THE GREAT GÛPTA EMPIRE

A.D. 308 TO A.D. 450

The curtain rises again upon a wedding; the wedding of Princess Kumâri Devi. Eight hundred years before, King Bimbi-sâra of the Sesu-nâga dynasty had strengthened his hold on Magadha by marrying her ancestress, a princess of that Lichchâvi clan which for centuries has held strong grip on a vast tract of country spreading far into the Nepaul hills.

This kingdom of the Lichchâvis had given Bimbi-sâra much trouble. It was to check the inroads of the bold hill folk that he first built the watch fort of Patâliputra, the modern Patna. Of the history of the warlike clan during these long intervening years nothing is known; but they must have kept their independence, for Princess Kumâri Devi (which, by the way, is tautological, since Kumâri means princess, the whole name therefore standing as Princess-Goddess) appears from the obscure as a person of importance, apparently an heiress. Whether she was the reigning princess history sayeth not; but it appears not unlikely that this was the case, and that at the time the Lichchâvis, instead of being checked by, were in possession of, Patâliputra.

Be that as it may, the Goddess-Princess chose to marry one Chandra-gûpta, a mere local chief of whose father and grandfather only the names have been preserved. Possibly he was good-looking; let us hope so! From the character of his son, Samûdra-gupta, it is reasonable to suppose that he rose above the common herd of princelings in both intelligence and accomplishments; though, on the other hand, these might have been derived from the princess.

Scarcely, however; unless the fairy god-mother had worked hard, since the bride's race warrants us in presupposing beauty. Even now, says a contemporary witness, "the delicate features and brilliantly fair complexion of the Lichchâvi women are remarkable."

Anyhow, the immediate result of what must have been a love match was the appearance for the first and last time in Indian History of a veritable Prince Consort, who, though calling himself king, struck coins which bore the name of his queen as well as his own, and whose son claimed succession as the "son of the daughter of the Lichchâvis."

Indeed, save as husband and father, Chandra-gûpta, the first of the Gûpta race, has little claim on attention. After the fashion of Prince Consorts, he is more or less of a figure-head, though the prospects of his dynasty were considered sufficiently dignified and secure to permit of his coronation date being made the beginning of yet another of the many Indian eras; one which has, however, passed entirely out of use.

Chandra-gûpta seems to have died when still quite a young man, leaving his son, apparently quite a boy, to reign in his stead.

A precocious stripling this Samûdra-gupta, who was to fill the throne of India as it has seldom been filled for more than half a century. Possibly there may have been some interval of Regency with the Queen-Mother at its back, but one of the most curious features in this fifty-year-long reign, is that we know nothing of it from the words of any historian, that we gather no allusion to it from any contemporaneous literature. Our knowledge, which year by year increases, comes from coins, from inscriptions; notably from a pillar which now stands in the fort at Allahabad. Originally incised and set up by Asôka six centuries earlier, Samûdra-gupta's court panegyrist has used its waste space for a record of his master's great deeds. A quaint contrast; since these were chiefly bloody wars, and Asôka everywhere was a peace propagandist.

In truth, Samûdra-gupta appears to have been an Indian Alexander. What he saw he coveted, what he coveted he conquered. From this same pillar we learn that his empire included all India as far south as Malabar, as far north as Assam and Nepaul. It was thus larger than any since the days of Asôka, though the southward sweep of Samûdra-gupta's victorious armies cannot, in the nature of things, have been much more than a raid. A campaign, involving fully 3,000 miles of marching, which cannot have occupied less than three years, and the furthest limit of which lands one more than 1,200 miles from one's base, must be a mere march to victory and a retreat with spoils.

The record of this march is fairly complete. The courtly panegyrist's stilted verses tell us in detail of Tiger-Kings subdued, of homage and tribute; but, so far as this slight history is concerned, all we need picture to ourselves is an apparently invincible hero, laden with loot from all the treasures of the south.

With honour also, for he made many treaties with foreign powers.

One gives us a quaint picture of the time. The Buddhist king of Ceylon sent two monks, one the king's brother, to visit the monastery which pious King Asôka of olden days had built by the sacred Bo tree at Bodh-Gya.

Now, India being at this time Brahmanical, the worthy brothers met with scant courtesy, and on return complained that they had literally found no place at the holy shrine wherein to lay their heads. The Buddhist king, therefore, anxious to redress this anomaly, despatched an embassy to Samûdra-gupta, asking leave to found a rest-house for the use of pious pilgrims, and sent with it rich jewels and gifts galore. These were duly accepted by the Hindoo as tribute, and gracious permission given. Whereupon the decision to build a special monastery close to the sacred tree was duly engraved on a copper plate, and, in due time, carried out by the erection of what was described two centuries later by the Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen T'sang (to whose literary labours we of to-day owe nearly all our knowledge of India in these far ages), as having three stories, six halls, three towers, and accommodation for a thousand monks,

"on which the utmost skill of the artist has been employed; the ornamentation is in the richest colours, and the statue of Buddha is cast of gold and silver, decorated with gems and precious stones."

Natheless this was the golden age of the Hindoo, not of the Buddhist, and, imitating Pushŷa-mitra, who overset the Buddhist Maurya dynasty, Samûdra-gupta determined to proclaim his supremacy by the ancient Horse sacrifice. So once more the doomed charger, followed by an army, set out on its wanderings for a year. This we know by reason of a few rare coins bearing the effigy of the victim standing before the altar, encircled by an explanatory legend, which have survived time, to be discovered of late years. There is also a rudely-carven stone horse now standing at the door of the Museum in Lucknow, which some archæologists label as belonging to Samûdra-gupta's great sacrifice.

