India Through the Ages Part 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahomed was an Arab, but was in every way unlike his race. A posthumous son, he had "inherited from his mother a delicate and extremely impressionable const.i.tution, 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, he should have claimed inspiration, and claimed it militantly. The time was ripe for a revival. Religion was being discussed on all sides, and Mahomed having, it is said, gained nine converts by his first vision, set to work to gain more. Ere he died all Arabia frankly followed his teaching. This, however, was not the result of what Asoka advocated as the only legitimate method of a mission, for "example, tolerance, gentleness and moderation in speech"

have never found much place in Mahomedan proselytising; the rather fire and sword, a sharp blade held to the throat that hastily gabbles the Kalma or Mahomedan creed.

And yet it is a faith which has held, which still holds, its own, and which was to be responsible for much in the future history of India.

Like all faiths, however, it has gone far beyond its founder, and it is doubtful for how much of the Mahomedanism of to-day the seer-prophet of A.D. 610 is really responsible. Within six years of his death his successors had carried their version of the dreamer's thoughts to Syria and Egypt. Ere Harsha died the whole of Persia as far east as Herat was added to the Arab empire. Thence in the slow centuries it drifted towards India; for the l.u.s.t 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 a.s.sa.s.sination of Ali, the fourth _kalifa_--he was son-in-law of the Prophet--and the subsequent murders of his two sons Hussan and Hussain, was productive of a strife which lasts to the present day between the rival sects of _Shiahs_ and _Sunnis_.

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

[Map: India to A.D. 1000]

PART II

THE MIDDLE AGE

CAMPAIGNS OF THE CRESCENT

A.D. 1001 TO A.D. 1200

Part I

For close on these two hundred years the northern plains of India were a battle-field. Winter after winter, as the sun's power declined, and the curious second spring began of cold-weather crops and fruits and flowers, which to this day make the Punjab seasons hover between the tropics and the temperates, there debouched from the snow-clad hills, all along the western and north-western frontier of India, long files of wild-looking hors.e.m.e.n, followed by camels, by foot soldiers; and somewhere, in their midst always, was the green flag of the Prophet, with its over-riding, overbearing crescent, telling its tale of rising power; the crescent which is an apt symbol of a fighting faith.

What tempted these hardy northern folk into the wide plains of India?

Was it, indeed, zeal for Souls? Hardly. By the way, as a sort of salve to conscience, such zeal was good to break an idol or two, or an idolater's head; but _au fond_, the money bags outweighed all other reasons for these recurring raids.

For during those three centuries of Chaos, during the dark ages of degeneracy, India had grown rich-inordinately rich. Overlaid, and yet again overlaid with finikin fanciful ornamentations, almost incoherent in their diffuse discursive details, the temples were perfect mines of wealth; in some cases of useless, buried treasure, since in the gradual downfall OF the Hindu nation at large, the privileged cla.s.s of Brahmans had closed their grip even on the power of the princes. The only thing which remained comparatively untouched, as in India it has ever remained untouched, being the slow-moving ma.s.s of the peasantry, who, willing bondsmen to Mother Earth, took no heed of anything save famine.

The first swoop for plunder was made by one Mahmud, King of Ghuzni, in November A.D. 1001. He must have entered India by the Khyber Pa.s.s, for on the 27th of that month, near Peshawar, he met and defeated King Jaipal of Lah.o.r.e. One can imagine the contest. The long-nosed, long-curled, long-bearded Ghuznivites, rough and ready in their skin-coats, their burly bosoms aflame with covetousness for creed and gold, their guttural throats resounding with the war-cry of Islam: "Kill! Kill! For the Faith!" And on the other side, the clean-shaven, oiled, scented Hindus lax with long centuries of ease, yet still full of pride, full of high courage.

It was a foregone conclusion, despite the mailed elephants and the elaborate old War Office dispositions and compositions of corps and _cadre_ which had come down, we may be sure, from Chandra-gupta's days. For once the East gets hold of a thing, it sticks to it.

