Aurungzebe--End of Middle Age--Unamiable character--Good
king--Quarrel with Mahrattas under Siva-ji--Likeness between
Aurungzebe and the Mahratta general--Extreme astuteness of
latter--Additional grants to England--Help promised by James
II. to East India Company--Sir John Child as scapegoat--
India's coral strand--Aurungzebe's untiring energy--His
deathbed.
PART III
THE MODERN AGE
CHAPTER I
India in the beginning of the eighteenth century--General _volte_
_face_--Review of the Indian Peninsula--Temptation of Tom
Tiddler's ground--Gold but no riches--Bernier's horror at
commercial status of India--Surprise at high state of
intellectual civilisation--Curious contrasts--Western methods--
Salaries of officers--Story of the king of Guzerat--Gabriel
Boughton--William Hamilton.
CHAPTER II
Rise of the Mahratta power--Siva-ji's genius for the sea--Moghuls'
star descending--Bahadur Shah's difficulties--The Sikhs--Death
of the Emperor--Recrudescence of the murders and horrors of
the past--Accession of Farokhsir--Mahratta war--Growing
strength of Mahrattas--Final victory--Asaf-Jah returns
Delhi-wards--Nadir the Persian crosses the Indian Border.
CHAPTER III
The invasion of Nadir--Once more the cry of "Toorkh"--Sole object
gold--The raid seemed born out of due time--Diplomacies of
Nadir--The fatal field of Paniput once more--This time an
almost bloodless route--Delhi sieged, one hundred and fifty
thousand killed--Thirty millions worth of solid plunder
carried off--Decrease in dividends of Company--Opposition
to its monopoly in trade once more raised--Renewal of
monopoly.
CHAPTER IV
The game of French and English--French East India Companies--
Joseph Dupleix--His diplomacies--Admiral Labourdonnais--
Jealousies between the two--British squadron--Game of hide
and seek--Pondicherry given to French by Nawab of Arcot--
Siege of Madras--Plight of England--Saved by a storm--
Labourdonnais impeached by France--Nawab of Arcot sides
with England--Coast of Coromandel saved by another storm--
Siege of Pondicherry--Disastrous failure--Dupleix sings "Te
Deums"--Peace of Aux la Chapelle.
CHAPTER V
Plots and counterplots--Peace brings thought--French and English
turn to commerce--Only ascending power in India the
Mahrattas--Western soldiers used as mercenaries--Immediate
difficulties--Successional wars, French on one side, English
the other--Putting up of puppets--England gets the worst of
it--Robert Clive as champion.
CHAPTER VI
Robert Clive as writer, as soldier, as writer once more--Tales
of his youth--He takes Arcot--Wonderful vitality--Great
influence with natives--They refuse to start on campaign
unless led by him--Constant increase of his army by desertions
from the enemy--Game of French and English again--Council
of Negotiation a farce--Attention of both France and England
drawn to constant hostilities in the East--Dupleix recalled
--Dies miserably in poverty--Clive commanding at Madras--
News of Black Hole outrage--Sails to avenge it--Cause of the
outrage--Clive avenges it--Great friction at Calcutta--Battle
of Plassey--Omichand incident--England has real hold on
India.
CHAPTER VII
Robert Clive as Governor of Bengal--State of Upper India--
Ahmed-Shah's invasion and revenge--Comte de Lally--Bussy and
Bobbili--Sir Eyre Coote--Gradual defeat of French interests--
Quarrels over _batta_ money--Mir-Jaffar as Nawab of Bengal
gives trouble--Gives _jaghir_ to Clive--Clive goes home--
Trouble at Murshidabad--Ahmed-Shah, Durrani, invades Upper
India--Historic battlefield once more--Question of private
trade--Warren Hastings opposes it--Clive returns to India--
Raises status of Civil Service--Puts down corruption--Health
fails--Goes to England--Disgrace--Disillusionment--Dies by
his own hand after a grudging acquittal.
CHAPTER VIII
Hyder-Ali et Alia--Treaty of Paris harmful--Hyder-Ali's
lawlessness--Colonel Smith holds his own--Treaties--Money-bags--
Plunder--Price of India stock goes down--Financial pressure.
CHAPTER IX
Warren Hastings--Early career--Supporter of Clive--Makes many
enemies--Treaty of Nawab of Oude and Mahrattas--English
mercenaries--Hastings appointed first Governor-General--
Reconstruction of appointments under new Act--Mr Francis--
Persistent enmity--Dissensions in the Council--Incident of
Nuncomar--Hastings in minority--In majority--Financial
reforms--Francis refuses assent or criticism--Suggests the
Great Mistake--Hastings relieved of office--Refuses to accept
dismissal--Two Councils, two Governor-Generals--Supreme
Court decides for Hastings--Incomprehensible conspiracies in
Mahratta Court--Hyder Ali again gives trouble--Dies--His
son, Tippoo Sahib--Case of the Rajah of Benares--Of the
Begums of Oude--Harsh terms imposed on Nawab of Oude.
CHAPTER X
Administrations and impeachments--Review of Clive's and Warren
Hastings' careers--Attempt to unravel the clues--Influx to India
of foreigners--Walter Reinhardt--Begum Sumroo--George
Thomas--General view of India.
CHAPTER XI
The Board of Control appointed by the Crown--Responsibilities--
Lord Cornwallis--Jawan Bakht--Civil and military reforms--
Tippoo Sahib again--Four years' wear--Permanent settlement
evolved at Wimbledon--Immediate effects--France and
England at war--Renewed trouble in Oude--Death of Tippoo
Sahib--English action in Oude--Threatening outlook--
Mahratta jealousy--Assaye--Marquis of Wellesley--First
interview of conquering England with Great Moghul--Mutiny at
Vellore--Lord Minto--Debt of India.
CHAPTER XII
The extinction of monopoly--Church establishment formed--
Parliament--History of cotton trade--Earl Moira--War in Nepaul--
Rajputana smouldering--Kishen Kumari--Lord Hastings--
Final Mahratta war--More trouble in Oude--Lord Amherst--
Burmese war--Lord William Bentinck--Policy of noninterference--
Disastrous result--Trouble in Oude--Diplomacy with
Shah-Sujah--The short sea passage.
CHAPTER XIII
Freedom and frontiers--Tea--India thrown open to the world--
Struggle over Governor--Generalship--Lord Auckland--
Macaulay's Penal Code--Fresh trouble in Oude--Embassy to
Dost Mahomed--Sir Alexander Burnes--Disaster at Kabul--
Lord Ellenborough--Sir Henry Hardinge--Annexation of
Punjab.
CHAPTER XIV
Manners, morals, and missionaries--Second Burmese war--Annexation
of Oude--Unrest--Causes of it--Evangelical wave--Successions--
Annexations--General review of Oude--Question.
CHAPTER XV
The Great Mutiny--Sir Charles Metcalfe's prediction--Signs of the
times--Barrackpore--Meerut--Delhi--Fateful delay--Lucknow--
Cawnpore--John Nicholson--End of defence--Success of attack--
Retribution--Final question.
INDIA THROUGH THE AGES
PART I
THE ANCIENT AGE
As the mind's eye travels backwards across the wide plains of Northern
India, attempting to re-people it with the men of olden time,
historical insight fails us at about the seventh century B.C. From
that date to our own time the written Word steps in to pin protean
legend down to inalterable form.
And yet before this seventh century there is no lack of evidence. The
Word is still there, though, at the time, it lived only in the mouths
of the people or of the priesthood. Even if we go so far back as B.C.
2000, the voices of men who have lived and died are still to be heard
in the earlier hymns of the Rig-Veda.
And before that?
Who knows? The imaginative eye, looking out over the vast sea of young
green wheat which in many parts of the Punjab floods unbroken to the
very foot of the hills, may gain from it an idea of the wide ocean
whose tide undoubtedly once broke on the shores of the Himalayas.
The same eye may follow in fancy the gradual subsidence of that sea,
the gradual deposit of sand, and loam brought by the great rivers from
the high lands of Central Asia. It may rebuild the primeval huts of
the first inhabitants of the new continent--those first invaders of
the swampy haunts of crocodile and strange lizard-like beasts--but it
has positively no data on which to work. The first record of a human
word is to be found in the earliest hymn of the Aryan settlers when
they streamed down into the Punjab. When?
Even that is beyond proof. The consensus of opinion amongst learned
men, however, gives the Vedic period--that is to say, the period
during which the hymns of the Rig-Veda were composed--as approximately
the years between B.C. 2000 and B.C. 1400.
But these same hymns tell us incidentally of a time before that. It is
not only that these Aryan invaders were themselves in a state of
civilisation which necessarily implies long centuries of culture, of
separation from barbarian man; but besides this, they found a people
in India civilised enough to have towns and disciplined troops, to
have weapons and banners; women whose ornaments were of gold, poisoned
arrows whose heads were of some metal that was probably iron.
All this, and much more, is to be gathered in the Rig-Veda concerning
the Dasyas or aboriginal inhabitants of India. Naturally enough, as
inevitable foes, they are everywhere mentioned with abhorrence, and we
are left with the impression of a "tawny race who utter fearful
yells."
Who, then, were these people?
Are we to treat the monotonous singing voice which even now echoes out
over the length and breadth of India, as in the sunsetting some
Brahman recites the ancient hymns--are we to treat this as the _first_
trace of Ancient India? Or, as we sit listening, are we to watch the
distant horizon, so purple against the gold of the sky, and wonder if
it is only our own unseeing eyes which prevent our tracing the low
curve that may mark the site of a town, ancient when the Aryans swept
it into nothingness?
"The fiction which resembles truth," said the Persian poet Nizami in
the year 1250, "is better than the truth which is dissevered from the
imagination"; so let us bring something of the latter quality into our
answer.
Certain it is that for long centuries the reddish or tawny Dasyas
managed to resist the white-skinned Aryas, so that even as late as the
period of that great epic, the Mahabharata--that is, some thousand
years later than the earliest voice which speaks in the Vedic
hymns--the struggle was still going on. At least in those days the
Aryan Pandavas of whom we read in that poem appear to have
dispossessed an aboriginal dynasty from the throne of Magadha. This
dynasty belonged to the mysterious Naga or Serpent race, which finally
blocks the way in so many avenues of Indian research. They are not
merely legendary; they cross the path of reality now and again, as
when Alexander's invasion of India found some satrapies still held by
Serpent-kings.
It is impossible, therefore, to avoid wondering whether the Aryans
really found the rich plains of India a howling wilderness peopled by
savages close in culture to the brutes, or whether, in parts of the
vast continent at least, they found themselves pitted against another
invading race, a Scythic race hailing from the north-east as the Aryan
hails from north-west?
There is evidence even in the voice of the Rig-Veda for this. To begin
with, there is the evidence of colour--colour which was hereafter to
take form as caste. We have mention not of two, but of three divergent
complexions. First, the "white-complexioned friends of Indra," who are
palpably the Aryans; next, "the enemy who is flayed of his black
skin"; and lastly, "those reddish in appearance, who utter fearful
yells."
It seems, to say the least of it, unlikely that a single aboriginal
race should be described in two such curiously different ways.
As for the fearful yells, that is palpably but another way of
asserting that the utterers spoke a language which was not understood
of the invaders. "Du'ye think th' Almighty would be understandin'
siccan gibberish," said the old Scotch lady when, during the
Napoleonic war, she was reminded that maybe many a French mother was
praying as fervently for victory as she was herself. The same spirit
breathes in many a Vedic hymn in which the Dasyas are spoken of as
barely human. "They are not men." "They do not perform sacrifices."
"They do not believe in anything." These are the plaints which precede
the ever-recurring prayer--"Oh! Destroyer of foes! Kill them!" And
worse even than this comes the great cause of conflict--"_Their rites
are different_."
So the story is told. These Dasyas, "born to be cut in twain," have
yet the audacity to have different dogma, conflicting canons of the
law. Even in those early days religion was the great unfailing cause
of strife.
These same hymns of the Rig-Veda, however, give us but scant
information of the foes who are called generally Dasyas, or "robbers."
But here again divergence creeps in. It is impossible to class "the
wealthy barbarian," the "neglecters of sacrifices," who, "decorated
with gold and jewels," were "spreading over the circuit of the earth,"
whose "iron cities" were to be destroyed, who were to be "slain
whether weeping or laughing, whether hand to hand or on horseback,
whether arrayed in hosts or aided by missile-hurling heroes"--it is
impossible, surely, to class these enemies with the mere robber brutes
of whom it is written that they "were slain, and the kine made
manifest."
