Indian architecture. Greco- and Muhammadan influences. Indian art. Western professor; and the contempt with which Europeans in India regard it, merely proves their ignorance of the system on which Hindu music is built up. Indian architecture (artha-sástra 1), although also ranked as an upa-veda or supplementary part of inspired learning, derived its development from Buddhist rather than from Brahmanical impulses. A brick altar sufficed for the Vedic ritual. The Buddhists were the great stone-builders of India. Their monasteries and shrines exhibit the history of the art during twenty-two centuries, from the earliest cave structures and rock-temples, to the latest Jain erections, dazzling in stucco and overcrowded with ornament. It seems not improbable that the churches of Europe owe their steeples to the Buddhist topes. The Greco-Bactrian kingdom profoundly influenced architecture and sculpture in Northern India; the Musalmán conquerors brought in new forms and requirements of their Nevertheless, Hindu art powerfully asserted itself in the imperial works of the Mughals, and has left memorials which extort the admiration and astonishment of our age. own. The Hindu builders derived from the Muhammadans a lightness of structure which they did not formerly possess. The Hindu palace-architecture of Gwalior, the Indian-Muhammadan mosques and mausoleums of Agra and Delhi, with several of the older Hindu temples of Southern India, stand unrivalled for grace of outline and elaborate wealth of orna The Táj-Mahal at Agra justifies Heber's exclamation, that its builders had designed like Titans, and finished like jewellers. The open-carved marble windows and screens at Ahmadábád furnish examples of the skilful ornamentation which beautifies every Indian building, from the cave monasteries of the Buddhist period downward. They also show with what plasticity the Hindu architects adapted their Indian ornamentation to the structural requirements of the Muhammadan mosque. English decorative art in our day has borrowed largely decorative from Indian forms and patterns. The exquisite scrolls on the rock-temples at Karli and Ajanta, the delicate marble tracery and flat wood-carving of Western India, the harmonious blending of forms and colours in the fabrics of Kashmir, have contributed to the restoration of taste in England. Indian art-work, when faithful to native designs, still obtains the highest honours at the international exhibitions of Europe. In pictorial art, the Hindus never 1 Specifically, nirmána-silpam, or nirmána-vidyá. THE LAWS OF THE BRAHMANS. 113 made much progress, except in miniature-painting, for which Indian painting. perspective is not required. But some of the book-illustrations, executed in India under Persian impulses, are full of spirit and beauty. The Royal library at Windsor contains the finest existing examples in this by-path of art. The noble manuscript of the Shah Jahán Námah, purchased in Oudh for £1200 in the last century, and now in possession of Her Majesty, will itself amply repay a visit. The specimens at the South Kensington Museum do not adequately represent Indian painting (1882). But they are almost everything that could be desired as regards Indian ornamental design, including Persian bookbinding, and several of the minor arts. law. 500 B. C. (?). of Manu. While the Brahmans claimed religion, theology, and philo- Bráhman sophy as their special domain, and the chief sciences and arts as supplementary sections of their divinely-inspired knowledge, they secured their social supremacy by codes of law. Their earliest Dharma-sástras, or legal treatises, belong to the Grihyá- GrihyáSútras, Sútra period, a scholastic outgrowth from the Veda. But their two great digests, upon which the fabric of Hindu jurisprudence has been built up, are of later date. The first of these, the code of Manu, is separated from the Vedic era by a series of The code Brahmanical developments, of which we possess only a few of the intermediate links. It is a compilation of the customary law, current probably about the 5th century B.C., and exhibits the social organization which the Bráhmans, after their successful struggle for the supremacy, had established in the Middle Land of Bengal. The Bráhmans, indeed, claim for their laws a divine origin, and ascribe them to the first Manu or Aryan man, 30 millions of years ago. But as a matter of fact, the laws of Manu are the result of a series of attempts to codify the usages of some not very extensive centre of Bráhmanism in Northern India. They form a metrical digest of local customs, condensed by degrees from a legendary mass of 100,000 couplets (slokas) into 2685. They may possibly have been reduced to a written code with a view to securing the system of caste against the popular movement of Buddhism; and they seem designed to secure a rigid fixity for the privileges of the Bráhmans. The date of the code of Manu has formed a favourite The age of Manu. subject for speculation from the appearance of Sir William Jones' translation1 downwards. The history of those speculations is typical of the modernizing process which scholarship 1 Calcutta, 1794; followed by Hüttner's translation into German, 1797. VOL. VI. H Date of Older prose code 500-200 B.C. (?). has applied to the old pretensions of Indian literature. The present writer has refrained from anything approaching to dogmatic assertion in regard to the dates assigned to Vedic and Sanskrit works; as such assertions would involve disquisitions quite beyond the scope of this volume. It may, therefore, be well to take the code of Manu as a single instance of the uncertainty which attaches to the date of one of the best known of Indian treatises. Sir William Jones accepted for it a fabulous antiquity of 1250 to 500 B.C. Schlegel was confident that it could not be later than 1000 B.C. Professor Monier Williams puts it at 500 B.C., and Johaentgen assigns 350 B.C. as the lowest possible date. Dr. Burnell, in his posthumous edition of the code,1 discusses the question with admirable learning, and his conclusions must, for the present, be accepted as authoritative. As indicated in a recent paragraph, the code of Manu, or Mánava-Dharmasástra, is not in its existing metrical form an original treatise, but at versified recension of an older prose code. In its earlier shape it belonged to the Sútra period, probably extending from the sixth to the second century B.C. Dr. Burnell's investigations show that our present code of Manu was a popular work intended for princes or Rájás, and their officials, rather than a technical treatise for the Bráhmans. They also prove that the present code must have been compiled between 100 and Probably 500 A.D.; and they indicate the latter date as the most probable one, viz. 500 A.D. 