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 THE 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 OF NATIONS 
 
 INDIAPER.SIA
 
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 THE HISTORY OF NATIONS 
 
 HENRY CABOT LODGE,Ph.D.,LLD. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 
 
 INDIA 
 
 by 
 
 SIR WILLIAM W.HUNTER.F.R.S. 
 
 Late Director-General of 
 Statistics in India 
 and 
 
 MODERN PERSIA 
 
 Edited 
 by 
 GEORGE M.DUTCHERPhD. 
 
 Professor of History 
 Wesley an University 
 
 Volume V 
 
 Illustrated 
 
 The H.W. Snow and Son Company 
 
 C h i c a < o
 
 Copyright, 1907, by 
 JOHN D. MORRIS & COMPANY 
 
 Copyright, 1910 
 THE H. W. SNOW & SON COMPANY
 
 / \<\^%o^-ci
 
 THE HISTORY OF NATIONS 
 
 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 
 
 HENRY CABOT LODGE, PLD., LL.D. 
 
 Associate Editors and Authors 
 
 ARCHIBALD HENRY SAYCE, LL.D., 
 
 Professor of Assyriology, Oxford Uni- 
 versity 
 
 SIR ROBERT K. DOUGLAS, 
 
 Professor of Chinese, King's College, Lon- 
 don 
 
 CHRISTOPHER JOHNSTON, M.D., Ph.D., 
 
 Associate Professor of Oriental History and 
 Archaeology, Johns Hopkins University 
 
 C. W. C. OMAN, LL.D., 
 
 Professor of History, Oxford University 
 
 JEREMIAH WHIPPLE JENKS, Ph.D., LL.D., 
 
 Professor of Political Economy and Pol- 
 itics, Cornell University 
 
 KANICHI ASAKAWA, Ph.D., 
 
 Instructor in the History of Japanese 
 Civilization, Yale University 
 
 THEODOR MOMMSEN, 
 
 Late Professor of Ancient History. Uni- 
 versity of Berlin 
 
 ARTHUR C. HOWLAND, Ph.D., 
 
 Department of History, University of Penn- 
 sylvania 
 
 WILFRED HAROLD MUNRO, Ph.D., 
 
 Professor of European History, Brown 
 
 University 
 
 G. MERCER ADAM, 
 
 Historian and Editor 
 
 FRED MORROW FLING, Ph.D., 
 
 Professor of European History, University 
 of Nebraska 
 
 CHARLES MERIVALE, LL.D., 
 
 Late Dean of Ely, formerly Lecturer in 
 History, Cambridge University 
 
 FRANCOIS AUGUSTE MARIE MIGNET. 
 Late Member of the French Academy 
 
 J. HIGGINSON CABOT, Ph.D., 
 
 Department of History, Wellesley College 
 
 JAMES WESTFALL THOMPSON, Ph.D., 
 
 Department of History, University of 
 Chicago 
 
 SIR WILLIAM W. HUNTER, F.R.S., 
 
 Late Director-General of Statistics in India 
 
 SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, LL.D., 
 
 Professor of Modern History, King's Col- 
 lege. London 
 
 R. W. JOYCE, LL.D., 
 GEORGE M. DUTCHER, Ph.D., Commissioner for the Publication of the 
 
 Professor of History, Wesleyan University Ancient Laws of Ireland 
 
 vi
 
 ASSOCIATE EDITORS AND AUTHORS-Continued 
 
 justin McCarthy, ll.d., 
 
 Author and Historian 
 
 AUGUSTUS HUNT SHEARER, Ph.D.. 
 
 Instructor in History, Trinity College* 
 Hartford 
 
 W. HAROLD CLAFLIN, B.A., 
 
 Department of History, Harvard Uni- 
 versity 
 
 PAUL LOUIS LEGER, 
 
 Professor of the Slav Languages, C6!le*e 
 de France 
 
 WILLIAM E. LINGLEBACH, Ph.D., 
 
 Assistant Professor of European History 
 University of Pennsylvania 
 
 BAYARD TAYLOR, 
 
 Former United States Minister to Germany 
 
 CHARLES DANDLIKER, LL.D., 
 
 President of Zurich University 
 
 SIDNEY B. FAY, Ph.D., 
 
 Professor of History, Dartmouth College 
 
 ELBERT JAY BENTON, Ph.D., 
 
 Department of History, Western Reserve 
 University 
 
 SIR EDWARD S. CREASY, 
 
 Late Professor of History, University Col- 
 lege, London 
 
 ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE, Ph.D., 
 
 Assistant Professor of History, Harvard 
 University 
 
 WILLIAM RICHARD MORFILL, M.A., 
 
 Professor of Russian and other Slavonic 
 Languages, Oxford University 
 
 CHARLES EDMUND FRYER, Ph.D., 
 
 Department of History, McGill University 
 
 E. C. OTTE, 
 
 Specialist on Scandinavian History 
 
 J. SCOTT KELTIE, LL.D., 
 
 President Royal Geographical Society 
 
 ALBERT GALLOWAY KELLER, Ph.D., 
 
 Assistant Professor of the Science of So- 
 ciety, Yale University 
 
 EDWARD JAMES PAYNE, M.A., 
 
 Fellow of University College, Oxford 
 
 PHILIP PATTERSON WELLS, Ph.D., 
 
 Lecturer in History and Librarian of the 
 Law School, Yale University 
 
 FREDERICK ALBION OBER, 
 
 Historian, Author and Traveler 
 
 JAMES WILFORD GARNER, Ph.D., 
 
 Professor of Political Science, University 
 of Illinois 
 
 EDWARD S. CORWIN, Ph.D., 
 
 Instructor in History, Princeton Uni- 
 versity 
 
 JOHN BACH McMASTER, Litt.D., LL.D., 
 
 Professor of History, University of Penn- 
 sylvania 
 
 JAMES LAMONT PERKINS, Managing" Editor 
 
 The editors and publishers desire to express their appreciation for valuable 
 advice and suggestions received from the following: Hon. Andrew D. White, 
 LL.D., Alfred Thayer Mahan, D.C.L., LL.D., Hon. Charles Emory Smith, 
 LL.D., Professor Edward Gaylord Bourne, Ph.D., Charles F. Thwing, 
 LL.D., Dr. Emil Reich, William Elliot Griffis, LL.D., Professor John 
 Martin Vincent, Ph.D., LL.D., Melvil Dewey, LL.D., Alston Ellis, LL.D., 
 Professor Charles H. McCarthy, Ph.D., Professor Herman V. Ames, Ph.D., 
 Professor Walter L. Fleming, Ph.D., Professor David Y. Thomas, Ph.D., 
 Mr. Otto Reich and Mr. O. M. Dickerson. 
 
 vii
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The history of nearly every European country affords the historian 
 a subject of homogeneous character for his task; not so with the 
 history of India, for instead of one race, many must be dealt 
 with ; instead of one religion the people of India include numerous 
 devotees of nearly all the great world faiths; instead of a single 
 state with one form of government with a continuous history, 
 there have been numerous states with varying governmental 
 systems, and tribes and empires have crowded and jostled one 
 another, with dynasty rapidly displacing dynasty. The problem is 
 yet more difficult, for the historian of India has always the un- 
 fathomed oriental to study, and then for more than four centuries 
 must chronicle how the men of the West have come to India to 
 win empires, and must unravel the tangled web wrought by 
 European and Hindu as they have lived and fought and toiled 
 together. 
 
 No light task is it, then, to take up the history of India and 
 her peoples. Probably no one person has ever devoted himself 
 so completely and so faithfully to this endless but endlessly inter- 
 esting task as did Sir William Wilson Hunter. From his arrival 
 in India in 1861 to take up an assignment to a minor post, he 
 labored "first to enable England to learn India's wants; next to 
 help England to think fairly of India; and, finally, to make the 
 world feel the beauty and pathos of Indian life." In 1869 Lord 
 Mayo appointed him to organize the statistical survey of the Indian 
 empire, and for twelve years he toiled, in collaboration with num- 
 erous assistants, in the production of the 128 volumes which 
 contain the reports of that survey. The remainder of his life was 
 spent in the further pursuit of the same interesting studies. His 
 last work, a few weeks before his death in 1900, was on his " His- 
 tory of British India "a work which every student of Indian 
 history must regret will remain forever unfinished. 
 
 In order to put the wealth of material contained in the mas- 
 sive Statistical Survey of British India in a convenient and easily
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 accessible form, Hunter in 1881 brought out the first edition of 
 the " Imperial Gazetteer of India," of which a second edition in 
 fourteen volumes was published in 1885, and a third edition is now 
 in preparation by Mr. J. S. Cotton. The article, " India," in the 
 Gazetteer, fills the sixth volume, and a separate revised edition 
 of it was published in 1893 under the title " The Indian Empire, 
 Its People, History, and Products." The sixteen historical chap- 
 ters from this work were early published in a somewhat condensed 
 form under the title of " A Brief History of Indian Peoples," and 
 in a more condensed form appeared under the article " India " in 
 the ninth edition of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica." 
 
 More than eighty-five thousand copies of twenty-two English 
 editions of the " Brief History " were published during the author's 
 life, and a twenty-third edition prepared by the Rev. W. H. Hutton 
 bears the date 1903. Several translations of the little book have 
 been made, including versions in some of the languages of India. 
 It has been widely used as a text-book in India, and since 1886 has 
 been required for entrance examination by the Calcutta University. 
 Such evidences of the authoritative character and the popularity 
 of the " Brief History " are surely a full warrant for the selection 
 of it as one of the volumes of THE HISTORY OF NATIONS. 
 
 Sir William Hunter may be allowed in the words of the 
 preface to the first edition to tell the aims of his book : 
 
 " In this book I try to exhibit the growth of the Indian 
 peoples, to show what part they have played in the world's progress, 
 and what sufferings they have endured from other nations. Short 
 Indian histories, as written by Englishmen, usually dismiss the first 
 two thousand years of their narrative in a few pages, and start by 
 disclosing India as a conquered country. This plan is not good, 
 either for Europeans in India or for the Indians themselves; nor 
 does it accord with the facts. As long as Indian history is 
 presented to the Indian youth as nothing but a dreary record of 
 disunion and subjection, our Anglo-Indian schools can scarcely 
 become the nurseries of a self-respecting nation. I have there- 
 fore tried to put together, from original sources, a brief narrative 
 of what I believe to be the true history of the peoples of India. 
 These sources have been carefully examined in my larger works. 
 This little book merely states, without discussing, the results arrived 
 at by the labor of thirty years. 
 
 " I have tried to show how an early gifted race, ethnically
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 akin to our own, welded the primitive forest tribes into settled 
 communities. How the nobler stock, set free from the severer 
 struggle for life by the bounty of the Indian soil, created a lan- 
 guage, a literature, and a religion, of rare stateliness and beauty. 
 How the very absence of that strenuous striving with nature, which 
 is so necessary a discipline for nations, unfitted them for the great 
 conflicts which await all races. How, among the most intellectual 
 class, the spiritual and contemplative aspects of life overpowered 
 the practical and the political. How Hinduism, while sufficing to 
 organize the Indian communities into social and religious con- 
 federacies, failed to knit them together into a coherent nation. 
 
 " India was destined, by her position, to receive the human 
 overflow from the ancient breeding-grounds of central Asia. 
 Waves of conquest from the north were as inevitable in early times 
 as are the tidal waves from the ocean at the present day. But 
 such conquests, although rapid, were seldom enduring; and 
 although widespread, were never complete. The religious and 
 social organization of Hinduism never succumbed. The greatest 
 of India's conquerors, the Moguls, were being hemmed in by Hindu 
 confederacies before their supremacy had lasted 175 years. So far 
 as can now be estimated, the advance of the British alone saved 
 the Delhi empire from dismemberment by three Hindu military 
 powers, the Marathas, Rajputs, and Sikhs. The British rule has 
 endured because it is wielded in the joint interest of the Indian 
 races. 
 
 " But while these thoughts have long been present in my mind, 
 I have not obtruded them on my pages. For I hope that this little 
 book will reach the hands of many who look on history as a record 
 of events, rather than as a compendium of philosophy. The 
 greatest service which an Indian historian can at present render 
 to India, is to state the facts accurately and in such a way that they 
 will be read. If my story is found to combine truth with sim- 
 plicity, it will have attained all that I aimed at. If it teaches young 
 Englishmen and young natives of India to think more kindly of 
 each other, I shall esteem myself richly rewarded." 
 
 In prefacing his twenty-first edition, the author adds : " On 
 my own part, no pains have been spared to render this edition an 
 improvement on its predecessors. Although compressed into a 
 small size, it essays to embody the latest results of Indian historical 
 research, and of that more critical examination of the Indian records
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 which forms so important a feature of recent Indian work. My 
 endeavor has been to present the history of India in an attractive 
 and accurate narrative, yet within a compass which will place it 
 within reach of the ordinary English and American reader, and 
 render it available as a text-book for English and Indian colleges 
 or schools." Acknowledgment is also made to the various scholars 
 who had rendered him service in the preparation of the new edition, 
 and especially to Mr. H. Morse Stephens, who was then Lecturer 
 on Indian History to the University of Cambridge, but is now 
 Professor of History in the University of California. It is to 
 Professor Stephens that the editor is indebted for his interest in 
 the history of India, and for much of his knowledge of the subject. 
 
 This edition is based upon the twenty-third English edition by 
 the kind permission of the delegates of the Clarendon Press, who 
 have courteously extended the privilege of preparing the revised 
 work for American readers. 
 
 The author's text has been preserved as completely as possible, 
 but slight changes have been made to adapt the volume to this 
 series and a few slight errors have been corrected. In addition to 
 these merely verbal changes, a few irrelevant sentences have been 
 omitted. Additions of two sorts have been made. Sentences, and, 
 in some places, paragraphs, have been inserted to cover certain 
 points which the author had omitted for the sake of condensation, 
 but which it has been deemed desirable to insert to make the account 
 more complete and satisfactory. Such insertions are drawn, as 
 far as possible, from material in other books by Sir William 
 Hunter. In place of chapter XII the more complete corresponding 
 chapter from Hunter's " Indian Empire " has been inserted, pre- 
 ceded by an account of the development of European knowledge 
 of India, written by the editor. Chapter XVI has been expanded 
 by the editor and brought down to date, but Hunter's text is 
 preserved as far as possible. In addition to these changes, the 
 editor has inserted additional matter, intended in part to elucidate 
 and in part to supplement the author's text. To most American 
 readers reference books on India are not easily accessible, so that 
 it has been thought desirable to give much supplementary informa- 
 tion that would be unnecessary in the histories of other countries 
 for which reference books are more plentiful and satisfactory. 
 Several appendixes have been inserted as likely to be of use to 
 the reader and the student, and the bibliography, without any pre-
 
 PREFACE xiii 
 
 tension to completeness, has been made full because the student, 
 dependent upon the scant collections of Indian works in American 
 libraries, may thus be enabled to find some one book, though all 
 the rest are not accessible. 
 
 It is the hope of the editor that his part in the volume may 
 contribute even in a slight measure to the accomplishment of the 
 author's lofty purpose to make India better known and understood 
 by the West, and to win for India the sympathy of the peoples who 
 have attained to a degree of civilization, perhaps not always more 
 advanced than that of India, but always so vastly different. 
 
 The editor takes pleasure in this place in acknowledging his 
 indebtedness to friends who have assisted him in various ways in 
 the preparation of this volume. 
 
 i H^y juj ^jjgg^; 
 
 Wesleyan University
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INDIA 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Country 
 II. The People 
 
 III. The Non-Aryans 
 
 IV. The Aryans in India 
 V. Buddhism. 543 b. c.-iooo a. d. 
 
 VI. The Greeks in India. 327-161 b. c. 
 VII. The Scythic Inroads. 100 b. c-725 a. d. 
 VIII. Growth of Hinduism. 700-1500 
 IX. Early Mohammedan Conquerors. 714-1526 
 X. The Mogul Dynasty. 1526-1761 
 XI. The Marathas. 1650-1818 
 XII. Early European Settlements. 1498-1800 
 
 XIII. Growth of British Power. 1700-1805 . 
 
 XIV. The Consolidation of British India. 1805-1857 
 XV. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 
 
 XVI. India Under the British Crown. 1858- 1906 
 
 PAGE 
 
 3 
 20 
 
 25 
 36 
 56 
 
 67 
 72 
 
 75 
 
 88 
 
 109 
 
 130 
 
 138 
 178 
 204 
 232 
 242 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 1. The Sassanian Dynasty. 218-643 a. d. . . 313 
 II. Foreign Rule. 643-1502 325 
 
 III. The New Persian Empire. 1502- 1733 . . . 340 
 
 IV. Modern Persia. 1733-1906 35 1 
 
 V. The Government of Persia 371 
 
 The Opening of Tibet ..... 377 
 
 The Currency Question in India .... 3^3 
 
 Famines of India 3 
 
 Bibliography .....* 393 
 
 Index 45 
 
 XV
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 At the Court of the Mogul at Delhi (Photogravure) Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Buddha and His Disciples 56 
 
 The Interior of a Jain Temple . . . . . .64 
 
 The Interior of the Hindu Temple on the Island of 
 
 Rameswaram 84 
 
 The Maratha Maharajar of Holkar at the Battle of Assaye 136 
 
 Warren Hastings 188 
 
 The Storming of Seringapatam 200 
 
 The Amir of Sind Surrenders to Sir Charles Napier . .218 
 The Punishment of the Rebellious Sepoys . . . 238 
 
 The Prince of Wales in India 308 
 
 The Bodyguard of a Persian King (Colored) . . . 318 
 In a Persian Carpet Bazaar . .. . . .. . 368 
 
 TEXT MAPS 
 
 India Physical Features . . , 
 
 Alexander's Empire in the East 
 
 The Five Maratha Houses . 
 
 Early English Settlements in India . 
 
 Anglo-India. 1760 . 
 
 British Possessions in Farther India 
 
 The Railroads of India . . ,., 
 
 The Mutiny ..... 
 
 The Indian Empire. 1886 . . ... 
 
 The Plague Districts. 1896-1906 
 
 Greatest Extent of the Persian Empire 
 
 Religious Status. 700 a. d. 
 
 Asia. Circa 1400 a. d. 
 
 Modern Persia ...... 
 
 The Russian Advance in Central Asia 
 
 PAGE 
 
 14 
 
 68 
 
 134 
 164 
 
 185 
 211 
 224 
 236 
 268 
 284 
 3i7 
 327 
 338 
 345 
 367
 
 HISTORY OF INDIA
 
 HISTORY OF INDIA 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 THE COUNTRY 
 
 INDIA is a great three-cornered country, stretching southward 
 from mid-Asia into the ocean. Its northern base rests upon 
 the Himalaya ranges; the chief part of its western side is 
 washed by the Arabian Sea, and the chief part of its eastern side 
 by the Bay of Bengal. While thus guarded along the whole length 
 of its boundaries by nature's defenses, the mountains and the ocean, 
 it has on its northeastern and on its northwestern frontiers two 
 opposite sets of gateways which connect it with the rest of Asia. 
 On the northeast it is bounded by the wild hill regions between 
 Burma and the Chinese empire or Tibet ; on the northwest by the 
 Mohammedan states of Afghanistan and Baluchistan; and two 
 streams of population of widely diverse types have poured into 
 India by the passes at these northeastern and northwestern corners. 
 India extends from the eighth to the thirty-sixth degree of 
 north latitude, that is, from the hot regions near the equator to far 
 within the temperate zone, and approximately from the latitude of 
 Panama to the latitude of Nashville, or from Sierra Leone to Gib- 
 raltar. The capital, Calcutta, lies in 88 degrees of east longitude ; 
 so that, when the sun sets at six o'clock there, it is just past midday 
 in England, and at Washington, which is just eleven hours later 
 than Calcutta, it would be only seven o'clock in the morning. The 
 length of India from north to south, and its greatest breadth from 
 east to west, are both about 1900 miles; but it tapers with a pear- 
 shaped curve to a point at Cape Comorin, its southern extremity. 
 To this compact dominion the English have added Burma, or the 
 country on the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal. The whole 
 territory thus described contains over 1,750,000 square miles, and 
 294,000,000 of inhabitants. India, therefore, has an area almost 
 equal to, and a population in excess of, the area and population 
 of all Europe, less Russia ; it is very nearly equal to the area of the 
 United States east of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New
 
 4, INDIA 
 
 Mexico; and the population is about three and one-half times the 
 total population of the United States and its dependencies. 
 
 This noble empire is rich in varieties of scenery and climate, 
 from the highest mountains in the world to vast river-deltas, raised 
 only a few inches above the level of the sea. It teems with the 
 products of nature, from the fierce beasts and tangled jungles of 
 the tropics, to the stunted barley crop which the hillman rears, and 
 the small furred animal which he traps, within sight of the eternal 
 snow. If we could look down on the whole from a balloon, we 
 should find that India is made up of four well-defined tracts. The 
 first includes the Himalaya Mountains, which shut India out from 
 the rest of Asia on the north ; the second stretches southward from 
 their foot, and comprises the plains of the great rivers which issue 
 from the Himalayas; the third tract slopes upward again from the 
 southern edge of the river plains, and consists of a high, three- 
 sided tableland, dotted with peaks, and covering the southern half 
 of India ; the fourth is Burma on the east of the Bay of Bengal. 
 
 The first of these four regions is composed of the Himalayas 
 and their offshoots to the southward. The Himalayas (meaning, 
 in Sanskrit, the abode of snow) form two irregular mountain walls, 
 running nearly parallel to each other east and west, with a hollow 
 trough or valley beyond. The southernmost of these walls rises 
 steeply from the plains of India to over 20,000 feet, or four miles 
 in height. It culminates in Mount Everest (named for Sir George 
 Everest, a surveyor general of India), 29,002 feet, the highest 
 peak in the world. The crests then subside on the northward into 
 a series of dips, lying about 13,000 feet above the sea. Behind these 
 dips rises the inner range of the Himalayas, a second wall of moun- 
 tains and snow. Beyond the double wall thus formed is the great 
 trough or line of valleys in which the Indus, the Sutlej, and the 
 Brahmaputra gather their waters. From the northern side of these 
 valleys rises the tableland of Tibet, 16,000 feet above the sea. The 
 Himalayas shut out India from the rest of Asia. Their heights be- 
 tween Tibet and India are crowned with eternal snow; while vast 
 glaciers, one of which is known to be sixty miles in length, slowly 
 move their masses of ice downward to the valleys. This wild 
 region is in many parts impenetrable to man, and nowhere yields a 
 route for an army, but bold parties of traders, wrapped in sheep- 
 skins, force their way across its passes, 18,000 feet high. The bones 
 of worn-out mules and ponies mark their path. The little yak
 
 THE COUNTRY 5 
 
 cow, whose bushy tail is manufactured into lace in Europe, is em- 
 ployed in the Himalayas as a beast of burden, and patiently toils 
 up the steepest gorges with a heavy load on her back. The sheep 
 are also used to carry bags of borax to markets near the plains. 
 They are then shorn of their fleeces and eaten as mutton. A few 
 return into the inner mountains laden with sugar and cloth. 
 
 The Himalayas not only form a double wall along the north 
 of India, but at both ends send out hilly offshoots southward, which 
 protect its northeastern and northwestern boundaries. On the 
 northeast, these offshoots, under the name of the Naga and Patkoi 
 Mountains, form a barrier between the civilized British districts 
 and the wild tribes of upper Burma, but the barrier is pierced, just 
 at the corner where it strikes southward from the Himalayas, by 
 a passage through which the Brahmaputra River rushes into the 
 Assam Valley. On the opposite or northwestern frontier of India, 
 the hilly offshoots run down .the entire length of the British boun- 
 dary from the Himalayas to the sea. As they proceed southward, 
 they are in turn known as the Safed Koh, the Sulaiman Range, and 
 the Hala Mountains. This western barrier has peaks over 11,000 
 feet in height ; but it is pierced at the corner where it strikes south- 
 ward from the Himalayas by an opening, the Khaibar Pass, near 
 which the Kabul River flows into India. The Khaibar Pass, 3400 
 feet high, with the Kuram Pass to the south of it, the Gwalari Pass 
 near Dera Ismail Khan, and the famous Bolan Pass, 5800 feet 
 high, still farther south, form the gateways from India to Afghan- 
 istan and Baluchistan. 
 
 Portions of this mountainous region iormed by the Himalayas 
 and their offshoots and foothills are included within the provinces 
 of Burma, Assam, the United Provinces, and the Punjab, while 
 the Northwest Frontier Province, formed in 1901, is distinctively 
 a mountain region and controls the important Khaibar, Kuram, and 
 Gwalari Passes. British Baluchistan lies largely on the further 
 side of the mountains and controls the famous Bolan Pass. The 
 independent native states of Bhutan and Nepal, and the dependent 
 natives states of Sikkim and Kashmir, lie in the Himalayas along 
 the northern frontier ; and on the west is Baluchistan, with various 
 petty native states extending along the frontier northward to Chit- 
 ral, at the junction of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. 
 
 The rugged Himalayas, while thus keeping out enemies, are 
 a source of food and wealth to the Indian people. They collect and
 
 6 INDIA 
 
 store up water for the hot plains below. Throughout the summer, 
 vast quantities of moisture are exhaled from the distant tropical 
 seas. This moisture gathers into vapor, and is carried northward 
 by the monsoon, or regular wind, which sets in from the south in 
 the month of June. The monsoon drives the masses of vapor north- 
 ward before it across the length and breadth of India, sometimes 
 in the form of long processions of clouds, which a native poet has 
 likened to flights of great white birds; sometimes in the shape of 
 rainstorms, which crash through the forests, and leave a line of 
 unroofed villages and flooded fields on their track. The moisture 
 which does not fall as rain on its aerial voyage over India is at 
 length dashed against the Himalayas. These stop its further prog- 
 ress northward, and the moisture descends as rain on their outer 
 slopes, or is frozen into snow in its attempts to cross their inner 
 heights. Very little moisture passes beyond them, so that while 
 their southern sides receive the heaviest rainfall in the world, and 
 pour it down in torrents to the Indian rivers, the great plain of 
 Tibet on the north gets scarcely any rain. At Cherra Punji, where 
 the monsoon first strikes the hills in Assam, 523 inches of rain fall 
 annually; while in one year (1861) as many as 805 inches are re- 
 ported to have poured down, of which 366 inches fell in the single 
 month of June. While, therefore, the mean annual rainfall of 
 either Boston, New York, or Washington is about 45 inches, and 
 London about two feet, and that of the plains of India from one 
 to seven, the usual rainfall at Cherra Punji is thirty feet, or enough 
 to float the largest man-of-war; while in one year sixty-seven feet 
 of water fell from the sky, or sufficient to drown a four-story 
 building. 
 
 This neavy rainfall renders the southern slopes of the Hima- 
 layas very fertile. Their upper ranges form bare gray masses, 
 but wherever there is any depth of soil a forest springs up ; and the 
 damp belt of lowland at their foot, called the Tarai, is covered with 
 a dense fever-breeding jungle, habitable only by a few rude tribes 
 and wild beasts. Thickets of tree-ferns and bamboos adorn their 
 eastern ranges; tracts of rhododendron, which here grows into a 
 forest tree, blaze red and pink in the spring ; the deodar, or Hima- 
 layan cedar, rises in dark stately masses. The branches of the trees 
 are themselves clothed with mosses, ferns, and flowering creepers 
 or orchids. In the autumn, crops of red and yellow millet run in 
 ribbons of brilliant color down the hillsides. The chief saleable
 
 THE COUNTRY 7 
 
 products of the Himalayas are timber and charcoal; barley, small 
 grains or millets, grown in the hot valleys and upon terraces formed 
 with much labor on the slopes; potatoes, other vegetables, and 
 honey. Strings of ponies and mules straggle with their burdens 
 along the narrow paths, at places cut out of the sheer precipice. 
 The muleteers and their hard-working wives load themselves also 
 with pine stems and conical baskets of grain. 
 
 The high price of wood on the plains has caused many of the 
 hills to be stripped of their trees, so that the rainfall now rushes 
 quickly down their bare slopes, and no new woods can spring up. 
 The potato crop, introduced from England, led to a further destruc- 
 tion of timber. The hillman cleared his potato ground by burning 
 a ring round the trunks of the great trees, and laying out the side 
 of the mountain into terraces. In a few years the bark dropped 
 off the trees, and the forest stood bleached and ruined. Some of 
 the trees rotted on the ground, like giants fallen in a confused fight ; 
 others still remain upright, with white trunks and skeleton arms. 
 In the end, the rank green potato crop marked the spot where a for- 
 est had been slain and buried. Several of the ruder hill tribes fol- 
 lowed an even more wasteful mode of tillage. Destitute of either 
 plows or cattle, they burned down the jungle, and exhausted the soil 
 by a quick succession of crops, raised by the hoe. In a year or two 
 the whole settlement moved off to a fresh patch of jungle, which 
 they cleared and exhausted, and then deserted in like manner. The 
 forests of India are now under the charge of the forest department 
 of the government of India and of the provincial forest depart- 
 ments. The father of Indian forestry was a German, Dietrich 
 Brandis (born 1824, knighted 1887), who was called from the 
 University of Bonn by Lord Dalhousie and sent to British Burma 
 in 1856. He became the first inspector-general of forests in 1864 
 and held the office until 1883. He at first arranged for the training 
 of his English subordinates at the French school at Nancy and at 
 the German schools, but in 1885 a course in forestry was established 
 at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper's Hill. ^ Native 
 foresters are trained at the school opened at Dehra Dun in 1878 
 and at the newer schools at Poona and at Tharawadi. The Indian 
 forest administration * is now regulated by an act passed in 1878. 
 
 1 Berthold Ribbentrop, who was inspector-general from 1889 to 1900, has 
 published "Forestry in British India" (Calcutta, 1900), which may be consulted 
 in addition to the various official reports and surveys which have been published 
 by the Indian and provincial governments.
 
 8 INDIA 
 
 The special feature of the Himalayas, however, is that they 
 send down the rainfall from their northern as well as from their 
 southern slopes upon the Indian plains. For, as we have seen, they 
 form a double mountain-wall, with a deep trough or valley beyond. 
 Even the rainfall which passes beyond their outer or southern 
 heights is stopped by their inner or northern ridges, and drains into 
 the trough behind. Of the three great rivers of India the two 
 longest namely, the Indus and the Brahmaputra take their rise 
 in this trough lying on the north of the double wall of the Hima- 
 layas; while the third, the Ganges, receives its waters from their 
 southern slopes. 
 
 The Indus, with its mighty feeder the Sutlej, and the Brahma- 
 putra rise not very far from each other, in lonely valleys, which are 
 separated from India by mountain barriers 15,000 feet high. The 
 Indus and the Sutlej first flow westward. Then, turning south, 
 through openings in the Himalayas, they join with shorter rivers in 
 the Punjab, and their united stream falls into the Indian Ocean 
 after a course of 1800 miles. 
 
 The Brahmaputra, on the other hand, strikes to the east, flow- 
 ing behind the Himalayas until it searches out a passage for itself 
 through their clefts at the northeastern corner of Assam. It then 
 turns sharply round to the west, and afterward to the south, and so 
 finally reaches the Bay of Bengal. Like the Indus, it has a course 
 of about 1800 miles. Thus, while the Indus and the Brahmaputra 
 rise close to each other behind the Himalayas, and run an almost 
 equal course, their mouths lie 1500 miles apart, on the opposite 
 sides of India. Both of them have a long secret existence in the 
 trough between the double mountain wall before they pierce 
 through the hills ; and they bring to the Indian plains the drainage 
 from the northern slopes of the Himalayas. Indeed, the first part 
 of the course of the Brahmaputra is still unexplored. It bears the 
 name of the Sanpu for nearly a thousand miles of its passage be- 
 hind the Himalayan wall, and it is not till it bursts through the 
 mountains into India that the noble stream receives its Sanskrit 
 name of Brahmaputra, the son of Brahma or God. 
 
 The Ganges and its great tributary the Jumna collect the 
 drainage from the southern slopes of the Himalayas; they join their 
 waters to those of the Brahmaputra as they approach the sea, 
 and, after a course of 1 500 miles, enter the Bay of Bengal by a vast 
 network of channels.
 
 THE COUNTRY 9 
 
 The wide plains watered by the Himalayan rivers form the 
 second of the four regions into which I have divided India. They 
 extend from the Bay of Bengal on the east to the Indian Ocean on 
 the west, and contain the richest and most densely-crowded prov- 
 inces of the Indian empire. One set of invaders after another have, 
 from very ancient times, entered by the passes at their northeastern 
 and northwestern corners, and, following the courses of the rivers, 
 pushed the earlier comers south toward the sea. About 150,000,000 
 of people now live on and around these river plains, in the provinces 
 known as Lower Bengal, Assam, the United Provinces, the Punjab, 
 and Sind, and in Rajputana, and other native states. The Indus 
 brings water from the Himalayas to the western side of the river 
 plains of northern India, the Brahmaputra to their eastern, while 
 the Ganges and its feeders fertilize their central region. 
 
 The Indus, after it unites the five rivers of the Punjab, ceases 
 to obtain further tributaries, and the great desert of Rajputana 
 stretches from its left bank. The Brahmaputra, on the extreme 
 east of the plains, passes down the still thinly-inhabited valley of 
 Assam; and it is only in the lower part of its course, as it ap- 
 proaches the Ganges, that a dense population is found on its mar- 
 gin. But the Ganges and its great tributary the Jumna flow for 
 nearly a thousand miles almost parallel to the Himalayas, and re- 
 ceive many streams from them. They do the work of water-carrier 
 for most of northern India, and the people reverence the bountiful 
 rivers which fertilize their fields. The sources of the Ganges and 
 Jumna in the mountains are held sacred ; their point of junction at 
 Allahabad is yearly visited by thousands of pilgrims; and a great 
 religious gathering takes place each January on Sagar Island, 
 where the united stream formerly poured into the sea. To bathe 
 in Mother Ganges, as she is lovingly called, purified from sin during 
 life ; and the devout Hindu died in the hope that his ashes would 
 be borne by her waters to the ocean. The Ganges is also a river 
 of great cities. Calcutta, Patna, and Benares are built on her 
 banks ; Agra and Delhi on those of her tributary the Jumna ; and 
 Allahabad on the tongue of land where the two sister streams 
 
 unite. 
 
 In order to understand the Indian plains, we must have a clear 
 idea of the part played by these great rivers; for the rivers first 
 create the land, then fertilize it, and finally distribute its produce. 
 The plains were in many parts upheaved by volcanic forces, or de-
 
 10 INDIA 
 
 posited in an aqueous era, long before man appeared on the earth. 
 In other parts the plains of northern India have been formed out 
 of the silt which the rivers bring down from the mountains, and at 
 this day we may stand by and watch the ancient, silent process of 
 land-making go on. A great Bengal river like the Ganges has two 
 distinct stages in its career from the Himalayas to the sea. In the 
 first stage of its course, it runs along the bottom of valleys, receives 
 the drainage and mud of the country on both sides, absorbs tribu- 
 taries, and rushes forward with an ever-increasing volume of water 
 and silt. By the time that the Ganges reaches the middle of Lower 
 Bengal, it enters on the second stage of its life. Finding its speed 
 checked by the equal level of the plains, it splits out into several 
 channels, like a jet of water suddenly obstructed by the finger, or 
 a jar of liquid dashed on the floor. Each of the new streams thus 
 created throws off its own set of channels to left and right. 
 
 The country which these numerous channels or offshoots in- 
 close and intersect forms the delta of Bengal. The network of 
 streams struggles slowly across this vast flat; and the currents are 
 no longer able, owing to their diminished speed, to carry along the 
 silt or sand which the more rapid parent river had brought down 
 from northern India. The sluggish split-up rivers of the delta ac- 
 cordingly drop their burden of silt in their channels or on their 
 margins, producing almond-shaped islands, and by degrees raising 
 their beds above the surrounding plains. In this way the rivers of 
 a delta build themselves up, as it were, into high-level canals, which 
 in the rainy season overflow their banks, and leave their silt upon 
 the low country on either side. Thousands of square miles in 
 Lower Bengal thus receive each autumn a top-dressing of new soil, 
 brought free of cost by the river currents from the distant Hima- 
 layas a system of natural manuring which yields a constant suc- 
 cession of rich crops. 
 
 As the rivers creep further down the delta, they become more 
 and more sluggish, and raise their beds still higher above the ad- 
 jacent plains. Each set of channels has a depressed tract or swamp 
 on both sides, so that the lowest levels in a delta lie often about 
 half-way between the rivers. The stream overflows into these de- 
 pressed tracts, and gradually fills them up with its silt. The water 
 which rushes from the rivers into the swamps is sometimes yellow 
 from the quantity of silt or sand which it carries. When it has 
 stood a few days in the swamps, and the river flood subsides, the
 
 THE COUNTRY n 
 
 water flows back from the swamps into the river channels ; but it 
 has dropped all its silt, and is of a clear, dark-brown hue. The silt 
 remains in the swamp, and by degrees fills it up, thus slowly creat- 
 ing new land. 
 
 The last scene in the life of an Indian river is a wilderness of 
 forest and swamp at the end of its delta, amid whose malarious 
 solitudes the network of channels merges into the sea. Here all 
 the secrets of land-making stand disclosed. The streams, finally 
 checked by the dead weight of the sea, deposit their remaining silt, 
 which rises above the surface of the water in the shape of banks or 
 curved headlands. The ocean currents also find themselves im- 
 peded by the downflow from the rivers, and drop the burden of 
 sand which the tides sweep along the coast. In this way, while 
 the shore gradually grows out into the sea, owing to the deposit of 
 river silt, islands or bars are formed around the river mouths from 
 the sand dropped by the ocean currents, and a double process of 
 land-making goes on. 
 
 The great Indian rivers, therefore, not only supply new ground 
 by depositing islands in their beds, and by filling up the low-lying 
 tracts or swamps beyond their margins, but also by forming banks 
 and capes and masses of land at their mouths. They slowly con- 
 struct their deltas by driving back the sea. The land which they 
 thus create, they also fertilize. In the lower parts of their course 
 their overflow affords a natural system of irrigation and manuring ; 
 in the higher parts, man has to step in, and to bring their water 
 by canals to the fields. They form, moreover, cheap highways for 
 carrying the produce of the country to the towns and seaports ; and 
 what the arteries are to the human body, the rivers are to the plains 
 of Bengal. 
 
 But the very vastness of their energy causes terrible calamities. 
 Scarcely a year passes without floods, which sweep off cattle and 
 grain stores, and the thatched cottages, with anxious families 
 perched on their roofs. In the upper part of their courses, where 
 their water is carried by canals to the fields, the rich irrigated lands 
 sometimes breed fever, and are in places destroyed and rendered 
 sterile by a saline crust called reh. The formation of reh has been 
 described by Eliot James as follows : " Where the subsoil water 
 level is sufficiently near the surface, the strong evaporating force 
 of the sun's heat, aided by capillary attraction, draws to the surface 
 of the ground the water holding these salts (chiefly sodium sulphate
 
 12 INDIA 
 
 mixed with sodium chloride and sodium carbonate) in solution, and 
 these compel the water which passes off in the form of vapor, to 
 leave behind the salts it held, as a white efflorescence." Even grass 
 will not grow where this substance is thus found on the soil. 
 
 Farther down, the uncontrollable rivers wriggle across the 
 face of the country, deserting their old beds, and searching out new 
 channels for themselves, it may be at a distance of many miles. 
 During these restless changes, they drown the lands and villages 
 that lie in their path ; and a Bengal proprietor has sometimes to look 
 on helplessly while his estate is being converted into the new bed 
 of a broad, deep stream. Even in their quiet moods the rivers 
 steadily steal land from the old owners, and give it capriciously to 
 a fresh set. Each autumn the mighty currents undermine, and then 
 rend away, the fields and hamlets on their margins. Their activity 
 in land-making stops up their channels with newly formed islands, 
 and has thus left high and dry in ruin many a once important city 
 along their banks. The ancient harbors at their mouths have in 
 like manner been land-locked and shut off from the sea by islands 
 and bars formed from the silt or sand jointly deposited by the 
 rivers and the ocean currents. 
 
 Throughout the river plains of Bengal two harvests, and in 
 some provinces three, are reaped each year. In many districts, in- 
 deed, the same fields have to yield two crops within the twelve 
 months. Wheat and various grains, pease, pulses, oil-seeds, and 
 green crops of many sorts are reaped in spring ; the early rice crops 
 in September; the great rice harvest of the year and other grains 
 in November or December. Before these last have been gathered 
 in, it is time to prepare the ground again for the spring crops; 
 and the husbandman knows no rest except during the hot weeks 
 of May, when he is anxiously waiting for the rains. The northern 
 and drier regions, along the higher courses of the rivers, roll up- 
 ward from their banks into fertile plains, dotted with mud-built 
 villages, and adorned with noble trees. Mango groves scent the 
 air with their blossom in spring, and yield their abundant fruit in 
 summer. The spreading banian with its colonnades of hanging 
 roots, the stately pipal (Jicus religiosa), or sacred fig tree, with its 
 masses of foliage, the leafless wild cotton-tree laden with its heavy 
 red flowers, the tall feathery tamarind, and the quick-growing babul 
 (acacia arabica), the wood of which is used for making agricultural 
 implements and the bark for tanning, rear their heads above the crop
 
 THE COUNTRY 13 
 
 fields. As the rivers approach the coast, the palms begin to take 
 possession of the scene. 
 
 The ordinary landscape in the Bengal delta is a flat stretch 
 of rice fields, fringed round with evergreen masses of bamboos, 
 cocoanuts, areca, and other coroneted palms. This densely-peo- 
 pled tract seems at first sight bare of villages, for each hamlet 
 is hidden amid its own grove of plantains and wealth-giving trees. 
 The crops also change as we sail down the rivers. In the north, 
 the principal grains are wheat, barley, and millets, such as joar 
 and bajra. The two last form the food of the masses, rice, in 
 northern Bengal, being only grown on irrigated lands, and con- 
 sumed by the rich. Sorghum vulgare, or Indian millet, is used as 
 a fodder and from its seed a bread is made. In the delta, on the 
 other hand, rice is the staple crop and the universal diet. More 
 than a hundred varieties of it are known to the Bengal peasant. 
 Sugar cane, oil-seeds, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and many precious 
 spices and dyes grow both in the north and the south. The tea- 
 plant is reared on several hilly ranges which skirt the plains, but 
 chiefly around Darjiling or in the Dwars and Assam; pennisetum 
 typhoideum is used especially for feeding cattle and horses; the 
 opium poppy, about half-way down the Ganges, near Benares and 
 Patna; the silkworm mulberry, still farther down in Lower Ben- 
 gal; while the jute fiber is essentially a crop of the delta, and 
 would exhaust any soil not fertilized by river floods. Even the 
 jungles yield the costly lac dye and tasar silk cocoons. Lac is a 
 resinous substance deposited on twigs by the female lac insect, 
 carteria lacca, which yields a scarlet dye used for woolens and 
 leather. The residue, after the extraction of the dye, is the shellac 
 of commerce. Tasar, or tusser-silk, is the product of antheroea 
 paphia and other wild silkworms, and is used only for plainly 
 woven fabrics. To name all the crops of the river plains would 
 weary the reader. Nearly every vegetable product which feeds and 
 clothes a people, or enables it to trade with foreign nations, 
 abounds here. 
 
 Having thus glanced at the leading features of the Himalayas 
 on the north, and of the great river plains at their base, I come now 
 to the third division of India, namely, the three-sided tableland 
 which covers the southern half of the peninsula. This tract, known 
 in ancient times as the Deccan, or the South (dakshin), comprises 
 the Central Provinces, Berar, Madras, and Bombay, and the native
 
 14. 
 
 INDIA 
 
 territories of Mysore, of the nizam, Sindhia, Holkar, and other 
 feudatory princes. It slopes upward from the southern edge of the 
 Gangetic plains. Two sacred mountains stand as outposts on the 
 extreme east and west, with confused ranges stretching eight hun- 
 dred miles between. At the western extremity, Mount Abu, famous 
 for its exquisite Jain temples, rises 5650 feet from the Rajputana 
 plains, like an island out of the sea. The Aravalli chain, the Yind- 
 
 INDIA 
 
 PHYSICAL FEATURES 
 
 hya Mountains, the Satpura and Kaimur Ranges, with other high- 
 land tracts, run across the country eastward until they abut on the 
 Ganges Valley, under the name of the Rajmahal Hills. On the 
 eastern edge of the central mountainous region, Mount Parasnath, 
 also sacred to Jain rites, towers 4400 feet above the level of the 
 Gangetic plains. 
 
 These various ranges form, as it were, the northern wall and 
 buttresses on which rests the central tableland of India. Now
 
 THE COUNTRY 15 
 
 pierced by road and rail, they stood in former times as a barrier of 
 mountain and jungle between northern and southern India, and 
 greatly increased the difficulty of welding the whole into one em- 
 pire. The three-cornered tableland forms a vast mass of forests, 
 ridges, and peaks, broken by cultivated valleys and high-lying 
 plains. Its eastern and western sides are known as the Ghats, a 
 word applied to a flight of steps up a river bank or to a mountain 
 pass. The Eastern Ghats run in fragmentary spurs and ranges 
 down the Madras side of India, sometimes receding inland, and 
 leaving broad plains between them and the coast. The Western 
 Ghats form a great sea-wall for the Bombay presidency, with only 
 a narrow strip between them and the shore. At places they rise in 
 magnificent precipices and headlands almost out of the ocean, and 
 truly look like colossal " landing-stairs" from the sea. The East- 
 ern and Western Ghats meet at an angle near Cape Comorin at the 
 southern extremity of India, and so complete the three sides of the 
 tableland. The inner plateau itself lies far below the snow line, and 
 its ordinary elevation seldom exceeds 2000 to 3000 feet. Its best- 
 known hills are the Nilgiris (Blue Mountains), which contain the 
 summer capital of Madras, Utakamand, 7000 feet above the sea. 
 The highest point is Dodabetta peak, 8760 feet, at the southern 
 extremity of Mysore. 
 
 This inner region of highlands sends its waters chiefly to the 
 eastern coast. The drainage from the northern or Vindhyan edge 
 of the three-sided tableland falls into the Ganges. The Narbada 
 runs along the southern base of the Vindhyas, and carries their 
 southern drainage due west into the Gulf of Cambay. The Tapti 
 flows almost parallel to the Narbada, a little to the southward, and 
 bears to the Gulf of Cambay the waters from the Satpura Hills. 
 From this point, as we proceed southward, the Western Ghats rise 
 into a high unbroken barrier between the Bombay coast and the 
 waters of the inner tableland. The drainage has therefore to make 
 its way right across India to the eastward, now twisting round hill 
 ranges, now rushing down the valleys between them, until the rain, 
 which the Bombay Seabreeze dropped upon the Western Ghats, 
 finally falls into the Bay of Bengal. In this way the three great 
 rivers of the Madras presidency namely, the Godavari, the Krishna 
 (Kistna), and the Kaveri rise in the mountains overhanging the 
 Bombay coast, and traverse the whole breadth of the central table- 
 land before they reach the ocean on the eastern shores of India.
 
 16 INDIA 
 
 The ancient Sanskrit poets speak of the southern tableland as 
 buried under forests; and sal, ebony, sissu, teak, and other great 
 trees abound. Shorea robusta flourishes in northern India and fur- 
 nishes the most extensively-used timber in that region next to teak. 
 Dalbergia sissu yields a compact, durable timber used for railroad 
 ties and in shipbuilding, and for other similar purposes. The 
 Ghats, in particular, are covered with magnificent vegetation wher- 
 ever a sapling can take root. But tillage has now driven back the 
 jungle to the hilly recesses; and fields of wheat, and many kinds 
 of smaller grain or millets, tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, and pulses, 
 spread over the open country. The black soil of southern India is 
 proverbial for its fertility; and the lowlands between the Ghats and 
 the sea rival even Lower Bengal in their fruit-bearing palms, rice 
 harvests, and rich succession of crops. The inner tableland is, how- 
 ever, very liable to droughts; and the people have devised a varied 
 system of irrigation, in some districts from wells, in others from 
 tanks, or from artificial lakes formed by damming up the mouths 
 of river valleys. They thus store the rain brought during a few 
 months by the northern and southern monsoons, and husband it for 
 use throughout the whole year. The food of the common people 
 consists chiefly of small grains or millets, such as joar, bajra, and 
 ragi (cynosurus corocanus) . The principal exports are cotton and 
 wheat. It is, moreover, on the three-sided tableland, and among the 
 hilly spurs which project from it, that the mineral wealth of India 
 lies hidden. Coal mining now forms a great industry, both on the 
 northeastern edge of the tableland in Bengal, and in the valleys 
 of the Central Provinces. Beds of iron ore and limestone hold out 
 a prospect of metal-smelting on a large scale in the future; copper 
 and other metals exist in small quantities. The diamonds of Gol- 
 conda were long famous. Gold dust has from very ancient times 
 been washed out of many of the river beds; and gold mining is 
 now being attempted on scientific principles in the Madras presi- 
 dency and in Mysore. 
 
 Burma, the fourth region, which the English have incor- 
 porated into the Indian empire, consists mainly of the valley of the 
 Irawadi, and a strip of coast along the east side of the Bay of 
 Bengal. It stretches north and south, with the sea on the west, a 
 backbone of lofty ranges running down the middle, and the moun- 
 tainous frontier of the Chinese empire and Siam on the east. The 
 central backbone of ranges in Burma is formed by the Yoma Moun-
 
 THE COUNTRY 17 
 
 tains. They are covered with dense forests, and separate the Ira- 
 wadi Valley from the strip of coast. The river floats down an 
 abundant supply of teak from the north. A thousand creeks indent 
 the seaboard ; and the whole of the level country, both on the coast 
 and in the Irawadi Valley, forms a vast rice field. Tobacco of an 
 excellent quality supplies the cigars which all Burmese men and 
 women smoke ; and large quantities of tobacco leaf are also brought 
 over from the Madras presidency. Until 1886 British Burma was 
 divided into three provinces Arakan, or the northern coast strip; 
 Pegu, or the Irawadi Valley in the middle ; and Tenasserim, or the 
 narrow maritime tract and islands running down from the south of 
 the Irawadi delta. In 1886 Upper Burma, or the old kingdom of 
 Ava, was added to the British empire. Arakan and Pegu contain 
 mineral oil springs. Tenasserim is rich in tin mines, and in iron 
 ores equal to the finest Swedish, besides gold and copper in smaller 
 quantities, and a very pure limestone. Rice and timber form the 
 staple exports of Burma and rice is also the universal food of the 
 people. The most important ruby mines in the world are located 
 near Mandalay, and produce the famous pigeon-blood rubies. 
 
 The continental portion of the Indian empire, which has now 
 been described, is at present administered in thirteen provinces 
 under direct British rule and in fifteen groups of native states un- 
 der British protection of some form or other. In addition to the 
 continental territories, there are several outlying groups of islands 
 and other isolated bits of territory that administratively are reck- 
 oned as a portion of the Indian empire. It is to be noted, however, 
 that the Island of Ceylon, though lying immediately adjacent to the 
 shores of India, is not a part of the empire, but is administered as a 
 crown colony. The Maldive Islands situated southwest of Cape 
 Comorin are a dependency of Ceylon and not of the Indian empire. 
 
 A fourteenth province of the Indian empire is composed of the 
 chain of islands which extends from Cape Negrais at the south- 
 western point of Burma to Achin Head, the northwestern point of 
 Sumatra. This chain is divided into two groups, the Andamans 
 and the Nicobars. The Andamans are the more northerly group 
 and include four large islands and numerous small ones with an 
 area of more than 2500 square miles. The natives are an abo- 
 riginal race of the negrito type, and of the lowest and least intelli- 
 gent sort. They were long notorious for their cannibal practices. 
 They are now reduced to less than 2000 in number and are slowly
 
 18 INDIA 
 
 trying out. The only important product of the islands is timber. 
 Lieutenant Archibald Blair made a complete survey of the islands 
 in 1 789- 1 790 and the Indian government maintained a small colony 
 in the islands until May, 1796, when they were abandoned. The 
 cruel treatment and murder of shipwrecked mariners and other 
 visitors to the islands led the British government to take measures 
 for the reoccupation of the islands and in 1858 they were made a 
 penal settlement to which many of the Indian mutineers were trans- 
 ported. The chief station is Port Blair on South Andaman Island, 
 which has one of the finest harbors in the world. The more south- 
 erly group, known as the Nicobars, consists of the large island of 
 Great Nicobar and of eighteen smaller ones. The total area is 635 
 square miles and the population of about 6000 is made up almost 
 entirely of natives, who are apparently of Malay origin and who 
 were formerly notorious pirates and wreckers. The only valuable 
 product of the islands is the cocoanut. After attempting vainly 
 for a century to establish control of the islands, Denmark aban- 
 doned them in 1858. The piratical behavior of the natives led the 
 English to annex them in 1-869. The British station is Nancowry, 
 on the Island of Camorta, with an excellent harbor. In 1872 the 
 two groups were united into a province of the Indian empire under 
 a chief commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and 
 superintendent of Port Blair. The total area is 3188 square miles 
 and the population in 1901 was 24,649, of whom half were life 
 convicts the number being 14,235 in 1908. 
 
 The Laccadive Islands, off the Malabar coast, are fourteen in 1 
 number. The population was 10,274 in 1901, and is of Hindu 
 race, but Mohammedan faith. The more northerly islands belong 
 to the district of South Kanara and the others to the district of 
 Malabar, so that they form a part of the Madras presidency. 
 
 Aden and its dependencies, which are administered as a part 
 of the Bombay presidency, are the most important of the outlying 
 territories of India. Though the Portuguese had relations with 
 Aden from the beginning of the sixteenth century they never regu- 
 larly occupied the place. The English first visited it in 1607 and 
 maintained an irregular intercourse with it until its annexation in 
 1839. It was the first colonial acquisition during the reign of 
 Queen Victoria. Its area has been extended by further acquisitions 
 in 1840, 1868, and 1882, making a total of seventy-five square 
 miles. To this was added in 1857 ^ ie I & lanc\ of'Perim, with an
 
 THECOUNTRY 19 
 
 area of five square miles. In 1854 the Kuriah Muriah Islands, five 
 in number, were acquired from the sultan of Muscat for the land- 
 ing of the Red Sea cable ; and they are now leased for guano col- 
 lection. By arrangements made with the sultan of Socotra in 1876 
 and 1886 that island was placed under British protection. It has 
 an area of 1382 square miles and a population of about 12,000, 
 mostly Mohammedans. Perim is located in the Straits of Bab-el- 
 Mandeb at the entrance of the Red Sea; the peninsula of Aden is 
 on the Arabian coast 100 miles to the eastward ; the Kuriah Muriah 
 Islands are also off the Arabian coast 900 miles east of the straits ; 
 and Socotra lies in the Indian Ocean east of Cape Guardafui. Aden 
 has been a free port since 1850 and its importance was greatly 
 enhanced by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Its population 
 in 1 90 1 was 43,974. It is the only fortified point between Egypt 
 and Bombay and has a considerable garrison. It is administered 
 by a political resident, who is also commander of the troops, and 
 who has generally been appointed from the officers of the Bombay 
 army. He also has cognizance of the agreements and treaties made 
 by the Indian government with the local chiefs along the whole 
 southern coast of Arabia. 
 
 British interests in the Persian Gulf also come under the super- 
 vision of the government of India. The pearl fisheries are con- 
 trolled by the possession of the Island of Bahrein and the group of 
 islets surrounding it under an arrangement with the local sheik 
 or chief whose position is dependent upon British protection. Be- 
 sides Manameh and Moharek, each with a population of upward of 
 20,000, there are fifty villages in the islands, which are located on 
 the Arabian coast of the gulf and have an area of about 300 square 
 miles. The government of India has engagements and treaties with 
 numerous chiefs along the shores of the Persian Gulf and also with 
 the sultan of Muscat. These interests are supervised by a political 
 resident, who is also consul general and is resident at Bushire, on 
 the eastern shore of the gulf. In 1903, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, 
 made a tour of the gulf with a naval escort and confirmed the ar- 
 rangements with the " trucial chiefs," as they are called. England 
 has suppressed piracy and the slave trade in the gulf, established 
 lighthouses and other aids to navigation and has laid cables and in 
 other ways developed her interests there, and opened the gulf to the 
 world's commerce. England's interests in the Persian Gulf have 
 been continuous since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
 
 Chapter II 
 
 THE PEOPLE 
 
 INDIA is divided into two classes of territories : first, provinces 
 under British rule; second, states under native chiefs. The 
 population of the whole amounted in 1901 to 294,000,000, 
 or more than double the number estimated for the Roman empire 
 in the height of its power; but the English, even more than the 
 Romans, have respected the rights of the native chiefs who are will- 
 ing to govern well. Such chiefs still rule on their own account 
 more than one-third of the area of India, with over 62,000,000 
 of subjects, or more than a fifth of the whole Indian people. The 
 British territories, therefore, comprise about two-thirds of the 
 area of India, and nearly four-fifths, or over 231,000,000 of its 
 inhabitants. 
 
 The native princes govern their states with the help and under 
 the advice of a British resident, whom the viceroy stations at their 
 courts. Some of them reign almost as independent sovereigns; 
 others have less power. They form a great body of feudatory 
 rulers, possessed of revenues and armies of their own. The more 
 important exercise the power of life and death over their subjects ; 
 but the authority of all is limited by treaties, by which they acknowl- 
 edge their " subordinate dependence " to the British government. 
 The British government, as suzerain in India, does not allow its 
 feudatories to make war upon each other, or to form alliances with 
 foreign states. It interferes when any chief misgoverns his people; 
 rebukes, and if needful dethrones, the oppressor ; protects the weak, 
 and imposes peace upon all. 
 
 The British possessions are distributed into fourteen provinces. 
 Each has its own governor or head; but all are controlled by the 
 supreme government of India, consisting of a governor-general in 
 council. The governor-general also bears the title of viceroy. He 
 holds his court and government at Calcutta in the cold weather; 
 and during summer at Simla, in the Himalayas, 7000 feet above the 
 level of the sea. The viceroy of India is appointed by the ruler of 
 
 20
 
 THE PEOPLE 
 
 31 
 
 England; so also are the governors of Madras and Bombay. Of 
 course the king is not personally responsible for these appoint- 
 ments, but the ministry which is in office, so that the appointment 
 usually goes to a member of the party in power. The heads of the 
 other provinces are chosen for their merit from the Anglo-Indian 
 services, almost always from the civil service, and are nominated 
 by the viceroy, subject in the case of the lieutenant governorships 
 to the approval of the British secretary of state for India. The 
 king of England is emperor of India, and is spoken of both officially 
 and commonly in India as " the king-emperor." 
 
 British India is very thickly peopled; and some parts are so 
 overcrowded that the inhabitants can with difficulty obtain land to 
 cultivate. Each square mile of the British provinces has to feed, 
 on an average, 213 persons. Each square mile of the native states 
 has to feed, on an average, only 92 persons, or less than one-half. 
 If we exclude the outlying provinces of Burma and Assam, the peo- 
 ple in British India average 271 to the square mile; so that British 
 India is almost three times more thickly inhabited than the native 
 states. How thick this population is may be realized from the fact 
 that, in 1901, France only had 186 people to the square mile, while 
 even in crowded England, wherever the density approaches 200 to 
 the square mile the population ceases to be rural, and has to live 
 by manufactures, by mining, or by city industries. The density of 
 Indian population is closely approximated by that of New Jersey, 
 which in 1900 had 250 inhabitants to the square mile. 
 
 Unlike England, India has few large towns. Thus, in Eng- 
 land and Wales 58 per cent, of the population, in 1901, lived in 
 towns with upward of 20,000 inhabitants, while in British India 
 only 5 per cent, of the people lived in such towns. India, therefore, 
 is almost entirely a rural country ; and many of the so-called towns 
 are mere groups of villages, in the midst of which the cattle are 
 driven afield, and plowing and reaping go on. 
 
 We see, therefore, in India, a dense population of husband- 
 men. Wherever their numbers exceed 1 to the acre, or 640 to the 
 square mile excepting near towns or in irrigated tracts they find 
 it difficult to raise sufficient crops from the land to supply them with 
 food. Yet many millions of peasants in India are struggling to live 
 off half an acre apiece. In such districts, if the rain falls short by 
 a few inches, the people suffer great distress; if the rain fails to a 
 large extent, thousands die of famine.
 
 22 INDIA 
 
 In some parts of India, therefore, there are more husband- 
 men than the land can feed. In other parts, vast tracts of fertile soil 
 still await the cultivator. In England, the people would move 
 freely from the over-populated districts to the thinly-inhabited ones. 
 But in India the peasant clings to his fields; and parcels them out 
 among his children, even when his family has grown too numerous 
 to live upon the crops. If the Indian husbandmen would learn to 
 migrate to tracts where spare land abounds, they would do more 
 than the utmost efforts of government can accomplish to better 
 themselves and to prevent famines. 
 
 It is not stupidity that makes the Indian peasant cling to his 
 hereditary fields. In old days he could move to other districts or 
 provinces only with great difficulty and danger. Roads for carts 
 or wheeled traffic were few and far between ; and in many parts of 
 India existed only along the chief military routes. During the cen- 
 tury of confusion and native misrule which preceded the establish- 
 ment of the British power, traveling even by such roads as did 
 exist was perilous owing to robbers and armed bands. Railroads 
 and steamboats, which are the great modern distributors of popula- 
 tion, were altogether unknown in India under native rule, and 
 were introduced into India only about the middle of the nineteenth 
 century. By the help of roads, railroads, and river steamers, it 
 is now possible for the first time for the Indian peasants in over- 
 crowded districts to move to districts where there is still spare land. 
 The Indian cultivators are slowly but surely learning this, and they 
 are moving in large numbers to thinly peopled districts in eastern 
 and northern Bengal, Assam, and the Central Provinces. 
 
 Throughout many of the hill and frontier tracts land is so 
 plentiful that it yields no rent. The hillmen settle for a few years 
 in some fertile spot, which they clear of jungle. They then exhaust 
 the soil by a rapid succession of crops, and leave it to relapse into 
 forest. In such tracts no rent is charged ; but each family of wan- 
 dering husbandmen pays a poll-tax to the chief, under whose pro- 
 tection it dwells. As the inhabitants increase, this nomadic system 
 of cultivation gives place to regular tillage. Throughout Burma 
 we see both methods at work side by side; while in the thickly- 
 peopled plains of India the " wandering husbandmen " have disap- 
 peared, and each peasant family remains rooted to the same plot 
 of ground during many generations. 
 
 Yet only a hundred years ago there was more land even in
 
 THEPEOPLE 23 
 
 Bengal than there were cultivators to till it. The landlords had to 
 tempt husbandmen to settle on their estates, by giving them land 
 at low rents. Now the cultivators have grown so numerous that 
 in some districts they will offer any rent for a piece of ground. The 
 government has, therefore, had to pass laws to prevent too great a 
 rise in rents. These laws recognize the rights of the cultivators 
 in the fields which they have long tilled; and the rents of such 
 hereditary husbandmen cannot be raised above fair rates, fixed by 
 the courts. 
 
 In the old times the scarcity of people made each family 
 of cultivators of great value to their landlord. In many parts of 
 India, when once a peasant had settled in a village, he was not al- 
 lowed to go away. In hill districts where the nomadic or wander- 
 ing system of husbandry still survives, no family is allowed by the 
 native chief to quit his territory ; for each household pays a poll-tax 
 to the chief, and the chief cannot afford to lose this money. In 
 some provinces the English found the lower classes of husbandmen 
 attached like serfs to the soil, and their officers in southeastern 
 Bengal almost raised a rebellion by their efforts to liberate the 
 rural slaves. The descendants of the old serfs still survive; but 
 they are now freemen. 
 
 European writers formerly divided the Indian population into 
 two races, the Hindus and the Mohammedans; but when we look 
 more closely at the people, we find that they consist of four ele- 
 ments. First, the non-Aryan tribes, called the aborigines, who 
 numbered in 1872 (when the first census of India was taken) about 
 18,000,000 in the British provinces. Second, the descendants of 
 the Aryan or Sanskrit-speaking race, now called Brahmans and 
 Rajputs, who numbered in 1872 about 16,000,000. Third, the 
 great mixed population, generally known as the Hindus, which has 
 grown out of the Aryan and non-Aryan elements (chiefly from the 
 latter), and numbered in 1872 about 111,000,000. Fourth, the 
 Mohammedans, who began to come to India about 1000 a. d., and 
 who numbered in 1872 over 41,000,000. These made up the 
 186,000,000 of the people under British rule in 1872. Since then 
 the population of British India has grown to over 231,000,000 in 
 1901. All the four sections of the population above mentioned have 
 contributed to this increase, but many of the non-Aryan or abo- 
 riginal tribes have, during the past thirty years, been converted 
 to the Hindu religion, and are now reckoned in the census as Hin-
 
 24 INDIA 
 
 dus. The same fourfold division applies to the population of the 
 62,000,000 in feudatory India. 
 
 The great sources of the Indian population were, therefore, 
 the non-Aryans and the Aryans; and we must first try to get a 
 clear view of these ancient peoples. Our earliest glimpses of India 
 disclose two races struggling for the soil. The one was a fair- 
 skinned people, which had lately entered by the northwestern passes 
 a people who called themselves Aryan, literally of " noble " 
 lineage, speaking a stately language, worshiping friendly and pow- 
 erful gods. These Aryans became the Brahmans and Rajputs of 
 India. The other race was of a lower type, who had long dwelt in 
 the land, and whom the lordly newcomers drove back into the 
 mountains, or reduced to servitude on the plains. The compara- 
 tively pure descendants of these two races are now nearly equal in 
 numbers; the intermediate castes, sprung chiefly from the ruder 
 stock, make up the great mass of the Indian population. We shall 
 afterward see that a third race, the Scythians, also played an im- 
 portant part in India, about the beginning of the Chrisitian era. 
 The Mohammedans belong to a period a thousand years later.
 
 Chapter III 
 
 THE NON-ARYANS 
 
 THE oldest dwellers in India consisted of many tribes, who, 
 in the absence of a race name of their own, are called 
 the non-Aryans or aborigines. They have left no written 
 records ; indeed, the use of letters, or of any simplest hieroglyphics, 
 was to them unknown. The sole works of their hands which have 
 come down to us are rude stone circles, and the upright slabs and 
 mounds beneath which, like the primitive peoples of Europe, they 
 buried their dead. From the remains found in these tombs, we 
 only discover that, at some far distant but unfixed period, they 
 knew how to make round pots of hard thin earthenware, not inele- 
 gant in shape ; that they fought with iron weapons and wore orna- 
 ments of copper and gold. Earlier remains prove, indeed, that 
 these ancient tomb-builders formed only one link in a chain of pri- 
 meval races. Before them, India was peopled by tribes unac- 
 quainted with metals, who hunted and warred with polished flint 
 axes and other deftly wrought implements of stone, similar to 
 those found in northern Europe. And even these were the suc- 
 cessors of yet ruder beings, who have left their agate knives and 
 rough flint weapons in the Narbada Valley. In front of this far- 
 stretching background of the metal and stone ages, we see the 
 so-called aborigines being beaten down by the newly-arrived Aryan 
 race. 
 
 The victorious Aryans from western or west-central Asia 
 called the earlier tribes whom they found in India Dasyus, or " ene- 
 mies," and Dasas, or " slaves." The Aryans entered India from 
 the colder north, and prided themselves on their fair complexion. 
 Their Sanskrit word for " color " (varna) came to mean " race " 
 or "caste." The old Aryan poets, who composed the Veda at 
 least 3000 and perhaps 4000 years ago, praised their bright gods, 
 who, " slaying the Dasyus, protected the Aryan color " ; who " sub- 
 jected the black-skin to the Aryan man." They tell us of their own 
 
 U
 
 26 INDIA 
 
 " stormy deities, who rush on like furious bulls and scatter the 
 black-skin." Moreover, the Aryan, with his finely-formed features, 
 loathed the squat Mongolian * faces of the aborigines. One Vedic 
 poet speaks of the Dasyus or non-Aryans as " noseless " or flat- 
 nosed, while another praises his own " beautiful-nosed " gods. The 
 same unsightly feature was noticed with regard to a non-Aryan 
 Asiatic tribe, by the companions of Alexander the Great on his Indian 
 expedition, more than a thousand years later. Indeed the Vedic 
 hymns abound in scornful epithets for the primitive races of India, 
 as " disturbers of sacrifices," " gross feeders on flesh," " raw-eat- 
 ers," " lawless," " non-sacrificing," " without gods," and " with- 
 out rites." As time went on, and these rude tribes were driven 
 back into the forest, they were painted in still more hideous shapes, 
 till they became the " monsters " and " demons " of the Aryan poet 
 and priest. Their ancient race-name, Dasyu, or " enemy," thus 
 grew to signify goblin or devil, as the old Teutonic word for enemy 
 or " the hater " (modern German feind) has become the Eng- 
 lish " fiend." 
 
 Nevertheless all the non-Aryan tribes of ancient India could 
 not have been savages. We hear of wealthy Dasyus or non- 
 Aryans ; and the Vedic hymns speak of their " seven castles " and 
 " ninety forts." The Aryans afterward made alliance with non- 
 Aryan tribes; and some of the most powerful kingdoms of India 
 were ruled by non-Aryan kings. Nor were the non-Aryans devoid 
 of religious rites, or of cravings after a future life. " They adorn," 
 says an ancient Sanskrit book, " the bodies of their dead with gifts, 
 with raiment, with ornaments; imagining that thereby they shall 
 attain the world to come." These ornaments are the bits of bronze, 
 copper, and gold which we now dig up from beneath their rude 
 stone monuments. In the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic which nar- 
 rates the advance of the Aryans into southern India, a non-Aryan 
 chief describes his race as " of fearful swiftness, unyielding in 
 battle, in color like a dark-blue cloud." 
 
 Let us now examine these primitive peoples as they exist at 
 the present day. Thrust back by the Aryan invaders from the 
 
 1 This word Mongolian is incorrect, according to the latest scholarship. 
 Certainly some of the aborigines were in no way Mongolian, and in regard to 
 the remainder, the extent of Mongolian influence is very uncertain. These peo- 
 ples, most of whom are now classed by ethnologists as Dravidians, are of 
 undetermined race kinship, the latest researches having disproved the theory 
 of relationship with the natives of Australia.
 
 THE NON-ARYANS 27 
 
 plains, they have lain hidden away in the mountains, like the re- 
 mains of extinct animals found in hill-caves. India thus forms a 
 great museum of races, in which we can study man from his lowest 
 to his highest stages of culture. The specimens are not fossils or 
 dry bones, but living tribes, each with its own set of curious cus- 
 toms and religious rites. ' 
 
 Among the rudest fragments of mankind are the isolated An- 
 daman islanders, or non-Aryans of the Bay of Bengal. The Arab 
 and early European voyagers described them as dog-faced man- 
 eaters. The English officers sent to the islands in 1855 to estab- 
 lish a settlement found themselves in the midst of naked cannibals ; 
 who daubed their bodies at festivals with red earth, and mourned 
 for their dead friends by plastering themselves with dark mud. 
 They used a noise like crying to express friendship or joy; bore 
 only names of common gender, which they received before birth, 
 and which therefore had to be applicable to either sex; and 
 their sole conception of a god was an evil spirit, who spread dis- 
 ease. For five years they repulsed every effort at intercourse with 
 showers of arrows; but English officers slowly brought them to a 
 better frame of mind, by building sheds near the settlement, where 
 some of these poor beings might find shelter and receive medicines 
 and food. 
 
 The Anamalai Hills, in southern Madras, form the refuge of 
 many non-Aryan tribes. The long-haired, wild-looking Pulliyars 
 live on jungle products, mice, or any small animals they can catch ; 
 and worship demons. Another clan, the Mundavers, have no fixed 
 dwellings, but wander over the innermost hills with their cattle. 
 They shelter themselves in caves or under little leaf sheds, and sel- 
 dom remain in one spot more than a year. The thick-lipped, small- 
 bodied Kaders, " lords of the hills," are a remnant of a higher race. 
 They live by the chase, and wield some influence over the ruder 
 forest-folk. These hills abound in the great stone monuments 
 (kistvaens and dolmens) which the ancient non-Aryans erected 
 over their dead. The Nairs, the old military non-Aryan ruling race 
 of southwestern India, still keep up the ancient system of polyan- 
 dry, according to which one woman is the wife of several husbands, 
 and a man's property descends not to his own sons, but to his sis- 
 ter's children. This system also appears among the non-Aryan 
 tribes of the Himalayas at the opposite extremity of India. 
 
 Many wild tribes inhabit the mountain ranges which separate
 
 28 INDIA 
 
 northern from southern India. The best-known of these rude races 
 are perhaps the Bhils, who dwell in the Vindhya Hills, from Udai- 
 pur state far north of the Narbada River, southward to the Khan- 
 desh agency in the Bombay presidency. They move about with 
 their herds of sheep and goats through the jungly highlands, and 
 eke out a spare livelihood by the chase and the natural products of 
 the forest. In Udaipur state they are settled in little hamlets, each 
 homestead being built on a separate hillock, so as to render it im- 
 possible for their enemies to surprise a whole village at once. A 
 single family may be seized, but the shouts which it raises give the 
 alarm to all the rest, and in a few minutes the war-cry spreads from 
 hill to hill, and swarms of half-naked savages rush together in 
 arms to beat off the intruder. Before the British rule the Bhils 
 were the terror of the neighboring country, plundering and burning 
 villages far and wide ; while the native governments revenged them- 
 selves from time to time by fearful Bhil massacres. In 1818 the 
 East India Company obtained the neighboring Bombay district of 
 Khandesh, but its first expedition against the Bhils failed miser- 
 ably; one-half of its number having perished of fever in the jungles. 
 Soon afterward Sir James Outram took these wild tribes in hand. 
 He made friends with them by means of feasts and tiger-hunts. 
 Nine Bhil warriors, who were his constant companions in tracking 
 the beasts of chase, formed the beginning of a regular Bhil corps 
 which numbered 600 men in 1827, and fought boldly for the British 
 government. These loyal Bhils put a stop to plundering among 
 their wilder fellow-countrymen, and they have proved themselves 
 so trustworthy that they are now employed as policemen and 
 treasury-guards throughout a large tract in the Khandesh political 
 agency. 2 
 
 In the Central Provinces, the non-Aryan races form a large 
 part of the population. In certain localities they amount to one- 
 half of the inhabitants. Their most important race, the Gonds, 
 have made advances in civilization ; but the wilder tribes still cling 
 to the forest, and live by the chase. Some of them used, within 
 the present generation, flint points for their arrows. They wield 
 bows of great strength, which they hold with their feet, while 
 they draw the string with both hands. They can send an arrow 
 right through the body of a deer. The Maris fly from their grass- 
 
 2 Kipling describes the Bhils in "The Tomb of His Ancestors" in "The 
 Day's Work."
 
 THE NON-ARYANS 29 
 
 built huts on the approach of a stranger. Once a year a messenger 
 comes to them from the local raja to take their tribute, which 
 consists chiefly of jungle products. He does not, however, enter 
 their hamlets, but beats a drum outside, and then hides himself. 
 The shy Maris creep forth from their huts, place what they 
 have to give in an appointed spot, and run back again into their 
 retreats. 
 
 Farther to the northeast, in the tributary states of Orissa, 
 there is a poor tribe, about 10,000 in number, of Juangs or Patuas, 
 literally the " leaf-wearers." Until twenty years ago, their women 
 wore no clothes, but only a few strings of beads around the waist, 
 with a bunch of leaves before and behind. In 1871 the English 
 officer called together the clan, and, after a speech, handed out 
 strips of cotton for the women to put on. They then passed in 
 single file before him in their new clothes, and made obeisance. 
 Finally, they gathered the bunches of leaves, which had formed their 
 sole clothing, into a great heap, and solemnly set fire to it. 
 
 Proceeding to the northern boundary of India, we find the 
 slopes and spurs of the Himalayas peopled by a great variety of 
 rude non-Aryan tribes. Some of the Assam hillmen have no word 
 for expressing distance by miles or by any land-measure, but reckon 
 the length of a journey by the number of plugs of tobacco or 
 betel-leaf which they chew upon the way. They hate work; and, 
 as a rule, they are fierce, black, undersized, and ill-fed. In old 
 times they earned a scanty livelihood by plundering the hamlets 
 of the Assam Valley. They are now used as a sort of police, to keep 
 the peace of the border, in return for a yearly gift of cloth, hoes, 
 and grain. Their very names bear witness to their former wild life. 
 One tribe, the Akas of Assam, is divided into two clans, whose 
 names literally mean " the eaters of a thousand hearths," and " the 
 thieves who lurk in the cotton-field." 
 
 Many of the aboriginal tribes, therefore, remain in the same 
 early stage of human progress as that ascribed to them by the Vedic 
 poets more than 3000 years ago, but others have made great ad- 
 vances, and form communities of a well-developed type. These 
 higher races, like the ruder ones, are scattered over the length 
 and breadth of India, and I must confine myself to a very brief 
 account of two of them the Santals and the Kandhs. 
 
 The Santals have their home among the hills which abut on 
 the valley of the Ganges in Lower Bengal. They dwell in villages
 
 30 INDIA 
 
 of their own, apart from the people of the plains, and, when first 
 counted by British officers, numbered about a million. Although 
 still clinging to many customs of a hunting forest tribe, they have 
 learned the use of the plow, and have settled down into skillful 
 husbandmen. Each hamlet is governed by its own headman, who is 
 supposed to be a descendant of the original founder of the village, 
 and who is assisted by a deputy headman and a watchman. The 
 boys of the hamlet had their separate officers, and were strictly 
 controlled by their own headman and his deputy till they entered 
 the married state. The Santals know not the cruel distinctions 
 of Hindu caste, but trace their tribes, usually fixed at seven, to the 
 seven sons of the first parents. The whole village feasts, hunts, 
 and worships together. So strong is the bond of race, that ex- 
 pulsion from the tribe used to be the only Santal punishment. A 
 heinous criminal was cut off from " fire and water " in the village, 
 and sent forth alone into the jungle. Smaller offenses were for- 
 given upon a public reconciliation with the tribe; to effect which 
 the guilty one had to provide a feast, with much rice-beer, for 
 his clansmen. 
 
 The Santals do not allow child-weddings. They marry about 
 the age of fifteen to seventeen, when the young people are old 
 enough to choose for themselves. At the end of the ceremony the 
 girl's relatives pound burning charcoal with the household pestle, 
 and extinguish it with water, in token of the breaking up of her 
 former family ties. The Santals respect their women, and do 
 not take a second wife during the life of the first, except when the 
 first is childless. They solemnly burn their dead, and whenever 
 possible they used to float three fragments of the skull down the 
 Damodar River, the sacred stream of the race. 
 
 The Santal has no knowledge of bright and friendly gods, such 
 as the Vedic singers of the Aryan worship.. Still less can he 
 imagine one omnipotent and beneficent Deity, who watches over 
 mankind. Hunted and driven back before the Hindus and Mo- 
 hammedans, the Santal does not understand how a Being can be 
 more powerful than himself without wishing to harm him. 
 " What," said a Santal to an eloquent missionary who had been 
 discoursing on the omnipotence of the Christian God; "what if 
 that strong One should eat me ? " He thinks that the earth swarms 
 with demons, whose ill-will he tries to avert by the sacrifice of 
 goats, cocks, and chickens. There are the ghosts of his forefathers,
 
 THE NON-ARYANS 81 
 
 river-spirits, forest-spirits, well-demons, mountain-demons, and a 
 mighty host of unseen beings, whom he must keep in good humor. 
 These dwell chiefly in the ancient sal trees which shade his village. 
 In some hamlets the people dance round every tree, so that they 
 may not by evil chance miss the one in which the village-spirits 
 happen to be dwelling. 
 
 Until near the end of the eighteenth century, the Santals lived 
 by plundering the adjacent plains, but under British rule they settled 
 down into peaceful cultivators. To prevent disputes between them 
 and the Hindu villagers of the lowlands, British officers set up in 
 1832 a boundary of stone pillars. But the Hindu money-lender soon 
 came among them ; and the simple hillmen plunged into debt. Their 
 strong love of kindred prevented them from running away, and they 
 sank into serfs to the Hindu usurers. The poor Santal gave over 
 his whole crop each year to the money-lender, and was allowed 
 just enough food to keep his family at work. When he died, the 
 life-long burden descended to his children; for the high sense 
 of honor among the Santals compels a son to take upon himself 
 his father's debts. In 1848 three entire villages threw up their 
 clearings, and fled in despair to the jungle. In 1855 the Santals 
 started in a body of 30,000 men, with their bows and arrows, to 
 walk to Calcutta and lay their condition before the governor gen- 
 eral. At first they were orderly ; but the way was long ; they had 
 to live, and the hungry ones began to plunder. Quarrels broke 
 out between them and the British police; and within a week they 
 were in armed rebellion. The rising was put down, not without 
 mournful bloodshed. Their complaints were carefully inquired 
 into, and a simple system of government, directly under the eye of 
 a British officer, was granted to them. They are now a prosper- 
 ous people, but their shyness and superstition make them dread 
 any new thing. A few of them took up arms to resist the census 
 of 1881. 
 
 The Kandhs, literally " the mountaineers," a tribe about 100,- 
 000 strong, inhabit the steep and forest-covered ranges which rise 
 from the Orissa coast. Their system of government is purely 
 patriarchal. The family is strictly ruled by the father. The 
 grown-up sons have no property during his life, but live in his 
 house with their wives and children, and all share the common 
 meal prepared by the grandmother. The head of the tribe is 
 usually the eldest son of the patriarchal family; but if he be not
 
 32 INDIA 
 
 fit for the post he is set aside, and an uncle or a younger brother 
 is appointed. He enters on no undertaking without calling together 
 the elders of the tribe. 
 
 Up to 1835, when the English introduced milder laws, the 
 Kandhs punished murder by blood-revenge. The kinsmen of the 
 dead man were bound to kill the slayer, unless appeased by a pay- 
 ment of grain or cattle. Anyone who wounded another had to 
 maintain the sufferer until he recovered from his hurt. A stolen 
 article must be returned, or its value paid; but the Kandh twice 
 convicted of theft was driven forth from his tribe the greatest 
 punishment known to the race. Disputes were settled by duels, or 
 by deadly combats between armed bands, or by the ordeal of boil- 
 ing oil or heated iron, or by taking a solemn oath on an ant-hill, 
 or on a tiger's claw, or on a lizard's skin. If a house-father died 
 leaving no sons, his land was parceled out among the other male 
 heads of the village ; for no woman was allowed to hold land, nor 
 indeed any Kandh who could not with his own arms defend it. 
 
 The Kandh system of tillage represents a stage half-way 
 between the migratory cultivation of the ruder non-Aryan tribes 
 and the settled agriculture of the Hindus. The Kandhs do not, like 
 the ruder non- Aryans, merely burn down a patch in the jungle, 
 take a few crops off it, and then move on to fresh clearings. Nor, 
 on the other hand, do they go on cultivating the same fields, like the 
 Hindus, from father to son. When their lands show signs of 
 exhaustion, they desert them; and it was a rule in some of the 
 Kandh settlements to change their village sites once in fourteen 
 years. 
 
 A Kandh wedding consists of forcibly carrying off the bride in 
 the middle of a feast. The boy's father pays a price for the girl, 
 and usually chooses a strong one, several years older than his son. 
 In this way Kandh maidens are married about fourteen, Kandh 
 boys about ten. The bride remains as a servant in her new father- 
 in-law's house till her boy-husband grows old enough to live with 
 her. She generally acquires a great influence over him; and a 
 Kandh may not marry a second wife during the life of his first one, 
 except with her consent. 
 
 The Kandh engages only in husbandry and war, and despises 
 all other work. Attached to each village is a row of hovels 
 inhabited by a lower race, who are not allowed to hold land, to go 
 forth to battle, or to join in the village worship. These poor people
 
 THE NON-ARYANS 33 
 
 do the dirty work of the hamlet, and supply families of hereditary 
 weavers, blacksmiths, potters, herdsmen, and distillers. They are 
 kindly treated, and a portion of each feast is left for them, but they 
 can never rise in the social scale. No Kandh could engage in their 
 work without degradation, nor eat food prepared by their hands* 
 They are supposed to be the remnants of a ruder race, whom the 
 Kandhs found in possession of the hills, when they themselves were 
 pushed backward by the Aryans from the plains. 
 
 The Kandhs, like the Santals, have many deities, race-gods, 
 tribe-gods, family-gods, and a multitude of malignant spirits and 
 demons. Their great divinity is the earth-god, who represents the 
 productive energy of nature. Twice each year, at sowing-time and 
 at harvest, and in all seasons of special calamity, the earth-god 
 required a human sacrifice. The duty of kidnaping victims from 
 the plains rested with the lower race attached to the Kandh village. 
 Brahmans and Kandhs were the only classes exempted from sacri- 
 fice, and an ancient rule ordained that the offering must be bought 
 with a price. The victim, on being brought to the hamlet, was 
 welcomed at every threshold, daintily fed, and kindly treated till 
 the fatal day arrived. He was then solemnly sacrificed to the 
 earth-god, the Kandhs shouting in his dying ear, " We bought you 
 with a price ; no sin rests with us ! " His flesh and blood were 
 portioned out among the village lands. 
 
 In 1835 tne Kandhs passed under British rule, and human 
 sacrifices were put down. Roads have been made through their 
 hills, and fairs established. The English officers interfere as little 
 as possible with their customs; and the Kandhs are now a peace- 
 able and well-to-do race. 
 
 Whence came these primitive peoples, whom the Aryan 
 invaders found in the land more than 3000 years ago, and who are 
 still scattered over India, the fragments of a prehistoric world? 
 Written annals they do not possess. Their traditions tell us little, 
 but from their languages we find that they belong to three stocks. 
 First, the Tibeto-Burman tribes, who entered India from the north- 
 east, and still cling to the skirts of the Himalayas. Second, the 
 Kolarians, who also seem to have entered Bengal by the northeastern 
 passes. They dwell chiefly along the northeastern ranges of the 
 central tableland which covers the southern half of India. Third, 
 the Dravidians, who appear, on the other hand, to have found their 
 way into the Punjab by the northwestern passes. They now
 
 34 INDIA 
 
 inhabit the southern part of the three-sided tableland as far down 
 as Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India. This theory 
 concerning the origin of the non-Aryans is combated by Risley in 
 his chapter on caste in the Indian census report for 1901. 
 
 As a rule, the non-Aryan races, when fairly treated, are truth- 
 ful, loyal, and kind. Those in the hills make good soldiers; while 
 even the thieving tribes of the plains can be turned into clever 
 police. The non-Aryan low-castes of Madras supplied the troops 
 which conquered southern India for the British ; and some of them 
 fought at the battle of Plassey, which won Bengal for England. 
 The gallant Gurkhas, a non-Aryan tribe of the Himalayas, now 
 rank among the bravest regiments in the Indian army, and have 
 covered themselves with honor in every recent war, from Afghan- 
 istan to Burma. 
 
 In many countries of the world, the ruder tribes have been 
 crushed, or killed off by superior races. This has been the case, to 
 a large extent, with the primitive peoples of Mexico and Peru, with 
 the Indians of North America, and with the aborigines of Australia 
 and, to some extent, in New Zealand. But the non-Aryan tribes of 
 India are prospering instead of decreasing under British rule. Hill- 
 fairs and roads through their mountains and jungles have opened 
 up to them new means of livelihood; and the census shows that 
 they have a larger proportion of children than the other races of 
 India. As they grow rich, they adopt Hindu customs, and numbers 
 of them every year pass within the pale of Hinduism. Others 
 become converts to Christianity, and it seems likely that in the 
 course of two or three generations there will be but a small remnant 
 of the non-Aryan races which still cling to their aboriginal customs 
 and rites. The census since 1881 has included many of them 
 among the low caste Hindus, and returned a much smaller number 
 of pure aborigines than the figures given in the second chapter for 
 the aboriginal population from the census of 1872. 
 
 This arises partly from the fact that the aboriginal races are 
 merging into the Hindu community: partly because the system of 
 classification adopted in 1872 exhibited the aborigines more fully 
 according to their race than the later census enumerations. It 
 should be noted that the census of 1872 was not a synchronous 
 general census, but rather a compilation of enumerations made in 
 different provinces in different years and of estimates in those dis- 
 tricts in which for any reason a count could not be made. The
 
 THE NON-ARYANS 35 
 
 census of 1881 strictly speaking was the first census of India. The 
 censuses beginning with 1881 have omitted an enumeration based 
 upon race origin, so that one is dependent upon the returns of 
 religious beliefs for inferences concerning the race origins. The 
 heading Animistic may be taken as including scarcely any except 
 aborigines, but it by no means includes them all, for many, especially 
 in recent years have become converts to one of the other faiths, 
 especially Hinduism or Christianity.
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 THE ARYANS IN INDIA 
 
 ATa very early period we catch sight of a nobler race from the 
 / \ northwest, forcing its way in among the primitive peoples 
 JL Jkof India. This race belonged to the splendid Aryan or 
 Indo-European stock, from which the Brahman, the Rajput, and 
 the Englishman alike descend. Its earliest home seems to have 
 been in western Asia. From that common camping-ground certain 
 branches of the race started for the east, others for the farther west. 
 One of the western offshoots built Athens and Sparta, and became 
 the Greek nation ; another went on to Italy, and reared the city on 
 the seven hills, which grew into imperial Rome. A distant colony 
 of the same race excavated the silver ores of prehistoric Spain ; and 
 when we first catch a sight of ancient England, we see an Aryan 
 settlement fishing in wattle canoes, and working the tin mines of 
 Cornwall. Meanwhile other branches of the Aryan stock had gone 
 forth from the primitive Asiatic home to the east. Powerful bands 
 found their way through the passes of the Himalayas into the 
 Punjab, and spread themselves, chiefly as Brahmans and Rajputs, 
 over India. Recent researches concerning the Indo-Europeans and 
 concerning the early history of India tend to modify certain of 
 these conclusions, but there is as yet no reason to consider this 
 opinion as less weighty than any other. In regard to the early home 
 of the Indo-Europeans there is slight chance of positive proof, but 
 at present the weight of evidence seems to favor some region just 
 south of the Baltic Sea. 
 
 The Aryan offshoots, alike to the east and to the west, asserted 
 their superiority over the earlier peoples whom they found in pos- 
 session of the soil. The history of ancient Europe is the story of 
 the Aryan settlements around the shores of the Mediterranean ; and 
 that wide term, modern civilization, merely means the civilization 
 of the western branches of the same race. The history of India 
 consists in like manner of the history of the eastern offshoots of the 
 Aryan stock who settled in that land. 
 
 36
 
 THEARYANS 37 
 
 We know little regarding these noble Aryan tribes in their 
 early camping ground in western Asia. From words preserved in 
 the languages of their long-separated descendants in Europe and 
 India, scholars infer that they roamed over the grassy steppes with 
 their cattle, making long halts to raise crops of grain. They had 
 tamed most of the domestic animals; were acquainted with iron; 
 understood the arts of weaving and sewing ; wore clothes ; and ate 
 cooked food. They lived the hardy life of the comparatively 
 temperate zone; and the feeling of cold seems to be one of the 
 earliest common remembrances of the eastern and the western 
 branches of the race. 
 
 The forefathers of the Greek and the Roman, of the English 
 and the Hindu, dwelt together in western Asia, spoke the same 
 tongue, worshiped the same gods. The languages of Europe and 
 India, although at first sight they seem wide apart, are merely 
 different growths from the original Aryan speech. This is espe- 
 cially true of the common words of family life. The names for 
 father, mother, brother, sister, and widow are the same in most of 
 the Aryan languages, whether spoken on the banks of the Ganges, 
 of the Tiber, or of the Thames. Thus the word daughter, which 
 occurs in nearly all of them, seems to have been derived from the 
 Aryan root dhugh, which in Sanskrit has the form of duh, to milk ; 
 and perhaps preserves the memory of the time when the daughter 
 was the little milkmaid in the primitive Aryan household. 
 
 The ancient religions of Europe and India had a common 
 origin. They were to some extent made up of the sacred stories or 
 myths, which our joint-ancestors had learned while dwelling to- 
 gether in Asia. Several of the Vedic gods were also the gods of 
 Greece and Rome ; and to this day the Divinity is adored by names 
 derived from the same old Aryan word deva, the shining one, by 
 Brahmans in Calcutta, by the Protestant clergy of England, and by 
 Catholic priests in Peru. 
 
 The Vedic hymns exhibit the Indian branch of the Aryans on 
 their march to the southeast, and in their new homes. The earliest 
 songs disclose the race still to the north of the Khaibar Pass, in 
 Kabul; the later ones bring them as far as the Ganges. Their 
 victorious advance eastward through the intermediate tract can be 
 traced in the Vedic writings almost step by step. The steady 
 supply of water among the five rivers of the Punjab led the Aryans 
 to settle down from their old state of wandering half-pastoral tribes
 
 38 INDIA 
 
 into regular communities of husbandmen. The Vedic poets praised 
 the rivers which enabled them to make this great change perhaps 
 the most important step in the progress of a race. " May the 
 Indus," they sang, "the far-famed giver of wealth, hear us; (fer- 
 tilizing our) broad fields with water." The Himalayas, through 
 whose southwestern passes they had reached India, and at whose 
 southern base they long dwelt, made a lasting impression on their 
 memory. The Vedic singer praised " Him whose greatness the 
 snowy ranges, and the sea, and the aerial river declare." The 
 Aryan race in India never forgot its northern home. There dwelt 
 its gods and holy singers; and there eloquence descended from 
 heaven among men; while high amid the Himalaya Mountains 
 lay the paradise of deities and heroes, where the kind and the brave 
 forever repose. 
 
 The Rig- Veda forms the great literary memorial of the early 
 Aryan settlements in the Punjab. The age of this venerable 
 hymnal is unknown. Orthodox Hindus believe, without evidence, 
 that it existed " from before all time," or at least from 3001 years 
 b. c. European scholars have inferred from astronomical data 
 that its composition was going on about 1400 b. c, but the evidence 
 might have been calculated backward, and inserted later in the 
 Veda. In 1893 two scholars, Tilak and Jacobi, published the 
 results of independent research based upon astronomical data and 
 assigned the Rig-Veda to the period between 4500 b. c. and 2500 
 b. c. We only know that the Vedic religion had been at work long 
 before the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century b. c. The Rig- 
 Veda is a very old collection of 10 17 short poems, chiefly addressed 
 to the gods, and containing 10,580 verses. Its hymns show us 
 the Aryans on the banks of the Indus, divided into various tribes, 
 sometimes at war with each other, sometimes united against the 
 " black-skinned " aborigines. Caste, in its later sense, is unknown. 
 Each father of a family is the priest of his own household. The 
 chieftain acts as father and priest to the tribe; but at the greater 
 festivals he chooses someone specially learned in holy offerings 
 to conduct the sacrifice in the name of the people. The king himself 
 seems to have been elected ; and his title of vis-pati, literally " lord 
 of the settlers," survives in the old Persian vis-paiti, and as the 
 Lithuanian wiez-patis in east-central Europe at this day. Women 
 enjoyed a high position; and some of the most beautiful hymns 
 were composed by ladies and queens. Marriage was held sacred.
 
 THE ARYANS 
 
 39 
 
 Husband and wife were both " rulers of the house " (dampati) ; and 
 drew near to the gods together in prayer. The burning of widows 
 on their husbands' funeral pile was unknown ; and the verses in the 
 Veda which the Brahmans afterward distorted into a sanction for 
 the practice, have the very opposite meaning. " Rise, woman," 
 says the Vedic text to the mourner; "come to the world of life. 
 Come to us. Thou hast fulfilled thy duties as a wife to thv hus- 
 band." 
 
 The Aryan tribes in the Veda have blacksmiths, coppersmiths, 
 and goldsmiths among them, besides carpenters, barbers, and other 
 artisans. They fight from chariots, and freely use the horse, 
 although not yet the elephant, in war. They have settled down as 
 husbandmen, till their fields with the plow, and live in villages 
 or towns, but they also cling to their old wandering life, with their 
 herds and "cattle-pens." Cattle, indeed, still form their chief 
 wealth the coin in which payment of fines is made reminding 
 us of the Latin word for money, pecunia, from pecus, a herd. 
 One of the Vedic words for war literally means "a desire for 
 cows." 
 
 Unlike the modern Hindus, the Aryans of the Veda ate beef ; 
 used a fermented liquor or beer, made from the soma plant ; and of- 
 fered the same strong meat and drink to their gods. The identifi- 
 cation of this plant is not certain, but it seems to be sarcostemma 
 brevistigma, sometimes called moon-plant. Thus the stout Aryans 
 spread eastward through northern India, pushed on from behind 
 by later arrivals of their own stock, and driving before them, or 
 reducing to bondage, the earlier " black-skinned " races. They 
 marched in whole communities from one river valley to another; 
 each house-father a warrior, husbandman, and priest; with his 
 wife, and his little ones, and his cattle. 
 
 These free-hearted tribes had a great trust in themselves and 
 their gods. Like other conquering races, they believed that both 
 themselves and their deities were altogether superior to the people 
 of the land, and to their poor, rude objects of worship. Indeed, 
 this noble self-confidence is a great aid to the success of a nation. 
 Their divinities devas, literally " the shining ones," from the San- 
 skrit root div, " to shine " were the great powers of nature. They 
 adored the father-heaven, Dyaush-pitar in Sanskrit, the Dies- 
 piter or Jupiter of Rome, the Zeus of Greece ; and the encompass- 
 ing sky Varuna in Sanskrit, Uranus in Latin, Quranos in
 
 40 INDIA 
 
 Greek. 1 Indra, or the aqueous vapor that brings the precious rain 
 on which plenty or famine still depends each autumn, received the 
 largest number of hymns. By degrees, as the settlers realized 
 more and more keenly the importance of the periodical rains to 
 their new life as husbandmen, he became the chief of the Vedic 
 gods. " The gods do not reach unto thee, O Indra, nor men ; thou 
 overcomest all creatures in strength." Indra is also the god of the 
 thunder storm and therefore the god of war. Agni, the god of fire 
 (Latin ignis), ranks perhaps next to Indra in the number of hymns 
 addressed to him. He is " the youngest of the gods," " the lord 
 and giver of wealth." The Maruts are the storm gods, " who make 
 the rock to tremble, who tear in pieces the forest." Ushas, " the 
 high-born dawn " (Greek Eos), " shines upon us like a young wife, 
 rousing every living being to go forth to his work." The Asvins, 
 the " horsemen " or fleet outriders of the dawn, are the first rays 
 of sunrise, "lords of luster." The solar orb himself (Surya), the 
 wind (Vayu), the sunshine or friendly day (Mitra), the intoxicat- 
 ing fermented juice of the sacrificial plant (Soma), and many other 
 deities are invoked in the Veda in all, about thirty-three gods, 
 " who are eleven in heaven, eleven on earth, and eleven dwelling 
 in glory in mid-air." 
 
 The Aryan settler lived on excellent terms with his bright 
 gods. He asked for protection, with an assured conviction that it 
 would be granted. At the same time, he was deeply stirred by the 
 glory and mystery of the earth and the heavens. Indeed, the 
 majesty of nature so filled his mind that when he praises any one 
 of his shining gods, he can think of none other for the time being, 
 and adores him as the supreme ruler. Verses may be quoted de- 
 claring each of the greater deities to be the one supreme : " Neither 
 gods nor men reach unto thee, O Indra." Another hymn speaks 
 of Soma as " king of heaven and earth, the conqueror of all." To 
 Varuna also it is said, " Thou art lord of all, of heaven and earth ; 
 thou art king of all those who are gods, and of all those who are 
 men." The more spiritual of the Vedic singers, therefore, may be 
 said to have worshiped one god, though not one alone. 
 
 A few stanzas from one of these Vedic hymns will suffice to 
 show their character. " In the beginning there arose the golden 
 child. He was the one born lord of all that is. He established the 
 
 1 The identification of Varuna with Uranus is possible, but as yet has not 
 been proven.
 
 THEARYANS 41 
 
 earth and this sky. Who is the God to whom we shall offer our 
 sacrifice ? 
 
 " He who gives life, he who gives strength ; whose command 
 all the bright gods revere; whose shadow is immortality, whose 
 shadow is death. Who is the God to whom we shall offer our 
 sacrifice ? 
 
 " He who, through his power, is the one king of the breathing 
 and awakening world. He who governs all, man and beast. Who 
 is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice? 
 
 " He through whom the sky is bright and the earth firm ; he 
 through whom the heaven was established, nay, the highest heaven ; 
 he who measured out the light and the air. Who is the God to 
 whom we shall offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 " He who by his might looked even over the water-clouds ; he 
 who alone is God above all gods. Who is the God to whom we 
 shall offer our sacrifice ? " 2 
 
 While the aboriginal races buried their dead in the earth or 
 under rude stone monuments, the Aryan alike in India, in Greece, 
 and in Italy made use of the funeral-pile. Several exquisite San- 
 skrit hymns bid farewell to the dead : " Depart thou, depart thou 
 by the ancient paths to the place whither our fathers have departed. 
 Meet with the ancient ones ; meet with the lord of death. Throw- 
 ing off thine imperfections, go to thy home. Become united with 
 a body; clothe thyself in a shining form." "Let him depart to 
 those for whom flow the rivers of nectar. Let him depart to those 
 who, through meditation, have obtained the victory ; who, by fixing 
 their thoughts on the unseen, have gone to heaven. Let him depart 
 to the mighty in battle, to the heroes who have laid down their lives 
 for others, to those who have bestowed their goods on the poor." 
 The doctrine of transmigration was at first unknown. The circle 
 round the funeral-pile sang with a firm assurance that their friend 
 went direct to a state of blessedness and reunion with the loved ones 
 who had gone before. " Do thou conduct us to heaven," says a 
 hymn of the later Atharva-Veda ; " let us be with our wives and 
 children." " In heaven, where our friends dwell in bliss having 
 left behind the infirmities of the body, free from lameness, free 
 from crookedness of limb there let us behold our parents and our 
 
 2 This hymn, complete in ten stanzas, will be found in F. Max Muller: 
 " Vedic," I, i (vol. XXXII. of " Sacred Books of the East"), where it is ascribed 
 "To the Unknown God." Its citation is " Rig- Veda," Mandala 10, hymn tax. 
 (Ashtaka viii. Adhyaya 7. Varga 3-4.).
 
 42 INDIA 
 
 children." " May the water-shedding spirits bear thee upward, 
 cooling thee with their swift motion through the air, and sprink- 
 ling thee with dew." " Bear him, carry him ; let him, with all his 
 faculties complete, go to the world of the righteous. Crossing the 
 dark valley which spreadeth boundless around him, let the unborn 
 soul ascend to heaven. Wash the feet of him who is stained with 
 sin ; let him go upward with cleansed feet. Crossing the gloom, 
 gazing with wonder in many directions, let the unborn soul go up 
 to heaven." 
 
 By degrees the old collection of hymns, or the Rig- Veda, no 
 longer sufficed. Three other collections or service-books were 
 therefore added, making the four Vedas. The word Veda is from 
 the same root as the Latin vid-ere, to see : the early Greek feid-enai, 
 infinitive of oida, I know : and the English wisdom, or I wit. The 
 Brahmans taught that the Veda was divinely inspired, and that it 
 was literally " the wisdom of God." There was, first, the Rig- 
 Veda, or the hymns in their simplest form. Second, the Sama- 
 Veda, made up of hymns of the Rig- Veda to be used at the Soma 
 sacrifice. Third, the Yajur-Veda, consisting not only of Rig-Vedic 
 hymns, but also of prose sentences, to be used at the great sacrifices ; 
 and divided into two editions, the Black and White Yajur. The 
 fourth, or Atharva-Veda, was compiled from the least ancient 
 hymns at the end of the Rig- Veda, very old religious spells, and 
 later sources. Some of its spells have a similarity to the ancient 
 German and Lithuanian charms, and appear to have come down 
 from the most primitive times, before the Indian and European 
 branches of the Aryan race struck out from their common home. 
 
 To each erf the four Vedas were attached prose works, called 
 Brahmanas, in order to explain the sacrifices and the duties of the 
 priests. Like the four Vedas, the Brahmanas were held to be the 
 very word of God. The Vedas and the Brahmanas form the re- 
 vealed scriptures of the Hindus the sruti, literally " things heard 
 from God." The Vedas supplied their divinely-inspired psalms, and 
 the Brahmanas their divinely-inspired theology or body of doctrine. 
 To them were afterward added the Sutras, literally "strings of 
 pithy sentences " regarding laws and ceremonies. Still later the 
 Upanishads were composed, treating of God and the soul; the 
 Aranyakas, or " tracts for the forest recluse " ; and, after a very 
 long interval, the Puranas, or " traditions from of old." All these 
 ranked, however, not as divinely-inspired knowledge, or things
 
 THE ARYANS 43 
 
 "heard from God" (sruti), like the Vedas and Brahma- 
 nas, but only as sacred traditions smitri, literally "the things 
 remembered." 
 
 Meanwhile the four castes had been formed. In the old Aryan 
 colonies among the five rivers of the Punjab, each house-father was 
 a husbandman, warrior, and priest. But by degrees certain gifted 
 families, who composed the Vedic hymns or learned them off by 
 heart, were always chosen by the king to perform the great sacri- 
 fices. In this way probably the priestly caste sprang up. As the 
 Aryans conquered more territory, fortunate soldiers received a 
 larger share of the lands than others, and cultivated it not with 
 their own hands, but by means of the vanquished non-Aryan tribes. 
 In this way the four castes arose. First, the priests or Brahmans. 
 Second, the warriors or fighting companions of the king, called 
 Rajputs or Kshattriyas, literally " of the royal stock." Third, the 
 Aryan agricultural settlers, who kept the old name of Vaisyas, 
 from the root vis, which in the primitive Vedic period had included 
 the whole Aryan people. Fourth, the Sudras, or conquered non- 
 Aryan tribes, who became serfs. The first three castes were of 
 Aryan descent, and were honored by the name of the twice-born 
 castes. They could all be present at the sacrifices, and they wor- 
 shiped the same bright gods. The Sudras were " the slave-bands 
 of black descent " of the Veda. They were distinguished from 
 their " twice-born " Aryan conquerors as being only " once-born," 
 and by many contemptuous epithets. They were not allowed to be 
 present at the great national sacrifices, or at the feasts which fol- 
 lowed them. They could never rise out of their servile condition; 
 and to them was assigned the severest toil in the fields, and all the 
 hard and dirty work of the village community. 
 
 The Brahmans or priests claimed the highest rank, but they 
 seem to have had a long struggle with the Kshattriya or warrior 
 caste, before they won their proud position at the head of the Indian 
 people. They afterward secured themselves in that position, by 
 teaching that it had been given to them by God. At the beginning 
 of the world, they said, the Brahman proceeded from the mouth of 
 the Creator, the Kshattriya or Rajput from his arms, the Vaisya 
 from his thighs or belly, and the Sudra from his feet. This legend 
 is true so far, that the Brahmans were really the brain-power of 
 the Indian people, the Kshattriyas its armed hands, the Vaisyas the 
 food-growers, and the Sudras the down-trodden serfs. When the
 
 44 INDIA 
 
 Brahmans had established their power, they made a wise use' of it. 
 From the ancient Vedic times they recognized that if they were to 
 exercise spiritual supremacy, they must renounce earthly pomp. In 
 arrogating the priestly function, they gave up all claim to the royal 
 office. They were divinely appointed to be the guides of nations 
 and the counselors of kings, but they could not be kings themselves. 
 As the duty of the Sudra was to serve, of the Vaisya to till the 
 ground and follow middle-class trades or crafts, so the business 
 of the Kshattriya was to fight the public enemy, and of the Brah- 
 man to propitiate the national gods. 
 
 Each day brought to the Brahmans its routine of ceremonies, 
 studies, and duties. Their whole life was mapped out into four 
 clearly-defined stages of discipline. For their existence, in its full 
 religious significance, commenced not at birth, but on being in- 
 vested at the close of childhood with the sacred thread of the twice- 
 born. Their youth and early manhood were to be entirely spent in 
 learning the Veda by heart from an older Brahman, tending the 
 sacred fire, and serving their preceptor. Having completed his long 
 studies, the young Brahman entered on the second stage of his life, 
 as a householder. He married, and commenced a course of family 
 duties. When he had reared a family, and gained a practical 
 knowledge of the world, he retired into the forest as a recluse, for 
 the third period of his life ; feeding on roots or fruits, practicing his 
 religious duties with increased devotion. The fourth stage was 
 that of the ascetic or religious mendicant, wholly withdrawn from 
 earthly affairs, and striving to attain a condition of mind which, 
 heedless of the joys, or pains, or wants of the body, is intent only 
 on its final absorption into the deity. The Brahman, in this fourth 
 stage of his life, ate nothing but what was given to him unasked, 
 and abode not more than one day in any village, lest the vanities of 
 the world should find entrance into his heart. This was the 
 ideal life prescribed for a Brahman, and ancient Indian litera- 
 ture shows that it was to a large extent practically carried out. 
 Throughout his whole existence the true Brahman practiced a strict 
 temperance; drinking no wine, using a simple diet, curbing the 
 desires; shut off from the tumults of war, as his business was to 
 pray, not to fight, and having his thoughts ever fixed on study and 
 contemplation. " What is this world ? " says a Brahman sage. 
 " It is even as the bough of a tree, on which a bird rests for a night, 
 and in the morning flies away."
 
 THE ARYANS 45 
 
 The Brahmans, therefore, were a body of men who, in an 
 early stage of this world's history, bound themselves by a rule of 
 life the essential precepts of which were self-culture and self- 
 restraint. The Brahmans of the present India are the result of 
 3000 years of hereditary education and temperance ; and they have 
 evolved a type of mankind quite distinct from the surrounding 
 population. Even the passing traveler in India marks them out, 
 alike from the bronze-cheeked, large-limbed, leisure-loving Rajput 
 or Kshattriya, the warrior caste of Aryan descent; and from the 
 dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped low castes of non-Aryan 
 origin, with their short bodies and bullet heads. The Brahman 
 stands apart from both, tall and slim, with finely-modeled lips and 
 nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and slightly cocoa-nut shaped 
 skull the man of self-centered refinement. He is an example of a 
 class becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, 
 but by the vigor of hereditary culture and temperance. One race 
 has swept across India after another, dynasties have risen and 
 fallen, religions have spread themselves over the land and dis- 
 appeared, but since the dawn of history the Brahman has calmly 
 ruled; swaying the minds and receiving the homage of the people, 
 and accepted by foreign nations as the highest type of Indian man- 
 kind. The position which the Brahmans won resulted in no small 
 measure from the benefits which they bestowed. For their own 
 Aryan countrymen they developed a noble language and literature. 
 The Brahmans were not only the priests and philosophers, but also 
 the lawgivers, the men of science, and the poets of their race. 
 Their influence on the aboriginal peoples, the hill and forest races 
 of India, was even more important. To these rude remnants of the 
 flint and stone ages they brought, in ancient times, a knowledge of 
 the metals and the gods. 
 
 The Brahmans, among themselves, soon began to see that the 
 old gods of the Vedic hymns were in reality not supreme beings, 
 but poetic fictions. For when they came to think the matter out, 
 they found that the sun, the aqueous vapor, the encompassing sky, 
 the wind, and the dawn could not each be separate and supreme 
 creators, but must have all proceeded from one first cause. They 
 did not shock the more ignorant castes by any public rejection of 
 the Vedic deities. They accepted the old " shining ones " of the 
 Veda as beautiful manifestations of the divine power, and con- 
 tinued to decorously conduct the sacrifices in their honor, but
 
 46 INDIA 
 
 among their own caste the Brahmans taught the unity of God. 
 The mass of the people were left to believe in four castes, four 
 Vedas, and many deities, but the higher thinkers among the Brah- 
 mans recognized that in the beginning there was but one caste, one 
 Veda, and one God. 
 
 The confused old groups of deities or shining ones in the Veda 
 thus gave place to the grand conception of one God, in his three 
 solemn manifestations as Brahma the creator, Vishnu the pre- 
 server, and Siva the destroyer and reproducer. Each of these had 
 his prototype among the Vedic deities; and they remain to this 
 day the three persons of the Hindu trinity. Brahma, the creator, or 
 first person of the trinity, was too abstract an idea to be a popular 
 god. Vishnu, the second person of the trinity, was a more useful 
 and friendly deity. He is said to have ten times come down from 
 heaven and lived on the earth. These were the ten incarnations 
 (avatars) of Vishnu. Siva, the third person of the trinity, appears 
 as both the destroyer and reproducer; and thus shows to the eye 
 of faith that death is but a change of state, and an entry into a new 
 life. Vishnu and Siva, in their diverse male and female shapes, 
 now form the principal gods of the Hindus. 
 
 The Brahmans thus built up a religion for the Indian people. 
 They also worked out a system of philosophy, and arranged its 
 doctrines in six schools darsanas, literally mirrors of knowledge 
 at least 500 years before Christ. They had moreover a circle of 
 sciences of their own. The Sanskrit grammar of Panini, compiled 
 about 350 b. c, is still the foundation of the study of Aryan 
 language. 3 In this subject the Brahmans were far before the 
 Greeks or Romans, or indeed any European nation down to the 
 present century. Their Sanskrit, or " perfected speech," succeeded 
 after a long interval to the earlier language of the Veda, but seems 
 to have been used only, or chiefly, by the learned. The people spoke 
 a simpler form of the same language, called Prakrit. From this 
 old Prakrit the modern dialects of India descend. The Brahmans, 
 however, always wrote in Sanskrit, which sank in time into a dead 
 language unknown to the people. The Brahmans alone, therefore, 
 could read the sacred books or write new ones ; and in this way they 
 became the only men of learning in India. 
 
 3 President B. I. Wheeler's " Whence and Whither of the Modern Science of 
 Language " (University of California Publications, " Classical Philology," Vol. I. 
 No. 3, Berkeley, 1905), gives a succinct account of the importance of Sanskrit 
 grammar in the study of philology.
 
 THE ARYANS 47 
 
 As early as 250 b. c. two alphabets, or systems of written 
 characters, were used in India. The Brahmans preferred to hand 
 down their holy learning by memory, rather than to write it out. 
 Good Brahmans had to learn the Veda by heart, besides many other 
 books. This was the easier, as almost all their literature was in 
 verse (slokas). In the very ancient times, just after the Vedic 
 hymns, a pure style of prose, simple and compact, had grown up, 
 but during more than 2000 years the Brahmans have composed 
 almost entirely in verse; and prose-writing was for long almost a 
 lost art in India. 
 
 The Brahmans studied the movements of the heavenly bodies, 
 so as to fix the proper dates for the annual sacrifices. More than 
 3000 years ago the Vedic poets had worked out a fairly correct 
 calculation of the solar year, which they divided into 360 days, with 
 an extra month every five years to make up for the odd 5! days per 
 annum. They were also acquainted with the phases of the moon, 
 the motions of the planets, and the signs of the zodiac. The Brah- 
 mans had advanced far in astronomy before the Greeks arrived in 
 India in 327 b. c. They were not, however, ashamed to learn from 
 the newcomers; and one of the five systems of Brahman astron- 
 omy is called the Romaka or Greek science, but in time the Hindus 
 surpassed the Greeks in this matter. The fame of the Brahman 
 astronomers spread westward, and their works were translated by 
 the Arabs about 800 a. d., and so reached Europe. After the Mo- 
 hammedans began to ravage India in 1000 a. d., Brahman science 
 declined, but Hindu astronomers arose from time to time, and their 
 observatories may still be seen at Benares and elsewhere. An 
 Indian astronomer, the Maharaja Jai Singh, was able to correct the 
 list of stars published by the celebrated French astronomer De La 
 Hire, in 1702. The Maharaja Siwai Jai Singh II. founded the 
 city of Jaipur in 1728. He was a famous mathematician and 
 astronomer and erected five observatories in different cities of 
 the Mogul empire, the largest being at Jaipur, and another at 
 Benares. 
 
 The Brahmans also worked out a system of medicine for them- 
 selves. As they had to study the heavenly bodies in order to fix 
 the dates of their yearly festivals, so they made their first steps in 
 anatomy, by cutting up the animals at the sacrifice, with a view to 
 offering the different parts to the proper gods. They ranked 
 medical science as an Upa-Veda, or later revelation from heaven.
 
 48 INDIA 
 
 The ancient Brahmans did not shrink from dissecting the dead 
 bodies of animals. They also trained their students by means of 
 operations performed on wax spread over a board, instead of flesh, 
 and on the stems of plants. The hospitals which the Buddhist 
 princes set up throughout India for man and beast gave great op- 
 portunities for the study and treatment of disease. 
 
 In medicine the Brahmans learned nothing from the Greeks, 
 but taught them much. Arab medicine was founded on trans- 
 lations from Sanskrit works about 800 a. d. Mediaeval European 
 medicine, in its turn, down to the seventeenth century, was, in many 
 important respects, based upon the Arabic. The Indian physician 
 Charaka was quoted in European books of medicine written in the 
 Middle Ages. He is said to have been connected with the court of 
 Kanishka in the first century A. d., and his writings with those of 
 Susruta are the most important ancient Hindu medical treatises. 
 
 As Buddhism passed into modern Hinduism (600-1000 a. d.), 
 and the shackles of caste were imposed with an iron rigor, the 
 Brahmans more scrupulously avoided contact with blood or dis- 
 eased matter. They left the medical profession to the Vaidyas, a 
 lower caste, sprung from a Brahman father and a mother of the 
 Vaisya or cultivating class. These in their turn shrank more and 
 more from touching dead bodies, and from those ancient operations 
 on " the carcass of a bullock," by which alone surgical skill could 
 be acquired. The abolition of the public hospitals, on the down- 
 fall of Buddhism, must also have proved a great loss to Indian 
 medicine. The Mohammedan conquests, commencing in 1000 a. d., 
 brought in a new school of foreign physicians, who derived their 
 knowledge from the Arabic translations of the Sanskrit medical 
 works of the best period. These Mussulman doctors or hakims 
 monopolized the patronage of the Mohammedan princes and nobles 
 of India. The decline of Hindu medicine continued until it sank 
 into the hands of the village kabiraj, whose knowledge consists of 
 a jumble of Sanskrit texts, useful lists of drugs, aided by spells, 
 fasts, and quackery. Hindu students now flock to the medical col- 
 leges established by the British government, and in this way the 
 science is again reviving in India. 
 
 The Brahmans had also an art of music of their own. The 
 seven notes which they invented, at least four centuries before 
 Christ, passed through the Persians to Arabia, and were thence 
 introduced into European music in the . eleventh century a. d.
 
 THEARYANS 49 
 
 Hindu music declined under the Mohammedan rule. Its complex 
 divisions or modes and numerous sub-tones prevent it from pleas- 
 ing the modern European ear, which has been trained on a different 
 system; but it is highly original and interesting from a scientific 
 point of view. A great revival of Indian music has been brought 
 about by patriotic native gentlemen in our own days, and its strains 
 give delight to millions of the people of India. 
 
 The Brahmans made law a part of their religion. Their 
 earliest legal works were "the household maxims" (Grihya Su- 
 tras), some of them perhaps as early as 500 B.C. The customs 
 of the Brahmans in northern India were collected into the Code of 
 Manu, composed in its present final form between 100 and 500 a. d. 
 Another famous compilation, known as the Code of Yajnavalkya, 
 was drawn up later, apparently in the sixth or seventh century a. d. 
 These codes, and the commentaries written upon them, still rule the 
 family life of the Hindus. They set forth the law in three branches : 
 domestic and civil rights and duties, the administration of justice, 
 religious purifications and penance. They contain many rules 
 about marriage, inheritance, and food. They keep the castes apart, 
 by forbidding them to intermarry or to eat together. They were 
 accepted as almost divine laws by the Hindus; and the spread of 
 these codes was the work of the Brahmans as the civilizers of India. 
 They really record only the customs of the Brahman kingdoms in 
 the north, and do not truly apply to all the Indian races. The 
 greatest Hindu lawgivers agree that the usages of each different 
 country in India are to be respected; and in this way they make 
 allowance for the laws or customs of the non-Aryan tribes. Thus 
 among the Brahmans it would be disgraceful for a woman to have 
 two husbands, but among the Nairs of southern India and other 
 non-Aryan races it is the custom; therefore it is legal for such 
 races, and all the laws of inheritance among these peoples are 
 regulated accordingly. 
 
 The Brahmans were not merely the composers and keepers of 
 the sacred books, the philosophers, the men of science, and the law- 
 makers of the Hindu people they were also its poets. They did 
 not write history ; but they told the ancient wars and the lives of the 
 Aryan heroes in epic poems. The two most famous of these are 
 the Mahabharata, or chronicles of the Delhi kings, and the Rama- 
 yana, or story of the Aryan advance into southern India. 
 
 The Mahabharata is a great collection of Indian legends in
 
 50 INDIA 
 
 verse, some of them as old as the Vedic hymns. The main story 
 deals with a period not later than 1200 b. c, but it was not put 
 together in its present shape till more than a thousand years later. 
 An idea of the extent of the Mahabharata may be gained from the 
 fact that it contains 220,000 lines ; while the Iliad of Homer does 
 not amount to 16,000 lines, and Virgil's ./Eneid contains less than 
 10,000. 
 
 The central story of the Mahabharata occupies scarcely one- 
 fourth of the whole, or about 50,000 lines. It narrates a struggle 
 between two families of the ruling lunar race for a patch of coun- 
 try near Delhi. These families, alike descended from the royal 
 Bharata, consisted of two brotherhoods, cousins to each other, 
 and both brought up under the same roof. The five Pandavas were 
 the sons of King Pandu, who, smitten by a curse, resigned the 
 sovereignty to his brother Dhrita-rashtra, and retired to a hermit- 
 age in the Himalayas, where he died. The ruins of his capital, 
 Hastinapura, or the elephant city, are pointed out beside a deserted 
 bed of the Ganges, 57 miles northeast of Delhi, at this day. His 
 brother Dhrita-rashtra ruled in his stead; and to him one hundred 
 sons were born, who took the name of the Kauravas from an an- 
 cestor, Kuru. Dhrita-rashtra acted as a faithful guardian to his 
 five nephews, the Pandavas, and chose the eldest of them as heir to 
 the family kingdom. His own sons resented this act of super- 
 cession; and so arose the quarrel between the hundred Kauravas 
 and the five Pandavas, which forms the main story of the Mahabha- 
 rata. 
 