Were then these tawny-hued foes, with the mention of whom
wealth is invariably associated, in reality the ancestors of the
treasure-holding Takshaks or Nagas, that strange Snake race of which
we read in the Mahabharata, and of which we hear again during the
invasion of Alexander?
At least there is nothing to prevent us dreaming that this is so; and
while we listen to the voice of some Brahman chanting at sunset-time
the oldest hymns in the world, there is nothing to hinder us from
trying to imagine how strangely these must have fallen on the ears of
the "neglecters of sacrifices, the dwellers in cities, rich in gold
and beautiful women," of whom we catch a passing glimpse as the
stately Sanskrit rhythm rolls on.
The sun sets, the voice ceases, and the far-away past is no nearer and
no further from us than the present.
THE VEDIC TIMES
B.C. 2000 TO B.C. 1400
Before entering on its history it is necessary to grasp the size of
the great continent with which we have to deal. Roughly speaking,
India has fourteen and a half times the area of the British Isles. Of
most of this country we have next to no history at all, and in the
time which is now under consideration we have to deal only with the
Punjab, the "Land of the Five Rivers," the area of which about equals
that of Great Britain. That such lack of information should exist is
not wonderful, since, for all we know, this upper portion of India may
then have been on the shores of a still-receding sea; indeed, colour
is given to this suggestion by the remembrance that the five rivers of
the Punjab plain to this day act as huge drain-pipes which deprive the
intervening country of surface moisture. Naturally, this fact, in the
days when all India, save for its few isolated ranges of central
mountains, must have been one vast swamp, was an immense boon to
humanity.
The geographical area, therefore, with which we have to treat in the
Vedic period is very limited. It is a mere patch on the present
continent of India, bounded on the north by the snowy Himalayas, on
the south by the Indus (and probably by the sea), on the west by the
Suleiman Mountains, while on the east lay the unknown, and possibly
marsh, land of the Ganges and Jumna Rivers.
Curiously enough, although we speak of this very tract nowadays as the
"Land of the Five Rivers," in Vedic times the rivers were counted as
seven. That is to say, the Indus was called the mother of the six--not
five--streams which, as now, joined its vast volume. In those days
this juncture was most probably in comparatively close proximity to
the sea. Of these six rivers only five remain: the Jhelum, the Chenab,
the Ravi, the Beas, the Sutlej. The bed of the sixth river, the "most
sacred, the most impetuous of streams," which was worshipped as a
direct manifestation of Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning,[1] is
still to be traced near Thaneswar, where a pool of water remains to
show where the displeased Goddess plunged into the earth and dispersed
herself amongst the desert sands.
---------------------
[Footnote 1: Comparable in modern mythology to Minerva.]
---------------------
The stream never reappears; but its probable course is yet to be
traced by the colonies of Saraswata Brahmans, who still preserve, more
rigidly than other Brahmans, the archaic rituals of the Vedas. The
reason for this purity of rite being, it is affirmed, the grace-giving
quality of Mother Saraswati's water which, with curious quaint cries,
is drawn in every village from the extraordinarily deep wells (many of
which plunge over 400 feet into the desert sand), at whose bottom the
lost river still flows.
Into this Land of the Seven Rivers, then, came--somewhere about two
thousand years before Christ--wanderers who describe themselves as of
a white complexion. That they had straight, well-bridged noses is also
certain. To this day, as Mr Risley the great ethnologist puts it, "a
man's social status in India varies in inverse ratio to the width of
his nose"; that is to say, the nasal index, as it is called, is a safe
guide to the amount of Aryan, as distinguished from aboriginal blood
in his veins. One constant epithet given to the great cloud-god
Indra--to whom, with the great fire-god Agni, the vast majority of the
hymns in the Rig-Veda are addressed--is "handsome-chinned." But the
Sanskrit word _sipra_, thus translated "chin," also means "nose"; and
there can be no doubt that as the "handsome-nosed" one, Indra would be
a more appropriate god for a people in whom, that feature was
sufficiently marked to have impressed itself, as it has done, on
countless generations.
Whence the Aryans came is a matter still under dispute. That they
were a comparatively civilised people is certain. The hymns of the
Rig-Veda, which were undoubtedly composed during the six hundred years
following on the Aryans' first appearance in the Punjab, prove this,
as they prove many another point concerning these the first white
invaders of India. How the idea ever passed current that they were a
pastoral people is a mystery, since from the very first we read in
these hymns of oxen, of the cultivation of corn, of ploughing, and
sowing, and reaping.
"Oh! Lord of the Field!" reads one invocation. "We will cultivate this
field with thee! May the plants be sweet to us; may the rains be full
of sweetness; may the Lord of the Field be gracious to us! Let the
oxen work merrily; let the man work merrily; let the plough move
merrily! Fasten the traces merrily; ply the goad merrily.... Oh!
Fortunate Furrow! speed on thy way, bestow on us an abundant crop--sow
the seed on this field which has been prepared. Let the corn grow with
our hymns, let the scythes fall on the ripe grain. Prepare troughs for
the drinking of animals. Fasten the leathern string, and take out
water from this deep and goodly well which never dries up. Refresh the
horses, take up the corn stacked in the field, and make a cart to
convey it easily."
Practically Indian agriculture has gone no further than this in close
on four thousand years.
It is true that a hymn to the God of Shepherds finds occasional place
in the Rig-Veda, but in these there is an archaic ring, which seems to
point to the Aryan wanderings before India was reached. One of them
begins thus: "Oh! Pushan, the Path-finder, help us to finish our
journey!"
From purely religious hymns, naturally, one has no right to expect a
full crop of information concerning the political and social life of
the times in which they were composed, yet the light which the
Rig-Veda throws upon these dark ages is luckily surprising; luckily,
because we have absolutely no other source of knowledge.
From it we learn something of commerce, even to the extent of the laws
regulating sale and usury. We learn also of ships and shipwrecks, of
men who, "taking a boat, took her out to sea, and lived in the boat
floating on the water, being happy in it rocking gracefully on the
waves"; from which we may infer that our early Aryan brothers did not
suffer from sea-sickness. There is also a phrase in fairly constant
use, "the sea-born sun," which would lead us to suppose that these
writers of hymns had often seen sunrise over an Eastern ocean.
Many kinds of grain were cultivated, but the chief ones seem to
have been wheat and barley. Rice is not mentioned. Animals of all
sorts were sacrificed, and their flesh eaten; and as we read of
slaughter-houses set apart for the killing of cows, we may infer that
the Aryan ancestors of India were not strict vegetarians.
But all mention of food, even sacrificial food, in the Rig-Veda fades
into insignificance before its perfectly damnable iteration concerning
a fermented drink called "Soma." Scarcely a hymn finds finish without
some mention of it, and pages on pages are full of panegyrics of the
"exhilarating juice," the "adorable libation," "the bright effused dew
of the Soma, fit drink for gods." And apparently for men also, since
we read that the "purifying Soma, like the sea rolling its waves, has
poured out on men songs, and hymns, and thoughts." An apotheosis of
intoxication, indeed!
It appears to have been the fermented juice of some asclepiad plant
which was mixed with milk. The plant had to be gathered on moonshiny
nights, and many ceremonials accompanied its tituration, and the
expressing of its sap.
In later years, of course, the Soma ritual expanded into something
very elaborate, and no less than sixteen priests were required for its
proper fulfilment; but in the beginning, it is evident that each
householder prepared the drink, and offered some of it, and of his
food also, to Indra the cloud-god first, then to Agni the fire-god,
and so by degrees (increasing with the years) to a host of smaller
gods--the Winds, the Dawn, Day, Night, the Sun, the Earth.
For these ancient Aryans had not far to look for godhead. They found
it simply, naturally, in themselves, and in all things about them, as
the secret verse which to this day is held in sacred keeping by the
twice-born amply shows. For there can be small doubt that the closest
rendering to the original meaning runs thus:--
"Let us meditate on the Over-soul which is in all souls, which
animates all, which illumines all understandings."
Mankind makes but small advance with the years in metaphysics, and it
needed a Schopenhauer to reinvent the Over-soul--after how many
generations? Who can say?
Only this we know, that a few centuries after Christ, a Chinese
pilgrim to India committed himself to the assertion that "Soma is a
very nasty drink!"
There is no trace in these Vedic hymns of the many deplorable beliefs,
traditions and customs, which in later years have debased the
religious and social life of India.
The Aryans worshipped "bright gods," and seem to have been themselves
a bright and happy people. We hear nothing of temples or idols, of
caste or enforced widowhood. Indeed, the fact that the language
contains distinct, concrete, and not opprobrious terms for "the son of
a woman who has taken a second husband," and for "a man who has
married a widow," proves that such words were needed in the common
tongues of the people. Neither is there any trace of, nor the faintest
shred of authority for, either suttee or child-marriage.
So the ancient Aryan rises to the mind's eye as a big, stalwart,
high-nosed, fair-skinned man, with a smile and a liking for
exhilarating liquor, who, after long wanderings with his herds over
the plains of Central Asia--where, reading the stars at night, he sang
as he watched his flocks to Pushan the Path-finder--looked down one
day from the heights of the Himalayas over a fair expanse of new-born
land by the ripples of a receding sea, and found that it was good.
So for many a long year he lived, fighting, ploughing, and
praying--with copious libations--to Indra, the God of Battles, and to
Agni, the humble, homely God of Fire, who yet was the invoker of all
Gods mysteriously connected with the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the
very Lightning.
And one of the prayers to the god who "comprehended all things," who
"traversed the vast ethereal space, measuring days and nights and
contemplating all that have birth," ran thus:--
"Take me to the immortal and imperishable abode where light dwells
eternal."
We have not gone much further. The cry which rises in the Rig-Veda is
the cry of to-day:--
"From earth is the breath and the blood; but whence is the soul? What
or Who is that One who is ever alone; who forms the six spheres; who
holds the unborn in His Hand?"
Yet the religious feeling of these primitive Aryans was not all tinged
by doubt, by sadness; some of their hymns to the Dawn breathe the
spirit of deep joy which is in those who recognise, however dimly,
that the One of whom they question is no other than the Questioner.
So let us conclude this chapter with a few verses collated from these
hymns.
"Many-tinted Dawn! Th' immortal daughter of Heaven!
Young, white robed, come with thy purple steeds;
Follow the path of the dawnings the world has been given,
Follow the path of the dawn that the world still needs.
"Darkly shining Dusk, thy sister, has sought her abiding,
Fear not to trouble her dreams; daughters, ye twain of the Sun,
Dusk and dawn bringing birth! O Sisters! your path is unending;
Dead are the first who have watched; when shall our waking be
done?
"Bright, luminous Dawn; rose-red, radiant, rejoicing!
Shew the traveller his road; the cattle their pastures new;
Rouse the beasts of the Earth to their truthful myriad voicing,
Leader of rightful days! softening the soil with dew.
"Wide-expanded Dawn! Open the gates of the morning;
Waken the singing birds! Guide thou the truthful light
To uttermost shade of the shadow, for--see you! the dawning
Is born, white-shining, out of the gloom of the night."
Surely there is something in these phrases, taken truthfully from the
original and strung together consecutively so as to give the spirit
which animates the whole, that makes us of these later times feel
closely akin to those who sang thus in the Dawn of Days.
THE DAYS OF THE EPICS
ABOUT B.C. 1400 TO ABOUT B.C. 1000
The area of India which has now to be considered is much larger. Oudh,
Northern Behar, and the country about Benares are comprised in it; but
Southern India remains as ever, unknown, even if existent.
The sources of information concerning this period of six hundred years
are also much larger, though in a measure less trustworthy; for the
two great epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are
avowedly imaginative, and not--as are the hymns of the Rig-Veda--the
outcome of the daily life of a people, which, like the accretions of a
coral reef, remain to show what manner of creature once lived in them.
Even the remaining Vedas, the Yajur, the Sama and the Atharva, partake
of the same purely literary spirit, although the first and second of
these were probably in existence towards the end of the Vedic period.
The last named is--at least in its recognition as a Sacred Text--of
far later date. All three consist largely of transcripts from
the Rig-Veda, and around each of them, as indeed around the
Rig-Veda-Sanhita itself, there grew up a subsidiary literature called
Brahmanas, the object of which was to explain, consolidate, and
elaborate both the ritual and teaching of the Vedic age, as it became
archaic under the pressure of a greater complexity in life.
