A Vision of United India

Chapter 1

Political unity in ancient India Introduction

It is widely accepted all over the world today that Indian civilization has achieved greatness in the things most important to human culture, that is, in the mental, spiritual, religious, intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic fields; and in all these matters when seen in the whole, and in its deeper intention there is revealed a great largeness and profundity of development and growth. In fact, one might say that there is revealed here not only a great civilization, but one of the half dozen greatest of which we still have an existing record.

But while all admit the greatness of the achievement of India in the things of the mind and the spirit, there is still a general perception both in India and abroad, that she has failed in life and that her culture has not resulted in a strong, successful or progressive organization of life as is shown to us by the Western civilizations. This charge weighs with an especial heaviness today because modern man, even modern cultured man, is, or tends to be to a degree quite unprecedented, a political, economic and social being valuing above all other things the efficiency of the outward existence and the things of the mind and spirit mainly, if not exclusively, for their aid to humanity's vital and mechanical progress. Modern man has not that regard of the ancients, which looked up towards the highest heights and regarded an achievement in the things of the mind and spirit with an unquestioning admiration or a deep veneration for its own sake as the greatest possible contribution to human culture and progress.

And while it must be admitted that this modern tendency is somewhat exaggerated, ugly and degrading in its exaggeration, inimical to humanity's spiritual evolution, it has this much truth behind it that while the first value of a culture is its power to raise and enlarge the internal man, the mind and the soul, its soundness is not complete unless it has also shaped his external existence and made of it a rhythm of advance towards high and great ideals. This is the true sense of progress and there must be as part of it, a sound political, economic and social life, a power and efficiency enabling a people to survive, to grow and to move securely towards a collective perfection, and a living elasticity and responsiveness that will give room for a constant advance in the outward expression of the mind and the spirit. If a culture does not serve these ends, then there is evidently a defect somewhere either in its essential conceptions or in its application that will seriously detract from its claims to a complete and integral value. There must, therefore, be in any culture aiming at completeness, not only great and noble governing and inspiring ideas, but a harmony of forms and rhythms, a mould into which ideas and life can run and settle. This harmony of forms and rhythms is created by the political, social, and economic systems of the community.

A study of Indian history shows us that Indian culture had a sound political and economic system, which ensured its survival for more than five millenniums; it developed an organization that was admirable for stability and effective administration; it secured the communal order and liberties and the well being of the people under ancient conditions. At the same time, one cannot to fail to observe that this organization was neither able to create a lasting national and political unification of India nor secure her against foreign invasion. These invasions which lasted over a thousand years led first, to a very serious

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disruption of its institutions and finally, to a very long servitude. It is evident that there was a serious shortcoming somewhere in the political system.

In the first part of this book we shall make an attempt to analyse the causes for this failure. This study will have two aspects, the first being the study and analysis of the root causes for the failure of the unification of India in her early political history and second, India's failure to protect herself from foreign invasions in the later period of her political history. This second part has particular reference to the Muslim invasions and the British conquest. We believe that this study is not only important but that there is also an urgent need for it at the present juncture. A proper study and analysis of the failure could be of great help in the future unification of India, and this will be covered in the second part of the book.

The political history of India

History has shown that India had been subject to invasions right from the 3rd century BC. Starting with the invasion by the organized Persian Empire and then by Alexander in the pre-Christian eras, it was followed by a series of invasions till the advent of the Muslims. The Muslim invasion was followed by the British invasion and conquest till the year 1947.

We shall, therefore, divide the history of political India into four parts. First is the period from the ancient times till the advent of the Muslims; second is the period of the Muslim rule till the advent of the British, third is the period of the British rule and the last is the political history of independent India. In the first three periods, India was subject to invasions and each one of them was handled differently, sometimes with remarkable success and at other times with a certain amount of both success and failure. In the first period starting from the Persian invasions till the advent of the Muslims, the invaders were all absorbed and assimilated in India. In the next phase of the Muslim invasions, there was a great deal of assimilation, though incomplete, particularly in the field of religion. The third period was, really speaking, the first foreign conquest. However, here too, there was a certain amount of assimilation.

Each one of these periods has very important lessons for the student of political science and for the future unification of the Indian subcontinent. We shall now take up in some detail the different periods of political evolution in India.

