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The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s10: The Moslem Question

The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s10

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English

The Moslem Question

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In the second place, no special importance can be attached, in connection with the topic under discussion, either to the foreign (in the present instance, Moslem) invasions or to the establishment of kingdoms or empires by the Moslem Arabs or Moslem Turks in diverse parts of India. While discussing the sovereignty of Hindu states in India one cannot afford to leave the Deccan and Southern India out of sight. Not until Islam, whether under Arabs or Turks or Moghuls, succeeded in becoming the "paramount" political power *de jure* or even *de facto* in India should the student of history think of closing an epoch and commencing a new.

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It is good to be clear on one point. The demarcation of epochs is primarily an arbitrary action, not only in regard to India but virtually in regard to every country. The categories, prehistoric, primitive, ancient, early, medieval, modern, contemporary and what not are no less arbitrary. One is at liberty to fix upon any date and select one's own technical terms or categories of thought.³⁴

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³⁴ It is interesting that C. V. Vaidya's *History of Mediæval Hindu India* (Poona) Vol. I. (c 600-800), 1921, Vol. II. (c 750-1000), 1924 and Vol. III. (c 1,000-1,200) 1926, interprets the mediæval Hindu period as the period "from the accession of Harsha, the last Buddhist Emperor of India, to the death of Prithvīrāja the last Hindu Emperor of India" (Preface to Vol. II). One can hardly accept the proposition that the category "Emperor of India" ought to be applied either to Harṣa or to Prithvīrāja. Besides, the last great "Buddhist" sovereign was Dharmapāla (795-830?) or Devapāla of Bengal, and the last great "Hindu" sovereign Baji Rao I. (1720-1740), the Peshwa or perhaps Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), the Punjabi.

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The following considerations ought to be carefully noted in connection with our present topic.

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The capture of some of the cities in Sind by the Moslem Arabs during the second decade of the eighth century (712-13) might, for certain purposes, if one so desired, be certainly regarded as initiating a new chapter in India's life *vis-à-vis* Islam.

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Then the wars of the Arabs with the Hindu rulers of the Helmund and Kabul Valleys from 650 to 860 A.C. could with equal legitimacy be treated as constituting a substantial second step in a new direction. Besides, the powerful Hindu Sahi dynasty of the Punjab came to an end as a result of the Arab attacks by 1021. This annihilation was likewise no insignificant beginning for the *digvijaya* of Islam in India. In regard to the commencement of a new epoch not only the fall of the Punjab but even the fall of Afghanistan might serve as a convenient landmark in the eyes of any historian.

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The discomfiture of some of the Gurjara-Pratīhāra (Rajput) states at the hands of the Mussalman Turks in the tenth century has surely to be appraised as the fourth term in the same series of Islamic expansion or Hindu decline. Naturally there cannot be any harm in selecting just these events as the constituents of a landmark. And yet it is questionable if this fourth dose, cumulatively with the previous three, was big enough to raise the new foreign rulers to the status *de jure* or *de facto* of "paramount" power (Sultanate) in India.

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The continuity of Hindu political sovereignty over somewhat large areas, no matter what be the territorial or populational dimensions or what be the international relations subsisting between them, should be considered to be the chief item in regard to the problem of demarcation into epochs or periods of Indian history, so far as our attention is concentrated on ancient and medieval developments.

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In the tenth century Hindu India was politically quite extensive in the North as well as in the Deccan and the South. The political power of Hindu states endured for several centuries before many of them factually realized the necessity of *kowtowing* to, i.e., establishing subordinate alliance with, the Mussalman Turks (or Pathans) or finally got swallowed up in the new Moslem Empire.

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The drama of Indian history should, then, have a great Act closed not before the beginning of the thirteenth century (*c.* 1205) with the overthrow of the Senas of Bengal by a lieutenant of Muhammad Ghori and not before the beginning of the fourteenth century (1310) with the overthrow of the successors of the Cholas by a lieutenant of Alauddin Khilji.

