Indeed, as in some museum we gaze with keen yet clouded interest at

some case of coins labelled "Indo-Greek, Indo-Parthian _civ_: B.C.

250, A.D. 50," we are really gaining at a glance an impressionist

picture of the strange welter of principalities and powers, of sudden

diminutions and almost causeless exacerbations of influence, which

marked the passage of these few centuries upon the borderland of

India. Here a big gold plaque arrests our eye, just as the name of

Arsakes or Menander heaves into sight out of the confused medley of

their more insignificant surroundings; or some quaint half-Aryan,

half-Parthian inscription leaves us wondering of the why and the

wherefore, just as some trivial incident which has survived Time in

the pages of obscure Greek writers makes us pause to wish for more.

Strange, ghost-like personalities are those which live rudely hammered

out on a rough ingot of bronze, or silver, or gold, telling their tale

truly,--succinctly at times however, as when the name and portrait of

one prince forms at first the obverse of another, then the name alone

remains, and finally Hermaios disappears, and Kadphises rules supreme.

[Map: India to B.C. 231]

Who are they all? Historians peer and ponder; they add date to date,

and divide the total by their own desires--for in no branch of

knowledge is the personal equation more powerful than in history--yet

still that glance at the case of coins gives to the uninitiated the

best impression of the period.

One thing which militates against a concise pigeon-holing of such

information as we can gather into this brief review of Indian history,

is the fact that much of it has really nothing to do with India at

all. The Hindoo Kush range of mountains may be taken as the western

boundary of Asoka's empire, and the powers which encroached on that

empire matured their plans, conquered and governed such provinces as

they gained from beyond that boundary. The Bactrians, for instance,

who appeared on the banks of the Indus, came from the valleys

and fertile plains about the Oxus. They were a semi-civilised,

semi-Hellenised race, who boasted the possession of a thousand cities.

The Parthians, on the other hand, hailed from the wide steppes about

the Caspian Sea, and were barbarian utterly in the sense of not caring

for either luxury or culture. Mounted shepherds, mere moss-troopers,

they were a hardy race, and under the leadership of Arsakes, gripped

at the crown of Central Asia, and so, inevitably, after a time reached

out to the fat lands about the Indus; for the most part leaving the

princelings who parcelled out the land in possession, as feudatories

to the foreign power.

It will be remembered that Seleukos Nikator's attempt to recover India

for Greece in Chandra-gupta's time failed. Thenceforward for a hundred

years no other attempt was made. In B.C. 206, however, Antiochus the

Bactrian made a sweep on Kandahar, and Demetrios, his son, in B.C.

190, following his example, captured both the Punjab and Sinde. To his

own cost, however; for, weakened by these distant wars, he had to

yield his throne to one Eukratides, and be content for a time with the

title of "King of the Indians." Not for long, however, for Eukratides,

being bad to beat, eventually got a grip even on these eastern

provinces.

Justin the historian gives a few personal details of this Eukratides.

How he and three hundred held a fort for five months against Demetrios

and sixty thousand; and how he was killed in cold blood by his son and

colleague, who drove his chariot wheels over his father's dead body

and refused it burial. A poor return for trust, and honour, and

devoted love! It is satisfactory to know that the monstrous crime

brought its own punishment The dead hero's hold once gone, the

successes he had gained drifted from the murderer's hands, and

thereinafter ensued one of those confused welters of conflicting

names, powers, principalities, which send us back to our outlook on

the case of coins. Menander's name rises out of the obscure in B.C.

155, when he attempted to follow Alexander's footsteps. With a large

army he marched on India, and crossing the Beas, which had defied his

predecessor, actually threatened the capital of Paliputra itself. At

that time, however, the sovereignty of Magadha lay with a strong man;

the man who, ousting the degenerate Mauryas, had shown himself to have

the qualities of both a soldier and general. So the Greek king had to

beat a hasty retreat, thus ending the last attempt of Europe upon

India until Vasco de Gama's, in A.D. 1502.

About this time two nomad tribes from the wide Roof-of-the-World began

a march southward, which, like a flood, was eventually to sweep

everything before it. The first were the Sakas, who, driven from

behind by the following tribe, the Yuehchi, overwhelmed Bactria,

forced their way into the Punjab, and penetrated as far south as

Mathura, while another section founded a Sika dynasty at Kathiawar.

They seem to have owned allegiance to the Arsakian or Parthian kings

of Persia, and bore the Persian title of satrap.

Thus, from the pell-mell of petty princelings and wild, nomadic

chieftains another name springs to notice. On the coins it runs:

"_Maues basileus basileon_."

This king of kings, as he proudly calls himself, was Maues, the first,

or nearly the first, of an Indo-Parthian dynasty replacing the

Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian ones. As our eye runs over the coins--the

only relics of dead kings--it is arrested by the name of Gondophares.

Now who was Gondophares? The question clamours vainly for answer,

until a faint recollection of the early fathers brings Origen and the

Acts of St Thomas back to memory. Yes! Gondophares was the King of

India in the days when

"the twelve Apostles, having divided the countries of the world

amongst themselves by lot, India fell to the share of Judas, surnamed

Thomas or the Twin, who showed unwillingness to start on his mission."

Poor St Thomas! It was a far cry, but Habban, the Indian merchant,

conveyed his saintly purchase (for the Lord sold the unwilling

missioner to him in a vision for twenty pieces of silver) to King

Gundephar in safety. And the king bade the apostle, who was an

architect, build him a palace in six months.

"And St Thomas, commanded therefore by the Lord, promised to build him

the palace within the six months, but spent all the monies in

almsgiving. So when the time came, he explained that he was building

the king a palace, not on earth, but in heaven, not made with

hands--and multitudes of the people embraced the faith."

So runs the old Monkish story. Is it true? Who knows! Gondophares was

a real man, he was a real Indian king, he is associated in legend with

a Christian mission, and the claim that St Thomas was the missioner is

not at variance with known facts or chronology. With that we must be

content.

And now the coins tell another tale. In their turn the Indo-Parthian

princes were being driven southward. Their names disappear before

those of the horde of Turki nomads called the Yuehchi, who about the

middle of the second century B.C. followed the path taken years before

by the Sakas, and with two hundred thousand bowmen and a million

persons of all ages and sexes poured themselves into India in search

of pastures new.

So much for the north-western frontier. In the south-west, while Greek

prince after Greek prince in the north was minting coins that were to

carry his name idly, ineffectively, through the centuries, an

aboriginal Dravidian people, driven, no doubt, thousands of years

before from the fertile fields of the Gangetic plain by the steady

advance of the Aryan immigrants, were as steadily regaining their hold

upon Central India. The Andhra race was not slow to seize opportunity.

The death of Asoka gave them the chance of casting off their

allegiance to the Maury a empire, and they took it. A few years later

the King of the Andhras, self-styled the "Lord of the West," was able

to send an army to the eastern sea-coast, and so help Kalinga to

revolt also. The capital of the Andhra kingdom appears to have been an

unidentified city called Sri-Kakulum, on the banks of the Krishna

River; and the area of Andhra rule gradually increasing, crept closer

and closer to that of Magadha. The memory of Hala, the seventeenth

king, lives still by virtue of an anthology of love-songs called "The

Seven Centuries," which he is said to have composed. That, a

collection entitled "The Great Storybook," and a Sanskrit Grammar all

belong by repute to the reign of this king. Finally, the inevitable

collision occurred between the powerful Andhra dynasty and the

degenerate, dissolute monarchy at Magadha, which resulted in the

annihilation of the latter. But before turning to this, the course of

the years since the Maurya kings disappeared from sheer inanition

must be traced briefly. It was in B.C. 194 that Pus[^y]a-mitra,

commander-in-chief to the last of the Mauryas, lost patience with his

weak master, assassinated him, and founded the Sunga line. A strong,

unscrupulous man evidently, he held his own, succeeded in stemming

the steady tide of disintegration on both the south-east and the

north-west, and drove back the Greek invasion of Menander.

Still unsatisfied, he revived, in order to strengthen his rule, the

old traditional Horse-sacrifice, of which we read in the Vedas.

A quaint old ceremony without doubt. Imagine a grey horse, approved by

lucky marks, sanctified by priests, turned loose to wander at its

will. And behind it, following it from field to field as it ranges, a

complete army ready to claim pasturage for it from all and sundry

during the space of one whole year. Hey presto! by beat of drum the

fiat goes forth, as it grazes, that proprietors, principalities,

powers, must submit or fight. So, if an unconquered army returned when

the trial was ended, he who sent it forth had right to claim

suzerainty, to call himself Lord-Paramount of all the others.

This particular "Asva-medha," as it is called, has a peculiar

significance, in that it proves a determined return from Buddhism to

Brahmanism on the part of the holders of the Magadha throne. It is

said, indeed, that Push[^y]a-mitra, like so many bloody usurpers, was

_devote_, and that his piety included persecution of the new faith.

One thing seems certain: his ten successors in the Sunga dynasty were

all more or less in the hands of the Brahmans, who managed the state

while the titular monarchs amused themselves in various discreditable

ways, until in B.C. 75, one Vasu-deva, Brahman prime minister, lost

patience with _his_ hereditary master, killed him while engaged in a

dishonourable intrigue, and started a new dynasty--the Kanva--by

mounting the throne himself! an idle proceeding, since it was soon to

pass from the hands of his ineffectual successors to those of an

Andhra prince.

But by this time--B.C. 75--another advancing flood--the Yuehchi

migration--had appeared in the north-west, and for the first two

centuries or so of our era was to claim equal share with the Dravidian

kings in the Government of India.

And what of Vikramaditya? Vikramaditya the hero, the demigod, the king

_par excellence_ of the Indian populace of to-day? The monarch whose

victory over some Scythian invaders in B.C. 57 was celebrated by the

introduction of the Samvat era, which dates from that year? Are all

the stories of him that are told about the smoke-palled winter fires

in the Punjab fields, the hundred and one tales of his munificence,

his courage and his goodness--are all these mere legends?

So far as this early date is concerned, historians tell us that they

are. More than five hundred years later one of the Gupta kings bore

the name, and answers in some way to the description.

But how came he to be connected with the Samvat era which undoubtedly

dates from B.C. 57? Who can say! Vikramaditya is a terrible loss to

India. How can we bear to part with the king whose swans sang always:

"Glory be to Vikramajeet,

He gave us pearls to eat!"

The king whose puppets of stone that bore aloft his throne refused to

bear the weight of his successor, and wandered out into the wide

world, each telling a tale of departed glory!

No! Vikramaditya, the beloved of every Indian school-boy for his

valour, of every little Indian maiden for his gentleness, cannot be

given up without a protest.

"The fiction which resembles truth is better than the truth which is

dissevered from the imagination." Let us hark back to those words of

wisdom, and search round for some faint foothold for blessed belief.

Let us turn to our case of coins in hope. Stay! What is this?

A nameless one. The date is close to the era we are seeking; the only

inscription runs thus, "_Soter Megas_."

The "Great Saviour!" Is not that enough for the imagination? So let us

pass by the cogitations of the historian as to what nameless king

minted the coin, and listen with renewed confidence to the tale told

by a childish voice of how King Vikramaditya slew the foul fiend.

What does it matter whether he was Vikramaditya or another? Foul

fiends must always be killed; as well by a nameless king, provided he

be a "Great Saviour."

But one point more requires a few words ere we pass on--the extent to

which Greek culture influenced India.

Curiously little. A glance at the Graeco-Buddhist carvings which still,

in some places on the frontier, are to be had for the mere picking up

as they lie littered about among the rough-hewn stones which once were

fort or palace, temple or shrine, shows that while India accepted

Greek art, she did not oust her own, but grafted the new skill on the

old stock.

And though it fires the imagination to think of Greek customs, Greek

philosophy, Greek valour and intellect making its home for hundreds of

years among the young green wheat-fields by the bed of the Indus, we

must not blind our eyes to the fact that the broad yellow flood of the

river seems to have been an impassable barrier to the whole theory of

life which was the root-stuff of such custom, such philosophy, such

valour, such intellect.

India went on her way, as she has gone always, almost untouched by

outside influences. Despite the brilliancy of the Macedonian cavalry,

her own retained its ancient traditions; despite the intellectual

keenness of European theorists, India has dreamt--as she dreams

still--her old dreams.

There is a little temple near the supposed site of Taxila. Or perhaps

it was not a temple at all: it may have been anything else. But two or

three of the broken pillars have Ionic capitals.

That is about the extent of Greek influence in India.