 The hundred Kauravas forced their father to send away their 
 five Pandava cousins into the forest, and there they treacherously 
 burned down the hut in which the five Pandavas dwelt. The 
 Pandavas escaped, and wandered in the disguise of Brahmans to 
 the court of King Draupada, who had proclaimed a swayam-vara, 
 or a maiden's " own choice." This was a contest of arms, or with 
 the bow, among the chiefs, at which the king's daughter would take 
 the victor as her husband. Arjuna, one of the five Pandavas, bent 
 the mighty bow which had defied the strength of all the rival chiefs, 
 and so obtained the fair princess, Draupadi, who became the com- 
 mon wife of the five brethren. Their uncle, the good Dhrita- 
 rashtra, recalled them to his capital, and gave them one half of the 
 family territory, reserving the other half for his own sons. The 
 Pandava brethren hived off to a new settlement, Indra-prastha,
 
 THE ARYANS 51 
 
 afterward Delhi, clearing the jungle and driving out the Nagas 
 or forest-races. 
 
 For a time peace reigned. But the Kauravas tempted 
 Yudhishthira, "firm in fight," the eldest of the Pandavas, to a 
 gambling match, at which he lost his kingdom, his brothers, him- 
 self, and last of all his wife. Their father, however, forced his 
 sons to restore their wicked gains to their cousins. But Yudhish- 
 thira was again seduced by the Kauravas to stake his kingdom at 
 dice, again lost it, and had to retire with his wife and brethren into 
 exile for twelve years. Their banishment ended, the five Pandavas 
 returned at the head of an army to win back their kingdom. Many 
 battles followed, gods and divine heroes joined in the struggle, 
 until at last all the hundred Kauravas were slain, and of the friends 
 and kindred of the Pandavas only the five brethren remained. 
 Their uncle, Dhrita-rashtra, made over to them the whole kingdom. 
 For a long time the Pandavas ruled gloriously, celebrating the 
 asva-medha, or " great horse sacrifice," in token of their holding 
 imperial sway. Their uncle, old and blind, ever taunted them with 
 the slaughter of his hundred sons, until at last he crept away, with 
 his few surviving ministers, his aged wife, and his sister-in-law, 
 the mother of the Pandavas, to a hermitage, where the worn-out 
 band perished in a forest fire. The five brethren, smitten by re- 
 morse, gave up their kingdom; and, taking their wife, Draupadi, 
 and a faithful dog, they departed to the Himalayas to seek the 
 heaven of Indra on Mount Meru. One by one the sorrowful pil- 
 grims died upon the road, until only the eldest brother, Yudhish- 
 thira, and the dog reached the gate of heaven. Indra invited him 
 to enter, but he refused if his lost wife and brethren were not also 
 admitted. The prayer was granted ; but he still declined unless his 
 faithful dog might come in with him. This could not be allowed ; 
 and Yudhishthira, after a glimpse of heaven, was thrust down to 
 hell, where he found many of his old comrades in anguish. He 
 resolved to share their sufferings rather than to enjoy paradise 
 alone, but, having triumphed in this crowning trial, the whole scene 
 was revealed to him to be maya or illusion, and the reunited band 
 entered into heaven, where they rest forever with Indra. 
 
 The struggle for the kingdom of Hastinapura forms, however, 
 only a fourth of the Mahabharata. The remainder is made up of 
 other early legends, stories of the gods, and religious discourses, 
 intended to teach the military caste its duties, especially its duty of
 
 52 INDIA 
 
 reverence to the Brahmans. Taken as a whole, the Mahabharata 
 may he said to form the cyclopaedia of the heroic age in northern 
 India. 
 
 The second great Indian epic, the Ramayana, recounts the 
 advance of the Aryans into southern India. It is said to have been 
 composed by the poet Valmiki ; and its main story refers to a period 
 loosely estimated at about iooo b. c, but the Ramayana could not 
 have been put together in its present shape many centuries, if at all, 
 before the Christian era. Parts of it may be earlier than the Maha- 
 bharata, but the compilation as a whole apparently belongs to a 
 later date. The Ramayana consists of about 48,000 lines. 
 
 As the Mahabharata celebrates the lunar race of Delhi, so the 
 Ramayana forms the epic, or poetic history, of the solar race of 
 Ayodhya, the capital of the modern province of Oudh. The two 
 poems thus preserve the legends of the two most famous Aryan 
 kingdoms at the two opposite, or eastern and western, borders of 
 the old middle land of Hindustan (Madhya-desa). The opening 
 books of the Ramayana recount the wondrous birth and boyhood 
 of Rama, eldest son of Dasaratha, king of Ayodhya or Oudh; his 
 marriage with the princess Sita, after he proved himself the victor 
 at her " own choice " of a husband (swayam-vara), by bending the 
 mighty bow of Siva in the contest of chiefs; and his selection as 
 heir-apparent to his father's kingdom. A zanana intrigue ends in 
 the youngest wife of Dasaratha, Rama's father, obtaining the suc- 
 cession for her own son, Bharata, and in the exile of Rama, with 
 his bride Sita, for fourteen years to the forest. The banished pair 
 wander south to Prayag, the modern Allahabad, already a place of 
 sanctity, and thence across the river to the hermitage of Valmiki, 
 among the jungles of Bundelkhand, where a hill is still pointed out 
 as the scene of their abode. Meanwhile Rama's father dies; and 
 the loyal younger brother, Bharata, although declared the lawful 
 successor, refuses to enter on the inheritance, and goes in search 
 of Rama to bring him back as rightful heir. A contest of fraternal 
 affection takes place ; Bharata at length returning to rule the family 
 kingdom in the name of Rama, until the latter should come to claim 
 it at the end of his fourteen years of banishment. 
 
 So far, the Ramayana merely narrates the local annals of the 
 court of Ayodhya. In the third book the main story begins. 
 Ravana, the demon or aboriginal king of the far south, smitten by 
 the fame of Sita's beauty, seizes her at the hermitage while her
 
 THE ARYANS 53 
 
 husband Rama is away in the jungle, and flies off with her in a 
 magic chariot through the air to Ceylon. The next three books 
 (4th, 5th, and 6th) recount the expedition of the bereaved Rama 
 for her recovery. He allies himself with the aboriginal tribes of 
 southern India, who bear the names of monkeys and bears, and 
 raises among them a great army. The monkey general, Hanuman, 
 jumps across the straits between India and Ceylon, discovers the 
 princess in captivity, and leaps back with the news to Rama. The 
 monkey troops then build a causeway across the narrow sea, 
 the Adam's Bridge of modern geography, by which Rama 
 marches across, and, after slaying the monster Ravana, delivers 
 Sita. The rescued wife proves her faithfulness to him, during her 
 stay in the palace of Ravana, by the ancient ordeal of fire. Agni, 
 the god of that element, himself conducts her out of the burning 
 pile to her husband; and, the fourteen years of banishment being 
 over, Rama and Sita return in triumph to Ayodhya. There they 
 reigned gloriously; and Rama celebrated the great horse sacrifice 
 (asva-medha) as a token of his imperial sway over India. A 
 famine having smitten the land, Rama regards it as a punishment 
 sent by God for some crime committed in the royal family. Doubts 
 arise in his heart as to his wife's purity while in her captor's power 
 at Ceylon. He accordingly banishes the faithful Sita, who wanders 
 forth again to Valmiki's hermitage, where she gives birth to Rama's 
 two sons. After sixteen years of exile, she is reconciled to her 
 repentant husband, and Rama and Sita and their children are at 
 last , reunited. 
 
 The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, however overlaid with 
 fable, form the chronicles of the kings of the middle land of Hin- 
 dustan (Madhya-desa), their family feuds, and their national enter- 
 prises. In the later Sanskrit epics, the stories of the heroes give 
 place more and more to legends of the gods. Among them the 
 Raghu-vansa and the Kumara-sambhava, both assigned to Kalidasa, 
 take the first rank. The Raghu-vansa celebrates the solar line of 
 Raghu, king of Ayodhya, and especially his descendant Rama. The 
 Kumara-sambhava recounts the birth of the war-god. These two 
 poems could not have been composed in their present shape before 
 
 350 A. D. 
 
 In India, as in Greece and Rome, scenic representations seem 
 to have taken their rise in the rude pantomime of a very early age, 
 possibly as far back as the Vedic ritual; and the Sanskrit word
 
 54 INDIA 
 
 for the drama, nataka, is derived from nata, a dancer. The San- 
 skrit plays of the classical age which have come down to us 
 probably belong to the period between the first century b. c. and the 
 eighth century a. d. The father of the Sanskrit drama is Kalidasa, 
 already mentioned as the composer of the two later Sanskrit epics. 
 According to Hindu tradition, he was one of the " nine gems," 
 or distinguished men at the court of Vikramaditya, king of Ujjain, 
 in 57 b. c, but as a matter of fact there were several king 
 Vikramadityas, and the one under whom Kalidasa flourished ap- 
 pears to have ruled over Malwa in the sixth century a. d. 
 
 The most famous drama of Kalidasa is u Sakuntala, or the 
 Lost Ring." Like the ancient Sanskrit epics, it divides its action 
 between the court of the king and the hermitage in the forest. 
 Prince Dushyanta, an ancestor of the noble lunar race, weds a 
 beautiful Brahman girl, Sakuntala, at her father's retreat in the 
 jungle. Before returning to his capital, he gives his bride a ring 
 as a pledge of his love; but, smitten by a curse from a Brahman, 
 she loses the ring, and cannot be recognized by her husband till 
 it is found. Sakuntala bears a son in her loneliness, and sets out 
 to claim recognition for herself and child at her husband's court, 
 but she is as one unknown to the prince, till, after many sorrows 
 and trials, the ring comes to light. She is then happily reunited 
 with her husband, and her son grows up to be the noble Bharata, 
 the chief founder of the lunar dynasty, whose achievements form 
 the theme of the Mahabharata. Sakuntala, like Sita, is a type of 
 the chaste and faithful Hindu wife ; and her love and sorrow, after 
 forming the favorite romance of the Indian people for perhaps 
 eighteen hundred years, supplied a theme for Goethe, in the 
 " Vorspiel auf dem Theater " prefixed to his " Faust." 
 
 Among other Hindu dramas and poems may be mentioned the 
 " Mrichchhakatika, or Earthen Toy Cart," in ten acts, on the old 
 theme of the innocent cleared and the guilty punished ; and the poem 
 of " Nala and Damayanti, or the Royal Gambler and the Faithful 
 Wife." Many plays often founded upon some story in the Maha- 
 bharata or Ramayana, issue every year from the Indian press. 
 
 Besides the epic chronicles of their gods and heroes, the Brah- 
 mans composed many religious poems. One of the most beautiful 
 is the " Gita Govinda, or Song of the Divine Herdsman," written 
 by Jayadeva about 1200 a. d. The Puranas are an enormous col- 
 lection of religious discourses in verse.
 
 THEARYANS 55 
 
 Fables of animals have from old been favorites in India. The 
 Sanskrit " Pancha-tantra" or " Book of Beast Tales," was trans- 
 lated into Persian as early as the sixth century a. d. ; and thence 
 found its way to Europe. Some of the animal fables of ancient 
 India are among the familiar nursery stories of England and 
 America at the present day. 
 
 In order to understand the long rule of the Brahmans, and the 
 influence which they still wield, it is necessary ever to keep in mind 
 their position as the great literary caste. Their priestly supremacy 
 has been repeatedly assailed, and during a space of nearly a thou- 
 sand years it was overborne by the Buddhists. Throughout twenty- 
 five centuries the Brahmans have been the writers and thinkers of 
 India, the counselors of Hindu princes and the teachers of the 
 Hindu people. The education and learning which so long gave 
 them their power have ceased to be the monopoly of their caste, 
 and may now be acquired by all races and all classes in India.
 
 Chapter V 
 
 BUDDHISM. 543 B.C.-iooo A.D. 
 
 THE Brahmans had firmly established their power 600 years 
 before Christ. After that date a new religion arose in 
 India, called Buddhism, from the name of its founder, 
 Gautama Buddha. This new religion was a rival to Brahmanism 
 during more than a thousand years. About the ninth century a. d. 
 Buddhism was driven out of India, but it is still professed by many 
 millions of people in Asia, and some claim that it has more followers 
 than any other religion in the world. However, this statement can 
 not be substantiated, for there exist nothing but estimates of the 
 population of several of the Buddhist countries and it is exceedingly 
 difficult to determine who are and who are not to be reckoned as 
 Buddhists. The result is that estimates of the number of Bud- 
 dhists range all the way from 150,000,000 to 500,000,000. Esti- 
 mates of the number of Christians in the world center around 
 450,000,000. 
 
 Gautama, afterward named Buddha, was the only son of Sud- 
 dhodana, king of Kapilavastu. This prince ruled over the Sakya 
 people, about 100 miles north of Benares, and within sight of the 
 snow-topped Himalayas. The king wished to see his son grow up 
 into a warrior like himself, but the young prince shunned the sports 
 of his playmates, and spent his time alone in nooks of the palace 
 garden. When he reached manhood, however, he showed himself 
 brave and skillful with his weapons. He won his wife by a contest 
 at arms over all rival chiefs. For a time he forgot the religious 
 thoughts of his boyhood in the enjoyment of the world, but in his 
 drives through the city he was struck by the sights of old age, 
 disease, and death which met his eye ; and he envied the calm of a 
 holy man, who seemed to have raised his soul above the changes 
 and sorrows of this life. After ten years, his wife bore to him an 
 only son; and Gautama, fearing lest this new tie should bind him 
 
 56
 
 BUDDHISM 57 
 
 543 B. C.- 1000 A. D. 
 
 too closely to the things of earth, retired about the age of thirty 
 to a cave in the jungles. The story is told how he turned away 
 from the door of his wife's lamp-lit chamber, denying himself even 
 a parting caress of his newborn babe, lest he should wake the 
 sleeping mother, and galloped off into the darkness. After a 
 gloomy night ride, he sent back his one companion, the faithful 
 charioteer, with his horse and jewels to his father. Having cut 
 off his long warrior hair, and exchanged his princely raiment for 
 the rags of a poor passer-by, he went on alone a homeless beggar. 
 This giving up of princely pomp, and of loved wife and newborn 
 son, is the great renunciation which forms a favorite theme in the 
 Buddhist scriptures. 
 
 For a time Gautama studied under two Brahman hermits, in 
 Patna district. They taught him that the peace of the soul was to 
 be reached only by mortifying the body. He then buried himself 
 deeper in the jungles near Gaya, and during six years wasted 
 himself by austerities in company with five disciples. The temple 
 of Buddha-Gaya marks the site of his long penance. Instead of 
 earning peace of mind by fasting and self-torture, he sank into a 
 religious despair, during which the Buddhist scriptures affirm that 
 the enemy of mankind, Mara, wrestled with him in bodily shape. 
 Torn with doubts as to whether all his penance availed anything, 
 the haggard hermit fell senseless to the earth. When he recovered, 
 the mental agony had passed. He felt that the path to salvation lay 
 not in self-torture in mountain- jungles or caves, but in preaching 
 a higher life to his fellow-men. He gave up penance. His five 
 disciples, shocked by this, forsook him ; and he was left alone in the 
 forest. The Buddhist scriptures depict him as sitting serene under 
 a fig tree, while demons whirled round him with flaming weapons. 
 From this temptation in the wilderness he came forth with his 
 doubts forever laid at rest, seeing his way clear, and henceforth 
 to be known as Buddha, literally " the enlightened." 
 
 Buddha began his public teaching in the Deer-Forest, near 
 the great city of Benares. Unlike the Brahmans, he preached, not 
 to one or two disciples of the sacred caste, but to the people. His 
 first converts were common men, and among the earliest were 
 women. After three months he had gathered around him sixty 
 disciples, whom he sent forth to the neighboring countries with 
 these words : " Go ye now, and preach the most excellent law." 
 Two-thirds of each year he spent as a wandering preacher. The
 
 58 INDIA 
 
 S43 B. C.-1000 A. D. 
 
 remaining four months, or the rainy season, he abode at some fixed 
 place, teaching the people who flocked around his little dwelfing in 
 the bamboo grove. His five old disciples, who had forsaken him in 
 the time of his sore temptation in the wilderness, now came back 
 to their master. Princes, merchants, artisans, Brahmans and her- 
 mits, husbandmen and serfs, noble ladies and repentant women 
 who had sinned, were added to those who believed. Buddha 
 preached throughout Behar, Oudh, and the adjacent districts in the 
 Northwestern Provinces. He had ridden forth from his father's 
 palace as a brilliant young prince. He now returned to it as a 
 wandering preacher, in dingy yellow robes, with shaven head and 
 the begging bowl in his hand. The old king heard him with 
 reverence. The son, whom Buddha had left as a newborn babe, 
 was converted to the faith ; and his beloved wife, from the threshold 
 of whose chamber he had ridden away into the darkness, became 
 one of the first of Buddhist nuns. 
 
 Buddha's great renunciation took place in his thirtieth year. 
 After long self-preparation, his public teaching began when he was 
 about thirty-six, and during forty-four years he preached to the 
 people. In foretelling his death, he said to his followers : " Be ear- 
 nest, be thoughtful, be holy. Keep steadfast watch over your own 
 hearts. He who holds fast to the law and discipline, and faints 
 not, he shall cross the ocean of life and make an end of sorrow." 
 " The world is fast bound in fetters," he added : " I now give it 
 deliverance, as a physician who brings heavenly medicine. Keep 
 your mind on my teaching: all other things change, this changes 
 not. No more shall I speak to you. I desire to depart. I desire the 
 eternal rest (Nirvana)." He spent the night in preaching, and in 
 comforting a weeping disciple. His last words, according to one 
 account, were, " Work out your salvation with diligence." He died 
 calmly, at the age of eighty, under the shadow of a fig tree, accord- 
 ing to the commonly received tradition in 543 b. c. ; or according 
 to later criticism in 478 b. c. 
 
 The secret of Buddha's success was, that he brought spiritual 
 deliverance to the people. He preached that salvation was equally 
 open to all men, and that it must be earned, not by propitiating 
 imaginary deities, but by our own conduct. He thus did away with 
 sacrifices, and with the priestly claims of the Brahmans as media- 
 tors between God and man. He taught that the state of a man in 
 this life, in all previous and in all future lives, is the result of his
 
 BUDDHISM 59 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. v 
 
 own acts (Karma). What a man sows, that he must reap. As 
 no evil remains without punishment, and no good deed without 
 reward, it follows that neither priest nor God can prevent each 
 act from bringing about its own consequences. Misery or happi- 
 ness in this life is the unavoidable result of our conduct in a past 
 life ; and our actions here will determine our happiness or misery 
 in the life to come. When any creature dies, he is born again 
 in some higher or lower state of existence, according to his merit 
 or demerit. His merit or demerit consists of the sum total of his 
 actions in all previous lives. A system like this, in which our whole 
 well-being past, present, and to come depends on ourselves, 
 leaves little room for a personal God. 
 
 Life, according to Buddha, must always be more or less pain- 
 ful; and the object of every good man is to get rid of the evils of 
 existence by merging his individual soul into the universal soul. 
 This is Nirvana, literally " cessation." Some scholars explain it 
 to mean that the soul is blown out like the flame of a lamp. Others 
 hold that it is the extinction of the sins, sorrows, and selfishness 
 of a man's individual life the final rest of the soul. The pious 
 Buddhist strives to reach a state of holy meditation in this world, 
 and he looks forward to an eternal calm in a world to come. Bud- 
 dha taught that this end could only be reached by leading a good 
 life. Instead of the Brahman sacrifices, he laid down three great 
 duties, namely, control over self, kindness to other men, and rev- 
 erence for the life of all living creatures. 
 
 He urged on his disciples that they must not only follow the 
 true path themselves, but that they should preach it to all mankind. 
 Buddhism has from the first been a missionary religion. One of 
 the earliest acts of Buddha's public ministry was to send forth the 
 sixty disciples. He also formed a religious order, whose duty it 
 was to go forth unpaid and preach to all nations. While, therefore, 
 the Brahmans kept their ritual for the twice-born Aryan castes, 
 Buddhism addressed itself not only to those castes and to the lower 
 mass of the people, but to all the non-Aryan races throughout India, 
 and eventually to the whole Asiatic world. 
 
 On the death of Buddha, legend says five hundred of his 
 disciples met in a vast cave near Patna, to gather together his say- 
 ings. This was the First Council. They chanted the lessons of 
 their master in three great divisions the words of Buddha to his 
 disciples ; his code of discipline ; and his system of doctrine. These
 
 60 INDIA 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. 
 
 became the Three Collections (Tipitaka 1 in Pali and Tripitaka in 
 Sanskrit) of Buddha's teaching; and the word for a Buddhist 
 council means literally " a singing together." The complete text of 
 the southern canon in the Pali language but in Siamese characters 
 was printed under royal patronage at Bangkok, in 1893 and 1894, 
 and 49 sets of the work were distributed among American libraries 
 by the king of Siam. 
 
 A century afterward, the Second Council, of seven hundred, 
 was held to settle disputes between the more and less strict followers 
 of Buddhism. These two councils are not recognized as historical 
 by scholars. 
 
 During the next two hundred years Buddhism spread over 
 northern India. About 257 b. a, Asoka, 2 the king of Magadha 
 or Behar, became a zealous convert to the faith. He was grandson 
 of Chandra Gupta, whom we shall hear of in Alexander's camp. 
 And his dates have been provisionally fixed as follows: his acces- 
 sion 257 b. c, his Council 244 b. c, his death 223 b. a, and it is 
 by working back from these dates that the year 478 b. c. is de- 
 termined for the death of Buddha. Asoka is said to have supported 
 64,000 Buddhist priests; he founded many religious houses; and 
 his kingdom is called the land of the monasteries ( Vihara or Behar) 
 to this day. Asoka did for Buddhism what the Emperor Con- 
 stantine afterward effected for Christianity he made it a state 
 religion. This he accomplished by five means by a council to 
 settle the faith; by edicts setting forth its principles; by a state 
 department to watch over its purity; by missionaries to spread its 
 doctrines; and by an authoritative revision or canon of the Bud- 
 dhist scriptures. 
 
 In 244 b. c, Asoka convened at Patna the Third Buddhist 
 Council, of one thousand elders. Evil men, taking on them the 
 yellow robe of the Buddhist order, had given forth their own 
 opinions as the teaching of Buddha. Such heresies were now cor- 
 rected; and the Buddhism of southern Asia practically dates from 
 Asoka's Council. In a number of edicts, both before and after 
 that Council, he published throughout his empire the grand prin- 
 ciples of the faith. Forty of these royal sermons are still found 
 
 x The Pali Text Society has published portions of the "Tipitika" (London, 
 1882-1896) ; and translations of selected portions appear in the " Sacred Books of 
 the East." 
 
 2 See V. A. Smith, "Asoka, the Buddhist Emperor of India" ("Rulers of 
 India" series, London, 1901).
 
 BUDDHISM 61 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. " 
 
 graven upon pillars, caves, and rocks throughout India. Asoka 
 also founded a state department, with a minister of justice and 
 religion at its head, to watch over the purity, and to direct the 
 spread of the faith. Wells were to be dug and trees planted along 
 the roads for the wearied wayfarers. Hospitals were established 
 for man and beast. Officers were appointed to watch over family 
 life and the morals of the people, and to promote instruction among 
 the women as well as the youth. Asoka thought it his duty to con- 
 vert all mankind to Buddhism. His rock inscriptions 8 record how 
 he sent forth missionaries " to the utmost limits of the barbarian 
 countries," to " intermingle among all unbelievers " for the spread 
 of religion. They were to mix equally with soldiers, Brahmans. 
 and beggars, with the dreaded and the despised, both within the 
 kingdom " and in foreign countries, teaching better things." Con- 
 version was to be effected by persuasion, not by the sword. Bud- 
 dhism was at once the most intensely missionary religion in the 
 world, and the most tolerant. Asoka not only labored to spread 
 his religion, but he also took steps to keep its doctrines pure. He 
 collected the Buddhist sacred books into an authoritative version, 
 in the Magadhi language of his central kingdom in Behar, a version 
 which for two thousand years has formed the southern canon of 
 the Buddhist scriptures. 
 
 The fourth and last of the great Buddhist Councils was held 
 under the Scythian king, Kanishka, who ruled in northwestern 
 India for sixty years, about 15 b. c. to 45 a. d. Another authority 
 places his accession in 78 a. d. This Council of Kanishka is not 
 recognized by the southern Buddhists, while the northern Buddhists 
 in turn do not recognize the Council of Asoka. 
 
 He again revised the sacred books, and his version has supplied 
 the northern canon to the Buddhists of Tibet, Tatary, and China. 
 Meanwhile Buddhist missionaries were preaching all over Asia. 
 About 243 b. c. Asoka's son is said to have carried his father's 
 southern canon of the sacred books to Ceylon, whence it spread in 
 later times to Burma and the Eastern Archipelago. The northern 
 
 8 These inscriptions purport to be the work of Piyadasi, who has in various 
 ways been identified as Asoka. The most recent edition and commentary on 
 these inscriptions is to be found in the " Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenland- 
 ische Gesellschaft," vols. 37, 39, 40, 41, and 43. There are earlier editions by 
 Cunningham (Calcutta, 1877), and by Senart (Paris, 1881-1886). One of these 
 inscriptions, discovered as recently as 1896, purports to be upon the site of 
 Buddha's birthplace.
 
 62 INDIA 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. 
 
 canon of Buddhism, as laid down at the Council of Kanishka, be- 
 came one of the state religions of China in 65 a. d. ; and it is still 
 professed by the northern Buddhists from Tibet to Japan. The 
 Buddhist ritual and doctrines also spread westward, and exercised 
 an influence upon early Christianity. 4 Certain notable similarities 
 between Buddhism and Catholicism have impressed observers such 
 as Pere Hue in Tibet. The most interesting fact, however, is the 
 story of Barlaam and Josaphat. The story of Buddha appears as 
 the life of a Christian saint in the writings of St. John of Damascus 
 in the eight century, and as Saint Josaphat he is honored in the 
 Greek Church on August 26 and in the Roman Church on Novem- 
 ber 27. A church in Palermo is dedicated to him. 
 
 Buddhism was thus formed into a state religion by the Coun- 
 cils of Asoka and Kanishka. It did not abolish caste. On the 
 contrary, reverence to Brahmans and to the spiritual guide ranked 
 as one of the three great duties, along with obedience to parents 
 and acts of kindness to all men and animals. Buddha, however, 
 divided mankind not by their caste, but according to their religious 
 merit. He told his hearers to live good lives, not to offer victims 
 to the gods. The public worship in Buddhist countries consists, 
 therefore, in doing honor to the relics of holy men who are dead, 
 instead of sacrifices. Its sacred buildings were, originally, not 
 temples to the gods, but monasteries for the monks and nuns, with 
 their bells and rosaries; or memorial shrines, reared over a tooth 
 or bone of the founder of the faith. 
 
 While, on the one hand, many miraculous stories have grown 
 up around Buddha's life and death, it has been denied, 5 on the other 
 hand, that such a person as Buddha ever existed. The date of his 
 birth cannot be fixed with certainty ; the dates which are here given 
 for his life are those of the received Indian tradition. Some 
 scholars hold that Buddhism is merely a religion based on the 
 Brahmanical or Sankhya philosophy of Kapila. They argue that 
 Buddha's birth is placed at a purely allegorical town, Kapila- Vastu, 
 
 * See R. Spence Hardy, " Christianity and Buddhism Compared " ; A. Lillie, 
 " Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity " ; R. Seydel, " Das Evange- 
 liunt von Jesu in seinem V erh'dltnissen sur Buddha-Sage und Buddha-Lehre," 
 and " Die Buddha-Legende und das Leben Jesu nach den Evangelien " ; Max 
 Muller, " Essay on the Migration of Fables " in vol. IV. of " Chips from a Ger- 
 man Workshop." 
 
 5 Compare E. Senart, " Essai sur la legende du Buddha, son caractere et ses 
 origines."
 
 BUDDHISM 63 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. w 
 
 " the abode of Kapila " ; that his mother is called Maya-devi, in 
 reference to the Maya, or " illusion " doctrine of Kapila's system ; 
 and that the very name of Buddha is not that of any real person,' 
 but merely means " the enlightened." This theory is so far true,' 
 that Buddhism was not a sudden invention of any single mind, but 
 was worked out 'from the Brahman philosophy and religion which 
 preceded it, but such a view leaves out of sight the two great 
 traditional features of Buddhism, namely, the preacher's appeal to 
 the people, and the undying influence of his own beautiful life. 
 
 Buddhism never drove Brahmanism out of India. The two 
 religions lived together during more than a thousand years, from 
 before 250 b. c. to about 900 a. d. Modern Hinduism is the joint 
 product of both. In certain kingdoms of India, and at certain 
 periods, Buddhism prevailed. Brahmanism was at no time crushed ; 
 and the Brahmans in the end claimed Buddha as the ninth incar- 
 nation of their own god, Vishnu. The Chinese pilgrims to India 
 from 400 to 630 a. d. found Buddhist monasteries and Brahman 
 temples side by side. 
 
 In northern India, for example, a famous Buddhist king, 
 Siladitya, ruled at the latter date. He seems to have been an Asoka 
 of the seventh century a. d. ; and he strictly carried out the two great 
 Buddhist duties of charity and spreading the faith. He tried to 
 extend Buddhism by means of a general council in 634 a. d. 
 Twenty-one tributary sovereigns attended, together with the most 
 learned Buddhist monks and Brahmans of their kingdoms. The 
 object of the council was not merely to assert the Buddhist faith. 
 It dealt with the two religions of India at that time. First, a dis- 
 cussion took place between the Buddhists and the Brahmans; 
 second, a dispute between the two Buddhist sects who followed 
 respectively the northern scriptures or canon of Kanishka and the 
 southern scriptures or canon of Asoka. The rites of the populace 
 were as mixed as the doctrines of their teachers. On the first day 
 of the council, a statue of Buddha was installed with great pomp; 
 on the second, an image of the Brahman sun-god; on the third, an 
 idol of the Hindu Siva. 
 
 Siladitya held a solemn distribution of his royal treasures 
 every five years. The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang, an account 
 of whose travels is translated in Beal's " Si-yu-ki, or Buddhist 
 Records of the Western World," describes how, on the plain 
 where the Ganges and the Jumna unite their waters, near Al-
 
 64 INDIA 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. 
 
 lahabad, all the kings of the empire, and a multitude of people, 
 were feasted for seventy-five days. Siladitya brought forth the 
 stores of his palace, and gave them away to Brahmans and 
 Buddhists, monks and heretics, without distinction. At the end 
 of the festival he stripped off his jewels and royal raiment, 
 handed them to the bystanders, and, like Buddha of old, put on the 
 rags of a beggar. By this ceremony the king commemorated the 
 great renunciation of Buddha, and also practiced the highest duty 
 laid down by the Brahmans, namely, almsgiving. 
 
 The vast Buddhist monastery of Nalanda, near Gaya, formed 
 a seat of learning which recalls the Christian abbeys and universities 
 of mediaeval Europe. Ten thousand monks and novices of the 
 eighteen Buddhist schools here studied theology, philosophy, law, 
 science, especially medicine, and practiced their devotions. They 
 lived in learned ease, fed by the royal bounty. Even this stronghold 
 of Buddhism is a proof that Buddhism was only one of two hostile 
 creeds in India. During one short period, about 640 a. d., it was 
 three times destroyed by the enemies of the Buddhist faith. 
 
 Between 700 and 900 a. d. there arose various great reformers 
 of the Brahman faith. After 800 a. d. Brahmanism gradually 
 became the ruling religion. Legends dimly tell of persecutions 
 stirred up by Brahman reformers. Although there were severe 
 local persecutions of Buddhists, the downfall of Buddhism seems 
 to have resulted partly from its own decay, and partly from new 
 movements of religious thought, rather than from any general 
 suppression by the sword. In the tenth century, only outlying 
 states, such as Kashmir and Orissa, remained faithful ; and before 
 the Mohammedans fairly came upon the scene, Buddhism as a 
 popular faith had almost disappeared from India. 
 
 During the last thousand years Buddhism has been a banished 
 religion from its native Indian home, but it has won greater tri- 
 umphs in its exile than it could have ever achieved in the land of 
 its birth. It created a literature and a religion for nearly one-half 
 of the human race; and it is supposed, by its influence on early 
 Christianity, to have affected the beliefs of a large part of the other 
 half. Five hundred millions of men, or forty per cent, of the 
 inhabitants of the world, still follow the teaching of Buddha. 
 Afghanistan, Nepal, Eastern Turkestan, Tibet, Mongolia, Man- 
 churia, China, Japan, the Eastern Archipelago, Siam, Burma, Cey- 
 lon, and India, at one time or another marked the magnificent circle
 
 *1 * 
 
 t> s 
 
 * o 
 
 H
 
 BUDDHISM 65 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. 
 
 of its conquests. Its shrines and monasteries stretched from what 
 are now provinces of the Russian empire, to Japan and the islands 
 of the Malay Sea. During twenty-four centuries Buddhism has 
 encountered and outlived a series of rival faiths. At this day it 
 forms, with Christianity and Islam, one of the three great religions 
 of the world. 
 
 Even in India Buddhism did not altogether die. Many of its 
 doctrines still live in Hinduism. It also left behind a special sect, 
 the Jains, who number about one and a half millions in India. Like 
 the Buddhists, they deny the authority of the Veda, except in so 
 far as it agrees with their own tenets ; disregard sacrifice ; practice 
 a strict morality; believe that their past and future states depend 
 upon their own actions rather than on any external deity; and 
 refuse to kill either man or beast. The Jains divide time into three 
 eras; and adore twenty-four jinas, or just men. made perfect, in 
 the past age, twenty-four in the present, and twenty-four in the 
 era to come. The colossal statues of this great company of saints 
 stand in their temples. They choose wooded mountains and the 
 most lovely retreats of nature for their places of pilgrimage, and 
 cover them with exquisitely carved shrines in white marble or daz- 
 zling stucco. The Jains of India are usually merchants or bankers. 
 Their charity is boundless; and they form the chief supporters of 
 the beast hospitals, which the old Buddhistic tenderness for animals 
 has left in many of the cities of India. They claim, not without 
 evidence, that the Jain religion is even older than Buddhism; and 
 that the teaching of Buddha was based on the Jain faith. 
 
 Buddhism is still the religion of Burma, and has there over 
 nine millions of followers, or nine-tenths of the population. The 
 Buddhist monasteries have from ancient times been schools for the 
 young as well as religious houses for the monks; and they now 
 form the basis of the British system of public instruction through- 
 out Burma. In all the rest of British India there are only about 
 227,000 pure Buddhists, chiefly in the Bengal districts adjacent 
 to Burma, and in the remote valleys of the Himalayan ranges. 
 From time to time Buddhism seems to take a new start in Lower 
 Bengal, and Buddhist journals are published in Calcutta and else- 
 where. The- Jain faith, an allied religion to Indian Buddhism, 
 has been described in the last paragraph. The noblest survivals of 
 Buddhism in India are to be found not among any peculiar body, 
 but in the religion of the whole Hindu people; in that principle of
 
 66 INDIA 
 
 543 B. C.-1000 A. D. 
 
 the brotherhood of man, with the reassertion of which each new 
 revival of Hinduism starts; in the asylum which the great Hindu 
 sect of Vaishnavas affords to women who have fallen victims to 
 caste rules, to the widow and the outcast; in that gentleness and 
 charity to all men, which take the place of a poor-law in India, and 
 give a high significance to the half-satirical epithet of the " mild " 
 Hindu.
 
 Chapter VI 
 
 THE GREEKS IN INDIA. 327-161 B. C. 
 
 THE external history of India commences with the Greek 
 invasion in 327 b. c. Some indirect trade between India 
 and the Mediterranean seems to have existed from very- 
 ancient times. Homer was acquainted with tin, and other articles 
 of Indian merchandise, by their Sanskrit names; and a long list 
 has been made of Indian products mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. 
 The first Greek historian who speaks clearly of India is Hekataios of 
 Miletos (549-486 b. c.) ; the knowledge of Herodotos (450 b. c.) 
 ended at the Indus; and Ktesias, the physician (401 b. a), brought 
 back from his residence in Persia only a few facts about the pro- 
 ducts of India, its dyes and fabrics, monkeys and parrots. India to 
 the east of the Indus was first made known to Europe by the his- 
 torians and men of science who accompanied Alexander the Great, 
 king of Macedon. 
 
 Alexander the Great entered India early in 327 b. c. ; crossed 
 the Indus above Attock, and advanced, without a struggle, over the 
 intervening territory of Taxiles to the Hydaspes, the modern 
 Jehlam. He found the Punjab divided into petty kingdoms jealous 
 of each other, and many of them inclined to join an invader rather 
 than to oppose him. One of these local monarchs, Porus, disputed 
 the passage of the Jehlam with a force which, substituting chariots 
 for guns, about equaled the army of Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the 
 Punjab in the nineteenth century. Plutarch gives a vivid descrip- 
 tion of the battle from Alexander's own letters. Having drawn up 
 his troops at a bend of the Jehlam, about 14 miles west of the 
 modern field of Chilianwala, the Greek king crossed under shelter 
 of a tempestuous night. The chariots hurried out by Porus stuck 
 in the muddy bank of the river. In the engagement which fol- 
 lowed, the elephants of the Indian prince refused to face the Greeks, 
 and, wheeling round, trampled Porus' own army under foot. His 
 son fell early in the onset; Porus himself fled wounded; but on 
 tendering his submission, he was confirmed in his kingdom, and 
 
 67
 
 68 
 
 INDIA 
 
 327-326 B. C. 
 
 became Alexander's trusted friend. Alexander built two memorial 
 cities on the site of his victory Bucephala, on the west bank of the 
 Jehlam, near the modern Jalalpur, named after his beloved charger 
 slain in the battle ; and Nikaia, the present Mong, on the east side 
 of the river. 
 
 Alexander advanced southeast through the kingdom of the 
 younger Porus to Amritsar, and, after a sharp bend backward to 
 the west to fight the Kathaei at Sangala, he reached the Hyphasis, 
 the modern Beas. Here, at a spot not far from the modern battle- 
 field of Sobraon, he halted his victorious standards. He had re- 
 solved to march to the Ganges; but his troops were worn out by 
 the heats of the Punjab summer, and broken in spirit by the hur- 
 
 ricanes of the southwest monsoon. The native tribes had already 
 risen in his rear; and the conqueror of the world was forced to 
 turn back before he had crossed even the frontier province of 
 India. The Sutlej, the eastern districts of the Punjab, and the 
 mighty Jumna still lay between him and the Ganges. A single 
 defeat might have been fatal to his army; if the battle on the 
 Jehlam had gone against him, not a Greek would probably have 
 reached the Afghan side of the passes. Yielding at length to the 
 clamor of his men, he led them back to the Jehlam. He there 
 embarked 8000 of his troops in boats, and floated them down the 
 river through the southern Punjab to Sind; the remainder of his 
 army marched in two divisions along the banks. 
 
 The country was hostile, and the Greeks held only the land
 
 THEGREEKS 69 
 
 326-316 B. C. 
 
 on which they encamped. At Multan, then as now the capital of the 
 southern Punjab, Alexander had to fight a pitched battle with the 
 Malli, and was severely wounded in taking the city. His enraged 
 troops put every soul within it to the sword. Farther down, near 
 the confluence of the five rivers of the Punjab, he made a long halt, 
 built a town, Alexandria, the modern Uchh, and received the sub- 
 mission of the neighboring states. A Greek garrison and satrap, 
 whom he here left behind, laid the foundation of a lasting Greek 
 influence. Having constructed a new fleet, suitable for the greater 
 rivers on which he was now to embark, Alexander proceeded south- 
 ward through Sind, and followed the course of the Indus until he 
 reached the ocean. In the apex of the delta, he founded or re- 
 founded a city, Patala, which survives to this day as Haidarabad, 
 the native capital of Sind. At the mouth of the Indus, Alexander 
 beheld for the first time the majestic phenomenon of the tides. One 
 part of his army he shipped off under the command of Nearchus 
 to coast along the Persian Gulf; the remainder he himself led 
 through southern Baluchistan and Persia to Susa, where, after 
 terrible losses from want of water and famine on the march, he 
 arrived in 325 b. c. 
 
 During his two years' campaign in the Punjab and Sind, 
 Alexander subjugated no province ; but he made alliances, founded 
 cities, and planted Greek garrisons. He had given much territory 
 to Indian chiefs devoted to his cause ; every petty Indian court had 
 its Greek faction; and the troops which he left behind at many 
 points, from the Afghan frontier on the west to the Beas River on 
 the east, and as far south as the Sind delta, seemed visible pledges 
 of his return. A large part of his army remained in Bactria; and 
 in the partition of the empire after Alexander's death in 323 b. c, 
 Bactria and India fell to Seleucus Nicator, the founder of the 
 Syrian monarchy. 
 
 Meanwhile a new power had arisen in India. Among the 
 Indian adventurers who thronged Alexander's camp in the Punjab, 
 each with his plot for winning a kingdom or crushing a rival, 
 Chandra Gupta, an exile from the Gangetic valley, seems to have 
 played a somewhat ignominious part. He tried to tempt the 
 wearied Greeks on the banks of the Beas with schemes of conquest 
 in the rich provinces of Hindustan to the southeast; but, having 
 personally offended Alexander, he had to fly the camp in 326 b. c. 
 In the confused years which followed, he managed, with the aid
 
 70 INDIA 
 
 316-298 B. C. 
 
 of plundering hordes, to found a kingdom on the ruins of the 
 Nanda dynasty in Magadha, or Behar (316 b. a). He seized 
 their capital, Pataliputra, the modern Patna; established himself 
 firmly in the Gangetic valley, and compelled the northwestern 
 principalities, Greek garrisons and Indian princes alike, to acknowl- 
 edge his sovereignty. While the Greek general Seleucus was win- 
 ning his way to the Syrian monarchy during the eleven years which 
 followed Alexander's death, Chandra Gupta was building up an 
 empire in northern India. Seleucus reigned in Syria from 312 to 
 280 b. c. ; Chandra Gupta in the Gangetic valley from 316 to 292 
 b. c. In 312 b. c. these two monarchs advanced their kingdoms 
 to each other's frontier; they had to decide whether they were to 
 live in peace or at war. Seleucus in the end sold the Greek con- 
 quests in the Kabul Valley and the Punjab to Chandra Gupta, and 
 gave his daughter in marriage to the Indian king. He also sta- 
 tioned a Greek ambassador at Chandra Gupta's court from 306 
 to 298 b. c. 
 
 This ambassador was the famous Megasthenes. His descrip- 
 tion of India is perhaps the best that reached Europe during two 
 thousand years, from 300 b. c. to 1700 a. d. He says that the 
 people were divided into seven castes instead of four namely, 
 philosophers, husbandmen, shepherds, artisans, soldiers, inspectors, 
 and the counselors of the king. The philosophers were the Brah- 
 mans, and the prescribed stages of their religious life are indicated. 
 Megasthenes draws a distinction between the Brahmans or Brach- 
 manes and the Sramanas or Sarmanai, from which some scholars 
 infer that the Buddhist Sramanas or monks were a recognized 
 order fifty years before the Council of Asoka. But the Sarmanai 
 of Megasthenes probably also include Brahmans in the first and 
 third stages of their life, as students and forest recluses. The 
 inspectors, or sixth class of Megasthenes, have been identified with 
 the Buddhist supervisors of morals. Arrian's name for them, 
 episkopoi, is the Greek word which has become our modern bishop 
 or overseer of souls. 
 
 The Greek ambassador observed with admiration the absence 
 of slavery in India, the chastity of the women, and the courage of 
 the men. In valor, he says, they excelled all other Asiatics; they 
 required no locks to their doors; above all, no Indian was ever 
 known to tell a lie. Sober and industrious, good farmers, and 
 skillful artisans, they scarcely ever had recourse to a lawsuit, and
 
 THE GREEKS 71 
 
 298-161 B. C. 
 
 lived peaceably under their native chiefs. The kingly government 
 is portrayed almost as described in the Code of Manu. Megasthenes 
 mentions that India was divided into 118 kingdoms; some of which, 
 as the Prasii, under Chandra Gupta, exercised suzerain powers over 
 other kings or dependent princes. The Indian village system is 
 well described, each of the village communities seeming to the 
 Greek an independent republic. Megasthenes remarked the ex- 
 emption of the husbandmen (Vaisyas) from war and public serv- 
 ices ; and enumerates the dyes, fibers, fabrics, and products animal, 
 vegetable, and mineral, of India. Husbandry then as now depended 
 on the periodical rains; and forecasts of the weather, with a view 
 to " make adequate provision against a coming deficiency," formed 
 a special duty of the Brahmans. " The philosopher," he says, 
 " who errs in his predictions observes silence for the rest of his life." 
 After the time of Alexander the Great the Greeks made no 
 important conquests in India. Antiochus II., the grandson of 
 Seleucus, entered into a treaty with the famous Buddhist king, 
 Asoka, the grandson of Chandra Gupta, in 256 b. c. The Greeks 
 afterward founded a powerful independent kingdom in Bactria, to 
 the northwest of the Himalayas. During the hundred years after the 
 Indo-Greek treaty of 256 b. c. the Greco-Bactrian kings sent invad- 
 ing hosts into the Punjab ; some of whom reached eastward as far as 
 Muttra, or even Oudh, and southward to Sind and Cutch, between 
 181 and 161 b. c, but they founded no kingdoms; and the only 
 traces which the Greeks left in India were their science of as- 
 tronomy, their beautiful sculptures, and their coins. Some of the 
 early Buddhist statues, after 250 b. c, have exquisite Greek faces ; 
 and the same type is preserved in the most ancient carvings on the 
 Hindu temples. By degrees even this trace of Greek influence faded 
 away ; but specimens of Indo-Greek sculptures may still be found in 
 the museums of India.
 
 Chapter VII 
 
 THE SCYTHIC INROADS, ioo B. C.-725 A. D. 
 
 THE Greek or Bactrian expeditions into India ended more 
 than a century before Christ; but a new set of invaders 
 soon began to pour into India from the north. These 
 came from central Asia, and, for want of a more exact name, 
 have been called the Scythians. They belonged to many tribes, 
 and they form a connecting link between Indian and Chinese his- 
 tory. As the Aryan race in the west of Asia had, perhaps 3000 
 years before Christ, sent off branches to Europe on the one hand, 
 and to India on the other, so the Scythians, who dwelt to the east 
 of the old Aryan camping-ground in Asia, swarmed forth into 
 India and to China. There is some reason to believe that the great 
 Scythic migration at the close of the seventh century b. c, which 
 ruined the Assyrian empire, sent an offshoot into India; and some 
 writers have found reason to believe that Buddha was a descendant 
 of such a Scythian tribe. Certainly the northern Buddhists fre- 
 quently call Buddha, Sakya-Muni. That Sakya is equivalent to 
 Scythian is possible, but is not proven. Certainly the northern Bud- 
 dhists would not be loath to ascribe a Scythian origin to Buddha. 
 These Scythic inroads went on during a great period of time, but 
 they took place in very great force during the century preceding 
 the birth of Christ. They were the forerunners of a long series 
 of invasions which devastated northern India more than a thousand 
 years later, under such leaders as Genghis Khan and Timur, and 
 which in the end founded the Mogul empire. 
 
 About the year 126 b. c, the Tatar or Scythian tribe of Su 
 are said to have driven out the Greek dynasty from the Bactrian 
 kingdom, on the northwest of the Himalayas. Soon afterward the 
 Scythians rushed through the Himalayan passes and conquered 
 the Greco-Bactrian settlements in the Punjab. About the begin- 
 ning of the Christian era they had founded a strong monarchy in 
 northern India and in the countries just beyond. Their most 
 famous king was Kanishka, who summoned the Fourth Buddhist 
 
 73
 
 SCYTHIC INROADS 73 
 
 100-57 B. C. 
 
 Council about 40 a. d. King- Kanishka held his court in Kashmir ; 
 but his suzerainty extended from Agra and Sind in the south, to 
 Yarkland and Khokand on the north of the Himalayas. He seems 
 to have carried on successful wars as far as China. Six hundred 
 years afterward, in 630 a. d., a town called China-pati in the 
 Punjab was pointed out as the place where King Kanishka kept 
 his Chinese hostages. The Scythian monarchies of northern India 
 came in contact with the Buddhist kingdom under the successors 
 of Asoka in Hindustan. The Scythians themselves became Bud- 
 dhists ; but they made changes in that faith. The result was, as we 
 have seen, that while the countries to the south of India had 
 adopted the Buddhist religion as settled by Asoka's Council in 
 244 b. C.j the Buddhist religion as settled by Kanishka's Council in 
 40 a. d. became the faith of the Scythian nations to the north of 
 India, from central Asia to Japan. 
 
 Kanishka was the most famous of the Scythian kings in India, 
 but there were many other Scythian settlements. Indeed, the 
 Scythians are believed to have poured into India in such numbers 
 as to make up a large proportion of the population in the north- 
 western frontier provinces at the present day. For example, two 
 old Scythian tribes, the Getse and the Dahse, are said to have dwelt 
 side by side in central Asia, and perhaps advanced together into 
 India. Some writers hold that the Jats, who form nearly one-half 
 of the inhabitants of the Punjab, are descended from these ancient 
 Getae; and that a great subdivision of the Jats, called the Dhe, in 
 like manner sprang from the Dahae. Other scholars try to show 
 that certain of the Rajput tribes are of Scythian origin. However 
 this may be, it is clear that many Scythian inroads into India took 
 place from the first century b. c. to the fifth century a. d. 
 
 During that long period several Indian monarchs won fame 
 by attempting to drive out the Scythians. The best known of these 
 is Vikramaditya, king of Ujjain in Malwa, in honor of whose 
 victories one of the great eras in India, or systems of reckoning 
 historical dates, is supposed to have been founded. It is called the 
 Samvat era, and begins in 57 b. c. Its reputed founder is still 
 known as Vikramaditya Sakari, or Vikramaditya the enemy of the 
 Scythians. According to the Indian tradition, he was a learned 
 as well as a valiant monarch, and he gathered round him the poets 
 and philosophers of his time. The chief of these were called " the 
 nine jewels " of the court of Vikramaditya. They became so
 
 74 INDIA 
 
 57 B. C.-725 A. D. 
 
 famous that in after times a great many of the best Sanskrit poems 
 or dramas, and works of philosophy or science, were ascribed to 
 them ; although the style and contents of the works prove that they 
 must have been written at widely different periods. The truth is 
 that the name Vikramaditya is merely a royal title, meaning " a 
 very sun in prowess," which has been borne by several kings in 
 Indian history, but the Vikramaditya of the first century before 
 Christ was the most famous of them all famous alike as a defender 
 of his country against the Scythian hordes, as a patron of men of 
 learning, and as a good ruler of his subjects. 
 
 About a hundred years later, another valiant Indian king arose 
 against the Scythians. His name was Salivahana ; and a new era, 
 called the Saka or Scythian, was founded in his honor in 78 a. d. 
 These two eras the Samvat, beginning in 57 b. a, and the Saka, 
 commencing in 78 a. d. still form two well-known systems of 
 reckoning historical dates in India. 
 
 During the next five centuries, three great Indian dynasties 
 maintained the struggle against the Scythians. The Sah kings 
 reigned in the northwest of the Bombay presidency from 60 b. c. 
 to 235 a. d. The Gupta kings reigned in Oudh and northern India 
 from 319 to 470 a. d., when they seem to have been overpowered 
 by fresh hosts of Huns or Scythians. The Valabhi kings ruled over 
 Cutch, Malwa, and the northwestern districts of Bombay from 480 
 to after 722 a. d. The Greek traders in the Red Sea heard of the 
 Huns as a powerful nation of northern India about 535 a. d. The 
 Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, gives a full account of the court 
 and people of Valabhi from 630 to 640 a. d. His description shows 
 that Buddhism was the state religion; but heretics (i. e., Brahmans) 
 abounded; and the Buddhists themselves were divided between 
 the northern school of the Scythian dynasties, and the southern 
 or Indian school of Asoka. The Valabhi dynasty seems to have 
 been overthrown by the earlv Arab invaders of Sind in the eighth 
 century a. d. 1 
 
 1 For fuller details on the Scythian inroads and for full biographical refer- 
 ences, see the corresponding chapter in W. W. Hunter's " Imperial Gazeteer," 
 vol. VI., or his " Indian Empire," which the author says " has been pieced together 
 from the unfinished researches of the Archaeological Survey and from local 
 investigations."
 
 Chapter VIII 
 
 GROWTH OF HINDUISM. 700-1500 
 
 WE have now got a view of the three races which make up 
 the Indian people. These were, first, the non-Aryans, 
 or the earliest inhabitants of the country, sometimes 
 called the aborigines. Second, the Aryan race, who came to India 
 from central Asia in prehistoric times. Third, the Scythians or 
 Tatars, who had also begun to move into India before the dawn of 
 history, and whose later hordes came in great force between the 
 first century b. c. and the fifth century after Christ. Each of these 
 races had their own customs, their own religion, and their own 
 speech. 
 
 The non-Aryans were hunting tribes. In their family life, 
 some of them kept up the early form of marriage, according to 
 which a woman was the wife of several brethren, and a man's 
 property descended, not to his own, but to his sister's children. In 
 their religion, the non-Aryans worshiped demons, and tried by 
 bloody sacrifices or human victims, to avert the wrath of the malig- 
 nant spirits whom they called gods. 
 
 The Aryans early advanced beyond the rude existence of the 
 hunter to the semi-settled industry of the cattle-breeder and tiller 
 of the soil. In their family life a woman had only one husband, 
 and their customs and laws of inheritance were nearly the same 
 as those which now prevail in India. In their religion they wor- 
 shiped bright and friendly gods. 
 
 The third race, or the Scythians, held a position between the 
 other two. The early Scythians, indeed, who arrived in prehistoric 
 times, may have been as wild as the non-Aryans, and they probably 
 supplied a section of what we call the aborigines of India, but the 
 Scythian hordes, who poured into India from 126 b. c. to 400 a. d., 
 were neither hunters like the Indian non- Aryan tribes, nor half- 
 cultivators like the Aryans. They were shepherds or herdsmen, 
 who roamed across the plains of central Asia with their cattle, and 
 whose one talent was for war. 
 
 The Aryans supplied, therefore, the civilizing power in India. 
 
 75
 
 76 INDIA 
 
 700-1500 
 
 One of their divisions or castes, the Vaisyas, brought the soil under 
 the plow; another caste, the Kshattriyas, conquered the rude non- 
 Aryan peoples; their third caste, the Brahmans, created a religion 
 and a literature. The early Brahman religion made no account of 
 the lower races; but, as we have seen, about 500 b. c. a wider creed, 
 called the Buddhist, was based upon it. This new faith did much 
 to bring the early non-Aryan tribes under the influence of the higher 
 Aryan race, and it was accepted by the later Scythian hordes who 
 came into India from 126 b. c. to 400 a. d. Buddhism was there- 
 fore the first great bond of union among the Indian races. It did 
 something to combine the non-Aryans, the Aryans, and the Scyth- 
 ians into a people with similar customs and a common faith, but 
 it was driven out of India before it finished its work. 
 
 The work was continued by the Brahmans. This ancient caste, 
 which had held a high place even during the triumph of the Bud- 
 dhist religion, became all-powerful upon the decay of that faith. 
 Hiuen Tsiang, the Chinese pilgrim to India in 640 A. d., relates 
 how the Brahmans, or, as he calls them, the heretics, were again 
 establishing their power. The Buddhist monasteries had, even at 
 that time, a struggle to hold their own against the Brahman tem- 
 ples. During the next two centuries the Brahmans gradually 
 got the upper hand. The conflict between the two religions 
 brought forth a great line of Brahman apostles, some of whose 
 lives are almost as beautiful as that of Buddha himself. The first 
 of these, Kumarila, a holy Brahman of Behar, began his preach- 
 ing in the eighth century a. d. He taught the old Vedic doctrine 
 of a personal Creator and God. The Buddhists had no personal 
 God. According to a later legend, Kumarila not only preached 
 against the Buddhists, but persuaded a king of southern India to 
 persecute them. This prince, it is said, " commanded his servants 
 to put to death the old men and the young children of the Bud- 
 dhists, from the southernmost point of India to the Snowy Moun- 
 tain. Let him who slays not, be slain." At that time, however, 
 there was no king in India whose power to persecute reached from 
 the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. The story is probably an ex- 
 aggerated account of a local persecution by one of the many princes 
 of southern India. The Brahmans gained the victory partly be- 
 cause Buddhism was itself decaying, and partly because they of- 
 fered a new bond of union to the Indian races. This new bond of 
 union was Hinduism.
 
 HINDUISM 77 
 
 700-1500 
 
 Hinduism is a social league and a religious alliance. As a 
 social league, it rests upon caste, and has its roots deep down in 
 the race elements of the Indian people. As a religious alliance, 
 it represents the union of the Vedic faith of the Brahmans with 
 Buddhism on the one hand, and with the ruder rites of the non-Ar- 
 yan peoples on the other. We must get a clear view of both 
 these aspects of Hinduism as a social league, and as a religious 
 alliance. 
 
 As a social league, Hinduism arranged the people into the old 
 division of the " twice-born " Aryan castes, namely the Brahmans, 
 Kshattriyas, Vaisyas ; and the " once-born " castes, consisting of 
 the non-Aryan Sudras, and the classes of mixed descent. This ar- 
 rangement of the Indian races remains to the present day. The 
 " twice-born " castes still wear the sacred thread, and claim a joint, 
 although an unequal, inheritance in the holy books of the Veda. 
 The " once-born " castes are still denied the sacred thread ; and 
 they were not allowed to study the holy books, until the English 
 set up schools in India for all classes of the people. While caste 
 is thus founded on the distinctions of race, it has been influenced 
 by two other systems of division, namely, the employments of the 
 people, and the localities in which they live. Even in the oldest 
 times, the castes had separate occupations assigned to them. They 
 could be divided either into Brahmans, Kshattriyas, Vaisyas, and 
 Sudras; or into priests, warriors, husbandmen, and serfs. They 
 are also divided according to the parts of India in which they 
 live. Even the Brahmans have among themselves ten distinct 
 classes, or rather nations. Five of these classes or Brahman na- 
 tions live to the north of the Vindhya Mountains; five of them 
 live to the south. Each of the ten feels itself to be quite apart from 
 the rest; and they have among themselves no fewer than 1886 
 subdivisions or separate Brahmanical tribes. In like manner, the 
 Kshattriyas or Rajputs number 590 separate tribes in different 
 parts of India. 
 
 While, therefore, Indian caste seems at first a very simple ar- 
 rangement of the people into four classes, it is in reality a very 
 complex one, for its rests upon three distinct systems of division; 
 namely, upon race, occupation, and geographical position. It is 
 very difficult even to guess at the number of the Indian castes, but 
 there are not fewer than 3000 of them which have separate names, 
 and which regard themselves as separate classes. The different
 
 78 INDIA 
 
 700-1500 
 
 castes cannot intermarry with each other, and most of them can- 
 not eat together. The ordinary rule is that no Hindu of good 
 caste can touch food cooked by a man of inferior caste. By rights, 
 too, each caste should keep to its own occupation. Indeed, there 
 has been a tendency to erect every separate kind of employment or 
 handicraft in each separate province into a distinct caste. As a 
 matter of practice, the castes often change their occupation, and 
 the lower ones sometimes raise themselves in the social scale. Thus 
 the Vaisya caste were in ancient times the tillers of the soil. They 
 have in most provinces given up this toilsome occupation, and the 
 Vaisyas are now the great merchants and bankers of India. Their 
 fair skins, intelligent faces, and polite bearing, must have altered 
 since the days when their forefathers plowed, sowed, and reaped 
 under the hot sun. Such changes of employment still occur on a 
 smaller scale throughout India. 
 
 The system of caste exercises a great influence upon the 
 industries of the people. Each caste is, in the first place, a trade- 
 guild. It insures the proper training of the youth of its own 
 special craft; it makes rules for the conduct of the caste-trade; 
 it promotes good feeling by feasts or social gatherings. The 
 famous manufactures of mediaeval India, its muslins, silks, cloth 
 of gold, inlaid weapons, and exquisite work in precious stones 
 were brought to perfection under the care of the castes or trade- 
 guilds. Such guilds may still be found in full work in many parts 
 of India. Thus, in the northwestern districts of the Bombay 
 presidency, all heads of artisan families are ranged under their 
 proper trade-guild. The trade-guild or caste prevents undue com- 
 petition among the members, and upholds the interest of its own 
 body in any dispute arising with other craftsmen. 
 
 In 1873, for example, a number of the bricklayers in Ahmada- 
 bad could not find work. Men of this class sometimes added to 
 their daily wages by rising very early in the morning, and work- 
 ing overtime. When several families complained that they could 
 not get employment, the bricklayers' guild met, and decided that 
 as there was not enough work for all, no member should be al- 
 lowed to work in extra hours. In the same city, the clothdealers 
 in 1872 tried to cut down the wages of the sizers or men who dress 
 the cotton cloth. The sizers' guild refused to work at lower rates, 
 and remained six weeks on strike. At length they arranged their 
 dispute, and both the trade-guilds signed a stamped agreement
 
 HINDUISM 79 
 
 700-1500 
 
 fixing the rates for the future. Each of the higher castes or trade- 
 guilds in Ahmadabad receives a fee from young men on entering 
 their business. The revenue derived from these fees, and from 
 fines upon members who break caste rules, is spent in feasts to the 
 brethren of the guild, and in helping the poorer craftsmen or 
 their orphans. A favorite plan of raising money in Surat is for 
 the members of the trade to keep a certain day as a holiday, and 
 to shut up all their shops except one. The right to keep open 
 this one shop is put up to auction, and the amount bid is expended 
 on a feast. The trade-guild or caste allows none of its members 
 to starve. It thus acts as a mutual insurance society and takes the 
 place of a poor law in India. The severest social penalty which 
 can be inflicted upon a Hindu is to be put out of his caste. 
 
 Hinduism is, however, not only a social league resting upon 
 caste, but also a religious alliance based upon worship. As the 
 various race elements of the Indian people have been welded into 
 caste, so the simple old beliefs of the Veda, the mild doctrines of 
 Buddha, and the fierce rites of the non-Aryan tribes, have been 
 thrown into the melting-pot, and poured out thence as a mixture 
 of precious metal and dross, to be worked up into the complex 
 worship of the Hindu gods. 
 
 Buddhism not only inspired Hinduism with its noble spirit 
 of charity, but also bequeathed to it many of its institutions. The 
 Hindu monasteries in Orissa in our own day recall the Buddhist 
 convents of King Siladitya eleven hundred years ago. At the 
 present time, the bankers' guild of Surat devotes a part of the fees 
 which it levies on bills of exchange to maintain a hospital for sick 
 animals a true survival of the system of medical aid for man and 
 beast which King Asoka founded in 244 b. c. The religious life 
 of the Hindu Vishnuite sect is governed by the old rules laid down 
 by Buddha himself. The great Bengal scholar, Rajendra Lala 
 Mitra, himself a Vishnuite, believed that the car festival of Jagan- 
 nath is a relic of a Buddhist procession. 
 
 Hinduism also drew much of its strength, and many of its 
 rites, from the non-Aryan peoples of India. To them is due the 
 worship of stumps of wood, of rude stones, and of trees, which 
 makes up the religion of the villagers of Bengal. Each hamlet has 
 usually its local god, which it adores in the form either of an 
 unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Some- 
 times a lump of clay placed under a tree does service for a deity.
 
 80 INDIA 
 
 700-1500 
 
 Serpent- worship, and the honor paid by certain sects of Hindus to 
 the linga, or symbol of male creative energy, may probably be 
 traced back to the Scythian tribes who came to India, in very early 
 times, from central Asia. 
 
 Hinduism boasts a line of religious founders stretching from 
 about 700 a. D. to the present day. The lives of the mediaeval 
 saints and their wondrous works are recorded in the Bhakta-Mala, 
 or " the garland of the faithful," compiled by Nabhaji about the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century. It is the Acta Sanctorum 
 and Golden Legend of Hinduism. The same wonders are not 
 recorded of each of its apostles, but miracles abound in the lives 
 of all. The greater ones rank as divine incarnations prophesied of 
 old. According to the Hindu stories, some were born of virgins; 
 others overcame lions ; raised the dead ; their hands and feet when 
 cut off sprouted afresh; prisons were opened to them; the sea re- 
 ceived them and returned them to the land unhurt, while the earth 
 opened and swallowed up their slanderers. Their lives were 
 marvelous, and the deaths of the greatest of them a solemn 
 mystery. 
 
 The first in the line of apostles was Kumarila, a Brahman of 
 Behar, who has been already referred to as having stirred up a 
 legendary persecution of Buddhism throughout India in the eighth 
 century a. d. His yet more famous disciple was Sankara Acharya, 
 with whom we reach historical ground. Sankara was born in 
 Malabar, wandered as an itinerant preacher over India as far as 
 Kashmir, and died, aged 32, at Kedarnath in the Himalayas. He 
 molded the Vedanta philosophy of the Brahmans into its final 
 form, and popularized it into a national religion. It is scarcely too 
 much to say that since his short life in the eighth or ninth century 
 every new Hindu sect has had to start with a personal God. He 
 addressed himself to the high-caste philosophers on the one hand, 
 and to the low-caste multitude on the other. He left behind, as the 
 twofold results of his life's work, a compact Brahman sect and 
 a popular religion. 
 
 In the hands of Sankara's followers and apostolic successors, 
 Siva-worship became one of the two chief religions of India. Siva, 
 at once the destroyer and reproducer, represented profound philo- 
 sophical doctrines, and was early recognized as being in a special 
 sense the god of the Brahmans. To them he was the symbol of 
 death as merely a change of life. On the other hand, his terrible
 
 HINDUISM 81 
 
 700-1500 
 
 aspects, preserved in his long list of names, from Rudra, " the 
 roarer," of the Veda, to Bhima, " the dread one," of the modern 
 Hindu pantheon, well adapted him to the religion of fear preva- 
 lent among the ruder non-Aryan races. Siva, in his twofold char- 
 acter, thus became the deity alike of the highest and of the lowest 
 castes. He is the Maha-deva, or great god of modern Hinduism; 
 his wife is Devi, literally and preeminently " the goddess." His 
 symbol of worship is the linga, or emblem of male reproduction; 
 his sacred beast, the bull, is connected with the same idea ; a trident 
 tops his temples. His images partake of his double nature. The 
 Brahmanical conception of Siva is represented by his attitude as 
 a fair-skinned man, seated in profound thought, the symbol of the 
 fertilizing Ganges above his head, and the bull (emblem alike 
 of procreation and of Aryan plow-tillage) near at hand. The 
 wilder non-Aryan aspects of his character are signified by his neck- 
 lace of skulls, his collar of twining serpents, his tiger-skin, and his 
 club with a human head at the end. Siva has five faces and four 
 arms. His wife Devi, in like manner, appears in her Aryan or 
 Brahmanical form as Uma, " light," a gentle goddess and the type 
 of high-born loveliness; in her composite character as Durga, a 
 golden-colored woman, beautiful but menacing, riding on a tiger; 
 and in her terrible non-Aryan aspects as Kali, a black fury, of a 
 hideous countenance, dripping with blood, crowned with snakes, 
 and hung round with skulls. 
 
 The ritual of Siva-worship preserves, in an even more strik- 
 ing way, the traces of its double origin. The higher minds still 
 adore the godhead by silent contemplation, as prescribed by San- 
 kara, without the aid of external rites. The ordinary Brahman 
 hangs a wreath of flowers around the phallic linga, or places before 
 it harmless offerings of rice. The low-castes pour out the lives of 
 countless goats at the feet of the terrible Kali, the wife of Siva; 
 and until lately, in time of pestilence and famine, tried in their de- 
 spair to appease that relentless goddess by human blood. During 
 the famine of 1866, in a temple of Kali, a boy was found with his 
 neck cut, the eyes staring open, and the stiff clotted tongue thrust 
 out between the teeth. In another temple at Hugh, a railroad sta- 
 tion only twenty-four miles from Calcutta, a head was left before 
 the idol, decked with flowers. Such cases are true survivals of the 
 regular system of human sacrifices which we have seen among the 
 non-Aryan tribes. They have nothing to do with the old mystic
 
 82 INDIA 
 
 700-1500 
 
 purusha-medha, or man-offering, whether real or symbolical, of 
 the ancient Aryan faith, but form a part of the non-Aryan religion 
 of terror, which demands that the greater the need, the greater 
 shall be the propitiation. 
 
 The thirteen chief sects of Siva-worshipers faithfully repre- 
 sent the composite character of their god. The Smarta Brahmans, 
 the lineal successors of Sankara's disciples, still maintain their life 
 of calm monastic piety in southern India. The Dandis, or ascetics, 
 divide their time between begging and meditation. Some of them 
 adore, without rites, Siva as the third person of the Aryan trinity. 
 Others practice an apparently non-Aryan ceremony of initiation, 
 by drawing blood from the inner part of the novice's knee as an 
 offering to the god in his more terrible form, Bhairava. The 
 Dandis follow the non-Aryan custom of burying their dead, or 
 commit the body to a sacred stream. The Yogis include every class 
 of devotee, from the speechless mystic, who by long suppressions 
 of the breath has lost the consciousness of existence in an ecstatic 
 union with Siva, to the impostor who pretends that he can sit 
 upon air, and the juggler who travels with a performing goat. 
 The Sivaite sects descend, through various gradations of self- 
 mortification and abstraction, to the Aghoris, who eat carrion and 
 gash their bodies with knives. The lowest sects follow non-Aryan 
 rather than Aryan types, alike as regards their use of animal food 
 and their bloody sacrifices. 
 
 Vishnu had always been a very human god, from the time 
 when he makes his appearance in the Veda as a solar myth, the 
 " unconquerable preserver," striding across the universe in three 
 steps. His later incarnations or avatars made him the familiar 
 friend of man. Of these incarnations, which vary according to 
 tradition from ten to twenty-two in number, Vishnu-worship, with 
 the unerring instinct of a popular religion, chose the two most 
 beautiful for adoration. In his two human forms as Rama and 
 Krishna, the god Vishnu attracted to himself innumerable loving 
 legends, Rama, his seventh incarnation, is the hero of the Sanskrit 
 epic, the Ramayana. In his eighth incarnation, as Krishna, Vishnu 
 appears as a high-souled prince in the other epic, the Mahabharata. 
 As Krishna, also, he afterward grew into the central figure of 
 Indian pastoral poetry; was spiritualized into the supreme god of 
 Vishnuite Puranas; and now flourishes as the most popular deity 
 of the Hindus. Under his title of Jagannath, " the lord of the
 
 HINDUISM 83 
 
 700-1500 
 
 world," Vishnu is especially worshiped at Puri, 1 whence his fame 
 has spread through the civilized world. Nothing can be more 
 unjust than the vulgar story which associates his car festival with 
 the wholesale self-murder of his worshipers. Vishnu is essentially 
 a bright and friendly god, who asks no offerings but flowers, and 
 to whom the shedding of blood is a pollution. The official records, 
 and an accurate examination on the spot, disprove the calumnies 
 of some English writers on this subject. Fatal accidents fre- 
 quently happened amid an excited crowd. Suicides on occasions 
 have taken place, but the stories of wholesale bloodshed at one time 
 told about Jagannath, were merely ignorant libels on a gentle and 
 peaceful god, to whom no sacrifice which cost the life even of a kid 
 could be offered. The Vishnu sects are called Vaishnavas. 
 
 In the eleventh century the Vishnuite doctrines were gathered 
 into a religious treatise. The Vishnu Purana dates from about 
 1045 A - D -> an d probably represents, as indeed its name implies, 
 " ancient " traditions of Vishnu which had coexisted with Sivaism 
 and Buddhism for centuries. It derived its doctrines from the 
 Vedas, not, however, in a direct channel, but filtered through the 
 two great epic poems. It forms one of the eighteen Puranas or 
 Sanskrit theological works, in which the Brahman molders of 
 Vishnuism and Sivaism embodied their rival systems. These 
 works especially extol the second and third members of the Hindu 
 triad, now claiming the preeminence for Vishnu as the sole deity, 
 and now for Siva; but in their higher flights rising to a recogni- 
 tion that both are but forms for representing the one eternal God. 
 They are said to contain 1,500,000 lines. They exhibit only the 
 Brahmanical aspect of Vishnu-worship and Siva-worship, and are 
 devoid of any genuine sympathy for the lower castes. 
 
 The first of the line of Vishnuite reformers was Ramanuja, 
 a Brahman of southern India. In the middle of the twelfth cen- 
 tury he led a movement against the Sivaites, proclaiming the unity 
 of God, under the title of Vishnu, the cause and the creator of all 
 things. Persecuted by the Chola king in southern India, who tried 
 to enforce Sivaite conformity throughout his dominions, Ramanuja 
 fled to the Jain sovereign of Mysore. This Jain prince he con- 
 
 1 For a fuller account of the worship of Jagannath, or Juggernaut, at Puri, 
 see the corresponding chapter in Hunter's " Imperial Gazeteer," vol. VI., or in 
 Hunter's "Indian Empire"; and also the article "Peri" (town), in the "Impe- 
 rial Gazeteer," vol. XL
 
 84 INDIA 
 
 700-1500 
 
 verted to the Vishnuiie faith by expelling an evil spirit from his 
 daughter. Seven hundred monasteries, of which four still remain, 
 are said to have been erected by his followers before his death. 
 
 Ramanand stands fifth in the apostolic succession from Rama- 
 nuja, and spread his doctrine through northern India in the four- 
 teenth century. He had his headquarters in a monastery at 
 Benares, but wandered from place to place, preaching the one God 
 under the name of Vishnu. He chose twelve disciples, not from 
 the priests or nobles, but among the despised castes. One of them 
 was a leather-dresser, another a barber, and the most distinguished 
 of all was the reputed son of a weaver. Ramanuja had addressed 
 himself chiefly to the pure Aryan castes, and wrote in the Sanskrit 
 language of the Brahmans. Ramanand appealed to the people, and 
 the literature of his sect is in the dialects familiar to the masses. 
 The Hindi vernacular owes its development into a written lan- 
 guage, partly to the folk-songs of the peasantry and the war-ballads 
 of the Rajput court-bards, but chiefly to the literary requirements 
 of the new popular religion of Vishnu. 
 
 Kabir, one of the twelve disciples of Ramanand, carried his 
 doctrines throughout Bengal at the beginning of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury. As his master had labored to gather together all castes of 
 the Hindus into one common faith, so Kabir, seeing that the 
 Hindus were no longer the whole inhabitants of India, tried, about 
 the beginning of the fifteenth century, to build up a religion that 
 should embrace Hindu and Mohammedan alike. The writings of 
 his sect acknowledge that the God of the Hindu is also the God of 
 the Mussulman. His universal name is The Inner, whether he 
 be invoked as the Ali of the Mohammedans, or as the Rama of 
 the Hindus. " To Ali and to Rama we owe our life," say the 
 scriptures of Kabir's sect, " and we should show like tenderness to 
 all who live. . . . The Hindu fasts every eleventh day; the 
 Mussulman on the Ramazah. Who formed the remaining months 
 and days, that you should venerate but one? . . . The city 
 of the Hindu God is to the east [Benares], the city of the Mussul- 
 man God is to the west [Mecca] ; but explore your own heart, for 
 there is the God both of the Mussulmans and of the Hindus. Be- 
 hold but One in all things. He to whom the world belongs, he is 
 the father of the worshipers alike of Ali and of Rama. He is my 
 guide, he is my priest." 
 
 At the close of the fifteenth century Nanak Shah taught doc-
 
 a 2 
 
 3 S
 
 HINDUISM 85 
 
 700-1500 
 
 trines in the Punjab differing but little from those promulgated by 
 Kabir in Bengal. His followers ultimately formed the religious 
 and political organization known as the Sikhs. 2 
 
 In i486 Chaitanya was born, and spread the Vishnuite doc- 
 trines, with the worship of Jagannath, throughout the deltas of 
 Bengal and Orissa. Signs and wonders attended Chaitanya 
 through life; and during four centuries he has been worshiped as 
 an incarnation of Vishnu. Extricating ourselves from the halo 
 of legend which surrounds this apostle of Jagannath, we know lit- 
 tle of his private life except that he was the son of a Brahman 
 settled at Nadiya in Bengal ; that in his youth he married the 
 daughter of a celebrated saint; that at the age of twenty-four he 
 forsook the world, and, renouncing the state of a householder, re- 
 paired to Orissa, where he devoted the rest of his days to the 
 propagation of the faith. He disappeared in 1527 a. d. With 
 regard to his doctrine we have the most ample evidence. He held 
 that all men are alike capable of faith, and that all castes by faith 
 become equally pure. Implicit belief and incessant devotion were 
 his watchwords. Contemplation rather than ritual was his path- 
 way to salvation. Obedience to the religious guide is one of the 
 leading features of his sect; but he warned his disciples to respect 
 their teachers as second fathers, and not as gods. The great end 
 of his system, as of all Indian forms of worship, is the liberation 
 of the soul. He held that such liberation does not mean the anni- 
 hilation of separate existence. It consists in nothing more than 
 an entire freedom from the stains and the frailties and sinful de- 
 sires of the body. 
 
 The followers of Chaitanya belong to every caste, but they 
 acknowledge the rule of the gosains or descendants of the original 
 disciples. The sect is open alike to the married and unmarried. It 
 has its celibates and wandering mendicants, but its religious teach- 
 ers are generally married men. They live with their wives and 
 children in clusters of houses around a temple to Krishna, an in- 
 carnation of Vishnu. The adoration of the founder, Chaitanya, is 
 thus a sort of family worship in Orissa. The landed gentry wor- 
 ship him with a daily ritual in household chapels dedicated to his 
 name. After his death, a sect arose among his followers, who 
 asserted the spiritual independence of women. In their monastic 
 
 2 See Trumpp, " Nanak, der Stifter der Sikh-Religion " and " Die Religion 
 der Sikhs."
 
 86 INDIA 
 
 700-1500 
 
 inclosures, male and female cenobites live in celibacy, the women 
 shaving their heads, with the exception of a single lock of hair. 
 The two sexes chant the praises of Vishnu and Chaitanya together 
 in hymn and solemn dance. The really important doctrine of the 
 sect is their recognition of the value of women as instructors of 
 the outside female community. For long they were the only 
 teachers admitted into the zananas of good families in Bengal. 
 Three-quarters of a century ago they had effected a change for the 
 better in the state of female education; and the value of such in- 
 struction was assigned as the cause of the sect spreading so widely 
 in Calcutta. 
 
 The death of Chaitanya marked the beginning of a spiritual 
 decline in Vishnu-worship. About 1520 Vallabha-Swami preached 
 in northern India that the liberation of the soul did not depend 
 upon the mortification of the body ; and that God was to be sought, 
 not in nakedness and hunger and solitude, but amid the enjoyments 
 of this life. An opulent sect had, from an early period, attached 
 itself to the worship of Krishna and his bride Radha, a mystic sig- 
 nificance being of course assigned to their pastoral loves. Still 
 more popular among Hindu women is the adoration of Krishna as 
 the Bala Gopala, or the infant cowherd, perhaps unconsciously 
 affected by the Christian worship of the Divine Child. Another 
 influence of Christianity on Hinduism may possibly be traced in 
 the growing importance assigned by the Krishna sects to faith, 
 as an all-sufficient instrument of salvation. 
 
 Vallabha-Swami was the apostle of Vishnuism as a religion 
 of pleasure. The special object of his homage was Vishnu in his 
 pastoral incarnation, in which he took the form of the divine youth 
 Krishna, and led an Arcadian life in the forest. Shady bowers, 
 lovely women, exquisite viands, and everything that appeals to the 
 luscious sensuousness of a tropical race, are mingled in his wor- 
 ship. His daily ritual consists of eight services, in which Krishna's 
 image, as a beautiful boy, is delicately bathed, anointed with es- 
 sences, splendidly attired, and sumptuously fed. The followers of 
 the first Vishnuite reformers dwelt together in secluded monas- 
 teries, and went about scantily clothed, living upon alms. The 
 Vallabha-Swami sect performs its devotions arrayed in costly ap- 
 parel, anointed with oil, and perfumed with camphor or sandal- 
 wood. It seeks its converts not among weavers, or leather-dressers, 
 or barbers, but among wealthy bankers and merchants, who look
 
 HINDUISM 87 
 
 700-1500 
 
 upon life as a thing to be enjoyed, and upon pilgrimage as a holi- 
 day excursion, or an opportunity for trade. 
 
 The worship of Siva and Vishnu acts as a religious bond 
 among the Hindus, in the same way as caste supplies the basis of 
 their social organization. Theoretically, the Hindu religion starts 
 from the Veda, and acknowledges its divine authority. Practi- 
 cally, we have seen that Hinduism takes its origin from many 
 sources. Vishnu-worship and Sivaite rites represent the two most 
 popular combinations of these various elements. The highly cul- 
 tivated Brahman is a pure theist; the less cultivated worships the 
 Divinity under some chosen form, his ishta-devata. The ordinary 
 Brahman, especially in the south, takes as his " chosen deity " 
 Siva in his deep philosophical aspects as the fountain of being and 
 of reproduction, the symbol of death deprived of its terrors and 
 welcomed as the entrance into new forms of life. The phallic 
 linga serves him as an emblem of the unseen God. The middle 
 classes and the trading community adore some incarnation of 
 Vishnu. The low-castes propitiate Siva the Destroyer, or one of 
 his female manifestations, such as the dread Kali. Almost every 
 Hindu of education feels that his outward object of homage is 
 merely his ishta-devata, or a " chosen " form under which to adore 
 the supreme deity, Param-eswara. 
 
 The teachings of religious reformers and the development 
 of new sects did not cease entirely with Chaitanya and Vallabha- 
 Swami. Perhaps the most interesting of these newer sects is the 
 Brahma Samaj, which owes its origin to Raja Ram Mohan Rai 
 (1772- 1 835), whose teachings were purely monotheistic and 
 spiritual. He discarded all external symbols and ceremonies and 
 supplemented the spiritual adoration of the deity with a practical 
 system of morality requiring a life conformable to the divine will. 
 The avowed followers of this sect are few in number and are con- 
 fined chiefly to Calcutta, but they command the sympathy of many 
 of the educated natives of Bengal. 3 
 
 3 See P. C. Mozoomdar, " The Faith and Progress of the Brahmo-Somaj," 
 Calcutta, 1882, and S. D. Collet, " Brahmo Year Book," London, 1876, ff.
 
 Chapter IX 
 
 EARLY MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS. 714-1526 
 
 HINDUISM was for a time submerged, but never drowned, 
 by the tide of Mohammedan conquest, which set steadily 
 toward India about 1000 a. d. At the present day, the 
 south of India remains almost entirely Hindu, and by far the 
 greater number of the Indian feudatory chiefs are still under Brah- 
 man influence, but in the northwest, where the first waves of in- 
 vasion have always broken, about one-third of the population now 
 profess Islam. The upper valley of the Ganges boasts a succes- 
 sion of Mussulman capitals; and in the swamps of Lower Bengal, 
 the bulk of the non-Aryan or aboriginal population have become 
 converts to the Mohammedan religion. The Mussulmans now 
 make 62,000,000 of the total of 294,000,000 in India. 
 
 While Buddhism was giving place to Hinduism in India, a 
 new faith had arisen in Arabia. Mohammed, born in 570 A. d., 
 created a conquering religion, and died in 632. Within a hundred 
 years after his death, his followers had invaded the countries of 
 Asia as far as the Hindu Kush. Here their progress was stayed; 
 and Islam had to consolidate itself, during three more centuries, 
 before it grew strong enough to grasp the rich prize of India, Al- 
 most from the first the Arabs had fixed eager eyes upon that 
 wealthy empire, and several premature inroads foretold the coming 
 storm. 
 
 About fifteen years after the death of the Prophet, during the 
 reign of the Khalif Usman, a naval expedition visited Thana and 
 Broach on the Bombay coast. Other raids toward Sind took place 
 in 662 and 664, with no lasting results. In 711, however, the 
 youthful Kasim advanced into Sind, to claim damages for an 
 Arab ship which had been seized at an Indian port. After a bril- 
 liant campaign he settled himself in the Indus Valley; but the 
 farther advance of the Mussulmans depended on the personal dar- 
 ing of their leader, and was arrested by his death in 714. The de- 
 spairing valor of the Hindus struck the invaders with wonder.
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 89 
 
 714-888 
 
 One Rajput garrison preferred utter extermination to submission. 
 They raised a huge funeral pile, upon which the women and chil- 
 dren first threw themselves. The men having bathed, took a sol- 
 emn farewell of each other, and, throwing open the gates, rushed 
 upon the weapons of the besiegers, and perished to a man. In 750, 
 the Rajputs are said to have expelled the Mohammedan governor 
 from Sind; but it was not till 828 that the Hindus regained pos- 
 session of that province. 
 
 The armies of Islam had carried the crescent throughout Asia 
 west of the Hindu Kush, and through Africa and southern Europe, 
 to distant Spain and France, before they obtained a foothold in the 
 Punjab. This long delay was due not only to the daring of the 
 Indian tribes, such as the Sind Rajputs just mentioned, but to 
 the military organization of the Hindu kingdoms. To the north of 
 the Vindhyas, three separate groups of Hindu princes governed 
 the great river-valleys. The Rajputs ruled in the northwest, 
 throughout the Indus plains, and along the upper waters of the 
 Jumna. The ancient Middle Land of Sanskrit times (Madhya- 
 desa) in the valley of the Ganges, was divided among powerful 
 Hindu kingdoms, with their suzerain at Kanauj. The lower Gan- 
 getic valley, from Behar downward, was still in part governed by 
 Pal or Buddhist dynasties, whose names are found from Benares 
 to jungle-buried hamlets deep in the Bengal delta. The Vindhya 
 ranges stretched their wall of forest and mountain between the 
 northern and southern halves of India. Their eastern and central 
 regions were peopled by fierce hill tribes. At their western extrem- 
 ity, toward the Bombay coast, lay the Hindu kingdom of Malwa, 
 with its brilliant literary traditions of Vikramaditya, and a vast 
 feudal array of fighting men. India to the south of the Vindhyas 
 was occupied by a number of warlike princes, chiefly of non-Aryan 
 descent, but loosely grouped under three great semi-Hindu or 
 semi-Buddhistic overlords represented by the Chera, Chola, and 
 Pandya dynasties. 
 
 Each of these groups of kingdoms, alike in the north and in 
 the south, had a certain power of coherence to oppose to a foreign 
 invader; while the large number of the groups and units rendered 
 conquest a very tedious process. Even when the overlord or cen- 
 tral authority was vanquished, the separate groups and units had 
 to be defeated in detail; and each supplied a nucleus for subse- 
 quent revolt. We have seen how the brilliant attempt in 711, to
 
 90 INDIA 
 
 828-977 
 
 found a lasting Mohammedan dynasty in Sind, failed. Three cen- 
 turies later, the utmost efforts of a series of Mussulman invaders 
 from the northwest only succeeded in annexing a small portion of 
 the frontier Punjab provinces, between 977 and 1176. The Hindu 
 power in southern India was not completely broken till the battle 
 of Talikot in 1565; and within a hundred years, in 1650, the great 
 Hindu revival had commenced, which, under the form of the 
 Maratha confederacy, was destined to break up the empire in 
 India. That empire, even in the north of India, was only consoli- 
 dated by Akbar's policy of incorporating Hindu chiefs and states- 
 men into his government (1 556-1 605). Up to Akbar's time, and 
 during the earlier years of his reign, a series of Hindu or Rajput 
 wars had challenged the Mohammedan supremacy. In less than 
 two centuries after his death, the Mogul successor of Akbar was 
 a puppet and a prisoner in the hands of the Hindu Marathas at 
 Delhi. 
 
 The popular notion that India fell an easy prey to the Mus- 
 sulmans is opposed to the historical facts. Mohammedan rule 
 in India consisted of a series of invasions and partial conquests, 
 during eleven centuries, from the Arab raid about 647 to Ahmad 
 Shah's tempest of devastation in 1761. They represent in Indian 
 history the overflow of the tribes and peoples of central Asia to 
 the southeast: as the Huns, Turks, and various Tatar. tribes dis- 
 close in early European annals the westward movements from the 
 same great breeding-ground of nations. At no time was Islam 
 triumphant throughout all India. Hindu dynasties always ruled 
 over a large area. At the height of the Mohammedan power the 
 Hindu princes paid tribute, and sent agents to the imperial court, 
 but even this modified supremacy of the Mogul empire of Delhi 
 lasted less than a century and a half (1560-1707). Before the end 
 of that brief period, the Hindus had again begun the work of re- 
 conquest. The Hindu chivalry of Rajputana was closing in upon 
 Delhi from the southeast; the religious confederation of the Sikhs 
 was growing into a military power on the northwest. The Mara- 
 thas, who combined the fighting powers of the Hindu low-castes 
 with the statesmanship of the Brahmans, had begun to subject the 
 Mohammedan kingdoms in southern India to tribute. So far as 
 can now be estimated, the advance of the English power in the 
 eighteenth century alone saved the Mogul empire from reverting 
 to the Hindus.
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 91 
 
 977-1001 
 
 The first collision between Hinduism and Islam on the Pun- 
 jab frontier was the act of the Hindus. In 977 Jaipal, the Hindu 
 chief of Lahore, annoyed by Afghan raids, led his troops through 
 the mountains against the Mohammedan kingdom of the Ghaz- 
 nivides, in Afghanistan, who were of Turkish origin. Subuktigin, 
 the Ghaznivide prince, after severe fighting, took advantage of a 
 hurricane to cut off the retreat of the Hindus through the pass. 
 He allowed them, however, to return to India, on the surrender of 
 fifty elephants, and the promise of one million dirhams. This is 
 the Persian spelling, and like its Arabic equivalent, derham, is 
 derived from the Greek drachma. It is a silver coin weighing 
 about 43.7 grains troy and therefore worth a little more than the 
 United States dime, which contains 38.5 grains. The sum there- 
 fore, would amount to over $100,000, but owing to the difference 
 in the purchasing power, a somewhat larger sum would represent 
 the relative value. 
 
 Tradition relates how Jaipal, having regained his capital, was 
 counseled by the Brahmans standing at his right hand not to dis- 
 grace himself by paying ransom to a barbarian; while his nobles 
 and warrior chiefs, standing at his left, implored him to keep faith. 
 In the end, Subuktigin swept through the hills to enforce his ran- 
 som, defeated Jaipal, and stationed an Afghan officer with 10,000 
 horse to garrison Peshawar (977). Subuktigin was soon after- 
 ward called away to fight in central Asia, and his Indian raid left 
 behind it only this Peshawar outpost, but henceforth the Afghans 
 held both ends of the Khaibar Pass. 
 
 In 997 Subuktigin died, and was succeeded by his son, Mah- 
 mud of Ghazni, aged sixteen. This valiant monarch reigned for 
 thirty-three years, and extended his father's little Afghan king- 
 dom into a great sovereignty stretching from Persia on the west 
 to far within the Punjab on the east. Having spent four years in 
 consolidating his power in Afghanistan to the west of the Khaibar 
 Pass, Mahmud led in 1001 the first of his seventeen invasions of 
 India. Of these, thirteen were directed to the subjugation of the 
 western Punjab, one was an unsuccessful incursion into Kashmir, 
 and the remaining three were short but furious raids against more 
 distant cities, Kanauj, Gwalior, and Somnath. Jaipal, the Hindu 
 frontier chief of Lahore, was again defeated. According to Hindu 
 custom, a twice-conquered prince was deemed unworthy to reign; 
 and Jaipal, mounting a funeral pile, solemnly made over his king-
 
 92 INDIA 
 
 1001-1026 
 
 dom to his son, and burned himself in his regal robes. Another 
 local chief, rather than yield himself to the victor, fell upon his own 
 sword. In the sixth expedition (1008), the Hindu ladies melted 
 their ornaments, while the poorer women spun cotton, to support 
 their husbands in the war. In one great battle the fate of the 
 invaders hung in the balance. Mahmud, alarmed by a coalition of 
 the Indian kings as far as Oudh and Malwa, intrenched himself 
 near Peshawar. A sortie which he made was driven back, and the 
 wild Ghakkar tribe burst into the camp and slaughtered nearly 4000 
 Mussulmans, when an accident in the Hindu army started a panic 
 and altered the fortunes of the day. Mahmud completely routed 
 the Hindus and captured the valuable fortress of Nagarkot. 
 
 Each expedition, however, ended by further strengthening the 
 Mohammedan foothold in India. Mahmud carried away enormous 
 booty from the Hindu temples, such as Thaneswar and Nagarkot; 
 and his sixteenth and most famous expedition was directed against 
 the temple of Somnath in Gujarat. There is some uncertainty 
 about the chronology of Mahmud's reign and some authorities put 
 the plunder of Somnath in 1024 and others in 1025-1026. After 
 bloody repulses, he took the town. The Hindu garrison, at the 
 end of their gallant defense, left 500 of their warriors dead, and 
 put out in boats to sea. The famous idol of Somnath was merely 
 one of the twelve renowned lingas of Siva-worship erected in va- 
 rious parts of India. Mahmud, having taken the name of the 
 " Idol-Smasher," the modern Persian historians gradually con- 
 verted the plunder of Somnath into a legend of his pious zeal. 
 Forgetting the contemporary accounts of the idol as a rude block 
 of stone, Firishta tells how Mahmud, on entering the temple, was 
 offered an enormous ransom by the priests if he would spare the 
 image. Mahmud cried out that he would rather be remembered 
 as the breaker than the seller of idols, and clove the god open with 
 his mace. Forthwith a vast treasure of jewels poured forth from 
 its vitals, which explained the liberal offers of the priests, and re- 
 warded the disinterested piety of the monarch. The growth of this 
 fable can be clearly traced, but it is still repeated. Mahmud carried 
 off the temple gates, with fragments of the lingas, to Ghazni, and 
 on the way nearly perished with his army in the Indus desert; the 
 so-called " sandalwood gates of Somnath," brought back as a 
 trophy from Ghazni by Lord Ellenborough in 1842, and paraded 
 through northern India, were as clumsy a forgery as the story
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 93 
 
 1026-1030 
 
 of the jewel-bellied idol himself. Mahmud died at Ghazni in 
 1030. 
 
 As the result of seventeen invasions of India, and of twenty- 
 five years' fighting, Mahmud had reduced the western districts of 
 the Punjab to the control of his Afghan kingdom of Ghazni, and 
 left the remembrance of his raids throughout northern India 
 as far as Kanauj on the east and Gujarat in the south. He never 
 set up as a resident sovereign in India. His expeditions beyond 
 the Punjab were the adventures of a religious knight-errant, with 
 the plunder of a temple-city, or the demolition of an idol, as their 
 object, rather than serious efforts at conquest. As his father 
 Subuktigin had left Peshawar as an outpost garrison of Ghazni, 
 so Mahmud left the Punjab as an outlying province of that 
 Afghan kingdom. 
 
 The Mohammedan chroniclers tell many stories, not only of 
 his valor and piety, but also of his thrift. One day a poor woman 
 complained that her son had been killed by robbers in a distant 
 desert of Irak. Mahmud said he was very sorry, but that it was 
 difficult to prevent such accidents so far from the capital. The old 
 woman rebuked him with the words, " Keep no more territory than 
 you can rightly govern " ; and the sultan forthwith rewarded her, 
 and sent troops to guard all caravans passing that way. Mahmud 
 was an enlightened patron of poets, and his liberality drew to his 
 court the great Ferdousi, or Firdausi, that is the Paradaisiac, the 
 name popularly given to Abul Kasim Mansur, who died at Tus 
 in Khurasan in 1020. 
 
 The sultan listened with delight to his Shah-namah, or Book 
 of Kings, and promised him a dirham, meaning a golden one, for 
 each verse on its completion. After thirty years of labor, the poet 
 claimed his reward. But the sultan, finding that the poem had run 
 to 60,000 verses, offered him 60,000 silver dirhams, instead of 
 dirhams of gold. Ferdousi retired in disgust from the court, and 
 wrote a bitter satire, which to this day tells the story of the alleged 
 base birth of the monarch. Mahmud forgave the satire, but re- 
 membered the great epic, and, repenting of his meanness, sent 
 100,000 golden dirhams to the poet. The bounty came too late; 
 for, according to the legend, as the royal messengers bearing the 
 bags of gold entered one gate of Ferdousi's city, the poet's corpse 
 was being borne out by another. The sum originally given him 
 would have amounted to more than $6000, which may be com-
 
 94 INDIA 
 
 1030-1191 
 
 pared with the ten pounds or $50 which Milton received for 
 " Paradise Lost." There are various editions of the Shah-namah, 
 and French and German translations, but no complete English 
 translation. 
 
 During a century and a half the Punjab remained under Mah- 
 mud's successors as an Afghan Mussulman province in India. 
 There had long been a feud between the Afghan towns of Ghor 
 and Ghazni. Mahmud subdued Ghor in 1010; but about 105 1 the 
 Ghor chief captured Ghazni and dragged its principal men to his 
 own capital, where he cut their throats, and used their blood in 
 making mortar for the fortifications. After various reprisals, Ghor 
 finally triumphed over Ghazni in 1 152 ; and Khusru, the last of Mah- 
 mud's line, fled to Lahore, the capital of his outlying Indian terri- 
 tory. In 1 1 86 this also was wrested from him by the Ghor prince, 
 Shahab-ud-din, or Muiz-ud-din, better known as Mohammed of 
 Ghor, who had begun the conquest of India on his own account 
 eleven years before. Each of the Hindu principalities fought hard, 
 and some of them still survive, more than seven centuries after the 
 torrent of Afghan invasion swept over their heads. 
 
 On his first expedition toward Delhi in 1191, Mohammed of 
 Ghor was utterly defeated by the Hindus at Thanes war in the Pun- 
 jab, badly wounded, and barely escaped with his life. His scat- 
 tered hosts were chased for forty miles, but he gathered together 
 the wreck of his army at Lahore, and, aided by new hordes from 
 Afghanistan, again marched into Hindustan in 1193. Family 
 quarrels among the Rajputs prevented a united effort against him. 
 The cities of Delhi and Kanauj stand forth as the centers of rival 
 Hindu monarchies, each of which claimed the first place in north- 
 ern India. A Chauhan Rajput prince, ruling over Delhi and 
 A j mere, bore the proud name of Prithwi Raja or suzerain. The 
 Rahtor Rajput king of Kanauj, whose capital can still be traced 
 across eight square miles of broken bricks and rubbish in Farukha- 
 bad district, celebrated a feast, in the spirit of the ancient Hindu 
 horse sacrifice, to proclaim himself the overlord. At such a feast 
 all menial offices had to be filled by royal vassals; and the Delhi 
 monarch was summoned as a gatekeeper, along with the other 
 princes of Hindustan. During the ceremony, the daughter of the 
 king of Kanauj was to make her swayam-vara, as in the Sanskrit 
 epics. The Delhi raja loved the maiden, but he could not brook 
 to stand at another man's gate. As he did not arrive, the Kanauj
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 95 
 
 1191-1203 
 
 king set up a mocking - image of him at the door. When the prin- 
 cess entered the hall to make her choice, she looked calmly round 
 the circle of kings, then, stepping proudly past them to the door, 
 threw her bridal garland over the neck of the ill-shapen image. 
 Forthwith, says the story, the Delhi monarch rushed in, sprang 
 with the princess on his horse, and galloped off toward his northern 
 capital. The outraged father led out his Kanauj army against 
 the runaways, and, having, according to the legend, called in the 
 Afghans to attack Delhi on the other side from the west, brought 
 about the ruin of both the Hindu kingdoms of Delhi and Kanauj. 
 
 The tale serves to record the disputes among the Rajput 
 princes, which prevented a united resistance to Mohammed of 
 Ghor. Mohammed found Delhi occupied by the Tomara clan, 
 A j mere by the Chauhans, and Kanauj by the Rahtors. These 
 three Rajput states formed the natural breakwaters against in- 
 vaders from the northwest, but their feuds are said to have left 
 the kingdom of Delhi and Ajmere, then united under one Chauhan 
 overlord, only 64 survivors out of 108 warrior chiefs. In 1193 
 the Afghans again swept down on the Punjab. Prithwi Raja of 
 Delhi and Ajmere was defeated and slain. His heroic queen 
 burned herself on his funeral pile. Mohammed of Ghor, having 
 occupied Delhi, pressed on to Ajmere, and in n 94 overthrew the 
 rival Hindu monarch of Kanauj, whose body was identified on 
 the field of battle by his false teeth. The brave Rahtor Rajputs of 
 Kanauj, with others of the Rajput clans in northern India, quitted 
 their homes in large bodies rather than submit to the stranger. 
 They migrated to the regions bordering on the desert of the Indus, 
 and there founded the military kingdoms which bear their name, 
 Rajputana, to this day. History takes her narrative of these events 
 from the matter-of-fact statements of the Persian annalists, but 
 the Hindu court-bard of Prithwi Raja left behind a patriotic ver- 
 sion of the fall of his race. His ballad-chronicle, known as the 
 " Prithwiraj Rasau of Chand," is one of the earliest poems in Hindi. 
 It depicts the Mussulman invaders as beaten in all the battles except 
 the last fatal one. Their leader is taken prisoner by the Hindus, 
 and released for a heavy ransom, but the quarrels of the chiefs 
 ruined the Hindu cause. 
 
 Setting aside these patriotic songs, Benares and Gwalior mark 
 the southwestern limits of Mohammed of Ghor's own advance, but 
 his general, Bakhtiyar Khilji, conquered Behar in 1199, and Lower
 
 96 INDIA 
 
 1203-1210 
 
 Bengal down to the delta in 1203. On the approach of the Mus- 
 sulmans, the Brahmans advised Lakshman Sen, the Hindu king 
 of Bengal, to remove his capital from Nadiya to some more dis- 
 tant city, but the prince, a religious old man of eighty, could not 
 make up his mind, until the Afghan general had seized his capital, 
 and burst into the palace one day while his majesty was at dinner. 
 The monarch slipped out by a back door without having time to 
 put on his shoes, and fled to Puri in Orissa, where he spent his 
 remaining days in the service of the god Jagannath. Meanwhile 
 the sultan, Mohammed of Ghor, divided his time between cam- 
 paigns in Afghanistan and Indian invasions. Ghor was his capi- 
 tal, and he had little time to consolidate his Indian conquests. 
 Even in the Punjab, the tribes were defeated rather than subdued. 
 In 1203 the Ghakkars issued from their mountains, took Lahore, 
 and devastated the whole province. In 1206 a party of the same 
 clan swam the Indus, on the bank of which the Afghan camp was 
 pitched, and stabbed the sultan while asleep in his tent. 
 
 Mohammed of Ghor was no religious knight-errant of Islam 
 like Mahmud of Ghazni, but a practical conqueror. The objects 
 of his distant expeditions were not temples, but provinces. Subuk- 
 tigin had left Peshawar as an outpost of Ghazni in 977 ; and Mah- 
 mud had reduced the western Punjab to an outlying province of 
 the same kingdom in 1030. That was the net result of the Turki 
 invasions of India from Ghazni (977-1186). Mohammed of Ghor 
 left the whole north of India, from the delta of the Indus to the 
 delta of the Ganges, under skillful Mohammedan generals, who on 
 his death in 1206 set up as kings on their own account. 
 
 His Indian viceroy, Kutab-ud-din, proclaimed himself sover- 
 eign of India at Delhi, and founded a line which lasted from 1206 
 to 1290. Kutab claimed the control over all the Mohammedan 
 leaders and soldiers of fortune in India from Sind to Lower Ben- 
 gal. His name is preserved at his capital by the Kutab Mosque, 
 with its graceful colonnade of richly-sculptured Hindu pillars, and 
 by the Kutab Minar, which raises its tapering shaft, incrusted with 
 chapters from the Koran, high above the ruins of old Hindu Delhi. 
 It is 238 feet high and is said by Stanley Lane-Poole to be the 
 highest minaret in the world. It was somewhat damaged by an 
 earthquake in 1803. Kutab-ud-din had started life as a Turki 
 slave, and several of his successors rose by valor or intrigue from 
 the same low condition to the throne. His dynasty is accordingly
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 97 
 
 1210-1288 
 
 known as that of the Slave Kings. Under them India became for 
 the first time the seat of resident Mohammedan sovereigns. In 
 12 10 Kutab-ud-din died. 
 
 The Slave dynasty found itself face to face with the three 
 dangers which have beset the Mohammedan rule in India from the 
 outset, and beneath which that rule eventually succumbed. First, 
 rebellions by its own servants Mussulman generals, or viceroys 
 of provinces ; second, revolts of the Hindus ; third, fresh invasions, 
 chiefly by Moguls, from central Asia. 
 
 Altamsh, the third and greatest sultan of the Slave dynasty, 
 had to reduce the Mohammedan governors of Lower Bengal and 
 Sind, both of whom set up as independent rulers ; and he narrowly 
 escaped destruction by a Mogul invasion from central Asia. The 
 Moguls under Genghis Khan pierced through the Indian passes in 
 pursuit of an Afghan prince, in 1221 ; but their progress was stayed 
 by the Indus, and Delhi remained untouched. Before the death of 
 Altamsh the Hindus had ceased for a time to struggle openly ; and 
 the Mohammedan viceroys of the Slave dynasty of Delhi ruled all 
 India north of the Vindhya Range, including the Punjab, the North- 
 western Provinces, Oudh, Behar, Lower Bengal, Ajmere, Gwalior, 
 Malwa, and Sind. The kalif of Bagdad acknowledged India as 
 a separate Mohammedan kingdom during the reign of Altamsh, 
 and in 1229 coins were struck in recognition of the new empire of 
 Delhi. Altamsh died in 1236. 
 
 His daughter Raziya was the only woman who ever occupied 
 the Mohammedan throne of Delhi. Learned in the Koran, indus- 
 trious in public business, firm and energetic in every crisis, she 
 bears in history the masculine name of the Sultan Raziya. The 
 favor which she showed to her master of the horse, an Abyssinian 
 slave, offended her Afghan generals ; and, after a troubled reign of 
 three and a half years, she was deposed and put to death in 1240. 
 
 Mogul irruptions from central Asia and Hindu revolts within 
 India soon began to undermine the Slave dynasty. The Moguls 
 are said to have burst through Tibet into northeastern Bengal 
 in 1245; and during the next forty-three years they repeatedly 
 marched down the Afghan passes into the Punjab (1245-1288). 
 The wild Indian tribes, such as the Ghakkars and the hillmen of 
 Mewat, ravaged the Mohammedan provinces in the Punjab almost 
 up to the gates of Delhi. Rajput revolts foreshadowed that inex- 
 tinguishable vitality of the Hindu military races, which was to
 
 98 INDIA 
 
 1288-1290 
 
 harass, from first to last, the Mohammedan dynasties, and to out- 
 live them. Under the Slave Kings, even the north of India was 
 only half subdued to the Mohammedan sway. The Hindus rose 
 again and again in Malwa, Rajputana, Bundelkhand, and along the 
 Ganges and the Jumna, as far as Delhi itself. 
 
 The last but one of the Slave line, Balban, had not only to 
 fight the Moguls, the wild Indian tribes, and the Rajput clans he 
 was also compelled to battle with his own viceroys. Having in 
 his youth entered into a compact for mutual support and advance- 
 ment with forty of his Turki fellow-slaves in the palace, he had, 
 when he came into power, to break the strong confederacy thus 
 formed. After serving ably for twenty years as the chief minister 
 for one of the sons and successors of Altamsh, the brilliant slave 
 and successful minister followed his master on the throne in 1265, 
 and continued his efforts to defend the kingdom against the 
 foreign invader and to suppress domestic intrigue and insurrec- 
 tion. Some of his provincial governors he publicly scourged ; 
 others were beaten to death in his presence; and a general who 
 failed to reduce the rebel Mohammedan viceroy of Bengal was 
 hanged. Balban himself moved down to the Gangetic delta, and 
 crushed the Bengal revolt with merciless skill. His severity against 
 Hindu rebels knew no bounds. He nearly exterminated the 
 Rajputs of Mewat, south of Delhi, putting 100,000 of them to the 
 sword. He then cut down the forests which formed their retreats, 
 and opened up the country to tillage. The miseries caused by the 
 Mogul hordes at that time in central Asia drove a crowd of princes 
 and poets from Afghanistan and other Mohammedan countries to 
 seek shelter at the Indian court. Balban boasted that no fewer 
 than fifteen once independent sovereigns had fed on his bounty, and 
 he called the streets of Delhi by the names of their late kingdoms, 
 such as Bagdad, Khuarezm, and Ghor. He died in 1287. His 
 grandson and successor was murdered, and in 1290 the Slave dy- 
 nasty ended. 
 
 In that year, Jalal-ud-din, a Khilji leader, succeeded to the 
 Delhi throne, and founded a line which lasted for thirty years. 
 The clan of Khiljis derived their name from the town of Khilj 
 in Afghanistan, and though possibly of Turkish origin they had 
 become thoroughly Afghan in character and hostile to the Turks, 
 who had supplied most of the kings of the Slave dynasty. The 
 Khilji dynasty extended the Mohammedan power into southern
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 99 
 
 1290-1305 
 
 India. Ala-ud-din, the nephew of Jalal-ud-din, when governor 
 of Karra near Allahabad, pierced through the Vindhya ranges 
 with his cavalry, and plundered the Buddhist temple-city of Bhilsa, 
 300 miles off. After trying his powers against the rebellious Hindu 
 princes of Bundelkhand and Malwa, Ala-ud-din formed the idea 
 of a grand raid into the Deccan. With a band of only 8000 horse, 
 he rode into the heart of southern India. On the way he gave out 
 that he was flying from his uncle Jalal-ud-din's court, to seek serv- 
 ice with the Hindu king of Rajamahendri. The generous Rajput 
 princes abstained from attacking a refugee in his flight; and Ala- 
 ud-din surprised the great city of Deogiri, the modern Daulatabad, 
 at that time the capital of the Hindu kingdom of Maharashtra. 
 Having suddenly galloped into its streets, he announced himself 
 as only the advance guard of the whole imperial army, levied an 
 immense booty, and carried it back 700 miles to the seat of his 
 governorship on the banks of the Ganges. He then lured the Sul- 
 tan Jalal-ud-din, his uncle, to Karra, in order to divide the spoil, 
 and murdered the old man in the act of clasping his hand (1296). 
 
 Ala-ud-din scattered his spoils in gifts or charity like a devout 
 Mussulman, and proclaimed himself sultan. The twenty years of 
 his reign established the Mohammedan sway in southern India. 
 He reconquered Gujarat from the Hindus in 1297; captured Rin- 
 timbur, after a difficult siege, from the Jaipur Rajputs in 1300; 
 took the fort of Chitor, and partially subjected the Sesodia Rajputs 
 (1303); and, having thus reduced the Hindus on the north of 
 the Vindhyas, prepared for the conquest of southern India or the 
 Deccan. Before starting on this great expedition he had to meet five 
 Mogul inroads from central Asia. In 1295 he defeated a Mogul 
 invasion under the walls of his capital, Delhi; in 1304- 1305 he en- 
 countered four others, sending all his prisoners to Delhi, where 
 the chiefs were trampled by elephants, and the common soldiery 
 slaughtered in cold blood. He crushed with equal cruelty several 
 rebellions which took place among his own family during the same 
 period, first putting out the eyes of his insurgent nephews, and then 
 beheading them ( 1 299- 1 300 ) . 
 
 The tyrannical character of Ala-ud-din was shown not only 
 in ferocity and bloodshed, but also in the despotic measures of his 
 administration. The Hindus were crushed by a merciless system 
 of taxation under which Mohammedans fared but little better. 
 Draconian laws were enforced against intemperance. Prices of
 
 100 INDIA 
 
 1305-1311 
 
 foodstuffs and of all articles of common use were fixed by royal 
 edict and rigidly enforced. A thorough system of espionage ter- 
 rorized the people. These measures were all intended to assure the 
 security of the kingdom, whose fortifications he repaired and ex- 
 tended and whose army he increased and reorganized. 
 
 His affairs in northern India being thus settled, he undertook 
 the conquest of the south. In 1303 he had sent his eunuch slave, 
 Malik Kafur, with an army, through Bengal, to attack Warangal, 
 the capital of the southeastern Hindu kingdom of Telingana. In 
 1306 Kafur marched victoriously through Malwa and Khandesh 
 into the Maratha country, where he captured Deogiri, and per- 
 suaded the Hindu king Ram to return with him to do homage 
 at Delhi. Meanwhile the Sultan Ala-ud-din was conquering the 
 Rajputs in Marwar. His slave general, Kafur, made expeditions 
 through Maharashtra and the Karnatik, as far south as Adam's 
 Bridge, at the extremity of India, where he built a mosque. There 
 is some difficulty in the identification of the names of the places 
 mentioned in this expedition and the location of Kafur's mosque 
 is not settled beyond question. 
 
 The Mohammedan sultan of India was no longer merely an 
 Afghan king of Delhi. Three great waves of invasion from cen- 
 tral Asia had created a large Mohammedan population in northern 
 India. First had come the Turkis, represented by the House of 
 Ghazni ; then the Afghans, commonly so called, represented by 
 the House of Ghor ; next the Moguls, having failed to conquer the 
 Punjab, had taken service in great numbers with the sultans of 
 Delhi. Under the Slave Kings the Mogul mercenaries had be- 
 come so powerful as to require to be massacred (1286). About 
 1292 three thousand Moguls, having been converted from their 
 old Tatar rites to Islam, had received a suburb of Delhi for their 
 residence. Other Moguls followed. After various plots by them, 
 Ala-ud-din slaughtered 15,000 of the settlers, and sold their fam- 
 ilies as slaves (1311). 
 
 The unlimited supply of soldiers which this ruler could draw 
 upon from the Turki, Afghan, and Mogul settlers in northern 
 India and from countries beyond, enabled him to send armies far- 
 ther south than any of his predecessors. In his later years the 
 Hindus revolted in Gujarat; the Rajputs reconquered Chitor; and 
 many of the Mohammedan garrisons were driven out of the Deccan. 
 On the capture of Chitor in 1303, the Rajput garrison had pre-
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 101 
 
 1311-1330 
 
 ferred death to submission. The peasantry still chant an early- 
 Hindi ballad, telling how the queen and thirteen thousand women 
 threw themselves on a funeral pile, while the men rushed upon the 
 swords of the besiegers. A remnant cut their way to the Aravalli 
 Hills; and the Rajput independence, although in abeyance during 
 Ala-ud-din's reign, was never crushed. Having imprisoned his 
 sons and given himself up to paroxysms of rage, Ala-ud-din died 
 in 13 16, helped to the grave, it is said, by poison given by his 
 favorite general, Kafur. 
 
 During the four remaining years of the House of Khilji, the 
 actual power passed to Khusru Khan, a renegade low-caste Hindu, 
 who imitated the military successes and vices of his patron, the 
 General Kafur, and in the end murdered him. Khusru became all 
 in all to the new emperor, the debauchee Mubarik ; then slew him, 
 and seized the throne. While outwardly professing Islam, Khusru 
 desecrated the Koran by using it as a seat, and degraded the pulpits 
 of the mosques into pedestals for Hindu idols. In 1321, after a 
 few months' reign, he was slain by his revolted soldiery, and the 
 Khilji dynasty disappeared. 
 
 The leader of the rebellion was Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlak, who 
 had started life as a Turki slave, and risen to the frontier gov- 
 ernorship of the Punjab. He founded the Tughlak dynasty, which 
 lingered on for ninety-six years, although submerged for a time by 
 the invasion of Timur in 1398. Ghiyas-ud-din removed the capital 
 from Delhi to a spot about four miles farther east, and called it 
 Tughlakabad. 
 
 His son and successor, Mohammed Tughlak, was an accom- 
 plished scholar, a skillful general, and a man of severe abstinence, 
 but his ferocity of temper, perhaps inherited from the tribes of the 
 steppes of central Asia, rendered him merciless as a judge, and 
 careless of human suffering. The least opposition drove him into 
 outbursts of insane fury. He wasted the treasures accumulated by 
 Ala-ud-din in buying off the Mogul hordes, who again and again 
 swept through Afghanistan into the Punjab. On the other hand, in 
 fits of ambition, he raised an army for the invasion of Persia, and 
 is said to have sent out an expedition of 100,000 men against 
 China. The force against Persia broke up for want of pay, and 
 plundered his own dominions; the army against China perished 
 almost to a man in the Himalayan passes. He planned great con- 
 quests in southern India, and dragged the whole population of
 
 102 INDIA 
 
 1330-1351 
 
 Delhi 800 miles off in the far south to Deogiri, to which he gave 
 the name of Daulatabad. Twice he allowed the miserable suppliants 
 to return to Delhi; twice he compelled them on pain of death to 
 quit it. One of these forced migrations took place amid the horrors 
 of a famine ; the citizens perished by thousands, and in the end the 
 king had to give up the attempt. Having drained his treasury, he 
 issued a forced currency of copper coins, by which he tried to make 
 the king's brass equal to other men's silver. During the same cen- 
 tury, the Mogul conqueror of China, Kublai Khan, had extended 
 the use of paper notes, early devised by the Chinese; and Kai 
 Khatu had introduced a bad imitation of them into Persia. Mo- 
 hammed Tuglak's scheme was not without some basis in sound 
 economics, but the forced currency quickly brought its own ruin. 
 Foreign merchants refused the worthless money, trade came to 
 a stand, and the king had to take payment of his taxes in his own 
 depreciated coinage. On this failure he redeemed the tokens in 
 gold and silver. 
 
 Meanwhile the provinces began to throw off the Delhi yoke. 
 Mohammed Tughlak had succeeded in 1325 to the greatest empire 
 which had, up to that time, acknowledged a Mohammedan sultan 
 in India. His bigoted zeal for Islam forbade him to confide in 
 Hindu princes or Hindu officers ; he dared not trust his own kins- 
 men; and he thus found himself compelled to fill every high post 
 with foreign Mohammedan adventurers, who had no interest in 
 the stability of his rule. The annals of the period present a long 
 series of outbreaks, one part of the empire throwing off its alle- 
 giance as soon as another had been brought back to subjection. His 
 own nephew rebelled in Malwa, and, being caught, was flayed alive 
 (1338). The Punjab governor revolted in 1339, was crushed, and 
 put to death. The Mussulman viceroys of Lower Bengal and of 
 the Coromandel coast set up for themselves, about 1340, and could 
 not be subdued. The Hindu kingdoms of Karnata and Telingana 
 recovered their independence in 1344, and expelled the Mussulman 
 garrisons. The Mohammedan governors in the Deccan also re- 
 volted, while the troops in Gujarat rose in mutiny. Mohammed 
 Tughlak rushed with an army to the south to take vengeance on the 
 traitors, but hardly had he put down their rising than he was called 
 away by insurrections in Gujarat, Malwa, and Sind. He died in 
 1 35 1, while chasing rebels in the lower valley of the Indus. 
 
 Mohammed Tughlak was the first Mussulman ruler of India
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 103 
 
 1351-1375 
 
 who can be said to have had a regular revenue system. He in- 
 creased the land tax between the Ganges and the Jumna in some 
 districts tenfold, in others twenty-fold. The husbandmen fled be- 
 fore his tax-gatherers, leaving their villages to lapse into jungle, 
 and formed themselves into robber clans. He cruelly punished all 
 who trespassed on his game preserves, and he is reputed to have 
 invented a kind of man-hunt which is without precedent in the 
 annals of human wickedness. He surrounded a large tract with 
 his army, " and then gave orders that the circle should close toward 
 the center, and that all within it (mostly inoffensive peasants) 
 should be slaughtered like wild beasts." This sort of hunt was 
 more than once repeated; and on another occasion there was a 
 general massacre of the inhabitants of the great city of Kanauj. 
 Such horrors led in due time to famine, and the miseries of 
 the country exceeded all powers of description. The orientalist, 
 Stanley Lane- Poole, 1 takes a much more favorable view of this 
 ruler. He quotes from Ibn-Batuta : " This king is of all men the 
 one who loves to dispense gifts and to shed blood. His gateway 
 is never free from a beggar whom he has relieved and a corpse 
 which he has slain." His character reminds the student of eight- 
 eenth century European history of Joseph II. of Austria, in his 
 generous and benevolent schemes; of Robespierre in his devotion 
 to theory and his endeavor to establish a reign of virtue by mas- 
 sacring the vicious; and of Carrier of Nantes in his insane thirst 
 for blood. As a versatile and erratic genius he offers many points 
 of resemblance to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. 
 
 His cousin, Firuz Shah Tughlak, succeeded him. During the 
 first twenty years of his reign, Firuz Shah intrusted the cares of 
 state almost entirely to his able prime minister, Makbul Khan, 
 an official of Hindu race who had risen to high rank under Mo- 
 hammed Tughlak. The mother of Firuz Shah himself was a 
 Hindu and this combination of Hindu and Mohammedan ante- 
 cedents undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of this monarch 
 and to the peaceful prosperity of his rule. Firuz Shah, though not 
 a strong man, deserves in many respects the same credit as do the 
 benevolent despots of eighteenth century Europe, with some of 
 whom he might well be compared. He ruled mercifully, but had 
 to recognize the independence of the Mohammedan kingdoms of 
 Bengal and in the Deccan, and suffered much from bodily infirmities 
 and court intrigues. He undertook many public works, such as 
 1 Lane-Poole, u Mediaeval India."
 
 104 INDIA 
 
 1375-1526 
 
 dams across rivers for irrigation, tanks, caravansaries, mosques, 
 colleges, hospitals, and bridges, but his greatest achievement was the 
 old Jumna canal. This canal drew its waters from the Jumna 
 near a point where it leaves the mountains, and connected that river 
 with the Ghaggar and the Sutlej by irrigation channels. Part 
 of it has been reconstructed by the British government, and spreads 
 a margin of fertility on either side at this day. But the dynasty 
 of Tughlak soon sank amid Mohammedan mutinies and Hindu 
 revolts; and under Mahmud, its last real king, India fell an easy 
 prey to the great Mogul invasion of 1398. 
 
