PART I

THE ANCIENT AGE

As the mind's eye travels backwards across the wide plains of Northern India, attempting to re-people it with the men of olden time, historical insight fails us at about the seventh century B.C. From that date to our own time the written Word steps in to pin protean legend down to inalterable form.

And yet before this seventh century there is no lack of evidence. The Word is still there, though, at the time, it lived only in the mouths of the people or of the priesthood. Even if we go so far back as B.C. 2000, the voices of men who have lived and died are still to be heard in the earlier hymns of the Rig-Veda.

And before that?

Who knows? The imaginative eye, looking out over the vast sea of young green wheat which in many parts of the Punjâb floods unbroken to the very foot of the hills, may gain from it an idea of the wide ocean whose tide undoubtedly once broke on the shores of the Himalayas.

The same eye may follow in fancy the gradual subsidence of that sea, the gradual deposit of sand, and loam brought by the great rivers from the high lands of Central Asia. It may rebuild the primeval huts of the first inhabitants of the new continent--those first invaders of the swampy haunts of crocodile and strange lizard-like beasts--but it has positively no data on which to work. The first record of a human word is to be found in the earliest hymn of the Aryan settlers when they streamed down into the Punjâb. When?

Even that is beyond proof. The consensus of opinion amongst learned men, however, gives the Vedic period--that is to say, the period during which the hymns of the Rig-Veda were composed--as approximately the years between B.C. 2000 and B.C. 1400.

But these same hymns tell us incidentally of a time before that. It is not only that these Aryan invaders were themselves in a state of civilisation which necessarily implies long centuries of culture, of separation from barbarian man; but besides this, they found a people in India civilised enough to have towns and disciplined troops, to have weapons and banners; women whose ornaments were of gold, poisoned arrows whose heads were of some metal that was probably iron.

All this, and much more, is to be gathered in the Rig-Veda concerning the Dâsyas or aboriginal inhabitants of India. Naturally enough, as inevitable foes, they are everywhere mentioned with abhorrence, and we are left with the impression of a "tawny race who utter fearful yells."

Who, then, were these people?

Are we to treat the monotonous singing voice which even now echoes out over the length and breadth of India, as in the sunsetting some Brahman recites the ancient hymns--are we to treat this as the _first_ trace of Ancient India? Or, as we sit listening, are we to watch the distant horizon, so purple against the gold of the sky, and wonder if it is only our own unseeing eyes which prevent our tracing the low curve that may mark the site of a town, ancient when the Aryans swept it into nothingness?

"The fiction which resembles truth," said the Persian poet Nizâmi in the year 1250, "is better than the truth which is dissevered from the imagination"; so let us bring something of the latter quality into our answer.

Certain it is that for long centuries the reddish or tawny Dâsyas managed to resist the white-skinned Aryas, so that even as late as the period of that great epic, the Mâhâbhârata--that is, some thousand years later than the earliest voice which speaks in the Vedic hymns--the struggle was still going on. At least in those days the Aryan Pandâvas of whom we read in that poem appear to have dispossessed an aboriginal dynasty from the throne of Magadha. This dynasty belonged to the mysterious Nâga or Serpent race, which finally blocks the way in so many avenues of Indian research. They are not merely legendary; they cross the path of reality now and again, as when Alexander's invasion of India found some satrapies still held by Serpent-kings.

It is impossible, therefore, to avoid wondering whether the Aryans really found the rich plains of India a howling wilderness peopled by savages close in culture to the brutes, or whether, in parts of the vast continent at least, they found themselves pitted against another invading race, a Scythic race hailing from the north-east as the Aryan hails from north-west?

There is evidence even in the voice of the Rig-Veda for this. To begin with, there is the evidence of colour--colour which was hereafter to take form as caste. We have mention not of two, but of three divergent complexions. First, the "white-complexioned friends of Indra," who are palpably the Aryans; next, "the enemy who is flayed of his black skin"; and lastly, "those reddish in appearance, who utter fearful yells."

It seems, to say the least of it, unlikely that a single aboriginal race should be described in two such curiously different ways.

As for the fearful yells, that is palpably but another way of asserting that the utterers spoke a language which was not understood of the invaders. "Du'ye think th' Almighty would be understandin' siccan gibberish," said the old Scotch lady when, during the Napoleonic war, she was reminded that maybe many a French mother was praying as fervently for victory as she was herself. The same spirit breathes in many a Vedic hymn in which the Dâsyas are spoken of as barely human. "They are not men." "They do not perform sacrifices." "They do not believe in anything." These are the plaints which precede the ever-recurring prayer--"Oh! Destroyer of foes! Kill them!" And worse even than this comes the great cause of conflict--"_Their rites are different_."

So the story is told. These Dâsyas, "born to be cut in twain," have yet the audacity to have different dogma, conflicting canons of the law. Even in those early days religion was the great unfailing cause of strife.

These same hymns of the Rig-Veda, however, give us but scant information of the foes who are called generally Dâsyas, or "robbers." But here again divergence creeps in. It is impossible to class "the wealthy barbarian," the "neglecters of sacrifices," who, "decorated with gold and jewels," were "spreading over the circuit of the earth," whose "iron cities" were to be destroyed, who were to be "slain whether weeping or laughing, whether hand to hand or on horseback, whether arrayed in hosts or aided by missile-hurling heroes"--it is impossible, surely, to class these enemies with the mere robber brutes of whom it is written that they "were slain, and the kine made manifest."

Were then these tawny-hued foes, with the mention of whom wealth is invariably associated, in reality the ancestors of the treasure-holding Takshaks or Nâgas, that strange Snake race of which we read in the Mâhâbhârata, and of which we hear again during the invasion of Alexander?

At least there is nothing to prevent us dreaming that this is so; and while we listen to the voice of some Brahman chanting at sunset-time the oldest hymns in the world, there is nothing to hinder us from trying to imagine how strangely these must have fallen on the ears of the "neglecters of sacrifices, the dwellers in cities, rich in gold and beautiful women," of whom we catch a passing glimpse as the stately Sanskrit rhythm rolls on.

The sun sets, the voice ceases, and the far-away past is no nearer and no further from us than the present.

THE VEDIC TIMES

B.C. 2000 TO B.C. 1400

Before entering on its history it is necessary to grasp the size of the great continent with which we have to deal. Roughly speaking, India has fourteen and a half times the area of the British Isles. Of most of this country we have next to no history at all, and in the time which is now under consideration we have to deal only with the Punjâb, the "Land of the Five Rivers," the area of which about equals that of Great Britain. That such lack of information should exist is not wonderful, since, for all we know, this upper portion of India may then have been on the shores of a still-receding sea; indeed, colour is given to this suggestion by the remembrance that the five rivers of the Punjâb plain to this day act as huge drain-pipes which deprive the intervening country of surface moisture. Naturally, this fact, in the days when all India, save for its few isolated ranges of central mountains, must have been one vast swamp, was an immense boon to humanity.

The geographical area, therefore, with which we have to treat in the Vedic period is very limited. It is a mere patch on the present continent of India, bounded on the north by the snowy Himalayas, on the south by the Indus (and probably by the sea), on the west by the Suleimân Mountains, while on the east lay the unknown, and possibly marsh, land of the Ganges and Jumna Rivers.

Curiously enough, although we speak of this very tract nowadays as the "Land of the Five Rivers," in Vedic times the rivers were counted as seven. That is to say, the Indus was called the mother of the six--not five--streams which, as now, joined its vast volume. In those days this juncture was most probably in comparatively close proximity to the sea. Of these six rivers only five remain: the Jhelum, the Chenâb, the Râvi, the Beâs, the Sutlej. The bed of the sixth river, the "most sacred, the most impetuous of streams," which was worshipped as a direct manifestation of Sarâswati, the Goddess of Learning,[1] is still to be traced near Thanêswar, where a pool of water remains to show where the displeased Goddess plunged into the earth and dispersed herself amongst the desert sands.

[Footnote 1: Comparable in modern mythology to Minerva.]

The stream never reappears; but its probable course is yet to be traced by the colonies of Sarâswata Brahmans, who still preserve, more rigidly than other Brahmans, the archaic rituals of the Vedas. The reason for this purity of rite being, it is affirmed, the grace-giving quality of Mother Sarâswati's water which, with curious quaint cries, is drawn in every village from the extraordinarily deep wells (many of which plunge over 400 feet into the desert sand), at whose bottom the lost river still flows.

Into this Land of the Seven Rivers, then, came--somewhere about two thousand years before Christ--wanderers who describe themselves as of a white complexion. That they had straight, well-bridged noses is also certain. To this day, as Mr Risley the great ethnologist puts it, "a man's social status in India varies in inverse ratio to the width of his nose"; that is to say, the nasal index, as it is called, is a safe guide to the amount of Aryan, as distinguished from aboriginal blood in his veins. One constant epithet given to the great cloud-god Indra--to whom, with the great fire-god Agni, the vast majority of the hymns in the Rig-Veda are addressed--is "handsome-chinned." But the Sanskrit word _sipra_, thus translated "chin," also means "nose"; and there can be no doubt that as the "handsome-nosed" one, Indra would be a more appropriate god for a people in whom, that feature was sufficiently marked to have impressed itself, as it has done, on countless generations.

Whence the Aryans came is a matter still under dispute. That they were a comparatively civilised people is certain. The hymns of the Rig-Veda, which were undoubtedly composed during the six hundred years following on the Aryans' first appearance in the Punjâb, prove this, as they prove many another point concerning these the first white invaders of India. How the idea ever passed current that they were a pastoral people is a mystery, since from the very first we read in these hymns of oxen, of the cultivation of corn, of ploughing, and sowing, and reaping.

"Oh! Lord of the Field!" reads one invocation. "We will cultivate this field with thee! May the plants be sweet to us; may the rains be full of sweetness; may the Lord of the Field be gracious to us! Let the oxen work merrily; let the man work merrily; let the plough move merrily! Fasten the traces merrily; ply the goad merrily.... Oh! Fortunate Furrow! speed on thy way, bestow on us an abundant crop--sow the seed on this field which has been prepared. Let the corn grow with our hymns, let the scythes fall on the ripe grain. Prepare troughs for the drinking of animals. Fasten the leathern string, and take out water from this deep and goodly well which never dries up. Refresh the horses, take up the corn stacked in the field, and make a cart to convey it easily."

Practically Indian agriculture has gone no further than this in close on four thousand years.

It is true that a hymn to the God of Shepherds finds occasional place in the Rig-Veda, but in these there is an archaic ring, which seems to point to the Aryan wanderings before India was reached. One of them begins thus: "Oh! Pushan, the Path-finder, help us to finish our journey!"

From purely religious hymns, naturally, one has no right to expect a full crop of information concerning the political and social life of the times in which they were composed, yet the light which the Rig-Veda throws upon these dark ages is luckily surprising; luckily, because we have absolutely no other source of knowledge.

From it we learn something of commerce, even to the extent of the laws regulating sale and usury. We learn also of ships and shipwrecks, of men who, "taking a boat, took her out to sea, and lived in the boat floating on the water, being happy in it rocking gracefully on the waves"; from which we may infer that our early Aryan brothers did not suffer from sea-sickness. There is also a phrase in fairly constant use, "the sea-born sun," which would lead us to suppose that these writers of hymns had often seen sunrise over an Eastern ocean.