The first period

The first period of the socio-political evolution passed through three stages: first, the simple Aryan community, then a period of long transition with a considerable variety of experimental formations in political structure and synthesis, and finally, the definite formation of the monarchical state coordinating all the complex elements of the communal life of the people into regional and imperial unities.

However, it is very important to note that through all the building and rebuilding of the Indian polity, there was one principle permanent at the base of construction. That was the principle of an organically self-determining communal life. It was self-determining not only in the mass by means of the machinery of the vote and a representative body erected on the surface, representative only of the political mind of a part of the nation, which is all that the modern system has been able to manage. It was a system self-determining in every pulse of its life and in each separate member of its existence. A free synthetic communal order was its character and the condition of liberty it aimed at was not so

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much an individual liberty as a communal liberty. This is one of the striking features of the Indian political system and we must keep it in mind right through our study.

This free, organic life was founded on the system of the self-governing village community. The people of a village, living mostly on agriculture, formed in the total a single religious, social, military and political body that governed itself in its assembly, samiti, under the leadership of the king. There was as yet no clear separation of functions or class division of labour.

This system sufficed as long as life was restricted to a small area, but as life evolved, and the communities grew larger and the pressure of new circumstances came into existence, a new system was called for. To meet this necessity, the Indian mind evolved the stable socio-religious system of the four orders. And in ancient India, the four-fold order was at once and inextricably, the religious, cultural, social, political and economic framework of the society. Within that framework, each order had its natural portion; it must be emphasised that in none of the fundamental activities was the share or portion of any of them exclusive.

Thus India created a political system, which gave her stability and a sound government based on the full participation of all the people. But this was not sufficient to protect her from foreign invasion. From the third century BC, she was subject to invasion after invasion and all these invasions came from the passes of the North West. The first invasion that took place was that of the Persian Empire and it was soon followed by the invasion of the Greeks led by Alexander.

The reasons of this weakness

One of the reasons for the historic weakness of the Indian peninsula and its being prone to repeated invasions was its vulnerability through the north-western passes. The Khyber and Bolan passes were the route taken by almost all the invaders to India. This weakness did not exist so long as ancient India extended northward far beyond the Indus, and the powerful kingdoms of Gandhara and Vahlika presented a firm bulwark against foreign invasion. But once they had gone down before the organised Persian Empire, the trans-Indus countries, ceasing to be part of India, ceased also to serve as her protection. Instead, they became the secure base for every successive invader.

The inroads made by Alexander brought home the magnitude of the danger to the political mind of India and as a consequence, from this time onward, we see poets, writers and political thinkers constantly upholding the imperial ideal or thinking out the means of its realisation. The immediate practical result was the rise of the Mauryan empire founded with remarkable swiftness by the statesmanship of Chanakya and constantly maintained or restored through eight or nine centuries, in spite of periods of weakness and disintegration.

Thus began the age of empires in India. All the empires that followed the Mauryan empire of Chandragupta Maurya, the Gupta empire and the Harsha empire, withstood foreign invasions and served the purpose for which they had been created - the saving of the Indian soil and Indian civilization from that immense flood of barbarian unrest. That unrest, which started in the 4th century AD threatened all the ancient stable cultures and finally proved too strong even for the highly developed Greco-Roman civilization and the vast and powerful Roman Empire. It was the same phenomenon that threw great masses of Teutons, Slavs, Huns, and Scythians to the east and south in India; it battered at the gates of India for many centuries, it effected certain inroads, but finally when it sank,

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the great edifice of Indian civilization still stood firm, great and secure. In fact, all these invaders were assimilated and absorbed into the Indian culture.

Thus the great empires in India served the purpose for which they had been created, but at the same time, it has to be noted that none of them lasted long enough to build up a sound and durable political unity. Each one of these empires lasted for a little more than a century, then disintegrated from within and was followed by another. This process continued for the whole period till the advent of the Muslims. Thus it might be said that the early political history of India is the story of a succession of empires, indigenous and foreign, each of them destroyed by centrifugal forces but each bringing the centripetal tendency nearer to its triumphant emergence. For the dream of a united India remained in the minds of the people. This dream started with the Mauryan Empire, and all the succeeding empires merely confirmed the dream that was to survive and echo again and again in centuries to come, the dream of a united India.

