A LITERARY HISTORY OF INDIA.*
THE distinctive meaning of this book's title, A Literary History of India, may be ascertained from its preface, where the author tells us that be has essayed to set forth a connected history of India from such evidences as he has selected from its literature. Taking the word "literature," as Mr. Frazer uses it, to include the early records of past times, one may remark that all ancient history is in this sense literary ; the peculiarity of Indian literature being that it is uncom- monly scanty. Nor indeed can we perceive in what manner the first thirteen chapters of this volume, which treat of India before the advent of the bfahommedans, differ from other attempts to compile out of the results of philologic research, out of the sacred Hindoo books, from mythology, epigraphy, and other relics of antiquity, some conjectural survey of primitive tribal movements, of dynasties that rose and fell obscurely, and of the development of famous religions. The larger portion of Mr. Frazer's work is, indeed, rather a history of Indian literature than a literary history of India. And he defines it, in the middle of his book, as "an effort to note and mark the culminating waves of thought that rise on the great stream of Aryan literature that flows from Vedic times down to our own days."
But to delineate, from scattered and incoherent materials, the historical evolution of Indian thought during the last three thousand years, and to show its connection with the political fortunes of this vast country, is a most arduous under- taking. We have no clear evidence of any kind of regular pro- gress, social or religious. The Brahminism of to-day appears to be little changed, in its main characteristics, from the dogmatic and ritualistic system expounded in its ancient books ; the popular worship is still a confused polytheism ; the institution of caste still breaks up the multitude into innumerable groups. Buddhism, that prodigious pheno- menon, rose, reigned, and vanished in India without leaving any permanent breach in the Brahminic theology. Some remarkable puritanic sects, like that of the Sikhs, have held their ground ; but Islam is the only faith that has swept a large number of the Indian people into a totally new atmo- sphere of religions conceptions. And, lastly, since the early literature of Hinduism, including even its epic and dramatic poems, is fundamentally mythical and theological, we can
• A Literary History of India. By B,. W. Frazer, LL.B. London: T. Fisher Onwin. [184.]
extract from it very little more than doubtful generalisations and speculative inferences regarding the course or correlation of the facts upon which even literary history must to some extent be grounded.
Mr. Frazer's work inevitably labours under these disadvan- tages at the beginning. His starting-point is about 2,000 years B.C., with the Vedic hymns and the Aryan migrations.
The term "Aryan," we are told in a footnote, refers merely to those people who speak Aryan languages, and does not necessarily imply Aryan descent. Yet on the next page a Sildra is defined as one of non-Aryan blood, apparently because he was excluded from participation in the Brah- minic ritual, and throughout the book Aryan tribes are treated as a foreign conquering people. If, as Professor Max Muller and Mr. Frazer agree, "we predicate nothing of those we call Aryans except that the grammar of their language is Aryan," then Mr. Frazer's long dissertation upon the conquests, the customs, and the institutions of the Aryans as a separate race, closely united by the tie of blood, seems to rest upon a slender grammatical foundation. The truth is that this great preliminary difficulty of taking language to be the connotation of race embarrasses all attempts to trace out a line of authentic history from linguistic indications; and we know that in India a perpetual mingling and inter- fusion of tribes, tongues, customs, and worship has been going on immemorially.
Our researches into early Indian history are hampered also by the disadvantage that little or no help is to be gained from outside. Up to the Mahommedan invasion in the eleventh century A.D., India lay almost entirely out of con- tact with the historic nations of the West. Alexander's irruption into the Punjab rent for a moment the veil which screened her from the civilised world of antiquity ; and from the Grieco-Bactrian dynasties on her northern frontier a ray of Greek art reached and transformed the Buddhistic sculp- tures; but otherwise we are groping in a dim twilight. The following passage shows how very little can be made, even by far-fetched comparisons, of the suggestion that the sixth century B.C., when Sakya Gautama, the Buddha, appeared in India, marked a period of widespread intellectual disquietude among the natives :—
"The time was one when strange unrest and strange fore- bodings had everywhere been borne to the soul of man. Near at hand in Persia Zoroaster had proclaimed, as some solution of the bitter wail of mankind, the existence of the two ever conflicting principles of good and evil. In Palestine Jeremiah poured forth his lament that all his days are sorrow and his travail grief.' . . . . At Ephesus Thales had struck the first note of independent thought and unorthodox belief by declaring that water was the primal germ of all things, to be followed by Heraclitus, who saw everywhere evidences of nnresting change, the mere glow and fading away, like unto fire, of all things, an eternal becoming and a never existing Being So to the soul of Buddha crept the sad murmur of the bitter wail 'that the
millions slept, but the wheel of life still revolved."