Many kinds of grain were cultivated, but the chief ones seem to have been wheat and barley. Rice is not mentioned. Animals of all sorts were sacrificed, and their flesh eaten; and as we read of slaughter-houses set apart for the killing of cows, we may infer that the Aryan ancestors of India were not strict vegetarians.

But all mention of food, even sacrificial food, in the Rig-Veda fades into insignificance before its perfectly damnable iteration concerning a fermented drink called "Soma." Scarcely a hymn finds finish without some mention of it, and pages on pages are full of panegyrics of the "exhilarating juice," the "adorable libation," "the bright effused dew of the Soma, fit drink for gods." And apparently for men also, since we read that the "purifying Soma, like the sea rolling its waves, has poured out on men songs, and hymns, and thoughts." An apotheosis of intoxication, indeed!

It appears to have been the fermented juice of some asclepiad plant which was mixed with milk. The plant had to be gathered on moonshiny nights, and many ceremonials accompanied its tituration, and the expressing of its sap.

In later years, of course, the Soma ritual expanded into something very elaborate, and no less than sixteen priests were required for its proper fulfilment; but in the beginning, it is evident that each householder prepared the drink, and offered some of it, and of his food also, to Indra the cloud-god first, then to Agni the fire-god, and so by degrees (increasing with the years) to a host of smaller gods--the Winds, the Dawn, Day, Night, the Sun, the Earth.

For these ancient Aryans had not far to look for godhead. They found it simply, naturally, in themselves, and in all things about them, as the secret verse which to this day is held in sacred keeping by the twice-born amply shows. For there can be small doubt that the closest rendering to the original meaning runs thus:--

"Let us meditate on the Over-soul which is in all souls, which animates all, which illumines all understandings."

Mankind makes but small advance with the years in metaphysics, and it needed a Schopenhauer to reinvent the Over-soul--after how many generations? Who can say?

Only this we know, that a few centuries after Christ, a Chinese pilgrim to India committed himself to the assertion that "Soma is a very nasty drink!"

There is no trace in these Vedic hymns of the many deplorable beliefs, traditions and customs, which in later years have debased the religious and social life of India.

The Aryans worshipped "bright gods," and seem to have been themselves a bright and happy people. We hear nothing of temples or idols, of caste or enforced widowhood. Indeed, the fact that the language contains distinct, concrete, and not opprobrious terms for "the son of a woman who has taken a second husband," and for "a man who has married a widow," proves that such words were needed in the common tongues of the people. Neither is there any trace of, nor the faintest shred of authority for, either suttee or child-marriage.

So the ancient Aryan rises to the mind's eye as a big, stalwart, high-nosed, fair-skinned man, with a smile and a liking for exhilarating liquor, who, after long wanderings with his herds over the plains of Central Asia--where, reading the stars at night, he sang as he watched his flocks to Pushan the Path-finder--looked down one day from the heights of the Himalayas over a fair expanse of new-born land by the ripples of a receding sea, and found that it was good.

So for many a long year he lived, fighting, ploughing, and praying--with copious libations--to Indra, the God of Battles, and to Agni, the humble, homely God of Fire, who yet was the invoker of all Gods mysteriously connected with the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the very Lightning.

And one of the prayers to the god who "comprehended all things," who "traversed the vast ethereal space, measuring days and nights and contemplating all that have birth," ran thus:--

"Take me to the immortal and imperishable abode where light dwells eternal."

We have not gone much further. The cry which rises in the Rig-Veda is the cry of to-day:--

"From earth is the breath and the blood; but whence is the soul? What or Who is that One who is ever alone; who forms the six spheres; who holds the unborn in His Hand?"

Yet the religious feeling of these primitive Aryans was not all tinged by doubt, by sadness; some of their hymns to the Dawn breathe the spirit of deep joy which is in those who recognise, however dimly, that the One of whom they question is no other than the Questioner.

So let us conclude this chapter with a few verses collated from these hymns.

"Many-tinted Dawn! Th' immortal daughter of Heaven! Young, white robed, come with thy purple steeds; Follow the path of the dawnings the world has been given, Follow the path of the dawn that the world still needs.

"Darkly shining Dusk, thy sister, has sought her abiding, Fear not to trouble her dreams; daughters, ye twain of the Sun, Dusk and dawn bringing birth! O Sisters! your path is unending; Dead are the first who have watched; when shall our waking be done?

"Bright, luminous Dawn; rose-red, radiant, rejoicing! Shew the traveller his road; the cattle their pastures new; Rouse the beasts of the Earth to their truthful myriad voicing, Leader of rightful days! softening the soil with dew.

"Wide-expanded Dawn! Open the gates of the morning; Waken the singing birds! Guide thou the truthful light To uttermost shade of the shadow, for--see you! the dawning Is born, white-shining, out of the gloom of the night."

Surely there is something in these phrases, taken truthfully from the original and strung together consecutively so as to give the spirit which animates the whole, that makes us of these later times feel closely akin to those who sang thus in the Dawn of Days.

THE DAYS OF THE EPICS

ABOUT B.C. 1400 TO ABOUT B.C. 1000

The area of India which has now to be considered is much larger. Oudh, Northern Behar, and the country about Benares are comprised in it; but Southern India remains as ever, unknown, even if existent.

The sources of information concerning this period of six hundred years are also much larger, though in a measure less trustworthy; for the two great epics of India, the Mâhâbhârata and the Râmâyana, are avowedly imaginative, and not--as are the hymns of the Rig-Veda--the outcome of the daily life of a people, which, like the accretions of a coral reef, remain to show what manner of creature once lived in them.

Even the remaining Vedas, the Yajur, the Sâma and the Athârva, partake of the same purely literary spirit, although the first and second of these were probably in existence towards the end of the Vedic period. The last named is--at least in its recognition as a Sacred Text--of far later date. All three consist largely of transcripts from the Rig-Veda, and around each of them, as indeed around the Rig-Veda-Sanhita itself, there grew up a subsidiary literature called Brahmânas, the object of which was to explain, consolidate, and elaborate both the ritual and teaching of the Vedic age, as it became archaic under the pressure of a greater complexity in life.

It is to the epics and to the Brahmânas, then, that we must look for what sparse information is to be gleaned concerning India during this six hundred years or so. It should be remembered that even these books were to remain truly the "spoken word" for at least two centuries longer, until the art of writing became known about B.C. 800. As against this, however, we may set the undoubted fact that such was the marvellous memory of those early days, that by the close of the Epic period every syllable of the Rig-Veda had been counted with accuracy, and the whole carefully compiled, arranged, analysed as it now stands.

To tell the honest truth, the Brahmânas are but a barren field. Full of elaborate hair-splitting, cumbered with elaborate regulations for the performance of every rite; prolix, prosy, they reflect only a religion which was fast breaking down into canonical pomposity. It is true that towards the end of the Epic period matters improved a little, and in the teachings of the Ûpanishads--last of the so-called "revealed Scriptures" of India--we find a very different note; but as these seem to belong, by right of birth, more to the Philosophical period which follows on the Epic, we will reserve them for subsequent consideration.

It is, then, to the Mâhâbhârata and to the Râmâyana that we must look.

Not, however, for history as history; for the personages, the incidents in these two great poems are purely mythical.

But that a strong tribe called Bhâratas or Kurus who had settled near Delhi did for long years struggle with another strong tribe called the Panchâlas, who had settled near Kanauj, is more than likely. With this background, then, of truth, the story of the Mâhâbhârata is a fine romance, and throws incidentally many a side-light on Hindu society in these remote ages. But it is prodigiously long. In the only full English translation which exists it runs to over 7,500 pages of small type. Anything more discursive cannot be imagined. The introduction of a single proper name is sufficient to start an entirely new story concerning every one who was ever connected with it in the most remote degree. But it is a treasure house of folk-lore and folk tales, interspersed, quaintly, by keen intellectual reasonings on philosophical subjects, and still more remarkable efforts to pierce the great Riddle of the World by mystical speculations. It is, emphatically, in every line of it, fresh to the uttermost. It is the outcome of minds--for it is evidently an accretion of many men's imaginations--that still felt the first stimulus of wonder concerning all things, to whom nothing was common, nothing impossible.

A redaction even in brief of the Great Epic is beyond the power of any writer. To begin with, many of the side-issues are to the full as worthy transcription as those of the main thread of the story; and then it is almost impossible to make out what the latter really was in the beginning, before the endless additions and interpolations came to obscure the original idea.

To most critics this main thread presents itself as a prolonged war between the Kaurâvas and their first cousins the Pandâvas--in other words, between the hundred sons of Dhritarâshta, the blind king, and the five sons of his brother Pându--but to the writer the _leit motif_ is the story of Bhishma. It is a curious one; in many ways well worthy of a wider knowledge than it has at present in the West.

Bhishma, then, was the heir of Shantânu, the King of Hastinapûr. His birth belongs to fairy tale, for he was the son of Ganga, the river goddess, who consented to be the wife of the love-struck Shantânu on condition that, no matter what he might see, or she might do, no question should be asked, no remark made. There is therefore a distinct flavour of the world-wide Undine myth in the tale. In this case the lover-husband is of the most forbearing type. It is not until he sees his eighth infant son being relentlessly consigned to the river that he cries: "Hold! Enough! Who art thou, witch?" In consequence of this, in truth, somewhat belated curiosity, the goddess leaves him, after assuring him that her purpose is accomplished. Seven Holy Ones condemned to fresh life by a venial fault have been released by early death, and this last child is his to keep as being, indeed, the pledge of mutual love.

So far good. Bhishma is brought up as the heir until he is adolescent. Then his father falls in love with a fisherman's daughter who is obdurate. She refuses to marry, except on the condition that her son, if one is born, shall inherit the kingdom. Even a promise that this shall be so is not sufficient for her. She claims that Bhishma must not only swear to resign his own claim to the throne in favour of her son, but must also take a solemn vow of perpetual celibacy, so closing the door against future claims on the part of his children. Devoted to his father, the boy, just entering on manhood, accedes to the proposal; his father marries, and dies, leaving a young heir to whom Bhishma becomes regent. An excellent one, too, as the following extract concerning his regency will show:--

"In these days the Earth gave abundant harvest and the crops were of good flavour. The clouds poured rain in season and the trees were full of fruit and flowers. The draught cattle were all happy, and the birds and other animals rejoiced exceedingly, while the flowers were fragrant. The cities and towns were full of merchants and traders and artists of all descriptions. And the people were brave, learned, honest and happy. And there were no robbers, nor any one who was sinful; but devoted to virtuous acts, sacrifices, truth, and regarding each other with love and affection, the people grew up in prosperity, rejoicing cheerfully in sports that were perfectly innocent on rivers, lakes and tanks, in fine groves and charming woods.

"And the capital of the Kurus (Hastinapûr), full as the ocean and teeming with hundreds of palaces and mansions, and possessing gates and arches dark as the clouds, looked like a second Amaravati (celestial town). And over all the delightful country whose prosperity was thus increased were no misers, nor any woman a widow, but the wells and lakes were ever full, full were the groves of trees, the houses with wealth, and the whole kingdom with festivities.

"So, the wheel of virtue being thus set in motion by Bhishma, the subjects of other kingdoms, leaving their homes, came to dwell in the golden age."