 In that year, Timur Timur-i-Leng, that is, Timur the Lame, 
 corrupted into Tamerlane swept through the Afghan passes at 
 the head of the united Tatar hordes. He defeated the Tughlak 
 king, Mahmud, under the walls of Delhi, and entered the capital. 
 During five days a massacre raged ; " some streets were ren- 
 dered impassable by heaps of dead," while Timur calmly looked on 
 and held a feast in honor of his victory. On the last day of 1398 he 
 resumed his march, first offering a " sincere and humble tribute 
 of grateful praise " to God, in Firuz Shah's marble mosque on the 
 banks of the Jumna. Timur then crossed the Ganges, and, after 
 a great massacre at Meerut, proceeded as far as Hardwar. There 
 skirting the foot of the Himalayas, he retired westward into central 
 Asia (1399). Timur left no traces of his power in India, save 
 desolate cities. On his departure Mahmud Tughlak crept back 
 from his retreat in Gujarat, and nominally ruled till 141 2. 
 
 The Tughlak line finally ended in 1414. The Sayyid dynasty 
 ruled from 1414 till 1451, and the Afghan House of Lodi from 
 145 1 to 1526. Some of these sultans reigned over only a few miles 
 round Delhi, and during the whole period the Hindu princes and 
 the local Mohammedan kings were practically independent through- 
 out the greater part of India. The House of Lodi was crushed 
 beneath the Mogul invasion of Babar in 1526. 
 
 Babar founded the Mogul empire in India, whose last repre- 
 sentative died a British state prisoner at Rangoon in 1862. Before 
 entering on the story of that empire, it will be well to notice the 
 kingdoms, Hindu and Mohammedan, on the south of the Vindhya 
 range. The three ancient kingdoms, Chera, Chola, and Pandya, 
 occupied the Dravidian country of southern India, peopled by 
 Tamil-speaking races. Pandya, the largest of them, had its capital 
 at Madura, and traces its foundation to the fourth century b. c. The
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 105 
 
 1118-1526 
 
 Chola kingdom had its headquarters at Combaconum and Tan j ore. 
 Talkad, in Mysore, now buried by the sands of the Kaveri, was 
 the capital of the Chera kingdom from 288 to 900 a. d. The 11 6th 
 king of the Madura or Pandya dynasty was overthrown by the 
 Mohammedan general, Malik Kafur, in 1304, but the Mussulmans 
 failed to establish their power in the extreme south, and a series of 
 Hindu dynasties continued to rule from Madura over the old 
 Pandya kingdom until the eighteenth century. No European king- 
 dom can boast a continuous succession such as that of Pandya or 
 Madura, traced back by the piety of genealogists for more than two 
 thousand years. The Chera or Mysore and Travancore kingdom 
 enumerates fifty kings, and the Chola or Tanjore kingdom sixty- 
 six, besides minor offshoot dynasties. 
 
 Authentic history in southern India begins with the Hindu 
 kingdom of Vijayanagar or Narsingha, from 11 18 to 1565. The 
 capital can still be traced within the Madras district of Bellary, on 
 the right bank of the Tungabhadra River vast ruins of temples, 
 fortifications, tanks, and bridges, haunted by hyenas and snakes. 
 For at least three centuries, Vijayanagar ruled over the southern 
 part of the Indian peninsula. Its Hindu rajas waged war and made 
 peace on equal terms with the Mohammedan sultans of the Deccan. 
 
 The Mohammedan kingdoms of southern India sprang out of 
 the conquest of Ala-ud-din in 1303 to 1306. After a period of con- 
 fused fighting, the Bahmani kingdom of the Deccan emerged as the 
 representative of Mohammedan rule in southern India. Zafar 
 Khan, an Afghan general during the reign of Mohammed Tughlak, 
 defeated the Delhi troops, and became Mussulman sovereign of 
 the Deccan. Having in early youth been the slave of a Brahman, 
 who had treated him kindly, and foretold his future greatness, he 
 took the title of Bahmani, and transmitted it to his successors. 
 
 The rise of the Bahmani dynasty is usually assigned to the 
 year 1347, and it lasted for 178 years, or until 1525. Its capitals 
 were successively at Kulbarga and Bidar, both in the modern Hai- 
 darabad territories; and it loosely corresponded with the nizam's 
 dominions of the present day. At the height of their power, the 
 Mohammedan Bahmani kings claimed sway over half the Deccan, 
 from the Tungabhadra River in the south to Orissa in the north, 
 and from Masulipatam on the east to Goa on the west. Their direct 
 government was, however, much more confined. They derived 
 support, in their early struggle against the Delhi throne, from the
 
 106 INDIA 
 
 1489-1526 
 
 Hindu southern kingdoms of Vijayanagar and Warangal, but dur- 
 ing the greater part of its career, the Bahmani dynasty represented 
 the cause of Islam against Hinduism on the south of the Vindhyas. 
 Its alliances and its wars alike led to a mingling of the Mussul- 
 man and Hindu populations. For example, the king of Malwa 
 invaded the Bahmani dominions with a mixed force of 12,000 Mo- 
 hammedan Afghans and Hindu Rajputs. The Hindu raja of 
 Vijayanagar recruited his armies from Afghan Mussulmans, whom 
 he paid by assignments of land, and for whom he built a mosque. 
 The Bahmani Mohammedan troops, on the other hand, were fre- 
 quently led by converted Hindus. The Bahmani armies were them- 
 selves made up of two hostile sects of Mussulmans. One sect 
 consisted of Shias, chiefly Persians, Turks, or Tatars from central 
 Asia ; the other, of native-born Mussulmans of southern India, to- 
 gether with Abyssinian mercenaries, professing the Sunni faith. 
 The rivalry between these Mussulman sects frequently imperiled 
 the Bahmani throne. The dynasty reached its highest power dur- 
 ing the first half of the fifteenth century, and was broken up by 
 its discordant elements between 1489 and 1525. 
 
 Out of its fragments the five independent Mohammedan king- 
 doms in the Deccan were formed. These were: the Adil Shahi 
 dynasty, with its capital at Bijapur, founded in 1489 by a son of 
 Amurath II., sultan of the Ottoman Turks, and annexed by the 
 Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686-1688; the Kutab Shahi dy- 
 nasty, with its capital at Golconda, founded in 15 12 by a Turkoman 
 adventurer and also annexed by Aurangzeb in 1687 -1688; the 
 Nizam Shahi dynasty, with its capital at Ahmadnagar, founded in 
 1490 by a Brahman renegade from the Vijayanagar court and 
 finally subverted by the Mogul emperor, Shah Jahan, in 1636; 
 the Imad Shahi dynasty of Berar, with its capital at Ellichpur, 
 founded in 1484 also by a Hindu from Vijayanagar and annexed 
 to the Ahmadnagar kingdom in 1572 ; and the Barid Shahi dynasty, 
 with its capital at Bidar, founded 1492- 1498 by a Turki or Georgian 
 slave. The Bidar territories were small and ill-defined; and were 
 independent till after 1609. Bidar fort was taken by Aurangzeb 
 in 1657. 
 
 It is beyond the scope of this book to trace the history of these 
 local Mohammedan dynasties of southern India. They preserved 
 their independence until the firm establishment of the Mogul em- 
 pire in the north, under Akbar and his successors. For a time they
 
 MOHAMMEDAN CONQUERORS 107 
 
 1340-1526 
 
 had to struggle against the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar. 
 In 1565 they combined against that power, and, aided by a re- 
 bellion within Vijayanagar itself, they overthrew it at Talikot in 
 1565. The battle of Talikot marks the final downfall of Vijayana- 
 gar as a great Hindu kingdom. Talikot in the Bijapur district of 
 the Bombay presidency was the headquarters of the Mohammedan 
 allies and the battle was fought thirty miles farther south on the 
 right bank of the Kistna on January 25, 1565. The local Hindu 
 chiefs or nayaks kept hold of their respective fiefs, and the Moham- 
 medan kings of the south were only able to annex a part of its 
 dominions. From the nayaks are descended the well known 
 palegars (also spelled polygars) of the Madras presidency, and the 
 maharaja of Mysore, who were minor chiefs with something like 
 feudal power, and are now small landlords with feudal character- 
 istics. One of the blood-royal of Vijayanagar fled to Chandragiri, 
 and founded a line which exercised a prerogative of its former 
 sovereignty, by granting the site of Madras to the English in 
 1639. Another scion, claiming the same high descent, lingers to 
 the present day near the ruins of Vijayanagar, and is known as 
 the raja of Anagundi, a feudatory of the nizam of Haidarabad. 
 The independence of the local Hindu rajas in southern India 
 throughout the Mohammedan period is illustrated by the Man- 
 jarabad family, a line of petty chiefs, which maintained its au- 
 thority from 1397 to 1799. 
 
 In northern India Lower Bengal threw off the authority of 
 Delhi about 1340. Its Mohammedan governor, Fakir-ud-din, made 
 himself sovereign and stamped coin in his own name. A succes- 
 sion of a score of kings ruled Bengal until 1538, when it was tem- 
 porarily annexed to the Mogul empire of Delhi by Humayun. 
 Bengal was finally incorporated into that empire by Akbar in 1576. 
 The great province of Gujarat in western India had in like manner 
 grown into an independent Mohammedan kingdom, with its capital 
 at Ahmadabad, which lasted for nearly two centuries, from 1391 till 
 conquered by Akbar in 1573. The kingdom of Gujarat was notable 
 for its participation in the famous maritime struggle with the Mame- 
 lukes of Egypt against the first Portuguese viceroy in India, Al- 
 meida, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Malwa, which 
 had also risen to be an independent state under its Mohammedan 
 governors, was annexed by the king of Gujarat in 1531. Even 
 Jaunpur, including the territory of Benares, in the center of the
 
 108 INDIA 
 
 1394-1526 
 
 Gangetic valley, maintained its independence as a Mussulman state 
 for nearly a hundred years, from 1394 to 1478, during the disturbed 
 rule of the Sayyids and the first Lodi at Delhi. 
 
 The position of the early Mohammedan rulers of Delhi was 
 a very difficult one. Successive Mussulman hordes of Turks, 
 Afghans, and Tatars swept down the passes, and wrested India 
 from the preceding invaders of their own Mohammedan faith. The 
 Delhi empire was therefore beset by three perpetual dangers. First, 
 new Mohammedan invasions from central Asia; second, rebellious 
 Mohammedan generals or governors within India; third, the 
 Hindu races whom the early Delhi kings neither conciliated nor 
 crushed. It was reserved for Akbar the Great to remedy the in- 
 herent weakness of the position; and by incorporating the Hindus 
 into his government, to put a curb alike on Mohammedan invaders 
 from without, and on too powerful Mohammedan subjects within.
 
 Chapter X 
 
 THE MOGUL DYNASTY. 1 526-1 761 
 
 WHEN, therefore, Babar the Mogul invaded India in 1526, 
 he found it divided among a number of local Moham- 
 medan kings and Hindu princes. An Afghan sultan of 
 the House of Lodi, with his capital at Agra, ruled over what little 
 was left of the historic kingdom of Delhi. Babar, whose name 
 literally means " the Lion," was born February 14, 1483, and was 
 the fourth in descent from Timur the Tatar. In 1494, at the early 
 age of eleven, he succeeded his father in the petty kingdom of 
 Ferghana on the Jaxartes River (the modern Sir-Daria) ; and, 
 after romantic adventures, conquered Samarkand, the capital of 
 Timur's line, in 1497. Overpowered by a rebellion, and driven out 
 of the valley of the Oxus, Babar seized the kingdom of Kabul in 
 1504. During fifteen years he grew in strength on the Afghan 
 side of the Indian passes; then in 15 19, Babar began his series 
 of invasions into India, but it was not until the campaign of 
 1 525-1 526 that he was successful and defeated the Delhi sov- 
 ereign, Ibrahim Lodi, at Panipat. This was the first of three great 
 battles which, within modern times, have decided the fate of India 
 on that same plain of Panipat, namely: 1526, 1556, and 1761. 
 
 Panipat is near the Jumna in the province of the Punjab, and 
 on the Grand Trunk road fifty miles north of Delhi. The battle- 
 field was on the vast plain surrounding the town. Babar's victory 
 was won on the morning of April 21, 1526. 
 
 Having entered Delhi, Babar received the allegiance of the 
 Mohammedans, but was speedily attacked by the Rajputs of Chitor. 
 Those clans had brought all Ajmere, Mewar, and Malwa under 
 their rule, and now threatened to found a Hindu empire. In 
 1527 Babar defeated them at Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra, after a 
 battle memorable for its perils, and for Babar's vow in his ex- 
 tremity never again to touch wine. He rapidly extended his power 
 as far as Multan in the southern Punjab, and Behar in the eastern 
 valley of the Ganges. Babar died at Agra, December 26, 1530. 
 
 109
 
 110 INDIA 
 
 1530-1556 
 
 leaving a Mogul empire which stretched from the River Amu, 
 or Oxus, in central Asia, to the borders of the Gangetic delta in 
 Lower Bengal. 
 
 Mogul is the Arabic spelling of Mongol, and is specially ap- 
 plied to the emperors of India descended from Babar and some- 
 times called in Europe the Babarids. They were, however, of 
 mixed race ; Babar himself was a Turk on his father's side, though 
 a Mongol on his mother's, and he abhorred the very name of 
 Mogul. His descendants introduced a strong Rajput strain by 
 their marriages with Hindu princesses. The term Mogul is also 
 applied to the followers of the Mogul emperors, and came to mean 
 any fair man from central Asia or Afghanistan, as distinguished 
 from the darker natives of India. The various foreign invaders, 
 or governing Moslem class, Turks, Afghans, Pathans, and Moguls 
 eventually became so mixed that all were indifferently termed 
 Moguls. 
 
 Babar's son, Humayun, who was born on April 5, 1508, suc- 
 ceeded him in India, but had to make over Kabul and the western 
 Punjab to his brother and rival, Kamran. Humayun was thus 
 left to govern the new conquest of India, and at the same time was 
 deprived of Afghanistan and the Punjab frontier from which his 
 father had drawn his armies. The descendants of the early Afghan 
 invaders, long settled in India, hated the new Mohammedan or 
 Mogul hordes of Babar even more than they hated the Hindus. 
 After ten years of fighting, Humayun was driven out of India by 
 these Afghans under Sher Shah, the governor of Bengal. While 
 Humayun was flying through the desert of Sind to Persia, his son 
 Akbar was born in the petty fort of Umarkot (1542). Sher Shah 
 made himself emperor of Delhi, but was killed while storming the 
 fortress of Kalinjar in 1545. He was a far-sighted man and a 
 wise ruler ; he originated the fiscal and other reforms which Akbar 
 the Great afterward carried out with such credit to himself. His 
 son, Islam Shah, succeeded, but, under Sher Shah's grandson, the 
 Indian provinces, including Malwa, the Punjab, and Bengal, re- 
 volted against the Afghan dynasty in Bengal. Humayun, having 
 recovered his Kabul dominions, returned to India and defeated the 
 Afghan army of Sher Shah's nephew, Sikandar [Sekunder] Shah, 
 at Sirhind in 1555. Humayun reigned again for a few months 
 at Delhi, but died January 24, 1556. 
 
 Akbar the Great, the real founder of the Mogul empire as
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY ill 
 
 1556-1561 
 
 it existed for one and a half centuries, succeeded his father at the 
 age of fourteen. Born October 15, 1542, his reign lasted for 
 almost fifty years, from 1556 to 1605, and was therefore con- 
 temporary with that of Queen Elizabeth of England (1558-1603). 
 His father, Humayun, left but a small kingdom in India, not so 
 large as the present British province of the Punjab; Akbar ex- 
 panded that small kingdom into an Indian empire. At the time 
 of Humayun's death, Akbar was absent in the Punjab, under the 
 guardianship of Bairam Khan, fighting the revolted Afghans. 
 Bairam, a Turkoman by birth, had been the support of the exiled 
 Humayun, and held the real command of the army which restored 
 him to his throne at Sirhind. He now became the regent for the 
 youthful Akbar, under the honored title of Khan Baba, equivalent 
 to " the king's father." 
 
 Akbar and his regent had at once to advance from the Punjab 
 to reconquer the capital, which had been seized by Himu the able 
 general of Sikandar Shah. The forces met on the field of Panipat, 
 where Babar had won India thirty years before, and on Novem- 
 ber 5, 1556, Himu was defeated and slain. India now passed finally 
 from the Afghans to the Moguls. Sher Shah's line disappeared 
 from northern India and the Delhi throne, although it lingered on 
 for a time in Lower Bengal. 
 
 Brave and skillful as a general, but harsh and overbearing, 
 Bairam Khan raised many enemies; and Akbar, having endured 
 four years of thraldom, took advantage of a hunting party in 1560 
 to throw off his minister's yoke. The fallen regent, after a struggle 
 between his loyalty and his resentment, revolted, was defeated, and 
 pardoned. Akbar granted him a liberal pension ; and Bairam was 
 in the act of starting on a pilgrimage to Mecca, when he fell be- 
 neath the knife of an Afghan assassin, whose father he had slain 
 in battle. 
 
 The reign of Akbar was a reign of pacification. On his accession 
 in 1556 he found India split up into petty Hindu and Mohammedan 
 kingdoms, and seething with discordant elements; on his death in 
 1605, he bequeathed it an almost united empire. The earlier in- 
 vasions by Turks, Afghans, and Moguls had left a powerful Mo- 
 hammedan population in India under their own kings. Akbar 
 reduced these Mussulman states to provinces of the Delhi empire. 
 Many of the Hindu kings and Rajput nations had also regained 
 their independence : Akbar brought them into political dependence
 
 112 INDIA 
 
 1561-1589 
 
 upon his authority. This double task he effected partly by force 
 of arms, but in part also by alliances. He enlisted the Rajput 
 princes by marriage and by a sympathetic policy in the support of 
 his throne. He then employed them in high posts, and played off 
 his Hindu generals and Hindu ministers alike against the Mogul 
 party in upper India, and against the Afghan faction in Lower 
 Bengal. 
 
 Humayun had left but a small kingdom, confined to the 
 Punjab, with the districts round Delhi and Agra. Akbar between 
 1 561 and 1568 extended it, at the expense of his nearest neighbors, 
 the Rajputs. Jaipur was reduced to a fief of the empire ; and Akbar 
 cemented his conquest by marrying the daughter of its Hindu 
 prince. Jodhpur was in like manner overcome ; and Akbar married 
 his son, Salim, who afterward reigned under the title of Jahangir, 
 to the granddaughter of the raja. The Rajputs of Chitor were 
 overpowered in 1568 after a long struggle, but would not mingle 
 their high-caste Hindu blood even with that of a Mohammedan 
 emperor. They found shelter among the mountains and deserts 
 along the Indus, whence they afterward emerged to recover most 
 of their old dominions, and to found their capital of Udaipur, which 
 they retain to this day. They still boast that alone, among the 
 great Rajput clans, they never gave a daughter in marriage to 
 a Mogul emperor. 
 
 Akbar pursued his policy of conciliation toward all the Hindu 
 states. He also took special care to provide a career for the lesser 
 nobility. He appointed his brother-in-law, the son of the Jaipur 
 raja, governor of the Punjab. Raja Man Singh, also a Hindu 
 relative of the emperor's family, did good war service for Akbar 
 from Kabul to Orissa, and ruled as his governor of Bengal from 
 1589 to 1604. Akbar's great finance minister, Raja Todar Mall, 
 was likewise a Hindu, and carried out the first regular land-set- 
 tlement and survey of India. He had been trained under Sher 
 Shah, and after years of faithful service to Akbar, was his chief 
 finance minister from 1582 until his death in 1589. Lane-Poole 
 calls his survey " the Domesday Book of the Mogul empire." It 
 introduced upon a regular and permanent basis Sher Shah's system 
 of land revenue assessment which the British in turn inherited 
 from the Moguls as the " settlement " system. Out of 415 mansab- 
 dars, or commanders of horse, 51 were Hindus. Akbar abolished 
 the jaziah, the hated tax on non-Mussulmans, and placed all his
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 118 
 
 1576-1599 
 
 subjects upon a political equality. He had the Sanskrit sacred books 
 and epic poems translated into Persian, and showed a keen inter- 
 est in the religion of his Hindu subjects. He respected their laws, 
 but he put down their inhumane rites. He forbade trial by ordeal, 
 animal sacrifices, and child marriages before the age of puberty. 
 He legalized the remarriage of Hindu widows; but he failed to 
 abolish widow-burning on the husband's funeral pile, although he 
 took steps to insure that the act should be voluntary. 
 
 Akbar thus incorporated his Hindu subjects into the effective 
 force, both civil and military, of his empire. With their aid he 
 reduced the independent Mohammedan kings of northern India. 
 He subjugated the petty Hindu potentates from the Punjab to 
 Behar. After a struggle he wrested Lower Bengal in 1576 from 
 its Afghan princes of the House of Sher Shah. From the time of 
 Akbar's conquest of Lower Bengal it remained for nearly two 
 centuries a province of the Mogul empire, under governors ap- 
 pointed from Delhi. In 1765 it passed by an imperial grant to 
 the British. Orissa, on the Bay of Bengal, submitted to Akbar's 
 armies, under his Hindu general, Todar Mall, in 1575. On the 
 opposite coast of India, Gujarat was reconquered from its inde- 
 pendent Mohammedan king in 1 572-1 573, although not finally sub- 
 jugated until 1593. Malwa had been reduced in 1572. Kashmir 
 was conquered in 1587, and its last revolt quelled in 1592. Sind 
 was also annexed in 1592; and by the recovery of Kandahar in 
 1594, Akbar extended the Mogul empire from the heart of Afghan- 
 istan across all India north of the Vindhyas, eastward to Orissa, 
 and westward to Sind. He removed the seat of government from 
 Delhi to Agra, and founded Fatehpur Sikri as the future capital 
 of the empire. From this project he was afterward dissuaded, by 
 the superior position of Agra on the great waterway of the Jumna. 
 In 1566 he built the Agra fort, whose red sandstone battlements 
 majestically overhang the river to this day. 
 
 Akbar began to build at Sikri in 1569 and his structures there 
 outdid Louis XIV.'s similar creation at Versailles a century later. 
 Fatehpur Sikri was abandoned after fourteen years and its splendid 
 ruins to-day form the unburied Pompeii of the Mogul empire. 
 
 Akbar's efforts to establish the Mogul empire in southern 
 India were less successful. Those efforts began in 1586, but dur- 
 ing the first twelve years they were frustrated by the valor and 
 statesmanship of Chand Bibi, the Mussulman queen of Ahmad-
 
 114 INDIA 
 
 1599-1605 
 
 nagar. This celebrated lady skillfully united the usually hostile 
 Abyssinian and Persian factions in southern India, together with 
 their armies, and strengthened herself by an alliance with Bijapur 
 and other Mohammedan states of the south. In 1599 Akbar led 
 his armies in person against the princess ; but notwithstanding her 
 assassination by her mutinous troops, Ahmadnagar was not finally 
 reduced till the reign of Akbar's grandson Shah Jahan, in 1636. 
 Akbar subjugated Khandesh, and with this somewhat precarious 
 annexation his conquests in southern India ceased. He returned 
 to northern India in 1601, perhaps feeling that the conquest of the 
 south was beyond the strength of his young empire. 
 
 His last years were embittered by the intrigues of his family, 
 and by the misconduct of his beloved son, Prince Salim, afterward 
 the Emperor Jahangir. On October 15, 1605, he died, and was 
 buried in the noble mausoleum at Sikandra, whose mingled archi- 
 tecture of Buddhist design and Saracenic tracery bears witness 
 to the composite faith of the founder of the Mogul empire. In 
 1873 the British viceroy, Lord Northbrook, presented a cloth of 
 honor to cover the plain marble slab beneath which Akbar lies. 
 
 Akbar's conciliation of the Hindus, and his interest in their 
 literature and religion, made him many enemies among the pious 
 Mussulmans. His favorite wife was a Rajput princess; another 
 of his wives is said to have been a Christian. On Thursday nights 
 he loved to collect professors of many religions around him. He 
 listened impartially to the arguments of the Brahman and the 
 Mussulman, the Zoroastrian, the Jew, the Jesuit, and the skeptic 
 philosopher. The history of his life, the " Akbar-namah," or the 
 " Book of Akbar," written by Abul Fazl in 1597, records such a 
 conference, in which the Christian priest Redif disputed with a body 
 of Mohammedan mullas before an assembly of the doctors of all 
 religions, and is allowed to have had the best of the argument. 
 Starting from the broad ground of general toleration, Akbar was 
 gradually led on by free discussion to question the truth of his 
 inherited Mohammedan creed. The counsels of his friend Abul 
 Fazl, coinciding with that sense of superhuman omnipotence which 
 is bred of despotic imperial power, led Akbar at last to promulgate 
 a new state religion, called " the divine faith," based upon natural 
 theology, and comprising the best practices of all known forms of 
 belief. Abul Fazl was born in 1551 and was connected with 
 Akbar's court from 1574 until his death in 1602, occupying the
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 115 
 
 1593-1605 
 
 highest offices and enjoying the most intimate relations with Akbar. 
 He was introduced at court by his brother Faizi, who was born in 
 1547 and lived at Akbar's court on terms of personal intimacy 
 with the monarch from 1568 until his death in 1595. Faizi held a 
 title at the court of Akbar equivalent to poet laureate. The broth- 
 ers played a large part in the religious life and policy of Akbar. 
 They wrote in Persian, the classical language of the eastern Mo- 
 hammedans, which Akbar made the language for official business 
 in India. 
 
 Of this made-up creed Akbar himself was the prophet, or 
 rather the head of the church. Every morning he worshiped in pub- 
 lic the sun, as the representative of the divine soul which animates 
 the universe, while he was himself worshiped by the ignorant mul- 
 titude. It is doubtful how far he encouraged this popular adora- 
 tion of his person, but he certainly allowed his disciples to prostrate 
 themselves before him in private. The stricter Mohammedans ac- 
 cused him, therefore, of accepting a homage permitted only to God. 
 Akbar secured the establishment of toleration in 1593, five years 
 before the Edict of Nantes. 
 
 Akbar not only subdued all India to the north of the Vindhya 
 Mountains, he also organized it into an empire. He partitioned it 
 into provinces, over each of which he placed a governor, or vice- 
 roy, with full civil and military control. This control was divided 
 into three departments the military, the judicial, including the 
 police, and the revenue. With a view to preventing mutinies of 
 the troops, or assertions of the independence by their leaders, he 
 reorganized the army on a new basis. He substituted, as far as 
 possible, money payments to the soldiers for the old system of 
 grants of land, called jagirs, to the generals. Where this change 
 could not be carried out, he brought the holders of the old military 
 fiefs under the control of the central authority at Delhi. He further 
 checked the independence of his provincial generals, by a sort of 
 feudal organization, in which the Hindu tributary princes took their 
 place side by side with the Mogul nobles. The judicial adminis- 
 tration was presided over by a lord justice, or mir-i-adl, at the 
 capital, aided by kazis, or law-officers, in the principal towns. The 
 police in the cities were under a superintendent, or kotwal, who was 
 also a magistrate. In country districts, where police existed at all, 
 they were left to the management of the landholders or revenue 
 officers, but throughout rural India no regular police force can
 
 116 INDIA 
 
 1593-1605 
 
 be said to have existed for the protection of person and property 
 until after the establishment of British rule. The Hindu village- 
 system had its hereditary watchman for each hamlet. These village 
 watchmen were in many parts of the country taken from the 
 predatory castes, and were as often leagued with the robbers as op- 
 posed to them. The landholders and revenue officers had each their 
 own set of personal police, who plundered the peasantry in their 
 names. 
 
 Akbar's revenue system was based on the ancient Hindu cus- 
 toms, and survives to this day. He first executed a survey or actual 
 measurement of the fields. His officers then found out the produce 
 of each acre of land, and settled the government share, amounting 
 to one-third of the gross produce. Finally, they fixed the rates at 
 which this share of the crop might be commuted into a money pay- 
 ment. These processes, known as the land settlement, were at first 
 repeated every year, but, to save the peasant from the extortions 
 and vexations incident to an annual inquiry, Akbar's land settlement 
 was afterward made for ten years. His officers strictly enforced 
 the payment of a third of the whole produce; and Akbar's land 
 revenue from northern India exceeded what the British levy at the 
 present day. From his fifteen provinces, including Kabul beyond 
 the Afghan frontier, and Khandesh in southern India, he demanded 
 in about 1580, $78,000,000 per annum; or, excluding Kabul, 
 Khandesh, and Sind, $68,500,000. The British land tax from a 
 much larger area of northern India was $44,432,000 in 1901-1902. 
 Allowing for the difference in area and in purchasing power of sil- 
 ver, Akbar's tax was about three times the amount which the British 
 take. Returns for 1594 and 1605 show the land revenue of Akbar 
 at $91,000,000 and $95,000,000. The provinces had also to sup- 
 port a local militia, or bumi, in contradistinction to the regular 
 royal army, at a cost of at least $55,000,000. Excluding both 
 Kabul and Khandesh, Akbar's demand from the soil of northern 
 India was about $123,000,000 per annum, under the two items of 
 land revenue and militia cess. There were also a number of mis- 
 cellaneous taxes. Akbar's total revenue is estimated at about $230,- 
 000,000; while the total British revenue from the corresponding 
 region was $158,912,000 in 1901-1902. 
 
 Akbar's Hindu minister, Raja Todar Mall, conducted the rev- 
 enue settlement, and his name is still a household word among the 
 husbandmen of Bengal. Abul Fazl, the man of letters, and finance
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 117 
 
 1605-1626 
 
 minister of Akbar, compiled a statistical survey of the empire, to- 
 gether with many vivid pictures of his master's court and daily 
 life, in the " Ain-i-Akbari," which may be read with interest at 
 the present day. Abul Fazl was killed in 1602 at the instigation 
 of Prince Salim, the heir to the throne. 
 
 Salim, the favorite son of Akbar, was born late in 1569, and 
 succeeded his father in 1605, and ruled until 1627, under the title 
 of Jahangir, or " conqueror of the world." His reign of twenty- 
 two years was spent in reducing the rebellions of his sons, in ex- 
 alting the influence of his wife, and in festive self-indulgence. He 
 carried on long wars in southern India or the Deccan, but he added 
 little to his father's territories. India south of the Vindhyas still 
 continued apart from the northern empire of Delhi. Malik Am- 
 bar, the Abyssinian minister of Ahmadnagar, maintained, in spite 
 of reverses, the independence of that kingdom. At the end of 
 Jahangir's reign, his own son, Prince Khurram, was a rebel and 
 a refugee in the Deccan, in alliance with Malik Ambar against the 
 imperial troops. The Rajputs also began to reassert their inde- 
 pendence. In 1614 Prince Khurram, on behalf of his father the 
 emperor, defeated the Udaipur raja, but the conquest was only 
 partial and for a time. Meanwhile, the Rajputs formed an im- 
 portant contingent of the imperial armies, and 5000 of their cavalry 
 aided Prince Khurram to put down a revolt in Kabul. The Afghan 
 province of Kandahar was wrested from Jahangir by the Persians 
 in 1 62 1. The land tax of the Mogul empire remained at about 
 $95,000,000, under Jahangir, but his total revenues were estimated 
 by William Hawkins, who resided at the Mogul court from 1609 
 to 161 1, at 500,000,000 rupees, or $275,000,000. 
 
 The principal figure in Jahangir's reign is his empress, Nur 
 Jahan, the " light of the world," otherwise known as Nur Mahal, 
 the " light of the palace." Born in great poverty, but of a noble 
 Persian family, her beauty won the love of Jahangir, while they 
 were both in their first youth, during the reign of Akbar. The old 
 emperor tried to put her out of his son's way, by marrying her to 
 a brave soldier, who obtained high employment in Lower Bengal. 
 Jahangir, on his accession to the throne, commanded her divorce. 
 The husband refused, and was killed. The wife, being brought into 
 the imperial palace, lived for some time in chaste seclusion as a 
 widow, but in the end emerged as the Empress Nur Jahan, the 
 " light of the world." She surrounded herself with her relatives,.
 
 118 INDIA 
 
 1626-1627 
 
 and at first influenced the self-indulgent emperor, Jahangir, for his 
 good; but the jealousy of the imperial princes and of the Mogul 
 generals against her party led to intrigue and rebellion. In 1626 
 the successful general, Mahabat Khan, found himself compelled, in 
 self-defense, to turn against her. He seized the emperor, whom 
 he kept, together with Nur Jahan, in captivity for six months. 
 Jahangir died in November of the following year, 1627, before he 
 had completed the suppression of a rebellion against him, led by his 
 son, Shah Jahan, and his greatest general, Mahabat Khan. 
 
 Jahangir's personal character is vividly portrayed by Sir 
 Thomas Roe, the first British ambassador to India (1615-1618). 
 Agra continued to be the central seat of the government, but the im- 
 perial army on the march formed in itself a splendid capital. Jahan- 
 gir thought that Akbar had too openly severed himself from the 
 Mohammedan faith. The new emperor conformed more strictly to 
 the outward observances of Islam, but lacked the inward religious 
 feeling of his father. While he forbade the use of wine to his 
 subjects, he spent his own nights in drunken revelry. He talked 
 religion over his cups until he reached a certain stage of intoxica- 
 tion, when he " fell to weeping, and to various passions, which 
 kept them to midnight." In public he maintained a strict appear- 
 ance of virtue, and never allowed any person whose breath smelt 
 of wine to enter his presence. On one occasion, a courtier who 
 had shared his midnight revel indiscreetly alluded to it next morn- 
 ing. The sultan gravely examined him as to who could possibly 
 have been the companions of such a debauch, and bastinadoed them 
 so severely that one of them died. 
 
 When sober Jahangir tried to work wisely for his empire. A 
 chain hung down from the citadel to the ground, and communicated 
 with a cluster of golden bells in his own chamber, so that every 
 suitor might apprise the emperor of his demand for justice, without 
 the intervention of the courtiers. Many European adventurers 
 repaired to his court, and Jahangir patronized alike their arts and 
 their religion. In his earlier years he had accepted the new 
 religion, or " divine faith " of his father Akbar. It is said that 
 on his accession he had even permitted the divine honors paid 
 to Akbar to be continued to himself. Jahangir's first wife was a 
 Hindu princess. Figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary adorned 
 his rosary; and two of his nephews embraced Christianity with 
 his approval.
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 119 
 
 1627-1648 
 
 On the news of his father's death, Prince Khurram hurried 
 north from the Deccan, and proclaimed himself emperor, as Shah 
 Jahan, at Agra in January, 1628. He put down forever the court 
 faction of the Empress Nur Jahan, by confining her to private life 
 upon a liberal allowance ; and by murdering his brother, Shahriyar, 
 with all the other members of the house of Akbar who might be- 
 come rivals to the throne. He was just to his people, blameless in 
 his habits, a good financier, and as economical as a magnificent 
 court, splendid public works, and distant military expeditions could 
 permit. Under Shah Jahan the Mogul empire was finally shorn 
 of its Afghan province of Kandahar; but it extended its conquests 
 in southern India or the Deccan, and raised the magnificent build- 
 ings in northern India which now form the most splendid me- 
 morials of the Mogul dynasty. After a temporary occupation of 
 Balkh, and the actual reconquest of Kandahar by the Delhi troops 
 in 1637, Shah Jahan lost much of his Afghan territories, and the 
 province of Kandahar was severed from the Mogul empire by the 
 Persians in 1653. On the other hand, in the Deccan, the kingdom 
 of Ahmadnagar, to which Ellichpur had been united in 1572, was 
 at last annexed to the Mogul empire in 1636; Bidar fort was taken 
 in 1657; while the two other of the five kingdoms, namely Bijapur 
 and Golconda, were forced to pay tribute, although not finally re- 
 duced until the succeeding reign of Aurangzeb. The Marathas now 
 appear on the scene, and commenced, unsuccessfully at Ahmad- 
 nagar in 1637, that series of persistent Hindu attacks which were 
 destined in the next century to break down the Mogul empire. 
 The imperial princes, Aurangzeb and his brothers, carried on the 
 wars in southern India and in Afghanistan for their father Shah 
 Jahan. 
 
 Except during one or two military expeditions, Shah Jahan 
 lived a magnificent life in the north of India. At Agra he raised 
 the exquisite mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, a dream in marble, " de- 
 signed by Titans and finished by jewelers." This was in memory 
 of his wife, the mother of his fourteen children, who died in 1631. 
 Her name was Arjamand Benu, but she was called Mumtaz-i- 
 Mahal, or " exalted of the palace." The Taj was long in building 
 and was not completed until 1648. His pearl mosque, the marble 
 Moti Mas j id, within the Agra fort, is perhaps the purest and 
 loveliest house of prayer in the world. Not content with enrich- 
 ing his grandfather Akbar's capital with these and other architec-
 
 120 INDIA 
 
 1648-1658 
 
 tural glories, Shah Jahan planned the retransfer of the seat of 
 government to Delhi, and adorned that city with buildings of un- 
 rivaled magnificence. Its great mosque, the Jama Mas j id, was com- 
 menced in the fourth year of his reign, and completed in the tenth. 
 The palace of Delhi, now the fort, covered a vast parallelogram, 
 1600 feet by 3200, with exquisite and sumptuous buildings in 
 marble and fine stone. The entrance consists of a deeply recessed 
 gateway leading into a vaulted hall, which springs up two stories 
 high, like the nave of a gigantic Gothic cathedral, 375 feet in 
 length " the noblest entrance," says Ferguson, the historian of 
 architecture, " to any existing palace." The Diwan-i-Khas, or court 
 of private audience, overlooks the river, a masterpiece of delicate 
 inlaid work and poetic design. Shah Jahan spent many years of 
 his reign at Delhi, and prepared the city for its destiny as the most 
 magnificent capital in the world under his successor Aurangzeb. 
 Exquisite as are its public buildings, the manly vigor of Akbar's 
 red-stone fort at Agra, with its bold sculptures and square Hindu 
 construction, has given place to a certain effeminate beauty in the 
 marble structures of Shah Jahan. 
 
 Under Shah Jahan, the Mogul empire attained its highest 
 union of strength with magnificence. His son and successor, 
 Aurangzeb, added to its extent, but at the same time sowed the seeds 
 of its decay. Akbar's land revenue of about $95,000,000 had been 
 raised, chiefly by new conquest, to more than $120,000,000 under 
 Shah Jahan, but this sum included Kashmir and five provinces in 
 Afghanistan, some of which were lost during his reign. The land 
 revenue of the Mogul empire within India was about $114,000,000. 
 The magnificence of Shah Jahan's court was the wonder of Euro- 
 pean travelers. His peacock throne, with its tail blazing in the shift- 
 ing natural colors of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, was valued 
 by the jeweler, Tavernier, at more than $30,000,000. 
 
 Akbar's dynasty lay under the curse of rebellious sons. As 
 Jahangir had risen against his most loving father, Akbar, and as 
 Shah Jahan had mutinied against Jahangir, so Shah Jahan in his 
 turn suffered from the intrigues and rebellions of his family. In 
 1657 the old king fell ill; and Aurangzeb, born in 1618, after a 
 treacherous conflict with his brethren, deposed his father, and pro- 
 claimed himself emperor in 1658. The unhappy emperor was kept 
 in confinement for seven years, and died a state prisoner in the fort 
 of Agra in 1666.
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 121 
 
 1658-1670 
 
 Aurangzeb proclaimed himself emperor under the title of 
 Alamgir, the "conqueror of the universe," and reigned until 1707. 
 Under Aurangzeb the Mogul empire reached its widest limits, but 
 his long rule of forty-nine years merely presents on a more magnifi- 
 cent stage the usual tragic drama of a Mogul reign. In its personal 
 character, it began with his rebellion against his father; consoli- 
 dated itself by the murder of his brethren ; and darkened to a close 
 amid the mutinies, intrigues, and jealousies of his own sons. Its 
 public aspects consisted of a magnificent court in northern India; 
 conquests of the independent Mohammedan kings in the south; 
 and wars against the Hindu powers, which, alike in Rajputana and 
 in southern India or the Deccan, were gathering strength for the 
 overthrow of the Mogul empire. 
 
 The year after his accession, Aurangzeb defeated and put to 
 death his eldest brother, the noble but impetuous Dara. After 
 another twelve months' struggle, he drove out of India his second 
 brother, the self-indulgent Shuja, who perished miserably among 
 the insolent savages of Arakan. His remaining brother, the 
 brave young Murad, was executed in prison the following year, 
 1661. 
 
 Aurangzeb had from boyhood been a Mohammedan of the stern 
 puritan type. Having now killed off his rival brethren, he set up 
 as an orthodox sovereign of the strictest sect of Islam, while his 
 invalid father, Shah Jahan, lingered on in prison, mourning over 
 his murdered sons, until his own death. 
 
 Aurangzeb continued, as emperor, that persistent policy of 
 the subjugation of southern India which he had brilliantly com- 
 menced as his father's lieutenant. Of the five Mohammedan king- 
 doms of the Deccan, Bidar and Ahmadnagar with Ellichpur, had 
 been subdued by his father, Shah Jahan, or had fallen to his arms, 
 as the prince in command of the imperial armies, before his acces- 
 sion to the throne. The two others, Bijapur and Golconda, strug- 
 gled longer, but Aurangzeb was determined at any cost to annex 
 them to the Mogul empire. During the first half of his reign, or 
 for exactly twenty-five years, he waged war in the south by means 
 of his generals (1658-1683). A new Hindu power had arisen in 
 the Deccan, the Marathas, whose history will be traced in more 
 detail in a subsequent chapter. 
 
 The task before Aurangzeb's armies was not only the old 
 one of subduing the Mohammedan kingdoms of Bijapur and Gol-
 
 m INDIA 
 
 1670-1705 
 
 conda, but also the new one of crushing the quick growth of the 
 Hindu or Maratha confederacy. 
 
 During a quarter of a century, his utmost efforts failed. Bija- 
 pur and Golconda were not conquered. In 1670 the Maratha 
 leader, Sivaji, levied one-fourth of the revenues, as tribute from the 
 Mogul provinces in southern India; and in 1674 he crowned him- 
 self an independent sovereign at Raigarh. In 1 680-1 681 Aurang- 
 zeb's son, Prince Akbar, having rebelled against his father, joined 
 the Maratha army. Aurangzeb felt that he must either give up 
 his magnificent palace in the north for a soldier's tent in the Dec- 
 can, or he must relinquish his most cherished scheme of conquering 
 southern India. He accordingly prepared an expedition, on an 
 unrivaled scale of numbers and splendor, to be led by himself. 
 In 1683 he arrived at the head of his grand army in the Deccan, 
 and spent the next half of his reign, or twenty-four years, in the 
 field in southern India. Golconda and Bijapur fell after another 
 severe struggle, and were finally annexed to the Mogul empire 
 in 1688. 
 
 The conquest of these last of the five Mohammedan kingdoms 
 of the Deccan only left the arena bare for the operations of the 
 Marathas. Indeed, the attacks of the Marathas on the two Mo- 
 hammedan states had prepared the way for their annexation by 
 Aurangzeb. The emperor waged war during the remaining twenty 
 years of his life (1688-1707) against the rising Hindu power of 
 the Marathas. Their first great leader, Sivaj i, had proclaimed him- 
 self king in 1674, and died in 1680. Aurangzeb captured his son 
 and successor, Sambhaji, in 1689, and put him to a cruel death; 
 seized the Maratha capital, with many of their forts; and seemed 
 in the first year of the new century to have almost stamped out their 
 existence ; but, after a guerrilla warfare, the Marathas again sprang 
 up into a powerful fighting nation. In 1705 they recovered their 
 forts, while Aurangzeb had exhausted his health, his treasures, and 
 his troops, in the long and fruitless struggle. His soldiery murmured 
 for arrears, and the emperor, now old and peevish, told the mal- 
 contents that if they did not like his service they might quit it, while 
 he disbanded some of his cavalry to ease his finances. 
 
 Meanwhile the Marathas were pressing hungrily on the im- 
 perial camp. The grand army of Aurangzeb had grown during a 
 quarter of a century into an unwieldy capital. Its movements were 
 slow, and incapable of concealment. If Aurangzeb sent out a rapid
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 123 
 
 1662-1705 
 
 small expedition against the Marathas, who plundered and insulted 
 the outskirts of his camp, they cut it to pieces. If he moved out 
 against them in force, they vanished. His own soldiery feasted 
 with the enemy, who prayed, with mock ejaculations, for the health 
 of the emperor as their best friend. 
 
 In 1706 the grand army was so disorganized that Aurangzeb 
 opened negotiations with the Marathas. He even thought of sub- 
 mitting the imperial or Mogul provinces to their tribute; but the 
 insolent exultation of the Maratha chiefs led to the treaty being 
 broken off; and Aurangzeb, in 1706, found shelter in Ahmadnagar, 
 where he died on March 3, 1707, in the fiftieth year of his reign and 
 the eighty-ninth of his life. Dark suspicion of his sons' loyalty, and 
 just fears lest they should subject him to the cruel fate which he 
 had inflicted on his father, left him solitary in his last days. On the 
 approach of death he gave utterance in broken sentences to his 
 worldly counsels and adieus, mingled with terror and remorse, and 
 closing in an agony of desperate resignation : " Come what may, 
 I have launched my vessel on the waves. Farewell! Farewell! 
 Farewell ! " 
 
 The conquest of the Deccan or southern India was the one 
 inflexible purpose of Aurangzeb's life, and has therefore been dealt 
 with here in a continuous narrative. In the north of India great 
 events had also transpired. His general Mir Jumla led the im- 
 perial troops as far as Assam, the extreme eastern province of India 
 in 1662, but amid the pestilential swamps of the rainy season his 
 army melted away, its supplies were cut off, and its march was 
 surrounded by swarms of natives, who knew the country and were 
 accustomed to the climate. Mir Jumla succeeded in extricating 
 the main body of his troops, but died of exhaustion and a broken 
 heart before he reached Dacca, in the Bengal delta. 
 
 In the northwest of India Aurangzeb was not more fortunate. 
 During his time the Sikhs, a theistic and military sect of Hindus, 
 were growing into a power, but it was not till the succeeding reigns 
 that they commenced the series of operations which in the end 
 wrested the Punjab from the Mogul empire. Aurangzeb's bigotry 
 arrayed against him all the Hindu princes and peoples of northern 
 India. He revived the jaziah, or poll-tax on non-Mussulmans, in 
 1677; drove the Hindus out of the administration; and oppressed 
 the widow and children of his father's faithful Hindu general, 
 Jaswant Singh. A local sect of Hindus in northern India was
 
 124 INDIA 
 
 1676-1705 
 
 persecuted into rebellion in 1676; and in 1677, the Rajput states 
 combined against him. The emperor waged a protracted war 
 against them, at one time devasting Rajputana, at another time 
 saving himself and his army from extermination only by a stroke 
 of genius and rare presence of mind. In 1680, his rebel son, 
 Prince Akbar, went over to the Rajputs with his division of the 
 Mogul or imperial army. From that year the permanent alienation 
 of the Rajputs from the Mogul empire dates; and the Hindu 
 chivalry, which had been a source of strength to Akbar the Great, 
 became an element of ruin to Aurangzeb and his successors. The 
 emperor pillaged and slaughtered throughout the Rajput states 
 of Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur. The Rajputs retaliated by ravag- 
 ing the Mohammedan provinces of Malwa, defacing the mosques, 
 insulting the mullas, or priests of Islam, and burning the Koran. 
 In 1 68 1 the emperor patched up a peace in order to allow him to 
 lead the grand army into the Deccan, from which he was destined 
 never to return. Akbar's policy of conciliating the Hindus, and 
 welding them into one empire with his Mohammedan subjects, came 
 to an end under Aurangzeb. 
 
 All northern India except Assam, and the greater part of 
 southern India, paid revenue to Aurangzeb. His Indian provinces 
 covered nearly as large an area as do those of the British empire 
 at the present day, although their dependence on the central govern- 
 ment was less direct. From these provinces his land revenue 
 demand is returned at from $124,000,000 to $212,000,000, a sum 
 which represented at least three times the purchasing power of the 
 land revenue of British India at the present day ; but it is doubtful 
 whether the enormous demand of $212,000,000 was fully realized 
 during any series of years, even at the height of Aurangzeb's 
 power, before he left Delhi for his long southern wars. It was 
 estimated at only $165,000,000 in the last year of his reign, after his 
 absence of a quarter of a century in the Deccan. Fiscal oppressions 
 led to evasions and revolts ; and one or other of the provinces was al- 
 ways in open war against the emperor. The official standard return 
 of Aurangzeb's land revenue was about $195,000,000, and this re- 
 mained the nominal demand in the accounts of the central exchequer 
 during the next half-century, notwithstanding that the empire had 
 fallen to pieces. When the Afghan invader, Ahmad Shah Durani, 
 entered Delhi in 1761, the treasury officers presented him with a 
 statement showing the land revenue of the empire at more than
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 125 
 
 1705-1712 
 
 $195,000,000. The highest land revenue of Aurangzeb, after his 
 annexations in southern India, and before his final reverses, was 
 returned at $212,000,000, of which nearly $209,000,000 were from 
 Indian provinces, and the remainder from Kashmir and Kabul. 
 The total revenue of the Mogul empire under Aurangzeb, from all 
 sources, was estimated in 1695 at $440,000,000, and in 1697 at 
 $424,000,000. The gross taxation levied from British India, de- 
 ducting the opium excise, which is paid by the Chinese consumer, 
 averaged $185,000,000 during the ten years ending 1883. 
 
 Aurangzeb tried to live the life of a model Mohammedan 
 emperor. It is interesting to compare Aurangzeb with his famous 
 European contemporary, Louis XIV., for the length of his reign, 
 for the half century of ruinous wars, for the policy of extreme 
 centralization, for the ceaseless toil of the monarch in the personal 
 government of his realm, for his intolerance and persecution of the 
 Hindus corresponding with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
 and the persecution of the Huguenots, and for the helpless state in 
 which he left his realm. He might have said with the Grand 
 Monarch, " L'etat, c'est moi." Magnificent in his public appear- 
 ances, simple in his private habits, diligent in business, exact in his 
 religious observances, an elegant letter-writer, and ever ready with 
 choice passages alike from the poets and from the Koran, his life 
 would have been a blameless one, if he had had no father to depose, 
 no brethren to murder, and no Hindu subjects to oppress. His 
 bigotry made an enemy of everyone who did not share his own 
 faith; and the slaughter of his kindred compelled him to intrust 
 his whole government to strangers. The Hindus never forgave 
 him; and the Sikhs, the Rajputs, and the Marathas, immediately 
 after his reign, began to close in upon the empire. His Moham- 
 medan generals and viceroys, as a rule, served him well during 
 his vigorous life; but at his death they usurped his children's 
 inheritance. 
 
 The succeeding emperors were puppets in the hands of the 
 too powerful soldiers or statesmen who raised them to the throne, 
 controlled them while on it, and killed them when it suited their 
 purposes to do so. The subsequent history of the empire is a mere 
 record of ruin. For a time Mogul emperors still ruled India from 
 Delhi ; but of the six immediate successors of Aurangzeb, Bahadur 
 Shah (1707-17 1 2) and Johander Shah (1712) were under the 
 control of an unscrupulous general, Zul-fikar Khan, while the four
 
 126 INDIA 
 
 1712-1751 
 
 others, from 171 2 to 1720, were the creatures of a couple of Sayyid 
 adventurers who well earned their title of the " king-makers." 
 
 From the year 1720 the breaking up of the empire took a 
 more open form. Chin Kulick Khan, who had received the title 
 of Nizam-ul-Mulk Asof Jah from the Mogul emperor, by a series 
 of intrigues and campaigns made himself independent ruler of the 
 viceroyalty of the Deccan which had been intrusted to him, about 
 1720 to 1724. His successors continue to rule at Haidarabad under 
 the title of nizam. Saadat Ali Khan, a Persian Shiah, who had 
 risen to the post of wazir, or prime minister of the empire, prac- 
 tically established his own dynasty as the nawab wazir of Oudh, 
 of which place he had been appointed governor in 1732. He died 
 in 1743 and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Safdar Jang, whose 
 son Shuja-ud-daula ruled from 1753 to 1775 and was defeated in 
 the battle of Baxar in 1764. In Bengal, the nawab or governor, 
 Murshid Kuli Khan, sometimes called Jafar Khan, or Brahman, 
 make his province practically independent during his rule from 
 1704 to 1725. 
 
 The Hindu subjects of the empire were at the same time 
 asserting their independence. The Sikh sect in the Punjab was 
 driven by the oppression of the Delhi emperors into revolt in 1710, 
 and was mercilessly crushed by the Sayyids, six years later. The 
 indelible memory of the cruelties then inflicted by the Mogul troops 
 nerved the Sikh nation with that hatred to Delhi which served 
 the British cause so well in 1857. Their leader, Banda, was carried 
 about in an iron cage, tricked out in the mockery of imperial 
 robes, with scarlet turban and cloth of gold. His son's heart was 
 torn out before his eyes, and thrown in his face. He himself was 
 then pulled to pieces with red-hot pincers; and the Sikhs were 
 exterminated like mad dogs. The Hindu princes of Rajputana 
 were more fortunate. Ajit Singh of Jodhpur asserted his independ- 
 ence, and Rajputana practically severed its connection with the 
 Mogul empire in 171 5. The Marathas having enforced their claim 
 for tribute throughout southern India, burst through the Vindhyas 
 into the north, and obtained from the Delhi emperors the cession of 
 Malwa (1749) and Orissa ( 1751 ), with an imperial grant of tribute 
 from Bengal (1751). 
 
 While the Mohammedan governors and Hindu subjects of the 
 empire were thus becoming independent of the Delhi emperors, two 
 hew sets of external enemies appeared; one set from central Asia,
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 127 
 
 1739-1757 
 
 the other set from the sea. In 1739, Nadir Shah, who from a 
 robber chieftain had become the commander of the Persian army 
 and in 1736 the usurper of the throne of Persia, swooped down on 
 India, with his destroying host, and, after a massacre in the streets 
 of Delhi and a fifty-eight days' sack, returned through the north- 
 western passes with a booty estimated at $155,000,000. The de- 
 stroying host of the Persian king was succeeded by a series of 
 invasions from Afghanistan. Six times between 1747 and 1767 the 
 Afghans burst through the passes under Ahmad Shah Durani, pil- 
 laging, slaughtering, and then scornfully retiring to their homes 
 with the plunder of the Mogul empire. Ahmad was born about 
 1724, the son of the hereditary chief of the Abdali tribe of Afghans. 
 From 1738 to 1747 he was in the service of Nadir Shah, after whose 
 assassination in 1747 he made his way to Kandahar and had himself 
 crowned shah or king, and changed his tribal name to Durani. 
 He died in 1773. In 1738, Kabul, the last Afghan province of the 
 Mogul, was severed from Delhi; and, in 1752, Ahmad Shah ob- 
 tained the cession of the Punjab from the miserable emperor. The 
 cruelties inflicted upon Delhi and northern India during these six 
 Afghan invasions form an appalling tale of bloodshed and wanton 
 cruelty. The wretched capital opened her gates, and was fain to 
 receive the Afghans as guests. Yet in 1757 it suffered for six weeks 
 every enormity which a barbarian army can inflict upon a prostrate 
 foe. Meanwhile the Afghan cavalry were scouring the country, 
 slaying, burning, and mutilating, in the meanest hamlet as in the 
 greatest town. They took especial delight in sacking the holy places 
 of the Hindus, and murdering the defenseless votaries at the shrines. 
 A single example must suffice to show the miseries inflicted 
 by the invaders of India from the northwest. A horde of 25,000 
 Afghan horsemen swooped down upon the sacred city of Muttra 
 during a festival, while it was thronged with peaceful Hindu pil- 
 grims engaged in their devotions. " They burned the houses," 
 says the Tyrolese Jesuit Tieffenthaler, who was in India at that 
 time, " together with their inmates, slaughtering others with the 
 sword and the lance ; haling off into captivity maidens and youths, 
 men and women. In the temples they slaughtered cows [the 
 sacred animal of the Hindus] and smeared the images and pave- 
 ment with the blood." The borderland between Afghanistan and 
 India lay silent and waste; indeed, districts far within the Indian 
 frontier, which had once been densely inhabited, and which are
 
 128 INDIA 
 
 1752-1761 
 
 now again thickly peopled, were swept bare of inhabitants. Thus 
 Gujranwala, the seat of the ancient capital of the Punjab in Bud- 
 dhist times, was utterly depopulated. Its present inhabitants are 
 immigrants of comparatively recent date. The district, which was 
 stripped of its inhabitants in the eighteenth century, has now a new 
 population of a million. 
 
 The other set of invaders came from over the sea. In the 
 wars between the French and English in southern India, the last 
 vestiges of the Delhi authority in the Karnatik disappeared (1748- 
 1761) ; while, as a result of Maja Muroia's victory at Baxar in 1764, 
 Bengal, Behar, and Orissa were handed over to the English by an 
 imperial grant in 1765. The British obtained these three fertile 
 provinces as the nominee of the emperor ; but the battle of Panipat 
 had already reduced the throne of Delhi to a shadow. That battle 
 was fought on January 6, 1761, between the Afghan invader 
 Ahmad Shah and the Maratha powers, on the memorable plain of 
 Panipat on which Babar and Akbar had twice won the sovereignty 
 of India. The Afghans defeated the Marathas; but although the 
 Mohammedans could still win victories, they could no longer rule 
 India. During the anarchy which followed, the British patiently 
 built up a new power out of the wreck of the Mogul empire. Pup- 
 pet emperors continued to reign at Delhi over a numerous seraglio, 
 under such lofty titles as Akbar II. or Alamgir II., but their power 
 was confined to the palace, while Marathas, Sikhs, and Englishmen 
 were fighting for the sovereignty of India. The last of these pen- 
 sioned Mogul kings of Delhi emerged for a moment as a rebel 
 during the Mutiny of 1857, and died a state prisoner in Rangoon, 
 the capital of British Burma, in 1862. 
 
 Akbar had rendered a great empire possible in India by con- 
 ciliating the native Hindu races. He thus raised up a powerful 
 third party, consisting of the native military peoples of India, which 
 enabled him alike to prevent new Mohammedan invasions from 
 central Asia, and to keep in subjection his own Mohammedan 
 governors of provinces. Under Aurangzeb and his miserable suc- 
 cessors this wise policy of conciliation was given up. Accordingly, 
 new Mohammedan hordes soon swept down from Afghanistan ; the 
 Mohammedan governors of Indian provinces set up as independent 
 potentates: and the warlike Hindu races, who had helped Akbar 
 to create the Mogul empire, became, under his foolish posterity, 
 the chief agents of its ruin.
 
 MOGUL DYNASTY 129 
 
 1761 
 
 Before the British appeared as conquerors, the Mogul empire 
 had broken up. Their final and most perilous wars were neither 
 with the Delhi king, nor with his revolted Mohammedan viceroys, 
 but with the two Hindu confederacies, the Marathas and the Sikhs. 
 Mohammedan princes fought against them in Bengal, in the Kar- 
 natik, and in Mysore; but the longest opposition to the British 
 conquest of India came from the Hindus. Their last Maratha war 
 dates as late as 1818, and the Sikh confederation was overcome 
 only in 1849.
 
 Chapter XI 
 
 THE MARATHAS. 1650-1818 
 
 A BOUT the year 1634 a Maratha soldier of fortune, Shahji 
 f-\ Bhonsla by name, began to play a conspicuous part in south- 
 X JLern India. He fought on the side of the two independent 
 Mohammedan states, Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, against the Mo- 
 guls; and left a band of followers, together with a military fief, 
 to his son Sivaji, born in 1627. Sivaji formed a national party out 
 of the Hindu tribes of the Deccan, a native Hindu party which was 
 opposed alike to the imperial armies from the north, and to the 
 independent Mohammedan kingdoms of the south. There were 
 thus, from 1650 onward, three powers in the Deccan: first, the 
 ever-invading troops of the Delhi empire ; second, the forces of the 
 two remaining independent Mohammedan states of southern India, 
 Ahmadnagar and Bijapur; third, the military organization of the 
 local Hindu tribes, which ultimately grew into the Maratha con- 
 federacy. 
 
 During the eighty years' war of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, 
 with a view to the conquest of the independent Mohammedan king- 
 doms in southern India (1627-1707), this third or Hindu party 
 fought sometimes for the Delhi emperors, sometimes for the in- 
 dependent Mohammedan kingdoms, and obtained a constantly in- 
 creasing importance. The Mogul armies from the north, and the 
 independent Mohammedan kingdoms of the south, gradually ex- 
 terminated each other. Being foreigners, they had to recruit their 
 exhausted forces from outside. The Hindu or Maratha confederacy 
 drew its inexhaustible native levies from the wide tract known 
 as Maharashtra, stretching from the Berars in central India to near 
 the south of the Bombay presidency. The Marathas were therefore 
 courted alike by the imperial generals from Delhi and by the 
 independent Mohammedan kingdoms of the Deccan. Those king- 
 doms, with the help of the Marathas, long proved a match for the 
 imperial troops; but no sooner were the Delhi armies driven back, 
 
 130
 
 THEMARATHAS 131 
 
 1650-1680 
 
 than the Marathas proceeded to despoil the independent Mus- 
 sulman kingdoms. On the other hand, the Delhi generals, when 
 allied with the Marathas, could overpower the Mohammedan states. 
 
 Sivaji, the great Maratha leader, saw the strength of his posi- 
 tion, and, by a life of treachery, assassination, and hard fighting, 
 he won for the Marathas the practical supremacy in southern 
 India. As a basis for his operations, he perched himself safe in 
 almost impregnable hill forts among the Western Ghats. His 
 troops consisted of Hindu spearmen, mounted on hardy ponies. 
 They were the peasant proprietors of southern India, and they 
 could be dispersed or promptly called together according to the 
 season of the agricultural year. Except at seed time and harvest, 
 they were always at leisure for war. Sivaji had therefore the com- 
 mand of an unlimited body of men, without the expense of a stand- 
 ing army. With these he swooped down upon his enemies, exacted 
 tribute, or forced them to come to terms. He then paid off his 
 soldiery by a part of the plunder, and retreated with the lion's share 
 to his hill forts. In 1659 he lured the general of the independent 
 Mohammedan kingdom of Bijapur into an ambush, stabbed him at 
 a friendly conference, and exterminated his army. In 1662 Sivaji 
 pillaged as far as the extreme north of the Bombay presidency, and 
 sacked the imperial city of Surat. On this occasion the English 
 president at Surat, Sir George Oxenden, succeeded in beating off 
 the Marathas from the English factory. Surat was raided by the 
 Marathas several times in succeeding years, but the European fac- 
 tories were generally able to escape pillage. In 1664 he assumed 
 the title of raja or king, with the royal prerogative of coining 
 money in his own name. The year 1665 found Sivaji helping the 
 Mogul armies against the independent Mussulman state of Bijapur. 
 In 1666 he was induced to visit Delhi. Being coldly received by 
 the Emperor Aurangzeb, and placed under restraint, he escaped 
 to the south and raised the standard of revolt. In 1674 Sivaji 
 enthroned himself with great pomp at Raigarh, weighing himself 
 in a balance against gold, and distributing his weight in gold among 
 his Brahmans. He sent forth his hosts as far as the Karnatik in 
 1676, and he died in 1680. 
 
 The Emperor Aurangzeb would have done wisely to have left 
 the independent Mussulman kings of the Deccan alone, until he 
 had crushed the rising Maratha power. Indeed, a great statesman 
 would have buried the old quarrel between the Mohammedans of
 
 132 INDIA 
 
 1680-1740 
 
 the north and south, and would have united the whole force of 
 Islam against the Hindu confederacy, which was rapidly growing 
 to be the strongest power in the Deccan; but the fixed resolve of 
 Aurangzeb's life was to annex to Delhi the Mohammedan king- 
 doms of southern India. By the time he had carried out this 
 scheme he had wasted his armies and left the Mogul empire ready 
 to break into pieces at the first touch of the Maratha spear. 
 
 Sambhaji succeeded his father, Sivaji, in 1680, and ruled till 
 1689. His reign was spent in wars against the Portuguese settle- 
 ments on the southwestern coast of India, and against the armies 
 of the Mogul empire. In 1689 Aurangzeb captured him, blinded 
 his eyes with a red-hot iron, cut out the tongue which had blas- 
 phemed the Prophet, and struck off his head. His son, Sahu, then 
 six years of age, was also captured and kept a prisoner till the death 
 of Aurangzeb. In 1707 he was restored, on acknowledging al- 
 legiance to Delhi ; but his long captivity among the Moguls left him 
 only half a Maratha. He wasted his life in his seraglio, and 
 resigned the government of his territories to his Brahman minister, 
 Balaji Vishwanath, who held the title of peshwa from 171 2 to 1720. 
 This office of peshwa or prime minister became hereditary, and the 
 power of the peshwa superseded that of the Maratha kings. The 
 royal family of Sivaji only retained the little principalities of Satara 
 and Kolhapur. Satara lapsed to the British, for want of a direct 
 heir, in 1849. Kolhapur has survived through British clemency, 
 and is now ruled, under British control, by the representative of 
 Sivaji's line. 
 
 Meanwhile the peshwas were building up at Poona the great 
 Maratha confederacy. In 1718 Balaji, the first peshwa, marched 
 an army to Delhi in support of the Sayyid " king-makers." In 1720 
 he extorted an imperial grant of the tribute of the Deccan. The 
 Marathas were also confirmed in the sovereignty of their own 
 southern countries round Poona and Satara. The second peshwa, 
 Baji Rao (1721-1740), converted the grant of the tribute of the 
 Deccan, which had been given by the Delhi emperor in 1720, into 
 a Maratha sovereignty over the Deccan. The second peshwa also 
 wrested the province of Malwa from the Mogul empire in 1736, 
 together with the country on the northwest of the Vindhyas, from 
 the Narbada to the Chambal. In 1739 he captured Bassein from 
 the Portuguese. Malwa was finally ceded by the Delhi emperor 
 to the Marathas in 1743.
 
 THE MARATHAS 133 
 
 1740-1761 
 
 The third peshwa, Balaji Baji Rao, succeeded in 1740, and 
 carried the Maratha terror into the heart of the Mogul empire. The 
 Deccan became merely a starting-point for a vast series of their 
 expeditions to the north and the east. Within the Deccan itself 
 the peshwa augmented his sovereignty, at the expense of the Mo- 
 hammedan nizam of Haidarabad, after two wars. The great cen- 
 ters of the Maratha power were now fixed at Poona in Bombay 
 and Nagpur in the Central Provinces. In 1 741-1742, a general of 
 the Nagpur branch of the Maratha confederacy, known as the 
 Bhonslas, swept down upon Lower Bengal; but, after plundering 
 to the suburbs of the Mohammedan capital of Murshidabad, he was 
 driven back through Orissa by the nawab Ali Vardi Khan. The 
 " Maratha ditch," or semicircular moat around part of Calcutta, 
 records to this day the panic which then spread throughout Lower 
 Bengal. Next year, 1743, the head of the Nagpur branch, Raghuji 
 Bhonsla, invaded Lower Bengal in person. From this date, not- 
 withstanding quarrels between the Poona and Nagpur Marathas 
 over the spoil, the fertile provinces of the lower Ganges became a 
 plundering ground of the Bhonslas. In 1751 they obtained a for- 
 mal grant from the nawab Ali Vardi Khan of the tribute of Lower 
 Bengal, together with the cession of Orissa. In northern India 
 the Poona Marathas raided as far as the Punjab, and drew down 
 upon them the wrath of Ahmad Shah Durani, the Afghan, who had 
 already wrested that province from Delhi. At the battle of 
 Panipat in 1761 the Marathas were overthrown by the combined 
 Mohammedan forces of the Afghans and of the northern provinces 
 which still nominally remained to the Mogul empire. 
 
 The fourth peshwa, Madhu Rao, succeeded to the Maratha 
 sovereignty in this moment of ruin (1761). The Hindu con- 
 federacy seemed doomed to destruction, alike by internal dissen- 
 sions and by the superior force of the Afghan arms. As early as 
 1742, the Poona and Nagpur branches had taken the field against 
 each other, in their quarrels over the plunder of Bengal. Before 
 1 76 1 two other branches, under Holkar and Sindhia, held inde- 
 pendent sway in the old Mogul province of Malwa and the neigh- 
 boring tracts, now divided between the states of Indore and Gwalior. 
 At Panipat, Holkar, the head of the Indore branch, deserted the 
 line of battle the moment he saw the tide turn, and his treachery 
 rendered the Maratha rout complete. The peshwa was now little 
 more than the nominal head of the five great Maratha houses. The
 
 134 
 
 INDIA 
 
 1761-1772 
 
 word peshwa is a title. Sindhia, Holkar, the Bhonsla, and the Gaek- 
 war are the heads of the families of the respective names. The full 
 form of their title is the Maharaja Sindhia, or the maharaja of 
 Gwalior, etc. These five Maratha houses or dynasties had separate 
 territories and armies. Their five capitals were at Poona, the seat 
 of the peshwas ; at Nagpur, the capital of the Bhonslas ; at Gwalior, 
 the residence of Sindhia; at Indore, the capital of Holkar; and at 
 
 Baroda, the seat of the rising power of the Gaekwars. Madhu Rao, 
 the fourth peshwa, just managed to hold his own against the 
 Mohammedan princes of Haidarabad and Mysore, and against the 
 Bhonsla branch of the Marathas in Berar. His younger brother, 
 Narayan Rao, succeeded him as fifth peshwa in 1772, but was 
 quickly assassinated. The peshwas were the great Maratha power 
 in southern India; the other four or northern Maratha branches
 
 THE MARATHAS 135 
 
 1761-1817 
 
 were Sindhia and Holkar, the Bhonslas of Nagpur, and the Gaek- 
 wars of Baroda. We shall briefly relate the fortunes of these four 
 northern branches. 
 
 The peshwa's power at Poona began to grow weak, as that 
 of his nominal masters, the royal descendants of Sivaji, had faded 
 out of sight. The peshwas came of a high Brahman lineage, while 
 the actual fighting force of the Marathas consisted of low-caste 
 Hindus. It thus happened that each Maratha general who rose 
 to independent territorial sway was inferior in caste to, although 
 possessed of more real power, than the peshwa, the titular head of 
 the confederacy. Of the two great northern houses, Holkar was 
 descended from a shepherd, and Sindhia from a slipper-bearer. The 
 Marathas under Holkar and Sindhia lay quiet for a time after their 
 crushing disaster at Panipat in 1761; but within ten years of that 
 fatal day they had established themselves throughout Malwa, and 
 proceeded to invade the Rajput, Jat, and Rohilla provinces, from 
 the Punjab on the west to Oudh in the east. In 1765 the titular 
 emperor, Shah Alam, had sunk into a British pensioner, after his 
 defeat by Sir Hector Munro at Baxar in 1764. In 1771 the 
 emperor gave himself over to the Marathas. Sindhia and Holkar 
 nominally maintained him on his throne at Delhi, but held him a 
 virtual prisoner till they were overthrown in the second Maratha 
 war. The dynasties of both Sindhia and Holkar have preserved 
 to the present day their rule over the most fertile portion of Malwa. 
 
 The third of the northern Maratha houses, namely the 
 Bhonslas of Berar and the Central Provinces, occupied themselves 
 with raids to the east. Operating from their base at Nagpur, they 
 had extorted in 1751 the tribute of Lower Bengal, together with 
 the sovereignty of Orissa. The acquisition of Lower Bengal by 
 the British (1756-1765) put a stop to their raids. In 1803 a divi- 
 sion of the English army drove the Bhonsla Marathas out of Orissa. 
 In 1 81 7 their power was finally broken by the last Maratha war. 
 Their headquarter territories, now forming the Central Provinces, 
 were administered under the guidance of British residents from 
 1817 to 1853. On the death of the last Raghuji Bhonsla without a 
 direct male heir, in 1853, the Nagpur Maratha. territories lapsed 
 to the British, who organized them as the Central Provinces in 
 1861. 
 
 The fourth of the northern Maratha houses, namely, Baroda, 
 extended its power throughout Gujarat, on the northwestern coast
 
 136 INDIA 
 
 1761-1818 
 
 of Bombay, and the adjacent peninsula of Kathiawar. The scat- 
 tered but wealthy dominions known as the territories of the Gaek- 
 war were thus formed. Since the last Maratha war, in 1817, 
 Baroda has been ruled by the Gaekwars, with the help of an 
 English resident. In 1874, the reigning Gaekwar was tried by a 
 high commission, composed of three European and three native 
 members, on the charge of attempting to poison the resident, and 
 deposed; but the British government refrained from annexing the 
 state, and raised a descendant of the founder of the family from 
 obscure poverty to the state cushion. 
 
 While the four northern houses of the Marathas were pursuing 
 their separate careers, the peshwa's power was being broken to 
 pieces by family intrigues. The sixth peshwa, Madhu Rao Narayan, 
 was born after his father's death; and during his short life of 
 twenty-one years the power remained in the hands of his minister, 
 Nana Farnavis. Raghuba, the uncle of the peshwa, disputed the 
 birth of the posthumous child, Madhu Rao, and claimed for himself 
 the office of peshwa. The infant's guardian, Nana Farnavis, having 
 called in the French, the British at Bombay sided with Raghuba. 
 These alliances brought on the first Maratha war, 1 779-1 781, 
 ending with the Treaty of Salbai (1782). That treaty ceded the 
 Islands of Salsette and Elephanta near Bombay, together with two 
 others to the British, secured to Raghuba a handsome pension, and 
 confirmed the child-peshwa in his sovereignty, but the young peshwa 
 only reached manhood to commit suicide at the age of twenty-one. 
 
 His cousin, Baji Rao II., succeeded him in 1795 as the seventh 
 and last peshwa. The northern Maratha house of Holkar now took 
 the lead among the Marathas, and forced the peshwa to seek pro- 
 tection with the English. By the Treaty of Bassein in 1802 Baji 
 Rao the peshwa agreed to receive a British force to maintain him 
 in his dominions. The northern Maratha houses combined to break 
 down his treaty. The second Maratha war followed (1802-1804). 
 General Wellesley, afterward Duke of Wellington, crushed the 
 forces of the Sindhai and Nagpur branches of the Marathas on the 
 field of Assaye and Argaum in the south, while Lord Lake disposed 
 of the Maratha armies at Laswari and Delhi in the north. In 1804 
 Holkar was completely defeated at Dig. These campaigns led to 
 large cessions of territory to the British, to the final overthrow 
 of French influence in India, and to the restoration of the titular 
 Delhi emperor under the protection of the English.
 
 THE MARATHA MAHARAJA OF HOLKAR AT THE HEAD OF HIS CAVALRY IN THE 
 BATTLE OF ASSAYE 
 Drawing by R, Caton Woodvillt
 
 THE MARATHAS 137 
 
 1818 
 
 In 1817-1818, the peshwa, Holkar, and the Bhonsla at Nag- 
 pur, took up arms, each on his own account, against the British, 
 and were defeated in detail. That war broke the Maratha power 
 forever. The peshwa, Baji Rao, surrendered himself to the British 
 and his territories were annexed to the Bombay presidency. The 
 peshwa remained a British pensioner at Bithur, near Cawnpur in 
 northern India, on a magnificent allowance, till his death. His 
 adopted son grew up into the infamous Nana Sahib of the Mutiny 
 of 1857, when the last relic of the peshwas disappeared from the 
 eyes of men.
 
 Chapter XII 
 
 EARLY EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS. 1498-1800 
 
 THE Mohammedan invaders of India had entered from the 
 northwest. The Christian conquerors of India came by 
 the sea from the south. Twenty-eight years lacking a 
 month before Babar's famous victory at Panipat which transformed 
 the history of India, there landed on the Malabar coast of India a 
 little expedition whose arrival was fated even more than the triumph 
 of the Mogul conqueror to alter the destinies of the great penin- 
 sula and to make the date 1498 the most important in Indian 
 history since the departure of Alexander the Great in 325 b. c. 
 The tremendous importance in the history of both India and Europe 
 of the voyage of Vasco da Gama has ranked it with Columbus's 
 famous voyage of discovery six years earlier. This has perhaps 
 led to the misconception that India was as unknown to Europe and 
 of as little importance to Europe before that date as was America. 
 The truth is far otherwise, for, though the arms of the Per- 
 sians and the Greeks, alone among the nations ruling the shores of 
 the Mediterranean, had penetrated to India before the days of the 
 Portuguese, the trade of India had been one of the most important 
 factors in determining the course of empire and the lines of his- 
 torical development in western Asia, in northern Africa, and in 
 Europe from prehistoric times downward. As far back as the 
 eye of the historian may find a record to read, memorials of Indian 
 trade are discovered. The possession of the trade of India and the 
 East was not the least important factor in determining the rise and 
 fall of western empires in the pre-Christian centuries and in the 
 Middle Ages, as in modern times. By three great highways, the 
 strange and valued products of the Indies for thirty centuries 
 passed from the confines and coasts of India to the shores of the 
 Mediterranean; and now the present age is busy raising the em- 
 bargo of four centuries from the three ancient highroads of the 
 world's most valuable commerce. In 1869 the opening of the Suez 
 Canal revived the importance of the Red Sea route between Europe 
 
 138
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 139 
 
 1498 
 
 and the East; more recently Russia's Trans-Caucasian and Trans- 
 Caspian Railways have opened roads of steel and steam where 
 once the caravan crossed the deserts of central Asia with the mer- 
 chandise of India and sought the ports of the Caspian and the 
 Euxine; and the projected construction of the extension of the 
 Anatolian Railroad to Bussorah will again open the oldest and 
 most historic of all the routes of Indian trade, the Persian Gulf- 
 Syrian line. 
 
 The Chaldeans " whose cry is in their ships " enriched Baby- 
 lon with the traffic of the East, and passed it on up the river valleys 
 of Mesopotamia and across the desert to the marts of Tyre and 
 Sidon, whence the Phoenicians, the lords of the western seas, 
 distributed the eagerly sought goods to the nations of the Mediter- 
 ranean. The fate not only of Babylonia and Assyria and of Media 
 and Persia was affected by this trade, but the prosperity and the 
 wreck of the Hebrew nation might almost be spoken of as an epi- 
 sode in the history of this great trade route. Alexander and 
 Pompey made the control of this trade route for the first time a 
 prize of European empire. When the headship of empire passed 
 from Rome to Constantinople, the trade of the East became a 
 valued perquisite of the Byzantines. The rapid spread of the 
 Saracen empire in the seventh century restored this trophy to Asia ; 
 and to the splendor of Damascus and Bagdad, India was a notable 
 contributor. From the eleventh century onward, the gigantic raids 
 of the Turkish and Mogul hordes from the east, and the pious zeal 
 of the Crusader from the west, interrupted trade by this route and 
 finally the spread of the empire of the Ottoman Turk led to its 
 almost complete disuse in the fifteenth century. 
 
 The central Asian route, while free from the perils of the sea, 
 was still a tedious and dangerous one and the most liable to in- 
 terruption by the central Asian hordes. There is evidence of the 
 very ancient use of this route and the fabled voyage of the Argo- 
 nauts at least indicates the existence of early civilization on the 
 shores of the Euxine and the presence there of rich prizes worth the 
 seeking. One branch of this central Asian route touches the Cas- 
 pian, where some of the trade was diverted to the Volga, but most 
 of it passed by Tiflis to the Black Sea. Another branch of the route 
 ran by Tabriz and the Erzerum direct to the Euxine, from whose 
 eastern shores the bulk of the trade passed to Constantinople, which 
 was the great emporium where Asia and Europe exchanged the
 
 140 INDIA 
 
 1498 
 
 commerce of this route. Some of the trade from the earliest times 
 crossed the sea to the shores of the Crimea, whence it followed the 
 Don and the Dneiper to the northern marts, whither, in the Middle 
 Ages, the merchants of the Hansa came to traffic. The central 
 Asian route, like the Persian Gulf-Syrian one, was closed almost 
 absolutely by the Moguls and the Turks. It is, however, of in- 
 terest to note that in the days of Queen Mary an Englishman, 
 Anthony Jenkinson, who had reached Russia by way of Archangel, 
 followed the conquering armies of Ivan the Terrible down to 
 Astrakhan, and thence pushed on into central Asia as far as Bok- 
 hara (1558), where for the first time an Englishman beheld natives 
 of India who had come thither to trade. 
 
 To which dynasty of the Pharaohs the credit is due for open- 
 ing the Red Sea route to India is past finding out, but no doubt 
 the mariner had been plying from the Red Sea to the Malabar 
 coast for a thousand years before the great Pharaoh Necho sought 
 to further extend Egyptian trade by his public works at home and 
 by the expeditions which he is said to have fitted out to explore 
 unknown seas. Three centuries later the Macedonian conqueror 
 founded Alexandria (332 b. c.) which was the greatest mart of 
 Indian trade in the Levant from the days of the Ptolemies until the 
 Ottoman forces of the Sultan Selim I. conquered Egypt in 1517. 
 It was in the last days of the Ptolemies that the pilot Hippalus dis- 
 covered the phenomenon of the monsoons which enabled the sailor 
 to navigate his ship intelligently and far more easily across the 
 dangerous Indian Sea and furnished such a stimulus to trade that 
 in the first century Pliny reckoned the annual value of the Indian 
 trade at more than 55,000,000 sesterces, or $2,000,000. At a 
 slightly later date, the existing narrative of the " Circumnavi- 
 gation of the Indian Ocean " l was written describing this route, 
 while, from the days of the Byzantine splendor under Justinian, 
 dates the account of Cosmas Indicopleustes in his " Christian Topog- 
 raphy Embracing the Whole World," which is perhaps the most 
 valuable western account of India prior to the thirteenth century. 
 The Red Sea route was operated by Arab traders from the rise of 
 the Saracen empire to the arrival of the Portuguese in India 
 and of the Ottoman Turks in Egypt. From Alexandria the dis- 
 tributing trade was of enormous value and the contest for its con- 
 
 1 Translated in J. W. McCrindle's " Commerce and Navigation of the Eryth- 
 rean Sea."
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 141 
 
 1498 
 
 trol is the story of the rise and fall of cities and states along the 
 shores of the Mediterranean. The two great rivals for this trade 
 during the Middle Ages were the Genoese and the Venetians. Their 
 trade development is one of the most important facts of the age of 
 the Crusades. Gradually the Venetians forged ahead of their rivals, 
 though the fall of the Latin empire of Constantinople in 1261 gave 
 the Genoese practically a monopoly of the trade of that city until 
 its capture by the Ottoman sultan in 1453. Venice acquired the 
 major share of the trade coming by the Syrian and Red Sea routes, 
 and Alexandria and Famagusta in Cyprus were her great emporia 
 in the Levant. The successive triumphs of the Ottoman Turks in 
 the Levant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gradually ruined 
 Venice, and her humiliation was at last completed by the loss in 
 1669 of Candia, the last outpost of her great trade empire. 
 
 The wealth-giving products of India, China, and the East 
 were thus known and valued in the West before the days of Alex- 
 ander, and from Alexander's great diffusion of Hellenism till the 
 rise of the new Hellenism in the fifteenth century, but through these 
 long ages, had Europe been entirely ignorant of the marvelous land 
 with its myriads of strange peoples? By no means, for in three 
 ways there filtered through to the inquiring mediaeval citizen of the 
 West enough to stimulate the curiosity to know more. That the 
 Greek, the Roman, and the Byzantine possessed some such knowl- 
 edge has been seen. The expulsion of the Byzantines from Egypt 
 and Syria broadened rather than narrowed the channels of informa- 
 tion. From the seventh to the thirteenth centuries the Saracen 
 encouraged both trade and learning as well as conquest, and no 
 doubt many an observing Arab visited India in those days, and not 
 a few have left some record of their observations. Even later, an 
 Arab of Tangier, Ibn-Batuta, resided at the court of Moham- 
 med Tughak from 1334 to 1342, and left an account of his ex- 
 periences. 
 
 Love of adventure as well as of gain stirred in the hearts of the 
 traders of Christian Europe and now and then some venturesome 
 one extended his journey into the wondrous East, and occasionally 
 one came back to tell the story of the marvels. Such voyagers were 
 Marco Polo, the Venetian, at the close of the thirteenth century; 
 Nicolo Conti, another Venetian of the early fifteenth century ; Atha- 
 nasius Nikitin, a Russian, who was in India about 1470; Hieronimo 
 di Santo Stefano of Genoa, who was in India from 1494 to 1499;
 
 142 INDIA 
 
 1498 
 
 and finally Ludovico di Varthema, a native of Bologna, reached 
 India overland and spent part of the first decade of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury in India. Christian venture has often kept company with com- 
 mercial venture, and close upon the heels of the Polos went a fol- 
 lower of the good Saint Francis of Assisi, who journeyed through 
 India to China, where he became Archbishop of Peking. This 
 valiant friar, John of Monte Corvino, was followed by several other 
 Franciscans, last of whom to record his story was John de Mari- 
 gnolli, who passed through India in 1347- 1349 the years when 
 the Black Death was devastating Europe. That the West cared 
 to hear about the East is abundantly shown by the writings of Sir 
 John Mandeville and their popularity. 
 
 The revival of learning with its widening of human interests 
 early stimulated a desire for a wider knowledge of the earth, its 
 lands, its seas, and its peoples. The scholar in his study eagerly 
 pored over the pages of the long-forgotten geographical treatises 
 of the ancients, such as that of Ptolemy of Alexandria. Those that 
 went down to the sea in ships sought to correct their imperfect 
 charts by comparison with the ancient records, and the spirit of 
 venture stirred in them to visit forgotten shores, to penetrate to 
 lands dimly outlined by some voyager of old, and even to find some 
 new land or sail some new sea. 
 
 Not Venice and Genoa with their scholars, navigators, and 
 merchant princes secure in their advantageous position and in the 
 monopoly of the richest trade in the world, but Portugal, hitherto 
 unblest with scholar or mariner or merchant, a nation shut oft" 
 from the Mediterranean and denied participation in the rich 
 advantages of Italy, a land whose only history was of a perpetual 
 crusade against the Moslem for mere existence as a nation, brought 
 forth the men who solved the problem of the new age and thereby 
 turned the world's activities into new channels. Venice and Genoa 
 still used the galley with its oars and slaves and needed no better 
 craft on the land-locked seas. The ocean with its mighty waves 
 and fearful storms demanded a vessel of far different character. 
 The Mediterranean might be navigated without skillfully devised 
 instruments such as were essential to the navigation of the untra- 
 versed ocean. Of these the Italian had no need; the Portuguese 
 could do naught without newly designed ships and instruments, 
 and so set himself at the problem of invention. 
 
 As the merchant and banker of the Italian city strove to main-
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 143 
 
 1498 
 
 tain his monopoly by throttling every attempt at competition in the 
 South, so in the North the merchants of the Hansa gripped the 
 hardy seafarers of the North so tightly in their clutches that the 
 sons of the vikings well-nigh forgot the ancestral art and achieve- 
 ment. England and France fighting their frightful Hundred 
 Years' War ; Aragon struggling for Sicilian dominion ; and Castile 
 still facing the Mohammedan in Granada, had neither time nor 
 energy to take up any new problem. Portugal, tucked away in her 
 corner in Europe, had ended her crusade with the Mohammedan 
 by driving him far from her borders in the thirteenth century ; and 
 by the victory of Aljubarrota had freed herself from the too 
 solicitous interest of Castile in her welfare in 1385. So in the 
 fifteenth century Portugal alone of European nations had the 
 opportunity and the freedom from other cares to take up the new 
 problem. The old crusading spirit moved the princes and people 
 of the little kingdom to follow the infidel even beyond the bounds 
 of the peninsula, and in 141 5 John the Great, the victor of Aljubar- 
 rota, carried the crusade against the Moor into Africa, and there 
 won the fortress of Ceuta. Prince Henry the Navigator, then in 
 his twenty-first year, shared in this enterprise, and until his death 
 his crusading zeal for the success of the Christian arms and the 
 extension of the Christian faith never waned, but was coupled with 
 and inspired by his desire to solve the problem of Africa. Punish- 
 ment of the infidel, conversion of the heathen, and the acquisition 
 of trade and empire for Portugal were the aims of Prince Henry 
 and of all his successors. Prince Henry joined to his princely 
 private fortune the wealth of the Order of Christ of which he was 
 grand master, and in 141 8 he turned his back on the rest of the 
 world and settled at Sagres, the promontory at the extreme south- 
 west of Portugal, where he might forever face the problem of the 
 unknown ocean which washed the shores of unexplored Africa 
 the problem to which the forty-two remaining years of his life were 
 devoted in unremitting toil. 
 
 The revival of learning with its awakening of interest in the 
 geography of the ancients revived some old problems. What was 
 the shape of the earth? What was the character and extent of the 
 Atlantic? What about Africa could there be any foundation for 
 the often-scoffed tradition that Pharaoh Necho had sent an expedi- 
 tion around the continent? Some unknown, for reasons equally 
 unknown, gave one of the answers to this latter question in a chart
 
 144 INDIA 
 
 1498 
 
 of 135 1, the " Laurentian Portulan " as it is called, which actually 
 delineated with essential correctness an African coast extending 
 from the Straits of Gibraltar around to the Red Sea. Here then, in 
 theory at least, was a prize to stir the imagination of a keen- 
 minded man and valorous knight like Prince Henry and to nerve 
 him for years of patient, persistent endeavor. Beyond Africa was 
 India, and there might be a sea route thither. Geographer, ship- 
 carpenter, and sailor labored under the wise direction of the prince, 
 who, alone among princes and men, is surnamed the Navigator. 
 Eighteen degrees of African coast line verified was the net result of 
 his two score years of effort. A small beginning indeed, but he had 
 pointed the way, had immensely improved the means for prosecu- 
 ting the enterprise, and had gathered, trained, and inspired a corps 
 of co-workers and disciples. Not only Portuguese, but also navi- 
 gators from other lands were included; Columbus, a Genoese, 
 received his training in the service of Alfonso V. and John II. 
 Only the Navigator's princely position enabled him to defray the 
 enormous cost of the years of experiment, and amid the opposition 
 of a superstitious populace, none but a prince, nay, none but the 
 monarch himself might henceforth direct the enterprise. Alfonso 
 V. (1438-1481), surnamed the African, continued his uncle's 
 work and handed it on in turn to his son, John II. (1481-1495), 
 whose political sagacity won him the title of the Perfect. In the 
 twenty-sixth year after the death of Prince Henry, the first great 
 triumph was won by Bartholomew Diaz, who in i486 pushed far- 
 ther down the coast of Africa through the Sea of Darkness than 
 his predecessors, rounded the Cape of Storms and finally anchored 
 securely eastward of Africa's southernmost cape, auspiciously 
 christened by John the Perfect, the Cape of Good Hope. 
 
 It was December of 1487 when Diaz returned, but already in 
 the previous May, the king had dispatched an expedition in the 
 opposite direction, in anticipation of the success of Diaz, to explore 
 the eastern lands and seas along the Red Sea route, and to find 
 Prester John, the fabled Christian monarch of the East, and secure 
 his cooperation with the Portuguese in their crusading and other 
 enterprises. Covilham and Paiva journeyed together to Aden and 
 there parted, the one for India and the other for Abyssinia to visit 
 Prester John. Covilham, the first Portuguese to visit India, not 
 only came back with tales of this success, but also actually managed 
 on his return voyage to visit the east coast of Africa as far south
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 145 
 
 1498 
 
 as Sofala, almost reaching Diaz's most easterly point. From Cairo 
 in 1490 Covilham sent back this valued report to his monarch and 
 then plunged once more into the East to do the work of his com- 
 panion who had perished. Jealously guarded as a valued member 
 of the court of Alexander, prince of Abyssinia, he lived for more 
 than thirty years practically a state prisoner. 
 
 Though the combined efforts of Covilham and Diaz had fully 
 proved the existence of the long-sought sea route to India, the ulti- 
 mate prize of actual achievement was yet to be won. An unkind 
 fate snatched this and another splendid prize from the Perfect 
 King. Even before Diaz had set sail, a Genoese adventurer had 
 tried to bargain with the king to find him India by sailing west- 
 ward. John II., busy with the around-Africa project, gave little 
 heed to the wild scheme of Columbus, and bundled him off to 
 barter his precious plan at other courts. Now delay and mis- 
 fortune postponed from year to year the expedition that was to 
 crown all the efforts with success, until the afflicted monarch had 
 the humiliation of seeing his Spanish rivals receive from the hands 
 of the despised Genoese, a new world, which for the nonce men 
 imagined to be the Indies. Two years later John the Perfect was 
 gathered to his fathers and his cousin Emmanuel the Fortunate 
 reigned in his stead, when at last on July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama's 
 long-delayed ships sailed down the Tagus to achieve the first 
 European voyage to India. Portugal's princes alone had borne the 
 burden and heat of the day and the monarchs of Portugal alone 
 reaped the profit. The dynasty of John the Great had set itself the 
 task, and was now to master the problem, and to give Portugal the 
 enjoyment of the rich rewards for just so long as the dynasty of 
 John the Great ruled at Lisbon. Eighty years of effort were to be 
 followed by eighty-two years of full possession and profit. What 
 Henry the Navigator started to find in 14 18, Emmanuel the For- 
 tunate's captain discovered in 1498, and Portugal lost after Henry 
 the Cardinal, the last legitimate male heir of John the Great, sank 
 into his grave in 1580. 
 
 The Portuguese from the beginning understood that their 
 explorations were opening new questions in world politics, and 
 took steps to legalize fully their claim to the results, actual and 
 potential, of their efforts. International law was an unknown 
 science and the concert of the powers was yet to be imagined. The 
 mediaeval theory of the Papacy still swayed the minds even of
 
 146 INDIA 
 
 1498 
 
 monarchs and statesmen, and for them the Pope supplied the place 
 of international law and the concert of great powers. As early 
 as June 18, 1452, and January 8, 1454, Alfonso V. obtained from 
 Pope Nicholas V. bulls granting to Portugal jurisdiction over the 
 African discoveries. The progress of discovery and especially the 
 achievement of Columbus led to a long and exceedingly interesting 
 diplomatic contest between Spain and Portugal over the delimita- 
 tion of their respective portions of the unknown world which was 
 being revealed. The Bulls of Demarcation issued by Pope Alex- 
 ander VI. on May 3-4, 1493, the Treaty of Tordesillas of June 7, 
 1494, the Badajoz Conference of 1524, and the Treaty of Sara- 
 gossa in 1529 are the most important stages in the long struggle 
 between Spain and Portugal over the Indies. In general terms, the 
 result was to give the Americas, except Brazil, and the adjoining 
 seas to Spain; while Portugal received Africa, Asia, and Brazil 
 with the adjacent seas. 
 
 Thus, as the fifteenth century progressed, the triumphs of the 
 Ottoman Turks were rapidly closing the ancient routes of trade 
 from India to the West, so that the West was feeling more and 
 more keenly how necessary India and her luxurious products were, 
 but by fortunate coincidence the Western knowledge of India was 
 being constantly enlarged and necessity and ambition were further- 
 ing the efforts of the Portuguese as they struggled on step by 
 step nearer the goal of the Indies a goal whose possession they 
 carefully safeguarded by an astute diplomacy. In the fullness of 
 time Vasco da Gama and his three little caravels, the largest being 
 his flagship the San Gabriel of 120 tons, followed the course of 
 Diaz around the cape and then obeying the sailing directions 
 received from Covilham arrived safely at Calicut on the Malabar 
 coast of India on May 20, 1498. 
 
 From the first, Da Gama encountered hostility from the 
 Moors, or rather Arabs, who monopolized the sea-borne trade; 
 but he seems to have found favor with the Hindu raja of Calicut 
 or zamorin, a Sanskrit title meaning " the son of the sea." An 
 Afghan of the Lodi dynasty was then on the throne of Delhi, and 
 another Afghan king was ruling over Bengal. Ahmadabad 
 formed the seat of a Mohammedan dynasty in Gujarat. The five 
 independent Mohammedan kingdoms of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, 
 Ellichpur, Golconda, and Bidar had partitioned out the Deccan. 
 The Hindu raja of Vijayanagar still ruled as paramount in the
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 147 
 
 1498-1500 
 
 south, and was perhaps the most powerful monarch to be found 
 at the time in India, not excepting the Lodi dynasty at Delhi. 
 
 After staying nearly six months on the Malabar coast, Da 
 Gama returned to Europe, bearing with him the following letter 
 from the zamorin to the king of Portugal : " Vasco da Gama, a 
 nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom and has 
 given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is abundance of 
 cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, and precious stones. What I 
 seek from thy country is gold, silver, coral, and scarlet." The safe 
 arrival of Da Gama at Lisbon was celebrated with national rejoic- 
 ings as enthusiastic as those which had greeted the return of 
 Columbus. If the West Indies belonged to Spain by priority of 
 discovery, Portugal might claim the East Indies by the same right. 
 The Portuguese mind became intoxicated by dreams of a mighty 
 oriental empire. 
 
 The early Portuguese navigators were not traders or private 
 adventurers, but admirals with a royal commission to open up a 
 direct commerce with Asia, and to purchase eastern commodities 
 on behalf of the king of Portugal. As the finding of the route to 
 India had been a royal rather than a national enterprise, so the 
 empire gained was a royal possession and its commerce a royal 
 monopoly. Portuguese, both native and naturalized, were allowed 
 to participate in the trade under royal supervision but had to pay 
 a liberal percentage to the king. Lisbon was the entrepot of the 
 Indian trade; but in order to compete with the Italian merchants 
 in northern Europe the Portuguese monarch arranged for a 
 regular trade from Lisbon to Antwerp, which he selected as the 
 northern mart for the Indian wares. The century ending with the 
 Spanish seizure of Antwerp in 1585 was the age of the greatest 
 prosperity of the city. England was supplied with Indian goods 
 from Antwerp chiefly, and it was the occupation and consequent 
 closure of Antwerp to the trade of the Dutch and the English that 
 drove them to enter the direct trade with India. 
 
 A second expedition, consisting of thirteen ships and seven 
 hundred soldiers, under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral, 
 was dispatched in 1500. On his outward voyage, Cabral was 
 driven westward by stress of weather, and discovered Brazil. 
 
 After leaving Brazil and when approaching the Cape of Good 
 Hope, storms again broke upon the squadron, causing the loss of 
 several vessels and their crews. Among those who perished was
 
 148 INDIA 
 
 1500-1509 
 
 Bartholomew Diaz, who commanded one of the ships. Ultimately 
 Cabral reached Calicut. He established a factory, or agency for 
 the purchase of goods there; but as soon as he left Calicut the 
 factor was murdered by the Mohammedan merchants. In spite of 
 this disaster, he left a factor behind him at Cochin when he 
 returned to Portugal. 
 
 In 1502 the king of Portugal obtained from Pope Alexander 
 VI. a bull constituting him " Lord of the navigation, conquest, and 
 trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India." In that year Vasco 
 da Gama sailed again to the East, with a fleet numbering twenty 
 vessels. He formed alliances with the rajas of Cochin and Can- 
 nanore, and the rani of Quilon, and bombarded the zamorin of 
 Calicut in his palace. In 1503 the great Alfonso de Albuquerque 
 sailed to the East in command of one of three expeditions from 
 Portugal. The Portuguese arrived only just in time to succor the 
 raja of Cochin, who was being besieged by the zamorin of Calicut. 
 They built a fort at Cochin, and, to guard against any future dis- 
 aster, left 150 Portuguese soldiers under Duarte Pacheco to defend 
 their ally. When they departed, the zamorin, or Hindu raja of 
 Calicut, again attacked Cochin, but he was defeated by Pacheco 
 both by land and sea, and the prestige of the Portuguese was by 
 these victories raised to its height. 
 
 In 1505 a large fleet of twenty-two sail with fifteen hundred 
 soldiers was sent under Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese 
 viceroy of India. Almeida was the first Portuguese statesman in 
 India to develop a distinct policy. He saw that, in face of the 
 opposition of the Mohammedan merchants, whose monopoly was 
 infringed, it was necessary to fortify factories in India, in which 
 to carry on trade ; but he wished these forts to be as few as possible, 
 and that the chief power of Portugal should be on the sea. 
 Almeida had also a new danger to meet. The Mameluke sultan of 
 Egypt perceived that the discovery of the direct sea-route from 
 Europe to India around the Cape of Good Hope was ruining the 
 transit trade through Egypt. He therefore dispatched a fleet to 
 exterminate the Portuguese forces in Asia. The sultan's admiral 
 won a victory off Chaul, in 1508, in which Almeida's son was 
 killed; but on February 2, 1509, the Egyptians were utterly de- 
 feated off the Island of Diu. The danger of a general union of the 
 Moslems against the Portuguese was thus averted for the time, 
 and the quarrels between the Turks and Egyptians which ensued
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 149 
 
 1509-1529 
 
 gave time for the Christians to firmly consolidate their power in 
 India. 
 
 In 1509, Albuquerque succeeded as governor, and widely ex- 
 tended the area of Portuguese influence. He abandoned the system 
 of Almeida, and resolved to establish a Portuguese empire in 
 India, based on the possession of important points along the coast, 
 and on playing off the native princes against each other. His 
 schemes in India anticipated Dupleix and the English, especially in 
 the use of native troops and in his dealings with native govern- 
 ments. Having failed in an attack upon Calicut, he in 15 10 seized 
 Goa, which has since remained the capital of Portuguese India. 
 Then, sailing around Ceylon, he captured Malacca, the key to the 
 navigation of the Indian archipelago, and opened a trade with 
 Siam and the Spice Islands. Lastly, he sailed back westward, and, 
 after penetrating into the Red Sea, and taking Ormuz in the Per- 
 sian Gulf, returned to Goa, dying in 1515. In 1524 Vasco da 
 Gama came out to the East for the third time, and he too died at 
 Cochin, after a rule of only three months. For exactly a century, 
 from 1500 to 1600, the Portuguese enjoyed a monopoly of 
 oriental trade. " From Japan 2 and the Spice Islands to the Red 
 Sea and the Cape of Good Hope, they were the sole masters and 
 dispensers of the treasures of the East; while their possessions 
 along the Atlantic coast of Africa and in Brazil completed their 
 maritime empire." 
 
 The Portuguese had neither the political strength nor the per- 
 sonal character necessary to maintain such an empire. Their 
 national temper had been formed in their contest with the Moors 
 at home. They were not traders, but knights-errant and crusaders, 
 who looked on every pagan as an enemy of Portugal and of Christ. 
 Only those who have read the contemporary narratives of their 
 conquests can realize the superstition and the cruelty with which 
 their history in the Indies is stained. 
 
 Albuquerque alone endeavored to conciliate the good will of 
 the natives, and to live in friendship with the Hindu princes, who 
 were better pleased to have the Portuguese, as firmly governed by 
 him, for their neighbors and allies, than the Mohammedans whom 
 he had expelled or subdued. The justice and magnanimity of his 
 
 2 This and the following paragraphs are condensed from Sir George Bird- 
 wood's official " Report on the Miscellaneous Old Records in the Indian Office," 
 dated November 1, 1878 (folio, 1879) W. W. Hunter.
 
 150 INDIA 
 
 1529-1538 
 
 rule did as much to extend and confirm the power of the 
 Portuguese in the East, as his courage and the success of his mili- 
 tary achievements. In such veneration was his memory held, that 
 the Hindus of Goa, and even the Mohammedans, were wont to 
 repair to his tomb, and there utter their complaints, as if in the 
 presence of his shade, and call upon God to deliver them from the 
 tyranny of his successors. 
 
 Yet these successors were not all tyrants. Some of them were 
 great statesmen; many were gallant soldiers. The names of four 
 of them stand out brightly in the history of the Portuguese in 
 India. Nuno da Cunha, governor from 1529 to 1538, first opened 
 up direct and regular trade with Bengal. After 15 18 one ship 
 annually visited Chittagong to purchase merchandise for Portugal ; 
 but Da Cunha, hearing of the wealth of the province, and the 
 peaceful, industrious character of its inhabitants, resolved to make 
 a settlement there. He sent 400 Portuguese soldiers to assist the 
 Mohammedan king of Bengal against Slier Shah in 1534, and was 
 intending to follow in person, when important events on the other 
 side of India detained him. His intervention had the effect of 
 causing many Portuguese to settle in Bengal. They were never 
 formed into a regular governorship, but remained in loose depend- 
 ence upon the captain of Ceylon. Yet they became very pros- 
 perous, and their headquarters, Hugh, grew into a wealthy city. 
 After the capture of Hugh by Shah Jahan in 1629, the bravest of 
 the Portuguese in Bengal became outlaws and pirates, and in con- 
 junction with the Arakanese and the Maghs preyed upon the sea- 
 borne commerce of the Bengal coast. The event which prevented 
 Nuno da Cunha from establishing the Portuguese power in Bengal 
 was the approach of a great Turkish and Egyptian fleet. Selim I. 
 had extended the Turkish power by the conquest of Egypt in 1516- 
 15 17, and his successor Suleiman the Magnificent prepared to 
 accomplish the task which the sultan of Egypt had attempted thirty 
 years before. The Portuguese were in a better position to resist 
 than they had been in the days of the viceroy Almeida. Nuno da 
 Cunha had obtained possession of the Island of Diu, a place much 
 coveted by Albuquerque, from the king of Gujarat in 1535, and it 
 was there that the storm broke. Besieged by the king of Gujarat 
 by land and by the vast Turkish and Egyptian fleet, Diu stood a 
 terrible siege in 1538; and the defenders at last beat off the assail- 
 ants. Nuno da Cunha did not live to see this glorious result, for he
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 151 
 
 1538-1565 
 
 was maligned by enemies and sent home in custody, and it was 
 reserved for his successor to relieve Diu. 
 
 Joao de Castro, who ruled from 1545 to 1548, was no 
 unworthy countryman of Albuquerque and Da Cunha. He 
 relieved Diu, which again had to stand a siege by the king of 
 Gujarat, whom he defeated in one of the greatest victories ever 
 won by the Portuguese in India. He had also to defend Goa 
 against the king of Bijapur, and with similar successes. It was not 
 only as a warrior, but also as a statesman, that Joao de Castro won 
 his fame. In the three short years of his government he tried to 
 reform the errors of the Portuguese colonial system. The trade 
 of India was a royal monopoly, and crowds of officials lived by 
 peculation and corruption in order to enhance their salaries from 
 the crown. Joao de Castro endeavored to cleanse the Augean 
 stable, and by his own upright character set a shining example to 
 his compatriots. It was during his rule that the Portuguese, in 
 addition to being a trading and a governing power, became a 
 proselytizing power. Hitherto Catholic priests had come to India 
 to tend the souls of the Portuguese, but now began the era of mis- 
 sions to the heathen. This development of missionary effort was 
 largely due to the inspiring exertions of Saint Francis Xavier, who 
 was Castro's intimate friend. Francis Xavier was born in Navarre 
 in 1506, was educated at the University of Paris, and in 1534- 1540 
 joined with Ignatius of Loyola in founding the Society of Jesus. 
 He reached Goa in 1542 and died in 1552 when on his way to 
 China. He is known as the Apostle of the Indies. The Jesuits fol- 
 lowed the missionary pioneer of their order, and the whole authority 
 of the Portuguese government was practically placed at the disposal 
 of the Christian missionaries after this epoch. 
 
 Constantino de Braganza, a prince of the royal house of 
 Portugal, attempted, and not without some success, to take up the 
 task which had proved too hard for De Castro, during his rule 
 from 1558 to 1561; but he is better remembered as the conqueror 
 of Daman, one of the places still belonging to Portugal. Luis de 
 Athaide, who was viceroy from 1568 to 1571, and from 1578 to 
 1 58 1, had during his first viceroyalty to meet a formidable league 
 of opponents. The defeat of the Hindu raja of Vijayanagar at 
 Talikot in 1565, left the Mohammedan princes of the Deccan at 
 liberty to act against the Portuguese. A great league was formed 
 by thern., which included even the half-savage king of Achin. All
 
 152 INDIA 
 
 1565-1683 
 
 the Portuguese settlements on the Malabar coast as well as 
 Malacca were besieged by overwhelming forces, but the Portu- 
 guese commanders rose to the occasion. Everywhere they were 
 triumphant. The viceroy, in 1570, defended Goa for ten months 
 against the king of Bijapur, and eventually repulsed him; the 
 undisciplined Indian troops were unable to stand against the 
 veteran soldiers of Portugal; 200 of them, at Malacca, routed 
 15,000 natives with artillery. When, in 1578, Malacca was again 
 besieged by the king of Achin, the small Portuguese garrison 
 destroyed 10,000 of his men, and all the Achin cannon and junks. 
 Twice again, in 161 5 and for the last time in 1628, Malacca was 
 besieged, and on each occasion the Achinese were repulsed with 
 equal bravery. The increased military forces sent out to resist 
 these attacks proved, however, an insupportable drain on the 
 revenues and population of Portugal. 
 
 In 1580 the Portuguese crown was united with that of Spain, 
 under Philip II., who made and kept a promise to appoint none but 
 Portuguese to office in the East. The union with Spain proved 
 the ruin of the maritime and commercial supremacy of Portugal 
 in the East. The interests of Portugal in Asia were henceforth 
 subordinated to the European interests of Spain; and the enemies 
 of Spain, the Dutch and the English, preyed on the Portuguese as 
 well as on the Spanish commerce. In 1640 Portugal again became 
 a separate kingdom, but in the meanwhile the Dutch and English 
 had appeared in the Eastern seas; and before their indomitable 
 competition the Portuguese empire of the Indies withered away 
 as rapidly as it had sprung up. The period of the highest devel- 
 opment of Portuguese commerce was probably from 1590 to 1610, 
 on the eve of the subversion of their commercial power by the 
 Dutch, and when their political administration in India was at its 
 lowest depth of degradation. At this period a single fleet of 
 Portuguese merchantmen sailing from Goa to Cambay or Surat 
 would number as many as 150 or 250 carracks. Now, only one 
 Portuguese ship sails from Lisbon to Goa in the year. 
 
 The Dutch besieged Goa in 1603, and again in 1639. Both 
 attacks were unsuccessful on land ; but the Portuguese were gradu- 
 ally driven off the sea. In 1683 the Marathas plundered to the 
 gates of Goa, and in 1739 they sacked Bassein, the northern 
 capital. The further history of the Portuguese in India is a miser- 
 able chronicle of pride, poverty, and sounding titles. The native
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 153 
 
 1683-1800 
 
 princes pressed upon them from the land. On the sea they gave 
 way to more vigorous European nations. 
 
 The only remaining Portuguese possessions in India are Goa, 
 Daman, and Diu, all on the west coast, with a total area of 1638 
 square miles, and a total population of 531,798 in 1900. 
 
 About 30,000 so-called Portuguese half-castes are found in 
 Bombay, and 20,000 in Bengal, chiefly in the neighborhood of 
 Dacca and Chittagong. The latter are known as Firinghis; and, 
 excepting that they retain European surnames and the Catholic 
 faith, they are scarcely to be distinguished either by color, 
 language or habits of life from the natives among whom they live. 
 Their complexion is in many cases darker than that of the sur- 
 rounding Indian population; and, as a rule, they are a thriftless, 
 feeble class. 
 
 Nor do the Portuguese succeed in obtaining any share worth 
 mentioning in the modern trade of British India. While French 
 and Germans are taking advantage of the commercial activity of 
 British rule in the East to enter on Indian commercial enterprise 
 in increasing numbers, the few Portuguese traders or employees 
 born in Portugal and resorting to British India are decreasing. 
 Their total which amounted to 426 in 1872, had fallen to 133 in 
 1881, and was returned at 149 by the census of 1891. The efforts 
 by the British government to establish a commercial solidarity of 
 interest with Portugal in India have not worked out with entire 
 success. The construction of a railroad to a large extent with British 
 private capital, and under the supervision of private British engin- 
 eers, designed to connect the port of Marmagao, the main Portu- 
 guese settlement of Goa, with the interior of India led, about 1885, 
 to a customs treaty being negotiated, which placed the Goa and 
 the British systems on a fairly homogeneous basis. After some 
 years, however, the Portuguese declined to renew their engage- 
 ments so that they were left in a state of political and commercial 
 isolation in India. More recently the relations have grown more 
 intimate, and in 1902, while the total imports were $1,442,041 and 
 the exports $356,757, the transit trade with British India was 
 valued at $3,545,532. 
 
 The Dutch were the first European nation who broke through 
 the Portuguese monopoly. The Dutch war for independence 
 closed the ports of Spain, including Lisbon, to the Dutch, and forced 
 them into the direct trade with India. The war with Spain and
 
 154. INDIA 
 
 1583-1689 
 
 the closing of Lisbon and Antwerp compelled the English also to 
 enter directly into the Indian trade. During the sixteenth century- 
 Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam became successively the great 
 emporiums whence Indian produce, imported by the Portuguese, 
 was distributed to Germany, and even to England. At first the 
 Dutch, following in the track of the English, attempted to find 
 their way to India by sailing around the northern coast of Europe 
 and Asia. William Barents is honorably known as the leader of 
 three of these Arctic expeditions. 
 
 John Huyghen van Linschoten of Haarlem dwelt at Goa from 
 1583 to 1589 in the train of the Portuguese archbishop, and pub- 
 lished in 1 595-1 596 a narrative valuable for a guide and which was 
 translated into English in 1598 and into other languages. 
 
 The first Dutchman to double the Cape of Good Hope was 
 Cornelius Houtman, who reached Sumatra and Bantam in 1596. 
 Forthwith private companies for trade with the East were formed 
 in many parts of the United Provinces; but in 1602 they were all 
 amalgamated by the States-General into the Dutch East India 
 Company. Within fifty years the Dutch had established factories 
 on the continent, in Ceylon, in Sumatra, in the Persian Gulf, and in 
 the Red Sea, besides having obtained exclusive possession of the 
 Moluccas or Spice Islands. The first Dutch settlement in India 
 was at Pulicat, about 20 miles north of Madras, in 1609. The 
 Dutch settled at Surat in 161 8. In 16 19 they laid the foundation 
 of the city of Batavia, in Java, as the seat of the supreme govern- 
 ment of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies, which had pre- 
 viously been at Amboyna in the Moluccas. At about the same time 
 the Dutch discovered the coast of Australia (1606-1644); while 
 in North America they founded the city of New Amsterdam, now 
 New York, in 161 3- 1626. 
 
 During the seventeenth century the Dutch were the foremost 
 maritime power in the world. Their memorable massacre of the 
 English at Amboyna, in 1623, forced the British Company to retire 
 from the eastern archipelago to the continent of India and thus 
 led to the foundation of England's Indian empire. The long naval 
 wars and the bloody battles between the English and the Dutch 
 within the narrow seas were not terminated until William of 
 Orange united the two countries in 1689. In the eastern archi- 
 pelago the Dutch ruled without a rival, and expelled the Portu- 
 guese from almost all their territorial possessions. A portion of
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 155 
 
 1634-1800 
 
 the Island of Timor is the only relic which Portugal retains of her 
 former empire in the Indian archipelago. 
 
 In 1634 the Dutch began to visit Formosa; in 1640 they took 
 Malacca, a blow from which the Portuguese never recovered; in 
 1647 tne y were trading at Sadras, on the Coromandel coast about 
 40 miles south of Madras; in 1652 they founded a colony at the 
 Cape of Good Hope, as a half-way station to the East; in 1652 
 they built their Indian factory at Palakollu, on the Godavari delta 
 on the Madras coast; in 1658 they captured Jaffnapatam, the last 
 stronghold of the Portuguese in Ceylon. Between 1661 and 1664 
 the Dutch wrested from the Portuguese all their earlier settlements 
 south of Goa on the pepper-bearing coast of Malabar; and in 1669 
 they expelled the Portuguese from St. Thome in Madras, and from 
 Macassar in Celebes. 
 
 The fall of the Dutch colonial empire resulted from its short- 
 sighted commercial policy. It was deliberately based upon a 
 monopoly of the trade in spices, and remained from first to last 
 destitute of sound economical principles. Like the Phoenicians 
 of old, the Dutch stopped short of no acts of cruelty toward their 
 rivals in commerce; but, unlike the Phoenicians, they failed to 
 introduce their civilization among the natives with whom they 
 came in contact. The knell of Dutch supremacy was sounded by 
 Clive, when in 1759 he attacked the Dutch both by land and water 
 at Chinsurah, now part of the town of Hugh on the Hugh River, 
 a short distance above Calcutta, and forced them to an ignominious 
 capitulation. During the great French wars between 1795 and 
 181 1 England wrested from Holland every one of her colonies. 
 At the close of the Napoleonic wars many of the Dutch colonies 
 in the East were restored by the English, but during the next dec- 
 ade various readjustments were effected. By the eighth article 
 of the treaty signed at London on March 17, 1824, the Dutch 
 ceded to the English all their establishments on the continent of 
 India. This treaty also arranged the exchange of English claims 
 in Sumatra, and other islands of the eastern archipelago for 
 Malacca and Singapore; and defined the mutual relations of the 
 English and Dutch in the East politically and commercially. This 
 treaty, supplemented by more recent clauses concerning Sumatra, 
 Borneo, and New Guinea, is still in force. At present, the Dutch 
 flag flies nowhere on the mainland of India, but quaint houses, 
 Dutch tiles, and carvings, at Chinsurah, Negapatam, Jaffnapatam,
 
 156 INDIA 
 
 1498-1583 
 
 and at petty ports on the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, with the 
 formal canals in some of these old settlements, remind the traveler 
 of* scenes in the Netherlands. In the census of 1872 only 70 
 Dutchmen were enumerated throughout all British India, 78 in 
 1881, and 119 in 1891. 
 
 The earliest English attempts to reach India were made by 
 the Northwest Passage. In 1496 Henry VII. granted letters patent 
 to John Cabot and his three sons, one of whom was the famous 
 Sebastian, to fit out two ships for the exploration of this route. 
 They failed, but discovered the Island of Newfoundland, in 1497, 
 and in later years made other voyages to those coasts. In 1553 
 the ill-fated Sir Hugh Willoughby attempted to force a passage 
 along the north of Europe and Asia, the successful accomplish- 
 ment of which was reserved for a Swedish savant, Nordenskjold, 
 in 1878-1879. Sir Hugh perished miserably; but his second in 
 command, Chancellor, reached a harbor, now Archangel, on the 
 White Sea. Thence he penetrated by land to the court of the tsar, 
 Ivan the Terrible, at Moscow, and laid the foundation of " the 
 Russia company for carrying on the overland trade between India, 
 Persia, Bokhara, and Moscow." 
 
 Many English attempts were made to find a northwest pas- 
 sage to the East Indies, from 1576 to 161 6. They have left on 
 modern maps the imperishable names of Frobisher, Davis, Hud- 
 son, and Baffin. Meanwhile, in 1577, Sir Francis Drake had cir- 
 cumnavigated the globe, and on his way home had touched at 
 Ternate, one of the Moluccas, the king of which island agreed to 
 supply the English nation with all the cloves which it produced. 
 
 The first modern Englishman known to have visited the 
 Indian peninsula was Thomas Stephens, in 1579. William of 
 Malmesbury states, indeed, that in 883 Sighelmus of Sherborne, 
 sent by King Alfred to Rome with presents to the Pope, proceeded 
 thence to " India," to the tomb of Saint Thomas. The tomb of 
 Saint Thomas was at Edessa, now Urfa in northern Mesopotamia, 
 according to the tradition of the early church. He brought back 
 jewels and spices; but it by no means follows that the " India " of 
 William of Malmesbury meant the Indian peninsula. Stephens 
 was educated at New College, Oxford, and became rector of the 
 Jesuit college in Salsette near Bombay. His letters to his father 
 are said to have roused great enthusiasm in England to trade 
 directly with India.
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 157 
 
 1583-1599 
 
 In 1583 three English merchants, Ralph Fitch, James New- 
 berry, and Leedes, went out to India overland as mercantile adven- 
 turers. The jealous Portuguese threw them into prison at Ormuz, 
 and again at Goa. At length Newberry settled down as a shop- 
 keeper at Goa ; Leedes entered the service of the Great Mogul ; and 
 Fitch, after a lengthened peregrination in Ceylon, Bengal, Pegu, 
 Siam, Malacca, and other parts of the East Indies, returned to 
 England in 1591. 
 
 The voyage of Drake was followed by another voyage around 
 the world by Thomas Cavendish in 1 586-1 588, returning to England 
 just after the defeat of the Armada. In 1591 was fitted out the 
 first English expedition to sail around the Cape of Good Hope into 
 the Indian Ocean. One of the vessels, the Edward Bonaventure, 
 Captain James Lancaster, visited India and various neighboring 
 coasts and finally returned to England in 1594 with a valuable 
 cargo. The Muscovy or Russia Company organized in 1554 and 
 the Turkey or Levant Company chartered in 1581 both reckoned 
 on drawing some trade from India by the two overland routes, so 
 that there was a slowness in taking up the scheme of direct sea 
 trade. Elizabeth's diplomacy, also, was tortuous, so that the 
 accounts of Stephens, Fitch, and Lancaster were not permitted to 
 have the immediate effect in England that Linschoten's had in the 
 Netherlands. 
 
 The defeat of the Invincible Armada in 1588, at which time 
 the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united, gave a fresh stimu- 
 lus to maritime enterprise in England and the successful voyage 
 of the Dutch Cornelius Houtman in 1596 showed the way around 
 the Cape of Good Hope, into waters hitherto almost entirely monop- 
 olized by the Portuguese. Not entirely, for a renegade Portu- 
 guese, Magellan, had led a Spanish expedition around South 
 America to the Philippine Islands, where he was murdered in 1521. 
 One of the vessels returned by the way of the Cape of Good Hope, 
 completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. This was fol- 
 lowed by a series of Spanish voyages, especially from Mexico to 
 the Philippines and vicinity. Legazpi, sent out by the viceroy of 
 Mexico, established Spanish control in the Philippines between 
 1564 and 1571. 
 
