MAHOMEDAN DOMINATION
Of all the great religions that have shaped and are still shaping the
destinies of the human race, Islam alone was borne forth into the world
on a great wave of forceful conquest. Out of the sun-scorched deserts of
Arabia, with the Koran in the one hand and the sword in the other, the
followers of Mahomed swept eastward to the confines of China, northward
through Asia Minor into Eastern Europe, and westward through Africa into
Spain, and even into the heart of medieval France. But it was not till
the beginning of the eleventh century that the Mahomedan flood began to
roll down into India from the north with the overwhelming momentum of
fierce fanaticism and primitive cupidity behind it--at first mere short
but furious irruptions, like the seventeen raids of Mahmud of Ghazni
between 1001 and 1026, then a more settled tide of conquest, now and
again checked for a time by dissensions amongst the conquerors quite as
much as by some brilliant rally of Hindu religious and patriotic
fervour, but sweeping on again with a fresh impetus until the flood had
spread itself over the whole of the vast peninsula, except the extreme
south. For three centuries one wave of invasion followed another, one
dynasty of conquerors displaced another, but whether under Turki or
Afghan rulers, under Slave kings or under the house of Tughluk, there
was seldom a pause in the consolidation of Mahomedan power, seldom a
break in the long-drawn tale of plunder and carnage, cruelty and lust,
unfolded in the annals of the earlier Mahomedan dynasties that ruled at
Delhi. One notable victory Prithvi Raja, the forlorn hope of Hindu
chivalry, won at Thanesvar in 1192 over the Afghan hordes that had
already driven the last of the Ghaznis from Lahore and were sweeping
down upon Delhi, but in the following year the gallant young Rajput was
crushingly defeated, captured, and done to death by a ruthless foe. Then
Delhi fell, and Kutub-ed-Din, in turn the favourite slave, the trusted
lieutenant and the deputed viceroy of the Afghan conqueror, growing
tired of serving an absent master, within a few years threw off his
allegiance. In 1206 he proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi. That the
Slave Dynasty which he founded was in one respect at least not unworthy
of empire, in spite of the stigma attaching to its worse than servile
origin, the Kutub Minar and the splendid mosque of which it forms part
are there to show. The great minaret, which was begun by Kutub-ed-Din
himself, upon whose name it has conferred an enduring lustre not
otherwise deserved, is beyond comparison the loftiest and the noblest
from which the Musulman call to prayer has ever gone forth, nor
is the mosque which it overlooks unworthy to have been called
_Kuwwet-el-Islam_, the Might of Islam. To make room for it the Hindu
temples, erected by the Rajput builders of the Red Fort, were torn down,
and the half-effaced figures on the columns of the mosque, and many
other conventional designs peculiar to Hindu architecture, betray
clearly the origin of the materials used in its construction. But the
general conception, and especially the grand lines of the screen of
arches on the western side, are essentially and admirably Mahomedan. On
a slighter scale, but profusely decorated and of exquisite workmanship,
is the tomb of Altamsh, Kutub-ed-Din's successor, and like him
originally a mere favourite slave.
It had been well for these Slave kings had no other record survived of
them than those which they have left in stone and marble. Great
builders and mighty warriors they were in the cause of Allah and his
Prophet, but their depravity was only exceeded by their cruelty. The
story of the whole dynasty is a long-drawn tale of horrors until the
wretched Kaikobad, having turned Delhi for a short three years into a
house of ill-fame, was dragged out of his bed and flung into the Jumna,
his infant child murdered, and the house of Khilji set up where the
Slave kings had reigned. It was the second of these Khilji princes,
Ala-ud-Din, who built, alongside of Kutub-ed-Din's mosque, the Alai
Darwazah, the monumental gateway which is not only an exceptionally
beautiful specimen of external polychromatic decoration, but, to quote
Fergusson, "displays the Pathan style at its period of greatest
perfection, when the Hindu masons had learned to fit their exquisite
style of ornamentation to the forms of their foreign masters." Yet the
atrocities of his twenty years' reign, which was one of almost unbroken
conquest and plunder, wellnigh surpass those of the Slave kings. He had
seized the throne by murdering his old uncle in the act of clasping his
hand, and his own death was, it is said, hastened by poison administered
to him by his favourite eunuch and trusted lieutenant, K[=a]fur, who had
ministered to his most ignoble passions. To the Khiljis succeeded the
Tughluks, and the white marble dome of Tughluk Shah's tomb still stands
out conspicuous beyond the broken line of grim grey walls which were
once Tughlukabad. The Khiljis had been overthrown, but the curse of a
Mahomedan saint, Sidi Dervish, whose fame has endured to the present
day, still rested upon the Delhi in which they had dwelt. So Mahomed
Tughluk built unto himself a new and stronger city, but he did nothing
else to avert the curse. Indeed, he invented a form of man-hunt which
for sheer devilish cruelty has been only once matched in the West by the
_cani del duca_ when the crazy Gian Maria ruled in Milan. Well may his
milder successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital.
Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and
lavish charities. The record he kept of them is not without a certain
naïve pathos:
Under the guidance of the Almighty, I arranged that the heirs of
those persons who had been slain in the reign of my late Lord and
Patron, Sultan Mahomed Shah, and those who had been deprived of a
limb, nose, eye, hand, or foot, should be reconciled to the late
Sultan and appeased by gifts, so that they executed deeds declaring
their satisfaction, duly attested by witnesses. These deeds were
put into a chest, which was placed at the head of the late Sultan's
grave in the hope that God in his great mercy would show his
clemency to my late friend and patron and make those persons feel
reconciled to him.
The curse fell upon Delhi in the reign of the next Tughluk, Sultan
Mahmud. Timur, with his Mongolian horsemen, swooped down through the
northern passes upon Delhi, slaying Mahomedans and Hindus alike and
plundering and burning on all sides as he came. Opposite to the famous
ridge, where four and a half centuries later England was to nail her
flag to the mast, he forded the Jumna, having previously slain all
captives with his army to the number of 100,000. Mahmud's army, with its
125 elephants, could not withstand the shock. Timur entered Delhi, which
for five whole days was given over to slaughter and pillage. Then,
having celebrated his victory by a great carouse, he proceeded to the
marble mosque which Firuz Tughluk's piety had erected in atonement of
his grim predecessor's sins, and solemnly offered up a "sincere and
humble tribute of praise" to God. Within a year he disappeared in the
same whirl-wind of destruction through the northern passes into his
native wilds of Central Asia, leaving desolation and chaos behind him.
From so terrific a blow Delhi was slow to recover. A group of
picturesque domes marks the resting-place of some of the Seyyid and Lodi
kings who in turn ruled or misruled the shrunken dominions which still
owned allegiance to Delhi. The achievement of a centralised Mahomedan
empire was delayed for nearly two centuries. But the aggressive vitality
of Islam had not been arrested, and out of the anarchy which followed
Timur's meteoric raid Mahomedan soldiers of fortune built up for
themselves independent kingdoms and principalities and founded dynasties
which each had their own brief moment of power and magnificence. In all
these states, which spread right across Middle India from the Arabian
Sea to the Gulf of Bengal, Islam remained the dominant power; but, even
whilst trampling upon Hinduism, it did not escape altogether the
inevitable results of increasing contact with an older and more refined
civilisation. Amidst rapine and bloodshed and the constant clash of
arms, it was a period of intense artistic activity which, as usual in
the countries conquered by Islam, expressed itself chiefly in terms of
stone and marble, and though Hinduism never triumphed as classical
paganism, for instance, triumphed for a time in Papal Rome, the steady
and all-pervading revival of its influence can be traced from capital to
capital, wherever these Mahomedan _podestas_ established their seat of
government during that Indian _Cinque Cento_, which corresponds in time
with, and recalls in many ways, though at best distantly, the Italian
_Cinque Cento_, with its strange blend of refined luxury and cruelty, of
high artistic achievement and moral depravity.
To the present day almost all those cities--some of them now mere cities
of the dead, such as Golconda and Gaur and Mandu, some, such as Bijapur
and Bidar and Ahmednagar and Ahmedabad, still living and even
flourishing--bear witness to the genius of their makers. From motives of
political expediency, the Mahomedan rulers of those days, whether
Bahmanis or Ahmed Shahis or Adil Shahis or whatever else they were
called, were fain to reckon with their Hindu subjects. Wholesale
conversions to the creed of the conquerors, whether spontaneous or
compulsory, introduced new elements into the ruling race itself; for
converted Hindus, even when they rose to high positions of trust,
retained many of their own customs and traditions. Differences of
religion ceased to be a complete bar to matrimonial and other alliances
between Mahomedans and Hindus. Even in war Mahomedan mercenaries took
service with Hindu chiefs, and Hindus under Mahomedan captains. There
was thus, if not a fusion, a gradual mingling of the Mahomedan and Hindu
populations which, in spite of many fierce conflicts, tended to promote
a new _modus vivendi_ between them. It was a period of transition from
the era of mere ruthless conquest, which Timur's tempestuous irruption
brought practically to a close, to the era of constructive
statesmanship, which it was reserved to Akbar, the greatest of the
Moghul Emperors, to inaugurate.
