BOOKS.
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF INDIA.*
Dn. ViNoster Sams is one of the most distinguished of the scholar-administrators of whom the Indian Civil Service is justly proud. He is a veteran in historical studies, and tells us, not without a touch of pride, and perhaps of natural pathos, that he has devoted half-a-century to the investigation of the history of India. The Royal Asiatic, Society, of which he is one of the most honoured and learned members, has recognized his historical industry and acumen by conferring upon him its Gold Medal, a distinction never more worthily camed than by the author of The Early History of India, A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, and the recently published and admir- able Life of Akbar the Great Mogul, to say nothing of many other contributions to Indian historical investigation. Such are some of the author's credentials for the formidable task entrusted to him by the delegates of the Clarendon Press.
Let us say at once that Dr. Vincent Smith has in this volume (a marvel of skilful selection and concision) completely super- seded all existing manuals, and they are many, of Indian history. To tell so long and so varied a tale in some seven hundred and eighty pages, to be at once brief, accurate, informing, and enter- taining, is to perform a feat which calls for respectful admiration. Dr. Vincent Smith has achieved it with an ease and success due to long practice and a life-long enthusiasm for his subject. Unlike most of his predecessors, he carefully cites at the end of each of his chapters the authorities on whom he relies. It is notice- able that among these are quoted with hearty gratitude and approval many native Indian scholars of our own time, products of historical study in the modem Universities of India. There could not be a better, a completer, a more stimulating and suggestive introduction to those who would learn at no great cost of effort what India is, and what historical causes have produced the present social and political condition of the penin- sula. Unlike most rapid summaries of a vast mass of historical facts, Dr. Vincent Smith's History is so admirably written and arranged, with so keen an eye for essential and organic facts, and couohed in so pleasant and easy a style, that it must be an indolent and incompetent reader indeed who does not come under the spell of his fascinating story and the masterly fashion in which it is presented.
Never was it more necessary that Indians and Englishmen
• The Oxford History of India, from the Earliest Times to the End of 1911. By Dr. l'Ineent A. Smith, 0.I.B. Oxford: at the Clarendon Preis. [121. 64. nstJ
alike should have at least some elementary idea of what India is, and how it has happened that Great Britain has become responsible for its government and education. It is a long and a singularly interesting history that Dr. Vincent Smith displays before our eyes. To India, as to Europe, came, some three thousand years ago, settlers few in number, but power- ful in intellectual and linguistic capacity. They brought with them the copious vocabulary which in Europe has produced the great modern languages and literatures of our day, and in India gave birth to the not dissimilar dialects of the literary spe6:11es of the North. Common origins are obvious in the vocabulary, and the Indo-Aryan languages share many words and turns of speech with the tongues of Western Europe, approximately equal in area and population to India.
East and West, into animistic tribes dominated by fetichistic religions of terror, spread the Aryan civilization ; the Aryan vocabulary ; above all, the Aryan theory of the heavenly city of immortal gods, accessible to human entreaty, sharing human frailties, interested in human affairs. In the East and in the West alike were born new tongues compounded of indigenous idioms and the invading vocabulary, and in both indigenous deities and ancient beliefs were assimilated by the conquering religion. In India the result was Hinduism, socially built upon caste, a recognition of the superior social claims of those who claimed an Aryan origin ; doctrinally, a compound of popular polytheism and philosophic pantheism. In the West a modified Christianity, varying from nation to nation, has more or less completely superseded the ancient Aryan faith. In India, in spite of six hundred years of Muslim rule, in spite of growing contact with the science, literature, and ethics of the West, Hinduism survives and is strong. The vigorous and interesting literatures of modern India, rich in every form of literary art, are essentially Hindu in inspiration and expression, so mucii so that in some Provinces Muslims have been driven to write verse in accordance with Hindu formulae and con- ventions. On the borderlands Hinduism is still an expanding faith and still accepts converts from humbler Indian races.
The essential attraction of Hinduism to Indian minds is precisely the fact that, in spite of its now distant Aryan and Vedic origins, it has become a purely Indian religion. Its gods and its rites alike, its conventions and its customs, are Indian. What, more than anything else, has been an obstacle to the spread of Christianity, has been the fact that the Divine Redeemer, as preached by Western missionaries, is un-Oriental and specifically un-Indian. The Hindu social system, as expressed in the organization of the family and the village, has survived the overrule of Mohammedan invaders and settlers. So long as these remained, Muslim dominion met with but faint and half-hearted opposition, save at the hands of Maratha,s, Rajputa, and Sikhs. So also was it with the tolerant rule of John Company, based on Mohammedan precedents in most of its administrative details.
In our own time, however, and all but unobserved by us, British rule has made a notable change in Indian beliefs and aspirations. Hinduism sturdily resists Christian teaching, but is not above assimilating Christian ethics and a new theism admittedly borrowed and adapted from the West. In art, science, literature, law, the educated Indian feels that he can now hold his own with the white man, and no longer confesses his inferiority. Western ethics and civilization are essentially Christian, and assert a superiority based on the purity, the benevolent intention, of Christian ethics. The Indian, tacitly or overtly, denies that such qualities are a monopoly of pro- fessors of the Christian faith. He asserts, ingeniously or ingenuously, that his ancient village system is as essentially democratic as any Western system of politics.
If the result were a willingness to collaborate, to accept that politive d'association which our French Allies assert to be the goal of the administration of their dependencies, the task ahead of us were easier than it is like to be. It is, no doubt, the aim of Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford to procure, by every possible concession and conciliation, this much-desired collaboration. But European examples and European education have roused a new ambition in Hindu minds, and concessions are only accepted as an instalment in view of an early approach- ing and complete independence of Western control. Young Indians at Oxford and Cambridge, after the lessons of four years of war, openly assert that the sole difference between British and Teutonic rule over alien races is that ours is a hypocritical dominion, since we deceive ourselves and others into a belief in our own magnanimity and benevolence, whereas the Teuton makes no secret of his theory that might is right, and is at least honest in his use of force. It is this spirit, growing and not diminishing, that is the reef ahead of paper Consti- tutions and well-meant reforms, which will not win the necessary approval and support of the educated classes. They must needs he imposed by force upon unwilling subjects.
With these and similar considerations Dr. Vincent Smith's scholarly and deeply interesting History is, of course, not con- cerned. His business is with facts, not with generalized interpretations of them. Yet no one can carefully peruse his admirably clear, vivid, and lucid account of the fortunes of India during some three thousand years without some such mental comment as that in which we have ventured to indulge. One fact stands out with astonishing prominence. The main result of Christian rule in India, after six hundred years of Muslim administration, has been to restore a new vitality and self-confidence to Hinduism, and especially to the Hinduism of Bengal, oldest and best educated of British Provinces. No man can appreciate the probable result unless he knows some- thing of the origin and evolution of the Hindu system of life and social organization, and of the secret of its imperturbable persistence through many generations of alien dominion. In Dr. Vincent Smith's work all this is set down with scholarly impartiality, and with the contagious gusto of narration which marks the born historian.
We must not conclude without congratulating the Clarendon Press on the admirable illustrations and plans with which the book is copiously furnished. ' We have here incomparably - the best summary history of India yet written, not least commendable in its full references to original authorities, and its skilful and astonishingly lucid arrangement of an embarrass- ingly large mass of detailed information.
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