Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  The tendency to unite the Mohammedan and the Hindu styles was fostered by the eclectic impartiality of Akbar; and the masterpieces that his artisans built for him wove Indian and Persian methods and motifs into an exquisite harmony symbolizing the frail merger of native and Moslem creeds in Akbar’s synthetic faith. The first monument of his reign, the tomb erected by him near Delhi for his father Humayun, is already in a style of its own—simple in line, moderate in decoration, but foreshadowing in its grace the fairer edifices of Shah Jehan. At Fathpur-Sikri his artists built a city in which all the strength of the early Moguls merged with the refinement of the later emperors. A flight of steps leads up to an imposing portal in red sandstone, through whose lordly arch one passes into an enclosure filled with chef-d’æuvres. The major building is a mosque, but the loveliest of the structures are the three pavilions for the Emperor’s favorite wives, and the marble tomb of his friend, Salim Chisti the sage; here the artists of India began to show that skill in embroidering stone which was to culminate in the screen of the Taj Mahal.

  Jehangir contributed little to the architectural history of his people, but his son Shah Jehan made his name almost as bright as Akbar’s by his passion for beautiful building. He scattered money as lavishly among his artists as Jehangir had scattered it among his wives. Like the kings of northern Europe, he imported the surplus artists of Italy, and had them instruct his own carvers in that art of pietra dura (i.e., of inlaying marble with a mosaic of precious stones) which became one of the characteristic elements of Indian adornment during his reign. Jehan was not a very religious soul, but two of the fairest mosques in India rose under his patronage: the Juma Masjid—or Friday Mosque—at Delhi, and the Moti Masjid—or Pearl Mosque—at Agra.

  Both at Delhi and at Agra Jehan built “forts”—i.e., groups of royal edifices surrounded by a protective wall. At Delhi he tore down with superior disdain the pink palaces of Akbar, and replaced them with structures which at their worst are a kind of marble confectionery, and at their best are the purest architectural beauty on the globe. Here is the luxurious Hall of Public Audience, with panels of Florentine mosaic on a black marble ground, and with ceilings, columns and arches carved into stone lacery of frail but incredible beauty. Here, too, is the Hall of Private Audience, whose ceiling is of silver and gold, whose columns are of filigree marble, whose arches are a pointed semicircle composed of smaller flowerlike semicircles, whose Peacock Throne became a legend for the world, and whose wall still bears in precious inlay the proud words of the Moslem poet: “If anywhere on earth there is a Paradise, it is here, it is here, it is here.” We gather again some faint conception of “the riches of the Indies” in Mogul days when we find the greatest of the historians of architecture describing the royal residence at Delhi as covering twice the area of the vast Escorial near Madrid, and forming at that time, and in its ensemble, “the most magnificent palace in the East—perhaps in the world.”*122

  The Fort at Agra is in ruins,* and we can only guess at its original magnificence. Here, amid many gardens, were the Pearl Mosque, the Gem Mosque, the halls of Public and Private Audience, the Throne Palace, the King’s Baths, the Hall of Mirrors, the palaces of Jehangir and of Shah Jehan, the Jasmine Palace of Nur Jehan, and that Jasmine Tower from which the captive emperor, Shah Jehan, looked over the Jumna upon the tomb that he had built for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

  All the world knows that tomb by her shortened name as the Taj Mahal. Many an architect has rated it as the most perfect of all buildings standing on the earth today. Three artists designed it: a Persian, Ustad Isa; an Italian, Gieronimo Veroneo; and a Frenchman, Austin de Bordeaux. No Hindu seems to have shared in its conception; it is utterly un-Hindu, completely Mohammedan; even the skilled artisans were, in part, brought in from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Moslem faith.124 For twenty-two years twenty-two thousand workmen were forced to labor upon the Taj; and though the Maharaja of Jaipur sent the marble as a gift to Shah Jehan, the building and its surroundings cost $230,000,000—then an enormous sum.125†