But the coins of this king are somewhat lavish of information. Several, which represent him playing on a lyre, remain a proof that the court panegyrist was not a wholesale flatterer in counting him musician. This, again, gives ground for belief that he was also, as is claimed for him, a poet. That he took delight in patronising art of all kinds is proved beyond doubt by the great number of eminent men whose works date from the reign of Samûdra-gupta, and his son Chandra-gûpta II., who, on his coronation, took the name of Vikramadîtya; the latter being, of course, the one associated in the mind of every Hindu of to-day with the splendid renaissance of national learning and art, on which they love to dwell. To them Vikramadîtya is synonymous with the zenith of Hindu glory; but it is open to doubt whether the hero's father may not lay claim to a lion's share of the record of great achievements. We know of a certainty that he was sufficiently notable as musician to warrant his coins being stamped with majesty in that rôle; his poet-laureate tells us of keen intellect, love of study, and skill in argument. Is not this sufficient to make us at any rate date the beginning of the Renaissance from the days of Samûdra-gupta?

Be that as it may, it is abundantly clear that in him we are dealing with another of those rare kings, who are kings indeed by right of their personal supremacy.

India is curiously fruitful in them, and, so far as we have come in Indian history, their individualities stand forth all the stronger in contrast with the mists and shadows which surround them. Bhishma, Chandra-gûpta, Asôka, Kanîshka, Samûdra-gupta--we gauge our admiring interest by our desire to know what manner of men these were in feature and form. But Fate, for the most part, denies us even the scant suggestion of a rude coin. She does so here. Whether Samûdra inherited his mother's beauty is for the present an unanswerable question. We do not know even the year of his passing, still less the manner of it: the story goes on without a pause to Chandra-gûpta-Vikramadîtya, his son, whose fame, until lately, quite overwhelmed all memory of his father; that father who conquered India, who allied himself with foreign powers, who made the subsequent achievements of his son possible.

The question which besets us now is the extent to which Chandra-gûpta-Vikramadîtya's fame is really his own; how much of it is due to the fact that we possess of his reign and administration an almost unique record in the account given of his travels and sojourn in India by the Buddhist pilgrim from China, Fa-Hien? This gives us information which fails us in the reigns of other kings. How much, again, of this Vikramadîtya's fame belongs by right to that other mythical Vikramadîtya of before-Christ days? That nameless king who flits like a Will-o'-the-Wisp through the mists of early Indian history?

How much, again, is rightfully due to his father--that striking personality which historians have forgotten, but which now comes surging through the shadows, a veritable man indeed?

Who can say? All we know is that the Gûpta dynasty was a mighty one; that it still serves the modern Hindu as a model of good government, just as the Mahomedan still points with pride to Akbar's rule.

What, then, were the salient points of this beloved control? Judging by Fa-Hien's account they may be summed up in personal liberty. The subject was left largely to follow his own intentions, and the criminal law was singularly lenient. This was rendered possible by the wide acceptation amongst the masses of Buddha's gospel of good-will; for although Brahmanical Hinduism had ousted Buddhist dogma, it had scarcely touched its ethics. Capital punishment was unknown; there was no need for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. "Throughout the country," we read, "no one kills any living thing."

An easy kingdom in good sooth to rule! According to our traveller, the people seem to have vied with each other in virtue. All sorts of charitable institutions existed, and the description of a free hospital, endowed by benevolence, is worth quoting:--

"Hither come all poor or helpless patients suffering from every sort of infirmity. They are well taken care of, and a doctor attends to them, food and medicine being given according to their wants. Thus they are made quite comfortable, and when they are well they may go away."

Thus, once more, the East saw light sooner than the West; for the first hospital in Europe only struggled into existence more than five hundred years after this one at Magâdha.

But the chief glory of the Gûpta empire was its patronage of the arts and sciences. Every pundit in India knows the verse which names the "nine gems of Vikramadîtya's court"; those learned men amongst whom Kâlidâsa, the author of "Sakûntala" (so far as fame goes, the Shakspeare of India), stood foremost. Poets, astronomers, grammarians, physicians, helped to make up the nawa-ratani, as it is called, and the extraordinary literary activity of the century and a quarter (from A.D. 330 to 455), during which long period Samûdra, Chandra, and his son, Kumâra, reigned, is most remarkable. The revival of Sanskrit, the sacred language of the Brahmans, points to an upheaval of Hindu religious thought, and so does the almost endless sacred literature, which, still surviving, is referred to the golden age of the Gûptas. The Purânas in their present form, the metrical version of the Code of Manu, some of the Dharm-shâstras, and, in fact, most of the classical Sanskrit literature, belong to this period.

Architecture was also revolutionised. As Buddhism slipped from the grip of the people under pressure from the ever-growing power of the Brahmans, the very forms of its sacred buildings gave way to something which, more ornate, less self-evident, served to reflect the new and elaborate pretensions of the priesthood. Mr Cunningham gives us somewhere the seven characteristics of the Gûpta style of architecture; but it is more easily summed up for the average beholder in the words "cucumber and gourd." These names serve well to recall the tall, curved vimanas, or towers, exactly like two-thirds of a cucumber stuck in the ground, and surmounted by a flat, gourd-like "Amalika," so called because of its resemblance to the fruit of that name.