THE BACTRIAN CAMEL AND THE

INDIAN BULL

A.D. 45 TO A.D. 225

The device of a camel and a bull on the reverse and obverse of a coin

minted by Kadphises, the first Kushan king in India, is, Mr Vincent

Smith remarks, a singularly appropriate symbol for the conquest of

Hindustan by a horde of nomads from Central Asia.

These wanderers, ever pressed from behind, had come far; they had met

and overwhelmed by sheer numbers many hostile tribes. But all this was

prior to their passage into India proper. That took place about the

year B.C. 40, when Hermaios, the last of the Indo-Greek rulers, gave

way to the first Mongolian king.

It is curious to note this transference of power viewed in the light

of our case of coins. First, we find the names of both princes

preserved in the legend, the portrait of the Greek, with his title in

Greek lettering, still adorning the obverse. After a while the legend

changes, the Mongolian's name monopolises it, though the portrait

remains. Again a while, and Hermaios' face disappears in favour of the

features of the Roman Emperor, Augustus; a piece of flattery due to

the growing fame of Rome at its zenith, even in the Far East. So,

after again a little while, the coin shows nothing but that symbol of

conquest, the Bactrian Camel dominating the Indian Bull!

A pause for consideration will show us that this was no ordinary

conquest. The domination of a highly civilised people such as the

Indians were undoubtedly, even in those far ages, by a horde of upland

wanderers, veneered with a culture picked up hastily as they

journeyed, cannot have come about without much disturbance. Yet of

this we have no record. The feet of those million or more of men,

women, children, seem to have overwhelmed even their own noise and

clamour. Still, we know that the final overthrow of the old dynasties

in the Punjab and the Indus valley was deferred until Kadphises I. had

been gathered to his fathers after a reign of forty years, and his

son, Kadphises II., reigned in his stead. As energetic, as ambitious

as his father, he was keen enough to see the advantages of propitiating

that great Western emperor of Rome, whose gold was now pouring into

India in exchange for the latter's silk, gems, dye-stuffs, and spices;

so, after conquering the whole of the North-Western Provinces, he sent

an embassy to Rome in order to acquaint the Emperor Trajan of the fact.

Probably we have here the first political connection between East and

West.

For the rest, was this in truth, not the golden age, but the age of

gold, for in addition to the Roman Aurei, of which numberless

specimens are to be found in our Museums, we have examples of Oriental

gold coins of the same purity and weight, which must have been struck

by the Kushan kings, as these leaders of the wanderers are called.

On the death of the second Kadphises, one Kanishka came to the throne.

This is a name which still has a voice in Indian tradition, and,

beyond India, is still known in the legendary lore of Tibet, Mongolia,

and China.

Yet as to who he was, whether he came to the throne by honest

succession, or even as to the date of his reign, we have next to no

accurate information.

Here and there, as we dig at the grave of this dead king, our spade

and mattock turn up a coin, an inscription, perhaps an allusion in

later literature; but the point remains unsettled as to whether

Kanishka reigned in B.C. 57 or A.D. 120. The evidence of coins points

to the latter date. There is a certain quaint four-pronged symbol to

be found in most of the coins struck by Kadphises II., which is found

also in the innumerable coinage of Kanishka; for, whoever he was, he

minted much. Sure sign of a long and prosperous reign.

But there is evidence also which brings home to the enquirer the

mysterious attraction which lingers alike in the search for buried

treasure, and the search for buried history. For, close beside our

traces of Kanishka, of Kadphises, we come upon those of that nameless

King, the Great Saviour, whose unknown personality dominates for the

imaginative the two centuries of time which holds in their grip of

years the birth of Christ. A hundred years before that event, a

hundred years after, this vision of a Great King flits vaguely through

the obscure, making us say: "It cannot be, and yet--suppose it were?"

Good old Vikramaditya! Will the years, as they bring new discoveries,

bring you back from the realms of myth?

Meanwhile, "Soter Megas Basileus Basileon" remains free of the fetters

of fact, and Kanishka, the king, evades them in a fashion that is

purely tantalising.

"Strangely open to doubt," is the verdict of the historian on almost

everything concerning him.

And yet we know much.

We know that, like Asoka, he was an ardent Buddhist, though of how or

why he adopted this faith we are ignorant. We know that he ruled as

far east as Benares, as far south as the mouths of the Indus, as far

west and north as the Pamirs. His capital was Peshawur; but he had

subdued the old Indian capital of Paliputra. We know, also, that he

was a man of artistic tastes, a student and an admirer of Nature; for

his favourite holiday ground was the valley and hills of Kashmir,

where he erected many great monuments. At Peshawur itself, besides a

monastery whose ruins may still be traced outside the Lahore gate of

the modern town, he raised a great tower to cover some Buddhist

relics. The spire or pinnacle of this was in thirteen stories, made of

beautifully carved wood, and, surmounted by an iron finial, rose 400

feet in height. It is thus described by a Chinese pilgrim who visited

it in the sixth century.

But what best deserves remembrance in connection with Kanishka's name

are the wonderful sculptures which of late years have been discovered

in such quantities in the Hashtnugar district, and elsewhere. They are

known, generically, as the Gandhara sculptures, as they are supposed

to be the output of a distinct school which flourished in the district

of that name. But in conception, style, and execution, they assimulate

closely to the Graeco-Roman school, which at this period of the world's

history was nearly cosmopolitan.

Kanishka is also to be remembered for the Great Buddhist Council he

convened, in imitation, apparently, of Asoka. The story goes that

certain commentaries, being approved by this Council, were ordered to

be engraved on copper, and placed, for security, in a st'hupa or

tumulus.

The site of this has not yet been discovered, the copper plates remain

unread!

A find this, perchance, for the coming years! It is something to look

forward to, something which may clear up many points concerning

Kanishka now "strangely open to doubt."

The history of his successors is, likewise, doubtful. We stand,

indeed, on the threshold of one of those curious intervals in Indian

story, when the curtain comes down on the living picture of the stage,

leaving us to wonder what the next act of the drama will be, and when

it will recommence. Still more like, perhaps, is the position of the

spectator to one who, on some mountain top, watches the rolling clouds

sweep through the valleys below him. A stronger breath of wind, a

little rift in the hurrying white vapour, and a glimpse of the life

that goes on and on below the mists comes into view for a moment, and

is gone the next.

So we look back towards the beginning of the third century after

Christ. A glint of sunlight, a passing peep of something recognisable,

obliterated in an instant by the rolling clouds growing more and more

obscure as they deepen and darken.

"Then there were in this land three kings, Hushka, Jushka, and

Kanishka, who built three towns."

So runs the Kashmir chronicle.

It reads like the beginning of a fairy tale, but nothing follows

save a gold coin with the beautifully executed portrait of a

striking-looking man upon it, a man with deep-set eyes and determination

marked upon every feature. Beneath it, the legend of King Huwushka, or

Hushka.

Another glimpse comes to us of one Vasu-deva. Does he in truth belong

to the Mongolian princes, with their strange uncouth names? His is a

purely Indian one, and the coins which bear his name no longer bear

the Bactrian camel. The bull, too, is attendant on the Indian God

Siva, complete with his noose and trident.

Had Buddhism, then, gone by the board? Who can tell. The curtain is

finally rung down about the year A.D. 230 on the confused passing of

the Andhra dynasty in the south, the Kushan dynasty in the north, and

does not rise again, not even for a moment, until a hundred years have

passed.

And yet, before this little book is published, the grave may have

given up its dead, and out of a few dry bones, a chance coin, a

half-obliterated inscription, some new personality may have arisen to

live again through those long, empty years.

India is very wide, and she is very secretive. How can it be

otherwise, when beyond reach of the clash and welter of kings, of

courts and conquests, the great mass of the people live untouched by

change, watching their crops, ploughing, sowing, reaping,

"undisturbed" (as Megasthenes pointed out with wonder), "even when

battle is raging in their neighbourhood, by any sense of danger, since

the tillers of the soil are regarded by the Indians as a race sacred,

inviolable." To the world beyond such lives are a secret; they hold

the unknown.

So from behind the curtain the "Song of the Plough" rises in monotonous

chant as, in the same dress, using the same implements as he uses

to-day, the peasant drives his white oxen, and sings:--

"Bitter blue sky with no fleck of a cloud!

Ho! brother-ox drive the plough deep.

Sky-dappled grey like the partridge's breast!

Ho! brother-ox drive the plough straight.

Merry drops slanting from East to West!

Oh! brother-ox drive home the wain.

The gods give poor folk rain."

THE GREAT GUPTA EMPIRE

A.D. 308 TO A.D. 450

The curtain rises again upon a wedding; the wedding of Princess Kumari

Devi. Eight hundred years before, King Bimbi-sara of the Sesu-naga

dynasty had strengthened his hold on Magadha by marrying her

ancestress, a princess of that Lichchavi clan which for centuries has

held strong grip on a vast tract of country spreading far into the

Nepaul hills.

This kingdom of the Lichchavis had given Bimbi-sara much trouble. It

was to check the inroads of the bold hill folk that he first built the

watch fort of Pataliputra, the modern Patna. Of the history of the

warlike clan during these long intervening years nothing is known; but

they must have kept their independence, for Princess Kumari Devi

(which, by the way, is tautological, since Kumari means princess, the

whole name therefore standing as Princess-Goddess) appears from the

obscure as a person of importance, apparently an heiress. Whether she

was the reigning princess history sayeth not; but it appears not

unlikely that this was the case, and that at the time the Lichchavis,

instead of being checked by, were in possession of, Pataliputra.

Be that as it may, the Goddess-Princess chose to marry one

Chandra-gupta, a mere local chief of whose father and grandfather only

the names have been preserved. Possibly he was good-looking; let us

hope so! From the character of his son, Samudra-gupta, it is

reasonable to suppose that he rose above the common herd of

princelings in both intelligence and accomplishments; though, on the

other hand, these might have been derived from the princess.

Scarcely, however; unless the fairy god-mother had worked hard, since

the bride's race warrants us in presupposing beauty. Even now, says a

contemporary witness, "the delicate features and brilliantly fair

complexion of the Lichchavi women are remarkable."

Anyhow, the immediate result of what must have been a love match was

the appearance for the first and last time in Indian History of a

veritable Prince Consort, who, though calling himself king, struck

coins which bore the name of his queen as well as his own, and whose

son claimed succession as the "son of the daughter of the Lichchavis."

Indeed, save as husband and father, Chandra-gupta, the first of the

Gupta race, has little claim on attention. After the fashion of Prince

Consorts, he is more or less of a figure-head, though the prospects of

his dynasty were considered sufficiently dignified and secure to

permit of his coronation date being made the beginning of yet another

of the many Indian eras; one which has, however, passed entirely out

of use.

Chandra-gupta seems to have died when still quite a young man, leaving

his son, apparently quite a boy, to reign in his stead.

A precocious stripling this Samudra-gupta, who was to fill the throne

of India as it has seldom been filled for more than half a century.

Possibly there may have been some interval of Regency with the

Queen-Mother at its back, but one of the most curious features in this

fifty-year-long reign, is that we know nothing of it from the words of

any historian, that we gather no allusion to it from any

contemporaneous literature. Our knowledge, which year by year

increases, comes from coins, from inscriptions; notably from a pillar

which now stands in the fort at Allahabad. Originally incised and set

up by Asoka six centuries earlier, Samudra-gupta's court panegyrist

has used its waste space for a record of his master's great deeds. A

quaint contrast; since these were chiefly bloody wars, and Asoka

everywhere was a peace propagandist.

In truth, Samudra-gupta appears to have been an Indian Alexander. What

he saw he coveted, what he coveted he conquered. From this same pillar

we learn that his empire included all India as far south as Malabar,

as far north as Assam and Nepaul. It was thus larger than any since

the days of Asoka, though the southward sweep of Samudra-gupta's

victorious armies cannot, in the nature of things, have been much more

than a raid. A campaign, involving fully 3,000 miles of marching,

which cannot have occupied less than three years, and the furthest

limit of which lands one more than 1,200 miles from one's base, must

be a mere march to victory and a retreat with spoils.

The record of this march is fairly complete. The courtly panegyrist's

stilted verses tell us in detail of Tiger-Kings subdued, of homage and

tribute; but, so far as this slight history is concerned, all we need

picture to ourselves is an apparently invincible hero, laden with loot

from all the treasures of the south.

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

One gives us a quaint picture of the time. The Buddhist king of Ceylon

sent two monks, one the king's brother, to visit the monastery which

pious King Asoka of olden days had built by the sacred Bo tree at

Bodh-Gya.

