? state, and, finally, affected to be not only a temporal sovereign, but an incarnation of deity. Right or wrong, the policy of Abkar/secured for a while the cohesion, and, consequently, the permanence, of the Moghul Empire, and maintained it intact through the reigns of his two immediate successors, Jehangír and Shah Jehan. The history of Muhammadan rule in India, from the early Arab conquests in Scinde down to the end of the reign of Shah Jehan, has already been treated in Part I. of the present volume. Part II., which is now submitted to the public, deals with the violent reaction of bigotry and intolerance which characterised the reign of Aurangzeb, the son and successor of Shah Jehan. Aurangzeb professed to be a Sunní Muhammadan of the strictest type. He gained the throne by hypocrisy and murder, and then lavished the strength and treasures of the empire in the hopeless attempt to crush out idolatry and heterodoxy, and to establish the religion of the Koran as the dominant faith of the people of India. Then followed popular tumults, Rajpút revolts, and Mahratta uprisings, which sapped the vitality of the Moghul Empire, and rendered it an easy prey to internal enemies and foreign invaders. The present half of the fourth volume is thus devoted to the reign of Aurangzeb, under whom the Moghul Empire reached its zenith, and the reigns of his successors, under whom the empire declined and fell. It covers an entire century, beginning with the accession of Aurangzeb in 1658, the year of the death of Oliver Cromwell, and ending just before the rise of British dominion in India in the early years of George III. It thus deals with a period of peculiar interest to English readers;-namely, the old commercial era, when India was still governed by its native princes, whilst the late East India Company was exclusively occupied with its trading transactions at Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay, and had not as yet begun to aspire after territorial aggrandisement or political power. The reign of Aurangzeb is not generally familiar to English readers. Previous Moghul sovereigns had been anxious to hand down the story of their lives to future generations, but Aurangzeb was induced to issue an edict strictly forbidding his subjects from writing the annals of his reign. The reasons for this strange prohibition are explained in the accompanying History;1 but the consequence has been that the materials furnished by Muhammadan writers for dealing with the reign of Aurangzeb are meagre and unsatisfactory. Fortunately the deficiency has been supplied in some measure by the old records of the Madras Government, and Catrou's History of the Moghul Empire, which was based upon the contemporary memoirs of Manouchi, the Venetian physician, who resided for nearly fifty years in India, and was for a long time in the service of the Moghul. The Madras records were investigated by the author in 1860-61 under the instructions of Sir Charles Tre 1 See Chap. vii. page 361. 2 velyan, who was at that time Governor. The memoirs of Manouchi have been already described in the Preface to Part I.; but it may be added, on the authority of the Madras records, that during the latter years of the reign of Aurangzeb, Manouchi took up his abode at Madras, where he was much respected by the English, and employed on more than one occasion in presenting petitions to the Moghul in behalf of the East India Company's servants at Fort St. George.3 The There is one other feature in the present half volume to which attention may be drawn. ninth chapter, which deals with the state of civilisation in the Moghul Empire, mainly consists of the evidence of European travellers who sojourned in India at different intervals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some account of these travellers will be found in the chapter in question. It will suffice, in the present place, to mention the names of Terry, Della Valle, Tavernier, Thevenot, Fryer, Hamilton, and Karstens Niebuhr, as amongst the most competent and trustworthy eyewitnesses of the condition of the people of India, in addition to those who have been already brought under review in Part I. of the present volume. The remaining portion of the present History will 2 The results of these investigations were published at Madras in 1861-62, in three volumes, small 4to, under the title of "Madras in the Olden Time, Compiled from Official Records." The author is indebted to his publisher, Mr. N. Trübner, for a copy of Father Catrou's History of the Reign of Aurangzeb, but the original memoirs, written in Portuguese, which Manouchi sent to Europe in the beginning of the last century, have not as yet been discovered. comprise that of British India, and will deal with the rise and growth of British power, and progress of British administration and legislation, from the earliest settlements of the late East India Company in India down to our own time.* WITHAM, ESSEX, December 1880. In Part I. of the present volume the author expressed the opinion that the Vedic Aryans might possibly prove to have been Moghuls; and as this hypothesis has met with some opposition, he would take this opportunity of furnishing additional grounds for arriving at such a conclusion. During a residence in Burma he found that the Burmese, who are unquestionably Moghuls, still cherish the traditions and worship of the Vedic gods. They are Buddhists; but on the first day of every new year they celebrate the descent of Indra. In their popular songs they implore Indra and the other Vedic gods, especially Brahma, to help them in their troubles. At Mandalay he found that the King of Burma entertained Brahmans at his court; that on state occasions these Bráhmans chanted hymns which resembled Vedic hymns. Subsequently he found that the Moghul Khans in Upper Asia, in the neighbourhood of the Altai mountains, presented wine and food in Vedic fashion to fire, air, water, and ghosts; that their priests, like Bráhmans, were skilled in astronomy, foretold eclipses, and cast nativities; that they had dirty saints, like Hindu yogis, who performed miracles by virtue of their sanctity and penances. Pursuing these inquiries, he found that Sir Henry Rawlinson had discovered that the language of the ancient Scythians was Aryan, and he deemed it possible that the Moghuls, who are descendants of ancient Scythians, were Aryans likewise. It was on these data that he pronounced it likely that the Moghuls and the Vedic Aryans had a common origin. Father Rubruquis states in his Travels amongst the Tartars in the thirteenth century that the Moghuls regarded themselves as a sovereign tribe. Possibly they may have been descendants from the royal Scythians described by Herodotus. It is equally possible that they may have been originally an Aryan colony, who had established a supremacy over a Turanian or non-Aryan people. It is certain that the two races of Turks and Moghuls have been in antagonism from a very remote period; they have waged perpetual war against each other. The Turks are the so-called Children of the Moon, and to this day they carry the crescent on their standard. The Moghuls are the socalled Children of the Sun, and to this day they carry a peacock on their standard. A peacock of gold and jewels blazed over the throne of the Moghul Emperor Shah Jehan, and a peacock is still the standard of the Moghul kings of Burma. |