That such buildings are interesting may be conceded, but that any one can call the collection of pickle-bottles (for that is practically the effect of them) at-let us say-Bhuvan-eshwar beautiful, passes comprehension.

Exquisite they are in detail, perfect in the design and execution of their ornamentation, but the form of these temples leaves much to be desired. The flat blob at the top seems to crush down the vague aspirings of the cucumber, which, even if unstopped, must ere long have ended in an earthward curve again.

To return to history.

Chandra-gûpta-Vikramadîtya died in A.D. 413. His greatest military achievement was the overthrow of the Sâka dynasty in Kathiawâr, and the annexation of Mâlwa to the already enormous empire left him by his father. In other ways we have large choice of prowess. All the tales which linger to this day on the lips of India concerning Râjah Bikra- or Vikra-majît are at our disposal.

Of his son Kumâra we at present know little, save that he reigned successfully for not less than forty years, keeping his kingdom intact, remaining true to its traditions.

Perhaps some day his fame also will rise from its grave, and coin or inscription may prove him true unit of the Great Trio of Gûpta emperors. This much we may guess: he was his grandmother's darling, for he bears her name in masculine dress.

THE WHITE HUNS AND GOOD KING HARSHA

A.D. 450 TO A.D. 648

The name Huns has quite a familiar sound. We think of Attila; we remember the 350 pounds weight of gold which Theodosius of Byzantium paid as an annual tribute to the victorious horde which swept into Europe about the middle of the fifth century; finally, we hark back to Gibbon's description of this race of reckless reiving riders; for the Huns seem to have been born in the saddle and never to have lived out of it. This is what he says:--

"They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their broad shoulders, flat noses and small black eyes, deeply buried in the head; and, as they were almost destitute of beards, they never enjoyed either the manly graces of youth or the venerable aspect of age." (En passant, we can but wonder what our poor Gibbon would have said to the shaven chin of to-day!) "A fabulous origin was assigned worthy of their form and manners--that the witches of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction."

Again, poor Huns! We do not need such legend to know that they were utterly barbarian; that they rode like the devil, fought with bone-tipped javelins, clothed themselves in skins, and ate herbs and half-raw meat which they had first made tender by using it as their saddle! It is a sufficiently black indictment, and, though it applies only to the rolling swarm of savages which, on leaving that hive of humanity, the wide Siberian Steppe, turned westward, we have no reason to suppose that the swarm which turned eastward differed much from the type. It is true they are called the White Huns, but that is most likely because among the dark races of Hindustan, the yellow Mongolian complexion showed fair.

India had been overrun many times before, but it needs small consideration to see that this invasion must have been the worst, must have brought with it a perfect horror of havoc. Far more so than the Hun invasion in Europe. There the ultimate savage met, for the most part, with Goths and Visigoths. In India they stood between a Brahman and his salvation, between culture and comfort. For India was in these days far more civilised than Europe; its people were refined, bound hand and foot by ritual, curiously conventional in custom.

The long ages which had passed since the Vedic times had made religion more complex, had multiplied ceremonial to such an extent that the performance of the simplest duty was hedged about by the danger of fateful commissions, and still more fateful omissions. The revival of Hinduism during the paling days of the Gûpta empire had vastly increased the power of the Brahman. In brief, Purânic Hinduism--that is, religion based on the Purânas, as distinct from the Vedas--with all its hair-splitting, its overlay of ritual by ritual, was at its zenith. From birth to death a man--even the meanest man--was in the grip of innumerable petty commandments.

The very gods he worshipped had changed. The elemental deities of the Rig-Veda--the Winds, the Fire, the Sun, the Dawn--behind which lay ever (half recognised, wholly mysterious) the Unconditioned, the Absolute, were lost; crowded out, as it were, by the three hundred and thirty millions of Purânic godlings, which rumour says had replaced the thirty-and-three of the Vedas. And beset by an Athanasian furore for faith, the Purânas had defined the undefinable. The doctrine of a Trinity seems about this era of the world's history to have been more than usually in the air, and we find it here, hard and fast, crystallised unchangeably.

Brahma the Creator, Siva the destroying Spirit, Vishn or Krishn the Saviour, the Man-God, kind to the weaknesses of humanity. The three hundred and thirty millions of little gods were contained in the Three; they were emanations, attributes, as such imaged and worshipped. A great change this from the singing of a hymn to Agni the Fire-God, as the victim's flesh shrivelled in the flame, and the cooling of the ashes with a libation of soma juice.

And the worshipping of images brought with it a veneration for temples, a reverence for a paid priesthood, with its inevitable corollary of cult and custom and ceremonial. This complexity of religion naturally showed itself in the character of the people. As Mr Dutt writes:--

"Pompous celebrations and gorgeous decorations arrested the imagination and fostered the superstitions of the populace; poetry, arts, architecture, sculpture, and music lent their aid, and within a few centuries the nation's wealth was lavished on these gorgeous edifices and ceremonials which were the outward manifestations of the people's unlimited devotion and faith. Pilgrimages, which were rare or unknown in very ancient times, were organised on a stupendous scale; gifts in land and money poured in for the support of temples, and religion gradually transformed itself to a blind veneration of images and their custodians. The great towns of India were crowded with temples, and new gods and new idols found sanctuaries in stone edifices and in the hearts of ignorant worshippers."

