I'

AN ENGLISH HISTORY OF INDIA1

T is difficult within the compass of a brief review to do justice to the numerous merits of Mr. Vincent A. Smith's latest book on India. It is a deeply learned work of more than 530,000 words, relating the history of a sub-continent from prehistoric times to the end of 1911. A great portion of it is a summary of the author's four previous books on India, Asoka, The Early History of India, A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon and Akbar the Great Mogul, each of which was the result of first-hand investigation conducted through a whole generation.

In the Oxford History of India the reader must not expect, however, to find the simplicity and unity that characterize the dynastic histories of China and Japan. The picture is as bewilderingly varied and diversified as that of Europe from the wars of the Iliad to the war against Germany. It is true, as the book before us reveals, that on various occasions pax sarvabhaumica (peace of the world-empire), the Indian analogue of pax Romana, was achieved within the boundaries of India. In fact, only once did Europe witness the formation of a unitary state with the size and area (page 105) of the Maurya Empire (B. C. 322-185). This was the Roman Empire at its zenith, during the second and third centuries A. D. Neither the heterogeneous European possessions of Charles V nor the ephemeral conquests of Napoleon acquired the dimensions of the Tughlak Empire of the fourteenth century (page 242) or of the Moghul Empire of the seventeenth (pages 365, 443) or of the Maratha Empire of the eighteenth (pages 460, 461). In terms of population and area, even the less extensive Goopta Empire of the fifth century (page 150), the Vardhana Empire of the seventh (page 166) and the Chola Empire of the eleventh (pages 211-212) were barely approached by the Empire of Charlemagne. Still it must be admitted, though not with the strictures passed by the author in his Early History of India (edition of 1914, pages 356-357), that the political unity of India even in British times is as great a myth as the political unity of Europe. It is a veritable "pluralistic universe" that the student has to contemplate at the threshold of Indian history in spite of the fundamental uniformity

'The Oxford History of India. By Vincent A. Smith. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1919.-xxiv, 816 pp.

of the people's cultural "ideals". In trudging through Mr. Smith's jungle of facts, one needs, therefore, the patience and discrimination that are necessary for mastering the kaleidoscopic changes set forth in Freeman's Historical Geography of Europe. The Indian continent exhibits the same development as the western half of Eur-Asia. It furnishes but another illustration of the universal sway of the Hobbesian "state of nature", the matsya-nyaya (or "logic of the fish”), as Hindu political philosophy calls it. The worst that can be said about the conflicting nationalities of India is not worse than the description which Depping gives in his Histoire du commerce entre le Levant et l'Europe (vol. ii, pages 207-214) of the relations between the Christians of Greece, Italy and Spain in the face of the Ottoman invasions. And this statement of a medieval anti-monarchist, cited in Engelbert's De Ortu et Fine Romani Imperii, should give pause to an occidental student inclined to view the political mentality of the old Orient as something essentially distinctive: "The Roman Empire was and is always troubled by wars and rebellions; hardly ever were the gates of the temple of Janus shut; the greater number of Roman. emperors have died violent deaths; and the Roman Empire has been the cause rather of disorder than of peace ".

The sense of historical perspective is as a rule lacking in Mr. Smith's writings. In the present volume he has been led, in spite of himself (page xxiii), to interpret his entire story with an eye to the "event of 1757", as if the three or four thousand years of Hindu political life and Indo-Saracenic evolution were merely preliminary to Plassey! In this book (pages 67, 74, 332), as in the Early History of India (pages 112, 113, 119, 199), the author cannot think of Alexander's failure in India and the expulsion by the Hindus of Seleukos (B. C. 303) and Menander (B. C. 153) without a sigh, which, though subdued, is yet audible. Not until he reaches the capture of Goa by Albouquerque in 1510 does he seem to experience genuine relief. Let the occidental with a sense of humor imagine the naïve sentiments of an oriental historian, who, disappointed by the failure of the Persians at Marathon and Salamis and apprehensive for the prospects of a greater Asia, should hold his breath until Islam begins to flourish on European soil, until southeastern Europe is Mongolised to the Carpathian Mountains and the Turks are at the gates of Vienna. Mr. Smith's point of view is, however, one that naturally pervades the psychology of every European and American student of oriental culture and politics, sicklied o'er, as it is, with the dogma of the "superior race".

But there is another prejudice in the Oxford History, that is born of the political propaganda on behalf of the vested interests and the powers that be, to which Mr. Smith's scholarship happens to be harnessed. The volume is to be memorized as a text-book by the undergraduates of British-Indian colleges, and the facts, therefore, have to be so manipulated that even he who runs may be convinced of the logic of the "white man's burden", and more specifically, of the righteousness of British imperialism in India. The author's treatment of the Mogul monarchy (pages 416-418) is an eminent execution in Rembrandtesque style, calculated to serve as a dismal background for the silver lining that occasionally sets off what Indian nationalists call the permanent cloud of the British régime. The sweeping estimate of Shivaji the Great and the Marathas as shameless robbers, ruffians, tyrants etc. (pages 436, 637) is a disgrace to British militarism, which should be able, now that a century has rolled away, to be generous to the most formidable enemy it ever encountered in the East. Altogether, in this volume, intended to be a handbook of loyalty, the reader will find the philosophy of Indian history summed up thus: The Hindus are caste-ridden and therefore inefficient as a fighting force; and the Mohammedans are at their best mere fanatics and normally the most unspeakable pests of humanity. This is the twofold message of the book to western scholars. The author's chivalrous appreciation of almost all the female rulers of India, whether Hindu or Mohammedan, such as Raziya, Durgavati, Chand Bibi, Ahalya Bai, must not, however, be ignored (pages 226, 347, 363, 577).