The causes of the failure

Let us now try to analyse the reasons for this failure to unite politically for a sufficiently and reasonably long time. And why in the end did the final collapse come about? These fluctuating movements in the political field, the tardiness, and the final collapse with the advent of the Muslims raise certain very important questions. Was there a fundamental incapacity in the political consciousness of the Indian people or were there other reasons and forces responsible for this situation? We shall try to answer these questions briefly in the following pages.

A great deal has been said and written in modern times about the inability of Indians to unite. It is said that there was never a common patriotism and that this patriotism has only now been created by the influence of Western culture; it is also said that the divisions imposed by religion and caste were the great obstacles to unity and that these could be removed only by modernizing and westernising India. Admitting even in their full degree the force of these strictures - all of them are not altogether true or rightly stated or vitally applicable to the matter - they are only symptoms and we have still to seek the deeper causes.

There are those who reply that the lack of Indian political unity was not really a failure; the argument put forward is that India was at least as big as Europe and that if Europe had not been able to unite for all these centuries, then how could we blame India for this failure? After all, India is as much a continent as Europe. The Indian subcontinent is practically almost as large as Europe containing a great number of peoples and the difficulties of forging unity have been as great or at least almost as considerable. In fact, the subcontinent is home to almost all the religions in the world and has a very large number of distinct and well-formed cultural and linguistic identities. And if it is no proof of the insufficiency of Western civilization or of the political incapacity of the European peoples that the idea of European unity should have remained for so long an ineffective dream on the ideal plane and has only just managed to succeed, it is not just to apply a different system of values to the much clearer ideal of unity or at least of unification, the persistent attempt at its realisation and the frequent near approach to success that marked the history of the Indian peoples.

While there is some force in this argument, it is not in the form entirely apposite; the analogy is far from perfect and the conditions were not quite of the same order. The peoples of Europe are nations very sharply divided in their collective personality, and

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their spiritual unity in the Christian religion or even their cultural unity in a common European civilization was never so real and complete as the ancient spiritual and cultural unity of India. The spiritual unity centred on Christendom was not the centre of their life, nor even its basis or firm ground of existence, but only its general air or circumambient atmosphere. And this is because the centre of gravity of Europe lies not in its spiritual or cultural centre but much more in its economic and political centre. It is only the increasing community of political movements and the now total economic interdependence of the whole of Europe that has at last created the European Union. It needed two devastating World Wars to impress on the European peoples the imperative necessity of a European Union. Whether it will create a lasting unity, and overcome the mentality born of an age of long separatism remains to be seen.

The psychological unity in India

In India, however, the situation was very different; it was more a cultural and spiritual unity than a political and economical unity. For in India, the spiritual and cultural unity was made complete at a very early time and it became the very basis of life of all this great surge of humanity between the Himalayas and the two seas. The peoples of ancient India were not so much distinct nations sharply divided from each other by a separate political and economic life; rather, they were sub-peoples of a great spiritual and cultural nation itself firmly separated physically, from other countries by the seas and the mountains and from other nations by its strong sense of difference, its peculiar common religion and culture.

The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn; its propensity has always been to seek the things of the spirit and the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary, dependent, to be handled and determined in the light of the higher knowledge; the outer world was seen as an expression, a preliminary field or aid to the deeper spiritual aim. In other words, this approach led to a tendency to create whatever it had to create first on the inner plane and afterwards in its other and outer aspects.

The early mind of India understood the essential character of this problem. The Vedic Rishis and their successors made it their chief work to found a spiritual basis of Indian life and to effect the spiritual and cultural unity of the many races and peoples of the peninsula.

What were the methods adopted by the ancients to bring about this spiritual and cultural unity?

Observing the religious and spiritual tendency of the Indian people, the ancient seers adopted a combination of different psychological and practical methods to bring about spiritual and cultural unity.

As a first step, they created sacred religious places and distributed them all over the country; some of the places are in Haridwar, Prayag near Allahabad, Gaya, Nasik, Dwarka, Puri, Kumbakonam and Rameswaram.

Another method they adopted was the repetition of the sacred text, which every Indian had to use every time he went to bathe:

Gangecha Jamunechaiva Godavari Sarasvatee

Narmada Sindhu Kaveri jalesmin sannidhim kuru

And it means: May the Ganges, the Yamuna. the Godavari, the Sarasvatee, the Narmada, the Sindhu and the Kaveri enter into this water.

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These are the great rivers of the Indian sub-continent and it is along the course of the great rivers that the sacred stream of Indian culture flowed all over the land.