  Only St. Peter’s has so fitting an approach. Passing through a high battlemented wall, one comes suddenly upon the Taj—raised upon a marble platform, and framed on either side by handsome mosques and stately minarets. In the foreground spacious gardens enclose a pool in whose waters the inverted palace becomes a quivering fascination. Every portion of the structure is of white marble, precious metals, or costly stones. The building is a complex figure of twelve sides, four of which are portals; a slender minaret rises at each corner, and the roof is a massive spired dome. The main entrance, once guarded with solid silver gates, is a maze of marble embroidery; inlaid in the wall in jeweled script are quotations from the Koran, one of which invites the “pure in heart” to enter “the gardens of Paradise.” The interior is simple; and perhaps it is just as well that native and European thieves coöperated in despoiling the tomb of its superabundant jewels, and of the golden railing, encrusted with precious stones, that once enclosed the sarcophagi of Jehan and his Queen. For Aurangzeb replaced the railing with an octagonal screen of almost transparent marble, carved into a miracle of alabaster lace; and it has seemed to some visitors that of all the minor and partial products of human art nothing has ever surpassed the beauty of this screen.

  It is not the most sublime of all edifices, it is only the most beautiful. At any distance that hides its delicate details it is not imposing, but merely pleasing; only a nearer view reveals that its perfection has no proportion to its size. When in our hurried time we see enormous structures of a hundred stories raised in a year or two, and then consider how twenty-two thousand men toiled for twenty-two years on this little tomb, hardly a hundred feet high, we begin to sense the difference between industry and art. Perhaps the act of will involved in conceiving a building like the Taj Mahal was greater and profounder than the act of will of the greatest conqueror. If time were intelligent it would destroy everything else before the Taj, and would leave this evidence of man’s alloyed nobility as the last man’s consolation.

  4. Indian Architecture and Civilization

  Decay of Indian art—Hindu and Moslem architecture compared—General view of Indian civilization

  Despite the screen, Aurangzeb was a misfortune for Mogul and Indian art. Dedicated fanatically to an exclusive religion, he saw in art nothing but idolatry and vanity. Already Shah Jehan had prohibited the erection of Hindu temples;127 Aurangzeb not only continued the ban, but gave so economical a support to Moslem building that it, too, languished under his reign. Indian art followed him to the grave.

  When we think of Indian architecture in summary and retrospect we find in it two themes, masculine and feminine, Hindu and Mohammedan, about which the structural symphony revolves. As, in the most famous of symphonies, the startling hammer-strokes of the opening bars are shortly followed by a strain of infinite delicacy, so in Indian architecture the overpowering monuments of the Hindu genius at Bodh-Gaya, Bhuvaneshwara, Madura and Tanjore are followed by the grace and melody of the Mogul style at Fathpur-Sikri, Delhi and Agra; and the two themes mingle in a confused elaboration to the end. It was said of the Moguls that they built like giants and finished liked jewelers; but this epigram might better have been applied to Indian architecture in general: the Hindus built like giants, and the Moguls ended like jewelers. Hindu architecture impresses us in its mass, Moorish architcture in its detail; the first had the sublimity of strength, the other had the perfection of beauty; the Hindus had passion and fertility, the Moors had taste and self-restraint. The Hindu covered his buildings with such exuberant statuary that one hesitates whether to class them as building or as sculpture; the Mohammedan abominated images, and confined himself to floral or geometrical decoration. The Hindus were the Gothic sculptor-architects of India’s Middle Ages; the Moslems were the expatriated artists of the exotic Renaissance. All in all, the Hindu style reached greater heights, in proportion as sublimity excels loveliness; on second thought we perceiv
e that Delhi Fort and the Taj Mahal, beside Angkor and Borobudur, are beautiful lyrics beside profound dramas—Petrarch beside Dante, Keats beside Shakespeare, Sappho beside Sophocles. One art is the graceful and partial expression of fortunate individuals, the other is the complete and powerful expression of a race.