Each of these early Mahomedan states has a story and a character of its
own, and each goes to illustrate the subtle ascendancy which the Hindu
mind achieved over the conquering Mahomedan. I can only select a few
typical examples. None is in its way more striking than Mandu, over
whose desolation the jungle now spreads its kindly mantle. Within two
years of Timur's raid into India the Afghan governors of Malwa
proclaimed themselves independent, and Hushang Ghuri, from whom the new
dynasty took its name, proceeded to build himself a new capital. The
grey grim walls of Mandu still crown a lofty outpost of the Vindhya
hills, some seventy miles south-east of Indore, the natural scarp
falling away as steeply on the one side to the fertile plateau of Malwa
as on the other to the broad valley of the sacred Nerbudda. The place
had no Hindu associations, and in the stately palaces and mosques
erected by Hushang and his immediate successors early in the fifteenth
century scarcely a trace of Hindu influence can be detected, though some
of them still stand almost intact amidst the luxuriant vegetation which
has now swallowed up the less substantial remains of what was once a
populous and wealthy city. The Ghuris came from Afghanistan, and the
great mosque of Hushang Ghuri--in spite of inscriptions which say in
one place that it has been modelled on the mosque of the Kaaba at Mecca,
and in another place on the great mosque at Damascus--is perhaps the
finest example of pure Pathan architecture in India, and one of the
half-dozen noblest shrines devoted to Mahomedan worship in the whole
world; a mighty structure of red sandstone and white marble, stern and
simple, and as perfect in the proportions of its long avenues of pointed
arches as in the breadth of its spacious design. Behind it, under a
great dome of white marble, Hushang himself sleeps. Unique in its way,
too, is the lofty hall of the Hindola Mahal, with its steeply sloping
buttresses--a hall which has not been inaptly compared to the great
dining-hall of some Oxford or Cambridge College--and alongside of it,
the more delicate beauty, perhaps already suggestive of Hindu
collaboration, of the Jahaz Mahal, another palace with hanging balconies
and latticed windows of carved stone overlooking on either side an
artificial lake covered with pink lotus blossoms. Mandu was at first an
essentially Mahomedan city, and under Mahmud Khilji, who wrested the
throne from Hushang's effete successor, its fame as a centre of Islamic
learning attracted embassies even from Egypt and Bokhara. But its
greatness was short-lived. Mahmud's son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for
many years his father's right hand, both in council and in the field.
But no sooner did he come to the throne in 1469 than he discharged all
the affairs of the state on to his own son and retired into the
seraglio, where 15,000 women formed his court and provided him even with
a bodyguard. Five hundred beautiful young Turki women, armed with bows
and arrows, stood, we are told, on his right hand, and, on his left,
five hundred Abyssinian girls. Profligate succeeded profligate, and the
degeneracy of his Mahomedan rulers was the Hindu's opportunity. The
power passed into the hands of Hindu officers, who were even suffered to
take unto themselves mistresses from among the Mahomedan women of the
court. The end came, after many vicissitudes, with Baz Bahadur, chiefly
known for his passionate devotion to the fair Hindu, Rup Mati, for whom
he built on the very crest of the hill, so that from her windows she
might worship the waters of the sacred Nerbudda, the only palace now
surviving in Mandu which bears a definite impress of Hinduism. Baz
Bahadur surrendered to the Emperor Akbar in 1562.
At Ahmedabad, on the other hand, the Ahmed Shahi Sultans of Gujerat
found themselves in presence of an advanced form of Hindu civilisation
as soon as they entered into possession of the kingdom which they
snatched from the general conflagration. Whether Ahmedabad, which is
still the modern capital of Gujerat and ranks only second to its
neighbour, Bombay, as a centre of the Indian cotton industry, occupies
or not the exact site of the ancient Karn[=a]vati, Gujerat was a
stronghold of Indian culture long before the Mahomedan invasions.
Architecture especially had reached a very high standard of development
in the hands of what is usually known as the Jaina school. This is a
misnomer, for the school was in reality the product of a period rather
than a sect, though Jainism probably never enjoyed anywhere, or at any
time, such political ascendancy as in Gujerat under its Rashtrakuta and
Solanki rulers from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and seldom has
there been such an outburst of architectural activity as amongst the
Jains of that period. To the present day the _salats_ or builders,
mostly Jains, have in their keeping, jealously locked away in iron-bound
chests in their temples, many ancient treatises on civil and religious
architecture, of which only a few abstracts have hitherto been published
in Gujerati, but, as may be seen at Ahmedabad, in the great Jaina temple
of Hathi Singh, built in the middle of the last century at a cost of one
million sterling, they have preserved something of the ancient
traditions of their craft.