And

There are certain other defects, which are to be attributed to the author's conception of sociology, historiography and comparative politics. He is evidently inclined to read much of the liberties and institutions of the nineteenth century into the Weltanschauung of Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome and Catholic and feudal Europe. so far as the Orient is concerned, his viewpoint does not seem to have advanced beyond the generalizations of Buckle, Hegel, Maine and Max Müller, in spite of his own monumental discoveries in Indian archaeology and epigraphy (pages xi, xii; Akbar, page 385; Early History, pages 357, 477).

One would expect to learn from a general history dealing with all ages what influence the people of India have exerted on the civilization of mankind. But the author does not even hint at the possible or actual contact of India with Babylonian and Pharaonic cultures. Chinese intercourse with the Hindus is, indeed, alluded to, but we do not learn that India gave China and Japan not only religion and

mythology but dramaturgy, folklore, painting, logic, algebra and alchemy as well. Students of Chinese culture are well aware that the neo-Confucianism of the Sung period (960-1278), which furnishes even today the spiritual food of China's masses, was a direct product of the Vikramadityan renaissance which Fa Hien, Hiuen Thsang, Itsing and other Max Müllers of medieval China had imported from India into their native land. The influence of Hindu mathematics, medicine and chemistry on the Saracen capitals at Bagdad, Cairo and Cordova, and through them on the universities of medieval Europe, is a legitimate theme for the historian of India, but no aspect of the expansion of India finds a place in Mr. Smith's narrative. He does, indeed, say that the influence of New India on "Europe and the United States of America is no longer negligible" (page 737), but the impact of Indian thought on the modern world, which is made manifest in such publications as Victor Cousin's Histoire de la philosophie and exhibited in the influence of Kalidasa on Goethe and the early romanticists and of the Geeta on the transcendental movement in EuropeanAmerican poetry and fine arts deserves the special attention of the historian. Unfortunately, even the effects of the "discovery" of Sanskrit literature on the "comparative sciences" remain unnoticed in this comprehensive treatise. Nobody will charge the author with extreme phil- Hellenism, but he is still too greatly obsessed by the idea of "Greek influence on India" to estimate properly the reverse current, except possibly in the case of Gnosticism and neo-Platonism (pages 67, 134, 138-143, 160, 162-163; Early History, pp. 237241, 306-307). The authorities cited in the Oxford History, Akbar and the Early History are so many and up-to-date that one notes with regret that the significance of Seal's Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (1915) and Mookerji's History of Indian Shipping (1910) in reëstimating the influence of Indian culture has been overlooked by Mr. Smith.

Altogether, the weaknesses of the author's methodology as a historian, i. e., an "" interpreter' of facts-this does not apply to his work as an archaeologist or antiquarian-would be felt by anybody familiar with the work of western historians who have written on any period of occidental civilization, e. g., Bury's History of Greece or Mahaffy's Greek Life and Thought or Bryce's Holy Roman Empire. It is not too much to say that an Indian scholar employing the same data used by Mr. Smith would produce a wholly different story, chapter by chapter.

The least satisfying section of the book is that dealing with the

Sultans of Delhi (1200-1526). The author has exhausted the dictionary of abuse in vilifying the early Mohammedan rulers, who, as he has rightly pointed out, should not be called Pathan or Afghan, since they were all, with the exception of one House, Turks of various denominations. Students of medieval civilization know that the crusading zeal of Islam was felt to their sorrow by the Christian powers of Europe not less than by the people of India, and that for centuries the Mediterranean Sea was no less a Saracen lake than was the so-called Arabian Sea. The fact that they were conquered by Moslems is not more disgraceful to Hindus as a race than to Europeans. If Mr. Smith expects to foster Hindu hostility to the Moslem by raking up stories of religious persecution and wanton slaughter, he will be disappointed, for the oriental student can easily cite plenty of instances of inquisition, torture and pogroms in the annals of Christendom. The one effect that books iv and v of the Oxford History are sure to have on the mind of Young India is to increase the general unrest which the British are trying to allay by a thousand and one means. If there is one Mohammedan youth still left in India who is not anti-British at heart, Mr. Smith's volume is well suited to range him on the side of militant Indian nationalism. Nobody in the Mohammedan world, from Canton to Morocco, is prepared to swallow the characterization of the pioneers of Indian Islam, page after page, as worse than "ferocious beasts". In the name of "truth" our historian has dipped his pen in vitriol.

Notwithstanding his ifs and buts and general tendency to discount all" oriental" achievements as such, the author is on the whole sympathetic in his treatment of the Hindu period (see e. g., Early History, pages 127, 298, 344). He is, in fact, its first and only historian and may even be accused by critics of partiality for the subject of his discoveries. And yet it is only fair to add that in his discussion of the political institutions of the Hindus he has scarcely done them justice (pages xi, xii). It is not necessary to wax enthusiastic, as Havell has done in his recent History of Aryan Rule in India or Banerjea in his Public Administration in Ancient India, over the so-called " village communities" or to accept at its face value every statement in the Sanskrit text-books that points toward a democratic polity. No one with a sense of humor would suggest that the British constitution was anticipated in the mantri-parishat (cabinet) of the Maurya monarchy or in the "five great assemblies" of the south Indian states, described in Pillai's Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago. But on the strength of authentic inscriptions, like those of Ooshavadata at Nasik, of Rood