  Hence this little survey must conclude as it began, by confessing that none but a Hindu can quite appreciate the art of India, or write about it forgivably. To a European brought up on Greek and aristocratic canons of moderation and simplicity, this popular art of profuse ornament and wild complexity will seem at times almost primitive and barbarous. But that last word is the very adjective with which the classically-minded Goethe rejected Strasbourg’s cathedral and the Gothic style; it is the reaction of reason to feeling, of rationalism to religion. Only a native believer can feel the majesty of the Hindu temples, for these were built to give not merely a form to beauty but a stimulus to piety and a pedestal to faith. Only our Middle Ages—only our Giottos and our Dantes—could understand India.

  It is in these terms that we must view all Indian civilization—as the expression of a “medieval” people to whom religion is profounder than science, if only because religion accepts at the outset the eternity of human ignorance and the vanity of human power. In this piety lie the weakness and the strength of the Hindu: his superstition and his gentleness, his introversion and his insight, his backwardness and his depth, his weakness in war and his achievement in art. Doubtless his climate affected his religion, and coöperated with it to enfeeble him; therefore he yielded with fatalistic resignation to the Aryans, the Huns, the Moslems and the Europeans. History punished him for neglecting science; and when Clive’s superior cannon slaughtered the native army at Plassey (1757), their roar announced the Industrial Revolution. In our time that Revolution will have its way with India, as it has written its will and character upon England, America, Germany, Russia and Japan; India, too, will have her capitalism and her socialism, her millionaires and her slums. The old civilization of India is finished. It began to die when the British came.

  CHAPTER XXII

  A Christian Epilogue

  I. THE JOLLY BUCCANEERS

  The arrival of the Europeans—The British Conquest—The Sepoy Mutiny—Advantages and disadvantages of British rule

  IN many ways that civilization was already dead when Clive and Hastings discovered the riches of India. The long and disruptive reign of Aurangzeb, and the chaos and internal wars that followed it, left India ripe for reconquest; and the only question open to “manifest destiny” was as to which of the modernized powers of Europe should become its instrument. The French tried, and failed; they lost India, as well as Canada, at Rossbach and Waterloo. The English tried, and succeeded.

  In 1498 Vasco da Gama, after a voyage of eleven months from Lisbon, anchored off Calicut. He was well received by the Hindu Raja of Malabar, who gave him a courteous letter to the King of Portugal: “Vasco da Gama, a nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom, and has given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is abundance of cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and precious stones. What I seek from your country is gold, silver, coral and scarlet.” His Christian majesty answered by claiming India as a Portuguese colony, for reasons which the Raja was too backward to understand. To make matters clearer, Portugal sent a fleet to India, with instructions to spread Christianity and wage war. In the seventeenth century the Dutch arrived, and drove out the Portuguese; in the eighteenth the French and English came, and drove out the Dutch. Savage ordeals of battle decided which of them should civilize and tax the Hindus.

  The East India Company had been founded in London in 1600 to buy cheap in India, and sell dear in Europe, the products of India and the East Indies.* As early as 1686 it announced its intention “to establish a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come.”3 It set up trading-posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, fortified them, imported troops, fought battles, gave and took bribes, and exercised other functions of government. Clive gayly accepted “presents” amounting to $170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; appointed Mir Jafar ruler of Bengal for $6,000,000; played one native prince against another, and gradually annexed their territories as the property of the East India Company; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself (1774).4 Warren Hastings, a man of courage, learning and ability, exacted contributions as high as a quarter of a million dollars from native princes to the coffers of the Company; accepted bribes to exact no more, exacted more, and annexed the states that could not pay; he occupied Oudh with his army, and sold the province to a prince for $ 2,500,0005—conquered and conqueror rivaled each other in venality. Such parts of India as were under the Company were subjected to a land tax of fifty per cent of the produce, and to other requisitions so numerous and severe that two-thirds of the population fled, while others sold their children to meet the rising rates.6 “Enormous fortunes,” says Macaulay, “were rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.”7

  By 1857 the crimes of the Company had so impoverished northeastern India that the natives broke out in desperate revolt. The British Government stepped in, suppressed the “mutiny,” took over the captured territories as a colony of the Crown, paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India.8 It was plain, blunt conquest, not to be judged, perhaps, by Commandments recited west of Suez, but to be understood in terms of Darwin and Nietzsche: a people that has lost the ability to govern itself, or to develop its natural resources, inevitably falls a prey to nations suffering from strength and greed.

