THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF INDIA.*
Tux co-operative method of writing history, which has been adopted very successfully by the Cambridge University Press for modern history, for the history of English literature and for mediaeval history, has now been applied to the case of India. The work is to comprise six volumes. Professor E. J. Rapson is editing the first two volumes on Ancient India,. Colonel Haig the next two on Mohammedan India, and Sir Theodore Morison the two concluding volumes on British India. If these all reach the standard of the first volume, which has just appeared, we shall indeed have an excellent history of
India, far surpassing all existing works either in English or in any other language. Professor Rapson has enlisted the leading British and American authorities on early Indian problems, and they have gathered up and presented in an attractive form the scattered results of much recent research. The Master of Emmanuel deals with the Aryans, Professor Berriedale Keith with the Rigveda and later Vedic writings, Dr. Charpentier of Upsala with the Jains, Professor Rhys Davids with early Buddh- ism, Professor Washburn Hopkins of Yale with the Sutras and the Epics—especially the Mahabharata. Then Professor Williams Jackson of Columbia contributes a fascinating chapter on the Persian'rule in Northern India, Mr. E. R. Bevan describes Alexander's expedition and summarizes the references to India in Greek and Latin author's and Dr. George Macdonald discusses the Hellenic kingdoms of Central Asia, best known to us through the numismatic evidence, which he handles with great skill. Mr. F. W. Thomas then takes up the tale with two chapters on Chandragupta and the native Maurya empire, and a chapter on Asoka, the patron of Buddhism. The editor himself deals with the confusion that followed the fall of the Mauryas and with the successive tides of invasion from the north-west—Yavana, Scythian and Parthian. Dr. L. D. Burnett gives two brief chapters on the little known early history of Southern India and Ceylon, and Sir John Marshall, the Director of the Indian Archaeological Survey, compresses the research-work of a life into a most valuable chapter on the early Indian monuments, which, through the generosity of Sir Dorabji Tata, is suitably illustrated with photographs.
The mere enumeration of the contents of the book goes far to justify the application of the co-operative method. The subject is, indeed, too vast and too obscure to be mastered by any one man ; moreover, it falls naturally into sections which can be treated separately without overlapping, unlike the topics of European history. Professor Rapson, moreover, shows him- self an alert• and judicious editor and supplies plenty of cross- .
references where a question is treated by more than one con. tributor. We are more than ever impressed by the curious fact that the Hindu, generally speaking, has no historical sense.
" In all the large and varied literatures of the Brahmans, Jains and Buddhists," says Professor Rapson, " there is not to be found a single work which can be compared to the Histories in which Herodotus recounts the struggle between the Greeks and Persians, or to the Annals in which Livy traces the growth and progress of the Roman power." We have to deduce the course of events before the Moslem invasions from foreign sources, from coins and monuments, and from stray and uncertain references in poems and religious treatises. The reason of this is simply that intellectual activity was restricted to the religious orders. Brahmans, Joins and Buddhists were—and still are to a large extent—concerned with ideas rather than with events, with thought rather than with action. The Mohammedans, in India as elsewhere, have shown a lively interest in history, however biased and inaccurate their annalists might be. But the Hindu, painfully conscious of the transitoriness of human life, seems always to have despised the task of chronicling the
deeds of men playing their little part on the earth. His mental attitude is typified in what seem to us the absurdities of Gandhi's plea for a return to the spinning-wheel and hand-loom stage of industry. If Gandhi were told that his position was un- historical, that he could not set the clock of progress back lay a century or two, he might reply that human history did not interest him in the least and that progress was a meaningless term. It is at any rate true to say that a study of early India, a thousand years before Christ, throws no little light on the modem Nationalist movement, because the Hindu of to-day is essentially the. same as his remote forefathers of the Vedic Age, • The Cambridge History of India. Vol. I. " Ancient India." Bated by E. J. Hawn. Cambridge : at the 'University Press. tin. net.]
so well described by Professor Keith. The Hindu mind seems to have been less affected than that of the Chinese by the vicissitudes of twenty or thirty centuries.
The history of India becomes definite when the Persians invaded her and ruled all India north of the Indus. Alexander had to be content with occupying these Persian provinces. So, too, had the later Greek invaders, Seleucus I., Antiochus and probably Demetrius, who in the second century before Christ was " King of India." The inscription of Darius at Bahistan in Persia, dating from about 520 B.C., is the earliest of Indian annals. The Greek writers and the coins give tangible evidence for this period. Seleucus had to make terms with a powerful native Indian ruler, Chandragupta or Sandrocottus, who was the first of the Maury& emperors. Chandragupta gave the invader 500 war elephants which helped to win for him the decisive battle of Ipsus in 301, and in return the Indian ruler received Kandahar and Kabul. Chandragupta's capital was on the site of the modern Patna. He was the overlord of all Hindustan. His grandson was the famous Asoka, who is well remembered for his enthusiastic patronage of Buddhism and for the benevolent edicts which he delighted to inscribe on rocks and pillars. After his day darkness again descends on India. The history of the later invasions from Central Asia has to be laboriously pieced out from coins and monuments, with no small amount of conjecture. Professor Rapson's chapters on this extremely obscure period are models of cautious scholarship and furnish a fairly coherent narrative. Gondo- pharnes, the Parthian conqueror, is assigned to the first half- century of our era. The reference in an apocryphal gospel to the visit of St. Thomas to the court of Gondopharnes thus becomes chronologically possible. It has been suggested that the King's name, rendered in Armenian as " Gathaspar," may be recognized in Gaspar, the traditional name of the first of the three Magi who went from the East to Bethlehem. We must heartily commend this admirable commencement of a work that is much needed. The history of Asia has been unduly neglected in England.
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