Firishta described Ahmedabad as, in his day, "the handsomest city in
Hindustan and perhaps in the world," and very few Indian cities contain
so many beautiful buildings as those with which Ahmedabad was endowed in
the course of a few decades by its Ahmed Shahi rulers. No one can fail
to admire the wealth of ornamentation and the exquisite workmanship
lavished upon them, though they are not by any means the noblest
monuments of Mahomedan architecture in India. In fact--and herein lies
their peculiar interest--they are Hindu rather than Mahomedan in spirit.
For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as
ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in
earlier times for their Hindu rajas. By the mere force of a civilisation
in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders
imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them,
many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture. To
obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the
Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant,
they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining
them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the
capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was
permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat.
Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed
through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan
purposes has passed. It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy. The
earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu
temple with a Mahomedan façade, and the figures of animals and of idols
can still be traced on the interior pillars. The octagonal tomb of Ganj
Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at
Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all
the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built
on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan
character. Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and
tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the
most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat. It was completed in
1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi
dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one
century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in
the domain at least of architecture.
In Bijapur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which
I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake
itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu
art--perhaps because the great days of Bijapur came after it had taken
its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern
India to perish by the sword of Islam. Having laid low the Hindu "City
of Victory," the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan "City of
Victory" eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed. The
Gol Kumbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in
which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an
almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed space in the
world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St.
Peter's dominates the Roman Campagna. To such heights Hindu architecture
can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the
Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed
circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which
rests on symmetrical groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like
the same bold span or the same lofty elevation. Have we not there a
symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan
conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture? Even if the
Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the
most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture.
The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except
under compulsion.
To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that
divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus
required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan
_condottieri_ possessed. A new power more equal to the task was already
storming at the northern gates of India. On a mound thirty-five miles
north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a
small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous
battles that decide the fate of nations. It is Panipat. There, on April
21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the
last of the Lodis. Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way
down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar horsemen;
but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for
empire. He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his
remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his
statesmanship as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations
upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric
of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries. Though it was
at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed
himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there
to-day. But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his
son Humayun's mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark
green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous
feature in the plain of Delhi. Endowed with many brilliant and amiable
qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father
or his son. Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated
but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it,
when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi
caused his death at the early age of forty-eight. But would he have
been able to retain it? He had by no means crushed the forces of
rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule,
and which were still holding the field under the leadership of the
brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu. Delhi itself was lost within a few
months of Humayun's death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty
years after his grandfather's brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had
in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan. He too fought and won,
and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to
mould and to fashion at the promptings of his genius.
Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was
already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He
showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the
reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors
before him in India, men of his own race and creed--the blood of Timur
flowed in his veins--and men of other races and of other creeds. They
too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had
passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. What was the reason?
Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and
that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities
their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and
perished? Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a
better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by
dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal
service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on
terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by
breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge
in the family. He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force,
but he never used force alone. He subdued the Rajput states, but he won
the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among
their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan
kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East.
He created a homogeneous system of civil administration which our own
still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which
was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively
slight modifications to the present day.
Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area
of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social
fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious
exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu
caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could
be no security for the future against the revival of the old and
deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself
learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred
books to be translated into Persian--the cultured language of his
court--so that he could study them for himself; and he invited
Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of
different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his
presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted
palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his
characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles
distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly
perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with
exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the
greatest of the Moghul Emperors--the contemporary of our own great Queen
Elizabeth--presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his
long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief
offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council
Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural
skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu
than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who
was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over
against it, in the beautiful "Golden House," dwelt his Rajput consort,
Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he
forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in
Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as
upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and illustrious
Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to
Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation,
untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious
evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the
memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed
the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the
great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar
himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all
denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired
Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than
in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the "Gate of Victory," the
lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the
spacious mosque quadrangle: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world
is a bridge. Pass over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but
an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'"
It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests
in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the
religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound
denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them,
he foresaw that his life's work would assuredly some day be wrecked. Did
he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had
already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as noble a
mind as his not proof against the overweening _hubris_ to which a
despotic genius has so often succumbed? One momentous evening, in the
Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and
confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the
domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran,
which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating
it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He
promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new
profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, "There
is no God but God, and Mahomed is his prophet," proclaimed indeed in the
same words the unity of God, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent
of God. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only borrowed its
prayers chiefly from the Parsees and its ritual from the Hindus, but
practically abolished all Mahomedan observances. The orthodox Mahomedans
naturally held up their hands in horror, and many preferred honourable
exile to conformity. But the awe which Akbar inspired, and perhaps the
acknowledged elevation of his motives, generally compelled at least
outward acceptance during his lifetime. His Mahomedan subjects had,
moreover, to admit that his desire to conciliate Hinduism did not blind
him to its most perverse features. Whilst he abolished the capitation
tax on Hindus and the tax upon Hindu pilgrims, he forbade infant
marriages and, short of absolute prohibition, did all he could to
discountenance the self-immolation of Hindu widows. To the Brahmans
especially his condemnation, both implied and explicit, of the caste
system was a constant stone of offence.