A golden age indeed! A millenium dating a thousand years before the Christ. And for this, Bhishma the Brother Regent and Sâtyavâti the Queen-Mother were responsible. The Boy-King appears to have been but a poor creature. Even Bhishma's famous exploit of carrying off the three beautiful daughters of the King of Benares--Amva, Amvîka and Amvalîka--as brides for the lad, does not seem to have kept him from evil courses. True, the elder of these three "slender-waisted maidens, of tapering hips and curling hair," cried off the match by bashfully telling the softhearted Bhishma that she had set her affections on some one else; whereupon he, holding that "a woman, whatever her offence, always deserveth pardon," bid her follow her own inclinations. Still the two remaining brides did not avail to prevent the young bridegroom from succumbing to disease, leaving them childless.

Here, then, was a situation. Bhishma and the Queen-Mother, both of an age, left without an heir! After Eastern fashion she urges him to take his half-brother's place, and raise up offspring to his father and to herself. But Bhishma is firm to his oath. "Earth," he says, "may renounce its scent, water its moisture, light its attribute of showing form, yea! even the sun may renounce its glory, the comet its heat, the moon its cool rays, and very space renounce its capacity for generating sound; but I cannot renounce Truth." Pressed to the uttermost he can only reiterate: "I will renounce the three worlds, the empire of heaven, and anything which may be greater than this, but Truth I will not renounce."

Poor Bhishma! One feels that he is a veritable Sir Galahad, beset by loving women, for when another father for possible heirs is found, Amvîka, who had expected Bhishma, refuses to look at his successor, the result being that her son Dhritarâshta is born blind, and being thus unfitted for kingship, Amvalîka's son Pandu becomes heir to the throne.

_Hinc illæ lachrymal!_ Bhishma's vow of celibacy produces the rivals, and his part in the epic henceforward shows but dimly on the bloody background of the long quarrel between the hundred God-given sons of Dhritarâshta, and the five God-begotten sons of Pandu.

Yet, overlaid as it is by diffuse divergencies, the story of self-sacrifice, of a man whom all women love and none can gain, goes on. Bhishma, on Pandu's death, installs the blind Dhritarâshta as Regent King, and continues, as ever, faithful to his trust. Once or twice a ring of human pathos, human regret, is heard in the harmony of his good counsels, his unswerving loyalty, his fast determination to "pay the debt arising out of the food which has been given me."

Once when Arjuna, third of the five Pandus, climbs up on his knees, all dust-laden from some boyish game, and, full of pride and glee, claims him as father--"I am not thy father, O Bhârata!" is the gentle reply.

Again, when Amva, the eldest princess of the three maidens whom Bhishma had carried off as brides for his brother, returns in tears from seeking the lover he had allowed her to rejoin, saying that the prince will have none of Bhishma's leavings, there is human regret in the latter's refusal to accept the assertion that the carrying off was equal to a betrothal, and that he is bound in honour to marry the maiden himself! Yet of this refusal comes much. The injured girl calls on High Heaven for requital, and though her champion Râma is unable to conquer the invincible Bhishma, Fate intervenes finally.

Amva's penances, prayers, austerities, find fruit in revenge. She is born again as Chikandîni, the daughter of a great king whose wife conceals the child's sex for twenty-one years, until, according to the promise of the Gods, Chikandîni becomes in reality Chikandîn, the most beautiful, the most valiant of princes, who is destined in time to cause the death of Bhishma. For amongst the many confessions of a soldier's faith which the latter here makes is this: "With one who hath thrown away his sword, with one fallen, with one flying, with one yielding, with woman or one bearing the name of woman, or with a low, vulgar fellow--with all these I do not battle." So Chikandîn is beyond Bhishma's retaliation, and when in the final fight he "struck the great Bhârata full on the breast," the latter "only looked at him with eyes blazing with wrath; remembering his womanhood, Bhishma struck him not."

This, however, was not yet to come. Bhishma had as yet to bring up the five Pandu princes and the hundred sons of Dhritarâshta to be good warriors and true, and in the process we come across many quaint interludes. The story of Princess Drâupadt's Self-choice is charming, and the description of the ceremony worth giving as a picture of the times.

"The amphitheatre," we read, "was erected on an auspicious and level plain to the north-east of the town, surrounded on all sides by beautiful mansions, enclosed with high walls and a moat with arched doorways here and there. And the vast amphitheatre was also shaded by a canopy of various colours, and resounded with the notes of a thousand trumpets, and was scented with black aloes, and sprinkled with sandal wood water and adorned with flowers. The high mansions surrounding it, perfectly white, resembled the cloud-kissing peaks of Himalaya. And the windows of these mansions were covered with lattice of gold, and the walls thereof set with diamonds and precious stones. The staircases were easy of ascent, while the floors were covered with costly carpets and rugs. Now all these mansions were adorned with wreaths of flowers and rendered fragrant with excellent aloes. They were white and spotless as the necks of swans. And they were each furnished with a hundred doors wide enough to admit a crowd of persons. And in these seven-storied houses of various sizes, adorned with costly beds and carpets, lived the monarchs who were invited to the Self-choice, their persons adorned with every ornament, and possessed with the hope of excelling each other. Thus the denizens of the city and the surrounding country, taking their seats on the platforms, beheld these things.

"And the concourse of princes, gay with the performances of actors and dancers, increased daily, until on the sixteenth morning the daughter of the King entered the arena, richly attired and bearing in her hand a golden dish on which lay offerings to the gods, and a garland of flowers.

"Then a priest of the Moon race ignited the sacrificial fires and poured libations, uttering benedictions; and all the musical instruments that were playing, stopped, and in the whole amphitheatre was perfect stillness. Then the Princess' brother, taking his sister by the hand, cried in a voice low and deep as the kettledrums of the clouds: 'Hear all ye assembled Princes, hear! This is the bow, these are the arrows, yonder is the mark! Given Beauty, Strength, Lineage, he who achieveth the feat hath Princess Drâupadi to wife.' Then, for the sake of her unrivalled Beauty, the young Princes vied with each other in jealousy, and rising in their royal seats each exclaiming: 'Princess Drâupadi shall be mine!' began to exhibit their prowess."

It would take too long to give _in extensor_ how one after the other the Princes failed to string the mighty bow. How Karna, the Disinherited Knight of the Romance--in reality uterine brother to the five Pandu princes, but passing as their deadliest Kuru enemy--strung it easily, but "turned aside with a laugh of vexation and a glance at the Sun, his real father," when Princess Drâupadi cried: "Hold! I will have none of mixed blood to my lord!"

How the young Arjuna, second of the five Pandu princes, "first of car-warriors and wielders of the bow," came disguised as a Brahman youth and achieved the feat; rousing no remonstrance, it may be remarked, as to admixture of race from the fair Princess Drâupadi.

Then follows the incident of Drâupadi marrying the whole five Pandu brothers, in obedience to their mother's mistaken command. She, when her five sons appeared in the dusk, "bringing their alms," bid them share it as ever; so, despite much heart-questioning, the fivefold wedding took place. It is an incident which is glozed over by ardent admirers of the Mâhâbhârata, and spoken of deprecatingly, as a mere myth. Why, it would be difficult to say, since it is palpably held up to honour as an instance of almost superhuman virtue. It is a voluntary self-abnegation on the part of the Five Princes, who swear to set aside jealousy for ever; an attempt on their part to right the relations between the sexes, and to return to the purer teaching of old times when, as we are distinctly told, "men and women followed their own inclinations without shame or sin." Certainly the record of this union of the Five Brothers to the devoted, almost divine Drâupadi, holds no suspicion of either the one or the other; surely, therefore, it requires neither disguise nor apology.

Thereinafter, amid ever-recurring sweep of furious blasts and counterblasts, ever-changing chances of fortune and misfortune, comes the great gambling scene which, deprived of disagreeable details and properly staged, should make the fortune of any dramatist who could really touch it. A fine scene, truly! Yudishthira, eldest of the Pandu princes, their ruling spirit, the brain, so to speak, of Bhima's strength, Arjuna's skill, Nakula's devotion, Sahadeva's obedience, had been challenged to a gambling bout by his chief enemy, Dhritarâshta's eldest son Duryôdhana. To this, according to the soldier's code of honour, there could be no refusal. But Yudishthira, gambler at heart, would not acknowledge himself beaten. He stakes his riches, his kingdom, his brothers, himself--last of all, his wife.

Losing her, she is sent for to the gambling saloon. She refuses to come. Finally, dragged thither by force, she pleads that Yudishthira, having first gambled away himself, was a slave, and so had no right to stake a free woman. Then ensues a scene of conflicting passions and protest which, once read of, lingers in the mind, rising superior to the certain disagreeable details which undoubtedly disfigure it in the original.

So the story sweeps on and on, ending really with Bhishma's death on the field of battle after a final encounter in which Arjûna, realising that victory is unattainable so long as "the Grandsire" lives, uses Chikandîn, the man-woman, as his shield, and so brings about the defeat of the otherwise invincible Bhishma. The latter, "lying on his bed of arrows," surrounded by all the princes, then proceeds to discourse for long days ("until the sun, entering its northern declension, permitted him to resign his life-breath") on the whole duty of mankind, and especially on the duties of kingship.

These discourses, which in the English translation run to over 2000 pages, are marvellously illuminating. When we read in them doctrines of kingly science which long centuries later were to be re-enunciated by Machiavelli, when we find in them many a theory of modern science forestalled by some bold, theoretical plunge into the Infinite, that Infinite to which "it is impossible to set limits since it is limitless," we may well pause to ask ourselves how much nearer we are to discovering the Great Secret than those were who, nearly three thousand years ago, puzzled themselves over the problem of consciousness, and why, "when the mind is otherwise engaged, the life-agent in the body heareth not."

Have we, even in science, gone much further than the assertion that "Space, which even the Gods cannot measure, is full of blazing and self-luminous worlds?"

Perhaps we have; but of a certainty we cannot outclass the Mâhâbhârata in the imagination with which it treats the Insoluble.

"In the Beginning," we read, "was infinite Space motionless, immoveable. Without Sun, Moon, or Stars, it seemed to be asleep. Then a darkness grew within the darkness, and water sprang to life."

So, gaining force as it goes like some giant wave, the vast epic sweeps on, gathering worthless pebbles and hopeless wreckage, with its thousand facets of bright bold sea, to leave us, after it has crashed over us, bewildered, storm-shaken on the shore, our heads whirling with wild memories of flashing, jewel-set cuirasses, "beautiful like the firmament of night bespangled with stars," of floating veils "like wind-tossed clouds," of celestial voices, "deep as the kettledrums of the skies," of "sparkling showers of keen arrows like the rays of the sun," of "tender, small-waisted maidens," and "mighty, high-souled car-warriors."

It is a marvellous dream, and as one reads it the ceaseless fall of seas upon a shore seems to fill the ear with the eternal message of indestructible life.

The Râmâyana, great though the epic is, and, in a way, more poetical, has none of this storm and stress. As R. C. Dutt, in his "Ancient India," says:--

"On reading it one feels that the real heroic age of India had passed. We miss the rude and sturdy manners and incidents which mark the Mâhâbhârata. The heroes of the Râmâyana are somewhat tame and commonplace personages, very respectful to priests, very anxious to conform to all the rules of decorum and duty, doing a vast amount of fighting work mechanically, but without the determination, the persistence of real fighters. A change has come over the spirit of the nation. It is more polished, more law-abiding, less sturdy, less heroic. In brief, the two epics give us the change which Hindu life and society underwent from the commencement to the close of the Epic age."

Griffiths, in the introduction to his metrical version of the Râmâyana, remarks that one of its most salient features is the complete absence of any mention of "that mystical devotion which absorbs all the faculties," to which we have constant reference in the Mâhâbhârata. The remark is full of critical acumen, and at once differentiates the varying planes on which the two dramas move.