It is to the epics and to the Brahmanas, then, that we must look for
what sparse information is to be gleaned concerning India during this
six hundred years or so. It should be remembered that even these books
were to remain truly the "spoken word" for at least two centuries
longer, until the art of writing became known about B.C. 800. As
against this, however, we may set the undoubted fact that such was the
marvellous memory of those early days, that by the close of the Epic
period every syllable of the Rig-Veda had been counted with accuracy,
and the whole carefully compiled, arranged, analysed as it now stands.
To tell the honest truth, the Brahmanas are but a barren field. Full
of elaborate hair-splitting, cumbered with elaborate regulations for
the performance of every rite; prolix, prosy, they reflect only a
religion which was fast breaking down into canonical pomposity. It is
true that towards the end of the Epic period matters improved a
little, and in the teachings of the Upanishads--last of the so-called
"revealed Scriptures" of India--we find a very different note; but as
these seem to belong, by right of birth, more to the Philosophical
period which follows on the Epic, we will reserve them for subsequent
consideration.
It is, then, to the Mahabharata and to the Ramayana that we must look.
Not, however, for history as history; for the personages, the
incidents in these two great poems are purely mythical.
But that a strong tribe called Bharatas or Kurus who had settled near
Delhi did for long years struggle with another strong tribe called the
Panchalas, who had settled near Kanauj, is more than likely. With this
background, then, of truth, the story of the Mahabharata is a fine
romance, and throws incidentally many a side-light on Hindu society in
these remote ages. But it is prodigiously long. In the only full
English translation which exists it runs to over 7,500 pages of small
type. Anything more discursive cannot be imagined. The introduction of
a single proper name is sufficient to start an entirely new story
concerning every one who was ever connected with it in the most remote
degree. But it is a treasure house of folk-lore and folk tales,
interspersed, quaintly, by keen intellectual reasonings on
philosophical subjects, and still more remarkable efforts to pierce
the great Riddle of the World by mystical speculations. It is,
emphatically, in every line of it, fresh to the uttermost. It is the
outcome of minds--for it is evidently an accretion of many men's
imaginations--that still felt the first stimulus of wonder concerning
all things, to whom nothing was common, nothing impossible.
A redaction even in brief of the Great Epic is beyond the power of any
writer. To begin with, many of the side-issues are to the full as
worthy transcription as those of the main thread of the story; and
then it is almost impossible to make out what the latter really was in
the beginning, before the endless additions and interpolations came to
obscure the original idea.
To most critics this main thread presents itself as a prolonged war
between the Kauravas and their first cousins the Pandavas--in other
words, between the hundred sons of Dhritarashta, the blind king, and
the five sons of his brother Pandu--but to the writer the _leit motif_
is the story of Bhishma. It is a curious one; in many ways well worthy
of a wider knowledge than it has at present in the West.
Bhishma, then, was the heir of Shantanu, the King of Hastinapur. His
birth belongs to fairy tale, for he was the son of Ganga, the river
goddess, who consented to be the wife of the love-struck Shantanu on
condition that, no matter what he might see, or she might do, no
question should be asked, no remark made. There is therefore a
distinct flavour of the world-wide Undine myth in the tale. In this
case the lover-husband is of the most forbearing type. It is not until
he sees his eighth infant son being relentlessly consigned to the
river that he cries: "Hold! Enough! Who art thou, witch?" In
consequence of this, in truth, somewhat belated curiosity, the goddess
leaves him, after assuring him that her purpose is accomplished. Seven
Holy Ones condemned to fresh life by a venial fault have been released
by early death, and this last child is his to keep as being, indeed,
the pledge of mutual love.
So far good. Bhishma is brought up as the heir until he is adolescent.
Then his father falls in love with a fisherman's daughter who is
obdurate. She refuses to marry, except on the condition that her son,
if one is born, shall inherit the kingdom. Even a promise that this
shall be so is not sufficient for her. She claims that Bhishma must
not only swear to resign his own claim to the throne in favour of her
son, but must also take a solemn vow of perpetual celibacy, so closing
the door against future claims on the part of his children. Devoted to
his father, the boy, just entering on manhood, accedes to the
proposal; his father marries, and dies, leaving a young heir to whom
Bhishma becomes regent. An excellent one, too, as the following
extract concerning his regency will show:--
"In these days the Earth gave abundant harvest and the crops were of
good flavour. The clouds poured rain in season and the trees were full
of fruit and flowers. The draught cattle were all happy, and the birds
and other animals rejoiced exceedingly, while the flowers were
fragrant. The cities and towns were full of merchants and traders and
artists of all descriptions. And the people were brave, learned,
honest and happy. And there were no robbers, nor any one who was
sinful; but devoted to virtuous acts, sacrifices, truth, and regarding
each other with love and affection, the people grew up in prosperity,
rejoicing cheerfully in sports that were perfectly innocent on rivers,
lakes and tanks, in fine groves and charming woods.
"And the capital of the Kurus (Hastinapur), full as the ocean and
teeming with hundreds of palaces and mansions, and possessing gates
and arches dark as the clouds, looked like a second Amaravati
(celestial town). And over all the delightful country whose prosperity
was thus increased were no misers, nor any woman a widow, but the
wells and lakes were ever full, full were the groves of trees, the
houses with wealth, and the whole kingdom with festivities.
"So, the wheel of virtue being thus set in motion by Bhishma, the
subjects of other kingdoms, leaving their homes, came to dwell in the
golden age."
A golden age indeed! A millenium dating a thousand years before the
Christ. And for this, Bhishma the Brother Regent and Satyavati the
Queen-Mother were responsible. The Boy-King appears to have been
but a poor creature. Even Bhishma's famous exploit of carrying off the
three beautiful daughters of the King of Benares--Amva, Amvika and
Amvalika--as brides for the lad, does not seem to have kept him from
evil courses. True, the elder of these three "slender-waisted maidens,
of tapering hips and curling hair," cried off the match by bashfully
telling the softhearted Bhishma that she had set her affections on
some one else; whereupon he, holding that "a woman, whatever her
offence, always deserveth pardon," bid her follow her own
inclinations. Still the two remaining brides did not avail to prevent
the young bridegroom from succumbing to disease, leaving them
childless.
Here, then, was a situation. Bhishma and the Queen-Mother, both of an
age, left without an heir! After Eastern fashion she urges him to take
his half-brother's place, and raise up offspring to his father and to
herself. But Bhishma is firm to his oath. "Earth," he says, "may
renounce its scent, water its moisture, light its attribute of showing
form, yea! even the sun may renounce its glory, the comet its heat,
the moon its cool rays, and very space renounce its capacity for
generating sound; but I cannot renounce Truth." Pressed to the
uttermost he can only reiterate: "I will renounce the three worlds,
the empire of heaven, and anything which may be greater than this, but
Truth I will not renounce."
Poor Bhishma! One feels that he is a veritable Sir Galahad, beset by
loving women, for when another father for possible heirs is found,
Amvika, who had expected Bhishma, refuses to look at his successor,
the result being that her son Dhritarashta is born blind, and being
thus unfitted for kingship, Amvalika's son Pandu becomes heir to the
throne.
_Hinc illae lachrymal!_ Bhishma's vow of celibacy produces the rivals,
and his part in the epic henceforward shows but dimly on the bloody
background of the long quarrel between the hundred God-given sons of
Dhritarashta, and the five God-begotten sons of Pandu.
Yet, overlaid as it is by diffuse divergencies, the story of
self-sacrifice, of a man whom all women love and none can gain, goes
on. Bhishma, on Pandu's death, installs the blind Dhritarashta as
Regent King, and continues, as ever, faithful to his trust. Once or
twice a ring of human pathos, human regret, is heard in the harmony of
his good counsels, his unswerving loyalty, his fast determination to
"pay the debt arising out of the food which has been given me."
Once when Arjuna, third of the five Pandus, climbs up on his knees,
all dust-laden from some boyish game, and, full of pride and glee,
claims him as father--"I am not thy father, O Bharata!" is the gentle
reply.
Again, when Amva, the eldest princess of the three maidens whom
Bhishma had carried off as brides for his brother, returns in tears
from seeking the lover he had allowed her to rejoin, saying that the
prince will have none of Bhishma's leavings, there is human regret in
the latter's refusal to accept the assertion that the carrying off was
equal to a betrothal, and that he is bound in honour to marry the
maiden himself! Yet of this refusal comes much. The injured girl calls
on High Heaven for requital, and though her champion Rama is unable to
conquer the invincible Bhishma, Fate intervenes finally.
Amva's penances, prayers, austerities, find fruit in revenge. She is
born again as Chikandini, the daughter of a great king whose wife
conceals the child's sex for twenty-one years, until, according to the
promise of the Gods, Chikandini becomes in reality Chikandin, the most
beautiful, the most valiant of princes, who is destined in time to
cause the death of Bhishma. For amongst the many confessions of a
soldier's faith which the latter here makes is this: "With one who
hath thrown away his sword, with one fallen, with one flying, with one
yielding, with woman or one bearing the name of woman, or with a low,
vulgar fellow--with all these I do not battle." So Chikandin is beyond
Bhishma's retaliation, and when in the final fight he "struck the
great Bharata full on the breast," the latter "only looked at him with
eyes blazing with wrath; remembering his womanhood, Bhishma struck him
not."
This, however, was not yet to come. Bhishma had as yet to bring up the
five Pandu princes and the hundred sons of Dhritarashta to be good
warriors and true, and in the process we come across many quaint
interludes. The story of Princess Draupadt's Self-choice is charming,
and the description of the ceremony worth giving as a picture of the
times.
"The amphitheatre," we read, "was erected on an auspicious and level
plain to the north-east of the town, surrounded on all sides by
beautiful mansions, enclosed with high walls and a moat with arched
doorways here and there. And the vast amphitheatre was also shaded by
a canopy of various colours, and resounded with the notes of a
thousand trumpets, and was scented with black aloes, and sprinkled
with sandal wood water and adorned with flowers. The high mansions
surrounding it, perfectly white, resembled the cloud-kissing peaks of
Himalaya. And the windows of these mansions were covered with lattice
of gold, and the walls thereof set with diamonds and precious stones.
The staircases were easy of ascent, while the floors were covered with
costly carpets and rugs. Now all these mansions were adorned with
wreaths of flowers and rendered fragrant with excellent aloes. They
were white and spotless as the necks of swans. And they were each
furnished with a hundred doors wide enough to admit a crowd of
persons. And in these seven-storied houses of various sizes, adorned
with costly beds and carpets, lived the monarchs who were invited to
the Self-choice, their persons adorned with every ornament, and
possessed with the hope of excelling each other. Thus the denizens of
the city and the surrounding country, taking their seats on the
platforms, beheld these things.
"And the concourse of princes, gay with the performances of actors and
dancers, increased daily, until on the sixteenth morning the daughter
of the King entered the arena, richly attired and bearing in her hand
a golden dish on which lay offerings to the gods, and a garland of
flowers.
"Then a priest of the Moon race ignited the sacrificial fires and
poured libations, uttering benedictions; and all the musical
instruments that were playing, stopped, and in the whole amphitheatre
was perfect stillness. Then the Princess' brother, taking his sister
by the hand, cried in a voice low and deep as the kettledrums of the
clouds: 'Hear all ye assembled Princes, hear! This is the bow, these
are the arrows, yonder is the mark! Given Beauty, Strength, Lineage,
he who achieveth the feat hath Princess Draupadi to wife.' Then, for
the sake of her unrivalled Beauty, the young Princes vied with each
other in jealousy, and rising in their royal seats each exclaiming:
'Princess Draupadi shall be mine!' began to exhibit their prowess."
It would take too long to give _in extensor_ how one after the other
the Princes failed to string the mighty bow. How Karna, the
Disinherited Knight of the Romance--in reality uterine brother to the
five Pandu princes, but passing as their deadliest Kuru enemy--strung
it easily, but "turned aside with a laugh of vexation and a glance at
the Sun, his real father," when Princess Draupadi cried: "Hold! I will
have none of mixed blood to my lord!"
How the young Arjuna, second of the five Pandu princes, "first of
car-warriors and wielders of the bow," came disguised as a Brahman
youth and achieved the feat; rousing no remonstrance, it may be
remarked, as to admixture of race from the fair Princess Draupadi.
