A Popular and Picturesque History of Hindustan

by
Flora Annie Steel

Preface

A history, above all one which claims to hold no original research, but simply to be a compilation of the work of others, needs no introduction save the compiler’s thanks to many who have been consulted.

One word, however, may be said regarding the only accent used — the circumflex.

This is put always on the tone of stress; that is to say, on the syllable to be accented. Thus Mâlwa, Ambêr, Jeysulmêr, Himâlya, Vizigapatâm. Where no accent appears the syllables are of equal value.

F. A. STEEL.

Talgarth, Machynlleth.

Part I

The Ancient Age

As the mind’s eye travels backwards across the wide plains of Northern India, attempting to re-people it with the men of olden time, historical insight fails us at about the seventh century B.C. From that date to our own time the written Word steps in to pin protean legend down to inalterable form.

And yet before this seventh century there is no lack of evidence. The Word is still there, though, at the time, it lived only in the mouths of the people or of the priesthood. Even if we go so far back as B.C. 2000, the voices of men who have lived and died are still to be heard in the earlier hymns of the Rig-Veda.

And before that?

Who knows? The imaginative eye, looking out over the vast sea of young green wheat which in many parts of the Punjâb floods unbroken to the very foot of the hills, may gain from it an idea of the wide ocean whose tide undoubtedly once broke on the shores of the Himalayas.

The same eye may follow in fancy the gradual subsidence of that sea, the gradual deposit of sand, and loam brought by the great rivers from the high lands of Central Asia. It may rebuild the primeval huts of the first inhabitants of the new continent — those first invaders of the swampy haunts of crocodile and strange lizard-like beasts — but it has positively no data on which to work. The first record of a human word is to be found in the earliest hymn of the Aryan settlers when they streamed down into the Punjâb. When?

Even that is beyond proof. The consensus of opinion amongst learned men, however, gives the Vedic period — that is to say, the period during which the hymns of the Rig-Veda were composed — as approximately the years between B.C. 2000 and B.C. 1400.

But these same hymns tell us incidentally of a time before that. It is not only that these Aryan invaders were themselves in a state of civilisation which necessarily implies long centuries of culture, of separation from barbarian man; but besides this, they found a people in India civilised enough to have towns and disciplined troops, to have weapons and banners; women whose ornaments were of gold, poisoned arrows whose heads were of some metal that was probably iron.

All this, and much more, is to be gathered in the Rig-Veda concerning the Dâsyas or aboriginal inhabitants of India. Naturally enough, as inevitable foes, they are everywhere mentioned with abhorrence, and we are left with the impression of a “tawny race who utter fearful yells.”

Who, then, were these people?

Are we to treat the monotonous singing voice which even now echoes out over the length and breadth of India, as in the sunsetting some Brahman recites the ancient hymns — are we to treat this as the first trace of Ancient India? Or, as we sit listening, are we to watch the distant horizon, so purple against the gold of the sky, and wonder if it is only our own unseeing eyes which prevent our tracing the low curve that may mark the site of a town, ancient when the Aryans swept it into nothingness?

“The fiction which resembles truth,” said the Persian poet Nizâmi in the year 1250, “is better than the truth which is dissevered from the imagination”; so let us bring something of the latter quality into our answer.

Certain it is that for long centuries the reddish or tawny Dâsyas managed to resist the white-skinned Aryas, so that even as late as the period of that great epic, the Mâhâbhârata — that is, some thousand years later than the earliest voice which speaks in the Vedic hymns — the struggle was still going on. At least in those days the Aryan Pandâvas of whom we read in that poem appear to have dispossessed an aboriginal dynasty from the throne of Magadha. This dynasty belonged to the mysterious Nâga or Serpent race, which finally blocks the way in so many avenues of Indian research. They are not merely legendary; they cross the path of reality now and again, as when Alexander’s invasion of India found some satrapies still held by Serpent-kings.

It is impossible, therefore, to avoid wondering whether the Aryans really found the rich plains of India a howling wilderness peopled by savages close in culture to the brutes, or whether, in parts of the vast continent at least, they found themselves pitted against another invading race, a Scythic race hailing from the north-east as the Aryan hails from north-west?

There is evidence even in the voice of the Rig-Veda for this. To begin with, there is the evidence of colour — colour which was hereafter to take form as caste. We have mention not of two, but of three divergent complexions. First, the “white-complexioned friends of Indra,” who are palpably the Aryans; next, “the enemy who is flayed of his black skin”; and lastly, “those reddish in appearance, who utter fearful yells.”

It seems, to say the least of it, unlikely that a single aboriginal race should be described in two such curiously different ways.

As for the fearful yells, that is palpably but another way of asserting that the utterers spoke a language which was not understood of the invaders. “Du’ye think th’ Almighty would be understandin’ siccan gibberish,” said the old Scotch lady when, during the Napoleonic war, she was reminded that maybe many a French mother was praying as fervently for victory as she was herself. The same spirit breathes in many a Vedic hymn in which the Dâsyas are spoken of as barely human. “They are not men.” “They do not perform sacrifices.” “They do not believe in anything.” These are the plaints which precede the ever-recurring prayer — “Oh! Destroyer of foes! Kill them!” And worse even than this comes the great cause of conflict — “Their rites are different.”