It was new blood against old--a new faith against one so ancient that it had almost been forgotten. Almost, not quite, as the story shows of what Jaipal did, when the Mahomedan conqueror, driven back to the cool by the approach of a new summer, carelessly gave the royal prisoner--whom he had dragged about with him in his victorious raid--a contemptuous freedom. But ere this time came, Mahmud of Ghuzni had to set one of his many marks--he invaded India no less than twelve times--as far south in the Punjab as Bhattinda, a town in the Patiala State. A marvellous place this even nowadays, set as it is amid deserts of sand, patched with green grain-fields. The low, insignificant city seems lost in the old fort; a perfect mountain of a place, visible for miles and miles, a rose-red ma.s.s of sun-scorched bricks with white-edged, crenulated parapets so quaintly stern, so still more quaintly fragile-looking in its suggestion of some huge iced cake.

Here, doubtless, in the half-desert land, it was the sound of the _koel_ knelling his sonorous note in the _kikar_ trees, or the sudden transformation, mayhap, of the uncanny, witchlike, gnarled thickets of the low _dhak_ trees into coral-pink stretches, showing like sunset clouds on the gold of the sun-saturate sands, that warned Mahmud he must be up and away from the oncoming of the heat.

As he pa.s.sed up the Peshawar valley, laden to the last limit with loot, the peach gardens must have been a-blossom; and, being a man with the odd strain of imagination in him, which all have had who have left their mark on India, he must, despite his plunder, have regretted leaving so much beauty behind him.

But he left tragedy also; for Jaipal, the beaten king, went straight back to Lah.o.r.e, and having formally proclaimed himself unworthy to reign after having suffered defeat at the hands of the unclean, mounted a funeral pyre, and burnt himself in sight of his people, leaving his son Anang-pal to reign in his stead.

Truly Indian history is provocative of picture-making. We have one here which would tax most painters' power. Yet the look which must have been on the proud king's face, as, remembering his name, "The Guardian of Victory," he defied defeat, defied disgrace, by defying death, is worth recording, worth recalling in these later days when the primitive virtues are somewhat overclouded.

So there was peace for three years. Apparently the plunder was sufficient unto the day until 1004, when Mahmud again appeared with the return of the wild birds from Lake Mansarawar, on the Siberian Steppes; but this was more a primitive campaign against a tributary chief on the western side of the Indus, than a real raid.

The following year, however, things were organised on a larger scale, and he was opposed by Anang-pal, who met no better fate than his father, and fled incontinently to Kashmir. But Mahmud's progress southward was checked by the news of revolt in Ghuzni, and he had to return in order to count scores with his pet converted Hindu, one Sek Pal, who, left governor, had resumed his Brahmanical thread, and was in full swing of conspiracy with his fellows in India.

It took the burly Mahomedan short time to settle his shrift, and send him to cells for life, so that the next fall of the leaf found Mahmud ready for his fourth invasion of India.

A real invasion, a real resistance this time. For the Rajas of Lah.o.r.e, Delhi, Gwalior, Ujjain, Ajmir, Kanauj, had joined confederacy to rout the Unclean Stranger. It was a holy war: women sold their jewels, and men sent their h.o.a.rds to furnish forth its munitions.

To no purpose. It is true that at the outset Mahmud suffered a reverse. The Ghakkars, Scythic warrior race of the Salt Range, laughed at the invader's entrenched camp amongst their bare hills, bore down on it, overpowered his outposts, and accounted for some four thousand of his army.

But even that failed to stop these big, burly men, bent on plunder, bent on proselytising at the sword's point. The result of this raid was the destruction of Nagar-kot, ancient town hard by the temple called Jawala-Mukhi, or Flame's Mouth, where, since the beginning of Time, the jets of combustible gas issuing from the ground amongst the dark shadows of the sheltering spire have burnt bravely as emanations, manifestations, of the G.o.ddess Durga, that Fury of Womanhood.

According to native historians Mahmud's returning army must have been a perfect caravan, for it carried with it about seven thousand pounds weight of gold coins, six thousand of gold and silver plate, fifteen hundred of golden ingots, a hundred and twenty-eight thousand of unwrought silver, and more than a hundred and fifty pounds weight of pearls, corals, diamonds and rubies.

But the combustible gas must have remained to be re-lit in honour of Mai Durga, and so have remained to help the memories of the iconoclasts! A fine trade this, that of smashing golden idols in the name of the Prophet, and carrying the bits and the diamond and sapphire eyes away in the name of Mammon!