India: Past and Present (In 2 Vols.)

India is a land of strange contrasts, not the least striking of these being the immutability of its social institutions as compared with the constant changes in its political conditions. Caste, religion, and the customs growing out of them, are to-day, in their essential features, what they were in the remote past. In these respects a century in the orient is but as a decade of Western civilization. The progress of the past hundred years in India has equaled that of all previous time. On the other hand, the history ofIndia is a record of unceasing turmoil. Wave upon wave, the sea of hostile invasion has inundated the land. Its capitals have been shaken by revolution time and again; new rulers have risen in sudden strength and old dynasties have disappeared as dew before the sun. But through all the shiftings of the political kaleidoscope the masses have slumbrously pursued their way, ignorant perhaps, or at any rate reckless, of the fortunes of their over-lords. Not in the people, then, do we trace the course of past events, but in the buildings which form connecting links between distant centuries. Hardly a temple or palace in the country but is rich in historical associations.