 In 1 597- 1 599 the Dutch, who had now firmly established their 
 trade in the East, raised the price of pepper against the English 
 from three shillings per pound to six shillings and even to eight
 
 158 INDIA 
 
 1599-1600 
 
 shillings. The merchants of London held a meeting on September 
 22, 1599, at Founders' Hall, with the lord mayor in the chair, and 
 agreed to form an association for the purposes of trading directly 
 with India. Some of the merchants sent John Mildenhall by Con- 
 stantinople to the Great Mogul with letters from Queen Elizabeth 
 to apply for privileges for an English company. On December 31, 
 1600, the English East India Company was incorporated by royal 
 charter under the title of " the Governor and Company of Merchants 
 of London trading to the East Indies." The original company had 
 only 125 shareholders, and a capital of 68,373/. ($332,300), which 
 was raised to 429,000/. ($2,085,000), in 1612-1613, when voyages 
 were undertaken on the so-called 'first joint-stock account. Per- 
 haps the most active of the merchants in promoting the organization 
 of the Company was Richard Staper. The first governor of the new 
 Company was Thomas Smith, or Smythe, who was born about 
 1558, knighted in 1603, and died in 1625. Both of these merchants 
 had earlier been founders of the Levant Company, and Smith was 
 later treasurer of the London Virginia Company. 
 
 Courten's Association, known as " the Assada Merchants," 
 from a factory subsequently founded by it in Madagascar, was 
 established in 1635, but, after a period of internecine rivalry, was 
 united with the London company in 1650. This company was com- 
 posed chiefly of Sir William Courten (1 572-1636), and Sir Paul 
 Pindar (c. 1 565-1650), two wealthy London merchants who had 
 made large loans to Charles I. ; and Endymion Porter (1587-1649), 
 a groom of the bedchamber to Charles I. On Courten's death 
 his privileges were continued to his younger son, William Cour- 
 ten (d. 1655). 
 
 In 1654-1655, the " Company of Merchant Adventurers" ob- 
 tained a charter from Cromwell to trade with India, but united with 
 the original company two years later. The final merger of the 
 Association and of the Merchant Adventurers with the East India 
 Company was effected by Cromwell's new charter to the East India 
 Company on October 19, 1657. A more formidable rival sub- 
 sequently appeared in the " General Society," or English Company, 
 trading to the East Indies, which was incorporated under powerful 
 patronage in 1698, with a capital of two millions sterling ($9,720,- 
 000). According to Evelyn, in his "Diary" for March 5, 1698, 
 " the old East India Company lost their business against the new 
 Company by ten votes in Parliament, so many of their friends being
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 159 
 
 1600-1608 
 
 absent, going to see a tiger baited by dogs." However, a com- 
 promise was speedily effected through the arbitration of Lord 
 Godolphin in 1702, and the London and the English Companies 
 were finally amalgamated in 1709, under style of " The United 
 Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies." 
 About the same time the Company increased its loans to the English 
 government to an aggregate of 3,200,000/. ($15,552,000), at 5 
 per cent, interest, in return for the exclusive privilege of the trade to 
 all places between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Ma- 
 gellan. The Company had not only to face incorporated rivals from 
 time to time, but it had also to contend with " interlopers," or 
 private, independent trading adventurers whose methods tended to 
 piracy, during the whole period of their trade monopoly. The first 
 of these was Michelborne, and the notorious Captain Kidd was 
 one of the piratical interlopers. 
 
 The early voyages of the Company from 1600 to 16 12 are 
 distinguished as the " separate voyages," twelve in number. The 
 subscribers individually bore the expenses of each voyage, and 
 reaped the whole profits. With the exception of the fourth, all these 
 separate voyages were highly prosperous, the profits hardly ever 
 falling below 100 per cent. After 1612, the voyages were conducted 
 on the joint-stock account, which differed, however, from the 
 modern understanding of that term. The joint-stock method did 
 not- approximate the modern plan until Cromwell's charter of 1657, 
 and did not come into full operation in the modern sense until the 
 formation of the United Company in 1708. 
 
 The English were promptly opposed by the Portuguese, but 
 James Lancaster (knighted 1603; died 1618), even in the first voy- 
 age in 1601-1602, established commercial relations with the king of 
 Achin and at Priaman in the Island of Sumatra ; as well as with the 
 Moluccas, and at Bantam in Java, where he settled a " house of 
 trade " in 1603. In 1604 the Company undertook their second voy- 
 age, commanded by Sir Henry Middleton, who extended their trade 
 to Banda and Amboyna. The success of these voyages attracted a 
 number of private merchants to the business; and in 1606 James I. 
 granted a license to Sir Edward Michelborne and others to trade 
 " to Cathay, China, Japan, Corea, and Cambaya." Michelborne, on 
 arriving in the East, instead of exploring new sources of commerce 
 like the East India Company, followed the pernicious example of 
 the Portuguese, and plundered the native traders among the islands
 
 160 INDIA 
 
 1608-1615 
 
 of the Indian archipelago. He in this way secured a considerable 
 booty, but brought disgrace on the British name, and seriously 
 hindered the Company's business at Bantam. 
 
 In 1608 Captain David Middleton, in command of the fifth 
 voyage, was prevented by the Dutch from trading at Banda, but 
 succeeded in obtaining a cargo at Pulo Way, in the Moluccas. In 
 this year also, Captain William Hawkins proceeded from Surat, as 
 envoy from James I. and the East India Company, to the court of 
 the Great Mogul. He was graciously received by the Emperor 
 Jahangir, and remained three years at Agra. In 1609 Captain Shar- 
 pay obtained the grant of free trade at Aden, and a cargo of pepper 
 at Priaman in Sumatra. In 1609 also, the Company constructed the 
 dockyard at Deptford, which was the beginning, observes Sir Wil- 
 liam Monson, " of the increase of great ships in England." In 
 161 1 Sir Henry Middleton, in command of the sixth voyage, 
 arrived before Cambay. He resolutely fought the Portuguese, who 
 tried to beat him off, and obtained important concessions from the 
 native powers. In 1610-1611 also, Captain Hippon, commanding 
 the seventh voyage, established agencies at Pettipollee, now 
 Nizampatam, and at Masulipatam, and in Siam at Patania or Patany 
 on the eastern coast of the Malay peninsula. 
 
 In 1612 the Company's fleet, under Captain Best, was at- 
 tacked off Swally, the port of Surat, at the mouth of the River 
 Tapti, by an overwhelming force of Portuguese; but the assailants 
 were utterly defeated in four engagements, to the astonishment of 
 the natives, who had hitherto considered them invincible. The 
 first-fruit of this decisive victory was the leave obtained by Thomas 
 Aldworth from the Mogul governor to establish an English factory 
 at Surat, with subordinate agencies at the neighboring towns of 
 Gogo, Ahmadabad, and Cambay. Trade was also opened with the 
 Persian Gulf. In 1614 an agency was established at Ajmere by Mr. 
 Edwards of the Surat factory. In 161 5 Captain Downton inflicted 
 another defeat on the Portuguese near Surat. The chief seat of the 
 Company's government in western India remained at Surat until 
 1 684- 1 687, when it was transferred to Bombay. 
 
 In 161 5 Sir Thomas Roe was sent by James I. as ambassador 
 to the court of Jahangir, and succeeded in placing the Company's 
 trade in the Mogul dominions on a more favorable footing. From 
 the days of Roe until the time of Sir John Child, the English theory 
 was that of " quiet trade " in the Mogul dominions. No fortifica-
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 161 
 
 1615-1620 
 
 tions or garrisons were established at the factories or agencies in 
 the Mogul empire, but entire dependence was placed on the Mogul 
 authorities for protection. When the protection ceased to be efficient, 
 with the beginning of the Maratha raids and the break-up of the 
 Mogul empire, the " quiet trade " theory had to give place to the 
 imperial ideas of the Childs. 
 
 In 1618 the English established a factory at Mocha; but the 
 Dutch were compelling them to resign all pretensions to the Spice 
 Islands. In that year also, the Company failed in its attempt to 
 open a trade on the Malabar coast with Dabhol, Baticala, and Cali- 
 cut, through a want of sincerity on the part of the zamorin, or 
 Calicut raja. In 1619 the English were permitted to establish a fac- 
 tory and build a fort at Jask, near the entrance of the Persian Gulf. 
 
 In 1619 the " Treaty of Defense " with the Dutch, to prevent 
 disputes between the English and Dutch Companies, was ratified. 
 When it was proclaimed in the East, the Dutch and English fleets, 
 dressed out in all their flags, and with yards manned, saluted each 
 other; but the treaty ended in the smoke of that stately salutation, 
 and the perpetual strife between the Dutch and English Companies 
 went on as bitterly as ever. Up to this time the English Company 
 did not possess any territory in sovereign right in the Indies, ex- 
 cepting the Island of Lantore, or Great Banda in the Moluccas. 
 The island was governed by a commercial agent of the Company, 
 who had under him thirty Europeans as clerks and warehousemen. 
 This little band, with 250 armed Malays, constituted the only force 
 by which it was protected. In the Islands of Banda and Pulo Roon 
 and Rosengyn in the Moluccas, the English Company had factories, 
 at each of which were ten agents. At Macassar in Celebes and 
 Achin in Sumatra, they possessed agencies; the whole being sub- 
 ordinate to a head factory at Bantam in Java. 
 
 In 1620 the Dutch, notwithstanding the Treaty of Defense 
 concluded the previous year, expelled the English from Pulo Roon 
 and Lantore; and in 1621 from Bantam in Java. The fugitive fac- 
 tors tried to establish themselves first at Pulicat, and afterward at 
 Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast, but were effectually opposed 
 by the Dutch. In 1620 the Portuguese also attacked the English 
 fleet under Captain Shilling off the Persian coast, but were de- 
 feated with great loss/ From this time the estimation in which the 
 Portuguese were held by the natives declined, while that of the 
 English rose. In 1620, too, the English Company established
 
 162 INDIA 
 
 1620-1632 
 
 agencies at Agra and Patna. In 1622, they joined with the Persians, 
 attacked and took Ormuz from the Portuguese, and obtained from 
 Shah Abbas a grant in perpetuity of the customs of Gombroon 
 (Bandar Abbas). This was the first time that the English took the 
 offensive against the Portuguese. In the same year, 1622, the 
 English Company succeeded in reestablishing their factory at 
 Masulipatam. 
 
 The massacre of Amboyna, which made so deep an impression 
 on the English mind, marked the climax of the Dutch hatred to the 
 English in the eastern seas. After long and bitter recriminations, 
 the Dutch seized Captain Towerson, with 9 Englishmen, 9 Japanese, 
 and one Portuguese sailor, on February 17, 1623. They tortured 
 the prisoners at their trial, and found them guilty of a conspiracy 
 to surprise the garrison. The victims were executed in the heat 
 of passion, and their torture and judicial murder led to an outburst 
 of indignation in England. 
 
 Ultimately commissioners were appointed to adjust the claims 
 of the two nations; and the Dutch had to pay a sum of 3615/. 
 ($17,570) as satisfaction to the heirs of those who had suffered; 
 but from that time the Dutch remained masters of Lantore and the 
 neighboring islands. They monopolized the trade of the whole 
 Indian archipelago until the great naval wars which commenced in 
 1793. In 1624 the English, unable to oppose the Dutch, withdrew 
 nearly all their factories from the archipelago, the Malay peninsula, 
 Siam, and Java. Some of the factors and agents retired to the 
 Island of Lagundy, in the Strait of Sunda, but were forced by its 
 unhealthfulness to abandon it. 
 
 Driven out of the eastern archipelago by the Dutch, and thus 
 almost cut off from the lucrative spice trade, the English betook 
 themselves in earnest to founding settlements on the Indian sea- 
 board. In 1625-1626 the English established a factory at Arma- 
 gaon, now Durgarayapatnam, about seventy miles north of Madras 
 on the Coromandel coast, subordinate to Masulipatam; but in 1628 
 Masulipatam was, in consequence of the oppressions of the native 
 governors, for a time abandoned in favor of Armagaon, which now 
 mounted 12 guns, and had 23 factors and agents. In 1628 the 
 factory at Bantam in Java was reestablished, and in 1630 made an 
 agency subordinate to Surat; in the same year Armagaon, rein- 
 forced by 20 soldiers, was also placed under the presidency of Surat. 
 In 1632 the English factory was reestablished at Masulipatam,
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 163 
 
 1632-1640 
 
 under a grant, the " golden firman," from the king of Golconda. 
 In 1634, by a firman dated February 2, the Company obtained from 
 the Great Mogul liberty to trade in Bengal, but their ships were to 
 resort only to Pippli in Orissa, now left far inland by the sea. The 
 Portuguese were about the same date expelled for a time from 
 Bengal. English trade with Bengal was opened by Ralph Cart- 
 wright and others who made a voyage from Masulipatam to the 
 Orissa coast, where they obtained from the Mogul governor of 
 Orissa a grant of trading privileges dated May 5, 1633. Cart- 
 wright immediately established a factory at Balasor, which had a 
 precarious existence until the nawab of Bengal confirmed the Eng- 
 lish trading privileges in those regions about 1650. 
 
 In 1 634- 1 63 5 the English factory at Bantam in Java was 
 again raised to an independent presidency, and an agency was 
 established at Tatta, or " Scindy," on the Indus delta. In 1637 
 Courten's Association, chartered in 1635, settled agencies at Goa, 
 Baticala, Karwar, and Rajapur, on the Malabar coast and at Achin 
 in Sumatra. Its ships had the year before plundered some native 
 vessels at Surat and Diu. This act disgraced the Company with 
 the Mogul authorities, who could not comprehend the distinction 
 between the Company and the Association ; and depressed the Eng- 
 lish trade with Surat, while that of the Dutch proportionately 
 increased. 
 
 In 1638 Armagaon was abandoned as unsuited for commerce; 
 and in 1639 Fort Saint George, or Madraspatam or Chennapatam, 
 was founded by Francis Day, and the factors at Armagaon were 
 removed to it. It was made subordinate to Bantam in Java, until 
 raised in 1653 to the rank of a presidency. Chennapatam is the 
 native name, while Madraspatam or Madras has become the English 
 name. The site was purchased from the raja of Chandragiri, a de- 
 scendant of the Vijayanagar dynasty, and was the first territorial 
 possession of the English in India. In 1640 the Company estab- 
 lished an agency at Bussorah at the head of the Persian Gulf, and 
 a factory at Karwar on the Malabar coast. Trade having much ex- 
 tended, the Company's yard at Deptford was found too small for 
 their ships, and they purchased some copyhold ground at Black- 
 wall, which was at that time a waste marsh, without an inhabitant. 
 Here they opened another dockyard, in which was built the Royal 
 George, of 1200 tons, the largest ship up to that time constructed 
 in England.
 
 164 
 
 INDIA 
 
 1640-1663 
 
 The English factory at Hugh in Bengal was established in 1650. 
 At about the same time, in consequence of professional services 
 rendered by Gabriel Boughton, surgeon of the Hopewell, to the 
 Mogul governor of Bengal, concessions were made to the Company 
 which placed the factories at Balasor and Hugh on a more favorable 
 footing. In 1647 Courten's Association established its colony at 
 Assada, in Madagascar. In 1652 England declared war against 
 the Dutch on account of their accumulated injuries against the 
 
 English Company. In 1658 the Company established a factory at 
 Kasimbazar, spelled Castle Bazaar in the records, near the head of 
 the Ganges delta, and adjacent to Murshidabad, the residence of 
 the nawabs of Bengal from 1704 onward, and the English es- 
 tablishments in Bengal were made subordinate to Fort Saint George, 
 or Madras, instead of to Bantam. 
 
 In 1 66 1 Bombay was ceded to the British crown as part of 
 the dower of Catharine of Braganza, but was not delivered up 
 until 1665. King Charles II. transferred it to the East India Com- 
 pany, for an annual payment of ten pounds, in 1668. The seat of
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 165 
 
 1665-1686 
 
 the western presidency was removed to it from Surat in 1684- 
 1687. 
 
 The Company's establishments in the East Indies thus consisted 
 in 1668 of the presidency of Bantam in Java, with its dependencies 
 of Jambi in Sumatra, Macassar in Celebes, and minor agencies in 
 the Indian archipelago; Fort Saint George and its dependent fac- 
 tories on the Coromandel coast and in Bengal; Surat with its 
 affiliated dependency of Bombay ; and factories at Broach, Ahmada- 
 bad, and other places in India; also at Gombroon, or Bandar 
 Abbas, and Bussorah in the Persian Gulf and Euphrates Valley. 
 In 1664 Surat was pillaged by the Maratha Sivaji, but Sir George 
 Oxenden bravely defended the English factory; and the Mogul 
 emperor, in admiration of his conduct, granted the Company an 
 exemption from customs for one year. In 165 1 the Company had 
 occupied the Island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and 
 after twice losing it to the Dutch reconquered it in 1673 and 
 received the grant of it by royal charter. The island remained in 
 possession of the Company until 1834 with the exception of the 
 period of Napoleon's exile. 
 
 In 1 68 1 Bengal was separated from Madras, and Mr., after- 
 ward Sir, William Hedges, arrived at Hugh, the chief Bengal fac- 
 tory, in July, 1682, as the newly appointed " agent and governor " of 
 the Company's affairs " in the Bay of Bengal," and of the factories 
 subordinate to it, at Kasimbazar, Patna, Balasor, Maldah, and Dacca. 
 With him came a corporal of approved fidelity, with twenty 
 soldiers, to be a guard to the agent's person at the factory of Hugh, 
 and to act against interlopers. Mr. Hedges's " Diary," from the 
 signing of his commission in November, 1681, to his return to Eng- 
 land in April, 1687, has been edited, with valuable notes and com- 
 mentaries, by the late Sir Henry Yule, and presents a very remark- 
 able picture of life and government in India at the close of the 
 seventeenth century. In 1684, at the termination of Hedges's 
 governorship, Bengal reverted to the control of Madras until 1700, 
 when it finally became an independent presidency. In 1686 
 Kasimbazar, in common with the other factories in Bengal, had 
 been condemned to confiscation by the nawab, Shaista Khan, who 
 presumed upon his relationship to the Mogul imperial family to act 
 with great independence and show of authority during the absence 
 of Aurangzeb on his long campaign in southern India. The Hugh 
 factory was much oppressed, and finally on December 20, 1686, the
 
 166 INDIA 
 
 1686-1690 
 
 Company's agent, Job Charnock, and the council were forced by 
 the exactions of the nawab to quit the factory and retire down the 
 river to Sutanati, now Calcutta. Broken in spirit by the oppres- 
 sions of the Moguls, the Company resolved to abandon the fac- 
 tories in Bengal. In 1688 Captain Heath of the Resolution, in 
 command of the Company's forces, embarked all its servants and 
 goods, sailed down the Hugh, and anchored off Balasor on the 
 Orissa coast. In February, 1690, the Company made terms with 
 the Moguls and secured an imperial firman renewing all their 
 rights of trade. Charnock, acting upon this, secured from the new 
 nawab a renewal of the old arrangements, but instead of establish- 
 ing the Company's capital in Bengal at Hugh as of old, he selected 
 Sutanati, where he had tarried in 1686, and on August 24, 1690, 
 arrived there and laid the foundation of Calcutta as the new capital 
 of the English in Bengal. After two years and a half of bitter 
 hardships Charnock died, but his work had been done and the 
 English interests had been placed upon a secure foundation and 
 prospered continuously from that time. 
 
 The foundation of Calcutta as a fortified factory of the Com- 
 pany was only one instance of the important change in the Com- 
 pany's affairs at this date. The wars of Aurangzeb in southern 
 India and the raids of the Marathas had made it clear to a few 
 keen observers that the disruption of the Mogul empire was 
 imminent, and that the Company must take measures to consolidate 
 its interests in places which could be fortified to advantage and 
 which should be fully accessible to the Company's ships at all 
 times. This had determined the location of Calcutta. Madras 
 had been similarly located by Francis Day, but the other stations 
 on the Coromandel coast were not located with reference to de- 
 fensibility and so fell victims of native raids as did Vizagapatam 
 and Masulipatam in 1689. In 1683 trade had been opened at Cud- 
 dalore, a hundred miles below Madras, and the advantage of the 
 position led to the establishment by the Company of Fort Saint 
 David or Tegnapatam just north of the town as another fortified 
 factory on this coast. Elihu Yale, a native of New England and 
 later the benefactor of Yale College, was the governor of Madras 
 at this time (1687-1692). Mention should also be made of his 
 predecessor, Sir Streynsham Master (1677-1681) and of his suc- 
 cessor, Thomas Pitt (1698- 1709), the grandfather of the Earl of 
 Chatham, as governors whose strong personalities and valuable
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 167 
 
 1662-1690 
 
 services have left an impress upon the history of the English in 
 India. 
 
 During this critical period, when the Company's position on 
 the eastern coast of India was undergoing reconstruction and when 
 the Company was finally driven from the Indian archipelago by the 
 Dutch, who captured Bantam in 1682, a similar crisis developed in 
 the Company's affairs on the western coast of India. Surat was 
 open to constant raids by the Marathas and was beyond the pro- 
 tection of the guns of the Company's ships, and the other factories 
 were no better placed, while Bombay was not safe from Mogul 
 and Maratha fleets, and was moreover the scene of insurrection led 
 by the third member of council, Richard Keigwin, an officer of the 
 royal navy, from December, 1683, to November, 1684. The Com- 
 pany's interests on this coast were, however, in the hands of strong 
 men with the genius and courage necessary to cope with the condi- 
 tions. Sir George Oxenden, who had been president at Surat since 
 1662 and had taken over the governorship of Bombay on its 
 acquisition by the Company in 1668, died at Surat in 1669 and was 
 succeeded in the double office by Gerald Aungier, who laid the 
 foundations of Bombay's importance. When Aungier died in the 
 harness at Surat in 1677, no worthy successor appeared until John 
 Child assumed the duties of governor and general in October, 
 1 68 1. Though frequently called governor-general in the con- 
 temporary documents, and after 1686 possessing authority over all 
 the English settlements in India, Sir John Child never had the 
 official title of governor-general. 
 
 The Keigwin revolt at Bombay led Charles II. to support the 
 Company in the appointment of Child as admiral and captain- 
 general of the Company's forces on land and sea, with orders to 
 suppress the rebellion and to remove the headquarters from Surat 
 to Bombay. Order was reestablished at Bombay in 1684, and in 
 1687 Child, who had been knighted two years before, completed 
 the removal of the presidency to Bombay which has since remained 
 the capital of the British on the western coast. Child dealt with 
 the interlopers in no lenient manner; and toward the natives, 
 whether Maratha or Mogul, he carried out a strong and consistent 
 policy. His early years had been spent in the country of the 
 Marathas so that he understood their power and their position. He 
 saw the peril of the Mogul empire and dared to adopt toward it a 
 policy of hostility that amounted to war, in order to enforce his
 
 168 INDIA 
 
 1674-1699 
 
 demands on behalf of the Company; but in February, 1690, he was 
 fain to demand peace from Aurangzeb, who renewed the Com- 
 pany's trading privileges on condition of Child's dismissal. Child 
 had already died at Bombay on the 4th of that month. Thanks to 
 the efficient services of men like Child and Charnock the English 
 in India had weathered the period of storm and stress and had suc- 
 cessfully laid the foundations of England's power at Calcutta, 
 Madras, and Bombay, the three presidency towns around which 
 the empire of the British in India was to be built up in the two suc- 
 ceeding centuries. 
 
 It must be confessed that the government in London and the 
 directors of the Company there resident had, in general, but little 
 conception of the problems which faced their subordinates in India 
 and were puzzled to understand what relation building fortifica- 
 tions and fighting Moguls or Marathas had to buying and selling 
 goods for the Company. Fortunately, at the crucial moment, there 
 was in control of the Company in London a man who had the 
 political insight which the moment demanded. This was Sir Josia 
 Child, born in 1630, the son of a London merchant. After being 
 mayor of Portsmouth, where he had been in the naval stores busi- 
 ness, he purchased Wanstead Abbey, now a part of the London 
 park system. In 1674 he became a director of the East India Com- 
 pany and held that office with the exception of 1676 until his death 
 in 1699. He was created a baronet in 1678. Though the change 
 from a commercial to an imperial policy is generally attributed to 
 the Childs, they were not solely responsible for it, and had at first 
 given their support to the old theory. Sir Josia Child seems to 
 have been the largest single stockholder in the East India Company 
 and to have been able to control a considerable number of other 
 shares, so that for several years he was able to dominate the Com- 
 pany's councils, to the intense disgust of the minority interests and 
 of the interlopers. Sir Josia was a vigorous and original thinker 
 on economic and political problems, as his writings and acts testify, 
 and the mutual cooperation of the two brilliant and aggressive 
 brothers, Sir Josia in London as a director of the Company con- 
 tinuously from 1677 to 1699 and as the governor of the Company 
 in 1681-1682 and 1686-1687, an d Sir John in Bombay as governor 
 and general from 1681 to 1690, is shown not only in the results 
 already indicated, but also in the statements of the Company's policy 
 made during this decade.
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 169 
 
 1684-1699 
 
 Two or three quotations from the letters of the court of di- 
 rectors must suffice to indicate this new policy of the Company. 
 On July 2, 1684, they wrote, " Though our business is only trade 
 and security, not conquest which the Dutch have aimed at, we dare 
 not trade boldly, nor leave great stocks . . . where we have not 
 the security of a fort." On December 12, 1687, they wrote to the 
 council at Madras that they look to them, " in a most especiall 
 manner " to " establish such a Politie of civill and military power, 
 and create and secure such a large Revenue as may bee the founda- 
 tion of a large, well-grounded, sure English Dominion in India 
 for all Time to come ; " and yet they add on August 2j of the 
 next year, " we would have you do no wrong or violence to any 
 in amity with us . . . Just and Stout is the motto we 
 hope to deserve and wear." In 1689, England placed on the 
 throne William of Orange, stadtholder of the United Netherlands, 
 and Mary Stuart his wife, and adopted the Bill of Rights ; and on 
 September 1 1 of that year the court of directors wrote to Sir John 
 Child and his council : " The increase of our revenue is the sub- 
 ject of our care, as much as our trade ; 'tis that must maintain our 
 force when twenty accidents may interrupt our trade ; 'tis that must 
 make us a nation in India. Without that we are but a great num- 
 ber of interlopers, united by His Majesty's royal charter, fit only 
 to trade where nobody of power thinks it their interest to prevent 
 us. And upon this account it is that the wise Dutch, in all their 
 general advices that we have seen, write ten paragraphs concern- 
 ing their government, their civil and military policy, warfare, and 
 the increase of their revenue, for one paragraph they write con- 
 cerning trade." The subsequent history of the English East India 
 Company and its settlements will be narrated in the next chapter. 
 
 The Portuguese at no time attempted to found a company, but 
 kept their eastern trade as a royal enterprise and monopoly. The 
 first incorporated company was the English, established in 1600, 
 which was quickly followed by the Dutch in 1602. The Dutch 
 conquests, however, were made in the name of the state, and ranked 
 as national colonies, not as semi-commercial possessions. Next 
 came the French, whose first East India Company was founded in 
 1604; the second in 161 1 ; the third in 1615 ; the fourth, Richelieu's, 
 in 1642, and the fifth, Colbert's, in 1664. The early French Com- 
 panies consisted of trading adventurers, who left no establishments 
 in India ; and when, after the troublous period of the Fronde, Louis
 
 170 INDIA 
 
 1650-1761 
 
 XIV. was firmly seated on the throne of France, it was to the 
 Island of Bourbon or Reunion and Madagascar that the king's 
 ministers looked for a field for commercial expansion. The Island 
 of Bourbon was occupied about 1650, and an attempt was made to 
 form settlements in Madagascar. Colbert, however, hoped to win 
 a share in the profitable India trade, and the fifth French East India 
 Company was founded by him in 1664, with the intention of rivaling 
 the success of the English and the Dutch in India itself. Pondi- 
 cherri was acquired by Francois Martin in 1674, and Chandarnagar, 
 on the Hugh about 25 miles above Calcutta and just below Hugh 
 and Chinsurah, in 1688; but want of support from France brought 
 the Company's affairs in India to a very low ebb, and the Company 
 felt obliged to cede its right of monopoly to some enterprising 
 merchants of Saint-Malo. The brilliant schemes of Law drew fresh 
 attention to the Indian trade, and the powers, possessions, and assets 
 of Colbert's Company were taken over by his great Company of 
 the West, which is chiefly remembered by its project of developing 
 the colony of Louisiana in America. On the downfall of Law, a 
 sixth East India Company was formed by the union of the French 
 East and West India, Senegal, and China Companies, under the 
 name of "The Perpetual Company of the Indies," in 1719. The 
 exclusive privileges of this Company were, by the French king's 
 decree, suspended in 1769 ; and the Company was finally abolished 
 by the National Assembly in 1790. 
 
 In February, 1701, Pondicherri was made the capital of the 
 French settlements in India, and Frangois Martin was appointed 
 president of the superior council and director general of French 
 affairs in India. Martin died December 30, 1706, and his successors 
 as governors-general of the French Indies assumed office as follows : 
 Dulivier, January 1, 1707; Hebert, July, 1708; Dulivier, again, 
 October, 171 3; Hebert, again, 171 5; La Provostiere, August 19, 
 1718; Lenoir, October, 1721; Beauvallier de Courchant, October 
 6, 1723; Lenoir, again, September 4, 1726; Benoit Dumas, Septem- 
 ber 19, 1735; Joseph Dupleix, October, 1741; Godeheu, August 2, 
 1754; Duval de Leyrit, March 25, 1755. Pondicherri was captured 
 by the English on January 16, 1761 ; and since then the French 
 colonies in India have been unimportant. Dumas and Dupleix first 
 conceived the idea of founding an Indian empire upon the ruins of 
 the Mogul dynasty ; and for a time the French nation successfully 
 contended with the English for the supremacy in the East. In each
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 171 
 
 1612-1772 
 
 of the great European wars beginning with the War of the League 
 of Augsburg in 1688, but more fully with the War of the Austrian 
 Succession in 1740, and ending with the Napoleonic wars in 181 5, 
 France was opposed by England and in several instances also by 
 the Dutch. Each of these wars had a counterpart in struggles in 
 India. The crucial test was the Seven Years' War, which ruined the 
 French empire in India. 
 
 The French settlements in India have an area of about 196 
 square miles and a population of 273,185 in 190 1, and are five in 
 number, Pondicherri, Karikal, Chandarnagar, Mahe, and Yanaon. 
 Karikal is on the Coromandel coast about 75 miles south of Pondi- 
 cherri; Yanaon is on the same coast on the Godavari delta; and 
 Mahe is on the Malabar coast a few miles from Tellicherri. The 
 imports in 1902 amounted to more than $800,000 and the exports 
 to more that $5,500,000. The French government is obliged to 
 make an annual subvention to meet the deficit in the budget of its 
 Indian possessions. 
 
 The first Danish East India Company was formed in 1612, 
 and the second in 1670. The settlements of Tranquebar, on the 
 Coromandel coast about 150 miles south of Madras, and just north 
 of Karikal, and Serampur on the Hugh about 15 miles above Cal- 
 cutta, were both founded in 16 16, and acquired by the English by 
 purchase from Denmark in 1845. Tranquebar was the seat of the 
 first Protestant mission in India, founded in 1706 by the Lutherans, 
 Ziegenbalz and Pliitschau ; and Serampur was the scene of the labors 
 of William Carey and other famous Baptist missionaries. Other 
 Danish settlements on the mainland of India were Porto Novo on 
 the Coromandel coast about 120 miles south of Madras; with 
 Eddova and Holcheri on the Malabar coast. The Company started 
 by the Scotch " The Company of Scotland trading to Africa and 
 the Indies " incorporated by the Scottish parliament, June 26, 
 1695, may be regarded as having been stillborn. Its chief pro- 
 moter was William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England. 
 Its only undertaking was the ill-fated Darien colony in America. 
 
 The " Royal Company of the Philippine Islands," incorporated 
 by the king of Spain in 1733, had little to do with India proper. 
 
 Of more importance was the Ostend Company, incorporated 
 by the Holy Roman emperor in 1722; its factors and agents being 
 chiefly persons who had served in the Dutch and English Com- 
 panies. This enterprise forms the subject of Carlyle's " Third
 
 172 INDIA 
 
 1717-1722 
 
 Shadow Hunt " of the Emperor Charles VI. " The Kaiser's Im- 
 perial Ostend East India Company, which convulsed the diplomatic 
 mind for seven years to come, and made Europe lurch from side 
 to side in a terrific manner, proved a mere paper company; never 
 sent ships, only produced diplomacies, and ' had the honor to be.' " 
 These picturesque paragraphs from Carlyle's " History of Fried- 
 rich the Second," do not disclose the facts. The Ostend Company 
 formed the one great attempt of the Holy Roman empire, then 
 with Austria at its head, to secure a share of the Indian trade. It 
 not only sent ships, but it also founded two settlements in India 
 which threatened the commerce of the older European companies. 
 One of its settlements was at Coblom or Covelong, between the 
 English Madras and the Dutch Sadras, on the southeastern coast. 
 The older was at Bankipur, or Banky-bazaar, on the Hugh River, 
 between the English Calcutta and the Dutch Chinsurah. Each of 
 these German settlements was regarded with hatred by the English 
 and Dutch; and with a more intense fear by the less successful 
 French, whose adjacent settlements at Pondicherri on the Madras 
 coast, and at Chandarnagar on the Hugh, were also threatened by 
 the Ostend Company. 
 
 So far from the German association being " a mere paper com- 
 pany," and never sending ships, as Carlyle supposes, its formation 
 was the result of a series of successful experimental voyages. In 
 1 71 7 Prince Eugene of Savoy, the famous general, and governor- 
 general of the Austria Netherlands, ordered two vessels to sail for 
 India, under the protection of his own passports. The profits of the 
 expedition led to others in succeeding years, and each voyage proved 
 so fortunate that the emperor found it necessary to protect and 
 consolidate the property of the adventurers by a charter in 1722. 
 This deed granted to the Ostend Company more favorable terms 
 than any of the other European companies enjoyed. Its capital 
 was six million gulden; which at the present rate would be $2,412,- 
 000, but the relative value would give a considerably larger sum, 
 and so great were its profits during its first years that its shares 
 brought in 15 per cent. The French, Dutch, and English Com- 
 panies loudly complained of its factories, built at their very doors, 
 both on the Hugh River and on the Madras coast. These com- 
 plaints were warmly taken up by their respective governments in 
 Europe. 
 
 The object which the Emperor Charles VI. had in view
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 173 
 
 1722-1733 
 
 was political not less than commercial. The Catholic Netherlands, 
 now Belgium, in which Ostend is situated, formed a part of the Holy 
 Roman empire. By the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden in 17 14 they 
 passed from Spain to Austria. Charles VI. was at the same time 
 ruler of the Catholic Netherlands and Austria and Holy Roman 
 emperor. Thus his interests in the Ostend Company were Belgian, 
 Austrian, and Imperial, hence the apparent confusion in his aims 
 for the Company. The wrath of the English and Dutch was height- 
 ened by the fact that the success of their arms had given the 
 Belgian provinces to Charles VI. 
 
 In 1 719 the Austrian Oriental Trading Company was organ- 
 ized to trade within the Austrian dominions and from Austrian 
 ports, with its headquarters at Trieste and Fiume, but after a few 
 years it declined and about 1740 ceased to exist. Prince Eugene 
 had urged that an Indian company might be made to form the 
 nucleus of an Austrian fleet, with a first-class naval station at 
 Ostend on the North Sea, and another at Fiume or Trieste on the 
 Adriatic. Such a fleet would complete the greatness of Austria 
 by sea as by land; and would render her independent of the mari- 
 time powers, especially of England and the Dutch. The empire 
 would at length put its ports on the Baltic and the Adriatic to a 
 proper use, and wo^ld thenceforth exert a commanding maritime 
 influence in Europe. 
 
 The existing maritime powers objected to this ; and the Ostend 
 Company became the shuttlecock of European diplomacy for the 
 next five years. The Dutch and the English felt themselves par- 
 ticularly aggrieved. They pleaded the Treaties of Westphalia and 
 Utrecht. After long and loud altercations, the emperor sacrificed 
 the Ostend Company in 1727 to gain the acceptance of a project 
 nearer his heart the Pragmatic Sanction for the devolution of 
 his hereditary dominions. To save his honor, the sacrifice at first 
 took the form of a suspension of the company's charter for seven 
 years, but the company was doomed by the maritime powers. Its 
 shareholders did not, however, despair. They made attempts to 
 transfer their European center of trade to Hamburg, Trieste, Tus- 
 cany and even Sweden. 
 
 Meanwhile the other European companies in Bengal had taken 
 the law into their own hands. They stirred up the Mohammedan 
 government against the newcomers. In 1733, the Mohammedan 
 military governor of Hugh picked a quarrel, in the name of the
 
 174. INDIA 
 
 1733-1751 
 
 Delhi emperor, with the little Belgian settlement at Bankipur, which 
 lay about eight miles below Hugh town on tr\e opposite side of 
 the river. The Mohammedan troops besieged Bankipur; and the 
 garrison, reduced to fourteen persons, after a despairing resistance 
 against overwhelming numbers, abandoned the place and set sail 
 for Europe. The Ostend agent lost his right arm by a cannon ball 
 during the attack; and the Ostend Company, together with the 
 Austrian interests which it represented, became thenceforward 
 merely a name in Bengal. Its chief settlement, Bankipur or Banky- 
 bazaar, has long disappeared from the maps ; and I could only trace 
 its existence from a chart of the eighteenth century, aided by the 
 records of that period, and by repeated personal inquiry on the spot. 
 The Ostend Company, however, still prolonged its existence in 
 Europe. After a miserable struggle it became bankrupt in 1784; 
 and was finally extinguished by the arrangements made at the 
 renewal of the English East India Company's charter in 1793. 
 
 What the emperor had failed to effect, Frederick the Great, 
 king of Prussia, resolved to accomplish. Having gained possession 
 of East Friesland in 1744, he tried to convert its capital, Embden, 
 into a great northern port. Among other measures, he gave his 
 royal patronage to the Asiatic Trading Company, started September 
 1, 1750, and founded the Bengalische Handelsgesellschaft on Jan- 
 uary 24, 1753. The first of these companies had a capital of 
 $853,000; but six ships sent successively to China only defrayed 
 their own expenses, and yielded a profit of ten per cent, in seven 
 years. The Bengal Company of Embden proved still more un- 
 fortunate; its existence was summed up in two expeditions which 
 did not pay, and in a long and costly lawsuit. 
 
 The failure of Frederick the Great's efforts to secure for 
 Prussia a share in the Indian trade resulted to some extent from 
 the jealousy of the rival European companies in India. The Dutch, 
 French, and English pilots refused to show the way up the dan- 
 gerous Hugh River to the Embden ships, " or any other not belong- 
 ing to powers already established in India." It is due to the 
 European companies to state that in thus refusing pilots to the new- 
 comers, they were carrying out the orders of the native government 
 of Bengal to which they were then strictly subject. "If the 
 Germans come here," the nawab of Murshidabad had written, 
 August 19, 1 75 1, to the English merchants on a rumor of the 
 first Embden expedition reaching India, " it will be very bad for
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 175 
 
 1731-1778 
 
 all the Europeans, but for you worst of all, and you will afterward 
 repent it; and I shall be obliged to stop all your trade and busi- 
 ness. . . . Therefore take care that these German ships do not 
 come." 
 
 " God forbid that they should come," was the pious response 
 of the president of the English council; "but should this be 
 the case, I am in hopes they will be either sunk, broke, or de- 
 stroyed." 
 
 They came, nevertheless, and some years later the English 
 court of directors complained that their Bengal servants were 
 anxious to trade privately with the Embden Company. " If any 
 of the Prussian ships," wrote the court, March 25, 1756, "want 
 the usual assistance of water, provisions, or real necessaries, they 
 are to be supplied according to the customs of nations in amity 
 one with the other. But you are on no pretense whatsoever to have 
 any dealings with them, or give the least assistance in their mer- 
 cantile affairs." 
 
 The truth is that the Prussian Company had effected an 
 entrance into Bengal, and found the French, English, and Dutch 
 merchants quite willing to trade with it on their private account, 
 but the Prussian investments were made without experience, and 
 the Embden Company was before long sacrificed by the Prussian 
 king to the exigencies of his European diplomacy. 
 
 The last nation of Europe to engage in maritime trade with 
 India was Sweden. When the Ostend Company was suspended, a 
 number of its servants were thrown out of employment. Henry 
 Koning, of Stockholm, took advantage of their knowledge of 
 the East, and obtained a charter for the Swedish Company, 
 dated June 13, 1731. The headquarters of the company were at 
 Gothenburg, and between 1731 and 1778 it sent seventy-six ships 
 to China, three to Bengal, and three to Surat. The profits at first 
 were large, but gradually fell off. This company was reorganized 
 in 1806, but did little; and, after many troubles, disappeared from 
 India. 
 
 Such is a summary of the efforts by European nations to ob- 
 tain a share in the India trade. The Portuguese failed, because 
 they attempted a task altogether beyond their strength : the conquest 
 and conversion of India. Their memorials are the epic of " The 
 Lusiad," the death-roll of the Inquisition, an indigent half-caste 
 population, and three decayed patches of territory on the Bombay
 
 176 INDIA 
 
 1778-1800 
 
 coast. The Dutch failed on the Indian continent because their 
 trade was based on a monopoly which it was impossible to maintain, 
 except by great and costly armaments. Their monopoly, however, 
 still flourishes in their isolated island dominion of Java. The 
 French failed, in spite of the brilliancy of their arms and the genius 
 of their generals, from want of steady support at home. Their 
 ablest Indian servants fell victims to a corrupt court and a careless 
 people. Their surviving settlements disclose that talent for careful 
 administration, which, but for French monarchs and their minis- 
 ters and their mistresses, might have been displayed throughout a 
 wide Indian empire. 
 
 The German companies, whether Austrian or Prussian, were 
 sacrificed to the diplomatic necessities of their royal patrons in 
 Europe, and to the dependence of the German states in the wars 
 of the eighteenth century upon the maritime powers, but the Ger- 
 mans have never abandoned the struggle. The share in the Indian 
 trade which Prussian king and Austrian kaiser failed to grasp 
 in the eighteenth century has been gradually acquired by German 
 merchants in our own day. An important part of the commerce 
 of Calcutta and Bombay is now conducted by German firms. Ger- 
 man mercantile agents are to be found in the rice districts, the jute 
 districts, the cotton districts; and persons of German nationality 
 have rapidly increased in the Indian census returns. 
 
 England emerged the prize-winner from the long contest of 
 the European nations for India. Her success was partly the good 
 gift of fortune, but chiefly the result of four elements in the na- 
 tional character. There was: first, a marvelous patience and self- 
 restraint in refusing to enter on territorial conquests or projects 
 of Indian aggrandizement, until she had gathered strength enough 
 to succeed. Second, an indomitable persistence in those projects 
 once they were entered on; and a total incapacity, on the part of 
 her servants in India, of being stopped by defeat. Third, an ad- 
 mirable mutual confidence of the Company's servants in each other 
 in times of trouble. Fourth, and chief of all, the resolute support 
 of the English nation at home. England has never doubted that 
 she must retrieve, at whatever strain to herself, every disaster which 
 may befall Englishmen in India, and she has never sacrificed the 
 work of her Indian servants to the exigencies of her diplomacy in 
 Europe. She was the only European power which unconsciously, 
 but absolutely, carried out these two principles of policy. The
 
 EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS 177 
 
 1800 
 
 result of that policy, pursued during three centuries, is the British 
 India of to-day. 
 
 Though England has made herself the paramount power in 
 India and has successfully for more than a century excluded all 
 other powers from political intervention in India, she has not mo- 
 nopolized for her merchants the trade of India, and especially since 
 the transfer of India from the Company to the crown in 1858 
 has maintained what has come to be known as " the open door." 
 Traders of all nations enter the markets of India on a par with 
 Englishmen and now control a large proportion of the trade. Of 
 India's sea-borne trade in 1902-1903, exclusive of treasure and 
 government stores, forty-one per cent, only was with the United 
 Kingdom, nine per cent, with China, five per cent, with France, 
 six per cent, with Germany, and four and one-half per cent, with 
 the United States. The total shipping entered and cleared to for- 
 eign countries at Indian ports during 1902-1903 was 10,926,560 
 tons, an increase of thirteen per cent, as compared with the previ- 
 ous year. The number of natives of continental European states 
 resident in British India, exclusive of the native states, has steadily 
 increased in recent years. In 1872 the number was 2554, but had 
 increased to 5278 in 1881, and 5868 in 1891.
 
 Chapter XIII 
 
 GROWTH OF BRITISH POWER. 1700-1805 
 
 THE political history of the British in India begins in the 
 eighteenth century with the French wars in the Karnatik. 
 It was at Arcot, in the Madras presidency, that Clive's 
 star first shone forth; and it was on the field of Wandiwash in 
 the same presidency that the French dream of an Indian empire 
 was forever shattered. Fort St. George, or Madras, was, as we 
 have seen, the first territorial possession of the English on the main- 
 land of India, having been founded by Francis Day in 1639. The 
 French settlement of Pondicherri, about 100 miles lower down the 
 Coromandel coast, was established in 1674; and for many years the 
 English and French traded side by side without rivalry or terri- 
 torial ambition. 
 
 On the death of the Mogul emperor, Aurangzeb, in 1707, 
 southern India gradually became independent of Delhi. In the 
 Deccan proper, the Nizam-ul-Mulk founded a hereditary dynasty, 
 with Haidarabad for its capital, which exercised a nominal author- 
 ity over the entire south. The Karnatik, or the lowland tract be- 
 tween the central plateau and the Bay of Bengal, was ruled by a 
 deputy of the nizam, known as the nawab of Arcot, who in his turn 
 asserted claims to hereditary sovereignty. Farther south, Trichin- 
 opoli was the capital of a Hindu raja; Tanjore formed another 
 Hindu kingdom under a degenerate descendant of the Maratha 
 leader, Sivaji. Inland, Mysore was gradually growing into a third 
 Hindu state; while everywhere local chieftains, called palegars or 
 nayaks, were in semi-independent possession of citadels or hill- 
 forts. These represented the feudal chiefs or fief-holders of the 
 ancient Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar; and many of them had 
 maintained a practical independence, subject to irregular payments 
 of tribute, since the fall of that kingdom in 1565. 
 
 Such was the condition of affairs in southern India when war 
 broke out between the English and the French in Europe in 1743. 
 Dupleix was at that time French governor of Pondicherri and 
 
 1T8
 
 BRITISH POWER 179 
 
 1743-1748 
 
 Give was a young civil servant or " writer " at Madras. Joseph 
 Frangois Dupleix was born at Landrecies, France, in 1697. He 
 was a son of a director of the French East India Company and 
 joined the Company's service at Pondicherri in 1720. He was 
 governor-general of the French possessions in India from 1742 
 to 1754, and died discredited and poverty-striken in Paris on No- 
 vember 10, 1764. Robert Clive was born in Shropshire, England, 
 on September 29, 1725, and was appointed a writer in the service 
 of the East India Company in 1743, and reached Madras in the 
 following year. In 1747 he was commissioned ensign in the Com- 
 pany's army. He was governor of Bengal from 1758 to 1760 and 
 from 1765 to 1767. In addition to his career in India, it may be 
 noted that he was created Baron Clive of Plassey in the Irish peer- 
 age in 1762. He died by his own hand on November 22, 1774. 
 
 An English fleet appeared first on the Coromandel coast, but 
 Dupleix by a judicious present induced the nawab of Arcot to 
 interpose and forbid hostilities. In 1746 a French squadron ar- 
 rived, under the command of Bertrand Frangois Mahe de la Bour- 
 donnais, the famous French governor of the Isle de France, or 
 Mauritius, from 1735 to 1746. Madras surrendered to it almost 
 without a blow; and the only settlement left to the English was 
 Fort St. David, some miles south of Pondicherri, where Clive and 
 a few other fugitives sought shelter. The nawab of Arcot, faithful 
 to his impartial policy, marched with 10,000 men to drive the 
 French out of Madras, but was defeated by Paradis at Saint 
 Thome, now a southern suburb of Madras, on November 4, 1746. 
 In 1748 an English fleet arrived under Admiral Boscawen, and 
 attempted the siege of Pondicherri, while a land force cooperated 
 under Major Stringer Lawrence, known as the " Father of the 
 Indian Army." The French repulsed all attacks; but the Treaty 
 of Aix-la-Chapelle, in the same year, restored Madras to the Eng- 
 lish, to compensate for the retrocession to France of Louisburg in 
 North America, which had been captured by the English in 1745. 
 
 It should be remembered that the two wars in the Karnatik 
 were merely parts of two great world-wide struggles, the War of 
 the Austrian Succession, 1740- 1748, and the Seven Years' War, 
 1 756- 1 763. In Europe the central fact in each of these wars was 
 the struggle between Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa for 
 Silesia; in America and in Asia and upon the seas, the great fact 
 was the struggle between England and France for maritime su-
 
 180 INDIA 
 
 1748-1760 
 
 premacy and colonial empire. The earlier struggle was indeci- 
 sive and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was merely a truce which 
 was violated by both parties before the war was formally renewed 
 in 1756. In France the chief minister, Choiseul, was baffled by 
 the intrigues of Louis XV. and the incapability of the French 
 generals. Until the crisis of the struggle was past England loy- 
 ally supported William Pitt, and England's success in the three- 
 fold struggle was due to his masterly policy and to the ability of 
 the subordinates whom he selected to carry it out. The first war 
 with the French was merely an incident in the greater contest in 
 Europe. The second war had its origin in Indian politics, while 
 England and France were at peace. The easy success of the 
 French arms had inspired Dupleix with the ambition of founding 
 a French empire in India, under the shadow of the Mohammedan 
 powers. Disputed successions among the reigning families both 
 at Haidarabad and at Arcot gave him his opportunity. On both 
 thrones Dupleix placed nominees of his own, and for a time he 
 posed as the arbiter of the entire south. In boldness of concep- 
 tion, and in knowledge of oriental diplomacy, Dupleix has prob- 
 ably had no equal, but he was no soldier, and he was destined to 
 encounter in the field the " heaven-born genius " of Clive. The 
 English of Madras, under the instinct of self-preservation, had 
 maintained the cause of another candidate to the throne of Arcot, 
 in opposition to the nominee of Dupleix. Their candidate was 
 Mohammed Ali, afterward known in history as Wala-jah. 
 
 The war which ensued between the French and English in 
 southern India has been exhaustively described by Orme. The 
 one incident that stands out conspicuously is the capture and sub- 
 sequent defense of Arcot by Clive in 1751. This heroic feat, even 
 more than the battle of Plassey, spread the fame of English valor 
 throughout India. Shortly afterward Clive returned to Eng- 
 land in ill-health, but the war continued fitfully for many years. 
 On the whole, the English influence predominated in the Karnatik 
 or Madras coast, and their candidate, Mohammed Ali, maintained 
 his position at Arcot, but, inland, the French were supreme in 
 southern India, and they were also able to seize the maritime tract 
 called the Northern Circars. 
 
 The final struggle did not take place until 1760. In that year, 
 Colonel Coote won the decisive victory of Wandiwash, which is in 
 the hills fifty-eight miles southwest of Madras and about equi-
 
 BRITISH POWER 181 
 
 1760-1763 
 
 distant from Pondicherri. He then proceeded to invest Pondi- 
 cherri, which was starved into capitulation in January, 1761. A 
 few months later the hill fortress of Ginji also surrendered. In 
 the words of Orme, " that day terminated the long hostilities be- 
 tween the two rival European powers in Coromandel, and left not 
 a single ensign of the French nation avowed by the authority of 
 its government in any part of India." 
 
 By the Treaty of Paris, February 10, 1763, Pondicherri and 
 certain other factories were restored to the French with narrow 
 territorial limits, but the French were deprived of their military 
 and political influence in Indian affairs. Thrice after this Pondi- 
 cherri and its dependencies were seized by England in time of war 
 and restored at the peace. The present territorial position of 
 France in India is determined by the treaties of 18 14 and 181 5, 
 which gave Pondicherri, Chandarnagar, Karikal, Mahe, and 
 Yanaon to France. The commercial relations of the French in 
 India are determined by the conventions of March 7, 181 5, and of 
 May 13, 1818. Toward the close of the Seven Years' War the 
 negotiation of the Family Compact made Spain a party to the war 
 as the ally of France. For this reason an expedition under General 
 Draper and Admiral Cornish sailed from Madras and captured 
 Manila on October 6, 1762. This event was unknown in Europe 
 when the Treaty of Paris was signed and so Manila and the 
 Philippines remained in the hands of Spain. 
 
 Meanwhile the narrative of British conquests shifts with Clive 
 to Lower Bengal. At the time of Aurangzeb's death, in 1707, the 
 nawab or governor of Lower Bengal was Murshid Kuli Khan, 
 known also in European history as Jafar Khan. By birth a Brah- 
 man, and brought up as a slave in Persia, he united the adminis- 
 trative ability of a Hindu to the fanaticism of a renegade. 
 Hitherto the capital of Lower Bengal had been at Dacca, on the 
 eastern frontier of the empire, whence the piratical attacks of the 
 Portuguese and of the Arakanese or Maghs could be most easily 
 checked. Murshid Kuli Khan transferred his residence to Mur- 
 shidabad, in the immediate neighborhood of Kasimbazar, which 
 was then the river port of the Gangetic trade. The English, the 
 French, and the Dutch had each factories at Kasimbazar, as well 
 as at Dacca, Patna, and Maldah, but Calcutta was the separate 
 headquarters of the English, Chandarnagar of the French, and 
 Chinsurah of the Dutch, these three towns being situated not far
 
 182 INDIA 
 
 1707-1763 
 
 from one another on the lower reaches of the Hugli, where the 
 river was navigable for sea-going ships. Murshid Kuli Khan 
 ruled over Lower Bengal prosperously for twenty-one years, and 
 left his power to a son-in-law and a grandson. The hereditary 
 succession was broken in 1740 by AH Vardi Khan, a usurper, but 
 the last of the great nawabs of Bengal. In his days the Maratha 
 horsemen ravaged the country, and the inhabitants of Calcutta 
 obtained permission in 1742 to erect an earthwork, known to the 
 present day as the Maratha Ditch. 
 
 AH Vardi Khan died in 1756, and was succeeded by his 
 grandson, Siraj-ud-daula (Surajah Dowlah), a youth of only 
 eighteen years, whose ungovernable temper led to a rupture with 
 the English within two months after his accession. In pursuit of 
 one of his own family who had escaped from his vengeance, he 
 marched upon Calcutta with a large army. Many of the English 
 fled down the river in their ships. The remainder surrendered 
 after some resistance, and were thrust for the night into the 
 " Black Hole " or military jail of Fort William, a room about 
 eighteen feet square, with only two small windows barred with 
 iron. It was the ordinary garrison prison in those times of cruel 
 military discipline, but although the nawab does not seem to have 
 been aware of the consequences, it meant death to a crowd of Eng- 
 lish men and women in the stifling heats of June. When the door 
 of the prison was opened next morning, only 23 persons out of 146 
 remained alive. There seems to have been but one woman in the 
 Black Hole and she was one of the survivors. The victims in- 
 cluded, besides the English, other Europeans and natives. 
 
 The news of this disaster fortunately found Clive back again 
 at Madras, where also was a squadron of king's ships under Ad- 
 miral Watson. Clive and Watson promptly sailed to the mouth of 
 the Ganges with all the troops they could get together. Calcutta 
 was recovered with .little fighting ; and the nawab consented to a 
 peace, which restored to the English Company all their privileges, 
 and gave them ample compensation for their losses. 
 
 It is possible that matters might have ended thus, if a fresh 
 cause of hostilities had not suddenly arisen. War had just been 
 declared between the English and French in Europe; and Clive, 
 following the traditions of warfare in the Karnatik, captured the 
 French settlement of Chandarnagar on the Hugli. Siraj-ud-daula, 
 enraged by this breach of neutrality within his dominions, sided
 
 BRITISH POWER 183 
 
 1757-1763 
 
 with the French, but Clive, again acting upon the policy which he 
 had learned from Dupleix in southern India, provided himself with 
 a rival candidate, Mir Jafar, for the throne. Undaunted, he 
 marched out to the grove of Plassey, about 70 miles north of Cal- 
 cutta, at the head of 1000 Europeans and 2000 sepoys, with 8 
 pieces of artillery. The Bengal viceroy's army numbered 35,000 
 foot and 15,000 horse, with 50 cannon. Clive is said to have 
 fought in spite of his council of war. The truth is, he could 
 scarcely avoid a battle. The nawab attacked with his whole ar- 
 tillery at 6 A. M. ; but Clive kept his men well under shelter, 
 " lodged in a large grove, surrounded with good mud-banks." At 
 noon the enemy drew off into their intrenched camp for dinner. 
 Clive only hoped to make a " successful attack at night." Mean- 
 while, the enemy being probably undressed over their cooking- 
 pots, he sprang upon one of their advanced posts, which had 
 given him trouble, and stormed " an angle of their camp." Sev- 
 eral of the nawab's chief officers fell. The nawab himself, dis- 
 mayed by the unexpected confusion, fled on a camel; his troops 
 dispersed in a panic; and Clive found he had won a great victory. 
 Mir Jafar's cavalry, which had hovered undecided during the bat- 
 tle, and had been repeatedly fired on by Clive, " to make them keep 
 their distance," now joined the English camp; and the road to 
 Murshidabad, the nawab's capital, lay open. 
 
 The battle of Plassey was fought on June 23, 1757, an an- 
 niversary afterward remembered when the Mutiny of 1857 was at 
 its height. History has agreed to adopt this date as the beginning 
 of the British empire in the East ; but the immediate results of the 
 victory were comparatively small, and several years passed in hard 
 fighting before even the Bengalis would admit the superiority of 
 the British arms. For the moment, however, all opposition was 
 at an end. Clive, again following in the steps of Dupleix, placed 
 his nominee, Mir Jafar, upon the viceregal throne at Murshidabad, 
 as nawab of Bengal. Enormous sums were exacted from Mir 
 Jafar as the price of his elevation. The Company claimed 
 15,000,000 rupees ($5,500,000) as compensation for its losses. 
 For the English, Hindu, and Armenian inhabitants of Calcutta 
 were demanded, respectively, 5,000,000, 2,000,000, 700,000 rupees ; 
 for the naval squadron and the army, 2,500,000 rupees apiece. The 
 members of the council were promised the following amounts : Drake, 
 the governor, and Colonel Clive, as second member of the select com-
 
 184 INDIA 
 
 1757-1765 
 
 mittee, 280,000 rupees each ; and Becker, Watts, and Major Kilpat- 
 rick, 240,000 rupees each. Colonel Clive also received 200,000 rupees 
 as commander in chief, and 1,600,000 rupees " as a private dona- 
 tion." Additional " donations " were likewise made to the other 
 members of the council, amounting in the case of Watts to 800,000 
 rupees. The first four of these items are taken from the treaty with 
 Mir Jafar. The remaining figures are from the testimony before 
 the Parliamentary investigating committee, and it is not alto- 
 gether clear what the exact amount of the personal gifts was. As- 
 suming that the total given is correct, it would have amounted to 
 about $13,000,000. The English still cherished extravagant ideas 
 of Indian wealth. But no funds existed to satisfy their inordinate 
 demands, and they had to be content with Mir Jafar's promise to 
 pay one-half down and the balance in three years, and even of this 
 reduced amount one-third had to be taken in jewels and plate, there 
 being neither coin nor ingots left. 
 
 At the same time the new nawab of Bengal made a grant to 
 the Company of the zamindari or landholder's rights over an ex- 
 tensive tract of country round Calcutta, now known as the district 
 of the Twenty-Four Parganas. A pargana is a subdivision of a 
 district. The Twenty-Four Parganas include the country imme- 
 diately surrounding Calcutta, but do not include the city. The 
 area of this tract was 882 square miles, but has been increased 
 by later additions. In 1757 the Company obtained only the zamin- 
 dari rights, that is, the right to collect the cultivator's rents, to- 
 gether with the revenue jurisdiction attached, subject to the 
 obligation of paying over the assessed land tax to the nawab, as 
 the representative of the Delhi emperor. In 1759 the land tax 
 also was granted by the emperor, the nominal suzerain of the 
 nawab, in favor of Clive, who thus became the landlord of his own 
 masters, the Company. This military fief, or Clive's jagir, as it 
 was called, subsequently became a matter of inquiry in England. 
 Lord Clive's claims to the property as feudal suzerain over the 
 Company were contested by it in 1764; but finally, in 1765, when 
 he returned to Bengal, a new deed was issued, confirming the un- 
 conditional jagir to Lord Clive for ten years, with reversion after- 
 ward to the Company in perpetuity. This deed, having received 
 the Delhi emperor's sanction on August 12, 1765, gave absolute 
 validity to the original jagir grant in favor of Lord Clive. It 
 transferred eventually to the Company the Twenty-Four Parganas
 
 BRITISH POWER 
 
 185 
 
 1758-1765 
 
 as a perpetual property, based upon a jagir grant. The annual 
 sum of 222,958 rupees, the amount at which the land-rent was 
 assessed when first made over to the Company in 1757, was paid 
 to Lord Clive from 1765 until his death in 1774, when the whole 
 proprietary right reverted to the Company. 
 
 In 1758 Clive was appointed by the court of directors the 
 first governor of all the company's settlements in Bengal. Two 
 
 powers threatened hostilities. On the northwest, the shahzada or 
 imperial prince, afterward the Emperor Shah Alam, with a mixed 
 army of Afghans and Marathas, and supported by the nawab wazir 
 of .Oudh, was advancing his own claims to the province of Bengal. 
 In the south, the influence of the French under Lally and Bussy 
 was overshadowing the British at Madras. The name of Clive 
 exercised a decisive effect in both directions. The nawab of Ben- 
 gal, Mir Jafar, was anxious to buy off the shahzada, who had
 
 186 INDIA 
 
 1758-1763 
 
 already invested Patna, but Clive marched in person to the rescue, 
 with an army of only 450 Europeans and 2500 sepoys, and the 
 Mogul army dispersed without striking a blow. In the same year 
 Clive dispatched a force southward under Colonel Forde, which 
 recaptured Masulipatam on the Madras coast from the French, 
 and permanently established British influence in the Northern Cir- 
 cars, and at the nizam's court of Haidarabad in southern India. 
 Clive next attacked the Dutch, the only other European nation 
 who might yet prove a rival to the English. He defeated them 
 both by land and water; and their settlement at Chinsurah existed 
 thenceforth only on sufferance. At the critical moment in the 
 Chinsurah campaign Forde found himself unable to act without 
 fresh instructions. In reply to his urgent message, Clive, who was 
 engaged at whist, wrote in pencil on the back of the paper, " Dear 
 Forde, fight them immediately. I will send you the order in coun- 
 cil to-morrow," and continued his game. 
 
 From 1760 to 1765 Clive was in England. He had left no 
 system of government in Bengal, but merely the tradition that 
 unlimited sums of money might be extracted from the natives by 
 the terror of the English name. In 1761 it was found expedient 
 and profitable to dethrone Mir Jafar, the nawab of Murshidabad, 
 and to substitute his son-in-law, Mir Kasim, in his place. On this 
 occasion, besides private donations, the English received a grant 
 of the three districts of Bardwan, Midnapur, and Chittagong, 
 estimated to yield a net revenue of half a million sterling a 
 year. 
 
 The freshly appointed nawab of Bengal, Mir Kasim, soon be- 
 gan to show a will of his own, and to cherish dreams of inde- 
 pendence. He retired from Murshidabad to Monghyr, a strong 
 position on the Ganges which commanded the line of communica- 
 tion with the northwest. There he proceeded to organize an army, 
 drilled and equipped after European models, and to carry on in- 
 trigues with the nawab wazir of Oudh. He was resolved to try 
 his strength with the English, and he found a good pretext. The 
 Company's servants claimed the privilege of carrying on their 
 private trade throughout Bengal, free from the nawab's inland 
 imposts. The assertion of this claim caused affrays between the 
 customs officers of the nawab and the native traders, who, whether 
 truly or not, represented that they were acting on behalf of the 
 servants of the Company. The nawab alleged that his civil
 
 BRITISH POWER 187 
 
 1763-1765 
 
 authority was everywhere set at nought. The majority of the 
 council at Calcutta would not listen to his complaints. The gov- 
 ernor, Henry Vansittart, and Warren Hastings, then a junior 
 member of council, attempted to effect some compromise, but the 
 controversy had become too hot. The nawab' s officers fired upon 
 an English boat, and a general rising against the English took 
 place. In June, 1763, 2000 sepoys were cut to pieces at Patna; 
 about 200 Englishmen, who there and in various other parts of 
 Bengal fell into the hands of the Mohammedans, were massacred. 
 
 As soon as regular warfare commenced Mir Kasim met with 
 no more successes. His trained regiments were defeated in two 
 pitched battles by Major Adams, at Gheria, on August 2, and at 
 Udhunala, on September 5; and he himself took refuge with the 
 nawab wazir of Oudh, who refused to deliver him up to the Eng- 
 lish. This led to a prolongation of the war. Shah Alam, who had 
 now succeeded his father as emperor, and Shuja-ud-daula, the 
 nawab wazir of Oudh, united their forces, and threatened Patna, 
 which the English had recovered. A more formidable danger ap- 
 peared in the English camp, in the form of the first sepoy mutiny. 
 It was quelled by Major Hector Munro, who ordered twenty-four 
 of the ringleaders to be blown from guns, an old Mogul punish- 
 ment. On October 23, 1764, Major Munro won the decisive 
 battle of Baxar, about seventy miles west of Patna, which laid 
 Oudh at the feet of the conquerors, and brought the Mogul em- 
 peror, Shah Alam, as a suppliant to the English camp. The old 
 deposed nawab of Bengal, Mir Jafar, was brought forth from his 
 retirement, and was again appointed nawab in place of Mir Kasim, 
 who had risen against the English, whose council in Calcutta had 
 thus twice found the profitable opportunity which they loved, of 
 creating a new nawab of Bengal, and of receiving the donations 
 and large sums of money distributed to them by each of the nawabs 
 on his accession. These and other devices by which the English 
 amassed fortunes in India gave rise to the expression, " to shake 
 the pagoda tree." 
 
 In 1765 Lord Clive arrived at Calcutta, as governor of Ben- 
 gal for the second time. Two landmarks stand out in his policy. 
 First, he sought the substance, although not the name, of terri- 
 torial power, under the fiction of a grant from the Mogul emperor. 
 Second, he desired to purify the Company's service, by prohibiting 
 illicit gains, and guaranteeing a reasonable salary from honest
 
 188 INDIA 
 
 1765-1767 
 
 sources. In neither respect were his plans carried out by his im- 
 mediate successors, but English efforts at good government in 
 India date from this second governorship of Clive in 1765, as 
 their military supremacy had dated from his victory at Plassey 
 in 1757. 
 
 Clive advanced rapidly from Calcutta to Allahabad, and there 
 settled in person the fate of nearly the northern half of India. 
 Oudh was given back to the nawab wazir, on condition of his pay- 
 ing half a million sterling toward the expenses of the war. The 
 provinces of Allahabad and Kora, lying between the Ganges and 
 the Jumna, were handed over to the Emperor Shah Alam, who in 
 his turn granted to the English Company the fiscal administra- 
 tion of Lower Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, and also the territorial 
 jurisdiction of the Northern Circars. A puppet nawab was still 
 maintained at Murshidabad, who received an annual allowance 
 from the Company of 600,000/. Half that amount, or about 
 300,000/., was paid to the emperor as tribute from Bengal, Behar, 
 and Orissa. Thus was constituted the dual system of government, 
 by which the English received all the revenues of Bengal, Behar, 
 and Orissa, and undertook to maintain the army; while the crim- 
 inal jurisdiction was vested in the nawab. In Indian phraseology, 
 the Company was diwan, and the nawab was nizam. The actual 
 collection of the revenues still remained for seven years in the 
 hands of native officials (1765-1772). 
 
 Give's other great task was the reorganization of the Com- 
 pany's service. All the officers, civil and military alike, were tainted 
 with the common corruption. Their legal salaries were paltry, 
 and quite insufficient for a livelihood, but they had been permitted 
 to augment them, sometimes a hundredfold, by means of private 
 trade and by gifts from the native powers. Despite the united 
 resistance of the civil servants, and an actual mutiny of two hun- 
 dred military officers, Clive carried through his reforms. Private 
 trade and the receipt of presents were prohibited for the future, 
 while a fair increase of pay was provided out of the monopoly of 
 salt. 
 
 It is interesting to note that Mir Jafar, who died just before 
 Clive reached India, had bequeathed to Clive a large sum. As the 
 money was already in hand and as he could not honorably accept 
 it under the new order forbidding the Company's officials to accept 
 presents from natives, he established the amount as a fund for
 
 WARREN HASTINGS 
 
 (Born 1732. Died 1818) 
 
 Painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds
 
 BRITISH POWER 189 
 
 1767-1772 
 
 disabled officers and men of the Company's army. This fund, 
 known as Lord Clive's Fund, reverted to the heirs of Clive on the 
 dissolution of the Company. 
 
 Lord Clive quitted India for the third and last time in 1767. 
 Between that date and the governorship of Warren Hastings, in 
 1772, little of importance occurred in Bengal, beyond the terrible 
 famine of 1770, which is officially reported to have swept away 
 one-third of the inhabitants. The dual system of government 
 established in 1765 by Clive had proved a failure. The English 
 were the real rulers, but the administration of the districts was still 
 carried on by native officials. There was thus a divided responsi- 
 bility, and when any disaster occurred it was impossible to find 
 out who was really to blame. Even the distant court of directors 
 in England discerned that a complete change had become neces- 
 sary in the government of Bengal. Warren Hastings, a tried 
 servant of the company, distinguished alike for intelligence, for 
 probity, and for knowledge of oriental manners, was nominated 
 governor by the court of directors, with express instructions to 
 carry out a predetermined series of reforms. In their own words, 
 the court had resolved to " stand forth as diwan, and to take upon 
 themselves, by the agency of their own servants, the entire care 
 and administration of the revenues." In the execution of this plan 
 Hastings removed the exchequer from Murshidabad to Calcutta, 
 and appointed European officers, under title of collectors, to super- 
 intend the collections and preside in the revenue courts. 
 
 Clive had laid the territorial foundations of the British empire 
 in Bengal. Hastings may be said to have created a British ad- 
 ministration for that empire. The wars forced on him by native 
 powers in India, the clamors of his masters in England for money, 
 and the virulence of Philip Francis with a faction of his colleagues 
 at the council table in Calcutta retarded the completion of his 
 schemes ; but the manuscript records disclose the patient statesman- 
 ship and indomitable industry which he brought to bear upon them. 
 From 1765 to 1772 Clive's dual system of government, by corrupt 
 native underlings and rapacious English chiefs, had prevailed. 
 Thirteen years were now spent by Warren Hastings in experi- 
 mental efforts at rural administration by means of English officials 
 (1772- 1 785). The completion of the edifice was left to his suc- 
 cessor. Hastings was the administrative organizer, as Clive had 
 been the territorial founder, of England's Indian empire.
 
 190 INDIA 
 
 1772-1773 
 
 Hastings rested his claims as an Indian ruler on his adminis- 
 trative work. He reorganized the Indian service, reformed every 
 branch of the revenue collections, created courts of justice and 
 laid the basis of a police ; but history remembers his name, not for 
 his improvements in the internal administration, but for his bold 
 foreign policy in dealing with the native states. From 1772 to 
 1774 he was governor of Bengal; from the latter date to 1785 he 
 was the first governor-general of India, presiding over a council 
 nominated, like himself, under a statute of Parliament known as 
 the Regulating Act (1773). Lord North's Regulating Act (13 
 George III., c. 63) also established at Calcutta a supreme court of 
 judicature, consisting of a chief justice and three puisne judges, 
 to administer English law for the English in India. The first chief 
 justice was a former schoolfellow of Hastings, Sir Elijah Impey, 
 who faithfully cooperated with Hastings. In his domestic policy 
 Hastings was greatly hampered by the opposition of his colleague 
 in council, Philip Francis, whom he ultimately wounded in a duel; 
 but in his external relations with Oudh, with the Marathas and 
 with Haidar Ali, Hastings was generally, although not always, 
 able to compel assent to his views. 
 
 His relations with the native powers, like his domestic policy, 
 formed a well-considered scheme. Hastings had to find money 
 for the court of directors in England, whose thirst for the wealth 
 of India was not less keen, although more decorous, than that of 
 their servants in Bengal. He had also to protect the Company's 
 territory from the native powers, which, if he had not destroyed 
 them, would have annihilated him. Beyond the Bengal frontier 
 a group of Mohammedan viceroys or governors of the old Mogul 
 empire had established independent states, the most important of 
 which was Oudh. Beyond this group of Mohammedan states the 
 Marathas were practically the masters of northern India, and held 
 the nominal emperor of Delhi as a puppet under their control. The 
 wise policy of Warren Hastings was to ally himself with the in- 
 dependent Mohammedan states, that is to say principally with 
 Oudh, just beyond his own frontier. If he could make these Mo- 
 hammedan states strong, he hoped that they would prevent the 
 Marathas from pouring down into Bengal; but these Moham- 
 medan states were themselves so weak that this policy only ob- 
 tained a partial success. In the end Warren Hastings found him- 
 self compelled to advance the British territories farther up the
 
 BRITISH POWER 191 
 
 1773-1774 
 
 Ganges, and practically to bring the Mohammedan states under 
 his own control. 
 
 Warren Hastings had in the first place to make Bengal pay. 
 This he could not do under Give's dual system of administration. 
 When he abolished that double system, he cut down the nawab 
 of Bengal's allowance to one-half, and so saved about 160,000/. 
 ($800,000) a year. As a matter of fact, the titular nawab, being 
 then a minor, had ceased to render even any nominal service for 
 his enormous income. Clive had himself reduced the original 
 600,000/. ($3,000,000) to 450,000/. ($2,250,000) on the accession 
 of a new nawab in 1766; and the grant was again cut down to 350,- 
 000/. ($1,750,000) on a fresh succession in 1769. The allowance had 
 practically been of a fluctuating and personal character. Its fur- 
 ther reduction in 1772 in the case of the new child-nawab had, 
 moreover, been expressly ordered by the court of directors six 
 months before Hastings took office as governor of Bengal. 
 
 Hastings's next financial stroke was to stop payment of the 
 tribute of 300,000/. ($1,500,000) to the Delhi emperor, which 
 Clive had agreed to, in return for the grant of Bengal to the Com- 
 pany, for the emperor had now been seized by the Marathas. 
 Hastings held that his majesty was no longer independent, and 
 that to pay money to the emperor would practically be paying it 
 to the Marathas, who were England's most formidable enemies in 
 India, and whom he clearly saw that the English would have to 
 crush, unless they were willing to be crushed by them. Hastings 
 therefore withheld the tribute from the puppet emperor, or rather 
 from his Maratha custodians. 
 
 On the partition of the Gangetic valley in 1765, Clive had 
 also allotted the provinces of Allahabad and Kora to the Emperor 
 Shah Alam. The emperor, now in the hands of the Marathas, 
 made them over to his new masters. Warren Hastings held that 
 by so doing his majesty had forfeited his title to these provinces. 
 Hastings accordingly resold them to the wazir of Oudh. By this 
 measure he freed the Company from a military charge of nearly 
 half a million sterling, and obtained a price of over half a million 
 for the Company. The terms of sale included the loan of British 
 troops to subdue the Rohilla Afghans, who had seized and for 
 some time kept hold of a tract on the northwestern frontier of 
 Oudh. The Rohillas were Mohammedans and foreigners; they 
 had cruelly lorded it over the Hindu peasantry ; and they were now
 
 192 INDIA 
 
 1774-1775 
 
 intriguing with the Marathas, the most dangerous foes of the 
 English. The wazir of Oudh, supported by the British troops 
 lent to him by Hastings, completely defeated the Rohillas. He 
 compelled most of their fighting men to seek new homes on the 
 other side of the Ganges River, in a neighboring and equally fertile 
 district, but one in which they could no longer open the northern 
 frontier of Oudh to the Marathas. By the foregoing series of 
 measures Hastings ceased to furnish the Maratha custodians of 
 the Delhi emperor with the Bengal tribute; he also strengthened 
 the English ally, the wazir of Oudh, and closed his frontier against 
 Maratha invasions; he bettered the Company's finances in Bengal 
 by a million sterling ($5,000,000) a year in both its revenue and 
 expenditure : some say two millions per annum. 
 
 Hastings further improved the financial position of the Com- 
 pany by contributions from Chait Singh and from the begam of 
 Oudh. Chait Singh, the raja of Benares, had grown rich under 
 British protection. He resisted the just demand of Warren Has- 
 tings to subsidize a military force, and entered into correspondence 
 with the enemies of the British government. This led to his arrest. 
 He escaped, headed a rebellion, and was crushed. His estates were 
 forfeited, but transferred to his nephew, subject to an increased 
 tribute. The begam, or queen-mother, of Oudh was charged with 
 abetting Chait Singh, the Benares raja, in his rebellion. A heavy 
 fine was laid upon her, which she resisted to the utmost, but after 
 severe pressure on herself and the eunuchs of her household, over 
 a million sterling ($5,000,000) was obtained. 
 
 On his return to England Warren Hastings was impeached 
 by the House of Commons for these and other alleged acts of 
 oppression. He was solemnly tried by the House of Lords, and the 
 proceedings dragged themselves out for seven years (1788- 1795). 
 They form one of the most celebrated state trials in English history, 
 and ended in a verdict of not guilty on all the charges. Meanwhile 
 the cost of the defense had ruined Warren Hastings, and left him 
 dependent upon the generosity of the court of directors, a gener- 
 osity which never failed. 
 
 The Bombay government looked with envy on the territorial 
 conquests of Madras and Bengal. It accordingly resolved to estab- 
 lish its supremacy at the Maratha court of Poona. This ambition 
 found scope, in 1775, by the Treaty of Surat, by which Raghuba, 
 one of the claimants to the headship of the Marathas as peshwa,
 
 BRITISH POWER 193 
 
 1775-1781 
 
 agreed to cede Salsette and Bassein to the English, in consideration 
 of being himself restored to Poona. The military operations that 
 followed are known as the first Maratha war. Warren Hastings, 
 who in his capacity of governor-general claimed a right of control 
 over the decisions of the Bombay government, strongly disap- 
 proved of the Treaty of Surat, but when war actually broke out, in 
 1779, he threw the whole force of the Bengal army into the scale. 
 One of his favorite officers, Colonel Goddard, marched across the 
 peninsula of India from sea to sea, and conquered the rich province 
 of Gujarat almost without a blow. Another, Captain Popham, 
 stormed, on August 3, 1780, the rock-fortress of Gwalior, which 
 was regarded as the key of Hindustan. These brilliant successes of 
 the Bengal troops atoned for the disgrace of the Convention of 
 Wargaum in 1779, when the Marathas had overpowered and dic- 
 tated terms to the Bombay force; but the war was protracted until 
 1 78 1. It was closed in 1782 by the Treaty of Salbai, which prac- 
 tically restored the status quo. Raghuba, the English nominee for 
 the peshwaship, was set aside on a pension ; Gujarat was restored to 
 the Marathas; and only Salsette, with Elephanta and two other 
 small islands in Bombay harbor was retained by the English. 
 
 Meanwhile, Warren Hastings had to deal with a more danger- 
 ous enemy than even the Maratha confederacy. The reckless con- 
 duct of the Madras government had aroused the hostility of Haidar 
 Ali of Mysore, and also of the nizam of the Deccan, the two strong- 
 est Mussulman powers in India. These attempted to draw the 
 Marathas into an alliance against the English. Haidar Ali began 
 his career as a soldier of fortune when about thirty years of age 
 in 1749, and soon after 1760 he had made himself master of 
 Mysore. He became an implacable foe of the English, whom he 
 sought to expel from India through the combined efforts of their 
 foes. 
 
 The diplomacy of Hastings won back the nizam and the 
 Maratha raja of Nagpur; but the army of Haidar Ali fell like a 
 thunderbolt upon the British possessions in the Karnatik. A strong 
 detachment under Colonel Baillie was cut to pieces at Perambakam, 
 and Haidar Ali's Mysore cavalry ravaged the country up to the 
 walls of Madras. For the second time the Bengal army, stimulated 
 by the energy of Hastings, saved the honor of the English name. 
 He dispatched Sir Eyre Coote, the victor of Wandiwash, to relieve 
 Madras by sea, with all the men and money available, while Colonel
 
 194. INDIA 
 
 1781-1786 
 
 Pearse marched south overland to overawe the raja of Berar and 
 the nizam. The war was hotly contested, for the aged Sir Eyre 
 Coote had lost his energy, and the Mysore army was not only well 
 disciplined and equipped, but skillfully handled by Haidar and his 
 son Tipu. Haidar died in 1782, and peace was finally concluded 
 with Tipu in 1784, on the basis of a mutual restitution of all con- 
 quests. Warren Hastings retired from the governor-generalship 
 in 1785. 
 
 Ever since the humiliating Treaty of Paris, in 1763, France 
 had been smarting to avenge herself for her losses in America and 
 India and on the seas. The American Declaration of Independence 
 and Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga led France to declare war 
 against England in 1778. Early naval successes led France to seek 
 the recovery of her power in India. Suffren, probably the greatest 
 of French admirals, was sent with a fleet to the coast of India, to 
 cooperate with Haidar Ali, with whom the French had long been 
 intriguing. The combats between Suffren and Hughes, the English 
 commander, fill glorious pages in the naval annals of both nations. 
 The French posts in India were seized by the English, but were 
 restored by the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 and the French fleet 
 was withdrawn. 
 
 Hastings's administration of India, and the acts of the Com- 
 pany, had given rise to questions upon which parties in England 
 had taken sides. Parliamentary investigations led to new legisla- 
 tion. In 1783 Fox introduced a bill to revise the system of adminis- 
 tration, but was defeated in the House of Lords. The younger Pitt 
 then became prime minister and secured the passage of a new India 
 bill in 1784. This act, somewhat amended at various times, estab- 
 lished the system of dual control of India by the English govern- 
 ment and the English East India Company, which continued in 
 operation until 1858. While the administration remained in the 
 hands of the board of directors of the company, its acts were sub- 
 ject to revision by a board of control, composed of six privy coun- 
 cilors, one of whom, the president, had a seat in the cabinet as 
 secretary of state. The governor-general and a few other high 
 officers were appointed by the crown, but the remaining patronage 
 was left in the hands of the Company. The authority of the gover- 
 nor-general and his council over the separate presidencies was made 
 complete in diplomatic, military, and revenue matters. By an 
 amending act in 1786 the governor-general was empowered in ex-
 
 BRITISH POWER 195 
 
 1786-1789 
 
 traordinary cases to act on his own responsibility, even in opposi- 
 tion to his council. 
 
 In 1786 arrived Lord Cornwallis, the same who had served in 
 America and who was now the first English nobleman to undertake 
 the office of governor-general of India. Between these two great 
 names an interregnum of twenty months took place under Sir John 
 Macpherson, a civil servant of the Company (February, 1785, to 
 September, 1786). John Macpherson was born in 1745 on the Isle 
 of Skye. He entered the East India Company's service in 1770 
 and became a member of the governor-general's council in 1782. As 
 senior member of council, he became acting governor-general on 
 Hastings's departure from India in 1785. He was made baronet in 
 1786 and returned to England after the arrival of Cornwallis. He 
 died in 1821. Lord Cornwallis twice held the high post of governor- 
 general. His first rule lasted from 1786 to 1793, and is celebrated 
 for two events, the introduction of the Permanent Settlement into 
 Bengal, and the second Mysore war. If the foundations of the 
 system of civil administration were laid by Hastings, the super- 
 structure was raised by Cornwallis. He made over the higher 
 criminal jurisdiction to European officers, and established the 
 nizamat sadr adalat, or supreme court of criminal judicature, at 
 Calcutta ; in the rural districts he separated the functions of revenue 
 collector and civil judge. The system thus organized in Bengal was 
 afterward extended to Madras and Bombay, when those presidencies 
 also grew into great territorial divisions of India. 
 
 The achievement most familiarly associated with the name of 
 Cornwallis is the Permanent Settlement of the land revenue of 
 Bengal. Up to this time the revenue had been collected pretty much 
 according to the old Mogul system. The zamindars, or government 
 farmers, whose office always tended to become hereditary, were 
 recognized as having a right to collect the revenue from the actual 
 cultivators ; but no principle of assessment existed, and the amount 
 actually realized varied greatly from year to year. Hastings tried 
 to obtain experience, from a succession of five years' settlements, 
 so as to furnish a standard rate for the future. Philip Francis, the 
 great rival of Hastings, advocated, on the other hand, a limitation 
 of the state demand in perpetuity. The same view recommended 
 itself to the authorities at home, partly because it would place their 
 finances on a more stable basis, partly because it seemed to identify 
 the zamindar with the landlord of the English system of property.
 
 196 INDIA 
 
 1789-1798 
 
 Accordingly, Cornwallis took out with him in 1786 instructions to 
 introduce a permanent settlement of the land tax of Bengal. 
 
 The process of assessment began in 1789, and terminated in 
 1 79 1. No attempt was made to measure the fields or calculate the 
 out-turn, as had been done by Akbar, and as is now done whenever 
 settlements are made in the British provinces. The amount to be 
 paid in the future was fixed by reference to what had been paid in 
 the past. At first the settlement was decennial, or for ten years, 
 but in 1793 it was declared permanent. The total assessment 
 amounted to 26,800,989 sicca rupees ($16,000,000) for Bengal. 
 Lord Cornwallis carried the scheme into execution; but the praise 
 or blame, so far as details are concerned, belongs to John Shore, a 
 civil servant, whose knowledge of the country was unsurpassed in 
 his time. Shore would have proceeded more cautiously than Corn- 
 wallis's preconceived idea of a proprietary body, and than the court 
 of directors' haste after fixity, permitted. 
 
 The second Mysore war of 1790- 1792 is noteworthy on two 
 accounts. Lord Cornwallis, the governor-general, led the British 
 army in person, with a pomp and a magnificence of supply which 
 recalled the campaigns of Aurangzeb. The two great southern 
 powers, the nizam of the Deccan and the Maratha confederacy, 
 cooperated as allies of the British. In the end, Tipu Sultan sub- 
 mitted when Lord Cornwallis had commenced to beleaguer his 
 capital. He agreed to yield one-half of his dominions to be divided 
 among the allies, and to pay three millions sterling ($15,000,000) 
 toward the cost of the war. These conditions he fulfilled, but ever 
 afterward he burned to be revenged upon his English conquerors. 
 Lord Cornwallis retired in 1793, and was succeeded by Sir John 
 Shore. 
 
 The period of Sir John Shore's rule as governor-general, from 
 1793 to 1798, was uneventful. When Shore left India in 1798 Sir 
 Alfred Clarke, as senior member of council, became acting governor- 
 general until the arrival of Wellesley. In 1798, Lord Mornington, 
 better known as the Marquis Wellesley, arrived in India, already 
 inspired with imperial projects which were destined to change the 
 map of the country. Lord Mornington was the friend and favorite 
 of Pitt, from whom he is thought to have derived his far-reaching 
 political vision, and his antipathy to the French name. From the 
 first he laid down as his guiding principle that the English must be 
 the one paramount power in the Indian peninsula, and the native
 
 BRITISH POWER 197 
 
 1798-1801 
 
 princes could only retain the insignia of sovereignty by surrendering 
 their political independence. The history of India since his time 
 has been but the gradual development of this policy, which received 
 its finishing touch when Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress 
 of India on January i, 1877. 
 
 To frustrate the possibility of a French invasion of India, led 
 by Napoleon Bonaparte in person, was the immediate governing idea 
 of Wellesley's foreign policy. France at this time, and for many 
 years later, filled the place afterward occupied by Russia in the 
 minds of Indian statesmen. Nor was the danger so remote 
 as might now be thought. The nizam of Haidarabad was over- 
 awed by the Frenchmen who officered his army. The soldiers of 
 Sindhia, the military head of the Maratha confederacy, were disci- 
 plined and led by French adventurers. Tipu Sultan of Mysore car- 
 ried on a secret correspondence with the French Directory, allowed 
 a tree of liberty to be planted in his dominions, and enrolled himself 
 in a republican club as " citizen Tipu." The islands of France, now 
 Mauritius, and of Bourbon, now Reunion, afforded a convenient 
 halfway rendezvous for French intrigue and for the assembling of 
 a hostile expedition. Throughout the eighteenth century these 
 islands were the real basis for all French activity in India. Mauri- 
 tius has been in English possession since 1810, but Reunion is still 
 French. It may be noted further that, as the Dutch were the allies 
 of the French, their colonies were liable to seizure by the English 
 at this time. In 1795 they annexed Ceylon to the Madras presi- 
 dency, but a few years later it was made a crown colony and its 
 cession confirmed by the Treaty of Amiens. The Dutch colony at 
 the Cape of Good Hope was seized in 1795, restored by the Treaty 
 of Amiens, again seized in 1806, and ceded to England by treaty in 
 1 814. These conquests greatly increased England's security in 
 India by removing unfriendly powers from important positions on 
 the route to India and from places that formed a satisfactory basis 
 for attacks upon India. Above all, Napoleon Bonaparte was then 
 in Egypt, dreaming of the Indian conquests of Alexander the Great, 
 and no man knew in what direction he might turn his hitherto 
 unconquered legions. 
 
 In February, 1801, Wellesley dispatched an expedition under 
 General Baird to assist in the expulsion of the French from Egypt, 
 but it arrived too late to be of much service. At about the same 
 time the mad Tsar Paul was actually planning, with the connivance
 
 198 INDIA 
 
 1801-1802 
 
 of Bonaparte, an overland invasion of India, but his assassination 
 promptly put an end to this wild scheme. 
 
 Wellesley conceived the scheme of crushing forever the French 
 hopes in Asia, by placing himself at the head of a great Indian 
 confederacy. In Lower Bengal, the sword of Clive and the policy 
 of Warren Hastings had made the English paramount. Before the 
 end of the century their power was consolidated from the seaboard 
 to Benares, high up the Gangetic valley. Beyond their frontier the 
 nawab wazir of Oudh had agreed to pay a subsidy for the aid of 
 British troops. This sum in 1797 amounted to $3,800,000 a year; 
 and the nawab, being always in arrears, entered into negotiations 
 for a cession of territory in lieu of a cash payment. In 1801 the 
 Treaty of Lucknow made over to the British the Doab, or fertile 
 tract between the Ganges and the Jumna, together with Rohilkhand. 
 The Treaty of Lucknow with Oudh was a reversal of Hastings's 
 policy of defense for Bengal. Hastings had depended on Oudh as 
 an ally to protect Bengal from attacks. Wellesley secured the 
 cession by Oudh of its belt of exterior territory, whose revenues 
 were to be applied to the maintenance of the Anglo-Indian army, 
 while Wellesley guaranteed the ruler of Oudh the secure possession 
 of the rest of his state. This meant that the native ruler was de- 
 prived of the control of the foreign and military affairs of his state, 
 which became practically an English protectorate. This treaty, 
 together with that with the nizam in 1800 and the one with the 
 Hindu raja of Mysore in 1799, initiated the policy of subsidiary 
 treaties by which the relations of the English government with the 
 various native states are still regulated. By this system England 
 secures external peace for herself in India and internal peace both 
 for her own and for the native possessions in India. This is the 
 establishment of the pax britannica. The French assistance to Tipu 
 Sultan in 1798 was the last instance of active intervention of anv 
 foreign power in India. 
 
 In southern India English possessions were chiefly confined, 
 before Lord Wellesley, to the coast districts of Madras and Bombay. 
 Wellesley resolved to make the British supreme as far as Delhi in 
 northern India, and to compel the great powers of the south to enter 
 into subordinate relations to the Company's government. The in- 
 trigues of the native princes gave him his opportunity for carrying 
 out this plan without a breach of faith. The time had arrived when 
 the English must either become supreme in India or be driven out of
 
 BRITISH POWER 199 
 
 1801 
 
 it. The Mogul empire was completely broken up ; and the sway had 
 to pass either to the local Mohammedan governors of that empire 
 or to the Hindu confederacy represented by the Marathas, or to the 
 British. Lord Wellesley determined that it should pass to the 
 British. 
 
 His work in northern India was at first easy. The Treaty of 
 Lucknow in 1 80 1 made the English territorial rulers as far as the 
 heart of the present United Provinces and established their political 
 influence in Oudh. Beyond those limits the northern branches of 
 the Marathas practically held sway, with the puppet emperor in 
 their hands. Lord Wellesley left them untouched for a few years, 
 until the second Maratha war ( 1802- 1804) gave him an opportunity 
 for dealing effectively with their nation as a whole. In southern 
 India he saw that the nizam at Haidarabad stood in need of his 
 protection, and he converted him into a useful follower throughout 
 the succeeding struggle. The other Mohammedan power of the 
 south, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, could not be so easily handled. Lord 
 Wellesley resolved to crush him, and had ample provocation for so 
 doing. The third power of southern India namely, the Maratha 
 confederacy was so loosely organized that Lord Wellesley seems 
 at first to have hoped to live on terms with it. When several years 
 of fitful alliance had convinced him that he had to choose between 
 the supremacy of the Marathas or of the British in southern India, 
 he did not hesitate to decide. 
 
 Lord Wellesley first addressed himself to the weakest of the 
 three southern powers, the nizam of Haidarabad. Here he won a 
 diplomatic success, which turned a possible rival into a subservient 
 ally. The French-trained battalions at Haidarabad were disbanded, 
 and the nizam bound himself by treaty not to take any European 
 into his service without the consent of the English government, a 
 clause since inserted in every engagement entered into with native 
 powers. 
 
 Wellesley next turned the whole weight of his resources against 
 Tipu, whom Cornwallis had defeated but not subdued. Tipu's 
 intrigues with the French were laid bare, and he was given an 
 opportunity of adhering to the new subsidiary system. On his 
 refusal, war was declared, and Wellesley came down in viceregal 
 state to Madras to organize the expedition in person, and to watch 
 over the course of events. One English army marched into Mysore 
 from Madras, accompanied by a contingent from the nizam.
 
 200 INDIA 
 
 1799-1802 
 
 Another advanced from the western coast. Tipu, after a feeble 
 resistance in the field, retired into Seringapatam, his capital, and, 
 when it was stormed in 1799, died fighting bravely in the breach. 
 Since the battle of Plassey, no event so greatly impressed the natives 
 as the capture of Seringapatam, which won for General George 
 Harris an eventual peerage, and for Wellesley an Irish marquisate. 
 In dealing with the territories of Tipu, Wellesley acted with modera- 
 tion. The central portion, forming the old state of Mysore, was 
 restored to an infant representative of the Hindu rajas, whom 
 Haidar AH had dethroned; the rest of Tipu's dominion was par- 
 titioned between the nizam, the Marathas, and the English. At 
 about the same time, the Karnatik, or the part of southeastern India 
 ruled by the nawab of Arcot, and also the principality of Tan j ore, 
 were placed under direct British administration, thus constituting 
 the Madras presidency almost as it existed to the present day. 
 The sons of the slain Tipu were treated by Lord Wellesley with 
 paternal tenderness. They received a magnificent allowance, with 
 a semi-royal establishment, first at Vellore, and afterward in Cal- 
 cutta. The last of them, Prince Ghulam Mohammed, who survived 
 to 1877, was long a well-known citizen of Calcutta, and an active 
 justice of the peace. 
 
 The Marathas had been the nominal allies of the English in 
 both their wars with Tipu; but they had not rendered active as- 
 sistance, nor were they secured to the English side as the nizam had 
 been. The Maratha powers at this time were five in number. The 
 recognized head of the confederacy was the peshwa of Poona, who 
 ruled the hill country of the Western Ghats, the cradle of the Mara- 
 tha race. The fertile province of Gujarat was annually harried by 
 the horsemen of the Gaekwar of Baroda. In central India two 
 military leaders, Sindhia of Gwalior and Holkar of Indore, alter- 
 nately held the preeminence. Toward the east the Bhonsla raja 
 of Nagpur reigned from Berar to the coast of Orissa. Wellesley 
 labored to bring these several Maratha powers within the net of his 
 subsidiary system. In 1802 the necessities of the peshwa, who had 
 been defeated by Holkar, and driven as a fugitive into British terri- 
 tory, induced him to sign the Treaty of Bassein. By that he pledged 
 himself to the British to hold communications with no other power, 
 European or native, and granted to the English districts for the 
 maintenance of a subsidiary force. This greatly extended the Eng- 
 lish territorial influence in the Bombay presidency, but it led to the
 
 3 
 
 3>
 
 BRITISH POWER 201 
 
 1802-1805 
 
 second Maratha war, as neither Sindhia nor the raja of Nagpur 
 would tolerate the peshwa's betrayal of the Maratha independence. 
 
 The campaigns which followed are perhaps the most glorious 
 in the history of the British arms in India. The general plan, and 
 the adequate provision of resources, were due to the Marquis 
 Wellesley, as also the indomitable spirit which refused to admit of 
 defeat. The armies were led by General Arthur Wellesley, the 
 younger brother of the governor-general, and General Lake. Well- 
 esley operated in the Deccan, where, in a few short months, he 
 won the decisive victories of Assaye and Argaum, and captured 
 Ahmadnagar. Lake's campaign in Hindustan was equally brilliant, 
 although it has received less notice from historians. He won 
 pitched battles at Aligarh and Laswari, and took the cities of Delhi 
 and Agra. He scattered the French-trained troops of Sindhia, and 
 at the same time stood forward as the champion of the Mogul 
 emperor in his hereditary capital. Before the end of 1803 both 
 Sindhia and the Bhonsla raja of Nagpur sued for peace. Sindhia 
 ceded all claims to the territory north of the Jumna, and left the 
 blind old Emperor Shah Alam once more under British protection. 
 The Bhonsla forfeited Orissa to the English, who had already 
 occupied it with a flying column in 1803, and Berar to the nizam, 
 who gained fresh territory by every act of complaisance to the 
 British government. The freebooter Jaswant Rao Holkar alone 
 remained in the field, supporting his troops by raids through Malwa 
 and Rajputana. The concluding years of Wellesley 's rule were 
 occupied with a series of operations against Holkar, which brought 
 little credit on the British name. The disastrous retreat of Colonel 
 Monson through central India (1804) recalled memories of the 
 Convention of Wargaum, and of the destruction of Colonel Baillie's 
 force by Haidar Ali. The repulse of Lake in person at the siege 
 of Bhartpur (Bhurtpore) is memorable as an instance of a British 
 army in India having to turn back with its object unaccomplished 
 (1805). In spite of Lake's repulse from Bhartpur, the raja was 
 sufficiently alarmed to come to terms with the English. Bhartpur 
 was not finally taken till 1827. Lord Combermere's capture of the 
 fortress then was made necessary by the seizure of the place by a 
 usurper whom the English were obliged to suppress. 
 
 In the internal administration, Wellesley was aided not only 
 by successful military leaders, such as his brother and Lord Lake, 
 but also by able and efficient subordinates in the important civil
 
 202 INDIA 
 
 1805 
 
 posts, and by a group of brilliant secretaries. Wellesley's brother 
 Henry, later Baron Cowley (1773-1847), was lieutenant governor 
 of the Oudh cessions; Barry Close (knighted 1812, died 1813) was 
 resident in Mysore and later at Poona; and James Achilles Kirk- 
 patrick was resident at Haidarabad. His foreign secretary was 
 Neil Benjamin Edmonstone (1765-1841); his military secretary, 
 William Kirkpatrick (1754-1812); and another secretary was 
 Henry St. George Tucker (1771-1851), the future chairman of the 
 court of directors. 
 
 Wellesley's administration is marked by the inauguration of 
 new policies, not only in foreign affairs, but also in the domestic 
 administration. The need of better training for the civil service, 
 and the desirability of exercising some oversight of the recruits 
 for the service, who were generally in their teens when they reached 
 India, led Wellesley to establish the College of Fort William, at 
 the head of which he placed a clergyman of the Church of England. 
 William Carey, the famous missionary, was the professor of San- 
 skrit. The college was opened without the permission of the court 
 of directors in 1800, and by their order was practically abolished 
 soon after. It existed in a restricted form till 1854, for instruction 
 in native languages. Metcalfe was the first matriculate in the col- 
 lege and several other famous Anglo-Indians were students in it. To 
 effect the training of the new civil servants, the court of directors 
 maintained the East India College at Haileybury, near London, 
 from 1806 to 1857, an d no appointee was sent to India until 18 
 years of age. A military school was also maintained at Addiscombe 
 in Surrey from 1809 to 1861, where cadets for all branches of the 
 Company's army, except the cavalry, received a preliminary training. 
 
 Wellesley, who understood that the neglect of Christianity was 
 responsible for much of the corruption of the character of the Com- 
 pany's servants, was the first governor-general to pay distinct at- 
 tention to Christianity in India. He caused a public celebration 
 of the Te Deum at the close of the Mysore war, and he used his 
 influence to secure the appointment of a bishop for India. He also 
 made some beginning at the humanitarian reforms which Bentinck 
 afterward accomplished. 
 
 Lord Wellesley, during his six years of office, carried out almost 
 every part of his territorial scheme. The policy of Wellesley had 
 resulted in giving the English the direct and complete control of the 
 whole eastern coast of India and of the southwestern coast so that
 
 BRITISH POWER 203 
 
 1805 
 
 it was impossible for a foreign foe to repeat easily the attacks of 
 Suffren, for there would be no naval base readily available. 
 
 In northern India, Lord Lake's campaigns brought the North- 
 western Provinces. The official use of the title Northwestern Prov- 
 inces began in 1835, and in 1902 they were joined with Oudh in the 
 United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, the ancient Madhyadesa under 
 British rule, together with the custody of the puppet emperor. The 
 new districts were amalgamated with those previously acquired from 
 the nawab wazir of Oudh into the Ceded and Conquered Provinces. 
 This arrangement of northern India remained till the Sikh wars of 
 1845 and 1849 ave tne English the Punjab. In southeastern India 
 we have seen that Lord Wellesley's conquests constituted the Madras 
 presidency almost as it exists at the present date. In southwestern 
 India the peshwa was reduced to a vassal of the Company, but the 
 territories now under the governor of Bombay were not finally built 
 up into their existing form until the last Maratha war in 181 8.
 
 Chapter XIV 
 
 THE CONSOLIDATION OF BRITISH INDIA. 1805-1857 
 
 THE financial strain caused by these great operations of 
 Lord Wellesley had meanwhile exhausted the patience of 
 the court of directors at home. In 1805 Lord Cornwallis 
 was sent out as governor-general a second time, with instructions 
 to bring about peace at any price, while Holkar was still unsub- 
 dued, and with Sindhia threatening a fresh war. Cornwallis was 
 now an old man, and broken in health. Traveling up to the north- 
 west during the rainy season, he sank and died at Ghazipur, before 
 he had been ten weeks in the country. 
 
 His immediate successor was Sir George Barlow. George 
 Hilaro Barlow was born in 1762 and appointed to the Bengal civil 
 service in 1778. As chief secretary to government and later as 
 member of the governor-general's council, he was the intimate 
 adviser of Shore and Wellesley. He was created a baronet in 1803. 
 After his service as acting governor-general from 1805 to 1807 
 he was governor of Madras from 1807 to 181 2, and died in 1847. 
 As a locum tenens he had no alternative but to carry out the 
 commands of his employers. Under these orders he curtailed the 
 area of British territory, and, in violation of engagements, aban- 
 doned the Rajput chiefs to the cruel mercies of Holkar and Sindhia. 
 During his administration, also, occurred the mutiny of the Madras 
 sepoys at Vellore in 1806, which, although promptly suppressed, sent 
 a shock of insecurity through the empire. The mutiny at Vellore was 
 due to an order of Sir John Cradock, afterward Lord Howden, the 
 commander-in-chief in Madras, regulating the style of turban 
 worn by the sepoys, and to another order forbidding the wearing 
 of caste marks when in uniform. The mutiny, which broke out on 
 July 10, 1806, was suppressed by Colonel Gillespie. The objection- 
 able orders were withdrawn and the family of Tipu Sultan was 
 removed from Vellore to Calcutta. Lord William Bentinck, then 
 governor of Madras, was summarily recalled. The feebly econom- 
 
 204
 
 CONSOLIDATION 205 
 
 1806-1808 
 
 ical policy of this interregnum proved most disastrous, but fortu- 
 nately the rule soon passed into firmer hands. 
 
 Gilbert Elliot, created Baron Minto of Minto in 1798 and 
 Earl of Minto in 18 13, was governor-general from 1807 to 181 3, 
 and he consolidated the conquests which Wellesley had acquired. 
 Lord Minto annexed Amboyna in 1809 and the Molucca group in 
 1 810. His only military exploits were the occupation of the Island 
 of Mauritius, and the conquest of Java by an expedition which he 
 accompanied in person. Java was administered for the Company 
 by Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826, knighted 1817) until its 
 return to the Dutch in 18 16. Sumatra remained in English con- 
 trol till 1824 under the administration of Raffles, who in 18 19 
 founded the English power at Singapore. The condition of central 
 India continued to be disturbed, but Lord Minto succeeded in pre- 
 venting any violent outbreaks without himself having recourse to 
 the sword. The Company had ordered him to follow a policy of 
 non-intervention, and he managed to obey this instruction without 
 injuring the prestige of the British name. 
 
 Under his auspices the Indian government opened relations 
 with a new set of foreign powers, by sending embassies to the 
 Punjab, to Afghanistan, and to Persia. Napoleon signed a treaty 
 of alliance with Persia in 1807 and had an agent, Gardane, resident 
 at Teheran from 1807 to 1809. This action led the English gov- 
 ernment to turn its attention to the powers on India's northwest 
 frontier. The ambassadors had been trained in the school of 
 Wellesley, and formed perhaps the most illustrious trio of " polit- 
 icals " whom the Indian services have produced. Charles Theophilus 
 Metcalfe, who went as envoy to the Sikh court of Ran jit Singh 
 at Lahore, was born in Calcutta on January 30, 1785, and entered 
 the Bengal service in 1801. He was resident at Delhi from 181 1 
 to 1819, and at Haidarabad from 1820 to 1825. In 1827 he 
 became a member of the governor-general's council, and after his 
 acting governor-generalship from 1835 to 1836 he was lieutenant- 
 governor of the Northwestern Provinces from 1836 to 1838. He 
 served as governor of Jamaica from 1839 to 1842, and governor- 
 general of Canada from 1843 to I 845- He succeeded his father 
 as baronet in 1822 and was created Baron Metcalfe in 1845. He 
 died in England September 5, 1846. Mountstuart Elphinstone met 
 the shah of Afghanistan at Peshawar. Elphinstone was born in 
 Scotland on October 6, 1779, and entered the Bengal civil service
 
 206 INDIA 
 
 1808-1814 
 
 in 1796. In addition to his embassy to Shah Shuja at Kabul in 
 1808, his most important services were as resident at Poona from 
 1810 to 1816, and governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827, where 
 he established a legal code and a system of education. After his 
 retirement he wrote his " History of India." He died on Novem- 
 ber 20, 1859. The envoy to Persia was John Malcolm. He was 
 born in Scotland on May 2, 1769, and entered the Indian army in 
 1782. He acquired a knowledge of Persian, which led to his later 
 promotions. He served as private secretary to the commander-in- 
 chief and later to the governor-general. His missions at Teheran 
 were in 1 799-1 801, 1808- 1809, and 18 10. He was made a K. C. B. 
 in 181 5, and from 1827 to 1830 he was governor of Bombay. 
 He wrote a " History of Persia/' a " Political History of India," 
 a " Life of Clive," and other works. He died on May 30, 1833, in 
 London. It cannot be said that these missions were fruitful of 
 permanent results; but they introduced the English to a new set 
 of diplomatic relations, and widened the sphere of their influence. 
 In 18 1 3 the East India Company's charter was renewed for twenty 
 years, but its monopoly as a trading company with India was 
 abolished. This act also directed the Company to allow mission- 
 aries full opportunity for work and authorized the establishment 
 of the bishopric of Calcutta. The first bishop was Thomas Fan- 
 shaw Middleton (1769-1822), who was succeeded by Reginald 
 Heber (1783- 1826). 
 
 The successor of Lord Minto was the earl of Moira, better 
 known by his later title as the marquis of Hastings. Francis Raw- 
 don-Hastings was born on December 9, 1754, and entered the army 
 in 1773. He was present at Bunker Hill and took part in the 
 various campaigns of the American Revolution, ending with the 
 Carolina campaign under Cornwallis. He had been known by 
 the courtesy title of Lord Rawdon, but in 1783 was created Baron 
 Rawdon, and succeeded as earl of Moira in the Irish peerage in 
 1793. He was an intimate friend and political supporter of the 
 Prince of Wales, later George IV. He was governor-general of 
 India from 1813 to 1823 and was created marquis of Hastings in 
 1 81 7. From 1824 to 1826 he was governor of Malta, and died at 
 sea near Naples on November 28, 1826. 
 
 The marquis of Hastings completed Lord Wellesley's con- 
 quests in central India, and left the Bombay presidency almost as it 
 stands at present. His long rule of nine years, from 1814 to 1823,
 
 CONSOLIDATION 207 
 
 1814-1815 
 
 was marked by two wars of the first magnitude, namely the cam- 
 paigns against the Gurkhas of Nepal and the last Maratha struggle. 
 
 The Gurkhas, the present ruling race in Nepal, are Hindu im- 
 migrants, who claim a Rajput origin. The indigenous inhabitants, 
 called Newars, belong to the Indo-Tibetan stock, and profess Bud- 
 dhism. The sovereignty of the Gurkhas over Nepal dates only from 
 1767, in which year they overran the valley of Khatmandu, and 
 gradually extended their power over the hills and valleys of Nepal. 
 Organized upon a feudal basis, they soon became a terror to their 
 neighbors, marching east into Sikkim, west into Kumaun, and south 
 into the Gangetic plains. In the last quarter their victims were 
 British subjects, and it became necessary to check their advance. 
 Sir George Barlow and Lord Minto had remonstrated in vain, and 
 nothing was left to Lord Moira but to take up arms. The cam- 
 paign of 1814 was at first unsuccessful. After overcoming the 
 natural difficulties of a malarious climate and precipitous hills, 
 the English troops were on several occasions fairly worsted by the 
 impetuous bravery of the little Gurkhas, whose heavy knives or 
 kukris dealt terrible execution. In the cold weather of 1814 Gen- 
 eral David Ochterlony, who entered the Bengal army in 1777, ad- 
 vanced by way of the Sutlej and stormed one by one the hill forts 
 which still stud the Himalayan states, now under the Punjab gov- 
 ernment, and compelled the Nepal darbar to sue for peace. In the 
 following year, 181 5, the same general made a brilliant march from 
 Patna into the lofty valley of Khatmandu, and finally dictated the 
 terms which had before been rejected, within a few miles of the 
 capital. By the Treaty of Segauli, which defines the English rela- 
 tions with Nepal to the present day, the Gurkhas withdrew on the 
 southeast from Sikkim ; and on the southwest, from their advanced 
 posts in the outer ranges of the Himalayas, which have supplied 
 to the English the health-giving stations of Naini Tal, Mussooree, 
 and Simla. The first house at Simla was erected in 1819 by 
 Lieutenant Ross, assistant political agent for the Hill states. In 
 1827 for the first time the governor-general, Lord Amherst, spent 
 some weeks of the summer at Simla, and the practice has been fol- 
 lowed with considerable regularity since then. Since 1864 Simla has 
 been regularly regarded as the summer capital of India and it is 
 the permanent headquarters of the army. 
 
 Meanwhile the condition of central India was every year be- 
 coming more unsatisfactory. The great Maratha chiefs had learned
 
 208 INDIA 
 
 1815-1817 
 
 to live as princes, rather than as predatory leaders, but their old 
 example of lawlessness was being followed by a new set of free- 
 booters, known as the Pindaris. As opposed to the Marathas, who 
 were at least a Hindu nationality bound by traditions of confeder- 
 ate government, the Pindaris were merely plundering bands, cor- 
 responding to the free companies of mediaeval Europe. Of no 
 common race, and without any common religion, they welcomed 
 to their ranks the outlaws and broken tribes of all India Afghans, 
 Marathas, or Jats. They represented the debris of the Mogul 
 empire, the broken men who had not been incorporated by the 
 Mohammedan or the Hindu powers which sprang out of its ruins. 
 For a time, indeed, it seemed as if the inheritance of the Mogul 
 might pass to these armies of banditti. In Bengal, similar hordes 
 had formed themselves out of the disbanded Mohammedan troops 
 and the Hindu predatory castes, but they had been dispersed under 
 the vigorous rule of Warren Hastings. In central India the evil 
 lasted longer, attained a great scale, and was only stamped out by 
 a regular war. 
 
 The Pindari headquarters were in Malwa, but their depreda- 
 tions were not confined to central India. In bands, sometimes of a 
 few hundreds, sometimes of many thousands, they rode out on 
 their forays as far as the opposite coasts of Madras and of Bombay. 
 The most powerful of the Pindari captains, Amir Khan, had an 
 organized army of many regiments, and several batteries of cannon. 
 Two other leaders, known as Chitu and Karim, at one time paid 
 a ransom to Sindhia of 100,000/. ($500,000). To suppress the Pin- 
 dari hordes, who were supported by the sympathy, more or less 
 open, of all the Maratha chiefs, Lord Hastings in 1817 collected 
 the strongest British army which had been seen in India, numbering 
 120,000 men. One-half operated from the north, the other half 
 from the south. Sindhia was overawed, and remained quiet. Amir 
 Khan disbanded his army, on condition of being guaranteed the 
 possession of what is now the principality of Tonk. The remain- 
 ing bodies of Pindaris were attacked in their homes, surrounded, 
 and cut to pieces. Karim threw himself upon the mercy of the 
 conquerors. Chitu fled to the jungles, and was killed by a tiger. 
 
 In the same year (1817), and almost in the same month (No- 
 vember), as that in which the Pindaris were crushed, the three 
 great Maratha powers at Poona, Nagpur, and Indore rose sepa- 
 rately against the British. The peshwa Baji Rao had long been
 
 CONSOLIDATION 209 
 
 1817-1823 
 
 chafing under the terms imposed by the Treaty of Bassein in 1802. 
 A new Treaty of Poona, in June, 181 7, now freed the Gaekwar 
 from his control, ceded fresh districts to the British for the pay of 
 the subsidiary force, and submitted all future disputes to the deci- 
 sion of the English government. The Hon. Mountstuart Elphin- 
 stone, then the resident at his court, foresaw a storm, and withdrew 
 to Kirki, whither he had ordered up a European regiment. The 
 residency was burned down by the Marathas, and the peshwa at- 
 tacked Kirki with his whole army. The attack was bravely repulsed, 
 and the peshwa immediately fled from his capital. Almost the 
 same plot was enacted at Nagpur, where the honor of the British 
 name was saved by the sepoys, who defended the hill of Sitabaldi 
 against enormous odds. The Maratha army of Holkar was de- 
 feated in the following month at the pitched battle of Mehidpur. 
 
 All open resistance was now at an end. Nothing remained 
 but to follow up the fugitives, and to impose conditions for a 
 general pacification. In both these duties Sir John Malcolm played 
 a prominent part. The dominions of the peshwa were annexed to 
 the Bombay presidency, and the nucleus of the present Central 
 Provinces was formed out of the territory rescued from the Pin- 
 daris. The peshwa himself surrendered, and was permitted to 
 reside at Bithur, near Cawnpur, on a pension of 80,000/. ($400,000) 
 a year. His adopted son was the infamous Nana Sahib of the 
 Mutiny of 1857. To fill the peshwa's place as the traditional head 
 of the Maratha confederacy, the lineal descendant of Sivaji was 
 brought forth from obscurity, and placed upon the throne of Satara. 
 An infant was recognized as the heir of Holkar; and a second 
 infant was proclaimed raja of Nagpur under British guardianship. 
 At the same time the states of Rajputana accepted the position of 
 feudatories to the, paramount British power. The map of India, 
 as thus drawn by Lord Hastings, remained substantially unchanged 
 until the time of Lord Dalhousie. But the proudest boast of Lord 
 Hastings and Sir John Malcolm was, not that they had advanced 
 the British frontier, but that they had conferred the blessings of 
 peace and good government upon millions who had groaned under 
 the extortions of the Marathas and Pindaris. 
 
 The marquis of Hastings was succeeded by Lord Amherst, 
 after the interval of a few months, during which John Adams, 
 the senior member of the governor-general's council, acted as gov- 
 ernor-general. William Pitt Amherst was born in January, 1773,
 
 210 INDIA 
 
 1823-1824 
 
 and succeeded as Baron Amherst on the death of his uncle, who had 
 been the British commander in America from 1758 to 1763. He 
 went as envoy to Peking in 18 16. He served as governor-general 
 of India from 1823 to 1828 and was created Earl Amherst in 1826. 
 He died in 1857. The Maratha war in the peninsula of India was 
 hardly completed when the English armies had to face new enemies 
 beyond the sea. Lord Amherst's administration is known in his- 
 tory by two prominent events the first Burmese war and the cap- 
 ture of Bhartpur. 
 
 For years the eastern frontier of Bengal had been disturbed 
 by Burmese raids. The peninsula of Farther India was known 
 to the Greeks in ancient times as the Golden Chersonese. Burmese 
 traditions state that a pious Indian prince from Benares founded 
 a kingdom on the coast of Arakan centuries before the birth of 
 Christ. They also assert that the southern parts of Burma were 
 peopled by settlers from the coast of Coromandel on the Madras 
 side of the Bay of Bengal. However this may be, it is certain that 
 the Buddhist religion, which is professed by the Burmese at the 
 present day, came from India at a very early date. Indeed, the 
 state establishment of Buddhism in Burma is said to have taken 
 place in 164 a. d. While a stream of civilization reached Burma 
 from India on the northwest, the wild Shan tribes and other races 
 of Tibeto-Chinese origin poured into the Irawadi Valley from the 
 northeast. Waves of invaders thus passed over Burma during 
 many centuries, some coming from Siam on the southeast, others 
 from the wild mountains of the Chinese frontier on the northeast. 
 These gradually established themselves into three separate king- 
 doms, namely, Arakan on the Burmese coast; Ava in the upper 
 Valleys of the Irawadi ; and Pegu in the delta of that river. They 
 became the ruling races of Burma, races of Tibeto-Chinese descent, 
 who professed or adopted the Buddhist religion, which had orig- 
 inally come from India. The three Burmese kingdoms fought 
 against each other with all the cruelties and massacres which char- 
 acterize the Tibeto-Chinese tribes; but the learning and civiliza- 
 tion of Buddhism survived every shock and flourished around its 
 ancient pagodas. European travelers in the sixteenth century vis- 
 ited Pegu and Tenasserim, which they described as flourishing 
 marts of maritime trade. During the period of Portuguese pre- 
 dominance in the East, Arakan became the asylum for desperate 
 European adventurers. With their help, the Arakanese extended
 
 CONSOLIDATION 
 
 211 
 
 1824 
 
 their power inland, occupied Chittagong, and, under the name of 
 the Maghs became the terror of the Gangetic delta. About 1750 
 a new dynasty rose in Burma, founded by Alaungpaya, or Alompra, 
 with its capital at Ava. His descendants ruled over independent 
 Burma until 1885. 
 
 The successors of Alompra, after having subjugated all Burma, 
 and overrun Assam, which was then an independent kingdom, 
 
 began a series of encroachments upon the British districts of Ben- 
 gal. As they rejected all peaceful proposals with scorn, Lord 
 Amherst was at last compelled to declare war in 1824. One expe- 
 dition with gunboats proceeded up the Brahmaputra into Assam. 
 Another marched by land through Chittagong into Arakan, for 
 the Bengal sepoys refused to go by sea. A third, and the strongest, 
 sailed from Madras direct to the mouth of the Irawadi. This 
 force was fitted out by Thomas Munro (1761-1827, knighted 1819),
 
 212 INDIA 
 
 1824-1828 
 
 who was governor of Madras from 1820 to 1827. Munro was 
 famous for his earlier administrative services in the Mysore ceded 
 districts, where he developed the rayatwari system of assessment 
 and collection for the land revenue, which, with some modifications, 
 is still in force in the Madras presidency. The war was protracted 
 over two years. After a loss to the Anglo-Indian army of about 
 20,000 lives, chiefly from the pestilential climate, and an expendi- 
 ture of 14,000,000/., the king of Ava signed, in 1826, the Treaty 
 of Yandabu. By this he abandoned all claim to Assam, and ceded 
 to the British the provinces of Arakan and Tenesserim, already in 
 the military occupation of the British. He retained the whole 
 valley of the Irawadi, down to the sea at Rangoon. 
 
 A disputed succession led to the British intervention in Bhart- 
 pur, the great Jat state of central India. The capture of the city 
 by Lord Combermere, in January, 1827, wiped out the repulse which 
 Lord Lake had received in January, 1805. Artillery could make 
 little impression upon the massive walls of mud, but at last a breach 
 was effected by mining, and Bhartpur was taken by storm, thus 
 removing the popular notion throughout India that it was im- 
 pregnable a notion which had threatened to become a political 
 danger. Bhartpur received a new native sovereign under English 
 protection and continues to be one of the native states. 
 
 The acting governor-general after Amherst's departure was 
 William Butterworth Bayley, who was born in 1782 and reached 
 India in 1799, where he received his training at the College of 
 Fort William and under the eye of Lord Wellesley. He was a 
 member of the governor-general's council from 1825 to 1830; 
 chairman of the court of directors from 1840 to 1854, and died in 
 i860. The next governor-general was Lord William Bentinck, 
 who had been governor of Madras, twenty years earlier, at the 
 time of the mutiny of Vellore. William Cavendish Bentinck was 
 born on September 14, 1774, and as second son of the duke of 
 Portland was known by the courtesy title of Lord William Bentinck. 
 He entered the army in 1791 and served in the various campaigns 
 against the French down to 18 14. His seven years' rule, from 
 1828 to 1835, was not signalized by any of those victories or ex- 
 tensions of territory by which chroniclers measure the growth of 
 an empire, but, nevertheless, it formed an epoch in administrative 
 reform, and in the slow process by which a subject population is 
 won over to venerate, as well as to obey, its foreign rulers. The
 
 CONSOLIDATION 213 
 
 1828-1829 
 
 modern history of the British in India, as benevolent administrators, 
 ruling the country with an eye single to the good of the natives, 
 may almost be said to begin with Lord William Bentinck. Accord- 
 ing to the inscription upon his statue at Calcutta, from the pen of 
 Macaulay : " He abolished cruel rites ; he effaced humiliating dis- 
 tinctions; he gave liberty to the expression of public opinion; his 
 constant study was to elevate the intellectual and moral character 
 of the nations committed to his charge." 
 
