Part 17 (1/2)

So each Rajput man put on the bridal coronet and the saffron robe, and every Rajput woman her wedding garment. And when the dawn came, the city gates were set wide, and through them poured desperate manhood surrounding a little knot of picked heroes who had sworn to see the child safe; while from behind rose up on the still morning air a column of smoke from the vast funeral pyre on which desperate women had sought the embrace of death in the dark vaults and caves which honeycomb the rock, and which, since that fatal day, have never been entered but once by mortal man. Their very entrance is now forgotten.

So runs the story. This, at least, is fact: the great Sacrifice of Honourable Death--the Johar--was performed at Chitore, and Allah-ud-din, entering victorious, found a silent city.

Given an unscrupulous man, possessed of boundless wealth, and all things are possible in a country distracted by jealousies as India was at this time. And all things were achieved. The frequent incursions, growing year by year on larger scale, of the Moghuls who had already gained foothold to the west and north, were repelled. The Dekkan was finally conquered and annexed by the king's worthless slave and favourite, the eunuch Kafur, a man whose life was one long tale of infamy. Originally the seat of the great Andhra dynasty, the Dekkan, divided into many princ.i.p.alities, had pa.s.sed into many hands. In the seventh century King Harsha had attempted to gather it into his empire, but had been foiled by the skill of Pulikesin the king, during whose reign the wonderful caves in the Ajanta valley were excavated and adorned.

Another dynasty, another king in the eighth century gave to the Dekkan the marvellous rock-cut temple at Ellora. At first a stronghold of the Jain religion, it oscillated between that and Brahmanism, until in the twelfth century the latter finally came uppermost with the Haysala line of kings.

It was in A.D. 1310 that Kafur swept through the kingdom, despoiled the capital, laid waste the country, and carried off the reigning Rajah, though its final absorption in the Mahomedan empire was not until A.D. 1327. Kafur, however, set his mark so far south as Adam's Bridge, opposite Ceylon, the furthest point yet reached by any northern invasion.

This was the zenith of Allah-ud-din's power. His health had yielded to intemperance of all kinds; he became more and more despotic, more and more cruel, more and more under the baleful influence of his creature Kafur.

Rebellion grew rife. Little Prince Ajey-si's heir, Hamir, recovered Chitore, Guzerat revolted, and almost ere it was annexed, the Dekkan rose and expelled half the Mahomedan garrison.

These tidings coming to the already suffering king brought on paroxysms of rage, and he died, his end accelerated by poison administered by that slave of his worst pa.s.sions, Kafur. Thereupon followed the usual murders and sudden deaths of an Indian succession, followed by the death of Kafur, and the final enthroning of Allah-ud-din's third son, Mobarik. He was a weak sensualist, who, nevertheless, was human. So he removed some of his father's more oppressive taxes, and did away with his restrictions on trade and property. After which he and his creature Khushru, a converted Hindu slave, outraged all decency, and gave way to sheer dissolute devilry, which ended in the master's murder by his favourite, who thereinafter s.n.a.t.c.hed at the crown.

But this man even the Mahomedan India of the time could not stand.

Mobarik, ”whose name and reign would be too infamous to have a place in the records of literature, did not our duty as historian oblige us to the disagreeable task,” was bad enough. Khushru was worse. So he was killed, and a worthy warrior, by name Ghazi-Beg Toghluk, who had repelled many invasions of Moghuls, was invited to the throne.

Ferishta's description of this is rather nice, and bears quotation:

”So they presented him with the keys of the city, and he mounted his horse and entered Delhi in triumph. When he came in sight of the Palace of a Thousand Minarets” (this must have been somewhere close to the Kutb) ”he wept, and cried aloud:

”'Oh, subjects of a great empire! I am no more than one of you who unsheathed my sword to deliver you from oppression, and rid the world of a monster. If, therefore, any member of the royal family remain, let him be brought, that we his servants should prostrate ourselves before his throne. But if none of the race of kings have escaped the b.l.o.o.d.y hands of usurpation, let the most worthy be selected, and I swear to abide by the choice.'”

Not a bad speech. Small wonder that there followed on it the first historical notice of ”chairing”--”the populace, laying hold of him, raised him up, carried him to the throne, and hailed him as Shahjahan, Master of the World; but he chose the more modest t.i.tle of Ghia.s.s-ud-din....”

For the curse of Sidi Dervish had been effectual, and the House of Khilji was extinct.

