[It is understood that the Author of each Paper published by the Committee is alone responsible for the statements and opinions his Paper contains.] AFGHANISTAN IN RELATION TO PAST INDIA is often spoken of as having been, in all ages, the easy prey of every foreign conqueror. Great generals are quoted as saying that her mountain barrier, if you hide behind it, is of no use; and that whenever India waited to fight her battle behind that barrier she lost it. And this view of history is emphasized by a great literary authority who has the courage to say that the master of Afghanistan has always been master of India. Ministers of State speak as if India had often been consolidated under one central government, and had consequently, as a political and military unit, measured her strength with that of some foreign power. However unfounded such notions may seem to every real student of Indian history, some of them receive countenance from historical writers when making general assertions. That is especially the case with the idea that India has always been the easy prey of foreign conquerors. Yet every history of India in existence supplies, in its detailed narrative, a contradiction to such a general assertion. As the statements we are about to make will cross many preconceived ideas, we, beforehand, appeal in support of them to any one good history of India, carefully read.* A discrepancy between general assertions and detailed statements became inevitable from the moment when the habit arose of calling every incursion of a Western nation across the frontiers of India a conquest of that country. Yet this is * For the general reader the comparatively brief narratives of Mountstewart Elphinstone, Montgomery Martin, and Meadows Taylor are easily consulted. habitually done. Persians and Greeks, Arabs and Afghans, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah, are all, not less than Mahmud and Baber, coolly set down as conquerors of India. Of the Aryans I do not speak, as their conquest, or occupation, lies beyond the limits of authentic history. No historical fact can be capable of plainer proof than is this, that, within the limits of authentic history, India before our own conquest, never did but once undergo a conquest by a foreign power. That power did not consist of any one nation; nor was the conquest effected at one stroke, or even in a few campaigns. It was the conquest of Moslem over Hindu;— Moslems of various nations coming on age after age, sometimes supporting and sometimes overturning one another, but always pushing eastward and southward till, at the end of six and a half or seven centuries, they held, for a little while, an illconsolidated dominion over nearly all India. But not even Shah Jehan or Aurungzebe could be said so to hold the country as to dispose of its forces as one military whole. Neither of them was master of India in the full sense in which we now are. If we note the events which illustrate the assertion that the master of Afghanistan was always master of India, they will sufficiently illustrate the confusion of ideas out of which all the others have arisen. Did, then, every one conquer India who held Afghanistan? The ancient Persians long held Afghanistan, not as it is now, but probably as Mountstewart Elphinstone found it with Beloochistan, Sinde, the west bank of the Indus, and, perhaps, Cashmere, none of which at present belong to it. But the Persians never conquered a twentieth part of India. No one pretends that they extended eastward of the Punjab, or held even the whole of that one province.* Alexander easily took Afghanistan and from it conquered * James Mill, indeed quotes Rennell as saying that their satrapy extended to Delhi, which Rennell does not say. Mill also very loosely says: "Bactria as well as India were among the parts of the dominions of Alexander which fell to the share of Seleucus."-Vol. ii. p. 237, fourth ed. |