Religion attends upon every act; it is the basis of the family, of caste, of society. The influence of Western thought upon Hindu belief is immense, but it is confused and blind. All attempts at a conscious reconstruction have been based upon imitations of the West, whether friendly or hostile. They have taken the Vedas for their Bible, but the Vedic religion died long ages ago, and these attempts are necessarily failures. None the less is felt the influence of the Western ideas. They make in a blind way for spirituality and morality. Hinduism has always had an ample provision for esoteric religion, and within its genial fold it is ready to include almost every manner of belief. The enlightened may attain a purer faith, the vulgar become more superstitious, but the signs are not yet visible.

The East lies buffeted and overwhelmed by the arms, the science, the ideas, the unconscious insolence of the West. It cannot renounce itself; it cannot merely imitate, even if imitation were possible or desirable. That way lies death. But the Oriental genius has always been adaptive rather than creative. If a breathing space be granted, it will reconstruct itself. What forms it will put on, what Avatar it will assume, these things are hidden in the womb of Time.

THE PUNJAB

BY SIR JAMES BROADWOOD LYALL, K.C.S.I., G.C.I.E.

(Lieut.-Governor of Punjab, 1887-92)

WHEN I tell my readers that the subject of my paper is a country about three times the size of England, excluding Wales, and that it has a population of twenty-five millions, they will understand that within the space at my disposal I can only deal with it in a very incomplete way. The Punjab is one of the five great Indian provinces which have local governments for the civil administration of their territories, and for the political control of Native States attached to them. At the head of these local governments is an officer appointed by the Queen, with the rank of Governor or Lieutenant-Governor. He is assisted by a very large staff of officers, English and native, including judges and magistrates of various grades, secretaries and heads of departments, commissioners and collectors of revenue and excise, engineers of public works of all kinds, medical officers, police officers, forest officers, sanitary inspectors, &c.

In the towns there are municipal committees, and in the districts, which answer to our counties, district boards; these are mainly composed of non-official persons appointed by popular election to assist in the management of local business.

The boundary of the province is shown in the map by a dotted line. Beluchistan and Afghanistan border it to the west, Kashmir and Chinese Tibet to the north, other provinces of India to east and south.

The name "Punjab" means "Five Waters," and is taken from the five great rivers which flow down the centre, and unite into one before they join the Indus. This name does not properly apply to that corner of the province which consists of the Delhi territory and the Ghaggar valley. It is the rest of the province which has been called Punjab from ancient times, and is now distinguished as the Punjab proper. The city of Lahore has always been the capital of the Punjab proper, and is now that of the whole province; though Delhi, so long the capital of India, is larger and commercially more important. Amritsar is also larger, and is the sacred city of the Sikhs. I will now make some remarks on the history of the province. They apply particularly to the Punjab proper as distinct from the Delhi territory.

There is a peculiarity in the situation of the Punjab which has given to its history and population a character somewhat distinct from that of the rest of India. The western side of the Punjab is the only point at which India is dangerously open to invasion by land. On all other sides India is protected by sea, or by mountains and deserts impassable to large bodies of men. The Punjab, therefore, has had to bear the brunt of all the ancient tribal migrations and military invasions directed from outside against India. All the collision and mixture with rough foreign nations from outside, incident to this situation, have inade the Hindu of the Punjab more manly, less priest-ridden and superstitious, and more careless about the ceremonial of caste and religion, than Hindus to the east are. A passage in the Code of Manu, which was written about 600 B.C., shows that this was the case even in those days. Time after time, as history and tradition show, invading hosts have tramped across the plains of the Punjab, to conquer and stay, or plunder and retreat. Many were led by men whose names are now entirely forgotten;

others by men whose names are still known to the whole world, like Alexander the Great of Macedon, who conquered the Punjab in 325 B.C., or Tamerlane the Tartar, who sacked Delhi in 1378. Others were led by men whose names are still great in the history of India, Persia, and Central Asia, like Mahmud of Ghazni, who began in A.D. 1001 the long series of Mohamedan invasions of India, and Babar, who founded in A.D. 1526 the Mogul dynasty, from which our Government took over the Empire.

History tells us that the Punjab was often annexed to Afghanistan and detached from the rest of India both before and after the Mohamedan occupation began. We also know that the Punjab remained without a break under the rule of Mohamedan dynasties of foreign extraction from the beginning of the eleventh century till the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the Sikhs revolted and established Sikh rule. Foreign dominion is therefore no novelty in the Punjab. The only peculiarity of our dominion is that it is European and that we do not settle in the country. These general remarks are all I have space to give regarding the older history of the Punjab.

As to the modern history, I must content myself with explaining as briefly as I can how and when the different parts of the province became British territory.

You must read histories of India if you want to know how the Mogul Empire gradually declined, and how it came to pass that by the end of the eighteenth century the Emperor at Delhi was a mere puppet, imprisoned in his palace by a Hindu a Hindu power known as the Mahratta Confederacy. At that time the Sikhs held the Punjab proper, and in the rest of India the real dominion belonged either to ourselves or to the Mahrattas. In the war between them and ourselves, which was inevitable, we were victorious, and in 1803 we took from them the Delhi territory. We left the

puppet Emperor of Delhi in possession of his palace, and conferred a very large pension upon him, but we kept the Government of the Delhi territory in our own hands. Soon after this, in 1809, we took under our protection a number of Sikh chiefs who held the country between the Delhi territory and the Sutlej River. These chiefs willingly assented, because they were afraid of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who had gradually subdued his brother Sikh chiefs to the west of the Sutlej, and had made himself king of all that part of the Punjab. Till his death, in 1839, the Sutlej remained our boundary to the west. His death was followed by a short period of internecine strife. All power passed into the hands of the Sikh soldiery, who were suspicious of their own chiefs and of our defensive preparations. The Sikh army crossed the Sutlej to oppose us, and this led to a very bloody war, in which we defeated them with much difficulty, and occupied Lahore in 1846. We then annexed the country between the Sutlej and the Bias Rivers to our dominions. Kashmir and other adjacent Himalayan country, which had been conquered by the Sikhs, we granted to Raja Golab Singh, one of Ranjit Singh's generals, to hold as our feudatory. The rest of Ranjit Singh's kingdom we gave to his infant son, Dulip Singh, to be held under our tutelage as a protected Native State. All this was very galling to the pride of the Sikhs, and two years later, in 1848, the greater part of the Sikh army, led by many of the leading Sikh nobles and officials, rose in insurrection, and fought two stubborn battles before they gave up the struggle. We then annexed the whole of Dulip Singh's territory, and made it, with the rest of the Sikh country, into a British province, under John Lawrence, who was made Chief Commissioner of the Punjab. At this time the Delhi territory was under the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, and not included in the