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 Laladitya, who built the

famous Temple of the Sun at Martand, not far from Bawun 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

karewas, 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-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 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 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, 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-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 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 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 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 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 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]