Now, India being at this time Brahmanical, the worthy brothers met

with scant courtesy, and on return complained that they had literally

found no place at the holy shrine wherein to lay their heads. The

Buddhist king, therefore, anxious to redress this anomaly, despatched

an embassy to Samudra-gupta, asking leave to found a rest-house for

the use of pious pilgrims, and sent with it rich jewels and gifts

galore. These were duly accepted by the Hindoo as tribute, and

gracious permission given. Whereupon the decision to build a special

monastery close to the sacred tree was duly engraved on a copper

plate, and, in due time, carried out by the erection of what was

described two centuries later by the Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen T'sang (to

whose literary labours we of to-day owe nearly all our knowledge of

India in these far ages), as having three stories, six halls, three

towers, and accommodation for a thousand monks,

"on which the utmost skill of the artist has been employed; the

ornamentation is in the richest colours, and the statue of Buddha is

cast of gold and silver, decorated with gems and precious stones."

Natheless this was the golden age of the Hindoo, not of the Buddhist,

and, imitating Push[^y]a-mitra, who overset the Buddhist Maurya

dynasty, Samudra-gupta determined to proclaim his supremacy by the

ancient Horse sacrifice. So once more the doomed charger, followed by

an army, set out on its wanderings for a year. This we know by reason

of a few rare coins bearing the effigy of the victim standing before

the altar, encircled by an explanatory legend, which have survived

time, to be discovered of late years. There is also a rudely-carven

stone horse now standing at the door of the Museum in Lucknow, which

some archaeologists label as belonging to Samudra-gupta's great

sacrifice.

But the coins of this king are somewhat lavish of information.

Several, which represent him playing on a lyre, remain a proof that

the court panegyrist was not a wholesale flatterer in counting him

musician. This, again, gives ground for belief that he was also, as is

claimed for him, a poet. That he took delight in patronising art of

all kinds is proved beyond doubt by the great number of eminent

men whose works date from the reign of Samudra-gupta, and his

son Chandra-gupta II., who, on his coronation, took the name of

Vikramaditya; the latter being, of course, the one associated in the

mind of every Hindu of to-day with the splendid renaissance of national

learning and art, on which they love to dwell. To them Vikramaditya is

synonymous with the zenith of Hindu glory; but it is open to doubt

whether the hero's father may not lay claim to a lion's share of the

record of great achievements. We know of a certainty that he was

sufficiently notable as musician to warrant his coins being stamped

with majesty in that _role_; his poet-laureate tells us of keen

intellect, love of study, and skill in argument. Is not this sufficient

to make us at any rate date the beginning of the Renaissance from the

days of Samudra-gupta?

Be that as it may, it is abundantly clear that in him we are dealing

with another of those rare kings, who are kings indeed by right of

their personal supremacy.

India is curiously fruitful in them, and, so far as we have come in

Indian history, their individualities stand forth all the stronger in

contrast with the mists and shadows which surround them. Bhishma,

Chandra-gupta, Asoka, Kanishka, Samudra-gupta--we gauge our admiring

interest by our desire to know what manner of men these were in

feature and form. But Fate, for the most part, denies us even the

scant suggestion of a rude coin. She does so here. Whether Samudra

inherited his mother's beauty is for the present an unanswerable

question. We do not know even the year of his passing, still

less the manner of it: the story goes on without a pause to

Chandra-gupta-Vikramaditya, his son, whose fame, until lately, quite

overwhelmed all memory of his father; that father who conquered India,

who allied himself with foreign powers, who made the subsequent

achievements of his son possible.

The question which besets us now is the extent to which

Chandra-gupta-Vikramaditya's fame is really his own; how much of it is

due to the fact that we possess of his reign and administration an

almost unique record in the account given of his travels and sojourn

in India by the Buddhist pilgrim from China, Fa-Hien? This gives us

information which fails us in the reigns of other kings. How much,

again, of this Vikramaditya's fame belongs by right to that other

mythical Vikramaditya of before-Christ days? That nameless king who

flits like a Will-o'-the-Wisp through the mists of early Indian

history?

How much, again, is rightfully due to his father--that striking

personality which historians have forgotten, but which now comes

surging through the shadows, a veritable man indeed?

Who can say? All we know is that the Gupta dynasty was a mighty one;

that it still serves the modern Hindu as a model of good government,

just as the Mahomedan still points with pride to Akbar's rule.

What, then, were the salient points of this beloved control? Judging

by Fa-Hien's account they may be summed up in personal liberty. The

subject was left largely to follow his own intentions, and the

criminal law was singularly lenient. This was rendered possible by the

wide acceptation amongst the masses of Buddha's gospel of good-will;

for although Brahmanical Hinduism had ousted Buddhist dogma, it had

scarcely touched its ethics. Capital punishment was unknown; there was

no need for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. "Throughout the

country," we read, "no one kills any living thing."

An easy kingdom in good sooth to rule! According to our traveller, the

people seem to have vied with each other in virtue. All sorts of

charitable institutions existed, and the description of a free

hospital, endowed by benevolence, is worth quoting:--

"Hither come all poor or helpless patients suffering from every sort

of infirmity. They are well taken care of, and a doctor attends to

them, food and medicine being given according to their wants. Thus

they are made quite comfortable, and when they are well they may go

away."

Thus, once more, the East saw light sooner than the West; for the

first hospital in Europe only struggled into existence more than five

hundred years after this one at Magadha.

But the chief glory of the Gupta empire was its patronage of the arts

and sciences. Every pundit in India knows the verse which names the

"nine gems of Vikramaditya's court"; those learned men amongst whom

Kalidasa, the author of "Sakuntala" (so far as fame goes, the

Shakspeare of India), stood foremost. Poets, astronomers, grammarians,

physicians, helped to make up the _nawa-ratani_, as it is called, and

the extraordinary literary activity of the century and a quarter (from

A.D. 330 to 455), during which long period Samudra, Chandra, and his

son, Kumara, reigned, is most remarkable. The revival of Sanskrit, the

sacred language of the Brahmans, points to an upheaval of Hindu

religious thought, and so does the almost endless sacred literature,

which, still surviving, is referred to the golden age of the Guptas.

The Puranas in their present form, the metrical version of the Code of

Manu, some of the Dharm-shastras, and, in fact, most of the classical

Sanskrit literature, belong to this period.

Architecture was also revolutionised. As Buddhism slipped from the

grip of the people under pressure from the ever-growing power of the

Brahmans, the very forms of its sacred buildings gave way to something

which, more ornate, less self-evident, served to reflect the new and

elaborate pretensions of the priesthood. Mr Cunningham gives us

somewhere the seven characteristics of the Gupta style of

architecture; but it is more easily summed up for the average beholder

in the words "cucumber and gourd." These names serve well to recall

the tall, curved _vimanas_, or towers, exactly like two-thirds of a

cucumber stuck in the ground, and surmounted by a flat, gourd-like

"Amalika," so called because of its resemblance to the fruit of that

name.

That such buildings are interesting may be conceded, but that any one

can call the collection of pickle-bottles (for that is practically the

effect of them) at-let us say-Bhuvan-eshwar beautiful, passes

comprehension.

Exquisite they are in detail, perfect in the design and execution of

their ornamentation, but the form of these temples leaves much to be

desired. The flat blob at the top seems to crush down the vague

aspirings of the cucumber, which, even if unstopped, must ere long

have ended in an earthward curve again.

To return to history.

Chandra-gupta-Vikramaditya died in A.D. 413. His greatest military

achievement was the overthrow of the Saka dynasty in Kathiawar, and

the annexation of Malwa to the already enormous empire left him by his

father. In other ways we have large choice of prowess. All the tales

which linger to this day on the lips of India concerning Rajah

Bikra- or Vikra-majit are at our disposal.

Of his son Kumara we at present know little, save that he reigned

successfully for not less than forty years, keeping his kingdom

intact, remaining true to its traditions.

Perhaps some day his fame also will rise from its grave, and coin or

inscription may prove him true unit of the Great Trio of Gupta

emperors. This much we may guess: he was his grandmother's darling,

for he bears her name in masculine dress.

THE WHITE HUNS AND GOOD KING

HARSHA

A.D. 450 TO A.D. 648

The name Huns has quite a familiar sound. We think of Attila; we

remember the 350 pounds weight of gold which Theodosius of Byzantium

paid as an annual tribute to the victorious horde which swept into

Europe about the middle of the fifth century; finally, we hark back to

Gibbon's description of this race of reckless reiving riders; for the

Huns seem to have been born in the saddle and never to have lived out

of it. This is what he says:--

"They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their

broad shoulders, flat noses and small black eyes, deeply buried in the

head; and, as they were almost destitute of beards, they never enjoyed

either the manly graces of youth or the venerable aspect of age." (_En

passant_, we can but wonder what our poor Gibbon would have said to

the shaven chin of to-day!) "A fabulous origin was assigned worthy of

their form and manners--that the witches of Scythia, who for their

foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had united in

the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring

of this execrable conjunction."

Again, poor Huns! We do not need such legend to know that they were

utterly barbarian; that they rode like the devil, fought with

bone-tipped javelins, clothed themselves in skins, and ate herbs and

half-raw meat which they had first made tender by using it as their

saddle! It is a sufficiently black indictment, and, though it applies

only to the rolling swarm of savages which, on leaving that hive of

humanity, the wide Siberian Steppe, turned westward, we have no reason

to suppose that the swarm which turned eastward differed much from the

type. It is true they are called the White Huns, but that is most

likely because among the dark races of Hindustan, the yellow Mongolian

complexion showed fair.

India had been overrun many times before, but it needs small

consideration to see that this invasion must have been the worst, must

have brought with it a perfect horror of havoc. Far more so than the

Hun invasion in Europe. There the ultimate savage met, for the most

part, with Goths and Visigoths. In India they stood between a Brahman

and his salvation, between culture and comfort. For India was in these

days far more civilised than Europe; its people were refined, bound

hand and foot by ritual, curiously conventional in custom.

The long ages which had passed since the Vedic times had made religion

more complex, had multiplied ceremonial to such an extent that the

performance of the simplest duty was hedged about by the danger of

fateful commissions, and still more fateful omissions. The revival of

Hinduism during the paling days of the Gupta empire had vastly

increased the power of the Brahman. In brief, Puranic Hinduism--that

is, religion based on the Puranas, as distinct from the Vedas--with

all its hair-splitting, its overlay of ritual by ritual, was at its

zenith. From birth to death a man--even the meanest man--was in the

grip of innumerable petty commandments.

The very gods he worshipped had changed. The elemental deities of the

Rig-Veda--the Winds, the Fire, the Sun, the Dawn--behind which lay

ever (half recognised, wholly mysterious) the Unconditioned, the

Absolute, were lost; crowded out, as it were, by the three hundred and

thirty millions of Puranic godlings, which rumour says had replaced

the thirty-and-three of the Vedas. And beset by an Athanasian _furore_

for faith, the Puranas had defined the undefinable. The doctrine of a

Trinity seems about this era of the world's history to have been more

than usually in the air, and we find it here, hard and fast,

crystallised unchangeably.

Brahma the Creator, Siva the destroying Spirit, Vishn or Krishn the

Saviour, the Man-God, kind to the weaknesses of humanity. The three

hundred and thirty millions of little gods were contained in the

Three; they were emanations, attributes, as such imaged and

worshipped. A great change this from the singing of a hymn to Agni the

Fire-God, as the victim's flesh shrivelled in the flame, and the

cooling of the ashes with a libation of soma juice.

And the worshipping of images brought with it a veneration for

temples, a reverence for a paid priesthood, with its inevitable

corollary of cult and custom and ceremonial. This complexity of

religion naturally showed itself in the character of the people. As Mr

Dutt writes:--

"Pompous celebrations and gorgeous decorations arrested the

imagination and fostered the superstitions of the populace; poetry,

arts, architecture, sculpture, and music lent their aid, and within a

few centuries the nation's wealth was lavished on these gorgeous

edifices and ceremonials which were the outward manifestations of the

people's unlimited devotion and faith. Pilgrimages, which were rare or

unknown in very ancient times, were organised on a stupendous scale;

gifts in land and money poured in for the support of temples, and

religion gradually transformed itself to a blind veneration of images

and their custodians. The great towns of India were crowded with

temples, and new gods and new idols found sanctuaries in stone

edifices and in the hearts of ignorant worshippers."

Add to this the testimony of the literature of the period. The dramas

of Kalidasa, beautiful as they are, concern themselves entirely with

Love. The very descriptions of nature have reference to it, as when we

read:--

"The oleander bud

Shows like the painted fingers of the fair,

Red tinted on the tip and edged with ebony."

His very reflections also are tinged with the same soft note of

underlying passion:--

"Not seldom in our hours of ease,

When thought is still, the sight of some fair form

Or mournful fall of music breathing low

Will stir strange fancies thrilling all the soul

With a mysterious sadness."

