An English History of India.1
An English History of India.1)Vincent A. Smith's latest book on India is a 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.
1. Comparative History.
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 sârva-bhaumica (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 C. 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 Gupta 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 of the people's cultural "ideals". In trudging through 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, the same Naturprozess of Gumplo-wicz's Der Rassenkampf as the western half of Eur-Asia. It furnishes but another illustration of the universal sway of the Hobbesian "state of nature", the mâtsyay-nyâya (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".
2. Smith's Fallacies.
But his sense of historical perspective is as a rule lacking in Smith's writings. Once in a while he admits, as in his Akbar the Great Mogul (pp. 342-355), that the Indian monarch's policy was not more tortuous than that of the European potentates of the sixteenth century, or that some of his institutions still survive as the basis of the modern British administration. But, on the whole, students of political science will find the Oxford History vitiated by several fundamental fallacies.
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 Albuquerque 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. 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 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, tryants 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 casteridden 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, Durgâvati, Chand Bibi, Ahalyâ Bai, must not, however, be ignored (pages 226, 347, 363, 577).
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. And 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 objective 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 Vikramâdityan 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 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 Kâlidâsa on Goethe and on early romanticists and of the Gîtâ on the transcendental movement in Eur-American 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. 237-241, 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 reestimating the influence of Indian culture has been overlooked by 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 Smith would produce a wholly different story, chapter by chapter.
3. Islam in India.
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 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, 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" the historian has dipped his pen in vitriol.
4. Hindu Period.
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 textbooks 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 General Ushavadâta at Nasik, of Rudradâmana in Gujarat, of the Chola Emperors and the Ceylonese dynasties as well as the Maurya Artha-shâstra and edicts (see Asoka, chapters IV, V) and the reports of Megasthenes and Roman writers on Alexander, it is possible to claim that there is no European institution of any importance from Diocletian to Frederick the Great of which a counterpart is not to be found in India from B.C. 322 to A.C. 1300. The Vehmgerichte of the Teutons and Henry II's Assizes are anticipated in the Ubbahika of the Buddhist Chullavagga and the jury of Kautilyan land legislation. The liber burgus of the medieval towns in Europe were not more extensive or intensive than the liberties of the shrenîs (gilds). The Parlement of Paris could be modeled on the organization of the highest court of judicature under the Mauryas; and les nerfs de la république, as Bodin defines the finances of a state, were not more centralized under le grand monarque with his philosophy of l'état c'est moi than under Râjarâja the Great.
It is high time to recognize the fact, as would be evident to persons utilizing the author's footnotes (pages XII, 68), that the Greek city republics which fell before the onslaughts of Macedonian gold and arms were not more "democratic" than were the ganas or republics that opposed Alexander in the Punjab or the commonwealths in Bihar, the president of one of which was the father of. Shâkya, the Buddha. Another fact that should also be known to every student of comparative politics is that neither in the theory of Hindu political philosophy nor in actual practice did the caste system affect the public services of India, civil or military, prior to the end of the thirteenth century.
The Oxford History is professedly a story of ruling houses and dynastic conflicts, but it is not exclusively a political and military history. There are occasional glimpses into economic conditions though these are designed mainly to throw light on the alleged misery and poverty of the people in pre-British times; every instance of famine, misrule and oppressive taxation under "native" rulers has been carefully noted. (By the bye, the author treats land revenue in Hindu and Mohammedan India as crown-rent without documentary evidence; Hopkins' analysis of land tenure in India Old and New is more accurate.) Standard books on the history of Sanskrit literature have been summarized to add to the readability of the narrative. The references to early Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Urdu literature are also interesting and useful. And, since Smith has to his credit a History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, which will remain a supplementary classic to Fergusson's older work, the reader of the Oxford History will find more than scrappy descriptions of the arts and crafts, especially the architectural monuments, distributed throughout its chapters. But as the author has neither the enthusiasm of a Guizot nor the scholarly eloquence of a John Richard Green for the theme of his investigations, his style seldom rises above that of the gazetteer-writer.