Great as was his genius and admirable as were many of his institutions,
Akbar, to use a homely phrase, fell between two stools to the ground. He
himself ceased to be a Mahomedan without becoming a Hindu, whilst the
great bulk at least of his subjects still remained at bottom Mahomedans
and Hindus as before. Neither community was ripe for an eclectic creed
based only upon sweet reasonableness and lofty ethical conceptions. His
son and successor, Jehanghir, at once reverted to Mahomedan orthodoxy,
but the reaction only became militant when Aurungzeb succeeded Shah
Jehan. The profound incompatibility between Islam and Hinduism
reasserted itself in him with a bitterness which the growing menace of
the rising power of the Hindu Mahrattas probably helped to intensify.
The reimposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus destroyed the last
vestige of the great work of conciliation to which Akbar had vainly
applied all his brilliant energies. Like Fatehpur Sikri itself, which
for lack of water he had been compelled to abandon within fifteen years
of its construction, it was a magnificent failure, and it was perhaps
bound in his time to be a failure.
Aurungzeb was the first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan
atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation
at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons
had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him
the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul
throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the
independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast
military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth
of the new Mahratta power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully
attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the
incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace
became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration
proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and
the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from
Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from
Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous
Peacock Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern
passes. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani
carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the
Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy
had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely
closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between
the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army.
The Mahrattas endured a crushing defeat, which, together with treachery
within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the
downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.
For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea
penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been
the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was
progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the
Portuguese--Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British--the
British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah
Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection,
and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India
Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained
there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one
faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in
the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, "If a
paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here"; and
when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was
already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same
Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed
the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between
Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in
her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the
Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of
royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had passed into
the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on
different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the noblest
of Akbar's dreams.
But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring
power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in
Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive
tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off,
but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be
fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same
process of adaptation, assimilation, and absorption, which had been
going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being
permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian
political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan
domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly
converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent
by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian
races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious
evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set
in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry
between the cults of Shiva and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of
the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by Shivaite
and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know
them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the
persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political
independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most
popular of Hindu gods, and the divine love, of which he was at first the
personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his
human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their
origin from the ancient ideas of sexual dualism immanent in some of the
Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of
the great gods into the Sakti worship of the female principle, often
with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly
as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of
such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by
Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the
altars of the Mahamatri, the great goddesses personified in Kali and
Durga. The worship of the gods assumed a more terrific and orgiastic
character. _Sati_ was more frequently practised. Many of the most
splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples--amongst others
that of Jaganath at Puri--were founded during that period. The custom,
in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines
and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated
in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of
religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration
of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross
idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction
against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant
Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but
nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has
also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended
to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of
Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism reasserted
itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against
Mahomedan domination.
The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan
ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority
of woman by her close confinement--of which there are few traces in
earlier times--within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a
precautionary measure for her protection against the lust of the
Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still constitutes one of the
greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom
requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when
her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the
women of India, even in the classes in which the men of India have been
drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained
and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate
conservatism clings to social traditions and religious superstitions of
which their male belongings have already been taught to recognise the
evils. In this respect Mahomedan domination has helped to strengthen the
forces of resistance inherent to Hinduism.
On the other hand, Mahomedan domination has left behind it a deep line
of religious cleavage, deepest in the north, which was the seat of
Mahomedan power, but extending to almost every part of India. Sixty-six
millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans,
and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences
between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations
converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and
Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common
hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is
still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the
political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by
the supreme force of religion. We have a pale reflection of that sort of
antagonism at our own doors in the bitterness between Protestants and
Roman Catholics in Ulster. All over India, Mahomedans and Hindus alike
remember the centuries of Mahomedan domination, the latter with the
bitterness bred of the long oppression that struck down their gods and
mutilated their shrines, the former with the unquenched pride and
unquenchable hope of a fierce faith which will yet, they believe, make
the whole world subject to Allah, the one God, and Mahomed, his one
Prophet.