Chapter XVII: Part I: The Ancient Age (4)

Harsha, then, was younger son of a Râjah of Thanêswar, in the Punjâb.

His father dying in A.D. 606, his elder brother ascended the throne, but was almost immediately most treacherously assassinated in conference by the King of Bengal; the conference apparently being for the purpose of arbitrating between the young Râjah of Thanêswar and the King of Mâlwa, who had murdered the former's brother-in-law for the sake of possessing his wife, and was keeping the Thanêswar princess a prisoner, with "iron fetters kissing her feet."

The assassinated king being too young to have a son, his brother Harsha was invited to take the throne. For some unknown reason he hesitated, and his formal coronation did not take place until nearly six years after he had assumed the actual responsibilities of kingship.

The story of the recovery of his widowed sister from the hands of her abductor is full of incident and romance. The rescue was but just in time, for the Princess Râj-yasri--a most attractive and learned young lady, and well versed in the Buddhistic schools, apparently--was about to commit _suttee_ amid the pathless forests, whither she had fled to escape her persecutor, when her brother, led to her retreat by the aboriginal chieftains, arrived upon the scene. The hurry was so great, that in it the assassin-lover appears to have escaped.

It will be observed by this that the family of Harsha was of the Buddhist faith. How, or why, we know not. The very name of his kingdom, Than-êswar (_S'thaneswara_, or, The Place of God), is purely Hindu; nevertheless, this, the last great King of Hindu India, professed the religion of Gâutama.

In fact, in many ways his reign is a poor imitation of that of Asôka. He did not, however, follow that king's example as a peace prophet, for he spent nearly thirty-six years out of his forty-two in bloody warfare. And in all his long career of aggression he met with but one check. He was unable to push his forces through the narrow defiles of the Deccan passes, and had to confine himself to being Lord Paramount of the North. So his empire, though extensive, never touched that of Asôka; in truth, he did not touch that monarch in any way. Nevertheless, his rule was excellent, and our Chinese pilgrim is loud in praise of it. Harsha did not trust to officialdom; personal supervision was his theory of government, and he was constantly on the move inspecting, punishing, rewarding. His camp must have been quaint, for in those days tents were unknown, and the "King's Palace" was built at each halting-place of boughs and reeds, and solemnly burnt after it had been used.

Like all these Eastern kings whose personalities have survived the years, he appears to have been somewhat of a genius. Besides being a most expert penman and draughtsmen, he wrote various learned books, and in his salad days produced several plays which still remain part of the literature of India. One, "The Necklace," is quite the liveliest of all Indian plays, and with appropriate songs and dances must have been rather like a Savoy comic opera. There is a legend that Harsha spent so much money on poets, actors, dancers and artists of all descriptions, that he had eventually to sell the gold and silver ornaments of the Hindu temples in order to pay for his pleasures; but this is pure legend. Following the example of Asôka, he established rest-houses for travellers, hospitals for the sick, magistrates for the regulation of morals; yet in all this, somehow, the sense of pose is never absent. Asôka's voice is still to-day a _cri du c[oe]ur_; Harsha's is--_fin de siècle_.

He could not help it. The curious religious eclecticism of the period favoured it. His family showed keenly the general tendency to self-consciousness, and it was written of his father:

"He offered daily to the Sun a bunch of red lotuses set in a pure vessel of ruby, and tinged, like his own heart, with the same hue."

Could Oscar Wilde have done more? Strange, indeed, how the cycles of culture come round and round.

It was in his later years that King Harsha became a pronounced Buddhist. This was largely owing to the preachings and teachings of Hiuen T'sang, in honour of whom a solemn assemblage was held at Kanaûj in the fresh spring-time of the year A.D. 644. The scene is admirably given in Hiuen T'sang's Record, and is well worth a reading. We can imagine the king carrying in person the canopy upheld over the golden statuette of Buddha; we can see him "moving along, scattering golden blossoms, pearls and other rare gems." We catch a glimpse of the flaming monastery accidentally catching fire, to be extinguished by the mere sight of the good Harsha. The rush of the mad Hindu fanatic to slay this "favourer of Buddhists" comes as a startling incident, to be followed by the immediate exile of five hundred Brahmans for high treason.

Then we learn of the journey to Prâg (Allahabad), where every five years Harsha, in accordance with ancient custom, had held a distribution of alms.[2]

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[Footnote 2: This assemblage, or fair, still exists, under the name of the Mâgh-mela.]

