gujerat and the final 
 conquest of the Afghans in Bengal ; the former being cele- 
 brated by the building of the mighty portal of the Jami' 
 Masjid known as the Buland Darwaza, one of the most splendid 
 achievements of his Rajput master-builders. 
 
 The Moguls in Humayun's reign had once before overrun 
 Gujerat, and its conquest was an easy matter for Akbar 's 
 well-organized army, for, after having existed for only a 
 century and a half as an independent Muhammadan state, 
 it had reached the condition so often recurring in the 
 political system of Islam — the supreme power had fallen into 
 the hands of low-born conspirators of criminal tendencies, 
 in whose hands the sword of Islam was mainly an instrument 
 of massacre and murder. After the death of Bahadur Shah 
 in the harbour of Diu in 1536, his nephew, Mahmud III, 
 reigned about eighteen years, and then was assassinated by 
 one of his slaves named Burhan, who disposed of other potential 
 candidates for the throne by a series of secret murders, but 
 shared the fate of his victims on his first appearance in public 
 afterwards. The government then fell into the hands of Itimad 
 Khan, a trusted servant of the former Sultan who had avenged 
 480 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 his master's murder by killing Burhan. Itimad put upon the 
 throne a puppet prince, Ahmad II, but five years later found 
 the new Sultan an inconvenience and, having got rid of him 
 by following Burhan's example, set up another under the title 
 of Muzaffar Shah III. This arrangement was not acceptable 
 to Itimad's rivals at court — a typical gang of Musalman 
 adventurers, chiefly Turkish and Abyssinian — so they divided 
 the Sultanate among themselves and revolted against Itimad's 
 authority. Sultan Mirza, one of the imperial Mogul family, and 
 other relatives of Akbar seized the opportunity of fishing in these 
 muddy waters, and eventually Itimad fled to Akbar's court and 
 invited the Padshah's intervention in the affairs of Gujerat. 
 
 Akbar accordingly in 1572 marched to take possession of 
 the Sultanate. As soon as the imperial forces reached Patan, 
 Muzaffar Shah, the nominal Sultan, left Ahmadabad and 
 presented himself at the Padshah's camp for the purpose of 
 surrendering himself and his kingdom. Akbar's relatives, the 
 rebellious Mogul Mirzas, gave more trouble. lycaving a garrison 
 at Ahmadabad, Akbar pushed on to lay siege to Surat, occupied 
 by a part of the rebel forces, but the Mirza in command, 
 Ibrahim Husain, evaded him and set out to join the main rebel 
 body in the north of Gujerat. Akbar, at the head of a few 
 chosen retainers, dashed off in pursuit, and came up with the 
 enemy just after they had crossed the river Mhendri, near the 
 town of Sarsa. At this moment Akbar was joined by several 
 of his most devoted Rajput friends, including Raja Bhagwan 
 Das, Raja Man Singh, the Raja of Rantambhor, and a few 
 more horsemen. Though the odds were still about seven to 
 one against him he resolved to attack at once. Crossing the 
 river, the Rajputs charged with Raja Man Singh at their 
 head, but they were so galled by the enemy's archers that they 
 had to fall back into a clump of prickly pear for shelter, the 
 sharp spines of the cactus serving as a barbed-wire defence. 
 The enemy's horse now charged in their turn, and Akbar was 
 attacked in a narrow lane formed by cactus hedges where 
 only three horsemen could ride abreast, and would have been 
 overpowered had not Raja Bhagwan Das and his brother come 
 
 zn 481 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to the rescue. The latter, says Ferishta, " displayed on this 
 day the heroism of Rustum and Isfandyar, and, penetrating 
 beyond the lane, he repeatedly charged through a body of one 
 hundred men, and eventually lost his life." ^ Akbar himself 
 performed prodigies of valour, fighting side by side with his 
 gallant Rajputs, and seeing his cousin, the Mirza, in the 
 enemy's ranks, charged straight at him. Ibrahim did not wait 
 to cross swords with the Padshah, but continued his retreat, 
 and succeeded in joining the other Mirzas near Patau. 
 
 Akbar went back to direct the siege of Surat, while the 
 Mirzas attempted a counter-stroke by laying siege to Patau 
 and by sending Ibrahim Husain to invade the Panjab. The 
 latter project was frustrated by Raja Rai Singh of Bikanir, 
 who had been appointed by Akbar as his governor in Jodhpur, 
 while the Mogul garrison of Ahmadabad marched to the relief 
 of Patau and attacked the main rebel army, which was driven 
 in disorder into the Dekhan. Ibrahim Husain, after being 
 defeated by the Raja of Bikanir, retired to his family estate in 
 Bihar, but shortly afterwards set off to join his brother in 
 raiding the Panjab. The vigilance of Akbar's officers, how- 
 ever, again frustrated his schemes. The brothers were taken 
 prisoners. Ibrahim died of his wounds, and his head was 
 struck off and placed, by Akbar's orders, over one of the gates 
 of Agra. His brother was confined in the fortress of Gwalior 
 until his death. In 1573 Akbar, having completed the conquest 
 of Gujerat by the capture of Surat, returned to his capital. 
 The success of the campaign had been chiefly due to the loyalty 
 and coturage of the Padshah's Rajput allies, who doubtless 
 found much satisfaction in paying off old scores with their 
 Gujerati neighbours. 
 
 A month afterwards one of the Mirzas, Muhammad Husain, 
 was on the war-path again, and with the help of several Gujerati 
 chieftains was besieging Ahmadabad. The imperial troops 
 were in difficulties, and, owing to the rainy season having set 
 in, it was impossible to send a large army to assist them. 
 Akbar followed his usual policy of striking a lightning blow 
 
 * Briggs' translation, vol. ii, p. 237. 
 482 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 before the enemy had time to gather strength. Without losing 
 a day he sent forward two thousand picked horsemen by forced 
 marches to Patan, and himself followed immediately with his 
 retinue mounted on camels and accompanied by led horses. 
 At Patau his force mustered three thousand cavalry. He 
 placed Mirza Abdurrahim, the son of his old guardian Bairam 
 Khan, in command of the advance guard, and then pushed 
 on towards Ahmadabad with such speed that the imperial 
 war-drums were announcing the Padshah's approach to the 
 astonished besiegers only nine days after he had left Agra — 
 a distance of 450 miles. The Mirza could hardly believe his 
 ears, for one of his spies had seen the Padshah in Agra fourteen 
 days before, but as he found that Akbar had no elephants 
 he resolved to give battle, and leaving 5000 horse to prevent 
 the garrison joining the relieving force, he marched with 
 7000 horse to the attack. Akbar, finding that the besieged 
 garrison could give him no aid, had crossed the river and 
 drawn up his troops on the plain. There were Moguls, Afghans, 
 and Rajputs on both sides, but the morale of the imperial 
 army was far superior. The rebels had no common interest 
 to serve except the prospect of plunder ; the Padshah's men 
 were inspired by devotion to their chief, and his personahty 
 counted for much. After some desperate fighting the battle 
 was decided by Akbar charging the enemy's flank with a 
 hundred men of his body-guard. The Mirza fled, but was 
 taken prisoner and handed over to the charge of the Raja of 
 Bikanir. While Akbar, after the victory, was waiting for 
 the arrival of the Governor of Gujerat he was suddenly attacked 
 by a detachment of Gujeratis under the command of a local 
 chieftain, but as soon as the imperial war-drum indicating the 
 Padshah's presence was sounded they broke and fled in dis- 
 order. Their commander fell in the pursuit, and in the turmoil 
 caused by the fighting the Mirza Muhammad Husain was 
 executed by the Raja of Bikanir 's orders, on his own responsi- 
 bihty, to prevent his escape. Akbar, after this brilliantly 
 successful campaign of about six weeks, returned to Fatehpur- 
 Sikri and received in audience the general in command of the 
 
 4B3 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 imperial forces in the Panjab, a son of Bairam Klian's sister, 
 who had suppressed the rebel Mirzas' attempt in that province 
 and brought back some of his prisoners tied up in raw cow- 
 hides with their eyelids sewn together. Akbar immediately 
 released them from this horrible torture, and even pardoned 
 some of them. At the same time he rewarded the general's 
 military services by conferring on him the title of Khan Jahan, 
 and afterwards sent him back to the Panjab to assist one of 
 the members of the imperial house in recovering possession of 
 Badakshan. 
 
 Akbar's next great military undertaking was the conquest 
 of Bengal, which had continued under Afghan rule from the 
 beginning of his reign, though, as in the case of Gujerat, the 
 government was hopelessly weak and corrupt and the whole 
 country was distracted by the various contending factions. 
 Daud Khan, the nominal ruler, had acknowledged Akbar's 
 suzerainty, but had neglected to pay the customary tribute, 
 and had come into conflict with the imperial forces in Bihar. 
 So in 1574 Akbar organized an expeditionary force, which, 
 as was usual in campaigns in the lower Ganges valley, was 
 assisted by an armed flotilla. He then proceeded, partly by 
 land and partly by river, into the eastern part of Bihar, which 
 was under Baud's government. After taking Hajipur and 
 Patna he appointed Mun'im Khan, one of his former guardians, 
 Governor of Bihar and commander-in-chief of the expeditionary 
 force and returned himself to Fatehpur. 
 
 Mun'im Khan was one of Humayun's Turkish adherents 
 who had entered Akbar's service. He was deepl}'' implicated 
 in the plot for the assassination of Atgah Khan, but had been 
 pardoned by Akbar, who was always lenient in dealing with 
 the riotous proceedings of his old associates if the}'' had proved 
 themselves loyal and capable soldiers. After the revolt and 
 death of Khan Zaman he had succeeded to the latter's jagir 
 in Jaunpur, and had acted as the Padshah's military'' repre- 
 sentative in Bihar as well as his diplomatic agent in the nego- 
 tiations with the Afghans in Bengal. The second in command 
 of the expedition was Raja Todar Mall, who had just before 
 
 484 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 been employed in settling revenue affairs in Gujerat and had 
 also done military service in Bihar previously. On the approach 
 of the Mogul army Daud retreated to the Hughli, and Mun'im 
 Elhan pushed on to the Afghan capital, Gaur, and occupied 
 Tandah, on the opposite side of the river. There he remained 
 for some time to order the affairs of the conquered territory, but 
 sent a detachment under the command of another of Humayun's 
 old retainers, Muhammad Otili Khan Barlas, and Raja Todar 
 Mall, to pursue the Afghans. 
 
 For some time the Afghans had the advantage, owing to 
 the difficulties of transport in the delta of the Ganges and 
 their superior knowledge of the country. The Mogul army 
 suffered seriously from sickness and was twice defeated in 
 minor engagements. At Midnapur Muhammad Quli Khan 
 died, and Raja Todar Mali was compelled to wait for the 
 arrival of Mun'im Khan with reinforcements. The decisive 
 battle took place at Takaroi, or Mughalmari, on the borders 
 of Orissa. The Afghans, led by a distinguished chieftain, 
 Gujar Khan, charged fu.riously with their elephants and threw 
 the Mogul vanguard into confusion. Khan-i-'Alam, the general 
 in command, was killed, and Mun'im Khan, who was an old 
 man of eighty, was driven off the field after a hand-to-hand 
 fight with the Afghan general. The day was saved by the 
 steadiness of the Rajputs on the right wing under Todar Mall's 
 command. " What does it matter," he cried when the news 
 of the disaster reached him, " if Khan-i-'Alam is dead ? Why 
 should we fear because the Klian Khanan has run away ? 
 The empire is ours ! " With these words he animated his 
 men and kept up the fight until Gujar Khan fell pierced by 
 an arrow and the Afghans on both flanks were pressed back 
 upon their centre. At the critical point Mun'im Khan 
 succeeded in rallying his broken troops and returned to 
 the attack. Daud Khan fled and the rout of the Afghans 
 was complete. The Mogul forces under Raja Todar 
 Mall then entered Orissa. Daud Khan shortly afterwards 
 opened negotiations with the Mogul commander-in-chief, 
 and a treaty was drawn up by which Bengal was ceded 
 
 485 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to the Mogul Empire, while Daud remained in possession of 
 Orissa, 
 
 The Khan Khanan, Mun'im Khan, whom Akbar appointed 
 Viceroy in Bengal, returned to his headquarters at Tandah, 
 but foolishly resolved to re-occupy Gaur, the old capital on 
 the other side of the Ganges, which had been deserted on 
 account of its unhealthiness. A violent epidemic of plague 
 caused the death of a great many of the Mogul officers and 
 played havoc with the troops, but the Viceroy, in spite of 
 protests, refused to move. At last he himself was taken ill 
 and died. Daud thought this was an opportunity for recovering 
 his lost kingdom, and being joined by many Afghan chieftains, 
 invaded Bengal with an army of fifty thousand horse. He had 
 made considerable headway before Akbar recalled Khan Jahan 
 Husain Qulifrom the Panjab and sent him with reinforcements 
 to take supreme command of the Mogul army in Bengal. 
 Raja Todar Mall remained as second in command. The new 
 campaign ended with the final defeat and death of Daud 
 and the extinction of Afghan rule in Bengal. 
 
 Khan Jahan in 1577 sent Todar Mall, who had again dis- 
 tinguished himself in the field, to the imperial court with 
 some of the rich spoils of war, and in the following year Akbar 
 sent the Raja again to Gujerat to attend to revenue affairs 
 in that province. 
 
 The Afghan landowners in Bengal continued to give much 
 trouble after the death of Daud, for they were by no means 
 content with finding themselves despoiled of their estates by 
 the retainers of the Mogul Viceroy. Nor were the Mogul 
 chieftains themselves disposed to render the imperial treasury 
 its dues, and the pressure which Akbar brought to bear upon 
 them subsequently led to a serious mutiny among the Mogul 
 troops in Bengal. The Viceroy, Khan Jahan, set the example 
 of amassing a huge fortune by indiscriminate plunder, and 
 was, says Abul Fazl, on the verge of rebellion when he 
 died a year after his appointment to the governorship of the 
 province. 
 
 Todar Mall was Akbar's right-hand man in revenue matters, 
 486 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 and lie served his master well. He was a man of strict integrity, 
 and a most capable departmental chief. By his exertions the 
 systematic plundering both of the treasury and of the ryots 
 by the revenue officials was effectually checked. The ryots 
 knew the limit of the Government's demands and were relieved 
 from the gang of unscrupulous thieves who acted as agents 
 for the Padshah ; the imperial treasury was filled to overflowing 
 and Akbar's political plans were never hampered for lack of 
 financial means. But the great fame which Todar Mall 
 acquired on account of his revenue system must be considered 
 more as a testimony of the people's gratitude for relief from the 
 intolerable burden which had weighed upon them almost con- 
 tinually from the first days of Muhammadan rule than as 
 an acknowledgment of its intrinsic merits as financial legis- 
 lation. Todar Mall was a hard man, and the fact that his 
 scheme was only a development of Sher Shah's revenue system 
 is sufficient to indicate how little the spirit of Indo-Aryan 
 political economy entered into his financial reforms. But 
 in this as in so many other matters Akbar's administration 
 gathered lustre from the misdeeds of his predecessors, and 
 Abul Fazl, hke other historians of the Mogtd period, has 
 conveniently avoided comparison with the great days of 
 Indo-Aryan rule. 
 
 Akbar, no doubt, was sincerely anxious to deal fairly 
 with the cultivators, whose industry provided the principal 
 part of the revenue. He did away with a number of vexatious 
 supplementary taxes and fees by which even Hindu rulers 
 had often raised the total amount of the land-tax above the 
 limit fijied by Indo-Aryan constitutional law. But Todar 
 Mall's demand of one-third of the average produce was double 
 the amount which Indo-Aryan political economists held to be 
 justifiable in normal times, and even exceeded that which 
 they allowed as an emergency measure when the safety of 
 the State was seriously threatened. On the other hand, the 
 condition of the country could not be considered normal. 
 Akbar had a gigantic task to perform, and the people were 
 happy to pay the price for a strong central government which 
 
 487 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 could give them peace and prosperity and an honest admini- 
 stration. 
 
 Various regulations made by Akbar's Government were 
 designed to obviate the hardships of a cut-and-dried revenue 
 system. The taxes were fixed in money value, but every ryot 
 was allowed to pay in kind if he thought the money rate was 
 not fair, and if the assessment of his land seemed to him too 
 high he had the right to insist upon the measurement and 
 division of his crops. A rebate on the full demand was allowed 
 in various cases, e.g. when the land had suffered from floods 
 or had been out of cultivation for three years. The tax was 
 remitted so long as the land lay fallow. The settlement was 
 first made annually, but afterwards for a term of ten years, 
 on the basis of the average payments for the preceding term. 
 As Revenue Minister Todar Mall had the advantage of his 
 experience as a Hindu landowner and thorough knowledgeof 
 the ancient village traditions, so that his whole scheme as 
 regards the measurement of land, classification of soils, and 
 assessment could be expeditiously carried out with the goodwill 
 of the villagers. Various improvements were made in the 
 instruments of mensuration, and Todar Mall earned the lasting 
 gratitude of the ryots for the relief of their former burdens 
 which he effected. 
 
 The most important innovation introduced by Todar Mall, 
 says Professor Blochmann, was the change in the language and 
 character used in the revenue accounts. " Formerly they 
 had been kept in Hindi ^ by Hindu muhanirs. Todar Mall 
 ordered that all Government accounts should henceforth be 
 written in Persian. He thus forced his co-religionists to learn 
 the court language of their rulers — a circumstance which may 
 well be compared to the introduction of the English language 
 in the courts of India. The study of Persian therefore became 
 necessary for its pecuniary advantages. Todar Mall's order 
 and Akbar's generous policy of allowing Hindus to compete 
 for the highest honours , . . explain two facts : first, that 
 before the end of the eighteenth century the Hindus had almost 
 
 1 " In the vernaculars" would have been a more correct statement. 
 488 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 become tlie Persian teachers of the Muhammadans ; secondly, 
 that a new dialect could arise in Upper India, the Urdu, which, 
 without the Hindus as receiving medium, never could have 
 been called into existence. Whether we attach more influence 
 to Todar Mall's order or to Akbar's policy, which, once initiated, 
 his successors, willing or not, had to follow, one fact should 
 be borne in mind — that before the times of Akbar the Hindus, 
 as a rule, did not study Persian, and stood therefore pohtically 
 below their Muhammadan rulers." ^ 
 
 Todar Mall's innovation, however, seems to have been 
 designed more in the interests of the landlords than of the 
 cultivators ; for the latter would certainly not have benefited 
 by the use of a foreign language in the revenue accounts. It 
 may be questioned whether the use of Persian as a court 
 language was ever a serious obstacle to the political advance- 
 ment of Hindus. The Persian language would be far easier 
 for the educated Hindu than English ; and many Muham- 
 I madan rulers before Akbar had employed Hindu ministers 
 who were doubtless as proficient in Persian as any Indian 
 Musalman. The Hindus had been teachers of the Muham- 
 madans even before the latter entered India, and it was through 
 the absorption of Indo-Aryan culture that Islam in India 
 took the position it holds to-day among world-religions. Akbar 
 was one of the great Musalman rulers who in promoting 
 the cause of Islam helped also to purge Hinduism of 
 many abuses and to break down sectarian intolerance on both 
 sides. 
 
 It was Todar Mall's strict integrity in financial matters as 
 well as his ability as a general which made Akbar select him 
 as his Vazir, and afterwards, in 1579, send him to suppress 
 the disorders in Bengal which arose from the attempt to carry 
 out his reforms in revenue administration. The landowners, 
 both Afghan and Mogul, resented any interference with their 
 prescriptive right of plundering the ryots and made common 
 cause in resisting the introduction of a settled system of 
 revenue-collection which both secured the due payment of 
 
 1 Am-i-Akharl, vol. i, p. 352. 
 
 489 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 imperial taxes and protected the cultivators from exactions. 
 In 1583, when Todar Mall became Vakil, or Prime Minister, 
 of the empire, Akbar sent his foster-brother, Mirza 'Aziz 
 Kokah, the son of Atgah Khan, whose tragic death has 
 already been recorded, to continue the difficult task of 
 restoring order in Bengal. He succeeded partly by con- 
 cessions to the landlords and partly by military measures 
 in pacifying both the Afghan and Mogul rebels, but it was 
 not until 1592, or eighteen 3^ears after the first expedition 
 to Bengal, that Raja Man Singh brought the refractory 
 zamindars to order and restored peace to the distracted 
 province. 
 
 In the meantime affairs in Rajputana and on the north-west 
 frontier had engaged Akbar's attention. In 1576 the army of 
 Ajmir fought a great battle with the Rana of Mewar, Partab 
 Singh (or Rana Kika), at Gogunda. Partab Singh was the 
 successor of Udai Singh. In the secure retreat of the fast- 
 nesses of the Aravali hills to which the Rajputs of Mewar 
 had retired after the fall of Chitor he had remained indifferent 
 to the glamour of the Padshah's successes in the field, which 
 brought even his own brothers to the imperial court, and 
 treated with contempt Akbar's demand for the surrender of 
 one of his State elephants as a token of submission. Akbar, 
 whose success both as a war-lord and as an administrator was 
 largely due to his unerring judgment in the selection of his 
 officers, appointed Raja Man Singh to the chief command of 
 the expedition sent to bring the proud Rana to reason, trusting 
 to his proved capacity as a general and his exceptional know- 
 ledge of the country and of Rajput tactics. Man Singh, 
 according to the evidence of the Musalman historian Badauni, 
 who took part in the battle, fully justified the Emperor's 
 confidence, for when the Rana descended from the mountains 
 and broke the vanguard of the imperial army in a furious charge 
 it was only his fine generalship and the conspicuous courage of 
 his Rajput bodyguard which turned defeat into victory and 
 prevented a great disaster to the Mogul army. " That day," 
 says Badauni, " through the generalship of Man Singh the 
 490 
 
AKBAR AS RULER 
 
 meaning of this line of Mulla Shiri became known : "A Hindu 
 wields the sword of Islam." ^ 
 
 Akbar, nevertheless, was not satisfied with the somewhat 
 meagre result of the campaign — which was that the Rana, 
 wounded in a hand-to-hand conflict with Man Singh, retreated 
 to his mountain fortress, leaving his State elephant and other 
 spoils in the possession of the Moguls — though Man Singh 
 doubtless showed a wise discretion in not allowing his forces 
 to be entangled in the recesses of the Aravali range. The 
 imperial prestige, however, suffered somewhat by the privations 
 endured by the troops after the victory from the scarcity of 
 fodder and provisions in the plains of Mewar, and from Man 
 Singh's refusal to allow the villages to be plundered according 
 to the time-honoured Musalman tradition. A good deal of 
 sickness resulted from over-indulgence in mango-fruit, which 
 grew, says Badauni, in such abundance as to defy description. 
 Akbar, after sending an emissary to investigate, recalled 
 Man Singh, but the Rajputs of Mewar continued to defy all 
 his efforts to subdue them. The Emperor, however, had little 
 reason to be dissatisfied with the progress of his military plans, 
 for the same year the campaign in Bengal was brought to a 
 triumphant conclusion by the defeat and death of Daud, a 
 success mainly due, as we have seen, to the ability of another 
 Rajput general, Raja Todar Mall. 
 
 ^ Badauni, Lowe's translation, vol. ii, p. 239. 
 
 491 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER OF 
 
 ISLAM 
 
 THE three years from 1576 to 1579 were comparatively 
 tranquil, and Akbar was free to plunge himself deeply 
 into the religious and metaphysical problems which 
 had such an intense attraction for him. Abul Fazl was admitted 
 into the inner circle of the court at Fatehpur, and the Thursday 
 evening debates on religion and philosophy had begun. Up 
 to this time Akbar, though he had maintained a tolerant attitude 
 towards Hindu beliefs, which vv^as in itself offensive to the 
 orthodox Musalman, had never wavered in the strict perform- 
 ance of his religious du.ties according to the Muslim faith. He 
 had been most assiduous in visiting the shrines of Musalman 
 saints, and had treated with the utmost reverence the living 
 shaikhs who had won a reputation for sanctit5^ The Great 
 Mosque and college of Fatehpur had been founded in honour 
 of Shaikh Salim Chishti ; Akbar's eldest son. Sultan Salim, 
 had been born in his house and named after him. The Sultan 
 Daniyal, a younger son of the imperial house, had Hkewise 
 been named after another shaikh of great renown at Ajmir 
 to whom the Padshah frequently paid his respects. Akbar 
 had encouraged his Musalman subjects to visit the holy shrines 
 of Islam at Mekka, and had assisted all who wished to do so 
 from the imperial treasury. He continued to do this even after 
 the proclamation which made him the supreme authority in 
 spiritual matters for all his subjects. In fact, though he 
 subsequently took a different attitude towards this and many 
 other of the outward forms and ceremonies of Islam, whicli he 
 rejected as superfluous or misleading in the same spirit as 
 492 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 Protestantism rejected the ritual of the Church of Rome, not 
 even his worst enemy, Badauni, accuses him of disputing the 
 authority of the Quran, though he says that others spoke 
 contemptuously of it. 
 
 Akbar, indeed, was a true son of the Renaissance who 
 claimed the right of interpreting the Musalman scriptures 
 in the light of the scientific knowledge of his time. He would 
 accept no dogmatic teaching which could not justify itself 
 philosophically, or was in conflict with the known laws of 
 nature. " Discourses in philosophy have such a charm for 
 me," he said, " that they distract me from all else, and I 
 forcibly restrain myself from listening to them lest the necessary 
 duties of the hour should be neglected." ^ But he was far 
 from being a rationalist who denied the truth of divine revela- 
 tion. It is true that he insisted on the necessity of considering 
 all dogmas in the light of human intelligence. ' ' The superiority 
 of man," he said, " rests on the jewel of reason. It is meet 
 that he should labour in its burnishing, and turn not from its 
 instruction. A man is the disciple of his own reason. If it 
 has naturally a good lustre, it becomes itself his direction, and 
 if it gains it under the direction of a higher mind it is still his 
 guide." 2 But at the same time, he said, the intellect will not, 
 with the full assent of ' reason,' confessedly oppose " the 
 divine law." " When man habituated himself to preserve the 
 sacred relationship between the Supreme Being and himself, 
 the bond of Divine love upon which the very existence of 
 humanity depended kept the rational soul in close contact with 
 God — and he who is spiritually illumined knows that none 
 can effectually oppose His commands." These are not the 
 sentiments of a rationalist, but rather those of a mystic who, 
 penetrating beneath the surface of dogmatic teaching, saw 
 that Islam in its inspirational depths came from the unf athomed 
 source of Divine wisdom from which the rishis of India had 
 drunk ages before the Hegira ; and now that the millennium 
 of Islam was approaching he felt that the time had come 
 
 1 Ain-i-Akbavt, Jarrett's translation, vol. iii, p. 386. 
 3 lUd., p. -383. 
 
 493 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 when all earnest Muslims should seek a means of reconciliation 
 with their Hindu brethren. 
 
 Some of Akbar's experiments for testing the foundation of 
 religious belief would seem crude to the modern scientist — 
 as when he ordered that twenty infants, whom their mothers 
 had agreed to part with for a consideration, should be put 
 into a secluded house far from human habitation in charge 
 of nurses with strict instructions that they should never hear 
 a word spoken — the object being to ascertain whether they 
 showed any natural tendency towards one form of religion 
 or another. The painful result was that many of the infants 
 died from neglect, and others after three or four years remained 
 dumb.^ But Akbar was neither ignorant, as Badauni declared, 
 nor shallow in his religious beliefs. The Shaikh Mubarak and 
 his two sons, who were his chief Musalman advisers, were 
 renowned for their thorough scholarship ; Akbar himself was 
 indefatigable in his studies. He sought counsel from the most 
 learned men of his age and availed himself of every source of 
 information on religious matters, as Badauni himself shows : 
 " Crowds of learned men from all nations, and sages of various 
 religions and sects, came to the court and were honoured with 
 private conversations. After inquiries and investigations, 
 which were their only business and occupation day and night, 
 they would talk about profound points of science, the subtleties 
 of revelation, the curiosities of history, and the wonders of 
 nature." ^ 
 
 But though Akbar was thus deeply imbued with the spirit 
 of Indo-Aryan culture, it seems to be an entire misconception 
 of his religious attitude to believe that he ceased to profess 
 Islam, though one of his ' happy sayings,' as translated by 
 Colonel Jarrett,^ would make it appear that he ultimately did 
 
 1 Badauni, Lowe's translation, vol. ii, p. 296. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 263. 
 
 ' Ain-i-Akban, vol. iii, p. 384. The question is discussed by Mr Vincent 
 Smith and others in the Asiatic Review, July and August 19 15. The correct 
 translation, given by Mr Yusuf Ali, is as follows : " Formerly I used to force 
 men into my way of thinking, and such a [proselyte] I looked upon as a 
 Musalman. As knowledge grew I was filled with shame. [For any one] not 
 
 494 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 so. He was a reformer, finding food in all religions, who 
 endeavoured to place Islam on a broader foundation and 
 make it a universal religion, tlius fulfilling the prophecy attri- 
 buted to Muhammad, which in Akbar's time caused so much 
 excitement among Muslims, that at the millennium of the 
 Hegira a new Prophet, the Imam Mahdi, would " fill the world 
 with justice " and lead all men to Islam. Naturally he satisfied 
 none of his courtiers except a few devoted adherents, and 
 aroused the bitter hostility of all narrow sectarians who were 
 so convinced of the absolute superiority of their own particular 
 dogmas that they were opposed to all inquiry into the deeper 
 truths of religion. To the Jesuit priests of Goa, though he 
 treated them with the greatest consideration and listened 
 most attentively to their arguments, his mind remained an 
 enigma — " so close and self-contained, with twists of words and 
 deeds, so divergent one from the other, and at most times so 
 contradictory, that even by much seeking one could not find 
 the clue to his thoughts." His leanings towards Christianity 
 disgusted the orthodox Musalman, like Badauni. The orthodox 
 Hindu, like the Raja Bhagwan Das, though perfectly willing 
 to do homage to him as Vishnu's Vicegerent on earth, refused 
 to recognize him as a guru or exponent of Aryan religion. 
 
 Raja Man Singh, when pressed by the Emperor to become 
 a member of the new Sangha which was to embrace all sects 
 
 being a Musalman to draw others into that [path] was not fitting. What they 
 are forced to accept, how can it be called religion ? " Mr Vincent Smith 
 makes this, as it seems to be at first sight, an open acknowledgment of 
 Akbar's secession from Islam. But though the argument is rather ambiguous 
 in form, Akbar is clearly referring throughout to his earlier years, when 
 Mr Vincent Smith himself allows that he was a sincere and zealous Miisalman. 
 It cannot therefore possibly be construed as Colonel Jarrett and Mr Vincent 
 Smith would have it. The argument seems rather to be that Akbar as he 
 advanced in years and knowledge had understood the true spirit of Islam 
 better than to force others to profess it against their conscience. Mr Vincent 
 Smith supports his contention by Father Monserrate's report of a conversation 
 he had with the Padshah in 1582 ; but such evidence is worth little in the 
 absence of Akbar's acknowledgment that the conversation was correctly 
 reported. The Jesuit Fathers were eager to claim Akbar as a convert, 
 and would be prone to exaggerate any expression of his opinions indicating a 
 dissent from Musalman orthodoxy. 
 
 495 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 and creeds, replied : " If your Majesty means by the term of 
 membership willingness to sacrifice one's life, I have given 
 pretty clear proofs and your Majesty might dispense with 
 examining me ; but if the term has another meaning and refers 
 to religion, surely I am a Hindu. And if I am to become a 
 Muhammadan your Majesty ought to say so — but besides 
 Hinduism and Islam I know of no other reHgion." 
 
 To the Sunnis, who took the traditional law of Islam as a 
 divine revelation and clung to the literal interpretation of it 
 given by the 'Ulamas, the spirit of inquiry which animated 
 Akbar was in itself, as Badauni said, " opposed to every 
 Mushm principle." The Padshah was to them a backslider 
 and a heretic who had renounced the creed of his fathers, a 
 pure rationalist who impiously doubted the truth of divine 
 revelation. The chief spokesman of the vSunni faction, the 
 Mukdum-ul-Mulk — " learned in law and austere in practice," 
 who " zealously persecuted heretics " and was the inveterate 
 enemy of Shaikh Mubarak and his sons — ^became Akbar's pet 
 aversion and the butt of Birbal's jests in the philosophical 
 debates. He nevertheless joined with the Shaikh, Faizi, 
 Abul Fazl, and others in signing the famous document which 
 declared that the Padshah was " a most just, a most wise, and 
 a most God-fearing King," and made him, on the authority 
 of the Quran, the final arbiter in questions affecting Islamic 
 doctrine. A few months afterwards Akbar sent him on a 
 pilgrimage to Mekka to get rid of him, and on his return he 
 was banished from the court ; but the story that Akbar 
 had him assassinated was doubtless one of the many malignant 
 inventions fabricated by the Padshah's enemies. 
 
 The events of these three most interesting years in Alcbar's 
 reign are recorded, from the Sunni point of view, in Badauni's 
 histor3^ When the Debating Hall, the Ibadat-Khana, which 
 Akbar ordered to be built at Fatehpur was finished in 1575, 
 " the questions of Sufism, scientific discussions, inquiries intc 
 philosophy and law, were the order of the day." Akbar spen1| 
 much of his time in company with the disciples of the saint oJ 
 Ajmir, to whose tomb he made annual pilgrimages^ discussing 
 496 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet. At the very 
 commencement of the debates disputes arose on questions of 
 precedence, and Akbar had to intervene and order that the 
 amirs should sit on the east side, the Sa3ryids on the west, 
 the 'Ulamas on the south, and the shaikhs on the north. The 
 learned doctors of Islam, unaccustomed to defend their tenets 
 in Hindu fashion with the weapons of logic instead of with 
 the sword, were far from pleased with this revival of a time- 
 honoured institution of Aryavarta, and the debates often 
 degenerated into unseemly wrangles. " One night the vein 
 of the neck of the 'Ulama of the age swelled up," says Badauni, 
 " and a horrid noise and confusion ensued." The Emperor 
 interposed and threatened to send away any 'Ulama who talked 
 nonsense or misbehaved himself. It was this incident which 
 provoked Badauni's whispered comment, " If I were to carry 
 out that order most of the 'Ulamas would have to leave " — 
 a thrust at his fellow-Sunnis which diverted the Emperor 
 greatly. 
 
 Akbar would call upon the Mukdum-ul-Mulk, as the chief 
 representative of the orthodox party, and put up Abul Fazl, 
 then a new arrival at court, to argue with him. One can 
 imagine that the young scholar was delighted with the oppor- 
 tunity of baiting his father's persecutor in open court, while 
 the robust, active-minded Emperor watched the combatants 
 with his penetrating eyes, listening attentively and enjoying 
 the intellectual treat with as much zest as he did his favourite 
 sport, an elephant fight. Akbar did not disguise his sympathy 
 for the younger of the two disputants, for, says Badauni, 
 " His Majesty used to interrupt the Moulana at every state- 
 ment, and at a hint from him his companions also would inter- 
 fere with interjections and observations, and would tell queer 
 stories about the Moulana, and exemplified in his person the 
 verse of the Quran, ' And some of you shall have life prolonged 
 to a miserable old age.' " The MukdUm-ul-Mulk was not a 
 popular person among Akbar's intimates. He had been a 
 great power at court in the reign of Islam Shah, when he had 
 been instrumental in bringing about the death of the Shaikh 
 
 2 1 497 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 'Alai. In the early years of Akbar's reign he had set the 
 Padshah's mind against Shaikh Mubarak and nearly succeeded 
 in procuring his execution as a heretic. But now his star was 
 on the wane, for Akbar had begun to understand the littleness 
 of his mind and the meanness of his character, and took a 
 mischievous pleasure in exposing him to ridicule. ' ' Stories were 
 told one after another about his meanness and shabbiness, 
 and baseness and worldliness, and oppression, all which vices 
 were exhibited towards holy and deserving men, especially 
 those of the Panjab, and which one by one came to Ught, 
 verifying the saying, ' There is a day when secrets shall be 
 disclosed.' " Akbar's method of dealing with the hoary old 
 hypocrite was very characteristic. Though he was willing 
 to condone many faults in the rough veteran soldiers who were 
 the associates of his boyhood, he hated meanness and deceit. 
 The Padshah himself was no saint, and he could be terrible 
 when his Tartar blood was roused ; but none of his narrow- 
 minded critics doubted the sincerity of his nature and his 
 intense desire to arrive at the truth. He was a keen observer 
 and an excellent judge of character : these debates gave him 
 an admirable opportunity of noting the qualifications and 
 worth of the men gathered round his throne. 
 
 At the beginning the discussions turned chiefly on points of 
 Muhammadan law and the doctrines of the many different 
 sects of Islam. Akbar ordered some of the 'Ulamas to wTite 
 a commentary on the Quran, but this, sa3''S Badauni, " led to 
 great rows among them." Then some Portuguese priests 
 appeared at court. He questioned them closely upon the 
 philosophical basis of Christian doctrine, and seemed to be 
 much impressed, for he requested the authorities at Goa to 
 send him experts to give further instruction. The hopes of 
 the Portuguese ran high at the prospect of winning so desirable 
 a convert, and in 1580 they sent a mission, headed by Father 
 Rodolfo Aquaviva, which was received most graciousl}^ by 
 the Padshah and accorded permission to build a chapel at 
 Agra. One of the priests was employed to assist in the trans- 
 lation of Greek literature into Persian. Faizi was ordered to 
 498 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 prepare a Persian translation of the Gospels ; tiie court painters 
 copied many of the sacred pictures, in which Akbar showed 
 much interest. Akbar, personall}'', disappointed the expecta- 
 tions of the good Fathers. The Padshah would join reverently 
 in divine service at the Christian church ; but his attitude was 
 that of an impartial scientific inquirer. He would try the 
 effect of Christianit}^ upon the unbiased mind of the young, 
 and ordered his son. Prince Murad, a child of eight years, to 
 be instructed in the Christian doctrine. He must have noticed 
 the inconsistency between the Christian principles taught by 
 the priests and the conduct of the Portuguese Christians at 
 Goa, and the experiment with his own son was by no means 
 convincing. Prince Murad, like both of his brothers, grew 
 up a confirmed drunkard, and eventually died of delirium 
 tremens at the age of twenty-eight. The second mission sent 
 from Goa in 1590 convinced the Jesuits that Akbar's mind 
 was inscrutable, though he still remained most friendly disposed 
 towards them and liked to have some of them always near him. 
 In the meanwhile Akbar was pursuing his inquiries with 
 unabated zeal, hearing the arguments of vSufi and vShiah divines, 
 listening to disputes between Brahmans, Buddhists, Musalmans, 
 Parsis, Jews, and Christians, and adding to his library Persian 
 translations of important works on philosophy, science, history, 
 and religion. Among Sanskrit works which were thus trans- 
 lated were the Atharva Veda, the Mahdhhdrata and Ram ay ana, 
 the Harivamsa, Kalhana's History of Kashmir, the Lilawati, or 
 treatise on arithmetic, by Bhaskaracharya, and other works 
 on mathematics and astronomy. Akbar personally supervised 
 the translation of the Mahabharata, and the court painters 
 were kept busy in making illustrations for the Hindu epics, 
 as well as for the masterpieces of Persian and Arabic literature. 
 The imperial librarians brought the Emperor daily the books 
 which they had translated and read them to him from begin- 
 ning to end. " At whatever page the readers daily stop His 
 Majesty makes with his own pen a sign, according to the 
 number of the pages, and rewards the readers with presents 
 of cash, either in gold or silver, according to the number of 
 
 499 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 leaves read out by them. . . . He does not get tired of hearing 
 a book over again, but hstens to the reading of it with more 
 interest." ^ In this way Akbar, who had a prodigious memory, 
 trained himself to take the part of arbitrator in the court 
 debates held in the Diwan-i-am or in the Ibadat-Khana, 
 which were of absorbing interest for him. He also began to 
 plunge into the intricacies of Hindu philosophy and ritual and 
 into the mysteries of occult science. " A Brahman, named 
 Debi, who was one of the interpreters of the Mahabharata, 
 was pulled up the wall of the castle [at Agra] sitting on a 
 chdrpdi till he arrived near a balcony which the Emperor had 
 made his bedchamber. Whilst thus suspended he instructed 
 His Majesty in the secrets and legends of Hinduism, in the 
 manner of worshipping idols, the fire, the sun and stars, and 
 of revering the chief gods of these unbelievers, such as Brahma, 
 Mahadev, Bishn, Kishn, Ram, and Mahama. . . . He became 
 especially firmly convinced of the doctrine of the transmigra- 
 tion of souls, and he much approved of the saying, ' There is 
 no religion in which the doctrine of Transmigration has not a 
 firm hold.' " ^ He was initiated into the secrets of Sanskrit 
 mantrams and the practice of Yoga, and began to study the 
 ancient superstition called alchemy, now made respectable 
 under the name of synthetic chemistry. Akbar, no doubt, 
 from his inexperience, was often imposed upon by the many 
 yogis and fakirs he consulted, though he had a short way of 
 dealing with charlatans when they were exposed. At one 
 time a certain fakir at I^ahore made a sensation by pretending 
 to disappear as he was performing the customary ablutions 
 in the river at the time of evening prayer, and simultaneously 
 making his voice heard, apparently on the opposite side of 
 the river, shouting to the person to whom he had just been 
 talking. Akbar, being greatly interested in psychical research, 
 sent for the man, took him to the bank of a river, either at 
 Agra or I^ahore, and commanded him to exliibit his powers, 
 at the same time promising him an immense reward if he 
 
 ^ Am-i-Akban, Blochinaun's translation, vol. i, p. 103. 
 ^ Badaiini; I,owe's translation, vol. ii, p. 265. 
 