So the story is told. These Dâsyas, “born to be cut in twain,” have yet the audacity to have different dogma, conflicting canons of the law. Even in those early days religion was the great unfailing cause of strife.

These same hymns of the Rig-Veda, however, give us but scant information of the foes who are called generally Dâsyas, or “robbers.” But here again divergence creeps in. It is impossible to class “the wealthy barbarian,” the “neglecters of sacrifices,” who, “decorated with gold and jewels,” were “spreading over the circuit of the earth,” whose “iron cities” were to be destroyed, who were to be “slain whether weeping or laughing, whether hand to hand or on horseback, whether arrayed in hosts or aided by missile-hurling heroes” — it is impossible, surely, to class these enemies with the mere robber brutes of whom it is written that they “were slain, and the kine made manifest.”

Were then these tawny-hued foes, with the mention of whom wealth is invariably associated, in reality the ancestors of the treasure-holding Takshaks or Nâgas, that strange Snake race of which we read in the Mâhâbhârata, and of which we hear again during the invasion of Alexander?

At least there is nothing to prevent us dreaming that this is so; and while we listen to the voice of some Brahman chanting at sunset-time the oldest hymns in the world, there is nothing to hinder us from trying to imagine how strangely these must have fallen on the ears of the “neglecters of sacrifices, the dwellers in cities, rich in gold and beautiful women,” of whom we catch a passing glimpse as the stately Sanskrit rhythm rolls on.

The sun sets, the voice ceases, and the far-away past is no nearer and no further from us than the present.

The Vedic Times
B.C. 2000 to B.C. 1400

Before entering on its history it is necessary to grasp the size of the great continent with which we have to deal. Roughly speaking, India has fourteen and a half times the area of the British Isles. Of most of this country we have next to no history at all, and in the time which is now under consideration we have to deal only with the Punjâb, the “Land of the Five Rivers,” the area of which about equals that of Great Britain. That such lack of information should exist is not wonderful, since, for all we know, this upper portion of India may then have been on the shores of a still-receding sea; indeed, colour is given to this suggestion by the remembrance that the five rivers of the Punjâb plain to this day act as huge drain-pipes which deprive the intervening country of surface moisture. Naturally, this fact, in the days when all India, save for its few isolated ranges of central mountains, must have been one vast swamp, was an immense boon to humanity.

The geographical area, therefore, with which we have to treat in the Vedic period is very limited. It is a mere patch on the present continent of India, bounded on the north by the snowy Himalayas, on the south by the Indus (and probably by the sea), on the west by the Suleimân Mountains, while on the east lay the unknown, and possibly marsh, land of the Ganges and Jumna Rivers.

Curiously enough, although we speak of this very tract nowadays as the “Land of the Five Rivers,” in Vedic times the rivers were counted as seven. That is to say, the Indus was called the mother of the six — not five — streams which, as now, joined its vast volume. In those days this juncture was most probably in comparatively close proximity to the sea. Of these six rivers only five remain: the Jhelum, the Chenâb, the Râvi, the Beâs, the Sutlej. The bed of the sixth river, the “most sacred, the most impetuous of streams,” which was worshipped as a direct manifestation of Sarâswati, the Goddess of Learning, is still to be traced near Thanêswar, where a pool of water remains to show where the displeased Goddess plunged into the earth and dispersed herself amongst the desert sands.

The stream never reappears; but its probable course is yet to be traced by the colonies of Sarâswata Brahmans, who still preserve, more rigidly than other Brahmans, the archaic rituals of the Vedas. The reason for this purity of rite being, it is affirmed, the grace-giving quality of Mother Sarâswati’s water which, with curious quaint cries, is drawn in every village from the extraordinarily deep wells (many of which plunge over 400 feet into the desert sand), at whose bottom the lost river still flows.

Into this Land of the Seven Rivers, then, came — somewhere about two thousand years before Christ — wanderers who describe themselves as of a white complexion. That they had straight, well-bridged noses is also certain. To this day, as Mr. Risley the great ethnologist puts it, “a man’s social status in India varies in inverse ratio to the width of his nose”; that is to say, the nasal index, as it is called, is a safe guide to the amount of Aryan, as distinguished from aboriginal blood in his veins. One constant epithet given to the great cloud-god Indra — to whom, with the great fire-god Agni, the vast majority of the hymns in the Rig-Veda are addressed — is “handsome-chinned.” But the Sanskrit word sipra, thus translated “chin,” also means “nose”; and there can be no doubt that as the “handsome-nosed” one, Indra would be a more appropriate god for a people in whom, that feature was sufficiently marked to have impressed itself, as it has done, on countless generations.

Whence the Aryans came is a matter still under dispute. That they were a comparatively civilised people is certain. The hymns of the Rig-Veda, which were undoubtedly composed during the six hundred years following on the Aryans’ first appearance in the Punjâb, prove this, as they prove many another point concerning these the first white invaders of India. How the idea ever passed current that they were a pastoral people is a mystery, since from the very first we read in these hymns of oxen, of the cultivation of corn, of ploughing, and sowing, and reaping.

