the Sakti worship of the female principle, often
with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly
as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of
such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by
Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the
altars of the Mahamatri, the great goddesses personified in Kali and
Durga. The worship of the gods assumed a more terrific and orgiastic
character. _Sati_ was more frequently practised. Many of the most
splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples--amongst others
that of Jaganath at Puri--were founded during that period. The custom,
in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines
and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated
in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of
religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration
of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross
idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction
against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant
Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but
nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has
also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended
to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of
Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism reasserted
itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against
Mahomedan domination.

The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan
ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority
of woman by her close confinement--of which there are few traces in
earlier times--within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a
precautionary measure for her protection against the lust of the
Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still constitutes one of the
greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom
requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when
her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the
women of India, even in the classes in which the men of India have been
drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained
and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate
conservatism clin