'It thus appears,' concludes Dr. Burnell, 'that the text belongs to an outgrowth of the Brahmanical literature, which was intended for the benefit of the kings, when the Brahmanical civilisation had begun to extend itself over the south of India.'2 Present metrical code 100-500 A. D. 500 A.D. Code of Yajnavalkya. The second great code of the Hindus, called after Yájnavalkya, belongs to a period when Buddhism had established itself, and probably to a territory where it was beginning to succumb to the Bráhmanical reaction. It represents the Brahmanical side of the great controversy (although a section of it deals with the organization of Buddhist monasteries), refers to the execution of deeds on metal plates, and altogether tury A.D.? marks an advance in legal precision. It refers more especially to the customs and state of society in the kingdom of Mithila, now the Tirhút and Purniyá Districts, after the Aryans had securely settled themselves in the Gangetic Provinces to the 6th cen 1 The Ordinances of Manu, by the late Arthur Coke Burnell, Ph. D., C.I.E., of the Madras Civil Service. Trübner. 1884. Pp. xv.-xlvii. 2 Idem, xxvii. SCOPE OF HINDU LAW. 115 east and south-east of their old Middle Land of Bengal. The MitákMitákshará commentary of the law which bears the name of shará. Yajnavalkya is in force over almost all India except Lower Bengal Proper; and the Hindus, as a whole, allow to Yajnavalkya an authority only second to that of Manu. Yajnavalkya's code was compiled apparently not later than the 6th or 7th century A.D. It is right again to mention that much earlier periods have been assigned both to Manu and Yájnavalkya than those adopted here. Duncker still accepts the old date of 600 B.C. as that at which Manu's code 'must have been put together and written down.'1 law. These codes deal with Hindu law in three branches, Scope of namely (1) domestic and civil rights and duties; (2) the Hindu administration of justice; (3) purification and penance. They stereotyped the unwritten usages which regulated the family life and social organization of the old Aryan communities in the Middle Land of Bengal. They did not pretend to supply a body of law for all the numerous races of India, but only for Hindu communities of the Bráhmanical type. It is doubtful whether they correctly represented the actual customary law even among the Hindu communities in the Middle Land of the Ganges. For they were evidently designed to assert and maintain the special privileges of the Brahmans. This they effected by a rigid demarcation of the employments of the people, each caste or division of a caste having its own hereditary occupation assigned to it; by stringent rules against the inter- Its rigid mingling of the castes in marriage; by forbidding the higher caste castes, under severe penalties, to eat or drink or hold social intercourse with the lower; and by punishing the lower castes with cruel penances, for defiling by their touch the higher castes, or in any way infringing their privileges. system. They exhibit the Hindu community in the four ancient Legal classes of priests, warriors, cultivators, and serfs (súdras). division of But they disclose that this old Aryan classification failed to represent the actual facts even among the Aryan communities in Northern India. They admit that the mass of the people did not belong to any one of the four castes, and they very inadequately ascribe it to concubinage or illicit connections. The ancient Bráhmanical communities in Northern India, as revealed by the codes, consisted-First, of an Aryan The actual element divided into priests, warriors, and cultivators, all of division of the people. whom bore the proud title of the Twice-Born, and wore the sacred thread. Second, the subjugated races, 'the once-born' 1 Ancient History of India, by Professor Max Duncker, p. 195, ed. 1881. Growth of Hindu law. Based on law. Súdras. Third, a vast residue termed the Varna- sankara, literally the mingled colours;' a great but uncertain number of castes, exceeding 300, to whom was assigned a mixed descent from the four recognised classes. The first British Census of India, in 1872, proved that the same division remains the fundamental one of the Hindu community to this day. As the Bráhmans spread their influence eastwards and southwards from the Middle Land of Bengal, they carried their codes with them. The number of their sacred lawbooks (Dharma-sástras) amounted to at least fifty-six, and separate schools of Hindu law sprang up. Thus the Dáyabhága version of the Law of Inheritance prevails in Bengal; while the Mitákshará commentary on Yájnavalkya is current in Madras and throughout Southern and Western India. But all modern recensions of Hindu law rest upon the two codes of Manu or of Yájnavalkya; and these codes, as we have seen, only recorded the usages of certain Bráhmanical centres in the north, and perhaps did not fairly record even them. As the Brahmans gradually moulded the population of India into Hinduism, such codes proved too narrow a basis for dealing with the rights, duties, and social organization of the people. Later Hindu legislators accordingly inculcated the recognicustomary tion of the local usages or land-law of each part of the country, and of each class or tribe. While binding together, and preserving the historical unity of, the Aryan twice-born castes by systems of law founded on their ancient codes, they made provision for the customs and diverse stages of civilisation of the ruder peoples of India, over whom they established their ascendency. By such provisions, alike in religion and in law, the Brahmans incorporated the Indian races into that loosely coherent mass known as the Hindu population. ism. Plasticity It is to this plastic element that Hinduism owes its success; of Hindu- and it is an element which English administrators have sometimes overlooked. The races of British India exhibit many stages of domestic institutions, from the polyandry of the Nairs to the polygamy of the Kulin Bráhmans. The structure of their rural organization varies, from the nomadic husbandry of the hillmen, to the long chain of tenures which in Bengal descends from the landlord through a series of middle-men to the actual tiller of the soil. Every stage in industrial progress is represented; from the hunting tribes of the central plateau to the rigid trade-guilds of Gujarát. The Hindu legislators recognised that each of these diverse stages of social development had its own usages and unwritten law. Even |