Part 15 (1/2)
”The Empire of Delhi was founded by a slave.”
So runs the well-known jibe. And it is true; for although India, despite the combined resistance of the Rajputs, was overcome during the reign of Mahomed Shahab-ud-din Ghori, the real glory of conquest belongs by rights to Eibuk, the slave; Eibuk of the ”broken little finger,” who took the name of Kutb-ud-din, or Pole-star of the Faith.
To those who know India the name conjures up one of the most marvellous sights in the world. A dark December morning in the Punjab, when the Christmas rain-clouds gather black on the horizon, and on them, above the rolling, brick-strewn ridges of Old Delhi, rises a thin shaft of light--the Kutb Minar, the finest pillar in the world.
It was built by the Turki slave Eibuk, and one can forgive him much in that he left the world such a thing of beauty to be a joy for ever.
And yet as one stands beneath it, marking here and there the half-obliterated traces of previous cutting on the stones of the wonderful tapering pillar, all corbeilled with encircling balconies, and banded in dexterous art with interlaced lettering; as one looks round on the dismantled ruins of still more ancient temples, the mind suddenly ceases to give the glory to Kutb-ud-din, and turns almost with amaze to the thought of the Hindu architects who built it to order out of their dishonoured shrines.
Think of it! Art, true Art rising superior to Self! Surely as they chiselled at those interlaced attributes of the One Unknowable, Unthinkable, they must have been conscious that though all things in this life were--as their religion told them--but Illusion, behind that Illusion lay Reality.
And so their work comforted them.
How much of India is built into this watch tower of her G.o.ds? The best of her, anyhow, and English civilisation can scarcely add an additional story to this record of her past.
To Kutb-ud-din Eibuk, however, belongs the glory of inception; therefore also some forgiveness, which, in truth, he sorely needs. For from the beginning his att.i.tude towards strict morality is, to say the least of it, doubtful. He was a beautiful Turki slave, the avowed pet and plaything of his master Shahab-ud-din, who gave him ”his particular notice, and daily advanced him in confidence and favours.”
He appears to have been diplomatic, for on one occasion, being questioned by the king as to why he had divided his share of a general distribution of presents amongst the other retainers, he kissed the ground of Majesty's feet, and replied, that being amply supplied already by that Majesty's favours, he desired no superfluities.
This brought him the Master of the Horse-s.h.i.+p, from which he went on to honour after honour, until in the year A.D. 1193 he was left as viceroy in India. Thenceforward he was practically king. It was he who took Delhi after a conflict in which the river Jumna ran red with blood. It was he who commanded the forces at Etawah, and it was his hand which shot the arrow that, piercing the eye of the Benares Rajah, cost him his life and the loss of everything he possessed.
A quaint picture that, by the way, of the search for Jai-Chund's body amidst the huge heaps of the slain, and its final recognition after weary days by ”the artificial teeth fixed by golden wires.” Had dentistry got as far in the West, I wonder?
Then it was Kutb-ud-din who presented to his master the three hundred elephants taken at Benares; amongst them the famous white one which refused to kneel like the others before the _M'lechcha_, king though he might be. The beast's independence serving him better than a man's would have done, since it brought no punishment, but the honour of being pad elephant to the viceroy thenceforth.
And it was he who marched his forces. .h.i.ther and thither, ”engaged the enemy, put them to flight, and having ravaged the country at leisure, obtained much booty.”
The eye wearies over the repet.i.tions of this formula, as the hand turns the pages of Ferishta's history, while the heart grows sick at the thought of what such a war of conversion or extermination meant in those days.
The victorious procession of the Mahomedan troopers was only broken once in Guzerat. Here Kutb-ud-din, despite six wounds, fought stubbornly and with his wonted courage, until forced by his attendants from the field, and carried in a litter to the fort at Ajmir, where he managed to hold out until reinforcements came to his aid from the King of Ghuzni.
Defeat seems ever to have been the mother of victory with these pa.s.sionate, revengeful Afghans, for on the very next occasion on which Kutb-ud-din ”engaged the enemy,” he is said to have killed fifty thousand of them, and to have gathered into his treasury vast spoils.
Nothing seemed to stop him. Even the swift a.s.sa.s.sination by his own prime minister of a cowardly rajah who was coming to terms with the _M'lechcha_ instead of resisting the Unclean to the death, did not avail to preserve almost impregnable Kalunjur; for a spring incontinently dried up in the fort, and there once more was one last sally, and then death for the garrison.
It was in A.D. 1205, after Kutb-din had had twelve years of battles, murders, and sudden deaths, twelve years of absolute if not nominal kings.h.i.+p, that Mahomed Shahab-ud-din's successor, feeling himself not strong enough to a.s.sume the reins of government in India, made a bid for peace for himself in Ghuzni by sending Eibuk the slave, the drums, the standards, the insignia of royalty, and the t.i.tle of King of India.
Eibuk received them all with ”becoming respect,” and was duly crowned.
This fact did not prevent his being crowned again in Ghuzni the following year!
He then, having attained to the height of his ambition, seeing no more worlds to conquer, having for the time being crushed even Rajput resistance, gave himself up ”unaccountably to wine and pleasure.”
This seems to have irritated the good citizens of Ghuzni. They invited another claimant to the throne to try his luck. He came, found Eibuk unprepared, possibly drunk. Anyhow, there was no time to attempt a defence. He fled to Lah.o.r.e, thus finally severing the Kings.h.i.+p of Ghuzni from that of India.
There, we are told, he became ”sensible of his folly,” repented, and thereinafter ”continued to exercise justice, temperance, morality.”