India, Old and New | Page 3

Brahma himself. There too, on a mound
beyond Indrapat, stands the granite shaft of one of Asoka's pillars, on
which, with a fine faith that the world has never yet justified, the great
Buddhist Apostle-Emperor of India inscribed over 2000 years ago his
edicts prohibiting the taking of life. At the very foot of the Kutub Minar
the famous Iron Pillar commemorates the victories of the "Sun of
Power," the Hindu Emperor of the Gupta dynasty with whose name,
under the more popular form of Raja Bikram, Indian legend associates
the vague memories of a golden age of Hindu civilisation in the fifth
and sixth centuries. The Pillar was brought there by one of the Rajput
princes who founded in the middle of the eleventh century the first city
really known to history as Delhi. There Prithvi Raja reigned, who still
lives in Indian minstrelsy as the embodiment of Hindu chivalry, equally
gallant and daring in love and in war--the last to make a stand in
northern India against the successive waves of Mahomedan conquest
which Central Asia had begun to pour in upon India in 1001, with the
first of Mahmud Ghazni's seventeen raids. In the next century an
Afghan wave swept down on the top of the original Turki wave, and
Kutub-ed-Din, having proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi in 1206,
built the great Mosque of _Kuwwet-el-Islam_, "The Power of Islam,"
and the lofty minaret, still known by his name, from which for six
centuries the Moslem call to prayer went forth to proclaim Mahomedan
domination over India.
With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties,
steeped in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn.
The annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less
eloquently to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of
Islam, was shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the
wild spaces of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again
like a devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed
the long line of Moghul Emperors who first under Baber and then

under Akbar won the Empire of Hindustan at the gates of Delhi, and for
a time succeeded in bringing almost the whole of India under their
sway. But their splendid marble halls in the great Fort of Delhi recall
not only the magnificence of the Moghul Empire, but its slow and sure
decay, until it became a suitor for the protection of the British power,
which, at first a mere trading power that had once sued humbly enough
for its protection, had risen to be the greatest military and political
power in India. It was at Delhi at the beginning of the nineteenth
century that Lord Lake rescued a Moghul Emperor from the hands of
Mahratta jailers, and it was at Delhi again that in 1857 the last
semblance of Moghul rulership disappeared out of history in the
tempest of the Mutiny. It was on the plain of Delhi that the assumption
by Queen Victoria of the imperial title was solemnly proclaimed in
1878, and, with still greater pomp, King Edward's accession in 1903.
There again in 1911 King George, the first of his line to visit his Indian
Empire as King-Emperor, received in person the fealty of princes and
peoples and restored Delhi to her former pride of place as its imperial
capital.
Where else in the world can such a procession of the ages pass before
one's eyes, from the great "Horse Sacrifice" of the Pandavas at the
dawn of history to the inauguration by a British prince in the
King-Emperor's name of modern political institutions conceived in the
democratic spirit of British freedom?
Yet at the very time when an Indian-elected assembly, representing as
far as possible all creeds and classes and communities, and above all
the Western-educated classes who are the intellectual offspring of
British rule, were gathered together to hear delivered to them in
English--the one language in which, as a result of British rule, and by
no means the least valuable, Indians from all parts of a vast polyglot
country are able to hold converse--the Royal message throwing open to
the people of India the road to Swaraj within the British Empire, the
imperial city of Delhi went into mourning as a sign of angry protest,
and the vast majority of its citizens, mostly, it must be remembered,
Mahomedans, very strictly observed a complete boycott of the Royal
visit in accordance with Mr. Gandhi's "Non-co-operation" campaign,

and went out in immense crowds to greet the strange Hindu saint and
leader who had come to preach to them his own very different
message--a message of revolt, not indeed by violence but by "soul
force," against the soulless civilisation of the West.
In no other city in