Twilight of the Sultanate c18.3

c18.3

About the time that Islam made its appearance in south India, a religious upheaval was in the offing there. The leader of this Hindu revivalist movement was Shankaracharya. Shankaracharya, as is well known, extinguished the last flicker of Buddhism, gave a new orientation to Hinduism, which after all had never died. But his *Advaitwād* was beyond the comprehension of the masses; it remained a subject of discussion among the intellectuals. Sankara, however, was not just a reformer; he was primarily a philosopher, a thinker and a crusader. His dynamic personality threw out sparks which illuminated the varied aspects of Hinduism. A century later Rāmānuja modified Shankara's monism, rejected the Mayawād, and laid the principle of *Visist Advaitwād*. Rāmānuja's monism was not so uncompromising,¹ but he and Shankara had retaught the nation the age-long idea of One Supreme Being. But in spite of the works of these masters and their followers the religion of the Hindus remained a blending of the two different tendencies, the monism of the intellectuals and the deistic polytheism of the commoners in which Brahminism, caste and Sanskrit were all preserved. All this is vouched for by Alberuni.