 500 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 could demonstrate a real miracle. The Emperor, no doubt, 
 had taken his precautions against fraud, for the man was 
 dumbfounded and made no answer. " Very well," said Akbar, 
 " then we will bind you hand and foot and throw you from 
 the top of the fort. If you come out of the water safe and 
 sound, well and good ; if not, you will have gone to hell." 
 The miserable fakir then confessed that for the sake of filling 
 his " hell of a stomach " he had played a simple trick. He had 
 an accomplice, his son living on the city side of the river, 
 who imitated his father's voice when the latter momentarily 
 hid himself under the water on the other side.^ 
 
 The numerous disputants of rival creeds who crowded 
 Akbar's court soon found out that a practical test was the 
 best way of convincing the Kmperor of the wonder-working 
 powers which each one claimed for his own religion. At one 
 of the conferences on religion which Akbar had arranged a 
 passionate discussion rose to white heat between the Christian 
 priests and Muhammadan mullas on the question of the divine 
 inspiration of the New Testament and the Quran. The mullas 
 became abusive, so that Akbar interposed, reproving them 
 for their violence, and wound up the debate by an expression 
 of his own opinion, which was the same as that stated in his 
 ' happy sayings,' namely, that God should be worshipped 
 through the intellect and not by a blind adherence to the 
 supposed revelations of Scripture. One of the contending 
 parties in the excitement of the moment shouted, " I^et us 
 make a peat fire, and in the presence of His Majesty we will 
 pass through it, and whichever gets safely through will thereby 
 prove the truth of his religion." Abul Fazl declares that the 
 proposal came from the Christian " Padre Radulf [Rodolfo]," 
 and that after Akbar had given permission the mullas refused 
 to face the ordeal. Badauni, on the other hand, puts the 
 challenge in the mouth of the Shaikh Outb-ud-din, and says 
 that the priests declined to accept it. The records of the 
 Jesuit Fathers support this version of the story, which prima 
 \ facie is more credible. The practice of going through fire as 
 
 ^ Badauni, I<owe's translation, vol, ii, pp. 378-379. 
 
 501 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 a test of faith is still current in India, and an Indian initiated 
 into the secret of doing so without serious injury to himself 
 would be more likely to make the proposal than an educated 
 European of that time, for in the sixteenth century the age 
 of miracles was already past in Europe. 
 
 Akbar gradually began to show a decided preference towards 
 Hindu observances in matters of religious ritual and court 
 ceremonial, though he continued to assert himself as the 
 exponent of a new intellectual movement in Islam. His 
 standpoint that religious faith must always be tested by the 
 intellect, rather than by dogmatic statements put forward as 
 divine revelation, was certainly a reflection of Hindu thought 
 expressed in the ordinance that every prayer addressed to the 
 Divine Spirit must be preceded by an invocation to Ganesha, 
 the iconic symbol of Reason. The Vishnu pillar upon which 
 his throne was placed in the Diwan-i-Khas at Fatehpur was 
 also an appeal to the ancient Vaishnava tradition which made 
 the monarch God's representative on earth. The theory 
 propounded by Akbar, that " a special grace proceeds from 
 the sun in favour of kings, and for this reason they pray [to 
 it] and consider it a worship of the Almighty," was likewise 
 borrowed from the traditions of Rajput royalty. He did not, 
 however, by any means conform to the fundamental principle 
 of Hindu polity, by which the sovereign's supremacy was 
 always subject to the constitutional laws of Aryavarta — 
 assumed to be one with the divine Vedas. Akbar's imperious 
 will could brook no restraints upon his prerogatives except 
 those which were self-imposed, and he maintained in principle 
 and practice the autocratic traditions of Islam. From the 
 day he assumed control of the government his will was law. 
 He, and he alone, was the interpreter of God's will. " If I 
 could but find any one capable of governing the kingdom I 
 would at once place this burden upon his shoulders and mth- 
 draw therefrom. ... It was the effect of the grace of God 
 that I found no capable minister, otherwise people would have 
 considered that my measures had been devised by them." ^ 
 
 1 Ain-i-Akban, Jarrett's translation, vol. iii, p. 387. 
 502 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 It was natural in a man of Akbar's temperament that he 
 should eventually tire of listening to the din of wordy warfare 
 which resounded in the audience halls of Fatehpur from morn 
 to night without any prospect of a final reconciliation between 
 the contending parties. As the discussions in the court debates 
 gradually involved the fundamental principles of religion and 
 the bases of Islamic belief were examined, the 'Ulamas became 
 more and more violent in abuse of each other and of those 
 who differed from them, and the differences between the 
 reforming party of Islam, headed by the Shaikh Mubarak and 
 his sons, and orthodox Musalmans appeared more hopelessly 
 irreconcilable. The climax was reached about the end of 
 1578, when Abul Fazl in the Ibadat-Khana put forward for 
 discussion the proposition that the king should be regarded 
 by his subjects not only as a temporal ruler but as a spiritual 
 guide. Even the Sunni 'Ulamas might have agreed to it 
 without demur if they had had no doubts of Akbar's orthodoxy. 
 An Indian sultan, de facto if not de jure, often had a position 
 analogous to that of the Khalif. It was his will, and not 
 that of the 'Ulamas, which decided which of the seventy-two 
 sects of Islam should be predominant in the State. A court 
 mulla could easily assent to the formula that the king, as head 
 of the Church, should be the arbitrator when the 'Ulamas 
 disagreed on points of doctrine. But Abul Fazl's opponents 
 knew too well the Padshah's personal sympathies not to 
 realize that their acceptance of the proposal meant the final 
 triumph of Shaikh Mubarak's revolutionary propaganda. It 
 therefore came as a bomb in the Sunni camp : prolonged and 
 stormy discussions took place without any agreement being 
 reached. While the dispute was at its height Akbar took a 
 bold step which made any further opposition by the mullas 
 an open defiance of his authority. He resolved to come 
 forward publicly in the imperial mosque as the leader of Islam 
 in India. Accordingly at the first Friday service of the month 
 of Jumada'l-awwal in 1579 he took the place of the court imam 
 and commenced to read the Eliutba before the assembled 
 court, to signify that henceforward the Padshah would be 
 
 503 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the spiritual as well as the temporal head of the Empire of 
 Hindustan, The Khutba ended, he began to recite a poem 
 composed by Faizi to celebrate the solemn occasion : 
 
 The lyord Who gave to us command, 
 Gave us wisdom, heart and strength, 
 Who guided us in law and right 
 And turned our mind from unjust ways, 
 Who can describe His power and state ? 
 Allahu Akbar — God is great. 
 
 But before he had finished the third verse Akbar was overcome 
 by emotion, and, descending from the pulpit, he left the rest 
 of the service to the court khatih. 
 
 There were precedents, says Badauni, for this proceeding 
 in Mogul history, for Timur and other Mogul monarchs had 
 Hkewise read the IChutba in the J ami' Masjid. But there 
 was no mistaking the significance of this occasion. The 
 opposition to Abul Fazl's proposal collapsed, and soon after- 
 wards a State document was issued under the signatures and 
 seals of the Mukdum-ul-Mulk, "of Shaikh Mubarak, the 
 deepest writer of the age," " of Ghazi Khan of Badakshan, 
 who stood unrivalled in the various sciences," and other 
 great authorities on Islamic law, which gave legal sanction 
 to the Padshah's assumption of the position of final arbiter 
 in all matters of dispute regarding religious questions, and 
 declared that his decisions should be binding both upon the 
 'Ulamas and on all subjects of the empire. The text of the 
 document was as follows : 
 
 " Whereas Hindustan has now become the centre of security 
 and peace, and the land of justice and beneficence, a large 
 number of people, especially learned men and lawyers, have 
 immigrated and chosen this country for their home. Now we, 
 the principal 'Ulamas, who are not only well versed in the 
 several departments of the I^aw and in the principles of juris- 
 prudence, and well acquainted with the edicts which rest on 
 reason or testimony, but are also known for our piety and 
 honest intentions, have duly considered the deep meaning, 
 first, of the verse of the Quran [Sur. IV, 62], ' Obey God, 
 504 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 and obey the Propliet, and those who have authority among 
 you/ and secondly, of the genuine tradition, ' Surely the 
 man who is dearest to God on the day of judgment is the 
 Imam-i-'Adil : whosoever obeys the Amir, obeys Me ; and 
 whosoever rebels against him, rebels against Me,' and thirdly, 
 of several other proofs based on reasoning or testimony ; 
 and we have agreed that the rank of Sultan-i-'Adil [a 
 just ruler] is higher in the eyes of God than the rank of a 
 Mujtaliid [an infalhble authority]. Further, we declare that 
 the King of the Islam, Amir of the Faithful, Shadow of God in 
 the world, Abul Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar Padshah 
 GhazT — ^whose kingdom God perpetuate — is a most just, a 
 most wise, and a most God-fearing king. Should, therefore, 
 in future a religious question come up regarding which the 
 opinions of the Mujtahids are at variance, and His Majesty, 
 in his penetrating understanding and clear wisdom, be inclined 
 to adopt, for the benefit of the nation and as a political expe- 
 dient, any of the conflicting opinions which exist on that 
 point, and issue a decree to that effect, we do hereby agree 
 that such a decree shall be binding on us and on the whole 
 nation. 
 
 " Further we declare that, should His Majesty think fit to 
 issue a new order, we and the nation shall likewise be bound 
 by it, provided always that such order be not only in 
 accordance with some verse of the Quran, but also of real 
 benefit to the nation ; and further, that any opposition on 
 the part of his subjects to such an order passed by His 
 Majesty shall involve damnation in the world to come, and 
 loss of property and religious privileges in this.^ 
 
 " This document has been written with honest intentions, 
 for the glory of God and the propagation of Islam, and is signed 
 by us, the principal 'Ulamas and lawyers, in the month of 
 Rajab of the year 987 " (September 1579).^ 
 
 ^ This damnatory clause may be considered as wholly opposed to Akbar' s 
 tolerant views in religious matters ; it was probably used as a common legal 
 formula and not intended to be taken literally. 
 
 2 Badauni, I,owe's translation, vol, ii, pp. 279-280. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 This famous document was drafted by Shaikh Mubarak, and 
 Badauni declares that all but he signed it unwillingly, apparently 
 for fear of losing the Padshah's favour — a curious comment 
 on their " honest intentions." But Badauni's testimony in 
 all religious questions is suspect : he was a bitter, disappointed 
 man who, while accepting the hospitality of the Shaikh and 
 his sons, was writing his secret history in which he vented his 
 malice against his hosts, although they continued to show 
 him the greatest kindness and often used their influence to 
 protect him from Akbar's displeasure. 
 
 About the same time as Akbar thus formally assumed the 
 spiritual leadership of Islam he took into his own hands the 
 administration of the department of Crown domains, which 
 included the granting of say ur gals or madali ma' ash ^ — lands 
 given by the Crown as benevolences. They were distinguished 
 from jdgirs or tuyul lands, which were estates granted, in 
 return for military service, for the maintenance of officers and 
 their retainers. The former were held to be gifts, remaining 
 in the possession of the owner and his descendants in perpetuo ; 
 the latter were only conferred on the officers (mausabdars) 
 so long as they held the king's commission, in lieu of salary. 
 
 We have seen already that according to Indo- Aryan constitu- 
 tional law the Crown domains were considered as the monarch's 
 share of communal lands, assigned by the Aryan community 
 to their ruler in return for the services he rendered as Protector 
 of the State. The sayurgal lands, under the Muliammadan 
 regime, corresponded to the grants given from the Crown 
 domains as rewards to Brahmans or other men of learning, 
 the court poets, master-builders and artists, etc., whom the 
 king delighted to honour — grants given, as a rule, without 
 religious prejudice, though the king often discriminated in 
 favour of his own special cult. The jagirs corresponded to the 
 estates held by Kshatriya or Rajput chieftains as fiefs bestowed 
 by the Crown, and liable to be resumed at the pleasure of their 
 overlord. On purely religious grounds it was comparatively 
 easy for Muhammadan rulers to come to an understanding 
 
 ^ 'Assistance of livelihood.' 
 506 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 with their Hindu subjects. On the land question there was 
 an irreconcilable difference which could only be fought out 
 to the bitter end vi et armis. Islam refused to recognize 
 the rights of the Aryan freeman so long as he remained an 
 unbeliever. Theoretically his lands, money, jewels, and every- 
 thing he possessed — even his own person and those of his wife 
 and family — were at the king's disposal for the benefit of the 
 faithful. If the Commander of the Faithful or his represen- 
 tative suffered them to live or to retain their hereditary posses- 
 sions it was only for the convenience of the elect. In practice, 
 of course, even the most bigoted of Musalman monarchs found 
 it convenient to allow their Hindu subjects of the agricultural 
 classes to remain in undisturbed possession of their lands, 
 as long as they paid the jizya and other special taxes on infidels, 
 and did not resist the king's ofiicers. But by the wholesale 
 destruction of monasteries and temples and the massacre of 
 monks and priests the soldiers of Islam not only secured a 
 vast amount of booty in the form of gold, silver, and jewels; 
 but enormously increased the extent of ownerless land at 
 the disposal of the Crown, for many of the original proprietors 
 who escaped massacre or slavery were turned adrift to earn 
 a subsistence either as religious mendicants or as revenue- 
 collectors for the Musalman. 
 
 The administration of the Crown domains, so far as concerns 
 the sayurgals, under Muhammadan rule was in charge of the 
 Qadi-i-Jahan, the highest law officer of the Crown, who 
 possessed an almost unlimited authority of conferring such 
 lands independently of the king. He was also the highest 
 ecclesiastical law officer, and often exercised the powers of a 
 High Inquisitor.^ The office of ^adi-i-Jahan had been held 
 for many years before the events above recorded by the Shaikh 
 Abdunnabi, one of the signatories to the document, whose 
 name is often mentioned in the accounts of the court debates. 
 Many years before he had conspired with the Mukdum-ul- 
 Mulk to bring about the death of Shaikh Mubarak, and as a 
 leader of the Sunni faction he could be trusted to see that no 
 
 ^ Atn-i-Akbari, Blochmann's translation, vol. i, pp. 270-271. 
 
 507 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 sayurgals were ever bestowed upon any but orthodox Musal- 
 mans, Akbar had appointed him, trusting to his honesty, 
 when he discovered that the whole department was a hot- 
 bed of bribery and corruption, and Abdunnabi had been 
 instrumental in bringing back to the Crown a great many of 
 the sayurgals which had been so lavishly distributed by Sher 
 Shah among his Afghan clansmen and retainers. The imperial 
 revenue, however, did not benefit much on account of the 
 Shaikh's prodigality in the redistribution of the sayurgals — 
 and his favours were not bestowed disinterestedly. He 
 lavished upon his proteges, says Badauni, " whole worlds of 
 subsistence allowances, lands and pensions, so much so that 
 if you place the grants of all former kings of Hindustan on one 
 scale and those of the Shaikh on the other, his scale would 
 weigh more." " But," he adds regretfully, " several years 
 later the scale went up, as it had been under former kings, and 
 matters took an adverse turn." The reason was that rumours 
 eventually reached Akbar's ears of what went on in the depart- 
 ment. In 1578 he got rid of Abdunnabi, and at the same time 
 put an end to the disgraceful scenes which often took place 
 in the court debates by packing off both the Shaikli and the 
 Mukdum-ul-Mulk — now sworn enemies — to Mekka in charge 
 of the pilgrims from Hindustan. Akbar was skilful in making 
 the punishment fit the crime, for the custodians of the holy 
 places at Mekka were notorious for their unscrupulous fleecing 
 of pilgrims. According to Blochmann there was a proverb 
 current in the East, " The Devil dwells in Mekka and Medina." ^ 
 Akbar then appointed Khwaja Sultan as ^adi, but took the 
 administration of the department into his own hands by 
 ordering that all those who held more than five hundred 
 bighahs of land should bring their farmans to court for inspec- 
 tion, or in default forfeit their sayurgals. The whole depart- 
 ment was vigorously overhauled by Abul Fazl with a view to 
 a more impartial distribution of State bounty and a general 
 cleansing of this Augean stable. It may be believed that the 
 wails of the faithful who had thus to render an account of their 
 
 ^ Translation of Am-i-Akbarl, vol. i, p. 273 n. 
 508 
 
AKBAR AS SPIRITUAL LEADER 
 
 possessions went up to heaven. Badauni gives a pitiful 
 account of the sufferings endured by the famihes of the " great 
 and noble and the renowned and famous " who lost respect ; 
 of the schools and mosques which were closed for lack of 
 endowments ; how " science and scientific men fell in estima- 
 tion"; and, worst of all, how lands were given to "men of 
 no renown, to low fellows, even to Hindus." 
 
 The Oazis, the subordinates of the ^adi in the provinces, 
 raised the cry of ' Islam in danger,' and one of them, the Qazi 
 of Jaunpur, soon after Akbar's reading of the Khutba in the 
 mosque of Fatehpur, issued a fatwa insisting on the duty of 
 rebelling against the Padshah. The Afghan zamindars, always 
 ready to respond to such a call, took up arms. Akbar's 
 brother, Mirza Hakim, the ruler of Kabul, seized the oppor- 
 tunity to march into the Panjab and lay siege to Lahore. 
 Akbar sent his foster-brother, the Elhan-i-'Azam, though he 
 was by no means in sympathy with the Padshah's religious 
 ideas, to suppress the rebellion in Jaunpur, and himself took 
 the field against Hakim. The Mirza was compelled to retreat, 
 and Akbar entered Kabul without opposition. Hakim was 
 pursued to the mountains and then begged forgiveness. Akbar 
 readily granted it and restored him to his kingdom. He died 
 in 1585, when Akbar removed his court from Fatehpur to 
 Lahore, which place remained his headquarters for thirteen 
 years. 
 
 As already mentioned, peace was not fully restored in 
 Bihar and Bengal until 1592. In the meantime Nathu or 
 Muzaffar Shah, the late ruler of Gujerat, another of the 
 recipients of Akbar's generosity, again made himself the tool 
 of the Padshah's bitter enemies. Together with a number of his 
 old associates he raised a rebellion, and marched to Ahmadabad, 
 which he took without much difl&culty, together with the con- 
 tents of the imperial treasury. With this and other booty 
 he was enabled to raise an army of forty thousand men, which 
 compelled the Mogul forces to retire to Patau. Akbar imme- 
 diately sent Abdurrahim, the son of Bairam Khan, with 
 reinforcements to take supreme command. He proved worthy 
 
 509 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 of his father's reputation, for with only ten thousand cavalry he 
 attacked Muzaffar Shah at Sarkij, near Ahmadabad, forced 
 the enemy back to the city, and drove them through it with 
 great slaughter. He afterwards defeated the ex-Sultan a 
 second time near Nadot. For these victories Akbar made him 
 governor of the province and raised his position in the army 
 to the same as his father had held — -that of a Khan EZhanan, 
 a title equivalent to that of Field-Marshal. Muzaffar Shah's 
 rebellion was by no means ended by these defeats. He fled 
 to the hill tracts of Gujerat, and with the assistance of various 
 chieftains continued to make constant raids into the province. 
 It was many years before order was restored in that part of 
 the empire. 
 
 510 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE DIN-ILAHi 
 
 AKBAR'S attention to spiritual affairs was not for a 
 moment diverted by these and other commotions in 
 different parts of his empire, or by the reforms he 
 initiated in departmental matters. The formal debates in 
 the Ibadat-Khana came to an end soon after the principal 
 'Ulamas had accepted the Padshah's spiritual authority, but 
 the religious excitement, which was general at the time and 
 by no means confined to court circles, continued to be a most 
 important factor in politics. Indeed Akbar's assumption of 
 the leadership of Islam must be considered not only as a means 
 of curbing the arrogant temper of the 'Ulamas, but as an act 
 of far-seeing statesmanship intended to ensure the peace of 
 Hindustan and the security of the Mogul dynasty. Politics 
 and religion in India had always been inseparable. No ruler 
 had succeeded or could succeed in establishing a perfect 
 political equilibrium in India by the sword alone. 
 
 The psychic atmosphere of Hinduism was still electric with 
 the religious fervour excited by Chaitanya's mission, thirty 
 years before Akbar's time, and the near approach of the 
 millennium continued to agitate the mind of Islam. Akbar's 
 fine political intuition must have told him that if the head of 
 the State refused to take the lead and guide the empire through 
 this critical period there would certainly not be wanting 
 religious fanatics to disturb the minds of his subjects and 
 possibly create a storm beyond his power to control. He 
 Jiad sought for and failed to find a man of light and leading 
 who would fully satisfy his own craving for spiritual enlighten- 
 ment and command the entire confidence of the people. It 
 was not, therefore, mere vanity which prompted him at last 
 
 5" 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 to listen to the suggestions made by his courtiers — some 
 prompted by mean motives and others by sincere admiration 
 for the brilHant gifts of their high-minded sovereign — that he 
 was " the ^ahib-i-Zaman who would remove all differences 
 of opinion among the seventy-two sects of the Islam and the 
 Hindus," ^ Outside the court, also, many prophecies were 
 quoted which in the popular imagination pointed to the 
 Padshah as the promised Mahdi. 
 
 Akbar proceeded cautiously and with a scrupulous regard 
 for Indian tradition in his plans for adapting the doctrine of 
 Islam to the spirit of the age. For establishing his authority 
 on an unshakable foundation it was necessary, above all 
 things, to appeal to the religious sense of the people. He began 
 to feel his way by using in public the formula " There is no 
 God but Allah and Akbar is His Khalifa " as a summary of 
 the teaching of the new Islam. This was in reality an adapta- 
 tion of the Vaishnava doctrine which made the king, as 
 Protector of the people, the representative of God on earth. 
 Finding, however, that it created dissatisfaction among orthodox 
 Musalmans, Akbar revived an Indo- Aryan tradition, sanctified 
 by pious associations of thousands of years, and founded a 
 new Order, or Sangha, open to all Indians, called the Din-Ilalii, 
 or Divine Faith, with that formula as its password. It was a 
 royal Order similar to that which Marco Polo noted in the 
 courts of South Indian kings in the thirteenth century ; the 
 badge of the Order was the Padshah's portrait, which the 
 members wore on the top of their turbans. The bhakti which 
 was to be the inspiration of its members was whole-hearted 
 devotion to the State, represented by the sovereign. 
 
 As in the Sangha of the Buddha, there were four paths,^ 
 or four degrees, within the Order. The bhaktas of the first 
 degree were those who were ready to sacrifice to the Padshah 
 all their worldly goods ; those of the second degree must be 
 
 1 Badaunl, I^ovve's translation, vol. ii, p. 295. 
 
 2 In the Buddhist Order the four paths were : (i) that of the Stream- 
 Attainer ; (2) of the Once-Returuer ; (3) of the Never-Retumer ; and (4) 
 of Arahantship. See Buddhism, Mrs Rhys Davids, p. 173. 
 
 512 
 
THE DIN-ILAHI 
 
 prepared to sacrifice their life in his service ; those of the 
 third were expected to entrust their honour to his keeping ; 
 and those of the fourth and highest degree were to accept the 
 Padshah's rehgious views as their own.^ All the courtiers, 
 says Badauni, became novitiates of the Order ; but apparently 
 few attained to the highest degree. Some, indeed, resolutely 
 refused to accept Akbar's guidance in religious matters and 
 continued to repeat their accustomed forms of prayer even 
 in the presence of the Padshah, after a special religious ritual 
 had been prescribed for the court. It is greatly to Akbar's 
 credit that though he often tried to influence his most valued 
 officials by argument, he always respected the 'conscientious 
 objector ' and never used his authority tyrannically to compel 
 anyone to accept membership of his Order. Akbar frequently 
 banished from his dominions any shaikhs, mullas, fakirs, 
 and others whom he considered to be dangerous to the State, 
 but never on account of their religious behefs. 
 
 Badauni attacks the Din-Ilahi violently as an organization 
 intended for the subversion of the creed of the Prophet, and 
 treats all of Akbar's ritualistic innovations as clear proofs of 
 his apostasy. But certainly Akbar himself did not intend it 
 as such, nor was it so regarded by the learned and pious 
 Musalmans who were his chief advisers. The latter accepted 
 it not as a ' new rehgion,' but as a religious brotherhood for 
 uniting the seventy-two sects of Islam and Indians of other 
 beliefs in the common aim of serving the State and securing 
 !the spiritual and temporal advantage of Hindustan in the new 
 era which was about to commence. There was the Prophet's 
 own authority for assuming that the millennium would usher 
 jin a new dispensation which would continue his own mission 
 to mankind and establish it on a broader basis. When, there- 
 fore, Akbar was armed with full powers by the 'Ulamas he 
 
 ^ In all probability the five-storied pavilion at Patebpur-Sikri, known as 
 bhe Panch Mahall, and planned after the ancient Indian pyramidal monastic 
 Assembly halls, was the chapter-house of the Order. ,The domed pavilion 
 jn the top would be the place where Akbar, as Grand ^Master 'of the ^rder, 
 ;ook his seat, and the four lower stories must have been the assembly halls 
 »f the members divided according to their degrees. 
 
 2K SI3 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 could with perfect consistency introduce the ritualistic reforms 
 he thought most fitting for inaugurating the new era in 
 accordance with the Prophet's revelation. But as in all 
 creeds there are many who cling to time-honoured forms and 
 ceremonies as the essential part of religion, so there were 
 many staunch Musalmans, like Badauni, who were horrified 
 at any proposal for revising the established ritual of Islam. 
 When Akbar regulated divine worship by the sim and used 
 fire and light as symbols of divine power the orthodox railed 
 at him as a Parsi or Hindu unbeliever, regardless of the fact 
 that Islam itself, like every other creed, fixed its festivals and 
 religious observances by the same means. When he enjoined 
 members of the Order to abstain from eating meat, to be 
 content with one wife — except she should be barren — and 
 allowed Musalman youth to consider for themselves the pro- 
 priety of the rite of circumcision, he also gave mortal offence 
 to the narrow-minded sectarian. 
 
 In 1582, which corresponded to the tenth year before the 
 Muhammadan millennium, Akbar, with his usual far-seeing 
 political instinct resolved to anticipate matters by formally 
 inaugurating the new era. A decree was then issued fixing 
 the commencement of the Ilahi era at the 3'^ear of the Padshah's 
 accession to the throne,^ and ordering that this reckoning 
 should be stamped on the imperial coinage and used in all 
 official documents. The Arabic computation of time, dating 
 from the flight of the Prophet, was changed for a solar year, 
 divided into months named after those of ancient Persia, and 
 the court festivals were rearranged after the same system. 
 State patronage was no longer to be given to the old-fashioned 
 Arabic learning, but the study of philosophy, astronomy, 
 medicine, mathematics, poetry, history, and imaginative 
 literature was to be encouraged. At the same time Akbar 
 showed respect for the founder of the MusHm faith by ordering 
 that a Tdnkh-i Alfi, or a history of the thousand 3?-ears from the 
 
 ' This was in strict accordance with Indian tradition, for the principal 
 Hindu eras had also been fixed from the year of the consecration of those 
 kings who had won the name of a Chakra-vartin, or universal monarch. 
 
 I 
 
THE DIN-ILAHI 
 
 death of the Prophet, should be prepared by the imperial 
 librarians. In accordance with the traditions of Islam, he 
 also appointed a Privy Council of forty members, corresponding 
 to the Chihil tandn, the forty true Musalmans who by God's 
 grace were always to exist on earth as representatives of the 
 Prophet. In the same year two of the grandees of the court 
 returned from the pilgrimage to Mekka bringing with them a 
 huge stone, so heavy that a very strong elephant was required 
 to transport it, which was believed to show the imprint of the 
 Prophet's foot. In deference to the feelings of his Musalman 
 subjects, Akbar went out to meet it with his whole court, and 
 by the Padshah's command the amirs took turns in carrying 
 it a few steps on the v/ay to the capital. 
 
 Various changes now made by Akbar in court ceremonial 
 and in the ritual of divine service were by no means pleasing 
 to Musalmans of the old school. Nor were they more gratified 
 by Akbar's endeavours to remove the disabilities and to 
 lighten the burdens which former Musalman rulers had imposed 
 upon the Hindus. In the previous year Akbar had abolished 
 a munber of vexatious tolls and customs which produced so 
 large a revenue that " no king," it was said, " would have 
 remitted them without divine guidance." ^ Raja Todar Mall 
 was now appointed Diwdn and entrusted with the great work 
 of reforming the administration of land revenue throughout 
 the empire. Abul Fazl makes clear in one sentence the whole 
 difference between Sher Shah's and Akbar's land policy : 
 " The raiyats were to be so treated that they should be willing 
 to make their payments to the treasury voluntarily." ^ The 
 Raja did his duty honestly and well as a member of the Din- 
 Ilahi. " Careful to keep himself free from all selfish ambition, 
 he devoted himself to the service of the State and earned an 
 everlasting fame. He devoted his skill and powerful mind to 
 simpHfying the laws of the State, and he allowed no grasping 
 and intriguing men to obtain any influence over him." ^ Musal- 
 
 ' Elliot, vol. V, p. 414. 
 
 ' Akbar-ndma; the twenty-seventh year of the reign — revenue regulations. 
 
 « Ibid, 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 mans were made to respect the religious susceptibilities of 
 their Hindu brethren by an ordinance forbidding the eating 
 of beef. At the same time Akbar prohibited Hindu customs 
 which were injurious or immoral, such as early marriages and 
 compulsory sati. 
 
 The essence of the Din-Ilahi was contained in this high- 
 minded and unflinching devotion to the common weal wliich 
 Akbar himself showed in the highest degree, and expected 
 from those who were admitted to membership of his Order. 
 In this sense the ' new religion,' though it may have numbered 
 few thoroughly sincere devotees among the Musalman and 
 Hindu aristocrac)^, made a profound and lasting impression 
 upon the masses. Thousands flocked to the polo-ground of 
 Fatehpur to receive the bounty which Akbar, according to a 
 time-honoured custom of Indian royalty, lavished upon the 
 poor without distinction of caste or creed. When the Padshah 
 appeared at the Jaroka window of the palace every morning to say 
 his prayers and show himself to his subjects, crowds of Hindus 
 assembled determined to begin the day auspiciously with the 
 sight of Vishnu's Vicegerent on earth. In the evening, Badauni 
 adds sneeringly, " there was a regular court assembly of needy 
 Hindus and Musalmans, all sorts of people, men and women, 
 healthy and sick, a queer gathering and a most terrible crowd." 
 And when Akbar, says his devoted friend Abul Fazl, left his 
 palace " to settle the affairs of a province, to conquer a kingdom, 
 or to enjoy the pleasures of the chase, there is not a hamlet, a 
 town, or a city that does not send forth crowds of men and 
 women with vow-offerings in their hands and prayers on their Ups, 
 touching the ground with their foreheads, praising the efficacy 
 of their vows, or proclaiming the accounts of the spiritual 
 assistance received. Other multitudes ask for lasting bliss, 
 for an upright heart, for advice how best to act for strength 
 of the body, for the birth of a son." In short, the Indian 
 people, with their deep religious sense, willingly assented to 
 the doctrine that " a most just, a most wise, and a most God- 
 fearing King " was fit to be the spiritual leader of his subjects 
 and were eager to be enrolled in the Order of the Din-Ilahi. 
 5i6 
 
THE DIN-ILAHI 
 
 As a political institution the Din-Ilahi entirely fulfilled 
 Akbar's hopes. It stirred the imagination of the Indian 
 masses so deeply that Akbar bequeathed to his descendants a 
 legacy of devoted loyalty to his dynasty incomparably richer 
 than any Musalman ruler before him had given to his suc- 
 cessors. But historians, both Indian and European, have 
 made a profound mistake in adopting Badauni's prejudiced 
 view of it as a ' new religion ' propagated by Akbar in opposi- 
 tion to the fundamental doctrines of Islam. The religious 
 principles of the Din-Ilahi only summed up those of the most 
 cultured and enlightened Indian Musalmans of the sixteenth 
 century ; but the mere fact that these principles made it 
 possible for Musalmans and Hindus to worship God at the 
 same shrine and with a common ritual was enough to condemn 
 Akbar as a hopeless heretic in the eyes of the faithful who 
 clung to the literal interpretation of the Sunna, the traditional 
 law of Islam. Akbar's answer to the charge was characteristic. 
 When the King of Turan, Abdulla Khan Uzbek, wrote to 
 him regarding the reports he had heard of the Padshah's 
 apostasy he replied : "Of God people have said that He had 
 a son ; of the Prophet some have said that he was a sorcerer. 
 Neither God nor the Prophet has escaped the slander of men 
 — ^then how should I ? " ^ 
 
 In the latter years of his reign, provoked by the implacable 
 hostility of the Sunnis, Akbar showed an open contempt for 
 their sectarian prejudices, which did much to strengthen the 
 case against him from the standpoint of the orthodox Musal- 
 man.^ But the best evidence that the Din-Ilahi was not what 
 it was represented to be by Akbar's enemies lies in the fact 
 
 ^ Blochmann, Am-i-Akban, vol. i, p. 468. 
 
 2 The conversion of Muhammadan mosques to secular uses was an instance 
 which Akbar's enemies seized upon as justification for their reckless abuse. 
 The orthodox Musalman chose to forget that it had been the settled policy 
 of many former rulers to desecrate Hindu temples and convert them into 
 mosques, often solely for the purpose of outraging the feelings of the Hindus. 
 In Akbar's time there must have been thousands of such mosques in Hindustan 
 rarely or never used for divine worship. To give them back to Hindus might 
 have been regarded as an insult to Islam. Akbar adopted the wisest and 
 justest course in adapting them for secular purposes. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 that its religious teaching, in spite of its popularity with the 
 masses, failed to attract any considerable number of the 
 higher classes of Hindus. The orthodox educated Hindu 
 refused to accept Akbar as an exponent of the esoteric teaching 
 of the Vedas, although the ritual of the Din-Ilahi was to a 
 great extent borrowed from Hinduism. Of the eighteen 
 principal members of the Order mentioned by Badauni all 
 were Muhammadans except Raja Birbal, who belonged to an 
 inferior class of Brahmans. Among them was Akbar's brilhant 
 and accomjjlished foster-brother, ' Azam Khan Kokah, a staunch 
 Musalman and a man of very independent character, who for 
 a long time was opposed to Akbar's tolerant religious principles 
 and boldly ridiculed both his sovereign and the Din-Ilahi. 
 He even went so far as to make a demonstration of his dis- 
 approval by absenting himself from court and disobeying 
 Akbar's orders to return. But a pilgrimage to Mekka, where 
 he suffered like others from the rapacity of the guardians 
 of the holy places, altered considerably his views upon Musal- 
 man orthodoxy, and immediately on his return to India he 
 shocked Badauni by accepting Abul Fazl as his spiritual 
 teacher, cut off his beard, joined the Order, and thenceforth 
 took a prominent part in its social gatherings. 
 
 Mr Vincent Smith ^ says that " the new creed was accepted 
 by a few time-serving courtiers . . . but it never attained 
 any real vogue, and probably was practically extinct even 
 before Akbar's death." He, like other writers, entirely 
 misunderstands the scope of the Din-Ilahi and its connec- 
 tion with Indian traditions of pre-Muhammadan times. The 
 political importance of the Order was far greater than he 
 suggests — even though Akbar's graceless son, Jahangir, ignored 
 it- — and his sweeping charge of insincerity against members of 
 the Order, not excepting great men like Shaikh Mubarak, 
 Faizi, and Abul Fazl, is without any historical justification. 
 Akbar, though deeply absorbed in spiritual questions, was 
 far more a statesman and empire-builder than a religious 
 propagandist. He was a profound student of Indian liistory 
 
 ^ Asiatic Review, July 1915. 
 
 S18 
 
THE DIN-ILAHI 
 
 and made a direct appeal to the deepest feelings of his subjects 
 by giving his Sangha a religious character, but his motives in 
 founding the Din-Ilahi were political rather than religious. 
 And neither the aims of the Order nor its place in the history 
 of the period can be properly appreciated unless it is under- 
 stood as one of the instruments by which Akbar tried to effect 
 his purpose of consolidating the Mogul Empire by obliterating 
 the sense of a foreign domination from the minds of his people 
 and bringing the polity of Islam into line with that of the 
 Aryan rulers of India. 
 
 But it was Akbar's great administrative reforms, mostly 
 introduced at the time of the founding of the Order or after- 
 wards, and his earnest endeavour to live up to the Aryan ideal 
 of " a most just, a most wise, and a most God-fearing King " 
 which roused the enthusiasm of the people of Hindustan for 
 the Din-Ilahi and made them, in Abul Fazl's words, " look 
 upon their conversion to the New Faith as a means of obtaining 
 every blessing." ^ The religious message of the Din-Ilahi was 
 by no means a new one — not even for Musalmans, much less 
 for Hindus. The startling innovation, denounced by Muham- 
 madan orthodoxy as rank heresy and welcomed by Hindus 
 as a divine revelation bringing blessings to all who received 
 it, was that henceforth in Hindustan all political and social 
 disqualifications on account of religious differences were to be 
 swept away. Islam of the new era proclaimed that " divine 
 grace is shed upon all alike " ^ and that no man should suffer 
 on account of the way he chose for worshipping God. Regarded 
 in this Ught the influence of the Din-Ilahi was far-reaching, 
 and continued long after the dissolution of the Order upon 
 Akbar's death. 
 
 ^ Aln-i-Akharl, Bloclimann, vol. i, p. 165. 
 
 2 Ain-i-Akbari, Jarrett's translation, vol. iii. p. 381. 
 
 519 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 IN 1585 Akbar drew closer the ties which united the 
 Mogul dynasty with the Hindu aristocracy by marrying 
 his eldest son, Prince Salim, or Sultan Jahangir, with 
 the daughter of Raja Bhagwan Das. In the same year he 
 found it expedient, upon the death of his brother, Mirza 
 Hakim — who, as before stated, had been restored to the 
 government of Kabul after the suppression of his rebellion 
 in 1581 — to leave Fatehpur and make lyahore his capital, 
 so that he might have a firmer grip upon the affairs of the 
 north-west frontier. lyahore remained his headquarters until 
 1598. In these thirteen years Akbar was actively engaged 
 in directing the military operations necessary for maintaining 
 the position he had assumed as a Chakra-vartin — ^the supreme 
 war-lord of India. Since the days of Chandragupta Maurya 
 it had been a fixed principle of Indo- Aryan polity that for the 
 successful defence of Aryavarta from foreign aggression it was 
 always expedient, if not absolutely necessary, to concentrate 
 the strength of her Kshatriya defenders under the banner 
 of a Chakra-vartin. History had repeatedly demonstrated the 
 soundness of the theory and it had always been recognized as 
 the ideal of Kshatriya statesmanship, but, unfortunately for 
 India, the mutual jealousies of rival war-lords had made it 
 difficult to maintain that principle in practice, and very few 
 of the Aryan rulers of India had been able to reach to it. 
 
 Since the Muhammadan invasion 'Ala-ud-din had been the 
 exponent of the doctrine of Kultur and ' f rightfulness ' on the 
 side of Islam who had come nearest to this position. Before 
 Akbar there had been some Musalman monarchs of alien race, 
 like Husain Shah of Jaunpur, who had discovered the secret 
 520 
 
 I 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 of wise, just, and God-fearing government which would make 
 aHen domination wholly acceptable to the people of India ; 
 but Husain Shah had been driven from his throne, and none 
 of them had extended their poHtical powers so far as to claim 
 the suzerainty of the ' Five Indies ' like Harsha. Outside the 
 limits of the Mogul Empire Muhammadan government in India 
 was now rotten to the core, with no prospect of amendment 
 from inside. Akbar was therefore perfectly justified in con- 
 sidering that he was consulting the interests both of the Mogul 
 dynasty and of India herself in using his mihtary strength to 
 restore order throughout Aryavarta, when milder measures 
 were certainly inadequate. 
 
 Akbar's first step was to secure his north-western frontier 
 from an attack which threatened from the Uzbeks of Turan, 
 under their ambitious ruler, Abdulla Khan, who had driven 
 Mirza Siilaiman, a prince of the house of Timur, out of Badak- 
 shan and now had his eyes on Kabul. As soon as this purpose 
 was effected Akbar despatched one of the imperial armies 
 under the command of Raja Bhagwan Das to undertake the 
 conquest of Kashmir and another to punish the refractory- 
 tribes in North-eastern Afghanistan. A third expedition was 
 directed against the Baluchis, who had also given trouble. 
 Kashmir had been under Musalman government since the 
 fourteenth century, but the valley was now distracted by 
 dynastic disputes. The cause of the unrest in the Swat country 
 was an outburst of religious fanaticism. Early in Akbar's 
 reign a Hindustani soldier had set himself up as a Mahdi, 
 under the name of Raushenai, ' the Enlightened One,' and had 
 won many enthusiastic followers among the Yusufzais and 
 other Afghan tribes, especially on account of the doctrine 
 that his faithful disciples were to be rewarded by the possession 
 of all the lands and property of unbelievers — ^which in all 
 ages and among all sects acts as a powerful stimulus to religious 
 zeal. The Raushenais had given much trouble in previous 
 years, until their prophets ventured to descend from the inacces- 
 sible hilly regions and meet the Mogul forces in the plains. 
 There the Afghan tribesmen met with severe punishment and 
 
 521 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 were forced to retire to their native fastnesses. Their Mahdi 
 died soon afterwards, but in spite of his faihire as a war-lord 
 his reputation for sanctity survived his death. His remains 
 were guarded as sacred reHcs, and his youngest son, upon 
 whom the prophet's mantle had fallen, kept the flames of J 
 religious fervour alive and the north-west frontier of India in i 
 a perpetual state of ferment. 
 