Add to this the testimony of the literature of the period. The dramas of Kâlidâsa, beautiful as they are, concern themselves entirely with Love. The very descriptions of nature have reference to it, as when we read:--

His very reflections also are tinged with the same soft note of underlying passion:--

And, leaving poetry alone, such knowledge as we have of social life in these days points to a certain effeminacy. In fact, there is evidence that woman played a larger part in society than she does in the India of to-day. The perennial joke against learned ladies, indeed, appears in the drama of the "Toy Cart," where the comic man says he always laughs when he "hears a woman read Sanskrit, or a man sing a song!" Then the heroine of this drama is frankly a courtesan, an Indian Aspasia, who received her lovers in a public court furnished with books, pictures, gambling-tables, etc., and who was

Such, then, were the people who "felt, dreaded, and magnified" (as Gibbon says of the Goths--a far less civilised nation--in like predicament) "the numbers, the strength, the rapid motions and implacable cruelty of the Huns; who beheld their fields and villages consumed with flames and deluged with indiscriminate slaughter."

Perhaps it is as well, therefore, that history is for the most part silent concerning the horror and the havoc of the century or so of time during which the Huns ravaged India. We hear only of the greater tragedies, of Toramâva the Tyrant, and his son Mihîragûla, who out-Heroded his father in implacable cruelty towards the cultured, caste-bound Hindus, to whom all things were sacred. Of him it is written that his favourite amusement in Kashmir was watching elephants goaded into impassable, precipitous hill-paths, so that he might laugh like a fiend if they slipped and fell; fell with a wild shriek of terror and anger, to be dashed to pieces thousands of feet below. An unpleasing picture this! One cannot wonder at the criticism passed on his death, when "the earth shook, thick darkness reigned, and a mighty tempest raged." It was succinct, bald, but forcible: "He has now fallen into the lowest hell, where he shall pass endless ages."

After his death, which must have occurred about the year A.D. 540, the clouds gather darkly, and we are permitted few peeps as to what was going on behind them. Certain it is that no trace of a paramount power is to be found in the scant records of the last half of the sixth century.

The beginning of the seventh, however, finds the historian in very different case. He has first and foremost the detailed account of Hiuen T'sang's travels with which to deal, and this is supplemented by the "Harsha-charita," or "Deeds of Harsha," written by a learned Brahman who lived at the court of the good king. That this latter book partakes more of the character of a historical romance than a steady, straightforward chronicle of events is true; but even so, the information at disposal is fuller and more precise than that which has been forthcoming hitherto, excepting, perhaps, in regard to the great Maurya kings.

Harsha, then, was younger son of a Râjah of Thanêswar, in the Punjâb.

His father dying in A.D. 606, his elder brother ascended the throne, but was almost immediately most treacherously assassinated in conference by the King of Bengal; the conference apparently being for the purpose of arbitrating between the young Râjah of Thanêswar and the King of Mâlwa, who had murdered the former's brother-in-law for the sake of possessing his wife, and was keeping the Thanêswar princess a prisoner, with "iron fetters kissing her feet."

The assassinated king being too young to have a son, his brother Harsha was invited to take the throne. For some unknown reason he hesitated, and his formal coronation did not take place until nearly six years after he had assumed the actual responsibilities of kingship.

The story of the recovery of his widowed sister from the hands of her abductor is full of incident and romance. The rescue was but just in time, for the Princess Râj-yasri--a most attractive and learned young lady, and well versed in the Buddhistic schools, apparently--was about to commit suttee amid the pathless forests, whither she had fled to escape her persecutor, when her brother, led to her retreat by the aboriginal chieftains, arrived upon the scene. The hurry was so great, that in it the assassin-lover appears to have escaped.

It will be observed by this that the family of Harsha was of the Buddhist faith. How, or why, we know not. The very name of his kingdom, Than-êswar (S'thaneswara, or, The Place of God), is purely Hindu; nevertheless, this, the last great King of Hindu India, professed the religion of Gâutama.

In fact, in many ways his reign is a poor imitation of that of Asôka. He did not, however, follow that king's example as a peace prophet, for he spent nearly thirty-six years out of his forty-two in bloody warfare. And in all his long career of aggression he met with but one check. He was unable to push his forces through the narrow defiles of the Deccan passes, and had to confine himself to being Lord Paramount of the North. So his empire, though extensive, never touched that of Asôka; in truth, he did not touch that monarch in any way. Nevertheless, his rule was excellent, and our Chinese pilgrim is loud in praise of it. Harsha did not trust to officialdom; personal supervision was his theory of government, and he was constantly on the move inspecting, punishing, rewarding. His camp must have been quaint, for in those days tents were unknown, and the "King's Palace" was built at each halting-place of boughs and reeds, and solemnly burnt after it had been used.

Like all these Eastern kings whose personalities have survived the years, he appears to have been somewhat of a genius. Besides being a most expert penman and draughtsmen, he wrote various learned books, and in his salad days produced several plays which still remain part of the literature of India. One, "The Necklace," is quite the liveliest of all Indian plays, and with appropriate songs and dances must have been rather like a Savoy comic opera. There is a legend that Harsha spent so much money on poets, actors, dancers and artists of all descriptions, that he had eventually to sell the gold and silver ornaments of the Hindu temples in order to pay for his pleasures; but this is pure legend. Following the example of Asôka, he established rest-houses for travellers, hospitals for the sick, magistrates for the regulation of morals; yet in all this, somehow, the sense of pose is never absent. Asôka's voice is still to-day a cri du cœur; Harsha's is--fin de siècle.

