t be satisfied with the fact that, between the
first century before and the third century after our era, the greatest
political revolution took place in India owing to the repeated inroads
of Turanian, or, to use a still less objectionable term, of Northern
tribes. Their presence in India, recorded by Chinese historians, is
fully confirmed by coins, by inscriptions, and by the traditional
history of the country, such as it is; but to my mind nothing attests
the presence of these foreign invaders more clearly than the break,
or, I could almost say, the blank in the Brahmanical literature of
India from the first century before to the third century after our
era.[102]

If we consider the political and social state of that country, we can
easily understand what would happen in a case of invasion and conquest
by a warlike race. The invaders would take possession of the
strongholds or castles, and either remove the old Rajahs, or make them
their vassals and agents. Everything else would then go on exactly as
before. The rents would be paid, the taxes collected, and the life of
the villagers, that is, of the great majority of the people of India,
would go on almost undisturbed by the change of government. The only
people who might suffer would be, or, at all events, might be the
priestly caste, unless they should come to terms with the new
conquerors. The priestly caste, however, was also to a great extent
the literary caste, and the absence of their old patrons, the native
Rajahs, might well produce for a time a complete cessation of literary
activity. The rise of Buddhism and its formal adoption by King Asoka
had already considerably shaken the power and influence of the old
Brahmanic hierarchy. The Northern conquerors, whatever their religion
may have been, were certainly not believers in the Veda. They seem to
have made a kind of compromise with Buddhism, and it is probably due
to that compromise, or to an amalgamation of _S_aka legends with
Buddhist doctrines, that we owe the so-called Mahayana form of
Buddhism--and more particularly the Amitabha worship--which was
finally settled at the Council under Kanishka, one of the Turanian
rulers of India in the first century A.D.

If then we divide the whole of Sanskrit literature into these two
periods, the one anterior to the great Turanian invasion, the other
posterior to it, we may call the literature of the former period
_ancient_ and _natural_, that of the latter _modern_