 The Baluchistan expedition was soon brought to a successful 
 conclusion, but it was not until the middle of 1587 that the 
 imperial armies, assisted by the internal disorders of the country, 
 broke through the passes of Kashmir and made it a part of 
 the Mogul Empire. Akbar visited Srinagar in the spring of 
 the following year, but the state of Hindustan and his own 
 energetic temperament did not permit him to indulge in the 
 luxury of a periodical exodus to the hills, which Jahangir and 
 Shah Jahan enjoyed in sumptuous ease. 
 
 The Swat expedition was an even more difficult business, 
 and involved the Mogul forces in serious reverses. As soon as 
 the imperialist troops entered the Swat valley the Yusufzais, 
 although they had ceased to believe in the divine inspiration 
 of the pretended Mahdi, made common cause with the Rau- 
 shenais and offered a desperate resistance to the invaders. 
 Zain Khan, the Mogul general, defeated them in twenty-three 
 fights, and established fortified posts to keep them in check ; 
 but the constant activity of the wily enemy eventually 
 exhausted his troops and he was compelled to ask for reinforce- 
 ments. 
 
 Akbar seems not to have realised the seriousness of the 
 situation, for his judgment in the appointment of the two 
 commanders of the relieving army was singularly at fault. 
 He chose two of his favourite courtiers. Raja Birbal and 
 Hakim Abul Fath, neither of whom had any special qualifica- 
 tions or experience in military affairs, though at the Mogul 
 court every man of rank was assumed to be a soldier. Raja 
 Birbal was a poet and musician ; his sparkling wit and good- 
 humour won him general popularity as well as the Padshah's 
 favour. Abul Fath was an accomplished Musalman scholar 
 522 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 and an expert on questions of religious doctrine who had held 
 high administrative appointments. Unfortunately, they were 
 not on good terms with each other, and as soon as the relieving 
 force joined Zain Khan's command the three generals began 
 to give the enemy the benefit of divided counsels by quarrelling 
 vigorously- — a situation which must have seemed as humorous 
 to the Afghan chieftains as one of Birbal's jests. The result of 
 the campaign can be easily anticipated. Birbal, with the 
 prestige of court favour at his back, succeeded in upsetting 
 Zain Khan's careful and methodical plan of campaign in the 
 vain belief that the agile tribesmen could be easily crushed 
 by the superior strength and organisation of the Mogul war- 
 machine. So long as the operations were confined to the 
 open country all went well with the campaign. The Yusufzais 
 were driven into the mountains and their villages and lands 
 were laid waste. But directly the imperial troops, with their 
 war-elephants and complicated supply service, attempted to 
 force their way further into the difficult and dangerous moun- 
 tains, where it was impossible to keep up communications, the 
 tribesmen swarming on the heights above harassed them 
 unceasingly. At last the imperialists began to be demoralised, 
 and a retreat became necessary, which ended in a great cata- 
 strophe. Raja Birbal in a night march was inveigled into an 
 ambuscade in a narrow defile, where his troops were cut to 
 pieces and he himself, with many other officers, was killed. 
 Zain Khan made a gallant but hopeless attempt to keep the 
 rest of his panic-stricken army together, but the Yusufzais 
 gave him no chance, and it was with the greatest difficulty 
 that he and Abul Fath escaped on foot to the fortress of 
 Attock. 
 
 Akbar was even more grieved by the loss of his favourite 
 poet and jester than by the disaster to the imperial arms, 
 and for a long time clung to the hope that he might still be 
 alive, for the Raja's body was never found. Rumours reached 
 the Padshah's ears that Birbal, being ashamed to reappear at 
 court, was wandering about the hills in the disguise of a 
 sannyasin. When this proved to be only village gossip a more 
 
 523 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 circumstantial story became current of a barber who had 
 been recognised as the missing Birbal by certain marks on his 
 body. Akbar sent urgent orders to the collectors of the 
 district that the barber should be brought to court at once. 
 The officials, to satisfy the Padshah's demand and save them- 
 selves further trouble, pretended that a criminal who had been 
 condemned to death was the person sought for, and sent a 
 report that he had died on the way to Lahore. Akbar went 
 into mourning a second time, and severely punished the officials 
 for neglect of duty in not having sent the man directly he 
 was identified. But now, as in previous emergencies, he 
 chose his two most trusted and experienced Rajput generals. 
 Rajas Man Singh and Todar Mall, to retrieve the errors of 
 the disastrous campaign. They soon succeeded in driving 
 back the Yusufzais and in coming to an arrangement with 
 them which enabled the imperial armies to deal with the 
 Raushenais and their new Mahdi, Jalala, in the south and 
 west of Kabul. By 1588, after much hard fighting, the north- 
 west frontier of the empire was brought to a tolerable state of 
 order by the decisive defeat of Jalala in the Khaibar Pass 
 and the establishment of fortified posts which compelled the 
 turbulent tribesmen to retire to their mountain fastnesses; 
 but the Raushenais continued to be aggressive until the end 
 of Akbar's reign and long afterwards. Man Singh was appointed 
 to the governorship of Kabul, but as the Afghans M^ere dis- 
 satisfied at a Hindu being placed over them, Akbar soon 
 afterwards transferred him to Bengal and gave them a Musalman 
 governor. 
 
 Another campaign of two years' duration, from 1588 to 1590, 
 directed by Mirza Abdurraliim, the son of Bairam Khan, 
 ended with the conquest and annexation of Sind. The Khan- 
 i-'Azam soon afterwards quelled a rebelhon in Gujerat and 
 took possession of two more principalities, Kathiawar and 
 Katch, in the name of the Padshah. In 1592 Raja Man 
 Singh, in command of the imperial army in Bengal, added to 
 the signal services he had rendered to the Mogul cause by the 
 subjugation of Orissa. He was now the premier Hindu prince 
 524 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 serving in the imperial army, for Akbar had lost two of his 
 most able and devoted Rajjjut adherents, Rajas Bhagwan Das 
 and Todar Mall, who died on the same day in 1589. The 
 steadfast loyalty, conspicuous ability, and high character of 
 these three Rajput chieftains had contributed more than 
 anything else to the security of Akbar's throne and the 
 contentment of the Indian people. 
 
 The Padshah's authority now extended over an empire 
 far greater than that of Harsha. With the exception of the 
 Rana of Mewar's territory, which remained in the midst of 
 the Mogul Empire as the last independent stronghold of Indo- 
 Aryan royalty, he was undisputed master of the whole of the 
 ancient Aryavarta from the Himalayas to the Narbada river, 
 and was recognised by the vast majority of his Hindu subjects 
 as fulfiUing their ideal of an Aryan monarch, although four 
 centuries of Muhammadan rule and the considerable dilution 
 of the Aryan element in the population had dimmed the 
 memories of the golden days when Aryavarta was the most 
 advanced in true culture and civilisation, the freest and richest 
 of all countries in Asia or in Europe. The village communities 
 and townships had indeed lost the political influence they 
 possessed under Hindu rule ; the village elders were no longer 
 addressed by State officials in terms of respect which belonged 
 to royalty. But they were again left free in the management 
 of local affairs ; the burden of oppressive taxation had been 
 removed ; justice was impartially administered ; Hindus 
 enjoyed exactly the same political and social rights as the 
 ruling race, the Moguls, and as the native Musalmans. Almost 
 half of the imperial armies was Hindu, ^ and individually every 
 Hindu was as free as any of Akbar's subjects, for it was not a 
 mere academic theory that the highest offices of State, military 
 I and civil, were open to him — ^they were, in fact, usually occupied 
 !by Indians and Hindus whose abilities commended them to 
 '!the Padshah. The Din-Ilahi, moreover, was a bold attempt 
 |on Akbar's part to give back to the people a share in the 
 management of the spiritual affairs of the empire such as 
 
 1 Bad^uni, I^owe's translation, vol, ii, p. 350. 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 they had when Harsha-Vardhana convoked the General 
 Assembly of the Sangha at Kanauj to hsten to the arguments 
 of the Master of the Law. 
 
 Further than this in the path of constitutional reform no 
 Musalman monarch, Indian or foreign, could have gone. It 
 was, indeed, a signal proof of Akbar's extraordinary power 
 as a statesman and of his influence in Islam that he could go 
 so far without provoking a general revolt of his Musalman 
 subjects. But Akbar owed much to the time in which he 
 lived and the country in which he was born. It probably would 
 have been impossible for him to have achieved so much in 
 any earlier period of Muhammadan domination in India, or in 
 any other country than India. From a Mogul and dynastic 
 point of view the success of his policy was equally remarkable. 
 The imperial army was not only a war-machine thoroughly 
 well equipped and drilled to a high state of efficiency ; it was 
 animated by the highest spirit of patriotism and recognised 
 by the people as their own defence against misrule and foreign 
 aggression — a political factor of incalculable importance for 
 the future of the Mogul Empire. Though the burden of taxa- 
 tion upon agriculture and trade had been greatly lightened, 
 the imperial revenue had enormously increased and the 
 treasuries were filled to overflowing. No other monarch in 
 Asia or in Europe could command the wealth which Akbar 
 had at his disposal for providing the sinews of war, and no 
 other monarch was better served by his officers and men. 
 And the insecurity, misery, and misrule which had been 
 prevalent over the greater part of Hindustan at the beginning 
 of Akbar's reign had given place to order, contentment, and 
 prosperity in little more than thirty years. Akbar's system 
 of civil administration was essentially bureaucratic, but no 
 bureaucracy was ever more efficient both in promoting the 
 welfare of the State and in reconciling the rulers with the 
 ruled. His government was not only more efficient than 
 that of any former Musalman ruler of India, but it was more 
 permanent in its effects ; its excellent organisation maintained 
 the solidity of the Mogul Empire long after his personal influence 
 526 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 was gone— both in the stormy reign of the cynical and egotis- 
 tical Jahangir, to whom the ethics of the Din-Ilahi were foolish- 
 ness, and in that of Akbar's favourite grandchild, the prodigal 
 grand seigneur Shah Jahan, when Hindustan again enjoyed a 
 long unbroken peace. It was not until Aurangzib, the icono- 
 clast, revived the narrow and intolerant political principles 
 of Muhammadan orthodoxy and crushed underfoot the free 
 institutions of Aryavarta which had survived the storms of 
 centuries that the splendid fabric of Akbar's statesmanship 
 began to fall into ruin— a ruin so complete that the Aryans of 
 the West have hardly yet begun to recognise the handiwork 
 of their forerunners in the East or to understand the soiurces 
 whence Akbar drew his inspiration as a statesman. 
 
 In 1594 Akbar further strengthened the defences of his 
 empire on the north-west frontier by the recovery of the 
 fortress of Kandahar, which had been held by the Shah of 
 Persia since the beginning of his reign. He then continued 
 to pursue the traditional policy of a Chakra-vartin by an 
 endeavour to extend his sovereignty over the Dekhan, an aim 
 which was only partly realised at the time of his death ten 
 years later. The Dekhan, hke the rest of Musalman India 
 at the time of Akbar's accession, was in a state of political 
 chaos. Its history till the death of Ali 'Adil Shah of Bijapur 
 in 1580 has been already told. The dynastic quarrels between 
 Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, and other rival Muhammadan kingdoms 
 ■^•ere renewed directly the purpose of their temporary recon- 
 ciliation—the destruction of the military power of Vijayanagar 
 h-had been effected. In 1586 one of the claimants to the 
 throne of Ahmadnagar, Burhan Nizam Shah, had appealed 
 for Akbar's intervention on his behalf— his brother, Murtezza 
 N'izam Shah, the actual king, having become unfit to reign 
 3n account of insanity. The expedition which Akbar sent to 
 ;mpport him was, however, unsuccessful, and Burhan became 
 I refugee at the Mogul court. Murtezza soon after attempted 
 o murder his own son by setting fire to his bed, but the youth 
 escaped and retaliated by murdering his father by a similar 
 nethod. He inaugurated his succession to the throne by the 
 
 527 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 wholesale murder of the surviving members of the royal 
 family, but ten months later was himself imprisoned and put 
 to death by his Prime Minister, after a reign of terror in which 
 mob-law prevailed and the Indian Muhammadans made a 
 general massacre of their foreign co-religionists. 
 
 Burhan's son, Ismail Nizam Shah, was then put upon the 
 throne, but two ^'■ears later the nobles of Ahmadnagar invited 
 Burhan himself to take it, which he did with the help of an 
 army sent from Bijapur, where his sister, Chand Bibi, Ali 
 'Adil Shah's widow, had considerable influence. It was not 
 long, however, before Burhan was at war with liis relative, 
 Ibrahim 'Adil Shah II, the ruler of Bijapur, and in league 
 with the Hindu Raja of Vijayanagar, Ramraj's brother and 
 successor — a reversal of the situation which obtained some 
 thirty years previously, when Ibrahim's uncle had allied 
 himself with Ramraj to crush Ahmadnagar. Ibrahim, how- 
 ever, with the help of his Mahratta cavalry, defeated the 
 allied forces under the walls of Sholapur, and Burhan died 
 soon afterwards, leaving the throne of Ahmadnagar to his 
 -son Ibrahim Nizam Shah, born of an Abyssinian mother. 
 After a reign of four months Ibrahim of Ahmadnagar was killed 
 in battle, and the Abyssinians of the royal body-guard there- 
 upon espoused the cause of his infant son, Bahadur Nizam 
 Shah, and invited his great-aunt, Chand Bibi, to assume the 
 regency during his minority. 
 
 Chand Bibi, as has been told, was the daughter of Husain, 
 the third king of the Nizam Shahi dynasty of Ahmadnagar, 
 and consequently of Brahman descent. From the time of 
 her marriage with Ali 'Adil Shah, as a part of the compact 
 made by the Musalman dynasties of the Dekhan for the 
 destruction of Vijayanagar, she had played a conspicuous part 
 in the politics of Bijapur. She had acted as regent during 
 the minority of her husband's nephew and successor, Ibrahim, 
 a task which demanded the highest courage and diplomatic 
 skill. At one time she was the ruling power in the State, at 
 another confined in prison by the minister who opposed her. 
 At last, in 1584, when Ibraium's sister was married to her 
 528 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 nephew, the son of Murtezza Nizam Shah, she left BijapUr 
 to reside at her brother's court — a change which by no means 
 diminished the difhculties of her position. Eleven years later, 
 when the Ab^^ssinians of the royal body-guard offered her the 
 regency of Ahmadnagar, there were three competitors for the 
 throne besides her own grand-nephew. The leader of one 
 of the rival parties had written to Akbar's son, Prince Murad, 
 then in command of the Mogul army in Gujerat, asking for 
 his assistance. The Prince eagerly seized the opportunity, 
 and, together with the Khan Klhanan, whom Akbar sent to 
 assist him, marched to Ahmadnagar. But when the Mogul 
 forces arrived under the walls of the fortress they found that 
 the approach of the foreign interlopers — as the Moguls were 
 still regarded in the Dekhan — ^had caused the majority of the 
 contending factions to tmite under Chand Bibi in offering a 
 desperate resistance to their entry into the city. 
 
 Chand Bibi's gallant defence of Ahmadnagar has made her 
 one of the heroines of Indian folk-lore in the Dekhan. She 
 aroused the enthusiasm of the garrison and the admiration of 
 the imperialists by appearing on the ramparts veiled but with 
 sword in hand to encourage the defenders, recklessly exposing 
 herself to the heavy fire of the enemy and directing the repair 
 of the breaches made by the Mogul mines. At the same time 
 she despatched messengers to call to her aid the forces of 
 Bijapur and other states whose independence would be 
 threatened by the success of the imperialists. Akbar, on the 
 other hand, was badly served in this campaign by his son. 
 Prince Murad, whom he trusted to uphold the prestige of the 
 house of Timur. The Prince, though not lacking in courage, 
 was a confirmed drunkard, hot-tempered and insolent towards 
 the able and experienced general deputed by Akbar to advise 
 him. After a siege of about four months the imperialists had 
 made little headway and found themselves confronted by a for- 
 midable confederation of the other Musalman kingdoms in the 
 Dekhan. Prince Murad was therefore glad to accept Chand Bibi's 
 offer to come to terms, by which Ahmadnagar retained its inde- 
 pendence by surrendering its claims to the suzerainty of Berar. 
 
 2L 529 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Chand Bibi's troubles were not, however, ended. Soon after 
 this great success the disloyalty of her Prime Minister and a 
 dispute regarding the boundaries of Berar involved her in a 
 fresh conflict with the Moguls, though she herself was most 
 anxious to avoid it. This time the imperiahsts narrowly 
 escaped a serious defeat by the united forces of the Dekhan, 
 though the situation was saved by the courage and resource 
 of the ELhan Khanan. Renewed disputes between the latter 
 and Prince Murad, and the generally unsatisfactory state of 
 affairs, induced Akbar in the beginning of 1598 to recall the 
 Khan Khanan and send Abul Fazl into the Dekhan as High 
 Commissioner to take general charge and send Prince Murad 
 back to court, but the latter died of delirium tremens the day 
 of Abul Fazl's arrival. Chand Bibi, finding herself in the 
 clutches of a gang of unscrupulous intriguers, saw the policy 
 of making the best terms possible with the Mogul power, and 
 entered into negotiations with Abul Fazl. A treaty was 
 signed ; but the Abyssinians and some of the Muhammadans 
 of the Dekhan, resolved not to submit to Akbar's suzerainty, 
 took the matter out of her hands, and the brave Sultana was 
 murdered in her palace by a mob of soldiers excited by rumours 
 that she was betraying them to the enemy. Ahmadnagar, after 
 another siege of about six months, fell in 1601 to the assault 
 of the imperial army under the command of Akbar's youngest 
 son, Prince Daniyal. Chand Bibi's ward, Bahadur Nizam Shah, 
 was taken prisoner and confined in the fortress of Gwalior. 
 
 Akbar, meanwhile, acting on Abul Fazl's advice, had left 
 I^ahore, and in order to be in close touch with the situation 
 entered the Dekhan through the territories of his feudatory 
 Bahadur Khan, the last of the Faruki dynasty of Khan- 
 desh. The latter had only recently come to the throne, after 
 having been imprisoned by his predecessor for thirty 3'ears 
 — ^for it was the custom of the rulers of Khandesh to keep 
 their nearest relatives under lock and key to guard against 
 conspiracies. Bahadur was therefore totally ignorant of 
 political affairs, and foolishly resolved to oppose the Mogul 
 power, trusting to the impregnability of the famous fortress of 
 530 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 Asirgarh, which experienced soldiers considered to be the 
 strongest in Asia and perhaps in the whole world. The place, 
 however, surrendered to Akbar after a siege of eleven months, 
 mainly owing to a virulent epidemic which swept off a great 
 part of the garrison and reduced the remnants to despair. 
 Bahadur was sent to join his ally of Ahmadnagar in captivity 
 at Gwalior and Khandesh was annexed to the Mogul Empire. 
 The success of the Mogul arms induced the Sultans of Bijapur 
 and Golconda to come to an understanding with Akbar, and a 
 marriage was arranged between Prince Daniyal and a daughter 
 of Ibrahim 'Adil Shah. In 1602 Akbar returned in triumph to 
 Agra and assumed the title of Emperor of the Dekhan, leaving 
 Abul Fazl in administrative charge. 
 
 It was not, indeed, the success of the campaign in the Dekhan, 
 but a serious situation which had arisen since his departure 
 from Hindustan, which induced Akbar to return. lyike many 
 other great men, Akbar was unfortunate in his children, none 
 of whom inherited the high intellectual power and strong moral 
 fibre of their father. The hordes of parasites and low adven- 
 turers on the outskirts of the court — Akbar's secret enemies — 
 were powerless against the Padshah himself, but took their 
 revenge in debauching his children and in stimulating their 
 headstrong tempers. Strong and wise as Akbar had proved 
 himself to be in controlling the turbulence and unscrupulous- 
 ness of his nobles, he had shown an indulgence bordering on 
 weakness towards the misconduct of his children. The good 
 counsellors whom Akbar appointed to guide them not infre- 
 quently found themselves unsupported by the Padshah in 
 checking the misbehaviour of their wards. Prince Salim, the 
 eldest — now past any tutor's control, for he was over thirty 
 years of age — ^was not only an habitual drunkard like his 
 brothers, but had already made an exhibition of fiendish cruelty 
 which Akbar would not have tolerated in any of his generals. 
 He had an implacable hatred of the honest Abul Fazl, who 
 had often risked annoying his sovereign by bringing Salim's 
 misconduct to his notice. Akbar seemed to consider that 
 any punishment inflicted upon the imperial princes would be 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 more damaging to the prestige of the dynasty than the disgrace 
 they brought upon it themselves, and endeavoured to wean 
 them from their vices by a father's loving counsel and to 
 bring them to a higher sense of responsibihty by giving them 
 a larger share in the administration of the empire. Before his 
 departure from the Dekhan Akbar had formally nominated 
 Prince Salim as his successor, made him Viceroy of Ajmir, 
 with the redoubtable Raja Man Singh as his adviser, and 
 entrusted him with the conduct of a new campaign against the 
 Rana of Mewar. But as soon as fresh disturbances in Bengal 
 called Man Singh back to his own viceroyalty Salim flung off 
 all restraint and, thinking that the situation in the Dekhan 
 gave him a fine opportunity, marched his army towards Agra 
 with the bold intention of turning the Padshah off his throne. 
 The governor of the fortress, however, shut the gates against 
 him. Salim then marched off to Allahabad, and, having suc- 
 ceeded in occup5dng the fortress and seizing the contents of 
 the imperial treasury, publicly assumed the royal title. 
 
 Akbar, as soon as the news reached him, acted with his usual 
 promptitude and returned to Agra with a picked body of the 
 imperial army ; but instead of taking the field against his 
 disloyal son, as Salim no doubt expected, sent him an affec- 
 tionate letter warning him against the consequences of con- 
 tinued disloyalty, but promising forgiveness if he would at once 
 return to his allegiance. vSalim thought it politic to send a 
 submissive reply full of professions of filial devotion, but being 
 informed by his spies that the main body of the imperial army 
 was still in the Dekhan, he marched to meet the Padshah at the 
 head of a considerable force wliich he had collected. Akbar 
 then sent a stern letter ordering him either to come to court 
 with a small retinue or to return at once to Allahabad. Salim 
 reluctantly accepted the former alternative and a reconciHation 
 took place. Akbar, hoping to keep him out of further mischief, 
 granted him the provinces of Bengal and Orissa. At the same 
 time the Padshah wrote a full account of what had happened 
 to his faithful henchman, Abul Fazl, and ordered him to return 
 to court, where his presence was urgentl}^ required. 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 Salim, who was well informed by his spies, fearing that 
 Abul Fazl's influence with his father might diminish his pros- 
 pects of succession to the throne, resolved to get rid of him, 
 and wrote to one of his cronies, Bir Singh, Raja of Urchah, 
 asking him to waylay and kill Kazl when he passed through 
 the Raja's territories — ^the route he would most likely choose 
 as the most direct. Abul Fazl was warned of his danger, 
 yet, with his touching faith in the virtue of the Padshah's 
 protection, could not be persuaded either to choose a safer 
 way or to provide himself with a strong escort, but pressed 
 forward with all speed on his journey to Agra accompanied only 
 by a few trusty retainers. He disdained to fly when the Raja 
 with his myrmidons came in sight, and died bravely defending 
 himself to the last, a truly loyal member of the Din-Ilahi. 
 
 Salim's exultation when he received from Bir Singh the 
 head of his hated enemy was great. For Akbar the loss of 
 his devoted friend was a cruel blow. For several days he gave 
 himself up to uncontrolled grief, refusing food and seeing no one. 
 " If Salim wished to be Emperor he might have killed me and 
 spared Abul Fazl," were his words when at last the whole 
 story was told to him. He then gave peremptory orders for 
 the punishment of the assassin, Bir Singh, and a strong force 
 was immediately sent to bring him to court alive or dead. 
 
 , The Raja, after several fights, was driven into the jungles, 
 and evaded capture until Akbar's death, when he reappeared 
 and was handsomely rewarded by Jahangir, who made no 
 attempt to conceal his own share in the murder. But not even 
 this atrocious outrage provoked the Padshah to take steps for 
 the punishment of Salim. He only continued to use his utmost 
 
 .efforts to conciliate his son's violent and hateful temper. 
 
 I Akbar's modern biographers have held this to be a great 
 blot on his character, without due consideration of all the 
 circumstances. The standard of political ethics which Akbar 
 and intimate friends sought to maintain was far above the 
 average of the ruling class to which they belonged. The 
 majorit^^ of that class regarded Salim not as a murderer, but 
 as a very acute and successful diplomatist — a judgment which 
 
 533 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 would be upheld by the text-books of a certain modern school 
 of diplomacy. Akbar, who was now sixty years of age, had 
 suffered periodically from an internal disorder, and the loss of 
 so many of his dearest friends and staunchest supporters 
 might well have affected his usual buoyant spirits and resolute 
 courage. Most of the great men who had helped him in 
 securing the foundations of the Mogul Empire — Shaikh Mubarak, 
 Faizi/ Abul Fazl, Todar Mall, and Bhagwan Das — had already 
 gone. Akbar was more than ever alone. Of his three sur- 
 viving sons, Murad had died ; his brother Daniyal was rapidly 
 drinking himself to death. Salim, in spite of his debauchery 
 and savage temper, was a strong man who could count upon 
 powerful support in the imperial army. If the Padshah had pro- 
 ceeded to use military force against him he might have provoked 
 a conflict which would have plunged the whole empire into 
 confusion, shattered the entire fabric he had so laboriously built 
 up, and opened the gates once more to India's foreign aggressors. 
 
 The only potential candidate for the succession whose repu- 
 tation stood higher than Salim's was the Prince's youngest son, 
 Elhurram, who eventually succeeded his father under the title 
 of Shah Jahan and did ^ much as a ruler to justify his grand- 
 father's good opinion of him. Raja Man Singh, Salim's 
 brother-in-law, and now the most powerful of Akbar's Hindu 
 nobles, was in favour of the nomination of his nephew by 
 marriage. Prince Khusru — Khurram's eldest brother. A 
 violent feud ah"eady existed between the latter and his father, 
 and Akbar seemed unwilling to do anything to widen the 
 breach. Under all the circumstances he probably showed the 
 wisest statesmanship in continuing to recognize Salim's heredi- 
 tary right to the throne according to the traditions of the 
 house of Timur, though plenty of precedents might have been 
 found in Indo- Aryan constitutional law for setting him aside. 
 
 Akbar only lived about three years after the death of Abul 
 
 1 Paizi died seven years before the murder of Abul Fazl. Even Badauni 
 draws a pathetic picture of Akbar hurrying -with, the court hakims to the 
 bedside of the dying poet, gently lifting up his liead, and joining in Abul Fazl's 
 grief when he found that the end had come. 
 
 534 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 Fazl in 1602, but persisted to the end in his endeavours to 
 control his incorrigible son. Knowing that Salim was amenable 
 to womanly influence (under the spell of Nur Jahan he later 
 on developed some sense of regal responsibility), the Padshah 
 sent the Sultana Salima, Bairam Khan's widow and now one 
 of Akbar's wives, who according to an Indian custom had 
 adopted Salim as her son after the death of his own mother, 
 to reason with him — the result being that he appeared again 
 at court in a chastened mood. Akbar received him kindly, 
 gave him permission to use the imperial insignia, and sent him 
 back to Rajputana to renew the campaign against the Rana 
 of Mewar — for the Rajputs of Mewar some years previously 
 had emerged from their etreats in the Aravali hills and had 
 gradually won back a great deal of lost ground. But the 
 Prince conducted himself so badly as a general in the field 
 that Akbar recalled him and sent him back to Allahabad. 
 There his continued drunkenness and the violent scenes which 
 took place between himself and his equalty intemperate son, 
 Khusru, so affected the mind of Khusru's mother that she 
 took poison and died. In a fit of repentance Salim reappeared 
 at Akbar's court and submitted to being put under medical 
 treatment for a time ; but the quarrels between the Prince 
 and his eldest son, who did his best to inflame Akbar's mind 
 against his father, again became a public scandal. 
 
 That these domestic troubles weighed heavily upon Akbar 
 and hastened his end there can be no doubt. It is unprofit- 
 able to speculate what xAkbar might have done if he had lived 
 longer and Salim's outrageous conduct had continued. But 
 the Padshah knew well that the only alternatives to the course 
 he actually took were to put his son to death or imprison 
 him for fife, and these were alternatives which he could 
 never bring himself to take, for in spite of all he loved his son, 
 and under ' Shaikhu Baba's ' ^ violent temperament there were 
 hidden some of the fine qualities of Babur's stock. 
 
 In the beginning of 1605 another blow fell upon Akbar — - 
 
 1 The pet name which Akbar gave Salim, after his foster-father, the Shaikh 
 Salim Chishti. 
 
 535 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the arrival of news from the Dekhan that Prince Daniyal 
 had died in a fit of dehrium tremens before his marriage with 
 the Princess of Bijapur had been consummated. Salim was 
 now his only surviving son. In the middle of September the 
 Padshah was taken seriously ill, and the administration of the 
 empire was left in the hands of his foster-brother, the Khan-i- 
 'Azam, and Raja Man Singh, both of whom would have welcomed 
 the sUghtest word from their sovereign in favour of the nomina- 
 tion of Prince Khusru as his successor. But as his end drew 
 near the Padshah called Salim to his bedside and, in the 
 presence of all the nobles, signified his dying wish that he 
 should gird on the sword of Humayun and take the imperial 
 turban on his head. Akbar passed away on October 15, 1605, 
 having just entered his sixty-fourth year, and Salim succeeded 
 without serious opposition from any side under the title of 
 Jahangir, ' the World-conqueror.' 
 
 Akbar was biuied with great pomp at Sikandra in a splendid 
 mausoleum, which he himself had commenced some time 
 before his death, strikingly different from those of his prede- 
 cessors, for it was planned, like the Panch Mahall at Fatehpur, 
 on the lines of the five-storied pyramidal pavilions which were 
 the meeting-places of the Buddhist Sangha and other rehgious 
 orders. It seems as if Akbar had intended it as the central 
 assembly hall of the Din-Ilahi, but Jahangir, who posed as an 
 orthodox Musalman and pretended to consider his father as 
 a wanderer from the fold of Islam who repented on liis death- 
 bed, altered the design of the top story so as to make it more 
 conventionally Mushm, a desecration which accounts for its 
 curiously truncated appearance. 
 
 Akbar has shared the fate of all great reformers in having 
 his personal character unjustly assailed, his motives impugned, 
 and his actions distorted, upon evidence which hardly bears 
 judicial examination. Thus some attribute his death to the 
 opium habit, ^ bringing forward a statement of one of the 
 Jesuit Fathers that the Padshah was reprehensibly drowsy 
 when listening to his discourses on religion. Others, more 
 ^ Vincent Smith, Asiatic Review, July 19 15. 
 
AKBAR AS CHAKRA-VARTIN 
 
 malicious, declare that he accidentally poisoned himself by 
 swallowing a deadly pill intended for one of his nobles — a 
 hoary fable of unknown antiquity which has been fastened on 
 the tomb of many other monarchs besides Akbar. The truth 
 seems to be that Akbar, following his physician's advice, was 
 accustomed to take a weak decoction of opium for the internal 
 disorder from Vv^hich he suffered, and it may well be believed that 
 during the stress and sorrow of his later years he sometimes 
 sought to soothe his troubled mind by the same means. He was 
 neither an ascetic nor a saint of the conventional type ; but 
 few of the great rulers of the earth can show a better record 
 for deeds of righteousness, or more honourably and consistently 
 maintained their ideals of a religious life devoted to the service 
 of humanity. In the Western sense his mission was political 
 rather than religious ; but in his endeavours to make the 
 highest religious principles the motive power of State policy 
 he won an imperishable name in Indian history and lifted the 
 political ethics of Islam into a higher plane than they had ever 
 reached before. 
 
 It does not detract from his greatness as a man and ruler 
 that his achievements fell short of his ideals — ^that the Din- 
 Ilahi did not accomplish the spiritual regeneration of the 
 rtding classes or wipe off the slate all the records of previous 
 centuries of misgovernment, and that his schemes did not 
 embrace a full recognition of the ancient Aryan system of self- 
 government upon which the economic strength and political 
 greatness of India stood firm longer than has been the case 
 with any other empire in the world. But Akbar 's endeavours 
 to realise the Aryan ideal are still worthy of imitation both 
 by British rulers of India and by all statesmen for whom 
 politics is a religion rather than a game of craft and skill. 
 
 537 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbas Khan, author of the Tdnkh-i 
 
 Sher Shdhi, 438 
 Abbasid dynasty, 252, 254, 256, 257, 
 
 279 
 Abdul Malik I, Samanid king, 280 
 Abdulla Khan Uzbek, King of Turan, 
 
 517. 521 
 
 Abdulla Khan Uzbek, one of Akbar's 
 generals, 460-461, 464, 466 
 
 Abdulla, brother of Ibrahim 'Adil 
 Shah I of Bijapiir, 396-397 
 
 Abdunnabi, Shaikh, 507-508 
 
 Abdurrahim, Mirza, one of Akbar's 
 generals, 483, 509-510, 524 
 
 A hhisheka, coronation ceremony, gon., 
 275 
 
 Abu, Motmt, 266 
 
 Abubekr, Sultan of Delhi, 367 
 
 Abul Fath, Hakim, scholar and cour- 
 tier, 522-523 
 
 Abul Fath Daiid, Amir of Multan, 
 285 
 
 Abul Fazl, Akbar's counsellor : early 
 years, 471-472 ; his rise into emin- 
 ence, 473; Badauni's enmity to, 
 474 ; Finance Minister, 476-477 ; 
 \nsAm-i-Akban,^']T, memorial of , 
 at Fatehpur, 479 ; signatory to the 
 document recognising Akbar as 
 spiritual leader, 496 ; in the dis- 
 cussions at Akbar's court, 497 ; 
 puts forward the proposition that 
 the king shoiold be regarded as 
 spiritual guide, 503, 504 ; helps in 
 the reform of the administration of 
 the Crown lands, 508 ; sent as 
 Commissioner to the Dekhan, 530- 
 531 ; disliked by Prince Salim, 531 ; 
 assassinated, 533 ; mentioned, 463, 
 486, 487, 492, 494, 501, 515, 516, 
 
 518, 519, 532. 534-535 
 Abyssinians: in the Bijapur royal 
 
 bodyguard, 394 ; in the royal 
 bodyguard of Ahmadnagar, 528, 
 529, 530 
 
 Acharya, caste name, 128 
 
 Adham Khan Atka, one of Akbar's 
 generals, 460, 461 
 
 'Adil Shahi dynasty, 340, 385 
 
 'Adil, or ' Adili, Shah — see Muhammad 
 'Adil Shah 
 
 'Adil Khan, son of Sher Shah, 445 
 
 Aditya, a name of Vishnu, 205 
 
 Adwaita doctrine of the Vedanta, 
 326 
 
 Afghanistan : Akbar sends expeditions 
 against, 521-523 ; mentioned, 139, 
 285 
 
 Afghans : the Afghan Sultans of 
 Delhi, 290 et seq. ; Afghans in pos- 
 session of the Panjab, 379 ; de- 
 feated by Babur at Panipat, 382- 
 383 ; Afghan women in Firuz Shah 
 Bahmani's harem, 387 ; defeated 
 by Babur at Buxar, 425 ; the 
 intrigues of Sher Khan against the 
 Moguls, 430-431 ; defeat the Mo- 
 guls at Busar and Kanauj, 432— 
 433 ; in power under the Sher Shah 
 dynasty, 437-448 ; Sher Shah's 
 generosity to, 440 ; defeated by 
 Humayun, 448 ; fight on the side 
 of Hemu, 451 ; rise against Akbar, 
 452, 459, 464; conquered by Akbar 
 in Bengal, 4S0, 484-486 ; Akbar 
 sends expeditions against, 521- 
 523 ; mentioned, 377, 392, 454 
 
 Agastya, sage, 127, 128 
 
 Agni, the Fire-spirit : the horse 
 sacrifice to, 121 ; mentioned, 7, 
 28 
 
 Agnimitra, Emperor of Magadha, 121, 
 124 
 
 Agra : the Taj Mahall at, 329, 
 406 ; Babur's capital, 423, 425- 
 426 ; taken by Hemu, 451 ; re- 
 covered by Akbar, 452 ; fort of, 
 rebuilt by Akbar, 466 ; Jestut 
 chapel at, 473, 498 ; mentioned, 37, 
 381, 383. 422, 423. 424. 427. 429. 
 
 539 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 432, 433, 447, 454, 456, 459, 460, 
 
 461, 469, 471, 477 n., 478, 482, 483, 
 500, 531. 532, 533 
 Agra and Oudh, province, 34, 265, 
 
 459 
 
 Agra and the Taj Mahdll, Handbook 
 to, cited, 463 n. 
 
 Agriculture : among the early Indo- 
 Aryans, 14, 15 ; the Sukrd-niti- 
 sdra on the profits of, 223 ; revived 
 under Firuz Shah, 319 ; burdens 
 on, relieved by Akbar, 526. See 
 also Ryots 
 
 Ahmad Shah I, Sultan of Gujerat, 
 341, 343, 348-349 
 
 Ahmad Shah II, Sultan of Gujerat, 
 481 
 
 Ahmad Shah Bahmani, Sultan of the 
 Dekhan, 340, 341, 350, 358 
 
 Ahmad Nizam Shah, Sultan of 
 Ahmadnagar, 340 
 
 Ahmad Khan L,odi: sided with the 
 reformer Budhan, 380 
 
 Ahmadabad : anciently Karnavati, 
 341 ; made his capital by Ahmad 
 Shah of Gujerat and rebuilt by 
 him, 341 ; the J ami' Masjid at, 
 341-342 ; mentioned, 327, 344, 
 348, 351, 353. 354. 481, 482, 483. 
 509, 510 
 
 Ahmadnagar: Chand Bibi's defence 
 of, 529 ; captured for Akbar, 530 ; 
 mentioned, 340, 389, 393, 400, 401, 
 403. 527, 528 
 
 Am-i-A khan : mentioned, 477 ; Bloch- 
 mann's translation, cited, 338 n., 
 478 n., 489 n., 500 n., 507 n., 508 n., 
 517 n., 519 n. ; Jarrett's transla- 
 tion, cited, 472 n., 476 n., 493 nn., 
 494 '>^- 5'^2 n., 519 n. 
 
 Am-ul-Mulk Burhan Nizam Shah's 
 commander-in-chief, 398 
 
 Aitareya Brahmana, cited, 82 n. 
 
 Ajanta: architecture at, 146; frescoes 
 at, 184, 185, 213, 329, 418; men- 
 tioned, 211 
 
 Ajatasatru, King of Magadha, 89 
 
 Ajivikas, sect, 91, 107 
 
 Ajmir : pUlaged by Afghans, 293 ; the 
 Arhai-din-ka Jhompra at, 294 ; 
 m.entioned, 292, 459, 462, 463, 492, 
 496 
 
 Ajodhya : made his capital by Samu- 
 dragupta, 153 ; mentioned, 37, 41, 
 42, 151, 155, 167, 188, 292 
 
 Akdsd, the cosmic ether, 239 
 
 540 
 
 Akbar : birth of, 435 ; left in his 
 uncle Kamran's hands, 436 ; re- 
 covered by his father, 447 ; suc- 
 ceeds to the throne, 450 ; the 
 Protectorship of Bairam Khan, 
 450-454 ; his physical strength, 
 his abilities and character, 450, 
 
 458 ; defeats the pretender Hemii, 
 452 ; trouble with the Afghans, 
 452, 459 ; difficulties with Bairam 
 Khan, 452-457 ; attempted to 
 reconcile religious differences, 459, 
 463 ; his political creed, 459 ; 
 assumes control of the government, 
 
 459 ; marries a Rajput princess, 
 and wins the loyalty of the Raj- 
 puts, 462 ; a ' much-married ' man, 
 462-463 ; his religious tolerance, 
 463, 472, 473, 474, 492, 513 ; cam- 
 paign in Rajputana, 463-464, 466— 
 469 ; his siege and capture of Chitor, 
 294, 306, 467-469 ; attempt on his 
 life, 465 ; relieved taxation, 465 ; 
 campaign in Bengal, 466 ; builds 
 Fatehpur-Sikri, 470 ; his conquest 
 of the Dekhan, 470, 527-531 ; 
 his love of learning and of philo- 
 sophical discussion, 472-473, 474- 
 475. 493. 499-500 ." adopted Indo- 
 Aryan political and social ideals, 
 473 ; the freedom of his opinions, 
 
 475 ; his views on marriage, 475- 
 
 476 ; his close attention to the 
 details of government, and his 
 varied interests, 477-479 ; his 
 official gazette, 477-478 ; early 
 revenue reforms, 479 ; and hunt- 
 ing, 479 ; conquers Gujerat, 480- 
 484 ; conquers Bengal, 484-486, 
 491 ; revenue reforms, with Todar 
 Mall, 486-490, 515 ; his steadfast 
 adherence to the Muslim faith, 492- 
 493, 494-495 ; the nature of his 
 religious belief, 493-494, 495, 501- 
 502 ; the Sunni sect and, 496 ; the 
 discussions in the Ibadat-Khana, 
 496-499, 511 ; his attitude towards 
 Christianity, 473-474, 495, 498- 
 499 ; studied Hindu philosophy 
 and occult science, 500-501 ; main- 
 tained the autocratic traditions of 
 Islam, 502 ; asserts himself as 
 spiritual leader of Islam in his 
 empire, 503-506, 511 ; reformed the 
 administration of the Crown lands, 
 506-509 ; and the Dm-Ilahi, 511- 
 
INDEX 
 
 519 ; doubtless influenced by Chai- 
 tanya's teaching, 418 ; his con- 
 siderate treatment of Hindus, 515— 
 516 ; extends his sway over all 
 Aryavarta, 520-525 ; his debt to 
 the Rajput chieftains, 525 ; recog- 
 nised as an ideal Aryan mon- 
 arch, 525 ; the beneficence and 
 efficiency of his rule, and the 
 success of his policy, 525-527 ; 
 his troubles with Prince SaHm, 531- 
 536 ; death, 536 ; his mausoleum 
 at Sikandra, 536 ; the cause of his 
 death, 536-537 ; his aim and his 
 achievement, 537 ; mentioned, 263, 
 320, 338, 339, 355, 358, 381, 405, 
 406, 449 
 
 Akbar-ndma, the, cited, 515 nn. 
 