He could not help it. The curious religious eclecticism of the period favoured it. His family showed keenly the general tendency to self-consciousness, and it was written of his father:

"He offered daily to the Sun a bunch of red lotuses set in a pure vessel of ruby, and tinged, like his own heart, with the same hue."

Could Oscar Wilde have done more? Strange, indeed, how the cycles of culture come round and round.

It was in his later years that King Harsha became a pronounced Buddhist. This was largely owing to the preachings and teachings of Hiuen T'sang, in honour of whom a solemn assemblage was held at Kanaûj in the fresh spring-time of the year A.D. 644. The scene is admirably given in Hiuen T'sang's Record, and is well worth a reading. We can imagine the king carrying in person the canopy upheld over the golden statuette of Buddha; we can see him "moving along, scattering golden blossoms, pearls and other rare gems." We catch a glimpse of the flaming monastery accidentally catching fire, to be extinguished by the mere sight of the good Harsha. The rush of the mad Hindu fanatic to slay this "favourer of Buddhists" comes as a startling incident, to be followed by the immediate exile of five hundred Brahmans for high treason.

Then we learn of the journey to Prâg (Allahabad), where every five years Harsha, in accordance with ancient custom, had held a distribution of alms.^[2]

The description of this is even more entrancing, and we can take part in all the ceremonials of the seventy-five days during which Buddha, the Sun, and Siva were apparently worshipped indiscriminately. The proceedings were opened by a magnificent procession of feudatory princes, and ended with a forty-days' distribution of alms to all and sundry.

After this, Hiuen T'sang writes

"the royal accumulation of five years was exhausted. Except the horses, elephants and military accoutrements ... nothing remained.... The king gave away his gems and goods, his clothing and neck-laces, ear-rings, bracelets, chaplets, neck jewels, and bright head jewel; all these he freely gave away without stint."

Was it a real gifting, we wonder, or, after duly worshipping in a borrowed second-hand suit, did Harsha return to his palace to find his wardrobe much the same as ever?

The hint of unreality in all things provokes the question.

King Harsha died in A.D. 648, shortly after his beloved Chinese pilgrim had departed for his native land. Once again it has to be written that the "withdrawal of the strong arm plunged the country into disorder."

Arjûna, his minister, seized the throne, but drew down on himself the wrath of China, and after a brief interval was carried thither as a prisoner.

Meanwhile, no one appeared to take the reins. In truth, degeneration had already set in. The people who had posed so long as a nation of culture, of refinement, who had spent their lives in applauding poetasters, who had laughed when the court wit said the commander-in-chief's nose was as long as the king's pedigree, who had been ready to worship any god if so be the ceremonial pleased their æsthetic sense, who had given free pass to their emotions in all ways, such people were not ready for action. And so once for all the clouds cover Hindu supremacy.

The next four hundred years are the Dark Ages of Indian history. Even the impressionist outlook of our case of coins is denied us. A thousand names jostle each other in commonplace confusion. In the chaos of conflicting claims, any attempt at classification is hopeless.

CHAOS

A.D. 700 TO A.D. 1001

These, as has been said, are the Dark Ages of Hindustan. She has ever been the prey of personality, the willing victim of vitality. From the year B.C. 620, when her real history begins, until now, that history has been that of individuals who have either risen from her ranks, or appeared on her horizon; who have dominated her imagination, and left her too often at their death confused, helpless, to fall back into the bewildering anarchy of petty princedoms.

The light shines clearly for a few years, reflected by one man's keen sword, or keener eyes; and then the strong arm falls, the vision fails, and India sinks back into the Great Apathy concerning things sublunary which is ever her most salient characteristic.

And these three hundred years give us no personality striking enough to be seen through the mist which settled down like a pall over India after the death of Harsha. This death, says Mr Vincent Smith, "loosened the bonds which restrained the disruptive forces always ready to operate in India, and allowed them to produce their normal result: a medley of petty states with ever-varying boundaries, and engaged in unceasing internecine war."

No new thing this in the past history of India; it will be no new thing in the future, for Hindustan will always need some strong, centralising, magnetic force to hold together its innumerable atoms.

It is true that in literature some few names hover doubtfully about the eighth century, and that round the outskirts of India, in Kashmir, Nepaul, Madras, Ceylon, we hear every now and again of events which arrest the attention for a moment. The reassertion of Chinese influence along the northern borderland, though brief, was noteworthy, and in Kashmir the names of several kings and one queen stand out from the general posse. Amongst them that of Lâlâditya, who built the famous Temple of the Sun at Martand, not far from Bâwun in Kashmir. A magnificent ruin this, standing out sharply against both the rising in the east and the setting in the west; set high on one of those lofty karêwas, or tablelands, which are so marked a characteristic of Kashmir. Fringing the mighty mountains, they stretch like promontories into the rice and saffron fields, still showing by their precipitous sides the force of the mighty flood which at some time must have swept through the valley, lowering its levels, and leaving these landmarks to tell of its passage.

Then we have two names--rather painfully reminiscent of comic opera--Avanti-vârman and Sankâra-vârman, good and bad boys of Kashmir history. The former remembered for his beneficent schemes, his kindly patronage; the latter for his ingenuity in squeezing the last drop of blood-tax from his oppressed subjects, and his aptitude in stealing temple treasures.

Finally, and alas! we have a queen called Didda. The less said of her the better. It is sufficient to record that she was the Messalina, the Lucrezia Borgia of Kashmîr for close on half a century.

A long time this! Could she by chance have had the secret of youth like Ninon d'Enclos?