  The conquest brought certain advantages to India. Men like Bentinck, Canning, Munro, Elphinstone and Macaulay carried into the administration of the British provinces something of the generous liberalism that controlled England in 1832. Lord William Bentinck, with the aid and stimulus of native reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, put an end to suttee and thuggery. The English, after fighting III wars in India, with Indian money and troops,9 to complete the conquest of India, established peace throughout the peninsula, built railways, factories and schools, opened universities at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Allahabad, brought the science and technology of England to India, inspired the East with the democratic ideals of the West, and played an important part in revealing to the world the cultural wealth of India’s past. The price of these benefactions was a financial despotism by which a race of transient rulers drained India’s wealth year by year as they returned to the reinvigorating north; an economic despotism that ruined India’s industries, and threw her millions of artisans back upon an inadequate soil; and a political despotism that, coming so soon after the narrow tyranny of Aurangzeb, broke for a century the spirit of the Indian people.

  II. LATTER-DAY SAINTS

  Christianity in India—The “Brahma-Somaj”—Mohammedanism—Ramakrishna—Vivekananda

  It was natural and characteristic that under these conditions India should seek consolation in religion. For a time she gave a cordial welcome to Christianity; she found in it many ethical ideals that she had honored for thousands of years; and “before the character and behavior of Europeans,” says the blunt Abbé Dubois, “became well known to these people, it seemed possible that Christianity might take root among them.”10 Throughout the nineteenth century harassed missionaries tried to make the voice of Christ audible above the roar of the conquering cannon; they erected and equipped schools and hospitals, dispensed medicine and charity as well as theology, and brought to the Untouchables the first recognition of their humanity. But the contrast between Christian precept and the practice of Christians left the Hindus sceptical and satirical. They pointed out that the raising of Lazarus from the dead was unworthy of remark; their own religion had many more interesting and aston
ishing miracles than this; and any true Yogi could perform miracles today, while those of Christianity were apparently finished.11 The Brahmans held their ground proudly, and offered against the orthodoxies of the West a system of thought quite as subtle, profound, and incredible. “The progress of Christianity in India,” says Sir Charles Eliot, “has been insignificant.”12

  Nevertheless, the fascinating figure of Christ has had far more influence in India than may be measured by the fact that Christianity has converted six per cent of the population in three hundred years. The first signs of that influence appear in the Bhagavad-Gita;13 the latest are evident in Gandhi and Tagore. The clearest instance is in the reform organization known as the Brahma-Somaj,* founded in 1828 by Ram Mohun Roy. No one could have approached the study of religion more conscientiously. Roy learned Sanskrit to read the Vedas, Pali to read the Tripitaka of Buddhism, Persian and Arabic to study Mohammedanism and the Koran, Hebrew to master the Old Testament and Greek to understand the New.14 Then he took up English, and wrote it with such ease and grace that Jeremy Bentham wished that James Mill might profit from the example. In 1820 Roy published his Precepts of Jesus: a Guide to Peace and Happiness, and announced: “I have found the doctrines of Christ more conducive to moral principles, and better adapted for the use of rational beings, than any other which have come to my knowledge.”15 He proposed to his scandalized countrymen a new religion, which should abandon polytheism, polygamy, caste, child marriage, suttee and idolatry, and should worship one god —Brahman. Like Akbar he dreamed that all India might be united in so simple a faith; and like Akbar he underestimated the popularity of superstition. The Brahma-Somaj, after a hundred years of useful struggle, is now an extinct force in Indian life.†