 Al Idrisi, Arabian historian : on the 
 Indian character, 250 
 
 Al Kadir Billa-Abassy, Khalif, 285 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, Stdtan of Delhi: sacks 
 Deoghur, 300-301 ; murders Jalal- 
 ud-din and seizes the throne, 
 301 ; his tyranny, and adminis- 
 trative methods, 301-305 ; his con- 
 quests, 306-307 ; death, 307, 309 ; 
 married a Rajput princess, 308 ; 
 mentioned, 294, 311, 316, 319, 385, 
 520 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, quondam Sultan of 
 Gaur, 335 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, Sultan of Malwa, 384 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, brother of Ibrahim Lodi : 
 rose against Humayun, 429 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, uncle of Ibrahim I,odi, 
 382 
 
 'Ala-ud-din, son-in-law of Nasir 
 Khan, 358 
 
 'Ala-ud-din Hasan, Afghan chieftain: 
 sacked Ghazni, 290-291 
 
 'Alai, Shaikh, Muslim revivalist: 
 poses as the Mahdi, 338, 446, 471 ; 
 mentioned, 498 
 
 Alberuni, Arabian historian : cited, 
 210, 243 
 
 Albuquerque, Alfonso da, Portuguese 
 navigator : in India, 345, 346 
 
 Alchemy : studied by Akbar, 500 
 
 Alcohol : abstinence from, promoted 
 by Asoka's rules, 100. See Drink 
 traffic 
 
 Alexander the Great : his raid into 
 the Panjab, 60, 63-65 ; mentioned, 
 
 4. 344. 365 
 Alexander, King of Epirus, 98 
 
 Ali 'Adil Shah, Sultan of Bijapur, 
 399-402, 403, 404, 406, 527, 528 
 
 Ali Berid Shah, Sultan of Bidar, 
 400 
 
 Ali ibn Abu Talib, Khalif, 368, 
 
 377 
 Ali, Khalif, 331, 399 n. 
 Ali, son of Burhan Nizam Shah, 398 
 Allahabad, 152, 158, 335, 532, 535 
 Alongoa, widow, Timiir's ancestor, in 
 
 his fictitious pedigree, 377 
 Alp Khan, Governor of Gujerat, 308 
 Alptagin, ruler of Ghazni, 280 
 Altamsh, Sultan of Delhi, 294, 299 
 Alwar, 457 
 Amalaka, ornament of temple spire: 
 
 the symbolism of, 112, 113, 180; 
 
 mentioned, 179, 182, 245 
 Amaravati: the sculptures at, 130, 
 
 146, 180 
 Amarkot, 434-435 
 Amdtya, or Home Minister, 36, 225 
 Amber, Rajput royal family, 462 
 Amina, wife of Burhan Nizam Shah, 
 
 398 
 Amir Berid, ruler of Kulbarga, 393, 
 
 395. 396, 397 
 Amir Khusru, poet, 308 
 Amir-al-Umara, title, 462 
 Ananda, the Buddha's disciple, 97 
 Ananta — see Sesha 
 Ancient and Medieval Architecture of 
 
 India, cited, 112 n., 146 n., 217 n., 
 
 219 n. 
 Andhra dynasty, 123, 130-131, 139, 
 
 142, 146, 150 
 Andhra, the state: paramount in the 
 
 South, 130 ; early relations with 
 
 the North, 1 30-1 31 ; fall of the 
 
 Andhra Empire, 147 
 ' Andli,' nickname of 'Adil Shah, 
 
 446 
 Anga, Aryan kingdom, 59 
 Anhilwar, 341 
 Animals : the sacrifice of, forbidden 
 
 by Asoka, 92 ; Asoka's humane 
 
 concern for, 92, 94 ; Akbar's 
 
 concern for, 479 
 Antardla, temple porch, 117 
 Antigonos Gonatas, King of Mace- 
 donia, 98 
 Antiochos Soter, King of Syria : sends 
 
 an embassy to Bindusara's court, 
 
 87-88 
 Antiochos Theos, King of Syria, 95, 
 
 98 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Anula, Sinhalese princess, 96 
 Apadana, the, at Persepolis, 75 
 Apparswami, Saiva revivaUst, 245 
 Aquaviva, Father Rodolfo, Jesuit: 
 heads a mission to Akbar's court, 
 498-499, 501 
 Arabia: Indian trade with, 361 
 Arabs: their advance on India, 210- 
 211 ; invade and estabUsh them- 
 selves in Sind, 188, 211, 250-252 ; 
 their admiration for the people of 
 India, 250-251 ; imbibed the prin- 
 ciples of Indo-Aryan statecraft and 
 borrowed the scientific elements 
 of their scholarship from India, 
 254-255 ; transmitted Hindu know- 
 ledge to the West, 257 ; won no 
 permanent political footing in 
 India, and obtained no hold upon 
 Indian religious feeling, 257 ; called 
 ' Asuras ' by the Hindu chroniclers, 
 263 
 Arahat, tank of Saint, in Buddhism, 
 
 102 
 Aravali hills, 294, 490, 491, 535 
 Archaeological research in India has 
 not been developed far, 43-44, 
 104 
 Archaeological Survey of India, 221 
 Architecture: the early Indo- Aryans 
 and, 20 ; antiquity of the Indo- 
 Aryan building tradition, 76 ; the 
 earliest Indo-Aryan buildings were 
 of wood, 115-116; the continuity 
 and vitality of the Indo-Aryan 
 architectural craft tradition, 116; 
 the traditional plan of the Hindu 
 temple, 1 1 6-1 1 7 ; architecture of the 
 Mahayana and Hinayana schools, 
 146 ; of the Gupta era, 177-186 ; 
 of Harsha's reign, 211 ; of the 
 period of the Saiva revival, 213, 
 216-217, 218-219, 238, 242-244 ; 
 Fergusson's misleading nomencla- 
 ture, 216, 217 ; the so-called Dravi- 
 dian style is Indo-Aryan, 238 ; 
 Jain temple architecture, 245 ; 
 MusHm architecture borrowed 
 Indian forms, 253 ; the ' Chalu- 
 kyan style,' 245 ; Fergusson and 
 the ' Pathan ' style, 283, 294-295 ; 
 ' Pathan ' architecture is purely 
 Indian, 295-296, 343, 376 ; the 
 development of Indo-Muhamma- 
 dan architecture, 328-330 ; the 
 ' Saracenic ' architecture of Persia 
 
 542 
 
 founded on Buddhist building 
 traditions, 328 ; the ' Saracenic ' 
 architecture of India essentially 
 Indian, 328-329 ; the evidence of 
 the buildings of Gaur that the 
 inspiration of Indo-Muhammadan 
 architecture was Indo-Aryan, 337 ; 
 the royal mosque at Kulbarga and 
 the buildings at Bijapur, 340 ; the 
 J ami' Masjid at Ahmadabad and 
 the Jaina temple at Ranpur, 341- 
 342 ; sculptured ornamentation 
 and images abandoned by the 
 Hindu craftsmen, 342-343 ; Fer- 
 gusson's classification of pre-Mu- 
 hammadan architecture, 348 n. ; 
 the ' Mogul style ' the product of 
 Indian culture, 376 ; the Bijapur 
 school of, 406 ; the mausoleum of 
 the Muhammadan period and its 
 relation to the stiipa, 444-445 ; 
 the J ami' Masjid at Fatehpur- 
 Sikri, 470 ; Indian mosques repre- 
 sent an adaptation of Indo-Aryan 
 building tradition, 470 
 
 Arhai-din-ka Jhompra, at Ajmir, 
 294 
 
 Ariana, 139, 328 
 
 Arjiina, usurper — see Arunasa 
 
 Arjiina, one of the Pandavas, 40, 188, 
 
 414- 415 
 
 Arkot, North and South, 239 w. 
 
 Army : Chandragupta's, 86-87 ; -A-k- 
 bar's, recruited largelj^ from the 
 Hindus, 525 ; Akbar's, its effi- 
 ciency and patriotic spirit, 526 
 
 Art, Indian: the beginnings of, un- 
 recorded, 43-44, 104 ; Mauryan 
 art, 104-118 ; the history of Aryan 
 art begins with the Mauryan epoch, 
 104 ; the South absorbed and con- 
 served Aryan artistic tradition, 
 129 ; Hellenistic craft traditions 
 on Indian soil, 133, 135 ; the art 
 of the Mahayana and Hina3'ana 
 schools of Buddhism, 145-146 ; Hel- 
 lenistic tradition not the directing 
 force of Indian artistic expression, 
 169 ; art of the Gupta era, 177- 
 186 ; Indian art traditions non- 
 sectarian, 186 ; art of Harsha's 
 reign, 211 ; art of Southern India 
 in the seventh to the eleventh 
 centuries, 242-246 ; the influence 
 of the Turkish monarchs on Indian 
 art, 295 ; the so-called ' Pathan ' 
 
INDEX 
 
 art is essentially Indian, 295 ; the 
 development of Indo-Muhamma- 
 dan art, 328-330 ; Islam gave 
 Indian art a new impulse, did not 
 change Indian aesthetic principles, 
 329. See also Architecture, Paint- 
 ing, and Sculpture 
 Artillery : first use of, in the Dekhan, 
 
 387 
 
 Arunasa, or Arjiina, usurper, 248- 
 250 
 
 Aryans, the Indian : closely related to 
 the Greeks, 4 ; how they reached 
 India, 4-5 ; the early culture of, 
 5 et seq. ; the early social organisa- 
 tion of, 5-6, 7-8, 14-22 ; the in- 
 tellectual generosity of, 6 ; their 
 civilisation the product of their 
 own genius, 6-7 ; antiquity of the 
 civilisation of, 8 ; their conquest 
 of India essentially an intellectual 
 one, 9 ; the village system of, 9- 
 II, 15, 22-29 ; the coming of, to 
 India, 13-14, 15, 33 ; patriarchy 
 among, 14 ; agriculture among, 14, 
 
 15 ; assimilated features from the 
 Dravidian social system, 15 ; the 
 instinct for racial purity among, 
 
 16 ; the scope of the term ' Aryan ' 
 widened, 16 ; the five social grades 
 among, 16 ; and the origin of 
 caste, 17 ; and the building craft, 
 20 ; commercial intercourse of, 
 with the Dravidian kingdoms and 
 Western Asia, 2 1 , 4 3 , 60-6 1 ; political 
 organisation of the Aryan tribes, 
 22 ; the wonderful work of, in 
 unifying the heterogeneous peoples 
 of India, 32 ; never widely dis- 
 tributed over India, 32 ; the physi- 
 cal characteristics of, 32 ; the 
 tribes of, did not enslave each 
 other, 33-34 ; the origin of king- 
 ship among, 35-37 ; their idea of 
 kingship, 35-37, 82-83; constitu- 
 tion of their king's council, 36 ; 
 the principal kingdoms of, 37-38; 
 Aryan republics, 38, 68, 69 ; the 
 political fusion of Aryans and non- 
 Aryans illustrated by the story 
 of the Great War, 40-41 ; the 
 Aryan belief in the divine power of 
 sacrifice, 47 ; the Buddha's appeal 
 to Aryan sentiment, 53 ; the unify- 
 ing effect of Buddhism upon the 
 Aryan political system, 55-56 ; the 
 
 bond between the Indo-Aryan, 
 Hellenic, and Iranian branches of the 
 Aryan race, 60, 61 ; moral virtues 
 of the Aryan character, 62 ; the 
 foundation of the Mauryan dynasty 
 the culminating point in Aryan 
 political supremacy in India, 89 ; 
 the reign of Asoka marked the 
 final breaking-down of the racial 
 barriers between Aryan and non- 
 Aryan, 89 ; the Aryan law of suc- 
 cession to the throne, 90 ; the 
 history of Aryan art begins with 
 the Mauryan epoch, 104 ; Indo- 
 Aryan artistic tradition and Aryan 
 royal craftsmen, 105-107 ; the 
 earliest Aryan religious symbols, 
 109 ; early Aryan dwellings were 
 of wood, 1 1 5-1 16; Aryan re- 
 ligious symbolism rejected graven 
 images and materialistic vehicles 
 of thought, 1 1 7-1 1 8 ; new ele- 
 ments entered the Indo-Aryan 
 pale as the result of the Turki 
 invasions, 126 ; the Aryanisation 
 of the South, 12 7-1 31 ; Aryan 
 civilisation completely superseded 
 Dravidian, 128-129 ; the spreading 
 of Indo-Aryan civilisation over 
 Asia, 145 ; the Aryan revival in 
 the Gupta era, 149-158, 178; San- 
 skrit the language of Aryan tradi- 
 tion, 154-155 ; the independence 
 of the Aryan character, 171 ; Indo- 
 Aryan military ethics, 173 ; de- 
 scendants of Hun and Turki in- 
 vaders admitted within the Aryan 
 pale, 176-177 ; the adverse effect 
 of the infusion of barbarian blood 
 upon Aryan tradition and polity, 
 177 ; Aryan tradition conserved 
 by the South, 227 ; the worth of 
 the Aryan constitution, 235 ; the 
 Aryanisation of the South gathered 
 strength under the disasters to 
 Aryan civilisation in the North, 
 238, 325 ; Europe's indebtedness to 
 Indo-Aryan culture, 254-255 ; Raj- 
 put tribes and Aryan ancestry, 260- 
 261 ; the Indo-Aryan administra- 
 tive system adopted by the Mu- 
 hammadan Sultans, 298 ; the 
 Indian ideal permeated the social 
 and spiritual life of the Muhamma- 
 dan conquerors, 308 ; Hindu polity 
 contrasted with Islamic, 322-323 ; 
 
 543 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 the effect of the Muhammadan 
 conquest upon Indo-Aryan art, 
 327-330 ; the Indo-Aryans ob- 
 tained ascendancy over the Dravi- 
 dians by means of their horses, 361- 
 362 ; the wisdom of the Aryan 
 principle of putting commercial 
 and military interests under high 
 intellectual direction, 366 ; the 
 Turkish conquerors absorbed Aryan 
 culture, 376 ; the essentially demo- 
 cratic character of the Hindu 
 political system, 404-405 ; Aryan 
 village life unaffected by the impact 
 of Islam, 407-409 ; Aryan culture 
 preserved through the period of 
 the Muhammadan conquest, 408 ; 
 Akbar recognised as an ideal Indian 
 monarch, 525 ; the free institutions 
 of Aryavarta crushed by Aurangzib, 
 527 ; Akbar' s effort to realise the 
 Aryan ideal, 537 
 
 Aryavarta: supposed to be crescent- 
 shaped, 34, 192 ; the extent of, in 
 Samudragupta's time, 152; freed 
 from foreign domination by Samu- 
 dragupta, 154; Indo-Aryan kings 
 never sought dominion outside the 
 confines of, 171 ; the weakness of, 
 to attack from without, 171-172 ; 
 Siva's bow the symbol of, 254 ; 
 political disunion in, helped the 
 victorious progress of Islam, 257- 
 258 ; Akbar extends his sway 
 completely over, 520-525 ; men- 
 tioned, 5^ 35, 38, 149, 150, 151, 
 152, 183 
 
 Asa Ahir, Hindu chieftain, 356-358, 
 432 
 
 Asad Khan (Khusru Turk), minister 
 of Bijapiir, 392, 393, 394-397 
 
 Asaf Khan, Gujerati general, 354 
 
 Asaf Khan, Mogul general, 464, 465- 
 466, 475 
 
 Asana-prajinapaka, or ' Seat-arran- 
 ger,' 52 
 
 Asandhimitra, wife of Asoka, 103 
 
 Ascetics : regulations excluding them 
 from the villages, 70-71 ; regard 
 paid to, 70 
 
 Asiatic Review, cited, 494 n., 518 n., 
 536 n. 
 
 Asirgarh, fortress: Nasir Khan's plot 
 to obtain possession of, 356-358 ; 
 besieged and taken by Akbar, 358, 
 531 
 
 544 
 
 Askari, Mirza, brother of Humayiin, 
 431, 433, 435, 436, 447 
 
 Asoka: gave State recognition to 
 Buddhism, 57, 89 ; said to have 
 studied Jainism, 59 ; the reign of, 
 89-103 ; early years, 90 ; corona- 
 tion, 90 ; his imperial standards 
 bearing his edicts, 90-91, 96-97, 
 105, 152, 180 ; converted to Bud- 
 dhism, 91-92 ; his zeal in the 
 propagation of Buddhism, 92, 93, 
 95. 97-98 ; details of his govern- 
 ment, as set forth in the edicts, 92- 
 
 94 ; sends out Buddhist missions, 
 
 95 ; his State pilgrimages, 96-97 ; 
 character of his rule, 98-99 ; his 
 religious tolerance, 99, 118 ; his 
 Buddhist propaganda, its results 
 and development, 99-102, 131 ; 
 death, 102 ; incidents in his 
 private life, 103 ; built the original 
 temple at Bodh-Gaya, 112 ; in 
 legends, sometimes confused with 
 Kanishka, 142 ; Fa-Hien on the 
 rxiins of his palace at Pataliputra, 
 168 ; his propaganda consolidated 
 Aryavarta, 258 ; mentioned, 43, 
 62, 73, 83, 88, 104, 106, III, 116, 
 117, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 
 129, 130, 131, 135, 137, 139, 144. 
 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 156, 160, 
 164, 166, 196, 202, 220, 268, 320, 
 326, 418, 458 
 
 Asram, the Brahman village, 38 
 
 Assam, 200, 250, 299 
 
 AssemlDUes, ^^llage, of the South, 
 
 227-235 ; election to, 230-233 
 Asuras, enemies of the Aryans, 4, 73, 
 
 181, 263 
 Asvamedha, the horse sacrifice, 153. 
 
 See Horse sacrifice 
 Atgah Khan — see Muhammad Atgah 
 
 Khan 
 Atharva Veda: on the building of a 
 
 house, 115; translated into Persian, 
 
 499 
 
 Attock, fortress, 523 
 
 Augustus, Emperor: received em- 
 bassies, from Indian kings, 139- 
 140 
 
 Aurangzib, Mogul emperor, 426 
 
 527 
 Avanti, ancient name of Malwa, 263. 
 
 See Malwa 
 Avantivarman, King of Kashmir, 
 
 273. 274 
 
INDEX 
 
 'Azam Khan Kokah (Khan-i-'Azam, 
 'Aziz Kokah), foster-brother of Ak- 
 bar, 476, 490, 509, 518, 524, 536 
 
 'Aziz Kokah, Mirza — see 'Azam Khan 
 Kokah 
 
 Azurbaijan, 375 
 
 Babaji Khanam, mother of Ismail 
 'Adil Shah I of Bijapur, 390-391, 
 
 394 
 Babur : invited to the throne of 
 Delhi, 381 ; conquers the Panjab, 
 381-382 ; advances on Delhi, 382 ; 
 defeats the Afghans at Panipat, 
 382-383 ; enters Delhi as sovereign 
 ruler, 384 ; his character, 420-422 ; 
 his description of Hindustan, 421- 
 422, 424 ; wins the battle of 
 Fatehpur-Sikri, 425 ; defeats the 
 Afghans at Bujxar, 425 ; his bene- 
 ficent administration and liberal 
 rule, 425-426 ; death, 426, 427 ; 
 mentioned, 263, 282, 354, 381, 
 393, 428, 429, 430, 431, 448 
 
 Babylon : ruled by an Aryan dynasty, 
 4' 337 ; early commercial inter- 
 course of Southern India with, 129 ; 
 mentioned, 5, 61, 119, 256 
 
 Badakshan, 484, 521 
 
 Badami dynasty, 245 
 
 Badami, the temples at, 217, 242 
 
 Badaiin Gate, Delhi, 303 
 
 Badauni, Akbar's biographer, 465 n., 
 474-475, 490-491. 493. 494 ai^d n., 
 495. 496. 497. 498, 500 w., 501 andn., 
 504, 505 n., 506, 508, 509, 512 n., 
 513, 514, 516, 517, 518, 525 n., 
 
 534^- 
 Baghdad, 251, 252, 255,256,279,280, 
 
 283, 285 
 Bahadur Shah, Sultan of Gujerat, 
 
 344. 346. 354. 429-430. 480 
 Bahadur Nizam Shah, Sultan of 
 
 Ahmadnagar, 528, 529, 530, 531 
 Bahadxir Khan of Khandesh, 358, 
 
 530-531 
 Bahmani dynasty, 339-340, 385, 388, 
 
 389. 393 
 Bahmani kingdom, 339-340 ; end of, 
 
 388 
 Bairam, Sultan of Delhi, 299 
 Bairam, Sultan of Ghazni, 290-291 
 B airam Khan, one of B abur' s generals : 
 helped Humayiin, 435, 436, 447, 
 448 ; Protector during the minority 
 of Akbar, 450-454 ; quarrels with 
 
 Akbar, deposed, and restored, 453- 
 456, 461 ; death, 457, 458 ; men- 
 tioned, 483, 509, 524, 535 
 
 Baktriana, 119, 138, 139 
 
 Baladitya (Narasinhagupta), Gupta 
 emperor, 174-175, 177, 184, 187 
 
 Balkh, 255 
 
 Baluchistan : the Arabs in, 210 ; 
 Akbar sends an expedition into, 
 521, 522 
 
 Bana, poet, 192 
 
 Banu Begam, wife of Humayun, 434- 
 436 
 
 Barabar hills: theAjivika hermitages 
 in, 106-107 
 
 Baramula Pass, 144 
 
 Baran (Btdandshahr), 286 
 
 Barmak family, 255 
 
 Barnett, ly. D., cited, 121 n., 144 n., 
 165 n. 
 
 Barodia, U. D., cited, 58 n., 66 n., 
 84 n. 
 
 Baz Bahadur of Malwa, and Riipmati, 
 355, 460, 464 
 
 Beal, S., cited, 166 n., 237 n. 
 
 Behlol Dodi, Afghan Sultan of Delhi, 
 379. 410 
 
 Belgaum, 395, 396, 397 
 
 Benares : Fa-Hien at, 168 ; the 
 stronghold of orthodox Brahmani- 
 cal learning, 198, 219 ; sacked by 
 Afghans, 293 ; famous as a seat 
 of learning, 320 ; the university 
 survived the Muhammadan con- 
 quest, 408 ; mentioned, 38, 41, 
 
 139. 173. 327. 413. 431, 432 
 
 Bengal: a Musulman kingdom, 
 usually subject to the Delhi 
 Sultan, 299 ; throws off allegiance 
 to Delhi, 313 ; part of the province 
 of Gaur, 335 ; Satya-Narayana 
 worshipped in, 338 ; the native 
 dialect survived unchanged in, 
 408 n. ; partitioned by Sher Shah, 
 442 ; revolt in, quelled by Akbar, 
 465-466 ; conquered by Akbar, 
 480, 484-486, 491, 509 : disorders 
 in, owing to Akbar's revenue 
 reforms, 489-490 ; Prince Salim 
 made governor of, 532 ; mentioned, 
 34, 164, 191 n., 240, 266-267, 387, 
 416, 431, 433, 451. 452, 454. 459, 
 464, 524, 532. See Gaur 
 
 Bengal, Eastern, 200, 250, 413 
 
 Bengal, Bay of, 240 
 
 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, 36 n. 
 
 545 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Berar, 339, 355, 395, 529, 53° 
 
 Bhagavad Gtta, the: Sankaracharya's 
 
 commentary on, 219 ; translated 
 
 into Bengali, 337; quoted, 155-156; 
 
 mentioned, 155, 185, 187, 214, 220, 
 
 414, 415 
 
 Bhagirathi, river, 412, 414 
 
 Bhagwan Das, Raja: one of Akbar's 
 henchmen, 462 ; honoured by 
 Akbar, 462 ; with Akbar in the 
 campaign in Gujerat, 481 ; would 
 not recognise Akbar as an exponent 
 of Aryan religion, 495 ; a daughter 
 of, married to Prince SalTm, 520 ; 
 leads an expedition into Kash- 
 mir, 521 ; death, 525 ; mentioned, 
 
 534 
 
 Bhakti, or devotion: the spirit of, 
 quickened the early Christian 
 churches, 141 ; the influence of, 
 felt throughout Asia, 209 ; the 
 spirit of, touched Muhammad, 
 210; Chaitanya adopted the doc- 
 trine of, 414, 417 ; of the Din- 
 Ilahi, 512; mentioned, 11 1 
 
 Bhakti-marga, the path of devotion : 
 philosophical ideal, 108 ; Vaishnava 
 philosophy identified with, 113; 
 Mahayana doctrine identified with, 
 138, 141 ; the sikhara a symbol of, 
 245; mentioned, 136 
 
 Bharata tribes, 40 
 
 Bharata-Varsha, name for Aryavarta, 
 171. See Aryavarta 
 
 Bharhut : the stupas at, 107, 109, no, 
 116, 118 
 
 Bhashyas, Sanskrit classics, 231 
 
 Bhaskaracharya, author of the Lila- 
 wati, 499 
 
 Bhaskaravarma, or Kumara, King of 
 Kamariipa, 200 
 
 Bhatnir, 372 
 
 Bhavabhuti, dramatist, 264 
 
 Bhikkus : Hiuen-Tsang on, 197-198 
 
 Bhima, one of the Pandavas, 40, 91 
 
 Bhinmal, or Srimal, 266 
 
 Bhitari, 173 
 
 Bhoj Tirumal Rai, claimant to the 
 throne of Vijayanagar, 395 
 
 Bhoja, Raja of Malwa, 264, 265 
 
 Bholpur, the lake of, 265 
 
 Bhumias, or land-owners, of Raja- 
 sthan, 262 
 
 Bhuvanesvar, 183, 211 
 
 Biana, 424 
 
 Bias, river 64, 372. See Hyphasis 
 
 546 
 
 Bibi Kadbanii — see BTbl Naila 
 
 Bibi Naila, or Bibi Kadbanu, mother 
 of Firuz Shah, 315-316, 317, 327 
 
 Bidar, 340, 389, 395 
 
 Bihar, 38, 59, 266-267, 294, 299, 335, 
 337, 430, 431, 432, 442, 482, 484, 
 485, 509. See also Magadha 
 
 Bihar! Mall, Raja, 462, 463 
 
 Bijapiir : the architecture of, 340, 
 406 ; becomes chief city of the 
 Dekhan, 340 ; the Turkish dynasty 
 of, and the struggle with Vija- 
 yanagar, 385-403 ; Ali ' Adil Shah' s 
 mosque at, 406 ; Akbar becomes 
 suzerain over, 531 ; mentioned, 
 327, 527. 528, 529 
 
 Bikanir, 116 
 
 Bindusara, Gupta emperor, 87-88, 
 142 
 
 Bir Singh, Raja of Urchah, 533 
 
 Birbal, Raja: Poet Laureate at Ak- 
 bar's court, 475 ; and the 'Ulamas, 
 475. 496 ," memorial to, at Fateh- 
 pur, 479 ; a member of the Din- 
 IlahT, 518 ; in joint command of an 
 expedition against the Afghans, 
 522-523 ; slain, 523 ; Akbar's grief 
 for, 523-524 
 
 Birds : Asoka issues regulations pro- 
 tecting, 94 
 
 Blochmann, H., cited, 338 n., 478 w., 
 488, 489 «., 500 n., 507 n., 508, 
 517 n., 519 n. 
 
 Bo Tree — see Bodhi Tree 
 
 Bodh-Gaya : the Bodhi Tree at — see 
 Bodhi Tree; the Buddha at, 49, 
 112, 135 ; the temple at, 112, 144, 
 146, 168 n. ; a monastery founded 
 at, by the Sinhalese, 154 ; waste 
 and desolate, in the time of Fa- 
 Hien, 166 ; Fa-Hien at, 168 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang on, 196 ; Chaitanya 
 makes a pilgrimage to, and gains 
 enlightenment at, 414, 417 ; men- 
 tioned, 106, 114 
 
 Bodhi Tree. I. In the Aryan village, 
 23,109. II. At Bodh-Gaya: Bud- 
 dha at, 49, 112, 135 ; Sanghamitra 
 took a branch of, to Ceylon, 96 ; 
 the story of, represented at Sanchi, 
 96 ; Asoka visits, 97 ; Tishyarak- 
 shita tries to destroy, 103 ; sym- 
 bolically represented in the Bhar- 
 hut stiipa, 109 ; uprooted and 
 replanted, 196 ; mentioned, 144, 
 154, 199 
 
INDEX 
 
 Bodhidharma, Buddhist patriarch, 
 247 
 
 Bodhisattva, 135. See Buddha 
 
 Bodhisattvas, 135, 138 
 
 B odzontschar : Timur ' s ancestry ficti- 
 tiously traced to, 377 
 
 Bombay, 146, 346 
 
 Borobudur, 145 
 
 Brahma, the Creator : the temple or 
 place of worship of, in the Aryan 
 village, 23, 109 ; the eastern gate in 
 the Aryan village dedicated to, 27 ; 
 name representing all birth symbols 
 in Indo- Aryan religion, 31 ; Saras- 
 vati regarded as the active force 
 of, 46 ; represented as a suppliant 
 before the Buddha, 54 ; gate in 
 Pataliputra dedicated to, 77 ; the 
 lotus associated with, 106 ; Buddha 
 took the place of, in Mahayanist 
 ritual, 109, 132 ; in the Three As- 
 pects, 136, 185 ; the image of, sym- 
 bol of creation, 217 ; divided the 
 people into the four classes, 222 ; 
 mentioned, 29, 203, 500 
 
 Brahmachavin, Brahman student, 18, 
 411 
 
 Brahmagupta, mathematician, 255 
 
 Brahmanism : the schism between 
 Buddhism and, traceable to the 
 divergent outlook between the 
 Brahman and Kshatriya thinkers, 
 40 ; the doctrines of, freely con- 
 troverted, 50 ; an exclusive cult, 
 50 ; the attitude of early Buddhism 
 to, 54 ; Buddhism and Jainism 
 both a revolt against, 59 ; the 
 influence of Brahmanical thought 
 upon Buddhism, 99 ; the pessi- 
 mistic school of philosophy most 
 typical of Brahmanical thought, 
 108 ; the Three Aspects of, 109 ; 
 the stiipa part of the symbolism of, 
 no. III ; the interaction of Brah- 
 manism and Buddhism, 1 21-123 >" 
 not favoured by the Andhra kings, 
 131 ; did not permit an image of 
 the Supreme Deity to be wor- 
 shipped, 132 ; the growth of Brah- 
 man influence in the Gupta age 
 and the subordination of Bud- 
 dhism, 148-149, 155-157 ; Fa-Hien 
 makes few references to, 167 ; 
 Buddhism grew out of, 170 ; the 
 m.utual tolerance of Brahmanism, 
 Buddhism, and Jainism, 185 ; Saiv- 
 
 ism the especial cult of, 215 ; 
 Sankaracharya's championship of, 
 219-220 ; asserts political supre- 
 macy after Harsha's death, 249 ; 
 the conflict between Buddhism and, 
 gave Islam its opportunity, 258 ; 
 the virtue of Brahmanical social 
 science, 259-260 ; the waning of 
 Brahman culture, and the purging 
 influence of Islam on Hinduism, 
 324-325 ; the choicer spirits of 
 Brahmanism worked to bring Islam 
 into the Hindu synthesis, 326. See 
 also Brahmans 
 Brahmans : the Indo-Aryan priestly 
 caste, 8, 16 ; gradually obtained 
 precedence over the Kshatriyas, 17, 
 39-40, 46 ; the members of, not 
 born into the order, but initiated, 
 
 1 8 ; their high moral standard, 1 8- 
 
 19 ; penalty upon, for offences 
 against the order, 19 ; the higher 
 craftsmen had a social status equal 
 to, 19-20 ; penalty upon, for theft, 
 21 ; Brahman philosophers gene- 
 rally adhered to the Saiva school, 
 31 ; the Brahmanical view of the 
 effect of Buddhism upon Vedic 
 revelation, 45 ; growth of power 
 of the Brahmanical priesthood, 46 ; 
 the Brahmanical priesthood and 
 the mantram, 46-47 ; and sacrifice, 
 47-48 ; some Brahmans leaned to 
 the doctrine of the Buddha, 53- 
 54 ; hostility of the Brahmans to 
 the Buddha's propaganda, 54 ; 
 not exempt from heavy punish- 
 ment, under Chandragupta's rule, 
 69, 81 ; severely penalised for in- 
 dulging in liquor, 79 ; rules govern- 
 ing, laid down in the Code of Manu, 
 159-160, 161, 163 ; learned Brah- 
 mans exempt from taxation, 162 ; 
 Brahmanhood the avenue to the 
 attainment of the highest aim of 
 humanity, 164 ; Fa-Hien and, 170 ; 
 prestige of the caste grows, 177 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang on, 196 ; the Sukrd- 
 nitisdra on the caste, 222 ; an 
 unlearned Brahman had no civil 
 rights, 231; Brahmanical 'tyranny,' 
 235 ; persecuted by Firuz Shah, 
 317 ; migration of, to the South, 
 following upon the Muhammadan 
 invasions, 325 ; under Muslim rule, 
 for a time held themselves aloof 
 
 547 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 from public affairs, 339 ; Marco 
 Polo's observations on the Brah- 
 mans of Gujerat, 364 ; employed 
 in the Muhammadan revenue ad- 
 ministration, 394, 409 ; opposed 
 Chaitanya, 416, 417 ; mentioned, 
 33, 38, 182. See also Erahmanism 
 
 Brahmaputra, river, 187 
 
 Brahmdsiddhdnta, the, 255 
 
 Brahmavarta, the name given by the 
 Aryans to their territory in India, 
 
 33 
 Bridges, 222 
 
 Briggs, J„ cited — see Perishta 
 Brihadratha, Mauryan emperor, 119 
 Brihaspati, King of Kashmir, 272, 
 
 273 
 
 Brindaban: Chaitanya' s pilgrimage 
 to, 417 
 
 British Museum, 153, 158 
 
 Buddha, the : a member of the 
 Kshatriya class, 20 ; as statesman 
 and social reformer, 45-56 ; not 
 a phenomenon in disputing ortho- 
 dox Brahmanical theories of his 
 time, 45 ; not an entirely original 
 thinker, 45-46 ; the institutions 
 which he came to attack, 46-49 ; a 
 master of the philosophical theories 
 of his time, 49 ; the reasons for 
 the success of his mission, 50 ; his 
 teaching appealed to Aryan senti- 
 ment, 51-52, 53-54 ; constitution 
 and rules of the Sangha, 52-53 ; 
 the Brahmans' attitude to, 53-55 ; 
 the influence of his teaching upon 
 Brahmanism, and upon India, 55- 
 56 ; an inspired interpreter of 
 psychological laws rather than a 
 reUgious teacher, 56 ; possessed 
 a faculty for organisation, 57 ; 
 Asoka's pilgrimage to his birth- 
 place, 97 ; came to be regarded 
 as the Supreme Deity, 99, 109 ; 
 incidents in the life of, depicted 
 on the stiipas of Bharhut and 
 SanchT, 107 ; took the place of 
 Brahma in the Trinity of Bud- 
 dhism, 109 ; worshipped as Vishnu- 
 Narayana, 109 ; attained Nirvana 
 under the Bodhi Tree, 112 ; a 
 national hero, 114 ; the image of, 
 never appears in the sculpture of 
 Buddhist shrines of the Mauryan 
 period, 117 ; the personality of, 
 forbidden to be worshipped, 117; 
 
 the attributes of divinity popu- 
 larly ascribed to, 132, 134 ; images 
 of, not allowed to be worshipped, 
 132-133 ; worshipped as a divinity, 
 133 ; sculptured images of, began 
 to be carved, under the influence 
 of Hellenic tradition, 133 ; the 
 divinity of, accepted by the Ma- 
 hayanist school, 138 ; regarded as 
 Vishnu, a cosmic principle, 145 ; 
 displaced by Krishna as a popular 
 hero, 155 ; worshipped as an in- 
 carnation of Vishnu, 184 ; said to 
 have lived at Nalanda, 199 ; estab- 
 lished the I^aw on the tradition of 
 the Indo- Aryan village community, 
 209 ; forbade imaginative draw- 
 ings of men and women, 210 n.; 
 may have been a Saiva devotee, 
 268 ; Chaitanya' s success as a 
 teacher during his lifetime compar- 
 able to the Buddha's, 417 ; was 
 probably worshipped as the Deity, 
 418 ; mentioned, 26 n., 62, 107, 
 119, 172, 203, 205, 326, 414. See 
 also Buddhism and Sangha 
 Buddhism : more a social than a 
 religious revolution, 50 ; its unify- 
 ing effect upon India, 55-56 ; 
 Asoka gave State recognition to, 
 57, 89 ; aifinity between Jainism 
 and, 59 ; progress of, in the first 
 two centuries after the Buddha's 
 death, 89-90 ; Asoka converted to, 
 91-92 ; Asoka's zeal for the propa- 
 gation of, 92, 93, 95, 97-98 ; Ceylon 
 converted to, 95-96 ; essentially a 
 democratic movement, 99 ; the 
 influence of Brahmanical thought 
 upon, 99 ; the results of Asoka's 
 propaganda of, 101-102, 107 ; the 
 Trinity of, 109, 136-137 ; the 
 stupa part of the symbolism of, 
 no; why Buddhist art appro- 
 priated both sikhara and stupa as 
 symbols, 113-114; the tolerance of 
 Buddhistic teaching, 118 ; the con- 
 flict between and interaction of 
 Brahmanism and Buddhism, 121- 
 123 ; Pushyamitra said to have 
 been antagonistic to, 121, 123 ; 
 spread over Western Asia, 125; 
 the first Turki invaders of India 
 had probably been converted to 
 Buddhism, 125-126 ; the organi- 
 sation of tbe Buddhist Churci 
 
 548. 
 
