Muḥammadans formed perhaps one-sixth of the population. They were necessarily discontented and crushed, having been conquered both by the Maratha Hindus and by the British. Yet they were not so cowed nor so weak as the Hindus. The British had entered into the heritage of their administration; multitudes of Muslims were still government officials; and Urdu, the hybrid tongue which had grown up as a medium of communication in the Muḥammadan camp, was still the official language in the law-courts and elsewhere. The bulk of public education was thus still Muḥammadan in character; and what men studied most was the Persian and Urdu languages. Yet the Muslim community was steadily declining. There was no living movement of thought and no spiritual leader among them.

3. Can we see what was the cause of the great Awakening which began about 1800 and since then has dominated the life and history of India? How was the Muslim period so barren as compared with the nineteenth century? How is it that European influence produced practically no results between 1500 and 1800? Why did the Awakening begin at that particular point?

The answer is that the Awakening is the result of the cooperation of two forces, both of which began their characteristic activity about the same time, and that it was quickened by a third which began to affect the Indian mind a little later. The two forces are the British Government in India as it learned its task during the years at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and Protestant Missions1 as they were shaped by the Serampore men and Duff; and the third force is the work of the great Orientalists. The material elements of Western civilization have had their influence, but, apart from the creative forces,

1 Catholic Missions have been continuously of service, especially in education, but they have had no perceptible share in creating the Awakening. 2

they would have led to no awakening. The proof of all this will gradually unfold itself in our chapters.

It was necessity that drove the East India Company to assume governmental duties. They had no desire to rule India, far less to reform the intellectual, social and religious life of the people. They were driven to undertake first one and then. another administrative duty, because otherwise they could not obtain that settled government and those regular financial arrangements without which profitable commerce is impossible. But every step they took led to another; and gradually the conscience of Britain awoke and began to demand that India should be governed for the good of the people. It was during the last decades of the eighteenth century that the old trading company was gradually hammered into something like a government. The men who did the work were Clive, Hastings and Cornwallis. A succession of changes transformed its civil-servant traders, whose incomes depended on their business ability, into administrators living on a salary and strictly forbidden to make money by trading; while the Government itself steadily assumed new functions, and grew in knowledge of the people.

(Protestant missionary history in India opens with the Danish Mission, which did very remarkable work in the Tamil country throughout the eighteenth century; but it was the toil of Carey and his colleagues that roused first Britain and then America and the Continent to a sense of their duty to the non-Christian peoples of the world. William Carey, an English Baptist, arrived in Calcutta on the 11th November, 1793, and, after many wanderings, settled as an indigo-planter near Malda in North Bengal. Here he studied Bengali and Sanskrit, began the work of translating the Bible into Bengali, gained his experience and developed his methods. In 1800 he settled in Serampore under the Danish flag; and in the same year he began to teach Sanskrit and Bengali in

Lord Wellesley's College in Calcutta. Then it was not long before the wiser men both in Missions and in the Government began to see that, for the immeasurable task to be accomplished, it was most necessary that Missions should take advantage of the advancing policy of the Government and that Government should use Missions as a civilizing ally. For the sake of the progress of India coöperation was indispensable,

The rise of Orientalism is contemporaneous with the beginnings of good government in North India and with the development of the new Mission propaganda, but it did not touch the Indian mind until later. It was Warren Hastings who took the steps which led to Europeans becoming acquainted with Sanskrit and Hinduism. By his orders a simple code of Hindu law was put together and translated into English in 1776. In 1785 Charles Wilkins, who had been roused to the study of Sanskrit by Hastings, published a translation of the Bhagavadgita; and Sir William Jones, the 1 At first sight it seems very extraordinary that our real knowledge of India should have begun so late. Europe has known of India superficially from time immemorial; and from a very early date Indians have had scraps of information about the West. Long centuries before the Christian era, it seems certain that Solomon sent his navy from the Gulf of Akabah to Western India; and Indian merchants sailed to the Persian Gulf and brought home Babylonian goods and ideas. The conquest of the Panjab by Darius the Persian brought a small amount of knowledge to Greece; and Alexander's matchless raid led to the establishment of direct communication between India and the Greek kingdoms. Roman traders carried on large commerce with the mouths of the Indus, and also with Southern India, in the first and second centuries A.D. Occasionally travellers from the West penetrated to India during the Middle Ages; and a great trade both by caravan and by sea went on uninterruptedly. Modern intercourse begins with Vasco da Gama, the famous Portuguese explorer, who sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and reached the coast of India at Calicut in Malabar in 1498. From that date onward, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English went to India by sea, and a large trade was carried on; yet until the end of the eighteenth century no serious attempt was made to understand India and its civilization.