 Lord William Bentinck's first care on arrival in India was to 
 restore equilibrium to the finances, which were tottering under the 
 burden imposed upon them by the Burmese War. This he effected 
 by three series of measures by reductions in permanent expendi- 
 ture, amounting to one and a half millions sterling a year; by 
 augmenting the revenue from land which had unfairly escaped 
 assessment; by duties on the opium of Malwa. He also widened 
 the gates by which educated natives could enter the service of the 
 Company. 
 
 Some of these reforms were distasteful to the covenanted serv- 
 ice and to the officers of the army, but Lord William was staunchly 
 supported by the court of directors and by the ministry at home. 
 The East India Company, after the battle of Plassey in 1757, first be- 
 came interested in the opium culture, and in 1773 began the control 
 of the trade in it with China. Prior to 1773 the annual export from 
 India to China was about 200 chests, in 1776 it was 1000 chests, 
 and 4054 chests in 1790. The annual average from 1820 to 1830 
 was 16,877 chests. Beginning with 1796 the Chinese government 
 imposed severe penalties on the use of opium. China seems regu- 
 larly to have produced more opium than India in spite of the 
 laws against its use. Troubles growing out of this opium trade 
 with China led, in Lord Auckland's administration, to the out- 
 break of the First China War, generally known as the Opium War. 
 Sir Hugh Gough, with an army sent from Madras, brought the 
 war to a successful close by the capture of Canton and other forts 
 and cities. By the Peace of Nanking in 1842 England received 
 the island of Llong Kong and the opening of the first of the treaty 
 ports. 
 
 Bentinck's most memorable acts are the abolition of sati 
 (suttee), or widow-burning, and the suppression of the thags 
 (thugs). At this distance of time it is difficult to realize the degree 
 to which these two barbarous practices had corrupted the social sys-
 
 214 INDIA 
 
 1829-1833 
 
 tern of the Hindus. European research has proved that the text in 
 the Vedas adduced to authorize the immolation of Hindu widows 
 was a willful mistranslation, but the practice had been enshrined in 
 Hindu opinion by the authority of centuries, and had acquired the 
 sanctity of a religious rite. The Emperor Akbar tried to prohibit 
 it, but failed to put it down. The early English rulers did not dare 
 to violate the religious traditions of the people. In the year 1817 
 no fewer than 700 widows are said to have been burned alive in 
 the Bengal presidency alone. To this day the holy spots of Hindu 
 pilgrimage are thickly dotted with little white pillars, each com- 
 memorating a sati. In spite of strenuous opposition, both from 
 Europeans and from natives, Lord William Bentinck carried a 
 regulation in council, on December 4, 1829, by which all who abetted 
 sati were declared guilty of " culpable homicide." The honor of 
 suppressing thags must be shared between Lord William Ben- 
 tinck and Captain Sleeman. Thags were hereditary assassins, who 
 made strangling their profession. They traveled in gangs, dis- 
 guised as merchants or pilgrims, and were banded together by an 
 oath based on the rites of the bloody goddess Kali. Between 1826 
 and 1835 as man y a s 1562 thags were apprehended in different 
 parts of British India; and, by the evidence of approvers, this 
 moral plague-spot was gradually stamped out. A special jail for 
 their protection was established at Jabalpur, since detection and 
 proof could be obtained only from members of the bands, so strin- 
 gent was their secrecy. 
 
 Two other historical events are connected with the administra- 
 tion of Lord William Bentinck. In 1833 the charter of the East 
 India Company was again renewed for twenty years, but on con- 
 dition that the Company should abandon its trade entirely, alike 
 with India and China, and permit Europeans to settle freely in 
 India. At the same time a fourth or law member was added to 
 the governor-general's council, who need not necessarily be a 
 servant of the Company; and a commission was appointed to 
 revise and codify the law. Thomas Babington Macaulay, after- 
 ward Baron Macaulay, was the first legal member of council, and 
 the first president of the law commission. 
 
 In 1830 it was found necessary to take Mysore under British 
 administration, because of an insurrection caused by the misgov- 
 ernment and oppressive taxation of the maharaja, who was de- 
 posed under clauses of the treaty of 1799. This arrangement con-
 
 CONSOLIDATION 215 
 
 1833-1836 
 
 tinued until March, 1881, when Mysore was restored to native 
 government, and the lawful heir enthroned. In 1834 the frantic 
 misrule of the raja of Coorg brought on a short and sharp war. 
 The raja was permitted to retire to Benares; and the brave and 
 proud inhabitants of his mountainous little territory decided to 
 place themselves under the sway of the Company. This was the 
 only annexation effected by Lord William Bentinck, and it was 
 done " in consideration of the unanimous wish of the people." He 
 retired in 1835. 
 
 Sir Charles Metcalfe succeeded Lord William Bentinck, being 
 senior member of council. His short term of office is memorable 
 for the measure which his predecessor had initiated, but which he 
 carried into execution, for giving entire liberty to the press. Pub- 
 lic opinion in India, as well as the express wish of the court of 
 directors at home, pointed to Metcalfe as the fittest person to carry 
 out the policy of Bentinck, not provisionally, but as governor-gen- 
 eral for a full term. 
 
 Party exigencies, however, led to the appointment of Lord 
 Auckland. George Eden was born in Kent, England, on August 
 25, 1784. He succeeded his father as Baron Auckland in 1814. 
 He was president of the board of trade from 1830 to 1834, and in 
 1835, and first lord of the admiralty in 1834, and from 1846 to 
 1849. His term as governor-general was from 1836 to 1842. He 
 was accompanied to India by his sister, the Honorable Emily Eden 
 (1797-1869), the novelist, who described her experiences in " Up 
 the County" (1844), "Portraits of the People and Princes of 
 India" (1866), and "Letters from India," edited by her niece 
 (1872). From this date commences a new era of war and con- 
 quest, which may be said to have lasted for twenty years. All looked 
 peaceful, until Lord Auckland, prompted by his evil genius, at- 
 tempted to place Shah Shuja upon the throne of Kabul an attempt 
 conducted with gross mismanagement, and ending in the annihila- 
 tion of the British garrison placed in that city. Lord Auckland 
 owed much to his group of able secretaries, William Hay Mac- 
 naghten, John Russell Colvin, and Henry Whitelock Torrens 
 (1806-1852), but their responsibility for the acts of the governor- 
 general is open to question. The responsibility seems to rest chiefly 
 upon the authorities in London. Lord Melbourne, the prime min- 
 ister, had Lord Palmerston for foreign secretary and Sir John 
 Hobhouse for president of the board of control.
 
 216 INDIA 
 
 1836-1837 
 
 Almost for the first time since the days of the sultans of Ghazni 
 and Ghor, Afghanistan had obtained a national king, in 1747, in 
 Ahmad Shah Durani. This resolute soldier found his opportunity 
 in the confusion which followed the death of the Persian conqueror, 
 Nadir Shah. Before his own decease in 1773, Ahmad Shah had 
 conquered a wide empire, from Herat to Peshawar, and from Kash- 
 mir to Sind. His intervention on the field of Panipat ( 1761 ) turned 
 back the tide of Maratha conquest, and replaced a Mohammedan 
 emperor on the throne of Delhi, but Ahmad Shah never cared to 
 settle down in India, and kept state alternately at his two Afghan 
 capitals of Kabul and Kandahar. The Durani kings were pro- 
 lific in children, who fought to the death with one another on each 
 succession. At last, in 1826, Dost Mohammed, head of the power- 
 ful Barakzai family, succeeded in establishing himself as ruler of 
 Kabul, with the title of amir, while two fugitive brothers of the 
 Durani line were living under British protection at Ludhiana, on 
 the Punjab frontier. 
 
 The attention of the English government had been directed to 
 Afghan affairs ever since the time of Lord Wellesley, who feared 
 that Zeman Shah, then holding his court at Lahore (1800), might 
 follow in the path of Ahmad Shah, and overrun Hindustan. 
 The growth of the powerful Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, how- 
 ever, gradually dispelled such alarms for the future. Subsequently, 
 in 1809, while a French invasion of India was still a possibility to 
 be guarded against, Mountstuart Elphinstone was sent by Lord 
 Minto on a mission to Shah Shuja, brother of Zeman Shah, to form 
 a defensive alliance. Before the year expired Shah Shuja had 
 been driven into exile, and a third brother, Mahmud Shah, was on 
 the throne. 
 
 In 1837, when the curtain rises upon the drama of English 
 interference in Afghanistan, the usurper Dost Mohammed Barakzai 
 was firmly established at Kabul. His great ambition was to re- 
 cover Peshawar from the Sikhs. When, therefore, Captain Alex- 
 ander Burnes arrived on a mission from Lord Auckland, with the 
 ostensible object of opening trade, the Dost was willing to promise 
 everything, if only he could get Peshawar. Lord Auckland had 
 another and more important object in view. At this time the 
 Russians were advancing rapidly in central Asia, and a Persian 
 army, not without Russian support, was besieging Herat, the tra- 
 ditional bulwark of Afghanistan on the west.
 
 CONSOLIDATION 217 
 
 1837-1841 
 
 One of the principal observers of this Russian advance was 
 Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895), who was employed in 
 Persia from 1833 to 1839 m reorganizing the Persian army. He 
 made a memorable ride of 750 miles in 150 consecutive hours to 
 warn the British minister at Teheran of the presence of a Russian 
 agent at Herat. Rawlinson served under Macnaghten and others 
 throughout the Afghan troubles. Later as consul at Bagdad he 
 was the constant correspondent of Sir Stratford Canning, the Eng- 
 lish minister at Constantinople. He was knighted in 1856. He 
 was one of the earliest and most persistent of English Russophobes, 
 and his writings are valuable expositions of that attitude. 
 
 The defense of Herat was conducted by an Anglo-Indian 
 official, Eldred Pottinger (1811-1843), who was traveling in Af- 
 ghanistan in disguise when the siege began in 1837. A Russian 
 envoy was at Kabul at the same time as Burnes. The latter was 
 unable to satisfy the demands of Dost Mohammed in the mat- 
 ter of Peshawar, and returned to India unsuccessful. Lord Auck- 
 land forthwith resolved upon the hazardous plan of placing a more 
 subservient ruler upon the throne of Kabul. Shah Shuja, one of 
 the two royal Afghan exiles at Ludhiana, was selected for the 
 purpose. At this time both the Punjab and Sind were independent 
 kingdoms; and both lay between British India and Afghanistan. 
 Sind was the less powerful of the two, and accordingly a British 
 army, escorting Shah Shuja, made its way through Sind into 
 southern Afghanistan by way of the Bolan Pass. Kandahar sur- 
 rendered, Ghazni was taken by storm, Dost Mohammed fled across 
 the Hindu Kush, and Shah Shuja was triumphantly led into the 
 Bala Hissar (the citadel and royal residence) at Kabul in August, 
 1839. After one more brave struggle, Dost Mohammed sur- 
 rendered, and was sent to Calcutta as a state prisoner. The gov- 
 ernor-general, Baron Auckland, was created earl of Auckland in 
 
 1839. 
 
 Although the English could enthrone Shah Shuja, they could 
 not win for him the hearts of the Afghans. To that nation he 
 seemed a degenerate exile thrust back upon them by foreign arms. 
 During two years Afghanistan remained in the military occupation 
 of the British. The catastrophe occurred in November, 1841, 
 when the English political agent, Sir Alexander Burnes, was as- 
 sassinated in the city of Kabul. 
 
 The troops in the cantonments were under the command of
 
 218 INDIA 
 
 1841-1842 
 
 William George Keith Elphinstone (not to be confused with Mount- 
 stuart Elphinstone). The general was born in 1782 and en- 
 tered the army in 1804. He became a major-general in 1837 and 
 went to India in 1839. In 1841 he was appointed to command at 
 Kabul. Sir William Hay Macnaghten was the political officer. 
 He was born in 1793 and entered the East India Company's service 
 in 1809. He became secretary to Bentinck in 1830 and was con- 
 nected with the secretariat until his appointment as minister at 
 Kabul on October 1, 1838. He was created a baronet in 1840. 
 General Elphinstone, an old man, proved unequal to the responsi- 
 bilities of the position. Macnaghten was treacherously murdered, 
 December 23, 1841, at an interview with the Afghan chief, Akbar 
 Khan, eldest son of Dost Mohammed. After lingering in its 
 cantonments for two months, the British army set off in the depth 
 of winter, under a fallacious guarantee from the Afghan leaders, 
 to find its way back to India through the passes. When it started 
 it numbered 4000 fighting men, with 12,000 camp-followers. A 
 single European survivor, Dr. William Brydon (1811-1873), 
 reached the friendly walls of Jalalabad, where General Robert Henry 
 Sale was gallantly holding out. The rest perished in the snowy 
 defiles of Khurd-Kabul and Jagdalak, from the knives and match- 
 locks of the Afghans, or from the effects of cold. A few prisoners, 
 chiefly women, children, and officers, were considerately treated by 
 the orders of Akbar Khan. 
 
 The first Afghan enterprise, begun in a spirit of aggression, 
 and conducted amid dissensions and mismanagement, had ended 
 in the disgrace of the British arms. The real loss, which amounted 
 only to a single garrison, was magnified by the horrors of the 
 winter march, and by the completeness of the annihilation. Within 
 a month after the news reached Calcutta, Lord Auckland had been 
 superseded by Lord Ellenborough. Edward Law was born in 
 1790 and succeeded as Baron Ellenborough in 1818. He was lord 
 privy seal in 1828, and president of the board of control from 1828 
 to 1830, in 1838, in 1841, and in 1858. His first impulse was to be 
 satisfied with drawing off in safety the garrisons from Kandahar 
 and Jalalabad, but bolder counsels were forced upon him. General 
 George Pollock, who was marching straight through the Punjab 
 to relieve General Sale, was allowed to penetrate to Kabul. Gen- 
 eral William Nott, although ordered to withdraw from Kandahar, 
 resolved to go round by way of Kabul. Lord Ellenborough gave
 
 p &

 
 CONSOLIDATION 919 
 
 1842-1844 
 
 his commands in well-chosen words, which would leave his generals 
 responsible for any disaster. General Nott accepted that responsi- 
 bility, and, instead of retreating southeast to the Indus, boldly 
 marched north to Kabul. After hard fighting the two British 
 armies, under Pollock and Nott, met at their common destination 
 in Kabul, in September, 1842. The great bazar of Kabul was 
 blown up with gunpowder, to fix a stigma upon the city ; the Brit- 
 ish prisoners were recovered; and the armies marched back to 
 India, leaving Dost Mohammed to take undisputed possession of 
 his throne. The drama closed with a bombastic proclamation from 
 Lord Ellenborough, who had caused the gates from the tomb of 
 Mahmud of Ghazni to be carried back as a memorial of " Somnath 
 revenged." The gates were a modern forgery ; and their theatrical 
 procession through the Punjab formed a vainglorious sequel to 
 Lord Ellenborough's timidity, while the fate of the British armies 
 hung in the balance. 
 
 Lord Ellenborough, who loved military pomp, had his tastes 
 gratified by two more wars. In 1843 the Mohammedan rulers of 
 Sind, known as the mirs or amirs, whose chief fault was that they 
 would not surrender their independence, were crushed by Sir Charles 
 Napier. Charles James Napier was born in London on August 10, 
 1782, and entered the army in 1794. He served during the Napole- 
 onic wars, in America during the War of 1812, in the Ionian Islands 
 from 1 8 19 to 1830, and in India from 1841 to 1847, an d from 
 1849 to 1 &S- He was knighted in 1838. The story goes that 
 Napier's dispatch announcing the conquest of Sind, of which he 
 disapproved, consisted of the one word, '" peccavi," I have sinned 
 (Sind). 
 
 The victory of Miani, in which 3000 British troops defeated 
 12,000 Baluchis, is one of the brilliant feats of arms in Anglo- 
 Indian history, but valid reasons could scarcely be found for the 
 annexation of the country. In the same year a disputed succes- 
 sion at Gwalior, fomented by feminine intrigue, resulted in an out- 
 break of the overgrown army which the Sindhia family kept up. 
 Peace was restored by the battles of Maharajpur and Panniar, at 
 the former of which Lord Ellenborough was present in person. 
 
 In 1844 Lord Ellenborough was recalled by the court of di- 
 rectors, who differed from him on points of administration, and 
 distrusted his erratic genius. He was succeeded by a veteran soldier, 
 Sir Henry Hardinge, who was born in Kent, England, on March
 
 INDIA 
 
 1844-1845 
 
 30, 1785, and entered the army in 1799. He served throughout 
 the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign, and was knighted 
 in 181 5. He was secretary at war from 1828 to 1839 and from 
 1841 to 1844, and Irish secretary in 1830, and from 1834 to 1835. 
 His governor-generalship lasted from 1844 to 1848. It was felt 
 on all sides that a trial of strength between the British and the one 
 remaining Hindu power in India, the great Sikh nation, was near. 
 
 The Sikhs were not a nationality like the Marathas, but orig- 
 inally a religious sect, bound together by the additional tie of mili- 
 tary discipline. They trace their origin to Nanak Shah, a pious 
 Hindu reformer, born near Lahore in 1469, before the ascendency 
 of either Moguls or Portuguese in India. Nanak, like other zealous 
 preachers of his time, preached the abolition of caste, the unity of 
 the godhead, and the duty of leading a pure life. From Nanak 
 ten gurus or apostles are traced down to Govind Singh in 1708, 
 with whom the succession stopped. Cruelly persecuted by the ruling 
 Mohammedans, almost exterminated under the miserable successors 
 of Aurangzeb, the Sikh martyrs clung to their faith with unflinch- 
 ing zeal. At last the downfall of the Mogul empire transformed the 
 sect into a territorial power. It was the only political organization 
 remaining in the Punjab. The Sikhs in the north, and the Marathas 
 in southern and central India, grew into the two great Hindu 
 powers who helped to partition the Mogul empire. 
 
 Even before the rise of Ranjit Singh, offshoots from the Sikh 
 misls or confederacies, each led by its elected sardar or chief, had 
 carved out for themselves feudal principalities along the banks of 
 the Sutlej, some of which endure to the present day. Ranjit Singh, 
 the founder of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab, was born in 1780. 
 In his twentieth year he obtained the appointment of governor of 
 Lahore from the Afghan king, and formed the project of building 
 up his personal rule on the religious fanaticism of his countrymen. 
 He organized the Sikhs, or " the liberated," into an army under 
 European officers, which for steadiness and religious fervor has 
 had no parallel since the " Ironsides " of Cromwell. From Lahore, 
 as his capital, he extended his conquests south to Multan, west to 
 Peshawar, and north to Kashmir. On the east side alone he was 
 hemmed in by the Sutlej, up to which river the authority of the 
 British government had advanced in 1804. Till his death in 1839, 
 Ranjit Singh was ever loyal to the engagements which he entered 
 into with Metcalfe in 1809. He left no son capable of wielding
 
 CONSOLIDATION 221 
 
 1845-1846 
 
 his scepter. Lahore was torn by dissensions between rival generals, 
 ministers, and queens. The only strong power in the Punjab was 
 the army of the khalsa, or central council of the Sikhs, which, 
 since the British disaster in Afghanistan, burned to measure its 
 strength with the British sepoys. Ran jit Singh's skillful European 
 generals, Avitabile and Court, were foolishly ousted from their 
 commands in the Sikh army, and the supreme military power was 
 vested in a series of panchayats, or elective committees of five. 
 General Avitabile was a Neapolitan by birth who had been in the 
 Persian service. He was long famous for the vigor with which 
 he administered affairs at Peshawar. Colonel Court was a French- 
 man who had been educated at the Ecole Polytechnique at Paris. 
 The most famous of Ranjit Singh's officers were, however, two 
 former soldiers of Napoleon, General Ventura, an Italian, and Gen- 
 eral Allard (1785-1839), a Frenchman, both of whom had tried 
 their fortunes in Egypt and in Persia. Colonel Gardiner, an 
 Irishman, and Colonel Van Cortlandt were among the other officers 
 of Ranjit Singh. 
 
 In 1845 tne Sikh army, numbering 60,000 men, with 150 guns, 
 crossed the Sutlej and invaded British territory. Sir Hugh Gough, 
 the commander, accompanied by the governor-general, Hardinge, 
 who showed his generous and knightly character by waiving his 
 rights and serving as second in command under Gough, hurried 
 up to the frontier. Within three weeks four pitched battles were 
 fought, at Mudki, Firozshah, Aliwal, and Sobraon. Aliwal was 
 won on January 28, 1846, by General Harry Smith (1788-1860), a 
 veteran of the Peninsular War, of the War of 181 2, and of the 
 Waterloo campaign. Smith was made a baronet in 1847 an d 
 was governor of the Cape Colony from 1847 to 1852, where he is 
 commemorated by the towns of Aliwal, Harrismith, and his wife 
 by Ladysmith. 
 
 The British loss on each occasion was heavy; but by the 
 last victory the Sikhs were fairly driven back across the Sutlej, and 
 Lahore surrendered to the British. By the terms of peace which 
 were granted, Dhulip Singh, a supposed infant son of Ranjit by a 
 dancing girl, was recognized as raja ; the Jalandhar Doab, or tract 
 between the Sutlej and the Beas, was annexed ; the Sikh army was 
 limited to a specified number; Major Henry Lawrence was appointed 
 to be resident at Lahore. Henry Montgomery Lawrence was born 
 in Ceylon on June 28, 1806, and was educated at Addiscombe and
 
 INDIA 
 
 1846-1853 
 
 began his service in the Bengal army in 1823. He was resident in 
 Nepal from 1843 to 1846, served in the Punjab from 1846 to 1853, 
 in Rajputana from 1853 to 1856 and in Oudh from 1856 to 1857. 
 He was knighted in 1848. A British force was sent to garrison the 
 Punjab for a period of eight years. Sir Henry Hardinge received 
 a peerage, and returned to England in 1848. 
 
 Lord Dalhousie succeeded. James Andrew Brown Ramsay 
 was born in Scotland, on April 22, 18 12. He succeeded his father 
 in 1838 as Baron Dalhousie in the peerage of the United Kingdom, 
 and as earl of Dalhousie in the Scotland peerage. He was presi- 
 dent of the board of trade from 1845 to J 856. The eight years' 
 rule, from 1848 to 1856, of this greatest of Indian proconsuls 
 left more conspicuous results than that of any governor-general 
 since Lord Wellesley, perhaps even since Clive. A high-minded 
 statesman, of a most sensitive conscience, and earnestly desiring 
 peace, Lord Dalhousie found himself forced against his will to 
 fight two wars, and to embark on a policy of annexation. His 
 campaigns in the Punjab and in Burma ended in large acquisitions 
 of territory; while Nagpur, Oudh, and several minor states also 
 came under British rule, through failure of direct heirs. 
 
 Dalhousie's deepest interest lay in the improvement of the 
 moral and material condition of the country. The system of admin- 
 istration carried out in the conquered Punjab, by the two Lawrences 
 and their assistants, is probably the most successful piece of govern- 
 ing ever accomplished by Englishmen. John Laird Mair Lawrence, 
 younger brother of Henry Lawrence, was born in Yorkshire, Eng- 
 land, on March 4, 181 1, and was educated at Haileybury. He went 
 to Calcutta in 1830. From 1846 to 1848 he was administrator of 
 the Jalandhar Doab, and from 1848 to 1857 he was either joint or 
 sole administrator of the Punjab. After several years in England 
 he returned to India as viceroy from 1864 to 1869. He was 
 knighted in 1856 and created Baron Lawrence in 1869. He died 
 on June 26, 1879, m London. 
 
 The chief coadjutor of the Lawrences was their friend, Robert 
 Montgomery (1809- 1887), wno after valuable services in the Pun- 
 jab became chief commissioner of Oudh in 1858 and was knighted 
 in 1859 and served as lieutenant-governor of the Punjab from 
 1859 to 1865. He was a brother-in-law of Thomason. From 1849 
 to 1853 tne Punjab was administered by a board of three composed 
 of the two Lawrences and Charles Grenville Mansell (1806- 1886),
 
 CONSOLIDATION 223 
 
 1853-1854 
 
 who was soon superseded by Montgomery. In 1853 John Law- 
 rence was put in sole control. Among the men associated with 
 the Lawrences the most notable were Edwardes and Nicolson; 
 James Abbott (1807-1896, knighted in 1894), who won fame as 
 commissioner of Hazara, where the city of Abbottabad preserves 
 his name; Reynell George Taylor (1822-1886), and Richard 
 Temple (1826-1902, baronet 1876), who was private secretary 
 to John Lawrence, and later the occupant of many important 
 posts. 
 
 Mention should be made at this point of the exceedingly 
 valuable services rendered by James Thomason (1804-1853) as 
 lieutenant-governor of the Northwestern Provinces from 1843 to 
 1853, an< 3 by his successor, John Russell Colvin, who was formerly 
 secretary to Lord Auckland, and who died at Agra during the 
 Mutiny. The administration of Sind by Henry Bartle Edward 
 Frere (181 5-1884, knighted 1859) as chief commissioner from 
 1850 to 1859 was also extremely able. 
 
 Burma has prospered under British rule not less than the 
 Punjab. In both cases, Lord Dalhousie himself laid the foundations 
 of administrative success, and deserves a large share of the credit. 
 No branch of the administration escaped his reforming hand. He 
 founded the public works department, with a view to creating the 
 network of roads and canals which now covers India. He opened 
 the Ganges Canal, still the largest work of the kind in the country. 
 It was begun as a result of the famine of 1837- 1838. Work was 
 begun in 1842 and the canal was opened on April 8, 1854. The 
 canal starts at Hardwar and extends to Jeyra, where it joins the 
 Lower Ganges Canal, which was constructed twenty years later. 
 The length of the main line of the Ganges Canal is 445 miles. It 
 is intended primarily for irrigation, but is also used for naviga- 
 tion. The Ganges Canal cost more than $13,000,000 and irrigates 
 900,000 acres. The Lower Ganges Canal irrigates 600,000 acres 
 and the total cost of the system has been about $25,000,000. It 
 has been a paying investment financially as well as an aid to pre- 
 vent famine. Lord Dalhousie turned the sod of the first Indian 
 railroad. This was begun in 1850 and in 1853 it was opened for 
 traffic, being that portion of the Great Indian Peninsular Railways 
 which is between Bombay and Shana, a distance of about twenty 
 miles. 
 
 He promoted steam communication with England by way of 

 
 224 INDIA 
 
 1854-1856 
 
 the Red Sea. The mails were first regularly carried by the Suez 
 route in 1837. The navigation of the Red Sea remained in the 
 control of the East India Company until 1854. The Peninsular and 
 Oriental Steam Navigation Company was incorporated in Decem- 
 ber, 1840, and sent its first steamer to India in 1842, and in 1845 
 began the regular monthly service around the Cape. In 1854 the 
 
 Peninsular and Oriental Company was able to open the regular 
 service by the Red Sea route, which was improved by the railway 
 across the isthmus in 1859, and by the canal in 1869. The service 
 is now weekly. The time from London to Bombay is now 14 days 
 as opposed to 23 before the canal was opened. 
 
 Dalhousie also introduced cheap postage and the electric tele- 
 graph. The adhesive postage stamp was first used in India by Sir 
 Bartle Frere in Sind and was adopted for general use in 1854, and 
 the rate made uniform for all distances in India at one-half anna
 
 CONSOLIDATION 225 
 
 1848-1856 
 
 per one-half tola, that is about one cent per ninety grains in weight. 
 The rate has since been lowered. 
 
 The first director general of telegraphs in India was William 
 Brooke O'Shaughnessy, who was born in Limerick in 1809 and 
 received the degree of doctor of medicine from Edinburgh in 1830. 
 In 1833 he became assistant surgeon in the Bengal army, where he 
 devoted himself to the study of telegraphy. Lord Dalhousie au- 
 thorized him to construct an experimental line and in 1852 he was 
 appointed director general of telegraphs and authorized to con- 
 struct an extensive system. The 800-mile line from Calcutta to 
 Agra was opened in March, 1854, and two years later 4000 miles 
 were in operation, including lines to Bombay and Madras. Law- 
 rence said : " The telegraph saved India " during the Mutiny. 
 O'Shaughnessy was knighted in 1856. He retired in 1861 and 
 changed his name to William O'Shaughnessy Brooke. He died 
 January 10, 1889. Telegraph communication between India and 
 England was opened in 1865 by the Persian Gulf line. 
 
 It is Lord Dalhousie's misfortune that these benefits are too 
 often forgotten in the recollections of the Mutiny, which followed 
 his policy of annexation, after the firm hand which had remodeled 
 British India was withdrawn. 
 
 By act of August 20, 1853, the charter of the East India 
 Company was renewed for an indefinite term of years. This act 
 was amended a year later. One important feature of the act of 
 1853 was the establishment of the office of lieutenant-governor of 
 Bengal, which relieved the governor-general of immediate charge 
 of local administration. These acts were largely the work of Sir 
 Charles Wood (1800-1885, created Viscount Halifax 1866), who 
 was president of the board of control from 1852 to 1855. Sir 
 Charles Wood's famous dispatch of July, 1854, based upon informa- 
 tion furnished by Dalhousie, outlined the system of Indian edu- 
 cation which Dalhousie proceeded to establish and which has been 
 perfected by his successors. Wood was later secretary of state for 
 India during the important period from 1859 to 1866. 
 
 Lord Dalhousie had not been six months in India before the 
 second Sikh or Punjab War broke out. Two British officers were 
 treacherously assassinated at Multan. Unfortunately, Henry Law- 
 rence, the resident at Lahore, was at home on sick leave. The 
 British army was not ready to act in the hot weather; and, despite 
 the single-handed exertions of Lieutenant Herbert Benjamin Ed-
 
 226 INDIA 
 
 1854-1856 
 
 wardes, this outbreak of fanaticism led to a general rising in the 
 Punjab. The khalsa army of the Sikhs again came together, and 
 once more fought on even terms with the British. On the fatal 
 field of Chilianwala, which English patriotism prefers to call a 
 drawn battle, the British lost 2400 officers and men, four guns, 
 and the colors of three regiments, January 13, 1849. Before rein- 
 forcements could come out from England, with Sir Charles Napier 
 as commander-in-chief, Lord Gough had restored his reputation 
 by the crowning victory of Gujrat, which absolutely destroyed the 
 Sikh army. Gujrat (not to be confused with the Gujarat) is lo- 
 cated near the River Chenab, north of Lahore. Multan had previ- 
 ously fallen, and the allied Mohammedan cavalry from Afghanistan, 
 who had forgotten their religious antipathy to the Sikhs, and 
 joined with them in a common hatred of the British name, were 
 chased back with ignominy to their native hills. The Punjab, an- 
 nexed by proclamation on March 29, 1849, became a British prov- 
 ince^ a virgin field for the administrative talents of Dalhousie and 
 the two Lawrences. Maharaja Dhulip Singh received an allow- 
 ance of 58,000/. a year, on which he lived for many years as an 
 English country gentleman in Norfolk. The famous diamond, the 
 Koh-i-nur, which had belonged to Ranjit Singh, passed into Eng- 
 lish hands at this time, and in July, 1850, was presented to Queen 
 Victoria. In 1849 the earl of Dalhousie was advanced to a 
 marquisate. 
 
 The first step in the pacification of the Punjab was a general 
 disarmament, which resulted in the delivery of no fewer than 120,- 
 000 weapons of various kinds. Then followed a settlement of the 
 land tax, village by village, at an assessment much below the rates 
 to which it had been raised by Sikh exactions; and the introduc- 
 tion of a loose but equitable code of civil and criminal procedure. 
 Roads and canals were laid out by Colonel Robert Cornelis Napier, 
 later created Baron Napier of Magdala. 
 
 The security of British peace, and the personal influence of 
 British officers, inaugurated a new era of prosperity, which was 
 felt to the farthest corners of the province. It thus happened that, 
 when the Mutiny broke out in 1857, the Punjab remained not only 
 quiet, but loyal. 
 
 The second Burmese war, in 1852, arose out of the ill-treatment 
 of some European merchants at Rangoon, and the insults offered 
 to the captain of a British frigate who had been sent to remonstrate. 

 
 
 CONSOLIDATION 227 
 
 1846-1856 
 
 The whole valley of the Irawadi, from Rangoon up to Prome, was 
 occupied in a few months. As the king- of Ava refused to treat, 
 the conquered tracts of lower Burma were annexed by proclama- 
 tion, on December 20, 1852, under the name of Pegu, to the prov- 
 inces of Arakan and Tenasserim, which had been acquired in 1826, 
 after the first Burmese war. 
 
 Since annexation, the inhabitants of Rangoon had multiplied 
 fourteenfold by 1891. The trade of the port, which four years 
 after its annexation (1857-1858) amounted to 2,131,055/., had in- 
 creased in 1 88 1- 1882 to 11,723,781/. The towns and the rural tracts 
 have alike prospered. Before 1826 Amherst district was the scene 
 of perpetual warfare between the kings of Siam and Pegu, and was 
 stripped of inhabitants. In February, 1827, a Talaing chief, with 
 10,000 followers, settled in the neighborhood of Maulmain; and, 
 after a few years, a further influx of 20,000 immigrants took place. 
 In 1855 the population of Amherst district amounted to 83,146 
 souls; in i860, to 130,953; and in 1 881, to 301,086. Or, to take 
 the case of a seaport. In 1826, when the British annexed the 
 province of Arakan, Akyab was a poor fishing village. By 1830 
 it had developed into a little town, with a trade valued at 7000/. 
 In 1881 the trade approached 2 millions sterling; so that the 
 trade of Akyab multiplied nearly four hundredfold in fifty years. 
 The population of lower Burma increased from 1,250,000 in 1855 
 to over 4,500,000 in 1891. The annexation of the kingdom of 
 Burma in 1886 made the total population in 1891 more than 7,700,- 
 000, which was increased to 10,500,000 in 1901. 
 
 Lord Dalhousie's dealings with the feudatory states of India 
 revealed the whole nature of the man. That rulers exist only for 
 the good of the ruled, was his supreme axiom of government, of 
 which he gave a conspicuous example in his own daily life. That 
 British administration was better for the people than native rule, 
 seemed to him to follow from this axiom. The truth is that the 
 system of British protectorates, as developed by Lord Wellesley 
 and his successors, had proved by no means a complete success. It 
 practically secured to the native chiefs their principalities and rev- 
 enues, however they might abuse their position and oppress their 
 subjects. A remedy for this state of things was worked out in the 
 India of Victoria by enforcing a higher standard of personal re- 
 sponsibility on the feudatory princes of India, but in Lord Dal- 
 housie's time the old unreformed system was bearing its last and
 
 228 INDIA 
 
 1854-1856 
 
 worst fruits. Dalhousie was thus led to regard native chiefs as 
 mischievous anomalies, to be abolished by every fair means. Good 
 faith must be kept with princes on the throne, and with their legiti- 
 mate heirs, but no false sentiment should preserve dynasties which 
 had forfeited sympathy by generations of misrule, or prolong those 
 that had no natural successor. The " doctrine of lapse " was the 
 practical application of these principles, complicated by the Indian 
 practice of adoption. It has never been doubted that, according to 
 Hindu private law, an adopted son entirely fills the place of a 
 natural son, whether to perform the religious obsequies of his 
 father or to inherit his property. In all respects he continues the 
 rights of the deceased. It was argued, however, both as a matter 
 of historical fact and on grounds of political expediency, that the 
 succession to a throne stood upon a different footing. The para- 
 mount power could not recognize such a right, which might be 
 used as a fraud to hand over the happiness of millions to a base- 
 born impostor. Here came in Lord Dalhousie's maxim of " the 
 good of the governed." In his mind the benefits to be conferred 
 through British administration weighed heavier than a supersti- 
 tious and often fraudulent fiction of inheritance. 
 
 When a native chief left direct male heirs of his body, Lord 
 Dalhousie recognized their right to succeed alike to the private 
 fortune and the public government of their father, but when there 
 was only an adopted son, Lord Dalhousie, while scrupulously re- 
 specting the claims of the heirs to the private fortune of the late 
 chief, denied the right of the adopted son to succeed to the public 
 government of the state. He held the government of a native 
 state to be a public trust ; he also held that, in the absence of direct 
 male issue with a lawful claim to succeed, the succession must be 
 decided by the British government, not in the interests of the family 
 of the late chief, but in the interests of the people. Those interests 
 he believed to be most effectually protected by bringing them undei 
 direct British rule. 
 
 The first state to escheat to the British government, in accord- 
 ance with these principles, was Satara, which had been reconsti- 
 tuted by Lord Hastings on the downfall of the peshwa in 1818. 
 The raja of Satara, the last direct representative of Sivaji, died 
 without a son in 1848, and his deathbed adoption of a son was set 
 aside in 1849. I* 1 tne sam e year the Rajput state of Karauli was 
 saved by the court of directors, who drew a fine distinction be-
 
 CONSOLIDATION 229 
 
 1848-1856 
 
 tween a dependent principality and a protected ally. In 1853 
 Jhansi suffered the same fate as Satara. The most conspicuous 
 application of the doctrine of lapse was the case of Nagpur. The 
 last of the Maratha Bhonslas, a dynasty older than the British gov- 
 ernment in India, died without a son, natural or adopted, in 1853. 
 His territories were annexed, and became part of the Central 
 Provinces. That year also saw British administration extended 
 to the Berars, or the Assigned Districts, which the nizam of 
 Haidarabad was induced to hand over as a territorial guarantee 
 for the subsidies which he perpetually left in arrear. The relics 
 of three other dynasties also passed away in 1853, although without 
 any attendant accretion to British territory. In the extreme south 
 the titular nawab of the Karnatik and the titular raja of Tan j ore 
 both died without heirs. Their rank and their pensions died with 
 them, but compassionate allowances were continued to their fam- 
 ilies. In the north of India Baji Rao, the ex-peshwa, who had been 
 dethroned in 1818, lived on till 1853 in the enjoyment of his 
 annual pension of 80,000/. His adopted son, Nana Sahib, inherited 
 his accumulated savings, but could obtain no further recognition. 
 Lord Dalhousie annexed the kingdom of Oudh on different 
 grounds. Ever since the nawab wazir, Shuja-ud-daula, received 
 back his forfeited territories of Oudh from Lord Clive in 1765, 
 the existence of his dynasty had depended on the protection of 
 British bayonets. Guarded alike from foreign invasion and from 
 domestic rebellion, the line of Oudh nawabs had sunk into private 
 debauchees and public oppressors. Their one virtue was steady 
 loyalty to the British government. The fertile districts between 
 the Ganges and the Gogra, which now support a denser agricultural 
 population than almost any rural area of the size on this globe, 
 had been groaning for generations under an anarchy for which 
 each British governor-general felt himself in part responsible. 
 Warning after warning had been given to the nawabs, who had 
 assumed the title of shah or king, since 18 19, that they must " put 
 their house in order." What the benevolent Bentinck and the sol- 
 dierly Hardinge had only threatened, was now performed by Lord 
 Dalhousie, who united an equal honesty of purpose with sterner 
 decision of character. He laid the whole case before the court 
 of directors. After long and painful hesitation, the court of di- 
 rectors resolved on annexation. Lord Dalhousie, then on the eve 
 of retiring, felt that it would be unfair to bequeath this perilous
 
 230 INDIA 
 
 1856 
 
 task to his successor in the first moments of his rule. The tardy 
 decision of the court of directors left him, however, only a few 
 weeks to carry out the work, but he solemnly believed that work 
 to be his duty to the people of Oudh. " With this feeling on my 
 mind," he wrote privately, " and in humble reliance on the blessing 
 of the Almighty (for millions of His creatures will draw freedom 
 and happiness from the change), I approach the execution of this 
 duty gravely and not without solicitude, but calmly and altogether 
 without doubt." 
 
 Accordingly, at the commencement of 1856, the last year of 
 his rule, Dalhousie gave orders to General Outram, the " Bayard 
 of India," then resident at the court of Lucknow, to assume the 
 administration of Oudh, on the ground that " the British govern- 
 ment would be guilty in the sight of God and man if it were any 
 longer to aid in sustaining by its countenance an administration 
 fraught with suffering to millions." The proclamation was issued 
 on February 13, 1856. The king of Oudh, Wajid Ali, bowed to 
 irresistible force, although he refused to recognize the justice of 
 his deposition. After a mission to England by way of protest 
 and appeal, he settled down in the pleasant suburb of Garden Reach, 
 near Calcutta, in the enjoyment of a pension of 120,000/. a year. 
 Oudh was thus annexed without a blow, but this measure, on which 
 Lord Dalhousie looked back with the proudest sense of rectitude, 
 was perhaps the act of his rule that most alarmed native public 
 opinion. 
 
 The marquis of Dalhousie resigned office in March, 1856, 
 being then only forty- four years of age ; but he carried home with 
 him the seeds of a lingering illness which resulted in his death in 
 i860. Excepting Cornwallis, he was the first, though by no means 
 the last, of English statesmen who have fallen victims to their de- 
 votion to India's needs. Lord Dalhousie completed the fabric 
 of British rule in India. The Indian empire, as mapped out by 
 Lord Wellesley and Lord Hastings during the first quarter of the 
 century, had received the addition of Sind in 1843. The marquis 
 of Dalhousie finally filled in the wide spaces covered by Oudh, the 
 Central Provinces, and smaller states within India, together with 
 the great outlying territories of the Punjab on the northwestern 
 frontier, and the richest part of British Burma beyond the sea. 
 
 The great governor-general was succeeded by his friend, 
 Charles John Canning, third son of George Canning. Lord Can-
 
 CONSOLIDATION 231 
 
 1856-1857 
 
 ning was born on December 14, 1812. In 1837 he succeeded his 
 mother as Viscount Canning in the Irish peerage. He was under 
 secretary of state for foreign affairs from 1841 to 1846 and post- 
 master general from 1853 to I 855- He became governor-general 
 of India in 1856 and upon the transfer of India to the crown became 
 the first viceroy of India, and was created Earl Canning in 1859. 
 He died in London, June 17, 1862, a few weeks after his return 
 from India. Lady Canning, who was a daughter of Lord Stuart 
 de Rothesay, was a popular social leader in London and in Calcutta. 
 She died in India in 1861. 
 
 At the farewell banquet in England, given to him by the court 
 of directors, Lord Canning uttered these prophetic words: " I 
 wish for a peaceful term of office. But I cannot forget that in the 
 sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than 
 a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last 
 threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin." In the following 
 year the sepoys of the Bengal army mutinied, and all the valley 
 of the Ganges from Patna to Delhi was enveloped in the flame.
 
 Chapter XV 
 
 THE SEPOY MUTINY OF 1857 
 
 THE various motives assigned for the Mutiny appear inade- 
 quate to the Western mind. The truth seems to be 
 that native opinion throughout India was in a ferment, 
 predisposing men to believe the wildest stories, and to rush into 
 action in a paroxysm of terror. Panic acts on an oriental popula- 
 tion like drink upon a European mob. The annexation policy of 
 Lord Dalhousie, although dictated by the most enlightened con- 
 siderations, was distasteful to the native mind. The spread of edu- 
 cation, the appearance at the same moment of the steam engine and 
 the telegraph wire, seemed to reveal a deep plan for substituting 
 an English for an Indian civilization. The Bengal sepoys especially 
 thought that they could see further than the rest of their country- 
 men. Most of them were Hindus of high caste ; many of them were 
 recruited from Oudh. They regarded reforms on Western lines 
 as attacks on their own nationality, and they knew at first hand what 
 annexation meant. They believed it was by their prowess that 
 the Punjab had been conquered, and that all India was held. The 
 numerous dethroned princes, or their heirs and widows, were the 
 first to learn and take advantage of this spirit of disaffection and 
 panic. They had heard of the Crimean War, and were told that 
 Russia was the perpetual enemy of England. The Company's 
 munificent pensions had supplied the funds with which they could 
 buy the aid of skillful intriguers. The Mutiny was confined to the 
 Bengal army, which recognized the caste system, while the Madras 
 and Bombay armies, which disregarded caste, remained loyal. The 
 ruling native princes remained true to the English government, 
 sometimes under sore temptations, as in the case of Sindhia at 
 Gwalior. The Mutiny was not a national rising on the part of the 
 people except in Oudh. In general the people of India continued 
 to go about their daily toil unmoved, though there was widespread 
 agitation by both Hindu and Mohammedan fanatics. 
 
 232
 
 SEPOY MUTINY 233 
 
 1857 
 
 On the other hand, the Company had not sufficiently opened 
 up the higher posts in its service to natives of education, talent, or 
 proved fidelity. It had taken important steps in this direction in 
 respect to the lower grades of appointments, but the prizes of Indian 
 official life, many of which are now thrown open to natives of 
 India by the crown, were then the monopoly of a handful of Eng- 
 lishmen. Shortly before the Mutiny, Sir Henry Lawrence pointed 
 out that even the army supplied no career to a native officer which 
 could satisfy the reasonable ambition of an able man. He insisted 
 on the serious dangers arising from this state of things; but his 
 warnings were unheeded till too late. In the crisis of the Mutiny 
 they were remembered. He was nominated provisional governor- 
 general in event of any accident happening to Lord Canning ; and 
 Queen Victoria's proclamation, on the transfer of the government 
 from the Company to the crown at the end of the great struggle, 
 affirmed the principle which he had so powerfully urged. " And it 
 is our further will," were her majesty's gracious words, " that, so 
 far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely 
 and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of 
 which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integ- 
 rity duly to discharge." Under the Company this liberal policy 
 was unknown. The sepoy Mutiny of 1857, therefore, found many 
 of the Indian princes, especially the dethroned dynasties, hostile 
 to the Company ; while a multitude of its own native officers were 
 either actively disloyal or indifferent to its fate. 
 
 In this critical state of affairs, a rumor ran through the native 
 army that the cartridges served out to the Bengal regiments had 
 been greased with the fat of pigs animals which are unclean alike 
 to Hindu and Mohammedan. No assurances could quiet the minds 
 of the sepoys. Indeed the evidence shows that a disastrous blun- 
 der had in truth been made in this matter a blunder which, al- 
 though quickly remedied, was remedied too late. Fires occurred 
 nightly in the native lines; officers were insulted by their men; 
 confidence was gone, and only the form of discipline remained. 
 
 In addition, the outbreak of the storm found the native regi- 
 ments denuded of many of their best officers. The administration 
 of the great empire to which Dalhousie had put the capstone re- 
 quired a larger staff than the civil service could supply. The prac- 
 tice of selecting able military men for civil posts, which had long 
 existed, received a sudden and vast development. Oudh, the Pun-
 
 234. INDIA 
 
 1857 
 
 jab, the Central Provinces, and British Burma were administered 
 to a large extent by picked officers from the Company's regiments. 
 Good and skillful commanders remained; but the native army 
 had nevertheless been drained of many of its brightest intellects and 
 firmest wills at the very crisis of its fate. At the same time the 
 British troops in India had, in spite of Lord Dalhousie's remon- 
 strances, been reduced far below the strength which the great 
 governor-general declared to be essential to the safety of the Com- 
 pany's rule. Two regiments were withdrawn at the outbreak of 
 the Crimean War. Several regiments were also absent on the 
 Persian campaign under Outram at the beginning of 1857. ^ n 
 1854 there were 31 battalions of regulars in India, but Dalhousie 
 asked for 37. Dalhousie would have diminished the size of the 
 native army, and he did so distribute it as to have the individual 
 stations as small as possible. Dalhousie enlisted an irregular force 
 in the Punjab under the Punjab government, which he kept sepa- 
 rate from the native army, and which proved so useful during the 
 Mutiny. He also adopted the policy of enlisting Ghurkas. Im- 
 mediately before the Mutiny there were in India 232,224 native 
 troops and 45,522 Europeans, of whom 6170 were officers. Mont- 
 gomery Martin ("Indian Empire") says: "In Bombay the rela- 
 tive strength of European to native infantry was as 1 to 9I; in 
 Madras as 1 to i6; and in Bengal as 1 to 24I." One of Dal- 
 housie's last official acts was to submit to the home authorities a 
 series of minutes containing recommendations concerning the army 
 in India, but his earnest representations on this subject were lying 
 disregarded in London when the panic about the greased cartridges 
 spread through the native regiments, and the storm burst upon 
 Bengal. 
 
 On the afternoon of Sunday, May 10, 1857, the sepoys at 
 Meerut, 35 miles northeast of Delhi, broke into open mutiny. 
 They forced open the jail and rushed in a wild torrent through 
 the cantonments, cutting down any European whom they met. 
 They then streamed off to Delhi, to stir up the native garrison 
 and the criminal population of that great city, and to place them- 
 selves under the authority of the titular Mogul emperor. Meerut was 
 then the largest military station in northern India, with a strong 
 European garrison of foot, horse, and guns, sufficient to overwhelm 
 the mutineers long before they could have reached Delhi; but 
 as the sepoys acted in irrational panic, so the British officers, in
 
 SEPOYMUTINY 235 
 
 1857 
 
 but too many cases, behaved with equally irrational indecision. The 
 news of the outbreak was telegraphed to Delhi, and nothing more 
 was done at Meerut that night. At the moment when one strong 
 will might have saved India, no soldier in authority at Meerut 
 seemed able to think or act. The next morning the Mohammedans 
 of Delhi rose, and all that the Europeans there could do was to blow 
 up the magazine. 
 
 A rallying center and a traditional name were thus given to 
 the revolt, which forthwith spread like wildfire through the North- 
 western Provinces and Oudh down into Lower Bengal. The same 
 narrative must suffice for all the outbreaks, although each episode 
 has its own story of sadness and devotion. The sepoys rose on 
 their officers, usually without warning, sometimes after protesta- 
 tions of fidelity protestations in some cases perhaps true at the 
 moment. The Europeans, or persons of Christian faith, were often 
 massacred; occasionally, also, the women and children. The jail 
 was broken open, the treasury plundered, and the mutineers marched 
 off to some center of revolt, to join in what had now become a 
 national war. Only in the Punjab were the sepoys anticipated by 
 stern measures of repression and disarmament, carried out by Sir 
 John Lawrence and his lieutenants, among whom Edwardes and 
 Nicholson stand conspicuous. John Nicholson was born in Dublin 
 on December i, 1821, and went to Calcutta in 1839 to enter the 
 Bengal infantry. He served in Afghanistan and the Punjab, being 
 employed as an administrative officer at Bannu in the Punjab from 
 185 1 to 1856. He died at Delhi from wounds on September 23, 
 1857. To the natives he appeared to be a demi-god and was ac- 
 tually worshiped as Nikkul Seyn by a brotherhood of fakirs. The 
 Sikh population never wavered. Crowds of willing Mohammedan 
 recruits from the Afghan hills joined the British. Thus the Pun- 
 jab, instead of being itself a source of danger, was able to furnish 
 a portion of its own garrison for the siege of Delhi. In Lower 
 Bengal most of the sepoys mutinied and then dispersed in dif- 
 ferent directions. The native armies of Madras and Bombay re- 
 mained, on the whole, true to their colors. In central India the 
 contingents of some of the great chiefs sooner or later threw in 
 their lot with the rebels, but the Mohammedan state of Haidarabad 
 was kept loyal by the authority of its minister, Sir Salar Jang. 
 This able man was born in 1829 and became the prime minister to 
 the nizam in 1853, which position he continued to hold until his
 
 236 INDIA 
 
 1857 
 
 death on February 8, 1883. He was created a G. C. S. L, and in 
 1876 he visited England. 
 
 The main interest of the sepoy war gathers round the three 
 cities of Cawnpur, Lucknow, and Delhi. The cantonments at 
 Cawnpur contained one of the great native garrisons of India. At 
 Bithur, not far off, was the palace of Dundhu Panth, the heir of the 
 last peshwa, whose more familiar name of Nana Sahib will ever 
 be handed down to infamy. On the death of Baji Rao, the last 
 peshwa, in 1853, Dalhousie recognized the right of his adopted 
 
 
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 4^ 
 
 
 son, Nana Sahib, to inherit the private estate of the late peshwa, 
 and to this fortune he added the jaghir of the land on which 
 Baji Rao had lived in the Northwestern Provinces, but the pension 
 to the late peshwa was not continued to his adopted heir. Certainly 
 Nana Sahib had little injustice of which to complain. Nan, liter- 
 ally grandmother, is a term of endearment, a pet name. At first 
 the Nana was profuse in his professions of loyalty; but when the 
 sepoys mutinied at Cawnpur on June 6 he put himself at their head, 
 and was proclaimed peshwa of the Marathas. The Europeans 
 at Cawnpur, numbering more women and children than fighting 
 men, shut themselves up in an ill-chosen hasty entrenchment, where 
 they heroically bore a siege for nineteen days under the sun of a
 
 SEPOYMUTINY 237 
 
 1857 
 
 tropical June. Everyone had courage and endurance to suffer 
 or to die ; but the directing mind was again absent. On June 27, 
 trusting to a safe conduct from the Nana a safe conduct supposed 
 to hold good as far as Allahabad they surrendered; and to the 
 number of 450 embarked in boats on the Ganges. A murderous fire 
 was opened upon them from the river bank. Only a single boat 
 escaped; and four men, who swam across to the protection of 
 a friendly raja, survived to tell the tale. The rest of the men were 
 massacred on the spot. The women and children, numbering 125, 
 were reserved for the same fate on July 15, when the avenging 
 army of Sir Henry Havelock was at hand. 
 
 Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief commissioner of Oudh, had 
 foreseen the storm. He fortified and provisioned the residency at 
 Lucknow ; and thither he retired, with all the European inhabitants 
 and a weak British regiment, on July 2. Two days later he was 
 mortally wounded by a shell. The clear head, however, was here 
 in authority. Sir Henry Lawrence had deliberately chosen his 
 position; and the little garrison held out, under unparalleled hard- 
 ships and against enormous odds, until relieved by Havelock and 
 Outram on September 25. On this occasion Outram justified his 
 name of the Bayard of India by serving as a volunteer under Have- 
 lock until the relief of Lucknow had taken place, though he was 
 officially Havelock's senior and superior. The relieving force was 
 itself invested by fresh swarms of rebels; and it was not till No- 
 vember that Sir Colin Campbell cut his way into Lucknow, and 
 effected the final deliverance of the garrison on November 16, 
 1857. The troops then withdrew to more urgent work, and did 
 not permanently reoccupy Lucknow till March, 1858. Colin Camp- 
 bell was born at Glasgow on October 20, 1792, the son of Colin 
 Macliver. He was by mistake commissioned in the army as Colin 
 Campbell in 1807 and retained the name thus bestowed. He served 
 in the Peninsular War and later in America, China, and India. He 
 was knighted in 1849 an< ^ served in the Crimean War. He was 
 commander-in-chief in India from 1857 to i860, and was created 
 Baron Clyde in 1858. He died on August 14, 1863. 
 
 The siege of Delhi began on June 8, a month after the original 
 outbreak at Meerut. Siege in the proper sense of the word it was 
 not; for the British army, encamped on the historic "ridge" of 
 Delhi, never exceeded 8000 men, while the rebels within the walls 
 were more than 30,000 strong. In the middle of August, Nichol-
 
 238 INDIA 
 
 1857 
 
 son arrived with a reinforcement from the Punjab; his own in- 
 spiring presence was perhaps even more valuable than the reinforce- 
 ment he brought. On September 14 the assault was delivered, and, 
 after six days' desperate fighting in the streets, Delhi was again 
 won. Nicholson fell heroically at the head of the storming party. 
 Hodson, the daring but unscrupulous leader of a corps of irregu- 
 lar horse, hunted down next day the old Mogul emperor, Bahadur 
 Shah, and his sons. The emperor was afterward sent a state 
 prisoner to Rangoon, where he .lived till 1862. As the mob pressed 
 in on the guard around the emperor's sons, near Delhi, Hodson 
 thought it necessary to shoot down with his own hand the princes 
 who had been captured unconditionally. William Stephen Raikes 
 Hodson was born on March 19, 1821, and entered the Indian army 
 in 1845. From 1852 to 1854 he was commander of the Guides. 
 At the outbreak of the Mutiny he was commissioned to raise an 
 irregular regiment, which came to be known as Hodson's Horse. 
 He was wounded at Lucknow and died on March 12, 1858. Most 
 writers have adopted a hostile view of Hodson's treatment of the 
 Mogul princes, and of his personal character. 1 
 
 After the fall of Delhi and the final relief of Lucknow the 
 war loses its dramatic interest, although fighting still went on in 
 various parts of the country for about eighteen months. The 
 population of Oudh and Rohilkhand, stimulated by the presence of 
 the begam of Oudh, the nawab of Bareilly, and Nana Sahib him- 
 self, had joined the mutinous sepoys en masse. In this quarter of 
 India alone, it was the revolt of a people rather than the mutiny 
 of an army that had to be quelled. Sir Colin Campbell conducted 
 the campaign in Oudh, which lasted through two cold seasons. 
 Valuable assistance was lent by Sir Jang Bahadur, the ruling min- 
 ister in Nepal for more than thirty years, at the head of his gallant 
 Gurkhas. He had visited England and was a thorough believer in 
 England's power. Town after town was occupied, fort after fort 
 was stormed, until the last gun had been recaptured, and the last 
 fugitive had been chased across the frontier by January, 1859. 
 
 In the meanwhile, Sir Hugh Henry Rose, with another army 
 from Bombay, was conducting an equally brilliant campaign in 
 central India. This British officer was born on April 6, 1801, at 
 Berlin, and educated there. He entered the English army in 1820 
 
 1 For a favorable account of him, see G. H. Hodson, "Hodson of Hodson's 
 Horse."
 
 p ^ 
 
 2
 
 SEPOY MUTINY 
 
 and served in Syria, with the embassy at Constantinople, and in 
 the Crimea. He became a major general in 1854 and was knighted 
 in 1855. He went to India in 1857, where he was commander-in- 
 chief of Bombay in i860, and of India from i860 to 1865. He was 
 commander-in-chief in Ireland from 1865 to 1870, and was created 
 Baron Strathnairn in 1866. He died at Paris on October 16, 1885. 
 His most formidable antagonists in central India were the disinher- 
 ited rani or princess of Jhansi and Tantia Topi, whose military 
 talent had previously inspired Nana Sahib with all the capacity for 
 resistance that he ever displayed. The rani was the widow of the 
 last raja of Jhansi, who had died without heirs of his body in 1853. 
 The rani was indignant because the British government would 
 not allow her to adopt an heir, because of her small pension from 
 which she was expected to pay her late husband's debts, and be- 
 cause the British slaughtered cattle in Jhansi in defiance of her 
 religion. Tantia Topi had been born a subject of the peshwa about 
 1 8 12 and was the devoted servant and adviser of Nana Sahib. The 
 princess fell fighting bravely at the head of her troops in June, 1858. 
 Tantia Topi, after doubling backward and forward through central 
 India, was at last betrayed and run down in April, 1859. He was 
 executed at Sipri on April 18. 
 
 The Mutiny sealed the fate of the East India Company, after 
 a life of more than two and a half centuries. The original Com- 
 pany received its charter of incorporation from Elizabeth in 1600. 
 Its political powers, and the constitution of the Indian government, 
 were derived from the Regulating Act of 1773, passed by the 
 ministry of Lord North. By that statute the governor of Bengal 
 was raised to the rank of governor-general; and, in conjunction 
 with his council of four members, he was intrusted with the duty 
 of controlling the governments of Madras and Bombay, so far as 
 regarded questions of peace and war : a supreme court of judicature 
 was appointed at Calcutta, to which the judges were nominated 
 by the crown ; and a power of making rules and regulations was 
 conferred upon the governor-general and his council. Next came 
 the India Act of Pitt, in 1784, which founded the board of control 
 in England, strengthened the supremacy of Bengal over the other 
 presidencies, and first authorized the historic phrase, " governor- 
 general in council." 
 
 The charter was renewed in 1781 and 1783, but the renewed 
 charter of 181 3 abolished the Company's monopoly of Indian trade,
 
 240 INDIA 
 
 1857 
 
 and compelled it to direct its energies to the good government of 
 the people. The Act of 1833, at the next renewal of the Company's 
 charter for another twenty years, did away with its remaining 
 trade to China. It also introduced successive reforms into the 
 constitution of the Indian government. It added to the council 
 a new (legal) member, who need not be chosen from among the 
 Company's servants, and who was at first entitled to be present 
 only at meetings for making laws and regulations; it accorded 
 the authority of acts of parliament to the laws and regulations so 
 made, subject to the disallowance of the court of directors; it 
 appointed a law commission ; and it finally gave to the governor- 
 general in council a control over the other presidencies, in all 
 points relating to the civil or military administration. The charter 
 of the Company was renewed for the last time in 1853, not for a 
 definite period of years, but only for so long as parliament should 
 see fit. On this occasion the number of directors was reduced, and 
 their patronage as regards appointments to the civil service was 
 taken away, to make room for the principle of open competition. 
 
 The Act for the Better Government of India, which finally 
 transferred the administration from the Company to the crown, was 
 not passed without an eloquent protest from the directors, nor 
 without bitter party discussions in parliament. It enacted that 
 India shall be governed by, and in the name of, the ruler of Eng- 
 land, through one of his principal secretaries of state, assisted by 
 a council of fifteen members. The governor-general received the 
 new title of viceroy. The European troops of the Company, num- 
 bering about 24,000 officers and men, were amalgamated with the 
 royal service, and the Indian navy was abolished. By the Indian 
 Councils Act, passed August 1, 1861, the governor-general's coun- 
 cil, and also the councils at Madras and Bombay, were augmented 
 by the addition of non-official members, either natives or Europeans, 
 for legislative purposes only. This act has been amended several 
 times, notably on June 20, 1892. By the terms of the act of 1861, 
 the governor-general's council consisted of five ordinary members, 
 three with official experience in India, one law, and one finance 
 member. The commander-in-chief is an extraordinary member of 
 council. In 1874 a sixth member was added for the public works 
 department. For legislative purposes not less than six and not 
 more than twelve members were added to the council. This num- 
 ber includes some distinguished natives and representatives of the
 
 SEPOY MUTINY 241 
 
 1857 
 
 legal and mercantile classes in India. The act also authorized the 
 governor-general to make rules for the transaction of business 
 in the council, and under this authority Canning placed each mem- 
 ber in charge of a department, and in minor matters that member 
 may give final orders. More important matters he refers to the 
 governor-general, and if they agree final orders may issue, but if 
 they disagree or the governor-general so wishes, the council as a 
 body is consulted. Technically the council is responsible for the 
 acts of each of its members. Thus the council has been practically 
 transformed into a cabinet and has been able to keep abreast of its 
 work as had seldom been the case under the old system, which re- 
 quired the whole council to act on every matter. By the Indian 
 High Courts Act of August 6, 1861, high courts of judicature were 
 constituted out of the old supreme courts at the presidency towns. 
 There was also passed on August I, 1861, the Indian Civil Service 
 Act.
 
 Chapter XVI 
 
 INDIA UNDER THE BRITISH CROWN 
 1858-1910 
 
 BOTH the suppression of the Mutiny and the introduction 
 of the peaceful revolution which followed fell to the lot of 
 I Lord Canning "a very mirror of honor, the pattern of a 
 just, high-minded, and fearless statesman, kind and consider- 
 ate . . . without any personal bias against opponents." 
 
 He preserved his equanimity unruffled in the darkest hours of 
 peril, and the impartiality of his conduct incurred alternate praise 
 and blame from partisans of each side. The epithet then scorn- 
 fully applied to him, of "Clemency" Canning, is now remembered 
 only to his honor. On November 1, 1858, at a grand darbar held at 
 Allahabad, he sent forth the royal proclamation which announced 
 that the queen had assumed the government of India. This docu- 
 ment, which is, in the truest and noblest sense, the Great Charter 
 of the Indian people, declared in eloquent words the principles of 
 justice and religious toleration as the guiding policy of the queen's 
 rule. It also granted an amnesty to all except those who had di- 
 rectly taken part in the murder of British subjects. Peace was 
 proclaimed throughout India on July 8, 1859. With the ter- 
 mination of the Company's rule, its army ceased to exist, and the 
 forces in India were incorporated as an integral part of the British 
 army. Henceforth Europeans could no longer enlist for service 
 in India only, but must enlist for regular general service in the 
 British army. Following the suppression of the Mutiny the ex- 
 traordinary military establishment was reduced to a peace basis. 
 The character of the army was greatly altered from the old Com- 
 pany's army, for in 1862 there were actually in India 76,000 
 European and 111,000 native troops, making the total British force 
 in India 187,000 men. In the autumn of 1859 Lord Canning made 
 a viceregal progress through the northern provinces, to receive 
 the homage of loyal princes and chiefs, and to guarantee to them 
 the right of adoption. In i860 Lord Canning had to send a puni- 
 tive expedition into the little Himalayan state of Sikkim on the 
 
 242
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 243 
 
 1860-1861 
 
 northern border of Lower Bengal. A treaty of April 16, 1861, 
 established peaceful relations with Sikkim, which was allowed to 
 maintain its independence, subject to some slight supervision by the 
 government of India. The importance of this little state lies in 
 its control of the best pass from Bengal into Tibet, and it has 
 accordingly figured prominently in all the questions of Indo-Tibetan 
 relations. India was also called upon to furnish several regiments 
 of Sikh troops to serve under Sir Hope Grant in the Second China 
 War of i860. In Burma the various British provinces were 
 formed into a single governmental unit, and on January 31, 1862, 
 Lieutenant Colonel Phayre was installed as the first chief com- 
 missioner of British Burma. Arthur Purves Phayre was born 
 in 18 12 and entered the Bengal army in 1828. After serving as 
 commissioner of Arakan and of Pegu, he was chief commissioner 
 of British Burma from 1862 to 1867. He was knighted in 1878 
 and died in 1885. 
 
 The suppression of the Mutiny increased the debt of India by 
 about forty millions sterling, and the military changes which en- 
 sued augmented the annual expenditure by about ten millions. To 
 grapple with this deficit, a distinguished political economist and 
 parliamentary financier, the Right Honorable James Wilson, was 
 sent out from England as financial member of the council. He 
 was born in Scotland on June 3, 1805. After a business career he 
 entered parliament in 1847 an d occupied various posts involving 
 financial duties. In his budget speech of February, i860, Wilson 
 said : " For perhaps the first time in any Asiatic war, Lord 
 Canning adopted, throughout the whole of this campaign [the 
 Mutiny], the most scrupulous principle of integrity. Whatever 
 service was performed, whatever provisions were supplied, were 
 strictly paid for." He reorganized the customs system, abolishing 
 all export duties and lowering the import duties. He imposed a 
 tax on all incomes of more than 200 rupees, a license duty of one, 
 four, or ten rupees upon trades and professions, and an internal 
 revenue tax on tobacco. He undertook to revise the business 
 methods of the government, especially in the military department. 
 He created a paper currency commission at Calcutta, corresponding 
 with the department of issue of the Bank of England, with branches 
 at Bombay and Madras, authorized to issue notes ranging in value 
 from 5 rupees to 1000 rupees, redeemable in silver. He died in 
 the midst of his splendid task, but his name still lives as that of
 
 5244 INDIA 
 
 1861-1862 
 
 the first and greatest finance minister of India. His successor 
 as finance member of council was Samuel Laing, who was born in 
 1 8 12, and was graduated from Cambridge and admitted as a bar- 
 rister of Lincoln's Inn in 1837. From 1842 onward he was regu- 
 larly interested in railroad administration, and was chairman and 
 managing director of the London, Brighton, and South Coast 
 Railways from 1848 to 1852, and from 1867 to 1894. He was a 
 member of parliament, with some interruptions, from 1852 to 1885, 
 and financial member of the governor-general's council from Janu- 
 ary, 1 86 1, to July, 1862. His year of service is notable for the 
 promotion of railroad construction, for his endeavors to free the 
 poorest classes from the burden of taxation, and for the initiation 
 of the policy of decentralization in taxation, in the case of the to- 
 bacco tax. The Bengal Tenancy Act, a memorable measure which 
 secured the land rights of the peasantry of Bengal, was passed 
 under Lord Canning's auspices in 1859, but as ^ had failed to meet 
 the situation fully and as a result of long and careful investigation 
 it was replaced by the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885; the Penal 
 Code, originally drawn up by Macaulay in 1837, became law in 
 i860; with Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure in 1861. 
 
 Lord Canning left India in March, 1862, and died before he 
 had been a month in England. His successor was Lord Elgin. 
 James Bruce was born in 181 1, and educated at Eton and Oxford, 
 where he was a student of Christ Church at the same time as 
 Lord Dalhousie, Lord Canning, and Gladstone. He succeeded in 
 1 84 1 as eighth earl of Elgin and twelfth earl of Kincardine in 
 the Scottish peerage. He was governor of Jamaica from 1842 to 
 1847, an d the governor-general of Canada from 1847 to I ^54. In 
 1857 he was sent as envoy to China. On his return he was made 
 postmaster-general, but from i860 to 1861 he was again sent to 
 China. He became viceroy and governor-general of India in 1862 
 and died of heart trouble at the Himalayan station of Dharmsala 
 on November 20, 1863, and there he lies buried. Lord Elgin 
 abandoned the pompous progress of the earlier governors-general 
 in traveling and went by train. The one event of his rule was 
 the expedition against the Wahabis, a group of turbulent and 
 fanatical Mohammedans in the northwest. On the death of Lord 
 Elgin, Sir Robert Napier, later Lord Napier of Magdala, as senior 
 member of council, succeeded until the. arrival of Sir William Deni- 
 son, the governor of Madras, who became acting governor-general
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 245 
 
 1862-1869 
 
 under the Act of 1861. William Thomas Denison was born in 
 1804 and was educated at Woolwich. He constructed the Rideau 
 Canal in Canada from 1827 to 1831, and was employed in other 
 engineering works until he was appointed lieutenant-governor of 
 Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1846. He opened the first 
 representative assembly in 1852 and was transferred to the gov- 
 ernorship of New South Wales from 1854 to 1861, where he 
 established responsible government in 1855. He was knighted in 
 1856, and was governor of Madras from 1861 to 1866, serving 
 as acting governor-general from December 2, 1863, to January 
 12, 1864. 
 
 Upon the death of Lord Elgin the viceroyalty was immediately 
 offered to Sir John Lawrence, the savior of the Punjab, who at 
 once hastened to his new post. Aside from such incidents as the 
 Bhutan war and the Orissa famine, the viceroyalty was devoid 
 of important events, but Lawrence's rule is notable for two things 
 for which his earlier experience, especially in the Punjab, admirably 
 fitted him: the effort to improve the condition of the natives, and 
 the handling of the perplexing question of the northwest frontier. 
 - After a careful investigation of the condition of the peasant 
 class in Oudh, the Oudh Tenancy Act of 1868 was passed, com- 
 pelling the talukdars, or baronial landlords, to respect the rights 
 of the ryots, or peasant tenants. Similar measures were carried 
 into effect in the Northwestern Provinces and in the Punjab, where 
 they raised much less discussion. The agrarian situation in Bengal 
 also received attention, especially from the courts. The law mem- 
 ber of the council from 1862 to 1869 was the famous legal scholar, 
 Henry James Sumner Maine. He was born in 1822, knighted in 
 1 87 1, and died in 1888. 
 
 Plans for various internal improvements received a great im- 
 petus from the inability of the government to deal with the famine 
 situation in Orissa in 1866, which resulted in a frightful loss of 
 life, so that, in a later famine in Bundelkhand and Upper Hindu- 
 stan in 1 868- 1 869, Lord Lawrence laid down the principle, for the 
 first time in Indian history, that the officers of the government would 
 be held personally responsible for taking every possible means to 
 avert death by starvation. Lawrence's administration also estab- 
 lished the rule that all future railroads and irrigation works should 
 be constructed by the ruling power, and that such permanent im- 
 provements should be paid for by loans, and that only the annual
 
 246 INDIA 
 
 1863-1869 
 
 charges for them should be paid from the revenue. The changed 
 conditions since the Mutiny, and the large increase in the number 
 of Europeans in the army in India, made necessary the erection of 
 extensive barracks with all the modern improvements in order 
 to preserve the health of the army. Other forms of sanitary work 
 were also carried out. The work of forest administration was 
 taken up by the imperial government. Of wider import, however, 
 was the extension of the railroad and irrigation systems. The 
 famine in Orissa owed its great severity to the absence of rail- 
 roads and even of passable carriage roads through the province. 
 The seacoast of Orissa is at best difficult of access, and during the 
 monsoons it was almost impossible for a vessel to discharge its 
 cargo on the coast, so that at Puri it took one steamer seven weeks 
 to unload. Public works were begun, but the famine victims 
 could not be paid in food, but only in money, so that the works 
 were soon suspended. The famine was followed by devastating 
 floods. The terrible character of the Orissa disasters led at once 
 to a burst of activity in the construction of railroads, roads, irri- 
 gation works, and other internal improvements. In this work Law- 
 rence received valuable assistance from the able and experienced 
 engineer officer, Richard Strachey. This man was born in 1817 
 and entered the Bengal Engineers in 1836. After serving in 
 various posts as an engineer he became secretary to the govern- 
 ment of India for the department of public works from 1862 to 
 1866, and inspector general of irrigation from 1866 to 1871. He 
 was member of the council of India from 1875 to 1878, and from 
 1879 to 1889, and temporary member of the governor-general's 
 council from 1878 to 1879. Since 1889 ne nas been chairman of 
 the East Indian Railways Company. He was knighted in 1897. 
 In regard to the financial and commercial situation under 
 Lawrence's rule, it should be noted that the distress in England, 
 due to the closing of the mills, was at its height when Lawrence 
 entered office. The American Civil War had made India the sole 
 available source of cotton supply, and the price had run up from 
 44/. a ton in i860 to 189/. in 1864. Wild speculation followed, 
 notably in Bombay, ending in a financial crash as soon as the 
 American war closed. This commercial crisis of 1866 also threat- 
 ened the young tea industry in Bengal. The reorganization of the 
 civil service following the transfer of India to the crown was com- 
 pleted under Lawrence, and the salaries raised to a uniform stand-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 247 
 
 1863-1869 
 
 ard. This period was also marked by the beginning of the deprecia- 
 tion of silver and the development of the money question. All of 
 these things contributed to an increase in the national expenditure, 
 with no compensating increase in the income of the imperial gov- 
 ernment, so that the five years of Lawrence's rule showed a net 
 deficit of 2,500,000/., in spite of the utmost efforts for frugality 
 and economy. The finance member of the governor-general's coun- 
 cil from 1863 to 1865 was Charles Edward Trevelyan, who was 
 born in 1807 and entered the Bengal civil service in 1826. He 
 was knighted in 1848, introduced the new Indian civil service 
 system in 1853, was governor of Madras in 1859-1860, and died 
 in 1886. He was the brother-in-law of Lord Macaulay. He was 
 succeeded as finance member of council by William Nathaniel 
 Massey, from 1865 to 1868. Massey was born in 1809 and died in 
 1 88 1. He was long a member of parliament, and wrote a history 
 of the reign of George III. 
 
 Along the northern frontier of Lower Bengal stretches the 
 independent Himalayan state of Bhutan, with which Lawrence had 
 to carry on his only war. This involved only a few skirmishes 
 and was terminated by a treaty on November 11, 1865. This 
 treaty provided that Bhutan should cede the dwars, or passes, be- 
 tween Bengal and Assam and Bhutan. The remainder of Bhutan 
 was allowed to maintain its independence subject to certain treaty 
 guarantees, which assured the government of India of the peace- 
 ful behavior of the restless tribesmen. 
 
 Of more serious character was the situation on the Afghan 
 frontier. On the death of Dost Mohammed, on June 9, 1863, 
 Sher Ali, the third son and acknowledged heir of the Dost, was 
 recognized as amir of Afghanistan by Lawrence, and his son, Mo- 
 hammed Ali, as heir apparent. Then followed a long civil war in 
 which the two older sons of the Dost, Afzal and Azum, obtained 
 possession of most of Afghanistan, and were partially recognized 
 as de facto rulers by Lawrence, who at the same time refused to 
 withdraw his recognition from Sher Ali. The latter soon won his 
 way back to power, and in 1869 was able to notify Lawrence that 
 he was once more in complete control. Lawrence's policy had 
 been " that we will leave the Afghans to settle their own quarrels, 
 and that we are willing to be on terms of amity and good-will 
 with the nation and with their rulers de facto." It was at this 
 same time that the Russian advance into central Asia, which fol-
 
 248 INDIA 
 
 1868-1869 
 
 lowed the Crimean War, became a cause for alarm. Envoys from 
 Khokand and Bokhara visited Lawrence, but the independence 
 of their states was destroyed, and finally Lawrence urged upon 
 the home government " that it [Russia] might be given to under- 
 stand in firm but courteous language that it cannot be permitted 
 to interfere in the affairs of Afghanistan, or in those of any state 
 which lies contiguous to our frontier." Lawrence opposed the 
 " forward movement " to establish a scientific, defensible northwest- 
 ern frontier, but preferred to maintain the line of the Indus as the 
 actual frontier, and to develop and preserve friendly relations, not 
 only with the Afghans and the Baluchis, but also with the various 
 hill tribes, but not to absorb them into the Indian empire. Colonel 
 Henry Marion Durand, who was military member of the governor- 
 general's council from 1865 to 1870, in succession to Sir Robert 
 Napier, was an expert on the northwest frontier question, having 
 served in the Afghan and Sikh wars. He closed his career as 
 lieutenant-governor of the Punjab from 1870 to 1871. 
 
 In 1868 England found it necessary to send an expedition into 
 Abyssinia and intrusted the conduct of it to the commander-in- 
 chief in Bombay, who was rewarded for his success with the title 
 of Lord Napier of Magdala. 
 
 Sir John Lawrence retired in January, 1869, after having 
 passed through every grade of Indian service, from an assistant 
 magistracy to the viceroyalty. On his return to England he was 
 raised to the peerage. He died in 1879, and lies in Westminster 
 Abbey. 
 
 Lord Mayo succeeded Lord Lawrence in 1869, and urged on 
 the material progress of India. Richard Southwell Bourke was 
 born in Dublin on February 21, 1822. He entered parliament 
 in 1847 an d succeeded as sixth earl of Mayo in the Irish peerage 
 in 1867. Under his courtesy title of Lord Naas he was thrice 
 chief secretary for Ireland, in 1852, 1858-1859, and 1866-1868. 
 
 The Ambala darbar in 1869, at which Sher Ali was formally 
 recognized as amir of Afghanistan, although in one sense the 
 completion of what Lord Lawrence had begun, owed its brilliant 
 success to Lord Mayo. In his foreign policy Lord Mayo sought, 
 with substantial success, to secure the recognition by Russia of 
 the boundaries of Afghanistan. He also mediated in Baluchistan 
 to establish internal order and to have. the Persian boundary ques- 
 tion settled. To the northward Eastern Turkestan was for the
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 
 
 1869-1870 
 
 moment independent under a Mohammedan soldier of fortune, 
 Yakub, who sought recognition from the government of India. 
 Douglas Forsyth, who had served in the Punjab under Lawrence, 
 was sent by Lord Mayo to visit him at Yarkand, but nothing 
 came of it, and the Chinese soon afterward restored their authority. 
 On the eastern frontier of Bengal the tribesmen of the Lushai 
 Hills became so troublesome that Lord Mayo resolved to give them 
 a lesson in good behavior, and under the direction of Lord Napier 
 of Magdala the Lushai expedition established order and security 
 upon that frontier. Briefly stated, Mayo's foreign policy was a 
 development of Lawrence's nonintervention doctrine. He sought 
 to surround India with a circle of independent friendly states which 
 should form a buffer against such an empire as Russia. 
 
 In his relations with the feudatory states he insisted that the 
 native princes should not be guilty of misgovernment. The worst 
 case with which he had to deal was the maharaja of Alwar, whom 
 he forced to accept a native council guided by the British political 
 agent. Mayo encouraged the native rulers in enlightened gov- 
 ernment and sought to develop an esprit de corps to that end by the 
 education of the heirs to the native principalities. For this purpose 
 he planned Mayo College at Ajmere, which was opened in 1875 
 for the education of young Rajput princes. The visit of His Royal 
 Highness, Alfred Ernest Albert, the duke of Edinburgh, in 1869- 
 1870, gave deep pleasure to the natives of India, and introduced 
 a tone of personal loyalty into the relations with the feudatory 
 princes. 
 
 Some of Lord Mayo's most important work was done in con- 
 nection with the finances, which were in a serious condition. The 
 annual deficits for the three years preceding the arrival of Lord 
 Mayo made a total equivalent to about $28,000,000. During his 
 first year he secured a slight surplus, and during the next three 
 years piled up a surplus aggregating more than $28,000,000. In 
 doing this both revenue and expenditure were reduced. Economy 
 was rigidly enforced in every department, estimates were scaled 
 down and every item carefully scrutinized, and public works involv- 
 ing outlays were carefully supervised. With the assistance of the 
 brothers, Richard and John Strachey, he carried into effect the 
 plan of decentralization in the financial administration which had 
 been suggested by Mr. Laing a decade earlier. The impulse to 
 local self-government, given by the last measure, has done much,
 
 250 INDIA 
 
 1870-1872 
 
 and will do more, to develop and husband the revenues of India, to 
 quicken the sense of responsibility among the British administra- 
 tors, and to awaken political life among the people. Lord Mayo 
 also laid the foundation for the reform of the salt duties. He thus 
 enabled his successors to abolish the old pernicious customs-lines 
 which had for long walled off province from province, and stran- 
 gled the trade between British India and the feudatory states. In 
 order to secure permanent improvement in the finances, great pains 
 were taken to secure and to collate statistics regarding the popula- 
 tion and the various conditions in each locality, for only with exact 
 knowledge in these matters could both revenue and expenditure 
 be wisely regulated. The first census of all India which was taken 
 by his orders showed the population of Bengal alone to be 26,000,- 
 000 larger than was estimated. Mayo organized the Statistical 
 Survey of India, which, under the direction of William Wilson 
 Hunter, " produced a printed account of each district, town, and 
 village, carefully compiled upon local inquiry, and disclosing the 
 whole economic and social facts in the life of the people." This 
 Survey is of the same type as the English Domesday Book, and of 
 the Ain-i-Akfari of the Mogul empire, but it embraces a far 
 greater area, an enormously larger population, and is much broader 
 in its scope. It is without doubt the greatest work of the kind 
 ever accomplished. 
 
 In his military policy Lord Mayo insisted upon the largest 
 economy consistent with the highest efficiency. He insisted on the 
 introduction of the most improved rifle, the Snider, and of rifled 
 guns for the artillery, and the provision of thoroughly sanitary con- 
 ditions for the troops, but he succeeded in effecting a substantial 
 reduction in the military budget. He developed the material re- 
 sources of the country by an immense extension of roads, railroads, 
 and canals. He carried out the beneficent system of public works 
 which Lord Dalhousie had inaugurated. In the construction of 
 public works he saw the evils of haste, of lack of supervision, 
 and lack of personal management, but with the aid of Richard 
 Strachey he remedied these conditions. He refused to make loans 
 for any public works except those that would be productive. He 
 carried out the policy of state control of public works in the 
 promotion of the various enterprises of railroad and canal con- 
 struction. He took a keen interest in the extension of educational 
 facilities to the masses, as well as to the upper classes. He insisted
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 251 
 
 186J-1872 
 
 upon a thorough system of prison reform, especially at the convict 
 settlement of the Andaman Islands, where he sent General Donald 
 Martin Stewart as manager. The most important legal reform 
 was the passage of the Indian Evidence Act in 1872, which had 
 been drafted by the law member of council, James Fitzjames 
 Stephen. This man was the son of Sir James Stephen and was 
 born in 1829. He succeeded his friend, Sir Henry Maine, as legal 
 member of the governor-general's council from 1869 to 1872. 
 He was knighted in 1877 and served as judge of the high court 
 of judicature in England from 1879 to J 89i. He died in 1894. 
 Mayo was fortunate in being surrounded by a group of ex- 
 perienced and able councilors and local administrators. In addi- 
 tion to Stephen in the law department and John Strachey in 
 the newly organized department of revenue, agriculture, and com- 
 merce, he had Sir Richard Temple in charge of the finances, Major 
 General Henry Wylie Norman in the military department, and Ellis 
 in the home department. Richard Temple was born in 1826 and 
 entered the Indian civil service in 1848. After serving with Law- 
 rence in the Punjab, he was chief commissioner of the Central 
 Provinces from 1864 to 1867, resident at Haiderabad, foreign sec- 
 retary to the government of India, finance member of council from 
 1868 to 1874, lieutenant-governor of Bengal from 1874 to 1877, 
 and governor of Bombay from 1877 to 1880. He was knighted 
 in 1867 and made a baronet in 1876. He was member of parliament 
 from 1885 to 1895 and died in 1902. Henry Wylie Norman was 
 born in London in 1826 and entered the Bengal infantry in 1844. 
 He served in the Sikh wars, in the Punjab, in the Mutiny, and 
 as military secretary to the government of India. He was military 
 member of the governor-general's council from 1870 to 1877, and 
 member of the council of India from 1878 to 1883. He was gov- 
 ernor of Jamaica from 1883 to 1889 and of Queensland from 1889 
 to 1896, but declined the offer of the viceroyalty of India in suc- 
 cession to Lord Lansdowne. He was chairman of the West 
 India Royal Commission in 1897 and a member of the Royal Com- 
 mission on the South African War. He was knighted in 1873 and 
 died in 1904. Barrow Helbert Ellis was born in 1823 and served 
 in various posts in the Bombay civil service, and from 1869 to 1875 
 was member of the governor-general's council for the home de- 
 partment, and member of the council of India from 1875 to 1885. 
 He was knighted in 1875 and died in 1887.
 
 252 INDIA 
 
 1869--872 
 
 Among the administrators were Lord Napier of Merchistoun 
 at Madras, Sir Vesey Fitzgerald at Bombay, Grey and Campbell 
 in Bengal, Sir William Muir in the Northwestern Provinces, Sir 
 Henry Marion Durand and Robert Henry Davies in the Punjab, 
 and John Henry Morris in the Central Provinces. Francis Napier 
 was born in 1819 and succeeded as ninth Baron Napier in the 
 Scottish peerage in 1834. He entered the diplomatic service in 
 1840 and was minister at Washington from 1857 to 1859, and 
 ambassador at St. Petersburg from i860 to 1864, and at Berlin 
 from 1864 to 1866. He was governor of Madras from 1866 to 
 1872, when he became acting governor-general until the arrival 
 of Lord Northbrook. On his return to England in 1872 he was 
 created Baron Ettrick of Ettrick in the peerage of the United 
 Kingdom. He died in 1898. William Robert Seymour Vesey 
 Fitzgerald was born in 181 8 and served in parliament for many 
 years. He was governor of Bombay from 1867 to 1872. He was 
 knighted in 1867 and died in 1885. William Grey was born in 
 1 8 18 and had held several important posts in the Indian civil serv- 
 ice prior to becoming a member of the governor-general's council 
 from 1862 to 1867. He was lieutenant-governor of Bengal from 
 1867 to 1 87 1, and governor of Jamaica from 1874 to 1877. He 
 was knighted in 1870 and died in 1878. George Campbell was born 
 in 1824 and entered the Indian civil service in 1842. His career 
 had already been a notable one when he became chief commissioner 
 of the Central Provinces from 1867 to 1868, and lieutenant-governor 
 of Bengal from 1871 to 1874. He was knighted in 1873, and 
 served in parliament from 1875 till his death in 1892. William 
 Muir was born in 1819 and entered the Bengal civil service in 1837. 
 He was knighted in 1867 and was lieutenant-governor of the North- 
 western Provinces from 1868 to 1874. He was finance member of 
 the governor-general's council from 1874 to 1876, and member of 
 the council of India from 1876 to 1885. He was principal and 
 vice chancellor of the University of Edinburgh from 1885 to 1902, 
 and was the author of several works on Mohammedan history. He 
 died in 1905. Robert Henry Davies was born in 1824 and was 
 knighted in 1874. He was chief commissioner of Oudh from 1865 
 to 1866 and from 1867 to 1871, and lieutenant-governor of the 
 Punjab from 1871 to 1877. He was member of the council of 
 India from 1885 to 1895 and died in .1902. John Henry Morris 
 was born in 1828 and went to India in 1848. He was chief com-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 253 
 
 1872-1876 
 
 missioner of the Central Provinces with brief interruptions from 
 1867 to 1883. He was knighted in 1883. 
 
 Lord Mayo's splendid vigor defied alike the climate and the 
 vast tasks which he imposed on himself. He anxiously and labor- 
 iously studied with his own eyes the wants of the farthest provinces 
 of the empire, but his life of noble usefulness was cut short by 
 the hand of an assassin while he was inspecting the conditions 
 in the convict settlement of the Andaman Islands in 1872. Mr. 
 John Strachey, the senior member of council present, temporarily 
 assumed the duties of governor-general until the arrival of the 
 governor of Madras, Lord Napier of Merchistoun, who was acting 
 governor-general until the arrival of the new viceroy, Lord North- 
 brook, in May, 1872. Thomas George Baring was born January 
 22, 1826, and succeeded his father in 1866 as Baron Northbrook. 
 He was a lord of the admiralty from 1857 to 1858, under secretary 
 of state for India from 1859 to 1864, for the home department from 
 1864 to 1866, and for war from 1868 to 1872. Belonging to the 
 great financial family of the Barings it was natural that Lord 
 Northbrook should give much attention to the department of 
 finance. He carried forward the policy of Lord Mayo, but the 
 Bengal famine in 1874 necessitated enormous extraordinary ex- 
 penditures which once more produced a deficit. The conduct of 
 the famine relief was so efficient that, for the first time, the rate 
 of mortality in the region of scarcity was not increased. The in- 
 come tax was abolished as unsuited to India, and the export duties 
 were also repealed. The Maratha Gaekwar of Baroda was de- 
 throned in 1875 f r misgovernment, and for his attempt to poison 
 the British resident at his court. The Gaekwar was tried by a mixed 
 commission of native princes and Europeans, which failed to give 
 a decisive verdict. The case was then referred to the home govern- 
 ment, and the marquis of Salisbury, then secretary of state for 
 India, ordered the deposition of the Gaekwar on the old charge of 
 misgovernment, disregarding the poisoning charge on which he had 
 been tried. His dominions were continued to a child of his race. 
 
 The prince of Wales, now King Edward VII., made a tour 
 through the country in the cold weather of 1875- 1876. He was ac- 
 companied during his visit to India by Sir Bartle Frere (1815-1894), 
 who had had a brilliant career as an Indian administrator, and who 
 was later the first high commissioner for South Africa. The presence 
 of His Royal Highness evoked a passionate burst of loyalty never
 
 254 INDIA 
 
 1876-1877 
 
 before known in the annals of British India. The feudatory chiefs 
 and ruling" houses of India felt for the first time that they were 
 incorporated into the empire of an ancient and a splendid dynasty. 
 Lord Northbrook resigned in 1876, because of his unwillingness 
 to abandon the Afghan policy of Lawrence and Mayo for the 
 imperialistic policy of the new English prime minister, Disraeli. 
 
 The period from the Mutiny to the beginning of Lord Lytton's 
 administration was a period of reorganization and readjustment. 
 Though the work was done by conservative men upon conserva- 
 tive lines, the two decades show vast changes. In 1856-1857 the 
 revenue was 23,270,000/. and the expenditures 23,413,000/., leaving 
 a deficit of 143,000/. In 1876-1877 the revenue had risen to 55,- 
 995,000/. and the expenditures to 58,178,000/., leaving a deficit 
 of 2,183,000/. The debt on April 30, 1857, was 50,483,000/. and 
 on March 31, 1877, J 3^,93 5, 000/. In 1856 the maritime commerce 
 of India was valued at 25,245,000/. for imports and 23,640,000/. 
 for exports. In 1876- 1877 the imports were 48,864,000/. and the 
 exports 65,044,000/. At the outbreak of the Mutiny the army in 
 India numbered 45,522 Europeans and 232,224 natives, in 1876- 
 1877 there were 64,902 Europeans and 125,246 natives. In 1857 
 the length of railroads in operation was 274 miles; in 1877 it was 
 6937 miles. In 1857 there were 4162 miles of telegraph lines and 
 in 1876 there were 16,649 miles. The number of pieces of mail 
 had increased from 29,000,000 annually to 120,000,000. During 
 the period new industries of importance, such as tea-growing and 
 cotton manufacturing, had been developed. The two following 
 administrations were ones of intense political activity, Lord Lyt- 
 ton's in foreign affairs, and Lord Ripon's in internal administra- 
 tion; but the succeeding administrations have reverted to more 
 conservative policies, and have avoided arousing such violent oppo- 
 sition to their measures, either in India or in England. 
 
 Lord Lytton followed Lord Northbrook in 1876. Edward 
 Robert Bulwer Lytton was born in London on November 8, 1831. 
 He went to Washington in 1849 as secretary to his uncle, Sir 
 Henry Bulwer, and later accompanied him to Florence. After 
 serving at various European courts he became minister at Lisbon 
 in 1874, having in the previous year succeeded his father, the 
 novelist, as Baron Lytton. 
 
 On January 1, 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress 
 of India at a darbar of unparalleled magnificence, held on the his-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 255 
 
 1877-1878 
 
 toric ridge overlooking the ancient Mogul capital of Delhi. The 
 Royal Titles Act of April 27, 1876, was one of Disraeli's famous 
 imperialistic measures. The act was passed with the understanding 
 that the imperial title should be used only in India. The queen be- 
 gan to use it in her signature in 1878 and in 1893 it appeared 
 on the British coins. The title empress of India was officially 
 translated as Kaisar-i-Hind. At the darbar in 1877 the " Most 
 Eminent Order of the Indian Empire " was created. While the 
 princes and high officials of the country were flocking to this gor- 
 geous scene, the shadow of famine was darkening over southern 
 India. The monsoons of 1876 had failed to bring their due supply 
 of rain, and the season of 1877 was little better. This long-con- 
 tinued drought stretched from the Deccan to Cape Comorin, and 
 subsequently invaded northern India, causing a famine more wide- 
 spread than any previously known in Indian history. Despite vast 
 importations of grain by sea and rail, despite the most strenuous 
 exertions of the government, which incurred a total expenditure 
 on this account of 11 millions sterling, the loss of life from actual 
 starvation and its attendant train of diseases was lamentable. The 
 deaths from want of food, and from the diseases incident to a 
 famine-stricken population, were estimated at five and one-fourth 
 millions. 
 
 The famine relief administration was in charge of Sir Richard 
 Temple, who was unfortunately under orders to enforce a most 
 rigid economy in his work, so that the liberal measures and the 
 complete success of the relief work in Bengal a few years earlier 
 were impossible. It was under Lord Lytton that the government 
 first adapted its system of finances and public works to the policy 
 of famine insurance. A famine commission under the presidency 
 of Richard Strachey was appointed to make a full study of the whole 
 question of famine insurance and famine relief, and it outlined the 
 policy which in the main has been followed by later administrations. 
 Another terrible disaster also occurred during Lord Lytton's ad- 
 ministration. On October 31, 1876, a tidal wave flooded 3000 
 square miles of the Ganges delta and swept away many thousands 
 of the population. 
 
 Before turning from the internal disasters of Lord Lytton's 
 viceroyalty to discuss his disastrous foreign policy a few events 
 of interest may be noted. The island of Socotra in the Gulf of 
 Aden was occupied in 1878. In the same year was enacted the
 
 256 INDIA 
 
 1878-1879 
 
 Vernacular Press Act intended to suppress the virulent criticism 
 of the government. The civil service regulations were modified 
 in order to improve the opportunities for advancement for the na- 
 tives. The Deccan Agricultural Relief Act was passed in 1880 to 
 prevent the exploitation of the peasants by unscrupulous money 
 lenders. The closing days of Lord Lytton's administration were 
 troubled by the discovery of serious discrepancies in the financial ac- 
 counts, which were ultimately proved to be due to careless bookkeep- 
 ing methods in connection with the military expeditions. Owing to 
 these blunders, there was a large deficit of which the government 
 had not been aware. In 1877 Lord Lytton opened the Moham- 
 medan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, founded by Sayyid 
 Ammad Khan Bahadur, a famous Mohammedan reformer, who 
 endeavored to bring his co-religionists into touch with contemporary 
 culture and life. Bahadur was knighted in 1888 and died in 
 1898. 
 
 In the autumn of 1878 the affairs of Afghanistan again forced 
 themselves into notice. Sher Ali, the amir who had been hospitably 
 entertained by Lord Mayo, was found to be favoring Russian in- 
 trigues. A British envoy was refused admittance to the country, 
 while a Russian mission was received with honor. This led to 
 a declaration of war. Thus Lawrence's policy of masterly inactivity 
 in Afghan affairs was abandoned by Lord Lytton, under the guid- 
 ance of the English prime minister, Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), 
 for a policy of intervention to thwart the designs of Russia, which 
 were being ably carried out in central Asia by General Kaufmann. 
 The position was greatly complicated by the disturbed condition in 
 the Balkans, by the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, and by the ensuing 
 negotiations ending in the Treaty of Berlin. During the Russo- 
 Turkish war, when the relations between England and Russia were 
 very much strained, native Indian regiments were sent from India 
 to Malta and Cyprus, being the first appearance of Indian troops 
 in Europe. It was this action which stimulated the Russians in 
 central Asia and led to their mission to Kabul. 
 
 British armies advanced by three routes the Khaibar, the 
 Kuram, and the Bolan and without much opposition occupied 
 the inner entrances of these passes in 1878. Sher Ali fled to 
 Afghan Turkistan, and there died, February 21, 1879. He had 
 ruled justly and with marked ability, introducing reforms upon 
 European lines, and endeavoring to maintain the independence of
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 257 
 
 1879-1880 
 
 his state between the aggressions of England and Russia " an 
 earthen pipkin between two iron pots," in the words of Lord 
 Lytton. He had long kept his son and heir, Yakub Khan, im- 
 prisoned, but had released him and made him regent when he 
 himself fled from Kabul. Yakub Khan showed little ability, and 
 failed to command unanimous support in Afghanistan. Pierre 
 Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, the representative of the viceroy on 
 the northwestern frontier, entered into a treaty with Yakub Khan, 
 at Gandamak in May, 1879, by which the British frontier was 
 advanced to the crests or Afghan edge of the passes, and a British 
 officer was admitted to reside at Kabul. This treaty embodied the 
 new principle of British intervention in Afghanistan and practically 
 made the country tributary to British India. By way of reward, 
 and because of his thorough knowledge of oriental character and 
 his remarkable ability in dealing with orientals, Cavagnari was 
 appointed as the first British resident at Kabul. Within a few 
 months he was treacherously attacked and massacred, together 
 with his escort, September 3, 1879, and a second war became neces- 
 sary. Yakub Khan surrendered to General Roberts on September 
 30, and abdicated on October 28, and was deported to India. Kabul 
 was occupied by General Roberts, and Kandahar by General Donald 
 Stewart, and a national rising of the Afghan tribes, which im- 
 periled the British garrison at Kabul, was decisively repulsed by 
 Roberts. 
 
 General Frederick Sleigh Roberts was born at Cawnpur, 
 India, on September 30, 1832, and entered the Bengal artil- 
 lery in 1 85 1. He became major-general in 1878 and a field-mar- 
 shal in 1895. He won the Victoria cross in the relief of Lucknow. 
 He was quarter-master-general in India from 1875 to 1878; com- 
 manded in Afghanistan from 1878 to 1880, was commander-in- 
 chief of Madras from 1881 to 1885, of India from 1885 to 1893, 
 of Ireland from 1895 to 1899, and in South Africa from 1899 t0 
 1900. He was commander-in-chief of the British army from 1901 
 to 1904. He was made a baronet in 1881, Baron Roberts of 
 Kandahar in 1892, and Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria, and 
 Water ford in 1901. 
 
 The conditions both in Afghanistan and in South Africa led 
 to bitter attacks upon Lord Beaconsfield's ministry, and to its defeat 
 in the general election of 1880. Lord Lytton regarded the con- 
 demnation as extending to himself, and so had his resignation
 
 258 INDIA 
 
 1880-1881 
 
 presented with that of his chief, in April, 1880. Though Disraeli 
 did irritate, and even anger, the English people by the extravagances 
 and blunders of his jingoism, he taught them the importance and 
 value of the empire both in India and in the colonies, and forced 
 them to give respectful attention to imperial questions. If Disraeli 
 bade Lytton to blunder into Afghanistan, it must be added that 
 Gladstone made his successor to blunder out, a double blunder 
 which was paralleled in the contemporary double blunder in the 
 Transvaal. 
 
 The Afghan question engrossed the attention of the new 
 viceroy, the marquis of Ripon, during the first year of his adminis- 
 tration. George Frederick Samuel Robinson was born in London on 
 October 24, 1827, and succeeded his father, who, as Viscount 
 Goderich, had been prime minister from 1827 to 1828, as earl of 
 Ripon in 1859, and was created marquis of Ripon in 1871. He 
 was under secretary of war from 1859 to 1861, and for India in 
 1 86 1. He was secretary of war from 1863 to 1866, for India 
 in 1866, and lord president of the council from 1868 to 1873. In 
 1 87 1 he was chairman of the joint commission for drawing up 
 the Treaty of Washington. He had been grand master of the 
 Freemasons, but resigned in 1874, and became a Catholic. He 
 was viceroy of India from 1880 to 1884, being the first Catholic 
 to hold that office. One of his first orders directed, as far as 
 possible, the discontinuance of Sunday work in the government 
 offices. 
 
 Following up the successes of General Roberts, Lepel Henry 
 Griffin, the British political agent, on July 22, 1879, pro- 
 claimed as amir, Abdur Rahman Khan, the son of Dost Moham- 
 med's eldest son, Afzul Khan. A few days Jater, on July 27, Ayub 
 Khan, a son of Sher AH, with the Herat troops, encountered an 
 English brigade at Maiwand, between Kandahar and the Helmand 
 River, and inflicted upon the British the severest disaster to their 
 arms in Asia since Chilianwala a defeat promptly retrieved by 
 the brilliant march of General Sir Frederick Roberts from Kabul 
 to Kandahar, and by the total rout of Ayub Khan's army on 
 September 1, 1880. For the moment the English attempted to 
 set up an independent chief at Kandahar, but abandoned the 
 attempt, and after a series of famous debates in parliament, sur- 
 rendered it to Abdur Rahman Khan, and the British forces retired 
 from Kabul, leaving Abdur Rahman in possession of the capital,
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 259 
 
 1861-1882 
 
 1 88 1. Ayub Khan again took the field. His success, however, 
 was short-lived, and Abdur Rahman then recovered Herat, and 
 thenceforth governed the whole of Afghanistan peacefully till his 
 death in September, 1901. After 1880 England returned to 
 Lawrence's policy of masterly inactivity with regard to Afghanis- 
 tan, but with Lord Mayo's purpose of excluding all other foreign 
 influence from that country. In one point, however, Lawrence's 
 policy was reversed: Lord Ripon began in July, 1883, the pay- 
 ment to the amir of " a fixed annual subsidy " of 1,200,000 rupees, 
 or about $600,000. The English government capped the Afghan 
 blunder, which it had forced upon the government of India, by com- 
 pelling the government of India to assume all but 5,000,000/. of 
 the 23,412,000/. which the blunder had cost. 
 
 Aside from the settlement of the Afghan question, Lord 
 Ripon's administration was free from questions of foreign rela- 
 tions, and only two events of any account are to be noted. On 
 November 18, 1880, Lord Ripon received the khan of Kelat in 
 darbar at Jacobabad, thus establishing satisfactory relations with 
 Baluchistan. In 1882 a contingent of Indian native troops was 
 sent to take part with the British forces in the successful occupation 
 of Egypt. 
 
 The troops were under the command of Major-General Herbert 
 Taylor Macpherson (born 1827, knighted 1879, died 1886), and 
 were largely responsible for the victory of Tel-el-Kebir, though 
 their services received but tardy recognition. The Indian gov- 
 ernment had to bear the charge for the expedition. The native 
 princes made offers of contingents, if necessary. Another expedi- 
 tion was sent to Suakin, to cooperate in the Sudan campaign of 
 1885, under the command of General John Hudson (born 1883, 
 knighted 1885, died 1893), who was afterward commander-in- 
 chief in Bombay in 1893. The men displayed conspicuous powers 
 of endurance in these campaigns, and of gallantry in the field. A 
 chosen band of the Indian officers and men were afterward sent to 
 England, and received an enthusiastic welcome from all classes of 
 the people. The only serious national calamity of this administra- 
 tion was on September 18, 1880, when a disastrous landslip oc- 
 curred at Naini Tal, an important hill station near Simla, resulting 
 in the death of 42 Europeans and 105 natives. 
 
 Lord Ripon availed himself of the unbroken peace which pre- 
 vailed in India after 1881 to enter on a series of internal reforms.
 
 260 INDIA 
 
 1882-1883 
 
 The years 1882 and 1883 will be memorable for these great meas- 
 ures. By repealing- the Vernacular Press Act, passed in 1878, 
 he set free the native journals from the last restraints on the free 
 discussion of public questions. In 1898 amendments to the code 
 gave the government once more a control over the press, which 
 was enforced by a series of sedition trials. His scheme of local 
 self-government has opened a new era erf political life to the natives 
 of India. Lord Ripon did what he could to increase the number 
 of natives in the civil service and increased their salaries. He 
 established a system of municipal self-government which is not 
 altogether suited to India, for in many places the rivalry between 
 Hindus and Mohammedans is intense, and in most cases the Hindus 
 are largely in the majority. The policy of decentralization was 
 carried still further by Lord Ripon in 1882. He also looked 
 with favor upon the Indian National Congress, which met for 
 the first time in 1883. 
 
 At the same time, by the appointment of an educational com- 
 mission, with a view to the spread of popular instruction on a 
 broader basis, he sought to fit the people for the safe exercise of 
 the rights which he conferred. This commission rendered the 
 report upon its investigations in 1883. 
 
 He also laid the foundations for the great measure of land 
 legislation for Bengal which passed into law under his successor, 
 Lord Dufferin. The Bengal and Oudh Rent Acts were passed in 
 March, 1885. The Bengal Act modified Lord Cornwallis' Per- 
 manent Settlement of 1793, and Lord Canning's act of 1859, so 
 as to guard the rights of the tenants against the zemindars or 
 landlords. The Oudh act had a similar purpose. 
 
 In 1882 Lord Ripon's finance minister, Evelyn Baring, tool 
 off the import duties on cotton goods, and the whole Indian import 
 duties were, with a few exceptions, abolished. This distinguished 
 financier was born in Cromer Hall, England, on February 26, 1841, 
 and was educated at Woolwich. He entered the Royal Artillery 
 in 1858, but became private secretary to his cousin, Lord North- 
 brook, during his viceroyalty from 1872 to 1876. He was com- 
 missioner of the Egyptian public debt from 1877 to 1879 and 
 controller-general in Egypt from 1879 to 1880. He was finance 
 member of the governor-general's council from 1880 to 1883, 
 when he left India to assume the high office of British representa- 
 tive at Cairo, amid the universal regret of the Indian people. He
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 261 
 
 1883-1884 
 
 was knighted in 1883, created Baron Cromer in 1892, Viscount 
 Cromer in 1898, and Earl Cromer in 1901. 
 
 A department of agriculture had been created by Lord Mayo 
 in 1871, but was abolished in 1877. Early in his rule Lord Ripon 
 had reestablished this department, and he took measures to guard 
 the country against famine. Lord Ripon also established pro- 
 vincial departments of agriculture. During the winter of 1883- 
 1884 an international exhibition was held at Calcutta. 
 
 In 1884 he deputed officers to England, to give evidence before 
 the parliamentary committee, with a view to the extension of 
 Indian railroads. Lord Ripon retired at the end of 1884. Some 
 of his measures for the promotion of local self-government, and 
 especially the Ilbert Act of January, 1884, were considered by 
 the European community to be unsuited to the actual condition 
 of India. 
 
 This measure stirred up the most virulent opposition of the 
 Anglo-Indians, though the number of native officials whose powers 
 were enlarged was very small, at first only one. The measure 
 was really designed to remedy a technical irregularity. The right 
 of appeal safeguards all Europeans against possible injustice at 
 the hands of native judges. But whether or not in advance of 
 the time, it is now realized that he pointed out the directions in 
 which progress must sooner or later take place. Lord Ripon loved 
 the people, and was greatly beloved by them. 
 
 Lord Ripon had a group of noteworthy associates in his 
 council and in charge of the provincial governments, who shared 
 with him the work, and must bear with him a share of the responsi- 
 bility and of the credit. Sir Donald Stewart became commander- 
 in-chief in 1 88 1, and was succeeded as military member of the 
 council by Major General T. F. Wilson, who died in office in 1886. 
 Baring and Colvin managed the finances, Stokes and Ilbert directed 
 the law department, and Hope the public works, while Bayley, 
 Thompson, and Gibbs complete the list of members of council. 
 
 Auckland Colvin, the son of John Russell Colvin, was born 
 in 1838, and entered the Indian civil service in 1858. He was 
 controller-general in Egypt from 1880 to 1882, financial adviser 
 to the Khedive from 1882 to 1883, finance member of the governor- 
 general's council from 1883 to 1887, and lieutenant-governor of 
 the Northwestern Provinces from 1887 to 1892. He retired from 
 India in 1892, and is now chairman of the Burma Railways Com-
 
 262 INDIA 
 
 1880-1884 
 
 pany. He was knighted in 1881. Whitley Stokes was born in 
 1830, and educated at the University of Dublin, and became a 
 barrister of the Inner Temple in 1855. He went to India in 1862, 
 where he held a succession of important legal posts, ending with 
 his services as law member of the governor-general's council from 
 1877 * 1882, and as president of the Indian Law Commission 
 of 1879. In addition to several law books he is the author of 
 numerous works on the Celtic languages and literatures. He now 
 lives in London. He was the " draftsman of many Indian con- 
 solidation acts, of the bulk of the present Codes of Civil and 
 Criminal Procedure," and of numerous other acts. Courtenay 
 Peregrine Ilbert was born in 1841, educated at Oxford, and admitted 
 as a barrister of Lincoln's Inn in 1869. He was law member of 
 the governor-general's council from 1882 to 1886, and vice-chan- 
 cellor of the University of Calcutta in 1885- 1886. He was assist- 
 ant parliamentary counsel to the treasury from 1886 to 1899, 
 and then for two years parliamentary counsel to the treasury. 
 Since 1901 he has been clerk of the house of commons. He was 
 knighted in 1895. Theodore Cracraft Hope was born in 183 1, 
 and entered the Bombay civil service in 1853. He was public 
 works member of the governor-general's council from 1882 to 1887. 
 He was knighted in 1886. Steuart Colvin Bayley was born in 
 1836, and entered the Bengal civil service in 1856. He was em- 
 ployed in numerous important posts, was knighted in 1878, and 
 was member of the governor-generals's council from 1882 to 1887, 
 and lieutenant-governor of Bengal from 1887 to 1890. Since 1890 
 he has been secretary to the political and secret department of 
 the India Office, and since 1895 a member of the council of India. 
 Augustus Rivers Thompson, after about twenty years of service 
 in India, became chief commissioner of British Burma from 1875 
 to 1878, member of the governor-general's council from 1878 to 
 1882, and lieutenant-governor of Bengal from 1882 to 1887. He 
 was knighted in 1885 and died in 1890. James Gibbs was mem- 
 ber of the Bombay council from 1874 to 1879, and of the council 
 of the governor-general from 1880 to 1885. He was born in 1825 
 and died in 1886. 
 
 Duff governed Madras ; Ferguson, Bombay ; Eden and Thomp- 
 son, Bengal; Couper and Alfred Lyall, the Northwestern Prov- 
 inces; Egerton and Aitchison, the Punjab; Morris was still chief 
 commissioner of the Central Provinces; Bernard was chief com-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 263 
 
 1880-1884 
 
 missioner of British Burma, and James Lyall was resident in 
 Mysore and chief commissioner of Coorg. Mountstuart Elphin- 
 stone Grant Duff, the son of the historian of the Marathas, was 
 born in Scotland in 1829. He was member of parliament from 
 1857 to 1 88 1, under secretary for India from 1868 to 1874, and 
 for the colonies from 1880 to 188 1. He was governor of Madras 
 from 1 88 1 to 1886, and was knighted upon his retirement. Be- 
 tween 1897 an d 1905 he published a series of volumes of " Notes 
 from a Diary." He died in 1906. James Fergusson was born 
 in Edinburgh in 1832, and after some service in the army, includ- 
 ing the Crimean War, he entered parliament and served as under 
 secretary for India from i860 to 1867, for the home office from 
 1867 to 1868, and for the foreign office from 1886 to 189 1. He was 
 postmaster-general from 1891 to 1892. He was governor of South 
 Australia from 1869 to 1873, of New Zealand from 1873 to I 874, 
 and of Bombay from 1880 to 1885. He is still living. Ashley 
 Eden, a nephew of the earl of Auckland, was born in 1831. He 
 entered the Indian civil service before the Mutiny and became 
 chief commissioner of British Burma from 1871 to 1875, lieu- 
 tenant-governor of Bombay from 1877 to 1882, and member of 
 the council of India from 1882 till his death in 1887. He was 
 knighted in 1878. George Ebenezer Wilson Couper was born 
 in 1824, and entered the Bengal civil service in 1848, serving 
 with the Lawrences in the Punjab and with Sir Henry Law- 
 rence at Lucknow, and later with Outram. He was chief com- 
 missioner of Oudh from 1871 to 1876, and lieutenant-governor 
 of the Northwestern Provinces from 1876 to 1882, when he re- 
 tired from India. He is still living. Alfred Comyn Lyall was 
 born in 1835, and entered the Bengal civil service in 1855. He 
 was knighted in 1881, and served as lieutenant-governor of the 
 Northwestern Provinces from 1882 to 1887. He was member of 
 the council of India from 1888 to 1903, and of the Privy Council 
 since 1902. Robert Eyles Egerton was born in 1827, and entered 
 the Bengal civil service in 1849. He was lieutenant-governor of 
 the Punjab from 1877 to 1882, and has since lived in retirement. 
 Charles Umpherston Aitchison was born in 1832, and educated 
 at the Universities of Edinburgh and Halle. He entered the Indian 
 civil service in 1855, and was knighted in 1881. He was chief 
 commissioner of British Burma from 1878 to 1880, lieutenant- 
 governor of the Punjab from 1882 to 1887, and member of the
 
 264 INDIA 
 
 1880-1884 
 
 governor-general's council from 1887 till his retirement in the 
 following year. He died in 1896. He edited the " Collection of 
 Treaties Relating to India." Charles Edward Bernard was born 
 in 1837, and entered the Bengal civil service in 1858. He was chief 
 commissioner of Burma from 1880 to 1887. He was knighted in 
 
 1886, and died in 1901. James Broadwood Lyall was born in 
 1838, and entered the Bengal civil service in 1858. He was resi- 
 dent in Mysore and chief commissioner of Coorg from 1883 to 
 
 1887, and lieutenant-governor of the Punjab from 1887 to 1892. 
 He was member of the Royal Commission on Opium in 1893, and 
 President of the Indian Famine Commission in 1898. He was 
 knighted in 1888, and is still living. 
 
 The earl of Dufferin succeeded the Marquis of Ripon as 
 viceroy in 1884. Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood 
 was born June 21, 1826, and succeeded his father as Baron Dufferin 
 in the Irish peerage in 1841. He was created Baron Dufferin in 
 the peerage of the United Kingdom in 1850, and was made an 
 earl in 1871, and a marquis in 1888. Among lesser posts he held 
 those of under secretary for India from 1864 to 1886, and for 
 war in 1866, and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and pay- 
 master-general from 1868 to 1872. He was governor-general of 
 Canada from 1872 to 1878; ambassador at St. Petersburg from 
 1879 to 1 88 1 ; at Constantinople from 1881 to 1884. In India he 
 sought to pursue a conservative policy, both at home and abroad, 
 in contrast with the blundering imperialism of Lord Lytton, and 
 the overzealous policy of internal reform of Lord Ripon. Cir- 
 cumstances, however, compelled the new viceroy to give constant 
 attention to serious problems of foreign relations. Beyond the 
 northwestern frontier, in central Asia, Russia was renewing her 
 policy of aggression; beyond the eastern frontier, in Indo-China, 
 France had also started upon an aggressive colonial policy. 
 
 Ever since the Crimean War Russia had been pressing her 
 conquests in central Asia, and her humiliation at the Congress of 
 Berlin in 1878 led her to redouble her activities in central Asia, 
 where she finally occupied Merv in February, 1884. The advo- 
 cates of a British forward policy in Afghanistan and on the north- 
 west frontier of India regard Herat as the gate of India. The 
 occupation of Merv placed Russia within easy striking reach of 
 Herat, to the great alarm of the Russophobes. Immediately nego- 
 tiations were opened between London and St. Petersburg, which
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 265 
 
 1884-1885 
 
 resulted in the appointment of a joint Afghan Frontier Commission 
 in August, 1884. Sir Peter Stark Lumsden (born in 1829 and 
 knighted in 1879), the British commissioner, promptly appeared 
 in Afghanistan with a grand flourish. The Russian commission 
 never appeared, but the Russian commander, General Komarov, 
 was active. Nothing was accomplished except to cause a clash 
 between Afghan soldiers and the Russians in the Penjdeh region. 
 These events led to the holding of a darbar at Rawal Pindi on 
 April 8, 1885, where the viceroy and the amir met, and the amir 
 informed the viceroy that he had no interest in Penjdeh. This, 
 in a way, destroyed the British position, but on March 30 the 
 troops of General Komarov had violated the diplomatic understand- 
 ing between England and Russia by attacking and driving back 
 an Afghan force near Penjdeh. This event produced the famous 
 war scare of April, 1885. Russia then took prompt measures to 
 assure the completion of the negotiations, and arrangements for a 
 new boundary commission were effected. The conduct of Glad- 
 stone's ministry in this matter, coupled with the withdrawal from 
 the Sudan at the same time, called forth serious criticism, and 
 the negotiations were ultimately completed by the new conservative 
 ministry of Lord Salisbury. The work of delimiting the boundary 
 between the Russian territories and Afghanistan was done chiefly 
 by Lieutenant Colonel Ridgeway and by Paul Lessar. Joseph 
 West Ridgeway entered the Bengal infantry in i860. He was 
 appointed commissioner to determine the Afghan boundary in 
 1885. He was envoy to Morocco in 1893, lieutenant-governor 
 of the Isle of Man from 1893 to 1895, and governor of Ceylon from 
 1896 to 1903. He was knighted in 1885, and is still living. Paul 
 Lessar was of Montenegrin origin, but an agent in the Russian 
 service, employed at various posts in Asia. He died in 1905 while 
 minister of Russia at Peking. 
 
 Lord Dufferin continued the policy inaugurated by Lord Ripon 
 in 1883 of paying the amir an annual subsidy of 12 lakhs of rupees, 
 a sum later increased to 18 lakhs. 1 This policy, a compromise in 
 its character, meant a full recognition of the autonomy of the amir 
 in Afghanistan, but it also meant that England would make it 
 her business to protect the amir and his territories, and to treat 
 
 1 Twelve lakhs was nominally about $600,000, but owing to the depreciation 
 of the rupee actually much less. Eighteen lakhs at the present rate is worth 
 $583,200.
 
 266 INDIA 
 
 1884-1887 
 
 him as her necessary ally. The Penjdeh affair, with its menace 
 of war, led the native states of India to come forward with loyal 
 offers of their armies and resources to the British government. It 
 also caused England to increase the number of European troops 
 in India by 10,000 men, and the native contingent by about twice 
 as many, requiring an increased annual expenditure of 1,500,000/. 
 
 During Lord Dufferin's administration the first forward move- 
 ment was made at another point on the northwestern frontier. 
 Arrangements were made by which Quetta, the Bolan Pass, and 
 the neighboring territory became British Baluchistan in 1887. 
 Some years later, in 1 890-1 891, by means of the Zhob Field Force, 
 and similar expeditions, the British made more effective their control 
 over independent Baluchistan. In 1893 tne W khan of Kelat, who 
 confessed to the murder of 3000 of his subjects during the 36 yeai 
 of his reign, was deposed and his son set up in his stead, anc 
 in 1899 the frontiers of British Baluchistan were extended. Ba- 
 luchistan is now nominally independent, but actually it is a pro- 
 tectorate under strict British surveillance, a very different positior 
 from that of Afghanistan. The development of Quetta and oi 
 British interests in Baluchistan was largely the work of the first 
 agent of the governor-general in Baluchistan and first chief com- 
 missioner of British Baluchistan, Sir Robert Groves Sandeman. 
 This man was born in 1838, and was employed in Baluchistai 
 from 1877 till his death in 1892. He was knighted in 1879, anc 
 was chief commissioner of British Baluchistan from 1887 to 1892. 
 
 Beyond the eastern frontier, the unrest caused by the Frencl 
 activities in Indo-China led to a closer attention to affairs in the 
 independent kingdom of upper Burma. The persistent misconduct 
 of King Thebau, his ill-treatment of British subjects, and his 
 rejection of all conciliatory offers led to British armed inter- 
 vention. A force under General Harry North Dalrymple Pren- 
 dergast (born 1834 and knighted in 1885) invaded upper Buraic 
 on November 14, 1885, and two weeks later, on the 28th, Thebai 
 surrendered at his capital. The king was sent a prisoner to Madras. 
 On January 1, 1886, his territories were annexed, and on Septem- 
 ber 25 were incorporated with lower Burma as a province oi 
 British India under Sir Charles Bernard as the first chief com- 
 missioner. Imperialism, rather than justice, characterized Eng- 
 land's intervention in Burma, though the result of annexation has 
 been the establishment of settled order, a better government, anc
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 267 
 
 1884-1888 
 
 greater prosperity. Had England followed the policy laid down 
 by Lord Canning after the Mutiny, and placed a representative of 
 the royal family on the throne and administered the government 
 in his name, and managed Burma like the native states of India, 
 probably order would have been easily restored. The policy of 
 annexation aroused the Burmese people, who sought to defend their 
 independence by a protracted guerrilla warfare, which the English 
 stigmatized as dakaity or brigandage. This led to long and ex- 
 pensive campaigning in upper Burma until the guerrilla or dakait 
 bands were destroyed by harsh and rigorous methods. The an- 
 nexation of Burma was opposed by the natives of India, both as 
 a matter of policy and because of the heavy burden of resulting 
 expenditure. They even suggested making Burma a crown colony, 
 like Ceylon and the Straits Settlements. Burma was made a 
 lieutenant-governor's province and given a legislative council on 
 May i, 1897. 
 
