India, Old and New | Page 8

of the human race, almost wholly shut off until modern times from any
intimate contact with our own Western world, but it has been the one
great force that has preserved the continuity of Indian life. It withstood
six centuries of Mahomedan domination. Could it be expected to yield
without a struggle to the new forces, however superior we may
consider them and however overwhelming they may ultimately prove,
which British rule has imported into India during a period of transition

more momentous than any other through which she has ever passed,
but still very brief when compared with all those other periods of
Indian history which modern research has only recently rescued from
the legendary obscurity of still earlier ages?
We are witnessing to-day a new phase of this great struggle, the clash
of conflicting elements in two great civilisations. A constitution has
been inaugurated at Delhi to bring India into permanent and equal
partnership with a commonwealth of free nations which is the greatest
political achievement of Western civilisation, and the latest prophet of
Hinduism, applying to it the language of the West, has banned it
forthwith as a thing of Satan, the offspring of a Satanic government and
of a Satanic civilisation. His appeal to India is intended to strike many
and various chords, but it is essentially an appeal to the ancient forces
of Hinduism which gave India a great civilisation long before Europe,
and least of all Britain, had emerged from the savagery of primitive
man. Englishmen find it difficult to understand the strength of that
appeal, perhaps because they do not realise how deep and vital are the
roots of the civilisation to which it appeals.

CHAPTER II
THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM
India's civilisation, intimately bound up from its birth with the great
social and religious system which we call Hinduism, is as unique as it
is ancient. Its growth and its tenacity are largely due to the geographical
position of a great and populous sub-continent, on its land side exposed
only to incursions from the north through mountainous and desolate
regions, everywhere difficult of access and in some parts impenetrable,
and shut in on the other two sides of a roughly isosceles triangle by
broad expanses of sea which cut it off from all direct intercourse with
the West until, towards the close of the Middle Ages, European
navigators opened up new ocean highways to the East. India owes her
own peculiar civilisation to the gradual fusion of Aryan races of a
higher type that began to flow down from Central Asia before the dawn

of history upon the more primitive indigenous populations already in
possession. Its early history has only now begun to emerge from the
twilight of myths and legends, and cannot even now be traced with any
assurance of accuracy nearly as far back as that of other parts of the
world which preceded or gave birth to our own much more recent
civilisation. The pyramids of Ghizeh and Sakkara and the monumental
temples of Thebes bore ample witness to the greatness of Egyptian
civilisation long before the interpretation of her hieroglyphics enabled
us to determine its antiquity, and the discovery of its abundant art
treasures revealed the high degree of culture to which it reached.
Excavations in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates have yielded an
almost equally valuable harvest in regard to Babylonian and Assyrian
civilisation, and Cnossus has told us its scarcely less wonderful story.
Yet the long line of Pharaohs was coming to an end and Egypt was
losing the national independence which she has never once recovered;
Nineveh had fallen and Jerusalem was destroyed; Greece and even
Rome had already started on their great creative careers before any
approximately correct date can be assigned to the stages through which
Indian civilisation had passed. India only becomes historical with the
establishment of the Sasunaga dynasty in the Gangetic kingdom of
Magadha, which centred in what is now Behar, about the year 600 B.C.
As to the state of India before that date, no sort of material evidence has
survived, or at any rate has yet been brought to light--no monuments,
no inscriptions, very little pottery even, in fact very few traces of the
handicraft of man; nor any contemporary records of undoubted
authenticity. Fortunately the darkness which would have been
otherwise Cimmerian is illuminated, though with a partial and often
uncertain light, by the wonderful body of sacred literature which has
been handed down to our own times in the Vedas and Brahmanas and
Upanishads. To none of these books, which have, for the most part,
reached us in various recensions often showing considerable
discrepancies and obviously later interpolations, is it possible to ascribe
any definite date. But in them we undoubtedly possess a genuine