first great Sanskritist, published in 1789 a translation of Śakuntalā, the finest of all Indian dramas. Another Englishman, named Hamilton, happened to be passing through France on his way home, in 1802, and was arrested. During his long involuntary stay in Paris he taught Sanskrit to several French scholars and also to the German poet, Friedrich Schlegel. Thus was the torch handed on to Europe. The discovery of Sanskrit led to a revolution in the science of language. About the same time English scholars began the study of the flora and fauna of India, and also of her people.

4. But, though history has shown decisively that it was the British Government and Protestant Missions working together that produced the Awakening of India, we must note carefully that, at the outset, the Government vehemently opposed Missions. In order to understand their attitude, we must realize that their only object was trade, and that it was purely for the safeguarding of their trade that they had interfered with the politics of the land. In consequence, they regarded themselves as in every sense the successors of the old rulers and heirs to their policy and method, except in so far as it was necessary to alter things for the sake of trade. There was another point. They had won their territory by means of an Indian army composed mainly of high-caste Hindus, who were exceedingly strict in keeping all the rules of caste and of

(We ought also to mention the wonderful work done by two Frenchmen. Anquetil du Perron went to India and ultimately prevailed upon the Parsee priests to teach him the language of the Avesta. He brought his Mss. and his knowledge to Europe in 1771, and thus became the pioneer of Zoroastrian research in the West. Four years later he translated into Latin a Persian version of a number of the Upanishads, produced under the orders of a Mughal Prince in the seventeenth century. It was through his almost incomprehensible Latin that Schopenhauer received his knowledge of the Vedanta philosophy. L'Abbé Dubois, a Catholic missionary who lived and wandered in the Tamil country from 1792 to 1823 wrote Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, one of the most vivid and reliable descriptions of a people that has ever been penned.

religious practice. Further, every competent observer was deeply impressed with the extraordinary hold Hinduism had upon the people. Every element of life was controlled by it.1 In consequence, the Government believed it to be necessary, for the stability of their position, not merely to recognize the religions of the people of India, but to support and patronize them as fully as the native rulers had done, and to protect their soldiers from any attempt to make them Christians. Accordingly, they adopted three lines of policy from which, for a long time, they stubbornly refused to move : 2)

(a. They took under their management and patronage a large number of Hindu temples. They advanced money for rebuilding important shrines and for repairing others, and paid the salaries of the temple officials, even down to the courtesans, which were a normal feature of the great temples of the South. They granted large sums of money for sacrifices and festivals and for the feeding of Brahmans. Salvoes of cannon were fired on the occasion of the greater festivals; and government officials were ordered to be present and to show their interest in the celebrations. Even cruel and immoral rites, such as hook-swinging, practised in the worship of the gods, and the burning of widows, were carried out under British supervision. In order to pay for all these things, a pilgrim-tax was imposed, which not only recouped the Government for their outlay, but brought them a handsome income as well. Reformers in England and India found it a long and toilsome business to get this patronage of idolatry by a Christian Government put down. The last temple was handed over as late as 1862.)

1 During the many years that I studied Hindu customs I cannot say that I ever observed a single one, however unimportant and simple, and, I may add, however filthy and disgusting, which did not rest on some religious principle or other. Dubois, p. 31.

2 Richter, 185-192.

See below, pp. 408-9.