 Early in 1886 a great camp of exercise was held on the 
 memorable battle-plain of Panipat in the Punjab: and the fortress 
 of Gwalior was given back by Lord Dufferin's government to its 
 hereditary chief, the Maharaja Sindhia. It should be noted that 
 Sindhia was loyal during the Mutiny, though his troops were 
 not. 
 
 During 1887 the jubilee or fiftieth year of the reign of Her 
 Majesty the Queen-Empress Victoria was celebrated with universal 
 enthusiasm throughout India. A great commission inquired into 
 the question of more largely employing native officers in the higher 
 branches of the administration. This commission, headed by Sir 
 Charles Aitchison, presented a report in 1887, which resulted in a 
 gradual but complete remodeling of the civil service, so that in 
 place of the old convenanted and uncovenanted civil service there 
 now exist an imperial civil service, a provincial civil service, and 
 a subordinate civil service. To the last two natives easily secure 
 admission and far outnumber the Europeans, but in the imperial 
 civil service the natives, though admitted, have to conform to 
 regulations which are simple for Englishmen, but more difficult 
 for a native to comply with. The result has been to give the natives 
 an easier access to a larger number of offices. 
 
 The earl of Dufferin retired from office in 1888, and was 
 created marquis of Dufferin and Ava for the services which he 
 had rendered during his viceroyalty. He was ambassador at Rome
 
 268 
 
 INDIA 
 
 1888 
 
 from 1888 to 1 89 1, and at Paris from 1891 to 1896. He died 
 February 12, 1902. 
 
 Lord Dufferin had been very popular with the Anglo-Indians, 
 but his policy in Burma, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan had alienated 
 native sympathies. He was renowned for his social graces, as was 
 also Lady Dufferin, who will long be remembered in India for 
 
 her sympathetic interest in the native women. In order to 
 supply them with proper medical and surgical attendance, she 
 started the movement to obtain properly trained women nurses 
 and doctors, and began a fund to promote such work in 1885. 
 
 The marquis of Lansdowne succeeded Lord Dufferin. Henry 
 Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice was born January 14, 1845, an( ^ 
 succeeded his father in 1866 as fifth marquis of Lansdowne (the 
 first marquis was Lord Shelburne, the prime minister of George 
 III.). He was a lord of the treasury from 1868 to 1872, and
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 269 
 
 1888-1894 
 
 under-secretaiy for war from 1872 to 1874, and for India in 1880. 
 He was governor-general of Canada from 1883 to 1888, and 
 viceroy of India from 1888 to 1894. He was secretary for war 
 from 1895 to 1900, and for foreign affairs from 1900 to 1905. 
 
 Under Lord Lansdowne's rule the defenses of the north- 
 western frontier of India were strengthened, and the passes from 
 Afghanistan were secured against any possible invaders. This 
 plan of frontier defense, worked out by General Roberts and by 
 the military member of the governor-general's council, General 
 George Tomkyns Chesney, provided for three things : railroad com- 
 munication between the frontier and the military base in India; 
 the fortification of selected positions commanding the passes into 
 India; and the fortifications of great cantonments to serve as the 
 immediate strategic base for operations along the frontier. Rawal 
 Pindi was selected as the base for the defense of the important 
 Khaibar Pass, with strong posts at Peshawar and at Attock, com- 
 manding the passage of the Indus. On the Baluchistan frontier 
 Quetta is the strategic center, and the policy of Sir Robert Sande- 
 man in dealing with the Baluchi tribes and chiefs was warmly sup- 
 ported by Lord Lansdowne, and was carried out with entire success. 
 The character and the history of the land and the peoples on the 
 Baluchi and Afghan frontiers have differed widely and necessitated 
 widely different polices in dealing with them. At the same time the 
 native chiefs were allowed to take a more important position than 
 before in the armies of India. A number of them had come forward 
 with offers of money and troops to aid in the defense of the country. 
 Under Lord Lansdowne these offers were accepted. Many of the 
 feudatories now maintain regiments, carefully drilled and armed, 
 which in time of war would serve with the troops of the British 
 government. These regiments are kept up free of cost to the 
 British government, and are a free-will offering to it from the 
 loyalty of the native princes. This policy was adopted in 1889, 
 and a few British officers are assigned for purposes of supervision 
 only, and the contingents are officered entirely by natives. These 
 troops have served in the campaigns on the northwest frontier and 
 in China in 1900. In 1901 these so-called imperial service troops 
 numbered 6399 cavalry, 298 artillery, and 9754 infantry, a total 
 of 16,451 men, supervised by 19 British officers. These troops 
 are practically the corps d' elite of the armies of the native states. 
 No definite statistics are available concerning the remainder of
 
 270 INDIA 
 
 1888-1894 
 
 the armies of the native states, which are ill-organized. The insti- 
 tution by Lord Curzon, at a later date, of an Imperial Cadet Corps 
 for young Indian Chiefs and nobles, without necessarily leading to 
 a military career, may give additional force and interest to the asso- 
 ciation of British and native troops. 
 
 While the native princes are thus zealous to aid the sovereign 
 power, the peoples and races in the British provinces have been 
 learning the first lessons of local self-government. Municipal coun- 
 cils and district boards have, during the past forty years, been 
 gradually created throughout India by acts either of the govern- 
 ment of India or of the provincial goverments. The first case 
 of election occurred in Lord Northbrook's administration. Their 
 members consist chiefly of native gentlemen, many of whom are 
 elected by their fellow citizens. These municipal councils and 
 district boards now manage many branches of the local adminis- 
 tration. Their legal powers and their practical ability to do good 
 work are increasing. At the same time, the Indian National Con- 
 gress, composed of delegates from all parts of India, has, since 1885, 
 been held each December in one of the provincial capitals, such as 
 Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Allahabad. This congress dis- 
 cusses plans for opening a larger share in the work of legislation 
 and in the higher branches of the executive administration to 
 natives of India. The delegates have always been Hindus, espe- 
 cially Bengali Brahmans. The Parsees and Mohammedans have, 
 in general, held aloof from the congress and often have openly 
 opposed it. The government has refused to accord it any official 
 recognition, and has taken measures to keep the official classes from 
 participating in it. Nevertheless, some of the strongest supporters 
 of the congress have been retired officials. Two examples of this 
 statement are Sir William Wedderburn, who presided at the fifth 
 congress, and Allan Octavian Hume, who was born in 1829, and 
 served in the Bengal civil service from 1849 to 1882. Wedder- 
 burn was born in 1838, and served in the Bombay civil service 
 from i860 to 1887, being judge of the high court, and chief secre- 
 tary to the government. He was member of parliament from 
 1893 to 1900. He succeeded as fourth baronet in 1882, and was a 
 member of the Royal Commission on Indian Expenditure in 1895. 
 
 The resolutions of the congress have uniformly contained 
 assertions of loyalty to the British government of India, and have 
 demanded a certain group of reforms in the administration. The
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 271 
 
 1888-1910 
 
 freedom of criticism of the government and the character of the 
 demands for reform have not caused the government to view the 
 congress with approbation. Its claims to be representative of 
 an Indian nation are false, for there is no Indian nation, the con- 
 gress does not by any means represent all sections of the Indian 
 population, and it is only in a limited sense representative in its 
 constitution. The congress would be impossible were there no 
 English rule, with its common education and speech, and its means 
 of communication, especially the railroads. Two native Indians 
 have stood for English constituencies and been elected to the House 
 of Commons. The reports of the proceedings of the congress are 
 regularly published in English, and are easily accessible. A peri- 
 odical, called India, which is published in London and reports all 
 the parliamentary debates concerning India, is, in a measure, an 
 organ of the congress. 
 
 In 1892 the British parliament passed the Indian Councils Act, 
 which increased the number of legislative members of the coun- 
 cils, and introduced a stronger non-official element. This act was 
 supplemented by a series of regulations issued under its authoriza- 
 tion by the governor-general in council on June 23, 1893, which 
 determined the methods of selection of legislative members of coun- 
 cil, in accordance with the needs and conditions of each province. 
 Legislative councils now exist in Bengal, Eastern Bengal and As- 
 sam, the United Provinces, the Punjab, Burma, Madras and Bom- 
 bay. The act permits discussion of the budget and interpellation 
 in the legislative council. The year 1893 will be memorable for 
 the first general election of representative members to the Indian 
 legislative councils. 
 
 Side by side with this political movement, efforts have been 
 made to reform certain evils in the social and domestic life of the 
 Hindus, arising out of the customs of child-marriage and of the 
 enforced celibacy of Hindu widows. The whole tendency of these 
 efforts, under the guidance of the social reformer, Behramji Mer- 
 wanji Malabari, is to protect young Indian girls and to improve 
 the status of Indian women. He is a Parsee. Born in 1853, he has 
 spent his life as an author, editor, and social reformer. For twenty 
 years he edited the Indian Spectator, and he is now the editor of 
 East and West. He was mainly instrumental in securing the pas- 
 sage of the Age of Consent Act. 
 As early as 1856 the government of India had legalized the
 
 m 
 
 INDIA 
 
 1884-1894 
 
 remarriage of widows, and in 1870 it had passed a female infanti- 
 cide act. In 1887 the courts of India were occupied with the 
 case of Rukhmabai, which involved the right of the man to enforce 
 the completion of the marriage contract. In 1888 the princes 
 of Rajputana agreed to fix the minimum age for marriage at four- 
 teen for girls and at eighteen for boys. In March, 1891, the gov- 
 ernment of India raised the age of consent from ten to twelve 
 years. About 1890 the Pandita Ramabai, who is well known in 
 America, began her famous work at Poona for the education of 
 Hindu widows. 
 
 The old system, by which the Indian armies were commanded 
 by three separate commanders-in-chief in Bengal, Madras, and 
 Bombay, had become antiquated, owing to the quicker communca- 
 tion between the three presidencies by means of railroads, steamers, 
 and the telegraph. For a long time the commander-in-chief in 
 Bengal had also been commander-in-chief for all India. It was 
 therefore determined to have only one central commander-in-chief, 
 with four lieutenant-generals under him at the head of the four 
 great military divisions of India. The separate commanders-in- 
 chief for Madras and Bombay were abolished. Thus in Bengal, 
 the Punjab, Bombay, and Madras there was a lieutenant-general 
 who was practically the head of an army corps. The native regi- 
 ments were renumbered, and various other measures were taken 
 to blot out every trace of the old provincial army system, and to 
 give strength to the new arrangements. This long-desired reform 
 was worked out chiefly by General Roberts, though not all of the 
 measures went into effect until after the close of his service as 
 commander-in-chief. By 1895, after five years of work, the 
 changes were completed. 
 
 In 1893 the old religious strife between the Hindus and Mus- 
 sulmans broke out afresh. A series of fanatical riots took place 
 at the festivals of the two faiths in many of the British provinces 
 and native states of India, from Burma to the northwest and Bom- 
 bay. In some of these tumults, especially in the city of Bombay, 
 much blood was shed, men were killed, and houses were burned. 
 By the end of 1893 the excitement had calmed down again. There 
 were similar but less violent and less widespread disturbances in 
 later years, but they have been of slight account since 1895, when 
 the government began the policy of requiring the turbulent locality 
 to defray the cost of suppressing the riot. Apparently the rea-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 273 
 
 1888-1894 
 
 son for the riots was the denunciation by Hindu fanatics of the 
 Mohammedans for killing cows, which the Hindus consider sacred. 
 
 The pacification of Burma was scarcely completed when Lord 
 Lansdowne arrived, and under his administration field forces had 
 to be employed against the Chins on the Bengal border, the Karens 
 and the Shans on the Siamese frontier, and the Kakhyens near 
 the Chinese border. These tribes all submitted gradually. Later 
 a series of agreements with China resulted in a complete delimita- 
 tion of the frontier by 1902. The murder of several English 
 officers at Manipur on March 24, 1891, was followed by a puni- 
 tive expedition, which quieted the disturbances in that state. In 
 1889 an interesting case arose over the malfeasance of an English 
 official named Crawford, who was finally removed from the serv- 
 ice by Lord Reay, the governor of Bombay. So great was the 
 outcry by English officials, it was found advisable to recall Lord 
 Reay. It is interesting to note that when Lord Lansdowne entered 
 office old Haileyburians were still holding many of the most im- 
 portant posts in India, but nearly all of them had retired before 
 Lord Lansdowne left India. The last Haileyburian to retire from 
 the service was Sir Henry Thoby Prinsep, who retired in 1904, 
 after twenty-six years of service as judge of the high court at 
 Calcutta. While Haileyburians had monopolized the important 
 posts at the arrival of Lord Lansdowne, before his viceroyalty 
 closed a large number of the highest posts came to be held by 
 Etonians. In 1890 Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince 
 of Wales, afterward Edward VII., made a tour of the country, and 
 in the same year, the csarevitch, later Tsar Nicolas III., paid a 
 visit to India. 
 
 The continued fall in the rupee from its nominal value of 
 fifty cents to an actual value of about twenty-nine cents, in 1893, 
 with a further downward inclination toward twenty-five cents, 
 seriously embarrassed the Indian finances. India had yearly to 
 remit about $90,000,000 in gold to England, chiefly in payment 
 of interest on loans, railroad material, and army charges ; and this 
 sum, which would have amounted to 180,000,000 rupees with the 
 rupee equal to fifty cents, would amount to 360,000,000 rupees 
 with the rupee at a quarter of a dollar. The remedy proposed by 
 the government of India was bimetallism; that is, to establish a 
 fixed ratio between silver and gold for purposes of coinage by 
 international agreement. As England and the western nations
 
 274 INDIA 
 
 1888-1894 
 
 could not combine to carry out that scheme, the Indian mints were 
 closed for free coinage in 1893, in order to render rupees scarce 
 and so to raise and to keep up their sterling value to twenty-nine 
 cents. This expectation was not realized, for the price of silver 
 continued to fall, and in 1895 the value of the rupee sank to about 
 twenty-seven cents. A royal commission was appointed in that 
 year to inquire into Indian finances, with a view, if possible, to 
 securing some remedy for the situation. 
 
 After the presentation of its report, a gold standard was 
 established in 1899, and fixity of exchange was secured. The 
 rupee has since remained at thirty-three cents. Sir Auckland Col- 
 vin's successors as finance members of the governor-general's coun- 
 cil have had to bear most of the burden of settling this important 
 financial problem. They have been David Miller Barbour, from 
 1888 to 1893 ; James Westland, from 1893 to 1899; Clinton Edward 
 Dawkins, from 1899 to 1900, and Sir Edward FitzGerald Law, 
 from 1900 to 1904. 
 
 In January, 1894, Lord Elgin succeeded Lord Lansdowne. 
 Victor Alexander Bruce was born near Montreal, Canada, dur- 
 ing his father's governor-generalship, on May 16, 1849. He 
 succeeded his father, who died while viceroy of India in 1863, as 
 ninth earl of Elgin and Kincardine. He was commissioner of 
 works in 1886. 
 
 The financial reforms and tax reductions of Lord Ripon's ad- 
 ministration had been largely undone by the Burma war, which cost 
 4,000,000/., the Penjdeh scare, which cost 2,000,000/., and the army 
 increase at an additional annual cost of 1,500,000/. To meet this 
 the income tax had been revived in 1886, and the salt tax increased 
 in 1888, and a five per cent, customs duty was imposed in 1894, 
 and extended to cotton goods in 1895. The license tax, however, 
 had been repealed in 1886. 
 
 After much discussion, this duty was extended to Manchester 
 cotton cloths of the finer qualities, with which the Indian mills do 
 not compete. A curious panic was caused during the summer 
 of 1894 by the secret smearing of multitudes of trees in northern 
 India, and hidden and ominous meanings were ascribed to it. The 
 practice was found to be a harmless act of certain devotees to call 
 popular attention to the shrine of their god. 
 
 In 1893 a royal commission was issued to inquire into the 
 results of using opium in India, and the possibility of prohibiting
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 275 
 
 1894-1897 
 
 it. After examining many witnesses in England and India, eight 
 of the nine commissioners reported in 1895 that the results of 
 using opium in India were much less harmful than had been sup- 
 posed in England. It was found that opium sent scarcely any 
 criminals to the Indian jails, scarcely any patients to the Indian 
 hospitals, and scarcely any lunatics to the Indian asylums. It 
 was proved that opium does not act, as alcohol does in Great 
 Britain, as a cause of crime, disease, and death, while it is largely 
 used as a remedy for fever and malaria. Parliament agreed with 
 the royal commission's report, and declined to prohibit the use 
 of opium in India. 
 
 Another parliamentary commission made an inquiry into the 
 use of bhang, ganja, and similar native drugs, with like results. 
 It was pointed out that an attempt to prohibit the use of opium and 
 similar drugs would lead to an increased use of alcoholic beverages 
 by the natives, which would be productive of far greater evils. 
 An effort to supplant the use of opium as a febrifuge was made 
 by the introduction of the cinchona tree, which has been grown 
 in India with some success, and its bark has been used to some 
 extent. Opium may be grown only by licensed individuals, who 
 are required to sell their whole product to the government, which 
 manufactures the marketable article, and sells it at regular auction 
 for export. Opium grows in Behar, the Northwestern Provinces, 
 and Oudh, and their product is called Bengal opium. It also 
 grows in certain native states in central India and Rajputana, and 
 their product is known as Malwa opium, and passes into govern- 
 ment hands the same as the Bengal opium. About ninety per cent, 
 of the exported opium goes to China. Two-thirds of the profits go 
 to the government. Opium is rarely smoked in India except in 
 Burma. In considering the report of the opium commission, spe- 
 cial attention should be given to the minority report of Henry 
 Joseph Wilson, who vigorously criticised the conduct of the com- 
 mission. Wilson was born in 1833, and has been a member of 
 parliament since 1885. He is a radical, a vigorous opponent of 
 all the Chamberlain policies, and a notable reform agitator. 
 
 In 1895 the government began the inspection of the pilgrim 
 ships between India and Arabia, and the measure received the 
 approval of the Mohammedans. In 1897 a parliamentary com- 
 mission investigated the question of contagious diseases in the 
 army, dealing especially with the difficult and serious problem of
 
 276 INDIA 
 
 1894-1898 
 
 venereal diseases, which were extensively prevalent. The tea plan- 
 tations of Assam were seriously damaged by an earthquake on June 
 12, 1897. A legislative council was granted to the Punjab in 1897, 
 and also to Burma, which was raised to the rank of a lieutenant- 
 governor's province. The diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria in 
 1897 was d u ty celebrated in India, and the native princes sent 
 detachments of the imperial service troops to London to partici- 
 pate in the festivities. An agitation for imperial penny postage 
 took place at this time, and India cooperated promptly with other 
 parts of the British empire in carrying out the plan. The action 
 was followed by a corresponding reduction of the domestic postage 
 rate in India. 
 
 During the governor-generalships of Lord Lansdowne and 
 Lord Elgin a series of measures were taken to settle the boundaries 
 of the Indian empire on its eastern and northeastern borders. In 
 the east the territories of upper Burma, annexed in 1886, were 
 molded into a peaceful and prosperous British province. Eng- 
 land concluded agreements with China respecting Burma, its 
 frontier, and its trade on July 24, 1886, March 1, 1894, and 
 February 4, 1897. The sphere of French influence from the Ton- 
 quin side was defined in the agreement made with France on 
 January 15, 1896. 
 
 In the extreme northwest of India, the frontier between the 
 British dominions and Afghanistan was fixed. While affairs on 
 the Baluchistan frontier have caused almost no trouble, the situa- 
 tion on the Afghan frontier has always been a perplexing one. 
 In 1864 Sir Bartle Frere, who had easily maintained satisfactory 
 conditions along the frontier of Sind during his administration, 
 wrote to Sir John Lawrence protesting against the policy pursued 
 on the Punjab frontier, which, by contrast, was always a scene 
 of disturbance. Lawrence replied : " From the borders of Sind 
 northward, the character of the people both in the hills and on 
 the plains differs as you go along." These turbulent tribes 
 occupied the hill country and the valleys lying between the Indus 
 and Afghanistan. Many of them were of Indo-European stock, 
 and had never been subdued by the passing generations and races 
 of conquerors. Over many of them the amir claimed a suzerainty 
 which he never made real. The position of these tribes was, in 
 a measure, a guarantee of the safety. of India from invasion on 
 that frontier, but the tribesmen were. a perpetual menace to the 

 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 277 
 
 1894-1898 
 
 friendly relations of the British and Afghans. Scarcely a year 
 went by that one or more of these tribes did not raid the peaceful 
 plains below or commit some offense which required the sending 
 of a punitive expedition. This condition went on year after year 
 until the settlement of the Russo-Afghan frontier and the develop- 
 ment of Lord Roberts' plan of frontier defense had been completed. 
 Then the government of India decided to secure an exact delimi- 
 tation of the frontier between India and Afghanistan and to reduce 
 to order the tribes within the bounds of India and to encourage 
 the amir to establish his power over his tribes. The Russo-Afghan 
 frontier was finally completed by the agreement concerning the 
 Pamirs on March n, 1895. At the same time the conditions on 
 the frontier, which had been exceedingly restless since 1888, reached 
 a climax in Chitral. 
 
 The more southerly part of the boundary had been defined 
 by the agreement negotiated with the amir on November 12, 1893, 
 by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, the son of Sir Henry Marion 
 Durand, which conceded Waziristan to the English. The new 
 territory was occupied by General William Stephen Alexander 
 Lockhart, the nephew of the biographer of Sir Walter Scott, and 
 the boundary was surveyed in 1895. In the same year Nasirulla 
 Khan, second son of Abdur Rahman, and full brother of the Amir 
 Habibulla, for the first time visited England. He received a mag- 
 nificent reception, and visited the chief centers of British industry 
 and commerce. 
 
 At the extreme north the valley of Kashmir, which, at the close 
 of the Sikh wars, had been recognized by the British as an inde- 
 pendent state under their protection, was brought into closer re- 
 lations with India by the establishment of a British resident at 
 Srinagar, the capital, after the accession of the new maharaja in 
 1885. Kashmir entered on a new development by the settlement 
 of its land revenue and of the cultivator's rights, on equitable prin- 
 ciples, by a highly skilled British officer whom the maharaja 
 employed for that purpose. This officer was Walter Roper Law- 
 rence, who was born in 1857, entered the Indian civil service in 
 1879, and was knighted in 1903. He was settlement commissioner 
 in Kashmir from 1889 to 1895. He was private secretary to Lord 
 Curzon from 1898 to 1903, and head of the staff of the Prince of 
 Wales during his Indian tour in 1905- 1906. 
 
 British influence was firmly established in the outlying prov-
 
 278 INDIA 
 
 1894-1898 
 
 inces of Kashmir to the north, along the line of Hunza, Nagar, and 
 Gilgit, by Colonel Algernon George Arnold Durand, son of Sir 
 Henry Marion Durand, who opened a British agency at Gilgit in 
 March, 1889, and reestablished the control of the maharaja of 
 Kashmir over those regions. 
 
 Owing to a disputed succession and the ambitious designs of 
 Umra Khan, a neighboring chieftain, as well as to the general 
 conditions of unrest, Chitral was a storm-center at the beginning 
 of 1895, when the Pamir question was being settled. George 
 Scott Robertson, the British agent at Gilgit, who was then at 
 Chitral, found himself involved in the struggle, was besieged in 
 the Chitral fort, and defended himself with great gallantry against 
 overwhelming odds for 46 days. A powerful force, under Robert 
 Cunliffe Low, was advanced from the Punjab to relieve him, while 
 a smaller body of Indian and Kashmir troops, under Lieutenant 
 Colonel James Graves Kelly, marched to his aid across the snows 
 from Gilgit. After the two expeditions had overcome great phy- 
 sical obstacles, from the height of the passes and the then almost 
 inaccessible situation of Chitral, the enemy abandoned the siege 
 of the fort on April 18, 1895. The political officer at Chitral and 
 his little garrison were saved, and" the British influence was con- 
 firmed in that remote mountainous corner which, by the recent 
 agreement with Russia, had come within fifty miles of the Russian 
 sphere of influence in central Asia. The Waziris went on the war- 
 path again in June, 1897, and General George Corrie Bird, who 
 entered the Indian army in 1856, was sent to subdue them. The 
 Swatis and Mohmands arose in July, and in August the Afridis in 
 the Khaibar Pass joined the insurgents, among whom a Moham- 
 medan fanatic, known as the Mad Mullah, was active. The cam- 
 paign for the subjugation of these tribes is generally known as 
 the Tirah campaign. 
 
 The commander-in-chief in India at this time was Sir George 
 White, and the generals who played the leading part in the cam- 
 paign were Lockhart, Bird, Palmer, Blood, and Elles. George 
 Stuart White was born in 1835 and entered the army in 1853. He 
 served in the Mutiny and in Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and on 
 the northwest frontier. He was commander-in-chief in India from 
 1893 to 1898. He served in South Africa in 1899- 1900, where 
 he defended Ladysmith. He was governor of Gibraltar from 1900 
 to 1904, and has since been governor of Chelsea Hospital. He
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 279 
 
 1894-1899 
 
 won the Victoria Cross in 1879, and was knighted in 1886. Arthur 
 Power Palmer was born in 1840 and entered the Indian army in 
 1857. He served through the Mutiny, and in Abyssinia, Afghanis- 
 tan, Egypt, Chin Hills, and Tirah. He was commander-in-chief 
 in India from 1900 to 1902. He was knighted in 1894 and died 
 in 1904. Bindon Blood was born in 1842 and entered the royal 
 engineers in i860. He served in Zululand, Afghanistan, Egypt, 
 and Chitral. In 1897- 1898 he commanded the Malakand Field 
 Force and the Buner Field Force. He served in South Africa from 
 1899 to 1 90 1, where he became lieutenant-general, commanding 
 troops in eastern Transvaal. He is now lieutenant-general com- 
 manding in the Punjab. Edmond Roche Elles was born in 1848 and 
 entered the royal artillery in 1867. He served in the Lushai, Egyp- 
 tian, and Hazara expeditions. From 1895 to 1900 he commanded 
 the Peshawar district, and commanded the Mohmand Expeditionary 
 Force in 1897. From 1901 to 1905 he was military member of 
 the governor-general's council. He was knighted in 1898. The 
 campaign ended in February, 1898, having cost the British 2500 
 lives and about 3,000,000/. Since then the frontier has remained 
 comparatively quiet, and later certain districts were organized by 
 Lord Curzon into the Northwest Frontier Province. 
 
 In 1898 the earl of Elgin was succeeded by Lord George 
 Nathaniel Curzon of Kedleston, who had already considerable ex- 
 perience of India's needs. Lord Curzon was born at Kedleston on 
 January 11, 1859, and was educated at Eton and Balliol college, 
 Oxford. He was a member of parliament from 1886 to 1898, 
 under secretary for India from 1891 to 1892, and for foreign 
 affairs from 1895 to 1898. He traveled widely in central, eastern, 
 and southern Asia, and wrote upon Indian, Persian, and other 
 Asiatic questions. He was created Baron Curzon of Kedleston in 
 the Irish peerage in 1898. His wife is Mary Victoria Leiter, daugh- 
 ter of the late L. Z. Leiter of Washington. 
 
 He formally assumed the office of governor-general at Cal- 
 cutta on January 6, 1899. Special commissions of inquiry were 
 at once appointed with view to a series of schemes of administra- 
 tive reforms, embracing police, irrigation, railroads, and education 
 in every branch. These commissions nearly all reported in 1903. 
 The work of putting their recommendations into operation was 
 necessarily a slow one, and Lord Curzon scarcely had time to 
 accomplish all that was planned, and the result of the work cannot
 
 280 INDIA 
 
 1899-1904 
 
 yet be judged. The irrigation commission, under the presidency 
 of the experienced engineer and Indian official, Sir Colin Campbell 
 Scott-Moncrieff (born 1836, knighted 1903), planned for pro- 
 tective works costing 440,000,000 rupees, about $142,560,000, 
 and requiring twenty years of work. In his own words, Lord Cur- 
 zon had set himself the task " of placing upon the anvil every 
 branch of Indian policy and administration, of testing its efficiency 
 and durability, and of doing, if possible, something for its effi- 
 ciency and durability." He undertook also a series of visits to na- 
 tive states and parts of India never previously visited by a viceroy, 
 and was received everywhere with a cordiality which witnessed to 
 the sense of security and strength which proceed from incorporation 
 in the great unity of the Indian empire. 
 
 In 1900 Lord Curzon visited Assam and Quetta, and later 
 made a tour of the coast, either by land or sea, from Karachi, around 
 Cape Comorin, to Calcutta. In 1901 he went to Nepal and to 
 Burma, visiting even remote parts. In 1903 he made a notable tour 
 of the Persian Gulf to strengthen England's control in those parts. 
 In 1904 he made an extended visit to England, being the first vice- 
 roy to do so during his incumbency. 
 
 To him is due, also, the sustained policy of archaeological con- 
 servation and restoration, which will preserve to the peoples of 
 India the great monuments, political, military, and religious, of 
 the past, as abiding memorials of the different ages of the long 
 history of the land. A brilliant young Cambridge graduate, John 
 Hubert Marshall (born 1876), was appointed director-general of 
 the Archaeological Survey of India in 1902, and an annual ap- 
 propriation of 100,000 rupees ($32,400) was placed at his dis- 
 posal for the preservation of national monuments. The policy was 
 also adopted of stopping the use of historic buildings for offices 
 and barracks, and preserving them henceforth as nearly as possible 
 in their original condition, while in other cases efforts are made 
 to preserve the monuments from natural decay. 
 
 Military reforms were continued and amplified. The native 
 states were encouraged in their support of the Imperial Service 
 Troops, and an Imperial Cadet Corps was created for the training 
 of the sons of native princes. Plans were worked out for the 
 establishment of an Indian Staff College at Quetta. A native army 
 reserve was created, with the intention of retaining one native 
 soldier in the reserve to every three in active service. The re-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 281 
 
 1899-1904 
 
 cruiting of the native troops was more largely carried out on the 
 basis of creating racial and tribal regiments. Not only was the 
 number of Sikh and Gurkha regiments increased, but other tribal 
 regiments such as the Garhwalis were organized. This appeal to 
 tribal and racial loyalty, as a means of securing an esprit de corps 
 among the native troops, is best exemplified in the case of the 
 Afridis of the Khaibar Pass, who have been organized into the 
 Khaibar Rifles. A large addition of British officers was made to 
 the native force, a transport service was created, and the entire 
 Indian army was rearmed with Lee-Enfield rifles of .303 bore. 
 Breech-loading guns were introduced for the artillery, and smoke- 
 less powder was adopted. British troops were dispatched from 
 India to South Africa, where they did valuable service in Natal 
 at the beginning of the Boer War, while native troops were em- 
 ployed in colonial garrisons to release British troops for service 
 in South Africa. Native troops were also sent to China, where 
 they joined in the relief of the besieged legations at Peking in 
 1900. The employment of these troops belonging to the Indian 
 establishment for purely British service resulted in a large saving 
 of expense to the government of India, which was thus enabled to 
 secure the rearming of the Indian army without an increase in the 
 military budget. From the Indian establishment 13,200 Euro- 
 peans, with a large number of native camp-followers, were dis- 
 patched to South Africa at the outbreak of the Boer War. Three 
 sepoy regiments were sent to serve in the garrisons of the Mauritius, 
 Singapore, and Hongkong, in order to release European troops 
 for service in South Africa, it not being considered good policy to 
 use native Indian troops to fight a people of European origin like 
 the Boers. The native princes offered troops for service in South 
 Africa, but they were declined, though afterward accepted for the 
 China expedition of 1900. A seemingly curious counterpart of 
 this was the order issued by Lord Curzon in August, 1900, requir- 
 ing native princes to secure the permission of the government of 
 India to travel abroad, but it was intended to hold to their duty 
 as rulers certain native princes who neglected their people to 
 enjoy themselves abroad. In 1901 the number of troops from 
 the Indian establishment serving elsewhere was 1500 natives in 
 Mauritius, 800 natives and 2100 British in Ceylon, 800 natives in 
 Singapore, 600 natives in Jubaland, 5200 British in South Africa, 
 and 300 British and 16,300 natives in China, making a total of
 
 282 INDIA 
 
 1899-1904 
 
 7600 British and 20,000 natives. These have from time to time 
 been returned to India. 
 
 Considerable reforms were undertaken under Lord Curzon 
 in the system of land revenue assessments, as well as special meas- 
 ures to arrest agricultural indebtedness. Especially notable is the 
 Land Alienation Act in the Punjab, by which an endeavor has been 
 made to check the evils of growing debt and the consequent ex- 
 propriation of the agricultural population. Much industrial legis- 
 lation has had the same object of ameliorating the condition of the 
 poorer classes; and as administrators of a reasoned policy, agri- 
 cultural and financial, Sir Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson, who en- 
 tered the Indian civil service in 1870, and Sir Edward Law have 
 done highly beneficial work. A board of scientific advice has also 
 been founded, and experiments in agricultural research and educa- 
 tion have been planned and inaugurated. Measures were taken to 
 assist the indigo growers to meet the competition of the artificial 
 product manufactured in Germany. To assist the sugar growers, 
 countervailing duties were levied on imports of bounty-grown sugar, 
 but later these were modified to conform with the arrangements 
 made by the Brussels Conference in 1902. 
 
 The last five years of the nineteenth century were years of 
 almost unparalleled misfortune and distress in India because of 
 the plague and the famines. Early in October, 1896, the bubonic 
 plague was certified to exist in the Bombay presidency. The bu- 
 bonic plague seems to be identical with the Black Death of the 
 fourteenth century and with the plague that devastated London in 
 1665, and probably with the visitations of plague that swept over 
 Asia and Europe at earlier dates. It had been endemic in several 
 restricted localities, such as certain districts of Mesopotamia, and 
 certain Himalayan valleys, and for about thirty years in some moun- 
 tain villages in Yun-nan, China. From these last places it spread 
 in 1894 to Canton, where there were 50,000 deaths, and to Hong- 
 kong, where it caused 10,000 deaths. The plague was studied by 
 the Pasteur Institute and by eminent scientists; and a sterilized 
 culture for preventive inoculation was discovered in 1896 by Walde- 
 mar Mordecai Wolff Haffkine, a Russian bacteriological expert in 
 the Indian service, which has been used with considerable success. 
 Several scientists have discovered serums for which they have 
 claimed either a preventive or curative value, but none of them 
 has had even the moderate success of Haffkine's cultures. The
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 283 
 
 1899-1910 
 
 exact cause of the disease has been a matter of much uncertainty, 
 though it is certainly immediately connected with unsanitary con- 
 ditions, and almost never affects people who are living under proper 
 sanitary conditions and being properly nourished. The spread of 
 the disease may be checked by vigorous sanitary measures, as has 
 been proven in the case of the American and European towns in 
 which some cases have appeared. The way in which the disease 
 enters the system has never been satisfactorily determined, but it 
 does not seem to be through food, nor does mere touch seem to 
 communicate the disease. Apparently the disease enters directly 
 into the blood through cuts, abrasions, or bites, but this is only 
 partially proven. There has been an effort to associate the spread 
 of the disease with rats, and while they may be responsible, they 
 are not always so. Fleas have been held responsible, and the 
 latest report concerning the investigations of the experts at Bom- 
 bay lays the responsibility upon the rat fleas. 
 
 In spite of hygienic precautions, the plague spread rapidly in 
 the Bombay presidency, and before the close of 1896 many of the 
 population had fled. In 1897 and 1898 it increased in Poona and 
 other parts of western India, and the measures used to disinfect 
 dwellings and treat plague cases caused riots in several districts. 
 This opposition to the santiary measures of the government reached 
 its height in the murder at Poona, on June 22, 1897, f Mr. Rand 
 and Lieutenant Ayerst. These sanitary measures conflicted with 
 the caste system and the seclusion of native women; hence the 
 violent opposition which has caused the government to make the 
 sanitary measures voluntary, instead of compulsory. The virulent 
 criticism of the government policy in the native press led to a 
 series of sedition trials in 1897, followed by the adoption of new 
 press regulations on March 12, 1898. From the Bombay presi- 
 dency the plague spread to other parts of India, especially to the 
 Punjab, Bengal, and the United Provinces, and in 1905 even to 
 Burma. The total number of deaths reported prior to 1901 ex- 
 ceeded 400,000; in 1901 there were 272,000 deaths from plague; 
 in 1902, 559,602; in 1903, 853,573; and in I94, M449- The 
 plague reached its height in the early months of 1905, when 57,702 
 deaths were reported for the week ending April 1. Since then 
 the epidemic seems to have been wearing itself out, for the number 
 of deaths had fallen so that for the whole month of October, 1905, 
 there were only 14,296, the total number of deaths from plague
 
 284 
 
 INDIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 for 1905 was 950,600. The prolonged epidemic has made necessary 
 the rebuilding of considerable portions of Bombay, Calcutta, and 
 other places in a sanitary manner. The self-sacrificing work of 
 doctors, nurses, ministers of religion, and officials has been warmly 
 eulogized by the government. The almost complete immunity of 
 these persons, who were in direct and constant contact with the 
 disease, was remarkable, but it was no doubt due to the careful 
 
 sanitary conditions under which they have lived and to their sufficient 
 and proper nourishment. 
 
 At the same time India was visited by a series of most severe 
 famines, which affected several provinces of British India, as well 
 as many native states. In 1896 the rainfall was five inches less 
 than the normal 41 inches; in 1897 tne rams were generally suffi- 
 cient, and in 1898 profuse, but in 1899 the deficiency was eleven 
 inches, being the worst recorded; and in 1900 the rains were once
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 285 
 
 1898-1904 
 
 more sufficient. The result of this fluctuation in the rainfall was 
 a famine from September, 1896, to October, 1897, affecting 310,000 
 square miles and 35,000,000 people in the United Provinces of 
 Agra and Oudh, Bengal and the Central Provinces; and another 
 lasting from September, 1899, to November, 1900, especially in 
 Bombay, the Central Provinces, and Rajputana, affecting more than 
 400,000 square miles and 95,000,000 persons. In this latter famine 
 the area affected was three and one-half times that of the United 
 Kingdom, and the population affected was two and one-third times 
 as great. Relief was everywhere organized, and as many as 26 
 per cent, of the population were in receipt of assistance during the 
 worst period in some parts of the country. At one time more 
 than 4,500,000 were receiving aid in the five most afflicted prov- 
 inces, while in all India in June, 1900, about 6,500,000 persons, a 
 number equal to the population of the London metropolitan police 
 district, were in the relief camps. The cost to the government of 
 the 1897 famine was about 17,000,000/., and of the 1900 famine 
 about 13,000,000/. The smaller figures in 1900 are due to the 
 lesser area of British India affected, the famine being most serious 
 in the native states. In 1897 England subscribed liberally to the 
 Mansion House Fund, but in 1900 much less was received, largely 
 because of the South African War. In both years, especially in 
 1900, foreign countries subscribed liberally to relief funds. In 
 1900 the United States government assigned a naval vessel to trans- 
 port supplies to India. The 1900 famine was the most widespread 
 recorded in Indian history, though not so acute as the Orissa 
 famine of 1866, nor so fatal as the terrible Bengal famine of 
 1770. During the whole period, owing to the strenuous exertions 
 of the government, the general mortality was less than in previous 
 famines, and the distress more amply and swiftly relieved. A com- 
 mission, under Sir Anthony Patrick MacDonnell, lieutenant-gov- 
 ernor of the Northwestern Provinces and chief commissioner of 
 Oudh from 1895 to 1901, was appointed to consider the whole cir- 
 cumstances, and they reported in May, 1901, making valuable 
 suggestions for dealing with future periods of drought and 
 scarcity. 
 
 The rains were irregular and in some places not only late 
 but insufficient in the later months of 1905, but there was no serious 
 famine situation to handle, though several hundred thousand were 
 employed on relief works. The number in receipt of relief, re-
 
 286 INDIA 
 
 1898-1904 
 
 ported on April 16, 1906, was 475,000, mostly in Bombay, A j mere, 
 Rajputana, Central India States, and the United Provinces. Two 
 other disasters during the viceroyalty are to be noted. On Sep- 
 tember 25, 1899, a landslip at Darjiling caused considerable loss 
 of life, including five children of Mr. Lee, an American mission- 
 ary. On April 4, 1905, an earthquake shock was felt in north- 
 western India. Most of the damage was confined to an area of 
 about 700 square miles in the Punjab, where the loss of property 
 was enormous, and 15,000 lives were lost, chiefly at the hill stations 
 of Dharmsala and Kangra. 
 
 After long consideration it was decided, at the close of 1901, to 
 create a Northwest Frontier Province under a chief commissioner 
 directly subordinate to the government of India. Roughly speak- 
 ing, the new province contains all of the territory lying between 
 the newly defined frontier of Afghanistan and the upper course of 
 the River Indus, thus including such former portions of the Pun- 
 jab as Peshawar, Kohat, and Dera Ismail Khan, and such border 
 territories as Chitral, Khaibar, and Kurram. It has an area of 
 more than 16,000 square miles and a population of more than 
 2,000,000, but its important strategic position is entirely out of 
 proportion to its size. The creation was the occasion for the 
 declaration of a policy of neither neglecting nor crushing the fron- 
 tier tribes, but of military concentration and tribal conciliation. 
 Military garrisons were withdrawn from the frontier posts to be 
 massed at the military bases, and the tribal militia and levies were 
 welcomed and utilized in their place. The military bases were at 
 the same time connected with the frontier posts by a system of 
 light railroads. The first chief commissioner of the Northwest 
 Frontier Province is Lieutenant Colonel Harold Arthur Deane, who 
 was born in 1854 and entered the army in 1874. He served in 
 the Afghan war, on police duty in the Andamans and Nicobars, 
 and as a deputy commissioner in the Punjab. In 1895 he was the 
 political officer with the Chitral Relief Force, and remained as 
 resident and political agent in Dir, Swat, and Chitral until he 
 was appointed resident in Kashmir in 1900. He became chief com- 
 missioner of the Northwest Frontier Province in 1901, and was 
 knighted in 1906. Lord Curzon's frontier policy is a clear and 
 definite one, carefully worked out from the foundation. It is not 
 the " forward policy," nor is it " Lawrence's policy," nor yet a 
 compromise. It is a new policy created by Lord Curzon, and it
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 287 
 
 1898-1904 
 
 has resulted in the maintenance of the most satisfactory condi- 
 tions that have existed on the frontier since the annexation of the 
 Punjab. 
 
 In September, 1901, the amir Abdur Rahman of Afghanistan 
 died. He was succeeded by his oldest son, Habibulla, who had been 
 associated with him in the administration for some years and who 
 began his rule well by an amnesty, and showed a disposition to 
 maintain cordial relations with the British government. Troubles 
 in Waziristan among the Mahsud Waziris, where outrages on 
 British subjects had been constant, were met by several small puni- 
 tive expeditions, but the viceroy, by measures of blockade followed 
 by retaliatory sallies, secured a satisfactory settlement. This re- 
 gion, however, still remains the most unsettled and restless on the 
 frontier. 
 
 The viceroy's visit to Nepal in 1901 was evidence of the 
 friendly relations with another neighboring state with which in 
 early days there had been war ; and of the safe and quiet condition 
 of the northern frontier, except for the Tibetan question, which 
 was gradually becoming a matter of sufficient importance to de- 
 mand the close attention of the government of India. 
 
 In itself the change of sovereigns in England in 1901 did not 
 mark an historical epoch, though the event was fraught with fully 
 as much importance for India as for England. Victoria, the first 
 empress of India, closed her long reign of more than sixty-three 
 years over the British dominions on January 22, 1901. Nowhere 
 had the expansion of the British empire and the advancement of 
 British subjects under the rule of the queen-empress been marked 
 by more valiant effort, or more splendid achievement, than in 
 India, though it must be added that no part of the empire had 
 passed through such bitter trials and such deep afflictions. Both 
 in achievement and in affliction her Indian subjects had always 
 received the fullest sympathy from the empress. Though she had 
 never visited India, her profound interest in the welfare of the 
 people of India had often been manifested, as when in her later 
 years she undertook to learn the Hindustani language. 
 
 In 1887 the queen had included some native Indians among 
 her attendants. One of them, a groom of the chamber, the munshi 
 (interpreter or secretary) Abdul Karim, gave her lessons in Hin- 
 dustani, and she made some progress in the language. Her counsel 
 and advice to her subordinates, the real rulers of India, had been
 
 288 INDIA 
 
 1898-1904 
 
 marked by wisdom and an earnest desire to conserve the interests 
 and increase the prosperity of her people in India. Nowhere in 
 all the countries which she had ruled was there a more genuine 
 sorrow, a more profound sense of loss, than in India. At a meet- 
 ing in which all classes and creeds were represented it was decided 
 to commemorate her great services to India by a Victoria Hall 
 in Calcutta, to contain and concentrate in memorial the historic 
 interests of the different ages of the past of the great Indian em- 
 pire. The cornerstone was laid by the Prince of Wales on January 
 4, 1906. 
 
 On August 9, 1902, Edward VII., who when Prince of Wales 
 had visited India in 1875, was crowned in Westminster Abbey, in 
 the presence of many Indian princes among the representatives of 
 the peoples united under his sway. A contingent of Indian troops, 
 representing almost every part of the great empire, was conspicu- 
 ous in the military pageants which accompanied the period of re- 
 joicing. The Indian commemoration, the coronation darbar, took 
 place at Delhi on January 1, 1903, when Edward VII. was pro- 
 claimed by the viceroy as emperor on the same site on which Lord 
 Lytton had announced the imperial title of Victoria, just twenty- 
 six years earlier. Over a hundred rulers of separate states, whose 
 united population amounted to sixty millions of people, from the 
 Arab sheiks of Aden on the west to the Shan chiefs of the Mekong 
 on the east, were assembled to testify their allegiance to their com- 
 mon sovereign in the presence of his brother, Prince Arthur Wil- 
 liam Patrick Albert, the duke of Connaught. The viceroy, speak- 
 ing on behalf of the emperor, assured the princes and people of 
 India that their rights and liberties would be respected and their 
 welfare earnestly sought under his rule, which, he trusted would 
 bring to India the benefits " of expanding industry, of awakened 
 faculties, of increasing prosperity, and of more widely distributed 
 comfort and wealth." The inauguration of the new reign was 
 marked not only by ceremonial pomp and grandeur indicative of 
 the unity, vast extent, and abounding riches of the great Indian 
 empire, but also by a considerable reduction of taxes, which for 
 the first time in twenty years lightened the burden of the toiling 
 masses of the Indian people. The extra tax on salt, which had 
 been added in 1888, was removed, and the amount of exemption 
 under the income tax was increased. This reduction was the 
 natural result of a large surplus revenue in the previous year, and
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 289 
 
 1898-1904 
 
 it has for the present been justified, as the budget still continues 
 to show a surplus. 
 
 England also marked the opening century by an act of justice 
 in her dealings with India. Though England has never taxed 
 India nor drawn any revenue from her for her own profit, she 
 has compelled India to bear all the expenses of her own adminis- 
 tration, and has not failed to extend that requirement to expendi- 
 tures for purposes in which the interest of India was, to say the 
 least, uncertain. The discussion aroused by this practice led to the 
 appointment in 1895 of a commission to consider the matter. In 
 consequence of its reports made in 1896 and 1900, it was arranged 
 that after April 1, 190 1, the English government should relieve 
 the Indian government of annual charges to the amount of 257,- 
 500/., chiefly for the transport of troops to India, for Aden, and 
 for diplomatic expenses in Asia. Though the direct gain to India 
 was slight, the moral gain 'was considerable, and it is not likely 
 that India will again be charged with such items as the Indo- 
 Egyptian expeditions of 1882 and 1885, and the expenses of the 
 shah's visit to England. In 1902 the expenses of the native princes 
 of India in attending the coronation were borne by England and 
 India jointly. 
 
 The disastrous famines of 1897 and 1900 emphasized the ne- 
 cessity of pushing with even greater vigor the policy of internal 
 improvements. Steady progress has been made in the construction 
 of irrigation works in accordance with the broad plans outlined by 
 the irrigation commission under Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff. The 
 most important of these undertakings is in the Punjab, where 
 canals along the upper Jhelam and the upper Chenab and in the 
 Lower Ban doab will have a combined length of 2714 miles of 
 main canal and will practically complete the possible development 
 of irrigation in the Punjab. This gigantic undertaking was au- 
 thorized early in 1905, and will require more than a decade to com- 
 plete, and will cost more than $25,000,000. Both as a protection 
 in case of famine and for military purposes, the extension of rail- 
 roads went on at the rate of a thousand miles a year during Lord 
 Curzon's administration. America has contributed to some extent 
 to this development, especially in the construction of locomotives 
 and of bridges. 
 
 The most interesting instance was the construction in 1900 of 
 the Gokteik viaduct. It is eighty miles northeast of Mandalay on
 
 290 INDIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 the road to the Shan Hills, and from the bottom of the gorge to the 
 tracks above is 820 feet. The contract was awarded to the Pennsyl- 
 vania Steel Company, which underbid the English contractors and 
 was the only bidder guaranteeing to complete the work in the 
 time required. J. C. Turk was sent to India as engineer in charge 
 of construction. For ten months (February to December) he and 
 his small force of Americans with their native helpers labored there 
 and the result was the first American bridge in the Indian empire 
 and the greatest viaduct in the world. 
 
 In the management of the railroad system of India, Lord 
 Curzon sought to secure unity of direction and control, and so 
 created a railroad board charged with the general supervision of 
 Indian railroads. The reckoning of time was standardized on July 
 !> I 95> by fixing a uniform time for all India five hours and thirty 
 minutes in advance of Greenwich time, that is, practically Madras 
 time, and six hours and thirty minutes in advance of Greenwich for 
 Burma, that is, practically Rangoon time. 
 
 Lord Curzon believed that India possessed enormous resources 
 which might be developed if capital could be obtained. He accord- 
 ingly sought to secure and diffuse knowledge of the country's 
 resources, and to improve the laws and regulations concerning min- 
 ing and industry, so as to attract capital, especially from England, 
 for investment. The mining laws were revised and a special gov- 
 ernment bureau created to deal with mining matters. In Decem- 
 ber, 1905, a mining institute was authorized. In 1905 one of the 
 members of the governor-general's council was assigned to the de- 
 partment of commerce and industry. The commerce of India has 
 increased with great rapidity. The trade from India to England 
 alone amounted in 1907 to 96,042,980/., more than three times 
 the amount in 1857, the last year under the Company, and nine- 
 fold greater than in 1840. The increase in the railroad mileage 
 has been accompanied by a corresponding improvement of the pos- 
 tal facilities, and by an even greater increase in the amount of 
 mail matter carried. The telegraph system has been expanded with 
 double the rapidity of the railroad system, at the rate of two thou- 
 sand miles of line a year, so that there were in 1908 68,940 miles 
 of lines, with 271,944 miles of wire. Wireless telegraphy has been 
 introduced, especially for communication with the Andaman 
 Islands. 
 
 Since the recovery from the famine in 1900 the financial
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 291 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 conditions have greatly improved, and are now, probably, in the 
 most satisfactory condition that they have been since the crown 
 took control after the Mutiny. No small part of this is due to the 
 successful settlement of the silver question in 1899. Not only have 
 taxes been reduced for the first time in twenty years, but Lord 
 Curzon was able to report to the council in the budget debate of 
 March, 1905, that during the preceding seven years taxes amount- 
 ing to 13,000,000/. had been remitted, and that there is "now no 
 tax in India which could be called burdensome or oppressive." 
 The 1910 budget shows no cessation of the prosperous conditions. 
 Further, the government has not only maintained the necessary 
 currency reserve fund, now amounting to about $52,000,000, but 
 has also laid by a gold reserve which in 1904 amounted to 
 $35,000,000. ^ 
 
 In considering the budget in 1905 plans were also made 
 to secure elasticity in the collection of the taxes, by establishing 
 rules which should work automatically to relieve the cultivators of 
 the burden of taxation in times of famine or other calamity which 
 destroyed or decreased his ability to pay taxes, instead of waiting 
 for the slow and cumbersome methods which had heretofore 
 obtained. 
 
 Results have shown promptly the success of measures intended 
 for the material welfare of India, but efforts no less sincere were 
 made by Lord Curzon to promote the moral and social welfare of 
 the peoples of India, which have not yet had time to show results, 
 and it will be impossible for some time yet to form any judgment 
 on the wisdom and value of these efforts. The whole question of 
 education was canvassed by a commission, and measures affecting 
 every part of the educational system were enacted in 1904. The ex- 
 tension and improvement of primary education was favored, but the 
 financial situation offers a serious hindrance to the development of a 
 satisfactory system of primary education. Higher education received 
 much closer attention, and a Universities Act was passed to harmon- 
 ize and unify the work of the colleges and universities, and to insure 
 really efficient work in the various institutions. The general over- 
 sight of the educational work was placed in the hands of a director 
 general of education. One of the evil tendencies in the educational 
 system was removed by abolishing native competition for the civil 
 service and selecting native civil servants henceforth by a proba- 
 tionary system. The recent demand for improved facilities for
 
 292 INDIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 technical education has been felt in India as in other countries, and 
 the government has made some effort to meet the demands. 
 
 The investigation of the police system resulted in the passage 
 of a police reform act in March, 1905. The old system was thor- 
 oughly discredited, especially because of the bad reputation borne 
 by the old officials. By increasing the pay it was hoped to secure 
 a better class of officials and to remove from them* the temptation 
 to corruption. To a considerable extent the bill w'as apparently 
 reactionary in character, for it sought the revival of the old village 
 community and the imposition of the responsibility for the local 
 peace and order upon the village watchman and the villagers. The 
 need of police reform had long been felt, but it was neglected be- 
 cause of the financial difficulties, for the new system will require 
 an additional expenditure of about $5,000,000 annually. The 
 change had also been long delayed, because viceroys had hesitated 
 to touch such a difficult and thorny problem. 
 
 India has a surplus of laborers, while in some of the colonies 
 of England and other countries there is a demand for cheap labor. 
 An effort has been made to solve the two problems by sending 
 indentured coolies from India to these various colonies. At first 
 some were sent to the French West India colonies, but the arrange- 
 ment was soon revoked because of a failure on the part of the 
 French employers to comply with the terms of the contract in 
 a reasonable spirit. During the last twenty years the only non- 
 English colony to which coolies have been furnished has been 
 Dutch Guiana, though some coolies do still remain in the French 
 West Indies. The English colonies which have received Indian 
 coolies in recent years have been the Mauritius, Natal, British 
 Guiana, British West Indies, Fiji Islands, British East Africa, and 
 the Seychelles. During the decade from 1892 to 1902 the number 
 of coolie emigrants leaving India was 174,544 and the number 
 returning was 55,059. Since 1899 the annual number of emi- 
 grants has been at least thirty per cent, larger than before. The 
 government of India now appoints a protector of emigrants. 
 The indentures or contracts provide for proper protection of the 
 emigrant in every way, for a fair rate of wages, for good quarters 
 and proper medical attendance, and for a free return to India. The 
 government of India surpervises these contracts carefully. No 
 doubt there are some things about the system that do not meet 
 the approval of enlightened westerners, but it must be remembered
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 293 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 that the coolie has been accustomed to the Indian standard and 
 conditions of life and not to English or American standards and 
 conditions, and that when compared with these latter standards 
 his condition may be a bad one, but as compared with conditions 
 to which he has been accustomed, he often finds himself better off. 
 At least he is guaranteed shelter, clothing, food, and medical at- 
 tendance, which he would not be sure of and probably did not 
 have in India, for it is only as a last resort that the extremely con- 
 servative Hindu will consent to leave his ancestral home. Some 
 Indians, after completing the terms of their indenture, have re- 
 mained as permanent settlers in the lands to which they have gone. 
 Some of the most enlightened natives of India have accepted 
 many of the western ideas and have taken an active interest in 
 the promotion among their people of reforms, especially of a social 
 character, and have undertaken work of charitable or educational 
 sort. All efforts of this kind have received hearty encouragement 
 from the government of India. The native princes of India have 
 been foremost in such activities, and it is worth noting that in 
 December, 1904, at the meeting of the Indian Social Reform Con- 
 gress, the Gaekwar of Baroda, who visited the United States in 
 May, 1906, advocated the abolition of caste as a necessary step in 
 the social improvement of the people of India. The government 
 has, however, carefully refrained from countenancing any move- 
 ment of a political sort among the natives, such as the Indian Na- 
 tional Congress. This organization has met year by year to 
 discuss Indian problems, but its character has been semi-political, 
 and most of the discussions have been political in character, and 
 their professed aims are to secure political reforms and especially 
 a larger sphere of political activity for natives of India. The 
 government has never interfered with the meetings of the Congress, 
 which serves as a sort of safety valve, but it has withheld all rec- 
 ognition from it. At the close of the meeting in December, 1904, 
 Sir Henry Cotton, formerly chief commissioner of Assam, and a 
 former member of the supreme legislative council of India, who 
 had acted as the president of the Congress, sought an interview 
 with Lord Curzon to present a report of the Congress. The 
 viceroy declined to receive him officially, but offered to receive 
 him personally as a distinguished retired Indian civil servant. The 
 president of the 1905 Congress was Mr. Gokhale of Bombay, one 
 of the native members of the supreme legislative council. The
 
 294 INDIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 summary of the political demands of the natives given in his ad- 
 dress to the Congress shows the ambitions of the most advanced 
 and independent thinkers among the natives of India to-day. 
 
 Without doubt one of the most important services rendered to 
 India by Lord Curzon was the vast improvement which he secured 
 in the status of the native princes of India and in the relations 
 between them and the government of India. He made it his espe- 
 cial duty to cut through the endless mass of correspondence with 
 the princes and to meet them personally and to talk over every 
 question at issue, and to inspire them with his own activity and 
 zeal and high ideals of service to the people of India. Annoying 
 and troublesome questions, which viceroy after viceroy had hesi- 
 tated to deal with, were taken up, and to the surprise of old 
 Anglo-Indians easily settled to the satisfaction of all parties. In 
 this way the question of the Berars, or ceded districts of Haidarabad, 
 was settled by leaving the regions in dispute henceforth entirely in 
 the hands of the English, while the nizam of Haidarabad received 
 a financial recompense. Holkar of Indore, who had proved himself 
 entirely unable to rule in a way satisfactory to the government of 
 India, was deposed and his heir established in his place, with 
 scarcely a murmur. The maharaja of Kashmir, who had been 
 deprived of some of his independence, was brought into a reason- 
 able mood, and almost the last official act of Lord Curzon was to 
 formally invest him once more with his full independent powers. 
 In order to entertain the native princes properly when they made 
 official visits to the viceroy at Calcutta, Lord Curzon purchased the 
 house formerly occupied by Warren Hastings at Calcutta and set 
 it aside as a palace for visiting princes. 
 
 Lord Curzon has said that one hour of talk in dealing with the 
 native princes was worth more than years of formal correspondence. 
 The results fully justified his efforts to get in touch with them and 
 to inspire them with loyalty to the English power in India, and 
 with the same spirit of earnest effort for the advancement of India 
 and the peoples of India which he felt. This is shown in the 
 offers of the princes to aid England in South Africa and China, and 
 on the northwestern frontier; by the presence of native princes at 
 the coronation of King Edward in London and at the coronation 
 darbar at Delhi; but the most splendid testimonial to their appre- 
 ciation of the work of Lord Curzon was at Indore, the very 
 capital of the prince he had summarily deposed, where sixty-five
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 295 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 princes of central India gathered to meet him and present a fare- 
 well address to him as he was on his way to Bombay to leave 
 India in November, 1905. Curzon found the native princes of 
 India useless relics and expensive and troublesome anomalies; he 
 left them the most loyal upholders of the English power and the 
 most faithful colaborers with the English government. It must 
 be said, however, that the subjects of the native princes are not 
 always as loyal as their rulers, for they remember the ancient 
 independence and splendor of the native rule without understanding 
 the changes which time has wrought, other than the loss of full 
 national independence. There is no active disloyalty and not even 
 real discontent with the English rule in India, though there is a 
 group of noisy irreconcilables, just as in every country. 
 
 The frontier policy of Lord Curzon as worked out in the crea- 
 tion of the Northwest Frontier Province, and in the withdrawal 
 of English troops from the advanced border posts, and in bring- 
 ing the border tribesmen into sympathy with the government of 
 India and intrusting them with the guardianship of the frontier, 
 and in enforcing the pax Britannica along the border, has proven 
 thoroughly successful. Since the annexation of the Punjab the 
 frontier had never been quiet, and during the administration of 
 Lord Elgin the frontier troubles had cost $22,500,000, while under 
 Lord Curzon the cost for a longer period was only $1,250,000. 
 The death of the amir and the succession of his son was watched 
 with the greatest apprehension. The disruption of the amir's 
 dominions or complications with the English or the Russians were 
 dangerous possibilities. The new amir succeeded his father without 
 a noticeable break in the peaceful conditions and maintained his 
 authority among the Afghans and his relations with the English 
 unaltered. Naturally questions had arisen since the Durand Treaty 
 more than a decade before, and to settle these, as well as to renew 
 with the amir the arrangements made with his father, a mission 
 was sent to Kabul under Sir Louis Dane in the latter part of 1904. 
 Several months were spent at Kabul and the reception of the mis- 
 sion was more cordial than that of Sir Henry Durand. In the 
 meantime the amir sent his son, Inayatulla Khan, to visit Calcutta 
 in January, 1905. He was royally welcomed by the viceroy, and 
 every effort made to render the visit of the young prince a memor- 
 able one. The treaty signed by the amir and Sir Louis Dane at 
 Kabul on March 21, 1905, is very brief and provides for a full and
 
 296 INDIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 complete maintenance of the relations between the English and the 
 amir as under the former agreements with Abdur Rahman. There 
 is absolutely no new provision and no detailed specification in the 
 treaty. This has led to suspicion that the mission was really a 
 failure, but that does not at all follow. The full renewal of the old 
 agreement and the full and confidential discussion of all matters of 
 mutual interest would in themselves render the mission a success, 
 even if England secured no further concessions in Afghanistan. 
 A complete mutual understanding between the government of 
 India and the amir is far more essential than a few miles of tele- 
 graph or railroad in Afghanistan. The rumors of any break in 
 the satisfactory relations with the amir are entirely without foun- 
 dation, as are also the rumors of a Russian mission to Afghanistan, 
 or of a massing of Russian troops on the Afghan frontier during 
 the period of the negotiations. It is true that at present the Rus- 
 sians have in their Trans-Caspian Railways a line paralleling the 
 northern frontier of Afghanistan, and there is a spur running to 
 Kushk on the frontier only a short distance from Herat. The 
 English have their lines in the Punjab and neighboring regions 
 with a railhead at Peshawar at the mouth of the Khaibar Pass, on 
 the road to Kabul ; and the line to Quetta has been extended by a 
 tunnel under the old Kojah Pass to Chaman on the Afghan side of 
 the mountains, and only an open plain lies between Chaman and 
 Kandahar. From 1903 to 1905 a commission under the direction 
 of Colonel McMahon was employed in Seistan delimiting and mark- 
 ing the boundary between Persia and Afghanistan and settling the 
 important disputed question of international water rights, which 
 is of great importance, owing to the use of the streams for irri- 
 gation. During 1904-1905 a British Indian commercial mission 
 was also employed in Persia. Amir Habibulla has enlarged and 
 improved his army, and introduced a new system of recruiting. 
 Though the amir shows* certain progressive tendencies, he must go 
 very slowly in order to maintain his hold upon the suspicious and 
 restless Afghan chiefs. 
 
 For the first time in years matters on the northern frontier 
 of India demanded the attention of the government. The southern 
 slopes of the Himalayas are occupied by the independent states 
 of Nepal and Bhutan, which are nominal tributaries of the Chi- 
 nese empire, and which are on friendly terms with the English. 
 Between these two hill states lies the little country of Sikkim, which
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 297 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 is a semi-independent tributary of both the Chinese and Indian 
 empires. Questions between the empires of India and China con- 
 cerning this little state are of importance, because the adjoining 
 part of the Chinese empire is the " forbidden land " of Tibet, which 
 by its refusal to have dealings with foreigners was preventing the 
 execution of the terms of the treaties intended to settle the ques- 
 tions which had arisen on the border. The importance of Sikkim 
 is enhanced by the fact that the most practicable route from India 
 to Tibet passes through it over the Himalayas into the Chumbi 
 valley, which is Tibetan territory, and the slight trade between 
 India and Tibet was almost entirely by this route. For the peace 
 of the border and the protection of Sikkim it was important for the 
 government of India to have the questions at issue definitely settled. 
 The dilatory behavior of the Tibetans and the inability of England 
 to enforce the treaty engagements made it obligatory upon the 
 government of India if it wished to maintain its self-respect in 
 dealing with Asiatics to effect a definite settlement and enforce it. 
 The action of England, however, might have been delayed much 
 longer had it not become perfectly clear that Russian agents were 
 at work at Lhasa and that immediate action was necessary to block 
 the Russian schemes, and to prevent a power, whose interests might 
 be other than friendly, from establishing itself in Tibet. 
 
 In the spring of 1903, accordingly, Lord Curzon endeavored 
 to arrange for an expedition to Lhasa, but the government in Lon- 
 don would sanction nothing of the sort. It was accordingly ar- 
 ranged with the Chinese government that the envoys from India 
 should meet the Tibetan officials at Kamba-jong, fifteen miles be- 
 yond the Sikkim frontier in Tibet, and the Chinese promised to 
 cooperate in the negotiations. In July Claude White, the English 
 political officer in Sikkim, and Captain W. F. T. O'Connor, the only 
 white man who could speak Tibetan fluently, established themselves 
 at Kamba-jong, in spite of the official protests of the Tibetans. 
 The natives, however, treated the British officials in the most 
 friendly way, as they did throughout the expedition, except when 
 driven by the lamaist hierarchy to do otherwise. Major Francis 
 Edward Younghusband soon arrived and took charge of this 
 Tibetan mission as political officer. The stay at Kamba-jong was 
 absolutely fruitless so far as negotiations were concerned, for the 
 Tibetans did not send any accredited officials to represent them, and 
 only ordered the British mission to withdraw.
 
 298 INDIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 The futility of the situation became apparent to even the gov- 
 ernment in London, which now grudgingly acquiesced in an advance 
 to Gyantse as the place at which to negotiate, but again with the 
 distinct disclaimer of any intention of going on to Lhasa. It was 
 already too late to hope to reach Gyantse before winter, so it was ar- 
 ranged that at the same time the mission should withdraw from 
 Kamba-jong and that a point on the Chumbi valley route to Gyantse 
 should be occupied, which was as far within the Tibetan border as 
 Kamba-jong. Accordingly, late in December, 1903, Major Young- 
 husband went into winter quarters at Tuna. During the winter 
 stores were accumulated and other arrangements made for an ad- 
 vance in the spring. This was begun on March 26, 1904, when 
 Colonel James Ronald Leslie Macdonald, in command of the mili- 
 tary escort of the mission, began the advance from Chumbi, and on 
 the 30th joined the mission at Tuna. The advance from there was 
 begun on the following morning, but it was soon halted by a force 
 of Tibetans who occupied the road at Guru. The English attempted 
 to disarm the Tibetans and to proceed without any fighting, but the 
 Lhasan general fired upon a Sikh, and a general fight ensued, in 
 which the Tibetans, after severe losses, including the Lhasan gen- 
 eral, were repulsed. The advance was then continued without oppo- 
 sition to Gyantse, where the mission arrived on April 11 without 
 having lost a man. There the mission established itself at Chang- 
 lo, a short distance from the town, and waited for an opportunity 
 to negotiate. 
 
 The presence of a considerable Tibetan force on the road be- 
 tween Lhasa and Gyantse, at a point from which the British line 
 of communication might easily be cut, led to a fight at the Karo-la 
 on May 6, in which Lieutenant Colonel Brander defeated and 
 scattered the Tibetan force. This engagement was probably fought 
 at the highest altitude of any military action on record, 17,000 feet 
 above sea-level. While Colonel Brander was performing this ex- 
 ploit, the Tibetans, at the suggestion of Dorjiev, the Russian agent 
 at Lhasa, made a night attack on the mission at Chang-lo, which was 
 repulsed, and the same time seized Jong, which commanded both 
 Gyantse and Chang-lo. This exploit of May 5 showed that the 
 hope of negotiations at Gyantse was futile and that an advance to 
 Lhasa was inevitable. In the meantime, however, Major Young- 
 husband had to defend himself at Chang-lo until the full military 
 escort, under Colonel Macdonald, should come up. Almost con-
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 299 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 tinuous fighting was kept up, but the mission managed both to main- 
 tain its daily mail dispatch and its telegraphic connections, for it 
 had carried a wire along as the advance had been made. Colonel 
 Macdonald with his force arrived on June 26, and after a few 
 days of delay, in renewed attempts at negotiations, the Jong was 
 assaulted and captured on July 6. On July 14 the advance from 
 Gyantse to Lhasa was begun. One event of some importance has 
 to be noted, and that is the arrival in the British camp at the begin- 
 ning of July of the Tongsa Penlop of Bhutan, who is the actual 
 ruler of that country, as there is at present no Deb raja. His friend- 
 ship and assistance in dealing with the Tibetans was to prove of 
 no small value. 
 
 The hundred and fifty miles from Gyantse to Lhasa were cov- 
 ered without opposition, though the advance was made slowly and 
 the mission did not reach Lhasa till August 3. It was found that 
 Dorjiev had fled in May and that the Dalai Lama had also recently 
 left Lhasa, after having intrusted his seal to a regent, the Ti- 
 Rimpoche. The Nepalese envoy at Lhasa, as well as the Tongsa 
 Penlop of Bhutan, were of valuable assistance as intermediaries, but 
 the real negotiations were all conducted through the Amban, the Chi- 
 nese official representative in Lhasa. This scrupulous respect for the 
 suzerainty of China was an important factor in the situation, and no 
 doubt conduced to the speedy settlement of terms. The treaty was 
 signed in the Potala, the palace of the Grand Lama, on September 7, 
 1904. 
 
 The treaty provided for the settlement of the boundary diffi- 
 culties, for the opening of Yatung on the Sikkim frontier, Gyantse, 
 and Gartok in western Tibet to British trade, and for resident Brit- 
 ish agents at these posts, though not at Lhasa. Other commercial 
 details were regulated. Careful provisions were made to exclude 
 all foreign influence, and to prohibit the granting of telegraph, rail- 
 road, mining, and other concessions. An indemnity of about 
 $2,500,000 for the ill-treatment of the mission was imposed and the 
 Chumbi valley was to be held in pawn until the payment should 
 be completed. The English government had given specific orders 
 that the period should not exceed three years. At the request of 
 the Tibetans the period was extended to seventy-five years. This 
 unauthorized action of Major Younghusband was promptly dis- 
 avowed by the British authorities. And although the sum demanded 
 represented only about half the cost of the mission, it was further
 
 300 INDIA 
 
 1904-1910 
 
 cut down and the period of three years insisted upon in amendment 
 to the treaty. 
 
 To be entirely valid the treaty required the signature of China 
 as suzerain of Tibet. This signature was long delayed, and al- 
 though a Chinese commissioner spent some time in Calcutta during 
 1905, nothing was accomplished, and he withdrew nominally on 
 account of his health. Negotiations were then transferred to 
 Peking, and on April 27, 1906, a treaty was signed by China and 
 Great Britain confirming the Tibetan treaty as amended by the 
 British government and guaranteeing the territorial integrity of 
 Tibet. 
 
 The policy of the expedition must receive some notice. Colonel 
 Macdonald, in command of the escort, demurred at every advance 
 move, insisting that the best thing to do was to get such terms as 
 were possible and to get out of Tibet immediately afterward. Colo- 
 nel Younghusband, whose knowledge and experience of Oriental 
 character is unrivaled, insisted from the beginning that the only sat- 
 isfactory conclusion was to dictate terms in Lhasa itself. The gov- 
 ernment of India, under Lord Curzon and, during his absence in 
 England, under Lord Ampthill, was one of full cooperation with 
 Colonel Younghusband. The government in London had as foreign 
 secretary Lord Lansdowne, whose years of service as viceroy should 
 have made him hesitate to sacrifice British interests in the Tibetan 
 question to other phases of England's foreign policy, and have 
 made him refrain from gratuitous guarantees to Russia that Eng- 
 land would limit her activities in Tibet to the minimum. The 
 secretary for India was Mr. Brodrick, whose treatment of Indian 
 questions has left much to be desired. His disavowal of the in- 
 demnity clause in the treaty and his reprimand of Major Young- 
 husband revealed his absolute ignorance of the conditions of the 
 problem and a woeful lack of appreciation of the value of the 
 major's achievement to the government of India. The knowledge 
 acquired by the expedition confirmed, if that were necessary, the 
 judgment of Lord Curzon that the expedition was essential to the 
 safety of the Indian empire, for the real natural defense of India 
 on this side is not the Himalayas, but the broad extent of desert 
 lying between Lhasa and the Siberian frontier. Furthermore, once 
 it had been decided to take up the question, the handling of it by 
 the government in London deserves nothing but blame. Colonel 
 Younghusband and the men who worked with him, such as Claude 
 White, Mr. Wilton, Captain O'Connor, and others, deserve the
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 301 
 
 1904-1910 
 
 highest praise for an achievement of the most splendid sort. The 
 triumph over all of the physical difficulties, the diplomatic success, 
 and the vast extension of knowledge concerning the " forbidden 
 land " will make the expedition one memorable in the annals of the 
 British in India. 
 
 It remains to note that the expedition resulted in discrediting 
 the Dalai Lama entirely. After his flight the political blunders of 
 the Lama were obvious, and the fact that he had persisted in his 
 policy, under the influence of Dorjiev, in spite of the opposition of 
 the Amban and of the lamaist hierarchy, contributed to a feeling 
 of relief at his departure. His life at Urga, whither he fled, made 
 notorious his discreditable immorality. The result was that there 
 was no protest heard, when on September n, 1904, the Amban 
 at Lhasa solemnly announced the deposition of the Dalai Lama at 
 the order of the emperor of China and the recognition of the 
 Tashi Lama of Shigatse as the spiritual head of lamaism. The 
 visit of Captain O'Connor to the Tashi Lama on his return from 
 Lhasa, and later the visit of the Tashi Lama to India in Decem- 
 ber, 1905, and January, 1906, to pay his respects to the Prince of 
 Wales, and to make pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in India, have 
 confirmed the good relations between India and Tibet. The po- 
 litical control of Tibet seems to be really in the hands of the abbots 
 of the three great monasteries at Lhasa, headed by the Ti-Rim- 
 poche, or regent, and their attitude toward all foreigners is one 
 of uncompromising hostility. Their treaty with Colonel Young- 
 husband was grudgingly made by them, and also perhaps largely 
 out of resentment for the pro-Russian policy of the fugitive Dalai 
 Lama. It is fairly obvious that the English can expect little better 
 than indifference from this Lhasan hierarchy, but the people of 
 Tibet, who evidently do not relish the rule of the hierarchy any 
 more than the people of the Papal States did that of the Roman 
 hierarchy in the nineteenth century, always behaved with the great- 
 est friendliness toward the British, and their treatment by the mis- 
 sion cannot help remaining to them a pleasant incentive to friend- 
 ship. The Dalai Lama seems to have been the center of some 
 intrigues at Urga, and possibly the Chinese have wished to restore 
 him, but at present his existence is a cause of some anxiety to the 
 parties concerned; his demise will be a relief to the situation 
 and it will not be surprising if the Chinese manage to put him out 
 of the way.
 
 302 INDIA 
 
 1904-191O 
 
 Some of the aftermath of the expedition to Lhasa has been 
 important. The mission left Lhasa on September 23 and reached 
 India in October. A small detachment under Major C. H. D. 
 Ryder, and including Captain O'Connor, went to visit the Tashi 
 Lama at Shigatse and then explored the upper course of the 
 Tsang-po or Brahmaputra River, and crossed the divide to the head- 
 waters of the Indus and the Sutlej, and finally reached Simla in 
 January, 1905. This expedition thus effected an important exten- 
 sion of geographical knowledge. The Tongsa Penlop of Bhutan 
 was rewarded for his services by receiving knighthood in the 
 Order of the Indian Empire in January, 1905, and the decoration 
 was conferred by Claude White, the political officer in Sikkim, who 
 paid a visit to Panakha, the capital of Bhutan, for that purpose. 
 The friendly relations with these border countries between India 
 and Tibet was shown by the visit of the maharaja of Sikkim and 
 the Tongsa Penlop to Calcutta to pay their respects to the Prince 
 of Wales in January, 1906, in company with the Tashi Lama. 
 
 As already noted, Lord Curzon was absent from India during 
 the crisis in the Tibetan negotiations. His term expired and he left 
 India on April 30, 1904, and was appointed lord warden of the 
 Cinque Ports and took up his residence at Walmer Castle upon his 
 arrival in England. It was finally decided to reappoint him, but his 
 return to India was for some weeks delayed by the serious illness of 
 Lady Curzon. As soon as her convalescence warranted the viceroy 
 set out alone for India, where he arrived on December 13. During 
 his absence the acting governor-general was Arthur Villiers Russell, 
 Baron Ampthill, the governor of Madras, who acquitted himself 
 of the difficult task to the full satisfaction of all parties. 
 
 Serious problems faced Lord Curzon upon his return, in ad- 
 dition to his various measures of reform which he was constantly 
 endeavoring to initiate. One of the most difficult of these was the 
 Bengal question. In 1874 Bengal had become too large to be 
 administered as a single unit, and certain districts were set off as 
 the chief commissionership of Assam. This measure, which caused 
 an outcry at the time, thoroughly justified itself. It soon became 
 apparent that the problem had only been touched instead of being 
 definitely solved. Successive lieutenant-governors continued to 
 find the burden of administering the province of Bengal not only 
 too heavy, but an increasingly heavy burden. Certain conditions 
 pointed to the extension of Assam to include the eastern districts
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 308 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 of Bengal as the best solution of the matter. After being under 
 official consideration for many months the decision was finally 
 announced in the summer of 1905, and on October 16 the prov- 
 ince of Eastern Bengal and Assam came officially into existence. 
 It embraces, in addition to the native states of Manipur and 
 Hill Tipperah, which lie within its borders, the former province 
 of Assam and the Chittagong, Dacca, and Rajshahi divisions of 
 Bengal. Its capital is located at Dacca. The administration is 
 under a lieutenant-governor with a legislative council and board 
 of revenue, though the jurisdiction of the high court of Calcutta 
 is to continue to extend over the new province. The chief com- 
 missioner of Assam, J. B. Fuller, became lieutenant-governor of 
 the enlarged province. At the same time certain rectifications of 
 the southwestern boundary of Bengal were also effected by the 
 transfer of certain hill states from Chutia Nagpur to the Central 
 Provinces in exchange for Sambalpur, which was included in Ben- 
 gal, because the language of the district made its administration by 
 the Central Provinces difficult, while in Bengal it was a simple 
 matter, as the language was the same as that of Orissa. The new 
 province contains a population of about 31,000,000, of whom 18,000,- 
 000 are Mohammedans and 12,000,000 are Hindus, thus according 
 some recognition to the predominance of Mohammedans in the 
 eastern districts, whereas they had been an overlooked minority in 
 the old province. 
 
 The diminished province of Lower Bengal now has about 
 50,722,067 population, of whom 42,540,359 are Hindus and 
 9,208,191 Mohammedans. It should be noted that there is no 
 racial or linguistic differentiation between the two provinces, 
 and this gave rise to a loud outburst of Bengali patriotism 
 against the partition of their country. There was as little reason 
 for this outcry as there would be for patriotic objections to the 
 division of an American county for administrative convenience. 
 In fact, events showed that a large part of the outcry was due to 
 interested parties in Calcutta, who had profited by the diversion of 
 the trade of the eastern districts to Calcutta, which would more 
 naturally have passed to Chittagong, and they now feared that the 
 creation of the new province would result in the revival of the 
 trade of Chittagong at the expense of Calcutta. To this it is only 
 necessary to reply that Chittagong is as good a harbor as Calcutta, 
 if not a better one, and that it is the natural outlet of the new
 
 304 INDIA 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 province, and that if Calcutta had profited by the trade in the past, 
 she was now only losing what she had unfairly enjoyed. To the 
 people of the new province the change cannot prove otherwise than 
 a blessing, for it will insure them a careful oversight from the 
 administration in place of the unavoidable neglect of the past, and 
 it will no doubt result in the revival of Dacca and Chittagong to 
 at least their old-time importance. While there may be some falling 
 off in the trade of Calcutta, it is probable that the result will in 
 other matters be entirely to the advantage of the diminished prov- 
 ince as well. 
 
 The agitation of the Bengalis over the partition has been the 
 most notable manifestation yet witnessed of political activity on 
 the part of the natives, and especially of the educated natives of 
 India. The Indian National Congress has been more or less 
 academic in character, but here was a practical question, and the 
 Bengalis made an effort to have the Congress take it up in an 
 effective way. For some time there had been on the part of the 
 government an effort to encourage native industry, which had been 
 taken up with some vigor by the natives. The Bengalis seized 
 upon this as an easy tool for their purpose, and the swadeshi or 
 " own country things " movement was turned into a popular agita- 
 tion against English goods. The result was serious loss to mer- 
 chants dealing in English goods, while the merchants handling 
 native goods profited largely and unexpectedly. In December, 
 1905, the Bengalis were active at the session of the Indian National 
 Congress, and a resolution against the so-called partition of Bengal 
 was carried, and another in favor of the use of native goods; but 
 the Bengali effort to combine the two into a political boycott of 
 English goods was defeated. Lord Curzon and other officials also 
 broke the power of the movement by constantly announcing their 
 belief in swadeshi in so far as it meant a use of native goods and 
 an encourgement of native industry, but they denounced it when 
 perverted into a boycott of English goods. 
 
 A gratuitous reference to the question in the dispatch of Brod- 
 rick on Lord Curzon's resignation gave new zeal to the agitators, 
 but the new viceroy, Lord Minto, and the new secretary of state 
 for India, John Morley, have upheld Lord Curzon's measure, and 
 it is now in- operation, with the full support of all the authorities. 
 
 Unfortunately for Lord Curzon, and for India, his second term 
 was destined to come to an early end under conditions of the most
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 305 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 regrettable sort. Lord Curzon had always given his full support 
 to every effort to improve England's position in India, and that 
 included the condition of the army and the question of the military 
 defense of India. The commander-in-chief since 1902 was Horatio 
 Herbert Kitchener, the ablest of the younger generals in the Eng- 
 lish army. 
 
 Lord Kitchener was born in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1850, 
 and was educated at Woolwich. He entered the Royal Engineers in 
 1 87 1. He served on the Palestine Survey from 1874 to 1878, and on 
 the Cyprus Survey from 1878 to 1882. He served in Egypt from 
 1882 to 1899, being sirdar of the Egyptian army from 1890 to 1899. 
 He was chief of staff to Lord Roberts in South Africa from 1899 
 to 1900, and succeeded Lord Roberts as commander-in-chief in 
 South Africa from 1900 to 1902. Since 1902 he has been com- 
 mander-in-chief in India. He was knighted in 1894 and created 
 Baron Kitchener of Khartoum in 1898, and Viscount Kitchener 
 of Khartoum in 1902. He is a man of strong personality, and a 
 military man in the fullest sense of the term. Administrative 
 delays annoyed him in his handling of army questions, and appar- 
 ently the secretariat of the military department took no pains to 
 secure prompt action. Apparently, also, General Sir Edmond Elles, 
 the military member of the governor-general's council, and there- 
 fore the head of the military department, was not inclined to modify 
 his own or the departmental policy, and act at the dictation of 
 General Kitchener. Brodrick, the secretary of state for India, 
 was pitifully incompetent to deal with two such brilliant and able 
 subordinates as Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener in such a way 
 as to harmonize their relations and to retain the services of both 
 for the empire. 
 
 The question of army administration seems to have been a 
 subject of prolonged discussion between the viceroy, the com- 
 mander-in-chief, and the secretary of state, and Lord Curzon re- 
 turned to India after discussion of the question with the authorities 
 in London, so that he felt that in permitting him to return to India 
 as viceroy, they agreed with and would support his views. This 
 did not prove to be the case, and in June, 1905, the secretary of 
 state published a blue book of the correspondence, together with 
 the arrangement, to which he now gave his sanction. This was a 
 compromise, but one so clearly in favor of the commander-in-chief 
 that General Elles at once resigned as military member of council.
 
 306 INDIA 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 The details of the plan were indefinite, and after further corre- 
 spondence Lord Curzon felt that the statements of the secretary 
 of state were so sufficiently in accord with his ideas that he could 
 accept the plan. That this was a misunderstanding at once became 
 clear when Lord Curzon suggested General Sir Edmund George 
 Barrow as the new military supply member of his council. This 
 proposal was at once negatived by Brodrick, and after an inter- 
 change of telegrams, Lord Curzon, who was then on a sick bed, 
 telegraphed his resignation on August 12, 1905. A few days 
 later the news of the resignation and its acceptance was published, 
 and the appointment of Lord Minto to succeed as viceroy was 
 announced. 
 
 Under the old system the commander-in-chief was an ex- 
 traordinary member of the governor-general's council, but not the 
 head of an administrative department. The military member of 
 council occupied a position as head of the military administration 
 department corresponding to the American secretary of war, but 
 his relations to the commander-in-chief were made much more deli- 
 cate by the fact that he was a ranking subordinate of the com- 
 mander-in-chief, and in recent years had been selected from the 
 higher ranks, and so was a man who, in case of war, might be 
 called to assume important command. His position was not only 
 that of a secretary of war, but also of a general of high rank in 
 the army and the expert military adviser of the governor-general. 
 Obviously, unless the military member were in absolute accord 
 with the commander-in-chief, the latter would find the situation 
 annoying and irksome. This fact, plus the soldier's hatred of red 
 tape, will explain the reason for Lord Kitchener's attitude. Lord 
 Curzon, on the other side, supported by the members of the coun- 
 cil, felt the political and constitutional difficulties. There must 
 be one, and only one, responsible head, and obviously that must 
 be the viceroy, and not the commander-in-chief. Therefore, the 
 viceroy must have advice on military matters from other qualified 
 individuals besides the commander-in-chief, so that he might act 
 wisely concerning them, not only from the point of view of army 
 organization and methods, but also as concerned the matters of 
 finance and the general adjustment of the army to the rest of the 
 state administration. Naturally the viceroy wished to retain the 
 military member of council as his war minister. In the same way 
 the commander-in-chief felt that the union in his person of the
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 307 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 duties of his own position and that of the military member would 
 redound to the advantage of the army in giving a completely unified 
 control. 
 
 The secretary of state for India naturally and rightly at- 
 tempted a compromise, but bungled the affair and showed a 
 conspicuous lack of tact. As finally worked out, the present 
 arrangement makes the commander-in-chief a regular member of 
 council and the head of what is called the army department, with a 
 secretarial staff exactly corresponding to the other administrative 
 departments ; and various functions formerly belonging to the mili- 
 tary member and his department are transferred to the commander- 
 in-chief and the army department. Instead of the military member 
 with his department there is now a military supply member, the 
 head of the department of military supply, with the usual secre- 
 tarial staff. As the name indicates, the military supply member 
 and his department retain only a small part of the functions 
 formerly pertaining to the military member, but the viceroy dis- 
 tinctly reserved the privilege of requiring general military advice 
 of the military supply member. No doubt Lord Kitchener would 
 have wished to make the position of military supply member a 
 civilian's post, and to have had the organization of his own depart- 
 ment more under his direct and sole control than will be possible 
 with its organization on the same basis as the other departments. 
 It is not likely that Lord Kitchener will find the new viceroy less 
 careful of his full constitutional privileges than Lord Curzon, 
 though in a different way. Because the liberals, when out of 
 power, had attacked Brodrick's handling of the situation, it was 
 expected by some that the new liberal secretary of state for India, 
 Morley, would abandon Brodrick's scheme, but he has not done 
 so, and has only sought to secure some slight readjustments in 
 the settling of details which had not already been arranged. 
 Morley's speech on the subject in parliament showed no sympathy 
 for Lord Curzon or his administration, and Lord Curzon replied 
 by a letter in the London Times declaring the new army administra- 
 tive system, even after the adjustments made by Morley, unwork- 
 able, and fraught with serious danger to India. 
 
 The whole affair was a regrettable incident, and neither Lord 
 Curzon nor Lord Kitchener behaved with complete poise and tact 
 in the matter. The dispute between the two chief officers of the 
 Indian empire was in itself a sorry spectacle to present to the people
 
 308 INDIA 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 of India, and the blunder of publishing the dispatches with all of 
 their recriminations was inexcusable. It seems clear that some 
 reforms, in the direction actually taken, were needed for the good 
 of the service; and the pity is that they could not have been 
 secured and at the same time the splendid abilities of both Lord 
 Curzon and Lord Kitchener retained for the empire. In view of 
 the outcome, it is a matter for regret that Lord Curzon returned 
 to India for a second term, for the added months in India were 
 marked by the unpopular but necessary partition of Bengal, which 
 might almost be compared with Lord Dalhousie's annexation of 
 Oudh, and by the scandal of the army quarrel. For the present, 
 at least, these two events seriously dim the splendor of the great 
 achievements of his first term as viceroy. No viceroy ever strove 
 with greater zeal to serve India, and none ever had a fuller under- 
 standing of India's needs. In tactfulness he was deficient, and 
 his frankness of speech at times amounted to indiscretion. He was 
 not a popular viceroy, though the army quarrel did result in a 
 certain revulsion of feeling in his favor, but the value of much 
 of his work has been recognized by all. Since his resignation it 
 has been the wont of writers to call him the greatest viceroy since 
 Dalhousie. It does seem that he is to be reckoned among the 
 very limited number of India's greatest rulers. Many years must 
 elapse before a full and fair judgment upon the man and his work 
 will be possible, for at present it is impossible not only to get 
 the necessary perspective, but even to obtain full and accurate 
 knowledge of some of the most important events of his adminis- 
 tration. It is not likely that time will set aside his own judgment 
 of his work as " not of aggression, but of consolidation and re- 
 straint. It is enough for me to guard what we have without 
 hankering for more." 
 
 During Lord Curzon's administration occurred a group of 
 events fraught with the greatest importance to the position of the 
 British in India. In India were the frightful disasters of plague 
 and famine; in England occurred the death of the queen, and 
 within the empire the South African war; abroad the death of 
 the amir, the Boxer rising in China, and the Russo-Japanese war 
 were events of the deepest significance for India. Such was the 
 combination of these events, that at several times during the admin- 
 istration of Lord Curzon, the natives of India, had they desired to 
 rebel, would have found England in a position of the greatest
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 309 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 embarrassment and difficulty. Not only was there no sign of 
 disloyalty, but numerous uncalled-for and unmistakable manifesta- 
 tions of loyalty to the British government in India. The behavior 
 of India, therefore, during the administration of Lord Curzon may 
 be taken as the best answer concerning the attitude of the natives of 
 India toward the rule of the British, and as to the security of 
 English rule in the great peninsula. 
 
 It was exceedingly fortunate that the visit of the Prince and 
 Princess of Wales to India had been arranged for the cool season 
 of 1905-1906, for it came just at a time when something was 
 needed to divert the minds of all^ and especially the natives, from 
 the regrettable incident of the army quarrel. The prince and 
 princess arrived at Bombay on board the Renown on November 
 9, 1905, the anniversary of the king's birth. The privilege of 
 welcoming them was accorded to Lord Curzon as his last function 
 in India. A few days later, on November 18, Lord Minto, the 
 new viceroy, arrived, and Lord Curzon introduced him to the 
 people of India as " a viceroy of ripe experience, strong sense of 
 duty, sound judgment, and great personal charm." On the same 
 day Lord Curzon embarked from Bombay for England. Gilbert 
 John Murray Kynynmound Elliot is a descendant of the first earl 
 of Minto, who was governor-general of India from 1807 to 1813, 
 and was born in 1847, an d succeeded as fourth earl of Minto in 
 1 89 1. He was educated at Eaton and Cambridge. He served 
 in the Turkish army in 1877 and in the Afghan war in 1879. He 
 was secretary to Lord Roberts in South Africa in 1881, and served 
 in Egypt in 1882. He was military secretary to Lord Lansdowne 
 in Canada from 1883 to 1885, and was governor-general of Canada 
 from 1898 to 1904. 
 
 During their tour, extending from their arrival at Bombay on 
 November 9, 1905, to their departure from Karachi on March 19, 
 1906, the Prince of Wales and his wife were welcomed every- 
 where in the most royal manner, and their tour was a source of 
 gratification to themselves, to the people of India, and to the 
 British government. The wide experience of Sir Walter Law- 
 rence as private secretary for Lord Curzon fitted him admirably 
 for the duty of attending upon the prince during the tour. The 
 importance of Lord Curzon's policy in dealing with the native 
 princes was emphasized by the prolonged visits made to all of the 
 most important of the native rulers. Every section of the empire
 
 310 INDIA 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 was visited. Mysore, in the extreme south, and Darjiling and 
 Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas, Mandalay in Burma, and 
 Jammu in Kashmir, Landi Kotal on the farther side of the Khaibar 
 Pass, and Quetta in Baluchistan show that the visit extended to 
 the farthest borders of the empire. This not only illustrated the 
 extension and increased security of the empire, but also the vast 
 extension of the railroad systems since the visit of the prince's 
 father exactly thirty years before. The demonstrations of loyalty 
 which greeted the prince were a touching testimonial of the native 
 appreciation of the British rule, and a pleasant augury for the 
 administration of the new viceroy. 
 
 At the meeting of the Indian National Congress in December, 
 1906, the discussions were even more anti-British than they had 
 been the year before. Serious signs of unrest began to develop in 
 Eastern Bengal and the Punjab, and at the National Congress in 
 1907 the election of a president was accompanied by so much sedi- 
 tious talk and violence that the Congress was adjourned. Two 
 political parties had been formed : the Moderates, who wanted a 
 form of colonial self-government similar to that of Canada and 
 Australia, and the Extremists, who desired independence. The 
 majority of the members wished to employ only constitutional 
 means for the attainment of greater freedom. 
 
 In the latter part of 1907, Sir James Willcocks led a primitive 
 expedition against the Zakka Khels, an Afridi tribe; although this 
 expedition was successful there was trouble with the tribes on 
 the Mohmand border early in 1908. In April Sir James Willcocks 
 again took the field and he was aided by the amir of Afghanistan, 
 who had previously ordered his rebellious subjects to lay down 
 their arms, and who now sent a large body of his troops to co- 
 operate with the British. Two attacks were made and before June, 
 1908, the Mohmand tribes had submitted. 
 
 Attempts on the life of Sir Andrew Fraser, the Lieutenant- 
 Governor of Bengal, followed by the assassination of a magistrate, 
 the killing of three persons by a bomb thrown in a carriage, train- 
 wrecking, and other acts of violence, led to many arrests by the 
 police and disclosed a widespread plot by a section of the Extremist 
 party for the destruction of property and murder of officials. The 
 government was compelled to adopt severe measures; two of these 
 related to seditious utterances in the press and punishment for 
 illegal use of explosives. As the repression of the newspapers has
 
 UNDER BRITISH CROWN 310a 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 always been objected to by Indian agitators, no action was allowed 
 to be taken except on application of the local governments. Under 
 these laws Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leader of the Extremists, was 
 sentenced to six years' transportation for seditious utterances. In 
 Bombay there were riots accompanied by loss of life but peaceful 
 conditions were gradually restored. Most of these agitators were 
 Bengalis, but the great majority of the Mohammedans remained 
 loyal to the British. However, there were a number of riots be- 
 tween Hindus and Mohammedans, due to religious differences. 
 
 During 1908, there was also much discussion concerning the 
 fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's proclamation transferring 
 the government of India from the East India Company to the 
 crown. Some of the agitators claimed that the terms of the pro- 
 clamation promising self-government had been violated. On No- 
 vember 1 occurred the anniversary, and the following day the King 
 sent a message to the people of India. The Viceroy, Lord Minto, 
 read it at a durbar at Jodhpur ; it contained a remission of various 
 sentences for criminal offenses and promised an extension of the 
 principle of representative institutions ; it also spoke of the govern- 
 ment's impartiality in protecting religious worship and of the 
 progress being made in abolishing distinctions of race as a test of 
 admission to positions of public authority. In the same year Keir 
 Hardie, the British labor leader, visited India and returned to Eng- 
 land with a determination to make the "wrongs" of India a subject of 
 political agitation in Great Britain. He did not achieve any mate- 
 rial success in that line but he did contribute to a stronger senti- 
 ment in favor of a more liberal government for India. 
 
 Early in 1909, Lord Morley, the British Secretary of State for 
 India, announced that measures would be taken to increase the 
 native representation in the legislative council of the Viceroy but 
 that nothing would be done that would in any way weaken the 
 central authority. On May 26, King Edward gave his consent to 
 Lord Morley's reforms. The striking feature of the Morley scheme 
 is the fact that in the provincial legislative councils the native 
 members are to be in the majority, although the head of the pro- 
 vince at his own discretion may withhold his consent to any meas- 
 ure. Both the English officials and the East Indian publicists are 
 firm in their belief that this veto power will not be abused. An- 
 other feature of the reform measure is the expansion of the Supreme 
 Legislative Council. The official majority is retained but the non-
 
 310b INDIA 
 
 1905-1910 
 
 official members are given increased powers which will enable them 
 to check the officials. The native members are given a wide range 
 of subjects to discuss in the council and they are permitted to move 
 resolutions recommending the removal of an undesirable statute or 
 the enactment of a legal measure. The right to discuss financial 
 statements and to make recommendations about money affairs to 
 the government has also been granted to the natives. Those Indian 
 citizens who are to assist in the governing of their country are to 
 be elected by popular vote. 
 
 In July, 1909, just a few weeks after the king's sanction of these 
 reform measures, Colonel Sir William Curzon-Wyllie, one of Lord 
 Morley's aides, was shot and killed in London by a Hindu fanatic 
 named Madar Lai Dhinagri. On November 14, an attempt was 
 made to assassinate Lord Minto as he and Lady Minto were driv- 
 ing through the city of Ahmedabad, India. Two bombs were 
 thrown at the carriage, but both were intercepted, and falling on 
 soft sand failed to explode. The would-be assassins made their 
 escape but they were probably members of the Extremist party. 
 On November 15 Lord Morley's plans for the reformation of 
 Indian governmental affairs were put into operation. Various dis- 
 turbances throughout the country culminated in the assassination 
 of a British chief magistrate of the Indian service at Bombay. The 
 Indian National Assembly was convened at Lahore on December 
 27, 1909.
 
 HISTORY OF PERSIA 
 
 By W. Harold Claflin, M. A. 
 
 Department of History, Harvard University
 
 HISTORY OF PERSIA 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 THE SASSANIAN DYNASTY. 218-643 A. D. 
 
 THERE are but few nations of the earth which can match 
 the boast of Persia: that despite an unexampled series 
 of conquests and subjugations she has as a nation played 
 a great part in world history in ancient, in mediaeval, and in modern 
 times. In ancient times she stands forth, first among the great 
 conquering nations, next as the only power able to cope with the 
 Roman colossus. In mediaeval times she became the mistress of 
 the intellectual world, the paradise of poetry, the literary center 
 and dispenser of light for all the East. In modern times she ap- 
 pears again as a great political state courted by Europe, influ- 
 encing the Asiatic expansion of European powers, splitting the 
 Mohammedan world by her secession from the orthodox faith. 
 And finally, after producing the last of the great series of Asiatic 
 conquerors whose exploits and whose spoils revive for us the 
 marvels of the Arabian Nights, she sinks rapidly into decay, and 
 like many another Asiatic power, falls an easy prey before the 
 more scientific civilization of modern Europe. 
 
 Persia, or Iran, was divided by the ancients into three parts: 
 the coast, the mountain, and the plain. This description holds 
 good for the modern Persia of the shahs, which, clipped of many 
 provinces as it is, still corresponds in the main to the empires of 
 former times. The coast region lying along the Persian Gulf 
 forms a low, narrow, unhealthful strip cut off to the north by a 
 mountain wall which approaches at times to within a mile of the 
 sea and again recedes to a distance of twenty miles. This region, 
 arid and intensely hot, bears a strong resemblance to the opposite 
 coast of Arabia and indeed is chiefly peopled by Arabs. Back of 
 the mountain wall, which is penetrated here and there by difficult 
 passes the caravan routes to the interior lies a mountainous 
 region diversified in parts by lovely valleys and broad plains. This 
 is Persia proper, the cradle of the race and the center of the ancient 
 
 313
 
 814 PERSIA 
 
 218 A. D. 
 
 empire. Here lie the ruins of the ancient cities Persepolis, Susa, 
 Pasagardae. Here is the famous Vale of Shiraz, famed in all 
 the East for its wine and roses. But on the whole the region is 
 desolate and in parts scarcely habitable. Back of this hilly coun- 
 try lies the great plateau of Iran, stretching from the fertile Tigris 
 Valley on the west to the mountains of Afghanistan on the east, 
 and northward to the Caspian and the River Oxus. This vast and 
 lofty plateau, traversed in part by lofty mountain ranges, is in 
 general desolate and barren, unwatered save for springs and sub- 
 terranean channels. To the west lie the grain lands of ancient 
 Media and the mountainous territory of the Karduchi, the modern 
 Kurdistan; to the east, cut off by sandy deserts and salt marshes, 
 lies the great province of Khurasan, fertile and well-wooded. To 
 the north the huge bulk of the Elburz Mountains, culminating in 
 lofty Demavend, the sacred mountain of Iran, and the still more 
 famous Ararat, cuts off the plateau from the Caspian. The well- 
 wooded valleys of the Elburz, watered by rushing mountain 
 streams, are among the most picturesque and delightful spots in 
 the country. On the whole, however, the plateau of Iran is a 
 bleak and scanty region, suffering from extremes of heat and cold, 
 but still the birthplace of a strong and virile race. 
 
 The native Persian of to-day has, after centuries of oppres- 
 sion and constant mixture with foreign races, sadly degenerated 
 from his prototype of Achaemenian or Sassanian times. The 
 Tajiks, as they are called, form the bulk of the settled population, 
 and are merchants and agriculturists. Centuries of gross misrule 
 have destroyed their ancient manliness and independence and made 
 of them a servile, cunning, and even dishonest race. Strangely 
 enough the finest of the native Persians to-day are found among 
 the Guebres or Fire Worshipers, who have clung to the ancient 
 faith of Iran despite twelve hundred years of persecution. The 
 ruling race to-day, and the most virile, is the Turkoman largely 
 formed of nomad tribes who are still distinguished for their 
 marauding habits. 
 
 The first period of Persian history closed with the conquest of 
 the Achaemenian kingdom by Alexander the Great in 323 b. c. 
 It had been the idea of Alexander to fuse the Greeks and the Per- 
 sians and to establish himself at the head of a Perso-Hellenic state 
 with its capital at Babylon. But this magnificent dream died with 
 the conqueror and his successors were content to play the ordinary
 
 THE SASSANIAN DYNASTY 515 
 
 218 A. D. 
 
 role of conquerors, surrounding themselves with Greek mercen- 
 aries and intrusting the government of the provinces to Greek 
 satraps. The Persians were treated as slaves, their religion in- 
 sulted and their temples plundered. The Seleucid rule was not, 
 however, of long duration in Persia. About 250 b. c. the Par- 
 thians, a barbarous and warlike people of Turanian stock inhabit- 
 ing the region southeast of the Caspian, threw off the Greek rule 
 under their king, Arsaces, and founded an independent state. 
 About 163 b. c. the great Parthian king Mithradates overran 
 Persia, Media, and Babylonia and established on the ruins of 
 Seleucid power an empire which lasted four centuries and was the 
 first to check the expansion of the Mistress of the World. 
 
 Under the Parthian kings the state of the subject peoples of 
 Iran was somewhat improved. The Arsacide monarchs began at 
 least by conforming to the national religion, while the provinces 
 were ruled by native sub-kings who were permitted to do very much 
 as they pleased so long as they paid an annual tribute and sent the 
 required military levies to the king of kings at Ctesiphon. And so, 
 under native princes, themselves often of the priestly order, the 
 national religion and the traditions of former greatness were pre- 
 served in Persia through the long centuries of foreign domination. 
 
 The Parthian empire after a remarkable career finally went 
 the way of most eastern dynasties. Under a series of incapable 
 and luxurious kings the Romans conquered province after province 
 while the empire was torn by civil wars and local uprisings. The 
 last Parthian king, Artabanes, did much to revive the prestige of 
 the empire by his great victory over the Romans at Nineveh, but 
 even he was unable to check the process of disintegration. It was 
 natural under these circumstances that Persia should seek to revive 
 her ancient independence. A leader was found in Ardashir, or 
 Artaxerxes, said by tradition to be of lowly birth, but more probably, 
 to judge from his inscriptions, the sub-king of Persia. Rising in 
 sudden revolt Ardashir rapidly conquered all Susiana, Persia, and 
 Kirman, and when Artabanes, aroused to the situation, finally took 
 the field he was defeated and slain in battle on the plain of 
 Hormuz, 218 a. d. 
 
 This victory gave to Ardashir the dominion of the East. The 
 remaining Parthian provinces were quickly conquered, and the 
 new Persian empire soon extended from the Tigris to the borders 
 of Afghanistan. Not content with these successes Ardashir
 
 316 PERSIA 
 
 218-258 A. D. 
 
 dreamed of restoring the boundaries of the empire of Xerxes and 
 of expelling the Romans from all Asia. A short contest convinced 
 him of the futility of his plans and he contented himself with 
 the conquest of Armenia, where reigned a king of the Arsacide 
 dynasty. 
 
 The great work of Ardashir's later years was the restoration 
 of the old national religion throughout Iran. The religion given 
 to the Persians by Zoroaster had soon been corrupted from a pure 
 monotheism into a dualism wherein two equal and independent 
 principles Ahura Mazda (Ormazd) the principle of good, and 
 Angro Mainyus (Ahriman) the principle of evil, are represented 
 in eternal contention. To this belief was later added the worship 
 of the elements fire, air, earth, water and the introduction of new 
 divinities, Mithra, the sun god, and Anaitis, the Babylonian goddess 
 of love. To remove the corruptions which had crept in under 
 Parthian rule and so to restore the former purity of worship 
 Ardashir ordered a collection of the precepts of Zoroaster in one 
 volume. The work was intrusted to ten priests chosen from an 
 assembly of forty thousand of the Magi and the result was the 
 Zend-Avesta, the authorized bible of Zoroastrianism. 
 
 The dynasty of the Sassanidse, so called from Sassan, the 
 grandfather of Ardashir, ruled over Persia for more than four 
 centuries and raised the empire to a height of glory and prosperity 
 not surpassed by that of the Achaemenians. The external history 
 of the period is marked by an almost continual struggle between 
 Persia as heir of the Parthians, and Rome the heir of the Greeks. 
 The contest of centuries, waged for the possession of the border 
 provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia, brought no lasting ad- 
 vantage to either side, but so exhausted the rivals that in the end 
 they both fell an easy prey to the young and vigorous power of the 
 Mohammedans. As in most oriental dynasties, so in the Sas- 
 sanian, the personal equation is the chief factor in the progress oi 
 the nation. Under able kings Persia reached the heights of 
 strength and prosperity; under weak ones she quickly fell into 
 depths of weakness and disorder. Here we can glance at only a 
 few of the great figures which made the Sassanian dynasty one of 
 the most notable in the history of Asia. 
 
 Ardashir was succeeded in 240 by his son Shahpur or Sapor 
 (the King's Son). The reign of Shahpur is distinguished for his 
 wars with the Roman empire. In the first of these the Persians,
 
 THE SASSANIAN DYNASTY 
 
 317 
 
 258-272 A. D. 
 
 taking advantage of the supposed weakness of the young emperor, 
 Gordian, captured the powerful fortress of Nisibis, overran Syria 
 and surprised the great city of Antioch, the Roman metropolis of 
 the East. Gordian, however, showed unexpected energy, routed the 
 Persians in numerous battles and only his murder saved Persia 
 from a counter invasion. The second war with Rome was, like the 
 first, provoked by Shahpur, but its outcome was very different. 
 Antioch was again sacked by a Persian army and the Emperor 
 Valerian defeated and taken prisoner to drag out a miserable ex- 
 istence as slave of the king of kings the first Roman emperor to 
 fall into barbarian hands. After ravaging Syria and Cappadocia 
 
 GREATEST EXTEHT OF 
 o THE PERSIAN EMPIRE 
 
 ETHiop 
 
 Shahpur returned in triumph with a vast booty to Ctesiphon, but 
 his glory was somewhat dimmed by the defeat of part of the army 
 at the hands of Odenatus, prince of Palmyra, whose overtures had 
 been haughtily rejected by the Persian. 
 
 The rest of the reign of Shahpur was generally peaceful. 
 The king devoted his energies to the building of a new capital to be 
 called by his name, and to putting down the Manichean heresy, a 
 strange mixture of Persian and Christian beliefs which also 
 troubled eastern Christendom for two centuries and found echoes in 
 western Europe during the Middle Ages. Shahpur was undoubtedly
 
 318 PERSIA 
 
 272-531 A. D. 
 
 one of the most remarkable of the Sassanidae, not only as a warrior, 
 but as a statesman and as an administrator. 
 
 The first two Sassanian princes were men of exceptional 
 ability. With their successors the rapid degeneration so noticeable 
 in oriental dynasties set in. Armenia became independent once 
 more and the great Roman emperor, Diocletian, forced Persia to 
 cede him five of her best provinces. With Shahpur II. who, pro- 
 claimed king of kings at his birth, reigned for seventy years, 309,- 
 379, a new era of prosperity began. On the death of the Emperor 
 Constantine, Shahpur declared war on his weak successor, and 
 after inflicting on the Romans their worst defeat since the time of 
 Crassus, laid siege to the fortress of Nisibis. But the valor of the 
 bishop, St. James, saved the city and Shahpur was recalled to the 
 east by an invasion of the Massagetse, a Tatar tribe of central 
 Asia. A new war with Rome brought a formidable invasion of 
 Persia by the Emperor Julian the Apostate, who entered Meso- 
 potamia and advanced to the Persian capital Ctesiphon. His 
 death in the battle of Samrah, 363, freed Shahpur from a most 
 formidable enemy and enabled him to force the Romans into 
 a treaty by which all their recent conquests as well as Armenia 
 and Nisibis were surrendered to the Persians. Thus the reign of 
 Shahpur left Persia in the highest position she had occupied since 
 the days of the Achaemenides. Shahpur well deserves his title of 
 the Great and was with one exception the ablest of the Sassanian 
 rulers. 
 
 The following century of Persian history is marked by no 
 great rulers. Its chief events were the wars with the Ephthialtes 
 or " White Huns," a Turkish tribe who at one time forced the 
 Persians to pay them tribute, and the attempts of the Persian 
 kings to convert Armenia to Zoroastrianism. The Armenians had 
 been among the earliest converts to Christianity, as they have been 
 among its steadiest adherents. As between Rome and Persia their 
 sympathies naturally inclined through ties of religion to the former 
 and in the reign of Theodosius a large part of Armenia had defi- 
 nitely been attached to the Roman empire. 
 
 The attempt to root out Christianity in that part of the coun- 
 try which the Persians still held led to a national uprising headed 
 by the patriots, Vartan and Valian, which finally forced the 
 Persians to make peace and permit the complete restoration of the 
 Christian Church. The result was that Persarmenia from being
 
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 THE SASSANIAN DYNASTY 319 
 
 531-579 A. D. 
 
 a constant source of weakness to Persia now became under a rule 
 of toleration one of her pillars of strength. 
 
 The reign of Shah Khusru or Chosroes, surnamed Anushir- 
 wan, 531-579, raised the Sassanian empire to its pinnacle of glory. 
 The Persian army was carried into regions whither no eastern 
 conqueror had yet penetrated, while better still the internal condi- 
 tion of the empire was prosperous as never before. Khusru in- 
 herited from his predecessor, Kobad, a Roman war which the 
 genius of the great Belisarius, the ablest general of his age, had 
 already rendered disastrous to the Persians. The first care of 
 Shah Khusru was to make peace with the empire, though the rapid 
 advance in the power of Justinian could not fail to cause him 
 anxiety. While Belisarius was engaged in conquering Africa and 
 Italy for his master, embassies came to the Persian court from the 
 Goths and Armenians begging him to come to their succor before 
 Justinian had attained his aim of universal empire. Khusru by this 
 time needed little persuasion and in 543 crossed the Euphrates with 
 a vast army, invaded Syria and appeared under the walls of An- 
 tioch, which had not seen a Persian army for three centuries. The 
 " Queen of the East," then at the height of its splendor, fell after 
 a short resistance and Khusru gave its churches and palaces up 
 to pillage and to the flames. Then after visiting the coast of the 
 Mediterranean and holding chariot races at Antioch he returned 
 leisurely to Ctesiphon bearing an enormous booty. A renewal of 
 the contest, however, resulted less favorably to the Persians, and 
 Khusru was obliged to cede the province of Lazica on the Black 
 Sea to the Romans, 562 a. d. 
 
 Finally freed on the side of Rome, Khusru turned his atten- 
 tion to Arabia, where the Christian Abyssinians had invaded and 
 conquered the rich province of Yemen on the Red Sea. Encour- 
 aged by fugitive Arabs who reached his court Khusru dispatched 
 an expedition by sea from the Persian Gulf to Aden, the natives 
 rose in revolt, and the Abyssinians were driven back across the sea. 
 Yemen from an Abyssinian became a Persian dependency with a 
 Persian general as king. In 572 another war broke out on the 
 Roman frontier. Khusru took the field in person with 40,000 
 horse and 100,000 foot and took the fortress of Daras, the key to 
 Syria and Asia Minor. The war was still in progress when the 
 great king died, 579, after a reign of forty-eight years. 
 
 Khusru Anushirwan was as great in peace as in war. He re-
 
 320 PERSIA 
 
 579-615 A. D. 
 
 formed the administration of the empire, dividing it into four 
 great governments intrusted to faithful servants who watched 
 over the satraps of the provinces. The great king himself made 
 frequent progresses through his dominions to watch over the 
 administration of justice and to punish dishonest officials. He re- 
 formed the system of taxation substituting land and property taxes 
 for the old oppressive tithes or payments in kind. To prevent ex- 
 tortion he placed the supervision of the collection of the revenues in 
 the hands of the Magian priesthood. The army was reorganized 
 and fixed wages established, the king himself as general-in-chief 
 receiving 4001 dirhems, one dirhem (twelve cents) more than any 
 of his generals. Much attention was given to the encouragement 
 of agriculture by the building of canals and irrigation ditches, 
 while to increase the population marriage was made compulsory. 
 Khusru was also a patron of learning. He gave refuge to many 
 Greek sages driven by persecution from the dominions of Justinian 
 and in his reign the annals of the kingdom were collected, forming 
 the basis for the later Shah-nameh of Ferdousi. A university was 
 founded at Susa where medicine, philisophy, rhetoric, and astron- 
 omy were taught. In many ways Khusru was a man far in advance 
 of his time. Though his power was unlimited and his rule severe, 
 he was by no means a tyrant. He permitted freedom of worship 
 to all religions, and we learn from the anecdotes told of him that 
 his respect for individual rights, whether of rich or poor, was of 
 the highest. On the whole the greatest and best of the Sassanian 
 kings, perhaps the greatest in all Persian history, he amply de- 
 served the simple yet glorious title of " the Just." 
 
 The usual temporary collapse followed the death of Khusru, 
 but the empire was again united by the accession of Khusru II., 
 surnamed Parviz, " the Generous," 591-628, who gained his throne 
 from the usurper Bahram with the aid of the Romans. The reign 
 of the second Khusru was the most remarkable in Sassanian an- 
 nals, marking as it does the extremes of elevation and depression 
 in Persian power. The whole reign of Khusru is the history of 
 one continuous war with the Roman empire of the East. 
 
 After the murder of his friend and ally, Maurice, in 603, 
 Khusru declared war on the weak tyrant, Phocas, and during the 
 period of disorder which afflicted the empire overran and conquered 
 in a few years all Syria and Asia Minor. Aided by a revolt of 
 the Jews, Damascus and Jerusalem were taken in 615 and the in-
 
 THE SASSANIAN DYNASTY 321 
 
 615-633 A. D. 
 
 habitants massacred. The next year the Persian general, Shahr 
 Barz, conquered Egypt which had not seen a foreign invader since 
 the days of Julius Caesar. Meantime another Persian army ad- 
 vanced through Asia Minor and appeared at Chalcedon on the 
 Bosporus opposite Constantinople. Thus in fifteen years the 
 Romans had lost all their Asiatic and east African territories held 
 for six centuries against Parthian and Persian. The new emperor, 
 Heraclius, reduced to his capital, took the desperate resolve of 
 leaving Constantinople to its fate and carrying the war into the 
 enemy's country. Embarking his army in a great fleet he crossed 
 the Black Sea to Trebizond and thence invaded Armenia with 120,- 
 000 men, everywhere defeating the Persians and putting Khusru 
 himself to flight. The next year he landed again on the Black 
 Sea coast and marched straight across Asia Minor to Cicilia, de- 
 feating on the way Shahr Barz, the best of the Persian generals. 
 In 625 the Persians persuaded the Bulgarians and Avars to make 
 with them a combined attack on Constantinople. But the Greek 
 fleet patrolling the Bosporus held the allies apart and the northern 
 hordes could make no impression on the fortifications of the city. 
 
 In 627 Heraclius again took the field and advanced from 
 Armenia into the heart of the Persian empire. Khusru was de- 
 feated in the great battle of Nineveh and his capital of Dastaghard 
 fell into the hands of the Romans. The shah fled to Ctesiphon, 
 where he perished in a palace revolution after witnessing the loss 
 of all his conquests and the devastation of his own provinces, 628 
 a. d. His death was the signal for the close of the terrible struggle 
 which had ravaged western Asia for twenty-four years. By the 
 treaty of peace the boundaries between the two empires were 
 restored as they had existed before the war, so that the contest 
 had no further result than the complete exhaustion of both sides. 
 The usual confusion followed the fall of Khusru till in 632 
 the nobles raised to the throne Yezdigerd III., the last of the 
 Sassanidae. 
 
 While the two great empires of the East had been locked in 
 a death struggle for supremacy, the prophet Mohammed had been 
 preaching the One God to the pagan tribes of Arabia, and uniting 
 them by persuasion or force under the banner of the new faith. Mo- 
 hammed had begun his mission about the year 614 a. d. By the time 
 of his death, in the same year that Yezdigerd mounted the Persian 
 throne, all Arabia had been converted to Islam (literally the Sur- 
 
 \
 
 322 PERSIA 
 
 633-641 A. D. 
 
 render to God), and the Arabs were prepared to carry their 
 proselytizing zeal to the surrounding nations. With the succession 
 to the kalifate of Abu Bekr, the father-in-law of Mohammed, began 
 the wonderful career of Arab conquest. In 633 the Arabs led by 
 Khalid, the Sword of God, overran the Persian provinces to the 
 west of the Euphrates. But in the following year the Persians 
 reconquered the region and drove the Arabs back into the desert. 
 When Kalif Omar heard the news he cried, " I swear by the Lord 
 that I will smite down the proud princes of Persia with the sword 
 of the princes of Arabia." A call to arms was sent through all 
 Arabia and Sa'd ibn Walik, known as the Ravening Lion, with 
 30,000 men marched to Kadesia on the edge of the Syrian desert. 
 Thence messengers were sent to Yezdigerd urging him to embrace 
 Islam. It is said that the Persian in scorn ordered a clod of earth 
 to be brought and given to the Arabs, who received it gladly as an 
 omen of the conquest of Persia. 
 
 The Persian host of 120,000 men with 30 war elephants, led 
 by Rustam, the best of the Persian generals, advanced to meet the 
 Arab army which was drawn up under the walls of Kadesia. The 
 first day's battle favored the Persians, whose war elephants spread 
 terror in the Arab ranks. But the Arabs received reinforcements 
 during the night (whence the name " the night of succors "), and 
 now more accustomed to the elephants, renewed the combat. After 
 three days more of desperate fighting Rustam was slain and the 
 Persian host put to flight. 
 
 Kadesia was the beginning of the end for the Persian mon- 
 archy. In the following year Sa'd with 60,000 men captured 
 Ctesiphon, the magnificent capital of Persia, with a booty so 
 enormous that even the Arab historian is at a loss to describe it. 
 The spoil is said to have reached 900,000,000 dirhems ($108,000,- 
 000), so that each of the soldiers received as his share 1200 pieces 
 of silver. Among the treasures found in the royal palace was a 
 great carpet of white brocade, 450 feet long and 90 feet broad, 
 with a border worked in precious stones to represent a garden of 
 flowers, the leaves formed of emeralds, the blossoms of rubies, 
 sapphires, and pearls. 
 
 All Mesopotamia and Irak was now in the hands of the Arabs 
 who, at the command of Omar, halted for a time and consolidated 
 their conquest by founding the cities of Bussorah and Kufa. In 
 641, after the conquest of Syria was complete, the tide turned east-
 
 THE SASSANIAN DYNASTY 323 
 
 41-643 A. D. 
 
 ward once more. Yezdigerd had collected an enormous army for 
 a final effort to save his throne. But the Persian host was almost 
 annihilated in the decisive battle of Nehavend, " the Victory of 
 Victories " and with Nehavend the whole Persian empire fell 
 before the Mohammedan conquerors. Here and there isolated 
 stands were made by local chieftains, but all organized resistance 
 was at an end. The unhappy Yezdigerd fled to Merv and main- 
 tained for ten years a fugitive existence, ever seeking help to 
 recover his throne, only to perish obscurely in a miller's hut in 
 652 A. D. 
 