That of Râma and his long-suffering wife Sîta, is, doubtless, the more human of the two; but there is a grandeur about the story of Bhishma before which the former crumbles to commonplace. Still, as R. C. Dutt asserts:--

"There is not a Hindu woman in the length and breadth of India to whom the story of Sîta is not known, and to whom her character is not a model to strive after and to emulate. Râma, also, though scarcely equal to Sîta in the worth of character, has been a model to man for his truth, his obedience, his piety. Thus the epic has been for the millions of India a means of moral education, the value of which can hardly be over-estimated."

Historically, there is little to be gleaned from it beyond the conquest of Southern India and Ceylon. Socially, it shows the accretion of custom, the consolidation of dogma, and the passing of power from the soldier to the priestly caste. Yet even here it is but a very modified Brahmanism of which we catch glimpses, and even caste itself is not as yet crystallised into hard and fast form.

So, with the Râmâyana and some few Purânas which, however, will be better considered in the next chapter, the Epic period closes.

Some few points in it may lay claims to distinct historical basis. The existence of Janaka, King of Kosâla, the father of Sîta, the befriender of wisdom, is so far attested by later writings and by legend, that his personality gains reality; but it is in the crashing, confused welter of the Mâhâbhârata that we must look for a just estimate of what India was like a thousand years before Christ.

THE MARVELLOUS MILLENNIUM

B.C. 1000 to A.D. 1

A millennium indeed! A thousand years of Time which (despite many purely historical events in its latter half, to which return will be made in the next chapter) must be treated, as a whole, as perhaps the most wonderful period in the history of the world. For, just as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries humanity appears to have set its mind on art, and such names as Shakspeare, Dante, Rafael, Leonardo da Vinci, Palestrina, Cervantes, and a hundred others are to be found jostling each other in history, so, during these thousand years, the mind of man throughout the whole world appears to have been set on solving the great secret of Life and Death.

The answer was given in many ways by the Greek and Roman philosophers, by Confucius in China, by Christ in Judea, by Buddha and the great systems of Indian philosophy in Hindustan; and yet the question is still being asked with the old intensity, the old keen desire for answer!

Now, since these thousand years have, in India, left behind them a very remarkable literature which, even in these latter days, is the root of all life and thought in that vast peninsula, it is as well to attempt a slight sketch of the time, as a whole, before embarking on actual history; though to do the latter we shall, after treating of the religious age, have to hark back to the year 620 B.C.

At the commencement, then, of this thousand years, the Aryans were still pushing their way westwards and southwards from the alluvial plains of Northern India.

It seems likely that the tide of their conquest followed that of the retreating sea. However that may be, certain it is that they found before them dark, almost impenetrable, swampy forests, swarming with enemies of all kinds. Who or what these were we have at first small record. Doubtless the human foes belonged to the aboriginal tribes which are still to be found clinging to the far mountain uplands and inaccessible fastnesses which the Aryans did not care to annex. But in the literature of which mention has been made, all and sundry are disdainfully dismissed with the epithet "_Rakshas_," or evil demons.

Behind this shrinking verge of devildom, however, we know that "the children of light" were settling down; towns were springing up, waste land was being cleared and cultivated, schools were being established, and many principalities rising into power. But of all this we have as yet no record at all, until about one-half of the millennium was over. On the other hand, we have exhaustive literary evidence of what the minds of men were busying themselves about, first in the Ûpanishads, and then in the myriad Sûtras or Aphorisms, on every subject, apparently, under the sun, which are still extant.

Regarding the former--of which the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, wrote: "They have been the solace of my life; they will be the solace of my death"--though some of these treatises or essays belong, undoubtedly, to the dying years of the Epic age, they fall far more naturally into place during the opening years of this, the succeeding one. Their bold hypotheses covering all things were the first reaction against the soul-stifling formalisms of the Brahmânas; these, again, being due to the development of the dignity of the priestly class, which followed naturally on the excessive militarism so noticeable in the Mâhâbhârata. Of a truth, its stalwart warriors, for ever engaged in deadly combat and stirring adventures, could as heads of households have had little time for the due performance of domestic ceremonials after the customs of their fathers. Hence the rapid growth of the professional priesthood.

The fatal facility, however, with which speculative thought, after throwing off the shackles of canon and dogma, finds fresh slavery for itself in scientific formalism, is shown by the succeeding Sûtra literature, in which every department of thought and action is crystallised and codified into cut-and-dried form.

A reaction from this, again, is to be found in the succeeding philosophy of Kapîla and his disciples, which must have been promulgated a century or so before the birth of Gâutama Buddha. Frankly agnostic, many of the conclusions of this Sankhya system are to be found in the works of the latest German philosophers. Like theirs it is cold, and appeals not to the masses, but to speculative scholars. Still, it is strange that the very first recorded system of philosophy in the world, the very first attempt to solve the Great Question by the light of reason alone, should differ scarcely at all from the last. The human brain fails now, as it failed then; for Kapîla's doctrine never really overset those of the Ûpanishads, though the system of philosophy founded upon these last (and therefore called the Vedanta) was not to come for many years. But what, indeed, can or could overset the doctrine laid down in these same Ûpanishads, of a Universal Soul, a Universal Self, which is--to use the very words of the text:--

"Myself within the heart smaller than a corn of rice, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than the kernel of a canary seed: myself within the heart greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than heaven. Lo! He who beholds all beings in this Self, and Self in all beings, he never turns away from it. When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who has once beheld that unity? He, the Self, encircles all, bright, incorporeal, scatheless, pure, untouched by evil; a seer, wise, omnipresent, self-existent, he disposed all things rightly for eternal years. He therefore who knows this, after having become quiet, subdued, satisfied, patient and collected, sees Self in Self, sees all in Self. Evil does not overcome him, he overcomes all evil. Free from evil, free from stain, free from doubt, he becomes True Brahman. The wise who, meditating on this Self, recognises the Ancient who dwells for ever in the abyss, as God--he indeed leaves joy and sorrow far behind; having reached the subtle Being, he rejoices because he has obtained the cause of rejoicing."

Such words as these live for ever, a veritable Light in the Darkness of many philosophies.

Yet even the Vedanta teaching failed to satisfy the masses; its atmosphere was too rarefied for them. So about the middle of the millennium a new Teacher arose. Gâutama Buddha was born about the year B.C. 560 at Kapilavâstu, and the followers of the religion of which he was the founder number at this present day nearly one-third of the whole human race.

A magnificent work truly, look at it how we may! Yet it becomes the more astounding when we enquire into the religion itself; for it holds out no bait to humanity. It neither gives the immediate and certain grip on a spiritual and therefore eternal life which the Vedanta promises, neither does it proclaim the personal individual immortality for which the Christian is taught to look.

Yet it holds its place firmly as first favourite with humanity. There are some five hundred million Buddhists, as against some three hundred million Christians; while about the tenth century of our era fully one-half the world's inhabitants followed the teaching of Gâutama.

Why is this? Wherein lies the charm? Possibly in its pessimism, in the declaration that all is, must be, suffering.

"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of Suffering. Birth is suffering, decay is suffering, illness is suffering, Death is suffering.

"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the cause of suffering. Thirst for pleasure, thirst for life, thirst for prosperity, thirst that leads to new birth.

"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the cessation of Suffering. It is the destruction of desire, the extinction of thirst.

"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the Pathway which leads to the cessation of suffering. Right Belief, Right Aspirations, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Exertion, Right-mindedness, Right Meditation."

In these few words lies the whole teaching of Buddhism. To king and beggar alike, the world is evil; there is but one road to freedom, and that must be trodden alike by all. In that road none is before or after others.

Now to the poor, to the oppressed, there is balm in this thought. Lazarus does not yearn for Abraham's bosom! Before all lies forgetfulness, peace, personal annihilation.

This, then, was the teaching which Gâutama Buddha, the son of a king, gave as a gift to his world; and his world, wearied yet once more with formalism, with the ever-growing terrorism of caste and creed, welcomed it with open arms. The progress of the Buddhistic faith was fairly astounding, and half India was converted in the twinkling of an eye. Of the life led by the founder himself much has been written. Many of the incidents bear a strange resemblance to those in the life of Christ. Perhaps none is more beautiful than the story of the woman who applied to Gâutama, begging him to restore her dead child to life. As given in Sir Edwin Arnold's _Light of Asia_, it runs so:--

"Whom, when they came unto the river side, A woman--dove-eyed, young, with tearful face And lifted hands saluted, bending low: 'Lord! thou art he,' she said, 'who yesterday Had pity on me ...

* * * * *

when I came Trembling to thee whose brow is like a god's. And wept, and drew the face-cloth from my babe, Praying thee tell what simples might be good.' ...

'Yea! little sister, there is that might heal Thee first and him, if thou couldst fetch the thing. Black mustard-seed a tola; only mark Thou take it not from any hand or house Where father, mother, child or slave hath died.' 'Thus didst thou speak, my Lord. ... I went, Lord, clasping to my breast The babe grown colder, asking at each hut: "I pray you, give me mustard, of your grace A tola, black," and each who had it gave. But when I asked: "In my friend's household here Hath any, peradventure, ever died? Husband or wife or child or slave?" they said: "Oh, Sister! what is this you ask? The dead Are very many, and the living few." ... Ah sir! I could not find a single house Where there was mustard seed, and none had died.'

* * * * *

"'My sister! thou hast found,' the Master said, 'Searching for what none finds that better balm I had to give thee.... Lo! I would pour my blood if it could stay Thy tears, and win the secret of that curse Which makes sweet love our anguish ... I seek that secret: bury thou thy child.'"

Buddha, it will be observed, answered no questions. He left the insoluble alone. He simply preached that holiness meant peace and love, that peace and love meant pure earthly happiness.

So, even while they accepted the morality of Buddhism, and acquiesced in its negation, the keener speculative minds were still busy trying to find some key to fit the Great Lock.

The Yoga system of philosophy followed on the Sankhya, the Nyaya and the Vaisasika on the Yoga; finally, the two Mimamsa or Vedanta philosophies. Of these the Yoga is merely a repetition, with some alteration, of the Sankhya; the Nyaya--which is to the Hindu what the Aristotelian system was to the Greek, and which is still the school of logic--finds its complement in the scientific and atomic theories of the Vaisasika. This last, which is the first effort made in India to enquire into the laws of physics, is curiously provocative of thought. A Rip-van-Winklish feeling creeps into the mind as the eyes read that all material substances are aggregates of atoms, that the ultimate atom must be simple, that the mote visible in the sunbeam, though the smallest perceptible object, must yet be a substance, therefore a thing composed of things smaller than itself.

Once again the question arises, "How much further have we gone towards solution?"

Of the Vedanta system enough has already been said. It is pure Monism, matter being but a manifestation of the Supreme Energy, the Supreme Soul, the Supreme Self which comprises all things, holds all things, is all things.

So much for the speculative thought of this remarkable age. But when we turn to other subjects, we find the same truly marvellous acumen displayed in almost every field of enquiry.

Panini, whom Max Muller called the greatest grammarian the world has ever seen, lived in the middle of this millennium, and by resolving Sanskrit to its simple roots, paved the way for the Science of Languages. It is strange, indeed, to think of him in the dawn of days discovering what was to be rediscovered more than two thousand years afterwards, and adopting half the philological formulas of the present century.

