characterised the
development of Hinduism when the ancient ritual and the more impersonal
gods of the Vedas and of the Brahmanas gave way to the cult of such very
personal gods as Shiva and Vishnu, with their feminine counterparts,
Kali and Lakshmi, and ultimately to the evolution of still more popular
deities, some, like Skanda and the elephant-headed Ganesh, closely
connected with Shiva; others like Krishna and Rama, _av[=a]taras_ or
incarnations--and in many ways extremely human incarnations--of Vishnu.
At the same time, the Aryan Hindus, as they went on subduing the
numerous aboriginal races of India, constantly facilitated their
assimilation by the more or less direct adoption of their primitive
deities and religious customs. The two great epics, the Mahabharata,
with its wonderful episode, the Baghavat-Ghita, which is the apotheosis
of Krishna, and the Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama, show the
infusion into Hinduism of a distinctly national spirit in direct
opposition to the almost cosmopolitan catholicity of Buddhism,
sufficiently elastic to adapt itself even to the political aspirations
of non-Hindu conquerors as well as of non-Hindu races beyond the borders
of Hindustan, in Nepal and in Ceylon, in Burma and in Tibet, in China
and in Japan. The conflict between Buddhist and Hindu theology might not
have been irreconcilable, for Hinduism, as we know, was quite ready to
admit Buddha himself into the privileged circle of its own gods as one
of the incarnations of Vishnu. What was irreconcilable was the conflict
between a social system based on Brahmanical supremacy and one that
denied it--especially after Hinduism had acquired a new sense of Indian
patriotism which only reached fuller development in our own times when
it was quickened by contact with European nationalism.

Hindus themselves prefer, however, to-day to identify Indian nationalism
with the period when from another long interval of darkness, which
followed the downfall of the Kushan kingdom, Indian history emerges into
the splendour of what has been called "the golden age of Hinduism" in
the fourth and fifth centuries of our era under the great Gupta dynasty,
who ruled at Ujjain. Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or
more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as
Ozen[=i] to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as
Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves.
When Uma w