5. Modern India.
Western scholars have often complained of the lack of a general history of India, even for the British period, especially one covering the recent era since the advent of the "industrial revolution" in Europe and America. The older authorities, like James Mill and Meadows Taylor, useful as far as they go, do not come near the present; and apart from the disconnected stories that can be pieced together from the volumes in the Rulers of India Series and the annual reports and gazetteers published by the Government of India, no student of modern civilization has been able to familiarize himself with the history of the Indian people under British rule during a period that has seen an Asian race, the Japanese, emerge as a first-class power and challenge in the Chinese "cockpit of nations" the domination of the East by the West. The last part of the present volume undertakes to supply this need. But the narrative unfortunately ceases to be the history of India and becomes instead the history of European rivalries and the survival of the fittest in the South Asian sub-continent.
The western student, however, will be disappointed with the author's treatment, for he will not find here the philosophic view of England's expansion in India as a by-product of the whirlpool of world politics between 1688 and 1815 (including Great Britain's failure in the American colonies) which Seeley's lectures have made a matter of common knowledge for all modern history. The importance of India in its relation to British imperialism and the status quo in Asia, with which readers of Curzon's volumes on the Middle East and the Far East are familiar, has not left its stamp on the pages of the Oxford History. And, of course, the conditions since the Crimean War that eventually led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Anglo-French Entente and the Anglo-Russian Convention, with their momentous consequences for India, have not been analyzed by the author. The Egyptian and South African campaigns have been ignored, the Persian Gulf, Tibet and China touched upon only incidentally. To all intents and purposes, British India has been presented by the historian in a state of "splendid isolation". Even from the standpoint of the ruling race, the jewel of the Imperial crown is thus left an unintelligible phenomenon.
Under such circumstances it is too much to expect that the author should have watched the development of those intellectual and moral forces among the people of the country that make Young India a political "problem" of the British Empire as well as a sociological "study" in ethnic rejuvenation. The volume does not mention the activities of the National Congress and the Moslem League, two associations of Indian politicians who were eminently loyalist in their vision until the Amritsar massacre of 1919, not to speak of the "ideas of 1905", that body of philosophical radicalism which has inaugurated a new era in the history of India that cannot be interpreted by any of the shibboleths of the preceding half-century. In fact, all that makes modern history worth reading, whether as an embodiment of the triumph of positivism and humanism or from the narrower angle of the expansion of Europe and America and the distinctive glory of pax Britannica, is virtually ignored. An American student who wishes to understand how much of modernism, i.e., the spirit of science and democracy, has pervaded the life and thought of three hundred and fifty million souls will find in Smith's history only a chronological summary of the wars (minus the intrigues) that governor after governor has embarked upon in quest of territorial aggrandizement and the principal statutes by which the administration of the country has been organized. He will learn nothing of the parliamentary legislation by which during two generations the indigenous industries of India were strangled in order to convert the dependency into a monopoly market for British manufactures and a helpless land of raw materials, nor of the manner in which treaties with the Indian States were made and unmade by Great Britain's Pro-Consuls.2
Smith has not forgotten, however, to discuss the comparative merits of Hastings, Wellesley, Dalhousie and Curzon nor to justify the conduct of every British exponent of Machtpolitik. Such phrases as "grave necessities of the situation", "urgent necessities of the time", a time when "everything was at stake", considerations of "high politics", "the agonies of millions of helpless peasants" (pages 538, 539, 581, 608) are invoked to whitewash or even defend all the "forward" policies of annexationists. Wellesley's "Foreign Office point of view", which expressed itself in the dictum that the "extension of direct British rule was an unquestionable benefit to any region annexed", is a first postulate with the author (pages 588, 604). No language, therefore, is stern enough, in his estimation, to condemn the occasional "pusillanimous policy of non-interference" (pages 581, 608).3
Smith finds fault with Elphinstone for relying too much on the exaggerated reports of the Moslem chroniclers in regard to the events of medieval India (page 223). But he is guilty of a similar error not only in his acceptance of Persian and European material, whenever it suits his purpose to prove his thesis of the innate baseness of the Mohammedans (page 237), but also in his endorsement of every Tom, Dick and Harry who had anything to do with the East India Company's affairs as "a gentleman well qualified for governing", "noble", "polished" etc. (pages 339, 340, 383).
