12 INDIA STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM
was to Europe, but there was chaos enough in the country, which was
relieved, for a time, by another great figure in Indian History,
Harshavardhana of Kanauj (606-48 A.D.). Hiou-ent-siang, model of
piety and scholarship, visited India in his time, spent fifteen years
in the country and left an invaluable record of what he saw.
After Harsha, a pall seems to fall on north Indian history, except
for the Palas, the Rashtrakutas and the Gurjara-Pratihars, dynasties
with euphonious names and not a few brilliant, though short-lived,
achievements to their credit. Notable also is the emergence, generally
speaking, of the Rajput States, militantly Hindu but of dubious racial
origin, and too rent by fierce elan jealousies and a senseless competi-
tion in personal prowess to be able to set up a single paramount
political organisation. Not before long would a brave new element
enter significantly into Indian life, for in the first flush of ardent
advance, the Arabs, metamorphosed by the evangel of Islam, went far
and wide, and before the eighth century was out, had conquered Sind.
The wealthy cities of Hindustan attracted, in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, bands of Turkish, Arab and Afghan adventurers, shaken
out of their torpor and their homes by the upheavals caused in the
Near East by the rise of Islam. At last, in 1206, an independent
Muslim State was founded in India, the Delhi Sultanate,2 with which
opens a new and significant chapter in our annals.
Hindu history, properly so called, continued in South India, where
the culture, which we might call Dravidian for want of a better and
scientifically more tenable name, remained, with its own literature
and art and music, unaffected by the changes occurring beyond the
Vindhyas. There, tribal organisation had been superseded at an early
date, and when the first intrepid travellers from the so-called Aryan
north negotiated the great forest barrier of Central India and reached
the south, they found flourishing and well-organised communities in
existence. The south had an enormous sea frontier, the waters gird-
ling it on three elongated sides, and its economic life naturally reflect-
ed the phenomenon.3 In the Indian Ocean its sea-farers were what
the Phoenicians were in the Mediterranean. They carried on an
extensive commerce, in pearls, pepper and spices particularly, with
Egypt and Rome, and took active part along with enterprising groups
from north-eastern India, in the colonisation of regions like Java, Bali,
Cambodia, Coehin-China. Southern dynasties, like the Pallavas, the
Cheras, Cholas and'Pandyas, played a great role, and as patrons of archi-
tecture and sculpture have left a legacy that can never be forgotten,
a An invaluable book on the period 1200-1550 A.D, is "Life and Conditions of the
People of Hindusthan", by K. M. Ashraf. (Reprinted from the Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal, Vol. 1, 1935),
8 E, B, Havell, "A Short History of India ", p, 70,