INDEX 
 
 based on the tradition of the vil- 
 lage community, 126; the effect 
 of, on Asia and on India, 126 ; 
 Amaravati one of the seats of Bud- 
 dhist learning in the South, 130 ; 
 had much influence in the South, 
 131 ; its increased following and 
 its changed character in the first 
 century B.C., 131-132 ; the parent 
 stem for many different schools of 
 thought, 132 ; did not permit an 
 image of the Supreme Deity to 
 be worshipped, 132 ; and the 
 doctrine of Yoga, 134 ; and the 
 dogma of reincarnation, 134-135 ; 
 and the doctrine of the One in 
 Many, 135-138 ; the encroach- 
 ment of Brahmanical symbolism 
 in, 136-137 ; the formation of the 
 Mahayana and Hinayana schools, 
 137-138 ; the Kushan Empire a 
 centre of Buddhist culture, 138 ; 
 development of Buddhist propa- 
 ganda in China and the influence 
 of Buddhist idealism upon Chris- 
 tianity, 139; Kanishka and, 142- 
 143 ; lost its predominance to 
 Brahmanism, 148-149, 155-157 ; 
 adopted the Vedic deities, 148 ; 
 the impress of Buddhist ethics 
 upon Brahmanical laws, 160 ; Fa- 
 Hien's observations on the condi- 
 tions of, 166-170 ; its evolution 
 and disintegration, 170 ; Buddhist 
 monasteries and shrines devastated 
 by Huns, 176 ; the mutual toler- 
 ance of Buddhism, Brahmanism, 
 and Jainism, 185 ; the Law of the 
 Sangha an adjustment rather than 
 a revolution in Aryan thought, 190 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang on, 196 ; the spiritual 
 impulse of, felt throughout Asia, 
 209 ; the western extension of, 210; 
 the relation of Saivism and Vaish- 
 navism to, 213 ; Sankaracharya's 
 influence upon, 219-220 ; favoured 
 the growth of a vernacular litera- 
 ture, 237 ; few traces of Buddhist 
 architecture in Southern India, 
 244 ; China becomes the seat of 
 the Buddhist patriarchate, 247 ; 
 Harsha's favouritism to, 248-249 ; 
 lost its influence as a popular 
 religion in India, 249 ; the conflict 
 between Brahmanism and, gave 
 Islam its opportunity, 258 ; helped 
 
 to emasculate the manhood of 
 India, and made easier the Mu- 
 hammadan conquest, 259-260 ; 
 favoured by the Pala kings of 
 Bengal, 266, 267 ; flourished in 
 Kashmir, 269 ; the organisation 
 of, broken up hj the storm of the 
 Muhammadan invasions in Hindu- 
 stan, 325 ; the theories of Buddha 
 were given a Vedic interpretation, 
 326 ; the four paths of the Bud- 
 dhist Sangha, 512. See also Buddha 
 and Sangha 
 
 Buddhists : reckoned as heretica in 
 Chandragupta's time, 77, 84 ; said 
 to have been persecuted by Pushya- 
 mitra, 121, 123 
 
 Budhan, reformer, 380 
 
 Building — see Architecture and Crafts- 
 men 
 
 Bukhara, 139 
 
 Buland Darwaza, of the Grand 
 Mosque of Fatehpur, 470, 480 
 
 Bulandshahr, 286 
 
 Bundelkhand, 287, 300 
 
 Burhan Nizam Shah I, Sultan 
 of Ahmadnagar : his opportunist 
 policy, 393 ; his conflict with 
 Bijapiir, 395-397 ; routed by Ibra- 
 him of Bijapur, 396 ; death, 397 ; 
 mentioned, 398 
 
 Burhan Nizam Shah II. Sultan of 
 Ahmadnagar, 527-528 
 
 Burhan, pretender to the throne of 
 Gujerat, 480, 481 
 
 Burial regulations in Pataliputra, 
 78 
 
 Burma : Indian trade with, 145, 236 ; 
 mentioned, 75, 115, 240 
 
 Biitiiga II, Raja, 239 
 
 Buxar : Babur defeats the Afghans 
 near, 425 ; Sher Shah defeats 
 Humayun near, 432, 433 
 
 Cabrai,, Pedro Alvarez, Portuguese 
 navigator : in India, 345 
 
 ^adi-i- J ahan, or Law Officer, the 
 office of, 507 
 
 9ahib-i-Zaman, spiritual head of Is- 
 lam, 512 
 
 Calendar: Akbar institutes changes 
 in, 514 
 
 CaUcut: the Portuguese at, 344- 
 
 345 
 Cankxina, Lalitaditya's minister, 271 
 Canpaka, Harsha's minister, 268 
 
 549 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Canton, China : made the seat of the 
 
 Buddhist patriarchate, 247 
 Caste : not a hindrance to progress in 
 the Indo-Ar^j-an social system at 
 its best, 6 ; origin of, 17 ; caste 
 distinctions clearly defined in the 
 laws of Mann, 159 ; the admit- 
 tance of descendants of foreigners 
 within the Aryan pale made the 
 caste system stricter, 177 ; caste 
 distinctions ignored in Sankara- 
 charya's monastic order, 220 ; the 
 Sukrd-nitisdra on, 222 ; the merit 
 of the caste system, 260 ; the 
 effect of the political creed of 
 Islam upon the system, 405-406 ; 
 the village schools open only to 
 members of the four castes, 409 
 Cattle : regulations for the care of, 
 under Chandragupta's government, 
 80 
 ' Celestial Bride, the,' Great Mosque 
 
 at Ghazni, 282, 289, 327 
 Ceylon : converted to Buddhism by 
 Asoka's missions, 95-96 ; practi- 
 cally a part of Aryan India in 
 Samudragupta's time, 153-154 ; 
 Fa-Hien in, 165, 170 ; the last 
 refuge of sectarian Buddhism, 220 ; 
 South Indian trade with, 236 ; 
 South Indian wars with, 236 ; 
 conquered by the Cholas, 240, 241; 
 mentioned, 42, 98, 145, 153, 164 
 Chaitanya : his life and work, 410- 
 419 ; mentioned, 338, 342, 380, 
 420, 511 
 Chaitdnya-charit-amrita, cited, 416, 
 
 417 n., 419 n. 
 Chakra-vartin, supreme ruler : Akbar 
 as, 520-537; mentioned, 260, 266, 
 514 n. 
 Chalukyan dynasty, 188, 212, 218, 
 236, 238, 240, 242, 245 ; the Chalu- 
 kyas of Kalyan, 240 
 Chalukyan Empire, 188, 217 
 ' Chalukyan style,' 245 
 Champanir, Raja of, 343 
 Champanir, fortress, 343, 354, 430 
 Chanakya, Chandragupta Maurya's 
 minister : helps Chandragupta to 
 win the throne of Magadha, 66-67 • 
 the reputed author of the Kautiltya- 
 artha-Sdstra, 67 ; his political 
 policy, 69 ; his part in building up 
 the Magadhan Empire, 86 ; men- 
 tioned, 59, 62, 82, 84, 90, 98 
 
 Chand Bardai, poet, 292 
 
 Chand Bibi, wife of AH 'Adil Shah, 
 401, 528-530; her defence of Ah- 
 madnagar, 529 
 
 Chandalas, low non- Aryan tribes : ex- 
 cluded from the Aryan village, 77 ; 
 mentioned by Fa-Hien, 160, 161 ; 
 social intercourse with, forbidden, 
 
 165 
 
 Chandela dynasty, 265 
 
 Chanderi, fortress, 354, 425 
 
 Chandra, the Moon-god, 41 ; the 
 worship of, a Brahmanical cult, 
 41, 192 ; the cult of, 121 
 
 Chandra-pal, Rajput chieftain, 287 
 
 Chandra-putras, ' sons of Chandra,' 
 41, 121 
 
 Chandra-vamsa, the race of Chandra, 
 41-42 
 
 Chandragupta Maurya : said to have 
 inclined to Jainism, 59, 84 ; the 
 reign of, 66-87 ; family connec- 
 tions, 66 ; relations with Alexander 
 the Great, 66 ; expels Macedonian 
 garrisons from the Panjab and wins 
 the throne of Magadha, 66-67 ; 
 defeats Seleukos, 67 ; consolidates 
 Aryavarta under his rule, 67 ; not 
 a despot, 68, 69, 82 ; his political 
 policy, 69-70 ; details of his 
 government, 70-86 ; his states- 
 manship inspired by Indo-Aryan 
 tradition, 76 ; his Council, 82 ; 
 details of his ordinary life, 84 ; 
 his revenue system, 85-86 ; his 
 army and navy, 86-87 ; death, 87 ; 
 mentioned, 62, 89, 98, 119, 142, 
 151, 160, 184, 190, 228, 426 
 
 Chandragupta Gupta I, Emperor of 
 Magadha, 149-152 
 
 Chandragupta Gupta II (Vikrama- 
 ditya), 158, 164, 171, 172, 186 
 
 Chauhan clan, 292 
 
 Chaupar, a game, 477 
 
 Chenab, river, 64, 371 
 
 Chera dynasty — see Kerala 
 
 Chidambaram : the temple at, 238- 
 
 239, 243 
 Chihil tandn, the forty true repre- 
 sentatives of Muhammad, 515 
 China : students from, came to India, 
 126 ; armies from, advance against 
 India, 142 ; Indian intercourse 
 with, 143, 361 ; Buddhism spread 
 over, 144 ; Buddhism continued to 
 flourish in, after it had been sup- 
 
INDEX 
 
 planted in India, 220 ; enters into 
 India's political affairs, 247 ; be- 
 comes the seat of the Buddhist 
 patriarchate, 247 ; her part in the 
 development of Muslim culture, 
 256 ; Muhammad Tughlak invades, 
 311 ; mentioned, 75, 165, 169, 170, 
 250, 312 
 
 Chinghiz Khan : claimed as ancestor of 
 Timur, 368, 377 ; Babur's mother 
 a descendant of, 420 
 
 Chitor : rallying-point of the Rajputs, 
 263 ; taken by Afghans, 294 ; the 
 palaces and Towers of Victory 
 at, 295 and n., 344 ; besieged 
 and taken by 'Ala-ud-din, 306 ; 
 recovered by the Rajputs, 309 ; 
 taken by Sher Shah, 444 ; be- 
 sieged and taken by Aklaar, 467- 
 469 ; mentioned, 341, 347, 353, 
 429 
 
 Chitrakuta, sacred hill of, 153 
 
 Chola art, 242-246 
 
 Chola dynasty, 43, 129, 236, 238- 
 246, 325, 388 
 
 Chola Empire, 95, 98, 212, 238-241, 
 
 243. 359 
 
 Choul, port, 346 
 
 Christianity : the soil prepared for, 
 by the Buddhist missions, 100; in- 
 fluence of Buddhist idealism upon, 
 139 ; the beginnings of, in India, 
 380 ; Christians recognised by 
 Yusuf 'Adil Shah of Bijapur, 
 389; Akbar's tolerant attitude to, 
 473-474, 495, 498-499 ; mentioned, 
 
 157 
 Chullavagga, cited, 53 n., 210 n. 
 Chunar, fortress, 431, 432, 451 
 Circassians, 385, 387 
 Climate of India : relatively active in 
 
 obliterating traces of civilisation, 
 
 44 
 Cochin : the Portuguese at, 345 
 Coinage : of Kadphises I and II, 142 ; 
 Kanishka's, 143 ; Skandagupta 
 reduces the standard of the gold 
 coinage, 174 ; the gold standard 
 raised by Puragupta, 174 ; Mu- 
 hammad Tughlak' s experiment 
 with the currency, 312-313 
 Colombo Museum, 245 
 Colonisation, early Indian, 145 
 Commerce : with Mesopotamia, 4, 
 337 ; with Asia Minor, 60-61 ; 
 of Southern India, with the North 
 
 and with Europe, 129-130 ; with 
 Burma, 145, 236 ; Marco Polo's 
 observations on Indian commerce, 
 360-361,362; burdens on, relieved 
 by Akbar, 526 
 
 Comorin, Cape, 238 
 
 Conjeveram, or Kanchipura, 153, 237, 
 239 and n., 242, 326, 408 
 
 Co-operative principle, in ancient 
 India, 71, 77, 150, 185-186 
 
 Coromandel coast, 359 
 
 Cosmic Cross, 25, 28, 473 
 
 Cotterill, H. B., cited, 60 
 
 Council, the king's : constitution of, 
 36 ; Chandragupta's Coimcil, 82 ; 
 Manu on, 161 ; the Sukrd-niti- 
 sdra on the constitution and func- 
 tions of, 225 ; and the succession 
 to the throne, 248 ; an essential 
 element in the Indo-Aryan polity, 
 270 
 
 Courts, judicial : in Chandragupta's 
 government, 80-81. See Justice 
 and I/aw 
 
 Craftsmen : the higher ranks of, had 
 a status equal to the Brahmans, 
 19-20, 105 ; craftsmanship did not 
 always hold an inferior status, 76 ; 
 supposed to be under the special 
 protection of the king, 81 ; the 
 Aryan royal craftsmen : their 
 status, the rule forbidding them to 
 work for private gain, their artistic 
 tradition, some works of, 105-107 ; 
 the continuity and vitality of the 
 Indian architectural craft tradi- 
 tion, 116 ; have always been 
 closely associated with religious 
 propaganda, 128, 307 ; Indian 
 craft traditions non-sectarian, 186 ; 
 craftsmen the spoil of plundering 
 expeditions, 236 ; their lives spared 
 in battle, 237, 372 ; Indian crafts- 
 men made to work for Islam, 307 ; 
 many taken by Timiir at the cap- 
 ture of Delhi distributed over 
 Western Asia by him, 376 ; Akbar's 
 interest in the work of his crafts- 
 men, 478 
 
 Crescent, the ensign of Islam, bor- 
 rowed from India, 254 
 
 Cunningham, General Sir A. F. D., 
 
 183 
 Cypress, the symbolism of, 182 
 Cyrene, 95, 98 
 Cyrus the Great, 61, 62 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 DABAIvWARAH, 288 
 
 Daftar-Khana, or Record Of&ce, Ak- 
 bar's, at Fatehpur, 476-477 
 
 Dahir, King of Sind, 250, 251, 252, 
 263 
 
 Dakshina, or reward, of the Brahman 
 priests, 47 
 
 Damaras, feudal landlords, 271, 272 
 
 Damayanti, a heroine of the Maha- 
 bharata, 408 
 
 " Dance of the Seven Virtues, The," 
 201 
 
 Daniyal, Sultan, son of Akbar : his 
 intemperance, 476, 534 ; besieges 
 and takes Ahmadnagar, 530 ; be- 
 trothed to a daughter of Ibrahim 
 of Bijapiir, 531 ; death, 536; men- 
 tioned, 457, 462, 476, 492 
 
 Dankiila, Raja of, 349 
 
 Dards, tribe, 271 
 
 Darius, 61, 62, 68 
 
 Dasaratha, Maury an emperor, 119 
 
 Dasharatha, King, 41 
 
 Dasyus, or Dasas, Indian non-Aryan 
 aborigines, 33, 178, 181 
 
 Daiid Khan, Afghan nder in Bengal, 
 484-486 
 
 Daulat Khan Dodi, Governor of 
 Lahore, 381-382 
 
 Daulatabad, 300, 312, 357, 386, 400, 
 See Deoghur 
 
 Davids, Mrs Rhys, cited, 5inn., ^^n. 
 
 Davids, T. W. Rhys, cited, 104 n. 
 
 Death, the Dord of — see Yama 
 
 Debi, Brahman, instructed Akbar in 
 Hindu lore, 500 
 
 Deimachos, Seleukos' ambassador to 
 India, 87 
 
 Dekhan : said to have been included 
 in the Maxiryan Umpire by Bindu- 
 sara, 87 ; the Aryanisation of, 127- 
 130 ; becomes for a time the 
 stronghold of Indo-Aryan civilisa- 
 tion, 131 ; revival of the power of 
 the states of, 188 ; history of, from 
 the seventh to the eleventh cen- 
 turies, 212-241 ; the rise and 
 progress of Saivism in, 213-220 ; 
 the Indo-Aryan codes of law 
 observed in, 226-227 ; invaded 
 by 'Ala-ud-din, Sultan of Delhi, 
 300-301, 306-307 ; Aryan culture 
 gained an impetus in, as a result 
 of the Muhammadan invasions of 
 Hindustan, 325 ; first Muhamma- 
 dan kingdom in, formed by Hasan 
 
 552 
 
 Gangii, 339 ; Muhammadan archi- 
 tecture in, 340 ; the struggle be- 
 tween Bijapur and Vijayanagar, 385 
 -403 ; the lives of prisoners of war 
 spared in, 387 ; artillery first used 
 in, in the campaign of Bijapiir 
 against Vijayanagar, 387 ; the 
 problem of Musalman statecraft 
 in, had little to do with sectarian 
 differences, 403-405 ; Akbar's con- 
 quest of, 470, 527-531 ; mentioned, 
 153- 154. ^75, 191. 263, 309, 310, 
 333. 334. 339. 35°, 353, 355, 358, 
 482 
 
 Delhi : captured by Afghans, 293 ; 
 capital of the paramount Mxihani- 
 madan state in Northern India, 
 299 ; Muhammad Tughlak's caprice 
 and, 312 ; Timxir marches on, cap- 
 tures, and sacks, 371-377 ; after 
 Timur's invasion, 378-379 ; Babur 
 invited to the throne of, 381 ; 
 Babur advances on, 382 ; entered 
 by Babur after Panipat, 383 ; not 
 adopted by Babur as his capital, 
 423 ; entered by Humayun on his 
 restoration, 448 ; Hiunayun's mau- 
 soleum at, 448-449 ; taken by 
 Hemii, 451 ; recovered by Akbar, 
 452 ; the Afghans make a new 
 attempt on, 459 ; mentioned, 164, 
 263, 290, 292, 294, 298, 304, 305, 
 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 320, 321, 
 350, 447, 454, 461, 465 
 
 Delhi, Old, sacked by Ttmiir, 375 
 
 Delhi Empire, 290-323 ; break-up of, 
 333. 335-358, 367, 446 ; Malwa 
 subject to, 347 
 
 Deodar, the tree, emblem of eternity, 
 III 
 
 Deoghvir, 300, 306, 308, 312. See 
 Daulatabad 
 
 Deva, Raja of Vijayanagar, 387 
 
 Devas, Aryan gods : the Buddha's 
 teaching did not depose, 54, 118 ; 
 their places in the Aryan village 
 system, 135-136 ; mentioned, 4, 
 
 24. 25 
 Devabhiiti, King of Magadha, 124 
 Devaki, mother of Krishna, 173 
 Devi Das, Raja, defended Mirtha, 
 
 463-464 
 Dewal Devi, princess of Gujarat, 
 
 308 
 Dhar, 327, 341, 347 
 Dhara, 264 
 
INDEX 
 
 Dharma, the Truth ot Law : the 
 Buddhist spiritual counterpart of 
 the Aryan common law, 53 ; the 
 Dharma of Buddha proclaimed the 
 law of the land by Asoka, 89 ; set 
 forth in Asoka' s edicts, 91 ; Asoka' s 
 zeal for the proclamation of, 92, 93- 
 94, 95, 97-98 ; in the Trinity of 
 Buddhism, 109, 137 ; the proclama- 
 tion of, symbolised, 117 ; men- 
 tioned, 54 
 
 Dharmapala, King of Bengal, 266, 267 
 
 Dharmasdlas, travellers' rest-houses, 
 167, 348 
 
 Dhritarashtra, father of the Kau- 
 ravas, 40 
 
 Dhwaja-stambhas, or imperial stan- 
 dards: Asoka's, 90-91, 96-97. 105, 
 152, 164, 180 ; Chandragupta II's 
 'Iron Pillar' at Delhi, 164 
 
 Dilawar Shah, Sultan of Malwa, 347 
 
 Dilshad Agha, sister of Yusuf Turk, 
 
 391 
 Din-Ilahi : founded, 512 ; the four 
 degrees of, 512-513 ; its religious 
 purpose, 513-514 ; its success, 517 ; 
 the attitude of the Hindus towards, 
 
 518 ; its political purpose, 518- 
 
 519 ; the reason for its enthu- 
 siastic acceptance by the people, 
 519 ; its far-reaching influence, 
 519 ; a measure of reform, 525- 
 526; despisedby Jahangir, 5I8,527,• 
 mentioned, 339, 418, 480, 536, 537 
 
 Dinesh Chandra Sen, cited, 191 n., 
 337 nn., 338 and n., 408 n., 410 n., 
 411 n., 414 n., 415 n. 
 
 Dinkot, 370 
 
 DiodotUvS, satrap, 119 
 
 Dion Cassius, cited, 139 
 
 Dionysios, ambassador from the 
 Egyptian coiirt to India, 87 
 
 Dipalpiir, 315, 316 
 
 Diu, 346, 430, 480 
 
 Diwaji, Raja of Sind, 211 
 
 Diwan, Finance Minister : TodarMall 
 as, 515 
 
 Diwan-i-am, or Hall of Public Audi- 
 ence : at Fatehpur, 478, 500 
 
 Diwan-i-Khas, or Throne Room: at 
 Agra, 461 ; at Fatehpur, 473, 478, 
 502 
 
 Drama, Indo-Aryan, 158, 192, 264 
 
 Draupadi, wife of the Pandavas, 40 
 
 Dravida: early Aryan intercotirse 
 with, 43 ; hardly any trace to be 
 
 found of the life and culture of the 
 early cities of, 43 ; the Aryanisa- \, 
 tion of, 127-130, 238 ; Aryan 
 civilisation completely superseded 
 the Dravidian, 128-129 ; early 
 commercial relations of, 129-130 ; 
 mentioned, 216. See also India, 
 Southern 
 
 ' Dravidian style,' 246 
 
 Dravidians : the social system of, 9- 
 lO; 11-13 ; matriarchy among, 12, 
 13 ; their civilisation welded to the 
 Aryan, 15, 376 ; made great con- 
 tributions to the common Indo- 
 Aryan intellectual fund, 32 ; con- 
 served Aryan tradition, 227 ; the 
 Aryans won military ascendancy 
 
 W over, by means of their horses, 361 
 
 Drink traffic : regulation of, in Patali- 
 putra, 79 ; condemned by Manu, 
 160 ; liquor and intoxicants for- 
 bidden by the Sultan 'Ala-ud-din, 
 303. See Alcohol 
 
 Drona, Brahman teacher, 39, 263 
 
 Drona-mukha, central fort of a dis- 
 trict, 71 
 
 Duma Lena, temple at EUora, 211 
 
 Durbhanga, 191 n. 
 
 Durga, goddess, 13, 15, 193 
 
 Diirgavati, Rani, of Garrah, 355, 464 
 
 Dushratta, King of the Mitanni, 5, 
 41, 119 
 
 Earth-MothUr, 128 
 
 Fcbatana, 75 
 
 Edicts: Asoka's, described, 90-91 ; 
 Asoka's, cited, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 
 102 ; Firuz Shah's were humani- 
 tarian, 319-320 
 
 Education : oral methods of, in 
 India's Golden Age of culture, 168- 
 169 ; Hiuen-Tsang on, 196-198 ; 
 the village schools^ 409 ; Akbar 
 educated by the traditional oral 
 method, 472 
 
 Egypt: evidence of the presence of 
 Asoka's Buddhist missionaries in, 
 100 ; the sacred lotus of, is really 
 an Indian flower, 106 ; early com- 
 mercial intercourse of Southern 
 India with, 129 ; co-operates with 
 Gujerat against the Portuguese, 
 346; mentioned, 62, 88, 98, 311 
 
 Eightfold Path, the Aryan, Buddha's 
 doctrine : associated with the 
 symbolism of the Aryan village, 
 
 553 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 28 ; the Buddha sets out to preach, 
 49 ; Asoka enters upon, 92 ; 
 Asoka's zeal in pursuing, 102 ; 
 mentioned, 51, 57, 89, 97, 144 
 
 Ekbal Khan, claimant to the throne 
 of Delhi, 378 
 
 Election to the village assemblies, 
 230-233 
 
 Elephant Stables, Vij ay anagar, 406 
 
 Elephanta, temple of : the sculptures 
 of, 184, 185, 329 ; mentioned, 211, 
 246 
 
 Elliot, Sir H. M., cited, 250 n., 251 n., 
 286 w., 287 M., 288 w., 301 n., 302 nn., 
 303 nn., 304 n., 305 nn., 307 n., 
 308 M., 312W., 3137^., 316W., 319WW., 
 322 n., 369 n., 370 n., 373 and nn., 
 375 n., 438 nn., 439 nn., 440 nn., 
 441 n., 443 w., 445 n., 515 w. 
 
 Ellora : the Vishvakarma Chaitya 
 House at, 185-186 ; the Duma 
 Lena at, 211 ; the Kailasa temple 
 at, 219, 245 ; the Indra Sabha and 
 Jagannatha Sabha at, 245 ; men- 
 tioned, 246 
 
 Elphinstone, M., cited, 31 n., 252 n. 
 
 Emanuel I of Portugal : embassies 
 from, to India, 344, 345 
 
 Epic Age, the, 34 
 
 Epigraphy in Southern India, Report 
 on the Progress of, cited, 221 tc. 
 
 Epirus, 95. 98 
 
 Europe: intercourse between India 
 and, supposed to have begun with 
 Alexander's raid, 60 ; early com- 
 mercial intercourse of Southern 
 India with, 129 ; Indian culture 
 spread over, 254-255 
 
 Fa-HiEN, Chinese pilgrim : his obser- 
 vations on Indian life, 160-161, 
 165-170, 184, 194, 196 ; his journey 
 in India, 165-170 ; mentioned, 185, 
 188 
 
 Faizabad, 37 
 
 Faizi, Akbar's counsellor : summoned 
 to court, and wins Akbar's friend- 
 ship, 471 ; Persian Poet lyaureate, 
 473 ; memorial of, at Fatehpur, 
 479 ; signatory to the document 
 declaring Akbar to be the spiritual 
 leader of Islam in India, 496 ; 
 death of, 534 ; mentioned, 472, 
 494. 498, 503. 504, 518 
 
 Famine : regulations relating to, in 
 Chandragupta's system, 81 ; famine 
 
 554 
 
 in Kashmir, recorded by Kalhana, 
 274 ; famine of 1033, 290 ; famine- 
 preventive measures a recognised 
 branch of Hindu traditional polit}'^, 
 305 ; famine in the early years of 
 Akbar's reign, 451 ; mentioned, 
 
 273, 313. 378 
 Faruki dynasty of Khandesh, 356- 
 
 358, 530 
 
 Fatehpur-Sikri : battle near the site 
 
 of, 425 ; Mariam Zamani's palace 
 
 at, 463 ; built by Akbar, and made 
 
 his capital, 470, 473 ; the J ami' 
 
 Masjid at, 463, 470, 471, 480, 492 ; 
 
 the Diwan-i-Khas at, 473, 478, 502 ; 
 
 the Ibadat-Khana at, 474, 496 ; the 
 
 Daftar-Khana at, 476 ; the Diwan- 
 
 i-am at, 478, 500 ; memorials at, 479 ; 
 
 the Buland Darwaza at, 480 ; Akbar 
 
 removes his court from, 509, 520 ; 
 
 the Panch Mahall at, 513 n., 536 ; 
 
 mentioned, 482, 483, 484, 492, 516 
 
 Fath, Abul— see Abul 
 
 Fath Daud, Abul — see Abul 
 
 Fath Khan, son of Firuz Shah, 318, 
 
 320 
 Fathabad, or Futtehabad: built by 
 
 Firuz Shah, 320 
 Fatima, daughter of Muhammad, 331 
 Fazl, Abul — see Abul 
 Ferghana, 425, 426 
 Fergusson, J . : and the Gupta style 
 in architecture, 177-178 ; and the 
 ' Indo- Aryan style,' 178-179 ; his 
 misleading architectural nomencla- 
 ture, 216, 217, 315, 329, 336 ; his 
 ' Chalukyan style,' 245 ; and the 
 ' Pathan ' style, 283, 294-295 ; on 
 the screen of Outb-ud-din's mosque 
 at Delhi, 298 ; on the J ami' Masjid 
 at Ahmadabad and the Jaina 
 temple at Ranpur, 341-342 ; his 
 classification of pre-Muhammadan 
 architecture, 348 n. ; cited, 20, 
 117, 184 n. 
 Ferishta : cited, 281 and n., 282 andn., 
 283 andn.yiSs and n., 28g,2go andn., 
 291, 292, 299 n., 306 «,, 308 n., 309, 
 310 and n., 311 nn., 335, 336 nn., 
 337. 339 n., 344 n., 350 n.. 352, 
 357 >*•« 380 n., 381 and n., 387 and 
 nn., 389 n., 390 and n., 392, 393 «., 
 394 n., 402, 403, 422, 423, 428. 
 448 and n,, 455 n., 467, 469, 482 
 Ferries : regulation of, in ancient 
 India, 74 ; mentioned, 222 
 
INDEX 
 
 Firdausi, Persian poet, 282, 283 
 
 Fire regulations in Pataliputra, 79 
 
 First Cause, 46, 55, 214 
 
 Firuz Shah, Delhi Sultan : his reign, 
 315-323 ; parentage, 315 ; reli- 
 gious principles, 317-318 ; admini- 
 strative and other reforms, 319- 
 322 ; his organisation of slavery, 
 321-322 ; death, 323 ; mentioned, 
 331. 332, 333. 335. 367. 378, 394 
 
 Firuz Shah Bahmani, Sultan of the 
 Dekhan, 387 
 
 Firuzabad : built by Firuz Shah, 320 ; 
 mentioned, 374 
 
 Five Indies, the, 191, 194, 205, 207, 
 216, 267, 521 
 
 Five lingams, the, 239, 245 
 
 Five Peoples, the, 34 
 
 Five Rivers, the land of the, 34, 59 
 
 Five Sdstras, 197 
 
 Francis Xavier, St : in India, 365 
 
 Frederick, Caesar, traveller : in India, 
 402 
 
 Futtehabad, or Fathabad, 320 
 
 Gahawar clan, 292 
 Gama, Vasco da : in India, 344-345 
 Gambling : regulation of, in Patali- 
 putra, 79-80 ; forbidden by the 
 Code of Manu, 160 
 Gandhara : the sculpture of the 
 Gandhara school, 146, 169; invaded 
 by Huns, 173, 176 ; Hiuen-Tsang 
 on, 196 ; mentioned, 133, 141, 
 186 
 Ganesha, god of the Hindu house- 
 hold, 114, 502 
 Ganga, goddess of the Ganges, 41, 
 
 48 
 Ganga Das, Chaitanya s mentor, 411 
 Gangd-putras, ' sons of Ganga,' 41 
 Gangaikonda-Cholapuram, 243 
 Ganges : quinquennial festival at the 
 confluence of the Jumna and, 204 ; 
 mentioned, 34, 75, 97, 151, 193, 
 236, 240, 243, 287, 313, 337, 377, 
 412, 432, 433, 466, 484, 485 
 Gangoly, O. C, cited, 127 n., 246 
 Gangii, Brahman astrologer, 339 
 Garbha-griha, or shrine, 116, 182 
 Garrah, 355, 464 
 
 Gaur. I. The state : subdued by 
 Harsha, 191 ; Buddhism favoured 
 in, 266 ; subject to the Delhi 
 Sultan, 299, 307, 310, 318 ; trade 
 with the west coast, 328 ; breaks 
 
 away from the Delhi Empire, 335 ; 
 history of, under independent 
 Muhammadan rule, 335-336 ; men- 
 tioned, 379. See Bengal. II. The 
 city : its architecture, 336-337 ; 
 a naval port, 337 ; sacked by Sher 
 Khan, 431 ; Humayun at, 432 ; 
 occupied for Akbar, 485, 486 ; 
 mentioned, 299, 327 
 Gautama — see Buddha 
 Gaya — see Bodh-Gaya 
 Gayatri, mystic formula initiating to 
 
 Brahmanhood, 18 
 General Assembly of the Sangha, 53 ; 
 at Kanauj, convoked by Harsha, 
 202-205, 526 
 Geometry an Indo- Aryan invention, 
 
 26 n. 
 Georgians, 385, 387 
 Ghalib Khan, rebel in Malwa, 352 
 Ghats, Western, 131, 339, 345 
 Ghdzt, the title, 452 
 Ghazi Khan of Badakshan, 504 
 Ghazipur district, 173 
 Ghaznevide dynasty, 239 ; fall of, 
 
 290 
 Ghazni : the Great Mosque of, 282- 
 283 ; sacked by Afghans, 291; men- 
 tioned, 280, 289, 294, 423 
 Ghiyas-ud-din I, or Tughlak. Shah, 
 Sultan of Delhi, 291, 309-310, 315- 
 316, 347 
 Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlak II, 367 
 Ghur, 290, 291 
 Ghiiri dynasty of Delhi, 291-294, 347 ; 
 
 of Malwa, 347-350 
 Giles, H., cited, 167 n. 
 Girnar, or Junaghar, 73, 343 
 Goa: the Portuguese at, 345, 365, 
 
 380, 389, 396, 397, 473, 498, 499 
 Godavari, river, 42, 91, 130, 153, 
 
 236 
 Gogunda, battle of, 490 
 Goha, Rajput chieftain, 443 
 Golconda : the diamond-mines of, 
 361 ; Akbar becomes suzerain 
 over, 531 ; mentioned, 393, 396, 
 400 
 Golconda, Jamshid, Shah of, 396 
 Gonanda dynasty, 270 
 Gopala, King of Bengal, 266, 267 
 Gopuram, or temple gateway : the 
 origin of, 24, 180 ; mentioned, 
 
 244 
 Goswamis, Vaishnava order founded 
 by Chaitanya, 419 
 
 555 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Govind Singh, guru, 342 
 
 Govinda, guru, 219 
 
 Gramya-devata, divinity of the vil- 
 lage community, 27 
 
 Great Vehicle — see Mahayana 
 
 ' Great War,' the, 34, 40, 157, 263 
 
 Greece : commercial intercourse be- 
 tween India and, 60-61, 129, 130; 
 Islam and the culture of, 256 
 
 Greeks, the race : the Indo- Aryans 
 closely related to, 4. See Yavanas 
 
 Green, J. R., cited, 7-8, 52 n. 
 
 Grihya-devata, divinity of the house- 
 hold, 27 
 
 Guilds : regulations excluding them 
 from the villages, 70-71 ; had their 
 own courts, 81 ; the members of, 
 recognised no distinction of sect, 
 185-186 ; enjoyed self-government, 
 223 
 
 Giijar Khan, Afghan chieftain, 485 
 
 Gujerat : conquered by Chandragupta 
 II, 164 ; conquered by the Sul- 
 tan 'Aia-ud-din, 306 ; becomes an 
 independent Muhammadan king- 
 dom, 340-341 ; rich in remains of 
 Indo-Aryan civilisation, 343 ; rose 
 to be one of the most powerful of 
 the Musalman kingdoms, 343-344 ; 
 attacks the Portuguese settlers, 
 345-346 ; conquered by Akbar, 
 346, 355, 480-484 ; Marco Polo's 
 observations on customs in, 364- 
 365 ; risings in, against Akbar, 
 509-510, 524 ; mentioned, 191, 
 308, 309, 327, 337, 347, 350, 352, 
 
 354. 356, 358.- 364, 378, 379, 387. 
 429, 430, 431, 434, 435, 454, 461, 
 464, 486, 529 
 
 Gujerati dynasty, 340-346 
 
 Gunas, the three, 136 
 
 Gupta dynasty, 73, 131, 147-178, 
 187, 188, 264 
 
 Gupta Empire, the, 147-178 ; the 
 Gupta era an Aryan revival, 151- 
 152, 178 ; India in Gupta times, 
 159-170 ; the empire attenuated, 
 175, 187, 188 ; literature and art 
 of the Gupta era, 177-186, 242 
 
 Gurdaspur district, 64 
 
 Glirjara clan, 266 
 
 Giiriara, kingdom of, 191, 266, 
 267 
 
 Gwalior : captured by Altamsh, 299 ; 
 mentioned, 358, 459, 482, 530, 
 531 
 
 556 
 
 Gwalior, Raja of, killed at Panipat, 
 
 383 
 Gwalior diamond, the, 427 
 
 HadTa Sultana, sister of Ali 'Adil 
 Shah of Bijapiir, 401 
 
 Hajipur, 484 
 
 Hakim, Mirza, brother of Akbar: 
 rises against Akbar, 466, 509 ; 
 death of, 520 
 
 Halebid: captured by 'Ala-ud-din, 
 307 ; temples at, 330 
 
 Hall, H. R., cited, 41, 62, 129 n,, 
 181 
 
 Hall of the Thousand Columns : sym- 
 bolism of, 244 ; mentioned, 340 
 
 Hamida, wife of Humayiin and 
 mother of Akbar, 433-436 
 
 Plamir Deva, Rajput chieftain : de- 
 fended Rantambhor against 'Ala- 
 ud-din, 306 
 
 Hansi, river, 321 
 
 Hanzi, 290 
 
 Hardwar, 377 
 
 Harishena, poet, 152, 158 
 
 Harivamsa, the, 499 
 
 Harsha, King of Kashmir, 26S, 274 
 
 Harsha-Vardhana of Thaneshar : 
 events leading up to his accession, 
 188-189 ; nominated king, 190 ; 
 a pious Buddhist, and adhered to 
 the Mahayana school, 190, 202 ; 
 supreme ruler in Aryavarta, 191 ; 
 his capital Kanauj, 191 ; his lite- 
 rary and dramatic works, 191-192 ; 
 summons Hiuen-Tsang to his court, 
 201 ; his regard for Hiuen-Tsang, 
 201, 204, 206, 220 ; Hiuen-Tsang 
 on his character and his admini- 
 stration, 201-202 ; his great Bud- 
 dhist Assembly at Kanauj, 202- 
 204, 207, 526 ; his great festival at 
 ' the Place of Alms,' 204—206 ; art 
 during his reign, 211 ; death, 212, 
 247 ; the break-up of his empire 
 and its consequences for India, 247- 
 250, 257, 260 ; sent a mission to 
 China, 247-248 ; mentioned, 196, 
 200, 208, 210, 266, 267, 269, 521, 
 525 
 
 Harshakarita, epic, 192 
 
 Harun - al - Raschid, 254, 255, 279, 
 
 307 
 Hasan, Shiah martyr, 331 
 Hasan Gangii Bahmani, or Brahmani, 
 
 Sultan of Kulbarga, 339 
 
INDEX 
 
 Hashtinapur, 40 
 
 Hegira, the, 208 
 
 Hellenism, India and, 141 . See Greece 
 
 Hemn, aspirant for the throne of 
 Delhi, 446 ; proclaimed sovereign, 
 451 ; defeated by Akbar and put 
 to death, 452 
 
 Heracleitus of Bphesus, 60 
 
 Herat, 67, 290, 375 
 
 Hermitages of the Ajivikas, in the 
 Barabar hills, 91, 106-107 
 
 Herodotus, 62 
 
 Himalaya, deity, 7, 29 
 
 Himalaj^as : the Aryan migration into 
 India chiefly took place through, 
 4 ; the environment of, gave Indo- 
 Aryan thought its special cha- 
 racter, 7 ; the effect of, as a 
 physical barrier, upon the empire 
 of Aryavarta, 258 ; mentioned, 
 286, 525 
 
 Hinayana, or Little Vehicle : its 
 development helped by the art of 
 the craftsmen, 138 ; too austere 
 for an emotional people, 141 ; 
 Southern India became the strong- 
 hold of, 1 41-142, 217 ; the archi- 
 tecture of the school becomes more 
 free, 146 ; flourished in Ceylon, 
 154 ; the members of, lived amic- 
 ably with Mahayanists, 166, 198 ; 
 Hinayana monasteries in Persia, 
 210 ; atisterity of, appealed more 
 to the Arabs than the exuberant 
 symbolism of the Mahayana school, 
 210 ; the cleavage between the 
 Hinayana and Mahayana parties 
 in the Sangha, 214 ; the new 
 Saiva party grew out of the 
 school, 214, 216 ; Sankaracharya's 
 blow to the prestige of, 220 ; 
 kept its hold on the South, 325 ; 
 mentioned, 167, 190, 192, 198, 
 202 
 
 Hindal, Mirza, brother of Humayun, 
 432, 433, 447 
 
 Hindu Kush, 250, 370 
 
 Hinduism : the two main groups of 
 modern, 29, 42, 148 ; absorbed the 
 Dravidian pantheon, 128 ; Bud- 
 hism merged in, 148, 170 ; a syn- 
 thesis of Indian religious thought, 
 157 ; the varying relation of Bud- 
 dhism to, 170 ; Islam spiritually 
 at one with, 210 ; protected by 
 Firuz Shah, 317 ; the purging in- 
 
 fluence of Islam upon, 324-325. 
 489 ; the results of the impact of 
 Islam upon, 326-331 ; the struggle 
 between Islam and, had a political 
 and sociological rather than a 
 religious basis, 403-406 ; the ritual 
 of the DIn-Ilahi borrowed from, 
 518 
 
 Hindus : in the Muhammadan army 
 of Gaur, 336 ; persecuted by 
 Sikandar Lodi, 380 ; Akbar's con- 
 siderate treatment of, 515-516 ; 
 their attitude to the Din-Ilahi, 518 ; 
 their social and political position 
 under Akbar, 525 
 
 Hindiistan : — the Aryavarta of the 
 Mahabharata, 152 ; Babur's de- 
 scription of, 421-422, 424 
 
 Hissar, river, 321 
 
 Hissar Firuza, 320 
 
 Hiuen-Tsang, Chinese pilgrim : his 
 account of his visit to India, 192- 
 207 ; Harsha's esteem for, 201, 
 204, 206, 220 ; on Harsha's cha- 
 racter and his rule, 201-202 ; at 
 Harsha's great Assembly at Kan- 
 auj, 203-204 ; at the festival at 
 ' the Place of Alms,' 204-206 ; on 
 the civilisation of the South, 237 ; 
 mentioned, 144, 188, 190, 191, 
 192, 210, 212, 219, 220, 247-248, 
 269 
 
 Horse : the important part played 
 by, in Indian political history, 361- 
 362 ; the demand for horses made 
 a ground for legalising piracy, 363 ; 
 part of the cargo of every ship 
 coming from the West, 364 
 
 Horse sacrifice: Pushy amitra's 120- 
 121, 122, 124 ; Samudragupta's, 
 153 ; mentioned, 150 
 
 ' Horseshoe ' window, in Asokan 
 architecture, 114 ; the ' horseshoe ' 
 arch in Muslim architecture de- 
 veloped from, 254 
 
 Houses, the early Indo-Aryan, built 
 of wood, 1 1 5-1 16 
 
 Hoysala Ballala dynasty, 307 
 
 Hughli, river, 485 
 
 Humayiin: with Babur at Panipat, 
 383 ; given a peshkesh by the royal 
 family of Gwalior, 384 ; Babur's 
 sacrifice for, 426-427 ; character, 
 428, 448-449 ; his struggle for his 
 throne, 429-436 ; defeated by Sher 
 Khan at Buxar and at Kanauj, 
 
 557 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 432-433 ; a refugee, 433-436, 445, 
 447 ; regains his throne, 447-448 ; 
 death, 448 ; his mausoleum at 
 Delhi, 449 ; mentioned, 354, 450, 
 451. 455, 458, 459, 484, 485. 
 536 
 
 Huns, in India, 173-177, 193 
 
 Hunting: forbidden by the Code of 
 Manu, 160 ; Akbar and, 479 
 
 Husain Shah, Sultan of Jaunpur, 
 337-338, 379, 380, 410, 459, 520, 
 521 
 
 Husain Arghiin, Sultan of Sind, 435, 
 
 436 
 Husain Nizam Shah, Sultan of 
 
 Ahmadnagar, 398, 399-402, 403 
 Husain, Shiah martyr, 331 
 Hushang Ghiiri, Sultan of Malwa, 
 
 341, 347. 348-350 
 Hushangabad, 350 
 Hushkapura, 144 
 Huvishka, Kushan emperor, 144, 
 
 269 
 Hydaspes, river, 64. See Jhilam 
 Hydraotes, river, 64. See Ravi 
 Hyphasis, river, 64, 66. See Bias 
 
 Ibadat-Khana, or Debating Hall, 
 Akbar' s, 474, 496, 500, 503, 511 
 
 Ibn Batuta, traveller, 312 
 
 Ibrahim 'Adil Shah I, Sultan of 
 Bijapiir, 394-398, 399 
 
 Ibrahim 'Adil Shah II of Bijapur, 
 390, 392, 528, 531 
 
 Ibrahim I,odi, Sultan of Delhi, 381- 
 383, 384, 429, 430 ; defeated by 
 Babur at Panipat, 382-383 
 
 Ibrahim Nizam Shah, Sultan of 
 Ahmadnagar, 528 
 
 Ibrahim Qutb Shah, Sultan of Gol- 
 conda, 396, 400, 401 
 
 Ibrahim Shah Sharki, Sultan of 
 Jaunpur, 350, 378 
 
 Ibrahim Husain, Mirza, rebel leader, 
 481-482 
 
 Idar, 341 
 
 Ideals of Indian Art, cited, 245 n. 
 