While the efforts of the Indian rulers, the souverains indigènes, the "country powers", to establish suzerainty and pax sârva-bhaumica are reckoned as nothing better than levying blackmail (page 469), every instance of British intrigue with "forgotten potentates" is a "deed of heroism" (page 471)! Haidar Ali in the south and Ranjit Singh in the north are "fierce adventurers", Baji Rao II in the Deccan "a perjured vicious coward" (pages 544, 631). The author does not categorically uphold Clive's forgery and exactions (pages 492, 494), but, on the other hand, he seeks to explain away too easily the British failings of those "rough days" as inevitable because of the milieu of universal corruption among the Indians! The young men of India are invited to be loyal to the author's race by reading in his book that every Hindu and Mohammedan from 1757 to 1857 was an abominable wretch, a "scoundrel" and a "rascal" (pages 487-489, 497, 498, 500, 538-540, 545, 597, 637). In these intemperate expressions the writer has, however, only pandered to the doctrine that in politics he who fails is an unscrupulous knave and he who succeeds a daring genius. He has therefore failed to see in the so-called Sepoy War of 1857,3 though abortive, and in the unrest since 1905, howsoever futile in the opinion of the military world, an expression of that most elemental feeling, the love of national independence, which surges even in oriental breasts. Not the least noticeable feature of the book is the fact that the author has not considered it worth while to mention a single great man of India since 1818. Does he wish the world to understand that pax Britannica breeds only Royal Bengals—or rather mere tame cats? There could be no worse impeachment of British rule.
Unbiased scholars in France, Germany, Japan, America and even in Great Britain cannot but feel that Smith has tried too palpably to create the impression that the British Empire in India is the only empire in the world's history which is not stained with the blood of innocents, the "Portuguese atrocities", the wholesale assassinations by Cortes and Pizzaro. The scientific poise of the Oxford History would have been obvious to critics if the author had only attempted to indicate that the process of imperial annexation could not have been "roses, roses all the way", and that the English people are "not too bright or good for human nature's daily food."
None the less, the value of the book is great. For one thing, it presents for the first time a comprehensive history of India, more or less encyclopedic in character, based on the results of the latest explorations and excavations. European and American sociologists who used to think of Hindu attainments in terms of the Manu Samhitâ and the alleged pessimism of Buddha and who know Mohammedan India only in the pages of Elphinstone have but to open Smith's volume to be struck by the enormous advance in indology that has been systematically effected by the painstaking researches of scholars of both hemispheres. The author himself
(died 1920) was not only an honored collaborator and authority among that band, but as the whirligig of fortune would have it, he was a direct stimulating power among the antiquarians and other intellectuals of India. As such he happened to be, paradoxically enough, one of the unconscious spiritual fathers of that last wave of the "romantic movement" which has been manifesting itself as Indian nationalism in the world forces of to-day.
Notes
- The Oxford History of India. By Vincent A. Smith. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1919.—xxiv, 816 pp.↩
- Maulavi Mohammed Musihuddin, Premier of Oudh, wrote an account of the British robbery perpetrated on the State which he had been serving. The English edition of the story has been suppressed. But a German version appeared at Leipzig (Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1864) under the title: Wie England Verträge schlieβit und bricht (von einem Indierfreund). See also How England conquered India (Stockholm 1920).↩
- Vide The War of Indian Independence by and Indian Nationalist (Vinayak Savarkar), London, 1909.↩