Then follows the incident of Draupadi marrying the whole five Pandu
brothers, in obedience to their mother's mistaken command. She, when
her five sons appeared in the dusk, "bringing their alms," bid them
share it as ever; so, despite much heart-questioning, the fivefold
wedding took place. It is an incident which is glozed over by ardent
admirers of the Mahabharata, and spoken of deprecatingly, as a mere
myth. Why, it would be difficult to say, since it is palpably held up
to honour as an instance of almost superhuman virtue. It is a
voluntary self-abnegation on the part of the Five Princes, who swear
to set aside jealousy for ever; an attempt on their part to right the
relations between the sexes, and to return to the purer teaching of
old times when, as we are distinctly told, "men and women followed
their own inclinations without shame or sin." Certainly the record of
this union of the Five Brothers to the devoted, almost divine
Draupadi, holds no suspicion of either the one or the other; surely,
therefore, it requires neither disguise nor apology.
Thereinafter, amid ever-recurring sweep of furious blasts and
counterblasts, ever-changing chances of fortune and misfortune, comes
the great gambling scene which, deprived of disagreeable details and
properly staged, should make the fortune of any dramatist who could
really touch it. A fine scene, truly! Yudishthira, eldest of the Pandu
princes, their ruling spirit, the brain, so to speak, of Bhima's
strength, Arjuna's skill, Nakula's devotion, Sahadeva's obedience, had
been challenged to a gambling bout by his chief enemy, Dhritarashta's
eldest son Duryodhana. To this, according to the soldier's code of
honour, there could be no refusal. But Yudishthira, gambler at heart,
would not acknowledge himself beaten. He stakes his riches, his
kingdom, his brothers, himself--last of all, his wife.
Losing her, she is sent for to the gambling saloon. She refuses to
come. Finally, dragged thither by force, she pleads that Yudishthira,
having first gambled away himself, was a slave, and so had no right to
stake a free woman. Then ensues a scene of conflicting passions and
protest which, once read of, lingers in the mind, rising superior to
the certain disagreeable details which undoubtedly disfigure it in the
original.
So the story sweeps on and on, ending really with Bhishma's death on
the field of battle after a final encounter in which Arjuna, realising
that victory is unattainable so long as "the Grandsire" lives, uses
Chikandin, the man-woman, as his shield, and so brings about the
defeat of the otherwise invincible Bhishma. The latter, "lying on his
bed of arrows," surrounded by all the princes, then proceeds to
discourse for long days ("until the sun, entering its northern
declension, permitted him to resign his life-breath") on the whole
duty of mankind, and especially on the duties of kingship.
These discourses, which in the English translation run to over 2000
pages, are marvellously illuminating. When we read in them doctrines
of kingly science which long centuries later were to be re-enunciated
by Machiavelli, when we find in them many a theory of modern science
forestalled by some bold, theoretical plunge into the Infinite, that
Infinite to which "it is impossible to set limits since it is
limitless," we may well pause to ask ourselves how much nearer we are
to discovering the Great Secret than those were who, nearly three
thousand years ago, puzzled themselves over the problem of
consciousness, and why, "when the mind is otherwise engaged, the
life-agent in the body heareth not."
Have we, even in science, gone much further than the assertion that
"Space, which even the Gods cannot measure, is full of blazing and
self-luminous worlds?"
Perhaps we have; but of a certainty we cannot outclass the Mahabharata
in the imagination with which it treats the Insoluble.
"In the Beginning," we read, "was infinite Space motionless,
immoveable. Without Sun, Moon, or Stars, it seemed to be asleep. Then
a darkness grew within the darkness, and water sprang to life."
So, gaining force as it goes like some giant wave, the vast epic
sweeps on, gathering worthless pebbles and hopeless wreckage, with its
thousand facets of bright bold sea, to leave us, after it has crashed
over us, bewildered, storm-shaken on the shore, our heads whirling
with wild memories of flashing, jewel-set cuirasses, "beautiful like
the firmament of night bespangled with stars," of floating veils "like
wind-tossed clouds," of celestial voices, "deep as the kettledrums of
the skies," of "sparkling showers of keen arrows like the rays of the
sun," of "tender, small-waisted maidens," and "mighty, high-souled
car-warriors."
It is a marvellous dream, and as one reads it the ceaseless fall of
seas upon a shore seems to fill the ear with the eternal message of
indestructible life.
The Ramayana, great though the epic is, and, in a way, more poetical,
has none of this storm and stress. As R. C. Dutt, in his "Ancient
India," says:--
"On reading it one feels that the real heroic age of India had passed.
We miss the rude and sturdy manners and incidents which mark the
Mahabharata. The heroes of the Ramayana are somewhat tame and
commonplace personages, very respectful to priests, very anxious to
conform to all the rules of decorum and duty, doing a vast amount of
fighting work mechanically, but without the determination, the
persistence of real fighters. A change has come over the spirit of the
nation. It is more polished, more law-abiding, less sturdy, less
heroic. In brief, the two epics give us the change which Hindu life
and society underwent from the commencement to the close of the Epic
age."
Griffiths, in the introduction to his metrical version of the
Ramayana, remarks that one of its most salient features is the
complete absence of any mention of "that mystical devotion which
absorbs all the faculties," to which we have constant reference in the
Mahabharata. The remark is full of critical acumen, and at once
differentiates the varying planes on which the two dramas move.
That of Rama and his long-suffering wife Sita, is, doubtless, the more
human of the two; but there is a grandeur about the story of Bhishma
before which the former crumbles to commonplace. Still, as R. C. Dutt
asserts:--
"There is not a Hindu woman in the length and breadth of India to whom
the story of Sita is not known, and to whom her character is not a
model to strive after and to emulate. Rama, also, though scarcely
equal to Sita in the worth of character, has been a model to man for
his truth, his obedience, his piety. Thus the epic has been for the
millions of India a means of moral education, the value of which can
hardly be over-estimated."
Historically, there is little to be gleaned from it beyond the
conquest of Southern India and Ceylon. Socially, it shows the
accretion of custom, the consolidation of dogma, and the passing of
power from the soldier to the priestly caste. Yet even here it is but
a very modified Brahmanism of which we catch glimpses, and even caste
itself is not as yet crystallised into hard and fast form.
So, with the Ramayana and some few Puranas which, however, will be
better considered in the next chapter, the Epic period closes.
Some few points in it may lay claims to distinct historical basis. The
existence of Janaka, King of Kosala, the father of Sita, the
befriender of wisdom, is so far attested by later writings and by
legend, that his personality gains reality; but it is in the crashing,
confused welter of the Mahabharata that we must look for a just
estimate of what India was like a thousand years before Christ.
THE MARVELLOUS MILLENNIUM
B.C. 1000 to A.D. 1
A millennium indeed! A thousand years of Time which (despite many
purely historical events in its latter half, to which return will be
made in the next chapter) must be treated, as a whole, as perhaps the
most wonderful period in the history of the world. For, just as in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries humanity appears to have set its
mind on art, and such names as Shakspeare, Dante, Rafael, Leonardo da
Vinci, Palestrina, Cervantes, and a hundred others are to be found
jostling each other in history, so, during these thousand years, the
mind of man throughout the whole world appears to have been set on
solving the great secret of Life and Death.
The answer was given in many ways by the Greek and Roman philosophers,
by Confucius in China, by Christ in Judea, by Buddha and the great
systems of Indian philosophy in Hindustan; and yet the question is
still being asked with the old intensity, the old keen desire for
answer!
Now, since these thousand years have, in India, left behind them a
very remarkable literature which, even in these latter days, is the
root of all life and thought in that vast peninsula, it is as well to
attempt a slight sketch of the time, as a whole, before embarking on
actual history; though to do the latter we shall, after treating of
the religious age, have to hark back to the year 620 B.C.
At the commencement, then, of this thousand years, the Aryans were
still pushing their way westwards and southwards from the alluvial
plains of Northern India.
It seems likely that the tide of their conquest followed that of the
retreating sea. However that may be, certain it is that they found
before them dark, almost impenetrable, swampy forests, swarming with
enemies of all kinds. Who or what these were we have at first small
record. Doubtless the human foes belonged to the aboriginal tribes
which are still to be found clinging to the far mountain uplands and
inaccessible fastnesses which the Aryans did not care to annex. But in
the literature of which mention has been made, all and sundry are
disdainfully dismissed with the epithet "_Rakshas_," or evil demons.
Behind this shrinking verge of devildom, however, we know that "the
children of light" were settling down; towns were springing up, waste
land was being cleared and cultivated, schools were being established,
and many principalities rising into power. But of all this we have as
yet no record at all, until about one-half of the millennium was over.
On the other hand, we have exhaustive literary evidence of what the
minds of men were busying themselves about, first in the Upanishads,
and then in the myriad Sutras or Aphorisms, on every subject,
apparently, under the sun, which are still extant.
Regarding the former--of which the German philosopher, Schopenhauer,
wrote: "They have been the solace of my life; they will be the solace
of my death"--though some of these treatises or essays belong,
undoubtedly, to the dying years of the Epic age, they fall far more
naturally into place during the opening years of this, the succeeding
one. Their bold hypotheses covering all things were the first reaction
against the soul-stifling formalisms of the Brahmanas; these, again,
being due to the development of the dignity of the priestly class,
which followed naturally on the excessive militarism so noticeable in
the Mahabharata. Of a truth, its stalwart warriors, for ever engaged
in deadly combat and stirring adventures, could as heads of households
have had little time for the due performance of domestic ceremonials
after the customs of their fathers. Hence the rapid growth of the
professional priesthood.
The fatal facility, however, with which speculative thought, after
throwing off the shackles of canon and dogma, finds fresh slavery for
itself in scientific formalism, is shown by the succeeding Sutra
literature, in which every department of thought and action is
crystallised and codified into cut-and-dried form.
A reaction from this, again, is to be found in the succeeding
philosophy of Kapila and his disciples, which must have been
promulgated a century or so before the birth of Gautama Buddha.
Frankly agnostic, many of the conclusions of this Sankhya system are
to be found in the works of the latest German philosophers. Like
theirs it is cold, and appeals not to the masses, but to speculative
scholars. Still, it is strange that the very first recorded system of
philosophy in the world, the very first attempt to solve the Great
Question by the light of reason alone, should differ scarcely at all
from the last. The human brain fails now, as it failed then; for
Kapila's doctrine never really overset those of the Upanishads, though
the system of philosophy founded upon these last (and therefore called
the Vedanta) was not to come for many years. But what, indeed, can or
could overset the doctrine laid down in these same Upanishads, of a
Universal Soul, a Universal Self, which is--to use the very words of
the text:--
"Myself within the heart smaller than a corn of rice, smaller than a
mustard seed, smaller than the kernel of a canary seed: myself within
the heart greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than
heaven. Lo! He who beholds all beings in this Self, and Self in all
beings, he never turns away from it. When to a man who understands,
the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be
to him who has once beheld that unity? He, the Self, encircles all,
bright, incorporeal, scatheless, pure, untouched by evil; a seer,
wise, omnipresent, self-existent, he disposed all things rightly for
eternal years. He therefore who knows this, after having become quiet,
subdued, satisfied, patient and collected, sees Self in Self, sees all
in Self. Evil does not overcome him, he overcomes all evil. Free from
evil, free from stain, free from doubt, he becomes True Brahman. The
wise who, meditating on this Self, recognises the Ancient who dwells
for ever in the abyss, as God--he indeed leaves joy and sorrow far
behind; having reached the subtle Being, he rejoices because he has
obtained the cause of rejoicing."
Such words as these live for ever, a veritable Light in the Darkness
of many philosophies.
Yet even the Vedanta teaching failed to satisfy the masses; its
atmosphere was too rarefied for them. So about the middle of the
millennium a new Teacher arose. Gautama Buddha was born about the year
B.C. 560 at Kapilavastu, and the followers of the religion of which he
was the founder number at this present day nearly one-third of the
whole human race.
A magnificent work truly, look at it how we may! Yet it becomes the
more astounding when we enquire into the religion itself; for it holds
out no bait to humanity. It neither gives the immediate and certain
grip on a spiritual and therefore eternal life which the Vedanta
promises, neither does it proclaim the personal individual immortality
for which the Christian is taught to look.
Yet it holds its place firmly as first favourite with humanity. There
are some five hundred million Buddhists, as against some three hundred
million Christians; while about the tenth century of our era fully
one-half the world's inhabitants followed the teaching of Gautama.