In addition, there were the legends of the gods and the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata -, which were read and moved people in every part of India. These legends were known by every Indian family and created a deep psychological bond among the people.

A very important factor in the unification of the people of India was language. The Sanskrit language was not only a strong unifying force; it was also a powerful educating one. In the words of the eminent historian, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee: "Sanskrit looms large behind all Indian languages, Aryan and non-Aryan. It is inseparable from Indian history and culture. Sanskrit is India. The progressive Unification of the Indian peoples into a single nation can correctly be described as the Sanskritisation of India". Finally, there was the universal reverence of the Vedas all over the country from the extreme North to the tip of South India.

Thus from a very early period of Indian history, the Indian subcontinent had fully realised a very deep, though complex kind of organic unity at the back of all the apparent diversities and multiplicities of the land and the people.

All these created a feeling that India was not just a geographical entity or a collection of people merely having the same religion and language. The Indian nation became a living being with a distinct personality, a dynamic psychological entity.

It is this feeling that has been expressed by poets and writers throughout the ages. In modern times, this was the whole meaning of Bandemataram and is beautifully expressed in the following words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

 India - a living personality

"Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting their separate existence, and keeping it in being. Such beings are as real and more permanently real than the men they influence, but they belong to a higher plane, are part of the cosmic consciousness and being and act here on earth by shaping the human consciousness on which they exercise their influence". 1

"Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle, which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence. For by its virtue alone she has been one of the immortal nations; this alone has been the secret of her amazing persistence and perpetual force of survival and revival". 2

"A Nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like the human individual. The soul of a nation is a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it. It is not merely the sum total of its individuals that compose it, but a collective personality of which the individuals are, as it were, cells, like the cells of a living and conscious organism. The soul of a nation is indeed conscious; it knows its raison d'etre, its life purpose, its destiny, the role it has to play in the divine scheme as the divine instrument. And it has a will and through this will it will inevitably find and fulfil itself. And just like the soul of a man, the nation's soul is behind all the movements that form its external life, supporting, building, guiding its political, economic, social and

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cultural make-up. The individual can know and come in contact with the nation's soul in and through his own soul".3

"Even as the individual has a soul which is its true self, governing more or less openly his destiny, each nation too has its soul which is its true self moulding its destiny from behind the veil: it is the soul of the country, the national genius, the spirit of the people, the centre of national aspiration, the fountain-head of all that is beautiful, noble, great and generous in the life of a country. True patriots feel its presence as a tangible reality. It is this which has been made almost into a divine being and all who love their country call it "Mother India" (Bharat Mata), and it is to her that they daily address a prayer for the welfare of their country". 4

The need of a political unification

We thus see that from the very ancient times, India had developed a cultural and spiritual unity. It is on this firm basis that the unity of India has lasted through the centuries.

But a mere spiritual and cultural unity was not, and could not be, a sufficient basis for a vigorous national life. A durable political unification was needed.

The ancient seers of India were not blind to this necessity. Observing that the constant tendency of the clan life of the Aryan peoples was to consolidate under confederacies and hegemonies of varying proportions, -'such as vairajya, samrajya', - they saw that to follow this line to its full conclusion was the right way. They evolved therefore, the ideal of the Chakravarti. The Chakravarti was the symbol of a uniting imperial rule - uniting without destroying the autonomy of India's many kingdoms and peoples, from sea to sea. This ideal was supported, like everything else in Indian life, with a spiritual and religious sanction. They set up as the outward symbol of this unity, the Aswamedha and Rajasuya sacrifices, and made it the dharma of a powerful King, his royal and religious duty, to attempt the fulfilment of this ideal. He was not allowed by the Dharma to destroy the liberties of the peoples who came under his sway nor to dethrone or annihilate their royal houses or replace their archons by his officials and governors. His function was to establish a suzerain power possessed of sufficient military strength to preserve internal peace and to combine at need the full forces of the country. And to this elementary function came to be added the ideal of the fulfilment and maintenance under a strong uniting hand of the Indian dharma, the right functioning of the spiritual, religious, ethical and social culture of India.

