ants of
relatively recent invaders, not only became rapidly Hinduised, but
secured relatively prompt admission to the rank of Kshatryas in the
Hindu caste system, with pedigrees dated back to the Sun and Moon, which
to the popular mind were well justified by their warlike prowess and
splendid chivalry. I need only recall the name of Prithvi-Raja, the lord
of Sambhar, Delhi, and Ajmer, whose epic fame rests not less on his
abduction of the Kanauj princess who loved him than on his gallant
losing fight against the Mahomedan invaders of India. But fierce clan
jealousies and intense dynastic pride made the Rajputs incapable of
uniting into a single paramount state, or even into an enduring
confederacy fit to withstand the storm of which Harsha himself might
have heard the distant rumblings. For it was during his reign that
militant Islam first set foot in India, in a remote part of the
peninsula. Just at the same time as the Arabs, in the first flush of
victory, poured into Egypt, a small force crossed the Arabian Sea and
entered Baluchistan, and a century later the whole of Sind passed into
Arab hands. Another two centuries and the Mahomedan flood was pouring
irresistibly into India, no longer across the Arabian Sea, but from
Central Asia through the great northern passes, until in successive
waves it submerged for a time almost the whole of India.

Now if we look back upon the fifteen centuries of Indian history, of
which I have sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the
Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the
twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent
form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other
hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital
social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in
prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of
a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic
to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and sufficiently
rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Of its marvellous tenacity
and powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the
elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous
uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed
under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the
Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, conte