And, leaving poetry alone, such knowledge as we have of social life in

these days points to a certain effeminacy. In fact, there is evidence

that woman played a larger part in society than she does in the India

of to-day. The perennial joke against learned ladies, indeed, appears

in the drama of the "Toy Cart," where the comic man says he always

laughs when he "hears a woman read Sanskrit, or a man sing a song!"

Then the heroine of this drama is frankly a courtesan, an Indian

Aspasia, who received her lovers in a public court furnished with

books, pictures, gambling-tables, etc., and who was

"Of courteous manners and unrivalled beauty,

The pride of all Ujjain."

Such, then, were the people who "felt, dreaded, and magnified" (as

Gibbon says of the Goths--a far less civilised nation--in like

predicament) "the numbers, the strength, the rapid motions and

implacable cruelty of the Huns; who beheld their fields and villages

consumed with flames and deluged with indiscriminate slaughter."

Perhaps it is as well, therefore, that history is for the most part

silent concerning the horror and the havoc of the century or so of

time during which the Huns ravaged India. We hear only of the greater

tragedies, of Toramava the Tyrant, and his son Mihiragula, who

out-Heroded his father in implacable cruelty towards the cultured,

caste-bound Hindus, to whom all things were sacred. Of him it is

written that his favourite amusement in Kashmir was watching elephants

goaded into impassable, precipitous hill-paths, so that he might laugh

like a fiend if they slipped and fell; fell with a wild shriek of

terror and anger, to be dashed to pieces thousands of feet below. An

unpleasing picture this! One cannot wonder at the criticism passed on

his death, when "the earth shook, thick darkness reigned, and a mighty

tempest raged." It was succinct, bald, but forcible: "_He_ has now

fallen into the lowest hell, where he shall pass endless ages."

After his death, which must have occurred about the year A.D. 540, the

clouds gather darkly, and we are permitted few peeps as to what was

going on behind them. Certain it is that no trace of a paramount power

is to be found in the scant records of the last half of the sixth

century.

The beginning of the seventh, however, finds the historian in very

different case. He has first and foremost the detailed account of

Hiuen T'sang's travels with which to deal, and this is supplemented by

the "_Harsha-charita_," or "Deeds of Harsha," written by a learned

Brahman who lived at the court of the good king. That this latter book

partakes more of the character of a historical romance than a steady,

straightforward chronicle of events is true; but even so, the

information at disposal is fuller and more precise than that which has

been forthcoming hitherto, excepting, perhaps, in regard to the great

Maurya kings.

Harsha, then, was younger son of a Rajah of Thaneswar, in the Punjab.

His father dying in A.D. 606, his elder brother ascended the throne,

but was almost immediately most treacherously assassinated in

conference by the King of Bengal; the conference apparently being for

the purpose of arbitrating between the young Rajah of Thaneswar and

the King of Malwa, who had murdered the former's brother-in-law for

the sake of possessing his wife, and was keeping the Thaneswar

princess a prisoner, with "iron fetters kissing her feet."

The assassinated king being too young to have a son, his brother

Harsha was invited to take the throne. For some unknown reason he

hesitated, and his formal coronation did not take place until nearly

six years after he had assumed the actual responsibilities of

kingship.

The story of the recovery of his widowed sister from the hands of her

abductor is full of incident and romance. The rescue was but just in

time, for the Princess Raj-yasri--a most attractive and learned young

lady, and well versed in the Buddhistic schools, apparently--was about

to commit _suttee_ amid the pathless forests, whither she had fled to

escape her persecutor, when her brother, led to her retreat by the

aboriginal chieftains, arrived upon the scene. The hurry was so great,

that in it the assassin-lover appears to have escaped.

It will be observed by this that the family of Harsha was of the

Buddhist faith. How, or why, we know not. The very name of his

kingdom, Than-eswar (_S'thaneswara_, or, The Place of God), is purely

Hindu; nevertheless, this, the last great King of Hindu India,

professed the religion of Gautama.

In fact, in many ways his reign is a poor imitation of that of Asoka.

He did not, however, follow that king's example as a peace prophet,

for he spent nearly thirty-six years out of his forty-two in bloody

warfare. And in all his long career of aggression he met with but one

check. He was unable to push his forces through the narrow defiles of

the Deccan passes, and had to confine himself to being Lord Paramount

of the North. So his empire, though extensive, never touched that of

Asoka; in truth, he did not touch that monarch in any way.

Nevertheless, his rule was excellent, and our Chinese pilgrim is loud

in praise of it. Harsha did not trust to officialdom; personal

supervision was his theory of government, and he was constantly on the

move inspecting, punishing, rewarding. His camp must have been quaint,

for in those days tents were unknown, and the "King's Palace" was

built at each halting-place of boughs and reeds, and solemnly burnt

after it had been used.

Like all these Eastern kings whose personalities have survived the

years, he appears to have been somewhat of a genius. Besides being a

most expert penman and draughtsmen, he wrote various learned books,

and in his salad days produced several plays which still remain part

of the literature of India. One, "The Necklace," is quite the

liveliest of all Indian plays, and with appropriate songs and dances

must have been rather like a Savoy comic opera. There is a legend that

Harsha spent so much money on poets, actors, dancers and artists of

all descriptions, that he had eventually to sell the gold and silver

ornaments of the Hindu temples in order to pay for his pleasures; but

this is pure legend. Following the example of Asoka, he established

rest-houses for travellers, hospitals for the sick, magistrates for

the regulation of morals; yet in all this, somehow, the sense of pose

is never absent. Asoka's voice is still to-day a _cri du c[oe]ur_;

Harsha's is--_fin de siecle_.

He could not help it. The curious religious eclecticism of the period

favoured it. His family showed keenly the general tendency to

self-consciousness, and it was written of his father:

"He offered daily to the Sun a bunch of red lotuses set in a pure

vessel of ruby, and tinged, like his own heart, with the same hue."

Could Oscar Wilde have done more? Strange, indeed, how the cycles of

culture come round and round.

It was in his later years that King Harsha became a pronounced

Buddhist. This was largely owing to the preachings and teachings of

Hiuen T'sang, in honour of whom a solemn assemblage was held at Kanauj

in the fresh spring-time of the year A.D. 644. The scene is admirably

given in Hiuen T'sang's Record, and is well worth a reading. We can

imagine the king carrying in person the canopy upheld over the golden

statuette of Buddha; we can see him "moving along, scattering golden

blossoms, pearls and other rare gems." We catch a glimpse of the

flaming monastery accidentally catching fire, to be extinguished by

the mere sight of the good Harsha. The rush of the mad Hindu fanatic

to slay this "favourer of Buddhists" comes as a startling incident, to

be followed by the immediate exile of five hundred Brahmans for high

treason.

Then we learn of the journey to Prag (Allahabad), where every five

years Harsha, in accordance with ancient custom, had held a

distribution of alms.[2]

---------------------

[Footnote 2: This assemblage, or fair, still exists, under the name of

the Magh-mela.]

---------------------

The description of this is even more entrancing, and we can take part

in all the ceremonials of the seventy-five days during which Buddha,

the Sun, and Siva were apparently worshipped indiscriminately. The

proceedings were opened by a magnificent procession of feudatory

princes, and ended with a forty-days' distribution of alms to all and

sundry.

After this, Hiuen T'sang writes,

"the royal accumulation of five years was exhausted. Except the

horses, elephants and military accoutrements ... nothing remained....

The king gave away his gems and goods, his clothing and neck-laces,

ear-rings, bracelets, chaplets, neck jewels, and bright head jewel;

all these he freely gave away without stint."

Was it a real gifting, we wonder, or, after duly worshipping in a

borrowed second-hand suit, did Harsha return to his palace to find his

wardrobe much the same as ever?

The hint of unreality in all things provokes the question.

King Harsha died in A.D. 648, shortly after his beloved Chinese

pilgrim had departed for his native land. Once again it has to be

written that the "withdrawal of the strong arm plunged the country

into disorder."

Arjuna, his minister, seized the throne, but drew down on himself the

wrath of China, and after a brief interval was carried thither as a

prisoner.

Meanwhile, no one appeared to take the reins. In truth, degeneration

had already set in. The people who had posed so long as a nation of

culture, of refinement, who had spent their lives in applauding

poetasters, who had laughed when the court wit said the

commander-in-chief's nose was as long as the king's pedigree, who had

been ready to worship any god if so be the ceremonial pleased their

aesthetic sense, who had given free pass to their emotions in all ways,

such people were not ready for action. And so once for all the clouds

cover Hindu supremacy.

The next four hundred years are the Dark Ages of Indian history. Even

the impressionist outlook of our case of coins is denied us. A

thousand names jostle each other in commonplace confusion. In the

chaos of conflicting claims, any attempt at classification is

hopeless.

CHAOS

A.D. 700 TO A.D. 1001

These, as has been said, are the Dark Ages of Hindustan. She has ever

been the prey of personality, the willing victim of vitality. From the

year B.C. 620, when her real history begins, until now, that history

has been that of individuals who have either risen from her ranks, or

appeared on her horizon; who have dominated her imagination, and left

her too often at their death confused, helpless, to fall back into the

bewildering anarchy of petty princedoms.

The light shines clearly for a few years, reflected by one man's keen

sword, or keener eyes; and then the strong arm falls, the vision

fails, and India sinks back into the Great Apathy concerning things

sublunary which is ever her most salient characteristic.

And these three hundred years give us no personality striking enough

to be seen through the mist which settled down like a pall over India

after the death of Harsha. This death, says Mr Vincent Smith,

"loosened the bonds which restrained the disruptive forces always

ready to operate in India, and allowed them to produce their normal

result: a medley of petty states with ever-varying boundaries, and

engaged in unceasing internecine war."

No new thing this in the past history of India; it will be no new

thing in the future, for Hindustan will always need some strong,

centralising, magnetic force to hold together its innumerable atoms.

It is true that in literature some few names hover doubtfully about

the eighth century, and that round the outskirts of India, in Kashmir,

Nepaul, Madras, Ceylon, we hear every now and again of events which

arrest the attention for a moment. The reassertion of Chinese

influence along the northern borderland, though brief, was noteworthy,

and in Kashmir the names of several kings and one queen stand out from

the general _posse_. Amongst them that of Laladitya, who built the

famous Temple of the Sun at Martand, not far from Bawun in Kashmir. A

magnificent ruin this, standing out sharply against both the rising in

the east and the setting in the west; set high on one of those lofty

_karewas_, or tablelands, which are so marked a characteristic of

Kashmir. Fringing the mighty mountains, they stretch like promontories

into the rice and saffron fields, still showing by their precipitous

sides the force of the mighty flood which at some time must have swept

through the valley, lowering its levels, and leaving these landmarks

to tell of its passage.

Then we have two names--rather painfully reminiscent of comic

opera--Avanti-varman and Sankara-varman, good and bad boys of Kashmir

history. The former remembered for his beneficent schemes, his kindly

patronage; the latter for his ingenuity in squeezing the last drop of

blood-tax from his oppressed subjects, and his aptitude in stealing

temple treasures.

Finally, and alas! we have a queen called Didda. The less said of her

the better. It is sufficient to record that she was the Messalina, the

Lucrezia Borgia of Kashmir for close on half a century.

A long time this! Could she by chance have had the secret of youth

like Ninon d'Enclos?

Her death, however, brings us to A.D. 1003, and in A.D. 1001 Mahmud,

so-called of Ghuzni, was to begin his first raid into India, and so

bring a new factor--Islamism--to its welter of creeds and castes.

Here, therefore, ends the Hindu period of Indian history. There

follows on it the Mahomedan age from A.D. 1001 to 1858, when the

English formally took over the entire charge of Government.

Now as in this Mahomedan age the new faith of the conquerors had much

to say to the general trend of events, it may be as well to occupy

this empty chapter by a brief exposition of what that faith is, and

how it inspired those constant invasions of India which make the next

few hundred years the record of an almost continuous campaign. Before

doing this, however, let us take still briefer stock of this past

Hindu age.

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

The natural vigour of the Vedas grew to the more complex, more

artificial energy of the Epics, and out of this arose strangely the

quietism of the Buddhist. War and Peace, Glory and Dishonour, Riches

and Poverty, all faded away to nothingness before the hope of

Nirvana--of escape from Desire. Thus Asoka becomes the dominating

figure, and even after his death the names of Kanishka and Hushka and

Harsha faintly echo his fame.

But they failed to keep it alive. The Brahmans, rising to power,

thrust out alike the simplicity of the Vedas and the nescience of

Buddha. So came the Renaissance.