“Oh! Lord of the Field!” reads one invocation. “We will cultivate this field with thee! May the plants be sweet to us; may the rains be full of sweetness; may the Lord of the Field be gracious to us! Let the oxen work merrily; let the man work merrily; let the plough move merrily! Fasten the traces merrily; ply the goad merrily…. Oh! Fortunate Furrow! speed on thy way, bestow on us an abundant crop — sow the seed on this field which has been prepared. Let the corn grow with our hymns, let the scythes fall on the ripe grain. Prepare troughs for the drinking of animals. Fasten the leathern string, and take out water from this deep and goodly well which never dries up. Refresh the horses, take up the corn stacked in the field, and make a cart to convey it easily.”

Practically Indian agriculture has gone no further than this in close on four thousand years.

It is true that a hymn to the God of Shepherds finds occasional place in the Rig-Veda, but in these there is an archaic ring, which seems to point to the Aryan wanderings before India was reached. One of them begins thus: “Oh! Pushan, the Path-finder, help us to finish our journey!”

From purely religious hymns, naturally, one has no right to expect a full crop of information concerning the political and social life of the times in which they were composed, yet the light which the Rig-Veda throws upon these dark ages is luckily surprising; luckily, because we have absolutely no other source of knowledge.

From it we learn something of commerce, even to the extent of the laws regulating sale and usury. We learn also of ships and shipwrecks, of men who, “taking a boat, took her out to sea, and lived in the boat floating on the water, being happy in it rocking gracefully on the waves”; from which we may infer that our early Aryan brothers did not suffer from sea-sickness. There is also a phrase in fairly constant use, “the sea-born sun,” which would lead us to suppose that these writers of hymns had often seen sunrise over an Eastern ocean.

Many kinds of grain were cultivated, but the chief ones seem to have been wheat and barley. Rice is not mentioned. Animals of all sorts were sacrificed, and their flesh eaten; and as we read of slaughter-houses set apart for the killing of cows, we may infer that the Aryan ancestors of India were not strict vegetarians.

But all mention of food, even sacrificial food, in the Rig-Veda fades into insignificance before its perfectly damnable iteration concerning a fermented drink called “Soma.” Scarcely a hymn finds finish without some mention of it, and pages on pages are full of panegyrics of the “exhilarating juice,” the “adorable libation,” “the bright effused dew of the Soma, fit drink for gods.” And apparently for men also, since we read that the “purifying Soma, like the sea rolling its waves, has poured out on men songs, and hymns, and thoughts.” An apotheosis of intoxication, indeed!

It appears to have been the fermented juice of some asclepiad plant which was mixed with milk. The plant had to be gathered on moonshiny nights, and many ceremonials accompanied its tituration, and the expressing of its sap.

In later years, of course, the Soma ritual expanded into something very elaborate, and no less than sixteen priests were required for its proper fulfilment; but in the beginning, it is evident that each householder prepared the drink, and offered some of it, and of his food also, to Indra the cloud-god first, then to Agni the fire-god, and so by degrees (increasing with the years) to a host of smaller gods — the Winds, the Dawn, Day, Night, the Sun, the Earth.

For these ancient Aryans had not far to look for godhead. They found it simply, naturally, in themselves, and in all things about them, as the secret verse which to this day is held in sacred keeping by the twice-born amply shows. For there can be small doubt that the closest rendering to the original meaning runs thus: —

“Let us meditate on the Over-soul which is in all souls, which animates all, which illumines all understandings.”

Mankind makes but small advance with the years in metaphysics, and it needed a Schopenhauer to reinvent the Over-soul — after how many generations? Who can say?

Only this we know, that a few centuries after Christ, a Chinese pilgrim to India committed himself to the assertion that “Soma is a very nasty drink!”

There is no trace in these Vedic hymns of the many deplorable beliefs, traditions and customs, which in later years have debased the religious and social life of India.

The Aryans worshipped “bright gods,” and seem to have been themselves a bright and happy people. We hear nothing of temples or idols, of caste or enforced widowhood. Indeed, the fact that the language contains distinct, concrete, and not opprobrious terms for “the son of a woman who has taken a second husband,” and for “a man who has married a widow,” proves that such words were needed in the common tongues of the people. Neither is there any trace of, nor the faintest shred of authority for, either suttee or child-marriage.

So the ancient Aryan rises to the mind’s eye as a big, stalwart, high-nosed, fair-skinned man, with a smile and a liking for exhilarating liquor, who, after long wanderings with his herds over the plains of Central Asia — where, reading the stars at night, he sang as he watched his flocks to Pushan the Path-finder — looked down one day from the heights of the Himalayas over a fair expanse of new-born land by the ripples of a receding sea, and found that it was good.

So for many a long year he lived, fighting, ploughing, and praying — with copious libations — to Indra, the God of Battles, and to Agni, the humble, homely God of Fire, who yet was the invoker of all Gods mysteriously connected with the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the very Lightning.