Her death, however, brings us to A.D. 1003, and in A.D. 1001 Mahmûd, so-called of Ghuzni, was to begin his first raid into India, and so bring a new factor--Islâmism--to its welter of creeds and castes.

Here, therefore, ends the Hindu period of Indian history. There follows on it the Mahomedan age from A.D. 1001 to 1858, when the English formally took over the entire charge of Government.

Now as in this Mahomedan age the new faith of the conquerors had much to say to the general trend of events, it may be as well to occupy this empty chapter by a brief exposition of what that faith is, and how it inspired those constant invasions of India which make the next few hundred years the record of an almost continuous campaign. Before doing this, however, let us take still briefer stock of this past Hindu age.

It was an age of growth, of renaissance, of decadence.

The natural vigour of the Vedas grew to the more complex, more artificial energy of the Epics, and out of this arose strangely the quietism of the Buddhist. War and Peace, Glory and Dishonour, Riches and Poverty, all faded away to nothingness before the hope of Nirvana--of escape from Desire. Thus Asôka becomes the dominating figure, and even after his death the names of Kanîshka and Hûshka and Harsha faintly echo his fame.

But they failed to keep it alive. The Brahmans, rising to power, thrust out alike the simplicity of the Vedas and the nescience of Buddha. So came the Renaissance.

An epoch marked, as such epochs generally are, by a curious cult of the emotions in all things. The Indians of the Gûpta empire were emphatically fin de siècle, so they did not survive. King Harsha, Mithraist, Buddhist, Hindu, worshipping his several deities by giving in alms even "his bright head-jewel," pictures the time. A time when the court panegyrist Bana, writing of his dying master, can so juggle with words as to describe his agony thus:--

"Helplessness had taken him in hand; pain had made him its province, wasting its domain, lassitude its lair ... broken in utterance, unhinged in mind, tortured in body, waning in life, babbling in speech, ceaseless in sighs."

Of a truth, there is no wonder that the Indian world also had come to "the tip of death's tongue," to "the portal of the Long Sleep."

It was becoming neurotic, hyper-æstheticised. It needed a rest and a rude awakening.

Mahomedanism was to give it the latter, and the founder of this faith had been born at Mecca on the 10th November A.D. 570. By a curious coincidence, the date on which he began his teaching and that of King Harsha's coronation are very nearly synchronous.

Mahomed was an Arab, but was in every way unlike his race. A posthumous son, he had "inherited from his mother a delicate and extremely impressionable constitution, and an exaggerated sensibility." He was melancholy, silent, fond of desert places, solitude, and dreamy meditations.

Nature appealed to him. The sight of the setting sun inspired him with vague restlessness, and he would weep and sob like a child at slight provocation.

His religious excitability was of the most acute character, and passed at times into attacks of epilepsy.

A true revivalist this! Small wonder if, having in his mountain solitude seen, or thought he had seen, a vision of the Great Unity which men call God, he should have claimed inspiration, and claimed it militantly. The time was ripe for a revival. Religion was being discussed on all sides, and Mahomed having, it is said, gained nine converts by his first vision, set to work to gain more. Ere he died all Arabia frankly followed his teaching. This, however, was not the result of what Asôka advocated as the only legitimate method of a mission, for "example, tolerance, gentleness and moderation in speech" have never found much place in Mahomedan proselytising; the rather fire and sword, a sharp blade held to the throat that hastily gabbles the Kalma or Mahomedan creed.

And yet it is a faith which has held, which still holds, its own, and which was to be responsible for much in the future history of India. Like all faiths, however, it has gone far beyond its founder, and it is doubtful for how much of the Mahomedanism of to-day the seer-prophet of A.D. 610 is really responsible. Within six years of his death his successors had carried their version of the dreamer's thoughts to Syria and Egypt. Ere Harsha died the whole of Persia as far east as Herât was added to the Arab empire. Thence in the slow centuries it drifted towards India; for the lust of personal and temporal power amongst the leaders checked its progress much. The great dispute as to the rightful succession to the Prophet provoked almost instant schism; while the assassination of Ali, the fourth kalifa--he was son-in-law of the Prophet--and the subsequent murders of his two sons Hussan and Hussain, was productive of a strife which lasts to the present day between the rival sects of Shîahs and Sunnis.

So, while the Dark Age of India drifted on, the Awakener was creeping closer to the border, and in A.D. 976 one Sabaktagîn, a Turkish slave who had married the Governor of Khorassan's daughter, began the invasion by sweeping the western bank of the Indus, and retiring laden with loot.

Map: India to A.D. 1000

PART II

THE MIDDLE AGE

CAMPAIGNS OF THE CRESCENT

A.D. 1001 TO A.D. 1200

Part I

For close on these two hundred years the northern plains of India were a battle-field. Winter after winter, as the sun's power declined, and the curious second spring began of cold-weather crops and fruits and flowers, which to this day make the Punjâb seasons hover between the tropics and the temperates, there debouched from the snow-clad hills, all along the western and north-western frontier of India, long files of wild-looking horsemen, followed by camels, by foot soldiers; and somewhere, in their midst always, was the green flag of the Prophet, with its over-riding, overbearing crescent, telling its tale of rising power; the crescent which is an apt symbol of a fighting faith.

What tempted these hardy northern folk into the wide plains of India? Was it, indeed, zeal for Souls? Hardly. By the way, as a sort of salve to conscience, such zeal was good to break an idol or two, or an idolater's head; but au fond, the money bags outweighed all other reasons for these recurring raids.