Why is this? Wherein lies the charm? Possibly in its pessimism, in the
declaration that all is, must be, suffering.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of Suffering. Birth is suffering,
decay is suffering, illness is suffering, Death is suffering.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the cause of suffering. Thirst
for pleasure, thirst for life, thirst for prosperity, thirst that
leads to new birth.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the cessation of Suffering. It
is the destruction of desire, the extinction of thirst.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the Pathway which leads
to the cessation of suffering. Right Belief, Right Aspirations, Right
Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Exertion,
Right-mindedness, Right Meditation."
In these few words lies the whole teaching of Buddhism. To king and
beggar alike, the world is evil; there is but one road to freedom, and
that must be trodden alike by all. In that road none is before or
after others.
Now to the poor, to the oppressed, there is balm in this thought.
Lazarus does not yearn for Abraham's bosom! Before all lies
forgetfulness, peace, personal annihilation.
This, then, was the teaching which Gautama Buddha, the son of a king,
gave as a gift to his world; and his world, wearied yet once more with
formalism, with the ever-growing terrorism of caste and creed,
welcomed it with open arms. The progress of the Buddhistic faith was
fairly astounding, and half India was converted in the twinkling of an
eye. Of the life led by the founder himself much has been written.
Many of the incidents bear a strange resemblance to those in the life
of Christ. Perhaps none is more beautiful than the story of the woman
who applied to Gautama, begging him to restore her dead child to life.
As given in Sir Edwin Arnold's _Light of Asia_, it runs so:--
"Whom, when they came unto the river side,
A woman--dove-eyed, young, with tearful face
And lifted hands saluted, bending low:
'Lord! thou art he,' she said, 'who yesterday
Had pity on me ...
* * * * *
when I came
Trembling to thee whose brow is like a god's.
And wept, and drew the face-cloth from my babe,
Praying thee tell what simples might be good.' ...
'Yea! little sister, there is that might heal
Thee first and him, if thou couldst fetch the thing.
Black mustard-seed a tola; only mark
Thou take it not from any hand or house
Where father, mother, child or slave hath died.'
'Thus didst thou speak, my Lord.
... I went, Lord, clasping to my breast
The babe grown colder, asking at each hut:
"I pray you, give me mustard, of your grace
A tola, black," and each who had it gave.
But when I asked: "In my friend's household here
Hath any, peradventure, ever died?
Husband or wife or child or slave?" they said:
"Oh, Sister! what is this you ask? The dead
Are very many, and the living few." ...
Ah sir! I could not find a single house
Where there was mustard seed, and none had died.'
* * * * *
"'My sister! thou hast found,' the Master said,
'Searching for what none finds that better balm
I had to give thee....
Lo! I would pour my blood if it could stay
Thy tears, and win the secret of that curse
Which makes sweet love our anguish ...
I seek that secret: bury thou thy child.'"
Buddha, it will be observed, answered no questions. He left the
insoluble alone. He simply preached that holiness meant peace and
love, that peace and love meant pure earthly happiness.
So, even while they accepted the morality of Buddhism, and acquiesced
in its negation, the keener speculative minds were still busy trying
to find some key to fit the Great Lock.
The Yoga system of philosophy followed on the Sankhya, the Nyaya and
the Vaisasika on the Yoga; finally, the two Mimamsa or Vedanta
philosophies. Of these the Yoga is merely a repetition, with some
alteration, of the Sankhya; the Nyaya--which is to the Hindu what the
Aristotelian system was to the Greek, and which is still the school of
logic--finds its complement in the scientific and atomic theories of
the Vaisasika. This last, which is the first effort made in India to
enquire into the laws of physics, is curiously provocative of thought.
A Rip-van-Winklish feeling creeps into the mind as the eyes read that
all material substances are aggregates of atoms, that the ultimate
atom must be simple, that the mote visible in the sunbeam, though the
smallest perceptible object, must yet be a substance, therefore a
thing composed of things smaller than itself.
Once again the question arises, "How much further have we gone towards
solution?"
Of the Vedanta system enough has already been said. It is pure Monism,
matter being but a manifestation of the Supreme Energy, the Supreme
Soul, the Supreme Self which comprises all things, holds all things,
is all things.
So much for the speculative thought of this remarkable age. But when
we turn to other subjects, we find the same truly marvellous acumen
displayed in almost every field of enquiry.
Panini, whom Max Muller called the greatest grammarian the world has
ever seen, lived in the middle of this millennium, and by resolving
Sanskrit to its simple roots, paved the way for the Science of
Languages. It is strange, indeed, to think of him in the dawn of days
discovering what was to be rediscovered more than two thousand years
afterwards, and adopting half the philological formulas of the present
century.
So with geometry, a science which certainly developed from the strict
rules concerning the erection of altars, as the science of phonetics
grew from the study necessary to ensure absolutely accurate
intonations of the sacred text. Of the former science much is to be
found in the Sulva Sutras; amongst other things, the celebrated
theorem that the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the square of
the two other sides of a rectangular triangle. This proposition is
ascribed by the Greeks to Pythagoras, but it was known in India long
before his time, and it is supposed that he learnt it while on his
travels, which included Hindustan.
Geometry, however, was not destined to take hold of the Indian mind.
The cognate science of numbers speedily took its place, and the acute
Asiatic intellect soon evolved Algebra out of the arithmetic which
they had rendered of practical use by the adoption of the decimal
system of notation.
For all these many discoveries the world is indebted to this
marvellous millennium.
Regarding the social life of this time the Dharma Sutras give us
endless laws--which are the originals of later and codified
laws--concerning almost every subject under the sun. As every Hindu
student (and every Hindu had to be student for a definite number of
years) had to learn these Sutras by heart, it may safely be predicted
that they faithfully reflect the general conduct of affairs. They are
extraordinarily minute in particular, and from them it may be gathered
that life had become much more artificial. Amongst the king's duties
is that of "guarding household weights and measures from
falsification." It may also be noticed that "the taxes payable by
those who support themselves by personal labour differ materially from
those paid by mere possessors of property." Any injury, also, to a
cultivator's land or to an artisan's trade was punished with great
severity, and violence in defence of them was held justifiable. A
legal rate of interest was settled, and the laws of inheritance were
laid down minutely, as also were those of marriage. Indeed, as Mr R.
C. Dutt puts it:--
"Everything that was confused during the Epic period was brought to
order--everything that was discursive was condemned; opinions were
arranged and codified into bodies of laws, and the whole social system
of the Hindus underwent a similar rigid treatment."
Briefly, it was at once an age of keen speculation and rapid
crystallisation almost unequalled in the history of any nation. Nor
have we to found this estimate of it solely by inference from the
literature which it has left behind it. We have other evidence on
which to draw. True, the earliest foreign notice of India is that of
Hekataios of Miletus, who wrote about B.C. 520, but he seems only to
have been aware of its existence. The next is that of some
inscriptions of the Persian king, Darius, which may be dated about
B.C. 486, while Ktesias of Knidos, who collected travellers' tales
about the East, wrote a little later. But Alexander's Indian campaign,
which began in the year B.C. 327, brought many Western eyes to wonder
at what they saw, and from this time Greece practically gives us the
chronology of Hindustan.
Of what these Western eyes saw we gain glimpses in the few fragments
of the works of Megasthenes which have withstood the destruction of
time. Living, as he did, in the fourth century B.C. as Ambassador at
the court of Paliputra, he gives us a picture of the times well worth
reading, with a few extracts from which this chapter may well
conclude.
"The inhabitants, having abundant means of subsistence, exceed, in
consequence, the ordinary stature, and are distinguished by their
proud bearing. They are also found to be well skilled in the arts, as
might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the very
finest water ... they almost always gather in two harvests annually;
and even should one of the sowings prove more or less abortive, they
are always sure of the other crop. It is accordingly affirmed that
famine has never visited India, and that there has never been any
general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food.... But, further,
there are usages observed by the Indians which contribute to prevent
the occurrence of famine among them; for whereas amongst other nations
it is usual, in the contests of war, to ravage the soil, and thus to
reduce it to an uncultivated waste, among the Indians, on the
contrary, by whom husbandmen are regarded as a class that is sacred
and inviolable, the tillers of the soil, even when battle is raging in
their neighbourhood, are undisturbed by any sense of danger, since the
combatants allow them to remain quite unmolested. Neither do they
ravage a land with fire nor cut down its trees.... The Indians do not
raise monuments to the dead, but consider the virtues which men have
displayed in life and the songs in which their praises are celebrated,
sufficient to preserve their memory.... All the Indians are free, and
not one of them is a slave. The Indians do not even use aliens as
slaves, and much less one of their own countrymen.... They live
frugally and observe very good order. Theft is of very rare
occurrence. The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved
by the fact that they seldom appeal to law. They have no suits about
pledges or deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses,
but make their deposits and confide in each other. They neither put
out money at usury or know how to borrow.... Truth and virtue they
hold alike in esteem.... In contrast to the general simplicity of
their style, they love finery and ornaments. Their robes are worked in
gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wear flowered garments of
the finest muslin. Attendants walking behind hold umbrellas over them;
for they have a high regard for beauty, and avail themselves of every
device to improve their looks....
"Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the market,
others of the city, others of the soldiers, while some superintend the
canals and measure the land, some collect the taxes, and some
construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and the
distances....
"Those who have charge of the city are divided into six bodies of five
each. The first body looks after industrial art. The second attends to
the entertainments of strangers, taking care of them, well or ill,
and, in the event of their dying, burying them and forwarding their
property to their relatives. The third enquires of births and deaths,
so that these among both high and low may not escape the cognisance of
Government. The fourth deals with trade and commerce, and has charge
of weights and measures. The fifth supervises the sale of manufactured
articles which are sold by public notice, and the sixth collects the
tithe on such articles. There is, beside the city magistrates, a third
body, which directs military affairs. One division of this has charge
of the infantry, another of the cavalry, a third of the war chariots,
a fourth of the elephants; while one division is appointed to
co-operate with the admiral of the fleet and another with the
superintendent of the bullock trains used for transporting the
munitions of war."
So much for the East before it was gripped by the West. With a
full-blown War Office, and a statistical registration of births and
deaths, it appears to have gone far on the course of our civilisation.
Concerning the "Brahmanes," as the old writers term the Brahmans,
Megasthenes says of them that they live in groves, and
"spend their time in listening to sermons, discourses, and in
imparting knowledge to such as will listen to them. The hearer is not
allowed to speak, or even to cough, and much less to spit, and if he
offends in any of these ways, he is cast out from their society that
very day, as being a man who is wanting in self-restraint. Death is
with them a very frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life
as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb matures, and
death as the birth into a new and happy life. They go about naked,
saying that God has given the body as sufficient covering for the
soul."
One may still hear this teaching given in the mango groves, or in the
shade of a banyan tree, throughout this India of the twentieth
century.
And it still satisfies the hearers.
THE SESU-NAGA (and Other) KINGS
B.C. 620 TO B.C. 327
We stand now on the threshold of actual history. Before us lie two
thousand five hundred years; and behind us? Who can say? From the far
distance come the reverberating thunders of the Mahabharata, still
filling the ear with stories of myth and miracle. But the days of
these are over. Henceforward, we are to listen to nothing save facts,
to believe nothing to which our ordinary everyday experience cannot
give its assent.
Who, then, were these Sesu-naga kings of whom we read in the lists of
dead dynasties given in the Puranas--those curious histories of the
whole cosmogony of this world and the next, some of which can now be
fairly proved to have existed in the very first centuries of our era,
and with them an accredited claim to hoar antiquity?
How came these kings by their name Ses, or Shesh-naga? A name which
indubitably points to their connection with the sacred snake, or
"nag."
Were they of Scythic origin? Nothing more likely. Certain it is that
Scythic hordes invaded India from the north-east, both during and
after the age of the Epics. It is conjectured, also, that they met in
conflict with the Aryan invaders from the north-west on the wide,
Gangetic plains, possibly close to the junction of the Sone River with
the Ganges.
Here, at any rate, lay the ancient kingdom of Magadha, the kingdom of
these Ses-naga kings.
There were ten of these kings, and of the first four, we, as yet, know
nothing. But almost every year sees fresh inscriptions deciphered, new
coins discovered, and therefore it is not unlikely that some day these
mere dry-as-dust names, Sesu-naga, Sakavarna, Kshema-dharman, and
Kshattru-jas, may live again as personalities. At present we must be
content with imagining them in their palace at Raja-griha, or "The
kings abode surrounded by mountains."