The full flowering of this ideal is seen in the great epics. The Mahabharata is the record of a legendary or, it may be, a historic attempt to establish such an empire, a dharmarajya or kingdom of the Dharma. There the ideal is pictured as so imperative and widely acknowledged that even the turbulent Shishupala is represented as justifying his submission and attendance at the Rajasuya sacrifice on the ground that Yudhisthira was carrying out an action demanded by the Dharma. And in the Ramayana we have an idealised picture of such a Dharmarajya, a settled universal empire. Here too, it is not an autocratic despotism but a universal monarchy supported by a free assembly of the city and provinces and of all the classes that is held up as the ideal, an enlargement of the monarchical state synthesizing the communal autonomies of the Indian system and maintaining the law and constitution of the Dharma.

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The Indian ideal of conquest

The ideal of conquest held up in ancient India was, therefore, not a destructive and predatory invasion, annihilating the organic freedom and the political and social institutions and exploiting the economic resources of the conquered peoples; rather, it was a sacrificial progression bringing with it a trial of military strength of which the result was easily accepted because defeat entailed neither humiliation nor servitude and suffering but merely a strengthening adhesion to a suzerain power concerned only with establishing the visible unity of the nation and the Dharma. The ideal and the purpose of the ancient Rishis is clear; it is evident that they saw the necessity of military and political utility and that of a unification of the divided and warring peoples of the land, but they saw also that it ought not to be secured at the expense of the free life of the regional peoples or of communal liberties. This could not be done by a centralized monarchy or a rigidly Unitarian imperial State. A hegemony or confederacy under an imperial head would be the nearest Western analogy to the conception they sought to impose on the minds of the people.

The consequences of this approach

Given this mentality and the consequent tendency to create from within outwards, it was inevitable that the unity India first created for herself would be a spiritual and cultural oneness. It could not be, to begin with, a political unification effected by an external rule centralized, imposed or constructed, as was done in Rome or ancient Persia, by a conquering kingdom or the genius of a military and organizing people. It cannot justly be said that this was a mistake or a proof of the unpractical turn of the Indian mind and that the single political body should have been created first and afterwards the spiritual unity could have securely grown up in the vast body of an Indian national empire.

In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

"The problem that presented itself at the beginning was that of a huge area containing more than a hundred kingdoms, clans, peoples, tribes, races, in this respect another Greece, but a Greece on an enormous scale, almost as large as modern Europe. As in Greece, a cultural Hellenic unity was necessary to create a fundamental feeling of oneness; here too and much more imperatively, a conscious spiritual and cultural unity of all these peoples was the first, the indispensable condition without which no enduring unity could be possible. The instinct of the Indian mind and of its great Rishis and founders of its culture was sound in this matter. And even if we suppose that an outward imperial unity like that of the Roman world could have been founded among the peoples of early India by military and political means, we must not forget that the Roman unity did not endure, that even the unity of ancient Italy founded by the Roman conquest and organization did not endure, and it is not likely that a similar attempt in the vast reaches of India without the previous spiritual and cultural basis would have been of an enduring character. It cannot be said either, even if the emphasis on spiritual and cultural unity be pronounced to have been too engrossing or excessive and the insistence on political and external unity too feeble, that the effect of this precedence has been merely disastrous and without any advantage. It is due to this original peculiarity, to this indelible spiritual stamp, to this underlying oneness amidst all diversities that if India is not yet a single organized political nation, she still survives and is still India".

It follows that with the cultural and spiritual oneness created by the ancients, it should have been easier to create a sound political unity. However vast the area and however

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many the practical difficulties, the creation of a political unity, ought therefore to have been effected more easily than in the case of Europe.

The difficulty and failure of Indian unification

The question, therefore, remains: Why then did India, despite this cultural and spiritual unity, fail to bring about a durable political unity?

We touch here on the secret of the difficulty and the ultimate failure in the problem of unifying ancient India. It could not be done by the ordinary means of a centralized uniform imperial State crushing out all that made for free divergence, local autonomies, established communal liberties. As a matter of fact, each time that an attempt was made in this direction, it failed after however long a term of apparent success One might even say that the guardians of India's destiny wisely compelled it to fail so that her inner spirit might not perish and her soul barter for an engine of temporary security, the deep sources of its life.

The ancient mind of India had the intuition of its need; its idea of an empire was a uniting rule that respected every existing regional and communal liberty, a rule that unnecessarily crushed out no living autonomy that brought about a synthesis of her life; its idea of empire was not based on a mechanical oneness.