For during those three centuries of Chaos, during the dark ages of degeneracy, India had grown rich-inordinately rich. Overlaid, and yet again overlaid with finikin fanciful ornamentations, almost incoherent in their diffuse discursive details, the temples were perfect mines of wealth; in some cases of useless, buried treasure, since in the gradual downfall OF the Hindu nation at large, the privileged class of Brahmans had closed their grip even on the power of the princes. The only thing which remained comparatively untouched, as in India it has ever remained untouched, being the slow-moving mass of the peasantry, who, willing bondsmen to Mother Earth, took no heed of anything save famine.

The first swoop for plunder was made by one Mahmûd, King of Ghuzni, in November A.D. 1001. He must have entered India by the Khyber Pass, for on the 27th of that month, near Peshawar, he met and defeated King Jaipal of Lahôre. One can imagine the contest. The long-nosed, long-curled, long-bearded Ghuznivites, rough and ready in their skin-coats, their burly bosoms aflame with covetousness for creed and gold, their guttural throats resounding with the war-cry of Islam: "Kill! Kill! For the Faith!" And on the other side, the clean-shaven, oiled, scented Hindus lax with long centuries of ease, yet still full of pride, full of high courage.

It was a foregone conclusion, despite the mailed elephants and the elaborate old War Office dispositions and compositions of corps and cadre which had come down, we may be sure, from Chândra-gûpta's days. For once the East gets hold of a thing, it sticks to it.

It was new blood against old--a new faith against one so ancient that it had almost been forgotten. Almost, not quite, as the story shows of what Jaipal did, when the Mahomedan conqueror, driven back to the cool by the approach of a new summer, carelessly gave the royal prisoner--whom he had dragged about with him in his victorious raid--a contemptuous freedom. But ere this time came, Mahmûd of Ghuzni had to set one of his many marks--he invaded India no less than twelve times--as far south in the Punjâb as Bhattinda, a town in the Patiala State. A marvellous place this even nowadays, set as it is amid deserts of sand, patched with green grain-fields. The low, insignificant city seems lost in the old fort; a perfect mountain of a place, visible for miles and miles, a rose-red mass of sun-scorched bricks with white-edged, crenulated parapets so quaintly stern, so still more quaintly fragile-looking in its suggestion of some huge iced cake.

Here, doubtless, in the half-desert land, it was the sound of the koël knelling his sonorous note in the kikar trees, or the sudden transformation, mayhap, of the uncanny, witchlike, gnarled thickets of the low dhâk trees into coral-pink stretches, showing like sunset clouds on the gold of the sun-saturate sands, that warned Mahmûd he must be up and away from the oncoming of the heat.

As he passed up the Peshawar valley, laden to the last limit with loot, the peach gardens must have been a-blossom; and, being a man with the odd strain of imagination in him, which all have had who have left their mark on India, he must, despite his plunder, have regretted leaving so much beauty behind him.

But he left tragedy also; for Jaipal, the beaten king, went straight back to Lahôre, and having formally proclaimed himself unworthy to reign after having suffered defeat at the hands of the unclean, mounted a funeral pyre, and burnt himself in sight of his people, leaving his son Anang-pal to reign in his stead.

Truly Indian history is provocative of picture-making. We have one here which would tax most painters' power. Yet the look which must have been on the proud king's face, as, remembering his name, "The Guardian of Victory," he defied defeat, defied disgrace, by defying death, is worth recording, worth recalling in these later days when the primitive virtues are somewhat overclouded.

So there was peace for three years. Apparently the plunder was sufficient unto the day until 1004, when Mahmûd again appeared with the return of the wild birds from Lake Mansarawar, on the Siberian Steppes; but this was more a primitive campaign against a tributary chief on the western side of the Indus, than a real raid.

The following year, however, things were organised on a larger scale, and he was opposed by Anang-pal, who met no better fate than his father, and fled incontinently to Kashmir. But Mahmûd's progress southward was checked by the news of revolt in Ghuzni, and he had to return in order to count scores with his pet converted Hindu, one Sek Pal, who, left governor, had resumed his Brahmanical thread, and was in full swing of conspiracy with his fellows in India.

It took the burly Mahomedan short time to settle his shrift, and send him to cells for life, so that the next fall of the leaf found Mahmûd ready for his fourth invasion of India.

A real invasion, a real resistance this time. For the Rajas of Lahôre, Delhi, Gwalîor, Ujjain, Ajmir, Kanauj, had joined confederacy to rout the Unclean Stranger. It was a holy war: women sold their jewels, and men sent their hoards to furnish forth its munitions.

To no purpose. It is true that at the outset Mahmûd suffered a reverse. The Ghakkars, Scythic warrior race of the Salt Range, laughed at the invader's entrenched camp amongst their bare hills, bore down on it, overpowered his outposts, and accounted for some four thousand of his army.

But even that failed to stop these big, burly men, bent on plunder, bent on proselytising at the sword's point. The result of this raid was the destruction of Nagar-kôt, ancient town hard by the temple called Jawâla-Mukhi, or Flame's Mouth, where, since the beginning of Time, the jets of combustible gas issuing from the ground amongst the dark shadows of the sheltering spire have burnt bravely as emanations, manifestations, of the Goddess Dûrga, that Fury of Womanhood. According to native historians Mahmûd's returning army must have been a perfect caravan, for it carried with it about seven thousand pounds weight of gold coins, six thousand of gold and silver plate, fifteen hundred of golden ingots, a hundred and twenty-eight thousand of unwrought silver, and more than a hundred and fifty pounds weight of pearls, corals, diamonds and rubies.