 Images : the worship of, rejected by 
 Ar5'an religious symbolism, 117 ; 
 the use of, in architecture, aban- 
 doned by Hindu craftsmen, 342- 
 343 ; Marco Polo on Indian image- 
 worship, 364 
 
 India : the history of, as distinguished 
 from that of Aryavarta, begins with 
 Asoka's reign, 89 ; the influence of 
 
 Asoka's Buddhist propaganda in, 
 100 ; the influence of Buddhism 
 on, 126 ; origin of the name, 192 ; 
 at the pinnacle of her greatness at 
 the time of the Arab invasion, 253 ; 
 her spiritual quest the source of 
 her greatness and her weakness, 
 258 ; her intellectual empire re- 
 tained, 408 
 
 India, Central : under suzerainty of 
 the Huns, 175 
 
 India, Northern : the beginning of the 
 influence of the South in, 127 ; 
 under the Kushan power, 139 ; the 
 influence of the Hun and other 
 barbarian invasions upon, 176 ; 
 the sikhara in, 179, 217 ; temple 
 architecture of, 216-217 ; the 
 Muhammadan conquest of, 299 et 
 seq. ; mentioned, 168, 191 
 
 India, North-western : the renowned 
 universities of, 255 
 
 India, Southern : Asoka sends mis- 
 sions to, 95 ; the Aryanisation of, 
 127 et seq. ; stronghold of Hina- 
 yana Buddhism, 141-142 ; the last 
 stronghold of Aryan India against 
 Islam, 142 ; history of, from the 
 seventh to the eleventh centuries, 
 212-241 ; the rise and progress of 
 Saivism in, 213-220 ; temple archi- 
 tecture of, 216-217 ; the Indo- 
 Aryan codes of law observed in, 
 226-227 ; art in, from the seventh 
 to the eleventh centuries, 242-246 ; 
 indifferent to the Muhammadan 
 conquest of Northern India, 300 ; 
 invaded by the Sultan 'Ala-ud- 
 din, 307 ; Aryan culture gained an 
 impetus in, as a result of the 
 Muhammadan invasions of Hindu- 
 stan, 325 ; Marco Polo's observa- 
 tions in, 359-363 ; mentioned, 154, 
 191, 196, 212. See also Dekhan 
 and Dravida 
 
 India, Western, 164, 245, 257 
 
 Indian Architecture, cited, 297 «., 
 406 n. 
 
 ' Indo-Aryan style/ 178-179 
 
 Indra, the Thunder-god : the southern 
 gate in the Aryan village dedicated 
 to, 27 ; attributes of, 28 ; gate 
 dedicated to, in Pataliputra, 77 ; 
 the holy mount of , 1 1 1 ; supplanted 
 by Vishuti-Surya as the patron 
 deity of Aryan royalty, 112 ; an 
 
INDEX 
 
 invocation to, to facilitate the 
 removal of a house, 115 ; men- 
 tioned, 4, 193 
 
 Indra III, Rashtrakuta king, 266 
 
 Indra Sabha, at Ellora, 245 
 
 Indraprastha, 40, 263 
 
 Indrayudha, King of Kanauj, 267 
 
 Indu, a name of Aryavarta, 34 
 
 Indus, the, 4, 38, 63, 64, 65, 67, 123, 
 124, 125, 142, 154, 250, 271, 285, 
 370. 382 
 
 Inquisition, instituted by the Jesuits 
 at Goa, 380 
 
 Iron Pillar, at Delhi, 164 
 
 Irrigation : regard paid to, in ancient 
 India, 73 ; great irrigation works 
 in Rajputana in the pre-Muham- 
 madan period, 265 ; Lalitaditya's 
 work, 271 ; Suyya's irrigation 
 works in Kashmir, 273-274 ; Firuz 
 Shah's great canal, 321 
 
 Ishta-devata, the divinity of the self, 
 27, 41 
 
 Ishvara, the Supreme Deity : the 
 Three Aspects of, 136 ; mentioned, 
 
 239. 307- 327 
 Ishvara Purl, Chaitanya's guru, 414 
 Islam : the soil prepared for, by the 
 Buddhist missions, 100 ; its socio- 
 logical programme the real reason 
 for its progress in India, 209 ; 
 spiritually at one with Hinduism, 
 210 ; India its adopted home- 
 land, 242, 256 ; early proselytis- 
 ing methods in India, 251 ; the 
 Arab conquest of Sind profoundly 
 affected Islamic culture, 252-253 ; 
 the crescent, the ensign of, bor- 
 rowed from India, 254 ; absorbed 
 Indo-Aryan culture, and was the 
 medium for its distribution through 
 Europe, 254-255 ; the reasons for 
 its success in India, 257-258 ; the 
 history of, in its first centuries, 
 279-280 ; Mahmud of Ghazni's 
 victories helped the progress of, 
 289 ; the progress of, in India, 
 arrested, 290 ; its followers not 
 concerned with the arts of peace, 
 296 ; its primitive doctrine ex- 
 panded by the working upon it of 
 Indian religious thought, 307- 
 308 ; Hindu polity contrasted with 
 that of Islam, 322-323 ; the purg- 
 ing influence of Islam upon Hindu- 
 ism, 324-325, 489 ; the results of 
 
 the impact of Islam upon Hindu- 
 ism, 326-331 ; did not alter Indian 
 aesthetic principles,but gave Indian 
 art a new impulse, 329-330 ; Islam 
 in India spiritually and intellectu- 
 ally isolated from the rest of the 
 Muhammadan world, 330-331 ; the 
 Sunni and Shiah sects of, 331-334 ; 
 the struggle between Islam and 
 Hinduism had a sociological and 
 political rather than a religious 
 basis, 403-406 ; racial prejudices 
 rather than sectarian differences 
 produced the conflicts between the 
 Musaknan rulers, 403-404, 405 ; 
 Islam an individualistic cult, and 
 effect of this on the political 
 system, 404-406, 429, 445 ; the 
 effect of the political creed of 
 Islam upon Indian social life, 405- 
 406 ; did not alter the course of 
 life in the villages or spiritually 
 affect the bulk of the Indian 
 population, 407-409 ; the soul of 
 India and her intellectual empire 
 preserved against the Islamic in- 
 vasion, 408 ; the position of Islam 
 among the world-religions due to 
 its adoption of Indo-Aryan culture, 
 489 ; Akbar's faithful adherence 
 to, 492-493, 494-495 ; Akbar 
 assumes the leadership of Islam in 
 India, 503-506 ; Islam refused to 
 recognise the Aryan land system, 
 507 ; the Dln-Ilahi, 511-519; Ak- 
 bar's great work for, 537 
 Islam Shah — see Sallm Shah 
 Ismail Shah of Persia: sends an 
 
 embassy to Ahmadabad, 344 
 Ismail Shah, Sultan of Berar, 
 
 395 
 Ismail' Adil Shah I, Sultan of Bijapiir, 
 
 390-394, 399 
 Ismail Nizam Shah, Sultan of Ah- 
 
 madnagar, 528 
 Itimad Khan, chief eunuch at Akbar's 
 
 court, 479 
 Itimad Khan, minister at the court 
 
 of Gujerat, 480-481 
 Ittila, Brahman, cursed Jayapida, 
 
 272 
 
 Jadunaxh Sarkar, cited, 411 n., 
 415 n., 416 n., 417 n., 419 n. 
 
 Jagannath Mishra, father of Chai- 
 tanya, 410, 411 
 
 55Q 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Jagannath temple at Purl, 417 
 
 Jagannatha Sabha, at EUora, 245 
 
 Jagirs, or tuyiil lands, 506-507 
 
 Jahan Husain Quli, Khan, 483-484, 
 486 
 
 Jahangir : despised the Dln-Ilahi, 
 518, 527 ; mentioned, 463 and n., 
 ^'Z'Z. See Salim, Prince 
 
 Jai Mall, Raja,. 463-464, 468 
 
 Jaichand, Raja of Kanauj, 292 and 
 n., 293 
 
 Jaidev, religious teacher, 342 
 
 Jainlsm, 58-59 ; affinity of, with 
 Buddhism, 59 ; essentially a demo- 
 cratic movement, 99 ; favoured by 
 Asoka, 99 ; the stupa part of the 
 symbolism of, no, in ; had much 
 influence in the South, 131 ; not 
 hindered by the Guptas, 156 ; the 
 mutual tolerance of Jainism, Brah- 
 manism, and Buddhism, 185 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang's reference to, 196 ; 
 Jain temples in Southern India, 
 244-245 ; defeated by Sankara- 
 charya in the South, 325 ; men- 
 tioned, 148, 237 
 
 Jains, or Nigranthas, 58, 91, 130 ; 
 Marco Polo's observations on the 
 Jains of Gujerat, 365 
 
 Jaipal, Raja of IvahorC; 281, 284 
 
 Jajnagar, 348, 350 
 
 Jaial Khan, son of Sher Shah: 
 succeeds as Salim Shah, 445 
 
 Jalal Khan Lodi, brother of Sultan 
 Ibrahim I,odi, 381 
 
 Jalal-ud-din, Stiltan of Delhi, 300- 
 301 
 
 Jalal-ud-din, Sultan of Gaur, 335- 
 
 336 
 Jalala, Afghan leader, 524 
 Jalauka, ruler of Kashmir, 268 
 Jalwara, 358 
 J ambukeshvaram temple, Trichino- 
 
 poly, 239 n. 
 J ami' Masjid : at Ghazni, 282-283 ; 
 
 at Jaunpur, 337 ; at Ahmadabad, 
 
 341-342 ; at Mandu, 348 ; at 
 
 Fatehpur-Sikri, 463, ^170, 471, 480, 
 
 492 
 Japan: Buddhism in, 210, 220 
 Jaroka window in the palace at 
 
 Fatehpur, 516 
 Jarrett, H. S., cited, 472 n., 476 n., 
 
 493 nn., 494, 495 n., 502 n., 519 n. 
 Jatakas, 'birth stories' of the 
 
 Buddha, 107, 135 
 
 560 
 
 Jats, tribe, 32, 251 
 
 Jauhdr, holocaust of Rajput women, 
 
 372, 464 
 
 J aunpur : founded by Firuz Shah, and 
 famous as a seat of learning, 320 ; 
 a centre of Muhammadan culture 
 under the Sharki dynasty, 337, 
 339 ; the J ami' Masjid and other 
 architecture at, 337 ; conquered 
 by Sultan Behlol Lodi of Delhi, 
 379; mentioned, 350, 378, 381,431, 
 432, 459, 460, 484, 509 
 
 Java: Indian intercourse with, 145 ; 
 Fa-Hien in, 170 
 
 Jaxartes, river, 125 
 
 Jaya Chandel, Rajput chieftain, 
 
 443 
 
 Jaya siambha — see Towers of Vic- 
 tory 
 
 Jayapida, King of Kashmir, 272 
 
 Jesuits: set up an Inquisition at 
 Goa, 380 ; Akbar's tolerance to, 
 473-474, 495 ; on Akbar's re- 
 ligious belief, 495, 499 ; at Akbar's 
 court, 498-499, 501 ; mentioned, 
 536 
 
 Jhalawar, 341 
 
 Jhilam, river, 64, 370, 442 
 
 Jinas, in Mahavira's system, 58- 
 
 59 
 
 Jitmal, ruler of Bengal under the 
 name of Jalal-ud-din, 335-336 
 
 Jiva, the, in Mahavira's system, 58 
 
 Jizya, or poll-tax : reimposed on 
 Brahmans by Firuz Shah, 317 ; 
 abolished by Akbar, 465 ; men-^ 
 tioned, 251, 296, 322, 507 
 
 Jndna-marga, the way of knowledge : 
 a philosophical ideal, 108 ; the 
 basis of Saiva philosophy, 113 ; 
 mentioned, 136 
 
 Jodh Bai's palace, at Fatehpur, 
 463 n. 
 
 Jodhpur, 434, 482 
 
 Jumna, river: quinquennial festival 
 held at the confluence of the 
 Ganges and, 204 ; mentioned, 97, 
 151, 286, 304, 313, 321, 373, 
 
 374 
 
 Junaghar — see Girnar 
 
 Justice, administration of : under 
 Chandragupta's government, 80- 
 81 ; Asoka and, 94-95 ; reference 
 to, by Fa-Hien, 166 ; the Sukrd- 
 nitisdra on, 226 ; the village 
 gssemblies took part in, 230 
 
INDEX 
 
 Kab!r, Hindu teacher, 342, 380 
 Kabul: in the Asokan Empire, 124; 
 part of the Ghaznevide Umpire, 
 291 ; won by Babur, 381 ; Babur 
 bujried at, 427 ; Humayiin at, 447, 
 448, 450 ; Akbar's enemies in, 466 ; 
 rebels against Akbar, and submits, 
 509, 520; mentioned, 67, 139, 271, 
 281, 370, 377, 382, 423, 426, 433, 
 451, 521, 524 
 Kadaram, 240 
 
 Kadphises I, Kushan emperor, 142 
 Kadphises II, Kushan emperor, 142 
 Kai-Kubad M'uizz-ud-din, Sultan of 
 
 Delhi, 300 
 Kailasa, Mount : Siva's hermitage, 
 
 III ; mentioned, 184, 326 
 Kailasa temple, EHora, 219, 245 
 Kailasanatha temple, Conjeveram, 
 
 243 
 Kalahasti temple. North Arkot, 239 n. 
 Kalamos, sophist, 140 
 Kalanjar, 444, 469 
 Kalhana, historian, 268, 269, 270, 
 
 271, 273, 274, 275, 499 
 Kali age, 45 
 Kahdasa, dramatist, 121, 158, 164, 
 
 177 
 Kahnga: conquered by Asoka, 91, 
 
 123 ; lost by Pushyamitra, 123 ; 
 
 part of the Chola Empire, 240 ; 
 
 mentioned, 120, 153, 170 
 Kaliya, water-demon, 273 
 Kalkin, Vishnu's tenth avatar, 45, 
 
 55 n. 
 KalUan, 397, 400 
 Kalmuks, 385 
 
 Kalugamalai, temple of, 245 
 Kamala-Vardhana, usurper, 274-275 
 Kamarupa : Hiuen-Tsang in, 200 ; 
 
 Muhammad ibn Bakhtiyar at- 
 tempted the conquest of, 299. 
 
 See also Assam 
 Kambodia: Indian intercourse with, 
 
 „ 145 
 Kdmilu-t Tawdnkh, cited, 288 n. 
 Kamran, Mirza, brother of Huma- 
 yun, 432, 433, 435, 436, 447, 450 
 
 ; Kanaka Sabhd of the Chidambaram 
 temple, 238 
 
 1 Kanakasabhai, V., 228 n. 
 
 ! Kanauj : Harsha's capital, 191 ; Har- 
 sha's great Buddhist Assembly at, 
 202—205, 207, 526 ; conquered by 
 Nagabhata, 265-266,267 ; Panchala 
 a name of, 266 ; sacked by Mahmud 
 
 of Ghazni, 266, 287; captured by 
 Afghans, 293, 294; battle of, be- 
 tween Sher Shah and Humayun, 
 433. 435. 437. 445, 44^; mentioned, 
 37, 189, 191 n., 201, 202, 212, 220, 
 248, 264, 292, 327, 337, 378, 438 
 
 Kanchi (Kanchipiira), or Conjeve- 
 ram, 153, 237, 239 and n., 242, 326, 
 408 
 
 Kandahar: taken by Sabuktagin, 
 280; the infant Akbar carried off 
 to, 436 ; taken by Humayiin, 447 ; 
 gained by Akbar, 527 ; mentioned, 
 
 433. 435 
 
 Kanha, or Krishna, Andhra king, 
 130 
 
 Kanheri, the Assembly Hall at, 146 
 
 Kanishka, Kushan emperor : his 
 reign, 142-144 ; Asoka sometimes 
 confused with, 142 ; mentioned, 
 139, 145, 150, 154, 169, 186, 269 
 
 Kans, Raja, 335 
 
 Kanva dynasty, 124, 131 
 
 Kanyakubja, or Kanauj — see Kanauj 
 
 Kapila, sage, 46 
 
 Kapilavastu: the Buddha's birth- 
 place, 46 ; Asoka at, 97 ; desolate, 
 in Pa-Hien's time, 166 
 
 Karan Rai, Raja of Gujerat, 308 
 
 Karikala, Chola king, 236 
 
 Karkota dynasty, 270-272, 274 
 
 Karle, the Chapter-house at, 107, 133 
 
 Karma, doctrine of : in the philosophy 
 of Mahavira, 58 ; the Vedic and 
 Buddhist theories of, 58 ; Manu on, 
 163 ; mentioned, 195 
 
 Karma-marga, way of work : philo- 
 sophical ideal, 108; the sikhara a 
 symbol of, 245; mentioned, 136 
 
 Karnavati, 341. See Ahmadabad 
 
 Karpura-manjuri, drama, 264 
 
 Karra, 300, 301 
 
 Karttikeya, or Senapati, the War- 
 god: the Mangalavithi dedicated 
 to, 24 ; the northern gate in the 
 Aryanvillage dedicated to, 27; gate 
 in Patahputra dedicated to, 77 ; 
 presided over the lunar mansions, 
 27 n. 
 
 Karuvaki, consort of Asoka, 103 
 
 Kashgar, 139 
 
 Kashiprasad Jayaswal, cited, 82 n. 
 
 Kashmir : one of the three areas to 
 which the Aryan race was mostly 
 confined, 32 ; iinder the Kushan 
 power, 139 ; early history of the 
 
 N 561 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 state, 267-275 ; Mahmud of Ghazni 
 invades, 286 ; Timur makes a raid 
 into, 377 ; conquered by Akbar, 
 521, 522 ; mentioned, 143, 144, 
 175, 266 
 
 Kashmir, History of, Kalhana's, 499 
 
 Kasi, Aryan kingdom, 38 
 
 Kassites, an Aryan race : conquered 
 Babylon, 4 
 
 Katch, province : annexed by Akbar^ 
 
 524 
 
 Kathaks, village story-tellers, 155 
 
 Kathiawar, or Surashtra : invaded by 
 Turki nomads, 125 ; conquered by 
 Chandragupta II, 164 ; gains in- 
 dependence, 187 ; annexed by 
 Akbar, 524 ; mentioned, 188, 287 
 
 Kaula Devi, wife of Sultan 'Ala-ud- 
 din, 308 
 
 Kauravas : the struggle between the 
 Pandavas and, 40-41, 263, 292 ; sup- 
 posed to be descendants of Chandra, 
 
 41 
 
 Kautiliya, name of Chanakya : men- 
 tioned, 68-81, 105, 160, 161, 165, 
 227. See Chanakya and Kautiliya- 
 artha-Sastra 
 
 Kautiltya-artha-Sdstra, Hindu code: 
 Chanakya the reputed author of, 
 67 ; what it is, 68, 70 ; upholds the 
 principles of the Aryan constitu- 
 tion, 68 ; on republican govern- 
 ment, 69 ; a just and liberal code, 
 69-70; on the Aryan village, 27, 70- 
 71, 77 ; controlled guilds and simi- 
 lar organisations, 70-71 ; on roads, 
 71-72 ; on water-supply, 72-73 ; on 
 navigation, 75 ; on the planning of 
 the royal city, 76-77 ; on co-opera- 
 tion, 77 ; on drink traffic and gam- 
 bling, 79 ; on the rearing and care 
 of live-stock, 80; on famine pro- 
 tection, 81; cited, 34W., 35«., i6on.; 
 mentioned, 150, 221. 222, 228 
 
 Kaviri, river, 236 
 
 Kaviripaddinam, 236 
 
 Kedarnath, monastery, 220 
 
 Kehrla, 349 
 
 Kenheri, 107 
 
 Kerala, or Chera, dynasty, 43,129, 236 
 
 Keralaputra kingdom, 95, 212 
 
 Keshava Kashmiri, pandit, 413 
 
 Khaibar Pass, 524 
 
 Khajuraho, temple of, 180, 265 
 
 Khalif ate: Muhammad Tughlak recog- 
 nised the temporal supremacy of, 
 
 562 
 
 310-311, 331 ; Muhammadans in 
 India practically independent of, 
 330-331 ; the Sunni and Shiah 
 sects differ with regard to the 
 succession to, 331 
 Khalisa demesne, 262 
 Khan Bab a, or Protector, Bairam 
 
 Khan's title, 450 
 Khan Khanan — see Mun'im Khan 
 Khan Khanan, the office of, 510 
 Khan-i-'Alam, general, 485 
 Khan-i-'Azam — see 'Azam Khan 
 
 Kokah 
 Khandakhddyaka, 255 
 Khandesh : becomes an independent 
 Musalman kingdom, 340 ; early 
 history of, 355-358 ; annexed by 
 Akbar, 358, 530-531 ; mentioned, 
 347. 352, 460 
 Khandesh dynasty, 356, 358 
 Kharavela, King of Kalinga, 131 
 Kharvdtika, central fort of a district, 
 
 71 
 Khattris, Aryan tribe, 32 
 Khilji dynasty of Delhi, 300-309 ; of 
 
 Malwa, 350-354 
 Khizr Khan, son of the Sultan 'Ala- 
 
 ud-dln, 308 
 Khizr Khan, Timur' s viceroy in 
 
 Delhi, 376, 378, 379 
 Khotan, 139 
 
 Khur-lakur, or war-tax, 262 
 Khurasan, 210, 280, 285, 287 
 Khurram, son of Jahangir, 534. See 
 
 Shah Jahan 
 Khusru, eldest son of Jahangir, 534, 
 
 535. 536 
 Khusru Turk, 392. See Asad Khan 
 Kliutba, the, prayer for the sovereign, 
 
 311, 383, 399 ; read by Akbar, 
 
 503-504, 509 
 Khwaja KuUan, one of Babur's 
 
 officers, 423 
 Khwaja Sultan, 508 
 Kika, Rana, of Mewar (Partab 
 
 Singh), 490-491 
 Kingship : the Aryan idea of, 35-37, 
 
 82-83, 512 ; succession to, 90, 189, 
 
 248 ; the Code of Manu on, 161 ; 
 
 the Indo- Aryan king took rank 
 
 as a Kshatriya, 180, 191, 195 ; 
 
 Hiuen-Tsang on, 195 ; the Sukrd- 
 
 nitisdra on, 224 ; the village 
 
 assemblies and the power of the i 
 
 king, 227-229 ; Indian monarchy 
 
 of the pre-Muhammadan period not 
 
INDEX 
 
 a despotism, 235 ; the beneJ&cent 
 Indo-Aryan tradition of kingship, 
 243 ; the kingship under Hindu 
 and under Islamic poHty con- 
 trasted, 322-323 ; Akbar's views 
 on, 502 ; Akbar declares himself 
 spiritual as well as temporal head 
 of his empire, 503-504 ; Islamic 
 theory of the right of the king 
 over the person and property of 
 the subject, 507 ; Hindu eras 
 fixed from the consecration of 
 certain kings, 514 w. 
 Kirat Singh, Raja of Kalanjar, 444 
 Koh-i-Nur, famous diamond, 384 
 Koppam, battle of, 241 
 Kosala, Aryan kingdom, 37 
 Kottam, administrative division, 234 
 Krishna, Universal Lord : guru of 
 the Pandavas, 15, 41 ; aids the 
 Pandavas, 40 ; represented as the 
 guru of the Pandavas and Kau- 
 ravas, 42 ; the national hero of 
 the Aryan revival of the Gupta 
 period, 155, 178; taught by Arjtina, 
 188 ; connected with Eternity, or 
 Narayana, 415 n.; his colour 
 symbol, 415 n.; mentioned, 172, 
 173. 185, 338, 408, 414, 415, 417, 418 
 Krishna, or Kanha, King of the 
 
 Andhra state, 130 
 Krishna-Rajal, Rashtrakiita king, 219 
 Krishna III, Rashtrakiita king, 239 
 Krishna Rai, Raja of Vijayanagar, 
 
 385-387 
 
 Krishna, river, 91, 130, 153, 339, 401 
 
 Krishna-Chaitanya name adopted 
 by Chaitanya, 417 
 
 Krishnasami Aiyar, C. N., cited 
 7.2.0 n. 
 
 Krishnaswami Aiyangar, S., cited, 
 127 n., 234 nn., 237 n. 
 
 Kshatriyas : the Indo-Aryan military 
 caste, 8, 16 ; originally the purest 
 Aryan stock, but gradually lost 
 their precedence to the Brahmans, 
 
 I 17, 39-40 ; their status and duties, 
 20-21 ; penalty upon, for theft, 
 21 ; Kshatriya thinkers generally 
 adhered to the Vaishnava school, 
 31 ; theoretically the Aryan king 
 should be chosen from the class 
 of. 35 ; Vishnu-Siirya their pat- 
 ron deity, 41 ; the Buddha's 
 teaching acceptable to, 51 ; wor- 
 shipped the Buddha as Vishnu- 
 
 Narayana, 109 ; assert their right 
 to govern, vested in the class by 
 Aryan tradition, 151 ; rules govern- 
 ing marriage of, laid down in the 
 Code of Manu, 159 ; kingship a 
 prerogative of the class, 161 ; 
 descendants of Hun and Turki 
 invaders admitted to the caste, 
 176 ; the spiritual leaders of the 
 Aryan tribes, 182 ; not bound 
 to render military service, 195 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang on, 196 ; the Sukrd- 
 nitisdra on the Kshatriya, 222 ; 
 the efficiency of the caste for 
 national defence impaired by Bud- 
 dhism, 260 ; mentioned, 33 
 
 Kulbarga. I. The state : breaks 
 from the Delhi Empire, 339. II. 
 The city : the royal mosque at, 
 340 ; loses its position as capital 
 of the Dekhan, 340 ; becomes part 
 of the Bijapiir possessions, 396 ; 
 mentioned, 393, 395 
 
 Kumal Khan, regent of Bijapur, 390- 
 391, 392, 393 
 
 Kumara, or Bhaskaravarma, King of 
 Kamariipa: Hiuen-Tsang at the 
 court of, 200-201 ; at Harsha's 
 great Assembly at Kanauj, 203 ; 
 takes leave of Hiuen-Tsang, 206 ; 
 mentioned, 196, 249 
 
 Kumara Devi, wife of Chandragupta 
 Gupta I, 149, 151 
 
 Kumaragupta, Gupta emperor, 171- 
 172 
 
 Kumbha, Rana of Chitor, 296 n., 341 
 
 344 
 
 Kunala, son of Asoka, 103 
 
 Kundalavana, monastery, 143 
 
 Kural of Tiruvalluvar, 237 
 
 Kurukshetra, battle of, 40, 188, 263 
 
 Kushan country, 169 
 
 Kushan dynasty, 138-139, 142-145, 
 150, 175 
 
 Kushan Empire : the rise of the 
 Kushan power helped Buddhist 
 propaganda, 131 ; the progress of 
 Mahayana Buddhism identified 
 with the growth of the Kushan 
 political power, 138, 140-141, 142; 
 history of the empire, 138-139, 
 142-145 ; art of the Kushan 
 period, 142-146 
 
 Kushans, or Yueh-chi, Turki nomads : 
 advance towards India, 125, 138; 
 may have received Asoka's Bud- 
 
 563 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 dhist missionaries, 125 ; mentioned, 
 
 149, 176 
 Kushrau II, King of Persia, 213 
 Kusinagara : the Buddha died at, 57, 
 
 117 ; Asoka makes a pilgrimage to, 
 
 97 
 
 Kutayudha -watiare, 173, 226 
 Kuvalayapida, King of Kashmir, 272 
 
 Lahore : becomes Akbar's capital, 
 509, 520 ; mentioned, 290, 291, 
 377. 433. 448- 451. 456, 500, 509 
 
 I/ake Beautiful, the, at Girnar, 73 
 
 Lakhnauti, or Gaur, capital of Gaur, 
 299, 327, 336. See Gaur 
 
 lyakhsman Sen, Raja of Bihar, 294 
 
 Lakshman, half-brother of Rama, 42 
 
 I^akshmi, goddess of the day, 7, 28, 
 114, 130, 184 
 
 Lalitaditya Muktapida, King of 
 Kashmir, 271-272, 273 
 
 Lalitapida, King of Kashmir, 272 
 
 Lalla, courtesan, 275 
 
 Land : communal holding of, in the 
 early Dravidian social system, 12 ; 
 the freeman the holder of, in the 
 Aryan system, 38 ; the land was 
 the people's, according to Aryan 
 tradition, 80 ; the quinquennial 
 redistribiition of the communal 
 lands, 204 ; the lands except royal 
 domains belonged to the village 
 assemblies, 228-229 ; land-tax, 85, 
 234 ; land-holding in the Rajput 
 states, 261-262 ; the Hindu land 
 system prevailed to a great extent 
 in the Musalman kingdom of 
 Gujerat, 343 ; Sher Shah's method 
 of collecting the land revenue, 438- 
 439. 515 ; Akbar's early reforms 
 in the land revenue system, 479, 
 515 ; Todar Mall's land revenue 
 reforms, 487-488 ; Akbar and the 
 administration of the Crown lands, 
 506-508 ; Islam refused to recog- 
 nise the Aryan land sj'stem, 507 
 
 I/anguage : of the countryside, re- 
 mained unchanged through the 
 periods of conquest and foreign rule, 
 408. See also Persian and Sanskrit 
 
 Law : Asoka and the administration 
 of, 94-95. See Justice 
 
 Layard, Sir A. H., cited, 113, 182 
 
 ' Letters of victory,' 413, 415 
 
 Lichchavi clan, 149, 151 
 
 Lilaivati, the, 499 
 
 564 
 
 Lingam, the: Siva's emblem, 217, 
 289 ; the ' five lingams,' 239, 245 
 
 Liquor traffic — see Drink traffic 
 
 Literature : the Kshatriya class con- i 
 tributed largely to sacred Utera- !j 
 ture, 20 ; the Sanskrit renaissance • 
 of the Gupta age : the Bhagavad 
 Gild, the Mahdhhdrata, etc., 154- 
 155. 157-158' 177 ; the classical 
 age of Tamil Hterature, 237 ; the 
 Sangam, a body of critics, 237 ; 
 the centuries immediately preced- 
 ing the Muhammadan conquest 
 were rich in, 264 ; Husain Shah's 
 work for, 337-338 ; Akbar's interest 
 in, 473. 499-500 
 
 Little Vehicle — see Hinayana 
 
 Lodi dynasty, 379-381 
 
 Lohara, fortress, 286 
 
 Lotus : as symbol in Indian art and 
 literature, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 
 180, 184, 326 
 
 Lowe, W. H., cited, 475 n., 491 «., 
 494 nn., 500 n., 501 n., 505 n., 
 512 n., 525 n. 
 
 Lucknow Museum, 153 
 
 Lumbini Garden, traditional scene of 
 the Buddha's birth, 97 
 
 Maabar, province, 359, 360, 361 
 
 MacCrindle, J. W., cited, 140 n. 
 
 Macedonia, 95, 98 
 
 Madhyadesa, or Middle Country, 34, 
 40, 59, 160, 226 
 
 Madras Museum, 245, 246 
 
 Madura : a centre of literary culture 
 in the South, 237 ; captured by 
 'Ala-ud-din, 307 ; mentioned, 218, 
 230, 238 
 
 Magadha, Aryan kingdom, afterwards j 
 called Bihar : known as ' the Land 
 of Monasteries,' loi ; loses its | 
 position as the paramount Indo- 
 Aryan state, 124 ; Fa-Hien on, | 
 165, 169 ; the spiritual centre of 
 Mahayana Buddhism, 169 ; men- 
 tioned, 37, 59, 60, 66, 67, 83, 115, 
 119, 120, 123, 129, 130, 131, 177, 
 199, 249, 266-267. See also Bihar 
 
 Magas, King of Cyrene, 98 
 
 Magi, 62 
 
 Maha-sabha, or Great Assembly, 228, 
 229. See Assemblies 
 
 Mahdbhdrata : the main plot of, 40 ;^ 
 the distinction between the Rdtnd- 
 yana and, 41-42 ; the Rdmdyana 
 
INDEX 
 
 probably older than, as an epic, 
 
 42 ; belongs to Kshatriya litera- 
 ture, 42 ; hardly any trace can be 
 found of the cities mentioned in, 
 
 43 ; the Bhagavad Gtta in, 155 ; 
 its origin, its purpose, and its 
 influence in moulding Indian na- 
 tional character, 157 ; and king- 
 ship, 161 ; translated into Bengali, 
 337 ; familiar to the masses, 338 ; 
 translated into Persian, 499 ; men- 
 tioned, 34, 35, 36 n., 37, 39, 91, 
 121, 128, 152, 159, 177, 178, 185, 
 188, 227 «., 236, 263, 326, 376, 408, 
 459, 500 
 
 Mahadeva, supreme deity, 288 
 Mahakala, the Broad Street in the 
 
 Aryan village, 23, 129 
 Mahakali, temple of, at Ujjain, 299 
 Maham Anaga, Akbar's nurse, 453, 
 
 454, 459, 460, 461 
 Mahanadi, river, 91, 239 
 Mahapadma L/ake, Kashmir, 273 
 Maharashtra, 212, 300, 310, 339, 387, 
 
 388, 404 
 Mahavagga, cited, 54 n. 
 Mahdvibhdshd, the, 143 
 Mahavira, founder of Jainism, 58-59, 
 
 60, 62, 84, 107, 131 
 Mahayana, or the Great Vehicle : 
 formation of the school, its doc- 
 trine and philosophy, 137-138 ; its 
 progress in its first century co- 
 incident with the growth of the 
 Kushan power, 138, 142 ; had 
 a far-reaching effect upon both 
 Eastern and Western religion, 139 ; 
 Nagarjuna, the great exponent of 
 its doctrine, 139, 141, 269 ; spiritu- 
 ally and intellectually Indian, and 
 only superficially related to Hel- 
 lenistic culture, 141 ; a cult for 
 the masses, 141 ; not a non- Aryan 
 crdt, 141 ; China became the seat 
 of the Patriarch of, 144 ; sculp- 
 ture of the Mahayana school, 145- 
 146 ; Aryan hostility to the move- 
 ment, 149 ; helped to reconcile 
 Buddhism and Brahmanism, 156 ; 
 the members of the cult living 
 amicably with followers of the 
 Hinayana, 166, 198 ; Magadha the 
 spiritual centre of, 169 ; a phase 
 of the Vaishnava movement, 184 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang a learned exponent of 
 its doctrine, 192 ; Nalanda the 
 
 Oxford of Mahayana Buddhism, 
 198 ; favoured by Harsha, 202— 
 203 ; sustained in particular the 
 fury of the onslaught of Islam in 
 India, 210 ; the cleavage between 
 the Mahayana and Hinayana 
 parties in the Sangha, 214 ; San- 
 karacharya's attack upon, 219- 
 220 ; in its sectarian aspect, dis- 
 appears from the mainland, 220 ; 
 its intellectual centre removed to 
 Southern China, 408 ; mentioned, 
 167, 190, 325 
 
 Mahdawi movement, 338, 446. See 
 Mahdi 
 
 Mahdi : Shaikh 'Alai poses as, 446, 
 471 ; Akbar imagined to be, 512 ; 
 Raushenai poses as, 521-522; Jalala 
 poses as, 524 ; mentioned 476, 495 
 
 Mahendra, brother of Asoka, 43 ; 
 heads Buddhist missions to South- 
 ern India and Ceylon, 95-96 
 
 Mahendragiri, 187 
 
 Mahendrapala, Raja of Kanauj, 264 
 
 Mahipala, King of Gaur, 240 
 
 MahmudShah Bahmani II of Bijapur, 
 
 385 
 Mahmud Begarah, Sultan of Gujerat, 
 
 343- 344. 346 
 
 Mahmud III, Sultan of Gujerat, 480 
 
 Mahmud of Ghazni : obtains the 
 throne, 281 ; his character, 283- 
 284 ; his raids into India, 284- 
 289 ; plunders the temple of 
 Somnath, 287-289 ; death, 289 ; 
 mentioned, 236, 239, 240, 259, 
 261, 263, 264, 265, 267, 279, 280, 
 290, 293, 307, 317, 327, 343, 367, 
 368, 376, 384, 402, 405 
 
 Mahmud Khilji Shah I, Sultan of 
 Malwa, 344, 350 
 
 Mahmiid Khilji Shah II of Malwa, 
 344, 351-354 
 
 Mahmud Tughlak, Sultan of Delhi, 
 
 367, 370, 373, 374, 378-379 
 Mahmud, son of Sikandar I^odi, 424, 
 
 431 
 Mahrattas, 390, 392, 528 
 Maitreya, the Buddhist Messiah, 193 
 Malabar, 219, 344, 345, 361, 365 
 Maladhar Vasu : translated the 
 
 Bhagavad Gitd into Bengali, 337 
 Mdlatimddhava, drama, 264 
 Mdlavikdgnimifra, drama, 121 
 Maldeo, Maharaja of Marwar, 434, 
 
 443-444 
 
 565 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Malfuzat-i Ttmun, cited, 369 nn,, 
 
 370 n., 373 nn., 375 n. 
 Malik Fakhr-ud-din, quondam Sultan 
 
 of Gaur, 335 
 Malik Iftikar, Governor of Khandesh, 
 
 356, 357 
 Malik Kabul Ulugh Khan, minister, 
 
 304 
 Malik Kafur, general, 306, 307, 308, 
 
 309 
 Malik Nasir Khan, Governor of 
 
 Khandesh, 356-358, 432 
 Mall Bhatti, Rana, 315-316 
 Mallu 'Adil Shah, Stdtan of Bijapur, 
 
 394 
 
 Mallu Khan, general, 374 
 
 Malwa : conquered by Chandragupta 
 II, 164 ; conquered by Huns, 175 ; 
 subdued by Harsha, 191 ; its 
 ancient name Avanti or Ujjain, 
 263 ; a centre of Aryan culture, 
 263 ; under Musalman rvde, 299 ; 
 history, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, 
 and sixteenth centuries, 347-355 ; 
 annexed to Gujerat, 354, 430 ; con- 
 quered by Akbar, 355, 460 ; Hu- 
 mayun's armies in, 430 ; annexed 
 by Sher Shah, 442 ; mentioned, 189, 
 265, 300, 337, 340-341, 343-344. 
 356, 358, 379, 424. 425, 454- See 
 also XJjjain 
 
 Malwa dynasty, 347 
 
 Mamallapuram, the sculptures at, 
 
 217. 243 
 Man Singh, Raja : becomes atta'~hed 
 to Akbar' s service, 462 ; fights for 
 Akbar in the Gujerat campaign, 
 481 ; defeats Partab Singh of 
 Mewar, 490-491 ; refuses to become 
 a member of the Din-Ilahi, 495- 
 496 ; subdues the Afghans, and 
 Orissa, 524 ; premier Hindu prince 
 in Akbar' s army, 524-525 ; opposed 
 to Prince Salim's succession, 534, 
 536 ; joint administrator of the 
 Umpire during Akbar' s last days, 
 536 ; mentioned, 532 
 Manaar, Gulf of, 359 
 Mandalam, or province, 234 
 Mandapam, or temple porch, 117, 
 244, 253 ; changed, under Muham- 
 madan influence, 342 
 Mandu, capital of Malwa, 299, 327, 
 347-349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354- 
 355, 430, 460 
 Mangalavithi, or Path of Blessing 
 
 566 
 
 in the Aryan village, 24, 27 ; sym- 
 bolised in Buddhist doctrine, 51 ; 
 symbolised in temple-planning, 244 
 
 Manikka-vacagar, Saiva revivalist, 
 218 
 
 Mansur, Khalif, 255, 280 
 
 Mansura, city, 285, 289 
 
 Mantra Brahmdna, 231 
 
 Mantram : what it was, and the powers 
 attributed to it, 46-47 ; displaced 
 by Buddhism, 54-55 ; its efficacy 
 lost by incorrect expression, 118 
 
