INDIAN NATIONALITY. £

performing ceremonial ablutions ; the Buddhist in
Oeylon uses the same prayer on a similar occasion. Or
take the epics, the foundation of Indian education and
•culture ; or a poem like the Megha Duta, the best known
and most read work of Kalidasa. Are not these expressive
of love for and knowledge of the Motherland ? The ' holy
land' of the Indian is not a far-off Palestine but the Indian
land itself.

The whole of Indian culture is so pervaded with this
idea of India as THE LAND, that it has never been necessary
to insist upon it overmuch, for no one could have supposed
it otherwise. " Every province within the vast boundaries
fulfils some necessary part in the completion of a nation-
.-ality. No one place repeats the specialised functions of
--another." Take, for example, Ceylon (whose people are
now the most denationalised of any in India); can we
think of India as complete without Ceylon? Ceylon is
unique as the home of Pali literature and Southern Bud-
•dhism, and in its possession of a continuous chronicle in-
valuable as a check upon some of the more uncertain data
of Indian Chronology. Sinhalese art, the Sinhalese religion,
•and, structure of Sinhalese society, bring most vividly before
us certain aspects of early Hindu culture, which it would be
hard to find, so perfectly reflected in any other pa,rt of modern
India. The noblest of Indian epics, the love-story of
Rama and Sita, unites Ceylon and India in the mind of
'every Indian, nor is this more so in the vsouth than in the
north. In later times, the histories of northern India
•and Ceylon were linked in "Vijaya's emigration, then by
Asoka's missions (contemporaneous with earliest ripples of
the wave of Hindu influence which passed beyond the
Himalayas to impress its ideals on the Mongolian east) ;
-and later still a Sinhalese princess became a Bajput bride