Flora Annie Webster Steel

“ Riding up proudly, kings, indeed, of their world, holders of untold wealth in priceless gems and gold--gold, unminted, almost valueless, jewels recklessly strung, like pebbles on a string.
This legend, indeed, of countless uncounted gold, of fair women, and almost weird, rough luxury, lingers still around the very name of Snake-King, and holds its own in the folk-lore of India.
In these days the kingdom of Magadha--so far as we can judge, a Scythic principality--was just entering the lists against that still more ancient Aryan kingdom of Kosâla, of which we read in the Râmâyana. ”

“ India is very wide, and she is very secretive. How can it be otherwise, when beyond reach of the clash and welter of kings, of courts and conquests, the great mass of the people live untouched by change, watching their crops, ploughing, sowing, reaping, "undisturbed" (as Megasthenes pointed out with wonder) , "even when battle is raging in their neighbourhood, by any sense of danger, since the tillers of the soil are regarded by the Indians as a race sacred, inviolable." To the world beyond such lives are a secret; they hold the unknown. ”

“ He should rule not for one but for all. Just as Asôka, nigh on two thousand years before, had protested that conquest by the sword was not worth calling conquest, so Akbar, whose soul in many ways followed close in thought to that of the old Buddhist king, felt, vaguely at first, afterwards more clearly, more concisely, that the king should be, as it were, the solvent in which caste and creed, even race, should disappear, leaving behind them nothing but equal rights, equal justice, equal law. To secure this, it was necessary to make all men forget conquest. ”

“ He was Emperor of Samarkhûnd, as his ancestor Timur had been, for exactly one hundred days, during which he appears to have enjoyed himself hugely. One is apt to think of these Eastern cities beyond the verge, as they are now--half-ruined, dreary, dead-alive. But in those days they were centres of commerce, learning, and art. To Samarkhûnd Timur had brought the untold riches of India, her clever craftsmen, her skilled artisans. It was a beautiful, a cultured city, and Babar came to the conclusion "that in the whole habitable world there are few places so pleasantly situated." ”

“ Absolute power, untold wealth, munificence, cruelty, passion, pride, prejudice; all the concomitants of an Eastern potentate are there. The celebrated Turquoise Throne itself fills the imagination with its "enamel of a sky-blue colour, cased in gold which was in time totally concealed by the number of precious ornaments"; but when we add to this the golden ball over the throne "all inlaid with jewels, on which sate a bird of paradise composed entirely of precious stones, in whose head was a ruby of inestimable price," we desire no more. The Eastern glamour is complete. ”

“ India is ever the slave of vitality, and Alexander was vital to the finger-tips. What else could be said of the man who, finding himself checked in an assault on a stronghold, leapt from the bastion into the fort, and, supporting himself against the wall, kept the enemy at bay with his sword, till one by one his followers, maddened by the sight of their beloved leader's danger, followed him in time to rescue him, wounded, fainting?
But the deed which, of all others, Arrian extols as the most noble deed ever performed by Alexander, took place in this wise in the desert. ”

“ It is virtually a claim for universal supremacy, for divine honour. Every one concerned in it, even the scullion in the kitchen who helps to cook the feast, must be of royal blood. So all India's princes were bidden to take their part in it, excepting Prithvi-Râj, and in his place an image of clay was made and set to the lowest job--that of door-keeper.
Thus the Râjah of Kanauj strove to save his dignity, for the rites were equally old, equally honourable; but what man, even though he were king, could calculate on what a young girl, just blossoming into womanhood, would say or do? ”

“ A pretty prince, indeed, to be the son of the greatest king India has ever known.
This rapid succession of sorrow left the emperor enfeebled. He had always been a hard worker, had spared himself not at all; now Nature was revenging herself on him for his defiance of fatigue.
As he lay dying in the fort at Agra, the emperor, bereft of his friends, worse than bereft of his sons, had but one comfort--his grandson, Prince Khurram, who afterwards succeeded his father under the title of Shâh-jahân. A word from Akbar might have set him on the throne; but the father was loyal to his disloyal son. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Are we to treat the monotonous singing voice which even now echoes out over the length and breadth of India, as in the sunsetting some Brahman recites the ancient hymns--are we to treat this as the first trace of Ancient India? Or, as we sit listening, are we to watch the distant horizon, so purple against the gold of the sky, and wonder if it is only our own unseeing eyes which prevent our tracing the low curve that may mark the site of a town, ancient when the Aryans swept it into nothingness? ”

