Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  This has been a long preface. We come back to the Mongols. Let us follow their fortunes for a while and see what happened to them. You will remember that Kublai Khan was the last Great Khan. After his death in 1292 the vast empire, which stretched right across Asia from Korea to Poland and Hungary in Europe, split up into five empires. Each of these five empires was in reality a very big empire. In a previous letter (No. 68) I have given you the names of these five.

  The principal one was the Empire of China, including Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Annam, Tongking and part of Burma. The Yuan dynasty, descendants of Kublai, succeeded to this; but not for long. Very soon bits of it dropped off in the south, and as I have told you, in 1368, just seventy-six years after Kublai’s death, his dynasty fell and the Mongols were driven away.

  In the far west was the Empire of the Golden Horde—what a fascinating name these people had! The Russian nobles paid tribute to it for nearly 200 years after Kublai’s death. At the end of this period (1480) the Empire was weakening a little and the Grand Duke of Moscow, who had managed to become the chief Russian noble, refused to pay tribute. This Grand Duke is called Ivan the Great. In the north of Russia there was the old republic of Novgorod, which was controlled by merchants and traders. Ivan defeated this republic and added it to his dukedom. Constantinople meanwhile had fallen to the Turks and the family of the old emperors had been driven out. Ivan married a girl of this old imperial family, and thus claimed to be in the imperial line and an heir to old Byzantium. The Russian Empire, which was finally ended by the revolutions of 1917, began in this way, under Ivan the Great. His grandson, who was very cruel, and was therefore called Ivan the Terrible, gave himself the title of Tsar, which was the equivalent of Caesar or Emperor.

  Thus the Mongols finally retired from Europe. We need not trouble ourselves much about the remains of the Golden Horde or the other Mongol empires of Central Asia. Besides, I do not know much about them. But one man claims our attention.

  This man was Timur, who wanted to be a second Chengiz Khan. He claimed to be descended from Chengiz, but he was really a Turk. He was lame and is therefore called Timur-i-lang or Timur the Lame or Tamurlane. He succeeded his father and became ruler of Samarqand in 1369. Soon afterwards, he started on his career of conquest and cruelty. He was a great general, but he was a complete savage. The Mongols of Central Asia had meanwhile become Muslims and Timur himself was a Muslim. But the fact that he was dealing with Muslims did not soften him in the least. Wherever he went he spread desolation and pestilence and utter misery. His chief pleasure was the erection of enormous pyramids of skulls. From Delhi in the east to Asia Minor in the west he caused to be massacred hundreds of thousands of persons and had their skulls arranged in the form of pyramids!

  Chengiz Khan and his Mongols were cruel and destructive, but they were like others of their time. But Timur was much worse. He stands apart for wanton and fiendish cruelty. In one place, it is said, he erected a tower of 2000 live men and covered them up with brick and mortar!

  The wealth of India attracted this savage. He had some difficulty in inducing his generals and nobles to agree to his proposal to invade India. There was a great council in Samarqand, and the nobles objected to going to India because of the great heat there. Ultimately Timur promised that he would not stay in India. He would just plunder and destroy and return. He kept his word.

  Northern India was then, you will remember, under Muslim rule. There was a Sultan at Delhi. But this Muslim State was weak, and constant warfare with the Mongols on the frontiers had broken its backbone. So when Timur came with an army of Mongols there was no great resistance and he went on gaily with his massacres and pyramids. Both Hindus and Muslims were slain. No distinction seems to have been made. The prisoners becoming a burden, he ordered all of them to be killed and 100,000 were massacred. At one place, it is said, both the Hindus and Muslims jointly performed the Rajput ceremony of jauhar—marching out to die in battle. But why should I go on repeating this story of horror? It was the same all along his route. Famine and disease followed Timur’s army. For fifteen days he remained in Delhi, and converted that great city into a shambles. He returned to Samarqand, after plundering Kashmir on the way.

