THE EAST IN MEDIEVAL TIMES 309

Knowledge He had planted in Aryavarta." Obviously, it
was the period of Hindu decadence, and new vitality was
imparted by the violent impact of a new civilisation; for
Islam was nothing less than that.

' India up to that date, or to about the close of that cen-
tury, was characteristically and exclusively Hindu, using
this term in its most comprehensive sense. Whatever chan-
ges took place up to that age were changes in Hindu India,
which remained Hindu, enfolding in its broad bosom such
divergent racial elements as Aryan and Dravidian, Scythian
and Mongolian, and religious differentiations such as Brah-
manism, Animism, Jainism, and Buddhism/ But 'Hindu-
ism found in Islam a strange bed-fellow, with a character
almost sturdier than its own. The capacity of Hindu so-
ciety for assimilation of peoples and cultures unlike its own,
before the advent of the Muhammadans, seemed to be in-
finite. But the Crescent for the first time revealed its li-
mitations. Indeed, for well nigh a millennium, Hindu so-
ciety threatened to go under. Islam was in the ascendant
from the advent of the Arabs in Sind (712 A.D.) to the de-
cline and fall of the Mughal Empire at the death of
Aurangazeb (1707 A.D.). Until after the final discomfiture
of Alamgir it was not certain that India was not to be
Dar-ul'Islam. But the Medieval Age in India closed with
the certainty that this ancient land was to belong equally
to both peoples and faiths, Muslim no less than Hindu.
On what terms has not been settled yet.

'The impact of these two cultures has created Modern
India and its problems. The aggressive European never
fully triumphed over purely Islamic countries. No one en-
tirely succeeded in submerging India so long as she re-
mained exclusively Hindu. It will not be unwarrantable,
therefore, to attribute the subjection of India to her loss of