“ Som-nâth, then, was a shrine of Life. The idol in its holy of holies bore no semblance of created beings. It was the symbol of Creation itself, a tall, rounded, black monolith of stone, set six feet in the ground, rising ten feet above it. One of the twelve lingams believed by the Hindus to have descended from Heaven, it was unexpressedly holy, marvellously mighty in miracle. Small wonder, then, with a priesthood of clutching hands, that Som-nâth stood renowned as the richest shrine in India. ”

“ But the cause is always the same: a knot of hurried horsemen showing on the level horizon, messengers, as it were, from the outside world beyond village ken.
"The Toork! The Toork!" rises the cry, and in an instant jewels are torn off and hidden, everything that can be concealed concealed, and with a wild prayer to some god for protection, the ultimate atom of India awaits destruction or dishonour or death in apathetic despair.
It must have needed a bitter biting indeed to have engraven this fear so indelibly on the Hindu heart. ”

“ There is small doubt, for instance, but that his study of the kingcraft chapters of the Mâhâbhârata had done much towards making Akbar what he was--the best ruler India has ever seen, or is likely to see; but, taking it as a whole, the tide of Mahomedan conquest had simply submerged Hindu learning, and the rising flood of Mahratta power was not one whit less prejudicial to philosophy. But below the troubled surface of wars and rumours of wars the heart of India dreamt on undisturbed. All things, as ever, were illusion. ”

“ For the rest there is no people in the world whose history yields more pure romance. The chivalry of Europe seems strained and artificial beside the stern, straight-forward code of honour by which the early Râjputs regulated their dealings alike with women and with other men; and no roundel of troubadour or challenge of knight-errant could have roused more enthusiasm than did the wild love and war songs of the Râjput bards. ”

“ Bhishma, on Pandu's death, installs the blind Dhritarâshta as Regent King, and continues, as ever, faithful to his trust. Once or twice a ring of human pathos, human regret, is heard in the harmony of his good counsels, his unswerving loyalty, his fast determination to "pay the debt arising out of the food which has been given me."
Once when Arjuna, third of the five Pandus, climbs up on his knees, all dust-laden from some boyish game, and, full of pride and glee, claims him as father--"I am not thy father, O Bhârata!" ”

“ So occupied in a close-pushed bastion, he saw by the flare of a torch on the rampart of the city some Râjput generals also going their rounds. To snatch a matchlock from the sentry and fire was Akbar's quick impulse.
It won him Chitore; for the man who fell, shot through the head, was Jâimul himself. Next morning, Akbar went through scenes which he never forgot. He saw, as his grandfather had done, the great war-sacrifice of the Râjputs; but, unlike Babar, he did not view it contemptuously. It made an indelible mark upon his soul. ”

“ In lesser--ever, thank Heaven!--in lessening degree this has remained the great problem in India: how to give freedom to its hereditary rulers, and yet to ensure that the race shall not suffer, yet to give it freedom from hereditary evils.
In the eighteenth century the men of courts and cities were, as a rule, vicious to the core. If evidence be needed on this point, go to Delhi, go to Lucknow, and there, in the dregs, and lees, and off-scourings of what was once a dynasty, you will still find some of the meanest specimens of humanity on God's earth. ”

“ Surely fatuousness could no farther go? We have here men who consider themselves qualified to criticise, while they admit total ignorance of the subject criticised!
Stung, no doubt, by this obvious retort, Mr Francis finally produced a scheme--a scheme which, containing as it does the very first inception of the "Great Mistake" which has dogged the footsteps of England in her dealings with India, had better have been hanged like a millstone round its promulgator's neck, and he drowned in the sea, than that it should ever have seen the light. ”

“ How many times has the fate of India been decided amongst its semi-barren stretches, where the low dhâk bushes glow like sunset clouds on the horizon? First by the mythical, legendary Pândus and Kurus, backed by the gods, protected by showers of celestial arrows. Next, when Shahâb-ud-din-Mahomed Ghori broke down the Râjput resistance, and Prithvi-râj, the flower of Râjput chivalry, was killed flying for his life amongst the sugarcane brakes. ”

“ And at Delhi was the representative of the House of Timur, of Akbar, whose memory still lingered in the hearts alike of Hindu and Mahomedan. He, the man without a State-religion, the man who had held the balance true, to whom all religions equal, was master indeed! Whether old Bahâdur-Shâh, his degenerate descendant, who since Akbar II.'s death had dozed and dreamed away a drugged life full of causeful and causeless complaints, was in the plot beforehand, or whether it took him by surprise to find himself acclaimed King instead of Puppet, is a moot point. ”