  Savage as he was, Timur wanted to put up fine buildings in Samarqand and elsewhere in Central Asia. So he collected, as Sultan Mahmud had done long before him, artisans and skilled mechanics and master-builders in India and took them with him. The best of these master-builders and craftsmen he kept in his own imperial service. The others were spread in the chief cities of western Asia. Thus developed a new style of architecture.

  After Timur’s departure, Delhi was a city of the dead. Famine and pestilence reigned unchecked. There was no ruler or organization or order for two months. There were few inhabitants. Even the man Timur had appointed as his Viceroy in Delhi retired to Multan.

  Timur then went west spreading desolation across Persia and Mesopotamia. At Angora he met a great army of the Ottoman Turks in 1402. By brilliant generalship he defeated these Turks. But the sea was too much for him, and he could not cross the Bosphorus. So Europe escaped him.

  Three years later, in 1405, Timur died, as he was marching towards China. With him collapsed his great empire, which covered nearly the whole of Western Asia. The Ottomans paid tribute to him, so did Egypt, so did the Golden Horde. But his ability was confined to his generalship, which was remarkable. Some of his campaigns in the snows of Siberia were extraordinary. But at heart he was a barbarous nomad, and he built up no organization and left behind him no competent men, as Chengiz had done, to carry on the empire. So the Empire of Timur ended with him and left a memory only of massacre and desolation. In Central Asia, of the hordes of adventurers and conquerors who have passed through it, four men are remembered still—Sikandar or Alexander, Sultan Mahmud, Chengiz Khan, and Timur.

  Timur shook up the Ottoman Turks by his defeat of them. But they recovered soon and, as we know, in another fifty years (1453) they took Constantinople.

  We must take leave of Central Asia now. It goes back in the scale of civilization and sinks into obscurity. Nothing of note happens which will demand our attention. Only the memory of old civilizations remains, destroyed by the hand of man. Nature also laid a heavy hand on it, and gradually made the climate drier and less habitable.

  We must also bid good-bye to the Mongols, except for a branch of them which subsequently came to India and built a great and famous empire here. But the Empire of Chengiz Khan and his descendants breaks up, and the Mongols revert to their petty chieftains and their tribal habits.

  75

  India Begins to Tackle a Difficult Problem

  July 12, 1932

  I have written to you of Timur and his massacres and pyramids of heads. How horrible and barbarous all this seems! Such a thing could not happen in our civilized age. And yet, do not be so sure. We have only recently seen and heard of what can and does happen even in our own times. The destruction of life and property caused by Chengiz Khan or Timur, great as it was, pales almost into insignificance before the destruction during the Great War of 1914–18. And every Mongol cruelty can be rivalled by modern instances of frightfulness.

  Yet it is undoubted that we have progressed in a hundred ways since the days of Chengiz or Timur. Life is not only vastly more complicated, but it is richer; and many of the forces of Nature have been explored and understood and brought to the use of man. Certainly the world is more civilized and cultured now. Why, then, do we relapse back into barbarism during periods of war? Because war itself is a negation and denial of civilization and culture, except in so far as it takes advantage of the civilized brain to invent and use more and more powerful and horrible weapons. With the coming of war most people who are involved in it work themselves up into a terrible state of excitement, forget much that civilization has taught them, forget truth and the graces of life, and begin to resemble their savage ancestors of a few thousand years ago. Is it, then, surprising that war, whenev
er waged, is a horrible thing?

  What would a stranger to this world of ours say if he were to visit us during war-time? Suppose he only saw us then, and not during peacetime. He would only judge by the war, and come to the conclusion that we were cruel and relentless savages, occasionally showing courage and sacrifice, but, on the whole, with few redeeming features, and with one master-passion—to kill and destroy each other. He would misjudge us and form a distorted view of our world, because he would see only one side of us at a particular, and not very favourable, time.