But each time an attempt to find such a solution was made, a solution that might securely have evolved and found its true means and form and basis, it did not last. The difficulties were great, the conditions were not ripe, and there was instead an attempt to establish a single administrative empire.

The pressure of an immediate and external necessity dictated that endeavour; but it failed to achieve complete success in spite of its greatness and splendour. This was because it followed a trend that was not eventually compatible with the true turn of the Indian spirit. We have already seen that the underlying principle of the Indian politico-social system was a synthesis of communal autonomies, the autonomy of the village, of the town and capital city, of the caste, guild, family, religious community, regional unit. The state or kingdom or confederated republic was a means of holding together and synthesizing in a free and living organic system these autonomies. The imperial problem was to synthesize again these states, peoples, nations - effecting their unity but respecting their autonomy -into a larger free and living organism. A system had to be found that would maintain peace and oneness among its members, secure safety against external attack and totalise the free play and evolution, in its unity and diversity, in the uncoerced and active life of all its constituent communal and regional units, of the soul and body of Indian civilization and culture, the functioning on a grand and total scale of the Dharma.

This was the sense in which the earlier mind of India understood the problem. But the administrative empires of later times accepted it only partially. And its trend was very slowly and almost subconsciously, what the centralizing tendency must always be, if not actively to destroy, still to wear down and weaken the vigour of the subordinated autonomies. The consequence was that whenever the central authority was weak, the persistent principle of regional autonomy, essential to the life of India, reasserted itself to the detriment of the artificial unity established and not, as it should have done, for the harmonious intensification and freer but still united functioning of the total life. The imperial monarchy tended also to wear down the vigour of the free assemblies, and the result was that the communal units instead of being elements of a united strength, became isolated and dividing factors. The village community preserved something of its vigour,

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but had no living connection with the supreme authority and, losing the larger national sense, was willing to accept any indigenous or foreign rule that respected its own self-sufficient narrow life. The religious communities came to be imbued with the same spirit. The castes, multiplying themselves without any true necessity or true relation to the spiritual or economic need of the country, became mere sacrosanct, conventional divisions, a power for isolation and not, as they originally were, factors of a harmonious functioning of the total life-synthesis. It is not true that in ancient India, the caste divisions were an obstacle to the united life of the people or that they were even in later times, an active power for political strife and disunion - except indeed at the end, in the final decline, and especially during its later history - but they did become a passive force of social division and stagnant compartmentalism, obstructive to the reconstitution of a free and actively united nation.

We may thus summarise the chief cause of the failure.

The cause of the failure lay deeper down; it lay in the dissidence between the manner in which the problem was or ought to have been envisaged. The actual turn given to the endeavour was a contradiction of the peculiar mentality of the people.

Conclusion

The Indian people had developed a sound political system, which ensured the participation of the whole community in all activities. It was based on the principle of an organic self -determining communal life.

The subcontinent of India was also united on a sound cultural and spiritual basis. This unity was based on the geographical unity of India, the Sanskrit language, the religion of Hinduism and the common reverence for the Vedas.

With the advent of invaders from across the Northwest border, the necessity of a strong political centre began to manifest itself. This took the form of empires. The empires of India saved India from the foreign invasions; in fact all the invaders were assimilated by Indian culture and civilization and they became an integral part of the nation. But at the same time, the centralizing tendency, which came inevitably with the formation of empires, subconsciously led to the wearing out of the freedom and vigour of the subordinate units. The result was that whenever the empire became weak, the regional tendency arose with vigour and weakened the unity of the nation. And this happened because the empires suffered by the inevitable haste, violence and artificiality of its first construction to meet a pressing need; that prevented it from being the deliberate, natural and steady evolution in the old solid Indian manner of the truth of her deepest ideal. As a consequence, the attempt to establish a centralized imperial monarchy brought with it not a free synthesis but a breaking down of regional autonomies. Although their institutes and customs were respected in accordance with the Indian principle, and at first, even their political institutions were not wholly annulled but brought within the imperial system; these could not really flourish under the shadow of the imperial centralization. The free peoples of the ancient Indian world began to disappear, their broken materials serving afterwards to create the now existing Indian races. And it can be concluded that although for a long time, the great popular assemblies continued to remain in vigour, their function in the end tended to become more mechanical, and their vitality to decline and suffer. The urban republics tended to become more and more mere municipalities of the organized kingdom or empire. The habits of mind created by the imperial centralization and the weakening or disappearance of the more dignified free popular institutions of the past