 The Sassanian period was one of the most glorious in Persian 
 history. The power and magnificence of the kings is attested even 
 by the few remains which have survived the centuries since their 
 time such as the palaces of Ctesiphon, Firzabad, and Mashita. 
 The architecture of the period, without losing the majesty of that 
 of earlier times, had gained in variety of expression and in richness 
 of detail. The sculptures of Sassanian times, used to describe both 
 religious ceremonies and exploits of the kings, show such remarkable 
 skill and vigor that many have declared them to be the work of 
 Greek and Roman artists in Persian service. But though Greek 
 and even Hindu influence is evident in the remains, still, on the 
 whole, the art of the period was thoroughly national. Centuries 
 of decay and ravages scarcely equaled in history have left few 
 records of the splendor of the Sassanians, but such as they are they 
 bear witness to a time of great artistic activity. Of the palace of 
 Ctesiphon nothing remains save a majestic arch or portal, 85 feet 
 in height, and 72 in breadth, which is in itself sufficient to con- 
 vince us that this was the most magnificent of Sassanian palaces. 
 The palace of Mashita, built by Khusru II. in the land of Moab, 
 gives a better idea of the work of the Sassanian kings. It was 
 built in the form of a square, 730 feet on a side, the walls strength- 
 ened by semicircular towers, the interior a succession of vaulted 
 chambers and spacious courts culminating in a great central hall 
 which was surmounted by a vast dome. The chief fagade, 200 
 feet long, is notable for its decorations of sculptured diaper work 
 in stone a bewildering maze of vines and foliage combined with 
 birds and animals. For richness and delicacy this example of 
 Sassanian sculpture is unsurpassed in the work of any other age 
 or clime. 
 
 The Persia of Sassanian times was essentially a land of city
 
 PERSIA 
 
 643 A. D. 
 
 folk. In districts now deserted save for wandering nomads once 
 stood great cities such as Susa, Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Hecatompylos, 
 Persepolis, and Ecbatana, the modern Hamadan. 
 
 Agriculture was more extensive than it is to-day, though 
 tribes of herdsmen roamed the vast plains just as they do now. 
 
 The Persian court was the most luxurious of the time. Its 
 splendor culminated apparently with Khusru II., whose harem of 
 three thousand concubines and ten thousand slave women is the 
 largest mentioned in history. The power of the kings was absolute 
 and unlimited. But their tyranny, which frequently degenerated 
 into fearful cruelty, was felt only by the upper classes, the nobles, 
 and courtiers. The mass of the people, especially after Khusru I., 
 were content and, for the age, well governed.
 
 Chapter II 
 
 FOREIGN RULE. 643-1502 
 
 THE Arab conquest of Persia did not involve an immediate 
 conversion of the inhabitants to the faith of Islam. The 
 religion of Zoroaster was at first spared and its followers 
 allowed to pay tribute, because like Jews and Christians they had 
 " received a writing " in the words of the Koran, and hence were 
 not to be treated as idolaters whose only choice was conversion or 
 the sword. Nevertheless the process of conversion went on rapidly, 
 aided by a decree of exemption for converts from certain oppres- 
 sive taxes. Indeed so numerous were the conversions and so low 
 had the revenue fallen that this bounty system had to be with- 
 drawn in the year 700. The old religion still lingered on and the 
 fire altars remained lighted in the remoter provinces long after the 
 conquest was complete. Later persecution drove the remaining 
 adherents of the ancient faith to seek refuge in India and only 
 a few thousand remain to-day in Persia. The result of this con- 
 version en masse has been that Persia has never, unlike the Otto- 
 man empire, been confronted with the problem of a great body 
 of unbelievers among her subjects. That vital source of weak- 
 ness to Turkey has been spared her more fortunate neighbor. 
 
 Though Persia as an independent nation had ceased to exist, 
 still the influence of her superior culture was powerful with her 
 conquerors. The Arabs absorbed to so great an extent the civil- 
 ization of Persia and the Sassanian methods of government that 
 the Kalif Suleiman once exclaimed, " I marvel at the Persians. 
 They have ruled a thousand years without for a moment having 
 need of us, while we have ruled but a hundred years and have 
 needed them every moment." 
 
 Under the Ommeyad dynasty of kalifs Persia was merely one 
 and not the most important province of the vast empire which 
 within a century after the death of Mohammed stretched from the 
 shores of the Atlantic to the borders of China and Hindustan. In 
 the history of the early kalifate we need note but one episode 
 
 325
 
 326 PERSIA 
 
 656-809 
 
 which, though creating little stir at the time, had a vital influence 
 on the future of Persia as well as of the whole Mohammedan 
 world. Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, whose favorite daughter 
 Fatima he married, became kalif after the assassination of Othman 
 in 656; but his authority did not extend beyond the eastern 
 provinces, for Muavia, governor of Syria, and Amru, the con- 
 queror of Egypt, refused him recognition. Ali was assassinated 
 in 661 and Muavia became kalif of all Islam. Of the two sons of 
 Ali, one, Hasan, died of poison, while the other, Hosein, after an 
 abortive attempt at rebellion was massacred with his family and 
 relations at Kerbela by the orders of the Persian governor, Obeid- 
 allah. The destruction of almost all the male descendants of the 
 Prophet aroused indignation throughout the Mohammedan world 
 as the tale borne from Mecca by pilgrims gained new and more 
 tragic details. With the pity bred in every household came also 
 a revived interest in the claims of Ali and his descendants to be 
 the true representatives of the Prophet. The movement gained 
 special force in Persia, where Ali had himself ruled and where the 
 general dislike for the Arabs and their doctrine found in this way 
 a chance for expression. A sect arose which held Ali and his de- 
 scendants, the Twelve Imams, to be the true successors of Moham- 
 med and rejected the regular line of kalif s and all their works. 
 This sect, though soon split into minor divisions and persecuted 
 as Shiahs or heretics, maintained itself in Persia till the day of 
 its own supremacy arrived. 
 
 With the advent of the Abbasside kalifs who transferred the 
 capital from Damascus to Bagdad near the Persian frontier, the 
 situation of Persia improved and her position in the Mohammedan 
 world became a more important one. The social distinctions be- 
 tween Arab and Persian began to disappear and Persian families, 
 like the Barmecides under Harun al Raschid, rose to the highest 
 offices in the state. The Abbasside dynasty culminated with Harun 
 al Raschid (Aaron the Just), 786-809, who ruled over a multitude 
 of peoples from Gibraltar to the Indus, forced the emperor of Con- 
 stantinople to pay him tribute and exchanged embassies with 
 Charlemagne and the emperor of China. His reign is, however, 
 chiefly notable for the revival of learning throughout the East. 
 Bagdad, then the most magnificent city in Asia, was the center to 
 which flocked the learned and talented, for the kalif was known 
 as a generous patron of both the sciences and the fine arts. This
 
 FOREIGN RULE 
 
 327 
 
 809-872 
 
 golden age of letters was attended by an increase in Persian in- 
 fluence. Persian dress became fashionable and the Persian 
 language became the tongue of polite society and of belles-lettres, 
 while Arabic remained the language of science and of the official 
 world. The learning of the Greeks was translated into Arabic 
 and Persian, while medicine, astronomy, geography, and mathe- 
 matics as well as the fine arts, were sedulously cultivated and even 
 advanced by original research. The name of Harun is best known 
 to us through the tales of the Arabian Nights which reveal the 
 
 deep impression made on the eastern mind by his wisdom and 
 splendor. 
 
 After his death, the Abbasside kalifate rapidly declined. The 
 weak vicegerents of the Prophet, shut up for the most part in their 
 luxurious palaces, gave themselves up to pleasure and relied more 
 and more for protection on their guard of Turkish mercenaries 
 which ruled the capital and set up or deposed rulers as it pleased. 
 In the provinces the governors or native princes threw off all but 
 nominal dependence on Bagdad and strove to establish hereditary 
 and independent states. Of the host of petty dynasties which thus 
 arose in Persia a few only can here be mentioned. 
 
 The Saffarid dynasty (872-902) was founded by Yusuf, the
 
 328 PERSIA 
 
 872-997 
 
 son of Leis the Saffar (coppersmith). Yusuf began his career as 
 leader of a band of robbers, and so increased his power that the 
 kalif was obliged to make him governor of Seistan, which, of all 
 the Persian provinces, preserved most of the ancient culture and 
 national spirit. Yusuf soon extended his dominions over Herat on 
 the one hand and over Shiraz and Fars on the other. At last he 
 broke into open revolt against the kalif but was defeated and died, 
 878. His brother Amr ruled over the greater part of the provinces 
 of Fars, Kirman, Seistan, and Khurasan, that is, a greater part of 
 the modern kingdom, till the year 900, when his power was broken 
 by Ismail the Samanid. 
 
 Ismail ibn Ahmad, founder of the Samanid dynasty (874- 
 999) was descended from a Persian noble of Bactria who, having 
 renounced Zoroastrianism, rose to high rank under the kalifs, while 
 his sons held the governments of Samarkand and Kashgar. In 
 903 Ismail having conquered the Saffarids in Khurasan brought 
 under his sway the vast region from the deserts of central Asia 
 to the Persian Gulf and from the borders of Irak to the River 
 Indus. Under him the cities of Samarkand and Bokhara attained 
 great splendor and became centers of civilization and learning 
 for the whole Mohammedan world. The empire which he had 
 founded lasted till 1004, when Samarkand and Bokhara were 
 captured by the Seljuk Turks, while the southern provinces fell 
 to the sultan of Ghazni. 
 
 The Buwayids, or Dilemites, who claim descent from Bahram 
 Ghor, the usurper against Khusru II., held in 932 the provinces 
 of Fars and Ispahan. A few years later they captured Bagdad 
 and ruled for the feeble kalifs with the title of amir-ul-omra, until 
 their overthrow, first by Mahmud of Ghazni and finally by the 
 Seljuk Turks. 
 
 More important than any of these fleeting dynasties was that 
 founded by Mahmud of Ghazni, 997-1030. Mahmud was the son 
 of Subuktigin, prince of Ghazni in Afghanistan, who had suc- 
 ceeded in spreading his sway over all that mountainous region, even 
 making an inroad into Hindustan. Mahmud, surnamed " the Vic- 
 torious," took up his father's career of conquest and in a series of 
 campaigns overran the Punjab and captured the sacred city of 
 Lahore. Recalled by an invasion of the Tatars into Khurasan, he 
 defeated and drove them beyond the Oxus. Then turning again 
 to India he spread his conquests eastward to the Ganges and south-
 
 FOREIGN RULE 329 
 
 997-1038 
 
 ward to Gujarat. A zealous Mohammedan, he converted multi- 
 tudes to the faith and laid the foundations for Mohammedan 
 power in India. 
 
 Mahmud professed the greatest respect for the kalif whom he 
 freed from the usurping Dilemites. In return the commander of 
 the Faithful made him his lieutenant and granted him the highly 
 prized title of sultan. Mahmud occupies a conspicuous position 
 in the illustrious line of Mohammedan conquerors. The extent of 
 his ravages is illustrated by the famous story told by his vizir of an 
 owl who daily wished long life to Mahmud because she was en- 
 abled to give her daughter the dowry of a hundred ruined villages. 
 Mahmud is also noted as a patron of literature. Among the four 
 hundred poets who were maintained at his court was Ferdousi, the 
 greatest epic poet of Persia, whose Shah-nameh, or Book of 
 Kings, has preserved for us Persia's traditions of her own past. 
 After the death of Mahmud his kingdom soon fell to pieces. The 
 Persian provinces were conquered by the Seljuk khans, while his 
 Indian empire with its capital at Lahore flourished till 1186 and 
 then fell before the sultans of Ghor. 
 
 Among the nomad tribes which were attracted to Persia by 
 the glowing accounts sent home by the Turkish mercenaries of the 
 kalif, the most powerful was that of the Seljuks. The Seljuks 
 were a branch of a Turkish race, the Holi Hu, who had wandered 
 from the steppes of Siberia and settled around the Caspian in the 
 eighth century of our era. Seljuk, from whom the tribe took its 
 name, was chief of a small principality with Bokhara as its capital. 
 His sons are said to have been invited into Persia by Mahmud of 
 Ghazni, himself, to war with him against the powerful Samanids. 
 The story runs that Mahmud demanded of the Seljuk envoy what 
 force they could bring to his aid. " Send this arrow," said the 
 envoy, presenting one of two which he carried, " and fifty thou- 
 sand horse will appear. Send the second arrow and an equal num- 
 ber will follow." " But suppose," asked Mahmud, " that I was in 
 distress, and needed all your exertions ? " " Then," replied the 
 Turk, " send my bow and two hundred thousand horse will obey the 
 summons ! " Mahmud was filled with astonishment and secret 
 alarm at this report of his allies' strength and prophesied the over- 
 throw of his own empire. 
 
 After the death of the great Ghaznivid, Toghrul Beg, chief 
 of the Seljuks who were now in possession of Khurasan, hearing
 
 330 PERSIA 
 
 1038-1093 
 
 of the weakness of the kalif, advanced into Persia and captured 
 Bagdad, taking the kalif prisoner. Toghrul treated his illustrious 
 captive with the utmost respect and the latter in return made the 
 Seljuk his viceroy with the title of sultan, thus adding immensely 
 to Toghrul's authority in the eyes of orthodox Mohammedans, who 
 still looked on the kalif as head of all Islam. Moreover, Toghrul 
 married one of the kalif's daughters despite the opposition of the 
 Abbassides, whose family pride had survived their loss of power. 
 
 Toghrul Beg was succeeded by his nephew Alp Arslan, the 
 Conquering Lion, 1063- 1073. The chief event of his short but 
 brilliant reign was the conquest of Asia Minor, which had been 
 held by the Byzantine emperors against the utmost efforts of the 
 Arab conquerors. In 1070 Alp Arslan encountered the Roman 
 army led by the emperor, Romanus Diogenes, at Manzikert. The 
 rashness of the Roman emperor resulted in the complete defeat of 
 his troops and laid all Asia Minor at the feet of the conqueror. 
 Romanus himself was taken prisoner, but met with a different fate 
 from his unhappy prototype, Valerian, eight centuries before. 
 Alp Arslan treated him with the utmost courtesy and respect and 
 released him and all his companions on the payment of a large 
 ransom. The Seljuk sultan now turned eastward and was prepar- 
 ing for the conquest of the trans-Oxus region, the former seat of his 
 race, when he fell by the hand of a prisoner whom he had just 
 condemned to death. He was buried in his favorite city of Merv 
 and over his tomb was engraved the inscription, " All ye who have 
 seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, come to Merv 
 and you will behold it buried in the dust." 
 
 Alp Arslan found a worthy successor in his son, Malak Shah, 
 1 073- 1 093, the most powerful monarch of the Seljuk dynasty. 
 His generals conquered all Syria and invaded Egypt, while to the 
 eastward his empire extended far beyond Samarkand and Bokhara, 
 and even the distant khan of Kashgar paid him tribute. We are 
 told that daily prayers were offered for his health in Mecca, Medina, 
 Jerusalem, Ispahan, Bagdad, Nishapur and Bokhara. The boat- 
 men on the Oxus were paid by bills of exchange drawn on Antioch 
 and current throughout the realm. No Mohammedan ruler had 
 held such an empire since the days of Harun al Raschid. Both 
 Alp Arslan and his son governed ostensibly as viceroys of the puppet 
 kalifs whose spiritual authority was still supreme throughout the 
 eastern Mohammedan world, and whose position may be likened
 
 FOREIGN RULE 331 
 
 1093-1141 
 
 to that of the Roman Pontiffs of to-day. This respectful attitude 
 of the Seljuk sultans did much to enhance their prestige among 
 Mohammedans. 
 
 The reigns of Alp Arslan and Malak Shah, chiefly celebrated 
 for their conquests, are just as notable for the peaceful achievements 
 which center round the name of the Nizam-ul-Mulk. Alp Arslan 
 selected for his chief vizir a native Persian, Abu Ali al Hassan, 
 known in history as Nizam-ul-Mulk (literally Ornamentor of 
 the State), who remained in office for twenty years. Under his 
 fostering rule Persia flourished as she had not for many genera- 
 tions. Hospitals and caravansaries were erected; bridges, roads, 
 and canals were built or repaired; agriculture and trade were en- 
 couraged; while the sultan and his vizir made frequent progresses 
 through the land to see that justice was maintained. Nor were 
 science and literature neglected. Colleges were established at Herat, 
 Nishapur, Ispahan, and Basra, while to the college at Bagdad was 
 added a law school and an astronomical observatory. Malak Shah 
 is unanimously praised by oriental writers for his greatness and 
 wisdom. But a great blot rests on his fame in his treatment of 
 Nizam-ul-Mulk. After serving his master faithfully for twenty 
 years the vizir was dismissed from office through the intrigues of 
 his enemies at court, and was shortly after assassinated by an 
 emissary of Hassan, chief of the Assassins and his personal foe. 
 Malak Shah did not long survive his great minister, and in dying, 
 1093, did much to hasten the fall of his empire by dividing it among 
 his sons. 
 
 The result of this disastrous policy was soon felt. The border 
 provinces on the west soon broke away from the empire and were 
 formed into the sultanates of Iconium, Mosul, Aleppo, and 
 Damascus, which played their part in the history of the Crusades. 
 In the east the process of disintegration was for a time postponed 
 by Sultan Sanjar, whose vassals ruled in Bagdad and Arabia while 
 he was engaged in extending the Seljuk power in India and 
 central Asia. With his death in battle against the Turkomans, in 
 1 141, perished the last vestige of a central power. Persia was soon 
 split up among a number of petty princes called atabegs (tutors) 
 who, originally governing as ministers for the Seljuk princes, 
 ended by usurping the power themselves. The kalif too, recovering 
 some of his temporal authority, ruled once more over Bagdad and 
 the province of Irak, while the eastern provinces of Persia fell into
 
 332 PERSIA 
 
 1141-1223 
 
 the hands of the sultans of Khuarezm. The sultanate of Khuarezm, 
 which took its name from the region between the Caspian and the 
 Ural Seas, was founded by the cupbearer of Malak Shah who 
 made his favorite governor of the trans-Oxus province. After 
 the death of Sanjar the princes of this dynasty set up an independent 
 state which soon became the most powerful in the East, extending 
 from Turkestan to the Persian Gulf. Under Sultan Ala-ad-din, 
 1 199-1220, Bokhara and Afghanistan were conquered. Ala-ad-din 
 seems to have adopted the Alid heresy, and was planning the de- 
 struction of the Abbasside kalifs when his empire was overthrown 
 by the invasion of the Mongols. 
 
 Of all the petty states growing out from the ruins of the 
 Seljuk monarchy, the most peculiar was that of the Assassins. 
 Chance had brought together in youthful friendship, the three most 
 notable men of their day in the East, Nizam-ul-Mulk, Omar 
 Khayyam, and Hassan ibn as-Sabbah. The three youths met at 
 the college of Nishapur where they studied under the learned Imam 
 el-Muwaffa, and before parting to seek their fortunes made a 
 compact that whoever among them succeeded in life should share 
 his good fortune with his comrades. Accordingly when Nizam 
 ul-Mulk became chief minister of the Seljuk empire, he gave a 
 pension to the dreamer, Omar, and a high office to the ambitious 
 Hassan. But the latter, jealous of his comrade's success, plotted 
 against him and being discovered took to flight. He soon joined 
 the fanatic sect of the Ismailites, a branch of the Alid heresy 
 organized into a sort of hierarchy, only the upper grades of which 
 held the full secrets of the sect. Hassan saw in this organization 
 an opportunity to raise himself again to power. Establishing his 
 seat at the Castle of Alamut (the Eagles' Nest) in the mountains 
 of northern Persia he soon drew about him hundreds of Ismailites 
 whom he proceeded to organize into a brotherhood of murder. 
 The neophytes were taught absolute obedience and complete self- 
 surrender and then sent out as messengers to strike down the 
 enemies of the order, nerved on by promises of the joys of Paradise 
 if they fell. Hassan is even said to have given them a foretaste of 
 this bliss by drugging them with hashish (whence some derive the 
 name of the sect) and conveying them to a beautiful garden, where 
 for a few days they enjoyed all the pleasures of the Moslem 
 Paradise. 
 
 The power of this terrible sect spread through Persia and Syria
 
 FOREIGN RULE 333 
 
 1038-1223 
 
 till the Old Man of the Mountains (Sheikh al Jebal), as the chief 
 of the order was called, ruled over a hundred castles. The murders 
 committed by the Assassins were often aimless and indeed the 
 order resembled in many ways the militant anarchists of to-day. 
 Despite the terror they spread throughout the East the sovereigns 
 of the day found them too useful as instruments of revenge to 
 attempt to suppress the scourge and they continued to flourish till 
 the general catastrophe of the Mongol conquest. 
 
 The Seljuk period of Persian history is the golden age of 
 Persian literature, and especially of poetry. Princes and atabegs 
 were proud to maintain poets and philosophers at their courts and 
 themselves sometimes aspired to be men of letters. We have seen 
 how Mahmud of Ghazni maintained at his court Ferdousi, who sang 
 the exploits of the ancient kings of Iran. Among the host of great 
 poets who succeeded him we can only note a few names in passing : 
 Abul Hasan Rudegi, who rose to such favor that he possessed two 
 hundred slaves to wait on him ; Nizami, the romantic author of the 
 Chamshe, to whom for one poem Kisil Arslan of Roum gave four- 
 teen estates; Nasir i Khusran, traveler and philosopher; Djalal- 
 ed-din, mystic and saint ; Omar Khayyam, satirist, philosopher, and 
 mathematician, best known to us for his Rubaiyat ; and a little later 
 Sheikh Muskhu-'d-Din, called Sa'di, the unrivaled didactic poet, 
 author of the divans of " Bustan (Fruit Garden)," and " Gulistan 
 (Rose Garden)," who ranks next to Hafiz as the most popular of 
 Persian poets. It is a striking tribute to the Persian love of the 
 beautiful that Sa'di's tomb, and that of Hafiz as well, are to this day 
 favorite goals of pilgrimage. Literary activity was, however, by 
 no means confined to poetry, as the career of the versatile Omar 
 Khayyam shows. Omar was the author of a treatise on mathe- 
 matics, an astronomer of note, and one of eight to draw up a 
 new calendar by order of Malak Shah which closely approaches our 
 own in accuracy. 
 
 While the brilliant empire of the Seljuks was entering into 
 its period of decay and disintegration, in another part of Asia a 
 power was in process of formation destined to affect fundamentally 
 the history of Asia and of eastern Europe. Persia from its position 
 on the southern highway between east and west had always been 
 subject to the inroads of these eastern hordes which since the days 
 of Attila had been precipitated wave on wave westward from the 
 borders of China. Hitherto Iran had, even when conquered by arms,
 
 334 PERSIA 
 
 1223-1256 
 
 been able to maintain and even extend her influence over the in- 
 vaders from Turan. Thus the Seljuk conquest was that of a 
 people in entire religious sympathy with their Iranian neighbors, 
 and Seljuk rule had proved a blessing instead of a scourge. But 
 the new hordes which now poured west and south from the vast 
 deserts of central Asia were entirely alien to Persia in race, creed, 
 and culture. 
 
 In 1205, Temuchen, after years of warfare, united under his 
 sway all the Mongol tribes from the deserts of Siberia to the 
 borders of China, and was proclaimed by them khakan or emperor, 
 assuming the title of Genghis Khan. After firmly establishing his 
 power and creating a marvelous military organization, Genghis sent 
 forth his generals west and south for the conquest of the world. The 
 dispute which led to the invasion of Persia was provoked by the 
 powerful sultan of Khuarezm, Ala-ad-din Mohammed, who wan- 
 tonly put to death several Mongol merchants, as well as an envoy 
 sent to demand reparation. In 1220 the Mongol armies poured 
 into Khuarezm, took Samarkand and Bokhara, and forced the sultan 
 to flight. From Turkestan the Mongols invaded Khurasan, and 
 the last Khuarezm sultan, Djala-ud-din, after a glorious, though 
 vain resistance, perished, a fugitive, in the hills of Kurdistan. The 
 invaders contented themselves with ravaging the conquered terri- 
 tories, and the civil wars which broke out after the death of 
 Genghis Khan, in 1227, left Persia in peace for twenty years. 
 Genghis Khan in dividing his territories among his sons gave 
 Khurasan and Persia to the youngest. But no attempt was made 
 to take possession of these lands till the accession of Mangu as 
 khakan, who promptly dispatched his brother Hulagu to secure 
 his inheritance. Hulagu with a vast army of horsemen and thou- 
 sands of Chinese engineers, skilled in the siege of towns, entered 
 Khurasan, in 1256, and marching westward stamped out the As- 
 sassins, took Bagdad, and put to death the Abbasside kalif, Al- 
 Mustassem. The great city was, we are told, given up to massacre 
 till the Tigris was swelled with the blood of the victims. With 
 the fall of Bagdad the Abbasside kalifate practically comes to an 
 end. A descendant of the house fled to Egypt and a shadowy 
 succession of kalifs remained there till the last of them surrendered 
 his title and claims to the Ottoman sultan, Selim. The petty states 
 of the atabega fell an easy prey to the Mongols, and Hulagu met 
 little resistance till he was defeated in Syria by the Mameluke sultan
 
 FOREIGN RULE 335 
 
 1256-1295 
 
 of Egypt the first check to the Mongol armies, hitherto deemed 
 invincible. 
 
 The Mongol conquest completed in 1258 was the most disas- 
 trous Persia had ever experienced. All resistance was punished by 
 indiscriminate massacres and the most revolting cruelties. Many of 
 the famous cities of olden times like Merv and Nishapur, which had 
 survived the Arab and Turkish conquests and even flourished 
 under them were now blotted out, while the greatest of all, Bagdad, 
 never recovered from the effects of Mongol fury. Only Fars, the 
 ancient Persia proper, was saved from the general ruin by its 
 prompt submission, and to this we owe the fact that Persian civil- 
 ization was not completely wiped out. 
 
 H.ulagu established his capital at Maragha, a delightful spot 
 among the hills of Azerbaijan, where he died in 1268. His suc- 
 cessors, once the conquest was completed, immediately set to work 
 to repair their own ravages and to make some attempts at assimila- 
 tion with their more cultivated subjects. At the time of the con- 
 quest the Mongols were pantheists, worshiping the powers of nature, 
 and hence, though far more tolerant than any other people of the 
 age, they were utterly abhorrent to their Mohammedan subjects. 
 Ahmad Khan, who ascended the throne in 1282, was the first to 
 adopt Islam. But having ordered a general persecution of Chris- 
 tians he so aroused the anger of his followers that they revolted and 
 put him to death. His nephew Arghun, 1284-1291, reversed the 
 policy of his predecessor, held to the ancient faith, persecuted the 
 Mohammedans, and treated the Christians with such favor that 
 Pope Nicholas IV. sent an embassy to thank him for his kind- 
 ness. Arghun seems to have corresponded with several European 
 sovereigns and especially with Philip IV. of France, to whom he 
 proposed an offensive alliance against the Mohammedan sultan of 
 Egypt. The reign of his successor, Kai-Khatu, a weak and ex- 
 travagant prince, is notable for a curious attempt to introduce the 
 use of paper currency into Persia. The use of paper money 
 became known to the Mongols through their relations with China, 
 where it had been commonly employed for some time. Kai-Khatu 
 having exhausted his resources bethought himself of this expedient 
 to refill the treasury. A decree was issued prohibiting the cir- 
 culation of the precious metals and establishing in every city bank- 
 ing houses, called Tschan Khana, where banknotes should be made 
 and issued. These notes, varying in value from one-half a dirhem
 
 336 PERSIA 
 
 1295-1336 
 
 (six cents) to ten dirhems ($1.20), were oblong pieces of paper 
 bearing besides a short inscription in Chinese, the Mohammedan 
 confession of faith and the Tatar titles of the king of Persia. The 
 value of the note was inscribed in the center, together with the date 
 of issue and a mandate commanding all to receive this currency. 
 The scheme was, however, a failure, for it aroused such general 
 execration throughout all the empire that Kai-Khatu was forced 
 to withdraw it to avoid a general rising. It was in the same reign 
 that Marco Polo the Venetian, after a residence of many years at 
 the court of the Great Khan in China came to Persia on his way 
 home in the suite of a Tatar princess sent to become the wife of the 
 Persian king. 
 
 Kai-Khatu was succeeded in 1295 by Ghazan Mahmud, the 
 ablest of the Mongol line. Ghazan began his reign by a vigorous 
 effort to break the power of the turbulent Mongol chiefs who had 
 become semi-independent princes. To gain the support of the 
 masses of the people in his struggle, he took the decisive step of 
 making public profession of his conversion to Mohammedanism 
 and his example was followed by 100,000 Mongol warriors. 
 Ghazan Mahmud did much to reform and consolidate his empire 
 and the institutes which he caused to be drawn up formed a model 
 of administrative law for his successors. But his work was only 
 of temporary duration and the long minority of his grandson Abu 
 Said saw the breakup of the empire amid civil wars. On its ruins 
 arose a host of petty states governed by Mongol or native chieftains. 
 Of these local dynasties which thus enjoyed a brief existence the 
 only one worthy of note was that of the Muzaffarids, 13 13-1393, 
 founded by Mubarz-ad-din, called Muzaffar " the Victorious." 
 This ruler held the province of Fars as well as Kirman and 
 Kurdistan, adopting as his capital the famous Shiraz, the garden 
 of Persia and the darling of poets. Here at the court of the 
 Muzaffarids flourished Hafiz, called Lishan ul Ghaid, the greatest 
 of Persian poets and one of the greatest of all time. Hafiz was by 
 profession a dervish and taught in the college at Shiraz. His fame 
 rests on his odes, whose exquisite sweetness gained for him the 
 title of Tschegerleb or Sugarlip. He sings of beauty and pleasure 
 in all their varied forms; of love, wine, flowers, nightingales. 
 Occasionally, too, in praise of God and his Prophet, lashing with 
 bitter scorn all manner of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and narrow 
 abhorrence of the good things of this world. The poetry of Hafiz
 
 FOREIGN RULE 337 
 
 1336-1401 
 
 has suffered the same fate as the Song- of Songs and the Rubaiyat, 
 for pious interpreters of the poet have tried to invest his sensuous 
 verses with depths of hidden meaning, religious allegory, and mys- 
 tical utterances. However this may be, the odes as pure poetry 
 stand without rival. Laden with the sweetest melody and clothed 
 in gorgeous imagery they are yet chastened by a classic purity of 
 style and a clear and unaffected diction. Hafiz was during his life 
 pursued by the hatred of the priesthood whose outward piety and 
 hypocrisy he scorned and satirized. But after his death his lyrics 
 soon became a national and sacred poetry and his tomb without 
 the walls of Shiraz and not distant from that of Sa'di, became a 
 favorite shrine for pilgrims. 
 
 The Muzaffarid dynasty after a short term of splendor fell 
 before the mightiest conqueror who had yet invaded the soil of 
 Persia. Amir Timur, surnamed Leng, or the Lame, was -born 
 in the province of Samarkand about the year 1336. After many 
 adventures and vicissitudes which are related in his " Institutes " 
 he became by 1380 the undisputed ruler of Turkestan and Kashgar, 
 overthrowing the power of the Mongol khans. Then turning 
 southward he ravaged Afghanistan and Khurasan, turning them 
 into deserts. In 1384, Timur entered Persia and easily overthrew 
 the last of the Mongol princes. The great city of Ispahan at first 
 submitted but suddenly revolted and put its Tatar garrison to death. 
 Timur retook the town and to make an example ordered a general 
 massacre of all the inhabitants. Seventy thousand heads were 
 raised in ghastly pyramids as a monument to his revenge and a 
 warning to those who dared oppose him. 
 
 Recalled for a time by a war against the Golden Horde of 
 Russia which he speedily overthrew, Timur again entered Persia 
 in 1393. All the princes submitted at once save the Muzzafarid 
 Mansur Shah, who, with his army of mailclad horsemen made a 
 brave resistance and fell in battle. The provinces of old Persia 
 which had escaped the horrors of the Mongol invasion now felt 
 the scarcely less thorough ravages of the Tatars. The capture of 
 Bagdad completed the conquest of Persia and Timur, placing the 
 government in the hands of his sons, returned to his favorite 
 residence of Samarkand. 
 
 The following years were occupied by campaigns in such 
 widely separated regions as Russia and Hindustan. The year 1401 
 saw Timur again in Persia preparing for the culminating struggle
 
 338 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 1401-1405 
 
 of his life against the sultan of the Ottoman Turks. The issue was 
 decided in the field of Angora, where the discipline of the Turkish 
 troops was of no avail against the generalship of Timur and the 
 vastly superior numbers of the Tatars. Sultan Bayezid was taken 
 prisoner to die of mortification and despair, while the Tatar 
 armies swept across Asia Minor, took and destroyed Smyrna and 
 appeared on the shores of the Bosporus. Here the sea, an utterly 
 alien element to the horsemen of Timur, checked further advance. 
 
 Timur did not long survive this, his greatest triumph. He died 
 in 1405 while preparing to lead an invasion of China. 
 
 At the close of his life Timur could look back on thirty years 
 of constant warfare in which he had ravaged the continent from 
 China to Egypt, from Delhi to Moscow. He died lord of an empire 
 beside which the Roman and the Macedonian shrink into insig- 
 nificance. Amir Timur (he never assumed a higher title) was, we 
 are told, of good stature, somewhat corpulent, with a fair com- 
 plexion and wonderfully brilliant eyes. He was a devout Moham- 
 medan, esteeming his conquest of the pagans of Hindustan to be 
 the proudest achievement of his life. Purely a conqueror and 
 destroyer, he inflicted an incalculable amount of suffering on the 
 human race and lacked either the desire or the capacity for organ- 

 
 FOREIGN RULE S39 
 
 1405-1502 
 
 izing his conquests. Yet he possessed some attractive qualities 
 and was by no means a barbarian. He was a man of some culture, 
 an admirer of Hafiz and a zealous patron of literature among his 
 own people, laying the foundations for an extensive literature in 
 Jagetai-Turki. He himself is supposed to have been the author 
 of two works his " Memoirs," and the " Institutes," which have 
 aroused the admiration of no less a person than the historian Gib- 
 bon. His marvelous achievements were largely made possible by 
 the conditions of Asia on his appearance. The Mongol dynasties 
 were everywhere falling to pieces, while his most dangerous op- 
 ponents, the Ottoman Turks, had not yet reached their full growth. 
 But the secret of his success lies still more in his own inexhaustible 
 energy and unfailing activity. " When I clothed myself in the 
 robes of empire " he says in the " Institutes," " I shut my eyes to 
 safety and to the repose which is found on the bed of ease." 
 
 Timur was succeeded by his son Kulil Sultan, whose amours 
 with the beautiful Shad-ul-Mulk are famous in eastern story and 
 ended by costing him his throne. His place was taken by the fourth 
 son of Timur, Shah Rokh, a wise and peaceful prince who had 
 governed Persia during his father's reign. Shah Rokh owed his 
 name to his father's enthusiasm for chess, for Timur had just 
 checkmated an opponent with his rook or castle when the news 
 of his son's birth was brought to him. Shah Rokh's reign was 
 spent in a constant effort to repair the ravages of his father, but 
 with his death in 1446 the unwieldy empire broke up in a turmoil 
 of civil wars between a host of claimants. The Persian provinces 
 remained nominally subject to the descendants of Timur, Babar, 
 Abu Seid, and Husein Mirza, who lost their provinces one by one 
 to the Turkomans. 
 
 The Turkomans were a nomad people of Turkish race who 
 had settled in Anatolia and Armenia and had split into two rival 
 tribes, the Black Sheep and the White Sheep. In 1466 Uzum 
 Hasan (Hasan the Long), chief of the White Sheep, overthrew 
 the prince of the rival tribe and became ruler of all Armenia and 
 Kurdistan. Continuing his conquests he soon routed the weak 
 successor of Timur and added most of Persia to his domains. He 
 was less successful, however, in a contest with Mohammed II., the 
 great Ottoman sultan, and his empire was a purely personal one 
 and did not long survive him.
 
 Chapter III 
 
 THE NEW PERSIAN EMPIRE. 1502-1733 
 
 THE death of Hasan marks an epoch in Persian history. 
 With him ended the series of foreign tyrannies which had 
 followed in rapid succession since the decline of the Ab- 
 bassides. In their stead arose a very different sort of dynasty based 
 on the national and religious sympathies of the people. From the 
 sacred province of Azerbaijan, the traditional home of the prophet 
 Zoroaster, came the race of the Safi, destined to carry out the 
 second great religious revival in Persian history and to establish a 
 native monarchy, the Safawi dynasty, such as had not existed since 
 the fall of the Sassanidse. 
 
 We have seen what causes led to the rise of the Alid or Aliite 
 sect, whose cardinal doctrines were reverence for Ali and his de- 
 scendants as the Twelve Imams, the true successors of the Prophet, 
 and rejection of the regular line of kalifs as well as of the Sunna 
 or body of tradition collected in their reigns. The followers of 
 Ali, called by their opponents Shiahs (sectaries), made most of 
 their converts in Persia, where hatred of the Arabs and a strong 
 inclination to mysticism caused the people to accept with gladness 
 the new belief. Thus in spite of long persecution the Shiahs made 
 continual progress and at the period we have reached formed the 
 bulk of the population. Among these sectaries the Safi family, 
 descended through Sheikh Safi from the seventh Imam, Musa 
 al Kasim, was highly reverenced both for noble birth and extreme 
 sanctity. In the days of Timur, the learned Sheikh Sudder-ud-Din 
 was sought out by the conqueror after his Turkish campaign and 
 asked what favor could be done him. " Release the tribes you 
 have led captive," was the reply of the sheikh. Timur did so and 
 the seven Turkish tribes, full of gratitude, became ardent disciples 
 of the holy man. Jumeyd, the grandson of Sudder-ud-Din, became 
 so influential and was followed by such crowds of pupils that Shah 
 Jahan in fear banished him from Azerbaijan and forced him to take 
 refuge with Uzum Hasan, whose daughter he married. In the 
 
 340
 
 THE NEW PERSIAN EMPIRE 341 
 
 1502-1524 
 
 confusion which followed the death of Hasan, Sheikh Ismail, grand- 
 son of Jumeyd, rose in revolt against the Turkomans, whom he 
 quickly defeated and at the end of four years found himself master 
 of all Persia, 1502. Thus easily, by aid of religious sympathy 
 and appeals to national feeling, was this momentous revolution 
 accomplished. 
 
 Ismail, once his creed and authority were firmly established 
 throughout Persia, turned to attack the Uzbegs, who, under Shak- 
 ban Khan, had overthrown the Timurid dynasty in Turkestan. 
 In 1 5 10 the Uzbegs were defeated and driven from Khurasan and 
 Afghanistan. A more dangerous enemy was the Ottoman sultan 
 Selim, a fanatical Sunnite or orthodox Mohammedan. 
 
 The Ottoman Turks had first come into collision with the 
 Persians at the time of the invasion of Timur. Now as rulers of 
 Asia Minor and conquerors of Constantinople they became the 
 logical enemies of Persia, as had been their predecessors, the Roman 
 emperors. Mohammed II. engaged in the old frontier struggle 
 with Uzum Hasan. Now in the days of his grandson the religious 
 schism had arisen to widen the breach and array the two leading 
 Mohammedan powers against each other as implacable foes. Selim 
 preceded his attack on Persia by a general massacre of the Shiahs 
 in his dominions, 40,000 of whom were put to death. He then 
 proclaimed a holy war against Ismail, declaring that the death of 
 one Shiah was equivalent to that of seventy Christians. The two 
 armies met in 15 14 in the great battle of Chalderan. 
 
 The Turkish artillery and the janizaries decided the day 
 against Persia despite the bravery of Ismail, who led his cavalry in 
 desperate charges to the very mouths of the Turkish cannon. 
 Ismail's capital, Tabriz, was captured and all Persarmenia and 
 Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the Ottomans. Selim's wars 
 against Egypt and his death in 1520 enabled Ismail to recover his 
 strength and even to conquer Georgia, but he was unable to recover 
 the lost provinces. He died in 1524 while on a pilgrimage to his 
 father's tomb at Ardebil and was mourned by all his subjects, 
 among whom he was regarded as a saint. 
 
 The reign of Ismail was of vital moment, not only to Persia, 
 which he left once more an independent state, but to the whole 
 Mohammedan world. Islam was now definitely split into two great 
 religious parties, whose hatred for each other was even greater than 
 that they entertained for unbelievers. The result for Christianity
 
 342 PERSIA 
 
 1524-1585 
 
 was of incalculable benefit. Had the sultans of Turkey obtained 
 recognition of their succession to the kalifate from Persia and made 
 of her a devoted ally instead of a bitter foe, the danger to Europe, 
 already seriously threatened by the single might of the Ottomans, 
 would have been vastly increased, and the flood of conquest might 
 not have been stayed at the walls of Vienna. But the Ottoman 
 empire and Persia, far from uniting under the banner of Islam, 
 wasted their best strength in bloody and indecisive conflicts with 
 each other. The Mohammedan schism, as great in its effect on 
 the East as was the Reformation on the West, must be reckoned 
 among the most potent elements which have assisted in the final 
 triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. 
 
 Shah Ismail was succeeded by his son, Tamasp, a man of little 
 ability or energy. His reign was marked by wars with the maraud- 
 ing Uzbegs on the one hand and with the Turks on the other. 
 The Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent made no less than six Persian 
 campaigns, and though always meeting with a valiant resistance, 
 conquered anew Armenia and Mesopotamia, with the cities of 
 Erivan, Van, Mosul, and, chief of all, Bagdad. However, despite 
 these losses the reign of Tamasp was in general a prosperous one. 
 His alliance was sought by the chief European powers, who re- 
 garded Persia as a bulwark against the threatening power of the 
 Ottoman empire, now in its zenith. An Englishman, Anthony 
 Jenkinson, was sent by Queen Elizabeth to open commercial rela- 
 tions with Persia. But he met with little encouragement, for 
 Tamasp, a very zealous man, dismissed him on learning that he was 
 a Christian. One blot on the character of Tamasp is his surrender 
 to Sultan Suleiman of Prince Bayazid, to whom he had promised 
 protection. He did better by the fugitive emperor of India, Hu- 
 mayun, son of Babar, whom he welcomed heartily and assisted in 
 recovering his throne. 
 
 The death of Tamasp in 1576 was followed by a period of dis- 
 order in which his sons strove for the mastery, aided by the rival 
 Kuzul Bash tribes. The Kuzul Bash, who play a great part in the 
 modern history of Persia, were the seven Turkish tribes released 
 by Timur, who attached themselves to the Safawi family and aided 
 Ismail to gain the throne. Their leaders held important positions 
 in the government ; and the army and the tribesmen, always turbu- 
 lent and unruly, were often as dangerous supporters of the monarchy 
 as were the pretorians at Rome or the janizaries at Constantinople.
 
 THE NEW PERSIAN EMPIRE 343 
 
 1585-1602 
 
 In 1585 the period of confusion was closed by the accession of 
 the young Abbas, who had been brought up as nominal governor 
 of Khurasan under the tutelage of Ali Kuli Khan. Abbas's first 
 care was directed to clearing the country of foreign invaders. Tak- 
 ing advantage of the confusion in Persia, the Turks had invaded 
 Azerbaijan and made themselves masters of Tabriz, while the Uzbegs 
 had raided Khurasan, stormed Herat and Mashad, and massacred 
 the inhabitants. A rapid campaign cleared Azerbaijan and Ghilan 
 of the Turks. Then by the decisive battle of Herat the Uzbegs were 
 so badly punished that Persia was long freed from their inroads. 
 Meantime, the generals of Abbas were occupied in asserting the 
 shah's authority along the Persian Gulf. The pearl islands, of 
 which the chief is Bahrein, were subdued and the mountainous 
 district of Lars, whose chief claimed descent from one of the 
 companions of Rustam, was reconquered. Among the spoils 
 was a crown said to have belonged to Khai Khusru (Cyrus the 
 Great) . 
 
 The chief danger to Abbas's throne lay always in the Otto- 
 man power, which still kept its grip on Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, 
 and part of Azerbaijan, the native province of the Safi. Abbas 
 fully realized that the irregular Persian lines were no match for the 
 trained infantry and splendid artillery of the Turks. Consequently 
 he gladly accepted the services of two English gentlemen-adven- 
 turers, Sir Anthony and Sir Robert Shirley, who set to work to 
 improve the Persian artillery and to organize a body of infantry 
 trained like the janizaries. Hitherto the pick of the army had been 
 drawn from the Kuzul Bash tribesmen, always unruly and deeming 
 themselves masters of the country. The new system reduced the 
 numbers of this dangerous soldiery and gave to Abbas a better 
 organized and more dependable force. By 1602 the shah's plans 
 were perfected and war was declared with the Ottoman empire. 
 Abbas marched with 65,000 men into Azerbaijan, calling his people 
 to arms in the holy war against the enemies of Ali and the family 
 of the Prophet. A decisive battle was fought between 100,000 
 Turks against the famous Christian renegade Cigala and the Persian 
 army led by the shah in person, whose superior generalship carried 
 the day. The complete triumph of the Persians was followed 
 by the reconquest of the lost provinces of Azerbaijan, Georgia, 
 Kurdistan, and Bagdad, and with them the sacred places of the 
 Shiahs, Kerbela, where Hosein had met his fate, and Samrah. The
 
 344 PERSIA 
 
 1602-1628 
 
 Turks kept up a constant border warfare throughout the reign of 
 Abbas, but the disputed provinces remained in Persian hands. 
 
 The victories of Abbas over the Turks, still the most dreaded 
 power of the day, raised him to the front rank among princes, and 
 caused his friendship to be courted by all the European states. The 
 period of European expansion into the East was now well under way, 
 and the English, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Dutch were 
 busy laying the foundations of their Asiatic empires. With the 
 English and the Dutch, who threatened him in no way, Abbas kept 
 on the best of terms and encouraged commercial intercourse be- 
 tween them and his subjects. With the Portuguese, the first comers 
 in the field, the case was different, for the settlements made by 
 Albuquerque on the Persian Gulf seemed to threaten the para- 
 mountcy of Persia in that region. Of these settlements, that of 
 Ormuz at the mouth of the gulf was the most prosperous and the 
 most coveted by the Persian monarch. The Island of Ormuz had 
 been conquered about the year 15 14 by Albuquerque, the great 
 Portuguese viceroy of the Indies. In spite of the barrenness and the 
 terrific heat of the spot, a city was founded which from its favorable 
 position soon became an emporium of trade for Turkey, Persia, 
 Arabia, and India. It is said that when Shah Ismail sent to Al- 
 buquerque demanding the tribute formerly paid by the princes of 
 the island, the viceroy sent back swords and bullets with the 
 message : " This is the coin with which Portugal pays her tribute." 
 Thanks to the respect inspired by the great Portuguese, Ormuz 
 remained unmolested until Abbas thought to make its wealth his 
 own. In alliance with the English, the jealous rivals of the Port- 
 uguese, Abbas attacked the city and conquered it in 1622. But the 
 shah found that instead of gaining the riches he desired, he had 
 destroyed the trade which had added so much to the prosperity of his 
 country. Ormuz naturally declined, and in spite of .English efforts, 
 its vast commerce disappeared or turned into other channels. 
 
 Though Shah Abbas ranks among the first of Persian warriors, 
 his real title to fame rests on his internal achievements rather than 
 on his conquests. Ispahan, his capital, was beautified with broad 
 avenues, stately mosques, and splendid palaces, so that it became 
 the most glorious city of Asia. Its walls were twenty-four miles in 
 circuit and its population is said to have reached a million. It 
 became the emporium of Asiatic trade and in its bazaars could be 
 found the merchandise and products of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
 
 THE NEW PERSIAN EMPIRE 
 
 345 
 
 1582-1628 
 
 The favorite palace of the shah, the Chehel Sitton or Forty- 
 Columns, was situated in a park outside the city walls. Along 
 the front of the palace ran a double row of columns, each rising from 
 the backs of four white marble lions. These pillars were inlaid with 
 mirrors, and the walls and ceilings of the palace were decorated with 
 crystal and gold. The Great Mosque in Ispahan was also the work 
 of Abbas. But the shah did not confine his efforts to the capital, for 
 
 his activity extended to all parts of the empire. Roads were im- 
 proved, bridges built, and huge caravanseries erected for the ac- 
 commodation of travelers. Justice was better administered and 
 corruption less rife than at any time since the days of the Nizam-ul- 
 Mulk. Through a zealous Mohammedan, Abbas was tolerant in his 
 views and encouraged settlements of Jews and Christians in his 
 dominions. But his tolerance did not extend to the Sunnite Mo- 
 hammedans. On the whole, in spite of such mistakes as the de-
 
 346 PERSIA 
 
 1582-1628 
 
 struction of Ormuz, we must regard Abbas as one of the most 
 enlightened of Mohammedan rulers and fully deserving of that title 
 too often indiscriminately applied " the Great." He ranks with 
 Khusru Anushirwan as the greatest and wisest of Persian rulers. 
 
 The private life of Abbas forms the dark side of his character. 
 He was by nature cruel and often treacherous. A fearful tyrant in 
 his own family, he was seized with jealousy of his own sons, who 
 were universally beloved; one of them he put to death, two others 
 he caused to be blinded. Yet Abbas was capable of being an agree- 
 able and even captivating companion. He was a lover of good 
 cheer, drank wine despite the prohibition of the Koran, and was 
 somewhat of a wit. On settling a colony of Christians in the 
 province of Mazanderan he remarked that as its chief products were 
 wine and hogs they would consider themselves in Paradise. He 
 died in 1628 at his favorite palace of Ferrahabad, aged seventy 
 years. 
 
 That great traveler, Sir John Chardin, tells us that with the 
 death of Abbas Persia ceased to prosper, and, indeed, it seems evi- 
 dent that the Persian character which had in the past given proof of 
 its virility and marvelous power of recuperation, now degenerated 
 under the peaceful misgovernment of the successors of the great 
 shah. It is almost impossible to account with exactness for this 
 gradual change in the character of the Persian people. Indeed, it 
 is almost unnoticeable till suddenly the great empire shows its full 
 weakness in a startling manner, and falls an easy prey to a handful 
 of Afghan warriors. Right here lies the contrast between the two 
 great Mohammedan powers, Turkey and Persia. Both have suffered 
 for centuries under a detestable system of government; but while 
 the native of Persia seems to have lost his former bravery and 
 independence of character under the system, the Ottoman Turk with 
 all his faults retains to-day much of his former virility, while as a 
 soldier he has few superiors. 
 
 With the descendants of Abbas a new principle enters into the 
 royal family. The royal princes, hitherto trained to public service 
 in war and government, were now confined by oriental jealousy to 
 the harem, with the inevitable result of a line of weak and debauched 
 tyrants. 
 
 Abbas's successor, his grandson Safi, began his reign by mur- 
 dering most of the princes of the blood, as well as many of the most 
 trusted servants of his grandfather. He is even accused of matricide. 
 

 
 THE NEW PERSIAN EMPIRE 347 
 
 1628-1694 
 
 These cruelties may have been only part of a settled design to 
 destroy the feudal forces in Persia and thus consolidate the royal 
 authority; but the only result was to deprive Persia of her ablest 
 men and thus weaken her strength. In the reign of Safi, the 
 Uzbegs resumed their raids into Khurasan, the emperor of Hindu- 
 stan conquered Kandahar, and the Turks recovered Bagdad and 
 most of Mesopotamia. Safi died from the effects of debauchery 
 after an inglorious reign of fourteen years, 1628- 1642. 
 
 A temporary reaction came with the accession of Abbas II., a 
 child of ten years. His ministers, zealous Mohammedans, insti- 
 tuted a strict policy of reform and strove to put down the vices 
 which were sapping the nation's strength. But the very strictness 
 of their guardianship may have driven the young shah to the op- 
 posite extreme. At any rate Abbas II. was a worthy emulator of 
 his father, indulging in the most fearful debauches, to which 
 Europeans were frequently invited. Though capable when drunk 
 of the worst atrocities, Abbas was in the main a just and mild ruler. 
 He recovered Kandahar from Shah Jahan of Hindustan and kept 
 on the best of terms with his Ottoman neighbors, who could find 
 no weightier reason for sending an embassy to Ispahan than the 
 purchase of a trick elephant. Abbas died at the age of thirty-four, 
 overcome like his father by the effects of evil living. 
 
 His son, Safi II., 1666-1694, inherited the dissolute character 
 of Abbas. He was governed by favorites and was particularly fond 
 of Europeans, who found a sure path to his favor by presents of 
 wine. A story told of Safi illustrates the superstition of the Persian 
 monarchs and their dependence on astrologers and soothsayers. 
 The shah was once taken very ill and it was discovered that he had 
 been crowned on a day of evil omen. Accordingly, when he had 
 recovered, Safi vacated the throne for a day and was then recrowned 
 under more favorable auspices, assuming the new name of Sulei- 
 man, by which he is generally known. The court of Suleiman was 
 famous throughout Europe and Asia for its magnificence. Thither 
 came many travelers who have left us curious pictures of the times 
 our only source, in fact, for Persian history of this period. 
 
 On his deathbed the shah said to his ministers, " If you desire 
 ease elevate Husein Mirza to the throne ; but if you desire the glory 
 of your country elevate Abbas Mirza." Evidently the ministers 
 preferred their own interests to those of the country, for Husein 
 was chosen, and did more by his bigotry and weakness to ruin the
 
 348 PERSIA 
 
 1694-1717 
 
 nation than his predecessors had by their vices. At first Husein, 
 under the influence of the priests or mullas, persecuted the sectaries, 
 who, like the Huguenots in France, formed the best blood of the 
 nation. The philosophical sect of the Sufi, though knitted by the 
 closest bonds to the very meaning of the dynasty, was driven into 
 exile. Eunuchs and mullas ruled the country in place of the 
 nobles, and the fact that Husein reigned peacefully for twenty 
 years shows to what depths of weakness and indifference the nation 
 had fallen. 
 
 The blow which produced a new revolution in Persian affairs 
 came as usual from the east, but this time from a new and hitherto 
 insignificant race. The Afghans, a people of Aryan blood, though 
 they claimed descent from the lost tribes of Israel, had for centuries 
 maintained a semi-independent position in their mountains, balanc- 
 ing between Persia and Hindustan. Between the two the Afghans 
 were perhaps more hostile to Persia, for they were Sunnites, ortho- 
 dox Mohammedans, and hated the Shiahs. At this period the 
 Afghans were divided into two main branches, the Ghilzis, who held 
 Kabul and Kandahar and could put thirty thousand men into the 
 field, and the less powerful but equally numerous Sadozais, who 
 dwelt about Herat. Both these tribes had been subject to Persia 
 since the days of Abbas the Great, but now, with the decline of his 
 empire, their opportunity had come. Oppressed by the Georgian 
 governor of Kandahar, Ghurgin Khan, the Ghilzis rose under Mir 
 Wais, killed the governor by treachery and seized the city. Two 
 Persian armies sent against them were defeated and by 1709 Mir 
 Wais had fully established the independent state. The example of 
 the Ghilzis was not lost on the other enemies of Persia, which was 
 soon threatened on all sides. The Kurds were encouraged by Af- 
 ghan success to take up arms, the Sadozai clan revolted at Herat and 
 aided by the Uzbegs defeated an army of 30,000 Persians, while the 
 Arabs of Maskat threatened the Persian Gulf and defeated a com- 
 bined attack of Persians and Portuguese. 
 
 The new ruler of Kandahar, Mahmud, who succeeded his 
 father, Mir Wais, in 17 17, seeing his opportunity in these dis- 
 turbances, invaded Seistan and seized the city of Kirman. The only 
 able Persian leader, Sulf Ali, fell through court jealousy, and 
 Mahmud at the head of 25,000 men advanced with surprising ease 
 to within nine miles of Ispahan itself. The news of the appearance 
 of the Afghans threw the capital into a state of panic and Shah
 
 THE NEW PERSIAN EMPIRE 349 
 
 1717-1725 
 
 Husein, beside himself with fear, tried in vain to bribe Mahmud to 
 withdraw. At last a force of troops was assembled and the Persian 
 army 50,000 strong marched out against the enemy. The Persians, 
 showily dressed, finely mounted and equipped, presented a striking 
 contrast to the ragged and tentless Afghans, in whose ranks nothing 
 glittered save the sword blades and the lanceheads. But this tattered 
 horde, aided it is true by treachery, soon drove the Persians in 
 headlong rout back to Ispahan. The terror in that city rose to 
 the highest pitch. At first Shah Husein thought of flight, but was 
 finally persuaded to remain and stand a siege. We have seen that 
 Ispahan had under Shah Abbas become one of the most splendid 
 cities of the East. The River Zanderud, spanned by noble bridges, 
 divided the city into two parts, the main section on the northern 
 bank, the Armenian settlement of Julfa and the royal palaces on the 
 southern. It was against these southern suburbs that the Afghans 
 began their attack. The Armenian suburb had been founded by 
 Abbas the Great and had prospered greatly during his reign. Now 
 the misgovernment and fanaticism of Husein had done much toward 
 ruining the settlement. Nevertheless, the Christians showed them- 
 selves faithful to the shah and only when the imbecile court refused 
 to aid them did they consent to surrender, paying a great ransom to 
 escape pillage. Mahmud, once secure of the southern suburb, now 
 proceeded to blockade the city, ravaging the country round and 
 cutting off all supplies. Ispahan was soon reduced to starvation, 
 while the utter weakness of the shah and the treachery of his ad- 
 visors aided to make the situation desperate. The city surrendered 
 without a blow being struck, Husein abdicated his throne and 
 saluted Mahmud as shah. Such was the miserable end of the 
 Safawi dynasty, which had begun so brilliantly two hundred years 
 before. 
 
 The distracted state of Persia was immediately taken advantage 
 of by her external foes. While an internal war was ravaging the 
 provinces, for the Afghans held scarcely more than the city of 
 Ispahan, the Turks seized Tabriz and Hamadan, while a new and 
 formidable enemy appeared in the Caspian. The northern shores 
 of this inland sea had been held by the Russians since the destruc- 
 tion of the Golden Horde by Ivan the Terrible. Now under Tsar 
 Peter the Great a Russian fleet appeared on the sea and a Russian 
 army of 30,000 men devastated the coast provinces of Derbent and 
 Ghilan. Meantime, a son of Husein named Tamasp had taken
 
 350 PERSIA 
 
 1725-1733 
 
 refuge in Astrabad, where many flocked to his support and the situa- 
 tion of Mahmud and his handful of followers grew more and more 
 difficult. In order to strike terror and so paralyze all resistance, the 
 Afghan plunged into the most fearful atrocities. The whole family 
 of Husein was butchered before the eyes of the captive monarch; 
 three hundred Persian nobles with their families were treacherously 
 massacred at a banquet and thousands of citizens of Ispahan shared 
 a similar fate. Mahmud died in the midst of these cruelties at the 
 early age of twenty-seven years (1725). The Afghan leader was 
 not a great man, though he overthrew a great empire. He pos- 
 sessed courage and activity, but his marvelous success was due 
 rather to the rottenness of the Persian empire and the unwarlike 
 character of the people, than to his own talents. The task of govern- 
 ing his conquests was altogether beyond him and he could think of 
 no better method of securing his authority than by startling acts 
 of barbarity. 
 
 The first care of Mahmud's successor, Ashraf, was to make 
 peace with the Turks, whose aid he hoped to gain by acknowledging 
 the Ottoman sultan to be kalif of all Islam. By this time Tamasp, 
 aided first by Ali Khan and then by a robber chieftain, Nadir Kuli, 
 had become a most dangerous opponent. In a short space of time 
 Nadir, as general of the royal forces, captured Mashad, Nishapur, 
 and Herat from the Afghans, and forced all Khurasan to submit to 
 the authority of Tamasp. Ashraf marched against him, but was so 
 thoroughly beaten at Damghan that the Afghans only rallied at 
 Teheran, two hundred miles from the field. This defeat broke the 
 charm of Afghan invincibility which had held the country in terrified 
 subjection. Everywhere the Persians rose against their masters 
 and Ashraf was forced to abandon Ispahan after putting to death 
 Shah Husein, and to fall back on Shiraz closely pursued by Nadir 
 Kuli. The retreat of the Afghans soon became a wild flight for 
 safety. Ashraf managed to reach Baluchistan, only to fall at the 
 hands of the tribesmen, and very few of his followers ever reached 
 their native land. But their destruction was but little consolation to 
 Persia. During seven years her greatest cities had been ruined 
 and her best provinces reduced to deserts by a small band of for- 
 eigners who could maintain themselves in the midst of a great 
 nation only by means of the fear they inspired.
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 MODERN PERSIA. 1733-1910 
 
 A LL eyes in Persia were now turned on Nadir Kuli, who, acting 
 Z-m nominally for Shah Tamasp, had delivered the country 
 X JL from the Afghan scourge. Nadir Kuli belonged to the 
 tribe of Afshar, one of the seven Kuzul Bash tribes. In early life 
 he had led a most precarious existence and was chief of a band of 
 robbers when he offered his services to Prince Tamasp. Rivalry 
 between Nadir and Fath AH, the other chief supporter of Tamasp, 
 led to the assassination of the latter and Nadir became chief general 
 of the shah, who was a mere puppet in his hands. As a reward 
 for his great services Nadir was granted the provinces of Khurasan, 
 Mazanderan, Seistan, and Kirman, so that almost half of Persia was 
 under his control. 
 
 Nadir did not rest long on the laurels of the Afghan campaign. 
 The Turks were driven from Azerbaijan in short order and a cam- 
 paign in Armenia was in preparation when a revolt of Herat called 
 him to the east. During his absence Shah Tamasp renewed the 
 Turkish war, was soundly beaten, and made peace, giving back the 
 provinces which his great general had just won. This fiasco cost 
 him the throne. For Nadir declaring the treaty to be contrary to 
 the will of heaven, called on all faithful Shiahs to take up arms, and 
 marching on Ispahan dethroned the unlucky shah and set up his 
 son Abbas as titular ruler. This accomplished, Nadir renewed the 
 war with Turkey and marched on Bagdad, the center of Otto- 
 man power in those regions. The city would surely have fallen, 
 despite the brave defense of its governor, had it not been for the 
 arrival of 100,000 Turks under the noted vizir, Topal Osman. 
 Nadir turned to meet this new adversary with 70,000 men, and the 
 two hosts met, 1733, on that same field of Samrah, where the 
 Emperor Julian had fallen in battle with the Persians, fourteen 
 centuries before. After a long and bloody battle the Persians fled, 
 leaving 20,000 dead on the field, and never rallied till they reached 
 the distant city of Hamadan. It was under these critical circum- 
 
 351
 
 352 PERSIA 
 
 1733-1737 
 
 stances that the genius of Nadir showed at its best. He praised 
 and rewarded his beaten troops, raised their spirits anew, rees- 
 tablished discipline, and was soon able to take the field with another 
 great host. This time fortune favored the Persians. The Turks, 
 seized with panic, fled before them and Topal Osman was slain. 
 Armenia and Georgia soon fell into Persian hands and though Bag- 
 dad remained Turkish, Nadir was able by a final treaty in 1735 to 
 recover all the provinces lost during the Afghan wars. 
 
 The time had now come when Nadir could throw aside all 
 pretense and assume the titles as well as the powers of a king. 
 The timely demise of the child-shah, Abbas III., smoothed the way, 
 and Nadir, with feigned reluctance, accepted the crown offered by 
 the generals of his army. But he made it a condition on ascending 
 the throne that the Shiah faith should be abolished as the state 
 religion, and that Persia should reenter the orthodox fold. Nadir 
 had hitherto been a zealous Shiah and had not hesitated to enlist 
 religious differences in his struggle with the Ottoman power. But 
 the Shiah sect was too closely allied with memories of the dynasty 
 he had dethroned for him to found his empire on its support. 
 Moreover, the ambition of the new shah already looked forward to 
 the conquest of other nations and in abolishing the Shiah faith he 
 saw removed the religious barrier which separated Persia from her 
 neighbors, and the path smoothed for external conquests. On 
 February 26, 1736, at twenty-six minutes after eight in the morn- 
 ing, as we are assured by an accurate historian, Nadir Shah placed 
 the crown, or rather the cap of royalty, on his head. 
 
 Once the internal tranquillity of the country was restored, 
 Nadir's first object was the reconquest of Afghanistan. With 80,000 
 men he invaded the country and laid siege to Kandahar, where 
 Husein Khan, brother of Mahmud, still held sway. After a year's 
 ineffectual blockade, regular siege operations were commenced and 
 the town was finally taken by storm. The Afghans were kindly 
 treated and, religious differences being now removed, were soon 
 enlisted in support of Nadir. Meantime the shah's son, Riza Kuli, 
 had invaded Balkh, the ancient Bactria, crossed the Oxus, after 
 defeating the Uzbeg khans, and was pressing on to Samarkand 
 when he was called by his father to a new field of conquest. 
 
 No sooner was Kandahar taken than Nadir Shah turned his 
 energies to a far greater design the invasion of Hindustan. North- 
 ern India or Hindustan had since the days of Mahmud of Ghazni 

 
 MODERN PERSIA 353 
 
 1737-1738 
 
 been ruled by a succession of Mohammedan dynasties. About 
 the year 1526 Babar, a descendant of Timur Leng and ruler of 
 Kabul, driven from Turkestan by the Uzbegs, succeeded in found- . 
 ing a great Indian empire with its capital at Delhi. This so-called 
 Mogul empire reached its height in the reigns of Akbar, the wisest 
 of Mohammedan rulers, and his descendants, Shah Jahan and 
 Aurangzeb. Since the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the empire 
 had rapidly declined and even became tributary to the marauding 
 tribes of the Maratha confederacy. The ruling emperor at this 
 time was Mohammed Shah, a jovial incompetent person who, we are 
 told, was never without a mistress in his arms or a glass in his 
 hand. 
 
 Nadir easily found a pretext for war in the Indian intrigues 
 among the Afghans, and the Persian host had poured through that 
 gateway of conquerors, the Khaibar Pass, and on to the plains of 
 Punjab before Mohammed awoke to a sense of the danger. In 
 1738 Lahore fell without resistance and Nadir advanced rapidly 
 to Kamal, within sixty miles of Delhi, where a vast Indian army was 
 drawn up. The battle was of short duration. In four hours the 
 Indian host was completely routed, twenty thousand slain, and 
 Mohammed Shah, finding himself surrounded, was forced to sur- 
 render. But the object of Nadir was not conquest, but booty. 
 Mohammed was treated with the utmost respect and reseated on his 
 throne after agreeing to the surrender of his treasure and the 
 cession of the lands west of the Indus. Nadir entered Delhi in 
 triumph, where, besides seizing the enormous imperial treasure, he 
 laid a heavy ransom on the people. An insane rising among the 
 citizens was followed by a general massacre, which ceased only when 
 Mohammed Shah appealed in person for the lives of his subjects. 
 According to an English eyewitness, 150,000 persons perished, 
 though a more likely estimate reduces the total to less than one- 
 tenth of that number. Nadir remained in Delhi fifty-eight days 
 to celebrate the marriage of his son, Nasr-Ullah, with a princess 
 of the house of Timur. When the court officials demanded as was 
 customary the genealogy of the bridegroom for seven generations, 
 Nadir, who was proud of his own lowly origin, replied, " Tell them 
 that he is the son of Nadir Shah, the son of the sword, the grand- 
 son of the sword ; and so on not for seven but for seventy genera- 
 tions." The marriage ceremonies completed, Nadir returned to 
 Herat bearing with him an enormous booty worth thirty crores of
 
 354 . PERSIA 
 
 1738-1747 
 
 rupees ($100,000,000). Among the spoils were the jewel-studded 
 peacock throne of Delhi and a famous diamond, the Koh-i-Nur. 
 In honor of his victory Nadir ordered a general remission of taxes 
 and displayed his treasures in public at Herat. 
 
 The next exploit of the conqueror was the invasion of Tur- 
 kestan and the subjugation of the Uzbeg and Khuarezm khans. 
 Samarkand and Bokhara became tributary to Nadir and bear to 
 this day evidences of his triumph. The conquest of Turkestan was 
 the last of the exploits of the shah who had in five years freed Persia 
 from foreign invaders and conquered five powerful rulers. The 
 character of the Persian monarch changed for the worse after the 
 conquest of India and his vast treasures seemed to bring a curse 
 with them. He became avaricious, jealous, and suspicious even of 
 his own sons. Riza Kuli, who promised to be a worthy successor of 
 his father, was suspected of high treason and his eyes were put out. 
 the people were ground down with taxes and the Shiahs, who still 
 formed the bulk of the population, were bitterly persecuted. At last 
 after six years of tyranny Nadir became unbearable and perished at 
 Mashad through a conspiracy of his own officers, 1747. 
 
 Nadir Shah was the last and not the least in the great line of 
 Mohammedan conquerors. He is described as a handsome, robust 
 person of great size and strength, with fine eyes and a ruddy com- 
 plexion. The tyranny of his later years and his apostasy from the 
 national faith have not obscured the glory of his earlier achieve- 
 ments, and the Persians reverence him to this day as a hero and 
 the deliverer of his country. In Nadir's reign occurred the re- 
 markable attempt of two Englishmen, Elton and Hanway, to 
 establish trade between England and Persia by way of the Black 
 Sea and the Caspian. They succeeded in building up a large trade, 
 but the enterprise was finally ruined by Russian prohibition. Elton 
 built for Persia a small fleet on the Caspian while Hanway has left 
 us a most valuable life of Nadir Shah. 
 
 Nadir as a result of his own cruelty left no worthy successor 
 and a period of anarchy followed his death. As soon as the murder 
 was known, Ahmad Khan, chief of the Abdali Afghans, seized 
 Kandahar and set up an independent state, which marks the final 
 separation of Persia and Afghanistan. Through the support of 
 Ahmad, the son of Riza Kuli, Shah Rokh, who had been blinded 
 during the civil wars, was raised to the throne. Shah Rokh had 
 even a better title to reign than his relationship with Nadir Shah,
 
 MODERN PERSIA 355 
 
 1747-1789 
 
 for his mother was a daughter of Husein, the last real ruler of the 
 Safawi dynasty. Amiable and generous, Shah Rokh proved a 
 popular ruler, but his blindness and lack of real ability prevented 
 him from keeping control of the turbulent tribal chiefs. His author- 
 ity was soon limited to the province of Khurasan, which the pro- 
 tection of the Afghans helped him to retain. The rest of Persia, 
 after several years of utter confusion and intertribal war, was 
 finally divided between three powerful chieftains. In the north, Mo- 
 hammed Hasan Khan, chief of the Khajars and son of that Fath 
 Ali Khan who had protected Tamasp II., ruled over Astrabad and 
 Mazanderan; in Azerbaijan, Azad Khan, one of the generals of 
 Nadir Shah, was supreme; while Ispahan and the south were held 
 by Kerim Khan, a Kurdish chieftain. A three-cornered contest be- 
 tween these powerful lords, in which first one and then another 
 gained the upper hand, resulted in the final victory of Kerim in 1760. 
 Azad was overthrown by Mohammed Hasan who, beaten in his 
 turn, perished in a local vendetta. 
 
 Kerim Khan ruled for nineteen years, 1760 1779, over all 
 Persia save Khurasan, though he never ventured to assume the 
 royal title of shah in shah, contenting himself with that of wali or 
 regent. His rule was eminently just and he did much to restore 
 prosperity to the sorely distracted land. His favorite residence was 
 at Shiraz, where he built the great bazaar, repaired the tomb of 
 Sheikh Sa'di, and erected a splendid shrine over the grave of Hafiz. 
 Here he died at the age of eighty, leaving the reputation of a wise 
 and peaceful ruler. The short-lived dynasty which he founded is 
 known in history as the Zend, from the name of an ancient Kurdish 
 tribe which claimed to have been entrusted with the sacred Zend- 
 Avesta by the prophet Zoroaster. 
 
 The death of Kerim Khan was the signal for new disorders. 
 Zaku Sadik, Ali Murad, and Juafir, all of the Zend dynasty, fol- 
 lowed in quick succession. Their reigns are distinguished only by 
 a series of horrible dynastic quarrels, in which brother murdered 
 brother and uncle blinded nephew, and by a revival of the Khajar 
 faction in the north. Agha Mohammed, son of Mohammed Hasan, 
 had in the days of anarchy been taken by his enemies and cruelly 
 mutilated. He had submitted to Kerim Khan after the murder of 
 his father, but at once revolted on hearing of Kerim's death and 
 soon united the Caspian provinces under his rule, with a capital at 
 Teheran.
 
 356 PERSIA 
 
 1789-1795 
 
 In 1789 Lutf Ali Khan with the aid of the vizir Hajji Ibra- 
 him succeeded to the throne of the Zends. Lutf Ali was only 
 twenty years of age, brave, handsome, and magnanimous, in fact 
 a perfect knight-errant, but wholly lacking in the qualities of a 
 ruler. His brief reign was filled by a constant struggle with Agha 
 Mohammed, who was in every way his antithesis a cold, remorse- 
 less, but very able tyrant. In 1790, while on his way to attack 
 Teheran, Lutf Ali was suddenly deserted by Hajji Ibrahim, who 
 went over to Agha Mohammed with most of the army. This act 
 of treachery forced Lutf Ali to abandon Ispahan and Shiraz, where 
 the gates were closed against him by the intrigues of Ibrahim. De- 
 serted by all but a few friends Lutf Ali did not lose courage but, 
 rallying a small force, laid siege to Shiraz and routed an army 
 sent against him. Agha Mohammed now advanced in person with 
 30,000 men to raise the siege, but Lutf Ali with a handful of fol- 
 lowers made a night attack on his camp and threw the whole army 
 into confusion. Only the wonderful coolness of Agha Mohammed 
 saved his army from utter rout. He remained in his tent through- 
 out the night and in the morning ordered the muezzin to call the 
 Faithful to prayer as usual. The troops of Lutf Ali were filled 
 with astonishment, and thinking the whole Khajar host had re- 
 turned took to flight. Agha Mohammed entered Shiraz in tri- 
 umph, appointing the traitor Ibrahim as his vizier, while Lutf Ali 
 fled to Khurasan and thence to Kandahar. But even then the 
 undaunted chief did not abandon the contest. Gathering a few 
 men he crossed the frontier in 1794 and seized the important city 
 of Kirman in eastern Persia. Here he was besieged by Agha Mo- 
 hammed, who finally took the town by treachery. Lutf Ali, after 
 fighting in the streets till all hope was gone, cut his way through 
 the Khajar forces with three companions and escaped into Seistan. 
 Enraged at the escape of his rival, Agha Mohammed gave up the 
 city to plunder and massacre. The eyes of 7000 of the inhabitants 
 were brought to him on a platter, 20,000 women and children were 
 carried away into slavery and the city was reduced to ruins. Lutf 
 Ali did not long survive this disaster. He was soon after be- 
 trayed into the hands of his enemy and put to death just six years 
 after his accession to the throne. His fall left Agha Mohammed 
 master of all Persia, save Khurasan, where the blind Shah Rokh 
 still maintained a shadowy overlordship. Urged on by greed for 
 the jewels of Nadir Shah, the Khajar prince found no difficulty in
 
 MODERN PERSIA 357 
 
 1795 
 
 overrunning the province and seizing Shah Rokh, who was tor- 
 tured tiP he revealed the whereabouts of his treasure. The fate 
 of this unhappy monarch, grandson of a mighty conqueror, who 
 died soon after from the effects of his sufferings, forms one of the 
 darkest pages in Persian history. 
 
 Agha Mohammed was undoubtedly one of the most inhuman 
 beings that ever sat upon a Persian throne. But the great eunuch 
 king, as he was called, possessed some redeeming qualities, and 
 chief among them a strong sense of patriotism, a rare trait in 
 oriental monarchs. The last and best years of his reign were spent 
 in a constant struggle to save his country from Russia, which had 
 succeeded the Ottoman empire as Persia's most formidable enemy. 
 The relations between Russia and Persia began in the sixteenth 
 century, when Ivan the Terrible overthrew the Tatar khan and 
 established the Muscovite power at Astrakhan. We have seen how 
 Peter the Great took advantage of the Afghan invasion to seize the 
 Persian provinces west of the Caspian. But these successes were 
 only temporary and Peter's successors abandoned his conquests 
 before the might of Nadir Shah. 
 
 A new opportunity for Russian aggression presented itself 
 in the situation of the Christian principality of Georgia in the 
 Caucasus, which had generally been under Persian suzerainty. 
 The Georgians, like the Circassians, were esteemed as slaves for 
 their beauty both in Turkey and in Persia, and under Persian rule 
 slave raids were of common occurrence. The country was besides 
 torn by constant dissensions between the ruling princes and the 
 nobles who cared for nothing save their own private interests. 
 It was under these circumstances that Prince Heraclius, despairing 
 for the future of his people under the Persian yoke, placed himself 
 under the protection which Catherine II. of Russia gladly ex- 
 tended. Agha Mohammed had, while still merely governor of 
 Astrabad, ample opportunity to watch with jealousy and to check 
 as he was able the growing encroachments of the Russians in the 
 Caspian. Once firmly seated on the throne, he hastened to take 
 up the Georgian question, demanding the return of Heraclius to 
 his allegiance. The Georgian prince refused, and in 1795 the shah 
 burst into Georgia with 60,000 men, defeated Heraclius in battle 
 and took his capital of Tiflis, slaying or carrying off the inhabitants 
 into slavery. So sudden had been the invasion that the Russians 
 could not arrive in time to aid the Georgians. So great was Cath-
 
 358 PERSIA 
 
 1795-1801 
 
 erine's mortification at the news of the sack of Tiflis that she 
 mediated not only the recovery of Georgia, but even the conquest 
 of all Persia, The Russian general, Plato Zubov, advanced in 
 1796 from Derbent into Georgia with 40,000 men, received the 
 submission of the country, and was preparing to march on Teheran 
 itself when he was recalled by the death of the empress. The 
 Russians had, however, gained great prestige and the good will of 
 the Georgians by their strict discipline and total abstinence from 
 plundering. The next year Agha Mohammed was preparing a 
 new attack when he was assassinated by one of his own body serv- 
 ants whom he had sentenced to death. 
 
 Although Agha Mohammed, embittered as he was by the mis- 
 fortunes of his youth, will rank among the most inhuman of rulers, 
 he did much to restore the Persian monarchy by putting an end to 
 the state of anarchy which had convulsed the empire since the 
 days of Nadir Shah. He suppressed the intertribal wars which 
 sapped the strength of the country, and made praiseworthy efforts 
 to encourage commerce and so enrich his people. But he came 
 too late to effect any lasting improvement, for the character of the 
 people was thoroughly weakened since the time of the great 
 Abbas. 
 
 One important change which he did make, however, was 
 the restoration of the Shiah faith, proscribed by Nadir Shah but 
 still the religion of the great majority of the population. The 
 Khajar dynasty, which he founded and which is still the ruling 
 house, was traditionally devoted to the national faith for its an- 
 cestors had been among the seven Turkish tribes which had fol- 
 lowed the fortunes of Shah Ismail. In personal appearance Agha 
 Mohammed was beardless and shriveled, so ugly that he could not 
 bear to have anyone look upon him. 
 
 The eunuch king was succeeded by his nephew, Fath Ali 
 Khan, who reigned for thirty-six years, 1 797-1 833, during a most 
 eventful period in European history. The first object of the new 
 shah was the reconquest of Georgia, the task bequeathed him by his 
 uncle. In 1800 the Georgian prince, George, son of Heraclius, 
 resigned his crown to Russia; but his brother Alexander refused 
 to accept Russian rule and broke into revolt. Taking advantage 
 of this disturbance, Fath Ali sent his son Abbas Mirza to invade 
 Georgia. Abbas fought a three days' battle with the Russians near 
 Erivan, but the issue was indecisive. The next year the shah took
 
 MODERNPERSIA 359 
 
 1801-1829 
 
 the field in person, but again little was accomplished and the con- 
 flict degenerated into a sort of armed truce, the Russians holding 
 Derbent, Tiflis, and Shirwan, the Persians Erivan. 
 
 The widespread influence of the great revolutionary wars 
 in Europe now found their echoes in the active intrigues of the 
 European powers at the Persian court. At first the French emis- 
 saries sent by Napoleon when he was contemplating an invasion 
 of India gained some influence. But after the Peace of Tilsit, 
 1807, when the French became allies of Persia's arch enemy, the 
 shah turned toward the English. Relations between Persia and 
 the British empire had been opened in the year 1800 by Captain 
 John Malcolm, sent by the governor-general of India to conclude 
 a commercial treaty. Now Malcolm returned to the Persian court 
 and British officers were detached to drill the Persian army. In 
 1 8 10 hostilities recommenced between Persia and Russia and soon 
 after the English officers were withdrawn. But two remained to 
 lead the Persians in the battle of Aslanduz, where the Russians 
 were completely victorious. This battle decided the war and 
 through English mediation the Treaty of Gulistan was signed 
 October 13, 18 13, by which Persia acknowledged the Russian an- 
 nexation of Georgia and ceded to that power the Caspian districts 
 of Daghestan, Baku, and Shirwan. A new war in 1827 ended 
 still more disastrously for Persia. After some preliminary suc- 
 cesses, Mohammed Mirza was beaten by the Russians at the Zizan, 
 and his father, Abbas, suffered a like fate at Ganjeh. The Rus- 
 sians crossed the Araxes, took Erivan and Tabriz, and forced the 
 shah to make the humiliating Treaty of Turkmanchai, 1829. By 
 this treaty Persia surrendered Erivan and Nakhitcheran, paid an 
 indemnity equivalent to fifteen million dollars, and agreed to main- 
 tain no warships in the Caspian. The Treaty of Turkmanchai 
 marks the beginning of Russian predominance in Persia. By the 
 acquisition of the fortress of Erivan, Russia gained the key to 
 the heart of Persia, while the exclusion of Persian warships from the 
 Caspian practically converted that sea into a Russian lake, and 
 laid the northern provinces of Persia at the mercy of the great 
 northern power. The murder at Teheran of the Russian envoy, 
 who had enraged the people by his overbearing conduct, brought 
 the two nations again to the verge of war. Persia escaped a new 
 disaster only by prompt punishment of the guilty and by sending 
 an expiatory mission to St. Petersburg.
 
 360 PERSIA 
 
 1809-1832 
 
 While Persia was continually involved in disastrous con- 
 flicts with her northern neighbor during Fath Ali's reign, her 
 relations with England were cordial and English influence con- 
 tinued to grow. In 1809 a commercial treaty was made with India, 
 while in 1814 the English envoys, Ellis and Morier, negotiated the 
 still more important political Treaty of Teheran. By the terms of 
 this treaty it was provided that England should aid Persia by 
 money or troops in case of an unprovoked invasion, while Persia 
 should attack the Afghans if they tried to invade India. 
 
 With Turkey Fath AH was on continual bad terms, and in 
 1 82 1 war broke out between the two countries. The Persians, led 
 by the veteran Abbas Mirza, gained some successes and invaded 
 Armenia, but were stopped by a terrible outbreak of the cholera. 
 After the lapse of four months Abbas again advanced into Ar- 
 menia with 30,000 men, beat a Turkish force of 50,000, and was 
 closing in on Erzerum, when operations were again stopped by the 
 plague. Peace was made in 1823 and all the injuries complained 
 of by Persia were promised redress. On the eastern frontier Abbas 
 Mirza was still more successful. Khurasan, semi-independent since 
 the death of Nadir Shah, was now reduced to submission, and 
 Yezd, the seat of the remaining fire-worshipers, and Kirman were 
 brought to recognize the royal authority. While Abbas rested at 
 Mashad, his son Mohammed pressed on to Herat and laid siege 
 to that bone of contention between Persians and Afghans. But 
 the siege proved a failure and the news of his father's death, 1832, 
 forced Mohammed to hasten back to Teheran to secure his own 
 rights of succession. 
 
 Russian influence induced Fath Ali, after the death of Abbas, 
 to pass over his seventy-five sons and name Mohammed, his grand- 
 son, as his successor. Thus when Fath Ali was dead, Mohammed 
 found himself confronted by the revolt of several of his disap- 
 pointed uncles. Supported by his father's army and backed by 
 English influence and money, he soon restored order and sup- 
 pressed a new revolt in Khurasan. The prestige thus gained by 
 England through her military representative, Sir Henry Bethune, 
 was, however, of short duration. The vizir, Hajji Mirza Aghasi, 
 was completely under Russian influence and the Russian envoy, 
 Count Simovich, was the actual ruler of Persia. To create a 
 breach between England and Persia, Count Simovich urged the 
 shah to renew his attack on Herat, which the Indian government,
 
 MODERN PERSIA 361 
 
 1832-1843 
 
 right or wrong, had begun to view as of vital importance in the 
 system of Indian defense. 
 
 In Afghanistan the line of the Abdali khans had been driven 
 from Kabul by Dost Mohammed, one of the Kuzul Bash tribesmen, 
 and had sought refuge in Herat, whence they made continual in- 
 roads into Khurasan and Seistan. Herat had always been regarded 
 by the Persians as an integral part of their country and it took 
 little urging to persuade Mohammed Shah to attempt its capture. 
 In November, 1837, a Persian army led by the shah in person and 
 accompanied by the Russian ambassador, appeared before Herat. 
 The Afghans showed little competence and the city would soon 
 have fallen had it not been for the presence of a young English 
 officeV, Eldred Pottinger, among the defenders, and the incapacity 
 of the Persians themselves. Indeed but one vigorous assault was 
 made, planned, it is said, by Count Simovich himself, and the 
 siege of ten months is more conspicuous for its diplomatic in- 
 trigues than for its military exploits. The English envoy, M'Neill, 
 had protested from the first, declaring the attack to be a breach 
 of treaty stipulations. As a matter of fact the English action was 
 in itself a violation of the treaty made in 1814, which promised 
 English neutrality in case of war between Persia and Afghanistan. 
 But the prevalent idea of the importance of Herat and the suspi- 
 cion that Persian conquest would be but a step to Russian occu- 
 pation, determined the Indian government to decisive action. An 
 Indian force entered the Persian Gulf and seized the Island of 
 Karak, while the new British envoy, Colonel Stoddart, by his 
 firm attitude persuaded the shah, already discouraged, to raise the 
 siege September 9, 1838. The Russian diplomacy had suffered a 
 severe check. Count Simovich was recalled and his actions 
 promptly disavowed by the Russian* minister, Count Nesselrode. 
 Relations between Persia and England remained strained till 1842, 
 when a new mission headed by Sir John M'Neill arrived at Te- 
 heran, and the Island of Karak was evacuated. But meantime the 
 Russians had taken advantage of the situation to seize the Island 
 of Ashurada in the Caspian, thus completing their hold on the 
 inland sea. Only one other event of note marked the reign of Mo- 
 hammed Shah the tragedy of Kerbela. The town of Kerbela, 
 sacred to the Shiahs as containing the tomb of Hosein and largely 
 inhabited by Persians, had for some years maintained a semi- 
 independent existence and defied the Turkish authorities. In 1843
 
 362 PERSIA 
 
 1843-1852 
 
 the governor of Bagdad stormed the town and put to death 3000 
 persons, many of them innocent pilgrims. This massacre aroused 
 the utmost horror and indignation in Persia, and war was only 
 averted by the prompt apologies and offers of reparation on the 
 part of the Turkish government. Mohammed Shah died in 1848. 
 His reign represents another step in the general decay of Persia. 
 The shah, a soldier of some repute in his youth, became inbecile in 
 later years and left the government entirely in the hands of the 
 wretched Hajji Mirza, who plundered and oppressed the people at 
 will, driving the few honest and capable officials into exile. Per- 
 sia's military power had utterly collapsed since the death of Agha 
 Mohammed; for the attempt to build up an efficient force trained 
 in the European fashion, praisworthy in itself, proved a failure, 
 and the power of the tribes who furnished the victorious armies of 
 Nadir Shah was now broken. 
 
 Mohammed was succeeded by Shah Nasr ud-din, whose long 
 reign, 1848- 1896, gave continual evidence of the decline of Per- 
 sia. The new sovereign was seated on the throne by the assistance 
 of Mirza Taki, the capable head of the army, who became vizir 
 with the title of Amir un Nizam. The usual rising in Khurasan 
 was, after an eighteen months' resistance, put down by the capture of 
 Mashad and the execution of the rebel leader. Far more important 
 and dangerous was the rise of a new fanatical sect, the Babis. 
 This sect was founded by a dervish, Sad AH Mohammed, who 
 assumed the name of Bab (Arabic for gate), declared himself to 
 be a prophet and preached a new doctrine founded on the mystic 
 Sufism and combining elements of pantheism and extreme social- 
 ism. Driven from Bagdad, Sad Ali returned to Persia and gained 
 such a following, especially among the educated classes, that the 
 government was alarmed and declared the profession of Babism 
 to be a capital crime. Bab was seized in 1848 and condemned to 
 be shot in the great square at Tabriz. But by some chance he was 
 not hit at the first discharge, and when the smoke of the volley 
 had cleared away he was nowhere to be seen. If he had made 
 good his escape a palpable miracle would have been wrought and 
 Babism gained enormous prestige. But unfortunately for the 
 cause he was soon recaptured and dispatched. The movement 
 continued, however, in spite of fearful persecutions. The Babis 
 rose in arms and at Zanzan a party maintained themselves for sev- 
 eral months and died fighting to the last man. An attempt to
 
 MODERNPERSIA S63 
 
 1852-1857 
 
 assassinate the shah in 1852 led to renewed persecution and a 
 veritable reign of terror. Hundreds were put to death, some by 
 frightful tortures, though offered their lives if they would repeat 
 the Moslem creed, and such constancy ended by arousing pity and 
 admiration. The sect still exists, especially among the upper 
 classes, and the whole remarkable movement shows the weakening 
 grip of Mohammedanism on the Persians, who are by nature mys- 
 tics and schismatics. 
 
 A serious reflection on the character of Nasr ud-din is his 
 treatment of the Amir un Nizam, to whom he owed his throne. 
 Mirza Taki had risen from the lowest ranks by force of his own 
 ability and had proved an excellent and faithful minister. But he 
 made the mistake of treating his master as a cipher and so incurred 
 the hatred of the harem party headed by the queen-mother. The 
 shah was finally persuaded to dismiss him and he was shortly after 
 lured from his wife's apartments, where he was safe, and put to 
 death. 
 
 The chief external events of the reign of Nasr ud-din were 
 the capture of Herat and the war with England. The old vizir 
 of Herat, Yar Mohammed, had succeeded in deposing the Abdali 
 princes in 1844 and assuming the power himself. His son pro- 
 fessed to be a faithful subject of Persia and in 1852 Persian troops 
 occupied the town, but withdrew at the demand of the English 
 minister. The Crimean War, in which England stood as the 
 champion of the hated Sunnite Turks, tended to alienate still fur- 
 ther the Persians from the English. In 1855 new complications 
 arose in Afghanistan, where the Abdalis had recovered Herat, 
 while Dost Mohammed had seized Kandahar. The Persian gov- 
 ernment claimed that the aggrandizements of Dost Mohammed 
 threatened their own frontier and again a Persian army occupied 
 Herat, after some resistance, in October, 1856. At about the same 
 time the British envoy, Charles Murray, after a long series of petty 
 persecutions, left Teheran and retired to Bagdad. Fruitless nego- 
 tiations at Constantinople between Lord Stratford de Redcliffe and 
 the Persian ambassador were brought to a close in November, 
 when the Indian government declared war and a British expedi- 
 tion landed in the Persian Gulf and stormed Bushire. In January, 
 1857, Sir James Outram, with 5000 men, attacked and routed 7000 
 Persians at Kush-ab. Then turning northward he entered the vul- 
 nerable province of Arabistan, whence access was easy to the in-
 
 364 PERSIA 
 
 1857-1898 
 
 terior. Outram landed at the mouth of the Karun River and the 
 Persian commander, Prince Khalar Mirza, who had an army of 
 13,000 men, fled in disgraceful cowardice without striking a blow. 
 The English advance was only checked by the news of the signa- 
 ture of a treaty of peace at Paris on March 4, 1858. By the Treaty 
 of Paris, Persia agreed to evacuate Herat, relinquish all claims of 
 suzerainty and to abstain from all further interference with the 
 internal affairs of Afghanistan. Herat was soon after taken by 
 the English protege, Dost Mohammed, and has since remained a 
 part of the dominions of the amir of Afghanistan. 
 
 From this time on the reign of Nasr ud-din remained a peace- 
 ful one. Its chief features were the numerous schemes of reform 
 always eagerly adopted and always quickly dropped by the govern- 
 ment, and the steady continuance of the commercial and political 
 duel between Russia and Great Britain for a dominant position at 
 the Persian court. In 1872 a telegraph line to connect India with 
 Europe was completed across Persia and opened under the man- 
 agement of the Indo-European Telegraph Company. The first 
 railroad in Persia, a line five miles in length, from Teheran to 
 Shah Abdul Azim, was opened in 1884. But when in 1889 Baron 
 de Reuter, representing English interests, got a concession to estab- 
 lish an imperial bank with sole right to issue bank notes and with 
 a certain mining monopoly, the Russians in turn received an ex- 
 clusive concession to build railroads in Persia. Since then no rail- 
 roads have been built and the little line at Teheran remains unique. 
 Nasr ud-din made three visits to Europe and was everywhere hos- 
 pitably received, but the result to Persia was nothing but a new 
 drain on her finances. In 1896 the shah, who was about to cele- 
 brate the fiftieth (lunar) year of his accession, was assassinated by 
 a Persian anarchist while praying at the shrine of Shah Abdul 
 Aziz. 
 
 The new shah, Muzaffar ud-din, found the country in well- 
 nigh desperate straits, due partly to an excessive coinage of copper 
 which had raised prices and ruined trade, and partly to the state 
 of chronic misgovernment. The debased coinage was withdrawn, 
 though at heavy expense to the government; but the vizir, Amir 
 ud Daulah, met with failure in his efforts to systematize the budget 
 and to reorganize the revenue department. In 1898 the distressed 
 government attempted to raise a loan in England. But the British 
 government failed to rise to the opportunity, and private interests,
 
 MODERN PERSIA 365 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 made shy by past failures of British enterprise in Persia, de- 
 manded the surrender of certain customs houses to their control. 
 This demand, equivalent to an accusation of bankruptcy, could not 
 be accepted without loss of prestige and the negotiations fell 
 through. The Persians now turned to Russia in 1900 and in- 
 stantly obtained far more favorable terms. A loan was made of 
 22,500,000 rubles ($12,000,000) issue at 85 and bearing five per 
 cent, interest, secured by a guarantee on all the customs save those 
 collected in the Persian Gulf. Moreover the Russian government 
 undertook to personally safeguard the interests of the bondholders. 
 The result to Persia was the payment of old and pressing debts and 
 a revival of trade due to the large increase of money put into cir- 
 culation. One reform in this reign, carried out by the popular 
 vizir, Amin es Sultan, was the abolition of the wretched system of 
 farming the revenues and the organization of a regular customs 
 service under Belgian control. 
 
 In the meantime, the Shah had developed a serious illness and 
 journeyed to Europe to consult specialists; but his health con- 
 tinued to grow worse. At this time, the summer of 1906, many 
 secret societies were formed at which political subjects were dis- 
 cussed and which the central government seemed unable to put 
 down. There was a scarcity of grain and the price of bread rose. 
 Cholera also appeared and thousands of the people died. Just at 
 this moment the government officials attempted to arrest a Mo- 
 hammedan priest for his expressed accusations against certain high 
 officials. When the police attempted to arrest him he was rescued 
 by his followers. The soldiers were then called out and a number 
 of citizens, among them a sayid, were killed in the riot that fol- 
 lowed. The people were aroused and marched through the streets 
 carrying the bloody shirt of the sayid, but the government soon 
 had matters well in hand and no further bloodshed occurred. The 
 bazaars were then closed and 5000 merchants and artisans, accom- 
 panied by some priests, marched to the British legation, where they 
 informed the minister they would remain while the English gov- 
 ernment adjusted their cause with the Persian government. All 
 business in Teheran except the mails and that of the butcher and 
 the baker ceased. At first the demands were limited to reforms 
 which would lower the price of bread and meat and which would 
 lessen the amount of graft in public office. 
 
 For some time the Shah was unacquainted with the situation,
 
 366 PERSIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 his sickness being much increased. When the facts were made 
 known to him, he at once dismissed the premier, Amir ud Daulah, 
 and summoned the leaders of the people for consultation. These 
 leaders had decided during the weeks that they had spent in the 
 British legation that the only way in which they could obtain 
 permanent benefits from their efforts would be to have a share in 
 governmental affairs. The first talk was of an advisory council, 
 but later they decided to demand a constitutional form of govern- 
 ment with a national assembly. The Shah acceded to their de- 
 mands and a committee was appointed to prepare a temporary 
 constitution. The people returned to their homes and business 
 went on as before. 
 
 About the first of October the first election was held in Persia, 
 and October 7, 1906, the National Assembly was inaugurated. The 
 speech from the throne was all that the people could desire. 
 
 The illness of the Shah continued to increase in spite of all 
 that could be done for him, and on January 9, 1907, the announce- 
 ment was made that "The King of Kings now rests with his 
 fathers." Ten days later the new Shah, Mohammed Ali Mirza, was 
 crowned. 
 
 Soon after the coronation complaints poured in upon the Shah 
 about M. Naus, a Belgian, the Minister of Customs and Posts. 
 For several months the question of his being retained in office 
 hung fire, until the Minister was attacked in the street by a band of 
 infuriated men. The European legations resented this attack, al- 
 though the protest was not made in order that M. Naus might be 
 retained in his position, but it was against allowing a European 
 to be attacked on the street by irresponsible persons. The oppo- 
 sition against the Minister increased to such an extent that he was 
 obliged to leave the country. 
 
 Following close upon this incident came a rebellion in the 
 region of Hamadan and Kermanshah, led by Prince Salar ud 
 Daulah, half-brother to the Shah. He had organized a strong 
 though undiciplined force, gathered mostly from the hill tribes of 
 Kurdistan. It is believed that he intended to contest the throne, 
 but the Shah was loyally supported by the National Assembly and 
 after a month the rebellion was entirely quelled. 
 
 The Shah now sent for Ali Ashair, Amin es Sultan, who had 
 been in exile for the last four years. The new premier found it 
 impossible to adjust himself to the new conditions in Persia and
 
 MODERN PERSIA 367 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 he became very unpopular. On the evening of September 2, 1907, 
 as he was leaving the parliament, he was fatally shot by an assas- 
 sin, who immediately committed suicide. The premier was buried 
 without special honors, but the grave of the murderer at once be- 
 came a place of pilgrimage. Just at this time the terms of the 
 Anglo-Russian agreement were made public and caused some feel- 
 ing on the part of many of the leaders, they believing it to be a 
 check on the commercial and political independence of their coun- 
 try ; instead of which it is confined to reciprocal stipulations on the 
 part of Russia and Great Britain and to a recognition of the prin- 
 ciple of "the open door." To add to the difficulties of the situation 
 Turkish troops crossed the frontier and laid claim to territory 
 about Urumia and Salmas, and an army sent to the region under 
 the leadership of Prince Firma Firman was defeated. 
 
 Mohammed AH Mirza paid his first visit to the National As- 
 sembly in November, 1907. He was received with all due honors, 
 and a little friction between the executive and legislative branches 
 of the government arising a few weeks later was quickly and amic- 
 ably settled. Several months later an unsuccessful attempt was 
 made to assassinate the Shah as he was returning from an excur- 
 sion to the country. 
 
 In June, 1908, the Shah sent some soldiers to the parliament 
 building to arrest certain persons charged with conspiracy who 
 were seeking protection there. The Assembly refused to hand over 
 these persons. This was followed by some violence on the part of 
 the Cossacks and the throwing of a bomb. The soldiers then at- 
 tacked the parliament house, cannonading it and destroying it. 
 Panic prevailed throughout the city and order was only restored 
 by resorting to martial law. Several of the Liberal leaders were 
 executed. Thus ended Persia's first parliament. 
 
 In the early months of 1909 actual civil war broke out in Per- 
 sia, the leaders of the Liberals or Nationalists, at the head of well 
 equipped and drilled troops, overthrowing the Shah's authority in 
 many towns and setting up reform governments. At the same time 
 Turkoman tribes from Russian Turkestan captured Meshed and 
 Astrahabed, holding them against both government and revolution- 
 ary Persian forces and indulging in wholesale massacres. Russian 
 troops took an important part in the fighting, attempting to aid the 
 Shah to quiet his kingdom, and England threatened to bring in her 
 forces if peace were not soon restored.
 
 368 PERSIA 
 
 1898-1910 
 
 On July 13, 1909, the revolutionists entered Teheran, the cap- 
 ital, in triumph. On July 16, the Shah, who had taken refuge in 
 the Russian legation, was formally dethroned and his son, the 
 Crown Prince Ahmed Mirza, was proclaimed King of Kings by the 
 National Assembly at Teheran. As the new ruler was a mere lad 
 of twelve years, his uncle, Azud es Sultan, was appointed regent. 
 
 On November 15th of this same year, the Persian Parliament 
 was opened by the youthful Shah at Teheran, the capital. 
 
 The important fact in the history of Persia for the last cen- 
 tury has been the constant rivalry of England and Russia for con- 
 trol of that rapidly decaying state. Flanked on the east by Afghan- 
 istan and on the west by the Ottoman empire, two powers which, 
 if not formidable, are hated by the Persians for racial and religious 
 causes, Persia lies as in a vise between Russian pressure on the 
 north and English pressure on the south. To appreciate the 
 present status of these two powers, in whose hands lies the future 
 of the land of Iran, we must retrace our steps and briefly recapitu- 
 late the events which have led to their establishment in the north 
 and south of Persia. 
 
 The Persians have never been a seafaring people and the Per- 
 sian Gulf, from the day when Nearchus, admiral of Alexander, 
 sailed a Greek fleet into its waters, has never been an undisputed 
 Persian possession. The Arabs, on the contrary, in the course of 
 their expansion soon took to the sea, and on first entering Persia 
 founded the city of Basra at the mouth of the Euphrates, the future 
 port of Bagdad. Thence the Arab sailors carried their voyages to 
 Africa and the Far East, and as early as the ninth century estab- 
 lished regular trade relations with China. We read in the exploits 
 of Sinbad the Sailor a marvelous picture of this phase of commer- 
 cial expansion. Ormuz, long before the time of Albuquerque, was 
 an Arab emporium and to this day the population of the gulf 
 region is almost wholly Arab.
 
 MODERN PERSIA 369 
 
 1910 
 
 After the fall of the Portuguese supremacy in the days of 
 Abbas the Great the foreign trade of the gulf was shared between 
 the English and the Dutch. The rise of the English to a pre- 
 dominant position was greatly assisted by their friendly relations 
 with the Seyyids of Muscat or Oman, the most powerful Arab 
 state in that region. The Seyyid of Muscat in 1652 drove out the 
 Portuguese and soon extended his rule over a large part of the 
 Arabian and east African coasts. The immediate cause of Brit- 
 ish political intervention in the gulf was the necessity of protect- 
 ing British commerce from the attacks of the Arab pirates who 
 inhabit the so-called Pirate coast. In 18 10 the governor of Bombay 
 attacked them in alliance with Muscat, but the piracies were imme- 
 diately resumed on the withdrawal of the fleet. In 1819-1821 new 
 expeditions after meeting an extraordinary resistance finally re- 
 sulted in the subjugation of the tribesmen. Henceforth a British 
 squadron was kept in the gulf to suppress piracy and the slave trade, 
 to preserve the status quo among the native chiefs, and to prevent 
 all foreign encroachments. The rulers of Oman have always re- 
 mained good friends of the English, but their power has of late 
 declined. To-day the Persian Gulf is politically as well as com- 
 mercially entirely in British hands. England's influence is para- 
 mount at Muscat, a British resident resides at Bushire, while the 
 Pirate coast, the pearl island of Bahrein, and the port of Koweit 
 are under her protection. 
 
 In northern Persia, on the other hand, the position of Russia 
 is unquestionably predominant and apparently unshakable. We 
 have seen how the Russian advance along the western shore of the 
 Caspian, begun in the days of Peter the Great, ended in the Treaty 
 of Turkmanchai, which established the Russian boundary within 
 striking distance of the Persian capital and turned the Caspian into 
 a Russian lake. All that was necessary to complete the Russian 
 grip was a similar advance on Persia's eastern borders. The Rus- 
 sian territories in central Asia are divided by the topography of the 
 country into two major divisions Turkestan and Transcaspia or 
 Turkomania. The Russian conquest of Turkestan need not detain 
 us. Begun in 18 12 by the invasion of the Kirghiz Steppe, it cul- 
 minated in the eventful years 1865- 1873 with the capture of Tash- 
 kent, Samarkand, Bokhara, and Khiva, which brought the Russians 
 to the borders of Afghanistan. 
 
 The conquest of the Transcaspian region is of more immediate
 
 370 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 1910 
 
 concern to the Persian problem. The region between the Caspian, 
 the Sea of Aral, and the Oxus is largely a great and barren plain, 
 with here and there stretches of more fertile country, such as the 
 Oasis of Merv. This region was peopled by the Turkomans, semi- 
 nomadic tribes of Turkish stock who lived largely by marauding 
 and kept the rich province of Khurasan in continual alarm. Among 
 these tribes the most powerful was that of the Tekkes, who held the 
 great Akhul Oasis as well as that of Merv, resisting all Persian 
 efforts to dislodge them or to suppress their forays. The Russian 
 occupation of this region began with the establishment of Fort 
 Novo Alexandrovsk on the Caspian in 1834. In 1869, Krasnovodsk, 
 
 now the chief port on the eastern side of the Caspian, was founded 
 and by 1874 a province of Transcaspia had been set up. The Rus- 
 sians soon came into conflict with the Tekkes, but at first with little 
 success. Three expeditions against the Turkoman fastness of Kizil 
 Arvat proved failures, and in 1879 General Lomakin suffered a 
 severe defeat at their hands. It was not till 1881 that the decisive 
 blow was struck which established Russian rule throughout Turko- 
 mania. In January, 1881, General Mikhail Skobelev, the hero of 
 Plevna, with 7000 men, stormed the Tekke fortress at Geok Tepe, 
 where were assembled 35,000 men, women, and children, with 
 10,000 horsemen. No quarter was given by the Russians, who 
 spared neither age nor sex. Nearly 20,000 persons were slain in the 
 fort and during the pursuit, while the Russians lost barely 1000 men.
 
 IN A PERSIAN CARPET BAZAAR 
 Painting by J. L. Gerome
 
 MODERN PERSIA 370a 
 
 1910 
 
 This butchery broke, or rather annihilated, the Turkoman power, 
 and, strange as it may seem, the survivors of the massacre have 
 become loyal subjects of the tsar. The victory of Geok Tepe 
 brought Russia to the borders of Khurasan, which was henceforth 
 freed from the scourge of Turkoman raiders. Askabad and Merv 
 soon fell into Russian hands and the Muscovite position was defi- 
 nitely consolidated by the completion of the Transcaspian Railroad, 
 which connects the Caspian with Turkestan, running close to the 
 Persian border. As matters stand to-day, the richest of all the 
 Persian provinces, Khurasan, lies practically in Russian hands, for, 
 cut off as it is from Teheran by the vast deserts of central Iran, it 
 is bound by the railroad closer to Russia than to Persia. 
 
 With so commanding a position along the Persian frontier, 
 Russia has been able of late years to dominate the court of Teheran 
 so completely that Muzaffar ud-din would seem to be little better 
 than a vassal of the great northern power, which controls his finances, 
 his court, and the organization of his army. Moreover, the trade 
 of Persia, hitherto mostly in English hands, has now to be divided 
 with the Slav. England and Russia control between them more than 
 four-fifths of the foreign trade of Persia. In 1890, of a foreign trade 
 worth $37,500,000, England's share was $15,000,000, Russia's only 
 $4,500,000. But in the last score of years matters have changed. 
 By 1903 the Russian trade had risen to nearly fifteen millions, of 
 which $6,000,000 were exports from Persia, $8,800,000 imports 
 into Persia; while England's share was about eighteen millions, 
 $16,400,000 imports and $1,400,000 exports. The Russian increase 
 since 1890 had been 350 per cent., the English only 20 per cent. 
 This vast expansion of Russian trade is due largely to the active 
 interest of the government, which, by cheapening means of transport 
 and by granting bounties, has enabled the Muscovite merchant to 
 undersell his English rival throughout northern Persia, though 
 England's hold in the south is still unshaken. 
 
 The most serious problem for Persian commerce, aside from 
 the question of transport, is that of her balance of trade. Her im- 
 ports are vastly in excess of her exports, and the result is a con- 
 tinual drain on the money wealth of the country. And the figures 
 given above show Persia's trade with Russia is on a far sounder 
 and more natural basis than that with England. While Russia 
 buys from Persia almost as much as she sells, England sells to 
 Persia twelve times as much as she purchases from her.
 
 370b 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 1910 
 
 But Russia has not been wholly content with her position as 
 actual ruler in Teheran and northern Persia. Her ambition has 
 been here, as elsewhere, not so much to annex territory, as to carve 
 her way southward to the open sea. It is even supposed that the 
 port of Bander Abbas, which commands the entrance to the gulf 
 and could with little expense be converted into a magnificent road- 
 stead, has already been chosen by the Russians as their future naval 
 station on the Indian Ocean. Such a plan, however, could never 
 meet with British assent, for a Russian port on the Indian Ocean 
 would be a more serious menace to India than even the presence of 
 a Russian army in Herat. The sudden activity of England in the 
 Persian Gulf since 1902, the occupation of Koweit, the visit of the 
 viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, in 1903, and the definite statement 
 of Lord Lansdowne in 1904, that England would tolerate no for- 
 eign naval station in that region, may be taken as an answer to the 
 Russian challenge. To sum up Russia controls to-day (1910) 
 northern Persia, and her influence is supreme at Teheran ; England 
 has practically turned the Persian Gulf into a British lake, and her 
 influence and commerce are still preponderant in the neighboring 
 provinces. 
 
 The history of Persia, stretching over more than twenty-five 
 centuries, presents as varied and kaleidoscopic a picture as that of 
 any nation. Conquered and ravaged by invader after invader, 
 Assyrian, Greek, Parthian, Roman, Arab, Turk, Mongol, and 
 Afghan, Persia has throughout displayed marvelous vitality and 
 power of recuperation. Over all her conquerors she has extended 
 the sway of her art, literature, culture, and traditions. Nothing 
 can indeed be more striking than the persistent efforts of her for- 
 eign and often barbaric dynasties to connect themselves with the 
 grandeur of her past and to pose as descendants of old national 
 kings or heroes. Whatever her future may be, Persia can look back 
 on a past more varied, more glorious, and, with perhaps one excep- 
 tion, more worthy of study than that of any other Asiatic nation.
 
 Chapter V 
 
 THE GOVERNMENT OF PERSIA 
 
 OUR sketch of Persian history would scarcely be complete, 
 nor will the conditions governing the present political 
 status of Persia, as well as the political history of the 
 past, be clearly understood without a glance at the organization of 
 the Persian state. 
 
 Up to 1906 Persia was an absolute monarchy, under an auto- 
 crat whose authority was nominally unlimited. In theory the 
 Shah had supreme power over his subjects, who held their lives 
 and land at his pleasure. His power and the reverence he inspired 
 are well expressed by the empty splendor of his titles, once indeed 
 far more expressive of actual conditions. He is Shah in Shah, 
 King of Kings, Zill Ullah, the shadow of God, and Kebla Alam, the 
 center of the world. 
 
 In 1905, however, the Persian people demanded representation 
 in governmental affairs and in January, 1906, the Shah gave his 
 consent to the establishment of a National Assembly. Under a 
 rescript of August 5, 1906, it was decided that the National Assembly 
 should consist of and be elected by members of the reiging family, 
 clergy, chiefs, nobles, landowners, merchants, and tradesmen. The 
 number of members was fixed at one hundred and fifty six, sixty 
 for Teheran and ninety six for the provinces, by an ordinance 
 dated September 10, 1906. The number of members may in the 
 future be raised to 200; they are elected for a term of two years, 
 and have immunity from prosecution except with the knowledge 
 of the Assembly at large. Ministers or their delegates may appear 
 and speak in the National Assembly ; the sanction of the parliament 
 is necessary for all territorial changes ; for alienation of State prop- 
 erty ; for contracting of loans ; for the construction of road and rail- 
 roads; for the granting of concessions, and for the ratification of 
 all treaties, except such as in the interest of the State demand 
 secrecy. 
 
 371
 
 372 GOVERNMENT OF PERSIA 
 
 1910 
 
 There is a Senate of sixty members, of whom thirty are ap- 
 pointed by the Shah (or regent) and thirty are elected on behalf 
 of the National Assembly, fifteen of each class being from Teheran 
 and fifteen from the provinces. The executive function, according 
 to the Constitution is invested in a cabinet of eight members. 
 
 For purposes of internal government, Persia is divided to-day, 
 as from time immemorial, into provinces large and small, with 
 governors who correspond closely to the satraps of Achaemenian or 
 Sassanian days. The greater provinces, like Azerbaijan and Khu- 
 rasan, are called mamlikat or kingdoms, and their governors, often 
 princes of the blood royal, are called vali. The smaller provinces 
 are called vilayets or eyalats. These provinces are again divided 
 into districts, cities, and villages, with officials responsible to the 
 provincial governors. The governors sometimes hold their posi- 
 tions by hereditary right, but are more commonly appointed by the 
 shah, and frequently changed lest their influence should become 
 too great. An exception is the great province of Azerbaijan, which 
 is always ruled by the heir to the throne. Among the minor offi- 
 cials who administer justice and collect the taxes are the mayors 
 of the town, variously called haikim, beglar begi, or kalantars, and 
 the village headmen, the kathodas, often nominated by the vil- 
 lagers themselves. 
 
 Distinct from the general organization is that of the nomad 
 tribesmen, Arabs, Turkomans, Kurds, Baluchis, and Lurs, who 
 form more than a fifth of the population. These tribes, which to-day 
 are becoming more and more settled in the land, are ruled by 
 hereditary chiefs called ilkhans. They pay no regular taxes, giving 
 tribute instead, and furnishing excellent irregular cavalry to the 
 army. 
 
 Persian law, like that of all Mohammedan countries, is founded 
 chiefly on the religious precepts of the faith. But here, as elsewhere, 
 a customary law has grown up, drawn from ancient Persian and 
 Tatar, as well as from Mohammedan, sources; with the result that 
 there exist in the kingdom to-day two distinct and rival legal sys- 
 tems the Shahr or religious law, and the Urf or secular law. The 
 Shahr, the strictly religious law, is confined to-day chiefly to civil 
 cases questions of property, marriage, inheritance, and the like. 
 Founded on the basis of the Koran and the precepts of the Twelve 
 Imams, it is, naturally, administered by learned priests or mullas 
 who in the large cities are appointed bv the shah, with the title of
 
 THE GOVERNMENT OF PERSIA 373 
 
 sheikh ul islam or kadi. But these judges are not controlled by the 
 secular power, and any man who by his learning reaches the high 
 grade of mujtahid may administer the Shahr equally with the 
 priests appointed by the shah himself. The chief of all these judges 
 is the great mujtahid, generally the head of the priesthood at Ker- 
 bela, the sacred city of the Shiahs. The Shahr differs from ordinary 
 Mohammedan law inasmuch as it embraces besides the Koran the 
 sayings of the Twelve Imams and the interpretations of a long line 
 of Persian doctors of law. It forms a regular and explicit as well 
 as extremely inflexible code, regulating every detail of life in 
 the minutest manner, as well as more evidently legal matters. Over 
 five hundred laws regulate questions of religious worship, while 
 more than fourteen hundred deal with matters of marriage and 
 divorce. 
 
 The Urf, or secular law, embraces all criminal matters, as well 
 as many civil cases. It is administered by the government officials, 
 and final appeals go to the divan or council of state, or to the shah 
 himself, whose consent is necessary for all capital executions. Per- 
 sian criminal law is in a curiously chaotic state, though attempts 
 have been made to codify it, and it still contains many strange 
 survivals of the past. Composition of offenses by heavy fine is fre- 
 quently allowed, asylums of refuge for criminals still exist in cer- 
 tain holy places, and the right of private vengeance is sometimes 
 recognized. Punishment by mutilation and whipping is often sub- 
 stituted for imprisonment*. 
 
 It is inevitable, under this dual system of law, that conflicts 
 should frequently arise between the clerical and secular jurisdic- 
 tions. Formerly the law was entirely administered by the mullas. 
 But since the days of Nadir Shah the secular law has steadily en- 
 croached on the religious, and it has been the constant policy of 
 recent shahs to limit the jurisdiction of the Shahr as far as possible 
 and to add all manner of cases to the jurisdiction of the Urf. 
 
 The success of the shahs in this direction is largely due to the 
 nature of the religious organization of Persia, which presents in a 
 marked degree the peculiarities of that of all Mohammedan coun- 
 tries. We must not forget that there exists no fixed priestly caste 
 in Islam. The priests are merely the ulema, that is, men learned in 
 the law, which, as has been noted, is thoroughly religious in its 
 essence. In Persia, anyone capable of reading and expounding the 
 Koran may act as a mulla or priest and officiate in religious cere-
 
 374 PERSIA 
 
 monies. Besides conducting religious services, the mullas serve 
 as judges and as teachers in the colleges, which exist in every city 
 and town of any size. When a priest becomes widely known for his 
 learning and sanctity he is called mujtahid, a title gained not by 
 appointment, but held in view of his general, repute, though the 
 mujtahids of the sacred cities of Kerbela and Nedjef give an official 
 sanction to its assumption. 
 
 At the head of all the priesthood stands the Naib el Imam, the 
 chief mujtahid of Kerbela, who is regarded by Shiahs as the suc- 
 cessor of the imams and the vicegerent of the Prophet. He is, as 
 we have seen, the chief interpreter of the religious law and final 
 judge of all cases under it. His authority, though purely moral, is 
 enormous and his influence is acknowledged by the shah himself. 
 The shah has no authority over the ulema as such, but, as we have 
 seen, he may appoint the sheikhs ul islam, and he frequently nom- 
 inates the imams, or heads of the large mosques. In a country so 
 thoroughly Mohammedan as is Persia, where Christians, Jews, and 
 Zoroastrians together form less than a fiftieth part of the population, 
 the influence of the priesthood cannot but be important. But as a 
 class they are not highly reverenced by the people, and the whole 
 influence of the government has been steadily devoted to limiting 
 their authority.
 
 THE OPENING OF TIBET 
 
 The Currency Question in India, 
 
 AND 
 
 Famines of India 
 By George M. Dutcher, Ph. D., 
 
 Piofessor of History, Wesleyan University
 
 The Opening of Tibet 
 
 TIBET is the lofty tableland north of the Himalayas in 
 which are the headwaters of such great rivers as the 
 Indus and the Brahmaputra of India, as the Mekong, 
 and the Salwin of Indo-China, and as the Yangtse and the 
 Hoang of China. Its extent is not definitely known, but it may 
 be roughly fixed at about 463,200 square miles with a scanty 
 population of perhaps 6,430,000. The country is under the nom- 
 inal suzerainty of China, and the most important part of it was 
 under the direct rule of the Dalai Lama of Lhasa and his nine 
 ministers, five priests and four laymen, assisted by the Chinese 
 amban or resident. The real power seems to have been lodged 
 in a sort of prime minister, the De-sri, for the Dalai Lama has 
 rarely attained to years of manhood, though the last was about 
 twenty-eight years of age at the time of his flight from Lhasa. 
 
 The indigenous religion of Tibet, which still persists to some 
 extent, was Shamanism. Buddhism was introduced in the seventh 
 century and gradually became prevalent in the form of Lamaism. 
 The title of " Dalai Lama," literally " ocean lama," popularly 
 called " the grand lama," is of comparatively recent origin, dating 
 from about 1600. 
 
 The tide of history has flowed around Tibet and left it in 
 an almost perpetual isolation. Prior to 1800 several Europeans 
 visited Tibet and even Lhasa itself, but since that date only a few 
 travelers have penetrated the country, and scarcely any of these 
 have reached Lhasa. The chief resources of Tibet are probably 
 its untouched wealth of gold and other minerals. Its total trade 
 has been insignificant, that with India scarcely amounting to a 
 half million dollars annually. 
 
 The first Englishman to enter Tibet was George Bogle, who 
 was sent by Warren Hastings, in 1774, to the Tashi Lama at 
 Shigatse. He was well received, but Samuel Turner met with less 
 
 1 It seems desirable to give a somewhat fuller statement than is possible in 
 the History of India concerning Tibet and the circumstances which led to the 
 sending of the Younghusband mission. Editor, June 26, 1906. 
 
 377
 
 378 THE OPENING OF TIBET 
 
 success in 1783, and after his expedition the Tibetans began the 
 policy of rigorously guarding their southern frontier against pass- 
 age by foreigners. Thomas Manning, the Chinese scholar and 
 the friend of Charles Lamb, visited Lhasa in 181 1, being the only 
 Englishman to enter that city before 1904. Later, two French 
 Lazarist missionaries, Hue and Gabet, reached Lhasa in 1846, be- 
 ing the last Europeans to visit that city prior to 1904. The most 
 notable of the later explorers of Tibet have been the Russian 
 Nikolai Mikhailovitch Przhevalski, the American William Wood- 
 ville Rockhill, and the Swede Sven Anders Hedin. Most im- 
 portant in some ways were the two journeys of a native of India, 
 Sarat Chandra Das, who visited Lhasa in 1883, and made exten- 
 sive and valuable reports to the 'Indian government. 
 