  So also, if we think of the past in terms of wars and massacres only, we shall misjudge it. Unfortunately wars and massacres have a way of attracting a great deal of attention. The day-to-day life of a people is rather dull. What is the historian to say about it? So the historian swoops down on a war or battle and makes the most of it. Of course we cannot forget or ignore such wars, but we must not attach more importance to them than they deserve. Let us think of the past in terms of the present, and of the people in those days in terms of ourselves. We shall then get a more human view of them, and we shall realize that what really counted were the day-to-day life and the thoughts of those people, and not the occasional wars. It is well to remember this, as you will find your history books over-full of such wars. Even these letters of mine are apt to stray in that direction. The real reason for this is the difficulty in writing about the day-to-day life of past times. I do not know enough about it.

  Timur, as we have seen, was one of the worst afflictions that befell India. One shudders to think of the trail of horror which he left behind him wherever he went. And yet southern India was wholly unaffected by him, so also the east and west and central India. Even the present United Provinces practically escaped him, except for a bit in the north, near Delhi and Meerut. The Punjab, besides Delhi city, was the province that suffered most by Timur’s raid. Even in the Punjab the main sufferers lay along the route taken by Timur. The vast majority of the people of the Punjab carried on their ordinary work without any interruption. So we must be on our guard not to exaggerate the importance of these wars and raids.

  Let us look at the India of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Delhi Sultanate shrinks till it vanishes away on Timur’s coming. There are a number of large independent States all over India, mostly Muslim; but there is one powerful Hindu State—Vijayanagar—in the south. Islam is no longer a stranger or a newcomer in India. It is well established. The fierceness and cruelty of the early Afghan invaders and the Slave kings have been toned down, and the Muslim kings are as much Indians as the Hindus. They have no outside connections. Wars take place between different States, but they are political and not religious. Sometimes a Muslim State employs Hindu troops, and a Hindu State Muslim troops. Muslim kings often marry Hindu women and Hindus are often employed as ministers and high officials by the Muslim kings. There is little of the feeling of conqueror and conquered or ruler and ruled. Indeed, most of the Muslims, including some of the rulers, are Indians converted to Islam. Many of these become converted in the hope of gaining Court favour or economic advantage, and in spite of their change of religion they stick to most of their old customs. Some Muslim rulers adopt forcible methods to bring about conversion, but even this is largely with a political object, as it is thought that the converts would be more loyal subjects. But force does not go far in bringing about conversions. A more effective method is the economic. Non-Muslims are made to pay a poll-tax called the jizya, and many of them, wishing to escape this, become Muslims.

  But all this takes place in the cities. The villages are little affected, and the millions of villagers carry on in the old way. It is true that the king’s officers interfere more in village life. The powers of the village panchayats are less now than they used to be, but still the panchayats continue and are the centre and backbone of village life. Socially, and in the matter of religion and custom, the village is almost unchanged. India, as you know, is still a country of hundreds of thousands of villages. The towns and cities sit on the surface, as it were, but the real India has been, and still is, village India. This village India was not much changed by Islam.

  Hinduism was shaken up in two ways by the coming of Islam; and, strange to say, these ways were contrary to each other. On the one side it became conservative; it hardened and retired into a shell in an attempt at protecting itself against the attack on it. Caste became stiffer and more exclusive; the purdah and seclusion of women became commoner. On the other hand, there was a kind of internal revolt against caste and too much puja and ceremonial. Many efforts were made to reform it.

  Of course right through history, from the earliest times, reformers have risen in Hinduism, who have tried to rid it of its abuses. Buddha was the greatest of these. I have also told you of Shankaracharya, who lived in the eighth century. Three hundred years later, in the eleventh century, there lived in the south, in the Chola Empire, another great reformer who was the leader of a rival school of thought to that of Shankara. His name was Ramanuja. Shankara was a Shaivite and a man of intellect. Ramanuja was a Vaishnavite and a man of faith. Ramanuja’s influence spread all over India. I have told you how, right through history, India has been culturally united, even though politically it may have been split up into many warring States. Whenever a great man or a great movement arose, it spread all over India regardless of political boundaries.

