The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.338

c10.s7.338

But far-reaching as the Greek mark may have been, and deeply as it has influenced many countries in Eastern Asia which Greeks never knew, it no longer influences India: Buddhism has long since vanished from the land of its birth. The Greeks, as we have seen, did to some small extent affect Indians while they were in India, and were also to some extent affected by them; but there was nothing that was to be permanent there, not even the Buddha-statue. What I said earlier in this chapter, that (except for the Buddha-statue) the history of India would have been essentially what it has been had Greeks never existed, only needs now one very trifling qualification—the Alexander-descents of some hill rulers. I have already considered the origin and meaning of these when writing of Bactria (Chap. VII), and the part played in them by the fictitious Seleucid pedigree; the only thing which need be added here is to call attention to the fondness of Indians of all classes for keeping pedigrees, which with them, as the Purāṇas show, really took the place of history.² As in Bactria, so also in India, I have never met with a complete list of the Alexander-descents, but a recent writer³ has given an interesting account of two of these hill rulers, Shah Sikander Khan, Mir (or Thum) of Nagir, who likes visitors to remark on the resemblance of his profile to that of the heads on some Greek coins (which happens to be true), and his elder brother Sir Mohamed Nazim Khan, Mir (or Thum) of Hunza; those who like picturesque links across the ages may find one in the fact that Hunza is to-day ruled by a descendant of Alexander who bears a British title. And that is all. It might serve as a text for yet another sermon on the vanity of human wishes that, while all else which Greeks did or sought to do in India has long vanished from that country, the one thing which still survives there in living form is a legend based on a fiction.