 Mantri, or Foreign Minister, 36 
 
 Manu, the Code of : a Brahman code, 
 39 ; describes the sociology and 
 polity of Aryavarta under the 
 Gupta emperors, 159, 160 ; on 
 caste, 159, 162-163 ; on marriage, 
 159, 163 ; on food and drinking, 
 159-160 ; on hunting and gam- 
 bling, 160 ; on kingship, 161 ; on 
 the king's council, 161 ; on the 
 village system and local administra- 
 tion, 162 ; on taxation, 162 ; on 
 women, 163 ; on transmigration, 
 and humanity's highest aim, 163— 
 164 ; embodies early tradition, but 
 reflects the conditions of the period 
 of its composition, 221 ; quoted, 
 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 37 ; mentioned, 
 47, 222 
 
 Mara, god of evil, 365 
 
 Marco Polo : his observations on 
 Indian life and custom, 359-365, 
 512 
 
 Mariam Zamani, Rajput wife of 
 Akbar, 462, 463, 469-470 
 
 Marriage : among the early Dravi- 
 dians, 11 ; the development of 
 monogamous, 13 ; Manu on, 159, 
 163 ; barbarian intermarriage with 
 the Indo-Aryan stock, and the 
 effect of it, 176-177 ; references to, 
 in the Sukrd-niiisdra, 222, 226 ; 
 rdkshasa marriage, 261 ; Akbar's 
 regulations regarding, 475, 516 ; 
 Akbar and plural marriages, 476 
 
 Martaban, or Matama, 240 
 
 Martand, temple of, 272 
 
 Marwar, 434, 443-444 
 
 Masnad Ali Isa Khan, Governor of 
 Sambhal, 438 
 
 Matama, or Martaban, 240 
 
 Mathura : a seat of Buddhist learn- 
 ing, 126 ; school of Hellenistic 
 sculpture at, 135 ; mentioned by 
 
INDEX 
 
 Fa-Hien, i66 ; Mahmud of Ghazni 
 and the temples of, 282 ; sacked 
 by Mahmud, 286-287 ; Sikandar 
 I(Odi's tyrannous regulations at, 
 380 ; mentioned, 37, 97, 327 
 
 Maulana Nasir-ud-din 'Umar, one of 
 Timiir's counsellors, 373 
 
 Mauxya, the family name of Chandra- 
 gupta, 66 
 
 Maury an art, 1 04-1 18 
 
 Maury an dynasty : Alexander's raid 
 associated with the founding of, 
 60, 63 ; Chandragupta's reign, 67- 
 87 ; Bindusara's reign, 87-88 ; 
 the great prestige of, 88 ; Asoka's 
 reign, 89-103 ; end of, 119 ; men- 
 tioned, 59, 131, 152 
 
 Maury an Empire, the, 66-119; the 
 break-up of, traceable to the spread 
 of Buddhism, loi ; mentioned, 142 
 
 Mausoleums, of the Muhammadan 
 period, 444-445 
 
 Medni Rai, Rajput chieftain, 351- 
 
 354. 424. 425 
 
 Meds, tribe, 251 
 
 Megasthenes, ambassador to Chan- 
 dragupta's court, 67, 69, 71, 75, 
 67, 78, 82, 84, 87, 115, 129, 221, 
 227 
 
 Meghavarna, King of Ceylon, 154 
 
 Mekka : Buddhism probably ex- 
 tended to, 210 ; mentioned, 285, 
 321, 331, 390, 454, 455, 456, 457, 
 470, 492, 496, 508, 515, 518 
 
 Menander, or Mihnda, Indo- Greek 
 king : defeated by Pushyamitra, 
 120, 123, 124, 125 ; a pious Bud- 
 dhist, 125 
 
 Meru, Mount: Vishnu's abode, 7, 
 1 1 1 ; the architectural symbol of, 
 112 
 
 Mesopotamia : early commercial in- 
 tercourse of India with, 4, 337 ; 
 the sikhara probably came from, 
 112; Buddhism in, 210; the 
 intercourse of India with, con- 
 tinued through dynastic changes, 
 256; mentioned, 88, 119, 290, 337 
 
 Metcalfe, Sir Charles, cited, 31 
 
 Mewar : the Ranas of, claim to be 
 descendants of Surya, 182 ; the 
 last stronghold of Indo-Aryan 
 royalty, 525 ; mentioned, 261, 295, 
 343, 469, 490-491, 532, 535 
 
 Mhendri, river, 481 
 
 Midnapiir, 485 
 
 Mihintale, the stiipa at, 96 
 Mlhiragula, Hun chieftain, 175-176, 
 
 187, 269 
 Mihrdh, adapted by Indian builders, 
 
 336 
 Milinda — see Menander 
 Milwat, fortress, 382 
 Minars : adapted from Indian Towers 
 
 of Victory, 254 
 Miriam, wife of Burhan Nizam Shah, 
 
 393. 398 
 Mirtha, fortress : captured for Akbar, 
 
 463-464, 467 
 Mirza, Sultan, 481, 482 
 Mirzas, rise against Akbar, 481-484 
 Mitanni, the kingdom, 4, 5 
 Mitannians, Aryan race, 4, 41, 119 
 Mithila, 191 n. 
 Mitra, deity, 7 
 Miyan Abdulla, Shaikh Mubarak's 
 
 preceptor, 338 
 Mlechchhas, or foreigners, 69, 176, 
 
 177 ; the Sukrd-niiisdra on, 222 
 Mogul dynasty, 420 et seq. ; their just 
 
 rule, 426 ; fall of, with Humayiin, 
 
 432-433 ; restored, 448 
 Mogul Empire, 378 et seq. ; Akbar's 
 
 influence on the fortunes of, 526- 
 
 527 
 
 ' Mogul style ' : essentially an Indo- 
 Aryan product, 376 
 
 Moguls : massacred by the Sultan 
 'Ala-ud-din, 302, 305, 306 ; in- 
 vasions of, repelled by 'Ala-ud- 
 dln, 306 ; bought off by Muham- 
 mad Tughlak, 311 ; invasion of, 
 under Timur, 323, 367-377 ; merce- 
 naries of the Afghan Sultanate of 
 Delhi, 379 ; the comparative intel- 
 lectual poverty of the pure Mogul 
 stock, 420 ; defeated at Buxar and 
 Kanauj by the Afghans under 
 Sher Shah, 432-433 ; mentioned, 
 303. 309, 316, 346, 354, 358, 385, 
 392, 394. See also Mogul dynasty 
 and Mogul Empire 
 
 Mongols — see Moguls 
 
 Monserrate, Father A., Jesuit, 495 n. 
 
 Morgan, M. de, 112 
 
 Mosques : features in the architec- 
 ture of, borrowed from the Indian 
 temple, 254 ; Indian mosques 
 represent an adaptation of Indo- 
 Aryan building tradition, 470 ; 
 some converted to secular uses by 
 Akbar, 517 n. 
 
 567 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Mountain, the holy, as a symbol in 
 
 Aryan art, 109 
 Mubarak, Shaikh, Akbar's coun- 
 sellor : a man of great learning, 
 471, 494 ; interested in the Mah- 
 dawi movement, 471 ; signed the 
 document recognising Akbar as 
 spiritual leader of Islam in India, 
 496, 504, 506 ; in danger of being 
 executed as a heretic, 498, 507 ; 
 leader of the Islamic reform party, 
 503 ; mentioned, 338, 518, 534 
 Mubarik, Sultan of Delhi, 309 
 Miidkal, 386, 392, 393, 397, 401 
 Mughalmari, or Takaroi, battle of, 485 
 Muhammad, the Prophet, 208-210, 
 253, 254. 331-332, 418, 514-515, 517 
 Muhammad 'Adil Shah (Muhammad 
 Khan), Delhi Sultan, 446, 451, 452, 
 
 459 
 
 Muhammad Atgah Khan, Akbar's 
 foster-father : B air am Khan's in- 
 signia conferred upon, 455 ; defeats 
 Bairam, 456; assassinated, 461, 
 484 ; mentioned, 490 
 
 Muhammad Shah Bahmani I, Sultan 
 of the Dekhan, 385-387 
 
 Muhammad ibn Bakhtiyar, 267, 293, 
 299 
 
 Muhammad Ghuri — see Shihab-ud- 
 din 
 
 Muhammad Husain, Mirza, rebel 
 leader, 482-483 
 
 Muhammad ibn Kasim, Arab chief- 
 tain, 250-251, 252, 257, 266 
 
 Muhammad Quli Khan B arias, 
 general, 485 
 
 Muhammad Tughlak, Sultan of Delhi, 
 310-314, 315. 316, 317, 320, 333, 
 
 335, 339 
 
 Muhammad Zaman Mirza, rebel 
 against Humayun, 429 
 
 Muhammadans : their respect for the 
 people of India, 250, 251 ; prin- 
 ciples of their rule, 251 ; effect of 
 the Muhammadan conquest in 
 India, 324-334, 407-409 
 
 Mujahid Shah Bahmani, Sultan of 
 the Dekhan, 387 
 
 Mukdiim-ul-Mulk, mulla, 496, 497- 
 498, 504, 507, 508 
 
 Mukti, or salvation, 155 
 
 Multan: submits to Mahmiid of 
 Ghazni, 285 ; Mahmiid sets out 
 from, against Somnath, 288 ; 
 Shihab-ud-din at, 293 ; besieged 
 
 568 
 
 and taken for Timiir, 370, 371 ; 
 Timiir advances on, 372 ; men- 
 tioned, 250, 289, 377, 378 
 
 Mun'im Khan (Khan Khanan), gene- 
 ral, 484-486, 529, 530 
 
 Miinja, Raja of Malwa, 264 
 
 Mura, mother of Chandragupta, 66 n. 
 
 Murad, Sultan, son of Akbar : birth, 
 470 ; his dissolute character, 476, 
 499 ; death, 499, 530, 534 ; besieges 
 Ahmadnagar, and fails, 529 
 
 Murtezza Nizam Shah, Sultan of 
 Ahmadnagar, 527, 528 
 
 " Music of Ch' in- Wang's Victory," 
 201 
 
 Mutarza, Prince, of Ahmadnagar, 
 401 
 
 Muzaffar Shah, Sultan of Gujerat, 
 340, 341, 347, 348, 351, 353, 354 
 
 Muzaffar Shah III of Gujerat (Nathii 
 Shah), 346, 481, 509-510 
 
 Mysore state, 239, 307 
 
 NadoT, battle of, 510 
 
 Nadu, or district, 234 
 
 Nagabhata, Raja of Kanauj, 265-266 
 
 N Uganda, play by Harsha, 192 
 
 Nagarjuna, 139, 141, 269 
 
 Nagarkot, 290 
 
 Nagaur, 455 
 
 Nakula, one of the Pandavas, 40 
 
 Nala, a hero of the Mahabharata, 
 408 
 
 Nalanda : renowned for its univer- 
 sity, 83, 174 ; Hiuen-Tsang at, 
 193, 198-200, 219 ; Hiuen-Tsang's 
 description of the monastery, 199- 
 200 ; decayed, 408 ; mentioned, 
 202, 219 
 
 Nambudri, Brahman sub-caste, 219 
 
 Nanak, guru, 342 
 
 Nanda dynasty, 59, 66, 67 
 
 Nanking, China, 247 
 
 Narain, supreme deity, 327 
 
 Naram-Sin, King of Babylon: the 
 stele of, 112, 113, 181, 182 
 
 Narasimhavarman, King of Kanchi, 
 212 
 
 Narasinhagupta Baladitya, Gupta 
 emperor, 174-175, 177, 184, 187 
 
 Narayana : collective name for sym- 
 bols of future life and eternity, 31 ; 
 Krishna connected with the con- 
 cept of, 415 n. 
 
 Narbada, river, 123, 191, 300, 347, 
 350 460, 525 
 
INDEX 
 
 Nard, a game, 477 
 
 Nasik : architecture of, 107, 146 ; 
 mentioned, 130 
 
 Nasir Khan — see Malik Nasir Khan 
 
 Nasir-ud-din, Sidtan of Delhi, 367 
 
 Nasrat Shah, claimant to the throne 
 of Delhi, 37S 
 
 Nataraja, Dord of the Dance : Siva 
 represented as, 239, 246 ; the 
 bronze Nataraja of the Tan j ore 
 temple, 329 
 
 Nathu Shah — see Muzaffar Shah III 
 
 Nautch, the, 239 
 
 Navy, Chandragupta's, 87 
 
 Navya Nyaya System, school of 
 logic, 410 
 
 Nearchos, Alexander's admiral, 65 
 
 Nepal, 49, 249 
 
 New Testament, 501 
 
 Nigranthas — see Jains 
 
 Nimai, name of Chaitanya, 411. See 
 Chaitanya 
 
 Nineveh : the sikhara and stiipa seen 
 in sculptures of, 113, 182 
 
 Nirvana : the supreme Aryan truth, 
 51 ; in Jainism, 59 ; the Buddha's 
 attainment of, 97, 112 ; Asoka 
 refers to ' heaven ' as the goal for 
 the pious, instead of, 99 ; the 
 Buddha's attainment of, symbo- 
 lised, 117; in Mahayanist doctrine, 
 138 
 
 Niiisdra of Sukracharya — see Sukrd- 
 nitisdra 
 
 Nityananda, Chaitanya' s chief dis- 
 ciple, 416 
 
 Nivedita, Sister, cited, 158 n., 326, 
 413 n. 
 
 Nizam Shahi dynasty of Ahmad- 
 nagar, 340, 389, 528 
 
 North-west frontier : Akbar subdues, 
 521-524, 527 
 
 Nritya Sabhd, or dancing hall, of the 
 Chidambaram temple, 239 
 
 Nudiah : captured by Afghans, 267, 
 294 ; the university of, survived 
 the Muhammadan conquest, 408 ; 
 a flourishing city and famous as an 
 educational centre, 410 ; Chai- 
 tanya' s birthplace and the scene 
 of his early activities, 410-413, 
 414, 416, 417 
 
 Nudity: Marco Polo's observations 
 on, 359, 364-365 
 
 Nur Jahan, wife of Jahangir, 535 
 
 Nyshapur, 282 
 
 Omar, Khalif, 356 
 
 Ommayad dynasty, 280 
 
 One in Many, the doctrine of : its 
 symbolism, and its developments, 
 135-136 ; mentioned, 209 
 
 ' One without a second,' the theory 
 of, 326 
 
 Oral teaching, 168-169, 197. 472 
 
 Orientation of temples, 114, 136 
 
 Orissa, or Kalinga : submits to 
 Samudragupta, 153 ; one of the 
 ' Five Indies,' 191 n. ; remains 
 independent of the Mogul Empire, 
 485-486 ; brought into subjection 
 to Akbar, 524 ; Prince Salim made 
 governor of, 532 ; mentioned, 348, 
 
 363 
 Oudh, 300. See Agra and Oudh 
 
 Pachisi, a game : played by Akbar, 
 
 477 ^• 
 
 Paez, Francisco, J esuit missionary : his 
 description of Vijayanagar, 402-403 
 
 Pahlavis, tribe, 188 
 
 Painting : in the Gupta era, 184 ; 
 the influence of the Muhammadan 
 conquest upon the traditions of 
 Indian painting, 329-330 ; illustra- 
 tions for the Hindu epics and other 
 literary masterpieces painted at 
 Akbar' s command, 499 
 
 Pala dynasty, 266, 267 
 
 ' Palace of the Gods,' at Bharhut, 116, 
 117 
 
 Pali : superseded Sanskrit as the 
 official literary language, 154 ; 
 mentioned, 141 
 
 Falitana, sacred hill of, 343 
 
 Pallava dynasty, 217, 236, 237, 238, 
 242 
 
 Panch Mahall, at Fatehpur-Sikri, 
 513 n., 536 
 
 Panch-janah, or ' Five Peoples,' 34 
 
 Panchala, the state, 263, 266. See 
 Kanauj 
 
 Panchalas, Aryan tribe, 37 
 
 Panchavdra, or Committee of General 
 Affairs, in the village assembly, 
 231, 233 
 
 Panchayats, or councils of five, 
 Chandragupta's, 87 
 
 Pandavas : taught the use of weapons 
 by Drona, 39 ; the struggle between 
 the Kauravas and, 40, 263, 292 ; 
 reputed to be descendants of 
 Chandra, 41 
 
 569 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Pandit, minister in the Aryan Council, 
 
 36. 225 
 Pandits, or scholars : contests of the, 
 
 412-413 
 Pandu, King, 40 
 Pandya dynasty, 43, 129, 140, 236, 
 
 237. 238, 307 
 Pandya kingdom, 43, 95, 212, 245 
 ' Pandyas, the five,' 43 
 Panipat, battle of, between Babur 
 and the Afghans, 382-383, 384, 
 420, 422, 425, 430 ; between Akbar 
 and Hemu, 452, 459 
 Panjab, the : Aryan immigration 
 into, 5 ; one of the three areas to 
 which the Aryan race was mainly 
 confined, 32 ; Alexander the Great's 
 raid into, 60 ; probably not in- 
 cluded in Pushyamitra's empire, 
 123 ; invaded by Turki nomads, 
 125 ; under the Kushan power, 
 139 ; under suzerainty of the 
 Hxins, 175 ; one of the ' Five 
 Indies,' 191 n. ; under suzerainty 
 of Mahmiid of Ghazni, 289, 291 ; 
 invaded by Moguls, 311; recovered 
 by the Afghans, 379 ; conquered 
 by Babur, 381-382 ; ceded to Sher 
 Shah, 433 ; recovered by Huma- 
 yun, 448 ; won for Akbar by 
 Bairam Khan, 450-452 ; Bairam 
 foments a revolt in, 455-456 ; 
 Mirza Hakim invades, 466, 509 ; 
 the Mirzas' attempt on, 482, 484 ; 
 mentioned, 33, 164, 191, 265, 290, 
 293, 321, 442, 459 
 Paramara dynasty of Malwa, 264 
 Paramdsdyika, mystic figure, 25 
 Parantaka I, Chola king, 230, 238, 
 
 239: 243 
 Parantaka II, Chola king, 239 
 Parasuramesvar, temple of, 211 
 Pari-Nirvdna, or death : of the 
 Buddha, 57, 89, 97, 117; the 
 stupa a symbol of, iii, 117 
 Parishat, agency of government, 93 
 Partab Singh, Rana of Mewar, 490-49 1 
 Parvati, or Uma, the Spring-maiden, 
 
 29, 184 
 Pataliputra : description of, as Chan- 
 dragupta Maurya's capital, 75-77, 
 78-79 ; government of, 77-78 ; built 
 mainly of wood, 78, 115 ; founded 
 by Ajatasatru, 89 ; Asoka's Council 
 of the Sangha at, 96 ; Samudra- 
 gupta changes his capital from, to 
 
 570 
 
 Ajodhya, 153 ; Fa-Hien on, 167- 
 168, 169 ; Hiuen-Tsang on, 196 ; 
 mentioned, 66, 67, 71, 92, 95. 97' 
 119, 124, 130, 131, 137, 149. 177. 
 229, 237, 266 
 
 Patau, 481, 482, 483, 509 
 
 Patanjali, Sanskrit grammarian, 122 ; 
 systematised the doctrine of Yoga, 
 134, 138 
 
 ' Pathan ' style, Fergusson's, 283, 
 294-295, 348 ; ' Pathan ' art is 
 purely Indian, 295-296, 343, 376 _ 
 
 Pathan Sultans, 290-300 ; their 
 quahty as rulers, 297-298 
 
 Paths, the Three, of Indo-Aryan 
 religion, 136 
 
 Patna, 484 
 
 Pattadakal, temple at, 218, 219, 242 
 
 Pearl-fishery: described by Marco 
 Polo, 359, 360 
 
 Pegu, or Prome, ancient kingdom of 
 Burma, 240 
 
 PersepoUs, 75, 106 
 
 Persia : the Aryan intellectual, 
 spiritual, and political elements 
 in, 61-62 ; Alexander the Great's 
 conquest of, naturally led him to 
 India, 63 ; Indian artistic tradition 
 related to Persian, but not im- 
 ported from Persia, 105 ; Bud- 
 dhism in, 210; and Islam, 280; 
 " a province of Aryan India," 328 ; 
 Persian architecture founded on 
 Indian building tradition, 328 ; 
 embassy from, to Gujerat, 344 ; 
 horses imported from, into India, 
 361 ; Humayiin a refugee in, 433- 
 436, 445, 447 ; Akbar recovers 
 Kandahar from, 527 ; mentioned, 
 139, 290, 514 
 
 Persian : the court language of 
 Musalman India, 333, 4S8, 489 ; 
 forbidden as the official language 
 by Ibrahim Shah of Bijapiir, 394; 
 taught in some of tbe village 
 schools, 409 ; the revenue accounts 
 ordered to be kept in, under Akbar, 
 488-4S9 ; Persian translations of 
 the Gospels and of Hindu classics 
 ordered to be made by Akbar, 499 
 
 Peshawar, 139, 293, 448 
 
 Phihppos, one of Alexander's gover- 
 nors, 66 
 
 Philosophy, Indian : the distinctive 
 character of, 3-4 ; coloured by the 
 Himalayan environment, 7; grew 
 
INDEX 
 
 spontaneously on Indian soil, 45 ; 
 its practical value, 56, 128; the 
 basic schools of Indian thought, 
 and their representation in ar- 
 tistic symbolism, 107-118; the 
 great influence exercised by philo- 
 sophers in the Indian state, 207- 
 208 ; the philosophical discussions 
 of Akbar's court, 473, 474-475, 
 492 ; Akbar's study of Hindu 
 philosophy, 500 
 
 Pinda offerings, 414 
 
 Pir Muhammad, grandson of Timur, 
 
 370. 371-372, 377 
 
 Pir Muhammad, tutor to Akbar, 453- 
 .454, 455-456, 460 
 
 Piracy in the Indian seas, 362-364 
 
 ' Place of Alms, the,' Harsha's 
 festival at, 204-206 
 
 Plague : of 1033, 290 ; in the early 
 years of Akbar's reign, 451 
 
 Pliny, cited, 140 
 
 Poll-tax — see Jizya 
 
 Poros, or Purusha, King : opposes 
 Alexander's invasion and is de- 
 feated, 64 ; put to death, 66 
 
 Portuguese : arrive in India and 
 settle at Goa, 344-346, 389 ; their 
 influence on Aryan India, 365 ; 
 set up an Inquisition at Goa, 380; 
 aid Prince AbduUa of Bijapur, 396- 
 397 ; send missions to Akbar's 
 court, 498-499 
 
 Post, letter, established by Babur, 
 426 ; a postal service organised by 
 Sher Shah, 441 
 
 Prabhakara-Vardhana, Raja of Tha- 
 neshar, 188 
 
 Pradakshind, the rite of, 24, 27, 109 
 
 Pradhdna, or President of the Coun- 
 cil, 36, 82, 225 
 
 Prddvivdka, or Chief Justice, 36 
 
 Prahlada, 408 
 
 Prambanam, 145 
 
 Prasad, Rana, of Amarkot, 434, 435 
 
 Pratinidhi, viceroy, or legal m.ember 
 of the Council, 36, 225 
 
 Prithivi-raja, Raja of Delhi : defeats 
 Shihab-ud-din, 291 ; defeated by 
 Shihab-ud-din, and put to death, 
 292-293 ; mentioned, 306, 408 
 
 Priyadarsikd, play by Harsha, 192 
 
 Prome — see Pegu 
 
 Property : development of the idea 
 of individual ownership in, among 
 the early Dravidians, 13 
 
 Provinces: method of organisation 
 
 and administration of, in the Chola 
 
 kingdom, 234 
 Ptolemy Philadelphus : sends an 
 
 embassy to Bindusara's court, 87 ; 
 
 mentioned, 95, 98 
 Pulakesin I, Chalukyan king, 188, 
 
 218 
 Pulakesin II, 191, 211, 212 
 Puragupta, Gupta emperor, 1 74 
 Piiran Mall, Raja of Raisin, 442- 
 
 443 
 
 Puranas, sacred poems : some prob- 
 ably belong to the Gupta period, 
 158 ; familiar to the masses, 338 
 
 Purbiya dynasty of Bengal, 335, 336 
 
 Puri: Chaitanya at, 417, 419 
 
 Purnavarma, Raja of Pataliputra, 
 196 
 
 Purohita, or Royal Chaplain, 36, 39, 
 87, 225 
 
 Purusha, King — see Poros 
 
 Purusha, philosophical concept, 136 
 
 Purushapura, 139, 143. See Pesha- 
 war 
 
 Pushyagupta, governor : formed the 
 Lake Beautiful at Girnar, 73 
 
 Pushyamitra : made Emperor of Ma- 
 gadha, 1 19-120 ; his famous horse- 
 sacrifice, 120-121, 122, 124 ; said 
 to have persecuted the Buddhists, 
 121, 123 ; extent of his empire, 
 123 ; mentioned, 124, 125, 131 
 
 Pushyamitra, hostile confederation, 
 172 
 
 Pythagoras of Samos, 60 
 
 Quran, the : contains no evidence of 
 having been inspired by the psy- 
 chology of Buddhism, 209 ; the 
 law of, supplants Aryan law and 
 custom in the courts, 251 ; the 
 philosophy of, enriched by Indian 
 and Persian scholarship, 280 ; men- 
 tioned, 157, 255, 296, 299, 321, 
 331, 368, 374, 388, 446, 461, 
 475, 493, 496, 497, 498, 501, 504. 
 505 
 
 Qutb Minar, the, at Delhi, 294 
 
 Qutb Shahi dynasty, 393 
 
 Qutb-ud-din : mosque of, at Delhi, 
 164, 298 ; sacked the monasteries 
 of Bihar, 267, 293-294; Sultan at 
 Delhi, 294, 299 ; mentioned, 306 
 
 Qutb-ud-din, Shaikh, 501 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Radhakumud Mookerji, cited, 2:^6n. 
 Rai Lakhsmaniya, Raja of Gaur, 410 
 Rai Singh, Raja of Bikanir, 482, 483 
 Raichor, 392, 393, 397, 401 
 Raisin: massacre of Rajputs at, 442- 
 
 443. 444 
 
 Raiyatwdri revenue system, 10 
 
 Raj, the British, 70, 257, 263 
 
 Rajadhiraja, Chola king, 241 
 
 Rajaditya, Chola king, 239 
 
 Rajagriha, capital of Magadha, 37; 
 General Assembly of the Sangha 
 at, 53 
 
 Rdjapatha, or King's Road, 23, 62, 
 71, 114, 180, 244 
 
 Rajaraja (Rajarajadeva) I, Chola king, 
 229, 234 n., 239-240, 243, 246 
 
 Rajasekhara, dramatist, 264 
 
 Rajasri, Princess, 189, 190, 191, 202, 
 205, 206 
 
 Rdjasiiya, coronation rite, 195 
 
 Rdjatarangini, cited, 269 w., 270 andn., 
 271, 272, 273-274, 275 
 
 Rajendra I, Chola king, 240, 241, 243 
 
 Rajendra III, 241 
 
 Rajputana : one of the three areas 
 to which the Aryan race was mainly 
 confined, 32 ; invaded by Turki 
 nomads, 125 ; maintained Aryan 
 tradition in the period of the 
 Muhammadan invasions, 260-262 ; 
 land-holding in, 261-262 ; rule in, 
 262-263 ; struggle with the Arabs, 
 263, 266 ; literature and art in, 
 264 ; temple-building in, 264-265 ; 
 great irrigation works in, 265 ; 
 history of, in the pre-Muhammadan 
 period, 265-266 ; Akbar's cam- 
 paign in, 463-464, 466-469 ; Akbar 
 sends an expedition to, against the 
 Rajputs of Mewar, 490-491 ; men- 
 tioned, 38, 44, 121, 124, 182, 191, 
 306, 455, 457, 459 
 
 Rajputs : a representative Indo- 
 Aryan type, 32 ; racial prejudice 
 of, and its results, 177 ; their claim 
 to Aryan ancestry, 260-261 ; their 
 culture, religious sense, and loyalty, 
 263 ; helped to build up the Mogul 
 Empire, 294 ; for a time, in power 
 in Malwa, 351-354 ; of Gwalior, 
 make peace with Babur, 383-384 ; 
 massacred by Slier Shah at Raisin, 
 442-443 ; Akbar wins their loyalty 
 462 ; help Akbar in the conquest of 
 Gujerat, 481-482; mentioned, 392 
 
 572 
 
 Rajya-pala, Raja of Kanauj, 287 
 Rajya-Vardhana of Thaneshar, 188- 
 
 189, 196 
 Rdkshasas, or demons, 13 ; the 
 rdkshasa form of marriage, 261 
 
 Ram Deva, Raja of Deoghur, 300- 
 301, 306 
 
 Rama : the story of, in the Rdmd- 
 yana, 42 ; mentioned, 41, 127, 
 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 173, 292, 
 408 
 
 Ramanand, Hindu teacher, 380 
 
 Ramaniija, Vaishnava reformer, 217, 
 325-326, 338, 409 
 
 Rdmdyana : on the status of crafts- 
 men, 19 ; on the royal coimcil, 
 36 ; the distinction between the 
 Mahdbhdrata and, 41-42 ; probably 
 older than the Mahdbhdrata as an 
 epic, 42 ; the first literary record 
 of the passing of the Aryans into 
 Southern India, 42 ; belongs to 
 Kshatriya literature, 42 ; hardly 
 any trace can be found of the 
 cities mentioned in, 43 ; in its 
 present form, probably belongs to 
 the Gupta period, 158 ; familiar to 
 the masses, 338 ; translated into 
 Persian, 499 ; mentioned, 5, 34, 
 37, 105, 121, 127, 376 
 
 Ramesvaram, temple of, 211, 244 
 
 Ramraj, Raja of Vijayanagar: wins 
 his throne, 395 ; allied with Ahmad- 
 nagar, 396, 397 ; allied with Bija- 
 piir, 398, 399-400 ; defeated at 
 Talikota and put to death, 401- 
 402 ; mentioned, 394, 405, 528 
 
 Ranpur, Jaina temple at, 341-342 
 
 Rantambhor : besieged by the Sultan 
 'Ala-ud-din, 306 ; taken by Akbar, 
 469 
 
 Rashtrakiita dynasty, 219, 238, 245, 
 253. 257. 266, 325, 388 
 
 Ratan Singh, Raja of Chitor, 344, 
 
 354 
 Ratha, or war-chariot, symboHsm of, 
 
 181 
 Raths, at Mamallapuram, 243 
 Ratnavah, wife of Raja Pur an Mall, 
 
 442 
 Ratnavah, play by Harsha, 192 
 Raushenai, posed as the Mahdi, 521- 
 
 522 
 Raushenais, tribe, 521-522, 524 
 Ravana, demon king of Ceylon, 42, 
 
 173. 236 
 
INDEX 
 
 Ravi, river, 64, 371 
 
 Razia Begam, Sultana of Delhi, 299 
 
 Red Sea ports. South Indian trade 
 
 with, 236 
 Reincarnation, the dogma of, 134- 
 
 135 
 
 Relic- worship, 150 
 
 Religion, Indian : its distinctive 
 character, 3-4 ; its relation to the 
 ordinary daily life of the Aryan 
 household, 26-27 ; the Saiva and 
 Vaishnava schools and the funda- 
 mental concepts of Hindu religion, 
 29-32 ; popular notions of religion 
 widely severed from the specula- 
 tions of the philosophical schools, 
 31-32 ; Aryan religion already a 
 synthesis of ideas before the advent 
 of the Buddha, 45 ; the true aim 
 of Indo- Aryan religion, 56 ; Asoka's 
 liberal principle, 94 ; Aryan re- 
 ligious symbolism rejected the 
 graven image and materialistic 
 vehicles of thought, 11 7-1 18 ; the 
 popular divinities continued to 
 exist side by side with the Bud- 
 dhistic faith, 118 ; new ideas con- 
 tributed to the Indian religious 
 synthesis as a consequence of the 
 Turki invasions, 126; influence of , 
 upon the practical concerns of 
 life, 128 ; Aryan religion absorbed 
 and preserved by the South, 
 128-129, 227; the anthropomor- 
 phic element in Indo- Aryan religion 
 132; the doctrine of Yoga, 134; 
 the dogma of reincarnation, 134- 
 135 ; the doctrine of the One in 
 Many, 135-136 ; Brahmanism re- 
 sumes its natural position as 
 India's religion, 148 ; Vaishnava 
 propaganda in the Gupta period, 
 178 ; Fergusson on the religion of 
 the pure Aryans, 178-179 ; the 
 sikhara and its connection with 
 Indian religion, 179-180 ; the 
 mutual tolerance of the Buddhist, 
 Brahman, and Jain sects, 185 ; 
 the origin and development of 
 Vaishnavism andSaivism, 213-218 ; 
 religion and pohtics inseparable in 
 Indian history, 215-216, 227, 511; 
 the primitive doctrine of Islam 
 expanded by the working upon 
 it of Indian religious thought, 
 307-308 ; the cult of Satya-Pir, 
 
 338 ; Marco Polo's observations 
 on Indian religious practices, 364- 
 365 ; tendency to an understand- 
 ing between Muhammadan and 
 Hindu in the fifteenth century, 
 379-380 ; Hindus persecuted for 
 their faith by Sikandar I^odi, 380 ; 
 the conflict between Bijapur and 
 Vijayanagar had not a religious 
 basis, 403-404 ; Akbar's attempt 
 to reconcile religious differences, 
 459, 463 ; Akbar and the Din-Ilahi, 
 339, 418, 480, 511-519 ; Akbar's 
 steadfast adherence to Islam, 492- 
 493 > 494-495 ; his religious philo- 
 sophy, 493-494, 495, 501-502 ; his 
 religious discussions, 496-498, 503, 
 511 ; his attitude towards Chris- 
 tianity, 473-474, 495, 498-499; as- 
 serts himself as spiritual leader of 
 Islam in India, 503-506, 511 ; his 
 effort to make the highest religious 
 principles the motive power of 
 State policy, 537 
 Renunciation, the Buddha's, 97, loi, 
 
 117, 206 
 Republics, Indian, 38, 68, 69 
 Rig- Veda, the, 33 
 Rivers : their importance as highways 
 
 in ancient India, 72-73 
 Roads : early, 23, 129-130 ; regula- 
 tion of, in ancient India, 71-72 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang found good roads in 
 India, 193 ; the Sukrd-nitisdra 
 on, 222 ; the great trunk road to 
 the north-west frontier, restored 
 by Babur, 426 ; Sher Shah's care 
 for, 441 
 Rodolfo Aquaviva — see Aquaviva 
 Rohtas, fortress in Bihar, 432, 442 ; 
 
 in the Panjab, 442 
 Rome, I. The state : Indian inter- 
 course with, 139-141, 143. II. The 
 city : Indian products in, 129, 140 
 Rudra Deva, Raja of Warangal, 363 
 Rudra-Sena, King of Kathiawar, 164 
 Rudramana Devi, Queen of Telingana, 
 
 363 
 Rukn-ud-din, Sultan of Delhi, 299 
 Rumi Khan, Turkish officer, 431 
 Riipmati, and Baz Bahadur, 355, 460 
 Ryots : enjoyed prosperity under 
 Firuz Shah, 319 ; Sher Shah's 
 treatment of, 437-438, 439-440, 
 441 ; protected by Akbar, 479, 
 487-488, 489-490, 515 
 
 573 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Sabat, besieging device, 467-468 
 
 Sabha, the Aryan patriarchal assem- 
 bly, 14, 228, 229. See Assemblies 
 
 Sabuktagin, Sultan of Ghazni, 239, 
 280, 281, 284, 285 
 
 Sachau, C. B., cited, 210 n., 243 n., 
 255 n., 256 n. 
 
 Sachiva, or War Minister, 36 
 
 Sacred Books of the East, 54 n., 57 n. 
 
 Sacrifice : development of, 47-48 ; 
 human, 48 ; displaced by Bud- 
 dhism, 54-55 ; the directing and 
 compelling force of the universe, 
 according to Vedic philosophy, 
 58 ; forbidden by Asoka, 92 
 
 Sddhus, seekers after truth and 
 knowledge : praised by Hiuen- 
 Tsang, 197-198 
 
 Safdar Khan, rebel, 391-392 
 
 Saffarid dynasty, 280 
 
 Sahadeva, one of the Pandavas, 40 
 
 SahasI, Raja of Sind, 211 
 
 Sahib Khan, brother of Mahmud II 
 of Malwa, 351-352 
 
 Sahiba, the first three Khalifs, 399 
 
 Sahseram: Sher Shah's mausoleum 
 at, 444, 449; mentioned, 437 
 
 Saiva sect : one of the two main 
 groups of modern Hinduism, 29, 
 42 ; the philosophy of, belongs to 
 the beginnings of Aryan religion, 
 29-30 ; the character of Saiva philo- 
 sophy, 31 ; the lines of cleavage 
 between the Vaishnava school and, 
 evidenced by the stiipa and the 
 sikhara, 113 ; the stupa a Saiva 
 symbol, 180 ; the Saiva sculptures 
 of Elephanta, 184 ; Hiuen-Tsang 
 on customs of Saiva ascetics, 195 ; 
 the rise and development of Saiv- 
 ism, 213-220 ; the architecture 
 of the Saiva revival, 213, 216-217, 
 218-219,238,242-244; thenautch 
 associated with Saivism, 239 ; the 
 bronze sculpture of the Saiva 
 revival, 245-246 
 
 Saka dynasty, 164 
 
 Sakala (vSialkot), 175 
 
 Sakas, Turki nomads : invade India, 
 125, 138, 176, 188 
 
 Saktas, Hindu sect : suppressed by 
 Firuz Shah, 317 
 
 Sakimtala, drama, 158, 376 
 
 Sakya Muni, name of the Buddha, 
 109, 214 
 
 Sakyas, Indo-Aryan clan, 49 
 
 574 
 
 vSalim Shah, or Islam Shah, Sultan of 
 Delhi, 445-446, 471 
 
 Salim, Sultan, son of Akbar : his 
 mother Mariam Zamani, 463 ; 
 birth, 470 ; named after the Shaikh 
 Salim Chishti, 470, 492 ; married 
 to a daughter of Raja Bhagwan 
 Das, 520 ; his vices, and his father's 
 grief for them, 531, 535; disliked 
 Abul Fazl, 531; rises against his 
 father, 532 ; causes Abul Fazl to be 
 assassinated, 533 ; Akbar's leniency 
 to, 533-535; succeeds as Jahangir, 
 536. See Jahangir 
 
 Salim Chishti, Shaikh : consulted by 
 Akbar, 470 ; the J ami' Masjid at 
 Fatehpur-Sikri built in honour of, 
 470, 492 ; mentioned, 473, 535 n. 
 
 Salima, Sultana, wife of Akbar, 535 
 
 Salivahan, Rajput chieftain, 353 
 
 Saman, founder of the Samanid 
 dynasty, 280 
 
 Samana, 372 
 
 Samanid dynasty, 280 
 
 Samanya, or Siitas, the fifth class in 
 the Aryan social system, 22 
 
 Samarkand, 283, 285, 368, 370, 375, 
 376, 377 
 
 Samarsi, Raja of Chitor, 291 
 
 Sambandha, inspired child, 246 
 
 Sambhal, 426, 438-439 
 
 Samman Burj, ' Jessamine Bower,' in 
 the palace at Agra, 477 n. 
 