 Since the days of Warren Hastings, and until recently, the 
 interests of the English in India have touched those of Tibet only 
 incidentally. The relations of the English in the Pamirs, in Kash- 
 mir, in Nepal, in Bhutan, and especially in Sikkim, have brought 
 the English and Tibetans into a series of relations which have 
 made a neighborly understanding necessary, especially in the pres- 
 ence of Russian activity in central Asia. Over the series of Hima- 
 layan border states, the Dalai Lama claimed a certain suzerainty, 
 which amounted to little more than occasional payments of tribute 
 at Lhasa and Peking. Some references to the history of these 
 various states and of their relations with the British have been 
 made in the history of India, and here attention will be confined 
 to Sikkim, as the little country through which the main route to 
 Tibet passes, and in which have occurred clashes between the 
 English and the Tibetans. By the terms of the treaty with Sikkim 
 in 1861, the construction of a road from Darjiling, now the rail 
 head, to the Jelap-la " the lovely level " Pass, the most prac- 
 ticable of the passes into Tibet, was permitted. Nothing else worthy 
 of note occurred until 1886, when England arranged to send Colman 
 Macaulay on a mission to Tibet. China agreed to assist the mis- 
 sion, which had gathered at Darjiling ready to start when it be- 
 came apparent that the Tibetans would refuse to receive it, and so, 
 at China's urgent request, it was countermanded. This affair 
 showed the British that, in spite of all assurances, China and 
 Tibet were playing off one against the other for the direct purpose 
 of keeping the British out of Tibet. The countermanding of the 
 Macaulay mission was followed by a Tibetan invasion of Sikkim.
 
 THE OPENING OF TIBET 379 
 
 In 1888 an expedition under Colonel Thomas Graham repulsed 
 the invasion and occupied Chumbi, the little valley beyond the 
 Jelap-la wedged in between Bhutan and Sikkim. These troubles 
 were terminated by the visit of one of the Chinese ambans to 
 Calcutta and the signature of a treaty on March 17, 1890, defin- 
 ing the Sikkim frontier as the Himalayan watershed, and renounc- 
 ing all Chinese or Tibetan claims on Sikkim. Other articles of 
 the treaty provided for a joint commission to arrange the details 
 of commercial intercourse between Tibet and India, and to adjust 
 certain other matters. Although a supplementary agreement was 
 signed in 1893, repeated British efforts failed to secure the execu- 
 tion of the various articles of the treaty. This, with the new prob- 
 lems which arose, made it essential that the British should secure 
 a clear definition of their relations with Tibet. In 1902 the govern- 
 ment of India gladly accepted a suggestion of the Chinese gov- 
 ernment to effect a settlement of the Indo-Tibetan questions, and 
 it was agreed that an English agent should meet Chinese and 
 Tibetan representatives at Khamba-jong, on the Tibetan side of the 
 frontier. In accordance with this agreement, the English mission, 
 headed by Major Younghusband, arrived at Khamba-jong in 
 July, 1903. 
 
 In the meanwhile, events had occurred which made the settle- 
 ment of the Tibetan question not simply desirable, but an urgent 
 necessity. Ever since the settlement of the Afghan frontier ques- 
 tions, Russia had quietly but persistently pushed her designs 
 against the feudatory provinces of the Chinese empire, and under 
 the cover of the Boxer rising in 1900 seemed about to accomplish 
 her purposes. Her success in Manchuria seemed complete until 
 Japan interposed. Of Russia's doings in Mongolia, eastern Turkes- 
 tan, and Tibet much less is known, but of her activity and of the 
 general nature of her designs there is little doubt. Apparently 
 Russia intended to reserve these vast regions, together with Man- 
 churia, as her sphere of influence in China. To prosecute her 
 designs in Tibet Russia worked through the Buriats, who live 
 in the vicinity of Lake Baikal and who were spiritual subjects of 
 the Dalai Lama. The central figure in these schemes was the 
 Buriat Dorjiev, who appeared under various names. Dorjiev had 
 gone to Lhasa in early life and entered the Bebung Monastery, and 
 had risen to a position of some importance therein. After many 
 years he was sent among his own people in 1898 to collect con-
 
 380 THE OPENING OF TIBET 
 
 tributions for the Lhasan hierarchy. It was during this visit that 
 he was discovered by the Russian authorities and at once induced 
 to become a Russian agent at Lhasa. On his return to Lhasa, he 
 had little trouble in winning the Dalai Lama to his schemes, but he 
 found that the rest of the hierarchy were stubbornly opposed to all 
 such outside intervention and influence. Nevertheless, Dorjiev 
 and the Dalai Lama were able to go far. Dorjiev bore presents 
 from the Dalai Lama to the tsar at St. Petersburg, and on his 
 return brought presents of no less significance from the tsar to the 
 Dalai Lama, and an agreement, not a formal treaty, between the tsar 
 and the Dalai Lama. The Chinese amban protested at these doings 
 and opposed Dorjiev at every step, as did also the Lhasan hierarchy 
 in general. It was about December, 1901, when Dorjiev returned 
 to Lhasa with the tsar's presents and the proposed agreement. 
 From that time onward he and the Dalai Lama worked in full 
 accord to promote the Russian interests to the direct despite of 
 both China and England, and in face of the determined opposition 
 of the great monasteries to all dealings with the foreigners. Rus- 
 sian arms were imported into Tibet and other measures of a 
 similar sort prosecuted. Dorjiev even boasted that in the spring 
 of 1903 Cossacks would be in Lhasa. It was these facts which 
 made the Younghusband mission and its success a necessity for the 
 government of India. The history of this mission and its results 
 have been recorded in the main part of this volume, and all of 
 these events seem to make it clear that the British policy in Tibet 
 must at least for a long time be carried out on lines closely analogous 
 to her Afghan policy, though there are some important differences. 
 As no British agent is maintained at Kabul, so none will be sta- 
 tioned at Lhasa. No railroads or other modern means of com- 
 munication will be introduced. England will not intervene in the 
 internal affairs of either country and she will not allow any other 
 power to acquire any interest whatsoever in Afghanistan or Tibet. 
 The analogy breaks down at some points, as in the matter of 
 commerce, and also because of the ecclesiastical situation in Tibet 
 and because of the Chinese suzerainty over the country. 
 
 Economically Tibet can never have any important relations 
 with Russia. Tibet's trade must, in the nature of things, be with 
 India, or with that part of China in which England is commer- 
 cially supreme. Geographical conditions make intercourse between 
 Tibet and India very much simpler than with any actual or pos-
 
 THE OPENING OF TIBET 381 
 
 sible Russian territory to the west or north, so that not only com- 
 mercially, but also strategically, England, and not Russia, is most 
 interested in the fate of Tibet. England's interest in Tibet is a 
 double one, for her commercial position in China, as well as her 
 empire in India, must be safeguarded. England must have the 
 open door in China as the simplest method of maintaining her 
 commercial supremacy there, and to make it secure and of effective 
 value she must prevent Russia from tampering with the back 
 door of China, for a Russian position on the upper Yangtse-Kiang 
 would be a perpetual menace to England's commerce in that valley. 
 Russia is not now prepared to meet England in an economic 
 struggle, but she might hope to reserve for herself a vast central 
 Asian empire from which England and other powers should now 
 be excluded in order that Russia may exploit it in the future. 
 
 The religious question is not less important than the com- 
 mercial. The Dalai Lama as Buddhist pope has some Russian 
 subjects in Siberia and his alliance would be invaluable to Russia 
 in the prosecution of her designs upon the Chinese empire. Eng- 
 land has nearly ten million Buddhist subjects, chiefly in Burma, 
 and to her Buddhist influence is also important, owing to the 
 large Buddhist population of her ally Japan, and of that part of 
 China which interests England most. Both for the sake of sub- 
 jects and allies, and for imperial and economic reasons, England 
 must deal just as delicately with Buddhist susceptibilities as with 
 Mohammedan. 
 
 Not only native susceptibilities, but also native prejudices and 
 fancies, must be considered. Asiatics only respect a power that 
 compels respect. Had England failed to take up the Sikkim and 
 Tibet business, and clear it up, she would have lost prestige, not 
 only in India, but throughout the East for having submitted to 
 being snubbed. Having taken up the Tibetan question England 
 must now see the thing through, cost what it may. Fortunately, 
 Lord Curzon's policy, which has proved so successful on the north- 
 west frontier, seems to be thoroughly fitted for the Tibetan fron- 
 tier as well, that is, the defense of the frontier and of all Indian 
 interests, the maintenance of friendly relations with the neighboring 
 country and non-interference in its internal affairs, and the exclu- 
 sion from the buffer state of all foreign influence. Tibet is not 
 an impossible field for military operations, but is an exceedingly 
 impracticable one, the more so toward the north than in the south,
 
 382 THE OPENING OF TIBET 
 
 so that it is more important for England to exclude Russian di- 
 plomacy and arms from Tibet than it is for Russia to exclude 
 England. 
 
 The commercial clauses of the Tibetan treaty will give India 
 easy access to Tibetan markets, and a practical monopoly of them, 
 for India can supply everything Tibet needs more promptly and 
 cheaply than even China, for the transport distance from India 
 is only one-fifth, or even one-tenth, that from China. This will 
 above all affect the trade in tea, which Tibet now obtains entirely 
 from China, whereas India could furnish a better grade much 
 more easily and therefore more cheaply. The commercial privi- 
 leges of India in Tibet under the treaty will make desirable the 
 establishment of good roads as trade routes. The political and 
 the possible military considerations also dictate a policy of road 
 building to the most practicable passes into Tibet, and as far be- 
 yond the frontier as possible. 
 
 In regard to the question of the integrity of China, England 
 may extend her influence effectively over Tibet without in any wise 
 offending the United States and the other powers which desire to 
 guarantee the integrity of China, but, even were it not so, it would 
 be open to England to say that the principle of the integrity of 
 China is intended to apply only to China proper, and not to the 
 tributary states of the empire. Neither is the policy of the open 
 door really affected. No doubt the United States will be able to 
 send goods into the Tibetan markets as she did into Manchuria. 
 Americans will also be interested in Tibet from a missionary stand- 
 point. For years the missionary societies, Catholic and Protestant, 
 have looked forward to the opening of Tibet, and will be ready 
 at the earliest possible moment to work their way in, both from 
 India and from China. Already missionaries have studied the 
 Tibetan language and a Moravian has published a Tibetan gram- 
 mar and a dictionary.
 
 The Currency Question in India 
 
 DURING the eighteenth century and following the breakup 
 of the old Mogul empire, there were a large number of 
 different native coinage systems existing in India, some 
 of great, some of trifling importance. There were, also, some 
 European and other non-Indian coins in circulation. When the 
 East India Company began to coin money, it adapted its system 
 to native, and not to British, standards. In Bengal the Company 
 noticed that the rupee most in circulation was that of the nine- 
 teenth year of the reigning Mogul emperor, and, accordingly, from 
 1793 to 1818, rupees of that type, and bearing that date, were 
 coined by the Company in Bengal. These rupees, known as siccas, 
 that is sikka rupees, literally newly-coined rupees, weighed 179.666 
 grains, having 175.923 grains of pure silver. In 1818 the weight 
 was changed to 191. 916 grains, and in 1833 tne amount of pure 
 silver was changed to 176 grains. These various siccas were su- 
 perseded in 1835 and ceased to be legal tender on January 1, 1838. 
 Beginning in 1835 the Company coined for all of its Indian pos- 
 sessions rupees weighing 180 grains and containing 165 grains 
 of pure silver. To find the value of a sum of siccas in the new or 
 Company's rupees, add one-fifteenth of the sum. In 1835 there 
 were found to be in circulation in India rupees of 300 different 
 coinages. As intercourse was slow between England and India 
 until that time, and as the commercial transactions were almost 
 entirely in the Company's hands, questions of exchange were of 
 comparatively small importance. Down to 1835 a rupee may be 
 roughly reckoned as equivalent to an average of 2.7 pence, or 
 55 cents. 
 
 From 1835 to 1893 the nominal value of the rupee was 24 
 pence, or 50 cents. For exact comparison the rupee weighed 180 
 grains, of which 165 were pure silver; the English florin of 24 
 pence weights 174.535 grains, of which 161.445 are P ure silver; and 
 the American 50-cent piece weighs 192.9 grains, of which 173.61 
 are pure silver. Since the rupee was the practical equivalent of 
 the florin and hence to be reckoned at ten to the pound sterling, 
 
 383
 
 CURRENCY IN INDIA 
 
 the custom arose of keeping accounts not in sums of rupees (e. g., 
 rs. 555,000), but in tens of rupees, which was equivalent to pounds 
 sterling (e. g., rx. 55,500, or 55,500/.). The Indian method of 
 numerating rupees is rs. 44,33,22,111, which would be read 44 
 crores, 33 lakhs, 22,111 rupees. From 1835 to 1873 tne exchange 
 value, now become a matter of commercial and financial im- 
 portance, fluctuated around the nominal value of 24 pence to the 
 rupee. The highest average rate for any one year was 26.035 
 pence in 1 860-1 861, and the lowest, 21.094 in 1848- 1849. During 
 twenty- four of the thirty-six years from 1837- 1838 to x 872- 1873 
 the rate was between 23 pence and 25 pence. 
 
 The formation of the Latin Union for coinage by most of the 
 countries of southern Europe in 1865, the coinage legislation of 
 the new German empire in 1873, and of the United States in the 
 same year, were events with a temporal, if not a causal, relation 
 to the decline in the price of silver, which began about 1873. Later 
 important events in the history of the silver question were the 
 Bland Silver Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act 
 of 1890 in the United States, and the fruitless meeting of the In- 
 ternational Monetary Conference at Brussels in 1892. The effect 
 of these last two events would seem to be reflected in the rate of 
 exchange: in 1889-1890 the rupee averaged 16.566 pence; in 1890- 
 1891, 18.089 pence; in 1891-1892, 16.733 pence; and in 1892- 
 1893, 14.985 pence. Both the United States and India, the two 
 countries most affected by the silver question, were forced to take 
 prompt measures. The United States repealed the purchasing 
 clause of the Sherman Act on November 1, 1893; while in India 
 a royal commission to inquire into the financial situation, which had 
 been appointed before the Brussels Conference, made its report 
 on May 31, 1893, and, on June 26, its recommendations were 
 enacted as law. This Coinage Act provided for the maintenance 
 of the rupee at the fixed value of 16 pence (32.4 cents), for the 
 use of English gold coins in India at the legal rate of 15 rupees 
 to the pound sterling, and for the closing of the Indian mints to the 
 free coinage of silver. The makeshift character of this legislation 
 was shown almost at the moment by the provision made by the 
 government of India to pay a depreciation allowance, in addition 
 to the nominal salaries. The rate of exchange also exposed the 
 futility of the measures, for in 1894- 1895 tne rupee was only worth 
 13.101 pence. Further, it seems that the closing of the Indian
 
 CURRENCY IN INDIA 385 
 
 mints to silver was followed by the emission of a large amount of 
 counterfeit rupees, which, however, were of correct weight, fineness, 
 and die, and so could not be detected. 
 
 The failure of the legislation of 1893 led to the appointment 
 of a second Royal Commission to inquire into the Indian finances 
 in 1895. Legislation, based upon its report, was enacted on Sep- 
 tember 15, 1899. The English sovereign was made a legal tender 
 in India and the Indian mints were opened to the free coinage of 
 gold. Previous to this time the government had recognized no 
 gold coin minted in India as a legal tender, though from 1835 
 onward the Company had coined mohurs, valued at 15 rupees, as 
 the ratio existed in 1835. & mav De added that notes, ranging 
 in value from 5 rupees to 10,000 rupees, are in circulation in India, 
 under the legislation drawn up by James Wilson, the finance mem- 
 ber of Lord Canning's council. 
 
 In conclusion it should be said that the silver question was not 
 a purely Indian question, but a question of world finance, and its 
 development and settlement have been the result, not so much of 
 legislation, as of the relative size of the world's accumulation of 
 gold and silver, and the amount of annual production of each metal. 
 The opening of the new and extensive gold fields of the Transvaal 
 and the Klondike have had an important effect on the . situation. 
 The action of India, in adopting the gold standard, was practically 
 followed by the United States by the Act of March 14, 1900; 
 and other nations and colonies took similar action at about the 
 same time, so that now nearly every country of importance is 
 on the gold basis. Under these conditions, the legislation of 1899 
 has proven successful, and will, no doubt, continue to do so. 
 
 The following table of the Indian currency gives the present 
 legal English equivalents, and the approximate American equiva- 
 lents 
 
 3 pie = 1 pice = 1 farthing = i cent 
 
 4 pice = 1 anna = 1 penny = 2 cents. 
 16 annas = I rupee = 16 pence = 32.4 cents. 
 15 rupees = 1 pound = 1 pound = $4.83%
 
 Famines of India 
 
 THE primary cause of famine in India is the failure of the 
 monsoons and the consequent failure of the crops, either 
 partially or totally, over a larger or smaller area. The 
 secondary and contributing causes of the suffering produced by 
 the famine are numerous and complicated. Undoubtedly, the de- 
 nudation of the forest lands has affected the rainfall and the 
 consequent area of productive soil. Antiquated, inefficient, and 
 wasteful methods of tillage are in some measure responsible. A 
 factor of prime importance is the complex social and economic 
 status which has produced an overcrowding of population in the 
 cultivated districts, while a large portion of the cultivable land of 
 India remains unredeemed from the jungle. This is a double evil, 
 for not only is much tillable land left unproductive, but the popu- 
 lation dependent upon any one district of cultivated land is so 
 great that the slightest shortage of crops results in scarcity of food. 
 The construction of extensive irrigation works in recent years has 
 both increased the cultivated area and insured a more reliable water 
 supply for a large area where the rains may fail. The government 
 is wisely giving full attention to this method of insurance against 
 famine. 
 
 The population of India is increasing rapidly, the more so 
 since British rule has put a complete stop to the wars which once 
 devastated India, and also to brigandage, widow-burning, in- 
 fanticide (especially of females), and other conditions and customs 
 which were destructive of life. To the changed social and eco- 
 nomic conditions created by British rule the people are very slow 
 in adapting themselves. Eighty per cent, of the people of India 
 still depend upon agriculture for their livelihood, so that in time 
 of drought they are thrown out of work and have no other means 
 available of earning their support, except as the government opens 
 relief works. 
 
 The land systems vary greatly in the different parts of India, 
 so that the agrarian question is a very complex one, and the gov- 
 ernment has not yet succeeded in effecting a just and equitable 
 settlement of the problems in all the different provinces. As a 
 
 386
 
 FAMINES OF INDIA 387 
 
 large part of the revenue is drawn from the land, the question of 
 the adjustment of the burden of taxation has an intimate rela- 
 tion with the conditions which produce famine, though it is a 
 curiously absurd piece of special pleading to charge the cause of 
 famine suffering, entirely or even to a considerable degree, to 
 over-taxation, or to inequality of assessment. Until recently the 
 money lenders have been able to fleece the needy agriculturists, un- 
 hampered by any checks, but within the last few years the gov- 
 ernment has attempted to place a limit upon their exactions, and 
 has considered establishing a system of land banks. The correct 
 adjustment of the land revenues and the land laws should be 
 supplemented by measures encouraging migration and the open- 
 ing up of the untilled lands. 
 
 Famines have ceased to exist in Europe, wherever railroad and 
 steamer communication has been opened, and it has naturally been 
 expected that a similar result would follow in India, and for that 
 reason enormous sums have been spent, especially, in developing 
 the railway system. The Orissa famine owed its disastrous re- 
 sults to the lack of the means for transporting the surplus stores of 
 the neighboring provinces to the sufferers. The extension of the 
 railway system has really resulted in decreasing the acuteness of 
 the famine in any one locality, but it has at the same time resulted 
 in increasing the scarcity area, because it has given the grain 
 merchants the ability to control prices so that famine prices in one 
 locality lead naturally to higher and even to scarcity prices in 
 the adjoining districts. Obviously a law fixing maximum prices 
 cannot be enforced in India, and least of all by an English govern- 
 ment. The opening of easy means of communication does not 
 solve the problem, even though food supplies at normal prices 
 were introduced, because of the habits of the people. In whole 
 districts- the people are rice eaters and might starve to death with 
 carloads of wheat standing beside them, because of ignorance of 
 methods of preparation of the food, or even from prejudice against 
 the unknown article. Other districts depend upon wheat, or 
 millet, as the staple of life, and to them rice is equally useless, until 
 they are taught its value and how to use it. Naturally a large 
 portion of the famine mortality is among the infants and small 
 children. Famines, also, are responsible for retarding the birth 
 rate. The stringency of the caste system and the customs requiring 
 the seclusion of women prevent the highest efficiency in any sys-
 
 388 FAMINES OF INDIA 
 
 tern of relief. Flood, pestilence, and other calamities may alsa 
 contribute to cause famine suffering. 
 
 No doubt there was also some justice in the statement that 
 the famines at the close of the nineteenth century were money 
 famines, rather than food famines, for certainly the currency ques- 
 tion, which perplexed the government down until 1899, did affect 
 trade conditions, and required increased taxation so that the masses 
 of the people were not in the most favorable position to weather 
 the period of scarcity. The " hard times " which pinched the Amer- 
 ican people in the years following 1893 starved the people of India. 
 So deep is the poverty of India that 40,000,000 of its population 
 never have enough to eat. 
 
 The frontier policy pursued by the Indian government from 
 Lord Lytton's administration through Lord Elgin's laid unduly 
 heavy burdens upon the taxpayers of India, and, while the result 
 of this policy will probably be the improvement of India's con- 
 dition as well as of its political position, it is certainly no injustice 
 to say that this policy was in some degree responsible for the famine 
 suffering since Lord Lytton's time. From a European stand- 
 point, India is not overtaxed, for in British India the taxes amount 
 to about 80 cents a head annually, while the national government 
 in the United States costs annually more than $5.00 for each in- 
 dividual, and, when the cost of state and local government is added, 
 it amounts to $15.00 a head. Against this fact, however, must 
 be placed a comparison of the per capita wealth and the per capita 
 incomes of the people of India and those of other countries, and 
 then it appears clearly that India is supporting a government ex- 
 pensive out of proportion to the wealth of the population. In 
 justice it should be remembered that neither heavy taxation nor 
 the famines are, to any serious extent, the result of wrong govern- 
 mental policies, but are the result of a combination of physical, 
 social, and economic conditions, which the government is honestly 
 endeavoring to remedy and which no government could possibly 
 correct except after the lapse of a long period. In other words, 
 India is suffering because she could not, on the instant, be trans- 
 formed from an Asiatic state and people, to a European basis of 
 civilization and life. 
 
 The fatality of famines is also largely increased by cholera 
 and other diseases, which the weakened famine sufferers are unable 
 to withstand. The drought frequently kills off the work-cattle, so
 
 FAMINES OF INDIA 389 
 
 that there are no draught animals available for transporting food 
 away from the railway during the famine, or to assist in tilling the 
 soil when the rains come again. This was especially true during 
 the 1 899- 1 900 famine. 
 
 In 1883 the so-called famine code was promulgated, and, after 
 the 1897 famine, a commission in 1898 revised the local famine 
 codes. The management of the relief work was more successful 
 and satisfactory in the 1897 an d 1900 famines than ever before. 
 Not counting periods of scarcity, there have been twenty-two seri- 
 ous famines in India since 1770, ten of these since 1858, and they 
 have cost probably 15,000,000 lives. 
 
 In order to relieve the sufferers from the famines, the vic- 
 tims are gathered in relief camps at places to which supplies may 
 be easily transported, and all who are able to work are employed 
 on relief works, formerly mostly railroads, now chiefly irrigation 
 works, so that in fighting a famine measures are taken to prevent 
 its recurrence. The laborers on the relief works are paid in money, 
 a minimum rate which enables the individual to buy enough food 
 for himself and those dependent upon him. The government not 
 only helps the victim while the famine lasts, but helps to put him 
 on his feet again when it is over, by furnishing him work-cattle, 
 implements, and seed, and even by making loans. The relief work 
 of the government is supplemented by private charity, especially by 
 the missionaries who devote especial care to the friendless orphans. 
 This is, incidentally, excellent policy for the missionaries, for over 
 these children they have unhampered control and readily make con- 
 verts of them when they reach mature age. 
 
 The system of famine insurance, introduced under Lord Lyt- 
 ton, was excellent in theory. It was estimated that the cost of 
 famines to the government of India averaged about 1,500,000/. 
 annually. It was, therefore, planned to raise that amount annually 
 by taxation, over and above the ordinary revenue. This was to 
 make the fat years pay for the lean ones. The sum was regularly 
 raised, but frequently diverted to uses that required a wild im- 
 agination to describe as famine relief, or famine insurance meas- 
 ures. In the long run the matter has squared itself, owing to the 
 enormous cost of such famines as those of 1897 and 1900. Still 
 it was an unwise policy to raise a fixed annual sum for famine 
 insurance and to spend it for objects that are not clearly relief or 
 insurance measures.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 This bibliography makes no pretense of giving a complete list of even the 
 best books, nor does the presence of a title in this list necessarily imply that it is 
 better than any similar book on the subject. The best bibliographical aid for the 
 student of India and its history is the " Catalogue of the Library of the India 
 Office," of which volume i is devoted to the books in English (London, 1888; 
 with "Index," London, 1888; and "Supplement," London, 1895). Many of the 
 books mentioned in this list furnish much valuable bibliographical material. 
 
 The most important of the general histories of India are: J. C. Marshman: 
 " History of India from the Earliest Period to the Close of Lord Dalhousie's 
 Administration" (London, 1867-1870, 3 vols.) ; H. G. Keene: "History of India 
 from the Earliest Times to the Present Day" (London, 1893, 2 vols.); while 
 mention may also be made of J. T. Wheeler : " Short History of India " (Lon- 
 don, 1880) ; H. Beveridge : " Comprehensive History of India, Civil, Military, 
 and Social" (London, 1862, 3 vols.) ; and L. J. Trotter: "History of India from 
 the Earliest Times to the Present Day" (third edition, London, 1899). 
 
 For the period prior to the arrival of the Europeans in India, the following 
 are valuable: S. Lefmann: " Geschichte des alten Indiens" (Berlin, 1890), and 
 U. Miiller: " Der Islam im Morgen- und Abendland," volume 2 (Berlin, 1887) ; 
 both of which are in Oncken's " Allgemeine Geschichte in Einseldarstellungen" ; 
 R. C Dutt: "History of Civilization in Ancient India based on Sanskrit Litera- 
 ture" (Calcutta, 1889- 1890, 3 vols.); and "Ancient India, 2000 B.C. 800 a.d. " 
 (London, 1893); V. A. Smith: "Early History of India from 6oo~ ?.c. to the 
 Mohammedan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great" 
 (Oxford, 1904) ; and J. T. Wheeler: "History of India from the Earliest Ages" 
 (London, 1874- 1876, 4 vols.). 
 
 For the student there is abundant material on the early history of the 
 British in India, but special mention should be made of the calendars and reports 
 on records prepared by W. N. Sainsbury, F. C. Danvers, and Sir G. C. M. 
 Birdwood. For the general reader, Sir W. W. Hunter : " History of British 
 India" (London, 1899- 1900, 2 vols.) replaces all other books for the period 
 down to 1708, and the student will find it an invaluable aid. Sir A. C. Lyall: 
 "Rise of the British Dominion in India" (New York, 1893), is the best brief 
 account, though R. W. Frazer: "British India" ("Story of the Nations" 
 series, London, 1896), is more complete. The standard work on the British in 
 India is J. Mill : " History of British India " (London, 1817, 3 vols., of which 
 the later editions were edited by H. H. Wilson with notes and continua-ion, the 
 sixth edition appearing in 10 volumes in London in 1872). E. P. Thornton: 
 "History of the British Empire in India" (London, 1841-1845, 6 vols.), is 
 worthy of mention, though distinctly favorable to the East India Company. 
 
 On the later history of the British in India see M. Townsend and G. Smith : 
 "Annals of Indian Administration, 1856-1875" (Serampore and Calcutta); 
 L. J. Trotter: " History of India under Queen Victoria from 1836 to 1880" (Lon- 
 don, 1886, 2 vols.); D. C. Boulger: "India in the Nineteenth Century" (Lon- 
 don, 1901) ; R. C. Dutt: "Economic History of British India, 1757-1837" 
 
 393
 
 394 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 London, 1902), and "India in the Victorian Age, Economic History of the 
 People" (London, 1904). 
 
 For the military history of the British in India, the following are among the 
 most important general works : A. Broome : " History of the Rise and Progress 
 of the Bengal Army " (only volume I published, London, 1850) ; P. R. Inness : 
 " History of the Bengal European Regiment, now the Royal Munster Fusiliers " 
 (2d edition, London, 1885) ; E. Buckle : " Memoir of the Services of the Bengal 
 Artillery," edited by J. W. Kaye (London, 1852); W. J. Wilson: "History of 
 the Madras Army" (Madras, 1882-1889, 4 vols, and atlas); J. G. S. Neill : 
 "Historical Record of the Madras European Regiment" (1843); and H. M. 
 Vibart : " Military History of the Madras Engineers and Pioneers from 1743 
 up to the Present Time" (London, 1881-1883, 2 vols.). For the Indian navy 
 see C. R. Low: "History of the Indian Navy, 1613-1863" (London, 1877, 2 vols.). 
 
 The " Dictionary of National Biography " contains sketches of all important 
 Anglo-Indians deceased prior to 1901, while the " Rulers of India " series, edited 
 by Sir W. W. Hunter, in 28 volumes, gives excellent accounts of the most famous 
 rulers of India, ending with the Earl of Mayo. See, also, Sir J. W. Kaye: 
 " Lives of Indian Officers, Illustrative of the Civil and Military Services of 
 India" (London, 1867, 2 vols.); G. Smith: "Twelve Indian Statesmen" (2d 
 edition, London, 1898) ; and C. E. Buckland : " Dictionary of Indian Biography " 
 (London, 1905). 
 
 The history of Christianity in India will be found in J. Hough : " History 
 of Christianity in India from the Commencement of the Christian Era " (London, 
 1839-1845, 4 vols.), and G. Smith: "Conversion of India from Pantsenus to the 
 Present Time, a.d. 193-1893 " (London, 1894) ; while a discussion of the present 
 situation, with a full bibliography, will be found in H. P. Beach : " India and 
 Christian Opportunity" (New York, 1904). 
 
 R. W. Frazer: "Literary History of India" (New York, 1898), may be 
 consulted in addition to works cited elsewhere. The following glossaries are 
 useful : H. H. Wilson : " Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms and of 
 Useful Words occurring in Official Documents relating to the Administration 
 of the Government of British India" (London, 1855), and G. Temple: "Glossary 
 of Indian Terms relating to Religion, Customs, Government, Land, and Other 
 Terms and Words in Common Use" (London, 1897). 
 
 On the government of India, a useful handbook is Sir W. Lee- Warner: 
 " Citizen of India " (London, 1900) ; and the best recent books are Sir G. 
 Chesney : " Indian Polity, a View of the System of Administration in India " (3d 
 edition, London, 1894) ; Sir Courtenay Ilbert: "Government of India" (Oxford, 
 1898) ; T. Morison : " Imperial Rule in India, being an Examination of the 
 Principles Proper to the Government of Dependencies" (Westminster, 1899); 
 and Sir J. Strachey : " India, its Administration and Progress " (3d edition, 
 London, 1903). For the Indian treaties, see Sir C. U. Aitchison: "Collection 
 of Treaties, Engagements, Sunnuds . . . relating to India and Neighboring 
 Countries" (2d edition revised and continued, Calcutta, 1892, n vols.). Sir W. 
 Lee- Warner: "Protected Princes of India" (London, 1894); W. Stokes: 
 "Anglo-Indian Codes" (Oxford, 1887-1891, 3 vols.) ; and L. C. Probyn: "Indian 
 Coinage and Currency" (London, 1897), are important on their respective 
 subjects. For the land systems and allied topics, consult B. H. Baden-Powell: 
 "Land Systems of British India" (Oxford, 1892, 3 vols.); "Short Account of 
 the Land Revenue and its Administration in British India" (Oxford, 1894); 
 and " Indian Village Community " (London, 1896) ; and A. Rogers : " Land 
 Revenue of Bombay, a History of its Administration, Rise and Progress" 
 (London, 1893, 2 vols.).
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Indian problems are discussed in Sir C. W. Dilke : " Problems of Greater 
 Britain " (4th edition, London, 1890) ; C. L. Tupper : " Our Indian Protectorate " 
 (London, 1893) ; W. S. Lilly: "British India and its Problem" (London, 1902) ; 
 J. O. Hobbes (Mrs. P. M. T. Craigie) : " Imperial India, Letters from the 
 East" (London, 1903); and W. Digby: "Prosperous British India" (London, 
 1901), which is a vigorous arraignment of the British administration in India. 
 The following collections of essays on India contain much of interest and value: 
 Sir A. C. Lyall: "Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social" (London, 1882-1899, 2 
 vols.) ; E. W Hopkins: "India, Old and New" (New York, 1901) ; Sir W. W. 
 Hunter : " India of the Queen and Other Essays," edited by Lady Hunter 
 (London, 1903); and W. Crooke: "Things Indian, being Discursive Notes on 
 Various Subjects Connected with India" (London, 1906). 
 
 Compendious and descriptive accounts of India are numerous, but the fol- 
 lowing may be noted : R. M. Martin : " British Colonies, their History, Extent, 
 Conditions and Resources," volume 5 (London, 1834) ; and " Indian Empire " 
 (1858-1861, 3 vols.);' Sir W. W. Hunter: "Indian Empire, its Peoples, History 
 and Products " (3d edition, London, 1893) ; Sir R. Temple : " Bird's-Eye View of 
 Picturesque India" (London, 1808); L. E. Guinness: "Across India at the 
 Dawn of the Twentieth Century" (London, 1898); C. H. Forbes-Lindsay: 
 "India, Past and Present" (Philadelphia, 1903, 2 vols.) ; G. W. Forrest: "Cities 
 of India" (New York, 1903); H. Compton: "Indian Life in Town and 
 Country" (New York, 1904); and Sir T. H. Holdich: "India" (London, 
 1904). 
 
 The " Statistical Survey of British India," in 128 volumes, compiled under 
 the general direction of Sir W. W. Hunter, has been condensed into Sir W. W. 
 Hunter: "Imperial Gazetteer of India" (2d edition, London, 1885-1887, 14 vols.). 
 A third edition is being prepared by J. S. Cotton. The map publishing firm of 
 Johnston have brought out an " Atlas of India," containing 16 maps and com- 
 plete index, with an introduction by Sir W. W. Hunter (Edinburgh, 1894). 
 Constable's have published J. G. Bartholomew: "Hand Atlas of India" (Lon- 
 don, 1893), and "Hand Gazetteer of India" (London, 1898). 
 
 Governmental publications by both the home and the local authorities are 
 valuable, such as the parliamentary papers, the reports of the various commis- 
 sions of inquiry, the annual reports of various officials and departments of the 
 government, the census reports, and such annual handbooks as the "India List 
 and India Office List," " Annual Statement of the Trade of British India" 
 " Financial Statement of the Government of India, with Discussion in the Legis- 
 lative Council," "Judicial and Administrative Statistics," "Agricultural Statis- 
 tics of British India," and "Statistical Abstract of British India." 
 
 Important material has been published by the Royal Asiatic Society and by 
 the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (founded in 1784), and in the Calcutta 
 Review (quarterly), founded in 1844. 
 
 The following is an alphabetical list of books which have special points of 
 merit : 
 
 Beatson, A. "View of the Origin and Conduct of the War against Tippoo 
 Sultaun." London, 1897. 
 
 An excellent history of the Mysore Wars. 
 Bernier, Frangois. " Travels." London, 1891. 
 
 Bernier was a French physician who resided at the court of Aurangzeb for 
 
 several years, and his account of the life there has become famous. 
 Blacker, V. " Memoirs of the Operations of the British Army in India during 
 the Maratha War, 1817-1819." London, 1821. 
 
 Excellent for a study of the Pindari War and the last Maratha War.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Bourchier, G. "Eight Months' Campaign against the Bengal Sepoy Army 
 
 during the Mutiny of 1857." London, 1858. 
 
 The most important of the contemporary and personal accounts of the 
 
 Mutiny. 
 
 Bowring, L. W. "Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, and the Struggle with the 
 
 Mussulman Powers of the South." (" Rulers of India " series.) Oxford, 
 
 1893. 
 Contains a good account of the siege of Seringapatam and of the previous 
 
 campaign. 
 Bradshaw, J. " Sir Thomas Munro and the British Settlement of the Madras 
 Presidency." ("Rulers of India" series.) Oxford, 1894. 
 A good description of the rayatwari system of assessment and collection for 
 the land revenue in the Madras presidency. 
 Buhler, J. G., and Kielhorn, F. " Grundriss der indo-arischen philologie und 
 altertums-kunde." Strassburg, 1896 in progress. 
 This is a valuable collection of monographs in English and German. Writ- 
 ten by the most competent scholars of the day. 
 Busteed, H. E. " Echoes from Old Calcutta." 3d edition. Calcutta, 1897. 
 
 Recognized for its excellent account of the Black Hole episode in the light 
 of recent investigations. 
 Cambridge, R. O. " Account of the War in India between the English and the 
 French on the coast of Coromandel, 1750-1760." London, 1761. 
 A good account of the part Indian territory played in the great Hundred 
 Years' War. 
 Camoens, Luiz de. " Os Lusiadas," Lisbon, 1572. 
 
 This is the epic of the Portuguese in India. There are many English 
 translations, of which that of Sir R. F. Burton is the best. 
 Cheyney, Edward Potts. " European Background of American History, 1300- 
 1600" (Vol. I of "The American Nation, a History"). New York, 1904. 
 The fullest and best recent account of the commerce of India and of Euro- 
 pean knowledge of India, prior to 1500. 
 Childers, Robert Caesar. " Dictionary of the Pali Language." London, 1872. 
 
 The article on Buddha is particularly good. 
 Colquhoun, J. A. S. "With the Kurram Field Force, 1878- 1879." London, 
 1881. 
 A personal account of the Second Afghan War. 
 Colvin, Sir Auckland. " John Russell Colvin, the last Lieutenant-Governor of 
 the Northwest under the Company." ("Rulers of India" series.) Ox- 
 ford, 1895. 
 Contains an able discussion of Lord Auckland's administration in India. 
 Creighton, J. N. " Narrative of the Siege and Capture of Bhurtfore." London, 
 1830. 
 This is the primary authority on the capture of Bhartpur. 
 Day, C. " Policy and Administration of the Dutch in Java." New York, 1904. 
 To the enquirer concerning the Dutch in India, this book will prove of as 
 much service as its name indicates, and is, besides, the best book on that 
 subject in the English language. 
 Danvers, F. C. " Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on the 
 Portuguese Records relating to the East Indies at Lisbon and Evora." 
 London, 1892. 
 Indispensable to the scholar. 
 - "History of the Portuguese in India." London, 1894. 2 vols. 
 This is the standard work in English on this subject.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 397 
 
 Dirom, A. " Narration of the Campaign in India which terminated the War 
 with Tippoo Sultan in 1792." London, 1793. 
 Certain to be interesting to all, because it is written by a contemporary. 
 Douglas, G., Duke of Argyll. " Eastern Question from the Treaty of Paris, 
 1856, to the Treaty of Berlin, 1878, and to the Second Afghan War." Lon- 
 don, 1879. 2 vols. 
 An excellent treatment of the Second Afghan War. 
 Dubois, J. A. " Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies," translated from 
 the Author's later French manuscript and edited by H. K. Beauchamp. 
 Oxford, 1897. 2 vols. 
 Based on local observations in southern India at the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 Duff, J. G. " History of the Marathas." London, 1826, reprinted Bombay, 1863. 
 3 vols. 
 This has a distinct value to the student of native Indian history. 
 Durand, Sir H. M. "Life of Major General Sir Henry Marion Durand." 
 London, 1883. 2 vols. 
 Valuable, because Durand was for a time private secretary to Lord Ellen- 
 borough while he was governor-general of India. 
 Elliot, Sir Henry Miers. " History of India as told by its own Historians, the 
 Mohammedan Period," revised and continued by J. Dowson. London, 
 1867- 1877. 8 vols. 
 Indispensable to the student. 
 Elphinstone, Mountstuart. " History of India, the Hindoo and Mohammedan 
 Periods." 6th edition. London, 1874. 
 This is still valuable, though needing some corrections in the light of later 
 researches. 
 Erskine, W. "History of India under the two first Sovereigns of the House 
 of Taimur, Baber and Humayun." London, 1854. 2 vols. 
 A scholarly but detailed account. 
 Fergusson, James. " History of Architecture in All Countries, from the Earliest 
 Times to the Present Day." 2d edition. London, 1874. 4 vols. 
 Volume IV. is devoted to India and China and is exceedingly entertaining. 
 Ferishta, M. K. " History of the Rise of the Mohammedan Power in India," 
 translated by J. Briggs. London, 1829. 4 vols. 
 The author is a native authority. 
 Garcin de Tassy, Joseph Heliodore Sagesse Vertu. " Les auteurs hindoustainis 
 et leurs ouvrages." 2d edition. Paris, 1868, and " Histoire de la literature 
 hindouie et hindoustanie." 2d edition. Paris, 1870-1871. 3 vols. 
 Excellent for the student of modern Hindu literature. 
 Goblet d'Alviella, E. " Ce que flnde doit a la Grece." Paris, 1897. 
 
 Worth consulting. 
 Hamilton, Alexander. "New Account of the East Indies." London, 1727. 2d 
 edition, 1744. 2 vols. 
 The personal narrative of one of the most famous interlopers. 
 Hensman, H. " Afghan War of 1879-1880." London, 1881. 
 
 This is the best account of the Second Afghan War. 
 Heyd, W. "Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen age." Leipzig, 1885- 
 1886. 2 vols. 
 A work of scholarly research, worthy of particular mention. 
 Holden, Edward Singleton. "Mogul Emperors of Hindustan." New York, 
 
 1895. 
 A brief but popular narrative.
 
 398 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Holdich, Sir Thomas." India." (" Regions of the World " series.) Oxford, 1904. 
 
 A convenient handbook. 
 Holmes, T. R. " History of the Indian Mutiny." 5th edition. London, 1898. 
 
 This is the standard history on this subject. 
 Holwell, John Z. " Indian Tracts." 3d edition. London, 1774. 
 
 Holwell, who was in charge at Calcutta, was one of the survivors of the 
 Black Hole episode, and his " narrative " is therefore of peculiar interest. 
 Hunter, Sir William Wilson. " Annals of Rural Bengal." London, 1868. Now 
 in its seventh edition. 
 A mass of interesting facts regarding the present religious practices of 
 peoples in certain localities, in which the author himself was an observer. 
 
 " Orissa." London, 1872. 2 vols. 
 
 These are really supplementary volumes to his " Annals of Rural Bengal." 
 Irwin, H. C. " The Garden of India, or Chapters on Oudh History and Af- 
 fairs." London, 1880. 
 Contains a good account of the annexation of Oudh. 
 Jonge, J. K. J. de " De Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gesag in Oost-Indi'e." 
 Amsterdam, 1864- 1883. 11 vols. 
 Very good but long, and there is no English translation as yet. 
 Kaye, Sir J. W. " History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857-1858." 5th edition. 
 London, 1870- 1877. 3 vols. 
 The most comprehensive work on this subject. 
 Klerk de Reus, G. C. Geschichtlicher Ueberblick der Administrativen, recht- 
 tichen und Unanziellen Entwicklung der Niederlandisch-Oostindischen 
 Compagnie." The Hague, 1894. 
 An excellent example of Dutch scholarship, as yet untranslated into English. 
 Lane-Poole, Stanley. " History of the Mogul Emperors of Hindustan illustrated 
 by their Coins." London, 1892. 
 A detailed, scholarly account. 
 Laurie, W. F. B. " Our Burmese Wars and Relations with Burma, being an 
 Abstract of Military and Political Operations, 1824-1826 and 1852-1853." 
 London, 1880. 
 An excellent account of the Burmese wars. 
 Logan, W. "Malabar." Madras, 1887. 
 
 Valuable for its account of that coast. 
 M'Crindle, J. W. " The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great as described 
 by Arrian, Q. Curtius, Diodorus, Plutarch and Justin." 2d edition, West- 
 minster, 1896 ; " Ancient India as described by Megasthenes and Arrian," 
 Bombay, 1877 ; " The Commerce and Navigation of the Erythrean Sea," 
 Bombay, 1879 ; " Ancient India as described by Ktesias the Knidian," Bom- 
 bay, 1882 ; and " Ancient India as described by Ptolemy," Bombay, 1885. 
 Excellent for sources and critical matter concerning ancient India. 
 Macdonnell, A. A. "History of Sanskrit Literature." New York, 1900. 
 
 Furnishes a compendious account of the ancient literature of India, and 
 gives bibliographical details concerning the editions of various Sanskrit 
 writings, as well as citing the most important works of recent oriental 
 scholars. 
 Mackenzie, R. " Sketch of the War with Tippoo Sultaun." Calcutta, 1793- 
 1794. 2 vols. 
 This is a good account of the second Mysore War. 
 Mahan, Alfred Thayer " Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783." 
 Boston, 1890. 
 The best work on the influence of maritime activity.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 399 
 
 Malcolm, Sir John. "Life of Robert, Lord Give." London, 1836. 3 vols. 
 
 This biography was written by one whose whole life, from childhood up, 
 had been devoted to the service of India and to a study of her political, 
 social, and commercial conditions. 
 Malleson, George Bruce "History of the Indian Mutiny, 1857-1858." London, 
 1878- 1880. 3 vols. 
 This supplements Kaye's " History of the Sepoy War in India." 
 
 " Decisive Battles of India." London, 1883. 
 
 Excellent for detail accounts of battles. 
 
 " History of the French in India from the founding of Pondichery in 1674 
 
 to the capture of that place in 1761." 2d edition. London, 1873. 
 The standard work on the French in India, and contains full bibliographical 
 references. 
 
 " Final French Struggles in India and the Indian Seas." London, 1878. 
 
 Supplements his earlier volume on the French in India. 
 Meinsma, J. J. * Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Besittingen." 
 Delft, 1872. 
 Brief and scholarly but in Dutch. 
 Muir, John. " Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the Peo- 
 ple of India, their Religion and Institutions." London, 1868-1873. 5 
 vols. 
 This work contains translations and critical annotations of many of the 
 important texts. 
 Muller, F. Max. "History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature." 2d edition. Lon- 
 don, i860. 
 This has not been excelled nor even replaced by any more recent work. 
 '"Lecture on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as illustrated by the Re- 
 ligion of India." London, 1878. 
 Very interesting and valuable. 
 Nelson, J. H. " View of the Hindu Law as administered by the High Court of 
 Judicature at Madras." Madras, 1877. 
 A detailed discussion of the legal aspects of caste in India. 
 Oman, J. C. " Great India Epics, the Stories of the Ramayana and the Mahab- 
 harata." London, 1894. 
 Presents the substance of the two great epics. 
 Orme, Robert. " History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in 
 Indostan from the year 1745." London, 1763-1778. 4th edition. London, 
 1803. 2 vols. 
 Written by one who was actively connected with the practical working of 
 British policy in India, and is, therefore, authoritative. 
 Ragozin, Mme. Zenaide Alexelevna "Vedic India" ("Story of the Nations" 
 series). New York, 1899. 
 A popular narrative. 
 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas Francois. " Histoire philosophique et politique des 
 etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes." 
 Paris, 1770. 4 vols. 
 Interesting, but not entirely reliable. There are numerous editions both in 
 English and in French. 
 Reclus, Jean Jacques filisee. " The Earth and its Inhabitants," edited by A. H. 
 Keane. New York, 1884. 
 The eighth volume is devoted to India and Indo-China. 
 Rhys-Davids, T. W. "Buddhist India" (" Story of the Nations" series). New 
 York, 1903 ; " Buddhism, being a Sketch of the Life and Teachings of
 
 400 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Guatama, the Buddha," 2d edition. London, 1893; and "Buddhism, its 
 History and Literature." New York, 1896. 
 These are all valuable. 
 Schrader, O. " Reallexikon der indo-germanischen altertumskunde ; grundzuge 
 einer kultur und volkergeschichte Alteuropas." Strassburg, 1901. 
 A summary of the results of the investigations concerning the life of the 
 Indo-Europeans. 
 Scott, J. G. (pseudonym, Shway Yoe). "The Burman, his Life and No- 
 tions." 2d edition. London, 1896. 2 vols. 
 An excellent sketch of Burma. 
 Sherring, M. A. "Hindu Tribes and Castes." Calcutta, 1872-1881. 3 vols. 
 
 A good general account of the caste system. 
 Sleeman, Sir W. H. "Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh in 1849 and 
 1850." London, 1858. 2 vols. 
 The annexation of Oudh is well told. 
 Smith, T. "Five Years' Residence at Nepaul, 1841-1845." London, 1852. 2 
 vols. 
 Is a good description of Nepal and should be read in connection with the 
 Nepal War of 1814-1815. 
 Steele, A. " Summary of the Law and Custom of Hindoo Caste.; within the 
 Dekhun Provinces." 2d edition. London, 1868. 
 An excellent account of the legal aspects of Indian caste. 
 Stephens, H. Morse. "Albuquerque" ("Rulers of Nations" series). Oxford, 
 
 1893. 
 
 A good history of the Portuguese in India. 
 Stewart, C. " History of Bengal from the first Mohammedan Invasion until the 
 virtual Conquest of that Country by the English, a.d. 1757. London, 1813. 
 
 This, though old, is still of service. 
 Thomson, Mowbray. " Story of Cawnpore." London, 1859. 
 
 The personal narrative of one of the four survivors of the massacre of 
 
 Cawnpur. 
 Tod, J. " Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, or the central and western 
 Rajpoot States of India." London, 1829-1832. 2 vols. 
 
 A good local history. 
 Travernier, Jean Baptiste. " Travels." London, 1889. 
 
 This is a record of the knowledge gained by a Frenchman who made several 
 
 expeditions to Asia, chiefly for business purposes. 
 Trevelyan, Sir G. O. " Cawnpore." London, 1865. 
 
 This is an excellent account of the mutiny of Cawnpur. 
 Valentyn, F. " Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien." Dordrecht, 1724. 5 vols. 
 
 Excellent, but in Dutch. 
 Vansittart, Henry. " Narrative of the Translations in Bengal from 1760-1764." 
 London, 1766. 
 
 The history of Bengal during his own governorship. 
 Warburton, Sir R. "Eighteen Years in the Khyber, 1879-1898." London, 1900. 
 
 Valuable for a study of the northwest frontier question. 
 Waring, E. S. " History of the Marathas." London, 1810. 
 
 Deals directly with the history of the Marathas and has a special value. 
 Wheeler, B. I." Alexander the Great" ("Heroes of the Nations" series). 
 New York, 1900. 
 
 Contains an excellent narrative of Alexander's invasion of India. 
 Wilks, M. " Historical Sketches of the South of India in an attempt to trace 
 the History of Mysore." London, 1810-1817. 3 vols.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 401 
 
 The account of the Mysore wars and especially of the siege of Seringapatam 
 is excellent. 
 Wilson, J. " Indian Caste." London, 1877. 2 vols. 
 
 A good general account of the caste system. 
 Yate, A. C. " England and Russia Face to Face in Asia, Travels with the 
 Afghan Boundary Commission." Edinburgh, 1887. 
 An excellent history of the Afghan frontier question. 
 Younghusband, G. J. " Indian Frontier Warfare." London, 1898. 
 
 Valuable for the Tirah campaign. 
 Yule, Sir Henry. " The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian, concerning the 
 Kingdoms and Marvels of the East," translated and edited with notes ; 
 3d edition revised throughout in the light of recent discoveries by Henri 
 Cordier of Paris. London, 1003. 2 vols. 
 A very important and interesting book. 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 Anderson, T. S. "My Wanderings in Persia." London, 1880. 
 
 Narrative of an English official in Persia. Interesting but sketchy and 
 
 rather unsympathetic. 
 Bassett, James. " Persia, the Land of the Imaums." New York, 1886. 
 
 Mr. Bassett's book is rather better than the average narrative of Persian 
 
 travels. 
 Benjamin, S. G. W. " Persia and the Persians." Boston, 1887. 
 
 The writer, who formerly represented the United States in Persia, gives an 
 
 appreciative picture of modern Persian life and customs, with a valuable 
 
 outline of Persian law and government. 
 "The Story of Persia" ("Story of the Nations" series). New York, 1903. 
 
 As the title indicates, this work makes no pretense to be more than a sketch 
 
 of the more salient points in Persian history. 
 Curzon, George Nathaniel. " Persia and the Persian Question." London, 1891. 
 2 vols. 
 
 A thoughtful study of modern Persia by an eminent authority on Eastern 
 
 affairs. It is written from an English standpoint, and the author has a 
 
 thesis to maintain. 
 Frazer, J. B. " Historical and Descriptive Account of Persia." New York, 
 1836. 
 
 This book, though old and hardly authoritative, forms a good handbook for 
 
 Persian history. 
 Malcolm, Sir John. " The History of Persia." 2 vols. London, 1815. 
 
 A work which has become a classic. The early legendary history of Persia 
 
 is especially well illustrated. Most subsequent English histories of Persia 
 
 are based on Malcolm. 
 Markham, Clement. " History of Persia." London, 1874. 
 
 A handy compilation of Malcolm's great work, corrected in the light of 
 
 more recent investigation. 
 Phelps, M. H. "Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi [Babism]." New York, 
 1904. 
 
 An appreciative and careful study of the most remarkable religious move- 
 ment in recent Persian history. 
 Rawlinson, George. " Russia and England in the East." London, 1875. 
 
 Naturally of a transitory value, for history has been made rapidly since this 
 
 sketch was written.
 
 402 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 "The Sixth Great Oriental Monarchy; or, The Geography, History, and 
 
 Antiquities of Parthia." London, 1873. 
 Valuable for its discussion of Roman domination in the East. The old idea 
 of the universal character of the Roman Empire is amply disproved. See 
 note under Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy. 
 
 " The Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy ; or, The Geography, History, and 
 
 Antiquities of the Sassanian or New Persian Empire." London, 1876. 
 This work, written by an eminent archaeologist and historian, stands as the 
 most authoritative work on the subject in English. Rawlinson has happily 
 combined scholarly treatment with a vivid and interesting style, which 
 makes the book attractive to the lay reader as well as to the special student. 
 
 Stuart, Donald. " The Struggle for Persia." London, 1902. 
 
 Narrative of a journey from Tabriz to Teheran, with some discussion of the 
 political status of Persia. Readable, but too prejudiced to be of any value 
 to the student of Persian conditions. 
 
 Whigham, H. J. "The Persian Problem." London, 1903. 
 
 A useful supplement to Lord Curzon's work. Particular attention is given 
 to English interests in the Persian Gulf.
 
 INDEX
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abbas (I) the Great, shah of Persia: 
 reign of, 343 
 
 Abbas II, shah of Persia: reign of, 347 
 
 Abbas III, shah of Persia: reign of, 351 
 
 Abbas Mirza: his campaign against the 
 Georgians, 358 ; defeated by the Rus- 
 sians, 359 
 
 Abbasside Dynasty: condition of Persia 
 under, 326 
 
 Abbott, James : associated with the Law- 
 rences in India, 223 
 
 Abdul Karim: gives lessons in Hindus- 
 tani to Queen Victoria, 287 
 
 Abdur Rahman Khan : proclaimed 
 amir of Afghanistan, 258; death of, 
 287 
 
 Abu Bekr, Mohammedan kalif: acces- 
 sion of, 322 
 
 Abul Fazl: sketch of, 114 
 
 Adams, Major: his campaign against 
 Mir Kasim, 187 
 
 Addiscombe: military school maintained 
 at, 202 
 
 Aden: sketch of, 18 
 
 Adil Shahi Dynasty: founded, 106 
 
 Afghan, Frontier Commission: appoint- 
 ed (1884), 265 
 
 Afghan War, 256 
 
 Agha Mohammed, shah of Persia: re- 
 volt of, 355; reign of, 356 
 
 Agra: captured by Lake, 201 
 
 Ahmadabad: labor troubles of, 78 
 
 Ahmad Khan, Persian ruler: reign of 
 (1282-1284), 335 
 
 Ahmad Khan: separates Afghanistan 
 from Persia (i747)> 354 
 
 Ahmad Shah Durani: invades India, 
 127; sketch of, 216 
 
 Ahmadnagar: captured by Wellesley, 
 201 
 
 Aitchison, Sir Charles Umpherston: 
 
 sketch of, 203 ; head of Civil Service 
 
 Inquiry Commission, 267 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of (1748), 179 
 Ajit Singh, prince of Rajputana: asserts 
 
 his independence of Mogul empire, 
 
 126 
 Akbar the Great: birth of, no; reign 
 
 of, no 
 Akbar, son of Aurangzeb : rebellion of, 
 
 122 
 Ala-ad-din Mohammed, Persian ruler: 
 
 provokes quarrel with the Mongols, 
 
 334 
 
 Ala-ud-din, king of Delhi : career of, 99 
 
 Albert Victor, Prince of Wales: visits 
 India, 273 
 
 Albuquerque, Alfonso de : his voyage to 
 India, 148; made viceroy of the In- 
 dies, 149 
 
 Alexander VI, Pope : issues the Bulls of 
 Demarcation, 146; grants bull to 
 king in Portugal, giving him au- 
 thority in the East, 148 
 
 Alexander the Great, king of Macedon : 
 invades India, 67 
 
 Alexander, Georgian prince: revolt of, 
 358 
 
 Alexandria: becomes mart of Indian 
 trade, 140 
 
 Alexandria: see Uchh 
 
 Ali, Mohammedan kalif: reign of, 326 
 
 Ali Murad, shah of Persia : reign of, 
 
 355 
 Ali Vardi, nawab of Bengal : defeats 
 
 the Bhonslas, 133; usurps the 
 
 throne, 182 
 Aligarh: battle of (1803), 201 
 Aliwal: battle of (1846), 221 
 Almeida, Francisco de : made viceroy of 
 
 the Indies, 148 
 Alp Arslan the Conquering Lion, king 
 
 of Persia: reign of, 330 
 Altamsh, king of Delhi: reign of, 97 
 
 405
 
 406 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Amboyna: massacre of (1623), 154, 162; 
 
 annexed to British empire, 205 
 Amherst, William Pitt Amherst, Baron: 
 
 his governor-generalship of India, 
 
 209 
 Amiens, Treaty of (1802), 197 
 Ampthill, Arthur Villiers Russell, 
 
 Baron: acting governor-general of 
 
 India, 302 
 Amr ben Leis, Mohammedan ruler: 
 
 reign of, 328 
 Amru Ibn al Aasse, (Amru ben al- 
 
 Ass) : refuses to recognize AH as 
 
 kalif, 326 
 Andaman Islands : description of, 17 
 Antioch: siege of (543 a.d.), 319 
 Antiochus (II) Theos, king of Syria: 
 
 concludes treaty with Asoka, 71 
 Arcot: siege of (1751), 180 
 Ardashir (Artaxerxes) I, king of Per- 
 sia: founds dynasty, 315 
 Argaum: battle of (1803), 136 
 Arghun, Persian ruler: reign of, 335 
 Artaxerxes : see Ardashir 
 Aryans: in India, 36 
 Ashraf, Afghan king: reign of, 350 
 Asiatic Trading Company: organized, 
 
 174 
 
 Aslanduz: battle of (1810), 359 
 
 Asoka, king of Magadha: accepts Bud- 
 dhism, 60; concludes treaty with 
 Antiochus II, 71 
 
 Assada: founded, 164 
 
 Assada Merchants: see Courten's Asso- 
 ciation 
 
 Assassins: organization of, 332 
 
 Assaye: battle of (1803), 136, 201 
 
 Athaide, Luis de : viceroy of the Indies, 
 151 
 
 Atharva-Veda : rise of, 42 
 
 Auckland, George Eden, Earl of: his 
 governor-generalship of India, 215 
 
 Aungier, Gerald: governor of Bombay, 
 167 
 
 Auranzeb, Mogul emperor: usurps 
 throne, 120; reign of, 121 
 
 Australia: discovered, 154 
 
 Avitabile, General: trains the Sikh 
 army, 221 
 
 Ayerst, Lieutenant: murder of, 283 
 
 Ayub Khan: at war with the British, 
 258 
 
 Azad Khan: reign of, 355 
 
 B 
 
 Babar the Mogul: invades India, 109 
 Babis, The: founded, 362 
 Badajoz Conference, (1524), 146 
 Baffin, William : searches for the North- 
 west Passage, 156 
 Bagdad: siege of (1733), 351 
 Bahadur, Mogul emperor: reign of, 
 
 125 
 Bahadur, Sayyid Ammad Khan : founds 
 
 the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental 
 
 College, 256 
 Bahadur, Sir Jang: assists in quelling 
 
 Mutiny, 238 
 Bahmani, Kingdom of: rise of, 105 
 Baillie, William : defeated by Haidar 
 
 AH, 193 
 Bairam Khan: regency of, 111 
 Baird, Sir David: his campaign against 
 
 Napoleon, 197 
 Bakhtiyar Khilji: conquests of, 95 
 Baj i Rao I, Maratha peshwa : reign of, 
 
 132 
 Baji Rao II, Maratha peshwa: reign of, 
 
 136; leads revolt of the Marathas, 
 
 208 
 Balaji Vishwanath: made peshwa, 132 
 Balaji Baji Rao, Maratha peshwa: reign 
 
 of, 133 
 Balban, king of Delhi : reign of, 98 
 Baluchistan: establishes peaceful rela- 
 tions with the British, 259 
 Baluchistan, British : organized, 266 
 Banda, Sikh leader: fate of, 126 
 Bankipur (Banky-bazaar) : founded, 
 
 172; siege of (i733)> 174 
 Bantam: captured by the Dutch (1682), 
 
 167 
 Barbour, David Miller: finance member 
 
 of the governor-general's council, 
 
 274 
 Barents, William: explorations of, 154 
 Barid Shahi Dynasty: founded, 106 
 Baring, Evelyn, Earl Cromer: sketch 
 
 of, 260 
 Baring, Thomas George, Baron North- 
 brook: see Northbrook, Thomas 
 George Baring, Baron 
 Barlow, Sir George Hilaro: his gover- 
 nor-generalship of India, 204 
 Bassein: sacked by the Marathas 
 (1739), 152
 
 INDEX 
 
 407 
 
 Bassein, Treaty of (1802), 136, 200 
 Bayezid, Persian ruler: defeated by 
 
 Timur, 338 
 Bayley, Sir Steuart Colvin : sketch of, 
 
 262 
 Bayley, William Butterworth : acting 
 
 governor-general of India, 212 
 Baxar: battle of (1764), 126, 128, 135, 
 
 187 
 Behar: conquered by Bakhtiyar Khilji, 
 
 (1109), 95 
 
 Belisarius : his campaigns against the 
 
 Persians, 319 
 Bengal : separated from Madras, 165 
 Bengal Company of Embden : organized, 
 
 174 
 
 Bengal Rent Act (1885), 260 
 
 Bengal Tenancy Act (1859), 244; 
 (1885), 244 
 
 Bentinck, Lord William Cavendish; re- 
 moved from governorship of Mad- 
 ras, 204; governor-general of India, 
 212 
 
 Berlin, Treaty of (1878), 256 
 
 Bernard, Sir Charles Edward : sketch of, 
 264; made chief commissioner in 
 Burma, 266 
 
 Bethune, Sir Henry: establishes English 
 influence in Persia, 360 
 
 Better Government of India, Act for the 
 (1858), 240 
 
 Bhakta-Mala: description of, 80 
 
 Bhartpur (Bhurtpore) : sieges of (1805), 
 201 ; (1827), 212 
 
 Bhils : description of, 28 
 
 Bhilsa: plundered by Ala-ud-din, 99 
 
 Bhurtpore: see Bhartpur 
 
 Bhutan War, 247 
 
 Bird, George Corrie: his campaign 
 against the Waziris, 278 
 
 Black Hole of Calcutta: story of, 182 
 
 Blood, Bindon : sketch of, 279 
 
 Bombay: ceded to England, 164 
 
 Boscawen, Edward : besieges Pondi- 
 cherri, 179 
 
 Boughton, Gabriel : wins concessions for 
 the English from governor of Ben- 
 gal, 164 
 
 Braganza, Constantino de: viceroy of 
 the Indies, 151 
 
 Brahma Samaj : rise of, 87 
 
 Brahmans : rise of, 43, 76 
 
 Brahmaputra: description of, 8 
 
 Brandis, Dietrich : father of Indian 
 
 forestry, 7 
 Brazil : discovery of, 147 
 Brydon, William : survives the march 
 
 from Kabul, 218 
 Bubonic Plague: sketch of, 282 
 Bucephala : founded, 68 
 Buddha: rise of, 56 
 Buddhism: in India, 56; in Burma, 65, 
 
 210 
 Burma: description of, 16; Buddhism in, 
 
 65; sketch of, 210 
 Burmese War, First, 210 
 Burmese War, Second, 226 
 Burnes, Sir Alexander: his mission to 
 
 Afghanistan, 216; assassination of, 
 
 217 
 Bushire: stormed (1856), 363 
 Bussorah: founded, 322 
 Buwayid Dynasty: reign of, 328 
 
 Cabot, John: searches for the North- 
 west Passage, 156 
 Cabot, Sebastian : searches for the 
 
 Northwest Passage, 156 
 Cabral, Pedro Alvares: his voyage to 
 
 India, 147 
 Calcutta : founded, 166 
 Calcutta, Black Hole of, 182 
 Campbell, Colin, Baron Clyde : relieves 
 
 Lucknow, 237; his campaign in 
 
 Oudh, 238 
 Campbell, Sir George : sketch of, 252 
 Canning, Charles John, Earl Canning: 
 
 his governor-generalship of India, 
 
 230 
 Catherine II, queen of Russia: aids 
 
 Georgia against Persia, 357 
 Cape Colony: captured by the English, 
 
 197 
 
 Carey, William: missionary efforts of, 
 171 ; professor of Sanskrit in Col- 
 lege of Fort William, 202 
 
 Cartwright, Ralph: opens English trade 
 with Bengal, 163 
 
 Caste: in India, 43, 78 
 
 Castro Joao de: viceroy of the Indies, 
 
 iSi 
 Cavagnari, Pierre Louis Napoleon: con- 
 cludes treaty with the amir of 
 Afghanistan, 257
 
 408 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cavendish, Thomas : circumnavigates 
 the globe, 157 
 
 Cawnpur: siege of (1857), 236 
 
 Ceylon: Buddhism introduced, 61; con- 
 quered by the Dutch, 155; made a 
 crown colony, 197 
 
 Chaitanya: teachings of, 85 
 
 Chait Singh, raja of Benares: rebellion 
 of, 192 
 
 Chalderan: battle of (1514), 34* 
 
 Chancellor, Richard: searches for the 
 Northwest Passage, 156 
 
 Chandarnagar : captured by Clive, 182 
 
 Chand Bibi, queen of Ahmadnagar: 
 frustrates Akbar's schemes for 
 southern India, 113 
 
 Chandra Gupta, king of Magadha: his 
 relations with the Greeks, 69; reign 
 of, 70 
 
 Chang-lo: attack on (1904), 298 
 
 Charaka: fame of, 48 
 
 Charles VI, Holy Roman emperor: 
 sends expeditions to India, 172 
 
 Charnock, Job: obliged to desert factory 
 at Kasimbazar, 166 
 
 Chaul: battle of (1508), 148 
 
 Chennapatam: see Madras 
 
 Chera, Kingdom of: description of, 105 
 
 Chesney, George Tomkyns : his plans 
 for frontier defense, 269 
 
 Child, Sir John: governor of Bombay, 
 167 
 
 Child, Sir Josia: controls the company 
 in London, 168 
 
 Chilianwala: battle of (1849), 226 
 
 China: Buddhism becomes the state 
 religion of, 62 
 
 Chinsurah : siege of (1759), 155 
 
 Chitral: siege of (1895), 2 78 
 
 Chitor: siege of (1303), 99 
 
 Chitu : leads Pindari revolt, 208 
 
 Choiseul or Choiseul-Amboise, fetienne 
 Francois, Duke of: Louis XV in- 
 trigues against policy of, 180 
 
 Chola, Kingdom of: description of, 
 10S 
 
 Chosroes : see Khusru 
 
 Clarke, Sir Alfred : becomes acting gov- 
 ernor-general of India, 196 
 
 Clive, Robert, Baron Clive of Plassey: 
 sketch of, 179; defends Arcot, 180; 
 captures Calcutta, 182; made gov- 
 ernor of Bengal, 185; second gov- 
 ernorship, 187 
 
 Close, Barry: resident in Mysore and 
 Poona, 202 
 
 Clyde, Colin Campbell, Baron: see 
 Campbell, Colin, Baron Clyde 
 
 Coblom (Covelong) : founded, 172 
 
 Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure 
 (1861), 244 
 
 Colbert de Croissi, Charles: organizes 
 the French East India Company, 
 170 
 
 Columbus, Christopher: attempts to dis- 
 cover India, 145 
 
 Colvin, John Russell: secretary to Lord 
 Auckland, 215 ; his services in In- 
 dia, 223 
 
 Colvin, Sir Auckland: sketch of, 261 
 
 Combermere, Stapleton Cotton, Vis- 
 count: his campaign in India, 212 
 
 Company, The : see United Company of 
 Merchants of England trading to 
 the East Indies, The 
 
 Company of the Philippine Islands, 
 Royal : organized, 171 
 
 Company of Scotland trading to Africa 
 and the Indies, The : organized, 171 
 
 Connaught, Arthur William Patrick Al- 
 bert, Duke of: visits India, 288 
 
 Conti, Nicolo: visits the East, 141 
 
 Coote, Sir Eyre : at battle of Wandi- 
 wash, 180; his campaign against 
 Haidar Ali, 193 
 
 Coorg: annexed to English possessions 
 in India, 215 
 
 Cornish, Sir Samuel: captures Manila 
 (1762), 181 
 
 Cornwallis, Charles, Lord: governor- 
 general of India, 195; his second 
 governor-generalship, 204 
 
 Cotton, Sir Henry: attempts to present 
 report of Indian National Congress, 
 
 293 
 Councils, Buddhist: the first, 59; the 
 
 second, 60; the third, 60; the fourth, 
 
 61 
 Couper, George Ebenezer Wilson : sketch 
 
 of, 263 
 Court, Colonel : trains the Sikh army, 
 
 221 
 Courten's Association: formed, 158; 
 
 makes settlements, 163; founds As- 
 
 sada, 164 
 Courten, Sir William: founds Courten's 
 
 Association, 158
 
 INDEX 
 
 409 
 
 Covelong: see Coblom 
 
 Covilham, Pedra da: visits India, 144 
 
 Cowley, Henry Wellesley, Baron: lieu- 
 tenant-governor of the Oudh ces- 
 sions, 202 
 
 Cradock, John, Lord Howden : causes 
 mutiny at Vellore, 204 
 
 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl : see Bar- 
 ing, Evelyn, Earl Cromer 
 
 Cunha, Nuno da: governor of the In- 
 dies, 150 
 
 Currency Question, The, 383 
 
 Curzon of Kedleston, George Nathaniel 
 Curzon, Baron: his governor-gen- 
 eralship of India, 279; his second 
 governor-generalship of India, 302 
 
 Dahse : invade India, 73 
 
 Dalhousie, James Andrew Brown Ram- 
 say, Earl of : his governor-general- 
 ship of India, 222 
 
 Daman: captured by the Portuguese, 151 
 
 Damascus: taken by the Persians (615 
 A.D.), 320 
 
 Damghan : battle of, 350 
 
 Dane, Sir Louis : his mission to Kabul, 
 
 295 
 
 Dara: death of, 121 
 
 Daras: captured by the Persians (572 
 A.D.), 319 
 
 Davies, Robert Henry: sketch of, 252 
 
 Davis, John: searches for the North- 
 west Passage, 156 
 
 Dawkins, Clinton Edward: finance 
 member of the governor-general's 
 council, 274 
 
 Day, Francis: founds Fort Saint 
 George, 163 
 
 Deane, Sir Harold Arthur: chief com- 
 missioner of the Northwest Frontier 
 Province, 286 
 
 Deccan Agricultural Relief Act (1880), 
 256 
 
 Defense, Treaty of (1619), 161 
 
 Delhi : captured by Mohammed of Ghor, 
 95; battle of (1398), 104; adorned 
 by Shah Jahan, 120; sack of (1736), 
 127; battle of (1804), 136; captured 
 by Lake, 201; siege of (1857), 237 
 
 Demarcation, Bulls of (i493)> 146 
 
 Denison, Sir William Thomas: becomes 
 
 acting governor-general of India, 
 
 244 
 Doegiri : captured by Ala-ud-din, 99 ; 
 
 captured by Malik Kafur, 100 
 Dorjiev: Russian agent at Lhasa, 298 
 Dost Mohammed: sketch of, 216; at war 
 
 with Persia, 361, 363; death of, 247 
 Dhulip Singh: recognized as raja, 221 
 Diaz, Bartholomew: rounds the Cape of 
 
 Good Hope, 144 
 Dig: battle of (1804), 136 
 Dilemite Dynasty: reign of, 328 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield: 
 
 his Afghan policy, 256 
 Diu: battles of (1509), 148; (1546), 151; 
 
 siege of (1538), 150 
 Djala-ud-din, Persian ruler: death of, 
 
 334 
 
 Drake, Sir Francis: circumnavigates 
 the globe, 156 
 
 Draper, Sir William: captures Manila 
 (1762), 181 
 
 Duff, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone 
 Grant: sketch of, 263 
 
 Dtifferin, Frederick Temple Hamilton- 
 Temple-Blackwood, Marquis of: his 
 governor-generalship of India, 264 
 
 Dufferin, Lady: her efforts in behalf of 
 Indian women, 268 
 
 Dupleix, Joseph Francois: sketch of, 
 178 
 
 Durand, Algernon George Arnold: es- 
 tablishes British influence north of 
 Kashmir, 278 
 
 Durand, Henry Marion: military mem- 
 ber of the governor-general's coun- 
 cil, 248 
 
 Durand, Sir Henry Mortimer: negoti- 
 ates treaty with the amir of Afghan- 
 istan, 277 
 
 Dutch: in India, 154 
 
 East India College : established at 
 
 Haileybury, 202 
 East India Company, Danish: founded, 
 
 171 
 East India Company, Dutch: organized, 
 
 154 
 East India Company, English: organ- 
 ized, 158; charter renewed (1813),
 
 410 
 
 INDEX 
 
 206; (1833), 214; (1853), 225; 
 sketch of, 239 
 
 East India Company, French: estab- 
 lished, 169 
 
 East India Company, Swedish: organ- 
 ized, 175 
 
 Eden, Sir Ashley: sketch of, 203 
 
 Eden, Emily: sketch of, 215 
 
 Eden, George, Baron Auckland: see 
 Auckland, George Eden, Earl of 
 
 Edinburgh, Alfred Ernest Albert, Duke 
 of: visits India, 249 
 
 Edmonstone, Neil Benjamin: foreign 
 secretary for Wellesley, 202 
 
 Edward VII, king of Great Britain and 
 Ireland and emperor of India : visits 
 India, 253; accession of, 288 
 
 Edwardes, Herbert Benjamin: attempts 
 to prevent outbreak in the Punjab, 
 225 
 
 Egerton, Robert Eyles: sketch of, 263 
 
 Elgin, James Bruce, Earl of: his gover- 
 nor-generalship of India, 244 
 
 Elgin, Victor Alexander Bruce, Earl of: 
 his governor-generalship of India, 
 274 
 
 Ellenborough, Edward Law, Baron: his 
 governor-generalship of India, 218 
 
 Elles, Sir Edmond Roche: sketch of, 
 279; resigns as military member of 
 council, 305 
 
 Elliot, Gilbert, Earl of Minto : appointed 
 governor-general of India, 205 
 
 Ellis, Sir Barrow Helbert: sketch of, 
 251; negotiates Treaty of Teheran, 
 360 
 
 Elphinstone, Mountstuart: envoy to 
 Afghanistan, 205; his mission to 
 Afghanistan, 216 
 
 Elphinstone, William George Keith : 
 sketch of, 218 
 
 Erivan: battle of (1800), 358 1 
 
 Ettrick of Ettrick, Francis Napier, 
 Baron: see Napier, Francis, Baron 
 Ettrick of Ettrick 
 
 Eugene of Savoy, Prince: sends expedi- 
 tion to India, 172 
 
 Family Compact, 181 
 
 Famines of India (1896-1900), 284 
 
 Famines of India, 286 
 
 Fatehpur Sikri : battle of (1527), 109 
 Fath AH, shah of Persia: reign of, 358 
 Ferdousi (Firdausi) : sketch of, 93, 329 
 Fergusson, James : sketch .of, 263 
 Firdausi : see Ferdousi 
 Firinghis: description of, 153 
 Firozshah : battle of ( 1846) , 221 
 Firuz Shah Tughlak, sultan of India: 
 
 reign of, 103 
 Fitch, Ralph: visits India, 157 
 Fitzgerald, Sir William Robert Sey- 
 mour Vesey: sketch of, 252 
 Forde, Francis : his campaign in south- 
 ern India, 186 
 Fort Saint David : see Tegnapatam 
 Fort Saint George: see Madras 
 Fort William, College of: founded, 
 
 202 
 Fox, Charles James : introduces a new 
 
 India bill, 194 
 Francis, Philip: his opposition to Hast- 
 ings, 189, 190 
 Francis Xavier, Saint: inaugurates mis- 
 sionary efforts in the East, 151 
 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia; 
 attempts to secure Indian trade for 
 Prussia, 174 
 Frere, Sir Henry Bartle Edward : his 
 administration of Sind, 223 ; intro- 
 duces adhesive postage stamp in 
 Sind, 224; accompanies Edward VII 
 in his visit to India, 253 
 Frobisher, Sir Martin : searches for the 
 
 Northwest Passage, 156 
 Fuller, J. B. : made lieutenant-governor 
 of Eastern Bengal and Assam, 303 
 
 Gama, Vasco da: his voyages to India, 
 138, 146, 148; death of, 149 
 
 Gandamak, Treaty of (1879), 257 
 
 Ganges : description of, 8 
 
 Ganges Canal : opened, 223 
 
 Ganjeh: battle of (1827), 359 
 
 Gardiner, Colonel : trains Sikh army, 
 221 
 
 Gautama: see Buddha 
 
 General Society: organized, 158 
 
 Genghis Khan: invades India, 97; his 
 conquests, 334 
 
 Geok Tepe: siege of (1881), 367
 
 INDEX 
 
 411 
 
 George, prince of Georgia: resigns 
 
 crown to Russia, 358 
 George Frederick, Prince of Wales: 
 
 visits India, 309 
 Getse: invade India, 73 
 Gibbs, James: sketch of, 262 
 Gillespie, Colonel: suppresses Vellore 
 
 mutiny, 204 
 Ghats : description of, 15 
 Ghazan Mahmud, Persian ruler: reign 
 
 of, 336 
 Ghazni: siege of (1839), 217 
 Gheria: battle of (1763), 187 
 Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlak, sultan of India: 
 
 founds dynasty, 101 
 Ghulan Mohammed, Prince: sketch of, 
 
 200 
 Ghurgin Khan: oppresses the Ghilzis, 
 
 348 
 Goa: captured by the Portuguese 
 
 (1510), 149; sieges of (1603), 152; 
 
 (1639). 152 
 Goddard, Thomas: in the first Maratha 
 
 War, 193 
 Gokhah: president of Indian National 
 
 Congress, 293 
 Gokteik Viaduct: construction of, 289 
 Gonds: description of, 28 
 Gordian, emperor of Rome : defeats 
 
 Persians, 317 
 Gough, Sir Hough : his services in the 
 
 Opium War, 213; his campaign 
 
 against the Sikhs, 221 
 Great Indian Peninsular Railways: 
 
 opened, 223 
 Greeks: in India, 67 
 Grey, Sir William: sketch of, 252 
 Griffin, Lepel Henry: political agent at 
 
 Kabul, 258 
 Gujarat: conquered by Moguls, 113; 
 
 battle of (1849), 226 
 Gujarat, Kingdom of: early history of, 
 
 107 
 Gulistan, Treaty of (1813), 359 
 Gupta Dynasty, 74 
 Gurkhas War, 207 
 Guru: battle of (1904), 298 
 Gualior: siege of (1780), 193 
 
 H 
 
 Habibulla, amir of Afghanistan: acces- 
 sion of, 287 
 
 Haffkine, Waldemar Mordecai Wolff: 
 discoveries of, 282 
 
 Hafiz (Lishan ul Ghaid) : sketch of, 336 
 
 Haidar AH: attempts to expel English 
 from India, 193 
 
 Haidarabad (Patala) : founded, 69 
 
 Haileybury: East Indian College estab- 
 lished at, 202 
 
 Hajji Ibrahim: treachery of, 356 
 
 Hajji Mirza Aghasi: under Russian in- 
 fluence, 360 
 
 Halifax, Charles Wood, Viscount: see 
 Wood, Charles, Viscount Halifax 
 
 Hardinge, Sir Henry: his governor-gen- 
 eralship of India, 219 
 
 Harris, George: at siege of Seringapa- 
 tam, 200 
 
 Harun al Raschid, Mohammedan kalif: 
 reign of, 326 
 
 Hasan, Uzum: conquests of, 339 
 
 Hassan ibn as-.Sabbah : sketch of, 332 
 
 Hastings, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 
 Marquis of: his governorship of In- 
 dia, 206 
 
 Hastings, Warren: attempts to com- 
 promise with Mir Kasim, 187; made 
 governor of India, 189; impeach- 
 ment of, 192 
 
 Havelock, Sir Henry: his campaigns 
 during the mutiny, 237 
 
 Hawkins, William : envoy to the court 
 of the Great Mogul, 160 
 
 Heber, Reginald, Bishop of Calcutta, 
 206 
 
 Hedges, Sir William: made governor of 
 Bengal, 165 
 
 Henry VII, king of England: sends out 
 expedition to search for the North- 
 west Passage, 156 
 
 Henry the Navigator, Prince: enter- 
 prises of, 143 
 
 Heraclius, Byzantine emperor: his wars 
 in the East, 321 
 
 Heraclius, prince of Georgia: reign of, 
 357 
 
 Herat: battle of (1585), 343; sieges of 
 (1832), 360; (1837), 216, 361 
 
 Himalayas: description of, 5 
 
 Himu: at battle of Panipat, 111 
 
 Hinduism : growth of, 75 
 
 Hiuen Tsiang: quoted on reign of Sila- 
 ditza, 63; quoted on the court and 
 people of Valabhi, 74
 
 412 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Hodson, William Stephen Raikes: 
 sketch of, 238 
 
 Holkar, Jaswant Rao: at war with the 
 English, 201 
 
 Hope, Sir Theodore Cracraft : sketch of, 
 262 
 
 Hormuz: battle of (218 a.d.), 315 
 
 Houtman, Cornelius: his voyage to In- 
 dia, 154 
 
 Howden, John Cradock, Lord: see 
 Cradock, John, Lord Howden 
 
 Hudson, Henry : searches for the North- 
 west Passage, 156 
 
 Hudson, Sir John: commands Indian 
 troops in Soudan campaign, 259 
 
 Hughes, Admiral: his campaigns in In- 
 dia, 194 
 
 Hugh: growth of, 150 
 
 Hulagu : captures Bagdad, 334 
 
 Human Sacrifice : in India, 81 
 
 Humayun, Mogul emperor: reign of, 
 no; receives aid from Tamasp I of 
 Persia, 342 
 
 Hume, Allan Octavian : supports the In- 
 dian National Congress, 270 
 
 Hunter, Sir William Wilson : directs the 
 Statistical Survey of India, 250 
 
 Husein, shah of Persia: reign of, 347; 
 death of, 350 
 
 Ibbetson, Sir Denzil Jelf : policy of, 282 
 Ibn-Batuta: at the court of Mohammed 
 
 Tughak, 141 
 Ilbert, Sir Courtenay Peregrine: sketch 
 
 of, 262 
 Ilbert Act (1884), 261 
 Imad Shahi Dynasty: founded, 106 
 Impey, Sir Elijah: chief justice of India, 
 
 190 
 Inayatulla Khan: visits Calcutta, 295 
 India, History of: the country, 3; the 
 people, 20; the non- Aryans, 25; the 
 Aryans, 36; Buddhism, 56; the 
 Greeks in India, 67; the Scythic 
 inroads, 72; growth of Hinduism, 
 75; early Mohammedan conquerors, 
 88; the Mogul dynasty, 109; the 
 Marathas, 130; early European set- 
 tlements, 138; growth of British 
 power, 178; the consolidation of 
 
 British India, 204; the Sepoy Mu- 
 tiny, 232; under the British crown, 
 242 
 Indian Civil Service Act (1861), 241 
 Indian Councils Acts (1861), 240; 
 
 (1892), 271 
 Indian High Courts Act (1861), 241 
 Indian National Congress : first meet- 
 ing of, 260; sketch of, 270, 293 
 Indus, The : description of, 8 
 Islam Shah, governor of Bengal : acces- 
 sion of, no 
 Ismail, Persian ruler: reign of, 341 
 Ismail ibn Ahmad, Mohammedan kalif : 
 
 founds Samanid dynasty, 328 
 Ispahan: growth of, 344; siege of 
 (I7I7), 349 
 
 Jafar Khan: see Murshid Kuli Khan 
 Jaffnapatam: captured by the Dutch 
 
 (1658), 155 
 Jahangir (Salim), Mogul emperor: 
 
 marriage of, 112; reign of, 117 
 Jai Singh I : corrects list of stars, 47 
 Jai Singh II : founds the city of Jaipur, 
 
 . 47 
 Jaipal, chief of Lahore : at war with the 
 
 Mohammedans, 91 
 Jaipur: founded (1728), 47 
 Jains, The: description of, 65 
 Jalalabad: siege of (1841), 218 
 Jalal-ud-din, king of Delhi : founds dyn- 
 asty, 98 
 Jama Masjid: built, 120 
 Jang, Sir Salar: sketch of, 235 
 Java : English conquest of, 205 
 Jehlam: battle of (327 B.C.), 67 
 Jenkinson, Anthony: travels of, 140; his 
 
 mission to Persia, 342 
 Jerusalem : taken by the Persians (615 
 
 a.d.), 320 
 Jhansi : escheats to the British govern- 
 ment, 229 
 Johander Shah: reign of, 125 
 John of Monte Corvino: his career in 
 
 the East, 142 
 Juafir, shah of Persia : reign of, 355 
 Juangs (Patuas) : description of, 29 
 Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome: 
 invades Persia, 318
 
 INDEX 
 
 413 
 
 Jumeyd : power of, 340 
 
 Jumna: description of, 8 
 
 Jumna Canal, The Old : built, 104 
 
 K 
 
 Kabir: teachings of, 84 
 Kadesia: battle of (634 a.d.), 322 
 Kafur, Malik : campaigns of, 100 
 Kai-Khatu, Persian ruler: introduces 
 paper notes into Persia, 102; reign 
 
 of, 335 
 Kalidasa, father of Sanskrit drama: 
 
 sketch of, 54 
 Kalinjar: siege of (1545), no 
 Kamal: battle of (1738), 353 
 Kandahar: captured by the Moguls 
 
 (1594), 113; battle of (1880), 258; 
 
 siege of (1736-1737), 352 
 Kandhs: description of, 31 
 Kanishka, Scythian king: summons 
 
 the Fourth Council, 61 ; reign of, 72, 
 Karim: leads Pindari revolt, 208 
 Karo-la: battle of (1904), 298 
 Kashmir: conquered by the Moguls 
 
 (1587-1592), 113 
 Kasim, Mohammedan ruler : his cam- 
 paign in India, 88 
 Kaufmann, Konstantin Petrovitch: his 
 
 campaign in Khiva, 256 
 Keigwin, Richard: leads insurrection in 
 
 Bombay, 167 
 Kelly, James Graves: his campaign for 
 
 the relief of Chitral, 278 
 Kerbela: siege of (1843), 361 
 Kerim Khan, Kurdish chieftain: reign 
 
 of, 355 
 Khaibar Rifles: organized, 281 
 Khalar Mirza: flies before English 
 
 forces, 364 
 Khalid: leads invasion of Persia, 322 
 Khan, Amir: leads Pindari revolt, 208 
 Khilji Dynasty: rules Delhi, 98 
 Khusru, king of Ghazni : defeated, 94 
 Khusru (I) Anushirwan, king of Per- 
 sia: reign of, 319 
 Khusru (II) Parviz, king of Persia: 
 
 reign of, 320 
 Khusru Khan : usurps the throne of 
 
 Delhi, 101 
 Kirkpatrick, James Achilles : resident at 
 
 Haidarabad, 202 
 
 Kirkpatrick, William: military secretary 
 
 for Wellesley, 202 
 Kirman: siege of (1794), 356 
 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, Viscount 
 
 Kitchener : commander-in-chief in 
 
 India, 305 
 Koh-i-Nur, The: carried away by Nadir 
 
 Shah, 354; presented to Queen Vic- 
 toria, 226 
 Komarov, General : his campaigns in 
 
 Afghanistan, 265 
 Koning, Henry: organizes Swedish East 
 
 India Company, 175 
 Kshaltriyas: rise of, 43 
 Kublai Khan : extends the use of paper 
 
 notes, 102 
 Kufa: founded, 322 
 Kulil Sultan: succeeds Timur, 339 
 Kumara-sambhava : sketch of, 53 
 Kumarila : teachings of, 76, 80 
 Kuriah Muriah Islands : sketch of, 19 
 Kush-ab: battle of (1857), 363 
 Kutab Shahi Dynasty: founded, 106 
 Kutab-ud-din, king of Delhi : founds 
 
 dynasty, 96 
 
 Laccadive Islands : description of, 18 
 
 Laing, Samuel : sketch of, 244 
 
 Lake, Gerard, Viscount Lake: his cam- 
 paign in India, 136; his campaign in 
 Hindustan, 201 
 
 Lakshman Sen : defeated by the Mo- 
 hammedans, 96 
 
 Lancaster, James : visits India, 157 ; es- 
 tablishes commercial relations with 
 Indian kings, 159 
 
 Lansdowne, Henry Charles Keith Petty- 
 Fitzmaurice, Marquis of: his gover- 
 nor-generalship of India, 268 
 
 Laswari: battle of (1803), 136, 201 
 
 Law, Edward, Baron Ellenborough : see 
 Ellenborough, Edward Law, Baron 
 
 Law, Sir Edward FitzGerald : finance 
 member of the governor-general's 
 council, 274; value of his work in 
 India, 282 
 
 Law, John: revives French interest in 
 India, 170 
 
 Lawrence, Sir Henry Montgomery : ap- 
 pointed to be resident at Lahore, 
 221; death of, 237
 
 414 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Lawrence, Sir John Laird Mair: sketch 
 of, 222; administrator of the Pun- 
 jab, 223; anticipates the Mutiny, 
 235; becomes governor-general of 
 India, 245 
 Lawrence, Stringer: at siege of Pondi- 
 cherri, 179 
 
 Lawrence, Sir Walter Roper: sketch of, 
 277; attends the Prince of Wales on 
 his visit to India, 309 
 
 Leaf-wearers : see Juangs 
 
 Leedes: enters the service of the Great 
 Mogul, 157 
 
 Legazpi: establishes Spanish control in 
 the Philippines, 157 
 
 Lessar, Paul: delimits the boundary be- 
 tween Russian territories and 
 Afghanistan, 265 
 
 Linschoten, John Higghen van: pub- 
 lishes a guide to India, 154 
 
 Lockhart, William Stephen Alexander: 
 occupies Waziristan, 277 
 
 Lodi, House of: reign of, 104 
 
 Lomakin, General : defeated by the 
 Tekkes, 367 
 
 Low, Robert Cunliffe: his campaign for 
 the relief of Chitral, 278 
 
 Lower Bengal: conquered by Bakhtiyar 
 Khilji (1203), 95; early history of, 
 107; captured by Akbar, 113 
 
 Lower Ganges Canal: sketch of, 223 
 
 Lucknow: siege of (1857), 237 
 
 Lucknow: Treaty of (1801), 198 
 
 Lumsden, Sir Peter Stark: British rep- 
 resentative to the Afghan Frontier 
 Commission, 265 
 
 Lutf Ali, shah of Persia: reign of, 356 
 
 Lyall, Sir Alfred Comyn : sketch of, 263 
 
 Lyall, Sir James Broadwood : sketch of, 
 264 
 
 Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, 
 Earl of: his governor-generalship of 
 India, 254 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron 
 Macaulay: made legal member of 
 the governor-general's council, 214 
 
 Macdonald, James Ronald Leslie: com- 
 mands military escort of Tibetan 
 mission, 298 
 
 McMahon, Colonel: his mission in Seis- 
 
 tan, 296 
 Macnaghten, Sir William Hay: secre- 
 tary to Lord Auckland, 215; sketch 
 of, 218 ' 
 M'Neill, Sir John : his mission to Teher- 
 an, 361 
 Macpherson, Sir Herbert Taylor: com- 
 mands Indian troops in Egyptian 
 
 campaign, 259 
 Macpherson, Sir John: sketch of, 195 
 Madhu Rao, Maratha peshwa, 133 
 Madhu Rao Narayan, Maratha peshwa: 
 
 reign of, 136 
 Mad Mullah: at war with the English, 
 
 278 
 Madras: founded, 163; taken by the 
 
 French (1746), I79J siege of (1781), 
 
 193 
 Magellan, Fernando: voyage of, 157 
 Mahabat Khan: rebellion of, 118 
 Mahabharata: description of, 49 
 Maharajpur: battle of (1843), 219 
 Mahe de la Bourdonnais, Bertrand 
 
 Francois : his campaign in India, 179 
 Mahmud, Afghan king: reign of, 348 
 Mahmud, prince of Ghazni: reign of, 
 
 91; conquests of, 328 
 Mahmud Shah, of Afghanistan: reign 
 
 of, 216 
 Mahmud Tughlak, sultan of India: 
 
 reign of, 104 
 Mahrattas: see Marathas 
 Maine, Henry James Sumner : law mem- 
 ber of the Indian councils, 245 
 Maiwand: battle of (1879), 258 
 Makbul Khan: administration of, 103 
 Malabari, Behramji Merwanji: reforms 
 
 of, 271 
 Malacca: sieges of (1578), 152; (1615), 
 
 152; (1628), 152 
 Malak Shah, Persian ruler: reign of, 
 
 330 
 Malcolm, Sir John : envoy to Persia, 
 
 206, 359; his negotiations with the 
 
 Marathas, 209 
 Malwa: siege of (1572), 113 
 Man Singh, Raja: aids Akbar the Great, 
 
 112 
 Manila: captured by the English, (1762), 
 
 181 
 Mansell, Charles Grenville : administers 
 
 the Punjab, 222
 
 INDEX 
 
 415 
 
 Manu, Code of: compiled, 49 
 
 Manzikert: battle of (1070), 330 
 
 Maratha Ditch: erected, 182 
 
 Maratha War: first, 136, 193; second, 
 136, 201; third, 208 
 
 Marathas (Mahrattas) : rise of, 121, 130 
 
 Marignolli, John de: visits India, 142 
 
 Maris: description of, 28 
 
 Marshall, John Hubert: appointed direc- 
 tor-general of the Archaeological 
 Survey of India, 280 
 
 Martin, Francois: his campaigns in In- 
 dia, 170 
 
 Massey, William Nathaniel: sketch of, 
 247 
 
 Master, Sir Streynsham: governor of 
 Bengal, 166 
 
 Mayo, Richard Southwell Bourke, Earl 
 of: his governor-generalship of In- 
 dia, 248 
 
 Mayo College: opened, 249 
 
 Mauritius, Island of: occupied by the 
 English, 205 
 
 Meerut: massacre of (1399), 104; out- 
 break of the Mutiny at, 234 
 
 Megasthenes : describes India, 70 
 
 Mehidpur: battle of (1817), 209 
 
 Merchant Adventurers, Company of, 158 
 
 Merv : occupied by Russia, 264 
 
 Metcalfe, Charles Theophilus, Baron 
 Metcalfe: matriculates at the Col- 
 lege of Fort William, 202; sent as 
 envoy to Lahore, 205 ; his governor- 
 generalship of India, 215 
 
 Miani: battle of (1848), 219 
 
 Michelborne, Sir Edward : granted li- 
 cense to trade with India, 159 
 
 Middleton, David : commands voyage to 
 India, 160 
 
 Middleton, Sir Henry: commands voy- 
 ages to India, 159, 160 
 
 Middleton, Thomas Fanshaw, Bishop 
 of Calcutta, 206 
 
 Mildenhall, John : sent to India as am- 
 bassador, 158 
 
 Minto, Gilbert John Murray Kynyn- 
 mound Elliot, Earl of: his governor- 
 generalship of India, 306, 309 
 
 Mir Jafar : claims throne of Bengal, 183 ; 
 dethroned, 186; restored, 187; be- 
 queaths a legacy to Clive, 188 
 
 Mir Jumla: his campaigns in the north 
 of India, 123 
 
 Mir Kasim : made nawab of Bengal, 186 ; 
 
 deposed, 187 
 Mir Wais: founds Afghan kingdom, 348 
 Mirza Taki: becomes vizir, 362; sketch 
 
 of, 363 
 Moguls: invade India, 97 
 Mogul Dynasty, 109 
 Mohammed, Mogul shah: defeated by 
 
 the Persians, 353 
 Mohammed Ali: see Wala-jah 
 Mohammed Hasan Khan, chief of the 
 
 Khajars : reign of, 355 
 Mohammed Mirza, shah of Persia: de- 
 feated by Russians, 359; reign of, 
 360 
 Mohammed of Ghor: career of, 94 
 Mohammed the Prophet, sketch of, 88, 
 
 321 
 Mohammed Tughlak, sultan of India: 
 
 reign of, 101 
 Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College : 
 
 opened, 256 
 Mohammedans : conquer India, 88 
 Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Earl 
 of: see Hastings, Francis Rawdon- 
 Hastings, Marquis of 
 Molucca Islands : annexed to British 
 
 empire, 205 
 Montgomery, Robert: sketch of, 222 
 Morier: negotiates Treaty of Teheran, 
 
 360 
 Morris, Sir John Henry: sketch of, 252 
 Most Eminent Order of the Indian Em- 
 pire: founded, 255 
 Muavia, Mohammedan kalif: reign of, 
 
 326 
 Mubarik, king of Delhi : reign of, 10 1 
 Mudki: battle of (1846), 221 
 Muir, William: sketch of, 252 
 Muiz-ud-din : see Mohammed of Ghor 
 Multan: battle of (326 B. c), 69 
 Munro, Sir Hector: crushes Sepoy mu- 
 tiny, 187; at the battle of Baxar, 
 
 135, 187 
 
 Munro, Sir Thomas: his campaign in 
 Burma, 211 
 
 Murad: death of, 121 
 
 Murshid Kuli Khan (Jafar Khan), na- 
 wab of Bengal: makes his province 
 independent, 126; sketch of, 181 
 
 Musa al Kasim: sketch of, 340 
 
 Muskhu-'d-Din : see Sa'di 
 
 Mutiny of 1857, The, 232
 
 416 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Muttra: destroyed, 127 
 
 Muzaffar ud-din, shah of Persia: reign 
 
 of, 364 
 Muzaffarid Dynasty: reign of, 336 
 Mysore War, 196 
 
 N 
 
 Nadir, shah of Persia: invades India, 
 127 ; his conquests, 350 ; reign of, 352 
 
 Nagpur: battle of (1817), 209; becomes 
 part of the Central Provinces, 229 
 
 Naini Tal: landslip at (1880), 259 
 
 Nalanda, Monastery of: description of, 
 
 6 4 
 Nana Sahib: inherits property of Baji 
 
 Rao, 229; leads the Mutiny of 1857, 
 236 
 Nanak Shah: teachings of, 84 
 Nanking, Peace of (1842), 213 
 Napier, Sir Charles James : his campaign 
 
 in Sind, 219 
 Napier, Francis, Baron Ettrick of Et- 
 
 trick: sketch of, 252 
 Napier, Robert Cornelis, Baron Napier 
 of Magdala: lays out roads and ca- 
 nals, 226; acting governor-general 
 of India, 244 
 Napoleon (I) Bonaparte: plans con- 
 quest of India, 197 
 Nasirulla Khan : visits England, 'Z'j'j 
 Nasr ud-din, shah of Persia: reign of, 
 
 362 
 Nasr-Ullah: marriage of, 353 
 Nehavend: battle of (641 a. a), 323 
 Newberry, James : settles in India, 157 
 Newfoundland : discovered, 156 
 Nicholas IV, Pope : sends embassy to 
 
 Arghun, 335 
 Nicholas V, Pope: grants jurisdiction of 
 African discoveries to Portuguese, 
 146 
 Nicolas III, emperor of Russia: visits 
 
 India, 273 
 Nicholson, John: sketch of, 235 
 Nikaia : founded, 68 
 Nikitin, Athanasius: visits India, 141 
 Nineveh: battle of (627 a.d.), 321 
 Nisibis: siege of, 318 
 Nizam Shahi Dynasty: founded, 106 
 Nizam-ul-Mulk, Persian statesman: ca- 
 reer of, 331 
 
 Nizam-ul-Mulk Asof Jah: revolt of, 
 126; founds a dynasty, 178 
 
 Non-Aryans : description of, 25 
 
 Nordenskjold: discovers the North- 
 east Passage, 156 
 
 Norman, Sir Henry Wylie: sketch of, 
 
 251 
 
 Northbrook, Thomas George Baring, 
 
 Baron: his governor-generalship of 
 
 India, 253 
 Northwest Frontier Province : created, 
 
 286 
 Northwest Passage: search for, 156 
 Northwestern Provinces : sketch of, 
 
 203 
 Nott, William : his campaign in India, 
 
 218 
 Nur Jahan (Nur Mahal) : sketch of, 
 
 117 
 
 O 
 
 O'Connor, W. F. T. : member of the 
 
 Tibetan mission, 297 
 O'Shaughnessy, William Brooke: di- 
 rector general of telegraphs in In- 
 dia, 225 
 Ochterlony, David : his campaigns 
 
 against the Gurkhas, 207 
 Odenatus, prince of Palmyra: defeats 
 
 Persian army, 317 
 Omar, Mohammedan kalif: commands 
 
 invasion of Persia, 322 
 Omar Khayyam : sketch of, 332, 333 
 Ommeyad Dynasty: condition of Persia 
 
 under, 325 
 Oriental Trading Company, Austrian : 
 
 organized, 173 
 Orissa: captured by Moguls (1573), 113 
 Orissa Famine, The (1866), 245 
 Ostend Company: sketch of, 171 
 Oudh : annexed to British India, 229 
 Oudh Rent Act (1885), 260 
 Oudh Tenancy Act (1868), 245 
 Outram, Sir James : makes friends of 
 the Bhils for the English, 28; as- 
 sumes government of Oudh, 230 ; his 
 campaigns in the Mutiny, 237 ; his 
 campaign against Persia, 363 
 Oxenden, Sir George: defends Surat, 
 131 ; defends English factory at 
 Surat, 165
 
 INDEX 
 
 417 
 
 P,Q 
 
 Pacheco, Duarte: his campaign in India, 
 
 148 
 Paiva (Payva), Alfonso de: sent to 
 
 Abyssinia, 144 
 Palakollu: built, 155 
 Palmer, Sir Arthur Power: sketch of, 
 
 279 
 Pandita Ramabai: her work for Hindu 
 
 widows, 272 
 Pandya, Kingdom of: description of, 104 
 Panipat: battles of (1526), 109; (1556), 
 
 in; (1761), 128, 133 
 Panniar: battle of (1843), 219 
 Paris, Treaties of (1763), 181; (1858), 
 
 364 
 
 Patala: see Haidarabad 
 
 Paterson, William: organizes a Scottish 
 East India company, 171 
 
 Patna: massacre of, 187 
 
 Patuas: see Juangs 
 
 Paul, emperor of Russia: plans invasion 
 of India, 198 
 
 Pearse, Colonel : his campaign against 
 Haidar Ali, 193 
 
 Penal Code: becomes law (1861), 244 
 
 Peninsular and Oriental Steam Naviga- 
 tion Company : incorporated, 224 
 
 Perambakam: battle of, 193 
 
 Permanent Settlement, 195 
 
 Perpetual Company of the Indies, The: 
 organized, 170 
 
 Persia, History of: the Sassanian dy- 
 nasty, 313; foreign rule, 325; the 
 new Persian empire, 340; modern 
 Persia, 351 ; the government of 
 Persia, 371 
 
 Peshawar: battle of (1008), 92 
 
 Peter the Great, emperor of Russia: 
 sends a fleet and army against Per- 
 sia, 349 
 
 Phayre, Sir Arthur Purves : installed 
 as chief commissioner of British 
 Burma, 243 
 
 Philip IV, king of France: corresponds 
 with Arghun, 335 
 
 Philip II, king of Spain : unites crowns 
 of Spain and Portugal, 152 
 
 Philippines: Spanish control established, 
 
 157 
 Pindar, Sir Paul: member of Courten's 
 Association, 158 
 
 Pindaris: revolt of (1815), 208 
 
 Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham: policy 
 
 of, 180 
 Pitt, William, son of the Earl of Chat- 
 ham; secures the passage of a new 
 India bill, 194 
 Pitt, Thomas: governor of Madras, 166 
 Plague, Bubonic: sketch of, 282 
 Plassey: battle of (1757), 183 
 Pliitschau : missionary efforts of, 171 
 Pollock, George : his campaigns in India, 
 
 218 
 Polo, Marco: visits the East, 141, 336 
 Pondicherri: siege of (1748), 179; cap- 
 tured by the English (1761), 170 
 Poona, Treaty of (1817), 209 
 Popham, Captain: captures Gwalior, 
 
 193 
 
 Porter, Endymion : member of Cour- 
 ten's Association, 158 
 
 Porto Novo: settled, 171 
 
 Porus : defeated by Alexander the Great, 
 67 
 
 Pottinger, Eldred: defends Herat, 217, 
 361 
 
 Prendergast, Sir Harry North Dalrym- 
 ple : his campaign in Burma, 266 
 
 Prinsep, Sir Henry Thoby: retires from 
 office, 273 
 
 Prithwi Raja, prince of Delhi: legend 
 of his daughter's marriage, 94; de- 
 feated by Mohammed of Ghor, 95 
 
 Pulicat: settled, 154 
 
 Punjab, The: annexed to British pos- 
 sessions, 226 
 
 Punjab Land Alienation Act, 282 
 
 Punjab Wars: see Sikh Wars 
 
 Purana, The Vishnu: description of, 83 
 
 Raffles, Thomas Stamford : administers 
 
 Java, 205 
 Raghuba: claims Maratha throne, 136, 
 
 192 
 Raghuji Bhonsla: invades Bengal, 133 
 Raghu-vansa: description of, 53 
 Rajputs (Kshattriyas) : rise of, 43 
 Ram Mohan Rai, Raja: teachings of, 87 
 Ramanand: teachings of, 84 
 Ramanuja: reforms of, 83
 
 418 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ramayana, Indian epic, 26, 52 
 Ramsay, James Andrew Brown, Earl of 
 
 Dalhousie: see Dalhousie, James 
 
 Andrew Brown, Earl of 
 Rand : murder of, 283 
 Ran jit Singh: sketch of, 220 
 Rawdon, Lord: see Hastings, Francis 
 
 Rawdon-Hastings, Marquis of 
 Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke: 
 
 sketch of, 217 
 Raziya, queen of Delhi : reign of, 197 
 Reay, Lord: recalled from Bombay, 
 
 273 
 Redcliffe, Lord Strafford: his negotia- 
 tions with Russia, 363 
 Regulating Act (1773), 190 
 Reunion: occupied by the French, 170 
 Ridgeway, Sir Joseph West: delimits 
 the boundary between Russian ter- 
 ritories and Afghanistan, 265 
 Rig- Veda: description of, 38 
 Rintimbur: siege of (1300), 99 
 Ripon, George Frederick Samuel Rob- 
 inson, Earl of: his governor-gener- 
 alship of India, 258 
 Riza Kuli: conquests of 352; blinded, 
 
 354 
 
 Roberts, Frederick Sleigh, Earl Roberts 
 of Kandahar, Pretoria, and Water- 
 ford: his campaign against Yakub 
 Khan, 257 ; his plans for frontier de- 
 fense, 269; reforms of, 272 
 
 Robertson, George Scott: besieged in 
 Chitral, 278 
 
 Robinson, George Frederick Samuel, 
 Earl of Ripon: see Ripon, George 
 Frederick Samuel Robinson, Earl 
 of 
 
 Roe, Sir Thomas: sent to the court of 
 Jahangir, 160 
 
 Rohillas: defeat of, 191 
 
 Rokh, shah of Persia: reign of, 354 
 
 Romanus Diogenes, emperor of Rome: 
 defeated by Persians, 330 
 
 Rose, Hugh Henry, Baron Strathnairn: 
 his campaign in central India, 238 
 
 Royal George: built, 163 
 
 Royal Indian Engineering College: es- 
 tablishes a course in forestry, 7 
 
 Royal Titles Act (1876), 255 
 
 Rustam: death of, 322 
 
 Ryder, C. H. D. : visits the Tashi Lama, 
 302 
 
 Saadat Ali Khan : becomes an independ- 
 ent ruler, 126 
 Sad Ali Mohammed: founds the Babis, 
 
 362 
 Sa'd ibn Walik: conquers Persia, 322 
 Sa'di (Muskhu-'d-Din) : sketch of, 333 
 Saf dar Jang, nawab of Oudh : reign of, 
 
 126 
 Safawi Dynasty: reign of, 340 
 Saffarid Dynasty: reign of, 327 
 Safi (Sophi) I, shah of Persia: reign of, 
 
 346 
 Safi (Sophi) II, shah of Persia: reign 
 
 of, 347 
 Sah Dynasty, The, 74 
 Sahu, Maratha king: reign of, 132 
 Saint Thome: battle of (1746), 179 
 Saka (Scythian) Era: founded, 74 
 Salbai, Treaty of (1782), 136, 193 
 Sale, Sir Robert Henry: defends Jala- 
 labad, 218 
 Salim: see Jahangir 
 Salivahana, Indian king: at war with 
 
 the Scythians, 74 
 Samarkand : captured by the Moguls 
 
 (1497), 109 
 Sama-Veda : rise of, 42 
 Sambhaji, Maratha king: reign of, 132; 
 
 death of, 122 
 Samrah: battles of (363 A.D.), 318 
 
 (1733), 351 
 Samvat Era: founded, 73 
 Sandeman, Sir Robert Groves: sketch 
 
 of, 266 
 Sangala: battle of (327 b.c), 68 
 Sankara Acharya: sketch of, 80 
 Santa Stefano, Hieronimo di: visits In- 
 dia, 141 
 Santals: description of, 29 
 Sapor: see Shahpur 
 Saragossa, Treaty of (1529), 146 
 Samanid Dynasty: reign of, 328 
 San jar, Persian sultan: reign of, 331 
 Sassanian Dynasty, 313 
 Sataro : escheats to the British govern- 
 ment, 228 
 Sayyid Dynasty: reign of, 104 
 Scott-Moncrieff, Sir Colin Campbell : 
 president of the irrigation commis- 
 sion, 280 
 Scythians: invade India, 72
 
 INDEX 
 
 419 
 
 Scythian Era: see Saka Era 
 
 Segauli, Treaty of (1815), 207 
 
 Seleuceus Nicator: receives Bactria 
 and India, 69 
 
 Selim, Ottoman sultan: at war with 
 Persia, 341 
 
 Seljuks : rise of, 329 
 
 Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, The, 232 
 
 Serampur: founded, 171 
 
 Seringapatam : siege of (1799), 200 
 
 Seven Years' War: its effect in India, 
 179 
 
 Shad-ul-Mulk : her relations with Kulil 
 Sultan, 339 
 
 Shah Alam, Mogul emperor: claims 
 Bengal, 185 ; at war with the Eng- 
 lish, 135, 187 
 
 Shah Jahan, Mogul emperor: reign of, 
 119; captures Hugh (1629), 150 
 
 Shah Rokh, Persian ruler : reign of, 339 
 
 Shahab-ud-din : see Mohammed of Ghor 
 
 Shahji Bhonsla: rise of, 130 
 
 Shahpur (Sapor) I, king of Persia: 
 reign of, 316 
 
 Shahpur (II) the Great, king of Persia: 
 reign of, 318 
 
 Shahr Barz: conquers Persia, 321 
 
 Shakban Khan : overthrows the Timu- 
 rid dynasty in Turkestan, 341 
 
 Sharpay, Captain : obtains grant of free 
 trade at Aden, 160 
 
 Sher Ali, Afghan ruler: disputed acces- 
 sion of, 247; intrigues with Russia, 
 256 
 
 Sher Shah, governor of Bengal: defeats 
 Humayun the Mogul, no 
 
 Shiraz: siege of (1790), 356 
 
 Shirley, Sir Anthony: reorganizes Per- 
 sian army, 343 
 
 Shirley, Sir Robert : reorganizes Persian 
 army, 343 
 
 Shore, Sir John : financial reforms of, 
 196; made governor-general, 196 
 
 Shuja, amir of Afghanistan : exiled, 
 216; attempts to regain his throne, 
 217 
 
 Shuja-ud-daula, nawab of Oudh : reign 
 of, 126; at war with the English, 
 187 
 
 Sighelmus of Sherborne: said to have 
 visited India, 156 
 
 Sikandar (Sekunder) : at battle of Sir- 
 hind, no 
 
 Sikh War, 225 
 Sikhs, The : sketch of, 220 
 Siladitya, an Indian king: reign of, 63 
 Simla : sketch of, 207 
 Simovich, Count: his influence in Per- 
 sia, 360 
 Sind: conquered by the Moguls (1592), 
 
 "3 
 
 Siraj-ud-daula (Surajah Dowlah), na- 
 wab of Bengal : at war with Eng- 
 lish, 182 
 Sirhind: battle of (1556), no 
 Siva-worship : description of, 81 
 Sivaji, Maratha leader: at war with 
 Aurangzeb, 122; career of, 130; pil- 
 lages Surat, 165 
 Sitabaldi: battle of (1817), 209 
 Skobelev, Mikhail : storms Geok Tepe, 
 
 367. 
 Slave Kings, Dynasty of : founded, 97 
 Sleeman, Captain : suppresses thags, 214 
 Smith, Harry : wins battle of Aliwal, 221 
 Smith (Smythe), Thomas: governor of 
 
 the English East India Company, 
 
 158 
 Sobraon: battle of (1846), 221 
 Socotra : occupied by the British, 255 
 Sophi : see Safi 
 Staper, Richard: promotes the English 
 
 East India Company, 158 
 Statistical Survey of India: organized, 
 
 250 
 Stephens, Thomas : visits India, 156 
 Stewart, Sir Donald : his campaigns 
 
 against the Afghans, 257; made 
 
 commander-in-chief of Indian 
 
 forces, 261 
 Stokes, Whitley: sketch of, 262 
 Strachey, John : acting governor-general 
 
 of India, 253 
 Strachey, Richard : sketch of, 246 ; pres- 
 ident of the famine commission, 255 
 Strathnairn, Hugh Henry Rose, Baron : 
 
 see Rose, Hugh Henry, Baron 
 
 Strathnairn 
 Su : drive out the Greek dynasty from 
 
 the Bactrian kingdom, 72 
 Subuktigin, prince of Ghazni : at war 
 
 with Jaipal of Lahore, 91 
 Succession, War of Austrian : its effect 
 
 in India, 179 
 Sudder-ud-Din : sketch of, 340 
 Sudras : rise of, 43
 
 420 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Suffern de Saint-Tropez, Pierre Andre 
 de: his campaigns in India, 194 
 
 Suez Canal: opened, 138 
 
 Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of Tur- 
 key: attempts to conquer India, 
 150; reign of, 342 
 
 Suleiman, shah of Persia: see Safi II 
 
 Sulf AH : fall of, 348 
 
 Surajah Dowlah: see Siraj-ud-daula 
 
 Surat: raided by the Marathas, 131 
 
 Surat, Treaty of (i775), 192 
 
 Swally: battle of (1612), 160 
 
 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494), 146 
 Torrens, Henry Whitelock: secretary to 
 
 Lord Auckland, 215 
 Tranquebar: founded, 171 
 Trevelyan, Charles Edward: sketch of, 
 
 247 
 Twenty-Four Parganas : transferred to 
 
 the Company, 184 
 Tucker, Henry St. George : secretary 
 
 for Wellesley, 202 
 Tughlak Dynasty: founded, 101 
 Turk, J. C. : builds the Gokteik viaduct, 
 
 290 
 Turkmanchai, Treaty of (1829), 359 
 
 Taj Mahal: built, 119 
 
 Talikot: battle of (1565), 90, 107, 151 
 
 Tamasp (Thamas) I, shah of Persia: 
 
 reign of, 342 
 Tamasp II, shah of Persia, regains his 
 
 throne, 350 
 Tantia Topi : career of, 239 
 Taylor, Reynell George: his career in 
 
 India, 223 
 Tegnapatam: founded, 166 
 Teheran, Treaty of (1814), 360 
 Tel-el-Kebir : battle of (1882), 259 
 Temple, Richard, Baron Temple: his ca- 
 reer in India, 223; sketch of, 251; 
 in charge of the famine relief ad- 
 ministration, 255 
 Thags: suppression of, 214 
 Thaneswar: battle of (1 191), 94 
 Thebau, Burmese king: at war with the 
 
 British, 266 
 Thomason, James: his services in India, 
 
 223 
 Thompson, Sir Augustus Rivers: 
 
 sketch of, 262 
 Three Collections, The, 60 
 Tibet: opening of, 297 
 Tibet, The Opening of, 377 
 Timur (Timur-i-Leng, Tamerlane) : in- 
 vades India, 104; invades Persia, 
 337 
 Tipu Sultan: at war with the English, 
 194; conspires against English, 197 
 Tirah Campaign (1897), 278 
 Todar Mall, Raja: services of, 112, 116 
 Toghrul Beg: conquests of, 330 
 Topal Osman: his campaign against the 
 Persians, 351 
 
 U, V 
 
 Uchh (Alexandria) : founded, 69 
 Udhunala: battle of (1763), 187 
 United Company of Merchants of Eng- 
 land trading to the East Indies, 
 The: organized, 159 
 Universities Act (1904), 291 
 Usman Khalif: sends expedition to 
 
 Bombay coast, 88 
 Vaidyas : rise of, 48 
 Valerian, emperor of Rome : captured 
 
 by the Persians, 317 
 Valian: leads religious revolt, 318 
 Vallabha-Swami : teachings of, 86 
 Van Cortlandt, Colonel: trains the Sikh 
 
 army, 221 
 Vansittart, Henry: attempts to compro- 
 mise with Mir Kasim, 187 
 Vartan: leads religious revolt, 318 
 Varthema, Ludovico di: visits India, 
 
 142 
 Veda: composed, 25 
 Vedas, The Four, 42 
 Vellore, Mutiny of (1806), 204 
 Ventura, General : trains Sikh army, 221 
 Vernacular Press Act: passed (1878), 
 
 256; repealed (1882), 260 
 Versailles, Treaty of (1783), 194 
 Victoria, queen of Great Britain and Ire- 
 land and empress of India: pro- 
 claimed empress, 254; death of, 287 
 Vijayanagar (Narsingha), Kingdom of: 
 
 sketch of, 105 
 Vikramaditya, king of Ujjain in Malwa: 
 
 reign of, 73 
 Vishnu-worship: description of, 82
 
 INDEX 
 
 421 
 
 W 
 
 Wajid AH, king of Oudh: deposed, 230 
 
 Wala-jah (Mohammed Ali) : claims 
 throne of Arcot, 180 
 
 Wales, Albert Victor, Prince of: visits 
 India, 273 
 
 Wales, George Frederick, Prince of: 
 visits India, 309 
 
 Wandiwash: battle of (1760), 180 
 
 Watson, Charles: at the capture of Cal- 
 cutta, 182 
 
 Wedderburn, Sir William: supports the 
 Indian National Congress, 270 
 
 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of: 
 his campaigns in India, 136, 201 
 
 Wellesley, Richard Cowley or Welles- 
 ley, Marquis of: made governor- 
 general of India, 196 
 
 Westland, James : finance member of the 
 governor-general's council, 274 
 
 White, Claude : member of the Tibetan 
 mission, 297 
 
 White, Sir George Stuart: sketch of, 
 278 
 
 Widow-burning: abolished, 213 
 
 Willoughby, Sir Hugh : searches for the 
 Northeast Passage, 156 
 
 Wilson, James : financial member of the 
 Indian council, 243 
 
 Wilson, T. F. : becomes military mem- 
 ber of the governor-general's coun- 
 cil, 261 
 
 Women : position of, in ancient India, 
 38; condition of, among the Ar- 
 yans, 75; spiritual independence of, 
 in Orissa, 85 
 
 Wood, Charles, Viscount Halifax : pres- 
 ident of the board of control, 
 225 
 
 X, Y, Z 
 
 Yajnavalkya, Code of: compiled, 49 
 
 Yajur-Veda: rise of, 42 
 
 Yakub, ruler of Eastern Turkestan : 
 seeks recognition from Indian gov- 
 ernment, 249 
 
 Yakub Khan: made regent of Afghanis- 
 tan, 257 
 
 Yale, Elihu: governor of Madras, 166 
 
 Yandabu, Treaty of (1826), 212 
 
 Yezdigerd III, king of Persia: reign of, 
 321 
 
 Younghusband, Francis Edward: in 
 charge of the Tibetan mission, 297 
 
 Yusuf ben Leis, Mohammedan kalif: 
 founds Saffarid dynasty, 327 
 
 Zafar Khan: becomes sovereign of the 
 Deccan, 105 
 
 Zaku Sadik, shah of Persia: reign of, 
 
 355 
 
 Zanzan: siege of (1848), 362 
 
 Zeman, amir of Afghanistan: reign of, 
 216 
 
 Zend Dynasty: reign of, 355 
 
 Zend-Avesta: compiled, 316 
 
 Ziegenbalz: missionary efforts of, 171 
 
 Zizam: battle of (1827), 359 
 
 Zubov, Plato: his campaign against 
 Persia, 358 
 
 Zul-fikar Khan: controls the Mogul em- 
 perors, 125

 
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