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created a sort of spiritual gap; there was on the one side the administered content with any government that gave them security and did not interfere too much with their religion, life and customs, and on the other, the imperial administration beneficent and splendid no doubt, but no longer that living head of a free and living people contemplated by the earlier and the true political mind of India. These results became prominent only with the decline, but they were there in seed and rendered almost inevitable by the adoption of a mechanical method of unification. The advantages gained were those of a stronger and more coherent military action and a more regularized and uniform administration, but these could not compensate in the end for the impairment of the free organic diversified life which was the true expression of the mind and temperament of the people.

The fall from the rule of Dharma

A worse result was a certain fall from the high ideal of the Dharma. In the struggle of kingdom with kingdom for supremacy, a habit of Machiavellian statecraft replaced the nobler ethical ideals of the past; aggressive ambition was left without any sufficient spiritual or moral check and there was a coarsening of the national mind in the ethics of politics and government. The signs of these were already in evidence in the draconic penal legislation of the Maurya times and in Asoka's sanguinary conquest of Orissa. The deterioration was held in abeyance by a religious spirit and high intelligence for a long time and did not come to a head till more than a thousand years later. It was then that it came into full force in the worst period of the decline when unrestrained mutual aggression, unbridled egoism of princes and leaders, total lack of political principle and capacity for effective union, want of a common patriotism and traditional indifference of the common people to a change of rulers gave the whole of the vast peninsula into the grasp of a handful of merchants from across the seas. But however tardy the worst results in their coming, and however redeemed and held in check at first by the political greatness of the empire and a splendid intellectual and artistic culture and by frequent spiritual revivals, India had already lost, by the time of the later Guptas, the chance of a natural and perfect flowering of her true mind and innermost spirit in the political life of her peoples.

It was at such a time that the Muslim invasions took place.

We may thus conclude that the political unity of India cannot be achieved unless it is based on a sound cultural and spiritual unity. For, spiritual unity is a large and flexible thing and does not insist like the political and external on centralization and uniformity; rather it lives diffused in the system and permits readily a great diversity and freedom of life. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

"After all the spiritual and cultural is the only enduring unity and it is by a persistent mind and spirit much more than by an enduring physical body and outward organization that the soul of a people survives. This is a truth the positive Western mind may be unwilling to understand or concede, and yet its proofs are written across the whole story of the ages. The ancient nations, contemporaries of India, and many younger born than she are dead and only their monuments left behind them. Greece and Egypt exist only on the map and in name, for it is not the soul of Hellas or the deeper nation-soul that built Memphis, which we now find at Athens or at Cairo. Rome imposed a political and a purely outward cultural unity on the Mediterranean peoples, but their living spiritual and cultural oneness she could not create, and therefore the east broke away from the west,

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Africa kept no impress of the Roman interlude, and even the western nations still called Latin could offer no living resistance to barbarian invaders and had to be reborn by the infusion of a foreign vitality to become modern Italy, Spain and France. But India still lives and keeps the continuity of her inner mind and soul and spirit with the India of the ages. Invasion and foreign rule, the Greek, the Parthian and the Hun, the robust vigour of Islam, the levelling steam-roller heaviness of the British occupation and the British system, the enormous pressure of the Occident have not been able to drive or crush the ancient soul out of the body her Vedic Rishis made for her. At every step, under every calamity and attack and domination, she has been able to resist and survive either with an active or a passive resistance. And this she was able to do in her great days by her spiritual solidarity and power of assimilation and reaction, expelling all that would not be absorbed, absorbing all that could not be expelled, and even after the beginning of the decline she was still able to survive by the same force, abated but not slayable, retreating and maintaining for a time her ancient political system in the south, throwing up under the pressure of Islam Rajput and Sikh and Mahratta to defend her ancient self and its idea, persisting passively where she could not resist actively, condemning to decay each empire that could not answer her riddle or make terms with her, awaiting always the day of her revival. And even now it is a similar phenomenon that we see in process before our eyes. And what shall we say then of the surpassing vitality of the civilization that could accomplish this miracle and of the wisdom of those who built its foundation not on things external but on the spirit and the inner mind and made a spiritual and cultural oneness the root and stock of her existence and not solely its fragile flower, the eternal basis and not the perishable superstructure "?5

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