We confess to some doubt whether writing of this sort is not open to the criticism that it is neither historical nor literary. But in the absence of solid historic material, one naturally has recourse to broad generalisations. The evidence of coins and inscriptions, which is all that we have, as is here said, for the Indian annals of the first seven centuries before Christ, "are not such as to enable any vivid picture to be drawn that would present a lifelike history of the period The centre fact to arrive at is the clue to the subjection of the East by the West;" and for the solution of this problem we are thrown back on "the enervating influence of climate."
We have indeed two contemporary accounts of the reign of Harsh& Vardhana, who in the seventh century seems to have established a considerable empire in northern India. But Mr. Frazer observes that "the extent of India was too vast, the incongruous race-elements it held too diverse and scattered, the caste restrictions too firmly planted to give hope in those early ages that India would ever throb with the one great racial feeling and purpose that makes a Fatherland." Nor, indeed, one might add, has any of the numerous empires ever founded in Asia afforded as yet the least prospect of such a unification, or realised in any perceptible degree the very modern and European idea of the fusion of races into a great nation inspired by the feeling of patriotism.
Mr. Frazer devotes an interesting chapter to the study of the gradual spread into South India of religions, language, and customs from the North. But in regard to the prehistoric politics of that region, we know only that long-forgotten kingdoms were founded and upset ; and of the religious his- tory before Brahminism supervened we know, in fact, nothing at all, except that there, as elsewhere, a confused polytheism prevailed. When the Brahminic theology came and conquered, the local literature and poetry became assimilated, we are told, to Sanskrit models; though we do not gather that any distinctive varieties of thought or belief have been developed in the lower Indian peninsula, where the people adopted the worship of Siva, and Vishnu, and learnt their philosophy from the great Vedantic sages. Two of the most famous commen- tators on the sacred books were born, however, in South India.
From the eleventh century A.D. the Mahommedan irrup- tions into India form a series of events that dominate all its modern history. We presume that Mr. Frazer's reason for according comparatively little space to this great political cataclysm is that he does not find it to have seriously modified the religion or the institutions of the Hindoos, except so far as it carried many millions of them into the fold of Islam. He shows that 1,.0 Emperor Akbar's attempt to found a kind of universal eclectic creed was predestined to failure, as, indeed, all such attempts have invariably failed everywhere. Nevertheless, we should have expected him to pay more attention, in a literary his- tory, to Mahommedan literature, for it is rich in authentic chronicles which are barely noticed at all. He passes on rapidly to the British period ; and the question pro- pounded in his final chapter, on "The Fusing Point of Old and New," is, How far a Western civilisation has wrought permanent changes in the religious or moral feelings of the people, or infused into them an intellectual life. Upon this momentous and complicated inquiry, con- densed into some sixty pages, contemporary Indian literature, including official Reports upon education, unfortunately throws very uncertain light. Mr. Frazer, whose literary illustrations are drawn chiefly from the products of Lower Bengal, makes too much, we thint, of the optimistic deism imported from Europe by Rammohun Roy under the name of the Brahmo Samiij. Bankin Chandra Chatterji, a Bengalee novelist, is stated to be "the first great creative genius modern India has produced ; " and many extracts are given from a work of great merit, Indulcka, by a South Indian novelist. So far as one can judge by the quotations, the poems and romances of contemporary Indian writers attest a remarkable capacity for appreciating and reproducing the style, sentiments, and metrical uses of England, with some original application to the feelings and circumstances of India. But much good work is also done in the departments of archwologic research, of science, and what may be called social philosophy; and "year by year the leaders of Indian thought spread their influence over ever-widening circles."
On the whole Mr. Frazer's book is undoubtedly interesting and suggestive; it draws attention to the phenomenon, almost unique in the history of societies, of the confluence, so to speak, of two civilisations, ancient and modern, Asiatic [o.a:1 European, differing as widely in their character as in the original sources from which they have flowed together. But the plan of the work is too large, and the Indian materials are too imperfect, for any clear and comprehensive presentation of Indian thought as exhibited in its literature. his mainly to these inherent difficulties that we may attribute a certain lack of method and proportion in the execution of the book's design and in the arrangement of its contents. You cannot, for example, handle such a portentous subject as the religious evolution of India from the literary standpoint; nor is it possible to take up compendiously such a problem as the relation of Indian beliefs, philosophical and popular, to the country's political vicissitudes through many centuries. Nevertheless, Mr. Frazer's volume is evidently the outcome of great industry and wide reading; and it will certainly be useful to those who desire information upon the general character of Indian literature, ancient and modern, sacred and profane.
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