It has a curiously distinguished, dignified sound, this description.
One can imagine these Ses-naga princes, their Scythian faces, flat,
oblique-eyed, yet aquiline, showing keen under the golden-hooded snake
standing uraeus-like over their low foreheads, riding up the steep,
wide steps leading to their high-perched palaces, on their milk-white
steeds; these latter, no doubt, be-bowed with blue ribbons and bedyed
with pink feet and tail, after the fashion of processional horses in
India even nowadays. Riding up proudly, kings, indeed, of their world,
holders of untold wealth in priceless gems and gold--gold, unminted,
almost valueless, jewels recklessly strung, like pebbles on a string.
This legend, indeed, of countless uncounted gold, of fair women, and
almost weird, rough luxury, lingers still around the very name of
Snake-King, and holds its own in the folk-lore of India.
In these days the kingdom of Magadha--so far as we can judge, a
Scythic principality--was just entering the lists against that still
more ancient Aryan kingdom of Kosala, of which we read in the
Ramayana. But there were other principalities in the settled country
which lay between the extreme north-west of the Punjab and Ujjain, or
Malwa. Sixteen such states are enumerated in various literary--chiefly
religious--works, which were probably compiled in the fifth century
B.C.; but these, again, are mere dry-as-dust names.
The first breath of real life comes with Bimbi-sara, the fifth
Sesu-naga king. He, we know, conquered and annexed the principality of
Anga and built the city of New Rajagriha, which lies at the base of
the hill below the old fort. But something there is in his reign which
grips attention more than conquests or buildings. During it, and under
his rule, the founders of two great religions gave to the world their
solutions of the problem of life. In all probability both Mahavira and
Gautama Buddha were born in Bimbi-sara's days; certain it is that he
must have heard the first teachings of Jainism and Buddhism preached
at his palace doors. He is supposed to have reigned for nearly five
and twenty years, and then to have retired into private life, leaving
his favourite son, Ajata-sutru, as regent.
And here tragedy sets in; tragedy in which Buddhist tradition avers
that Deva-datta, the Great Teacher's first cousin and bitterest enemy,
was prime mover. For one of the many crimes imputed to this
arch-schismatic by the orthodox, is that he instigated Ajatasutru to
put his father to death.
Whether this be true or not, certain it is that Bimbi-sara was
murdered, and by his son's orders; for in one of the earliest Buddhist
manuscripts extant there is an account of the guilty son's confession
to the Blessed One (_i.e_., Buddha) in these words: "Sin overcame me,
Lord, weak, and foolish, and wrong that I am, in that for the sake of
sovranty I put to death my father, that righteous man, that righteous
king."
If, as tradition has it, that death was compassed by slow starvation,
the prompt absolution which Buddha is said to have given the royal
sinner for this act of atrocity becomes all the more remarkable. His
sole comment to the brethren after Ajata-sutru had departed appears to
have been: "This king was deeply affected, he was touched in heart. If
he had not put his father to death, then, even as he sate here, the
clear eye of truth would have been his."
Apart from this parricidal act, the motive for which he gives with
such calm brutality, Ajata-sutru seems to have been a strong, capable
king. He had instantly to face war with Kosala, the murdered man's
wife--who, it is said, died of grief--being sister to the king of that
country. Round this war, long and bloody, legend has woven many
incidents. At one time Magadha, at another Kosala, seems to have come
uppermost. Ajata-sutru himself was once carried a prisoner in chains
to his opponent's capital; but in the end, when peace came, Kosala had
given one of its princesses in marriage to the King of Magadha, and
had become absorbed in that empire.
But this was not enough for ambitious Ajata-sutru. He now turned his
attention to the rich lands north of the Ganges, and carried his
victorious arms to the very foot of holy Himalaya.
In the course of this war he built a watch-fort at a village called
Patali, on the banks of the Ganges, where in after years he founded a
city which, under the name of Pataliputra (the Palibothra of Greek
writers), became eventually the capital, not only of Magadha, but of
India--India, that is, as it was known in these early days.
Patali is the Sanskrit for the bignonia, or trumpet-flower; we may
add, therefore, to our mental picture of the remaining four Ses-naga
kings, that they lived in Trumpet-flower City.
For the rest, these two great monarchs, Bimbi-sara and Ajata-sutru,
must have been near, if not actual contemporaries of Darius, King of
Persia, who founded an Indian satrapy in the Indus valley. This he was
able to do, in consequence of the information collected by Skylax of
Karyanda, during his memorable voyage by river from the Upper Punjab
to the sea near Karachi, thus demonstrating the practicability of a
passage by water to Persia. All record of this voyage is,
unfortunately, lost; but the result of it was the addition to the
Persian Empire of so rich a province, that it paid in gold-dust
tribute to the treasury, fully one-third of the total revenue from the
whole twenty satrapies; that is to say, about one million sterling,
which in those days was, of course, an absolutely enormous sum.
There is not much more to tell of Ajata-sutru; and yet, reading
between the lines of the few facts we actually know of him, the man's
character shows distinct. Ambitious, not exactly unscrupulous, but
uncontrolled. A man who, having murdered his father, could weep over
his own act, and seek to obliterate the blood-stain on his hands by
confessions and pious acts. When Buddha died, an eighth portion of his
bones was claimed by Ajata-sutru, who erected at Rajgriha a
magnificent tope or mound over the sacred relics.
But, if tradition is to be believed, he handed down the curse of his
great crime to his son, his grandson, and his great grandson; for the
Ceylon chronicle asserts, that each of these in turn were parricides.
It is--to use a colloquialism--a tall order; but assertion or denial
are alike unproven.
If it be true, there is some relief in finding that the last of these
criminal kings--Maha-nundin by name--was ousted from his throne and
killed by his prime minister, one Maha-padma-Nanda, who is said, also,
to have been the murdered man's illegitimate son by a Sudra, or
low-caste woman.
Whether this latter be true or not, certain it is that about the year
B.C. 361, or thereabouts, the reign of the Ses-naga kings ends
abruptly. The dream-vision of the steps of old Rajgriha with Scythian
princelings--parricidal princelings--riding up to their palaces on
processional horses, or living luxuriously in Trumpet-flower city,
vanishes, and something quite as dream-like takes its place.
For in the oldest chronicles we are told that there were but two
generations in the next, or Nanda dynasty--viz.: Maha-padma and his
eight sons--yet we are asked to believe that they reigned for one
hundred and fifty-nine years!
In truth, these nine Nandas seem in many ways mythical, and yet the
very confusion and contradictions which surround their history point
to some underlying reason for the palpable distortion of plain fact.
They are said to have reigned together, the father and his eight sons.
The name of only one of these is known, Suma-lya; but when Alexander
the Great paused on the banks of the Beas, in the year B.C. 326, he
heard that a king was then reigning at Pataliputra, by name Xandrames
(so the Greek tongue reports it), who had an army of over two hundred
thousand men, and who was very much disliked, because of his great
wickedness and base birth. For he was said to be the son of a barber,
and as such, "contemptible and utterly odious to his subjects."
This king must have belonged to the Nanda dynasty, and the story, if
it does nothing else, proves that the family was really of low
extraction. That it gained the throne by the assassination of a
rightful king, is also certain. But revenge was at hand. The tragedy
was to be recast, replayed, and in B.C. 321 Chandra-gupta, the
Sandracottus of the Greeks, himself an illegitimate son of the first
Nanda, and half-brother, so the tale runs, of the eight younger ones,
was, after the usual fashion of the East, to find foundation for his
own throne on the dead bodies of his relations.
But some four years ere this came to pass, while young Chandra-gupta,
ambitious, discontented, was still wandering about Northern India
almost nameless--for his mother was a Sudra woman--he came in personal
contact with a new factor in Indian history. For in March, B.C. 326,
Alexander the Great crossed the river Indus, and found himself the
first Western who had ever stood on Indian soil. So, ere passing to
the events which followed on Chandra-gupta's rude seizure of the
throne of Magadha, another picture claims attention. The picture of
the great failure of a great conqueror.
THE ANABASIS
B.C. 326 TO B.C. 320
"Some talk of Alexander...."
Who does not know the context? Who also does not think that he knows
who Alexander was, who could not, if necessary, reel off a succinct
account of his character, his conquests?
And yet, though most know of his Anabasis, how few have really grasped
the picturesque points of his grand sweep on India. Who, for instance,
has properly appraised and inwardly digested, until it remains as a
living picture in the mind's eye for ever, that quaint thirty days'
halt of the Macedonian legions on the western bank of the Indus, while
on the eastern lay, ripe for plucking, the rich harvest of the fertile
plains of India?
It was not a halt of preparation. Hephaistion had already swung the
barges across the tumultuous swirls of the great river, and a bridge,
unstable, yet firm, lay ready for use. The cohorts were eager.
Taxiles, the Indian king, had sent from the Takhsha, or Snake-City,
over the water, half a million of tribute, and an advance guard of
seven hundred horsemen and thirty caparisoned elephants. For he was
wily, and the Western army would aid him against his hereditary enemy
the great Porus, or Puar, a representative, doubtless, of the Rajput
tribe of that name, who reigned beyond the next river--the Jhelum.
So there was no real need for this prolonged rest, for this fateful
pause, ere the West reached out its hand and gripped the East. Still,
Alexander deemed it necessary for the purpose, as Arrian puts it
naively, of "offering sacrifice to the gods to whom he was in the
habit of sacrificing."
Wherefore?
He had conquered many other lands. Whence came this hesitation, this
desire for divine guidance? And wherefore did Taxiles, sacrificing to
the gods to whom he was _not_ in the habit of sacrificing, send over
three thousand oxen and ten thousand sheep as victims?
Who can say? All we know is, that the sacrifices were favourable to
the crossing, as they were bound to be since Alexander had made up his
mind to it. Whereupon he "celebrated a gymnastic and horse contest
near the river"; those who took part in it, doubtless, wearing crowns
of the ivy leaves which the Macedonian legions, as Arrian writes, had
found at Mount Merus to their great delight, "for they had not seen
any for a long time. So they eagerly made garlands of it, singing
hymns in honour of Dionysus."
It must have been a pleasant rest, a jolly time, those thirty days of
February and March spent by the sliding river. Those of us who know
Northern India have memories of many such a sojourn in the enchanted
no-man's-land of a Punjab river-bed, where the soil on which the tent
is pitched one year may be deep stream the next, and the great solemn
cranes stalk amongst the young green wheat, and the flocks of
flamingoes show rosy-red in the sunrises. Bright, bracing memories
these, full, as it were, of the wild wings of many quaint aquatic
birds, full of the deep spoors of the heavy black buffaloes, and the
motionless grey logs of bottle-nosed crocodiles.
Alexander's army, however, had no such _mise en scene_. At
Attock--about which place the bridge must have spanned the Indus--the
river rushes between fixed rocky banks; the uneven country is broken
by ravines, or, rather, deep clefts, which look as though they had
been split open in the barren, undulating valley by the burning summer
heat of the sun. And all around, upon a near horizon, rise, curiously
opalescent at all times, whether red by day or white by moonlight, a
circle of rocky hills. Elusive hills, distant at one moment, seeming
to crush in the valley at another.
One can imagine them rose-red in the dawn, when the order came at
last, and Alexander the Invincible closed in grips with his new
antagonist.
Plain sailing at first, despite the false alarm of the last day's
march to Taxila, when a complete army in order of battle was seen on
the horizon, and startled Alexander into instant dispositions for
attack, until this display of force was proved to be an Indian form of
honourable reception. The Serpent-City, yielded up to him by its
willing ruler without a blow, gave occasion "for more sacrifices which
were customary for him to offer."
Once again, however, _not_ customary to "Taxiles the Indian," who must
have watched this honouring of strange gods with furtive, wily eyes,
thinking the while of Porus, with the whole of his mighty army waiting
on the further side of the Jhelum River for this upstart Western
conqueror as a spider waits a fly.
Here at Taxila, also, "the king of the Mountaineer-Indians sent
envoys, the embassy including the king's brother, as well as the other
most notable men." This is one version of the story. Another is that
Alexander fought a pitched battle with the mountaineers, defeating
them, of course; but this is negatived by Arrian's distinct assertion
that when the conqueror moved Jhelum-wards in May, he left behind him
only "soldiers who were invalided by sickness."