An epoch marked, as such epochs generally are, by a curious cult of

the emotions in all things. The Indians of the Gupta empire were

emphatically _fin de siecle_, so they did not survive. King Harsha,

Mithraist, Buddhist, Hindu, worshipping his several deities by giving

in alms even "his bright head-jewel," pictures the time. A time when

the court panegyrist Bana, writing of his dying master, can so juggle

with words as to describe his agony thus:--

"Helplessness had taken him in hand; pain had made him its province,

wasting its domain, lassitude its lair ... broken in utterance,

unhinged in mind, tortured in body, waning in life, babbling in

speech, ceaseless in sighs."

Of a truth, there is no wonder that the Indian world also had come to

"the tip of death's tongue," to "the portal of the Long Sleep."

It was becoming neurotic, hyper-aestheticised. It needed a rest and a

rude awakening.

Mahomedanism was to give it the latter, and the founder of this faith

had been born at Mecca on the 10th November A.D. 570. By a curious

coincidence, the date on which he began his teaching and that of King

Harsha's coronation are very nearly synchronous.

Mahomed was an Arab, but was in every way unlike his race. A

posthumous son, he had "inherited from his mother a delicate and

extremely impressionable constitution, and an exaggerated

sensibility." He was melancholy, silent, fond of desert places,

solitude, and dreamy meditations.

Nature appealed to him. The sight of the setting sun inspired him with

vague restlessness, and he would weep and sob like a child at slight

provocation.

His religious excitability was of the most acute character, and passed

at times into attacks of epilepsy.

A true revivalist this! Small wonder if, having in his mountain

solitude seen, or thought he had seen, a vision of the Great Unity

which men call God, he should have claimed inspiration, and claimed it

militantly. The time was ripe for a revival. Religion was being

discussed on all sides, and Mahomed having, it is said, gained nine

converts by his first vision, set to work to gain more. Ere he died

all Arabia frankly followed his teaching. This, however, was not the

result of what Asoka advocated as the only legitimate method of a

mission, for "example, tolerance, gentleness and moderation in speech"

have never found much place in Mahomedan proselytising; the rather

fire and sword, a sharp blade held to the throat that hastily gabbles

the Kalma or Mahomedan creed.

And yet it is a faith which has held, which still holds, its own, and

which was to be responsible for much in the future history of India.

Like all faiths, however, it has gone far beyond its founder, and it

is doubtful for how much of the Mahomedanism of to-day the seer-prophet

of A.D. 610 is really responsible. Within six years of his death his

successors had carried their version of the dreamer's thoughts to Syria

and Egypt. Ere Harsha died the whole of Persia as far east as Herat was

added to the Arab empire. Thence in the slow centuries it drifted

towards India; for the lust of personal and temporal power amongst the

leaders checked its progress much. The great dispute as to the rightful

succession to the Prophet provoked almost instant schism; while the

assassination of Ali, the fourth _kalifa_--he was son-in-law of the

Prophet--and the subsequent murders of his two sons Hussan and Hussain,

was productive of a strife which lasts to the present day between the

rival sects of _Shiahs_ and _Sunnis_.

So, while the Dark Age of India drifted on, the Awakener was creeping

closer to the border, and in A.D. 976 one Sabaktagin, a Turkish slave

who had married the Governor of Khorassan's daughter, began the

invasion by sweeping the western bank of the Indus, and retiring laden

with loot.

[Map: India to A.D. 1000]

PART II

THE MIDDLE AGE

CAMPAIGNS OF THE CRESCENT

A.D. 1001 TO A.D. 1200

Part I

For close on these two hundred years the northern plains of India were

a battle-field. Winter after winter, as the sun's power declined, and

the curious second spring began of cold-weather crops and fruits and

flowers, which to this day make the Punjab seasons hover between the

tropics and the temperates, there debouched from the snow-clad hills,

all along the western and north-western frontier of India, long files

of wild-looking horsemen, followed by camels, by foot soldiers; and

somewhere, in their midst always, was the green flag of the Prophet,

with its over-riding, overbearing crescent, telling its tale of rising

power; the crescent which is an apt symbol of a fighting faith.

What tempted these hardy northern folk into the wide plains of India?

Was it, indeed, zeal for Souls? Hardly. By the way, as a sort of salve

to conscience, such zeal was good to break an idol or two, or an

idolater's head; but _au fond_, the money bags outweighed all other

reasons for these recurring raids.

For during those three centuries of Chaos, during the dark ages of

degeneracy, India had grown rich-inordinately rich. Overlaid, and yet

again overlaid with finikin fanciful ornamentations, almost incoherent

in their diffuse discursive details, the temples were perfect mines of

wealth; in some cases of useless, buried treasure, since in the

gradual downfall OF the Hindu nation at large, the privileged class of

Brahmans had closed their grip even on the power of the princes. The

only thing which remained comparatively untouched, as in India it has

ever remained untouched, being the slow-moving mass of the peasantry,

who, willing bondsmen to Mother Earth, took no heed of anything save

famine.

The first swoop for plunder was made by one Mahmud, King of Ghuzni, in

November A.D. 1001. He must have entered India by the Khyber Pass, for

on the 27th of that month, near Peshawar, he met and defeated King

Jaipal of Lahore. One can imagine the contest. The long-nosed,

long-curled, long-bearded Ghuznivites, rough and ready in their

skin-coats, their burly bosoms aflame with covetousness for creed and

gold, their guttural throats resounding with the war-cry of Islam:

"Kill! Kill! For the Faith!" And on the other side, the clean-shaven,

oiled, scented Hindus lax with long centuries of ease, yet still full

of pride, full of high courage.

It was a foregone conclusion, despite the mailed elephants and the

elaborate old War Office dispositions and compositions of corps and

_cadre_ which had come down, we may be sure, from Chandra-gupta's

days. For once the East gets hold of a thing, it sticks to it.

It was new blood against old--a new faith against one so ancient

that it had almost been forgotten. Almost, not quite, as the story

shows of what Jaipal did, when the Mahomedan conqueror, driven back to

the cool by the approach of a new summer, carelessly gave the royal

prisoner--whom he had dragged about with him in his victorious raid--a

contemptuous freedom. But ere this time came, Mahmud of Ghuzni had to

set one of his many marks--he invaded India no less than twelve

times--as far south in the Punjab as Bhattinda, a town in the Patiala

State. A marvellous place this even nowadays, set as it is amid

deserts of sand, patched with green grain-fields. The low,

insignificant city seems lost in the old fort; a perfect mountain of a

place, visible for miles and miles, a rose-red mass of sun-scorched

bricks with white-edged, crenulated parapets so quaintly stern, so

still more quaintly fragile-looking in its suggestion of some huge

iced cake.

Here, doubtless, in the half-desert land, it was the sound of the

_koel_ knelling his sonorous note in the _kikar_ trees, or the sudden

transformation, mayhap, of the uncanny, witchlike, gnarled thickets of

the low _dhak_ trees into coral-pink stretches, showing like sunset

clouds on the gold of the sun-saturate sands, that warned Mahmud he

must be up and away from the oncoming of the heat.

As he passed up the Peshawar valley, laden to the last limit with

loot, the peach gardens must have been a-blossom; and, being a man

with the odd strain of imagination in him, which all have had who have

left their mark on India, he must, despite his plunder, have regretted

leaving so much beauty behind him.

But he left tragedy also; for Jaipal, the beaten king, went straight

back to Lahore, and having formally proclaimed himself unworthy to

reign after having suffered defeat at the hands of the unclean,

mounted a funeral pyre, and burnt himself in sight of his people,

leaving his son Anang-pal to reign in his stead.

Truly Indian history is provocative of picture-making. We have one

here which would tax most painters' power. Yet the look which must

have been on the proud king's face, as, remembering his name, "The

Guardian of Victory," he defied defeat, defied disgrace, by defying

death, is worth recording, worth recalling in these later days when

the primitive virtues are somewhat overclouded.

So there was peace for three years. Apparently the plunder was

sufficient unto the day until 1004, when Mahmud again appeared with

the return of the wild birds from Lake Mansarawar, on the Siberian

Steppes; but this was more a primitive campaign against a tributary

chief on the western side of the Indus, than a real raid.

The following year, however, things were organised on a larger scale,

and he was opposed by Anang-pal, who met no better fate than his

father, and fled incontinently to Kashmir. But Mahmud's progress

southward was checked by the news of revolt in Ghuzni, and he had to

return in order to count scores with his pet converted Hindu, one Sek

Pal, who, left governor, had resumed his Brahmanical thread, and was

in full swing of conspiracy with his fellows in India.

It took the burly Mahomedan short time to settle his shrift, and send

him to cells for life, so that the next fall of the leaf found Mahmud

ready for his fourth invasion of India.

A real invasion, a real resistance this time. For the Rajas of Lahore,

Delhi, Gwalior, Ujjain, Ajmir, Kanauj, had joined confederacy to rout

the Unclean Stranger. It was a holy war: women sold their jewels, and

men sent their hoards to furnish forth its munitions.

To no purpose. It is true that at the outset Mahmud suffered a

reverse. The Ghakkars, Scythic warrior race of the Salt Range, laughed

at the invader's entrenched camp amongst their bare hills, bore down

on it, overpowered his outposts, and accounted for some four thousand

of his army.

But even that failed to stop these big, burly men, bent on plunder,

bent on proselytising at the sword's point. The result of this raid

was the destruction of Nagar-kot, ancient town hard by the temple

called Jawala-Mukhi, or Flame's Mouth, where, since the beginning of

Time, the jets of combustible gas issuing from the ground amongst the

dark shadows of the sheltering spire have burnt bravely as emanations,

manifestations, of the Goddess Durga, that Fury of Womanhood.

According to native historians Mahmud's returning army must have been

a perfect caravan, for it carried with it about seven thousand pounds

weight of gold coins, six thousand of gold and silver plate, fifteen

hundred of golden ingots, a hundred and twenty-eight thousand of

unwrought silver, and more than a hundred and fifty pounds weight of

pearls, corals, diamonds and rubies.

But the combustible gas must have remained to be re-lit in honour of

Mai Durga, and so have remained to help the memories of the

iconoclasts! A fine trade this, that of smashing golden idols in the

name of the Prophet, and carrying the bits and the diamond and

sapphire eyes away in the name of Mammon!

It found its apotheosis in the twelfth and last expedition to India,

when Mahmud directed all his energy towards Som-nath, a temple

renowned throughout India, set proudly on a peninsula in Guzerat,

surrounded on all sides save one by the sea.

The intervening seven excursions were all marked by noteworthy

incidents, all full to the brim of reckless romance, and each left

India the more helpless, the more ready to let the invader pass to

fresh, more southern conquests. Indeed, a certain suzerainty was

acknowledged by many Hindu rajahs, and on one occasion Mahmud's march

was ostensibly to the relief of a feudatory.

But it would take too long to follow in detail events which were in

general so alike. Swift marching, utter unpreparedness, almost pitiful

submission, and then "a halt at some sacred city, during which the

town was plundered, the idols broken, the temples profaned, and the

whole fired." Yet, as the ravaging raids touched Rajputana, resistance

became more spirited. At one place the garrison rushed out through the

breaches in true Kshatriya fashion to do or die, whilst the women and

children burned themselves in silence in their houses. Not one, we are

told, survived. This is the first mention in history of the _johar_,

or great war-sacrifice of the Rajputs. It is not the last.

So let us turn to Som- or Soma-nath. Now "Soma" is the Moon-God,

"Nath" is Lord. We have, therefore, a simple Temple to the Moon by

name; but in reality Som-nath, or Som-eswara, is one of the forms of

the God Siva--his self-existing form.

The crescent moon on the forehead with which the God always is

portrayed alludes to this, and to the intimate relation between the

phases of the planet as a measure of time, and the upright stone or

lingam, which as all know is worshipped as a symbol of material Life.

It is customary to condemn this nature or phallic worship in India as

unclean, almost obscene; it is not so, anyhow, in spirit.

Som-nath, then, was a shrine of Life. The idol in its holy of holies

bore no semblance of created beings. It was the symbol of Creation

itself, a tall, rounded, black monolith of stone, set six feet in the

ground, rising ten feet above it. One of the twelve lingams believed

by the Hindus to have descended from Heaven, it was unexpressedly

holy, marvellously mighty in miracle. Small wonder, then, with a

priesthood of clutching hands, that Som-nath stood renowned as the

richest shrine in India.

It must have been fine to see this temple, with its fifty-six pillars

set in rows, all carven and inlaid with gems, its gilded spires above

the dark, unlit sanctuary, where the great bell swung on a solid gold

chain which weighed some fifteen hundred pounds.

