The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s15: Reassertion of the Hindus as Political Powers (c. 1650-1850)
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s15
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Reassertion of the Hindus as Political Powers (c. 1650-1850)
c7.s15.1
Students of social metabolism and political morphology will understand that down to the beginning of the thirteenth century in the North and of the fourteenth century in the South the category, "Hindu period or periods" of Indian history, has a substance and a meaning, if periods have to be grouped according to religion or race. It is possible likewise to describe the period from the thirteenth or fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth with an expression like the "Mussalman period" on the strength of international and "geopolitical" relations in India.
c7.s15.2
During this period the Mussalmans enjoyed a genuine hegemony and paramountcy, although very often through the medium of small Moslem states in conflict with one another. But already towards the end of the fourteenth century (with the decline of Tughlaks) the "Rajputs" were reasserting themselves and establishing sovereign states. They had to submit to the Moghuls in the sixteenth century but again re-conquered their freedom with the decline of the Moghuls in the eighteenth.
c7.s15.3
Besides, by the middle of the seventeenth century and of course during the entire eighteenth century, new Hindu races, the Sikhs and the Marathas, were militant and succeeded in transforming themselves into manufacturers of states of substantial and dangerous importance. During this century and a half the Moghul Empire and other Mussalman states were placed on the defensive by the Hindus who pursued an aggressive rôle. The Mussalmans, therefore, could not claim to be anything more than colleagues and peers of the Hindus who were simultaneously holding their own in diverse regions of India, e.g., under the Rajputs of old standing as well as under the new-born Marathas and Sikhs.
c7.s15.4
The continuity of Hindu rule of the sovereign type was broken, say, for five hundred years from 1206 (Sultan Kutbuddin) to 1707 (Aurangzeb’s death). But even during this period of Hindu political submergence the Cholas maintained their independence down to 1310, Vijayanagara to 1565, and the Rajputs reasserted their power off and on between the Tughlaks (c 1388) and the Moghuls (c 1527) as Northern contemporaries of Vijayanagara.
c7.s15.5
The Sikhs had no state-making tradition of any sort. It was the militaristic energism of certain Punjabi races, the Jats, that enabled them to transform the devotional *Bhakti*-cult of Nānak into a tremendous political power with a characteristic *Gestalt* or morphology.
c7.s15.6
Like the Sikhs the Marathas also of the seventeenth century commenced their “political” career virtually on clean slates. There is no doubt, however, that the social complex, as M. G. Ranade makes it clear in *The Rise of the Maratha Power*, did not fail to furnish the Marathas with the traditional conceptions and ideals of Hindu statecraft. It is only in the Rajput states that one will have to look for the real continuity, although under modified forms, of the state-making processes, as prevalent, say, in Gurjara-Pratīhāra times.
c7.s15.7
It is but an accident of history that fragments of Rajput, Maratha and Sikh states have been permitted to go on during the period of British paramountcy since 1818, 1848 or rather 1857.