In those days Taxila was a University city, one of the largest in the
East--rich, luxurious, populous--noted as the principal seat of
learning in Northern India. All that is left of it now is some miles
of ruins between Hasan-Abdal and Rawalpindi, and a few copper and
silver pieces, more ingots than coins, punched in quaint, rude
devices. To Alexander it was a hospitable resting-place, where king
vied with conqueror in lavish generosity of mutual gifting. Golden
crowns for the Macedonian and all his friends; caparisoned chargers,
Persian draperies, banqueting vessels for the king and courtiers.
Pleasant rain fell also, laying the Punjab dust, and hastening the
flower-buds to bursting.
But behind all the policy and the pleasure, like a low, distant
thunder cloud, lay Porus, with an army fifty thousand strong, biding
his time beyond the river.
He had to be faced; so, early in May, Alexander, his small force
augmented by a contingent from Taxila, arrived on the banks of the
Hydaspes. Very different weather now from what it had been in March.
The hot winds were blowing, the rocks and sand were all aglow, and in
its widening bed, as the Jhelum debauched from the hills, the river,
swollen by the melting of Himalayan snows, showed a turbulent flood,
separating him from his enemy, who, with all his army and his huge
troop of elephants, could be seen lining the opposite shore.
How to cross to him, how to give the invincible Macedonian cavalry
time to recover and re-form after a forced passage, was the problem
before Alexander.
He set his camp face to face with his enemy's, and sent back for the
boats with which he had crossed the Indus. A veritable burning of the
bridge behind him in a way; but Alexander never considered defeat.
The easiest plan would no doubt have been to wait comfortably encamped
till October chill should have checked the melting of summer snow;
but, once again, Alexander considered no delay.
So there ensued what Arrian terms "the stealing of a passage." Day and
night long the sentinels of Porus were given no rest. Flotillas of
boats went up and down the river, reconnaissance parties were here,
there, everywhere, menacing a ford; and all the while it was being
spread about that Alexander, baffled, disappointed, was fast making up
his mind to wait till winter.
Yet 16 miles upwards, almost among the mountains, behind a wooded
island which shut out the view southward, galleys, rafts, skins
stuffed with hay, everything needful for a forced passage was secretly
being prepared.
Night after night brought a feint of attack. As Arrian writes:--
"The cavalry was led along the bank in various directions, making a
clamour and raising the battle cry ... as if they were making all
preparations for crossing the river.... When this had occurred
frequently ... Porus no longer continued to move about also; but,
perceiving his fear had been groundless, he kept his position."
It was not, however, as Arrian calls it, by "marvellous audacity"
only, that Alexander finally succeeded in his object. As one reads the
minute precautions, the stringent orders, the foresight displayed for
every possible complication, one is forced to acknowledge the master
mind of the commander. Small wonder if the very heavens fought for
him. It was now July, month of torrential rains, fierce storms; and
one of these fell suddenly like a pall over Alexander's forced night
march of 16 miles--"The noise of the thunder," Arrian writes, "drowned
with its din the clatter of the weapons."
Thus, noisily yet secretly, the position was gained by the 11,000
picked troops led by Alexander in person. The storm passed; the dawn
rose, calm and bright, to find the Western soldiers across the stream,
crashing through the low undergrowth of what their general deemed was
the mainland. For it was July now, and the rains had brought that
marvellous luxuriance of sudden life which springs ever from the union
of sun and water. So we can imagine the well-greaved Greeks brushing
aside the low daphne bushes, and crushing under foot the trailing
arches of the ground maidenhair fern. To find disappointment await
them, as, standing on a further shore, they realised that they were on
an island, that before them lay another formidable channel, swollen by
the night's rain. For a while the cavalry could find no ford; when
found, it was but a swimming one. Yet even so, dripping, half-drowned,
the legions were over and deployed in the open, before any attempt at
opposition could be made.
So with Alexander at the head, the West did battle for the first time
with the East.
The result was foregone. Outnumbered as it was by nearly five to one,
Alexander's force was still one of veterans, and Alexander himself the
foremost military genius of his own or any age.
The story, then, of the great battle of the Hydaspes remains as a
lesson in warfare, and soldiers of to-day may pore over the sketch map
of it in admiration. Here, in this attempt to give Indian history in
picturesque form, all minor things, the magnificent charges of the
Macedonian cavalry, the desperate courage of the Indians, even the
awful carnage wrought by the maddened elephants cooped up within
narrow space, all these fade into insignificance before the tale--so
seldom told as it should be told--of the meeting of Alexander and
Porus after the battle was over in the eighth hour of the day. Let it
be told in Arrian's own words.
"When Porus, who exhibited great talent in the battle, performing
deeds not only of a general, but of a valiant soldier, observed the
slaughter of his cavalry ... and that most of his infantry had
perished, he did not depart, as Darius the Persian king did, setting
an example of flight to his men.... At last, having received a wound
... he turned his elephant round and began to retire.
"Alexander, having seen him valiant in battle, was very desirous of
saving his life. Accordingly, he sent to him first Taxiles the Indian,
who, riding up ... as near as seemed safe, bade him ... listen to
Alexander's message. But when he saw his old foe Taxiles, Porus
wheeled and prepared to strike him with a javelin, and would probably
have killed him, if he had not quickly driven his horse beyond reach.
But not even on this account was Alexander angry ... but kept sending
others in succession, and last of all Meroes the Indian ... an old
friend of Porus.
"As soon as the latter heard the message of Meroes, and being overcome
by thirst from his wound, he dismounted from his elephant. After he
had drank water and felt refreshed, he ordered Meroes to lead him
without delay to Alexander....
"And Alexander rode in front of the line with a few of the Companions
to meet him, and stopping his horse, admired the handsome figure and
the stature of Porus, which reached somewhat about 5 cubits (6 ft. 6
in.). He was also surprised that he did not seem to be cowed in
spirit, but advanced to meet him as one brave man would meet another
brave man.... Then, indeed, Alexander was the first to speak, bidding
him say what treatment he would like to receive.
"'Treat me, O Alexander, in a kingly way!'
"Alexander, pleased, said: 'For my own sake, O Porus, I do that, but
for thine, do thou demand what is pleasing unto thee.'
"But Porus said all things were included in that, whereupon Alexander,
being still more pleased, not only granted him the rule over his own
Indians, but also added another country of larger extent than the
former to what he had before. Thus he treated the brave man in a
kingly way, and from that time found him faithful in all things."
A fine picture this; one which does not readily desert the mind's eye
when once it has found place there. And a fine beginning also to the
dealings of the West with the East. Pity that in the years to come the
same policy was not always adopted.
In commemoration of this victory a town was founded on the
battle-field, and another near the present one of Jhelum, in memory of
the horse "Bucephalus," who died there full of years and honour; not,
as Arrian says,
"from having been wounded by any one, but from the effects of toil and
old age; for he was about thirty years old, and quite worn out with
toils. He had shared many hardships and incurred many dangers with
Alexander, being ridden by none but the King, because he rejected all
other riders."
The triumphal progress through the Doabs, which ensued on Alexander's
passage of the Hydaspes, was only checked by the stout resistance of
Sangala, a fortified town as yet unidentified. But with the help of a
fresh contingent brought by Porus, it was razed to the ground as a
punishment for its stubborn and useless resistance.
And now before the conqueror lay the river Beas; beyond it, a nation
by repute brave, well equipped, more civilised than those through
which he had passed like a flaming sword. His own courage rose high;
to him "there seemed no end of the wars so long as anything hostile to
him remained."
But the spirit of the soldiers had begun to flag. It was now
September, the most trying month in Upper India. The lassitude born of
long heat disposed the men to listen to the tales of gigantic heroes
beyond the water, and so the exhortations of their leader fell on deaf
ears. Yet, as given by Arrian, the words were stirring beyond compare.
"If they had come so far, why should they shrink from adding further
lands to their Empire of Macedonia? To brave men there was no end to
labours except the labours themselves, provided they led to glorious
achievements. The distance to the Eastern ocean was not great, and
that must be united to their own familiar sea, since the Great Waters
encircled the earth. If they went back, the races they had conquered,
not being as yet firm in allegiance, might revolt. Oh! Macedonian and
Grecian Allies stand firm! Glorious are the deeds of those who undergo
labours, who live a life of valour, and die, leaving behind them
immortal glory."
But the words only provoked a long silence. And so the flaming sword
turned back; but the great fighting heart of its holder seems to have
been left behind in the old bed of the Beas River, where, on its
furthest bank, as a memorial of what would have happened but for dull
humanity, he erected twelve huge altars--
"equal in height to the loftiest military towers, while exceeding them
in breadth; to serve both as a thank-offering to the gods who had led
him so far as a conqueror, and also to serve as monuments of his own
labours. And after completing them, he offered sacrifices on them" (to
the gods to whom he was in the habit of sacrificing, doubtless!), "and
celebrated a gymnastic and equestrian contest."
A very different festivity this from that upon the banks of the Indus;
and we can imagine the great leader coming back across the wide stream
in his oared galley from the useless, unreal ceremonial, with bent
head and arms crossed like Napoleon on his way to St Helena.
A picture that fittingly may end the story of Alexander in India; for
the record of his retreat is a record of success without aim, beyond
the discovery of the Great Sea which encircles the whole Earth.
There is something intensely pathetic in this story of his choice of
the river Hydaspes as his means of retreat, of the infinite care for
every unit in his force which he showed before that approach of the
dawn in late October, when, without confusion, without disorder, he
poured a libation out of a golden goblet from the prow of his vessel
into the stream, in the name of his gods and the three great rivers,
the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Indus, to whom he trusted; then,
doubtless, flinging the cup of gold far into the sliding water,
ordered the signal for starting seawards to be given with the trumpet.
So in slow, stately, orderly procession (the "noise of the rowing"
mingling with "the cries of the captains, the shouts of the
boatswains," and the choric "songs of farewell from the natives who
ran along the banks, into a veritable battle cry"), he passed down to
the Great Ocean. The voyage took a year, and he reached the sea coast
not very far from where Kurrachee now stands. Practically, Alexander
was in India proper but nineteen months, and the outward result of his
flaming sword had passed almost before his premature death at Babylon,
a year and a half after he left its shores. But, though India remained
outwardly as ever "splendidly isolated," forgetful of the West, she
had felt the Hellenic power; she feels it still. In every little
village "Jullunder" (Alexander) is still a name wherewith to conjure,
and the village doctor still claims, with pride, to follow the Yunani
(Ionian) system of medicine.
That the former should be the case is surely small wonder. India
is ever the slave of vitality, and Alexander was vital to the
finger-tips. What else could be said of the man who, finding himself
checked in an assault on a stronghold, leapt from the bastion into the
fort, and, supporting himself against the wall, kept the enemy at bay
with his sword, till one by one his followers, maddened by the sight
of their beloved leader's danger, followed him in time to rescue him,
wounded, fainting?
But the deed which, of all others, Arrian extols as the most noble
deed ever performed by Alexander, took place in this wise in the
desert. His army, parched with thirst, were stumbling on blindly, led,
as usual in times of distress, by Alexander on foot.
To him, weary and exhausted, returned scouts, bearing with them water
collected in a helmet with great difficulty from some cleft in a
distant rock.
He took it, thanking the bearers, but immediately poured it upon the
ground in sight of all. "As a result of this," Arrian writes, "the
entire army was reinvigorated to so great a degree that any one would
have imagined that the water so lavished had furnished draught for
every man."
Truly, though he left little of sovereignty behind him, Alexander left
enough pictures imprinted on the soil of Hindustan to furnish forth
many a gallery.
THE GREAT MAURYAS
B.C. 321 TO B.C. 184
We come here to one of the landmarks of Indian History. There were
seven kings of the Maurya dynasty; of these, two gained for themselves
an abiding place in the category of Great World Rulers. Their names
are Chandra-gupta and Asoka. Grandfather and grandson, they made their
mark in such curiously divergent ways that they stand to this day as
examples of War and Peace.
Concerning Chandra-gupta's usurpation of the throne of the Nine
Nandas, something has already been said. It has also been mentioned
that while still almost a lad, he met with Alexander during the
latter's brief summer among the Punjab Doabs or Two-waters, so called
because they are the fertile plains which lie between the rivers.
