58 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
Arya Somaji and Hindusthani Rajput pour down the waterway of the Ganges, to go no farther east than the twin-cities of Patna and Bankipore, and these stand face to face with the unified and Sanskritic civilisation of Lower Bengal. All sorts of modified institutions, representing mutual assimilation, arise along the border-line. Costume, language, manners, and habits of life are all full of this compromise. The old standard of culture, which even yet is not wholly dead, along a line stretching from Patna through Benares to Lucknow, required of the highest! classes of Hindus the study of Persian as well as Sanskrit, and one of the most liberal and courtly types of gentlehood that the world has seen was moulded thus.
The fertile country of Bengal, closely settled and cultivated, organised round the monarchy of Gour, and claiming a definite relation to Benares and Kanauj as the sources of'its culture, cannot, at any time within the historical period, have been susceptible of chaotic invasion or colonisation. The drift of unorganised races could never pass through Behar, which must always have been and remains to the present the most cosmopolitan province of India. It has doubtless been this close contiguity of highly-diversified elements within her boundaries that has so often made Behar the birthplace of towering political geniuses. The great Chandra Gupta, his grandson Asoka, the whole of the Gupta dynasty, Shere Shah, and finally Guru Govind Singh, are more than a fair share of the critical