“ For these big, bold, burly men are fairly savages in comparison with the cultured Hindu whom they harried. And Masûd, though by repute an affable gentleman, generous even to prodigality, and of uncommon personal strength and courage, was as turbulent as a king as he had been as a prince.
His favourite maxim was, "Dominion follows the longest sword." His was not only long, but heavy. No other man of his court could wield it, and an arrow from his bow would pierce the hide of a mailed elephant. During the ten years of his reign he entered India with an army three times. ”

“ The position in which we are now placed is such as suits the character of the British nation, the principles of our laws, the spirit of our constitutions, and that liberal policy which becomes the dignity of a great and powerful empire. My public duty is discharged to the satisfaction of my conscience by the prosperous establishment of a system of policy which promises to improve the general condition of the people in India, and to unite the principal native states in the bond of peace under the protection of the British power. ”

“ Those of us who know Northern India have memories of many such a sojourn in the enchanted no-man's-land of a Punjâb river-bed, where the soil on which the tent is pitched one year may be deep stream the next, and the great solemn cranes stalk amongst the young green wheat, and the flocks of flamingoes show rosy-red in the sunrises. ”

“ The king whose puppets of stone that bore aloft his throne refused to bear the weight of his successor, and wandered out into the wide world, each telling a tale of departed glory!
No! Vikramadîtya, the beloved of every Indian school-boy for his valour, of every little Indian maiden for his gentleness, cannot be given up without a protest.
"The fiction which resembles truth is better than the truth which is dissevered from the imagination." Let us hark back to those words of wisdom, and search round for some faint foothold for blessed belief.
Let us turn to our case of coins in hope. Stay! ”

“ Here was no weakling, unnerved by luxury, but a man after a Râjput's heart. A man who swam every river he crossed for sheer joy in breasting a strong stream, who lived in the saddle, who, if challenged, would snatch up a comrade in either arm, and run round the battlements of a fort, leaping the embrasures in laughing derision; a man, too, well versed in warfare, better armed, if with a far smaller force at his disposal. ”

“ For six long years Nurjahân lived at the court as one of the attendants of Jahângir's Râjput mother, refusing any pension from the hand of the man who had killed Sher-Afkân, and supporting herself entirely by her exquisite skill in embroidery and painting.
And then?
It is customary to say that ambition overcame her scruples; but the seeing eye, reading between the lines, may find a womanly pity for the man who in the prime of life had lost all control over himself, and who sorely needed help. ”

“ It is a marvellous dream, and as one reads it the ceaseless fall of seas upon a shore seems to fill the ear with the eternal message of indestructible life.
The Râmâyana, great though the epic is, and, in a way, more poetical, has none of this storm and stress. As R. C. Dutt, in his "Ancient India," says:--
"On reading it one feels that the real heroic age of India had passed. ”

“ To English traders, keen on commerce, India must indeed have been the land of Upside-down; a land into which their gold was sucked down at the same time that astounding, almost undreamt-of treasures were literally vomited forth from every petty bazaar. Francois Bernier's views on this matter, and the conclusions which he draws from the indubitable facts which he observed, are so distinctly what may be called conventionally insular, that they serve well to show the attitude of mind in which the West, strong in conviction of its own worth, faced the East, all unfamiliar and startling. ”

“ For Hinduism is India--India is Hinduism. When the last trace of the metaphysical Monism which underlies every aspiration, every action, has disappeared, India and Hinduism will have disappeared also, but not till then.
So as time crept on, and under slack rule Mahomedan began to fight Mahomedan, each petty governor playing for his own hand, his own independence, the Râjputs raised their dejected heads, and, seizing every opportunity, strove to recover part at least of their own. ”

“ Delhi was laid waste; the horrors of Nâdir-Shâh being repeated and excelled, for the Durrâni had not the Persian's hold upon his troops. He also penetrated further down-country than did Nâdir, and harried the Gangetic plain as far as Muttra. The news of his raid, indeed, was one of the many factors in the problem of action or inaction which Clive had had to decide. But the heat drove the hardy northmen back to their hills, and Upper India reverted once more to its old peaceful life, Delhi to dreams. ”

“ Sometimes it has come when the first sword-points of the new-sprouted seed give a green shading to the sandy soil, and the flooding water from the wells which cease not night or day follows obedient to the naked brown figure with a wooden spud which directs it first to one patch of corn, then to another. Sometimes, again, it has come when the village has emptied itself upon the harvest field, when men are cutting and threshing, and women winnowing, while the children lie asleep in the great heaps of chaff, or make quaint images out of the straw. ”