So with geometry, a science which certainly developed from the strict rules concerning the erection of altars, as the science of phonetics grew from the study necessary to ensure absolutely accurate intonations of the sacred text. Of the former science much is to be found in the Sulva Sûtras; amongst other things, the celebrated theorem that the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the square of the two other sides of a rectangular triangle. This proposition is ascribed by the Greeks to Pythagoras, but it was known in India long before his time, and it is supposed that he learnt it while on his travels, which included Hindustan.

Geometry, however, was not destined to take hold of the Indian mind. The cognate science of numbers speedily took its place, and the acute Asiatic intellect soon evolved Algebra out of the arithmetic which they had rendered of practical use by the adoption of the decimal system of notation.

For all these many discoveries the world is indebted to this marvellous millennium.

Regarding the social life of this time the Dharma Sûtras give us endless laws--which are the originals of later and codified laws--concerning almost every subject under the sun. As every Hindu student (and every Hindu had to be student for a definite number of years) had to learn these Sûtras by heart, it may safely be predicted that they faithfully reflect the general conduct of affairs. They are extraordinarily minute in particular, and from them it may be gathered that life had become much more artificial. Amongst the king's duties is that of "guarding household weights and measures from falsification." It may also be noticed that "the taxes payable by those who support themselves by personal labour differ materially from those paid by mere possessors of property." Any injury, also, to a cultivator's land or to an artisan's trade was punished with great severity, and violence in defence of them was held justifiable. A legal rate of interest was settled, and the laws of inheritance were laid down minutely, as also were those of marriage. Indeed, as Mr R. C. Dutt puts it:--

"Everything that was confused during the Epic period was brought to order--everything that was discursive was condemned; opinions were arranged and codified into bodies of laws, and the whole social system of the Hindus underwent a similar rigid treatment."

Briefly, it was at once an age of keen speculation and rapid crystallisation almost unequalled in the history of any nation. Nor have we to found this estimate of it solely by inference from the literature which it has left behind it. We have other evidence on which to draw. True, the earliest foreign notice of India is that of Hekataios of Miletus, who wrote about B.C. 520, but he seems only to have been aware of its existence. The next is that of some inscriptions of the Persian king, Darius, which may be dated about B.C. 486, while Ktesias of Knidos, who collected travellers' tales about the East, wrote a little later. But Alexander's Indian campaign, which began in the year B.C. 327, brought many Western eyes to wonder at what they saw, and from this time Greece practically gives us the chronology of Hindustan.

Of what these Western eyes saw we gain glimpses in the few fragments of the works of Megasthenes which have withstood the destruction of time. Living, as he did, in the fourth century B.C. as Ambassador at the court of Pâlipûtra, he gives us a picture of the times well worth reading, with a few extracts from which this chapter may well conclude.

"The inhabitants, having abundant means of subsistence, exceed, in consequence, the ordinary stature, and are distinguished by their proud bearing. They are also found to be well skilled in the arts, as might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the very finest water ... they almost always gather in two harvests annually; and even should one of the sowings prove more or less abortive, they are always sure of the other crop. It is accordingly affirmed that famine has never visited India, and that there has never been any general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food.... But, further, there are usages observed by the Indians which contribute to prevent the occurrence of famine among them; for whereas amongst other nations it is usual, in the contests of war, to ravage the soil, and thus to reduce it to an uncultivated waste, among the Indians, on the contrary, by whom husbandmen are regarded as a class that is sacred and inviolable, the tillers of the soil, even when battle is raging in their neighbourhood, are undisturbed by any sense of danger, since the combatants allow them to remain quite unmolested. Neither do they ravage a land with fire nor cut down its trees.... The Indians do not raise monuments to the dead, but consider the virtues which men have displayed in life and the songs in which their praises are celebrated, sufficient to preserve their memory.... All the Indians are free, and not one of them is a slave. The Indians do not even use aliens as slaves, and much less one of their own countrymen.... They live frugally and observe very good order. Theft is of very rare occurrence. The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they seldom appeal to law. They have no suits about pledges or deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses, but make their deposits and confide in each other. They neither put out money at usury or know how to borrow.... Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem.... In contrast to the general simplicity of their style, they love finery and ornaments. Their robes are worked in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wear flowered garments of the finest muslin. Attendants walking behind hold umbrellas over them; for they have a high regard for beauty, and avail themselves of every device to improve their looks....

"Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the market, others of the city, others of the soldiers, while some superintend the canals and measure the land, some collect the taxes, and some construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and the distances....

"Those who have charge of the city are divided into six bodies of five each. The first body looks after industrial art. The second attends to the entertainments of strangers, taking care of them, well or ill, and, in the event of their dying, burying them and forwarding their property to their relatives. The third enquires of births and deaths, so that these among both high and low may not escape the cognisance of Government. The fourth deals with trade and commerce, and has charge of weights and measures. The fifth supervises the sale of manufactured articles which are sold by public notice, and the sixth collects the tithe on such articles. There is, beside the city magistrates, a third body, which directs military affairs. One division of this has charge of the infantry, another of the cavalry, a third of the war chariots, a fourth of the elephants; while one division is appointed to co-operate with the admiral of the fleet and another with the superintendent of the bullock trains used for transporting the munitions of war."

So much for the East before it was gripped by the West. With a full-blown War Office, and a statistical registration of births and deaths, it appears to have gone far on the course of our civilisation.

Concerning the "Brahmanes," as the old writers term the Brahmans, Megasthenes says of them that they live in groves, and

"spend their time in listening to sermons, discourses, and in imparting knowledge to such as will listen to them. The hearer is not allowed to speak, or even to cough, and much less to spit, and if he offends in any of these ways, he is cast out from their society that very day, as being a man who is wanting in self-restraint. Death is with them a very frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb matures, and death as the birth into a new and happy life. They go about naked, saying that God has given the body as sufficient covering for the soul."

One may still hear this teaching given in the mango groves, or in the shade of a banyan tree, throughout this India of the twentieth century.

And it still satisfies the hearers.

THE SESU-NÂGA (and Other) KINGS

B.C. 620 TO B.C. 327

We stand now on the threshold of actual history. Before us lie two thousand five hundred years; and behind us? Who can say? From the far distance come the reverberating thunders of the Mâhâbhârata, still filling the ear with stories of myth and miracle. But the days of these are over. Henceforward, we are to listen to nothing save facts, to believe nothing to which our ordinary everyday experience cannot give its assent.

Who, then, were these Sesu-nâga kings of whom we read in the lists of dead dynasties given in the Purânas--those curious histories of the whole cosmogony of this world and the next, some of which can now be fairly proved to have existed in the very first centuries of our era, and with them an accredited claim to hoar antiquity?

How came these kings by their name Ses, or Shesh-nâga? A name which indubitably points to their connection with the sacred snake, or "nâg."

Were they of Scythic origin? Nothing more likely. Certain it is that Scythic hordes invaded India from the north-east, both during and after the age of the Epics. It is conjectured, also, that they met in conflict with the Aryan invaders from the north-west on the wide, Gangetic plains, possibly close to the junction of the Sone River with the Ganges.

Here, at any rate, lay the ancient kingdom of Magadha, the kingdom of these Ses-nâga kings.

There were ten of these kings, and of the first four, we, as yet, know nothing. But almost every year sees fresh inscriptions deciphered, new coins discovered, and therefore it is not unlikely that some day these mere dry-as-dust names, Sesu-nâga, Sakavârna, Kshema-dhârman, and Kshattru-jâs, may live again as personalities. At present we must be content with imagining them in their palace at Raja-griha, or "The kings abode surrounded by mountains."

It has a curiously distinguished, dignified sound, this description. One can imagine these Ses-nâga princes, their Scythian faces, flat, oblique-eyed, yet aquiline, showing keen under the golden-hooded snake standing uræus-like over their low foreheads, riding up the steep, wide steps leading to their high-perched palaces, on their milk-white steeds; these latter, no doubt, be-bowed with blue ribbons and bedyed with pink feet and tail, after the fashion of processional horses in India even nowadays. Riding up proudly, kings, indeed, of their world, holders of untold wealth in priceless gems and gold--gold, unminted, almost valueless, jewels recklessly strung, like pebbles on a string.

This legend, indeed, of countless uncounted gold, of fair women, and almost weird, rough luxury, lingers still around the very name of Snake-King, and holds its own in the folk-lore of India.

In these days the kingdom of Magadha--so far as we can judge, a Scythic principality--was just entering the lists against that still more ancient Aryan kingdom of Kosâla, of which we read in the Râmâyana. But there were other principalities in the settled country which lay between the extreme north-west of the Punjâb and Ujjain, or Mâlwa. Sixteen such states are enumerated in various literary--chiefly religious--works, which were probably compiled in the fifth century B.C.; but these, again, are mere dry-as-dust names.

The first breath of real life comes with Bimbi-sâra, the fifth Sesu-nâga king. He, we know, conquered and annexed the principality of Anga and built the city of New Rajagrîha, which lies at the base of the hill below the old fort. But something there is in his reign which grips attention more than conquests or buildings. During it, and under his rule, the founders of two great religions gave to the world their solutions of the problem of life. In all probability both Mâhâvîra and Gâutama Buddha were born in Bimbi-sâra's days; certain it is that he must have heard the first teachings of Jainism and Buddhism preached at his palace doors. He is supposed to have reigned for nearly five and twenty years, and then to have retired into private life, leaving his favourite son, Ajâta-sutru, as regent.

And here tragedy sets in; tragedy in which Buddhist tradition avers that Deva-datta, the Great Teacher's first cousin and bitterest enemy, was prime mover. For one of the many crimes imputed to this arch-schismatic by the orthodox, is that he instigated Ajâtasutru to put his father to death.

Whether this be true or not, certain it is that Bimbi-sâra was murdered, and by his son's orders; for in one of the earliest Buddhist manuscripts extant there is an account of the guilty son's confession to the Blessed One (_i.e_., Buddha) in these words: "Sin overcame me, Lord, weak, and foolish, and wrong that I am, in that for the sake of sovranty I put to death my father, that righteous man, that righteous king."

If, as tradition has it, that death was compassed by slow starvation, the prompt absolution which Buddha is said to have given the royal sinner for this act of atrocity becomes all the more remarkable. His sole comment to the brethren after Ajâta-sutru had departed appears to have been: "This king was deeply affected, he was touched in heart. If he had not put his father to death, then, even as he sate here, the clear eye of truth would have been his."

Apart from this parricidal act, the motive for which he gives with such calm brutality, Ajâta-sutru seems to have been a strong, capable king. He had instantly to face war with Kosâla, the murdered man's wife--who, it is said, died of grief--being sister to the king of that country. Round this war, long and bloody, legend has woven many incidents. At one time Magadha, at another Kosâla, seems to have come uppermost. Ajâta-sutru himself was once carried a prisoner in chains to his opponent's capital; but in the end, when peace came, Kosâla had given one of its princesses in marriage to the King of Magadha, and had become absorbed in that empire.

But this was not enough for ambitious Ajâta-sutru. He now turned his attention to the rich lands north of the Ganges, and carried his victorious arms to the very foot of holy Himalaya.

In the course of this war he built a watch-fort at a village called Patali, on the banks of the Ganges, where in after years he founded a city which, under the name of Patâliputra (the Palibothra of Greek writers), became eventually the capital, not only of Magadha, but of India--India, that is, as it was known in these early days.

Patali is the Sanskrit for the bignonia, or trumpet-flower; we may add, therefore, to our mental picture of the remaining four Ses-nâga kings, that they lived in Trumpet-flower City.

For the rest, these two great monarchs, Bimbi-sâra and Ajâta-sutru, must have been near, if not actual contemporaries of Darius, King of Persia, who founded an Indian satrapy in the Indus valley. This he was able to do, in consequence of the information collected by Skylax of Karyanda, during his memorable voyage by river from the Upper Punjâb to the sea near Karâchi, thus demonstrating the practicability of a passage by water to Persia. All record of this voyage is, unfortunately, lost; but the result of it was the addition to the Persian Empire of so rich a province, that it paid in gold-dust tribute to the treasury, fully one-third of the total revenue from the whole twenty satrapies; that is to say, about one million sterling, which in those days was, of course, an absolutely enormous sum.

There is not much more to tell of Ajâta-sutru; and yet, reading between the lines of the few facts we actually know of him, the man's character shows distinct. Ambitious, not exactly unscrupulous, but uncontrolled. A man who, having murdered his father, could weep over his own act, and seek to obliterate the blood-stain on his hands by confessions and pious acts. When Buddha died, an eighth portion of his bones was claimed by Ajâta-sutru, who erected at Râjgrîha a magnificent tope or mound over the sacred relics.

But, if tradition is to be believed, he handed down the curse of his great crime to his son, his grandson, and his great grandson; for the Ceylon chronicle asserts, that each of these in turn were parricides. It is--to use a colloquialism--a tall order; but assertion or denial are alike unproven.

If it be true, there is some relief in finding that the last of these criminal kings--Mâhâ-nundin by name--was ousted from his throne and killed by his prime minister, one Mâhâ-padma-Nanda, who is said, also, to have been the murdered man's illegitimate son by a Sudra, or low-caste woman.

Whether this latter be true or not, certain it is that about the year B.C. 361, or thereabouts, the reign of the Ses-nâga kings ends abruptly. The dream-vision of the steps of old Râjgrîha with Scythian princelings--parricidal princelings--riding up to their palaces on processional horses, or living luxuriously in Trumpet-flower city, vanishes, and something quite as dream-like takes its place.

For in the oldest chronicles we are told that there were but two generations in the next, or Nanda dynasty--viz.: Mâhâ-padma and his eight sons--yet we are asked to believe that they reigned for one hundred and fifty-nine years!

In truth, these nine Nandas seem in many ways mythical, and yet the very confusion and contradictions which surround their history point to some underlying reason for the palpable distortion of plain fact. They are said to have reigned together, the father and his eight sons. The name of only one of these is known, Sumâ-lya; but when Alexander the Great paused on the banks of the Beâs, in the year B.C. 326, he heard that a king was then reigning at Patâliputra, by name Xandrames (so the Greek tongue reports it), who had an army of over two hundred thousand men, and who was very much disliked, because of his great wickedness and base birth. For he was said to be the son of a barber, and as such, "contemptible and utterly odious to his subjects."

This king must have belonged to the Nanda dynasty, and the story, if it does nothing else, proves that the family was really of low extraction. That it gained the throne by the assassination of a rightful king, is also certain. But revenge was at hand. The tragedy was to be recast, replayed, and in B.C. 321 Chandra-gûpta, the Sandracottus of the Greeks, himself an illegitimate son of the first Nanda, and half-brother, so the tale runs, of the eight younger ones, was, after the usual fashion of the East, to find foundation for his own throne on the dead bodies of his relations.

But some four years ere this came to pass, while young Chandra-gûpta, ambitious, discontented, was still wandering about Northern India almost nameless--for his mother was a Sudra woman--he came in personal contact with a new factor in Indian history. For in March, B.C. 326, Alexander the Great crossed the river Indus, and found himself the first Western who had ever stood on Indian soil. So, ere passing to the events which followed on Chandra-gûpta's rude seizure of the throne of Magadha, another picture claims attention. The picture of the great failure of a great conqueror.

THE ANABASIS

B.C. 326 TO B.C. 320

"Some talk of Alexander...."

Who does not know the context? Who also does not think that he knows who Alexander was, who could not, if necessary, reel off a succinct account of his character, his conquests?

And yet, though most know of his Anabasis, how few have really grasped the picturesque points of his grand sweep on India. Who, for instance, has properly appraised and inwardly digested, until it remains as a living picture in the mind's eye for ever, that quaint thirty days' halt of the Macedonian legions on the western bank of the Indus, while on the eastern lay, ripe for plucking, the rich harvest of the fertile plains of India?

It was not a halt of preparation. Hephaistion had already swung the barges across the tumultuous swirls of the great river, and a bridge, unstable, yet firm, lay ready for use. The cohorts were eager. Taxîles, the Indian king, had sent from the Takhsha, or Snake-City, over the water, half a million of tribute, and an advance guard of seven hundred horsemen and thirty caparisoned elephants. For he was wily, and the Western army would aid him against his hereditary enemy the great Porus, or Puar, a representative, doubtless, of the Râjput tribe of that name, who reigned beyond the next river--the Jhelum.

So there was no real need for this prolonged rest, for this fateful pause, ere the West reached out its hand and gripped the East. Still, Alexander deemed it necessary for the purpose, as Arrian puts it naïvely, of "offering sacrifice to the gods to whom he was in the habit of sacrificing."

Wherefore?

He had conquered many other lands. Whence came this hesitation, this desire for divine guidance? And wherefore did Taxîles, sacrificing to the gods to whom he was _not_ in the habit of sacrificing, send over three thousand oxen and ten thousand sheep as victims?

Who can say? All we know is, that the sacrifices were favourable to the crossing, as they were bound to be since Alexander had made up his mind to it. Whereupon he "celebrated a gymnastic and horse contest near the river"; those who took part in it, doubtless, wearing crowns of the ivy leaves which the Macedonian legions, as Arrian writes, had found at Mount Merus to their great delight, "for they had not seen any for a long time. So they eagerly made garlands of it, singing hymns in honour of Dionysus."

It must have been a pleasant rest, a jolly time, those thirty days of February and March spent by the sliding river. Those of us who know Northern India have memories of many such a sojourn in the enchanted no-man's-land of a Punjâb river-bed, where the soil on which the tent is pitched one year may be deep stream the next, and the great solemn cranes stalk amongst the young green wheat, and the flocks of flamingoes show rosy-red in the sunrises. Bright, bracing memories these, full, as it were, of the wild wings of many quaint aquatic birds, full of the deep spoors of the heavy black buffaloes, and the motionless grey logs of bottle-nosed crocodiles.

Alexander's army, however, had no such _mise en scene_. At Attock--about which place the bridge must have spanned the Indus--the river rushes between fixed rocky banks; the uneven country is broken by ravines, or, rather, deep clefts, which look as though they had been split open in the barren, undulating valley by the burning summer heat of the sun. And all around, upon a near horizon, rise, curiously opalescent at all times, whether red by day or white by moonlight, a circle of rocky hills. Elusive hills, distant at one moment, seeming to crush in the valley at another.

One can imagine them rose-red in the dawn, when the order came at last, and Alexander the Invincible closed in grips with his new antagonist.

Plain sailing at first, despite the false alarm of the last day's march to Taxîla, when a complete army in order of battle was seen on the horizon, and startled Alexander into instant dispositions for attack, until this display of force was proved to be an Indian form of honourable reception. The Serpent-City, yielded up to him by its willing ruler without a blow, gave occasion "for more sacrifices which were customary for him to offer."

Once again, however, _not_ customary to "Taxîles the Indian," who must have watched this honouring of strange gods with furtive, wily eyes, thinking the while of Porus, with the whole of his mighty army waiting on the further side of the Jhelum River for this upstart Western conqueror as a spider waits a fly.

Here at Taxîla, also, "the king of the Mountaineer-Indians sent envoys, the embassy including the king's brother, as well as the other most notable men." This is one version of the story. Another is that Alexander fought a pitched battle with the mountaineers, defeating them, of course; but this is negatived by Arrian's distinct assertion that when the conqueror moved Jhelum-wards in May, he left behind him only "soldiers who were invalided by sickness."

In those days Taxîla was a University city, one of the largest in the East--rich, luxurious, populous--noted as the principal seat of learning in Northern India. All that is left of it now is some miles of ruins between Hasan-Abdâl and Rawalpindi, and a few copper and silver pieces, more ingots than coins, punched in quaint, rude devices. To Alexander it was a hospitable resting-place, where king vied with conqueror in lavish generosity of mutual gifting. Golden crowns for the Macedonian and all his friends; caparisoned chargers, Persian draperies, banqueting vessels for the king and courtiers.

Pleasant rain fell also, laying the Punjâb dust, and hastening the flower-buds to bursting.

But behind all the policy and the pleasure, like a low, distant thunder cloud, lay Porus, with an army fifty thousand strong, biding his time beyond the river.

He had to be faced; so, early in May, Alexander, his small force augmented by a contingent from Taxîla, arrived on the banks of the Hydaspes. Very different weather now from what it had been in March. The hot winds were blowing, the rocks and sand were all aglow, and in its widening bed, as the Jhelum debauched from the hills, the river, swollen by the melting of Himalayan snows, showed a turbulent flood, separating him from his enemy, who, with all his army and his huge troop of elephants, could be seen lining the opposite shore.

How to cross to him, how to give the invincible Macedonian cavalry time to recover and re-form after a forced passage, was the problem before Alexander.

He set his camp face to face with his enemy's, and sent back for the boats with which he had crossed the Indus. A veritable burning of the bridge behind him in a way; but Alexander never considered defeat.

The easiest plan would no doubt have been to wait comfortably encamped till October chill should have checked the melting of summer snow; but, once again, Alexander considered no delay.

So there ensued what Arrian terms "the stealing of a passage." Day and night long the sentinels of Porus were given no rest. Flotillas of boats went up and down the river, reconnaissance parties were here, there, everywhere, menacing a ford; and all the while it was being spread about that Alexander, baffled, disappointed, was fast making up his mind to wait till winter.

Yet 16 miles upwards, almost among the mountains, behind a wooded island which shut out the view southward, galleys, rafts, skins stuffed with hay, everything needful for a forced passage was secretly being prepared.

Night after night brought a feint of attack. As Arrian writes:--

"The cavalry was led along the bank in various directions, making a clamour and raising the battle cry ... as if they were making all preparations for crossing the river.... When this had occurred frequently ... Porus no longer continued to move about also; but, perceiving his fear had been groundless, he kept his position."

It was not, however, as Arrian calls it, by "marvellous audacity" only, that Alexander finally succeeded in his object. As one reads the minute precautions, the stringent orders, the foresight displayed for every possible complication, one is forced to acknowledge the master mind of the commander. Small wonder if the very heavens fought for him. It was now July, month of torrential rains, fierce storms; and one of these fell suddenly like a pall over Alexander's forced night march of 16 miles--"The noise of the thunder," Arrian writes, "drowned with its din the clatter of the weapons."

Thus, noisily yet secretly, the position was gained by the 11,000 picked troops led by Alexander in person. The storm passed; the dawn rose, calm and bright, to find the Western soldiers across the stream, crashing through the low undergrowth of what their general deemed was the mainland. For it was July now, and the rains had brought that marvellous luxuriance of sudden life which springs ever from the union of sun and water. So we can imagine the well-greaved Greeks brushing aside the low daphne bushes, and crushing under foot the trailing arches of the ground maidenhair fern. To find disappointment await them, as, standing on a further shore, they realised that they were on an island, that before them lay another formidable channel, swollen by the night's rain. For a while the cavalry could find no ford; when found, it was but a swimming one. Yet even so, dripping, half-drowned, the legions were over and deployed in the open, before any attempt at opposition could be made.

So with Alexander at the head, the West did battle for the first time with the East.

The result was foregone. Outnumbered as it was by nearly five to one, Alexander's force was still one of veterans, and Alexander himself the foremost military genius of his own or any age.

The story, then, of the great battle of the Hydaspes remains as a lesson in warfare, and soldiers of to-day may pore over the sketch map of it in admiration. Here, in this attempt to give Indian history in picturesque form, all minor things, the magnificent charges of the Macedonian cavalry, the desperate courage of the Indians, even the awful carnage wrought by the maddened elephants cooped up within narrow space, all these fade into insignificance before the tale--so seldom told as it should be told--of the meeting of Alexander and Porus after the battle was over in the eighth hour of the day. Let it be told in Arrian's own words.

"When Porus, who exhibited great talent in the battle, performing deeds not only of a general, but of a valiant soldier, observed the slaughter of his cavalry ... and that most of his infantry had perished, he did not depart, as Darius the Persian king did, setting an example of flight to his men.... At last, having received a wound ... he turned his elephant round and began to retire.

"Alexander, having seen him valiant in battle, was very desirous of saving his life. Accordingly, he sent to him first Taxîles the Indian, who, riding up ... as near as seemed safe, bade him ... listen to Alexander's message. But when he saw his old foe Taxîles, Porus wheeled and prepared to strike him with a javelin, and would probably have killed him, if he had not quickly driven his horse beyond reach. But not even on this account was Alexander angry ... but kept sending others in succession, and last of all Meroës the Indian ... an old friend of Porus.

"As soon as the latter heard the message of Meroës, and being overcome by thirst from his wound, he dismounted from his elephant. After he had drank water and felt refreshed, he ordered Meroës to lead him without delay to Alexander....

"And Alexander rode in front of the line with a few of the Companions to meet him, and stopping his horse, admired the handsome figure and the stature of Porus, which reached somewhat about 5 cubits (6 ft. 6 in.). He was also surprised that he did not seem to be cowed in spirit, but advanced to meet him as one brave man would meet another brave man.... Then, indeed, Alexander was the first to speak, bidding him say what treatment he would like to receive.

"'Treat me, O Alexander, in a kingly way!'

"Alexander, pleased, said: 'For my own sake, O Porus, I do that, but for thine, do thou demand what is pleasing unto thee.'

"But Porus said all things were included in that, whereupon Alexander, being still more pleased, not only granted him the rule over his own Indians, but also added another country of larger extent than the former to what he had before. Thus he treated the brave man in a kingly way, and from that time found him faithful in all things."

A fine picture this; one which does not readily desert the mind's eye when once it has found place there. And a fine beginning also to the dealings of the West with the East. Pity that in the years to come the same policy was not always adopted.

In commemoration of this victory a town was founded on the battle-field, and another near the present one of Jhelum, in memory of the horse "Bucephalus," who died there full of years and honour; not, as Arrian says,

"from having been wounded by any one, but from the effects of toil and old age; for he was about thirty years old, and quite worn out with toils. He had shared many hardships and incurred many dangers with Alexander, being ridden by none but the King, because he rejected all other riders."

The triumphal progress through the Doabs, which ensued on Alexander's passage of the Hydaspes, was only checked by the stout resistance of Sangâla, a fortified town as yet unidentified. But with the help of a fresh contingent brought by Porus, it was razed to the ground as a punishment for its stubborn and useless resistance.

And now before the conqueror lay the river Beâs; beyond it, a nation by repute brave, well equipped, more civilised than those through which he had passed like a flaming sword. His own courage rose high; to him "there seemed no end of the wars so long as anything hostile to him remained."

But the spirit of the soldiers had begun to flag. It was now September, the most trying month in Upper India. The lassitude born of long heat disposed the men to listen to the tales of gigantic heroes beyond the water, and so the exhortations of their leader fell on deaf ears. Yet, as given by Arrian, the words were stirring beyond compare.

"If they had come so far, why should they shrink from adding further lands to their Empire of Macedonia? To brave men there was no end to labours except the labours themselves, provided they led to glorious achievements. The distance to the Eastern ocean was not great, and that must be united to their own familiar sea, since the Great Waters encircled the earth. If they went back, the races they had conquered, not being as yet firm in allegiance, might revolt. Oh! Macedonian and Grecian Allies stand firm! Glorious are the deeds of those who undergo labours, who live a life of valour, and die, leaving behind them immortal glory."

But the words only provoked a long silence. And so the flaming sword turned back; but the great fighting heart of its holder seems to have been left behind in the old bed of the Beâs River, where, on its furthest bank, as a memorial of what would have happened but for dull humanity, he erected twelve huge altars--

"equal in height to the loftiest military towers, while exceeding them in breadth; to serve both as a thank-offering to the gods who had led him so far as a conqueror, and also to serve as monuments of his own labours. And after completing them, he offered sacrifices on them" (to the gods to whom he was in the habit of sacrificing, doubtless!), "and celebrated a gymnastic and equestrian contest."

A very different festivity this from that upon the banks of the Indus; and we can imagine the great leader coming back across the wide stream in his oared galley from the useless, unreal ceremonial, with bent head and arms crossed like Napoleon on his way to St Helena.

A picture that fittingly may end the story of Alexander in India; for the record of his retreat is a record of success without aim, beyond the discovery of the Great Sea which encircles the whole Earth.

There is something intensely pathetic in this story of his choice of the river Hydaspes as his means of retreat, of the infinite care for every unit in his force which he showed before that approach of the dawn in late October, when, without confusion, without disorder, he poured a libation out of a golden goblet from the prow of his vessel into the stream, in the name of his gods and the three great rivers, the Jhelum, the Chenâb, the Indus, to whom he trusted; then, doubtless, flinging the cup of gold far into the sliding water, ordered the signal for starting seawards to be given with the trumpet. So in slow, stately, orderly procession (the "noise of the rowing" mingling with "the cries of the captains, the shouts of the boatswains," and the choric "songs of farewell from the natives who ran along the banks, into a veritable battle cry"), he passed down to the Great Ocean. The voyage took a year, and he reached the sea coast not very far from where Kurrachee now stands. Practically, Alexander was in India proper but nineteen months, and the outward result of his flaming sword had passed almost before his premature death at Babylon, a year and a half after he left its shores. But, though India remained outwardly as ever "splendidly isolated," forgetful of the West, she had felt the Hellenic power; she feels it still. In every little village "Jullunder" (Alexander) is still a name wherewith to conjure, and the village doctor still claims, with pride, to follow the Yunâni (Ionian) system of medicine.

That the former should be the case is surely small wonder. India is ever the slave of vitality, and Alexander was vital to the finger-tips. What else could be said of the man who, finding himself checked in an assault on a stronghold, leapt from the bastion into the fort, and, supporting himself against the wall, kept the enemy at bay with his sword, till one by one his followers, maddened by the sight of their beloved leader's danger, followed him in time to rescue him, wounded, fainting?

But the deed which, of all others, Arrian extols as the most noble deed ever performed by Alexander, took place in this wise in the desert. His army, parched with thirst, were stumbling on blindly, led, as usual in times of distress, by Alexander on foot.

To him, weary and exhausted, returned scouts, bearing with them water collected in a helmet with great difficulty from some cleft in a distant rock.

He took it, thanking the bearers, but immediately poured it upon the ground in sight of all. "As a result of this," Arrian writes, "the entire army was reinvigorated to so great a degree that any one would have imagined that the water so lavished had furnished draught for every man."

Truly, though he left little of sovereignty behind him, Alexander left enough pictures imprinted on the soil of Hindustan to furnish forth many a gallery.

THE GREAT MAURYAS

B.C. 321 TO B.C. 184

We come here to one of the landmarks of Indian History. There were seven kings of the Maurya dynasty; of these, two gained for themselves an abiding place in the category of Great World Rulers. Their names are Chandra-gûpta and Asôka. Grandfather and grandson, they made their mark in such curiously divergent ways that they stand to this day as examples of War and Peace.

Concerning Chandra-gûpta's usurpation of the throne of the Nine Nandas, something has already been said. It has also been mentioned that while still almost a lad, he met with Alexander during the latter's brief summer among the Punjâb Doâbs or Two-waters, so called because they are the fertile plains which lie between the rivers.

The identification, indeed, of the Sandracottus mentioned by Greek writers with Chandra-gûpta has been of incalculable value in enabling historians to fix other dates. It has been, as it were, a secure foundation for a superstructure which has grown, and still grows, year by year, and in which every new stone discovered is found to fit accurately in its place.

At the time of this meeting, Chandra-gûpta was a nameless adventurer, a political exile from Magadha. Who he really was seems doubtful. The illegitimate son, it is said, of one of the Nine Nandas by a beautiful low-caste woman (from whose name, Mura, the titular designation of the dynasty Maurya is taken), it is hard to see whence came the young man's undoubted claim to be of the Shesh-nâg, or Serpent race; for the Nandas were as undoubtedly of low-caste origin themselves. It is possible, therefore, that some further history of wrong may have existed to make Chandra-gûpta claim kinship with the Serpent-Kings whom the Nandas had ousted, and hold himself, like any young pretender, a rightful heir.

Be that as it may, he was ambitious, capable, energetic, and seized the first opportunity given him of rising to power.

This came with the news of Alexander's death in B.C. 323. In the instant revolt of conquered India which followed, he took a prominent part, and found himself, in B.C. 321, with an army at his back which, having accomplished its purpose and given its leader paramount power in Punjâb, was eager to follow his fortune elsewhere.

He led it to Magadha, and taking advantage of the Nanda king's unpopularity, slew every male member of the family.

This was the Eastern etiquette on such occasions; the sparing of a brother or an uncle being considered a weakness sure to bring speedy repentance in its train.

Except in as far as the principals were concerned, this revolution appears to have been easy and bloodless. At least so we gather from the play called the "Signet of the Minister," which, though not written till nearly twelve hundred years after the event, seems fairly trustworthy in fact.

In itself it is so studiously realistic, so palpably free from all appeal to the imagination, as to form a marked contrast to all other dramas of the period. It is most likely the first purely political play that ever was written, for, excluding love passages and poetical diction, it deals entirely with the stir of plot and counterplot. Chânakya, the wily Brahman--whose advice had been Chandra-gûpta's best weapon in gaining the throne--realising the insecurity of that throne without the hearty support of the nobles and, above all, of the late King's Prime Minister, sets himself by sheer diplomacy to cut the ground from beneath the feet of his master's enemies, and, succeeding, yields up his signet of office to the appeased Rakahâsa, whose final aside when he accepts it--"Oh! vile Chânakya--say rather, Wise Chânakya, a mine of wisdom inexhaustible! Deep ocean stored with excellent rare gems"--shows that he feels himself overmastered by sheer wit.

But the whole play is well worth reading; some of it--notably the parts in prose-reminding one of Shakspeare.

The remainder of Chandra-gûpta's career, however, was anything but bloodless. It was scarcely possible that it should be so, considering that he began life as a nobody and ended it as undisputed Emperor of India from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. A man of iron nerve, born to conquer, born to rule, he went on his way undeviatingly, holding his own despite the constant threats of his enemies, despite the danger of constant plots; a danger which made perpetual precaution necessary. He never occupied the same bedroom two nights in succession; he never during the daytime slept at the same hour.

A story is told of Chânakya's wily vigilance for his master. He noticed one day a long caravan of ants on the wall of the king's room carrying crumbs. This was enough for Chânakya. Without an instant's hesitation, the royal pavilion was ordered to be set on fire and, as the plaint runs:--

"The brave men who were concealed In the subterrene avenue that led To Chandra-gûpta's sleeping chamber, so, Were all destroyed."

So far as one can gather, Chandra-gûpta's character was not a lovable one; but there can be no question of his power to rule men wisely and well. Megasthenes' account of Pâlipûtra (which applies more to the reign of Chandra-gûpta, during whose lifetime the Grecian was ambassador to the court, than to that of any other monarch) gives us a marvellous picture of the grip which Government kept on the people; and kept for their good. Every department (especially the land revenue and irrigation, both of paramount importance in an Indian State) was legislated for with the utmost care, and though the whole system of government was based on the personal power of the king, it was far from being a mere arbitrary autocracy. His greatest contemporary was Seleukos Nikator, who in addition to ceding Kâbul, Herât, and Kandahâr to him, bestowed on him his daughter in marriage.

Chandra-gûpta died in B.C. 297, having reigned for twenty-four years. A short enough time in which to have accomplished so much; for at the day of his death, the only portion of the vast continent of India which did not acknowledge his rule was a strip of sea coast country about Cuttack, on the Bay of Bengal, and that part of the lessening peninsular which lay southward, beyond a line drawn through Mangalore and Madras.

His son Bindu-sâra reigned in his stead. Of him we know nothing; not even if he was born of the Grecian princess. Only this is on record, that he was extremely fond of figs, and, presumably, of learning; for a letter of his to Antiochus, the son of Seleukos Nikator, asks naïvely for the purchase and despatch of green figs and a professor! To which the dignified reply is still extant that the figs shall be procured and forwarded, but that by Grecian etiquette it was indecorous either to buy or sell a professor!

Bindu-sâra had this merit: he handed on the empire which he had received intact to his son, after a reign of five and twenty years.

So let us pass to Asôka, who, next to Akbar the Great Moghul, was the greatest of all Indian kings. Curiously enough, both these monarchs, Asôka and Akbar, ruled India through its imagination. Both claimed pre-eminence as apostles of a Faith in the Unknown; both appealed to the people on transcendental grounds.

At the time of his fathers death in B.C. 272, Asôka was Viceroy of the Western Province. He had previously ruled in a similar position in the Punjâb, where his headquarters had been Taxîla, the Serpent City. Chosen as Crown Prince from amongst numerous other sons on account of his ability, he had been given this semi-independent control, partly because of his ungovernable temper, which earned him the nickname of "The Furious." He thus seemed to take after his grandfather, Chandra-gûpta, who, with all his many virtues, was unquestionably cruel and arrogant. But Asôka was not to follow in his ancestor's footsteps. Forty years afterward, when his long and peaceful reign, marred by but one war, had come to an end, he had earned for himself the well-deserved title of "The Loving-minded One, Beloved of the Gods." A great change in any man's life; but nothing to the change which his life was to bring into his world.

In B.C. 260, when he came under the mingled influence of Buddhism and Jainism, those creeds were little more than sectarian beliefs confined to the India which had given them birth. When he died, Buddhism had spread through Asia, and had touched both Africa and Europe. Asôka has been called the Constantine of Buddhism, but he was more than that. The creed which brought him comfort was not, as Christianity was in Constantine's time, already a power to be reckoned with, it was simply the belief of a few enthusiasts, a few select souls who sought almost sorrowfully for some solution of the Great Secret.

What was the cause which led the Emperor of India, in his luxurious autocracy, to join himself to this Search? Undoubtedly it was remorse; remorse for the numberless lives needlessly sacrificed, the needless suffering entailed on humanity by the one war of his reign--the conquest of Kalînga, a maritime province on the sea-board of the Bay of Bengal. We have this remorse with us still (as we have so much of the innermost soul and thoughts and aspirations of Asôka) in the marvellous edicts engraven on rock and pillar, which, outlasting Time itself, tell to wild waste and deserted ruins their story of one man's struggle towards the light. One can almost hear the break, as of tears, in the voice that clamours still of "the regret which the Beloved-of-the-Gods felt at the murders and the deaths and the violence."

This regret, then, was the cosmic touch which drove Asôka to find comfort in preaching the doctrine of the sanctity of life. Was it Jainism (amongst the tenets of which this takes first place) which influenced Asôka most, or was it Buddhism? Doctors differ; only this we know, that it was through Asôka's exertions that the latter became the creed of one-third of the human race. For the energy of the man was incomparable. His missionaries were everywhere. "Let small and great exert themselves," is the cry still carven upon stone. "The teaching of religion is the most meritorious of acts.... There is no gift comparable to the gift of religion ... it is in the conquests of religion that the gods takes pleasure." So his yellow-robed monks went forth beyond the confines of his visible, tangible world, and found their way to Egypt, to Greece, to Syria. Their influence is still to be traced in other religions, though no record exists of their labours.

Thus for some thirty years of his life Asôka set himself to alter the faith of the world. Why? And how? Because he believed with a whole heart, not in ritual or dogma, but in something which--hard to be translated--is best rendered by the "Law of Piety." And this his edicts explain to be "mercy and charity, truth and purity, kindness and goodness."

A good creed even in these later days. Not to be improved upon by conformists or non-conformists!

As to how this gospel of good-will was to be preached we learn from these edicts also. It is by example, by tolerance, by "gentleness and moderation in speech."

"Government by religion, law by religion, progress by religion." This was Asôka's rule, and in it he stands alone as the only king who has subordinated all things to a faith which must only be preached in gentleness and moderation.

The first series of fourteen edicts were cut on rocks in various parts of his kingdom, from Attock on the Indus to Cuttack on the Eastern Sea, during the twelfth and thirteenth year of Asôka's reign. They are, therefore, the first-fruits of his conversion. They range over a vast number of subjects, but in each of them there is a personal note which justifies the belief that they are verily the words of the king, and not the mere drafts of some secretary.

On the other hand, the Minor Rock edicts were carven in the last year of Asôka's reign, and thus gain an additional interest from being the farewell of a king to the people whom he had striven so hard to lead into the Way of Peace. In one of them he says that the truest enjoyment for himself has been making men happy by leading them to follow the path of religion, that "with this object he has regulated his life"; yet, though he has "promulgated positive rules, it is solely by a change in the sentiments of the heart that religion makes true progress." The edict ends thus: "So spake Piyadâsi, Beloved-of-the-Gods. Wherever this edict exists on pillars of stone let it endure to remote ages."

It has endured. The Prakrit language in which it was engraven--the spoken language of those times--has passed; but Asôka's words are not of Time, they are of Eternity.

He was a great builder, but few of his buildings remain to this day. What their magnificence must have been we may judge by the topes at Sanchi, where the eye wearies in following the intricacy of ornament, the brain is bewildered in attempting to re-fashion in imagination the whole stupendous structure as it must have been. But here and there some monolithic sandstone pillar still remains, slender, perfect in proportion and execution, still bearing in close-carven character Asôka's message to his people, to the world.

Strange, indeed, that the West knows so little of him! Strangest of all that the twentieth century, with its Peace Party and its Anti-Vivesectionists, should not put Asôka's name as President in perpetuity of their organisations. Asôka, who more than a thousand years upheld the equal rights of animals with men to the King's care, and openly adjured his successors to follow in his steps, and not "to think that a conquest by the sword deserves the name of conquest."

What manner of man Asôka was outwardly, we have no means of knowing; but those who know of his life can picture him in his yellow monk's robe, wearied yet unwearied, pondering over his lifelong problem. "By what means can I lead my people into the path of peace?"

Unwearied because of the spirit which inspires the words, "Work I must for the public benefit"; wearied because, "Though I am ready at any hour and any place to receive petitions, I am never fully satisfied with my despatch of business."

He died in B.C. 231, leaving his empire intact, and was apparently succeeded by a grandson. After him came five kings, all mere names. The duration of the dynasty was 137 years, and as 89 of these belonged to the combined reigns of Chandra-gûpta, Bindu-sâra, and Asôka, the remaining six kings have but eight years apiece. Long enough, however, to disintegrate, to dissipate the vast empire of Asôka. So much so, that before continuing the story of what may be called the central kings of India, it is necessary to give a side-glance at the outlying provinces where, on the removal of Asôka's firm grip on Government, various minor dynasties began to rise into a power superior to that of Magâdha.

THE OUTLYING PROVINCES

B.C. 231 TO A.D. 45

A growing tide as it nears the springs claims more and more of the shore at each rise and fall. So it was with the tide which on Asôka's death set in around his throne.

On the north-western frontier, that battle-ground of India, there had been peace since Chandra-gûpta wrested half Ariana from the grip of Seleukos Nikator. But the country itself had remained more or less under Hellenist influence. Antiochus, Demetrios Eukratides, such are the names of the passing rulers of whose existence we know by the multitude of coins which form almost their only history.

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 Kadphîses 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 Asôka'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-gûpta'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 Kandahâr, and Demetrios, his son, in B.C. 190, following his example, captured both the Punjâb 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 Beâs, which had defied his predecessor, actually threatened the capital of Pâlipûtra 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 Sâkas, who, driven from behind by the following tribe, the Yuehchi, overwhelmed Bactria, forced their way into the Punjâb, and penetrated as far south as Mathura, while another section founded a Sika dynasty at Kathiawâr. 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 Habbân, 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 Sâkas, 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 Asôka 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 Kalînga to revolt also. The capital of the Andhra kingdom appears to have been an unidentified city called Sri-Kâkulum, 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 Hâla, 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 _dévote_, 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 Vikramadîtya? Vikramadîtya 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 Punjâb 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! Vikramadîtya 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! Vikramadîtya, 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 Vikramadîtya slew the foul fiend.

What does it matter whether he was Vikramadîtya 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 Græco-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 Taxîla. 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 Kadphîses, the first Kushân 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 Punjâb and the Indus valley was deferred until Kadphîses I. had been gathered to his fathers after a reign of forty years, and his son, Kadphîses 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 Kushân kings, as these leaders of the wanderers are called.

On the death of the second Kadphîses, one Kanîshka 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 Kanîshka 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 Kadphîses II., which is found also in the innumerable coinage of Kanîshka; 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 Kanîshka, of Kadphîses, 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 Vikramadîtya! 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 Kanîshka, 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 Asôka, 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 Pâlipûtra. 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 Kanîshka's name are the wonderful sculptures which of late years have been discovered in such quantities in the Hashtnûgar district, and elsewhere. They are known, generically, as the Gandhâra 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 Græco-Roman school, which at this period of the world's history was nearly cosmopolitan.

Kanîshka is also to be remembered for the Great Buddhist Council he convened, in imitation, apparently, of Asôka. 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 Kanîshka 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, Hûshka, Jûshka, and Kanîshka, 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 Huwûshka, or Hûshka.

Another glimpse comes to us of one Vâsu-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 Kushân 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 GÛPTA EMPIRE

A.D. 308 TO A.D. 450

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To return to history.

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

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

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

THE WHITE HUNS AND GOOD KING HARSHA

A.D. 450 TO A.D. 648

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 2: This assemblage, or fair, still exists, under the name of the Mâgh-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."

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

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

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

CHAOS

A.D. 700 TO A.D. 1001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Map: India to A.D. 1000]