Unfortunately, about forty years ago, a party of
Englishmen conceived the unhappy thought of exploring the ruins,
but a strong gust of wind arose and carried them over the precipice.
After this, General Dickinson gave orders for the destruction of
all means of communication with the upper fortress, and the lower
one, once the cause of so many losses and so much bloodshed, is
now entirely deserted, and serves only as a shelter for eagles
and tigers."
Listening to these tales of olden times, I could not help comparing
the past with the present. What a difference!
"Kali-Yug!" cry old Hindus with grim despair. "Who can strive
against the Age of Darkness?"
This fatalism, the certainty that nothing good can be expected now,
the conviction that even the powerful god Shiva himself can neither
appear nor help them are all deeply rooted in the minds of the old
generation. As for the younger men, they receive their education
in high schools and universities, learn by heart Herbert Spencer,
John Stuart Mill, Darwin and the German philosophers, and entirely
lose all respect, not only for their own religion, but for every
other in the world.
The young "educated" Hindus are materialists almost without exception,
and often achieve the last limits of Atheism. They seldom hope to
attain to anything better than a situation as "chief mate of the
junior clerk," as we say in Russia, and either become sycophants,
disgusting flatterers of their present lords, or, which is still
worse, or at any rate sillier, begin to edit a newspaper full of
cheap liberalism, which gradually develops into a revolutionary organ.
But all this is only en passant. Compared with the mysterious
and grandiose past of India, the ancient Aryavarta, her present
is a natural Indian ink background, the black shadow of a bright
picture, the inevitable evil in the cycle of every nation. India
has become decrepit and has fallen down, like a huge memorial of
antiquity, prostrate and broken to pieces. But the most
insignificant of these fragments will for ever remain a treasure
for the archeologist and the artist, and, in the course of time,
may even afford a clue to the philosopher and the psychologist.
"Ancient Hindus built like giants and finished their work like
goldsmiths," says Archbishop Heber, describing his travel in India.
In his description of the Taj-Mahal of Agra, that veritable eighth
wonder of the world, he calls it "a poem in marble." He might
have added that it is difficult to find in India a ruin, in the
least state of preservation, that cannot speak, more eloquently
than whole volumes, of the past of India, her religious aspirations,
her beliefs and hopes.
There is not a country of antiquity, not even excluding the Egypt
of the Pharaohs, where the development of the subjective ideal
into its demonstration by an objective symbol has been expressed
more graphically, more skillfully, and artistically, than in India.
The whole pantheism of the Vedanta is contained in the symbol of
the bisexual deity Ardhanari.