But the combustible gas must have remained to be re-lit in honour of Mai Dûrga, and so have remained to help the memories of the iconoclasts! A fine trade this, that of smashing golden idols in the name of the Prophet, and carrying the bits and the diamond and sapphire eyes away in the name of Mammon!

It found its apotheosis in the twelfth and last expedition to India, when Mahmûd directed all his energy towards Som-nâth, a temple renowned throughout India, set proudly on a peninsula in Guzerât, surrounded on all sides save one by the sea.

The intervening seven excursions were all marked by noteworthy incidents, all full to the brim of reckless romance, and each left India the more helpless, the more ready to let the invader pass to fresh, more southern conquests. Indeed, a certain suzerainty was acknowledged by many Hindu rajahs, and on one occasion Mahmûd's march was ostensibly to the relief of a feudatory.

But it would take too long to follow in detail events which were in general so alike. Swift marching, utter unpreparedness, almost pitiful submission, and then "a halt at some sacred city, during which the town was plundered, the idols broken, the temples profaned, and the whole fired." Yet, as the ravaging raids touched Râjputana, resistance became more spirited. At one place the garrison rushed out through the breaches in true Kshatriya fashion to do or die, whilst the women and children burned themselves in silence in their houses. Not one, we are told, survived. This is the first mention in history of the johâr, or great war-sacrifice of the Râjputs. It is not the last.

So let us turn to Som- or Soma-nâth. Now "Soma" is the Moon-God, "Nâth" is Lord. We have, therefore, a simple Temple to the Moon by name; but in reality Som-nâth, or Som-eswara, is one of the forms of the God Siva--his self-existing form.

The crescent moon on the forehead with which the God always is portrayed alludes to this, and to the intimate relation between the phases of the planet as a measure of time, and the upright stone or lingam, which as all know is worshipped as a symbol of material Life. It is customary to condemn this nature or phallic worship in India as unclean, almost obscene; it is not so, anyhow, in spirit.

Som-nâth, then, was a shrine of Life. The idol in its holy of holies bore no semblance of created beings. It was the symbol of Creation itself, a tall, rounded, black monolith of stone, set six feet in the ground, rising ten feet above it. One of the twelve lingams believed by the Hindus to have descended from Heaven, it was unexpressedly holy, marvellously mighty in miracle. Small wonder, then, with a priesthood of clutching hands, that Som-nâth stood renowned as the richest shrine in India.

It must have been fine to see this temple, with its fifty-six pillars set in rows, all carven and inlaid with gems, its gilded spires above the dark, unlit sanctuary, where the great bell swung on a solid gold chain which weighed some fifteen hundred pounds.

Steps led down from it to the sea--that sea which was a miracle in itself to the ignorant, up-country pilgrim, accustomed to parched deserts, unwitting of such natural phenomena as tides; for did it not bow, did it not rise and fall incessantly in constant adoration of the Great Lord of Life? So, at any rate, said the priests, and the pilgrim went back to his parched desert with empty pockets, to dream for the rest of his life of the solemn, ceaseless adoration of the sea. Aye! even when it raged black with monsoon winds, and spat white with fury at the temple walls, yet still in subservience, still as a slave.

This was not a place to be yielded up of the Brahmans without a struggle. So we read of a three days' battle, of scaling ladders, of heavy reinforcements of the "idolatrous garrison," of an "idolatrous"--surely there is no better word in the language with which to fight a foe!--array in the field which withdrew Mahmûd's personal attention. And then there is the crucial moment: Mahomedan troops beginning to waver, their leader leaping from his horse, prostrating himself on the ground before the Lord God of Battles, and imploring aid for the True Faith.

To speak trivially, it did the trick. One wild, cheering rush, and "the Moslems broke through the enemy's line and laid five thousand Hindus dead at their feet; so the rout became general." So general that the garrison of four thousand, abandoning the defence, escaped by the sea in boats.

Nothing left, then, but to enter the temple in pomp. A goodly procession of warriors! Mahmûd, his sons, his nobles; all, no doubt, spitting profusely, while keeping their weather eye open on the gems starring the heavy, carven pillars. Darker and darker! The pillars close in. No light now, save,--high up in the shadows--one pendent jewelled lamp, reflected in the glistening stones, showing dimly the huge, massive golden chain, the swinging bronze bell.

And what more? Only a roughly-polished, black marble, upright boulder, hung round, doubtless, as such lingams are to-day, with faded champak chaplets and marigold wreaths.

Was it disappointment which made Mahmûd strike at it with his mace? One could imagine it so, but that he had had experience of the idle objects of which men make idols. Perhaps the backward swing of the mace-head hit the bell and sent its last hollow boom of appeal--which so many worshippers had raised--straight to the ears of the Lord of Life.

It is a rare picture this, of one faith defying another. It does not need the amplification which legend brings to it, in order to grip attention.

That legend runs thus. When Mahmûd had ordered two fragments to be hewn off the idol, one for the threshold of the mosque at Ghuini, another for the threshold of his own palace, some of the two thousand priests of Baal in attendance offered untold gold to arrest further destruction; an offer viewed with favour by the king's sons, and the attendant nobles. Smashing one idol out of millions was but mildly meritorious, whereas the money thus gained might be given to the poor But the Judas argument failed.