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The description of this is even more entrancing, and we can take part in all the ceremonials of the seventy-five days during which Buddha, the Sun, and Siva were apparently worshipped indiscriminately. The proceedings were opened by a magnificent procession of feudatory princes, and ended with a forty-days' distribution of alms to all and sundry.

After this, Hiuen T'sang writes,

"the royal accumulation of five years was exhausted. Except the horses, elephants and military accoutrements ... nothing remained.... The king gave away his gems and goods, his clothing and neck-laces, ear-rings, bracelets, chaplets, neck jewels, and bright head jewel; all these he freely gave away without stint."

Was it a real gifting, we wonder, or, after duly worshipping in a borrowed second-hand suit, did Harsha return to his palace to find his wardrobe much the same as ever?

The hint of unreality in all things provokes the question.

King Harsha died in A.D. 648, shortly after his beloved Chinese pilgrim had departed for his native land. Once again it has to be written that the "withdrawal of the strong arm plunged the country into disorder."

Arjûna, his minister, seized the throne, but drew down on himself the wrath of China, and after a brief interval was carried thither as a prisoner.

Meanwhile, no one appeared to take the reins. In truth, degeneration had already set in. The people who had posed so long as a nation of culture, of refinement, who had spent their lives in applauding poetasters, who had laughed when the court wit said the commander-in-chief's nose was as long as the king's pedigree, who had been ready to worship any god if so be the ceremonial pleased their æsthetic sense, who had given free pass to their emotions in all ways, such people were not ready for action. And so once for all the clouds cover Hindu supremacy.

The next four hundred years are the Dark Ages of Indian history. Even the impressionist outlook of our case of coins is denied us. A thousand names jostle each other in commonplace confusion. In the chaos of conflicting claims, any attempt at classification is hopeless.

CHAOS

A.D. 700 TO A.D. 1001

These, as has been said, are the Dark Ages of Hindustan. She has ever been the prey of personality, the willing victim of vitality. From the year B.C. 620, when her real history begins, until now, that history has been that of individuals who have either risen from her ranks, or appeared on her horizon; who have dominated her imagination, and left her too often at their death confused, helpless, to fall back into the bewildering anarchy of petty princedoms.

The light shines clearly for a few years, reflected by one man's keen sword, or keener eyes; and then the strong arm falls, the vision fails, and India sinks back into the Great Apathy concerning things sublunary which is ever her most salient characteristic.

And these three hundred years give us no personality striking enough to be seen through the mist which settled down like a pall over India after the death of Harsha. This death, says Mr Vincent Smith, "loosened the bonds which restrained the disruptive forces always ready to operate in India, and allowed them to produce their normal result: a medley of petty states with ever-varying boundaries, and engaged in unceasing internecine war."

No new thing this in the past history of India; it will be no new thing in the future, for Hindustan will always need some strong, centralising, magnetic force to hold together its innumerable atoms.

It is true that in literature some few names hover doubtfully about the eighth century, and that round the outskirts of India, in Kashmir, Nepaul, Madras, Ceylon, we hear every now and again of events which arrest the attention for a moment. The reassertion of Chinese influence along the northern borderland, though brief, was noteworthy, and in Kashmir the names of several kings and one queen stand out from the general _posse_. Amongst them that of Lâlâditya, who built the famous Temple of the Sun at Martand, not far from Bâwun in Kashmir. A magnificent ruin this, standing out sharply against both the rising in the east and the setting in the west; set high on one of those lofty _karêwas_, or tablelands, which are so marked a characteristic of Kashmir. Fringing the mighty mountains, they stretch like promontories into the rice and saffron fields, still showing by their precipitous sides the force of the mighty flood which at some time must have swept through the valley, lowering its levels, and leaving these landmarks to tell of its passage.

Then we have two names--rather painfully reminiscent of comic opera--Avanti-vârman and Sankâra-vârman, 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 aptitude 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 Kashmîr 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 Mahmûd, so-called of Ghuzni, was to begin his first raid into India, and so bring a new factor--Islâmism--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 Asôka becomes the dominating figure, and even after his death the names of Kanîshka and Hûshka 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 Gûpta empire were emphatically _fin de siècle_, 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, lassitude 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-æstheticised. 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 constitution, 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 passed 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 God, 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 Asôka 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 Herât was added to the Arab empire. Thence in the slow centuries it drifted towards India; for the lust 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 assassination 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 _Shîahs_ 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 Sabaktagîn, a Turkish slave who had married the Governor of Khorassan'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