Steps led down from it to the sea--that sea which was a miracle in

itself to the ignorant, up-country pilgrim, accustomed to parched

deserts, unwitting of such natural phenomena as tides; for did it not

bow, did it not rise and fall incessantly in constant adoration of the

Great Lord of Life? So, at any rate, said the priests, and the pilgrim

went back to his parched desert with empty pockets, to dream for the

rest of his life of the solemn, ceaseless adoration of the sea. Aye!

even when it raged black with monsoon winds, and spat white with fury

at the temple walls, yet still in subservience, still as a slave.

This was not a place to be yielded up of the Brahmans without a

struggle. So we read of a three days' battle, of scaling ladders,

of heavy reinforcements of the "idolatrous garrison," of an

"idolatrous"--surely there is no better word in the language with

which to fight a foe!--array in the field which withdrew Mahmud's

personal attention. And then there is the crucial moment: Mahomedan

troops beginning to waver, their leader leaping from his horse,

prostrating himself on the ground before the Lord God of Battles, and

imploring aid for the True Faith.

To speak trivially, it did the trick. One wild, cheering rush, and

"the Moslems broke through the enemy's line and laid five thousand

Hindus dead at their feet; so the rout became general." So general

that the garrison of four thousand, abandoning the defence, escaped by

the sea in boats.

Nothing left, then, but to enter the temple in pomp. A goodly

procession of warriors! Mahmud, his sons, his nobles; all, no doubt,

spitting profusely, while keeping their weather eye open on the gems

starring the heavy, carven pillars. Darker and darker! The pillars

close in. No light now, save,--high up in the shadows--one pendent

jewelled lamp, reflected in the glistening stones, showing dimly the

huge, massive golden chain, the swinging bronze bell.

And what more? Only a roughly-polished, black marble, upright boulder,

hung round, doubtless, as such lingams are to-day, with faded

_champak_ chaplets and marigold wreaths.

Was it disappointment which made Mahmud strike at it with his mace?

One could imagine it so, but that he had had experience of the idle

objects of which men make idols. Perhaps the backward swing of the

mace-head hit the bell and sent its last hollow boom of appeal--which

so many worshippers had raised--straight to the ears of the Lord of

Life.

It is a rare picture this, of one faith defying another. It does not

need the amplification which legend brings to it, in order to grip

attention.

That legend runs thus. When Mahmud had ordered two fragments to be

hewn off the idol, one for the threshold of the mosque at Ghuini,

another for the threshold of his own palace, some of the two thousand

priests of Baal in attendance offered untold gold to arrest further

destruction; an offer viewed with favour by the king's sons, and the

attendant nobles. Smashing one idol out of millions was but mildly

meritorious, whereas the money thus gained might be given to the poor

But the Judas argument failed.

"The King"--to quote the text--"acknowledged there might be reason in

what they said, but replied that if he should consent to such a

measure his name would be handed down to posterity as 'Mahmud the

idol-seller,' and he wished it to be 'Mahmud the idol-breaker.' He

therefore directed the troops to proceed in their work. The next blow

broke open the belly of Som-nath, which was hollow, and discovered a

quantity of diamonds, rubies, and pearls of much greater value than

the amount which the Brahmans had offered."

Very dramatic, no doubt, but, unfortunately, none of these lingams are

hollow. It is possible, however, that the story found base in the

discovery of sacred vaults.

Be that as it may, Mahmud, "having secured the wealth of Som-nath,"

apparently fell in love with the country round about it; so much so

that he proposed remaining there and sending his son Masud back to

reign at Ghuzni. It needed pressure on the part of his officers to

induce him to stir; but after some difficulty in securing a Governor

for Guzerat, he started to march direct towards Ghuzni by way of the

desert.

This same difficulty gives us another picture.

Apparently there were two cousins Dabeshleems--fateful name, of what

nationality or family absolutely uncertain--one a hermit, the other a

rajah. The hermit was made governor, the prince became pretender.

Mahmud, ere leaving, reduced the latter, and handed him over prisoner

to the former. To this the hermit objected. But one course, he said,

was open to him, since by the tenets of his religion no king could be

put to death; he must build a vault under his throne and place the

unfortunate gentleman therein for life. This would be inconvenient,

therefore he prayed the conqueror to carry the rajah back with him to

Ghuzni.

So Mahmud, his army, and his vast loot, set out for the desert, set

their faces for the last time away from the wealth and idolatry of

India. Set them, as it turned out, very nearly away from all wealth,

all faiths; for in the desert the whole army was misled for three days

and three nights by a Hindu guide, "so that many of the troops died

raving mad from the intolerable heat and thirst." A Hindu guide who,

under torture, confessed exultantly that he was one of the priests of

Som-nath, and so died, satisfied with his measure of revenge.

Mahmud, however, had only to prostrate himself once more, and lo! a

guiding meteor, and after a long night-march, water! Water, even

though it must have been the Great Salt Lake.

After this, time passed in comparative uneventfulness, until on the

23rd of April A.D. 1030, in the sixty-third year of his age, "this

great conqueror gave up his body to death and his soul to immortality

amid the tears of his people."

One of his last recorded remarks was his exclamation when, in answer

to his enquiry, the Lord High Treasurer told him that before becoming

extinct, the last dynasty had accumulated seven pounds weight of

precious stones. "Thanks be to Thee, All-Powerful Being!" cried

Mahmud, prostrating himself yet once more. "Thou hast enabled me to

collect more than a hundred pounds."

What did he do with all the vast wealth which in the course of his

missionary work he managed to annex? We know that he built a

magnificent mosque at Ghuzni called "The Celestial Bride"; but that

could not have absorbed it all.

Indeed we know much of it was still in the treasury; for two days

before his death he ordered all the gold and the caskets of precious

stones to be brought before him, and "having seen them, he wept with

regret, ordering them to be carried back, without exhibiting his

generosity at that time to anybody."

Gold had evidently gripped at the heart and soul of this middle-aged,

well-shaped, ugly man, who was strongly pitted with the smallpox. His

was not a lovable personality in any way. Gifted with a touch of

genius, gifted above all things with that marvellous vitality which is

always as magic to the Indian, he was just, curiously callous, and

absolutely sceptical.

He openly doubted if he was really the son of his father, and scoffed

at the idea of a future state. Certainly annihilation would be a

kinder fate than the one which the poet Sa'adi gives to him in the

Gulistan, and which may be paraphrased thus:--

"The King of Khurasan saw in a dream

Mahmud the son of Subaktigeen,

Dead for this hundred years or more,

His head and his heart, his arms and his thighs

Dissolved to dust, and only his eyes

Moved in their sockets and saw

His gold, his empire, everything

He loved in the hands of another King."

CAMPAIGNS OF THE CRESCENT

A.D. 1001 TO A.D. 1200

Part II

The Great Raider Mahmud being now put past, the Campaigns of the

Crescent continued in feebler fashion. In truth, for a few years

Mahomed and Masud, the dead king's twin sons, were occupied in

settling the succession. Mahomed, the elder by some hours, mild,

tractable, was his father's nominee and on the spot; Masud, on the

other hand, was a great warrior, bold, independent, and promptly

claimed as his right those provinces which he had won by his sword. So

they came to blows.

At the outset Mahomed's piety failed him; for having decorously halted

his host during the whole of the Month of Fasting--Ramzan--Masud

thereinafter fell upon him, armed at all points, defeated him, and put

out his eyes after he had reigned a short five months.

Masud, the new king, appears to have been a man of considerable

character and grim humour, for one of the first acts of his reign was

in cold blood to hang an unfortunate gentleman who once, long years

before, when the question of succession was the subject of

conversation, had been heard to say crudely that if Masud ever came to

the throne he would suffer himself to be hanged.

So he suffered.

But in truth, as we read the story of this Ghuznevide dynasty, and of

the Ghori dynasty which followed it, we rub our eyes and wonder how

many centuries we have gone back. For these big, bold, burly men are

fairly savages in comparison with the cultured Hindu whom they

harried. And Masud, though by repute an affable gentleman, generous

even to prodigality, and of uncommon personal strength and courage,

was as turbulent as a king as he had been as a prince.

His favourite maxim was, "Dominion follows the longest sword." His was

not only long, but heavy. No other man of his court could wield it,

and an arrow from his bow would pierce the hide of a mailed elephant.

During the ten years of his reign he entered India with an army three

times. But the first of these raids was followed, A.D. 1033, by a

terrible famine, a still more terrible outbreak of plague, from which

in one month, more than forty thousand people died in Isphahan alone.

This was in its turn followed by a severe defeat of the Ghuznevide

arms by the Turkomans on the north-east frontier; for it must not be

forgotten that though these dynasties of which we are treating are

counted as of India, they have in reality but little to do with it.

They were but titular suzerains, and very often not that, of the more

northerly provinces of Hindustan.

Apparently as a salve to resentment and shame at this defeat, Masud

began to build a fine palace at Ghuzni, over which he must have spent

some of his father's treasures, for a golden chain and a golden crown

of incredible weight appears as a canopy in the Hall of Audience.

It must have been this depletion of the royal treasures which led to

his last and most successful campaign against the kingdom of Sivalak,

where he is said to have found enormous wealth; and so on to Sonput,

ancient Hindu shrine and city to the north of Delhi, whence he made a

Mahmud-like return laden with loot.

A quaint old city is Sonput, and a curious authenticity of its hoar

antiquity turned up not long ago, when some cultivators were digging a

well. This was a small clay image of the Sun-God, a deity to which

there is now in India but one single shrine.

But here the star of Masud's fortune touched its zenith. The

Turkomans, encouraged by success, renewed operations, finally forcing

the king to abandon his border principalities and seek time in India

to recover strength for renewed efforts.

Urged, perhaps, by kindness, perhaps by fear, he ordered his blinded

and imprisoned brother to be brought to Lahore, with the unforeseen

result that his household troops suddenly revolted, and hoisting the

blind prisoner on to their shoulders, incontinently proclaimed him

once more King.

It was all over in a moment; and Masud, whose life was spared by the

mild Mahomed, found himself forced to beg a subsistence of his

brother. His pride, however, would not stand the pitiful dole of L5

which was sent him, so he promptly borrowed L10 from his servants and

bestowed them as _bakshish_ on the messenger who had brought, and who

took back, the shabby gift.

Not a very tactful way of beginning what was practically an

imprisonment. But it was not to last long, for Prince Ahmed, Mahomed's

son, in whose favour the blind king resigned the crown, would have no

half-measures, and prevented further complications by burying Masud

alive.

The historian explains that the prince was suspected of a "strong

taint of insanity."

In truth, homicidal mania appears to set in generally, for the

remaining records of the Ghuznevide dynasty are as irrational, as

murderous as transpontine melodrama.

Prince Ahmed was in due time murdered by the murdered Masud's son, who

reigned long enough to see his Indian empire almost reft from him;

since with violent internal dissensions racking the body politic,

there was naturally no time for foreign affairs. So in the year A.D.

1048 the Rajah of Delhi, taking counsel with his compeers of Ajmir,

Kanauj, Kalungar, Gwalior, once more made themselves practically

independent of the Crescent. Only Lahore remained Mahomedan, repelling

a siege of seven months, and after actual street fighting, succeeded

in driving off the investing force.

Thus in a History of India there is small need to note that Masud II.,

a child of four years, succeeding his father, reigned six days; or

that Hussan Ali and Absal Raschid between them numbered but four

years.

In the general turmoil, wonder comes faintly how Ibrahim--a worthy

soul who, as the historian says, "begot 36 sons and 40 daughters by

various women"--ever managed to rule for forty-two years. Apparently

by a peaceful policy; but, as the same historian goes on to say that

this monarch "was remarkable for morality and devotion, having in his

youth succeeded in subduing his sensual appetites," one hesitates

before accepting either the narrator's facts or his deductions.

Finally, after the Ghuznevide dynasty had touched a bakers' dozen,

came one Byram, who was destined to lose the throne for his race by

two useless and brutal murders. The first was the public execution of

his son-in-law, an apparently harmless prince of Ghor--as the country

of the Afghans was then called. The reason of this act is obscure,

though it seems probable he was suspected of high treason. Be that as

it may, Kutb-din Ghori-Afghan was an ill man to assail, for he had two

big brothers. The first of these, Saif-ud-din, had no little success

in his immediate campaign of revenge. Byram fled, Ghuzni was occupied;

but finally, by a stratagem, the victor fell into his enemy's hands,

whereupon the latter doubled and excelled his former crime, by

blackening his captive's face, and sending him face tailwards round

the town on a bullock as a preliminary to torturing him, beheading

him, and impaling his grand _wazir_.

