The Decline of Hindu Civilization: Lessons from the Past
By Shashi Ranjan Kumar
Rupa Publications, 416 pages, Rs 995

India’s civilization was once known for its intellectual brilliance and spiritual depth, but there came a time when it declined. Why? There have been few answers. With rigorous research and a comparative approach, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, an IIT graduate and civil servant for thirty years, explores the possible reasons, offering insight into how and why the Hindu civilization faltered across culture, politics, society and thought. 

Here is an excerpt from the book:

Civilization is a Precarious Thing

Civilizations can reach great heights but with great achievements also come great vulnerabilities. Attaining greatness is difficult but preserving it is more so, ‘[f]or civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation […]’ The Gupta period is considered the ‘Golden Age’ of the Hindu civilization and the momentum imparted during this period sustained the civilization for a long time. But after the death of Harsha in 647, there was no powerful empire in northern India and the political confusion that prevailed was tempting enough for external powers to intervene, with disastrous consequences for the Hindu civilization. Will Durant is scathing in his criticism of the negligence shown by warring Hindu chiefs towards external threats:

“The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war […] they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundary and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600–1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.”

The invasion began with the Arabs making inroads into Sindh in the early eight century, then, in the eleventh century, the Ghaznavids ensconced themselves in Punjab, and finally the Delhi Sultanate was established by a Ghurid general in 1206. After five centuries of Muslim rule, ‘[i]n the eighteenth century, when the Mughal Muslim raj was breaking up, there were moments when it looked as if it was going to be followed immediately by the establishment of Hindu successor states’ but the attempt ‘to transform the Mughal raj into a Maratha Hindu raj was foiled by the intervention of a more powerful Western hand.’ The Marathas lost to the British and India was subjugated again. India’s encounter with the West was no less painful, and no less traumatic. Arnold Toynbee notes:

“India is a whole world in herself; she is a society of the same magnitude as our Western society; and she is the one great non-Western society that has been, not merely attacked and hit, but overrun and conquered outright by Western arms, and not merely conquered by Western arms but ruled, after that, by Western administrators. In Bengal, this Western rule lasted for nearly two hundred years, and in the Panjab for more than a hundred. India’s experience of the West has thus been more painful and more humiliating than China’s or Turkey’s, and much more so than Russia’s or Japan’s […]”

It is indeed a remarkable feat of history that so few Britons—not more than 1 in 2,000 at any point of time—ruled over a vast multitude of Indians for so long, and so easily. ‘Perhaps India would not have been conquered by Western arms if she had not been conquered by Muslim arms first,’ argues Toynbee, and perhaps ‘it had become an Indian habit, and the conditioning of Indian hearts and minds to acquiesce, by force of habit, in an empire imposed on India by alien conquerors […]’ Yet the British Raj in India was not an inevitability as the experience of China and Japan has shown. The Marathas fought with the British with a sense of determination and purpose; however, they failed to forestall their advance. Still, their attempt did not go completely energy was merely diverted into a different channel.’ India, which had recoiled into a shell for centuries, now embraced the outside world, although hesitatingly, and the creative energy it unleashed ultimately won it freedom from the British rule. Shivaji’s first espousal of hindavi swarajya, Ram Mohan Roy’s stimulus for the Hindu renaissance and Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha may appear to be discrete events, separated from one another by distance and time, but they were a manifestation of a common realization—that the Hindus had themselves allowed the situation to come to this pass; and a common yearning—that the country should be rid of foreign rule at any cost.

Why did India suffer this humiliation? Why was she unable to defend herself against foreign invasion repeatedly? No country of this size has been under foreign domination for so long. The Turkic invasion of India and the Mongol invasion of China, Russia and Japan took place within a century of one another. Muhammad Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan in 1192 and his slave-general, Qutb al Din Aibak, laid the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The Mongol conquest of China began in 1205, with Temujin launching a raid against the Western Xia. Coincidentally, the year 1206 also marks the beginning of the Mongol Empire when Temujin was anointed the ruler of all Mongols, under the regal name of Genghis Khan. His grandson, Kublai Khan, established the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and brought the whole of China under his rule by 1279 after defeating the last remnants of the Song dynasty. He also made attempts to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281 but failed on both the occasions partly, because of inclement weather and partly, due to the strong defence put up by the Japanese. Batu Khan, another grandson of Genghis Khan and the founder of the Golden Horde, marched into Russia and devastated many of the cities between 1236 and 1240. 

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In contrast, India remained under foreign yoke for seven centuries; three centuries of Turco-Afghan rule was followed by two centuries of Mughal rule; and for some time, it looked as if the Marathas would liberate the country but India succumbed again and became a British colony for two centuries. It was as if there would be no end to her humiliation.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]