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The Hindu period of Indian history closes neither with Harṣavardhana (647 A.C.) nor with the subjugation by Mussalmans of certain Gurjara-Pratīhāra (Rajput) states in North-Western India in the tenth and eleventh centuries. For, in the first place, a large number of politically sovereign states continued for a long time to be possessed by the Hindus. And secondly, the social expansion, religious assimilation, commercial progress and Imperial achievements such as we are wont to associate with the brightest eras of previous Hindu history were going on in Eastern and Southern India, politically unhampered as of yore by Islamic states, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The natural lines of progressive Hindu evolution were not disturbed in these regions while the buffer-princes of Kabul; Lahore, Delhi, Ajmer, Kanauj, Malwa and Gujarat were performing their heroic duties as by geographical position the gate-keepers of India against the inroads of aggressive Islam. Altogether, we do not experience in India under these conditions anything essentially different from the situations in Europe during the epochs of domination by the Saracens, the Mongols or Tartars, and the Ottoman Turks.

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*A Parallel Between Asia and Europe*

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Here one can aptly cite a few observations from Hermann Goetz in regard to the parallelism between Asia and Europe. “The great curves in the evolution of civilization are everywhere the same,” says he, “and herein the East follows the same laws as Europe. The invariability of the Orient is only a seeming appearance, and the belief in it is not older than the industrial revolution of Europe in the last 150 years.”

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It is interesting that sentiments bearing on the identity or parallelism between the East and the West should have at last begun to manifest themselves among Eur-American scholars, who, as is too well-known, are responsible for the unscientific and fallacious doctrine of the fundamental distinction between the Eastern and the Western views of life as well as lines of evolution.³⁵

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³⁵ Goetz: *The Relations between Indian Painting and Culture, a lecture delivered at the School of Oriental Studies, London, on November 10, 1924.* See also his *Epochen der indischen Kultur* (Leipzig 1929). The prevailing fallacy has been examined by the present author in the following among other works: *Chinese Religion Through Hindu Eyes* (Shanghai 1916), *Love in Hindu Literature* (Tokyo 1916), *The Folk Element in Hindu Culture* (London 1918), *Hindu Art Its Humanism and Modernism* (New York 1920), *The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus* (Leipzig, 1922), *The Aesthetics of Young India* (Calcutta 1922), *The Futurism of Young Asia* (Berlin 1922), *Die Lebensanschauung des Inders* (Leipzig 1923); cf. the trend in the evolution of this fallacy since the epoch of romanticism as exhibited in the present author’s *Political Philosophies Since 1905* (Madras 1928) pp. 29, 51, 105-108, 299-302.

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In connection with his survey of the different periods of Indian culture-history Goetz makes the following remarks in regard to that of the Gurjaras (Rajputs):

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“Just as in Europe art and Latin literature flourish for a short time under the Carolingian and Ottonian Emperors before their own national individuality comes to full development, similarly there is growing up a new Sanskrit literature, philosophy and historiography, but they never attain the high standard of the Gupta period. Thus grows up a new architecture, building the temples and their sculptures in a sort of Barock style in the finest, most luxurious and pathetic shapes. What the

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Cathedrals of Rheims and Chartres are to the West, are perhaps to India the *Śikharas* of the Orissan and Chandel temples. The painting of this time imitates the great examples of Ajantā, but where the latter create large frescoes of rich composition here there have remained only small miniatures in the manuscripts of the Buddhist *Śāstras* in honour of the primeval mother *Prajñāpāramitā*, small pictures of gods, goddesses and saints as much drawn after traditional patterns, as the sculpture of the temples is forming even the simplest details according to the rule of the *Śilpaśāstras*.”³⁶

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³⁶ In the same key as Goetz's but more universal and generalized are the works of Hartmut Piper on the Laws of World-History, namely, *Der gesetzmässige Lebenslauf der Völker Chinas und Japans* (Leipzig 1929) and *Indien* (Leipzig 1931). The methods of comparative race-biology that he has applied to European historical facts he has employed also in regard to China, Japan and India. The equations that he establishes between the East and the West are very often suggestive, although not always acceptable.

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