Allah-ud-din, the last brother, then took up the gloves, after defying

Byram in these words: "Your threats are as impotent as your arms! It

is no new thing for kings to make war on their neighbours, but

barbarity like yours is unknown to the brave, and such as none have

heard of being exercised towards princes. You may therefore be assured

that God has forsaken you, and has ordained that I, Allah-ud-din,

should be the instrument of that just revenge denounced against you

for putting to death the representative of the independent and very

ancient family of Ghor."

A quaint touch! that of the "very ancient," showing the value set on

blue blood in those days.

Allah-ud-din proved a true prophet. In the resulting battle the two

"Khurmiels," gigantic brothers-in-arms, the Gog and Magog of those

days, brought victory to his arms by the ripping up of elephants'

bellies and other prodigies of strength and valour. Byram fled, to die

miserably in India overwhelmed by misfortunes, while the conqueror

earned for himself the title of "The Burner of Worlds," by the deadly

revenge he took on Ghuzni and its inhabitants.

"The massacre," writes the historian, "continued for the space of

seven days, in which time pity seems to have fled from the earth, and

the fiery spirits of demons to actuate men. A number of the most

venerable and learned persons were, to adorn the triumph, carried in

chains to Feroz-Kuh, where the victor ordered their throats to be cut,

and tempering earth with their blood, used it to plaster the walls of

his native city."

Allah-ud-din thus ended the House of Ghuzni; for though two

descendants of Byram's kept a feeble hold on power from Lahore during

the space of a few years, he was the last real king. His actions are

strangely at variance with his character, for he is said to have "been

blest with a noble and generous disposition!"

We hear also of an uncommon thirst for knowledge. But in truth these

wild, revengeful Mahomedans of the borderland were then very much as

they are to-day; that is to say, proud, lawless, quick to respond in

kind to good or evil, above all, possessed by a perfect devil of

revenge--the cruel revenge which is ever associated with sensuality.

So, naturally, Allah-ud-din, after plastering the city walls with

blood, spent the gold he had taken from Ghuzni on pleasure, until he

died four years later, in A.D. 1156.

His son only reigned for a year. A fine fellow this, apparently, both

physically and mentally, if we are to believe what is said of him;

but, as usual, passionate, revengeful. So, seeing a chief who had

fought against and defeated his father wearing some of the family

jewels which had been stripped from his own wife after that occasion,

he out with his sword and slew the offender forthwith. Whereupon the

dead man's brother, choosing a convenient moment in the middle of a

subsequent battle, out with his lance and ran the young king through

the body.

Scarcely any of them, however, died in their beds. The procession of

murders and sudden deaths becomes indeed monotonous, but was now to be

broken for a while by the advent of another of those strong men who

every now and again make, as it were, a landmark in Indian history.

This was Shahab-ud-din who, counting the time during which he was his

elder brother's deputy, was to reign for close on fifty years, and

once more weld the principalities of India proper into one solid

empire.

A strange history is this of the devoted brothers, who appear from

their babyhood to have gone through life hand in hand in fortune and

misfortune; but the house of Ghori seems to have been remarkable alike

for its family feuds and for its family affection. The latter it was,

be it remembered, which led to the establishment of the dynasty.

Another peculiarity was their sonlessness. Ghiass-ud-din, the elder

brother, succeeded to the throne by virtue of cousinship only, and as

neither he nor Shahab-ud-din had sons, it passed at their death to a

nephew.

Before that, however, India had to be reconquered, and for this

purpose the Campaigns of the Crescent had to recommence.

The first was in A.D. 1176, when Mahomed Shahab-ud-din--for ere

commencing his task he added the name of the Prophet to his own, which

signifies the "Meteor of Faith"--swept through the low-lying lands

about the junction of the Punjab rivers with the Indus. He must have

had in his mind's eye the exploits of Mahmud nigh on two hundred years

before. Perhaps it was this memory which made him choose what is

practically the same name; on the other hand, he may only have been

seeking an excuse for plunder, like the dead conqueror had done in the

religious enthusiasm roused by the name of the prophet.

Be that as it may, in reading the account of his exploits, one is

tempted to rub one's eyes and ask, "Is this Mahmud of Ghuzni, or

Mahomed of Ghori?" So curiously alike are they in every way.

He did not, however, lead quite so many raids: on the other hand, he

was more permanently successful in them, despite far more organised

resistance than that which had opposed his great predecessor.

In fact, it is in this resistance that the real interest of the period

lies, so it may be as well to make a complete _volte face_, and having

viewed the introduction of Islam to India through Mahomedan eyes, look

at these final Campaigns of the Crescent from the Rajput side.

Before passing on to this, let us picture the man who, for close on

half a century, found his sole occupation in a soldier's life. Here we

have no added reputation of the arts or sciences. We are told he was a

great king and a just man, but he appears to have been quite

unscrupulous towards every one excepting his brother. Many of his

successes were due to treachery, and when he died--an old man,

assassinated in his sleep by those same wild tribes of the Punjab Salt

Range who inflicted so much damage on Mahmud of Ghuzni--he was the

richest king in the world. "The treasure," says the chronicler, "which

this prince left behind him is almost incredible. In diamonds alone of

various sizes he had five hundreds _muns_ (at the lowest computation

about 1,000 lbs.), the result of his nine expeditions into Hindustan,

from each of which, excepting two occasions, he returned laden with

wealth."

Yet India was still rich!

THE RAJPUT RESISTANCE

A.D. 1176 TO A.D. 1206

More than a hundred years had passed since Mahmud of Ghuzni's strong

grip had relaxed on India. During that time she had reverted, as she

always will revert, to those ideals of life which suit her dreamy yet

fireful temperament.

The fierce on-sweep of the Moslem scimitar had mowed down the tangle

of petty chiefships which had grown up in the Dark Ages, and so left

room for the spreading of four great kingdoms, Delhi, Ajmir, Kanauj,

Guzerat, which were all held by the representatives of certain Rajput

clans.

Now the Rajputs are born soldiers. They represent the second, or

military (called the Kshatriya) caste of ancient Vedic time; they have

provided India for long centuries with her warriors, her nobles, her

monarchs. Raj-putra means, in fact, a king's son. Their history is a

magnificent one. They have faced and fought every enemy which Fate has

brought to their native land in the past; they are ready still to face

and fight whatever may come to it in the future. They are the Samurai

of India, each clan led by a hereditary leader, and forming a separate

community, bound by the strongest ties of military devotion and pride

of race.

They claim to have sprung from the sun, or from the moon, or from the

fire; and between them lies ever the faint jealousy of a different

origin. Thus the Tomaras or Tuars of Delhi claimed the kinship of

flame with the Chauhans of Ajmir, while the Rathors of Kanauj stood by

their distant sun-cousins of Guzerat. For to this day the pride of

ancestry is the Rajput's most cherished inheritance. Often he has

little else; but he stills scorns to turn his lance into a

plough-share.

For the rest there is no people in the world whose history yields more

pure romance. The chivalry of Europe seems strained and artificial

beside the stern, straight-forward code of honour by which the early

Rajputs regulated their dealings alike with women and with other men;

and no roundel of troubadour or challenge of knight-errant could have

roused more enthusiasm than did the wild love and war songs of the

Rajput bards.

These, then, were the people whose resistance Mahomed Shahab-ud-din of

Ghor had to overcome, when, after an ineffectual attempt to reach the

heart of India through the sandy deserts of Multan and Guzerat, and a

further swoop on the country about Lahore (in which, by treacherous

stratagem, he seized on the persons who still prolonged the dying

Ghuznevide dynasty and sent them northwards to imprisonment and

death), he finally marched on Hindustan proper in the year A.D. 1191.

And here once more the pink-and-white mass of the huge fort of

Bhatinda heaves into view as our _mise en scene_. The flowers of the

_dakh_ trees had long since been picked as dye-stuff by the village

women, when once more the hosts of hardy horsemen swept over the

horizon. For, as ever, the _Toovkhs_--as the peasantry learned to call

these wild raiders--came with the flights of winter birds. The fort

gave in at once to the fierce attack of the Mahomedans. The filagree

sugar-work on its battlements seems, indeed, to have infected the mass

of stone beneath it with frailty, for despite its apparent strength,

Bhatinda has been taken and retaken ofttimes. So, leaving a garrison

there, Shahab-ud-din commenced his return; for the hardy horsemen

always seem to have been more afraid of melting in the heat of India

than meeting the onslaught of her armies.

Ere he had gone far, however, news of recall came to him. The great

Prithvi-Raj, conjoint King of Delhi and Ajmir, with many other Indian

princes, two hundred thousand horse, and three thousand elephants was

behind him.

Here was challenge indeed! The heat was forgotten; he faced round to

the relief of the garrison he had left, and boldly passing Bhatinda,

paused to give battle on that wild plain between Karnal and Delhi,

where half the struggles for the possession of India have been fought

to the bitter end.

He must have awaited his enemy with anxiety, for the fame of

Prithvi-Raj had spread even amongst Mahomedans. To the Hindus he was a

demi-god: the personification of every Rajput virtue, the pattern of

all Rajput manhood. A bold lover, a recklessly brave knight-errant,

the story of his exploits, as told by his bard, Chand, fills many

books, and is still listened to of winter nights beside the smoke-palled

fires by half the men and women in India. It will be sufficient to

recount one here to show what manner of man he was, and how he comes

still to hold the admiration, not only of the romantic Rajputs, but of

all India.

Prithvi-Raj, then, was of the Chauhan, Fire-born race. Rajah of Ajmir

only, by father-to-son descent, the kingship of Delhi had come to him

by the death of his maternal grandfather without male issue.

But the Rajah of Kanauj was also grandson, and elder grandson, of the

dead king by another daughter. Hence arose envy and strife between the

cousins; the more so, because the sixteen-year-old Prithvi carried all

things before him with an _elan_ not to be imitated. It was all very

well to match the young hero's Great Horse sacrifice (the last one, it

is believed, in India), with which he claimed empire, by instituting a

Sai-nair, accompanied by a Self-choice (also the last), for one's only

daughter, the Princess Sunjogata of Kanauj. Now the ceremony of

Sai-nair is a most august one. It is virtually a claim for universal

supremacy, for divine honour. Every one concerned in it, even the

scullion in the kitchen who helps to cook the feast, must be of royal

blood. So all India's princes were bidden to take their part in it,

excepting Prithvi-Raj, and in his place an image of clay was made and

set to the lowest job--that of door-keeper.

Thus the Rajah of Kanauj strove to save his dignity, for the rites

were equally old, equally honourable; but what man, even though he

were king, could calculate on what a young girl, just blossoming into

womanhood, would say or do?

As a matter of fact, the young Princess Fortunata (a literal

translation of the name) did a very distressing thing. No doubt

as she entered the splendid arena (decorated, possibly, in imitation

of the celebrated one, described in the Mahabharata as the scene

of Draupadi's Swayambara), where all the assembled princes of

India--excepting, of course, her wicked cousin, Prince Prithvi--were

eagerly awaiting her choice, she looked very sweet and innocent--quite

entrancing, briefly, in her fresh young beauty, about which every one

was raving; but who would have dreamed of the mischief which was

lurking behind the eyes down-dropped as she stood hesitating, the

marriage garland--which every prince longed to feel, even as a yoke,

round his neck--in her dainty little hands.

And then? Hey presto! Her dainty little feet sped determinedly over

the Court to the door, and there was the garland, not round any living

man, but be-decorating the misshapen image of clay which Jai-Chand,

her father, had caused to be put in absent Prithvi's place!

There must have been wigs on the green in the women's apartments that

fateful day, with papa cursing and mamma upbraiding, while all the

little culprit's female relations held up pious hands of horror. But

the deed was done, and there in broad daylight, on the wings of fierce

love and pride, awakened by the tale of that maiden garland on cold

clay, was the twenty-one-year-old Prince Prithvi himself, the flower

of Rajput chivalry, followed by youthful heroes, ready, like their

chief, for soft kisses or hard blows. The last came first in that

desperate five-days-running fight all the way back to Delhi, with

willing Princess Fortunata in their midst, her cheek paling but her

eyes dry, as one by one the dear, brave lads fell out from her cortege

dead or dying.

But the bravest, the dearest, the best, held her close, unharmed, and

so the soft kisses came at last.

For Prince Prithvi, though he lost some friends--lost, as the

historians put it, "the sinews of India"--kept his prize, and gained

for himself immortal memory in the hearts of all Rajput maidens even

to the present day.