  After Islam had settled down in India, a new type of reformer rose among the Hindus, as well as among the Muslims. He tried to bring the two religions nearer to each other by laying stress on the common features of both and attacking their rites and ceremonials. An effort was thus made to bring about a synthesis of the two—that is to say, a kind of mixture of the two. It was a difficult task, as there was much ill feeling and prejudice on both sides. But we shall see that century after century this effort was made. Even some of the Muslim rulers, and notably the great Akbar, tried to bring about this synthesis.

  Ramanand, who lived in the south in the fourteenth century, was the first well-known teacher who preached this synthesis. He preached against caste and ignored it. Among his disciples was a Muslim weaver named Kabir, who became even more famous later on. Kabir became very popular. His songs in Hindi, as you perhaps know, are very well known now even in remote villages in the north. He was neither Hindu nor Muslim; he was both, or something between the two, and his followers came from both religions and all castes. There is a story that when he died his body was covered with a sheet. His Hindu disciples wanted to take it for cremation; his Muslim disciples wanted to bury it. So they argued and quarrelled. But when they lifted up the sheet they found that the body for the possession of which they were quarrelling had disappeared and in its place there were some fresh flowers. The story may be quite imaginary, but it is a pretty one.

  A little after Kabir there rose another great reformer and religious leader in the north. This was Guru Nanak, who was the founder of Sikhism. He was followed, one after the other, by the ten gurus of the Sikhs, the last of whom was Guru Govind Singh.

  One other name, famous in Indian religious and cultural history, I should like to mention here. This was Chaitanya, a famous scholar of Bengal early in the sixteenth century, who suddenly decided that his scholarship was not worthwhile and left it, and took to the ways of faith. He became a great bhakta, who went about singing bhajans with his disciples all over Bengal. He founded also a Vaishnavite order, and his influence is still great in Bengal.

  So much for religious reform and synthesis. In all other departments of life also there was this synthesis going on, sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously. A new culture, a new architecture, a new language was growing up. But remember that all this took place far more in the cities than in the villages, and especially in Delhi, the imperial capital, and the other great capitals of States and provinces. At the top the king was more autocratic than ever before. The old Indian rulers had custom and convention to check their autocracy. The new Muslim rulers did not have ev
en this. Although in theory there is far more equality in Islam, and, as we have seen, even a slave could become sultan, still the autocratic and unchecked power of the king increased. What more amazing instance of this can one have than that of the mad Tughlaq who moved the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad?

  The practice of keeping slaves, especially by the sultans, also increased. A special effort was made to capture these in war. Artisans were specially valued amongst them. The others were enrolled in the sultan’s guard.

  What of the great universities of Nalanda and Takshashila or Taxila? They had long ceased to exist, but many new university centres of a new type had arisen. Tols they were called, where the old Sanskrit learning was imparted. They were not up to date. They lived in the past and probably kept up a spirit of reaction. Benares has all along been one of the biggest of such centres.

  I have spoken above of Kabir’s songs in Hindi. Hindi was thus in the fifteenth century already not only a popular but a literary language. Sanskrit had long ceased to be a living language. Even in the days of Kalidas and the Gupta kings, Sanskrit was confined to the learned. The ordinary people talked Prakrit, a variation of Sanskrit. Slowly the other daughters of Sanskrit developed—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujrati. Many Muslim writers and poets wrote in Hindi. A Muslim king of Jaunpur in the fifteenth century had the Mahabharata and the Bhagawad translated from the Sanskrit into Bengali. The accounts of the Muslim rulers of Bijapur in the south were kept in Marathi. So we find that already in the fifteenth century these daughter languages of Sanskrit had grown up considerably. In the south, of course, the Dravidian languages— Tamil and Telugu and Malayalam and Kanarese—were much older.