History of Mediaeval Hindu India (being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) v3.c33.s6.35

v3.c33.s6.35

But these also in ancient times did not care to establish kingly ruling families because the alien Mlechha rulers always accepted the religion of the conquered and in effect became native kings. Just as the Normans coming as conquerors became one with the conquered being already of the same religion as the Saxons and Britons, so the Greeks, the Kushans, the Śakas and the Huns became in India Buddhists or Vaishnavas and latterly Mihirakula was a staunch Śaiva and their rule was never felt as a foreign rule. The kings of Kashmir, of Sind, and of Kabul who later ruled the Panjab were Hindus and one with the people in manners and civilization and were never felt as foreign rulers. When the Turks conquered the Panjab the difference of religion indeed made the foreign rule intolerable by the destruction of temples and idols, and Mahomedan rule was also generally more oppressive, as we shall show later on, than Hindu rule. Yet the land-owning valorous Kshatriya tribes of the Panjab made no effort to establish a kingdom of their own for another reason and that was the forcible conversion of many of these tribes. The conversion of almost the whole fighting population of western Panjab has introduced a factor of cleavage in the people of this province,—the most warlike in the whole of India—which has unfortunately made it the most unfitted to attain self-rule. Why these tribes did not strenuously resist forcible conversion may be explained by their human desire to escape massacre and by their natural affection for their land and hereditary headship of villages as also by their weak Hindu feeling. The superstition of the Hindus that persons once defiled by eating beef and other heinous offences cannot be taken back into Hinduism made the cleavage permanent. The sympathies of these Mahomedan population, though originally Kshatriya by race and still observing certain Hindu customs, naturally went with the Mahomedan rulers; and the Panjab was again incapable of establishing a kingly line of its own, until we come to the Sikh rulers of the eighteenth century. Sikhism indeed resisted and eventually conquered Mahomedan oppression by organizing itself by a system akin to the conscription of ancient Greece and Rome or modern Germany and France. Guru Govindasing saw the necessity of transforming every Sikh into a soldier and the martial qualities of the people of the Panjab naturally aided him and enabled him to transform Sikhism into a militant religion like the Mahomedan religion itself. We have traced the history of the Panjab down to the present day to show why its people were and are politically apathetic. How modern environments will act upon the political consciousness of the people, now triply divided into Mahomedans, Hindus and Sikhs is outside the scope of our work and must be left to the political thinkers of the present and the future.