No Guides And No Cicerone
Could Be Of Any Use Whatever To Us.
The only thing they could do
would be to point out to us places where once there stood a fortress,
a castle, a temple, a sacred grove, or a celebrated town, and then
to repeat legends which came into existence only lately, under the
Mussulman rule.
As to the undisguised truth, the original history
of every interesting spot, we should have had to search for these
by ourselves, assisted only by our own conjectures.
Modern India does not present a pale shadow of what it was in the
pre-Christian era, nor even of the Hindostan of the days of Akbar,
Shah-Jehan and Aurungzeb. The neighborhood of every town that
has been shattered by many a war, and of every ruined hamlet, is
covered with round reddish pebbles, as if with so many petrified
tears of blood. But, in order to approach the iron gate of some
ancient fortress, it is not over natural pebbles that it is necessary
to walk, but over the broken fragments of some older granite remains,
under which, very often, rest the ruins of a third town, still more
ancient than the last. Modern names have been given to them by
Mussulmans, who generally built their towns upon the remains of
those they had just taken by assault. The names of the latter
are sometimes mentioned in the legends, but the names of their
predecessors had completely disappeared from the popular memory
even before the Mussulman invasion. Will a time ever come for
these secrets of the centuries to be revealed? Knowing all this
beforehand, we resolved not to lose patience, even though we had
to devote whole years to explorations of the same places, in
order to obtain better historical information, and facts less
disfigured than those obtained by our predecessors, who had to be
contented with a choice collection of naive lies, poured forth from
the mouth of some frightened semi-savage, or some Brahman, unwilling
to speak and desirous of disguising the truth. As for ourselves,
we were differently situated. We were helped by a whole society
of educated Hindus, who were as deeply interested in the same
questions as ourselves. Besides, we had a promise of the revelation
of some secrets, and the accurate translation of some ancient
chronicles, that had been preserved as if by a miracle.
The history of India has long since faded from the memories of her
sons, and is still a mystery to her conquerors. Doubtless it still
exists, though, perchance, only partly, in manuscripts that are
jealously concealed from every European eye. This has been shown
by some pregnant words, spoken by Brahmans on their rare occasions
of friendly expansiveness. Thus, Colonel Tod, whom I have already
quoted several times, is said to have been told by a Mahant, the
chief of an ancient pagoda-monastery: "Sahib, you lose your time
in vain researches. The Bellati India [India of foreigners] is
before you, but you will never see the Gupta India [secret India].
We are the guardians of her mysteries, and would rather cut out
each other's tongues than speak."
Yet, nevertheless, Tod succeeded in learning a good deal.
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