Warned by the past, one of the first acts of Ghia.s.s-ud-din was formally to nominate his successor from amongst his four sons. He made an unfortunate choice, for there is little doubt but that Prince Jonah was accessory to his father's death four years afterwards, when he invited him into a wooden palace which promptly fell upon, and crushed the king and five of his attendants.

Neither was Prince Aluf-Khan--under which t.i.tle Jonah became heir-apparent--a lucky choice in other ways. He lost a large army in attempting to regain Deogiri, and was not particularly successful against the Rajputs. The king, meanwhile, spent most of his energy in building a new citadel at Delhi, the ruins of which still survive under the name of Toghlukabad. A fine, ma.s.sive piece of work it must have been, with its huge blocks of dressed stone and curiously sloping walls, reminding one of a modern dam.

So with the death of honest Ghia.s.s appears the typical Eastern potentate, complete as to arrogance, cruelty, power, and pride, who for seven-and-twenty years was to cry, ”Off with his head!” to any one he pleased.

He seems to have been clever. We are told that he was the ”most eloquent and accomplished prince of his time, and that he was not less famous for his gallantry in the field than for those accomplishments which render a man the ornament of private society.”

It sounds well, but, judged by his acts, it appears doubtful if pride and arrogance had not made Mahomed Toghluk partially insane. No other supposition explains the extraordinary contradictions of his rule. He ”established hospitals and almshouses for widows and orphans on the most liberal scale,” but ”his punishments were not only rigid and cruel, but frequently unjust. So little did he hesitate to spill the blood of G.o.d's creatures, that one might have supposed his object was to exterminate the human species.” On more than one occasion, going out for a royal hunt, he suddenly announced his intention of hunting men, and not beasts; so the unoffending peasantry were driven in by the beaters and slain as if they were blackbuck. He imagined and started vast schemes for conquering China and Persia, in order to enrich his coffers, yet bribed a Moghul invasion to return whence it came by a huge subsidy which completely crippled him. He attempted to face famine--one of the worst India has ever known--by projects for agricultural improvements, and then added to the horrors and distress by ordering Delhi to be evacuated, and its inhabitants on pain of death to migrate with his court to Deogiri, which he rechristened Dowlutabad, or the ”Abode of Wealth.” He founded an admirably regulated postal system throughout the country, but the roads themselves were bad, and absolutely unsafe for travellers. He tried to escape insolvency by coining copper at silver values--the first instance of token money in India--then fell upon his people tooth and nail because the public credit was not stable enough to stand the strain. Consequently, vast tracts of land were left uncultured, whole families fled to the woods to subsist on rapine and murder, while famine desolated wide provinces.

But the potentate remained a potentate. So strong was his grip on the people, that when, after having once been allowed to return to Delhi he again ordered them to Dowlutabad, they obeyed, leaving ”the n.o.blest metropolis, the Envy-of-the-World, a resort for owls, and a dwelling-place for the beasts of the desert.”

Thus it was not the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin, but a surfeit of fish which eventually carried him off. This much may be said in his favour--he was no sensualist.

He was succeeded by his cousin Feroze in A.D. 1351, who until his death, at the great age of ninety, in A.D. 1388, bent his whole mind towards restoring peace and prosperity to his distracted empire; which, while the largest, nominally, that India had ever seen, was in reality at the breaking-up point from sheer disorder. His great panacea appears to have been irrigation, and many an old ca.n.a.l in India dates from the time of Feroze Toghluk. Despite his efforts, however, the empire began to disintegrate. The Dekkan and Bengal gained independence by the reception of amba.s.sadors at court, and various smaller states seceded into autonomy. India was, in fact, at this time semi-fluid, half-gelatinous. Its form was for ever changing.

Each princ.i.p.ality at one moment, am[oe]ba-like, reached out an invertebrate arm and clutched at something, the next it had shrunken to a mere piece of jelly, quiescent, almost lifeless. And Feroze Toghluk's hand was not strong enough for the task set it. Yet he was a good and kindly soul, as is evidenced by the resolutions which he caused to be engraven on the mosque he built at Ferozebad (another portion of Old Delhi). In one he abolished judicial mutilation, claiming that G.o.d in His goodness having conferred on him the power, had also inspired him with the disposition to end these cruelties.

Another orders the repeal of many vexatious taxes and licences. Yet another reduced the share of war plunder due to the sovereign from four-fifths to one-fifth, while it increased that of the troops to four-fifths from one. A fourth recorded his determination to pension for life all soldiers invalided by wounds or by age. A fifth declared his intention of severely punis.h.i.+ng ”all public servants convicted of corruption, as well as persons who offer bribes.” The latter being a nicety in legal morality which one would hardly expect of the fourteenth century.