 Sammitiya school of the Hinayana, 
 190 
 
 Samos, 140 
 
 Samudragupta, Gupta emperor : his 
 culture, 152, 158 ; succeeds to the 
 throne, 152 ; asserts his supremacy 
 in Aryavarta, and conquers the 
 South, 152-154 ; his cordial rela- 
 tions with Ceylon, 153-154 ; asso- 
 ciated with the Gupta renaissance 
 in Sanskrit literature, 158 ; men- 
 tioned, 164, 171, 172, 191 
 
 Sdn-kirtana -pattie^s, Chaitanya's, 415- 
 416 
 
 Sanchi : the sculptures of, 96, 107, 
 no, 116, 132, 418; mentioned, 
 104 
 
 Sandhimati, minister, 270 
 
 Sandhyd, priestly ritual, 27, 136 
 
 Sanga, Rana of Chitor, 353, 354, 424, 
 425, 431, 467 
 
 Sangam, body of literary critics, of 
 Madura, 237 
 
INDEX 
 
 Sangha, the Buddhist : constitution 
 and rules of, 51-53 ; the Vindya 
 Pitaka, a body of rules of, 54, 
 57 ; little known of the progress 
 of the Order diiring the Buddha's 
 lifetime and the first two centuries 
 after, 57, 89; did not include the 
 laity, 59 ; growth into power, 89- 
 90 ; Asoka becomes a member of, 
 92 ; in the Trinity of Buddhism, 
 109, 137 ; the learned members of, 
 claimed greater authority than the 
 Brahmans, 113 ; disestablished, 
 121 ; persecuted by Pushyamitra, 
 121, 123 ; represented many dif- 
 ferent schools of thought, 132 ; 
 Asoka' s General AssembUes of, 
 
 137 ; the great schism in, 137- 
 
 138 ; General Assembly of, con- 
 vened by Kanishka, 143 ; main* 
 tained its influence during the 
 Kushan period, 146 ; the machi- 
 nery of, controlled by the Brah- 
 mans, 148 ; Aryan revolt against 
 the tyranny of, 149-150, 152 ; the 
 Guptas did not move against, 156 ; 
 the intellectual downfall of, 156- 
 157 ; Fa-Hien on the flourishing 
 condition of, 166; Skandagupta a 
 liberal patron of, 172 ; Hiuen-'Tsang 
 on, 196-197 ; Harsha's discipline 
 of, 202 ; Harsha's General Assembly 
 of, 207 ; the formation of the 
 Vaishnava party in, 214 ; the 
 authority of, in the State, 216 ; 
 the organisation of, destroyed, 220 ; 
 the Brahmans of the South opposed 
 corruption in, 227 ; the third 
 General Assembly of, said to have 
 been held in Kashmir, 269 ; the 
 Four Paths of, 512 ; mentioned, 
 248. See also Buddha und Bud- 
 dhism 
 
 Sangha, the Jain, 58-59 
 
 Sanghamitra, sister of Asoka : Bud- 
 dhist missionary to Ceylon, 96 
 
 Sangharamas, Buddhist monasteries, 
 166 
 
 Sankaracharya : the great exponent 
 of Saivism, 215, 216, 217 ; his 
 career, 219-220 ; overthrew Bud- 
 dhism, 220, 325-326 ; his Niti- 
 sdra, 221-226 ; mentioned, 338, 409 
 
 Sankhya school of philosophy, 46 
 
 Sanskrit : the medium for transmit- 
 . ting the teaching of the Vedas and 
 
 Aryan tradition, 118, 154; the 
 Gupta revival in Sanskrit learning, 
 154-155, 177 ; employed for the 
 documents of Buddhism, according 
 to Fa-Hien, 169 ; a treatise on 
 Sanskrit grammar written by 
 Harsha, 192 ; the knowledge of, 
 became widely diffused among the 
 Hindus, 338 
 
 Saracens : many elements in the 
 culture of, borrowed from India, 
 254 ; so-called Saracenic architec- 
 ture in India really Indian, 296, 
 328-329 
 
 Sarang Khan, Governor of Multan, 
 
 370. 378 
 Sarangpur, 349, 355, 460 
 Sarasvati, goddess of learning, 46, 
 
 264, 410 
 Sarkar — see Benoy and Jadunath 
 Sarkij, 510 
 Sarnath : Asoka makes a pilgrimage 
 
 to, 97; mentioned, 46, 114, 179, 
 
 180, 182, 214 
 Sarsa, 481 
 Sasanka, King, 196 
 Sat-Chit-Anandam, Trinity of Spirit, 
 
 136 
 Sati : forbidden by Akbar, 475, 516 ; 
 
 mentioned, 190, 360, 469 
 Satiyaputra dynasty, 129 
 Satij^aputra kingdom, 95 
 Sattvam - Rajas - Tamas, Trinity of 
 
 Matter, 136 
 Satuni, King of Lulabu, 112 
 Saty a-Naray ana, synonym for Vishnu, 
 
 338 
 Satya-Pir, the cult of, 338 
 Satyavana, husband of Savitri, 408 
 Savitri, goddess of wisdom, 120, 408 
 Sayurgdls, Crown lands given as 
 
 benevolences, 506, 507-508 
 Sayyid dynasty of Delhi, 379 
 Sayyid Muhammad, Sultan of Delhi, 
 
 379 
 Sayyids, descendants of the Prophet, 
 
 371. 375. 379, 497 
 Schools, village, 409 
 
 Sculpture : of the Mauryan period, 
 105-118 ; Hellenistic traditions on 
 Indian soil, 133, 135 ; Indian in- 
 fluence on the artistic thought 
 of Hellenism, 141 ; the freedom 
 of the sculpture of the Maha- 
 yana school communicated to the 
 Hinayana, 146 ; the sculptures of 
 
 575 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Blephanta, 184-185 ; the sculp- 
 tures of Mamallapuram, 217 ; of 
 the Chola period, 245-246 ; the 
 influence of the Muhammadan 
 conquest upon the traditions of 
 Indian sculpture, 329-330 ; sculp- 
 tured ornament abandoned by the 
 Hindu temple-builders, 342-343 
 
 Seistan: Humayxin in, 436 
 
 Seleukos, Alexander's general : in- 
 vades India, 67 ; mentioned, 87 
 
 Sen — see Dinesh Chandra Sen 
 
 Sena dynasty, 267, 410 
 
 Senapati, the War-god — see Kartti- 
 keya 
 
 Sennacherib, palace of, represented in 
 a Nineveh sculpture, 113, 182 
 
 Sesha, or Ananta, the serpent of 
 Bternity : guarded Vishnu-Nara- 
 yana, 28 
 
 Sessodia clan, 292 
 
 Shachi Devi, mother of Chaitanya, 
 411, 414, 417 
 
 Shah Jahan, Mogul emperor, 522, 
 
 527. 534 
 Shahab-ud-din, Sultan of Damascus, 
 
 347 
 
 Shahab-ud-din, general, 370 
 
 Shahab-ud-din Abul Abbas Ahmad : 
 his Travels cited, 308 n. 
 
 Shahiya Turks, 271 
 
 Shah-ndma of Firdausi, 283 
 
 ' Shaikhu Baba,' Prince Salim's nick- 
 name, 535 
 
 Shams-i-Siraj 'AJif, chronicler, 315, 
 
 319 
 Shams-ud-din Ilyas, Sultan of Gaur, 
 
 335 
 
 Sharaf Kai, minister, 302 
 
 Sharif-ud-din Husain, Mirza, 463- 
 464, 465 
 
 Shark! dynasty, 320, 337, 379 
 
 Sharwan, 375 
 
 Sher Khan Sur — see Sher Shah 
 
 Sher Shah Sur (Sher Khan), Sultan of 
 Delhi, 355 ; attacks Humayiin and 
 drives him from his throne, 430- 
 433 ; becomes Shah, 433 ; his 
 reign, 437-444 ; his able adminis- 
 tration, 437-442 ; death, 444 ; 
 his mausoleum at Sahseram, 444, 
 449; his work destroyed by 'Adil 
 Shah, 446 ; contrasted with Huma- 
 yun, 448-449; mentioned, 336,445, 
 452, 453, 508 
 
 Sher Shah II, 459 
 
 Shiah sect : suppressed by Firuz 
 Shah, 317 ; the origin, the tenets, 
 and the following of, 331-334 ; 
 the qviarrels between Shiah and 
 Sunni had little influence on 
 foreign politics, 388-389 ; the 
 fallacy of the ' Shiah revolt' in the 
 Dekhan, 333, 403 n.; followed by 
 the majority of Persian Musalmans, 
 422 ; Sher Shah moves against, 
 443 ; Humayiin compelled to be- 
 come a proselyte of, 447 ; men- 
 tioned, 389, 392, 399 
 
 Shihab-ud-din, or Muhammad Ghiiri, 
 Sultan of Delhi, 291, 293-294, 384 
 
 Shiraz, 375 
 
 Shirl, MuUa, 491 
 
 Shivi, King, 408 
 
 Sholapur, 395, 396, 398, 401, 528 
 
 Shiira, minister, 272-273 
 
 Sialkot, 175 
 
 Siam : Indian intercourse with, 145 
 
 Siddhan, or Siddhi-astu, Hindu 
 primer, 197 
 
 Siddhartha, Prince — see Buddha 
 
 Sikandar Lodi, Sultan of Delhi : 
 supports a Muhammadan revolt in 
 Malwa, 351-352 ; a capable and 
 just ruler, 379, 381 ; persecuted 
 the Hindus, 379-381, 410 ; death, 
 381 ; mentioned, 344, 424, 431 
 
 Sikandar Siir, Afghan chieftain, 425 
 
 Sikandra : Sikandar Lodi buried 
 at, 381 ; Akbar's mausoleum at, 
 536 
 
 Sikhara, temple spire : the symbol- 
 ism of, 112, 113 ; the antiquity of, 
 as an architectural motif, 112 ; the 
 origin of, 113, 178-183 ; Fergusson 
 on the non-Ar3'an origin of, 178- 
 179 ; typical of the Vaishnava 
 school of thought, 214, 326 ; pecu- 
 liar to Northern India, 216-217 '> 
 in Jain temples, 245 ; combined 
 with the stiipa, 245 ; mentioned, 
 211 
 
 Sikri, village : Fatehpur built by 
 Akbar on the site of, 470 
 
 Silabhadra, Abbot of Nalanda, 198, 
 199, 200 
 
 Silpa-Sdstras, body of canons of craft 
 ritual : on the planning of the Indo- 
 Ar5'an village, 22-23, 26 and n., 
 105, 128, 130, 136, 180 ; said to 
 have been written bj' Agastya, 127 ; 
 mentioned, 19, 23, 225, 226, 237 
 
 576 
 
INDEX 
 
 Sind : the Arabs in, i88, 250, 251, 
 257, 259 ; the far-reaching effect 
 of the Arab conquest of, on the 
 culture of Islam, 252-253 ; invaded 
 by Mahmud of Ghazni, 285, 288, 
 289 ; part of, absorbed in the 
 Delhi Empire, 291 ; conquered by 
 Akbar, 524 ; mentioned, 124, 255, 
 256, 434, 435 
 
 Sindhu, river, 121, 274 
 
 Sipah Salar Rajab, father of Firuz 
 Shah, 315, 316 
 
 Sirkind, 451 
 
 Sita, wife of Rama, 42, 151, 153, 236 
 
 Siva : the Great Ascetic, 15 ; Kar- 
 ttikeya the offspring of, 27 n. ; 
 given the attributes of Yama, 27 ; 
 Spirit of Death, 28 ; symbolism of, 
 28-29 ; a name standing for the 
 death symbols in Indo-Aryan reli- 
 gion, 31 ; one of the Three Aspects 
 of the One Eternal, 31, 109, 136, 
 185, 205 ; as philosophical concept, 
 31 ; the popiilar conception of, 32 ; 
 in the Mahdbhdrata, 42 ; Mount 
 Kailasahis hermitage, iii ; repre- 
 sented as Nataraja, Lord of the 
 Dance, 239, 246 ; his bow becomes, 
 as the crescent, the ensign of 
 Islam, 254 ; the Moon-Lord, 287, 
 288 ; the lingam, symbol of, 289 ; 
 mentioned, 7, 29, 34, 41, 146, 178, 
 183, 184, 214, 219, 246 
 
 Siwana, fortress, 444 
 
 Siwand Rai, Rajput chieftain, 293 
 
 Skandagupta, Gupta emperor, 172- 
 
 174 
 
 Slavery : organised by Firuz Shah, 
 321-322 ; Akbar forbade the mak- 
 ing of slaves of prisoners of war, 
 469 
 
 Smith, Vincent A,, cited, 43 n.,66 n., 
 87, 91 n., 118 n., 121, 144, 174 nn., 
 189 n., 190, 248, 264, 494 n- 
 495 n., 518, 536 n. 
 
 Smriti, reasoned knowledge, 31 
 
 Society : organisation of Indo-Aryan, 
 5-11, 14-27 ; organisation of Dra- 
 vidian, 11-14 
 
 Sogdiana, 139 
 
 Soma : the Moon-god, 33 ; the cult 
 of, 41, 121, 192 ; the temple of, 
 at Somnath, 287 
 
 Soma juice, 48, 100, 121; not men- 
 tioned in the Code of Manu, 160 
 
 Somesvara I, Chalukyan king, 241 
 
 Somnath, temple of : plundered by 
 MahmM of Ghazni, 283, 287 ; 
 mentioned, 299 
 
 Son, river, 75 
 
 Spies, in Chandragupta's government, 
 
 83 
 
 Sravasti : Asoka makes a pilgrimage 
 to, 97 ; a small place in Fa-Hien's 
 time, 166; mentioned, 194 
 
 Sri Kakulam, seaport, 130 
 
 Srimal, or Bhinmal, 266 
 
 Srinagar, 143, 268, 522 
 
 Sringeri Math, monastery, 220 
 
 Srirangam, temple at, 326 
 
 Srong-Tsan-Gampo, King of Tibet, 
 249 
 
 SruH, divine revelation, 31 
 
 Stapathi, or master-builder, 128 
 
 Stein, Sir M. A. : his translation of 
 Rdjatarangini cited, 269 n., 270 
 and n., 271, 272, 273-274, 275 
 
 Sthanesvara — see Thaneshar 
 
 Sthdnlka, or mayor, 85 
 
 Sthdniya, a fortress, 71 
 
 Strabo, cited, 140 
 
 Stupa, monument : became the most 
 sacred symbol of Buddhism, 77 ; 
 Asoka built stiipas lavishly, 102 ; 
 the stupas of Bharhut and Sanchi, 
 107 ; symbolism of, 109-115, 179- 
 180, 217 ; not derived from the 
 sikhara, 179-180 ; typical of the 
 Saiva school of thought, 214 ; com- 
 mon in the South, 217 ; in Jain 
 temples, 245 ; combined with the 
 sikhara, 245 ; the mausoleum of 
 the Muhammadan period the coun- 
 terpart of, 444-445 
 
 Succession to the throne, the Aryan 
 law of, 90, 189, 248 
 
 Sudarsana, or Lake Beautiful, at 
 Gimar, 73 
 
 Sudras : one of the four ' pure classes,' 
 16 ; Brahmans reduced to the 
 status of, for neglect of the rules 
 of their order, 19 ; penalty upon, 
 for theft, 21 ; status and duties of, 
 22, 76 ; work of Stidra craftsmen, 
 107 ; rules governing, laid down 
 in the Code of Manu, 159, 163 ; 
 Manu on Siidra kingship, 161 ; 
 foreigners recognised as, 176 ; a 
 Sudra became a Kshatriya on being 
 made king, 191 ; a Sudra might 
 become king, 195 ; the Sukrd-niti- 
 sdra on, 222 ; position of, in the 
 
 o 577 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Rajput states, 261-262; gain en- 
 trance to the Sanskrit Tols, 338 
 
 Sufism, 280, 332, 447, 496 
 
 Sukrd-nitisdra : on the conduct of a 
 king, 36, 83 ; on the organisation 
 and government of the villages, 37 
 222-223, 224 ; on warfare, 173, 
 226, 387 ; on succession to the 
 kingshap, 189 ; character of the 
 work, and period, 221-222 ; on 
 caste, 222 ; on taxation, 223-224 ; 
 on the privileges, duties, and limita- 
 tions of the king, 224, 226 ; on the 
 planning of the king's capital, 224- 
 
 225 ; on the Council of State, 225 ; 
 on the administration of justice, 
 
 226 ; the ethics of, 226 ; on hunt- 
 ing, 226 
 
 Sulaiman, Khalif, 252 
 
 Sulaiman, Mirza, 521 
 
 SuUma Stiltana Begam : married to 
 Bairam Khan, 453 
 
 Sumantra, or Finance Minister, 36, 225 
 
 Simierians, a Dravidian race, 5 
 
 Sun window in early Indo-Aryan 
 architecture, 115 
 
 Sun-worship, 27, 136, 193 ; Akbar 
 and sun-observances, 514 
 
 Sundaramurti, Saiva revivalist, 245 
 
 Sunga dynasty : founded by Pushya- 
 mitra, 120 ; end of, 124 
 
 Sunganda-virta-Chola, name given to 
 one of the Chola kings, 234 
 
 Sunna, body of Muhammadan cano- 
 nical doctrine, 331, 517 
 
 Sunni sect : favoured by Firuz Shah, 
 317-318 ; the origin, the doctrine, 
 and the following of, 331-334 ; the 
 quarrels between Sunni and Shiah 
 had little political influence, 388- 
 389, 403-405; favoured by Babur, 
 422 ; favoured by Sher Shah, 443 ; 
 Akbar and, 474 ; their dissatisfac- 
 tion with Akbar' s religious views, 
 496 ; arouse Akbar' s contempt, 
 517 ; mentioned, 389, 392, 393, 
 
 394 
 Supreme Soul, Vedic doctrme of, 134 
 Sur, province, 440 
 Siir, tribe of, 440, 446 
 Surashtra, or Kathiawar, 164, 287, 
 
 288. See Kathiawar 
 Sur at, 481, 482 
 Siirya, the Sun-god : the cult of, 121 ; 
 
 patron deity of the Aryan warrior, 
 
 182 ; the Ranas of Mewar claim 
 
 to be descendants of, 182 ; Surya- 
 
 worship merged into that of Vishnu, 
 
 183 ; mentioned, 4, 7, 28, 41, 181 
 Surya-putras , ' sons of Siirya,' 41, 121 
 Surya-vamsa, the race of Surya, 41- 
 
 42, 292, 306, 469 
 Susa, 62, 65, 75, 112 
 Susarman, King of Magadha, 124, 131 
 Sutas — see Samanya 
 Sutras, 198 
 
 Siiyya, minister, 273, 274 
 Svarasta, 191 w. See Panjab 
 Swastika, the, as a symbol in Aryan 
 
 art, 109 
 Swat country : Akbar sends an 
 
 expedition into, 521, 522 
 Swayamvara, marriage ceremony, 
 
 292 n. 
 Sylhet, 410 
 
 Tabriz, 375 
 
 Tahirid dynasty, 280 
 
 Tahmasp, Shah of Persia : Humayun 
 
 a refugee at the court of, 436, 447 
 Tai-Tsung, Chinese emperor, 248 
 Taj Mahall, the, at Agra, 329, 406 
 Takaroi, or Mughalmari, battle of, 
 
 485 
 
 Takkolam, 239, 240 
 
 Taksha-sila, or Taxila : Alexander the 
 Great in, 64 ; capital of the north- 
 western province and reno^vned for 
 its university, 90 ; a seat of Bud- 
 dhist learning, 126 ; school of 
 Hellenistic sculpture at, 135 ; the 
 university capital of Mahayana 
 Buddhism, 139, 141 ; famous for 
 its school of medicine, 198, 256 ; 
 tributary to Kashmir, 269 ; the 
 university of, decayed, 408 ; men- 
 tioned, 66, 103, 137, 143, 237 
 
 Talikota, battle of, 401-402 
 
 Talnir, fort, 357 
 
 Tamerlane — see Timur 
 
 Tamil race, 43 ; literature, the clas- 
 sical age of, 237 
 
 Tamlak, Fa-Hien at, 170 
 
 Tana, 363 
 
 Tandah, 485, 486 
 
 Tang dynasty of China, 247 
 
 Tanjore: the Saiva temple at, 240, 
 243, 246, 329 ; mentioned, 127, 229, 
 238, 239 
 
 Tao-Ching, fellow-traveller of Fa- 
 Hien, 169 
 
 Tapas, or self-torture, 48-49 
 
INDEX 
 
 Tapti, river, 355, 357 
 
 Tardi Beg Khan, Governor of Delhi, 
 
 451 
 
 Tdnkh Yamini, cited, 286 n., 287 n. 
 
 Tdnkh-i Alft, Akbar's, 514-515 
 
 Tdnkh-i Ddudi, cited, 445 n. 
 
 Tdnkh-i Firoz ShdM, cited, 301 nn., 
 302 nn., 303 nn., 304 n., 305 nn., 
 307 n., 313 n., 316 n., 319 nn., 
 322 n. 
 
 Tdnkh-i Sher ShdM, cited, 438 andn., 
 439 MM., 440 nn., 441 M., 443 n. 
 
 Tatar Khan, general : reproves Firuz 
 Shah, 318-319 
 
 Tatar Khan, rebel against Humayun, 
 429 
 
 Tattanur-Miivendavelana, envoy, 231 
 
 Taxation : on fishermen, 75, 85 ; on 
 land, 85, 234 ; on Uquor and gam- 
 bling-houses, 85 ; the Code of 
 Manu on, 161-162 ; Fa-Hien on, 
 165 ; Hiuen-Tsang on, 194 ; the 
 Sukrd-nitisdra on, 223 ; the vil- 
 lage assemblies and, 228-229 ; 
 tolls on merchandise, 234 ; in 
 Rajputana, 262 ; abuse of, under 
 the Muhammadan Sultans, 298 ; 
 the Sultan ' Ala-ud-din' s oppressive 
 taxation, 302, 304-305 ; Firuz 
 Shah and the poll-tax, 317, 322 ; 
 alleviated under Firuz Shah, 319 ; 
 Sher Shah's method of revenue- 
 collection, 439-440, 487 ; relieved 
 by Akbar, 465, 487, 526 ; Akbar's 
 early reforms in the revenue admin- 
 istration, 479, 515 ; Todar Mall's 
 reforms, 486-490, 515 
 
 Taxila — see Taksha-sila 
 
 Telingana, 307, 339, 359, 363, 387. 
 See Telugu country 
 
 Telugu country, 239, 339, 361. See 
 Telingana 
 
 Temple : the traditional plan of the 
 Hindu, 1 1 6-1 17 ; temple architec- 
 ture of the Gupta era, 178-183 ; 
 temple architecture of Northern 
 and Southern India, 216-217 ; the 
 village assemblies concerned with 
 the administration of temples, 229- 
 230 ; the temples of the Saiva 
 revival, 216-217, 218-219, 238- 
 239, 242-244 ; the fundamental 
 idea of Indo-Aryan temple-plan- 
 ning best preserved in the temples 
 of Southern India, 243 ; the temple 
 the college, Parliament-house, and 
 
 citadel-fortress of the Indo-Aryan 
 community, 244 ; Jain temple 
 architecture. 245 ; the Muslim 
 mosque borrowed features from 
 the Indian temple 254 ; the great 
 era of temple-building, 259, 264- 
 265 ; temples put to practical uses, 
 265 ; sculptured ornamentation 
 abandoned by the Hindu crafts- 
 men, 342 ; destroyed temples re- 
 built as mosques, 343 ; Hindu 
 temples converted into mosques, 517 
 
 Terai, the Nepal, 49 
 
 Thaneshar (Sthanesvara) : rise of, 
 188 ; plundered by Mahmiid of 
 Ghazni, 285 ; Prithivi-raja de- 
 feated at, 293 ; mentioned, 191, 
 290, 291 
 
 Three Aspects of the One Eternal : 
 represented by Brahma, Vishnu, 
 and Siva, 31, 109 ; represented by 
 Buddha, Sangha, and Dharma, 
 109, 136-137 ; the basis of the 
 Brahmanical concept, 1 09-1 10 ; 
 the philosophical and the religious 
 theories of, 136 ; represented sym- 
 bolically in the sculpture of Fle- 
 phanta, 185 ; one of the funda- 
 mental ideas of Indian theism, 185 ; 
 the worship of, atHarsha's festival, 
 205 
 
 Three Jewels, the, 137 
 
 Tibet : Muhammad ibn Bakhtiyar 
 attempted the conquest of, 299 ; 
 mentioned, 249 
 
 Timiir : his fictitious pedigree, 368, 
 377 ; invades India, 368-377 ; 
 captures and sacks Delhi, 374-375 ; 
 and the genesis of the ' Mogul 
 style,' 376 ; death, 377, 379 ; 
 mentioned, 236, 323, 344, 347, 
 381, 420, 423, 428, 504 
 
 Timur Shin Khan, Mogul leader, 311 
 
 Tirhut, 310 
 
 Tirthankaras, legendary sages, 58 
 
 Tiruvalluvar, Tamil poet, 237 
 
 Tiruvannamalai, temple of, 239 n. 
 
 Tishyarakshita, wife of Asoka, 103 
 
 Tissa, King of Ceylon: converted to 
 Buddhism, 96 
 
 Tod, J. : his Annals of Rajast'han 
 cited, 38 n., 261, 262 nn., 263 
 and n., 292 n. 
 
 Todar Mall, Raja : his revenue 
 reforms, 479, 486-489, 515 ; made 
 Vakil, 479, 490 ; made Vaztr, 489 ; 
 
 579 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 helps in Akbar's conquest of 
 Bengal, 484-486, 491 ; heads a 
 new expedition to Bengal, 489 ; 
 in a campaign against the Afghans, 
 524 ; death, 525 ; mentioned, 534 
 
 Tolls : under Chandragupta's govern- 
 ment, 85 ; in the Chola kingdom, 
 234; relieved by Akbar, 515. 
 See Taxation 
 
 Tols, Sanskrit schools: the barriers 
 against admittance to, broken 
 down, 338 ; the work in, continued 
 through the Muhammadan period, 
 408 ; higher education given in, 
 409 
 
 Toramana, Hun chieftain, 175 
 
 Toran, or gateway of the stiapa : 
 symbohsm of, 113 ; origin of, 180 
 
 Towers of Victory [Jaya stamhha) : 
 at Chitor, 295 and n., 344 
 
 Towns : growth of, from the villages, 
 38 ; the planning of Pataliputra, 
 75-77 ; Sukracharya on the plan- 
 ning of the king's capital, 224-225 ; 
 the planning of Ahmadabad, 341 ; 
 Vijayanagar, 402-403 
 
 Traffic, regulation of, in ancient 
 India, 72, 74 
 
 Transmigration : Manu on, 163 ; 
 Akbar's faith in, 500 
 
 Tree, the, as a symbol in Indian art, 
 109 
 
 Tri-ratna, the Buddhist Trinity, 137 
 
 Trichinopoly, 239 7^, 
 
 Trimiirti, or Three Aspects, 205 ; the 
 sculpture of, at Elephanta, 184, 
 329. See Three Aspects 
 
 Trinity — see Three Aspects 
 
 Trinity of Matter, 136 
 
 Trinity of Spirit, 136 
 
 Tripura, demon, 246 
 
 Tughlak dynasty, 309-323, 367-379 
 
 Tughlak Shah, Sultan of Delhi, 309- 
 310, 315-316 
 
 Tughlakabad, 309, 313 
 
 Tulamba, 371, 372 
 
 Tungabhadra, river, 241, 386 
 
 Tunjina, King of Kashmir, 274 
 
 Tiiran, 517, 521 
 
 Turima, regent of Vijayanagar, 389, 
 
 392-393. 395 
 
 Turkistan, 287 
 
 Turks : tribes of, invade India, 125, 
 138 ; Ivalitaditya of Kashmir and, 
 271; Turkishdynastyof Delhi, 294- 
 323, 367-379 ; employed in Hindu 
 
 580 
 
 army of Kanauj, 292 ; the Turki 
 Sultans and Indo-Aryan cultiure, 
 294-296 ; their quaUty as rulers, 
 297-298 ; Turks from Europe help 
 Gujerat against the Portuguese, 
 346 ; added nothing to the culture 
 of Asia, 376 ; the Turkish dynasty 
 of Bijapur, 385-406 ; intellectual 
 development in the race probably 
 the result of fusion with Iranian 
 and Indo-Aryan stock, 420 ; men- 
 tioned, 175, 257 
 
 Tusita, heavenly sphere, 193 
 
 Tiiyul lands, 506 
 
 Udai Singh, Ranaof Mewar, 463, 467, 
 469, 490 
 
 Ujjain : a centre of Aryan cultiire, 
 renowned for its university and 
 astronomical schools, 90, 164, 198, 
 263, 264, 347 ; became the Gupta 
 capital, 164 ; the ancient name for 
 Malwa, 263 ; captured by Altamsh, 
 299 ; mentioned, 349. See also 
 Malwa 
 
 'Ulama, Islamic priests, 371, 375, 380, 
 443. 471. 496 
 
 Uma — see Parvati 
 
 Umbrella : part of Indian royal 
 paraphernalia, 106, no; a sytn- 
 bolic element in the stiipa, no 
 
 United Provinces — see Agra and 
 Oudh 
 
 Unity of the Godhead, the doctrine 
 of, 209 
 
 Universal Self, the Vedas on the 
 worship of, 117 
 
 Universal Soul, the Vedic theory of, 
 50, 55 
 
 Universities : origin of, 38 ; the 
 work of the Indian universities 
 continued through the Muham- 
 madan period, 408 
 
 Upagupta, Buddhist monk : con- 
 verted Asoka to Buddhism, 91 ; 
 accompanied Asoka on pilgrimage, 
 
 97 
 
 Upanishads : contain the root-ideas 
 of Indo-Aryan religion, 31 ; men- 
 tioned, 27, 28, 34, 41, 55, 58, 117, 
 132, 135, 164, 183, 214, 219 
 
 Ur, city, 129 
 
 Urchah, 533 
 
 Urdu dialect, 489 
 
 Uriya countr}', 239 
 
 Ushas, the Dawn Maiden, 106, 114 
 
INDEX 
 
 Utch, fortress, 370 
 
 Utpala, uncle of Brihaspati of Kash- 
 mir, 273 
 
 Uttaramailtir, village, 233, 238 
 
 Uttarameru - Catur - Vedimangalani, 
 village union, 230 
 
 Uzbeks, Turki tribe, 383, 464, 465- 
 466, 521 
 
 Vaisa.1,1, General Assembly of the 
 
 Sangha at, 53 
 Vaishnava sect : one of the two great 
 groups of modern Hinduism, 29, 
 42, 112 ; a Kshatriya cult, 31, 113 ; 
 the lines of cleavage between the 
 Saiva school and, evidenced by the 
 stiipa and the sikhara, 113 ; Vaish- 
 nava revival of the Gupta era, 178, 
 183, 325 ; the sikhara a Vaishnava 
 symbol, 180 ; the origin of the 
 Vaishnava theory of bhakti, 183 ; 
 Mahay ana Buddhism a phase of 
 the Vaishnava movement, 184 ; 
 Hiuen-Tsang on customs of Vaish- 
 nava ascetics, 195 ; had its root 
 in the beginnings of Aryan religion, 
 213 ; origin and development of 
 the school, 214 ; absorbed Maha- 
 yana Buddhism in the North, 220 ; 
 Ramanuj a' s Vaishnava propaganda 
 in the South, 325-326 ; Vaishnavism 
 always an exotic in the South, 326 ; 
 Chaitany a' s Vaishnava revival, 338, 
 410-419 : the Vaishnava doctrine 
 of kingship, 512 
 
 Vaisyas : the Indo-Aryan mercantile 
 class, 16 ; status and duties of, 20, 
 21-22 ; penalty upon, for theft, 
 21 ; probably traded with the 
 South at an early date, 43 ; work 
 of Vaisya craftsmen, 107 ; Manu 
 on marriage of, 159 ; Manu on the 
 taxation of, 162 ; a Vaisya became 
 a Kshatriya when made king, 191 ; 
 the Sukrd-niiisdra on, 222 ; had 
 a reputation for honesty and truth- 
 fulness, 361, 362 ; gained control 
 of India's political relations with 
 Burope, 365-366 
 
 Vakil, or Prime Minister, 461, 479, 
 490 
 
 Vakkula, the Buddha's disciple, 97 
 
 Valabhi, 187 
 
 Vamanapatha, village street, 244 
 
 Vanga — see Bengal 
 
 Varuna, Vedic deity, 4, 7, 28, 192 
 
 Vasishka, Kushan emperor, 144 
 
 Vasishtha, rishi, 221 
 
 Vasubandhu, Buddhist teacher, 172, 
 
 174 
 
 Vasudeva, Kushan emperor, 144 
 
 Vasudeva, King of Magadha, 124 
 
 Vasumitra, grandson of Pushj^amitra, 
 121 
 
 Vasurata, Brahman, 174 
 
 Vatsaraja, Giirjara king, 266, 267 
 
 Vazir, or Finance Minister, 473, 489 
 
 Vedanta, 280, 326, 329 
 
 Vedas : on the whole, Aryan in 
 origin, 5 ; contain the root-ideas 
 of Aryan religion, 31, 216 ; the 
 attitude of the Brahman and 
 Kshatriya philosophical schools to, 
 40 ; the Brahmanical view of the 
 effect of Buddhism upon Vedic 
 revelation, 45 ; the Buddha's pro- 
 paganda not really in conflict 
 with the fundamental principles 
 of Vedic religion, 54 ; the divine 
 authority of, denied by Mahavira, 
 58 ; on the worsliip of gods, 117 ; 
 Brahmanism makes a new inter- 
 pretation of, 122-123 ; the teach- 
 ing of, brought to the South, 127 ; 
 Buddhism and the religion of the 
 Vedas, 148 ; mentioned, 4, 26, 36, 
 118, 185, 244 
 
 Vedic deities, 4, 7, 28-31, 182 ; 
 sacrifice, 47-49, 120-121, 204 
 
 Vegetarianism : Asoka's rules helped 
 to promote, 100 
 
 Venkatadri, brother of Ramraj of 
 Vijayanagar, 403 
 
 Videha, Aryan kingdom, 37, 59 
 
 Vihara, name of Magadha, loi. See 
 Magadha 
 
 Vijayalaya, Chola king, 238 
 
 Vijayanagar. I. The state: struggle 
 with Bijapur, 385-403. 527. 528 ; 
 mentioned, 339. II. The city : 
 sack of, 402-403 ; the ' Blephant 
 Stables ' at, 406 
 
 Vijayanagar dynasty, 385 
 
 Vijayeshvara, Saiva temple at, 268 
 
 Vikrama era, 144 
 
 Vikramaditya I = Chandragupta II, 
 158, 164, 408. See Chandragupta II 
 
 Vikramaditya II, Chaluky an emperor, 
 218, 242 
 
 Vikramaditya, King of Sravasti, 194 
 
 Vikramaditya : Hemu assumes the 
 title, 451 
 
 581 
 
ARYAN RULE IN INDIA 
 
 Villages : village system of Aryans and 
 non-Aryans, lo et seq., 22-29, 182 ; 
 Vedic religion the moving spirit 
 in the organisation of the Aryan 
 village community, 31 ; the village 
 the political unit of the state, 38 ; 
 growth of the town from the village, 
 38 ; the administration of the Bud- 
 dhist Church framed on the political 
 institutions of the Aryan village 
 community, 52 ; the Buddha's 
 metaphors taken from the life of 
 the Aryan village community, 53 ; 
 the traditional rights of the village 
 communities not destroyed under 
 the Mauryan Bmpire, 69 ; classifi- 
 cation of villages by Kautiliya- 
 artha-Sastra, and rules for their 
 government, 70-71 ; the village 
 in religious symbolism, 109-110 ; 
 travellers' rest-houses in the village, 
 130 ; the doctrine of the One in 
 Many evidenced in the planning 
 of the village, 135-136 ; Manu on 
 the grouping of villages for ad- 
 ministrative purposes, 162 ; Indian 
 political freedom built on the basis 
 of the village republics, 215 ; the 
 organisation of village life un- 
 affected by wars and dynastic 
 changes, 220-221 ; the Sukrd-niti- 
 sdra on the organisation and 
 government of the villages, 222- 
 223 ; the village assemblies of the 
 South, 227-235 ; Indian temples 
 planned on the model of the village, 
 244 ; the village system the founda- 
 tion of the body politic in the 
 Rajput states, 261-262 ; position 
 of the village communities under 
 the Muhammadan Sultans, 298 ; 
 the village system and spiritual life 
 unaffected by the impact of Islam, 
 407-409 ; village schools, 409 ; 
 position of the village communities 
 in Akbar's time, 525 
 
 Vindya Pitaka, mles of discipline for 
 the Buddhist Sangha, 54, 57, loi ; 
 Fa-Hien's journey to India in 
 search of, 165, 168 
 
 Vindhya Mountains : the southern 
 boundary of Aryavarta, 34 ; men- 
 tioned, 42, 127, 139, 152, 188, 189, 
 190, 241, 300 
 
 Virupaksha temple, at Pattadakal, 
 218, 242 
 
 582 
 
 Vishnu, the Preserver : conceptions 
 and attributes of, 28 ; patron deity 
 of the Kshatriyas, 28, 180 ; a name 
 representing all the symbols asso- 
 ciated with life in Indo-Arj'an 
 religion, 31 ; as a philosophical 
 concept, 31 ; the popular concep- 
 tion of, 32 ; Krishna and Rama 
 incarnations of, 42, 185 ; the 
 Buddha regarded as an avatar of, 
 55, 184 ; Vishnu pillars, 105-106, 
 173, 180, 502 ; the blue lotus 
 associated with, 106, 113, 180, 184 ; 
 site of the temple of, in the Aryan 
 village, 109, 132, 180 ; in the Three 
 Aspects of Brahmanism, 109, 136, 
 185, 205 ; Motmt Mem his abode, 
 7, III, 112 ; every Indo- Aryan king 
 regarded as Vishnu's vicegerent on 
 earth, 145 ; represented in the stele 
 of Naram Sin, 113, 181 ; a cosmic 
 principle recognised by all schools 
 of Indian philosophy, 145 ; revival 
 of Brahmanism in the form of 
 the Vishnu cult, 156 ; the Guptas 
 devoted adherents of the cult of, 
 172 ; the flowering tree a symbol 
 of, 182 ; the king's or chieftain's 
 fort a symbol of, 182 ; Siirya- 
 worship merged into that of ^'^ishnu, 
 183 ; symbolism and metaphysics 
 of the cult of, 183 ; LakshmT the 
 bride of, 184 ; raised the earth 
 from the water, 273 ; the sikhara 
 a symbol of, 326 ; Satya-Narayana 
 a Bengali synonym for, 338 ; Chai- 
 tanj^a regarded as an incarnation 
 of, 417-418 ; mentioned, 7, 29, 
 144, 178, 213, 347 
 
 Vishnu-Narayana : conceived as the 
 cosmic Slumber, 27, 28 ; the 
 Buddha worshipped as, 109 ; as 
 Eternity, the stupa a symbol of, 
 III ; Krishna connected with, 
 415 «.; mentioned, 114, 132, 
 192 
 
 Vishnu-Siirya : took the place of 
 Indra, 27 ; patron deity of the 
 Kshatriyas, 41 ; patron deity of 
 Aryan royalty, 112 ; connected 
 with early sun - worship, 193 ; 
 Krishna connected with, 415 n. 
 
 Vishvakarma, the Divine Architect, 
 
 185 
 Vishvakarma Chaitya House, EUora, 
 185-186 
 
INDEX 
 
 Vishvambara, name of Chaitanya, 
 
 410-41 1. See Chaitanya 
 Vishvarupa, brother of Chaitanya, 
 
 410-41 I 
 Vitasta, river, 271, 273-274 
 
 Wawd, Khalif, 250, 252, 257 
 
 ' Wanderers,' fraternity of mendi- 
 cant sophists, 50 
 
 Wang-hiuen-tse, Chinese envoy, 249- 
 250 
 
 Warangal, 307 
 
 Warfare : the Sukrd-nitisdra on, 173, 
 226 
 
 Water-supply, regulation of, in 
 ancient India, 73. See Irrigation 
 
 Watters, T., cited, 194 nn., 195 nn., 
 196 nn., 197 nn., 198 n., 201 n., 
 212 n. 
 
 Wencheng, Princess, 249 
 
 ' Wheel of the Law, the,' prayer- 
 wheel, 117 
 
 Wheeler, J. Talboys, cited, 333, 
 403 n. 
 
 Women : Manu on, 163 ; served on 
 the committees of the village as- 
 semblies, 231-232 ; Indian women 
 prized in the Muslim slave-markets, 
 308 
 
 Wood : used in early building con- 
 struction, and acquired a sacra- 
 mental meaning, 11 5-1 16 
 
 Yama, Ivord of Death : the western 
 gate in the Aryan village dedicated 
 to, 27 ; a gate in Pataliputra dedi- 
 cated to, 77 ; the stiipa a symbol 
 
 of, III 
 
 Varkand, 139 
 
 ^ashaskara, King of Kashmir, 275 
 ^asodharman, Raja of Central India, 
 175. 187 
 
 Yasovarman, Raja of Kanauj, 264, 
 271 
 
 Yavanas, or Greeks, 121, 130, 188, 
 236, 292 
 
 Yoga, the doctrine of : the Buddha 
 studied, 49 ; description of, 134 ; 
 incorporated in the Mahayanist 
 system, 138, 192 ; Hiuen-Tsang's 
 visit to India undertaken princi- 
 pally to obtain knowledge of, 192 ; 
 Akbar instructed in, 500 
 
 Yoga-sdstra, 200, 201 
 
 Yoga-sutras, 122 
 
 Yogi's Seat, the, at Fatehpur, 473 
 
 Yudhisthira, one of the Pandavas, 40 
 
 Yudhisthira I of Kashmir, 269-270 
 
 Yueh-chi — see Kushans 
 
 Yule, Sir Henry, cited, 359 n., 360, 
 361 nn., 362 nn., 363 and nn., 
 365 nn. 
 
 Yusuf 'Adil Shah, Sultan of Bijapur, 
 385. 389-390 
 
 Yusuf Ali, Mr, cited, 494 n. 
 
 Yusuf Turk, foster-father of Ismail 
 'Adil Shah I of Bijapiir, 390-392 
 
 Yiisufzais, Afghan tribe : Akbar 
 sends expeditions against, 521-524 
 
 Yuva-rdja, or Crown Prince, 87, 152, 
 189 
 
 Zain Khan, one of Akbar' s generals, 
 
 522-523 
 Zaman-i-Shaibani, Khan, 459-460, 
 
 464, 465-466, 484 
 Zamani, Mariam — see Mariam 
 Zamorin of Calicut, 344, 345 
 Zarmaros, Indian who immolated 
 himself before the Emperor Augus- 
 tus, 140 
 Zein-ud-din, Shaikh, 357-358 
 Zoroaster, orZarathushtra, 61-62, 143 
 Zoroastrianism, 280 
 


 ■^^ -<• .;■ sjii; Deacidified using the Bookkecpci (jiuc. 
 
 f,^ _^ '',y^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 
 N c ""-^j ' Treatment Date: Feb, 2003 
 
 s^^iill^"^ "^ PreservationTechnologie 
 
 VS ■" A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIt 
 
 rf <■ r ... Tu rt-_,. „.,... 
 
 PRESERVATIt 
 
 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive