THE HISTORY OF INDIA AND
ITS STUDY
I
India as she is is a problem which can only be read by the light of Indian history. Only by a gradual and loving study of how she came to be, can we grow to understand what the country actually is, what the intention of her evolution, and what her sleeping potentiality may be.
We are often told that Indian literature includes no histories. It is said that the Rajatarangini in Kashmir, the Dipawamsa and Mahawamsa in Ceylon, and the records made after their accession to power by the Mohammedans are the only real works of history which she possesses. Even if this be true—and we snail be better able to discuss the question in a generation or two—we must remember that India herself is the master-document in this kind. The country is her own record. She is the history that we must learn to read. There are those who say that history as a form of literature can never survive the loss of political power, and that this is the reason why India has not more works of an accurate and dynastic character. Those who urge this believe that at each new epoch in her history vast numbers of chronicles belonging to the past have been destroyed. May be. On the other hand, we may find in our family pedigrees the counterpart and compensation for this feature of other national literatures. The little band of devoted scholars who are already at work on the history of Bengal tell us that their great trouble is to keep pace with their material. It pours in upon them day after day. The difficulty is to keep today's opinion so fluid and receptive that it shall not conflict with, or be antagonistic to, to-morrow's added knowledge. There may not at the moment be in our inheritance from the past many formal works of history. But perhaps the swimmer, who knows the joy of the plunge into deep waters and strong currents, is glad. Such minds feel that they have abundance of material for the writing of history, and are thankful indeed that this has been left for them to do.
It will be from amongst the records of home and family-life that light .will be shed upon the complete history of Bengal. It will be by searching into caste origins and tribal traditions that real data will be gathered for estimating the antiquity of processes. It is said that an overwhelming proportion of the higher-caste families of Bengal came from Magadha. If this be so, it is necessary to assume that there was at a certain time a whole-sale evacuation of Magadha. This would agree so well with the facts of history—the removal of the capital to Gour, on the destruction of Pataliputra, and the immense cultural potentiality of the Bengali people — that the suggestion cannot fail to form a dominant note in subsequent research. Such research must for some time be of a deeply inductive character. That is to say, it will proceed by the accumulation of particulars. This process is the ideal of modern science, and it may be said that so arduous and so against the natural appetite of the human mind is it, that few there be that attain unto it. Yet as an ideal its greatness is unquestionable. Conclusions reached by careful gathering of facts without bias towards one or reaction against another theory are incontrovertible. For this reason anyone who can bring forward one fact out of the far past, however private or circumscribed may seem its significance, so long as it is unknown and certain, is doing a service to historians. For progress must for some time depend upon this accumulation. We must investigate the elements in order to come at true concept^ of the whole.
When we have reached a new fact, the next effort should be to relate it to known central events. We know for instance that capitals changed in Bengal from Pataliputra to Gour, and from Gour to Vikrampur. These transitions could not take place without immense social consequences. The ruins of Behar mark the long struggle of Bengal against invasion. This fact belongs to her military history. But another record is found in her industrial development. The transfer of government from the old Hindu centre of Vikrampur to the Mohammedan capitals of Dacca and Murshidabad, meant, in its turn, great changes in the direction of arts and crafts. It would be marked by new tendencies in the matter of taste, the old artistic power exerting itself to meet new standards. We must accustom ourselves to the psychological analysis of ornament and the historical and geographical placing of works of art, in order to understand the immense influence of great political events upon private life and interests. Architecture, music, and poetry are things higher than the concrete industrial crafts of home and household life, yet marked, no less surely, with the era to which they belong. By learning to refer everything to its own time and to the state of mind that gave it birth, we build up in ourselves a wonderful readiness for the graver and more serious aspects of history. We learn too that lesson which botanists, zoologists, and geologists 'have had during the last century to learn and teach, namely, that things which are found together may have taken wide distances of space and time to produce. The poems of Vidyapati and Ram Mohun Roy may stand side by side in our hymn-books, but what travail of the human spirit lies between the making of the two! In ages of normal growth a new mode, in building, or graving, or thinking, is born but slowly, and goes much deeper than we can imagine in these degenerate days of trumpery and passing fashions. No one who has been in the Fort of Agra, and noted the styles of using black and white marble against red sandstone, distinctive of the reigns of Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jehan, could afterwards make a mistake as to which of these a particular pattern must be assigned to. The designs appear side by side at Agra, yet it took three reigns to make them possible.
The year, as we go through it, constitutes another kind of historical record. The festivals of the old village life which follow each other in such quick and delightful succession throughout the twelve or thirteen moons of the solar year, are not all effects of some single cause. On the contrary, the Car-festival of July hails from Buddhism, and has the great metropolis of its observance at Puri on the Orissan coast. But Janmashtami belongs to the Vaishnavism of Krishna, and turns our eyes in a very different direction, to Mathura and Brindaban. The Dewali Puja, again, connects us on the one side with the famous Japanese Feast of Lanterns, and on the other with Latin and Celtic anniversaries of the souls of the dead. How different are the thought-worlds out of which spring inspirations so various as all these! How long a period must each have had, in order to win its present depth and extent of influence! The very year as it passes, then, is a record of the changing ideas that have swept in succession across the Indian mind. It is a characteristic of India that almost every great outstanding thought and doctrine has somewhere or other a place devoted to its maintenance and tradition. This brings us to the thought of the geographical synthesis. The whole of India is necessary to the explanation of the history of each one of its parts. The story of Krishna comes from the Jumna, that of Rama from Ayodhya. Other elements may not be so easily assignable to their places of birth, but it is quite certain that when studied hard enough from that point of view each will be found to have its own definite area of origin. India is at once the occasion and the explanation of the web of Indian thought. But yet, throughout Bengal at any rate, there is a certain definite agreement as to which elements shall be included in the list of yearly celebrations, and in what order. Not all the great things of Indian memory are commemorated thus. There has evidently been a certain selection made and a certain rule imposed by some one or other at some definite time. Throughout Bengal there is no great disagreement as to the festivals and the order in which they occur. The selection must have been made therefore by some person, or body of persons, whose influence was universal in the province. It is a conception that penetrates everywhere, therefore the shaping pressure of this all-pervading influence must have been long-continued. It may have lasted perhaps for centuries. It does not seem to have been a personal influence, for individuals change their policy of government under caprice or circumstance from generation to generation. This would seem rather to have been a steady concensus of opinion, a strong vested interest uniformly exerted in a certain direction. But the complexity of the matter ruled upon, would point to some central seat of counsel and decision again, with as little that was purely personal in its authority as it is possible to imagine. Lastly, whatever was the source of deliberation, it is clear that there must have been a consolidated royal authority to give its support to the decisions of this centre, without flinching or changing, throughout the formative period. Only by a combination of all these conditions can we account for the uniformity and regularity with which so complex a yearly calendar is worked out, from one end of Bengal to the other.
If we wish to be clear about the element of deliberation, let us look, for example, at the Holi festival. In the observance of this day three different factors are distinctly traceable. First, there is a strain of prehistoric Eros-worship, as seen in the villages, in the use of abusive language to women and in the fact that these in their turn are privileged on that day to beat the lords of creation. The conceptions which belong to this phase of the celebration of the full moon of Phalgun must be extremely ancient, and consequently we must look for their analogues and correspondences amongst widely separated branches of the Aryan family, amongst Greek festivals of Love and Spring, for example, in Roman Saturnalia, Mediterranean Carnivals, and even so lately as in the old-fashioned Valentine's Day of English childhood.
That the birth of Chaitanya took place on this very day of Holi Puja, thus determining another of its associations, may seem to some of us an accident. But it was no accident that attempted to interpret the festival in terms of Krishna-worship. Some phase of Hinduism—to which, in the elaborateness of its civilisation, the thought of frank Eros-worship was as revolting and incomprehensible as now to ourselves—some such phase took into its consideration this festival, and decided to reinterpret each of its games and frolics in the light of the gambols of Krishna with the cowherds in the forest of Brindaban. The red powder of the spring-time thus became the blood of the demon Metrasur slain by the Lord. It was natural that the young peasants, under the excitement of danger just escaped, should "blood" one another, and should yearly thereafter burn the effigy of Metrasur in celebration of their deliverance. We can almost hear the voices of those who made the ingenious suggestion!
In the Holi-puja, then, as an instance, we can trace the efforts of some deliberately Hinduising power. This power, it is safe to suppose, is the same that has determined the sacred year as a whole. As a power it must have been ecclesiastical in character, yet must have lived under the aegis of a powerful throne. What throne was this? A very simple test is sufficient to answer. Those comparatively modern institutions which are more or less universal to the whole of India, must have derived their original sanction from Pataliputra. Things which are deeply established, and yet peculiar to Bengal, must have emanated from Gour. One of the most important points, therefore, is to determine the geographical distribution of a given observance. In this fact lies the secret of its age.
Historical events as such have never been directly commemorated in India. Yet perhaps, had Guru Govind Singh in the Punjab or Ramdas of Maharashtra lived in the time of the empire of Gour, he would have obtained memorials at the hands of Bengali Hinduiim. The fact that none of their age has done so shows that the calendar was complete before their time. Even Chaitanya, born in Bengal itself and a true product of the genius of the people, is scarcely secure in the universal synthesis. His veneration, like that of Buddha, is overmuch confined to those who have surrendered to it altogether. But if in the intellectual sense we would fully understand Chaitanya himself, it is necessary again to study the history of India as a whole, and to realise in what ways he resembled, and in what differed from, other men of his age. What he shared with all India was the great mediaeval impulse of Vaishnavism which originated with Ramanuja and swept the country from end to end. That in which his Vaishnavism differed from that of the rest of India represents the characteristic ideas of Bengal under the strong individualising influence of Gour and Vikrampur.
In all that lies around us then, we may, if our eyes are open, read the story of the past. The life we live to-day has been created for us by those who went before us, even as the line of sea-weed on the shore has been placed there by the waves of the tides now over, in their ebb and flow. The present is the wreckage of the past. India as she stands is only to be explained by the history of India. The future waits for us to create it out of the materials left us by the past, aided by our own understanding of this our inheritance.
II
If India itself be the book of Indian history, it follows that travel is the true means of reading that history. The truth of this statement, especially while the published renderings of our history remain so inadequate and so distorted, ought never to be forgotten. Travel as a mode of study is of infinite importance. Yet it is not everything. It is quite possible to travel the world over and see nothing, or only what is not true. We see, after all, only what we are prepared to see. How to develop the mind of the taught so that it shall see, not what its teacher has led it to expect, but the fact that actually passes before the eyes, is the problem of all right scientific education. In history also, we want to be able to see, not the thing that would be pleasant, but the thing that is true. For this we have to go through a strenuous preparation.
With a few of the counters of the game, as it were, we take it for granted that one is already familiar. The great names of Indian history—Buddhism, Saivism, Vaishnavism, Islam—mean something to one. Gradually each student makes for himself his own scale of signs by which to compare the degrees of this or that quality that interests him. He chooses his own episode, and begins to see it in its proper setting. Behar, from its geographical and ethnological position, cannot fail to be one of the most complex and historically interesting provinces in India. In studying Behar, then, we early learn the truth of the dictum of the late Purna Chandra Mukherji, and whenever we find a tamarind, mentally substitute by way of experiment a bo-tree; or when we come across a rounded hillock with the grave of a/zV on the top, convert it into a stupa, and make it a Buddhist centre.[1] If we do this and cultivate the habit of summing up our impressions, we shall be led to many wonderful and unexpected conclusions about the distribution of population at the Mohammedan invasion, the strength and forms of Buddhism, and so on.
But one of the master-facts in Indian history, a fact borne in upon us more deeply with every hour of study, is that India is and always has been a synthesis. No amount of analysis—racial, lingual, or territorial—will ever amount in the sum to the study of India. Perhaps the axioms of Euclid are not axioms after all. Perhaps all the parts of a whole are not equal to the whole. At any rate, apart from and above all the fragments which must be added together to make India, we have to recognise India herself, all-containing, all-dominating, moulding and shaping the destinies and the very nature of the elements out of which she is composed. The Indian people may be defective in the methods of mechanical organisation, but they have been lacking, as a people, in none of the essentials of organic synthesis. No Indian province has lived unto itself, pursuing its own development, following its own path, going its way unchallenged and alone. On the contrary, the same tides have swept the land from end to end. A single impulse has bound province to province at the same period, in architecture, in religion, in ethical striving. The provincial life has been rich and individual, yet over and above it all India has known how to constitute herself a unity, consciously possessed of common hopes and common loves. Thus in the pursuit of epochs and parts we must never forget the Motherland behind them all. In remembering her and turning to her, again and again we shall find the explanation that had baffled us, discover the link that we required.
We must not be cowed too easily by proofs that such and such a cherished idea had a foreign or semi-foreign origin. In this world there is no such thing as real originality. Some mind more powerful than others breaks up common symbols into their elements and recombines these in an unexpected fashion. This is the whole of what we call originality. The proof of a mind's vigour lies in its ability to work upon the materials it meets with. What is true of persons is true in this re- spect of nations. Some achievements, because we do not know their history, appear unique, solitary, miraculous. In reality "civilisations like religions are a web; they are not statues or salon-pictures, great creations of individual genius. If we could unveil the spectacle of the genesis of Greece, we should find links between common and uncommon in every department of her extraordinary output, and much that now seems unaccountable for its beauty or its boldness would then appear inevitable. The fact that Egypt, Assyria, and the East itself were all within hail, had more to do with the peculiar form taken by the Greek genius than we are npw prepared to grant. If so, the actual glory of Hellenic culture lay in the distinctiveness of its touch, and the energy of its manipulation, of the materials that came its way. Perhaps above even these qualities was a certain faculty of discrimination and organisation in which it excelled. But in any case the Greek race would not have produced the Greek civilisation in any other geographical or ethnological position than the one which they happened to occupy. The utmost that can be said in praise of any special people is that they have known how to give a strong impress of their own to those materials which the world of their time brought to their door. If this be the high-water mark then of national achievement, what is there to be said for that of India? Has she, or has she not, a touch of her own that is unmistakable? Surely it was a knowledge of the answer that led us to this question. Even in decorative matters the thing that is Indian cannot be mistaken for the product of any other nationality. Who can fail to recognise the Indian, the Assyrian, the Egyptian, or the Chinese touch in, for example, the conventionalising of a lotus? .In form, in costume, in character, and above all, in thought, the thing that is Indian is unlike any un-Indian thing in the whole world. For the mind that tends to be depressed by the constant talk of Indian debts to foreign sources, the best medicine is a few minutes' quiet thought as to what India has done with it all. Take refuge for a moment in the Indian world that you see around you. Think of your history. Is it claimed that some other people made Buddhism? Or that Shiva with his infinite renunciation was a dream of Europe? No : if India shared a certain fund of culture elements with other peoples, that is nothing to be unhappy about. The question is not, where did they come from? but what has she made out of them? Has India been equal to her opportunities at every period? Has she been strong enough to take all that she knew to be in the world at each given period, and assimilate it, and nationalise it in manner and use? No one in his senses would deny this of India. Therefore she has nothing of shame or mortification to fear from any inquiry into culture origins.
This nightmare being disposed of, there is still another. The Indian mind can hardly help making questions of antiquity into partisan arguments. Perhaps this is natural; but in any case it is a great barrier to the popularising of real historical inquiry. The mind of the student ought to be absolutely open on the point of dates. If there is the least bias in favour of one direction or the other, it is just like a weight on ane side of a balance. Fair measure does not come that way ! As a matter of fact, the strictly historical period in India may be comparatively short, something less than thirty centuries, but there can be no difference of opinion as to the vast length of the total period of evolution. The oldest problems of the world's history have their field of study here. Those sociological inquiries that lie behind all history must be pursued in India. History proper only emerges when a certain group of people becomes sufficiently consolidated to carry on common activities in a direction and with a motive that we may call political. Man as the political animal is the subject of history. This is a stage that will be arrived at soonest by communities which are relatively small and compact, and inhabit clearly defined geographical confines, on the frontiers of other populations not greatly unlike themselves in civilisation. Thus Egypt, Nineveh, and Babylon could not but arrive sooner than India on the historical stage in virtue of their very nearness to one another. But this does not necessarily mean that they could compete with her in actual age, or in the depth of the tendencies making for their evolution. And in any case, while these are dead, India lives and develops still, responds still to all the living influences of the world about her, and sees before her, as the individual unit that her development has made her, a long vista of growth and perfection to be achieved. The art and architecture of Egypt date from four thousand years before the Christian era. Crete had a story almost as early. Who shall say what was the age of Babylon? But we must remember that when all these were already mature, India was still a-making. A long childhood, say the biologists, is the greatest proof of evolutionary advancement. Egypt, with her exceptional climate, made art and architecture the supreme expression of her national existence. India put her powers, perhaps as long ago, into the dreams and philosophy of the Upanishads. Cities would have crumbled into dust, temples and carvings would have succumbed in a few aeons to the ravages of time. Human thought, written on the least permanent and most ephemeral of all materials, is nevertheless the most enduring of all the proofs of our antiquity. Who shall say that we have not chosen the better part? Every generation destroys the parchment of our record, and yet a million generations only make its truth the more assured. We can hardly dig so deep into the past as to come upon the time when in Egypt, or Greece, or Crete, or Babylon, the name of India had not already a definite sound and association. At the very dawn of history in Europe, her thought and scholarship were already held in that respect which is akin to awe. His old tutor in the fourth century before Christ begs Alexander to bring him an Indian scholar! There is no n&ed for discontent in the Indian mind, if those activities of which the historic muse can take account, activities intertribal, international, political, began for her comparatively late. India, alone of all the nations of antiquity, is still young, still growing, still keeping a firm hold upon her past, still reverently striving of it to weave her future. Are not these things enough for any single people?
At the same time, when these conditions are loyally recognised and accepted, we cannot doubt that the result will be a continual snatching of new morsels out of the night of the prehistoric to be brought within the lighted circle of history. This will happen still more constantly if students try to saturate themselves with the social habit of thought, that is to say, if they will accustom themselves to thinking of the human and psychological facts behind events. Only this habit can teach them when to postulate tribes and peoples for the individual names in ancient ballads, or when to read a war of migration and conquest for a battle. Only this can give them a sense of scale with which to measure the drift and tendency of the forces coming into play during certain epochs. To multiply here and divide there is very necessary, yet is only to be done rightly by one who is accustomed to think sociologically.
The sociological habit is essential also if we would be in a position to gauge the relations of India to the incomers from beyond her border. Few people know that in the beginnings of human society woman was the head of the family, and not man. Queens, who seem to us now something of an anomaly, represent ai] institution older than that of kings. In certain nations the memory of this ancient time of mother-rule is still deeply ingrained. Others, like the Aryans, have long ago passed out of it. And some fragmentary communities in the world remain still more or less on the border line between the two. Only a deep familiarity with the traces of these different phases can give us a real clue to the history of Asia. Only a grasp of that history will enable us to compute distances of time truly. How old a given institution is it may be impossible to say in terms of years, but we can tell at a glance whether it is matriarchal or patriarchal, or by what combination of two societies it may have arisen. The thought of goddesses is older than that of gods, just as the idea of queens is prior to that of kings.
The history of common things and their influence on our customs is a study that follows naturally on that of human society. Much of this we can make out for ourselves. For instance, we can see that the ass must be older than the horse as a beast of burden. Once upon a time the world had no steeds, no carrier, save this useful if humble servant of man. Let us dream for a while of this. Let us study the present distribution of the donkey, and find out his name in various Aryan languages. All that the horse now is, as a figure in poetry, the ass must once have been. Noblest, fleetest, bravest and nearest to man of all the four-footed kind, men would set no limit to their admiration for him. The Goddess Sitola rid^s upon a donkey, because, in that dim past out of which she comes, there were as yet no horses tamed by man. There was once no steed so royal as the milk-white ass, which is now relegated here to the use of dhobies, while numerous are the allusions to its use, and the glory thereof, in the older Jewish scriptures. The very fact that it appears in the account of the Royal Entrance, in the Christian story, points to the old association of splendour clinging longer to the name of the ass in Arab countries than elsewhere, and in harmony with this is the fact that it is widely distributed throughout Africa. After the horse was once tamed, men would never have taken the trouble necessary to reclaim the ass, and from this alone we may judge of its great antiquity. At the same time we may form an idea of the time and effort spent on the gradual domestication of wild animals, when we read the reiterated modern opinion that the zebra cannot be tamed. Primitive man would not so easily have given up the struggle. But then he would not either have expected so quick and profitable a result. In the story of the commonest things that lie about us we may, aided by the social imagination, trace out the tale of the far past.
Thus the mind comes to live in the historic atmosphere. It becomes ready to learn for itself from what it sees about it at home and on a journey. The search for stern truth is the best fruit of the best scientific training. But the truth is not necessarily melancholy, and Indian students will do most to help the growth of knowledge if they begin with the robust conviction that in the long tale of their Motherland there can be nothing to cause them anything but pride and reverence. What is truly interpreted cannot but redound to the vindication and encouragement of India and the Indian people.
- ↑ To the Mohammedan the tamarind tree is holy, and the fact that on entering Behar he would plant it in the place of the do, or take the trouble to build a pir's tomb on a rounded hillock, goes far to show that the sacred character of the tree and hill was still at that moment maintained in Behar. That is to say, Buddhism was remembered.