The identification, indeed, of the Sandracottus mentioned by Greek
writers with Chandra-gupta has been of incalculable value in enabling
historians to fix other dates. It has been, as it were, a secure
foundation for a superstructure which has grown, and still grows, year
by year, and in which every new stone discovered is found to fit
accurately in its place.
At the time of this meeting, Chandra-gupta was a nameless adventurer,
a political exile from Magadha. Who he really was seems doubtful. The
illegitimate son, it is said, of one of the Nine Nandas by a beautiful
low-caste woman (from whose name, Mura, the titular designation of the
dynasty Maurya is taken), it is hard to see whence came the young
man's undoubted claim to be of the Shesh-nag, or Serpent race; for the
Nandas were as undoubtedly of low-caste origin themselves. It is
possible, therefore, that some further history of wrong may have
existed to make Chandra-gupta claim kinship with the Serpent-Kings
whom the Nandas had ousted, and hold himself, like any young
pretender, a rightful heir.
Be that as it may, he was ambitious, capable, energetic, and seized
the first opportunity given him of rising to power.
This came with the news of Alexander's death in B.C. 323. In the
instant revolt of conquered India which followed, he took a prominent
part, and found himself, in B.C. 321, with an army at his back which,
having accomplished its purpose and given its leader paramount power
in Punjab, was eager to follow his fortune elsewhere.
He led it to Magadha, and taking advantage of the Nanda king's
unpopularity, slew every male member of the family.
This was the Eastern etiquette on such occasions; the sparing of a
brother or an uncle being considered a weakness sure to bring speedy
repentance in its train.
Except in as far as the principals were concerned, this revolution
appears to have been easy and bloodless. At least so we gather from
the play called the "Signet of the Minister," which, though not
written till nearly twelve hundred years after the event, seems fairly
trustworthy in fact.
In itself it is so studiously realistic, so palpably free from all
appeal to the imagination, as to form a marked contrast to all other
dramas of the period. It is most likely the first purely political
play that ever was written, for, excluding love passages and poetical
diction, it deals entirely with the stir of plot and counterplot.
Chanakya, the wily Brahman--whose advice had been Chandra-gupta's best
weapon in gaining the throne--realising the insecurity of that throne
without the hearty support of the nobles and, above all, of the late
King's Prime Minister, sets himself by sheer diplomacy to cut the
ground from beneath the feet of his master's enemies, and, succeeding,
yields up his signet of office to the appeased Rakahasa, whose final
aside when he accepts it--"Oh! vile Chanakya--say rather, Wise
Chanakya, a mine of wisdom inexhaustible! Deep ocean stored with
excellent rare gems"--shows that he feels himself overmastered by
sheer wit.
But the whole play is well worth reading; some of it--notably the
parts in prose-reminding one of Shakspeare.
The remainder of Chandra-gupta's career, however, was anything but
bloodless. It was scarcely possible that it should be so, considering
that he began life as a nobody and ended it as undisputed Emperor of
India from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. A man of iron nerve,
born to conquer, born to rule, he went on his way undeviatingly,
holding his own despite the constant threats of his enemies, despite
the danger of constant plots; a danger which made perpetual precaution
necessary. He never occupied the same bedroom two nights in
succession; he never during the daytime slept at the same hour.
A story is told of Chanakya's wily vigilance for his master. He
noticed one day a long caravan of ants on the wall of the king's room
carrying crumbs. This was enough for Chanakya. Without an instant's
hesitation, the royal pavilion was ordered to be set on fire and, as
the plaint runs:--
"The brave men who were concealed
In the subterrene avenue that led
To Chandra-gupta's sleeping chamber, so,
Were all destroyed."
So far as one can gather, Chandra-gupta's character was not a lovable
one; but there can be no question of his power to rule men wisely and
well. Megasthenes' account of Paliputra (which applies more to the
reign of Chandra-gupta, during whose lifetime the Grecian was
ambassador to the court, than to that of any other monarch) gives us a
marvellous picture of the grip which Government kept on the people;
and kept for their good. Every department (especially the land revenue
and irrigation, both of paramount importance in an Indian State) was
legislated for with the utmost care, and though the whole system of
government was based on the personal power of the king, it was far
from being a mere arbitrary autocracy. His greatest contemporary was
Seleukos Nikator, who in addition to ceding Kabul, Herat, and Kandahar
to him, bestowed on him his daughter in marriage.
Chandra-gupta died in B.C. 297, having reigned for twenty-four years.
A short enough time in which to have accomplished so much; for at the
day of his death, the only portion of the vast continent of India
which did not acknowledge his rule was a strip of sea coast country
about Cuttack, on the Bay of Bengal, and that part of the lessening
peninsular which lay southward, beyond a line drawn through Mangalore
and Madras.
His son Bindu-sara reigned in his stead. Of him we know nothing; not
even if he was born of the Grecian princess. Only this is on record,
that he was extremely fond of figs, and, presumably, of learning; for
a letter of his to Antiochus, the son of Seleukos Nikator, asks
naively for the purchase and despatch of green figs and a professor!
To which the dignified reply is still extant that the figs shall be
procured and forwarded, but that by Grecian etiquette it was
indecorous either to buy or sell a professor!
Bindu-sara had this merit: he handed on the empire which he had
received intact to his son, after a reign of five and twenty years.
So let us pass to Asoka, who, next to Akbar the Great Moghul, was the
greatest of all Indian kings. Curiously enough, both these monarchs,
Asoka and Akbar, ruled India through its imagination. Both claimed
pre-eminence as apostles of a Faith in the Unknown; both appealed to
the people on transcendental grounds.
At the time of his fathers death in B.C. 272, Asoka was Viceroy of the
Western Province. He had previously ruled in a similar position in the
Punjab, where his headquarters had been Taxila, the Serpent City.
Chosen as Crown Prince from amongst numerous other sons on account of
his ability, he had been given this semi-independent control, partly
because of his ungovernable temper, which earned him the nickname of
"The Furious." He thus seemed to take after his grandfather,
Chandra-gupta, who, with all his many virtues, was unquestionably
cruel and arrogant. But Asoka was not to follow in his ancestor's
footsteps. Forty years afterward, when his long and peaceful reign,
marred by but one war, had come to an end, he had earned for himself
the well-deserved title of "The Loving-minded One, Beloved of the
Gods." A great change in any man's life; but nothing to the change
which his life was to bring into his world.
In B.C. 260, when he came under the mingled influence of Buddhism and
Jainism, those creeds were little more than sectarian beliefs confined
to the India which had given them birth. When he died, Buddhism had
spread through Asia, and had touched both Africa and Europe. Asoka has
been called the Constantine of Buddhism, but he was more than that.
The creed which brought him comfort was not, as Christianity was in
Constantine's time, already a power to be reckoned with, it was simply
the belief of a few enthusiasts, a few select souls who sought almost
sorrowfully for some solution of the Great Secret.
What was the cause which led the Emperor of India, in his luxurious
autocracy, to join himself to this Search? Undoubtedly it was remorse;
remorse for the numberless lives needlessly sacrificed, the needless
suffering entailed on humanity by the one war of his reign--the
conquest of Kalinga, a maritime province on the sea-board of the Bay
of Bengal. We have this remorse with us still (as we have so much of
the innermost soul and thoughts and aspirations of Asoka) in the
marvellous edicts engraven on rock and pillar, which, outlasting Time
itself, tell to wild waste and deserted ruins their story of one man's
struggle towards the light. One can almost hear the break, as of
tears, in the voice that clamours still of "the regret which the
Beloved-of-the-Gods felt at the murders and the deaths and the
violence."
This regret, then, was the cosmic touch which drove Asoka to find
comfort in preaching the doctrine of the sanctity of life. Was it
Jainism (amongst the tenets of which this takes first place) which
influenced Asoka most, or was it Buddhism? Doctors differ; only this
we know, that it was through Asoka's exertions that the latter became
the creed of one-third of the human race. For the energy of the man
was incomparable. His missionaries were everywhere. "Let small and
great exert themselves," is the cry still carven upon stone. "The
teaching of religion is the most meritorious of acts.... There is no
gift comparable to the gift of religion ... it is in the conquests of
religion that the gods takes pleasure." So his yellow-robed monks went
forth beyond the confines of his visible, tangible world, and found
their way to Egypt, to Greece, to Syria. Their influence is still to
be traced in other religions, though no record exists of their
labours.
Thus for some thirty years of his life Asoka set himself to alter the
faith of the world. Why? And how? Because he believed with a whole
heart, not in ritual or dogma, but in something which--hard to be
translated--is best rendered by the "Law of Piety." And this his
edicts explain to be "mercy and charity, truth and purity, kindness
and goodness."
A good creed even in these later days. Not to be improved upon by
conformists or non-conformists!
As to how this gospel of good-will was to be preached we learn from
these edicts also. It is by example, by tolerance, by "gentleness and
moderation in speech."
"Government by religion, law by religion, progress by religion." This
was Asoka's rule, and in it he stands alone as the only king who has
subordinated all things to a faith which must only be preached in
gentleness and moderation.
The first series of fourteen edicts were cut on rocks in various parts
of his kingdom, from Attock on the Indus to Cuttack on the Eastern
Sea, during the twelfth and thirteenth year of Asoka's reign. They
are, therefore, the first-fruits of his conversion. They range over a
vast number of subjects, but in each of them there is a personal note
which justifies the belief that they are verily the words of the king,
and not the mere drafts of some secretary.
On the other hand, the Minor Rock edicts were carven in the last year
of Asoka's reign, and thus gain an additional interest from being the
farewell of a king to the people whom he had striven so hard to lead
into the Way of Peace. In one of them he says that the truest
enjoyment for himself has been making men happy by leading them to
follow the path of religion, that "with this object he has regulated
his life"; yet, though he has "promulgated positive rules, it is
solely by a change in the sentiments of the heart that religion
makes true progress." The edict ends thus: "So spake Piyadasi,
Beloved-of-the-Gods. Wherever this edict exists on pillars of stone
let it endure to remote ages."
It has endured. The Prakrit language in which it was engraven--the
spoken language of those times--has passed; but Asoka's words are not
of Time, they are of Eternity.
He was a great builder, but few of his buildings remain to this day.
What their magnificence must have been we may judge by the topes at
Sanchi, where the eye wearies in following the intricacy of ornament,
the brain is bewildered in attempting to re-fashion in imagination the
whole stupendous structure as it must have been. But here and there
some monolithic sandstone pillar still remains, slender, perfect in
proportion and execution, still bearing in close-carven character
Asoka's message to his people, to the world.
Strange, indeed, that the West knows so little of him! Strangest of
all that the twentieth century, with its Peace Party and its
Anti-Vivesectionists, should not put Asoka's name as President in
perpetuity of their organisations. Asoka, who more than a thousand
years upheld the equal rights of animals with men to the King's care,
and openly adjured his successors to follow in his steps, and not "to
think that a conquest by the sword deserves the name of conquest."
What manner of man Asoka was outwardly, we have no means of knowing;
but those who know of his life can picture him in his yellow monk's
robe, wearied yet unwearied, pondering over his lifelong problem. "By
what means can I lead my people into the path of peace?"
Unwearied because of the spirit which inspires the words, "Work I must
for the public benefit"; wearied because, "Though I am ready at any
hour and any place to receive petitions, I am never fully satisfied
with my despatch of business."
He died in B.C. 231, leaving his empire intact, and was apparently
succeeded by a grandson. After him came five kings, all mere names.
The duration of the dynasty was 137 years, and as 89 of these belonged
to the combined reigns of Chandra-gupta, Bindu-sara, and Asoka, the
remaining six kings have but eight years apiece. Long enough, however,
to disintegrate, to dissipate the vast empire of Asoka. So much so,
that before continuing the story of what may be called the central
kings of India, it is necessary to give a side-glance at the outlying
provinces where, on the removal of Asoka's firm grip on Government,
various minor dynasties began to rise into a power superior to that of
Magadha.
THE OUTLYING PROVINCES
B.C. 231 TO A.D. 45
A growing tide as it nears the springs claims more and more of the
shore at each rise and fall. So it was with the tide which on Asoka's
death set in around his throne.
On the north-western frontier, that battle-ground of India, there had
been peace since Chandra-gupta wrested half Ariana from the grip of
Seleukos Nikator. But the country itself had remained more or less
under Hellenist influence. Antiochus, Demetrios Eukratides, such are
the names of the passing rulers of whose existence we know by the
multitude of coins which form almost their only history.