This, then, was the paladin who took the field against the bearded,

middle-aged Mahomed Shahab-ud-din, and deftly outflanking his wings,

drove them back and back until the whole Mahomedan army showed a

circle surrounded by the enemy. In the centre the great general

himself, mad with passion at the counsel sent to him by his

subordinates to save himself as best he could. His reply was to cut

down the messenger, and calling on all who would to follow him, rush

out on the enemy, dealing reckless, almost futile death. To no

purpose. Prithvi's younger brother, marking down his quarry, drove his

elephant full against the burly-bearded leader of the desperate sally;

but Mahomed Ghori lacked no courage, and the charge was met half-way,

horse against leviathan, lance couched to lance.

And the honours lay with the Moslem, for Chawand Rao took the

lance-head full in his mouth, to the destruction of many teeth. But

Prithvi was in support of his brother, and a well-aimed arrow twanged

and quivered in the northerner's scimitar arm; he reeled in his saddle

and would have fallen, had not a faithful servant, taking advantage of

the wild, swift closing in of rescue for the wounded monarch, leapt up

behind him in the saddle, and turning the horse's head to the open,

carried the almost fainting king from the field. He was followed by

his whole army, harassed for full 40 miles by the victorious Hindus.

Princess Fortunata's kisses must have been sweet that night to her

victorious hero. But Mahomed Shahab-ud-din's calm had gone. Smileless,

he waited for the healing of his wound at Lahore, then, returning to

Ghor, publicly disgraced every officer who had not followed his

forlorn hope, by parading them round the city like horses or mules,

their noses in "nose-bags filled with barley, which he forced them to

eat like brutes," and afterwards flinging them into prison. So two

years passed in moody anger and sullen disgrace, crushed into

forgetfulness by reckless pleasure and festivity. Then, taking heart

of grace, he got together a picked force of 120,000 Toorki and Afghan

cavalry recruits, for the most part men of his own class and calibre,

whose helmets were encrusted with jewels, their cuirasses inlaid with

gold; and so off Peshawur ways.

"Since the day of defeat," he said to an old sage, "despite external

appearances, I have never slumbered with ease, or waked but in sorrow.

I go, therefore, to recover my lost honour from these idolaters, or

die in the attempt."

"My king," replied the wise old man, kissing the ground, "wherefore

should not those whom you have so justly disgraced likewise have

opportunity of wiping away the stain of their defeat?"

The plea struck him by its justice. He issued orders for the disgraced

officers' freedom, and gave leave for those desirous of redeeming

their character to follow his example. A picked force this, indeed,

with a vengeance!

And on the other side was haughty defiance, marked still by the

chivalrous sense of honour which, to such as Prithvi-Raj, was dearer

than life.

A proud acceptance of the issues met the curt declaration of war

should the Indians refuse to embrace the true faith, which the

Mahomedan general sent to Ajmir by accredited ambassador. A 'cute move

this; one to enhance the martial ardour of his men; perhaps to still

further inflame his own determination to turn past defeat to present

victory. Then ensued a pause for parley, in which the Princess

Fortunata had her share--a worthy share, as the following extracts

will show. Till then her kisses had lulled Prithvi-Raj to

forgetfulness of sterner things; now they were to rouse him from

his dream. For this was her reply when her husband, leaving his

War-Council to deliberate, sought wisdom where he had so often found

pleasure:--

"What fool asks woman for advice? The world

Holds her wit shallow.... Even when the truth

Comes from her lips men stop their ears and smile.

And yet without the woman where is man?

We hold the power of Form--for us the Fire

Of Shiv's creative force flames up and burns:

Lo! we are thieves of Life and sanctuaries

Of Souls. Vessels are we of virtue and of vice,

Of knowledge and of utmost ignorance.

Astrologers can calculate from books

The courses of the stars, but who is he

Can read the pages of a woman's heart?

Our book has not been mastered; so men say

'She hath no wisdom' but to hide their lack

Of understanding. Yet we share your lives,

Your failures, your successes, griefs and joys.

Hunger and thirst, if yours, are ours, and Death

Parts us not from you; for we follow fast

To serve you in the mansion of the Sun.

Love of my heart! Lo! you are as a swan

That rests upon my bosom as a lake.

There is no rest for thee but here, my lord!

And yet arise to Victory and Fame.

Sun of the Chauhans! Who has drunk so deep

Of glory and of pleasure as my lord?

And yet the destiny of all is death:

Yea even of the Gods--and to die well

Is life immortal---- Therefore draw your sword,

Smite down the foes of Hind; think not of self--

The garment of this life is frayed and worn,

Think not of me--we twain shall be as one

Hereafter and for ever.--Go, my king!"

So the fiery cross sped round Rajputana, and ere long Prithvi-Raj

could confront the enemy with an army of 300,000 horse, 3,000

elephants, and a large body of infantry. They encamped opposite and

within sight of each other on the old battle-field, with the river

Saraswati, which was soon to lose itself in the desert sands beyond,

running between the opposing armies. Despite the disparity in numbers

the forces were not ill-matched, for the Indians were hampered by a

thousand old traditions, old accoutrements, old scruples. The

Mahomedans, on the other hand, were full up with desire for gold, for

souls. But it was a holy war on both sides. The Hindus had sworn on

Ganges water to conquer or die, the Moslem had sworn likewise on the

Koran; so heads were bowed in humble prayer to the Lord of Hosts, and

human hearts beat high with murderous hope. Quaint conjunction when

all is said and done!

Thus far, well. Now comes Mahomed Shahab-ud-din's diplomatic

strategy, which some might call by another name, even though the

account of what occurred comes to us through the pen of an ardent

Mahomedan, and cannot, therefore, but put the best face on what

happened. Prithvi-Raj, then, facing his foe, so much smaller in

numbers, so altogether insignificant beside the splendid lavishness of

the Rajput camp, wrote a letter to Mahomed Shahab-ud-din. Whether

dictated by mere pride or martial honour, by contemptuous pity,

religious dislike to take life, or, as the Mahomedans aver, by mere

brag, the terms of it are worth reading:--

"To the bravery of our soldiers we know you are no stranger: and to

our great superiority in numbers, which daily increases, your eyes

bear witness. If you are wearied of your own existence, yet have pity

on your troops who may still think it a happiness to live. It were

better, then, you should repent in time of the rash resolution you

have taken, and we shall permit you to retreat in safety."

Not an undignified appeal, this first recorded attempt at peace with

honour. Its reply was, as the historian puts it, "politic." It

consisted in Mahomed Shahab-ud-din's assertion that he was only the

general of his brother's forces; that therefore he dare not retreat

without orders, but he would be glad of a truce until such time as

information could be sent to Ghuzni and an answer received.

A simple and admirable adjunct to the night-attack which followed, and

which found the Rajputs unprepared, in fancied security.

About the false dawning, when even the noise of revelry in the

opposite camp had quieted down to sleep, the Mahomedan army forded the

river in silence, and drew up in order on the sands beyond. Some

portion of it was actually within the Hindu lines ere the alarm was

raised.

Even so, the Rajput cavalry was to the front immediately, and checked

the advance.

For what followed, Mahomed Shahab-ud-din deserves unstinted praise. It

was good general-ship.

He formed his bowmen into four divisions, and placing them one behind

the other, ordered the first to come into fighting line, discharge

their arrows, and wheel to the rear, thus giving place to the second

fighting line, the whole army to retreat slowly, giving ground

whenever hard pressed.

All that day he fought, biding his time with such patience as he and

his twelve thousand steel-armoured horsemen could muster. The sun was

just setting when, judging the delusion of victory had done its work

in the hot heads of the Rajputs, he gave the orders for one desperate

charge.

It did its work!

"Din! Din! Fateh Mahomed!" once and for all overcame the Hindu war-cry

of, "Victory, Victory!" In the years to come success and failure were

to attend both; but only in detail. The great issue between Brahmanism

and Mahomedism was fought out on the vast Karnal battle-plain in A.D.

1193, when, as the chronicler of Islam says,

"one desperate charge carried death and destruction throughout the

Hindu ranks. The disorder increased everywhere, till at length the

panic became general. The Moslems, as if they now only began to be in

earnest, committed such havoc, that this prodigious army once shaken,

like a great building tottered to its fall, and was lost in its own

ruins."

How many thousand pagans "went below?" Who knows? But one is sure that

Mahomed Shahab-ud-din duly praised God from whom all blessings flow.

His subsequent atrocities prove that he must have relied on something

which he deemed Divine Guidance; mere humanity could never have been

so cruel.

Half Rajput chivalry lay dead under the stars, but the flower of it

was hiding in the sugar-cane brakes, stealing his way back to Delhi,

to the Princess Sunjogata his wife, who, as she had watched him go

forth, lance in rest, his sword buckled on by her own steady hands,

had said with foreboding courage to her maidens: "In Yoginapur (Delhi)

I shall see him no more: we will meet in Swarga." The tale of what

happened is almost beyond telling.

Prithvi Rajah was murdered in cold blood, murdered ignominiously. The

Princess Fortunata escaped a like, or a worse, fate by a funeral pyre,

and Delhi was given over to such hideous devils work as even that

long-suffering city has never seen before or since. The followers of

the Prophet wiped out their own and their God's disgrace in torrents

of blood, filled their pockets by the way, went on to Ajmir, enacted a

like tragedy, and so returned northwards when the pink clouds of the

low-lying groves of _dakh_ trees began to blossom about the

battle-field where the sun of the Hindus had set for ever.

But Mahomed Shahab-ud-din left his pet Turki slave Kutb-din-Eibuk

behind him at Delhi, and he, assuming almost regal honours, "compelled

all the districts around to acknowledge the faith of Islam."

How many murders go to the making of a Moslem is a question which

might fairly be asked. Converts, however, hardly came in fast enough

for Shahab-ud-din's zeal, so the next year saw him back again to help

his slave in crushing the Rajah of Kanauj, who, doubtless, had not

been of Prithvi-Raj's host. Thence he marched to Benares, in which

hot-bed of idolatry he thoroughly enjoyed himself by smashing the

idols in a thousand temples, which he subsequently purified by prayer

and purgation, and thereinafter consecrated to the worship of the true

God.

This was his last real outing, for Fate--can it have been that she

dissociated herself from his doubtful use of the white flag--began to

play him false. His slave-viceroy showed inclination to plunder on his

own behalf, and though the master once more returned to India, it was

but a flying visit, apparently to check independence. To no avail, for

Kutb-din-Eibuk, "ambitious of extending his conquests, led an army

into Rajputana, where, having experienced severe defeat, he was

compelled to seek protection in the fort at Ajmir."

For the fighting spirit in the Rajput was not to be quenched by blood,

or burned out by fire. It was to flame up fiercely for many a century

to come, until the wisdom of Akbar won it over to his side.

Mahomed Shahab-ud-din's hands were, however, too full to permit of his

giving much attention to India. His brother, Ghiass-ud-din, the mere

figure-head of a king, died in A.D. 1202, and though Shahab-ud-din was

crowned in his stead without any opposition, bad luck seemed to attend

him afterwards. His army was literally cut down to a mere body-guard

of a hundred troopers in Khorassan, and though his fortunes were

recovered in some measure, his time seems to have been taken up in

quelling the rebellions of his favourite slaves whom he had promoted

to honour.

In India, Kutb-din, it is true, remained faithful in name, though his

power and prestige rose above his master's, and he was virtually king,

not viceroy.

Finally, in A.D. 1206, the leader of the last real raid of the

Crescent into India was assassinated by the Ghakkars of the Salt Range

upon the banks of the Indus.

"The weather being sultry, the King had ordered the screens which

surround the royal tents to be struck in order to give free admission

to the air. This afforded the assassins an opportunity of seeing into

the sleeping apartments. So at night time they found their way up to

the tents and hid themselves, while one of their number advanced

boldly to the tent door. Challenged by a sentry, he plunged his dagger

in the man's breast, and this rousing the guard, who ran out to see

what was the matter, the hidden assassin took that opportunity of

cutting a way into the King's tent.

"He was asleep, with two slaves fanning him. They stood petrified with

terror as the Ghakkars sheathed their daggers in the King's body,

which was afterwards found to have been pierced by no fewer than

twenty-two wounds."

THE SLAVE KINGS

A.D. 1206 TO A.D. 1288

"The Empire of Delhi was founded by a slave."

So runs the well-known jibe. And it is true; for although India,

despite the combined resistance of the Rajputs, was overcome during

the reign of Mahomed Shahab-ud-din Ghori, the real glory of conquest

belongs by rights to Eibuk, the slave; Eibuk of the "broken little

finger," who took the name of Kutb-ud-din, or Pole-star of the Faith.

To those who know India the name conjures up one of the most

marvellous sights in the world. A dark December morning in the Punjab,

when the Christmas rain-clouds gather black on the horizon, and on

them, above the rolling, brick-strewn ridges of Old Delhi, rises a

thin shaft of light--the Kutb Minar, the finest pillar in the world.